Doomsday Book (42 page)

Dunworthy told the registrar about the T-cell enhancement and she nodded and said, "It will just be a moment."

They sat down to wait. It killed them all, Dunworthy thought. Half of Europe.

"I didn't get to read her her motto," Colin said. "Would you like to hear it?" He didn't wait for an answer. "Where was Father Christmas when the lights went out?" He waited expectantly.

Dunworthy shook his head.

"In the dark."

He took his gobstopper out of his pocket, unwrapped it, and stuck it in his mouth. "You're worried about your girl, aren't you?"

"Yes."

He folded up the gobstopper wrapper into a tiny packet. "What I don't understand is, why can't you go get her?"

"She isn't there. We must wait for the rendezvous."

"No, I mean why can't you go back to the same time you sent her through and get her while she was still there? Before anything happened? I mean you can go to any time you want, can't you?"

"No," he said. "You can
send
an historian to any time, but once she's there, the net can only operate in real time. Did you study the paradoxes at school?"

"Yes," Colin said, but he sounded uncertain. "They're like time-travel rules?"

"The space-time continuum doesn't allow paradoxes," Dunworthy said. "It would be a paradox if Kivrin made something happen that hadn't happened, or if she caused an anachronism."

Colin was still looking uncertain.

"One of the paradoxes is that no one can be in two places at the same time. She's already been in the past for four days. There's nothing we can do to change that. It's already happened."

"Then how does she get back?"

"When she went through, the tech took what's called a fix. It tells the tech exactly where she is, and it acts as a ... um ... " he groped for an understandable word. "A tether. It ties the two times together so the net can be reopened at a certain time, and she can be picked up."

"Like, 'I'll meet you at the church at half-past six?'"

"Exactly. It's called a rendezvous. Kivrin's is in two weeks. The twenty-eighth of December. On that day the tech will open the net, and Kivrin will come back through."

"I thought you said it was the same time there. How can the twenty-eighth be two weeks from now?"

"They used a different calendar in the Middle Ages. It's December the seventeenth there. Our rendezvous date is the sixth of January." If she's there. If I can find a tech to open the net.

Colin pulled out his gobstopper and looked at it thoughtfully. It was a mottled bluish-white and looked rather like a map of the moon. He stuck it back in his mouth.

"So, if I went to 1320 on the twenty-sixth of December, I could have Christmas twice."

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Apocalyptic," he said. He unfolded the gobstopper wrapper and folded it into an even tinier packet. "I think they've forgotten about you, don't you?"

"It's beginning to look that way," Dunworthy said. The next time a house officer came through, Dunworthy stopped him and told him he was waiting for T-cell enhancement.

"Oh?" he said, looking surprised. "I'll try to find out about it." He disappeared into Casualties.

They waited some more. "It was the rats," Badri had said. And that first night he had asked Dunworthy, "What year is it?" But he had said there was minimal slippage. He had said the apprentice's calculations were correct.

Colin took his gobstopper out and examined it several times for change in color. "If something terrible happened, couldn't you break the rules?" he said, squinting at it. "If she got her arm cut off or she died or a bomb blew her up or something?"

"They're not rules, Colin. They're scientific laws. We couldn't break them if we tried. If we attempted to reverse events that had already happened, the net wouldn't open."

Colin spit his gobstopper into the wrapper and folded the wrinkled paper carefully around it. "I'm sure your girl's all right," he said.

He jammed the wrapped gobstopper in his jacket pocket and pulled out a lumpy parcel. "I forgot to give Great-Aunt Mary her Christmas present," he said.

He jumped up and started into Casualties before Dunworthy could caution him to wait, got opposite the door, and came tearing back.

"Blood! The Gallstone's here!" he said. "She's coming this way."

Dunworthy stood up. "That's all that's needed."

"This way," Colin said. "I came in the back door the night I got here." He sprinted off in the other direction. "Come on!"

Dunworthy could not manage a sprint, but he walked quickly down the labyrinth of corridors Colin indicated and out a service entrance into a side street. A man in a sandwich board was standing outside the door in the rain. The sandwich board said, "The doom we feared is upon us," which seemed oddly fitting.

"I'll make certain she didn't see us," Colin said, and dashed around to the front.

The man handed Dunworthy a flyer. "THE END OF TIME IS NEAR!" it said in fiery capital letters. "'Fear God, for the hour of his judgment is come.' Rev. 14:7."

Colin waved to Dunworthy from the corner. "It's all right," Colin said, slightly out of breath. "She's inside shouting at the registrar."

Dunworthy handed the flyer back to the man and followed Colin. He led the way along the side street to Woodstock Road. Dunworthy looked anxiously toward the door of Casualties, but he couldn't see anyone, not even the anti-EC picketers.

Colin sprinted another block, and then slowed to a walk. He pulled the packet of soap tablets out of his pocket and offered Dunworthy one.

He declined.

Colin popped a pink one in his mouth and said, none too clearly, "This is the best Christmas I've ever had."

Dunworthy pondered that sentiment for several blocks. The carillon was massacring, "In the Bleak Midwinter," which also seemed fitting, and the streets were still deserted, but as they turned down the Broad, a familiar figure hurried toward them, hunched against the rain.

"It's Mr. Finch," Colin said.

"Good Lord," Dunworthy said. "What do you suppose we've run out of now?"

"I hope it's Brussels sprouts."

Finch had looked up at the sound of their voices. "There you are, Mr. Dunworthy. Thank goodness. I've been looking for you everywhere."

"What is it?" Dunworthy said. "I told Ms. Taylor I'd see about a practice room."

"It isn't that, sir. It's the detainees. Two of them are down with the virus."

