The Dancing Plague — the city that could not feed its people

Transcript

Bram: The first thing is that my mouth hurts, and the second thing is that I am the reason a hundred people cannot rest. I am standing on a plank platform about knee-height above a square, and I am playing. I know I am playing because my fingers are doing it without me, running a buzzing, nasal, slightly ridiculous little figure over and over on a capped reed the length of my forearm, and my cheeks are aching the particular ache of a man who has been blowing into a double reed since before the light came up. There is spit down my chin. I have, I would guess, been at this for hours. And below me, all round the platform, filling the square, are the dancers. That is the wrong word and it is the only word I have. There are dozens of them, maybe a hundred, and they are moving — turning, stamping, lurching, throwing their arms — and not one of them is looking at me, and not one of them is enjoying it. Their faces are the faces of people carrying something up a hill. Some of them are weeping while they do it. An old man near the front has his eyes shut and his mouth open and his feet are going and going and going. So. Let me get my bearings, because I have learned over a great many centuries of waking up inside strangers that the fastest way to find out who I am is to look at my hands and believe them. The hands are a working man's, with a callus on the left thumb and reed-stains in the creases, and there is a second instrument slung at my hip, a little drum, a tabor, and a felt cap on my head with a civic badge sewn to it. There is, I discover when I check, a coin in my purse that was not there yesterday, and it is a good coin. Oh, marvellous. I'm the entertainment. I am a town piper, one of the city's own hired musicians, I have been engaged and paid to stand up here and play, and the thing I have been engaged and paid to play FOR is this — these hundred people who cannot stop moving. I am, apparently, the cure. A bell starts up over the roofs, slow, a big bronze one, tolling the hour from a tower so tall I have to tip my head to find the top of it, and I keep playing straight through it because that, I understand, is the job: you do not stop. There are two other men on the platform with me, big men, and they are not musicians. Their job is to catch the ones who fall and set them back on their feet and point them at the dance again. The nearest of them — the name arrives with the body, Klaus — has the patient, appalled face of a man who has been doing something unspeakable for so long that it has become simply a shift of work. He catches a young man who buckles, hauls him upright by the armpits, aims him back into the crowd, and glances up at me.

Klaus: Don't stop, piper. When you stop, they look at us.

Bram: When you stop, they look at us. That is the truest description of my job I will hear all day, and it comes from a man holding a stranger up by the armpits. When I play, the watchers at the edge of the square have somewhere to put their eyes. The tune is a place to stand so you do not have to stand inside the silence and hear what the silence actually sounds like. I am not a healer and I am not, today, really a musician. I am a curtain. And it is somewhere in the third hour, or the fourth, watching a woman go down and get lifted and go again, that the thing arrives in me that I cannot make go away. They are not following the music. I speed up; they do not speed up. I change the figure; nothing in the square changes. I stop — just for a moment, just to see — and take the reed from my mouth, and the pipe dies, and the drum is silent, and the feet do not stop. The feet do not even falter. A hundred pairs of feet on a wooden floor, out of time with each other and out of time with me, going on into the silence I just made, and it is the most frightening sound I have ever stood inside, because it means the music was never leading them. It was keeping them company. It was making the thing look like something a city does on purpose. It was making it bearable — for us, the ones watching, the ones who could still choose to stand still. I put the reed back to my mouth, because the men below me have turned to look at why I stopped, and I start the figure again, and I am playing for the possessed in a market square, and I have just worked out that I am not helping them. I am helping everyone else pretend that somebody is.

The_overseer: Keep it up, piper. Council's paying by the day.

