Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,136

life is that of the eternal soul, as if they were only visiting life the way I am visiting this century, but I haven’t seen much evidence of it. Eliwys dutifully murmurs her aves at vespers and matins and then rises and brushes off her kirtle as if her prayers had nothing to do with her worries over her husband or the girls or Gawyn. And Imeyne, for all her reliquary and her Book of Hours, is concerned only about her social standing. I’d seen no evidence that God was real at all to them till I stood there in the damp church, listening to Father Roche.

I wonder if he sees God and heaven as clearly as I can see you and Oxford, the rain falling in the quad and your spectacles steaming up so you have to take them off and polish them on your muffler. I wonder if they seem as close as you do, and as difficult to get to.

“Preserve our souls from evil and bring us safely into heaven,” Roche said, and as if that were a cue, Agnes sat up in my arms and said, “I want Father Roche.”

Father Roche stood up and started toward us. “What is it? Who is there?”

“It is Lady Katherine,” I said. “I have brought Agnes. Her knee is—” What? Infected? “I would have you look at her knee.”

He tried to look at it, but it was too dark in the church, so he carried her over to his house. It was scarcely lighter there. His house is not much larger than the hut I took shelter in, and no higher. He had to stoop the whole time we were there to keep from bumping his head against the rafters.

He opened the shutter on the only window, which let the rain blow in, and then lit a rushlight and set Agnes on a crude wooden table. He untied the bandage, and she flinched away from him.

“Sit you still, Agnus, ” he told her, “and I will tell you how Christ came to earth from far heaven.”

“On Christmas Day,” Agnes said.

Roche felt around the wound, poking at the swollen parts, talking steadily. “ ‘And the shepherds stood afraid, for they knew not what this glittering light was. And sounds they heard, as of bells rung in heaven. But they beheld it was God’s angel come down to them.’ ”

Agnes had screamed and pushed my hands away when I tried to touch her knee, but she let Roche prod the red area with his huge fingers. There was definitely the beginning of a red streak. Roche touched it gently and brought the rushlight closer.

“ ‘And there came from a far land,’ ” he said, squinting at it, “ ‘three kings bearing gifts.’ ” He touched the red streak again, gingerly, and then folded his hands together, as if he were going to pray, and I thought, Don’t pray. Do something.

He lowered his hands and looked across at me. “I fear the wound is poisoned,” he said. “I will make an infusion of hyssop to draw the venom out.” He went over to the hearth, stirred up a few lukewarm-looking coals, and poured water into an iron pot from a bucket.

The bucket was dirty, the pot was dirty, the hands he’d felt Agnes’s wound with were dirty, and, standing there, watching him set the pot on the fire and dig into a dirty bag, I was sorry I’d come. He wasn’t any better than Imeyne. An infusion of leaves and seeds wouldn’t cure blood poisoning any more than one of Imeyne’s poultices, and his prayers wouldn’t help either, even if he did talk to God as if He were really there.

I almost said, “Is that all you can do?” and then realized I was expecting the impossible. The cure for infection was penicillin, T-cell enchancement, antiseptics, none of which he had in his burlap bag.

I remember Mr. Gilchrist talking about mediaeval doctors in one of his lectures. He talked about what fools they were for bleeding people and treating them with arsenic and goat’s urine during the Black Death. But what did he expect them to do? They didn’t have analogues or antimicrobials. They didn’t even know what caused it. Standing there, crumbling dried petals and leaves between his dirty fingers, Father Roche was doing the best he could.

“Do you have wine?” I asked him. “Old wine?”

There’s scarcely any alcohol in the small ale and not much more in their wine, but the