The Doomsday Book

by Connie Willis

  It’s not the plague, she told herself firmly. People who have the plague don’t wonder if they have it. They’re too busy dying.

  It wasn’t the plague. The fleas that had spread it lived on rats and humans, not out in the middle of a forest, and the Black Death hadn’t reached England till 1348. It must be some mediaeval disease Dr. Ahrens hadn’t known about. There had been all sorts of strange diseases in the Middle Ages—the king’s evil and St. Vitus’s dance and unnamed fevers. It must be one of them, and it had taken her enhanced immune system a while to figure out what it was and begin fighting it. But now it had, and her temperature was down and the interpreter would begin working. All she had to do was rest and wait and get better. Comforted by that thought, she closed her eyes again and slept.

  Someone was touching her. She opened her eyes. It was the mother-in-law. She was examining Kivrin’s hands, turning them over and over again in hers, rubbing her chapped forefinger along the backs, scrutinizing the nails. When she saw Kivrin’s eyes were open, she dropped her hands, as if in disgust, and said, “Sheavost ahvheigh parage attelest, bant hoore der wikkonasshae haswfolletwe?”

  Nothing. Kivrin had hoped that somehow, while she slept, the interpreter’s enhancers would have sorted and deciphered everything she’d heard, and she would wake to find the interpreter working. But their words were still unintelligible. It sounded a little like French, with its dropped endings and delicate rising inflections, but Kivrin knew Norman French—Mr. Dunworthy had made her learn it—and she couldn’t make out any of the words.

  “Hastow naydepesse?” the old woman said.

  It sounded like a question, but all French sounded like a question.

  The old woman took hold of Kivrin’s arm with one rough hand and put her other arm around her, as if to help her up. I’m too ill to get up, Kivrin thought. Why would she make me get up? To be questioned? To be burned?

  The younger woman came into the room, carrying a footed cup. She set it down on the window seat and came to take Kivrin’s other arm. “Hastontee natour yowrese?” she asked, smiling her gap-toothed smile at Kivrin, and Kivrin thought, Maybe they’re taking me to the bathroom, and made an effort to sit up and put her legs over the side of the bed.

  She was immediately dizzy. She sat, her bare legs dangling over the side of the high bed, waiting for it to pass. She was wearing her linen shift and nothing else. She wondered where her clothes were. At least they had let her keep her shift. People in the Middle Ages didn’t usually wear anything to bed.

  People in the Middle Ages didn’t have indoor plumbing either, she thought, and hoped she wouldn’t have to go outside to a privy. Castles sometimes had enclosed garderobes, or corners over a shaft that had to be cleaned out at the bottom, but this wasn’t a castle.

  The young woman put a thin, folded blanket around Kivrin’s shoulders like a shawl, and they both helped her off the bed. The planked wooden floor was icy. She took a few steps and was dizzy all over again. I’ll never make it all the way outside, she thought.

  “Wotan shay wootes nawdaor youse der jordane?” the old woman said sharply, and Kivrin thought she recognized jardin, the French for garden, but why would they be discussing gardens?

  “Thanway maunhollp anhour,” the young woman said, putting her arm around Kivrin and draping Kivrin’s arm over her shoulders. The old woman gripped her other arm with both hands. She scarcely came to Kivrin’s shoulder, and the young woman didn’t look like she weighed more than ninety pounds, but between them they walked her to the end of the bed.

  Kivrin got dizzier with every step. I’ll never make it all the way outside, she thought, but they had stopped at the end of the bed. There was a chest there, a low wooden box with a bird or possibly an angel carved roughly into the top. On it lay a wooden basin full of water, the bloody bandage that had been around Kivrin’s forehead, and a smaller, empty bowl. Kivrin, concentrating on not falling over, didn’t realize what it was until the old woman said, “Swoune nawmaydar oupondre yorresette” and pantomimed lifting her heavy skirts and sitting on it.

  A chamber pot, Kivrin thought gratefully. Mr. Dunworthy, chamber pots were extant in country village manor houses in 1320. She nodded to show she understood and let them ease her down onto it, though she was so dizzy she had to grab at the heavy bed hangings to keep from falling, and her chest hurt so badly when she tried to stand up again that she doubled over.