Bram: By the day. As if there were going to be a lot of days. As if somebody, somewhere, had already worked out that this was going to go on long enough to need a budget. This is Chronicles — history, lived from the inside. Not the dates and the names cut into the monument, but the morning it actually happened, close enough to touch. We drop you into the room where the world turned, and we make you feel why it still matters now. And there's only one honest way in: to actually be there, in a body, on the day. So one traveller goes where the rest of us can't — the same soul, life after life, moving through all of history, waking inside someone who was really there. I'm the Traveller. Episode sixteen. The Cure Was Dancing — the summer a city that could not feed its people spent a fortune to keep them moving. Right. Put that square down for a minute — I'll bring you back to it, and to that pipe, before the end, and I promise you it gets worse. But the square is standing at the top of a story whose reasons are all two winters further back, and if I drop you into the middle of it you will do exactly what everybody does with this one, which is treat it as a curiosity — the year a town danced — when the astonishing thing is a city making a completely reasonable decision that turns out to be a catastrophe. So come back with me. The place is Strasbourg, on the river Ill, a few miles west of the Rhine, and the first thing to fix in your head is what it is, because you are about to want to call it French and it is not, and will not be for another hundred and sixty-odd years. In our year it is a free imperial city — a city that answers to the Holy Roman Emperor and, in every practical matter, to itself. Twenty-odd thousand people inside the walls. It runs itself through its guilds — twenty of them, with a majority on the council, and an elected head called the Ammeister, and small lifelong privy councils where the real power sits — which means, and hold onto this, that when this city decides to do something extraordinary, there is no king to blame. It is decided by a committee of guildsmen and merchants who have to walk past the results in the street the next morning. And over all of it, one object you can see from a day's walk out on the plain: the cathedral, whose single north tower was finished not long before our story and is, in the year we are standing in, the tallest building in the world — the tallest thing human beings have ever built, and it will hold that title for three and a half more centuries. This is not a backwater. This is one of the great cities of the Empire, with a printing industry, a legal class, a chancery full of trained men. Now the thing standing under everything, the precondition, the fact the whole hour rests on. For the two years before our summer, the land failed. Not a bad season — a run of the worst weather grain can have, right across the upper Rhine: brutal winters, then late frosts in the spring that killed the young plants in the ground, then scorching dry summers on top. Eighteen months of it. The harvest of the year before our story very nearly failed outright. And because the failure was regional, there was no escape hatch — you cannot buy your way out of a hunger when every market you would buy from has the same empty barns. Rye is the bread of the poor here, and rye reached a price nobody alive could remember paying. I am not going to give you a number, because the honest number does not survive in a form I trust; I am going to give you what it did instead. People died of hunger in these years, across this region — died of it — and the survivors did the thing hungry country people have always done, which is walk. They walked off the failed land toward the towns, because the towns had grain stores and alms-houses and walls, and a starving family in a village has nothing and a starving family at a city gate has, at least, a gate to stand at. And I want you to hold what two years of that does to a body, because it is the physical condition of every person in this story and it never gets into the retellings. Two years is long enough that hunger stops being a crisis and becomes the ordinary state of things — the loosened teeth, the swollen bellies on thin children, the women who have stopped bleeding, the old who simply do not wake, the young men who used to work and now sit in doorways. It is long enough to hollow people out and long enough to make them desperate, and both of those are in this city in our summer: bodies worn down to almost nothing, and, out in the country behind them, bodies angry enough to reach for a weapon. These are not metaphors and they are not background. They are the exact material — starved, frightened, and primed — that the summer is about to act on. So by the spring before our summer there are hungry strangers at the gates of Strasbourg. And here is where the story really begins, because of what was waiting for them on the other side of the wall. This city, like every well-run city of the Empire, had already decided what it thought about the poor, and it had decided it in advance and in writing. The doctrine of the age was simple and it was everywhere: the poor divide into two kinds. There are the deserving poor — your own, local, known, honest, the widow of a guildsman, the man who worked until his back went — and the city has a real duty to them, and it discharged it, through the hospital and the parish alms and the guilds looking after their own. And then there are the others — the undeserving, the able-bodied beggar, and above all the stranger, the one who is somebody else's problem walked to your gate. And to those, the settled answer of the age was the gate. You licensed your own poor, sometimes with a token they could show, and you turned the rest away, or moved them on, or shut them outside the walls. Strasbourg was not cruel by the standards of its world. It was a well-run example of its world. And its well-run, written-down, entirely ordinary response to a countryside starving at its gate was to move against the incoming poor rather than take them in — to protect its own stores and its own people, and to treat a hungry stranger as what the doctrine said he was: not a duty, just a problem. Hold that. A city that has, before our story starts, looked at hundreds of hungry people and decided, on principle, that they are not its charge. Because in about a year, that same city is going to spend a fortune — guild halls, carpenters, hired musicians — on a few hundred of its people, and the difference between the two answers is the whole story, and it is not hypocrisy. It is something stranger and more human than hypocrisy, and I want you to watch it happen rather than have me explain it. One more thing about the moment, because it changes how it feels to stand in it. This is the last summer of the old certainty, and nobody in it knows that. Eight and a half months before our story, a monk in a town called Wittenberg, hundreds of miles away, nailed up a list of arguments about the Church that almost nobody in Strasbourg has heard of yet. The word we would use for what he started does not exist. Nobody in this city has changed their religion. The Mass is the Mass, the saints are real and powerful, pilgrimage works, and the city is about to prove that it believes all four of those things, in public, with wagons and holy water. That very year, a new young preacher named Matthäus Zell takes up a post at a chapel in the cathedral — the man who, in three years, will start pulling all of it down. Right now he is going to Mass like everybody else, and the saints are as real to him as the stones of the cathedral, and the idea that a man might one day stand in that pulpit and tell this city its pilgrimages were empty would strike everyone in it, him included, as raving. That is the ground we are standing on. It feels like bedrock. It has about fifteen years left. And let me put you in your own frame for a moment, because the calendar of this summer is stranger than the story. In the year we are standing in: Leonardo da Vinci is alive, an old man in France with under a year to live. The man who will burn Tenochtitlán has not sailed yet — that is half a year away, and this show has already stood in that city with him. The most powerful throne in Europe is empty of the boy who will fill it; the election is a year off. Printing is sixty years old and this is a printing town. This is not a dark huddled corner of the world. This is the bright, literate, well-governed heart of Christendom, at the height of its confidence, with the best doctors and the best lawyers and the tallest building on earth — and that confidence is the thing that is about to fail, in the most reasonable way imaginable. Keep that in your pocket: these are not primitive people fumbling in the dark. These are the most advanced people of their world, and that is exactly why what happens to them should frighten you. But before the confidence, the hunger. Let me take you into one room, on one cold night, before any of it starts, and introduce you to the woman this whole hour turns on — not because she was important, but because she was ordinary, which is the entire point. The room is cold and small and there is one fire in it, and I am hungry in a way I have to sit still inside for a moment before I understand it is not mine — it belongs to the body, and the body has been hungry so long that it has stopped being an event and become a weather. I am a woman. Grown, not old — thirty, perhaps, though the hands say older than that because the hands have worked. I am kneeling at a quern, a hand-mill, two stones one on top of the other, and I am grinding, and I can feel through the handle how little there is to grind — a poor thin measure of rye, ground fine because when there is little you make it go far, and ground at home on these two stones because the miller takes a cut of what he grinds and the miller's cut is, this winter, more than we can give. Outside the one window it is black and it is raining and the river is close; I can hear it. The house smells of damp and woodsmoke and bodies and the particular sourness of a place where people are eating less than they need. And there is a man. He is sitting on the edge of the bed behind me with his hands hanging between his knees, watching me grind, and the name arrives with him the way names do when I wake up inside a life — he is my husband, and I have a feeling about him that comes up through the body before I have any facts, and the feeling is tired tenderness, the love of two people who have been frightened together for a long time and have not had much left over to give each other.

