Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,76

it’s going to snow.

She dressed, sitting down as much as possible and leaning against the bedposts to pull her hose and boots on, and then went back over to the bed. I’ll rest a little, she thought, just till I’m warmed through, and was immediately asleep.

The bell woke her, the one from the southwest she had heard when she came through. It had rung all yesterday and then stopped, and Eliwys had gone over to the window and stood there for a while, as if trying to see what had happened. The light from the window was dimmer, but it was only that the clouds were thicker, lower. Kivrin put on her cloak and opened the door. The stairs were steep, set into the stone side of the hall, and had no railing. Agnes was lucky she had only skinned her knee. She might have pitched headlong onto the floor below. Kivrin kept her hand on the wall and rested halfway, looking at the hall.

I’m really here, she thought. It really is 1320. The hearth in the middle of the room glowed a dull red with the banked coals, and there was a little light from the smoke hole above it and the high, narrow windows, but most of the hall was in shadow.

She stopped where she was, peering into the smoky gloom, trying to see if anyone was there. The high seat, with its carved back and arms, sat against the end wall with Lady Eliwys’s slightly lower, slightly less ornate one next to it. There were tapestries on the wall behind them and a ladder at the far end of the wall up to what must be a loft. Heavy wooden tables hung along the other walls above the wide benches, and a narrower bench sat next to the wall just below the stairs. The beggar’s bench. And the wall it sat against was the screens.

Kivrin came down the rest of the stairs and tiptoed across to the screens, her feet crunching loudly on the dried rushes scattered on the floor. The screens were really a partition, an inside wall that shut off the draft from the door.

Sometimes the screens formed a separate room, with box beds in either end, but behind these there was only a narrow passage, with the missing hooks for hanging up cloaks. There were no cloaks there now. Good, Kivrin thought, they’re all gone.

The door was open. On the floor next to it was a pair of shaggy boots, a wooden bucket, and Agnes’s cart. Kivrin stopped in the little anteroom to catch her already ragged breath, wishing she could sit down a moment, and then looked carefully out the door and went outside.

There was no one in the enclosed courtyard. It was cobbled with flattish yellow stones, but the center of it, where a water trough hollowed out of a tree stood, was deep in mud. There were trampled hoofprints and footprints all around it, and several puddles of brown water. A thin, mangy-looking chicken was drinking fearlessly from one of the pools. Chickens had only been raised for their eggs. Pigeons and doves had been the chief meat fowls in the 1300s.

And there was the dovecote by the gate, and the thatch-roofed building next to it must be the kitchen, and the other, smaller buildings the storehouses. The stable, with its wide doors, stood along the other side, and then a narrow passage, and then the big stone barn.

She tried the stable first. Agnes’s puppy came bounding out to meet her on its clumsy feet, yipping happily, and she had to hastily push it back inside and shut the heavy wooden door. Gawyn obviously wasn’t in there. He wasn’t in the barn either, or in the kitchen or in the other buildings, the largest of which turned out to be the brewhouse. Agnes had said he wasn’t going with the procession to cut the Yule log as if it were something obvious, and Kivrin had assumed he had to stay here to guard the manor, but now she wondered if he had gone with Eliwys to visit the cottar.

If he has, she thought, I’ll have to go find the drop myself. She started toward the stable again, but halfway there she stopped. She would never be able to get up on a horse by herself, feeling as weak as she did, and if she did somehow manage it, she was too dizzy to stay on. And too dizzy to go looking