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE DOOMSDAY BOOK (082631-084122)

21 December 1320 (Old Style.) Father Roche doesn't know where the drop is. I made him take me to the place where Gawyn met him, but even standing in the clearing didn't jog my memory. It's obvious Gawyn didn't happen upon him until he was a long way from the drop, and by that time I was completely delirious.

And I realized today I'll never be able to find the drop on my own. The woods are too big, and they're full of clearings and oak trees and willow thickets that all look alike now that it's snowed. I should have marked the drop with something besides the casket.

Gawyn will have to show me where the drop is, and he's not back yet. Rosemund told me it's only a half day's ride to Courcy, but that he will probably spend the night there because of the rain.

It's been raining hard since we got back, and I suppose I should be happy since it may melt the snow, but it makes it impossible for me to go out and look for the drop, and it's freezing in the manor house. Everyone's wearing their cloaks and huddling next to the fire.

What
do
the villagers do? Their huts can't even keep the wind out, and the one I was in had no sign of a blanket. They must be literally freezing, and Rosemund said the steward said it was going to rain till Christmas Eve.

Rosemund apologized for her ill-tempered behavior in the woods and told me, "I was wroth with my sister."

Agnes had nothing to do with it -- what upset her was obviously the news that her fiance had been invited for Christmas, and when I had a chance with Rosemund alone, I asked her if she was worried over her marriage.

"My father has arranged it," she said, threading her needle. "We were betrothed at Martinmas. We are to be wed at Easter."

"And is it with your consent?" I asked.

"It is a good match," she said. "Sir Bloet is highly placed, and he has holdings that adjoin my father's."

"Do you like him?"

She stabbed the needle into the linen in the wooden frame. "My father would never let me come to harm," she said, and pulled the long thread through.

She didn't volunteer anything else, and all I could get out of Agnes was that Sir Bloet was nice and had brought her a silver penny, no doubt as part of the betrothal gifts.

Agnes was too concerned about her knee to tell me anything else. She stopped complaining about it halfway home, and then limped exaggeratedly when she got down off the sorrel. I thought she was just trying to get attention, but when I looked at it, the scab had come off completely. The area around it is red and swollen.

I washed it off, wrapped it in as clean a cloth as I could find, (I'm afraid it may have been one of Imeyne's coifs -- I found it in the chest at the foot of the bed) and made her sit quietly by the fire and play with her knight, but I'm worried. If it gets infected, it could be serious. There weren't any antimicrobials in the 1300's.

Eliwys is worried, too. She clearly expected Gawyn back tonight, and has been going to stand by the screens all day, looking out the door. I have not been able to figure out how she feels about Gawyn. Sometimes, like today, I think she loves him, and is afraid of what that means for both of them. Adultery was a mortal sin in the eyes of the church, and often a dangerous one. But most of the time I am convinced that his
amour
is completely unrequited, that she is so worried about her husband that she doesn't know he exists.

The pure, unattainable lady was the ideal of courtly romances, but it's clear he doesn't know whether or not she loves him either. His rescuing me in the wood and his story of the renegades was only an attempt to impress her (which would have been much more impressive if there
had
been twenty renegades, all armed with swords and maces and battle axes). He would obviously do anything to win her, and Lady Imeyne knows it. Which is why, I think, he's been sent off to Courcy.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

By the time they got back to Balliol, two more of the detainees were down with the virus. Dunworthy sent Colin to bed and helped Finch get the detainees to bed and phone the infirmary.

"All our ambulances are out," the registrar told him. "We'll send one as soon as possible."

As soon as possible was midnight. He didn't get back and to bed till past one.

Colin was asleep on the cot Finch had set up for him,
The Age of Chivalry
next to his head. Dunworthy debated pulling the book away but he didn't want to risk waking him. He went in to bed.

Kivrin could not be in the plague. Badri had said there was minimal slippage, and the plague had not hit England until 1348. Kivrin had been sent to 1320.

He turned over and closed his eyes determinedly. She could not be in the plague. Badri was delirious. He had said all sorts of things, talked about lids and breaking china as well as rats. None of it made any sense. It was the fever speaking. He had told Dunworthy to back up. He had given him imaginary notes. None of it meant anything.

"It was the rats," Badri had said. The contemps hadn't known it was spread by fleas on the rats. They had had no idea what caused it. They had accused everyone -- Jews and witches and the insane. They had murdered halfwits and hanged old women. They had burned strangers at the stake.

He got out of bed and padded into the sitting room. He tiptoed around Colin's cot and slid
The Age of Chivalry
out from under Colin's head. Colin stirred but didn't wake.

Dunworthy sat on the windowseat and looked up the Black Death. It had started in China in 1333, and moved west on trading ships to Messina in Sicily and from there to Pisa. It had spread through Italy and France -- eighty thousand dead in Siena, a hundred thousand in Florence, three hundred thousand in Rome -- before it crossed the Channel. It had reached England in 1348, "a little before the Feast of St. John the Baptist," the twenty-fourth of June.

That meant a slippage of twenty-eight years. Badri had been worried about too much slippage, but he had been talking of weeks, not years.

He reached over the cot to the bookcase and took down Fitzwiller's
Pandemics
.

"What are you doing?" Colin asked sleepily.

"Reading about the Black Death," he whispered. "Go back to sleep."

"They didn't call it that," Colin mumbled around his gobstopper. He rolled over, wrapping himself in his blankets. "They called it the blue fever."

Dunworthy took both books back to bed with him. Fitzwiller gave the date of the plague's arrival in England as St. Peter's Day, the twenty-ninth of June, 1348. It had reached Oxford in December, London in October of 1349, and then moved north and back across the Channel to the Low Countries and Norway. It had gone everywhere except Bohemia, and Poland, which had a quarantine, and, oddly, parts of Scotland.