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“Isabel—”
    I crawl over to him, smearing mud all over my skirts, and put my arms around his neck. He holds me, and I breathe in his ink-and-incense scent, all muddled up with mud and straw and the wet air of the river.
    â€œDon’t go back,” I say. “Please, don’t. Come back home with us and be safe.”
    Geoffrey’s long, bony arms are tight about me. I think of all the things the Bible says, about steadfastness, and faith, and duty, and how I don’t care about any of them if they mean my brother has to go back to a place where the sickness is. But all Geoffrey says is, “Isabel, it’s coming here too,” and I know that even the small protection I can offer him is worth nothing at all.

7. Pestilence
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    S o what is it, exactly, the pestilence? Some say it’s a plague, sent by God to destroy the wicked or perhaps the whole world, and that that’s why there’s no cure. A preacher who came to the village last year said that in the Bible it’s written that a third of humanity will be destroyed by plague before the end of the world comes. Which means that God is taking more than His share of death this time around, if the stories we’ve heard are true.
    Some say the pestilence is a disease like any other, caused by bad air, poisoned air, blown on the winds across Europe. That’s why it creeps north and north and north, why you can’t outrun it, why it never stops. But where did that bad air come from? And what happens to it? If the earth is a ball, like Geoffrey says, will the pestilence roll over the top of the world and come back round to greet us again? Or will it kill us all and go roving over the empty world, forever?
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    All this last year, travellers from the south have told stories about the sickness. Some call it the morte bleu , the blue death,
but most say the pestilence or just the sickness . Some talk of spitting blood, of hard, black buboes the size of pigeon eggs growing under the armpit or in the groin, of God’s tokens – red marks, like blood, below the skin. It stinks – everyone who talks about the pestilence talks about the stink.
    â€œLike the devil himself,” says one soldier, crossing himself.
    â€œYou’d know,” says his companion, but nobody laughs.
    More sinister are those who talk of a sickness that strikes like an adder, without warning.
    â€œMy cousin’s child – he took ill in the evening and was dead an hour later.”
    â€œMy father’s pig took a rag that had been used to wipe the blood from a man with the sickness. The pig ate the rag, and fell down dead in the road.”
    Other folk say that the pestilence brings madness. That folk will leap from their windows, run naked through the streets, babble and cry and fight as though all the king’s men are after them.
    â€œMaybe if won’t be so bad then,” the men say, grinning sideways one to another. “If the young women start taking their clothes off.”
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    How do you keep yourself safe? That’s the next question, the one everyone wants an answer to. Surely there are medicaments and spells; surely someone, somewhere has found a way? The preachers hiss.
    â€œBy loving God and begging His forgiveness. By turning from the devil and all his works.”
    â€œThis bone,” a wandering preacher told us. “It belonged to St William. Wear it next to your skin and it will save you from harm.”
    â€œChicken bones and glue,” Alice muttered. “Either that or he’s a grave robber, or a cathedral robber – or worse!”
    â€œDon’t look them in the eyes,” said the pardoner who came after Christmas selling forgivenesses for any sin you might ever want to commit and a few you never would. “That’s how it’s passed – through the eyes!”
    â€œI walked through the city of London,” said the young man at the Easter Fair, the