  “Maisry!” the old woman shouted toward the door. “Maisry, com undtvae holpoon!” and the inflection indicated clearly that she was calling someone—Marjorie? Mary?—to come and help, but no one appeared, so perhaps she was wrong about that, too.

  She straightened a little, testing the pain, and then tried to stand up, and the pain had lessened a little, but they still had to nearly carry her back to the bed, and she was exhausted by the time she was back under the bed coverings. She closed her eyes.

  “Slaeponpon donu paw daton,” the young woman said, and she had to be saying “Rest,” or “Go to sleep,” but she still couldn’t decipher it. The interpreter’s broken, she thought, and the little knot of panic started to form again, worse than the pain in her chest.

  It can’t be broken, she told herself. It’s not a machine. It’s a chemical syntax and memory enhancer. It can’t be broken. It could only work with words in its memory, though, and obviously Mr. Latimer’s Middle English was useless. Whan that Aprille with his shoures sote. Mr. Latimer’s pronunciations were so far off the interpreter couldn’t recognize what it was hearing as the same words, but that didn’t mean it was broken. It only meant it had to collect new data, and the few sentences it had heard so far weren’t enough.

  It recognized the Latin, she thought, and the panic stabbed at her again, but she resisted it. It had been able to recognize the Latin because the rite of extreme unction was a set piece. She had already known what words should be there. The words the women spoke weren’t a set piece, but they were still decipherable. Proper names, forms of address, nouns and verbs and prepositional phrases would appear in set positions that repeated again and again. They would separate themselves out rapidly, and the interpreter would be able to use them as the key to the rest of the code. And what she needed to do now was collect data, listen to what was said without even trying to understand it, and let the interpreter work.

  “Thin keowre hoorwoun desmoortale?” the young woman asked.

  “Got talion wottes,” the old woman said.

  A bell began to ring, far away. Kivrin opened her eyes. Both women had turned to look at the window, even though they couldn’t see through the linen.

  “Bere wichebay gansanon, ” the young woman said.

  The old woman didn’t answer. She was staring at the window, as if she could see past the stiffened linen, her hands clasped in front of her as if in prayer.

  “Aydreddit ister fayve riblaun, ” the young woman said, and in spite of her resolution, Kivrin tried to make it into “It is time for vespers,” or “There is the vespers bell,” but it wasn’t vespers. The bell went on tolling, and no other bells joined in. She wondered if it was the bell she had heard before, ringing all alone in the late afternoon.

  The old woman turned abruptly away from the window. “Nay, Elwiss, itbahn diwolffin. ” She picked up the chamber pot from the wooden chest. “Gawynha thesspyd—”

  There was a sudden scuffling outside the door, a sound of footsteps running up stairs, and a child’s voice crying, “Modder! Eysmertemay!”

  A little girl burst into the room, blond braids and cap strings flying, nearly colliding with the old woman and the chamber pot. The child’s round face was red and smeared with tears.

  “Wol yadothoos for shame ahnyous!” the old woman growled at her, lifting the treacherous bowl out of reach. “Yowe maun naroonso inhus.”

  The little girl paid no attention to her. She ran straight at the young woman, sobbing, “Rawzamun hattmay smerte, Modder!”

  Kivrin gasped. Modder. That had to be “mother.”<
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  The little girl held up her arms, and her mother, oh, yes, definitely mother, picked her up. She fastened her arms around her mother’s neck and began to howl.

  “Shh, ahnyous, shh, ” the mother said. That guttural’s a G, Kivrin thought. A hacking German G. Shh, Agnes.

  Still holding her, the mother sat down on the window seat. She wiped at the tears with the tail of her coif. “Spekenaw dothass bifel, Agnes.”

  Yes, definitely Agnes. And speken was “tell.” Tell me what happened.

  “Shayoss mayswerte!” Agnes said, pointing at another child who had just come into the room. The second girl was considerably older, nine or ten at least. She had long brown hair that hung down her back and was held in place by a dark blue kerchief.

  “Itgan naso, ahnyous,” she said. “Tha pighte rennin gown derstayres,” and there was no mistaking that combination of affection and contempt. She didn’t look like the blond little girl, but Kivrin was willing to bet this dark-haired girl was the little one’s older sister. “Shay pighte renninge ahndist eyres, Modder.”