The_husband: Leave it. There's enough for the morning. Come and be warm.

Bram: I do not put it down yet. There is a thing hungry people do, which is refuse comfort because comfort feels like giving up, and I do it now — one more turn of the stone, and another, as if the grinding were holding something at bay.

The_husband: There's enough. You'll wear the stone out and there'll still be nothing under it. Come here.

Bram: And I put the top stone down, and I stop, because he is right, and because the truest thing in this room is that we are both cold, and that the only thing either of us has left to give the other is warmth — not food, not comfort, not any promise about the spring — just the heat of a body, which costs nothing, which is the one thing hunger cannot take. So I go to him. And I want to be plain with you about this, because the retellings of this story skip it and it is the thing everything else grows out of: what happens in this room is two hungry people in the dark reaching for the one warm thing they have, and it is not tidy and it is not chaste and it is the opposite of despair — it is the flat refusal of two ordinary people to stop being alive to each other just because the world has gone hard. His hands are cold on me and then they are not. There is a long time where the only warm places in the whole cold world are where we are touching, and we stay in them. And there is an almost, before it, that I want you to have, because it is the whole shape of the thing. There is a moment where his hand stops on my hip and does not move, and I feel him hesitate, feel him think the thought neither of us will say, and I put my hand over his and press it flat against me, which is a woman saying I know, and stay anyway. Neither of us has the words for what we are choosing and neither of us needs them. We are two people who have been going hungry side by side for two years, who have watched the same neighbours die and the same children thin, and who have decided, tonight, in the dark, that we will not also stop being warm to each other, because that would be one loss too many, and we are already carrying all the losses we can hold.

The_husband: Still here. Still yours.

Bram: Still here. Still yours. He says it against my collarbone and I feel it more than hear it, and it undoes something in me that the winter had wound very tight.

The_husband: Warmer now?

Bram: Warmer now, he asks, as if warmth were a thing you could check on, a fire you could bank — and I tell him yes, warmer, and mean it more completely than I have meant anything in a year. He says my name into my hair. I will tell you the name the way the story keeps it: I am called Frau Troffea. Hold that lightly for now; it will matter later how we come to call me that. Tonight I am just a woman being warm with her husband in a bad winter. And there is one more thing in the room with us, and it does not have a body, and neither of us says it. It is a fear. It has been in this city for thirty years — it came in when my mother was young, a new sickness nobody had seen before, that the older folk still call the French disease, that turns up in the skin and the bones and the mind and that everyone knows, by now, is caught from exactly this, from the warm dark thing we are doing right now. There is a house for it, downstream, on the water, where they take the ones it has, and what they do to them there is a thing the whole city knows about and nobody wants to picture. And it is in the room. It is in the pause before he reaches for me, and in the half-second I decide not to think about it, and in the way neither of us will say the word while there is still one warm thing left to have. We are choosing each other over the fear, because the fear is always there and the warmth is only sometimes, and a person who has been cold and frightened for two years will take the warmth. You would. I did.

