Seeds of Time (10 page)

Luke shook his head and crossed himself again. “I did not know it, Dara. I am sorry for the loss.” He gestured at the wooden peg that stuck out from the hem of her skirt. “Ye've suffered much in yer life,” he said softly.

Darrell nodded. “As have you.” She turned away to give Luke a chance to wipe his eyes, her mind racing. “Let me get this straight,” she said. “Your aunt was burned as a witch because she foretold a tragedy to come. Your family has been hurt. Your village and Arisaig ...” She paused and looked up suddenly. “Luke, you said that many people are sick and dying?”

Luke nodded, mutely.

Darrell rubbed the crease between her eyebrows and spoke sharply. “Is anyone in your family ill?”

Luke nodded, miserably. “My whole family in Arisaig has died,” he said bitterly, and swiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “The flames that took my mother's sister and the two other women did not help. People have begun to sicken everywhere. My aunt's husband, overcome with grief and shame, hid in his home. After a week he too became ill and died in a matter of days. All his children, my cousins, followed him to their graves soon after.” Luke paused for breath and looked into the fire.

“Now even here in our small village, the bodies are piling up so fast that they are no longer being given Christian burial. The dead are burned every morning in a place near the centre of the village.” He shook his head. “So many have died that soon there will be no one left to do the burning. It is as if Death himself walks among us.”

Darrell started. She put her hand into the pocket of the brown skirt and felt a telltale shape there. She drew the object out.

“The woodcut print...”

She looked carefully at the picture that she had been given by Professor Tooth at the start of the summer term. The grim images of the dead and dying stared mutely out from the woodcut. Echoes of Professor Tooth's words
chased through her mind.
Epidemic...Plague...Black Death.
Among the bodies in the print, the rats foraged, gnawing bones. And slithering like a snake through the back of her brain came the memory of Professor Tooth's lesson ... and a boy named Luke, dead at nineteen of the Black Plague.

“It's the bubonic plague,” she whispered and began to pace. In spite of all that had happened, she felt that there must be some small thing that she could do to help Luke before she tried to find her own way back to Eagle Glen. She put her hand to her head.

“Think, think, think,” she muttered. “What do I remember about the plague?” She racked her brain to remember all she had learned from Professor Tooth about the Middle Ages. She looked sharply at Luke. “Do you think I could take a walk around the village with you?” she said suddenly. “I need to see this for myself.” Luke nodded. Darrell started toward the door, but halted in her tracks. She whirled toward Luke. “I know you lost your family in Arisaig,” she said slowly, “And I am very sorry for your loss. But has anyone who lives in this house become ill?”

Luke shook his head. “My father has been gone since the death of my aunt. My mother has been in mourning for her sister and has not left the house.” He gestured at the ceiling. “She sleeps now, with my baby sister, upstairs.” He gave a wry grin. “For y'see, my
Auntie Aileen did have the sight ... and she saw rightly. I did end up with a baby sister.”

“Oh ...” Darrell didn't know what to say. A feeling was growing inside her, something she recognized as determination. She realized she had to deal with one thing at a time, and pushed the thoughts of Luke's aunt to the back of her mind with the other things she could not find time to explain.

“I think the most important job right now is to avoid getting sick ourselves. If this really is the time of the plague, most useful drugs won't have been invented yet.” She thought for a moment, then turned back to Luke. She looked critically at his clothes. “Do you have any, er,
cleaner
clothes or rags around the house?”

Luke shook his head for a moment, and then brightened. “My sister's christening robes! They are safely wrapped to save for the next child.” He ran to a cupboard and rummaged, drawing out a grimy package wrapped in heavy woollen cloth and twine. Darrell watched him doubtfully as he unwrapped the package, but was pleased to see a delicate baby garment, clearly made of silk or some other fine fabric, emerge from the grimy wrappings.

“That will be perfect, Luke. Now, I'm sorry, but we need to cut it up.”

