Doomsday Book (68 page)

Kivrin went through Imeyne's bag again, tasting the contents of the pouches. The yellow powder was sulfur. Doctors had used that during epidemics, too, burning it to fumigate the air, and she remembered learning in History of Meds that sulfur killed certain bacteria, though whether that was only in the sulfa compounds she couldn't remember. It was safer than cutting the bubo open, though.

She sprinkled a little on the fire to test it, and it billowed into a yellow cloud that burned Kivrin's throat even through her mask. The clerk gasped for breath, and Imeyne, over in her corner, set up a continuous hacking.

Kivrin had expected the smell of bad eggs to disperse in a few minutes, but the yellow smoke hung in the air like a pall, burning their eyes. Maisry ran outside, coughing into her apron, and Eliwys took Imeyne and Agnes up to the loft to escape it.

Kivrin propped the manor door open and fanned the air with one of the kitchen cloths, and after awhile the air cleared a little, though her throat still felt parched. The clerk continued to cough, but Rosemund stopped, and her pulse slowed till Kivrin could scarcely feel it.

"I don't know what to do," Kivrin said, holding her hot, dry wrist. "I've tried everything.

Roche came in, coughing.

"It is the sulfur," she said. "Rosemund is worse."

He looked at her and felt her pulse and then went out again, and Kivrin took that as a good sign. He would not have left if she were truly bad.

He came back in a few minutes, wearing his vestments and carrying the oil and viaticum of the last rites.

"What is it?" Kivrin said. "Has the steward's wife died then?"

"Nay," he said, and looked past her at Rosemund.

"No," Kivrin said. She scrambled to her feet to stand between him and Rosemund. "I won't let you."

"She must not die unshriven," he said, still looking at Rosemund.

"Rosemund isn't dying," Kivrin said, and followed his gaze.

She looked already dead, her chapped lips half-open and her eyes blind and unblinking. Her skin had taken on a yellowish cast and was stretched tautly over her narrow face. No, Kivrin thought desperately. I must do something to stop this. She's twelve years old.

Roche moved forward with the chalice, and Rosemund raised her arm, as if in supplication, and then let it fall.

"We must open the plague-boil," Kivrin said. "We must let the poison out."

She thought he was going to refuse, to insist on hearing Rosemund's confession first, but he did not. He set the chrism and chalice down on the stone floor and went to fetch a knife.

"A sharp one," Kivrin called after him, "and bring wine." She set the pot of water on the fire again. When he came back with the knife, she washed it off with water from the bucket, scrubbing the encrusted dirt near the hilt with her fingernails. She held it in the fire, the hilt wrapped in the tail of her surcote, and then poured boiling water over it and then wine and then the water again.

They moved Rosemund closer to the fire, the side with the bubo facing it so they could have as much light as possible, and Roche knelt at Rosemund's head. Kivrin slipped her arm gently out of her shift and bunched the fabric under her for a pillow. Roche took hold of her arm, turning it so the swelling was exposed.

It was almost the size of an apple, and her whole shoulder joint was inflamed and swollen. The edges of the bubo were soft and almost gelatinous, but the center was still hard.

Kivrin opened the bottle of wine Roche had brought, poured some on a cloth, and swabbed the bubo gently with it. It felt like a rock embedded in the skin. She was not sure the knife would even cut into it.

She picked up the knife and poised it above the swelling, afraid of cutting into an artery, of spreading the infection, of making it worse.

"She is past pain," Roche said.

Kivrin looked down at her. She hadn't moved, even when Kivrin pressed on the swelling. She stared past them both at something terrible. I can't make it worse, Kivrin thought. Even if I kill her, I can't make it worse.

"Hold her arm," she said, and Roche pinned her wrist and halfway up the forearm, pressing her arm flat to the floor. Rosemund still didn't move.

Two quick, clean slices, Kivrin thought. She took a deep breath and touched the knife to the swelling.

