Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,19

about any of the willows along the road. She looked for a rock to lay at the spot where she could still glimpse the wagon, but there wasn’t a sign of one in the rough weeds at the edge of the road. Finally she clambered back through the thicket, catching her hair and her cloak on the willow branches, got the little brass-bound casket that was a copy of one in the Ashmolean, and carried it back to the side of the road.

It wasn’t perfect—it was small enough for someone passing by to carry off—but she was only going as far as the top of the hill. If she decided to walk to the nearest village, she’d come back and make a more permanent sign. And there weren’t going to be any passersby anytime soon. The steep sides of the ruts were frozen hard, the leaves were undisturbed, and the skim of ice on the puddles was unbroken. Nobody had been on the road all day, all week maybe.

She straightened weeds up around the chest and then started up the hill. The road, except for the frozen mudhole at the bottom, was smoother than Kivrin had expected, and pounded flat, which meant horses used it a good deal in spite of its empty look.

It was an easy climb, but Kivrin felt tired before she had gone even a few steps, and her temple began to throb again. She hoped her time-lag symptoms wouldn’t get worse—she could already see that she was a long way from anywhere. Or maybe that was just an illusion. She still hadn’t “ascertained her exact temporal location,” and this lane, this wood, had nothing about them that said positively 1320.

The only signs of civilization at all were those ruts, which meant she could be in any time after the invention of the wheel and before paved roads, and not even definitely then. There were still lanes exactly like this not five miles from Oxford, lovingly preserved by the National Trust for the Japanese and American tourists.

She might not have gone anywhere at all, and on the other side of this hill she would find the M-l or Ms. Montoya’s dig, or an SDI installation. I would hate to ascertain my temporal location by being struck by a bicycle or an automobile, she thought, and stepped gingerly to the side of the road. But if I haven’t gone anywhere, why do I have this wretched headache and feel like I can’t walk another step?

She reached the top of the hill and stopped, out of breath. There was no need to have gotten out of the road. No car had been driven along it as yet. Or horse and buggy either. And she was, as she had thought, a long way from anywhere. There weren’t any trees here, and she could see for miles. The wood the wagon was in came halfway up the hill and then straggled south and west for a long way. If she had come through farther into the tress, she would have been lost.

There were trees far to the east, too, following a river that she could catch occasional silver-blue glimpses of—the Thames? the Cherwell?—and little clumps and lines and blobs of trees dotting all the country between, more trees than she could imagine ever having been in England. The Domesday Book in 1086 had reported no more than fifteen percent of the land wooded, and Probability had estimated that lands cleared for fields and settlements would have reduced that to twelve percent by the 1300s. They, or the men who had written the Domesday Book, had underestimated the numbers badly. There were trees everywhere.

Kivrin couldn’t see any villages. The woods were bare, their branches gray-black in the late-afternoon light, and she should be able to see the churches and manor houses through them, but she couldn’t see anything that looked like a settlement.

There had to be settlements, though, because there were fields, and they were narrow strip fields that were definitely mediaeval. There were sheep in one of the fields, and that was mediaeval, too, but she couldn’t see anyone tending them. Far off to the east there was a square gray blur that had to be Oxford. Squinting, she was almost able to make out the walls and the squat shape of Carfax Tower, though she couldn’t see any sign of the towers of St. Frideswide’s or Osney in the fading light.

The light was definitely fading. The sky up here was