Category: women

I. Strasbourg, July 1518

The summer of 1518 had come to Strasbourg behind the Plague, as it had come before and would come again: patient, and entirely without mercy. The Rhine ran low and brown beneath a sky that seemed to have forgotten the colour of clouds. In the tanneries along the Ill, the stench of curing hides rose through the heat in visible waves, and the beggars who normally slept in the cooler dark beneath the bridge had moved on to somewhere less likely to kill them. A baker’s boy was sweeping burnt crumbs from a stall, the day’s loaves already having sold at a higher price than the council allowed. Even the cathedral, that great sandstone argument with heaven, seemed diminished by the light, its famous spire pointing upward with less conviction than usual, as if God had been slow to respond and the stone had begun to have doubts.

Jakob Sattler had lived in this city for thirty-one of his forty years and had never learned to love July. This one, he already sensed, would give him better reasons than most.

He heard them before he saw them.

It was not only music, though someone had already had the ill-considered notion of providing a drummer and a fiddler as improvisation to what was already happening, both of whom looked as though they would rather be anywhere else on earth. The sound that reached Sattler first as he came through the Kronenburg Gate was something underneath the music. A shuffling. A rhythmic scrape of leather on cobblestone that had no regard for the beat being offered to it. As if the feet knew a different song entirely.

He rounded the corner into the Pfennigturm square and stopped.

The first one — the woman who had begun it all, five days before his arrival, on a narrow cobbled street not far from here — was not in the square. Her name was Frau Troffea. He heard that from three separate sources. He did not know yet what use a name was, but he wrote it down.

There were perhaps two dozen of them. Men and women both, though more women than men, ranging from a girl who could not have been fifteen to an old wool merchant Sattler recognised from the market on the Ill. They were not dancing together. That was the first thing that struck him; he had expected something communal, even festive, some collective madness he could attribute to bad wine or a saint’s day he had forgotten. Instead each person moved alone, in their own private rhythm, eyes fixed on nothing, faces carrying expressions he could not immediately name. Not ecstasy. Not pain exactly. Something between the two that had no word in Latin or in German.

The wool merchant’s feet were bleeding. He did not appear to notice.

Sattler stood at the edge of the square for a long time, his leather bag in his hand, and watched. A physician’s first duty, his teacher in Heidelberg had told him, is to observe before he theorises. He had spent twenty years trying to honour that instruction. He honoured it now, though everything in him wanted to look away. He was aware that standing here, at the edge of the square with his notebook open, was itself a kind of statement. He found that he did not mind making it.

He chose the girl first, because she was the least frightening and because he was, despite everything, a coward about some things.

She was perhaps fourteen, dark‑haired, her dress good quality but torn at the hem from days of movement. There was a steadiness in her that belonged to older women, the kind of resilience that would make her formidable at thirty, if she lived that long. Her eyes were open but registered nothing in front of her. Sattler stepped into her path carefully, the way he might approach a horse that had been badly treated.

“Girl,” he said. Then, more gently: “Can you hear me?”

She danced around him without breaking rhythm, without any acknowledgement that he existed. He caught her arm — lightly, a physician’s grip, feeling for the pulse at the wrist — and she neither resisted nor responded. The pulse was rapid. Fever-rapid, though her skin when he pressed the back of his hand to her forehead was not especially hot. He released her and she continued her private rotation as if he were a post she had navigated around.

He tried three more. An older woman who wept silently as she moved, tears running without any corresponding expression on her face. A young man, a tanner’s apprentice by the smell of him, who had danced his shoes entirely to pieces and was working now on the skin beneath. A broad-shouldered farmer type who moved with surprising delicacy, as if performing steps learned long ago and only now remembered.

None of them responded. None of them stopped.

Sattler opened his bag and took out the small journal he used for case notes. He was aware of people watching him from doorways and upper windows: the non-dancers, the majority, the ones who had retreated behind wood and glass to observe the square with the particular Strasbourg expression that managed to convey both horror and mild disapproval simultaneously. A council notice hung crooked on a post nearby, the ink run in the heat, forbidding public music until further decree; a gesture so belated and half‑hearted it felt almost like an admission of helplessness.

He began with what he could establish. Names first, where he could get them, asking bystanders, pressing for answers when they shrugged. Then sex, approximate age, apparent social class from clothing. Duration… difficult without witnesses, but someone would know. He worked methodically, grateful for method, because method was the only thing standing between him and the feeling that had been building since he entered the square. The feeling had no clinical name. It was somewhere in the vicinity of dread.

It was the journal that saved him, in the end; not that day, but later. Because it was the journal that first showed him the pattern.

He had been noting addresses, asking bystanders where the afflicted lived, mostly out of habit. Cross-referencing was something his Heidelberg professor had insisted upon until it became instinct. He had noticed that the council’s dispatches referred to them as the afflicted, the dancing sick, the choreomaniacs. Categories. He used names. It was not sentimentality. It was medicine. You could not understand what was happening to a category. You could only understand what was happening to a person.