The_husband: Don't do your sums tonight. I can hear you doing them even now. Not tonight. Tonight there's enough, and I'm here, and that's the whole of the account. Sleep.

Bram: Afterwards he sleeps, the deep sudden sleep of a man whose body has been waiting all day for permission to stop. I lie awake and listen to the river and do the small sum a hungry woman does in the dark — how much rye in the crock, how many days, how far to the spring — and I do not know, lying there warm at last, that in about seven months my own feet are going to carry me out into a street and refuse to bring me home, and that this warm ordinary body is the one it is going to happen to. Right now it is just a body that is finally, briefly, not cold. Be warm, he said. So I was. Let her sleep. I want to pull the frame back from that one room, because the room is a single cell of something regional, and the size of it is the thing that makes everything downstream make sense. Multiply that quern and that thin measure of rye by an entire countryside for two years running. That is what the upper Rhine is, in the winters on either side of our story. The failed harvests were not Strasbourg's; they were the whole region's, which is why there was no buying out of it, and the human result was the one famine always produces and that the records of this corner of the world describe again and again in these years: the country walking into the towns. Roads with families on them. Gates with strangers at them. And inside the gates, the doctrine you already heard — mercy for our own, the gate for the rest — running into a tide of people it was written to keep out. And the country was not only hungry. It was arming. There was a peasant movement in these hills with a banner that was a laced farm boot, and it had risen and been broken before, and the year before our story it stirred again through the Black Forest and reached into this very region, and the response was soldiers — an armed league putting men on the roads to watch the crossings and seal the meeting-points, including on a road up into the hills to the west that you and I are going to travel, for a very different reason, before the end. So hold the whole picture. Two years of hunger. A new sickness thirty years in the walls. Plague in living memory on top of that. A country full of people who have buried their dead and lost their bread and been turned from the gate and, some of them, taken up arms. That is not a population that finds catastrophe hypothetical. When something inexplicable begins in a street in this city, the question these people ask is not is this real. They have no doubt at all that it is real. The only question is which visitation is this, and what does it want — and to answer that, they have a house on the water, and a saint in the hills, and a set of ideas about the body that are about to be tested to destruction. Let me show you the house on the water first, because it tells you everything about how this city loved its sick, and what its love cost them. This room is too hot, and I am sweating, and the smell in it is going to stay with me long after I leave this body — a smell of tallow and sickness and, under it, something metallic and wrong. I am young — younger than the woman in the cold room, a girl really, with strong forearms and a rag tied over the lower half of my face, and I am kneeling beside a low cot in a long room with a fire kept high at one end. This is a house I know the name of the moment I am in it: it is the pox house, downstream in the district where the river runs, the house they built for the French disease. And I know my job, because my hands know it. I am one of the smearing-girls. There is a pot beside me of a grey, heavy, oily salve, and there is a man on the cot, and my job is to work the salve into his skin. The salve is quicksilver — mercury, ground into fat — and it is the best medicine the age has for this sickness, and it is the reason this room exists, and I am about to tell you what it does, and I am not going to look away from it, because this is the thing the retellings leave out and it is the thing you have to hold to understand this city at all. A bell tolls somewhere over the water, the cathedral marking an hour, and the man on the cot flinches at it because sound hurts him now. He is perhaps three weeks into the friction — three weeks of being rubbed, day after day, with the grey salve, in this hot room, because the heat is part of it; you rub, and you sweat, and you are made to salivate, and the salivation is supposed to be the sickness leaving. He is salivating now. He cannot stop. It runs from the corner of his mouth and he cannot close his lips properly around it because his mouth is going — his gums have gone soft and dark and pulled back, and two of his teeth have loosened in their beds, and there is a smell off his breath that is the smell of the metal doing its work on him from the inside.

The_sufferer: How many more days, girl?

Bram: And I tell him what I am told to tell them. A few more. You are nearly through the worst. And I work the salve into the skin of his back and his arms, gently, because he is tender everywhere and because — and this is the thing — I am not cruel and this house is not cruel. This is the most tender place in the city. Somebody feeds this man and washes him and keeps his fire high and sits with him at night. There is a sick-father and a sick-mother who nurse here around the clock. The city pays for all of it. This house is Strasbourg being as good as it knows how to be to a body that everyone else would shut out — and the medicine at the centre of all that goodness is a metal that is loosening his teeth and blackening his mouth while I rub it in with my two kind hands. He tries to talk to me while I work, because talking is a thing he can still choose to do, and it steadies him.

The_sufferer: They say if you sweat it enough, and the mouth runs enough, that's the badness coming out. That it has to get worse to get better. Is that true, girl? Is my mouth the badness leaving?