Luke looked horrified. “Oh, no, my mother would never allow it. It is our family's most precious possession,
next to the rosary.” He pointed to a string of beautiful rosewood beads surrounding a pewter cross that hung on the wall near the fireplace.

“I'm very sorry,” Darrell repeated firmly, “but if we are to save your family, it is completely necessary.” She picked up a knife from the large table and began to slice up the fine cloth. Luke crossed himself once more and looked guiltily toward the ladder that led to the upper storey where his mother and sister slept. In moments, Darrell had fashioned two face masks, similar to those her mother wore during surgical procedures at the hospital.

“These are a bit rough,” she said as she tied one around Luke's face, “but they'll do for our quick tour of the village.” She fastened her own mask over her nose and mouth and tied it firmly behind her head.

“Let me take your arm, so I don't trip over this stupid leg,” she said to Luke. “And if anyone asks, say that I am one of your remaining cousins from Arisaig. That should keep people far enough away.”

Delaney trotting behind, they stepped out into the dark lane.

As they walked through the streets of Mallaig, Darrell knew she was walking through a dark chapter of history. The village was small, only a couple of short lanes surrounding a village square. The few people they saw usually scurried out of their way, frightened, perhaps, by the masks she and Luke wore. Darrell was struck by the tiny size of most of the people she saw. She was certainly taller than anyone she had seen except Luke, who was about her size. The smell of the streets was dank and rancid, though the masks made it somewhat easier to bear.

“How old are you, Luke?” Darrell asked, with curiosity.

“In October I will enter my twentieth year,” he said proudly. Darrell was surprised. She had thought Luke, by his dress and manner, to be about thirteen, her own
age. Instead, she found he was a fully grown man. Another question nagged at her.

“Luke,” Darrell said carefully. “Try not to think I'm out of my mind, but I have — ah — been out of the country for a while and I am not sure of the date. Do you keep track of the date?”

“I, too, am not sure of the exact date,” Luke replied. “I do know it is sometime in early summer, in the year of our Lord thirteen hundred and fifty.”

Darrell had to stop and catch her breath for a moment. Everything had pointed to this, but she was still having trouble grasping the reality of all she could see around her. Somehow, she had journeyed more than six hundred years back in time.

She looked around the village as it spread out around her. It was primarily small buildings, many with straw roofs and wattle and daub construction. The streets were cobbled, and a few thin horses and oxen could be seen, generally pulling carts. She did not notice anybody riding horses; most walked at the heads of their animals as they pulled carts loaded with straw or rocks. A few skinny dogs ran through the lanes, and one ran up to bark at Delaney.

Darrell was startled by the contrast between Delaney and the other dogs. In spite of Delaney's thin and dirty appearance, he still had a gleam in his eye and a jaunt to his tail. The barking dog was gaunt, obviously
starving. Darrell could see every bone of his spine protruding through the painfully thin fur on his back. Even his bark lacked vigour, and he turned and crept away at a quiet word from Luke.

A couple of fat cats slunk by, and after the scrawny dogs the sight almost made Darrell smile.
At least the cats are doing well,
she thought, with some irony.

The cobbled lanes were filthy, with gutters running with sewage. Twice, Darrell and Luke had to scurry out of the way as women threw washtubs of dirty water into the street, and once they narrowly missed being hit by a load of kitchen garbage tossed out a window.

“Where are all the ill people?” Darrell asked.

“As people fall ill, they return to their homes to die. The dead are taken to the village square to be burned.”

Darrell swallowed. “Could we go there?”

Luke looked disgusted. “Why there? All ye'll see are the dead, and many flies and rats. Even the village gravedigger cannot help ye, because he too has died of this terrible plague.”

“I don't want to go in, I just want to have a look at the place. I need to be sure that I'm right.” Luke agreed reluctantly, and they made their way toward the village square.

They could smell the place long before they could see it. The masks that they had donned earlier were no help against the stench of death and burning. Luke
would not enter the square, but stopped and leaned against a wall. Darrell, fighting the urge to retch, walked closer to the home of the now deceased gravedigger.

