Chapter One

The cold came off the sea three days before the ship did.

She felt it on the Dorchester road, in the body of a woman she had not yet taken, and she stopped walking to attend to it. The body stopped with her. It had been a widow’s body, footsore and forty, with a bundle on its back and a husband three weeks in the ground at Bridport, and it had been dying as it walked, quietly, the way bodies died of grief when the grief had nowhere left to go.

She had been following it for a day.

She did not hurry the bodies she meant to wear. That was not the Work. The Work was older than courtesy and had no use for it, but she had learned, in the long stretch of years, that a body taken gently kept better than a body taken in fright, and she had a use coming for a body that would keep.

The cold told her so.

She had worked plagues before. She had worked the cough that emptied the legions on the German rivers, and the swelling sickness that came up the Nile in the years the priests still wore the double crown, and the great burning that took Constantinople in the reign of the first Justinian and did not stop taking it for fifty years. She knew the shape of a plague the way a fisherman knew weather. A plague had a forward edge, a cold that ran ahead of the bodies, and she had learned to read its depth as the fisherman reads the color of the water.

This cold had no bottom.

She stood on the Dorchester road in the borrowed afternoon and let it move through her, and she could not find the floor of it. It came off the sea and it went inland and it did not thin. It was not a wave. A wave broke and drew back. This was the tide itself, turning, and it had decided to come in and not go out again for a long time.

The widow’s body shivered.

She let it. The body had earned its small fears. She gave it the rest of the road and the last of its walking, and at the place where the road bent down toward the water meadows she let it lie down in the long grass at the verge, as if to rest, and she took it there.

She took it by the slow method, the one that left the body whole.

It took nine breaths. She had learned the number a long time ago, in the year of the first plague she had ever worked, when she had stood at a bed in a country that no longer had a name and counted the breaths a body needed after the soul was gone before the going was sure. Nine. The widow gave them up one at a time into the summer grass, and on the ninth the soul loosened in the old order, by the old road, and went where the cold had not called it — somewhere bright, she thought, though she was never permitted to follow and see.

Then the body was empty, and she put it on.

It settled around her slowly. It always did. A body was a coat bought for someone else, and it took an hour or a day to learn how the dead woman had held her shoulders, the side she had favored, the words her mouth already knew. She sat in the grass while the body learned her, and learned the body, and somewhere out past the harbor mouth, three days east on a wind that smelled of tar and rot, the cold went on coming in off the sea with no bottom to it at all.

The dead woman’s name had been Aveline.

She took the name with the body, because names were useful and she had worn ten thousand of them, and not one of them had ever been hers.

✦ ✦ ✦

She came down into Melcombe on the second day, and saw the ship.

It had come in on the morning tide and no one had gone aboard it, and that told her more than anything the harbor men could have. A ship in from Gascony with wine in the hold was a ship swarmed before its ropes were fast — gaugers, factors, boys for the carrying, the customer’s clerk with his roll. This one sat at the end of the new quay with its sail brailed up and its deck empty and a stillness around it that the gulls would not cross.

The men of Melcombe stood on the quay in a loose crowd and looked at it and did not go near.

She went near.

She walked out along the quay in the body of the widow Aveline, in a plain wool gown gone green at the hem, and the men did not stop her. They never did. A man would put out his hand to bar a stranger and then his eyes would go past her shoulder to nothing at all, and the hand would come down, and a cold would go through him that he would blame on the water. One of them stepped back to let her by and crossed himself afterward without knowing why he had.

The smell of the ship reached her at twenty feet. Under the tar and the bilge and the spoiled wine it was the smell she had been smelling since the German rivers. The crew were below. Most of them were dead. Two were not yet, and would be by the turn of the tide, and the cold stood over the whole hull like a hand.

A man came down the gangplank.

He came down it easily, the only thing on the ship that moved, and he was wrong, and she knew he was wrong before she had finished seeing him, as she knew a death that came without the cold to call it.

He was a man of middle height in a good dark gown, foreign in the cut, with a leather scrip on a strap and the soft unhurried walk of someone who had never in his life been afraid of a room. He had come up out of a hold full of the dying and there was no death on him. The cold that lay over the ship did not lie over him. It went around him, the way the gulls went around the mast.