Bram: And I tell him yes. I tell him that is exactly what it is, the badness leaving, because that is what I have been taught and what the whole house believes and what, God help us, might even be so — and because a man three weeks into this needs it to be true more than he needs anything I could give him from the pot. And the terrible thing, the thing I turn over on the walk home, is that I cannot tell, and neither can the learned men who send him here, whether the mouth going is the sickness leaving or the cure arriving. The two look exactly the same from in here. You rub the metal in, and the man gets worse, and you call the worse the turn, and sometimes he comes out the far side of it alive.

The_sufferer: Will you be the one tomorrow? I do better when it's you. You've a gentle hand, girl, and you don't look at my mouth.

Bram: There is a preacher's shadow over this room, and I feel the body think of him with respect. There was a great voice in this city a while back, the cathedral preacher, dead some years now, who thundered from the tallest pulpit in the world about what the city owed its sick and its poor — and it was his shouting, everyone here knows, that built this house, that made the council put up the money and open the door. The best of the city is in this room because one man would not shut up about mercy. And the worst of what mercy could do, with the tools it had, is in the pot beside my knee. I finish the round. I wipe my hands. The man lies back and breathes through his ruined mouth and thanks me, and I go to the fire to warm the next batch of salve, and I understand, in the way the body understands it without words, that we will do this again tomorrow, and that some of the ones who come through that door walk out better, and some of them the cure finishes before the sickness would have. This is the city you need to know before the dancing starts. A city that will build a whole house, and pay a staff, and keep a fire burning day and night, for the bodies of people it loves — and hand those bodies the most brutal thing it owns, and call it healing, and mean it. Remember that when you watch the same city, a few months from now, look at a different kind of suffering body and reach, with exactly the same earnest care, for exactly the wrong cure. Come up out of the heat of that room and out onto the water and into the lanes, because I want to move us forward now, past the winter and into the summer, and set the last few pieces on the board. The pox house you just knelt in is one corner of a whole apparatus of care this city ran — the hospital, the cathedral's building fund, the parish alms, the guilds looking after their own. It was real and it was substantial and it was, every bit of it, for the city's OWN. The great comprehensive poor-law that people associate with this town, the model one, the one the reformers built — that is still years off, and it belongs to the world that the monk in Wittenberg is about to make, the world nobody in our summer knows is coming. Right now the machinery is the old machinery: care for our own, the gate for the stranger. And the young preacher I mentioned — Zell — is newly in his chapel at the cathedral this year, going to Mass, believing what everyone believes, three years from lighting the fuse. I point him out only so you feel the hinge you are standing on. Everyone in this story is about to do something extravagantly, expensively Catholic — wagons to a saint's shrine, holy water, crosses, a Mass in a cave — in the last summer it will ever be simply obvious to them to do that. They are not naïve. They are standing on the last firm ground of a world that is about to fall into the sea, and they cannot feel it moving. So here is the city, in the first days of July. Hungry for two years. Full of strangers it will not feed. A house on the water for the sickness it fears, and a saint in the hills for the sicknesses it does not understand. A council of guildsmen with a duty to keep order and a horror of disorder. And a population that knows, in its bones, that when God is angry it shows up in the body. Everything is set. And on a hot day in the middle of July, a woman you have already met steps out of her door, into a lane, and begins to dance. It is hot, and I am the woman from the cold room, and I have just walked out of my door into a lane, and I am dancing, and I did not decide to. I want to be exact about this because it is the centre of the whole thing and it is the thing no English sentence can carry. She was dancing — that is what the chronicles will say and it is a lie the shape of the truth. I am not dancing. My feet are dancing. I am up here, behind my own eyes, exactly as much myself as I was grinding rye in the winter, watching my feet do a thing on the hot cobbles that I am not telling them to do and cannot tell them to stop. It is not a fit; I am not on the ground; my mind is clear and calm and increasingly, coldly terrified. It is more like — you know the dream where you try to run and cannot? It is that, turned inside out. The running will not stop. My feet come down on the stones, one and then the other, turning me, stamping, carrying me a few steps up the lane and a few steps back, and I feel every one of them, and after a while I feel the first of them going wrong — a hot place on the sole, then a wet place, then a pain I would ordinarily sit down and cry about, and I cannot sit down. The body has taken a decision the way the body takes the decision to be hungry or to sleep, from somewhere underneath the part of me that talks, and it has decided to dance, and it is not consulting me, and it is not going to stop when I am tired, and I am already tired. And now there is a face in front of me. It is my husband. He has come out because the neighbours came to get him, and he is standing in front of me in the lane with his hands out, and he is doing the thing you would do, the only thing, he is asking me to stop.

The_husband: Stop it now. Come inside. Whatever this is — stop it, come in, come in out of the street.

