Connie Willis - Dooms Day Book

He smiled. “Or American change ringers. America hadn’t been discovered yet.” He reached for the door handle.

The door at the end of the corridor banged open and a large woman carrying a valise barged through it. “There you are, Mr. Dunworthy,” she shouted the length of the corridor. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Is that one of your bell ringers?” Mary said, turning to look down the corridor at her.

“Worse,” Dunworthy said. “It’s Mrs. Gaddson.”

It was growing dark under the trees and at the bottom of the hill. Kivrin’s head began to ache before she had even reached the frozen wagon ruts, as if it had something to do with microscopic changes in altitude or light.

She couldn’t see the wagon at all, even standing directly in front of the little chest, and squinting into the darkness past the thicket made her head feel even worse. If this was one of the “minor symptoms” of time-lag, she wondered what a major one would be like.

When I get back, she thought, struggling through the thicket, I intend to have a little talk with Dr. Ahrens on the subject. I think they are underestimating the debilitating effects these minor symptoms can have on an historian. Walking down the hill had left her more out of breath than climbing it had, and she was so cold .

Her cloak and then her hair caught on the willows as she pushed her way through the thicket, and she got a long scratch on her arm that immediately began to ache, too. She tripped once and nearly fell flat, and the effect on her headache was to jolt it so that it stopped hurting and then returned with redoubled force.

It was almost completely dark in the clearing, though what little she could see was still very clear, the colors not so much fading as deepening toward black—black-green and black-brown and black-gray. The birds were settling in for the night. They must have got used to her. They didn’t so much as pause in their pre– bedtime twitterings and settlings down.

Kivrin hastily grabbed up the scattered boxes and splintered kegs, and flung them into the tilting wagon. She took hold of the wagon’s tongue and began to pull it toward the road. The wagon scraped a few inches, slid easily across a patch of leaves, and stuck. Kivrin braced her foot and pulled again. It scraped a few more inches and tilted even more. One of the boxes fell out.

Kivrin put it back in and walked around the wagon, trying to see where it was stuck. The right wheel was jammed against a tree root, but it could be pushed up and over, if only she could get a decent purchase. She couldn’t on this side—Mediaeval had taken an ax to this side so that it would look like the wagon had been smashed when it overturned, and they had done a good job. It was nothing but splinters. I told Mr. Gilchrist he should have let me have gloves, she thought.

She came around to the other side, took hold of the wheel, and shoved. It didn’t budge. She pulled her skirts and cloak out of the way and knelt beside the wheel so she could put her shoulder to it.

The footprint was in front of the wheel, in a little space swept bare of leaves and only as wide as the foot. The leaves had drifted up against the roots of the oaks on either side. The leaves did not hold a print that she could see in the graying light, but the print in the dirt was perfectly clear.

It can’t be a footprint, Kivrin thought. The ground is frozen. She reached out to put her hand in the indentation, thinking it might be some trick of shadow or the failing light. The frozen ruts out in the road would not have taken any print at all. But the dirt gave easily under her hand, and the print was deep enough to feel.

It had been made by a soft-soled shoe with no heel, and the foot that had made it was large, larger even than hers. A man’s foot, but men in the 1300’s had been smaller, shorter, with feet not even as big as hers. A giant’s foot.

Maybe it’s an old footprint, she thought wildly. Maybe it’s the footprint of a woodcutter, or a peasant looking for a lost sheep. Maybe this is one of the king’s woodlands, and they’ve been through here hunting. But it wasn’t the footprint of someone chasing a deer. It was the print of someone who had stood there for a long time, watching her. I heard him, she thought, and a little flutter of panic forced itself up into her throat. I heard him standing there.

She was still kneeling, holding onto the wheel for balance. If the man, whoever it was, and it had to be a man, a giant, were still here in this glade, watching, he must know that she had found the footprint. She stood up. “Hello!” she called, and frightened the birds to death again. They flapped and squawked themselves into hushed silence. “Is someone there?”

She waited, listening, and it seemed to her that in the silence she could hear the breathing again. “ Speke. I am in distresse an my servauntes fled .”

Lovely, she thought even as she said it. Tell him you’re helpless and all alone.

“Halloo!” she called again and began a cautious circuit of the glade, peering out into the trees. If he was still standing there, it was so dark she wouldn’t be able to see him. She couldn’t make out anything past the edges of the glade. She couldn’t even tell for sure which way the thicket and the road lay. If she waited any longer, it would be completely dark, and she would never be able to get the wagon to the road.

But she couldn’t move the wagon. Whoever had stood there between the two oaks, watching her, knew that the wagon was here. Maybe he had even seen it come through, bursting on the sparkling air like something conjured by an alchemist. If that were the case, he had probably run off to get the stake Dunworthy was so sure the populace kept in readiness. But surely if that were the case he would have said something, even if it was only, “Yoicks!” or “Heavenly Father!” and she would have heard him crashing through the underbrush as he ran way.

He hadn’t run away, though, which meant he hadn’t seen her come through. He had come upon her afterwards, lying inexplicably in the middle of the woods beside a smashed wagon, and thought what? That she had been attacked on the road and then dragged here to hide the evidence?

Then why hadn’t he tried to help her? Why had he stood there, silent as an oak, long enough to leave a deep footprint, and then gone away again? Maybe he had thought she was dead. He would have been frightened of her unshriven body. People as late as the fifteenth century had believed that evil spirits took immediate possession of any body not properly buried.

Or maybe he had gone for help, to one of those villages that Kivrin had heard, maybe even Skendgate, and was even now on his way back with half the town, all of them carrying lanterns.

In that case, she should stay where she was and wait for him to come back. She should even lie down again. When the townspeople arrived, they could speculate about her and then bear her to the village, giving her examples of the language, the way her plan had been intended to work in the first place. But what if he came back alone, or with friends who had no intention of helping her?

She couldn’t think. Her headache had spread out from her temple to behind her eyes. As she rubbed her forehead, it began to throb. And she was so cold! This cloak, in spite of its rabbit-fur lining, wasn’t warm at all. How had people survived the Little Ice Age dressed only in cloaks like this? How had the rabbits survived?

At least she could do something about the cold. She could gather some wood and start a fire, and then if the footprint person came back with evil intentions, she could hold him off with a flaming brand. And if he had gone off for help and not been able to find his way back in the dark, the fire would lead him to her.