Doomsday Book (Oxford Time Travel, #1) - Connie Willis Page 0,3
“What about the visiting American professor, Montoya? She’s working on a mediaeval dig out near Witney, isn’t she? She should know something about the customs.”
“Ms. Montoya hasn’t any time either; she’s so busy trying to recruit people to work on the Skendgate dig. Don’t you see? They’re all useless. You’re the only one who can help me.”
He should have said, “Nevertheless, they are members of Brasenose’s faculty, and I am not,” but instead he had been maliciously delighted to hear her tell him what he had thought all along, that Latimer was a doddering old man and Montoya a frustrated archaeologist, that Gilchrist was incapable of training historians. He had been eager to use her to show Mediaeval how it should be done.
“We’ll have you augmented with an interpreter,” he had said. “And I want you to learn Church Latin, Norman French, and Old German, in addition to Mr. Latimer’s Middle English,” and she had immediately pulled a pencil and an exercise book from her pocket and begun making a list.
“You’ll need practical experience in farming—milking a cow, gathering eggs, vegetable gardening,” he’d said, ticking them off on his fingers. “Your hair isn’t long enough. You’ll need to take cortixidils. You’ll need to learn to spin, with a spindle, not a spinning wheel. The spinning wheel wasn’t invented yet. And you’ll need to learn to ride a horse.”
He had stopped, finally coming to his senses. “Do you know what you need to learn?” he had said, watching her, earnestly bent over the list she was scribbling, her braids dangling over her shoulders. “How to treat open sores and infected wounds, how to prepare a child’s body for burial, how to dig a grave. The mortality rate will still be worth a ten, even if Gilchrist somehow succeeds in getting the ranking changed. The average life expectancy in 1300 was thirty-eight. You have no business going there.”
Kivrin had looked up, her pencil poised above the paper. “Where should I go to look at dead bodies?” she had said earnestly. “The morgue? Or should I ask Dr. Ahrens in Infirmary?”
“I told her she couldn’t go,” Dunworthy said, still staring unseeing at the glass, “but she wouldn’t listen.”
“I know,” Mary said. “She wouldn’t listen to me either.”
Dunworthy sat down stiffly next to her. The rain and all the chasing after Basingame had aggravated his arthritis. He still had his overcoat on. He struggled out of it and unwound the muffler from around his neck.
“I wanted to cauterize her nose for her,” Mary said. “I told her the smells of the fourteenth century could be completely incapacitating, that we’re simply not used to excrement and bad meat and decomposition in this day and age. I told her nausea would interfere significantly with her ability to function.”
“But she wouldn’t listen,” Dunworthy said.
“No.”
“I tried to explain to her that the Middle Ages were dangerous and Gilchrist wasn’t taking sufficient precautions, and she told me I was worrying over nothing.”
“Perhaps we are,” Mary said. “After all, it’s Badri who’s running the drop, not Gilchrist, and you said he’d abort if there was any problem.”
“Yes,” he said, watching Badri through the glass. He was typing again, one key at a time, his eyes on the screens. Badri was not only Balliol’s best tech, but the University’s. And he had run dozens of remotes.
“And Kivrin’s well prepared,” Mary said. “You’ve tutored her, and I’ve spent the last month in Infirmary getting her physically ready. She’s protected against cholera and typhoid and anything else that was extant in 1320, which, by the way, the plague you are so worried over wasn’t. There were no cases in England until the Black Death reached there in 1348. I’ve removed her appendix and augmented her immune system. I’ve given her full-spectrum antivirals and a short course in mediaeval medicine. And she’s done a good deal of work on her own. She was studying medicinal-herbs while she was in Infirmary.”
“I know,” Dunworthy said. She had spent the last Christmas vac memorizing masses in Latin and learning to weave and embroider, and he had taught her everything he could think of. But was it enough to protect her from being trampled by a horse, or raped by a drunken knight on his way home from the Crusades? They were still burning people at the stake in 1320. There was no inoculation to protect her from that or from someone seeing her come through and deciding she was a witch.