Bram: And I am looking right at him. I want you to understand that. I am looking into my husband's face, the face from the warm dark room, and I am trying with everything I have to make my feet answer him, and they will not. I try to walk to him and I dance past him. I try to reach for his hands and my arms are in it too now. I open my mouth to tell him I cannot, and I am weeping, and the feet go on. There is nothing wrong with my love for him. There is nothing wrong with my will. The command is going down and the body is not taking it, and I watch his face change from fear for me to a deeper fear, the fear of a man who has understood that whatever has hold of his wife is not going to be talked out of her.

The_husband: Then I'll carry you. I'll pick you up and carry you in, and you can dance in the house where nobody sees.

Bram: And he tries. He steps in and gets his arms around me, and for a moment I am lifted off the cobbles and we both think — that will settle it, the feet cannot dance if they cannot reach the ground. And the feet dance anyway, in the air, against his shins, and he staggers, and a neighbour woman who has come to the noise puts her hand on his arm and says the thing that changes the whole street.

A_neighbour: Put her down. Don't you feel it in her? That's not hers to stop — that's been laid on her. Carry her in and you'll only be locking it in the house with you.

Bram: And he puts me down. Because she is right, and everyone in the lane can feel that she is right, and the feeling has a name that is older and larger than either of us. Because he knows what this is. Everyone in the lane knows what this is; I can see it arriving on the faces round him, the neighbours, the way they step back, the way one of them crosses herself. This is not madness and it is not sickness in the ordinary way. This is a visitation. Somebody has been made to dance. And there is only one thing in the whole of their world that lays a dance on a person like a hand — a saint, a particular saint, one with a shrine up in the hills, who is known to have this power, to strike a person with a dance if he is angered, and to lift it if he is appeased. They are not asking whether it is real. They are working out whose it is. The cathedral bell tolls the hour over the roofs and I dance through it, on a foot that is now leaving marks on the stone, and my husband walks beside me weeping, not touching me because touching me does nothing, just keeping pace.

The_husband: I'm here. I'm not going anywhere. Whatever it takes, however long — I'll walk every step of it beside you. You're not doing this alone.

Bram: He cannot stop it and he cannot carry me out of it and he knows both of those now, so he does the only thing left, which is refuse to let me do it by myself. And this is the first day, and I will collapse tonight when the body finally spends itself, and I will sleep like the dead, and in the morning — this is the part that breaks him — in the morning I will get up, and my feet will start again. And within a week there will be others. Not many at first — a few, then a dozen, then more, appearing in other lanes, other squares, always the same, always people who could not tell you why, always feet that will not answer. A thing that spreads by being seen. By the time the city stops counting it in ones, there are, so one family's book will say, hundreds. But that is ahead. Today it is just me, in a lane, dancing away from the only man I would stop for, watching his face, unable to give him the one thing he is asking me for. Step back with me, out of the lane, before we go into the rooms where the city decides what to do — because you just watched a hundred people arrive at a conclusion in about four seconds, and you need to know why it was the obvious one. When a body in this world starts doing something the person inside it cannot stop, the question is not medical first. It is who did this. And in this particular corner of Christendom there is a ready answer, a saint with a specific and frightening reputation. He is a young martyr of the early Church, and along the Rhine and the Mosel his cult is powerful, and he is known for two things that are the same thing: he can lift a dancing affliction, and he can lay one on you. Anger him — neglect his day, break a vow, offend him — and he can set your body dancing and not let it stop until he is satisfied. The cure and the curse are the same power, held by the same hand. So the script is not improvised in July. It is remembered. This city has heard about dancing sickness from its own pulpit within living memory — that same great preacher who built the pox house is known to have preached on it, on the affliction and on the pilgrimages people made to be rid of it. The people in these lanes have a whole framework ready: what it is, whose it is, and roughly what you do about it, which is to appease the saint. The dancing does not arrive into an empty sky. It arrives into a sky already full of exactly this possibility, in a population primed by hunger and sickness and fear to see a visitation when a body starts to move on its own. Which puts the council in a genuinely hard position, and I want you to feel that it is hard, because the easy version of this story is that a bunch of fools did an idiotic thing, and that is not what happened. What happened is that serious men, facing something they had never seen, did the responsible thing. They asked the experts. Come and stand in the room while they do it. I am in a fine room now, a warm one, and I am holding a pen, and the pen is the reason I am here. I am a clerk of the chancery — one of the trained men who keep this city's record — and I am sitting a little below and to the side of the men who matter, at a small table, with paper and an ink-pot and the job of writing down what is decided. The room is full: councillors, the privy men, the ones whose names the city keeps for life. There is a low urgent walla of voices that keeps rising and being hushed. And beside me, close enough that I can see the ink under his own nails, is the man I work for, the chancellor — the senior permanent officer of this whole city, the man who will still be here when these councillors have rotated out, the professional memory of the place. And I know something about him that makes this morning almost unbearable to sit through, because he is not only the chancellor. He is the most famous writer this city has ever produced. Years ago he wrote a book about human folly — a great catalogue of fools, every kind of fool there is, the best-selling thing anyone around here had printed before the monk started printing — and it made his name across the Empire. He is a satirist of folly, in office. And this morning he has to sit in this room, with his pen, and help decide what to do about the largest, strangest folly he has ever seen, and he cannot make a joke of it, because it is his job to make it a policy.

