by K. C. Dyer
“How old are you, Luke?” Darrell asked, with curiosity.
“In October I will enter my twentieth year,” he said proudly. Darrell was surprised. She had thought Luke, by his dress and manner, to be about thirteen, her own age. Instead, she found he was a fully grown man. Another question nagged at her.
“Luke,” Darrell said carefully. “Try not to think I’m out of my mind, but I have — ah — been out of the country for a while and I am not sure of the date. Do you keep track of the date?”
“I, too, am not sure of the exact date,” Luke replied. “I do know it is sometime in early summer, in the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and fifty.”
Darrell had to stop and catch her breath for a moment. Everything had pointed to this, but she was still having trouble grasping the reality of all she could see around her. Somehow, she had journeyed more than six hundred years back in time.
She looked around the village as it spread out around her. It was primarily small buildings, many with straw roofs and wattle and daub construction. The streets were cobbled, and a few thin horses and oxen could be seen, generally pulling carts. She did not notice anybody riding horses; most walked at the heads of their animals as they pulled carts loaded with straw or rocks. A few skinny dogs ran through the lanes, and one ran up to bark at Delaney.
Darrell was startled by the contrast between Delaney and the other dogs. In spite of Delaney’s thin and dirty appearance, he still had a gleam in his eye and a jaunt to his tail. The barking dog was gaunt, obviously starving. Darrell could see every bone of his spine protruding through the painfully thin fur on his back. Even his bark lacked vigour, and he turned and crept away at a quiet word from Luke.
A couple of fat cats slunk by, and after the scrawny dogs the sight almost made Darrell smile. At least the cats are doing well, she thought, with some irony.
The cobbled lanes were filthy, with gutters running with sewage. Twice, Darrell and Luke had to scurry out of the way as women threw washtubs of dirty water into the street, and once they narrowly missed being hit by a load of kitchen garbage tossed out a window.
“Where are all the ill people?” Darrell asked.
“As people fall ill, they return to their homes to die. The dead are taken to the village square to be burned.”
Darrell swallowed. “Could we go there?”
Luke looked disgusted. “Why there? All ye’ll see are the dead, and many flies and rats. Even the village gravedigger cannot help ye, because he too has died of this terrible plague.”
“I don’t want to go in, I just want to have a look at the place. I need to be sure that I’m right.” Luke agreed reluctantly, and they made their way toward the village square.
They could smell the place long before they could see it. The masks that they had donned earlier were no help against the stench of death and burning. Luke would not enter the square, but stopped and leaned against a wall. Darrell, fighting the urge to retch, walked closer to the home of the now deceased gravedigger.
Three bodies lay on the ground, looking pitiful and small in death, mercifully hidden under old sacking. But as Darrell watched, a man staggered into the yard, bearing a small bundle in his arms.
“Someone help me,” he called piteously. “Please help me! My child is not well.”
Darrell instinctively stepped out into the square, but a woman brushed her aside and bustled up to the man.
“I’ll take her, Alexander. Ye need to sit down and rest. Please, sit here, I will get ye a drink.”
The man turned grateful eyes on the woman as he slid to sit on a rough-hewn wooden bench outside the house. “Please check her, Abbie,” he said hoarsely. “I think her breathing is better now. She is resting more easily.”
Darrell watched as the woman laid the tiny lifeless body beside the other three on the ground.
“I’m sure she’ll be fine, Alexander,” Abbie said soothingly. “Let’s walk ye home, to get some rest.” She gave the man a drink and then led him out of the square, supporting him on her shoulder as she passed Darrell and Luke. Darrell could hear the laboured breathing of the man as he walked by and could see the telltale swelling under his jaw. The woman’s eyes met Darrell’s as they passed, and she smiled kindly, though she herself looked ready to drop.
“She is Abbie, the village midwife,” whispered Luke, after they had passed. “How she is still on her feet after treating so many of the sick, I cannot say.”
Darrell and Luke started back to his house. She could not get the sight of the small body left on the ground out of her mind. The baby’s skin had been so blue it looked almost black, and the throat had been swollen grotesquely.
Luke was clearly thinking the same thing. “Alexander is the village cobbler,” he said. “That baby was born the same month as Rose.” He sighed. “Abbie helped Alexander’s wife deliver the baby, and then she came to help my mother.”
Darrell was rocked by the enormity of this tragedy. When she had learned in Professor Tooth’s class that as many as one in every two people had died in the most affected parts of Europe, it had only been numbers. Seeing the faces and the agony of the loss of family and friends this close was almost too much to bear.
Darrell cleared her throat and said roughly, “I’ve seen enough. I want to go back to speak with your mother, Luke.”
As they made their way quickly back to Luke’s small dwelling, Darrell could see the turrets of a castle, cast in light stone, on a distant knoll surrounded by the water of the loch.
“What is that place?” she asked Luke in surprise.
“That is Ainslie Castle, the ancestral seat of the clan MacKenzie. The lands around the village all belong to the Laird.”
“Are you his servants, then?”
“No, my family are fishermen, but many peasants work his fields and are beholden to him for their lives and livelihood.” He thought for a moment. “We were very lucky, before this tragedy. The Laird is a fair man and usually was good to the people who worked for him. Many neighbouring areas do not have as strong a protector. The castle is on a tidal island, and when the tide is in, it is protected by the waters of the loch.”
“Where is the Laird now?” asked Darrell.
“I heard he travels to the far north, to the Nordic lands, where they say the Black Death has not yet found its way.”
Darrell sighed impatiently. “Some benefactor,” she said, scornfully.
“Oh, but he has left behind the castle guard to maintain order in his absence,” replied Luke. “They are a fine group of soldiers who help to keep the peace.” He dropped his head modestly. “It is my goal to join them one day, but first I must be apprenticed to another of the guard.”
“Another guard? Weren’t you an apprentice already?”
Luke nodded eagerly as he steered them in the direction of his home. “Yes, and I have learned much, about arms and warfare, animal husbandry, and how carefully to keep a soldier’s kit.” His expression became more serious. “The guard under whose tutelage I studied was taken by the illness several weeks ago. His death has left me without a patron.”
Darrell nodded, her mind preoccupied with both the struggle to walk without slipping on the cobblestone lane and the magnitude of the tragedy looming around her.
That night, Darrell sat down to eat with Luke, his mother, Maggie, and his baby sister, Rose. Luke introduced Darrell to his mother as Dara, a friend of Maggie’s sister from Arisaig, and she clung to Darrell and sobbed her grief into Darrell’s shoulder. Luke’s mother had circles under her pale grey eyes and her black hair was shot through with strands of pure white.
Darrell helped Maggie to a seat by the fire and then gently explained the plan she had come up with that afternoon, during her tour of the village with Luke.
“I would like to see your family safe,” Darrell explained. “We cannot halt the spread of this terrible disease, but perhaps we can preserve the lives of Luke and Rose.”
Luke’s mother looked like she was going to cr
y again, so Darrell spoke hastily. “Is there anything left for you here?” she asked. Maggie shook her head mutely.
“I have sold all we had to pay for the burial of my sister,” she wept. “They would not allow her to be buried on sanctified ground, and my husband had to pay a man to bury her in a field.”
“Do you know how dangerous this disease is to you?” Darrell asked.
Maggie nodded. “The sickness has taken all,” she said, despairingly. “We are in God’s hands now.”
Darrell shook her head. “I think I can help you. I have some knowledge that I learned when I was — ah — abroad. This disease is transmitted by fleas on rats and people. When the people get sick, it goes into their lungs. They cough and that can make others ill, too. If you want to keep well,” she continued, “you must stay far away from those who are sick. Do you have somewhere else you can go, to a place in the country, perhaps, where the illness has not made its way, yet?”
Luke spoke up. “Father’s family is from the north-ernmost part of the Highlands, far from here. It is a journey of many days, perhaps weeks, but we would be welcome there.”
“Then you must go,” said Darrell firmly. “And when you get there, you must keep the house very clean.” She gestured at the floor. “You have to get rid of rushes like these on the floor. When food and crumbs fall in here, it draws rats.” She looked doubtfully at the clothes Maggie and Luke were wearing.