  “Mother” again, and shay was “she” and pighte must be “fell.” It sounded French, but the key to this was German. The pronunciations, the constructions, were German. Kivrin could almost feel it click into place.

  “Na comfitte horr thusselwys,” the older woman said. “She hathnau woundes. Hoor teres been fornaught mais gain thy pitye.”

  “Hoor nay ganful bloody, ” the woman said, but Kivrin couldn’t hear her. She was hearing instead the interpreter’s translation, still clumsy and obviously more than a beat behind, but a translation:

  “Don’t pamper her, Eliwys. She is not injured. Her tears are but to get your attention.”

  And the mother, whose name was Eliwys, “Her knee is bleeding.”

  “Rossmunt, brangund oorwarsted frommecofre, ” she said, pointing at the foot of the bed, and the interpreter was right behind her. “Rosemund, fetch me the cloth on the chest.” The ten-year-old moved immediately toward the trunk at the foot of the bed.

  The older girl was Rosemund, and the little one was Agnes, and the impossibly young mother in her wimple and coif was Eliwys.

  Rosemund held out a frayed cloth that must surely be the one Eliwys had taken off Kivrin’s forehead.

  “Touch it not! Touch it not!” Agnes screamed, and Kivrin wouldn’t have even needed the interpreter for that one. It was still far more than a beat behind.

  “I would but tie a cloth to stop the bleeding,” Eliwys said, taking the rag from Rosemund. Agnes tried to push it away. “The cloth will not—” There was a blank space as if the interpreter didn’t know a word, and then, “—you, Agnes.” The word was obviously “hurt” or “harm,” and Kivrin wondered if the interpreter had not had the word in its memory and why it couldn’t have come up with an approximation from context.

  “—will penaunce,” Agnes shouted, and the interpreter echoed, “It will—” and then the blank again. The space must be so that she could hear the actual word and make her own guess at its meaning. It wasn’t a bad idea, but the interpreter was so far behind the space that Kivrin couldn’t hear the word she was intended to. If the interpreter did this every time it didn’t recognize a word, she was in serious trouble.

  “It will penaunce,” Agnes wailed, pushing her mother’s hand away from her knee. “It will pain,” the interpreter whispered, and Kivrin felt relieved that it had managed to come up with something, even though “to pain” was scarcely a verb.

  “How came you to fall?” Eliwys asked to distract Agnes.

  “She was running up the stairs,” Rosemund said. “She was running to give you the news that … had come.”

  The interpreter left a space again, but Kivrin caught the word this time. Gawyn, which was probably a proper name, and the interpreter had apparently reached the same conclusion because by the time Agnes had shrieked, “I would have told Mother Gawyn had come,” the interpreter included it in the translation.

  “I would have told,” Agnes said, really crying now, and buried her face against her mother, who promptly took advantage of the opportunity to tie the bandage around Agnes’s knee.

  “You can tell me now,” she said.

  Agnes shook her buried head.

  “You tie the bandage too loosely, daughter-in-law,” the older woman said. “It will but fall away.”

  The bandage looked tight enough to Kivrin, and obviously any attempt to bind the wound tighter would result in renewed screams. The old woman was still holding the chamber pot in both hands. Kivrin wondered why she didn’t go empty it.

  “Shh, shh,” Eliwys said, rocking the little girl gently and patting her back. “I would fain have you tell me.”

  “Pride goes before a fall,” the old woman said, seemingly determined to make Agnes cry again. “You were to blame that you fell. You should not have run on the stairs.”

  “Was Gawyn riding a white mare?” Eliwys asked.

  A white mare. Kivrin wondered if Gawyn could be the man who had helped her onto his horse and brought her to the manor.

  “Nay,” Agnes said in a tone that indicated her mother had made some sort of joke. “He was riding his own black stallion Gringolet. And he rode up to me and said, ‘Good Lady Agnes, I would speak with your mother.’ ”

  “Rosemund, your sister was hurt because of your carelessness,” the old woman said. She hadn’t succeeded in upsetting Agnes, so she’d decided to go after some other victim. “Why were you not tending her?”

