Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,77

for the drop. But I have to, she thought. They’re all gone, and it’s going to snow.

She looked toward the gate and then the passage between the barn and the stable, wondering which way to go. They had come down a hill, past a church. She remembered hearing the bell. She didn’t remember the gate or the courtyard, but that was most likely the way they had come.

She walked across the cobbles, sending the chicken clucking frantically over to the shelter of the well, and looked out the gate at the road. It crossed a narrow stream with a log bridge and wound off to the south into the trees. But there wasn’t any hill, and no church, no village, no indication that that was the way to the drop.

There had to be a church. She had heard the bell, lying in bed. She walked back into the courtyard and across to the muddy path. It led past a round wattle pen with two dirty pigs in it, and the privy, unmistakable in its smell, and Kivrin was afraid that the path was only the way to the outhouse, but it wound around behind the privy and opened out onto a green.

And there was the village. And the church, sitting at the far end of the green just the way Kivrin remembered it, and beyond it was the hill they had come down.

The green didn’t look like a green. It was a ragged open space with huts on one side and the willow-edged stream on the other, but there was a cow grazing on what was left of the grass and a goat tethered to a big leafless oak. The huts straggled along the near side between piles of hay and muck heaps, getting smaller and more shapeless the farther they were from the manor house, but even the one closest to the manor house, which should be the steward’s, was nothing but a hovel. It was all smaller and dirtier and more tumbledown than the illustrations in the history vids. Only the church looked the way it was supposed to.

The bell tower stood separate from it, between the churchyard and the green. It had obviously been built later than the church with its Norman round-arched windows and grayed stone. The tower was tall and round, and its stone was yellower, almost golden.

A track, no wider than the road near the drop, led past the churchyard and the tower and up the hill into the woods.

That’s the way we came, Kivrin thought, and started across the green, but as soon as she stepped out of the shelter of the barn, the wind hit her. It went through her cloak as if it were nothing, and seemed to stab into her chest. She pulled the cloak tight around her neck, held it with her flattened hand against her chest, and went on.

The bell in the southwest began again. She wondered what it meant. Eliwys and Imeyne had talked about it, but that was before she could understand what they were saying, and when it began again yesterday, Eliwys hadn’t even acted like she heard it. Perhaps it was something to do with Advent. The bells were supposed to ring at twilight on Christmas Eve and then for an hour before midnight, Kivrin knew. Perhaps they rang at other times during Advent as well.

The track was muddy and rutted. Kivrin’s chest was beginning to hurt. She pressed her hand tighter against it and went on, trying to hurry. She could see movement out beyond the fields. They would be the peasants coming back with the Yule log, or getting in the animals. She couldn’t make them out. It looked as if it were already snowing out there. She must hurry.

The wind whipped her cloak around her and swirled dead leaves past her. The cow moved off the green, its head down, into the shelter of the huts. Which were no shelter at all. They seemed hardly taller than Kivrin and as if they had been bundled together out of sticks and propped in place, and they didn’t stop the wind at all.

The bell continued to ring, a slow, steady tolling, and Kivrin realized she had slowed her tread to match it. She mustn’t do that. She must hurry. It might start snowing any minute. But hurrying made the pain stab so sharply she began to cough. She stopped, bent double with the coughing.

She was not going to make it. Don’t be foolish,