Three bodies lay on the ground, looking pitiful and small in death, mercifully hidden under old sacking. But as Darrell watched, a man staggered into the yard, bearing a small bundle in his arms.

“Someone help me,” he called piteously. “Please help me! My child is not well.”

Darrell instinctively stepped out into the square, but a woman brushed her aside and bustled up to the man.

“I'll take her, Alexander. Ye need to sit down and rest. Please, sit here, I will get ye a drink.”

The man turned grateful eyes on the woman as he slid to sit on a rough-hewn wooden bench outside the house. “Please check her, Abbie,” he said hoarsely. “I think her breathing is better now. She is resting more easily.”

Darrell watched as the woman laid the tiny lifeless body beside the other three on the ground.

“I'm sure she'll be fine, Alexander,” Abbie said soothingly. “Let's walk ye home, to get some rest.” She gave the man a drink and then led him out of the square, supporting him on her shoulder as she passed Darrell and Luke. Darrell could hear the laboured breathing of the man as he walked by and could see the telltale swelling under his jaw. The woman's eyes met Darrell's
as they passed, and she smiled kindly, though she herself looked ready to drop.

“She is Abbie, the village midwife,” whispered Luke, after they had passed. “How she is still on her feet after treating so many of the sick, I cannot say.”

Darrell and Luke started back to his house. She could not get the sight of the small body left on the ground out of her mind. The baby's skin had been so blue it looked almost black, and the throat had been swollen grotesquely.

Luke was clearly thinking the same thing. “Alexander is the village cobbler,” he said. “That baby was born the same month as Rose.” He sighed. “Abbie helped Alexander's wife deliver the baby, and then she came to help my mother.”

Darrell was rocked by the enormity of this tragedy. When she had learned in Professor Tooth's class that as many as one in every two people had died in the most affected parts of Europe, it had only been numbers. Seeing the faces and the agony of the loss of family and friends this close was almost too much to bear.

Darrell cleared her throat and said roughly, “I've seen enough. I want to go back to speak with your mother, Luke.”

As they made their way quickly back to Luke's small dwelling, Darrell could see the turrets of a castle, cast in
light stone, on a distant knoll surrounded by the water of the loch.

“What is that place?” she asked Luke in surprise.

“That is Ainslie Castle, the ancestral seat of the clan MacKenzie. The lands around the village all belong to the Laird.”

“Are you his servants, then?”

“No, my family are fishermen, but many peasants work his fields and are beholden to him for their lives and livelihood.” He thought for a moment. “We were very lucky, before this tragedy. The Laird is a fair man and usually was good to the people who worked for him. Many neighbouring areas do not have as strong a protector. The castle is on a tidal island, and when the tide is in, it is protected by the waters of the loch.”

“Where is the Laird now?” asked Darrell.

“I heard he travels to the far north, to the Nordic lands, where they say the Black Death has not yet found its way.”

Darrell sighed impatiently. “Some benefactor,” she said, scornfully.

“Oh, but he has left behind the castle guard to maintain order in his absence,” replied Luke. “They are a fine group of soldiers who help to keep the peace.” He dropped his head modestly. “It is my goal to join them one day, but first I must be apprenticed to another of the guard.”

“Another guard? Weren't you an apprentice already?”

Luke nodded eagerly as he steered them in the direction of his home. “Yes, and I have learned much, about arms and warfare, animal husbandry, and how carefully to keep a soldier's kit.” His expression became more serious. “The guard under whose tutelage I studied was taken by the illness several weeks ago. His death has left me without a patron.”

Darrell nodded, her mind preoccupied with both the struggle to walk without slipping on the cobblestone lane and the magnitude of the tragedy looming around her.

That night, Darrell sat down to eat with Luke, his mother, Maggie, and his baby sister, Rose. Luke introduced Darrell to his mother as Dara, a friend of Maggie's sister from Arisaig, and she clung to Darrell and sobbed her grief into Darrell's shoulder. Luke's mother had circles under her pale grey eyes and her black hair was shot through with strands of pure white.