  “I was at my broidery,” Rosemund said, looking to her mother for support. “Maisry was to keep watch over her.”

  “Maisry went out to see Gawyn,” Agnes said, sitting up on her mother’s lap.

  “And dally with the stableboy,” the old woman said. She went to the door and shouted, “Maisry!”

  Maisry. That was the name the old woman had called out before, and now the interpreter wasn’t even leaving spaces when it came to proper names. Kivrin didn’t know who Maisry was, probably a servant, but if the way things were going was any indication, Maisry was going to be in a lot of trouble. The old woman was determined to find a victim, and the missing Maisry seemed perfect.

  “Maisry!” she shouted again, and the name echoed.

  Rosemund took the opportunity to go and stand beside her mother. “Gawyn bade us tell you he begged leave to come and speak with you.”

  “Waits he below?” Eliwys asked.

  “Nay. He went first to the church to speak of the lady with Father Rock.”

  Pride goes before a fall. The interpreter was obviously getting overconfident. Father Rolfe, perhaps, or Father Peter. Obviously not Father Rock.

  “Why went he to speak to Father Rock?” the old woman demanded, coming back into the room.

  Kivrin tried to hear the real word under the maddening whisper of the translation. Roche. The French word for “rock.” Father Roche.

  “Mayhap he has found somewhat of the lady,” Eliwys said, glancing at Kivrin. It was the first indication she, or anyone, had given that they remembered Kivrin was in the room. Kivrin quickly closed her eyes to make them think she was asleep so they would go on discussing her.

  “Gawyn rode out this morning to seek the ruffians,” Eliwys said. Kivrin opened her eyes to slits, but she was no longer looking at her. “Mayhap he has found them.” She bent and tied the dangling strings of Agnes’s linen cap. “Agnes, go to the church with Rosemund and tell Gawyn we would speak with him in the hall. The lady sleeps. We must not disturb her.”

  Agnes darted for the door, shouting, “I would be the one to tell him, Rosemund.”

  “Rosemund, let your sister tell,” Eliwys called after them. “Agnes, do not run.”

  The girls disappeared out the door and down the invisible stairs, obviously running.

  “Rosemund is near grown,” the old woman said. “It is not seemly for her to run after your husband’s men. Ill will come of your daughters being untended. You would do wisely to send to Oxenford for a n
urse.”

  “No,” Eliwys said with a firmness Kivrin wouldn’t have guessed at. “Maisry can keep watch over them.”

  “Maisry is not fit to watch sheep. We should not have come from Bath in such haste. Certes we could have waited till …” something.

  The interpreter left a gap again, and Kivrin didn’t recognize the phrase, but she had caught the important facts. They had come from Bath. They were near Oxford.

  “Let Gawyn fetch a nurse. And a leech-woman to see to the lady.”

  “We will send for no one,” Eliwys said.

  “To …” another place name the interpreter couldn’t manage. “Lady Yvolde has repute with injuries. And she would gladly lend us one of her waiting women for a nurse.”

  “No,” Eliwys said. “We will tend her ourselves. Father Roche—”

  “Father Roche,” she said contemptuously. “He knows naught of medicine.”

  But I understood everything he said, Kivrin thought. She remembered his quiet voice chanting the last rites, his gentle touch on her temples, her palms, the soles of her feet. He had told her not to be afraid and asked her her name. And held her hand.

  “If the lady is of noble birth,” the older woman said, “would you have it told you let an ignorant village priest tend her? Lady Yvolde—”

  “We will send for no one,” Eliwys said, and for the first time Kivrin realized she was afraid. “My husband bade us keep here till he come.”

  “He had sooner have come with us.”

  “You know he could not,” Eliwys said. “He will come when he can. I must go to speak with Gawyn,” she said, walking past the old woman to the door. “Gawyn told me he would search the place where first he found the lady to seek for signs of her attackers. Mayhap he has found somewhat that will tell us what she is.”

  The place where first he found the lady. Gawyn was the man who had found her, the man with the red hair and the kind face who had helped her onto his horse and brought her here. That much at least she hadn’t dreamed, though she must have dreamed the white horse. He had brought her here, and he knew where the drop was.