Connie Willis - Doomsday Book

Agnes's eyes flew open. "You did not wake me," she said sleepily to Rosemund, and then more loudly as she came awake, "You promised to wake me."

"Get into your cloak," Kivrin said. "We must go to church."

"Kivrin, I would wear my bell."

"You're wearing it," Kivrin said, trying to fasten Agnes's red cape without stabbing her in the neck with the pin of the clasp.

"Nay, I have it not," Agnes said, searching her arm. "I would wear my bell !"

"Here it is," Rosemund said, picking it up off the floor, "It must have fallen from your wrist. But it is not meet to wear it now. This bell calls us to mass. The Christmas bells come after."

"I shall not ring it," Agnes said. "I would only wear it."

Kivrin didn't believe that for a minute, but everyone else was ready. One of Sir Bloet's men was lighting the horn lanterns with a brand from the fire and handing them to the servants. She hastily tied the bell to Agnes's wrist and took the girls by the hand.

Lady Eliwys laid her hand on Sir Bloet's upheld one. Lady Imeyne signalled to Kivrin to follow with the little girls, and the others fell in behind them solemnly, as if it were a procession, Lady Imeyne with Sir Bloet's sister, and then the rest of Sir Bloet's entourage. Lady Eliwys and Sir Bloet led the way out into the courtyard, through the gate, and onto the green.

It had stopped snowing, and the stars had come out. The village lay silent under its covering of white. Frozen in time, Kivrin thought. The dilapidated buildings looked different, the staggering fences and filthy daubed huts softened and graced by the snow. The lanterns caught the crystalline facets of the snowflakes and made them sparkle, but it was the stars that took Kivrin's breath away, hundreds of stars, thousands of stars, and all of them sparkling like jewels in the icy air. "It shines," Agnes said, and Kivrin didn't know whether she was talking about the snow or the sky.

The bell tolled evenly, calmly, its sound different again out in the frosty air — not louder, but fuller and somehow clearer. Kivrin could hear all the other bells now and recognize them, Esthcote and Witenie and Chertelintone, even though they sounded different, too. She listened for the Swindone bell, which had rung all this time, but she couldn't hear it. She couldn't hear the Oxford bells either. She wondered if she had only imagined them.

"You are ringing your bell, Agnes," Rosemund said.

"I am not," Agnes said. "I am only walking."

"Look at the church," Kivrin said. "Isn't it beautiful?"

It flamed like a beacon at the other end of the green, lit from inside and out, the stained-glass windows throwing wavering ruby and sapphire lights on the snow. There were lights all around it, too, filling the churchyard all the way to the bell tower. Torches. She could smell their tarry smoke. More torches made their way in from the white fields, winding down from the hill behind the church.

She thought suddenly of Oxford on Christmas Eve, the shops lit for last-minute shopping and the window of Brasenose shining yellow onto the quad. And the Christmas tree at Balliol lit with multi-colored strings of laser lights.

"I would that we had come to you for Yule," Lady Imeyne said to Lady Yvolde. "Then we had had a proper priest to say the masses. This place's priest can but barely say the Paternoster."

This place's priest just spent hours kneeling in an ice-cold church, Kivrin thought, hours kneeling in hose that have holes in the knees, and now this place's priest is ringing a heavy bell which has had to be tolled for an hour and will shortly go through an elaborate ceremony that he has had to memorize because he cannot read.

"It will be a poor sermon and a poor mass, I fear," Lady Imeyne said.

"Alas, there are many who do not love God in these days," Lady Yvolde said, "but we must pray to God that He will set the world right and bring men again to virtue."

Kivrin doubted if that answer was what Lady Imeyne wanted to hear.

"I have sent to the Bishop of Bath to send us a chaplain," Imeyne said, "but he has not yet come."

"My brother says there is much trouble in Bath," Yvolde said.

They were almost to the churchyard. Kivrin could make out faces now, lit by the smoky torches and by little oil cressets some of the women were carrying. Their faces, reddened and lit from below, looked faintly sinister. Mr. Dunworthy would think they were an angry mob, Kivrin thought, gathered to burn some poor martyr at the stake. It's the light, she thought. Everyone looks like a cutthroat by torchlight. No wonder they invented electricity.

They came into the churchyard. Kivrin recognized some of the people near the church doors: the boy with the scurvy who had run from her, two of the young girls who'd helped with the Christmas baking, Cob. The steward's wife was wearing a cloak with an ermine collar and carrying a metal lantern with four tiny panes of real glass. She was talking animatedly to the woman with the scrofula scars who had helped put up the holly. They were all talking and moving around to keep warm, and one man with a black beard was laughing so hard his torch swept dangerously close to the steward's wife's wimple.

Church officials had eventually had to do away with the midnight mass because of all the drinking and carousing, Kivrin remembered, and some of these parishioners definitely looked like they had spent the evening breaking fasts. The steward was talking animatedly to a rough-looking man Rosemund pointed out as Maisry's father. Both their faces were bright red from the cold or the torchlight or the liquor or all three, but they seemed gay rather than dangerous. The steward kept punctuating what he was saying with hard, thunking claps on Maisry's father's shoulder, and every time he did it the father laughed, a happy helpless giggle that made Kivrin think he was much brighter than she had supposed.

The steward's wife grabbed for her husband's sleeve, and he shook her off, but as soon as Lady Eliwys and Sir Bloet came through the lychgate, he and Maisry's brother fell back promptly to make a clear path into the church. So did all the others, falling silent as the entourage passed through the churchyard and in the heavy doors, and then beginning to talk again, but more quietly, as they came into the church behind them.

Sir Bloet unbuckled his sword and handed it to a servant, and he and Lady Eliwys knelt and genuflected as soon as they were in the door. They walked almost to the rood screen together and knelt again.

Kivrin and the little girls followed. When Agnes crossed herself, her bell jangled hollowly in the church. I'll have to take it off of her, Kivrin thought, and wondered if she should step out of the procession now and take Agnes off to the side by Lady Imeyne's husband's tomb and undo it, but Lady Imeyne was waiting impatiently at the door with Sir Bloet's sister.

She led the girls to the front. Sir Bloet had already gotten to his feet again. Eliwys stayed on her knees a little longer, and then stood, and Sir Bloet escorted her to the north side of the church, bowed slightly, and walked over to take his place on the men's side.

Kivrin knelt with the little girls, praying Agnes wouldn't make too much noise when she crossed herself again. She didn't, but when Agnes got to her feet she snagged her foot in the hem of her robe and caught herself with a clanging almost as loud as the bell still tolling outside. Lady Imeyne was, of course, right behind them. She glared at Kivrin.

Kivrin took the girls to stand beside Eliwys. Lady Imeyne knelt, but Lady Yvolde made only an obeisance. As soon as Imeyne rose, a servant hurried forward with a dark velvet covered prie- dieu and laid it on the floor next to Rosemund for Lady Yvolde to kneel on. Another servant had laid one in front of Sir Bloet on the men's side and was helping him get down on his knees on it. He puffed and clung to the servant's arm as he lowered his bulk, and his face got very red.