Brant: Let the physicians be heard. In order. And let it be written as they say it, not as we wish they'd said it.

Bram: So the physicians are heard, and I write. And here is the first thing you must not get wrong about them: they are learned men, and they are careful, and the first thing they do is rule things OUT. They rule out the stars — they have looked, and they will not blame the heavens. And they rule out, to the visible discomfort of some men in the room, the supernatural. They will not stand up in front of the council and say a saint has done this. They are men of the body, and they give a verdict about the body, in the only physics of the body that exists in this year, which is the physics of the four humours — the idea, two thousand years old and entirely respectable, that health is a balance of fluids and heat inside you, and sickness is that balance gone wrong. And reasoning inside that physics, they reach a diagnosis that is careful, and rigorous, and completely logical, and wrong. They say: this is hot blood. There is an overheating in the blood of these people, a surplus of heat, and heat of that kind, in their medicine, is discharged the way you would discharge any heat — by burning it off, by exertion, by movement, and then, once it is spent, by rest, which cools what is left. The affliction is the disease; the exertion is the cure; the dancing itself, done to exhaustion and then followed by rest, is how the body will burn off the bad heat and come back into balance.

A_physician: The heat must be spent, not dammed. Stop them and you trap it, and trapped heat turns to fever and worse. Let them move — give them room to move, and music to move to, and hands to keep them moving when the will fails — and then, and only then, rest. That is the whole of it.

Bram: And a councillor — a guildmaster, the sort of practical man who wants a thing costed before he votes for it — asks the only question a practical man would ask.

A_councillor: And where do several hundred people move, in a city this size, without stopping? Not in these lanes. You are asking for room we do not have.

Brant: Then we make room. Clear the guild halls. Raise stages in the open squares. If the physicians say they must move, the city will give them somewhere to do it, and men to keep them at it, and a measure to move to. Half-measures killed more men than any sickness ever did.

Bram: Do you see it? Do you see how good it is? Given the premise, the conclusion follows perfectly. The premise is wrong — there is no bad heat, driving these people to exhaustion is the single worst thing you could do to a body that cannot stop — but the reasoning on top of the wrong premise is sound. These are not fools ignoring the doctors. These are the doctors, giving the best medicine of the year, and the best medicine of the year says: let them dance. Help them dance. Do not stop them; that traps the heat. Keep them moving until it is spent. And now the room has to decide whether to do it, and this is the beat I will not forget, because I watch these men — the same council, some of the very same men, who last year set their faces against the hungry at the gate and said not our charge — I watch them lean into this, warm to it, resolve to act. Because this is different. This is not a problem walked to the gate. This is a visitation, or an affliction, on their OWN people, with a name and a verdict and a prescription. This is a religious and civic emergency, and there is a duty to it that there never was to a hungry stranger, and I watch the duty land on them, and I watch them decide to be generous.

Brant: Then we do it properly, or not at all. If the cure is dancing, the city provides the dancing.

