Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,78

she told herself, you have to find the drop. You’re ill. You have to get back home. Go as far as the church and you can rest inside for a minute.

She started on again, willing herself not to cough, but it was no use. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t make it to the church, let alone the drop. You have to make it, she shouted to herself over the pain. You have to will yourself to make it.

She stopped again, bending over against the pain. She had been worried that a peasant would come out of one of the huts, but now she wished someone would so they could help her back to the manor. They wouldn’t. They were all out in this freezing wind, bringing in the Yule log and gathering up the animals. She looked out toward the fields. The distant figures who had been out there were gone.

She was opposite the last hut. Beyond it was a scattering of ramshackle sheds she hoped no one lived in, and surely nobody did. They must be outbuildings—cowbyres and granaries—and beyond them, surely not that far away, the church. Perhaps if I take it slowly, she thought, and started toward the church again. Her whole chest jarred at every step. She stopped, swaying a little, thinking, I mustn’t faint. No one knows where I am.

She turned and looked back at the manor house. She couldn’t even get back to the hall. I have to sit down, she thought, but there was nowhere to sit in the muddy track. Lady Eliwys was tending the cottar, Lady Imeyne and the girls and the entire village were out cutting the Yule log. No one knows where I am.

The wind was picking up, coming now not in gusts but in a straight, determined push across the fields. I must try to get back to the house, Kivrin thought, but she couldn’t do that either. Even standing was too much of an effort. If there were anywhere to sit she would sit down, but the space between the huts, right up to their fences, was all mud. She would have to go into the hut.

It had a rickety wattle fence around it, made by weaving green branches between stakes. The fence was scarcely knee-high and wouldn’t have kept a cat out, let alone the sheep and cows it was intended against. Only the gate had supports even waist-high, and Kivrin leaned gratefully against one of them. “Hello,” she shouted into the wind, “is anyone there?”

The front door of the hut was only a few steps from the gate, and the hut couldn’t be soundproof. It wasn’t even windproof. She could see a hole in the wall where the daubed clay and chopped straw had cracked and fallen away from the matted branches underneath. They could surely hear her. She lifted the loop of leather that held the gate shut, went in, and knocked on the low, planked door.

There was no answer, and Kivrin hadn’t expected any. She shouted again, “Is anyone home?” not even bothering to listen to how the interpreter translated it, and tried to lift the wooden bar that lay across it. It was too heavy. She tried to slide it out of the notches cut in the protruding lintels, but she couldn’t. The hut looked like it could blow away at any minute, and she couldn’t get the door open. She would have to tell Mr. Dunworthy mediaeval huts weren’t as flimsy as they looked. She leaned against the door, holding her chest.

Something made a sound behind her, and she turned, already saying, “I’m sorry I intruded into your garden.” It was the cow, leaning casually over the fence and browsing among the brown leaves, hardly reaching at all.

She would have to go back to the manor. She used the gate for support, making sure she shut it behind her and looped the leather back over the stake, and then the cow’s bony back. The cow followed with her a few steps, as if it thought Kivrin was leading it in to be milked, and then went back to the garden.

The door of one of the sheds that nobody could possibly live in opened, and a barefoot boy came out. He stopped, looking frightened.

Kivrin tried to straighten up. “Please,” she said, breathing hard between the words, “may I rest awhile in your house?”

The boy stared dumbly at her, his mouth hanging open. He was hideously thin, his arms and legs no thicker