They were not from the same street. Not from the same parish, not the same guild, not the same church. The girl and the weeping woman lived on opposite sides of the city. The tanner’s apprentice had come in from a village three miles east. The wool merchant (old Georg Kessler, he had confirmed, forty years in the same stall) had been born in Colmar.

There was no obvious connection.

He almost closed the journal. Then something made him look again — not at the addresses, but at the column beside them. The apothecary marks. He had asked, almost without thinking, whether any of them had sought medicines recently. A physician’s reflex. Most bystanders hadn’t known. But three of them had — independently, without prompting — mentioned the same name.

Not an apothecary currently trading.

A widow on the Krutenau.

The Krutenau was the poor quarter, pressed against the river on the eastern edge of the city where the smell of the tanneries was inescapable and the houses leaned toward each other across the lanes as if sharing a confidence. Sattler had visited it often enough in a professional capacity — fever, malnutrition, the usual catalogue of what poverty did to a body over time. On the corner of the lane before Anna Schreiber’s house a door had been marked with a red cross, fresh enough that the paint had run slightly in the heat. He noted it the way he noted everything now, which was to say he noted it and kept walking, because in Strasbourg in July of 1518 a marked door was not remarkable. That was the thing about plague. It became ordinary before you had finished being afraid of it. But he had never visited this particular house, a narrow three-storey building with a dried herb wreath on the door that was at least two seasons old.

The woman who answered was not what he expected, though he could not have said precisely what he had expected. She was perhaps fifty, solidly built, with the hands of someone who had spent a lifetime doing useful things and the eyes of someone who had spent the same lifetime watching other people do foolish ones. She looked at his bag before she looked at his face.

“Physician,” she said. Not a question.

“Jakob Sattler. The council has asked me to —”

“I know what the council has asked you to do.” She stood back from the door, “You had better come in.”

Her name was Anna Schreiber. Her husband Heinrich had been an apothecary, dead four years of a chest complaint that she described with the clipped precision of someone who had watched it take a long time and had decided that the appropriate response was clarity rather than grief. The shop was closed now. She kept the stock because she knew its value and she kept the records because Heinrich had kept records the way other men kept promises — religiously, and as if his life depended on it.

Sattler sat at her table and accepted the wine she poured because refusing it would have been rude and he needed her to talk.

“Three of the dancers,” he said, “Possibly more. Their families mention your husband’s name.”

“I know.” She sat across from him with her own cup and did not drink from it. “I have been expecting someone to come. I had not decided whether to send for someone myself or wait.”

“What were you waiting for?”

She looked at him steadily. “To decide whether telling you would help or make things considerably worse.”

Sattler set down his cup. “Frau Schreiber. There are thirty people in the Pfennigturm square who cannot stop moving. More joining them each day. A man I have known for twenty years is dancing on bleeding feet and does not know I am alive. Whatever you know, I need to know it.”

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she rose and went to the back room (the old shop, he guessed, still fragrant with dried things he couldn’t name) and returned with a wooden box, not large, bound with a cord that had been tied and untied many times.

She set it on the table between them.

“Heinrich received letters,” she said. “From a physician in Basel. This was perhaps fifteen years ago, perhaps twenty. I was not always privy to the correspondence, but I remember the man’s name because Heinrich spoke of him with a reverence he did not often extend to other men of his profession,” she paused, “And also because what the man was proposing frightened Heinrich a great deal. He did it anyway. That was Heinrich’s particular failing.”

“The name?” Sattler said.

“Murner,” she said. “Conrad Murner.”

II. The Letters of Conrad Murner

The letters were written in a cramped scholarly hand, Latin mixed with German in the way of a man who thought in both languages simultaneously and had stopped caring which came out. There were eleven of them, spanning — as far as Sattler could establish from the dates — the years 1497 to 1503. The last one was different from the others. He set it aside and read the first ten in order, because order was what he had instead of understanding.

Conrad Murner wrote the way some men talked — at length, with digressions, and with the barely suppressed excitement of someone who has discovered something they know the world is not ready for. The early letters were theoretical. He had been studying contagion — not in the loose providential sense that most physicians employed the word, as a synonym for God’s displeasure made airborne, but in a precise and almost reckless mechanical sense. Disease, Murner argued, was a thing. A particular thing, specific to itself, that entered the body through particular means and did particular damage. Different diseases were different things. They could, in principle, be studied as a watchmaker studied the components of a mechanism.

This was not, Sattler reflected, entirely without precedent — Ibn Sina had gestured toward something similar five centuries earlier, but the confidence of it, the sheer systematic certainty, was unlike anything he had encountered in a contemporary. Murner wrote as if he already knew the answer and was working backward to the proof.

By the fifth letter he had arrived at his proposition. If disease was a specific thing, then exposure to a weakened form of that thing might teach the body to resist the stronger form. He used the word teach without embarrassment, as if bodies were students and pathogens were lessons. He had been experimenting, he wrote, with material taken from plague victims, all attenuated, modified by a process he described in careful detail, and had administered it to six volunteers in the Basel poorhouse. Three had subsequently been exposed to active plague. None had died. One had not sickened at all.

Sattler put the letter down and looked at the candle for a while.

