He darted past the cow and around the fence and disappeared behind the hut. Kivrin looked at the shed. It could hardly 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 onto 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 milchgoat. She poked at the fire again, trying to get a little more light from 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, his eyes glinting in the firelight Kivrin had stirred up, was a rat.
He sat on his haunches, his hand-like paws holding the chunk of cheese that had tempted him into imprisonment, watching 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 years, 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. He had looked like he belonged in the sewers and drains and tube tunnels he’d no doubt come out of, with his 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, his whiskers twitching. He took hold of two of the metal bars with his pinkish hands and looked appealingly through them.
