Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,69

a …” Agnes said. The interpreter didn’t catch the word. Karette? Chavette? “It is red. Do you wish to see it?” and before Kivrin could stop her, she went running out through the still partly opened door.

Kivrin waited, hoping she would come back and that a karette wasn’t alive, wishing she had asked where she was and how long she’d been here, though Agnes was probably too young to know. She looked no more than three, though of course she would be much smaller than a modern three-year-old. Five, then, or possibly six. I should have asked her how old she was, Kivrin thought, and then remembered that she might not know that either. Joan of Arc hadn’t known how old she was when the Inquisitors asked her at her trial.

At least she could ask questions, Kivrin thought. The interpreter was not broken after all. It must have been temporarily stymied by the strange pronunciations, or affected somehow by her fever, but it was all right now, and Gawyn knew where the drop was and could show it to her.

She sat up straighter among the pillows so she could see the door. The effort hurt her chest and made her dizzy, and her head ached. She anxiously felt her forehead and then her cheeks. They felt warm, but that could be because her hands were cold. It was icy in the room, and on her excursion to the chamber pot, she hadn’t seen any sign of a brazier or even a warming pan.

Had warming pans been invented yet? They must have. Otherwise how would people have survived the Little Ice Age? It was so cold.

She was beginning to shiver. Her fever must be going back up. Were they supposed to come back? In History of Meds she had read about fevers breaking, and after that the patient was weak, but the fever didn’t come back, did it? Of course it did. What about malaria? Shivering, headache, sweats, recurring fever. Of course they came back.

Well, it obviously wasn’t malaria. Malaria had never been endemic to England, mosquitoes didn’t live in Oxford in midwinter and never had, and the symptoms were wrong. She hadn’t experienced any sweating, and the shivering she was having was due to fever.

Typhus produced headache and a high fever, and it was transmitted by body lice and rat fleas, both of which were endemic to England in the Middle Ages and probably endemic to the bed she was lying on, but the incubation period was too long, nearly two weeks.

Typhoid fever’s incubation period was only a few days, and it caused headache, aching in the limbs, and high fever, too. She didn’t think it was a recurring fever, but she remembered it was normally highest at night, so that must mean it went down during the day and then up again in the evening.

Kivrin wondered what time it was. Eliwys had said, “It grows dark,” and the light from the linen-covered window was faintly blue, but the days were short in December. It might only be midafternoon. She felt sleepy, but that was no sign either. She had slept off and on all day.

Drowsiness was a symptom of typhoid fever. She tried to remember the others from Dr. Ahrens’s “short course” in mediaeval medicine. Nosebleeds, coated tongue, rose-colored rash. The rash wasn’t supposed to appear until the seventh or eighth day, but Kivrin pulled her shift up and looked at her stomach and chest. No rash, so it couldn’t be typhoid. Or smallpox. With smallpox, the pox started appearing by the second or third day.

She wondered what had happened to Agnes. Perhaps someone had belatedly had the good sense to bar her from the sickroom, or perhaps the unreliable Maisry was actually watching her. Or, more likely, she had stopped to see her puppy in the stable and forgotten she was going to show her chavotte to Kivrin.

The plague started out with a headache and a fever. It can’t be the plague, Kivrin thought. You don’t have any of the symptoms. Buboes that grew to the size of oranges, a tongue that swelled till it filled the whole mouth, subcutaneous hemorrhages that turned the whole body black. You don’t have the plague.

It must be some sort of flu. It was the only disease that came on so suddenly, and Dr. Ahrens had been upset over Mr. Gilchrist’s moving the date up because the antivirals wouldn’t take full effect until the fifteenth, and she’d only have partial immunity. It