He picked it up again.

Murner’s elation was visible in the handwriting of the sixth letter — wider, faster, the Latin abandoned almost entirely. He was distributing his preparation. Carefully, selectively, through apothecaries he trusted in Colmar, Sélestat, Strasbourg. Heinrich Schreiber’s name appeared, with a warmth that confirmed Anna’s account of the man’s reverence. He was saving lives, Murner wrote. He was certain of it.

The seventh and eighth letters were more subdued. There had been some adverse reactions he had not anticipated. Nothing fatal — or nothing he knew to be fatal — but some recipients had experienced tremors, confusion, brief episodes of involuntary movement. He had adjusted his preparation. He believed he had corrected the problem. He was monitoring.

The ninth letter did not mention the adverse reactions at all. Sattler noticed this the way he noticed everything now — with a cold, steady attention that was not quite fear.

He reached for the tenth letter and Anna Schreiber put her hand briefly on his wrist.

“Read the eleventh first,” she said. “Then read the tenth. I found it made more sense in that order.”

He looked at her. She withdrew her hand and looked at the table.

He picked up the eleventh letter. It was shorter than the others and the handwriting was not Murner’s… or rather, it was Murner’s hand, but changed; older. A hand that had recently been through something.

Heinrich, he wrote, I must tell you about the manuscript.

III. What Murner Knew

He was still holding the eleventh letter when the hammering came at the door.

Anna Schreiber did not startle. She rose with the unhurried competence of a woman who had long ago decided that unexpected visitors were simply part of the texture of life, and went to answer it. Sattler heard voices: hers, level and uninformative, and a younger male voice with the clipped impatience of official business. He looked down at the letter in his hand and did not read it.

He was thinking about the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

He had heard the story as a child — everyone had, it was over The name gave him pause — brother to the Franciscan satirist, if he remembered correctly, though the two had not spoken in years. she said two centuries old and had the worn, inevitable quality of things that persist because they contain something people cannot quite look at directly. A man with a pipe. A town that would not pay its debt. Children who followed music into a hillside and did not come back. He had always understood it as a moral tale, the kind Germans told their children about the consequences of broken promises. He had never thought to ask what the children heard. What the music promised them. Whether they followed in joy or in compulsion or in some state that contained both and could be distinguished from neither.

The Children’s Crusade. He had read about it in Heidelberg — thousands of children, some accounts said, marching toward the Holy Land in 1212, driven by a certainty that God would part the sea before them as he had for Moses. The sea had not parted. Most of them had died or been sold into slavery before they reached it. Historians called it mass delusion. Sattler had always thought that was too easy a word for something so enormous and so strange.

And before that — the dancing plague of 1374, here in the Rhine valley, in the aftermath of the Black Death when a third of Europe lay in its grave. Hundreds dancing through Aachen and Cologne and the river towns, unable to stop, crying out for relief from something they could not name.

Always movement. Always compelled. Always the poor, the desperate, the ones already standing at the edge of what human beings could endure.

Always a music nobody else could hear. Always the powerful counting bodies while someone else, usually one person, usually without authority, wrote down names.

Anna Schreiber returned. Behind her, looking deeply uncomfortable in the low-ceilinged room, was a young council clerk in the livery of Sebastian Brant, secretary to the Strasbourg city council and, in Sattler’s considered professional opinion, the most obstinate man in Alsace.

“The secretary sends his respects,” the clerk said, in a tone suggesting the secretary sent nothing of the kind. “He requests your report by the morning of the tenth of August. The council intends to decree a ban on music and public dancing. They also wish to discuss the matter of the shrine of Saint Vitus.”

“The shrine,” Sattler said.

“The dancers are to be conveyed there for healing. It is the secretary’s view that this is a matter of divine punishment and that medicine has had sufficient opportunity to demonstrate its—” The clerk paused, clearly reciting. “—its limitations in this regard.”

Sattler looked at the boy for a moment. He thought about thirty people in the Pfennigturm square, shuffling in their private rhythms, following their private music. He thought about the wool merchant Georg Kessler’s bleeding feet. He thought about the girl who had danced around him as if he were a post.

He thought about a man in Basel, fifteen years dead, who had read something — some thing, some text that should not have existed — and had understood it well enough to attempt the impossible.

“Tell the secretary,” Sattler said carefully, “that I am making progress. Tell him I will have a report. Tell him also that Saint Vitus is a child martyr associated with uncontrollable movement, and that sending people who cannot stop moving to his shrine seems to me to be asking the fire to cure the burning.”

The clerk absorbed this with the expression of a man calculating how much of it he could safely repeat. He settled on a bow and left.

Anna Schreiber sat back down. She looked at the letter in Sattler’s hand.

“The manuscript,” Sattler said. “What did Heinrich tell you about it?”

“Very little. He was frightened of it, I think, though he would not have used that word.” She was quiet for a moment. “He said Murner had not written it. He said Murner described it as something that had come to him — those were the words Heinrich remembered. Came to him. Not found, not received. Came. As if it had arrived of its own volition.”

Sattler looked down at the letter.

Heinrich, