In the spring of 1348

In the spring of 1348, Merthin woke up as if from a nightmare he could not remember. He felt frightened and weak. He opened his eyes to a room lit by bars of bright sunshine coming through half open shutters. He saw a high ceiling, white walls, red tiles. The air was mild. Reality returned slowly. He was in his bedroom, in his house, in Florence. He had been ill.
The illness came back to him first. It had began with a skin rash, purplish black blotches on his chest, then his arms, then everywhere. Soon afterwards he developed a painful lump or bubo in his armpit. He had a fever, sweating in his bed, tangling the sheets as he writhed. He had vomited and coughed blood. He had thought he would die. Worst of all was a terrible unquenchable thirst that had made him want to throw himself into the river Arno with his mouth open.
He was not the only sufferer. Thousands of Italians had fallen ill with this plague, tens of thousands. Half the workmen on his building sites had disappeared, as had most of his household servants. Almost everyone who caught it died within five days. They called it la moria grande, the big death.
But he was alive.
He had a nagging feeling that while ill he ha reached a momentous decision, but he could not remember it. He concentrated for a moment. He harder he thought, the more elusive the memory became, until it vanished.
He sat up in bed. His limbs felt feeble and his head spun for a moment. He was wearing a clean linen nightshirt, and he wondered who had put it on him. After a pause, he stood.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet

The deer was a young female

The deer was a young female, a year or two old, sleek across the haunches, well muscled under a soft leather skin.
She was on the far side of a clearing, pushing her long neck through the branches of a bush to reach a patch of scrubby grass. Ralp Tizgerald and Alan Fernhill were on horseback, the hooves of their mounts muffled by the carpet of wet autumn leaves, and their dogs were trained to silence. Because of this, and perhaps because she was concentrating on straining to reach her fodder, the deer did not hear their approach until it was too late.
Ralph saw her first, and pointed across the clearing. Alan was carrying his longbow, grasping it and the reins in his left hand. With the speed of long practice, he fitted an arrow to the string in a heartbeat, and shot.
The dogs were slower. Only when they heard the thrum of the bowstring, and the whistle of the arrow as it flew through the air, did they react. Barley, the bitch, froze in place, head up, ears erect, and Blade, her puppy, now grown larger than his mother, uttered a low, startled woof.
The arrow was a yard long, lighted with swan feathers. Its tip was two inches of solid iron with a socket into which the shaft fitted tightly. It was a hunting arrow, with a sharp point: a battle arrow would have had a square head, so that it would punch through an armour without being deflected.
Alan’s shoot was good, but not perfect. It struck the deer low in the neck. She jumped with all four feet – shocked, presumably by the sudden, agonizing stab. Her head came up out of the bush. For an instant, Ralph thought she was going to fall down dead, but a moment later she bounded away. The arrow was still buried in her neck, but the blood was oozing rather than spurting from the wound, so it must have lodged in her muscles, missing the major blood vessels.
From the book ‘World without end’ by Ken Follet