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 the 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. 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, 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, getting in the last of the potatoes 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 she thought Kivrin was leading her 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 than the twigs in the hut fences.
"Please, run to the manor and tell the men in the stable 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.