Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,80

Kivrin. There were several other crumbled and probably moldy bits of cheese on the floor of the cage. More food than in this entire hut, Kivrin thought, sitting very still on the lumpy sack of onions. One wouldn’t think they had anything worth protecting from a rat.

She had seen a rat before, of course, in History of Psych and when they tested her for phobias during her first year, but not this kind. Nobody had seen this kind, in England at least, in fifty years. It was a very pretty rat, actually, with silky black fur, not much bigger than History of Psych’s white laboratory rats, not nearly as big as the brown rat she’d been tested with.

It looked much cleaner than the brown rat, too. It had looked like it belonged in the sewers and drains and tube tunnels it had no doubt come out of, with its matted dust-brown coat and long, obscenely naked tail. When she had first started studying the Middle Ages, she had been unable to understand how the contemps had tolerated the disgusting things in their barns, let alone their houses. The thought of the one in the wall by her bed had filled her with revulsion. But this rat was actually quite clean-looking, with its black eyes and shiny coat. Certainly cleaner than Maisry, and probably more intelligent. Harmless-looking.

As if to prove her point, the rat took another dainty nibble on the cheese.

“You’re not harmless, though,” Kivrin said. “You’re the scourge of the Middle Ages.”

The rat dropped the chunk of cheese and took a step forward, its whiskers twitching. It took hold of two of the metal bars with its pinkish hands and looked appealingly through them.

“I can’t let you out, you know,” Kivrin said, and its ears pricked up as if it understood her. “You eat precious grain and contaminate food and carry fleas and in another twenty-eight years you and your chums will wipe out half of Europe. You’re what Lady Imeyne should be worrying about instead of French spies and illiterate priests.” The rat looked at her. “I’d like to let you out, but I can’t. The Black Death was bad enough as it was. It killed half of Europe. If I let you out, your descendants might make it even worse.”

The rat let go of the bars and began running around the cage, crashing against the bars, circling in frantic, random movements.

“I’d let you out if I could,” Kivrin said. The fire had nearly gone out. Kivrin stirred it again, but it was all ashes. The door she had left open in the hope that the boy would bring someone back looking for her banged shut, plunging the hut in darkness.

They won’t have any idea where to look for me, Kivrin thought, and knew they weren’t even looking yet. They all thought she was in the upstairs room asleep. Lady Imeyne wouldn’t even check on her until she brought her her supper. They wouldn’t even start to look for her until after vespers, and by then it would be dark.

It was very quiet in the hut. The wind must have died down. She couldn’t hear the rat. A twig on the fire snapped once, and sparks flew onto the dirt floor.

Nobody knows where I am, she thought, and put her hand up to her chest as if she had been stabbed. Nobody knows where I am. Not even Mr. Dunworthy.

But surely that wasn’t true. Lady Eliwys might have come back and gone up to put more ointment on, or Maisry might have been sent home by Imeyne, or the boy might have darted off to fetch the men from the fields, and they would be here any minute, even though the door was shut. And even if they didn’t realize she was gone until after vespers, they had torches and lanterns, and the parents of the boy with scurvy would come back to cook supper and find her and would go and fetch someone from the manor. No matter what happens, she told herself, you’re not completely alone, and that comforted her.

Because she was completely alone. She had tried to convince herself she wasn’t, that some reading on the net’s screens had told Gilchrist and Montoya something had gone wrong, that Mr. Dunworthy had made Badri check and recheck everything, that they knew what had happened somehow and were holding the drop open. But they weren’t. They no more knew where she was than Agnes and Lady Eliwys did.

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