Dooms Day Book

The road was barely wide enough for a wagon, though it was obvious that wagons had used it, or at least a wagon. The road was rutted into deep grooves, and leaves had drifted across and into the ruts. Black water stood in some of them and along the road’s edge, and a skim of ice had formed on some of the puddles.

Kivrin was standing at the bottom of a depression. The road climbed steadily up in both directions from where she was, and to what felt like the north, the trees stopped halfway up the hill. She turned around to look back. It was possible to catch a glimpse of the wagon from here—the merest patch of blue—but no one would. The road dived here into woods on either side, and narrowed, making it a perfect spot in which to be waylaid by cutthroats and thieves.

It was just the place to lend credibility to her story, but they would never see her, hurrying through the narrow stretch of road, or if they did catch sight of the barely visible corner of blue, they would think it was someone lying in wait and spur their horses into flight.

It came to Kivrin suddenly that, lurking there in the thicket, she looked more like one of those cutthroats than like an innocent maiden who’d been recently coshed on the head.

She stepped out onto the road and put her hand up to her temple. “O holpen me, for I am ful sore in drede!” she cried.

The interpreter was supposed to automatically translate what she said into Middle English, but Mr. Dunworthy had insisted she memorize her first speeches. She and Mr. Latimer had worked on the pronunciation all yesterday afternoon.

“Holpen me, for I haf been y-robbed by fel thefes,” she said.

She considered falling down on the road, but now that she was out in the open she could see it was even later than she’d guessed, nearly sundown, and if she was going to see what lay at the top of the hill, she had better do it now. First, though, she needed to mark the rendezvous with some kind of sign.

There was nothing distinctive about any of the willows along the road. She looked for a rock to lay at the spot where she could still glimpse the wagon, but there wasn’t a sign of one in the rough weeds at the edge of the road. Finally she clambered back through the thicket, catching her hair and her cloak on the willow branches, got the little brass-bound casket that was a copy of one in the Ashmolean, and carried it back to the edge of the road.

It wasn’t perfect—it was small enough for someone passing by to carry off—but she was only going as far as the top of the hill. If she decided to walk to the nearest village, she’d come back and make a more permanent sign. And there weren’t going to be any passersby any time soon. The steep sides of the ruts were frozen hard, the leaves were undisturbed, and the skim of ice on the puddles was unbroken. Nobody had been on the road all day, all week maybe.

She straightened weeds up around the chest to hide it and laid a branch over it, and then started up the hill. The road, except for the frozen mudhole at the bottom, was smoother than Kivrin had expected, and pounded flat, which meant horses used it a good deal in spite of its empty look.

It was an easy climb, but Kivrin felt tired before she had gone even a few steps, and her temple began to throb again. She hoped her time-lag symptoms wouldn’t get worse—she could already see that she was a long way from anywhere. Or maybe that was just an illusion. She still hadn’t “ascertained her exact temporal location,” and this lane, this wood had nothing about them that said positively 1320.

The only signs of civilization at all were those ruts, which meant she could be in any time after the invention of the wheel and before paved roads, and not even definitely then. There were still lanes exactly like this not five miles from Oxford, lovingly preserved by the National Trust for the Japanese and American tourists.

She might not have gone anywhere at all, and on the other side of this hill she would find the M-1 or Ms. Montoya’s dig, or an SDI installation. I would hate to ascertain my temporal location by being struck by a bicycle or an automobile, she thought, and stepped gingerly to the side of the road. But if I haven’t gone anywhere, why do I have this wretched headache and feel like I can’t walk another step?

She reached the top of the hill and stopped, out of breath. There was no need to have gotten out of the road. No car had been driven along it as yet. Or horse and buggy either. And she was, as she had thought, a long way from anywhere. There weren’t any trees here, and she could see for miles. The wood the wagon was in came halfway up the hill and then straggled south and west for a long way. If she had come through farther into the trees, she would have been lost.