Connie Willis - Dooms Day Book

“There, there, it’s all right,” he said, coming up carefully on its left side. He put his hand on its neck, and it stopped whinnying and began nosing at Dunworthy, looking for food.

He looked for some grass sticking up through the snow to feed her, but the area around the thornbush was nearly bare of snow.

“How long have you been trapped here, old boy?” he asked. Had the stallion’s owner been stricken with the plague as he rode, or had he died, and the panicked horse bolted, running until his flying reins got tangled in the bush?

He walked a little way into the woods, looking for footprints, but there weren’t any. The stallion began to whinny again, and he went back to free him, snatching up stalks of grass that stuck up through the snow as he went.

“A horse! Apocalyptic!” Colin said, racing up. “Where did you find it?”

“I told you to stay where you were.”

“I know, but I heard the horse whinnying, and I thought you’d run into trouble.”

“All the more reason for you to have obeyed me.” He handed the grass to Colin. “Feed him these.”

He bent over the bush and pulled out the reins. The stallion, in his efforts to extricate himself, had twisted the rein hopelessly round the spiked brambles. Dunworthy had to hold the branches back with one hand and reach in with the other to unwind it. He was covered with scratches within seconds.

“Whose horse is it?” Colin asked, offering the horse a piece of grass from a distance of several feet. The starving animal lunged at it and Colin jumped back, dropping it. “Are you sure it’s tame?”

Dunworthy had incurred a near-fatal injury when the stallion jerked his head down for the grass, but he had the rein free. He wrapped it around his bleeding hand and took up the other one.

“Yes,” he said.

“Whose horse is it?” Colin said, stroking its nose timidly.

“Ours.” He tightened the girth and helped Colin, protesting, up behind the saddle, and mounted.

The stallion, not yet realizing he was free, turned his head accusingly when he kicked her gently in the sides but then cantered off back down the snow-packed road, delighted at his freedom.

Colin clutched frantically at Dunworthy’s middle, just at the spot where the pain was, but by the time they had gone a hundred meters, he was sitting up straight and asking “How do you steer it?” and “What if you want it to go faster?”

It took them no time at all to return to the main road. Colin wanted to go back to the hedge and strike out across– country, but Dunworthy turned the stallion the other way. The road forked in half a mile, and he took the lefthand road.

It was a good deal more travelled than the first one, though the woods it led through were even thicker. The sky was completely overcast now, and the wind was picking up.

“I see it!” Colin said, and let go with one hand to point past a stand of ash trees to a glimpse of dark gray stone roof against the gray sky. A church, perhaps, or a manor house. It lay off to the east, and almost immediately a narrow track branched from the road, over a rickety wooden plank bridging a stream, and across a narrow meadow.

The stallion did not prick up its ears or attempt to speed his pace, and Dunworthy concluded it must not be from the village. And a good thing, too, or we’d be hanged for horse-stealing before we could ask where Kivrin is, he thought, and saw the sheep.

They lay on their sides, mounds of dirty gray wool, though some of them had huddled near the trees, trying to keep out of the wind and the snow.

Colin hadn’t seen. “What do we do when we get there?” he asked Dunworthy’s back. “Do we sneak in or just ride up and ask somebody if they’ve seen her?”

There will be no one to ask, Dunworthy thought. He kicked the stallion into a canter and they rode through the ash trees and into the village.

It was not at all like the illustrations in Colin’s book, buildings around a central clearing. They were scattered in among the trees, almost out of sight of one another. He glimpsed thatched roofs, and farther off, in a grove of ash trees, the church, but here, in a clearing as small as that of the drop, was only a timbered house and a low shed.

It was too small to be a manor house—the steward’s perhaps, or the reeve’s. The wooden door of the shed stood open, and snow had drifted in. There was no smoke from the roof, and no sound.

“Perhaps they’ve fled,” Colin said. “Lots of people fled when they heard the plague was coming. That’s how it spread.”

Perhaps they had fled. The snow in front of the house was packed flat and hard, as if many people and horses had been in the yard.

“Stay here with the horse,” he said, and went up to the house. The door here was not shut either, though it had been pulled nearly to. He ducked in the little door.

It was icy inside and so dark after the bright snow that he could see nothing except the red after-image. He pushed the door open all the way, but there was still scarcely any light, and everything seemed tinged with red.

It must be the steward’s house. There were two rooms, separated by a timbered partition, and matting on the floor. The table was bare, and the fire on the hearth had been out for days. The little room was filled with the smell of cold ashes. The steward and his family had fled, and perhaps the rest of the villagers, too, no doubt taking the plague with them. And Kivrin.

He leaned against the door jamb, the tightness in his chest suddenly a pain again. Of all his worries over Kivrin, this one had never occurred to him, that she would have gone.

He looked into the other room. Colin ducked his head in the door. “The horse keeps trying to drink out of a bucket that’s out here. Should I let it?”

“Yes,” Dunworthy said, standing so Colin couldn’t see round the partition. “But don’t let him drink too much. He hasn’t had any water for days.”

“There isn’t all that much in the bucket.” He looked round the room interestedly. “This is one of the serf’s huts, right? They really were poor, weren’t they? Did you find anything?”

“No,” he said. “Go and watch the horse. And don’t let him wander off.”

Colin went out, brushing his head against the top of the door.

The baby lay on a bag of flocking in the corner. It had apparently still been alive when the mother died; she lay on the mud floor, her hands stretched out toward it. Both were dark, almost black, and the baby’s swaddling clothes were stiff with darkened blood.

“Mr. Dunworthy!” Colin called, sounding alarmed, and Dunworthy jerked around, afraid he had come in again, but he was still out with the stallion, whose nose was deep in the bucket.

“What is it?” he asked.

“There’s something over there on the ground.” Colin pointed toward the huts. “I think it’s a body.” He yanked on the stallion’s reins, so hard the bucket fell over and a thin puddle of water spilled out on the snow.

“Wait,” Dunworthy said, but he was already running forward into the trees, the stallion following.

“It is a b—” Colin said, and his voice cut off sharply. Dunworthy ran up, holding his side.

It was a body, a young man’s. It lay sprawled face up in the snow in a frozen puddle of black liquid. There was a dusting of snow on his face. His buboes must have burst, Dunworthy thought, and looked at Colin, but he was not looking at the body, but at the clearing.

It was larger than the one in front of the steward’s house. At its edges lay half a dozen huts, at the far end the Norman church. And in the center, on the trampled snow, lay the bodies.

They had made no attempt at burying them, though by the church there was a shallow trench, a mound of snow-covered dirt piled beside it. Some of them seemed to have been dragged to the churchyard—there were long, sled-like marks in the snow—and one at least had crawled to the door of his hut. He lay half-in, half-out.