He reached the bottom of the gangplank and stood on the stone of the quay and looked, without hurry, along the harbor — at the men, at the gulls, at the green hills behind the town — and then he turned and looked at her.

He looked at her the way the dying looked at her.

He saw what she was.

She had been seen before. The dying always saw her, in the last clarity, and a few of the living touched the edge of it — children sometimes, and the mad, and once or twice a saint. But the dying saw her by accident, in the falling-open of the last hour, and they could no more have helped it than helped dying. This man saw her on purpose. He saw her and he was not dying and he was not afraid and the corner of his mouth moved, very slightly, as if at the start of a long pleasure he meant to take his time over.

He inclined his head to her. A small bow. Courteous.

She did not return it.

She had met him before. Not this body of his — he had no more had a body until now than she had owned a name — but the thing inside it she had met at the edge of every death that did not come to her clean. The soul that loosened and did not go up. The door that stood where her threshold should have been, and was not hers, and had something behind it that heard. She had worked beside that thing since before there were churches to put a name to it. She had never once seen it walk.

Now it had come down off a ship in a borrowed gown and bowed to her on the quay at Melcombe.

She understood, looking at him, that the cold with no bottom and the man with no cold were the same arrival. The pestilence had not come to England alone. It had brought him a crowd large enough to walk in.

He came toward her along the quay.

The men did not see him any more than they saw her. He passed between two of them and they shivered and drew their cloaks and went on staring at the ship.

He stopped an arm’s length from her, which was closer than the living came, and he said, in English better than any sailor’s, “Mistress.”

She said nothing.

“You felt it on the road,” he said. “I felt you feel it.” His voice was pleasant, unhurried, a little amused, like a man remarking on good weather to a stranger he intended to know. “It’s a large one. I have not seen one this large since”—he tilted his head, considering—“well. You were there. You would remember it better than I.”

“Constantinople,” she said. It was the first thing the body’s mouth had said to anyone but the dead widow.

“Constantinople,” he agreed, pleased that she had answered. “Fifty years. We did good work.”

“I did the Work,” she said. “You did what you do.”

“Yes.” He smiled. He had a good face for it — the borrowed face, lean and dark and quick. “That is what I came to talk to you about. What I do. And what you do. And how it is that you have done it for ten thousand years in a body, and I have only ever stood outside the door, and I find, this year, that I should like to know what it is like in there with you.”

The tide had turned under the ship. She felt the two men below give up their last hour, one and then the other, and the cold close over them and the souls loosen in the old order and go where they were called. Clean. The Work, done at a distance, as she did most of it, a thousand at a time across a country, without ever leaving the quay.

“You put on flesh,” she said.

“I did.”

“Why.”

He looked at her for a moment without the smile.

“Because you always do,” he said. “I have watched you wear them out, one after another, for as long as there have been any to wear, and I have never understood why a thing like you would consent to it. The cold. The smell. The grief that comes with the body whether you want it or not.” He glanced down at his own borrowed hand, turned it over, as if the fingers were a new and interesting tool. “I thought I would try it. While the dying are too many to count and no one will notice one more man among them. I thought I would walk where you walk, this year, and see what the flesh is for.”

Behind them the men of Melcombe had begun, at last, to argue about who would burn the ship.

“It is not for anything,” she said. “It is the cost of the Work. The dying cannot be attended by a thing they cannot see.”

“And yet you attend them in it. After ten thousand years.” He started to turn away, toward the green hills, toward the inland country where the cold was already running ahead of them both. “You could take them all at a distance, as you just took the two in the hold. You never come down to the quay. But you came down today.” He looked back at her over his shoulder, and the amusement was gone again, and what was under it was older and quieter and more patient than anything she had met in a long age of the world. “I think there is something the body is for that even you have not found yet. I think I should like to be there when you do.”

He went up the quay toward the town, and the men parted around the cold of him without knowing they did it, and she stood at the end of the stone with the empty ship behind her and the bottomless tide coming in, and for the first time in a great many years, she did not entirely know what was going to happen.