“Maggie, you must try to keep your family’s bodies clean. You must try to bathe in a stream or tub every day, and scrub away the lice and insects that live in your clothes or on your skin.”
Maggie looked startled. She looked at Luke in some confusion. He turned to Darrell to try to explain.
“Ye must understand that clothing is very expensive and that our father is only a poor fisherman. When the weather gets cool, our mother takes our underclothes and sews them in place. We wear them for the whole winter: when we sleep, for warmth, and when we rise, under our outer clothing.”
Darrell turned to Luke impatiently. “You must listen to me. This is why so many people are dying. This plague has made its way from somewhere in China on ships to devastate all of Europe. The disease is borne in the bloodstream of fleas that live on the bodies of rats. The rats run from ship to shore and spread the illness when the fleas jump onto humans.”
Luke looked despairing. “This is a port village. The rats run everywhere, here. Ye saw them yerself this afternoon.”
Darrell spoke firmly. “All the more reason to go to the north. It is away from the water, and if the disease has reached the area, you can keep it out of the home of your relatives by keeping rats and fleas to a minimum, and trying to keep your bodies free of dirt and insects.”
Maggie stood up and placed the sleeping Rose into her small cradle. She turned to look at Darrell and Luke, and her eyes flashed.
“This angel from Arisaig has been sent to us by my beloved sister. These are strange ideas she brings, but I believe her. We will leave word for yer father to seek us with his family in the north. We will leave tomorrow.” She looked around. “Ye spoke truly, Dara. There is nothing left for us here.”
She turned to Darrell and hugged her gently, and this time there were no tears in her eyes.
“Ye have given me hope, mo cridhe,” Maggie whispered, “and that is more than I have had in a very long time.”
Luke made a bed for Darrell on a bench after the two of them had spent more than an hour first sweeping and then washing the floor clean. Delaney curled up on the floor beside her and dozed by the fire. Darrell slept little that night, her thoughts whirling through her head. The next day, she helped the family pack a small cart with their belongings. As the afternoon wore on, she said goodbye to Maggie with hope that she and her children would survive where others had not.
As Luke finished strapping a final few treasures into the wagon, he looked up at Darrell with a strange glint in his eye. He dashed back into the small house while Maggie settled Rose in a sling around her shoulders. A moment later, he emerged and thrust something hurriedly into Darrell’s hand.
“This belonged to my aunt. She told me to take it if I had stomach trouble. It is the last one. Ye must have it.” His blue eyes glowed warmly in Darrell’s for a moment and then he turned away and lifted the handles of the heavy cart. Darrell looked with puzzlement at the small piece of toffee that Luke had dropped into her palm. She looked up in time to watch them, faces masked against infection, trudge away down the same dark lane that she had walked up only yesterday. It was not until she waved a last goodbye to Luke that she remembered that she, too, had a journey to make.
She turned and limped wearily down the lane, toward the sea and the rocky cave that she hoped would take her home. The wooden peg rubbed painfully on the stump of her leg, and with every step she took, her worries grew. What would happen to Luke and his family? How could the flimsy masks they wore protect them from the virulent illness that swept through this devastated land? The peg thumped gently on the filthy cobblestones, and she held her hand up to block most of the smell from the reeking stream that swept along beside the road. Delaney’s collar jangled gently as he trotted along beside her, the sound rising now as she hurried and he ran to keep up.
She stopped abruptly and looked down at Delaney, who halted obediently at her side and gazed up at her with a grin. His ears slid forward and he turned his head to look back the way they had come.
“Your collar can’t be jingling ...” Darrell began, but by that time the noise was so loud that all thoughts of Delaney’s absent collar were driven from her mind. There was a shout behind her, and two uniformed horsemen rode up in a clash of armour, the horses’ hooves striking sparks against the cobbles.
Darrell silently cursed herself for the preoccupation that kept her mind too busy to hear the arrival of the soldiers until it was too late to duck into a shadowy doorway.