Rosemund's arm spasmed, her shoulder twisting protectively away from the knife, her thin hand clenching into a claw. "What do you do?" she said hoarsely. "I will tell my father!"

Kivrin jerked the knife back. Roche caught at Rosemund's arm and pushed it back against the floor, and she hit weakly at him with her other hand.

"I am the daughter of Lord Guillaume D'Ivrey," she said. "You cannot treat me thus."

Kivrin scooted out of her reach and scrambled to her feet, trying to keep the knife from touching anything. Roche reached forward and caught both her wrists easily in one hand. Rosemund kicked out weakly at Kivrin. The chalice fell over and wine spilled out in a dark puddle.

"We must tie her," Kivrin said, and realized she was holding the knife aloft, like a murderer. She wrapped it in one of the cloths Eliwys had torn, and ripped another into strips.

Roche bound Rosemund's wrists above her head while Kivrin tied her ankles to the leg of one of the upturned benches. Rosemund didn't struggle, but when Roche pulled her shift up over her exposed chest, she said, "I know you. You are the cutthroat who waylaid the Lady Katherine."

Roche leaned forward, pressing his full weight down on her forearm, and Kivrin cut across the swelling.

Blood oozed and then gushed, and Kivrin thought, I've hit an artery. She and Roche both lunged for the pile of cloths, and she grabbed a thick wad of them and pressed them against the wound. They soaked through immediately, and when she released her hand to take the one Roche handed her, blood spurted out of the tiny cut. She jammed the tail of her surcote against it, and Rosemund whimpered, a small, helpless sound like Agnes's puppy, and seemed to collapse, though there was nowhere for her to fall.

I've killed her, Kivrin thought.

"I can't stop the bleeding," she said, but it had already stopped. She held the skirt of her surcote against it, counting to a hundred and then two hundred, and carefully lifted a corner of it away from the wound.

Blood still welled from the cut, but it was mixed with a thick yellow-gray pus. Roche leaned forward to dab at it, but Kivrin stopped him. "No, it's full of plague germs," she said, taking the cloth away from him. "Don't touch it."

She wiped the sickening-looking pus away. It oozed up again, followed by a watery serum. "That's all of it, I think," she said to Roche. "Hand me the wine." She looked round for a clean cloth to pour it on.

There weren't any. They had used them all, trying to stop the bleeding. She tipped the wine bottle carefully and let the dark liquid dribble into the cut. Rosemund didn't move. Her face was gray, as if all the blood had been drained out of her. As it had been. And I don't have a transfusion to give her. I don't even have a clean rag.

Roche was untying Rosemund' hands. He took her limp hand in his huge one. "Her heart beats strongly now," he said.

"We must have more linen," Kivrin said, and burst into tears.

"My father will see you hanged for this," Rosemund said.

TRANSCRIPT FROM THE DOOMSDAY BOOK (071145-071862)

Rosemund is unconscious. I tried to lance her bubo last night to drain out the infection, and I'm afraid I only made things worse. She lost a great deal of blood. She's very pale and her pulse is so faint I can't find it in her wrist at all.

The clerk is worse, too. His skin continues to hemorrhage, and it's clear he's near the end. I remember Dr. Ahrens saying untreated bubonic plague kills people in four or five days, but he can't possibly last that long.

Lady Eliwys, Lady Imeyne, and Agnes are still well, though Lady Imeyne seems to have gone almost crazy in her search for someone to blame. She boxed Maisry's ears this morning and told her God was punishing us all for her laziness and stupidity.

Maisry
is
lazy and stupid. She cannot be trusted to watch Agnes for five minutes at a time, and when I sent her for water to wash Rosemund's wound this morning, she was gone over half an hour and came back without it.

I didn't say anything. I didn't want Lady Imeyne hitting her again, and it is only a matter of time before Lady Imeyne gets around to blaming me. I saw her watching me over her Book of Hours when I went out for the water Maisry forgot, and I can well imagine what she's thinking -- that I know too much about the plague not to have been fleeing it, that I am supposed to have lost my memory, that I was not injured but ill.

