Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,254

if the tomb’s there. This might not be the village.” The stallion took two steps forward and reared its head, its ears back. It whinnied frightenedly.

“Go and put him in the shed,” Dunworthy said, taking hold of the reins. “He can smell the blood, and he’s frightened. Tie him up.”

He led the stallion back out of sight of the body and handed the reins to Colin, who took them, looking worried. “It’s all right,” Colin said, leading it toward the steward’s house. “I know just how you feel.”

Dunworthy walked rapidly across the clearing to the churchyard. There were four bodies in the shallow pit and two graves next to it, covered with snow, the first to die perhaps, when there were still such things as funerals. He went round to the front of the church.

There were two more bodies in front of the door. They lay face down, on top of one another, the one on top an old man. The body underneath was a woman’s. He could see the skirts of her rough cloak and one of her hands. The man’s arms were flung across the woman’s head and shoulders.

Dunworthy lifted the man’s arm gingerly, and his body shifted slightly sideways, pulling the cloak with it. The kirtle underneath was dirty and smeared with blood, but he could see that it had been bright blue. He pulled the hood back. There was a rope around the woman’s neck. Her long blond hair was tangled in the rough fibers.

They hanged her, he thought with no surprise at all.

Colin ran up. “I figured out what these marks on the ground are,” he said. “They’re where they dragged the bodies. There’s a little kid behind the barn with a rope around his neck.”

Dunworthy looked at the rope, at the tangle of hair. It was so dirty it was scarcely blond.

“They dragged them to the churchyard because they couldn’t carry them, I bet,” Colin said.

“Did you put the stallion in the shed?”

“Yes. I tied it to a beam thing,” he said. “It wanted to come with me.”

“He’s hungry,” Dunworthy said. “Go back to the shed and give him some hay.”

“Did something happen?” Colin asked. “You’re not having a relapse, are you?”

Dunworthy didn’t think Colin could see her dress from where he stood. “No,” he said. “There should be some hay in the shed. Or some oats. Go and feed the stallion.”

“All right,” Colin said defensively, and ran toward the shed. He stopped halfway across the green. “I don’t have to give it the hay, do I?” he shouted. “Can I just lay it down in front of it?”

“Yes,” Dunworthy said, looking at her hand. There was blood on her hand, too, and down the inside of her wrist. Her arm was bent, as though she had tried to break her fall. He could take hold of her elbow and turn her onto her back quite easily. All it required was to take hold of her elbow.

He picked up her hand. It was stiff and cold. Under the dirt it was red and chapped, the skin split in a dozen places. It could not possibly be Kivrin’s, and if it were, what had she gone through these past two weeks to bring her to this state?

It would all be on the corder. He turned her hand gently over, looking for the implant scar, but her wrist was too caked with dirt for him to be able to see it, if it was there.

And if it was, what then? Call Colin back and send him for an axe in the steward’s kitchen and chop it out of her dead hand so they could listen to her voice telling the horrors that had happened to her? He could not do it, of course, any more than he could turn her body over and know once and for all that it was Kivrin.

He laid the hand gently back next to the body and took hold of her elbow and turned her over.

She had died of the bubonic variety. There was a foul yellow stain down the side of her blue kirtle where the bubo under her arm had split and run. Her tongue was black and so swollen it filled her entire mouth, like some ghastly, obscene object thrust between her teeth to choke her, and her pale face was swollen and distorted.

It was not Kivrin. He tried to stand, staggering a little, and then thought, too late, that he should have covered the woman’s face.

“Mr. Dunworthy!”