“Hold!” There was no mistaking the command in the soldier’s voice. Darrell’s chin lifted defiantly. Dismounted, the soldier was almost a full head shorter than she, and he looked far less threatening than when mounted. The soldiers wore leather tunics over woollen shirts, and atop the tunics they wore vests of dirty chain mail. Through the chain she could see that they both had a similar crest painted on the breast of their leather tunics, though it was getting too dark to make out the design.
“I have no intention of holding,” she said shortly, thinking fast. “My aunt is expecting me and I must return home before nightfall.” She started to turn away, but the soldier took her arm with a grip that belied his small stature.
“Ow!” she cried and tried unsuccessfully to pull her arm away.
“Looks like ye’ve found yerself a fine specimen,” chuckled the mounted soldier to his compatriot. He glanced admiringly at Darrell. “Look at the height of this woman! She will surely be able to accomplish the work of two. The Laird would be pleased.”
Unable to tear her arm out of the grasp of the soldier, Darrell bit her lip, balanced on her sore stump, and stomped on the soldier’s foot. Though he wore a tall leather riding boot, it did not have a reinforced toe, and it became his turn to cry out. He leaped back in some surprise but did not release his grip, and Darrell was pulled off balance. Unable to keep upright on the slippery cobbles, she crashed into the small soldier. The weight of his armour proved too much; he tipped over, and the two of them landed in an untidy heap, only just missing the brown stream that ran alongside the road.
The soldier regained his feet in a moment, spluttering and fuming, his face red. His mounted companion laughed heartily from his saddle. Darrell had a more difficult time, for the road was slimy with unnamed filth, and her wooden peg slipped on the greasy surface. The small soldier offered no assistance, but had mercifully let go his vise-like grip on her arm.
By the time she stood up, Darrell’s whole body felt sore. Her leg throbbed where it was bound to the peg, and her arm was bruised and aching. She looked down to see her sleeve was alm
ost torn away, and the tanned skin of her arm showed through the rent in the fabric.
The mounted soldier stopped laughing and gestured to his companion. “Time to move on, Hamish. It is getting late, and we need to find one or two more before dark.”
The small soldier frowned. “I say we take this one. She is strong and healthy. Look at her teeth! She shows no sign of the sickness.”
The mounted soldier barked a short, humourless laugh. “Hamish, look at her! She is a cripple. She has probably been shunned by her family for her deformity.” He spat onto the ground near Darrell’s feet, and she hurriedly stepped away, stumbling a bit on the cobbles. “The castle needs strong work horses right now. She is useless.”
In the distance a shout rose up. Darrell looked back up the cobbled lane. Dusk was stealing the light and it was hard to see anything clearly. A light glimmered in the distance and then flared as a torch was lit, and then two. Out of the gloom, a third horse came flying down the lane toward them, bearing yet another soldier. Darrell’s heart began to pound. The soldier stopped halfway down the lane and called out.
“Captain! Julian! Fall in! We have found a family that will meet our needs.” He turned and galloped back to the group of soldiers.
The mounted soldier glanced down at Darrell. She winced as she tried to avoid putting weight on her sore leg. “Leave the cripple.”
The small soldier hesitated and smiled up at his companion, showing a mouthful of brown and broken teeth. “She may be no use at the Castle,” he said slyly, “but I’m sure we could find ... something ... for her to do.” He sneered at Darrell and grabbed her bare arm, pinching her cruelly. Darrell tugged her arm and cried out in frustration at the soldiers, who were now both leering at her.
The light at the end of the lane suddenly blazed as many torches were lit at once. Darrell could see with sickening clarity that a large group of soldiers, all with tunics similar to those worn by the men who stood with her, had surrounded Luke and his family. As the light flared, a brown blur flew past her face and a voice cried out in pain. The horse that bore the mounted soldier reared suddenly, and Darrell found she was free. The small soldier lay on the cobbles once more, bleeding freely from a bite on his leg and in danger of being trampled by his companion’s horse. Delaney ran between the horses, nipping at their hocks and nimbly avoiding the crashing hooves. The horse reared and the mounted soldier was thrown, landing like a heap on top of the small soldier on the ground. Angry shouts and confusion reigned.