Bram: And it is ordered, and I write every word of it. Clear the guild halls — take them out of trade, give the rooms over to the afflicted. Raise platforms in the open squares, in the horse market and in the grain market, so there is room to move. Hire musicians — pipers, drummers — to play, because movement wants a measure and a measure will help. And engage strong men, paid men, to keep the dancers upright and keep them going when they flag, because if they stop before the heat is spent, the cure fails. I write musicians, to be paid by the day. I write the grain market — and my pen hesitates on the words, because the grain market is where the bread is sold, and there is no bread, and we are about to build a dance floor in it. Nobody else in the room seems to notice. Perhaps they are too close to it. I am a clerk; noticing where the words sit is my whole craft. And here is the thing I truly cannot get past, sitting there with the ink drying. We have made a careful, expensive, well-intentioned decision, in a fine warm room, on the best advice available, and there is a column in the ledger for the timber, and a column for the musicians, and a column for the halls out of trade, and there is no column — I look, I am a clerk, I look for the column — there is no column at all for what this is going to cost the people we are about to cure. Let the ink dry. I want to stay in that room one more moment, because what just happened is the whole reason I brought you to this century at all, and it is not the reason you think. The easy story — the one you will find nearly everywhere — is that a superstitious age did a stupid thing. And every part of that is wrong, and the wrongness matters. This was not superstition; the physicians excluded the supernatural, on purpose, in a hard room. This was not stupidity; the reasoning was rigorous. What you just watched is the best available expertise, reasoning correctly, from a model of the body that was wrong — and producing, out of good method and bad premise, a catastrophe. The heat of the blood, the four humours, the discharge of surplus by exertion: this was the settled science of the age, taught in the best schools, held by the most careful men. And it told them to do the one thing guaranteed to destroy the bodies in front of them. The city did not fail because it was dark. It failed because it was confident, and competent, and consulted the right people, who gave it a professional answer built on a foundation nobody yet knew was sand. That is a failure that has never once gone out of fashion. Any century can manage it. Ours can. It is the failure of good procedure applied to a wrong picture of the world, and it is worth being frightened of precisely because it does not look like a mistake from the inside. From the inside it looks like doing everything right. So the halls are cleared, and the carpenters go to work, and the platforms go up, and the pipers are hired, and the strong men are engaged, and for a few weeks the city throws its whole earnest, well-organised, deeply mistaken heart at the problem. And the problem gets worse. Come and stand in a guild hall in the third week, and I will show you the best-intentioned thing this city ever did, running at full power. The heat hits me first, before I even work out where I am — a wet animal heat, the heat of too many bodies working in a closed room in August, and over it a smell I will spend the rest of this body trying not to breathe. I am a big man. I feel it in the shoulders and the back the moment I am in the body — I am one of the strong ones, one of the men the city hired to keep the dancers on their feet, and I am at work. This is a guild hall, a big fine room meant for a guild's feasts and business, and it has been cleared of all of that and given over to this, and the floor of it is full of people dancing, and the sound of it is the thing I cannot describe properly and will try anyway: it is feet. Dozens of feet on a wooden floor, none of them in time with any of the others, continuous, a dull ragged thunder with no rhythm in it at all — and over the top of that, thin and buzzing and absurd and completely failing to organise it, a hired piper, and a boy beating a little drum, a tabor, trying and trying to put a beat under a room that will not take one. And my job, my paid job, is a woman. She has been given to me to keep upright — they pair us off, a strong man to the ones who are failing — and I have my arm around her back and under her arm, and I am holding a good part of her weight, because her legs have almost stopped being legs and are still, somehow, dancing. I have been holding her for a long time. I know things about her now that you learn about a body only by holding it up for hours: I know she is light because she is starved, I know her heart is going far too fast under my forearm, I know the exact moment each turn is going to nearly take her down. And I know her feet, because I can see them, and I am going to tell you about her feet, because this is the thing the word dancing hides and I will not hide it. Her feet have no skin left on the soles. Weeks of this, on boards, and the skin is gone, and what is coming down on the wood now, turn after turn, is the meat under the skin, and it leaves a mark each time, and the board in front of us is dark with it, and she does not stop, because the cure is not to stop, and I am paid to make sure she does not, and so with my own two arms I lift her a little at each turn to take the weight off the ruin of her feet, and set her down, and she comes down on them again, and again, and I am helping. That is the horror I want you to hold. I am not the villain in this room. There is no villain in this room. I am a poor man doing a job the city is paying me for, as gently as it can be done, and the job is to keep a starving woman turning on the wrecked stumps of her own feet because the finest minds in the city have decided that this will save her.

The_piper: She's flagging — keep her moving, keep her in it!

Bram: Keep her moving. So I do. I hitch her up against my side and I turn with her, and her head lolls against my shoulder, and her eyes are open and they are not seeing me, they are not seeing anything in this room, they are the flat absent eyes I have learned this whole month to recognise, the eyes of someone who left some time ago and whose body did not get the message. And I hold the name the way you hold a stranger's name when you're carrying them — somebody said it, a neighbour who came looking, Frau Troffea, and I have been turning her for two hours and she has not said one word. There is a man across the hall shouting the thing we are all here to make happen, walking the floor between the pairs, the overseer, the one who answers to the council for this room.

The_overseer: Keep them up and keep them moving! The heat has to come out — you let one stop, you undo a week's work in her! On your feet, on your feet, that's the cure, that's the medicine!

Bram: That is the medicine. And I believe it — I want you to understand that I believe it, standing there with my arms full of a dying woman, because the men who decided it are cleverer than me and richer than me and closer to God than me, and they have said this is how she is saved. So when she sags, I lift. When her head goes down, I get my shoulder under it. When she makes a sound at last — the first sound in two hours, a small broken sound with no word in it — I take it for the cure working, because I have to, because the alternative is that I am the hands doing this to her.

The_overseer: The piper — louder! Give them the beat, drive them, the beat carries the feet!

The_piper: They're not on the beat! They've never once been on the beat — I could play a funeral and they'd dance it!

The_overseer: Then play, and let them dance it, and keep your opinions off my floor.

Bram: And the piper leans into it, and the boy hits the little drum har…