If she makes those accusations, I'm afraid she'll convince Lady Eliwys that I'm the cause of the plague and that she shouldn't listen to me, that they should take the barricade down and pray together for God to deliver them.

And how will I defend myself? By saying, I'm from the future, where we know everything about the Black Death except how to cure it without streptomycin and how to get back there?

Gawyn still isn't back. Eliwys is frantic with worry. When Roche went to say vespers she was standing at the gate, no cloak, no coif, watching the road. I wonder if it has occurred to her that he might already have been infected when he left for Bath. He rode to Courcy with the bishop's envoy, and when he came back he already knew about the plague.

(Break)

Ulf the Reeve is near death, and his wife and one of his sons have it. No buboes, but the woman has several small lumps like seeds inside her thigh. Roche constantly has to be reminded to wear his mask and to not touch the patients more than he has to.

The history vids say the contemps were panic stricken and cowardly during the Black Death, that they ran away and wouldn't tend the sick, and that the priests were the worst of all, but it isn't like that at all.

Everyone's frightened, but they're all doing the best they can, and Roche is wonderful. He sat and held the reeve's wife's hand the whole time I examined her, and he doesn't flinch at the most disgusting jobs -- bathing Rosemund's wound, emptying chamberpots, cleaning up after the clerk. He never seems afraid. I don't know where he gets his courage.

He continues to say matins and vespers and to pray, telling God about Rosemund and who has it now, reporting their symptoms and telling what we're doing for them, as if He could actually hear him. The way I talk to you.

Is God there, too, I wonder, but shut off from us by something worse than time, unable to get through, unable to find us?

(Break)

We can hear the plague. The villages toll the death knell after a burial, nine strokes for a man, three for a woman, one for a baby, and then an hour of steady tolling. Esthcote had two this morning, and Osney has tolled continuously since yesterday. The bell in the southwest that I told you I could hear when I first came through has stopped. I don't know whether that means the plague is over there or whether there's no one left alive to ring the bell.

(Break)

Please don't let Rosemund die. Please don't let Agnes get it. Send Gawyn back.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The boy who had run from Kivrin the day she tried to find the drop came down with the plague in the night. His mother was standing waiting for Father Roche when he went to matins. The boy had a bubo on his back, and Kivrin lanced it while Roche and the mother held him.

She didn't want to do it. The scurvy had left him already weak, and Kivrin had no idea whether there were any arteries below the shoulder blades. Rosemund did not seem at all improved, though Roche claimed her pulse was stronger. She was so white, as if she had been utterly drained of blood, and so still. And the boy didn't look as if he could stand to lose any blood.

But he bled hardly at all, and the color was already coming back in his cheeks before Kivrin finished washing the knife.

"Give him tea made from rose hips," Kivrin said, thinking that at least that would help the scurvy. "And willow bark." She held the blade of the knife over the fire. It was no bigger than the day she had sat by it, too weak to find the drop. It would never keep the boy warm, and if she told the woman to go gather firewood, she might expose someone else. "We will bring you some wood," she said, and then wondered how.

There was still food left over from the Christmas feast, but they were fast running out of everything else. They had used most of the wood that was already cut trying to keep Rosemund and the clerk warm, and there was no one to ask to chop the logs that lay piled against the kitchen. The reeve was ill, the steward was tending his wife and son.

Kivrin gathered up an armful of the already-split wood and some pieces of loose bark for kindling and took it back to the hut, wishing she could move the boy into the manor house, but Eliwys had the clerk and Rosemund to tend, and she looked ready to collapse herself.

Eliwys had sat with Rosemund all night, giving her sips of willow tea and rebandaging the wound. They had run out of cloths, and she had taken off her coif and torn it into strips. She sat where she could see the screens, and every few minutes she had stood up and gone over to the door, as if she heard someone coming. With her dark hair down over her shoulders, she looked no older than Rosemund.