Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,79

than the twigs in the hut fences.

“Please, run and tell someone to come. Tell them I’m ill.”

He can no more run than I can, she thought as soon as she said it. The boy’s feet were blue with cold. His mouth looked sore, and his cheeks and upper lip were smeared with dried blood from a nosebleed. He’s got scurvy, Kivrin thought, he’s worse off than I am, but she said again, “Run to the manor and bid them come.”

The boy crossed himself with a chapped, bony hand. “Bighaull emeurdroud ooghattund enblastbardey,” he said, backing into the hut.

Oh, no, Kivrin thought despairingly. He can’t understand me, and I don’t have the strength to try to make him. “Please help me,” she said, and the boy looked almost like he understood that. He took a step toward her and then darted suddenly away in the direction of the church.

“Wait!” Kivrin called.

He darted past the cow and around the fence and disappeared behind the hut. Kivrin looked at the shed. It could scarcely even be called that. It looked more like a haystack—grass and pieces of thatch wadded into the spaces between the poles, but its door was a mat of sticks tied together with blackish rope, the kind of door you could blow down with one good breath, and the boy had left it open. She stepped over the raised doorstep and went into the hut.

It was dark inside and so smoky Kivrin couldn’t see anything. It smelled terrible. Like a stable. Worse than a stable. Mingled with the barnyard smells were smoke and mildew and the nasty odor of rats. Kivrin had had to bend over almost double to get through the door. She straightened, and hit her head on the sticks that served as crossbeams.

There was nowhere to sit in the hut, if that was really what it was. The floor was as covered with sacks and tools as if it was a shed after all, and there was no furniture except an uneven table whose rough legs splayed unevenly from the center. But the table had a wooden bowl and a heel of bread on it, and in the center of the hut, in the only cleared space, a little fire was burning in a shallow, dug-out hole.

It was apparently the source of all the smoke even though there was a hole in the ceiling above it for a draft. It was a little fire, only a few sticks, but the other holes in the unevenly stuffed walls and roof drew the smoke, too, and the wind, coming in from everywhere, gusted it around the cramped hut. Kivrin started to cough, which was a terrible mistake. Her chest felt as if it would break apart with every spasm.

Gritting her teeth to keep from coughing, she eased herself down on a sack of onions, holding on to the spade propped against it and then the fragile-looking wall. She felt immediately better as soon as she was sitting down, even though it was so cold she could see her breath. I wonder how this place smells in the summer, she thought. She wrapped her cloak around her, folding the tails like a blanket across her knees.

There was a cold draft along the floor. She tucked the cloak around her feet and then picked up a bill hook lying next to the sack and poked at the meager fire with it. The fire blazed up halfheartedly, illuminating the hut and making it look more than ever like a shed. A low lean-to had been built on at one side, probably for a stable because it was partitioned off from the rest of the hut by an even lower fence than the cottage had had. The fire wasn’t bright enough for Kivrin to see into the lean-to corner, but a scuffling sound came from it.

A pig, maybe, although the peasants’ pigs were supposed to have been slaughtered by now, or maybe a milk goat. She poked at the fire again, trying to get a little more light on the corner.

The scuffling sound came from in front of the pathetic fence, from a large dome-shaped cage. It was elaborately out of place in the filthy corner with its smooth curved metal band, its complicated door, its fancy handle. Inside the cage, its eyes glinting in the firelight Kivrin had stirred up, was a rat.

It sat on its haunches, its handlike paws holding the chunk of cheese that had tempted it into imprisonment, watching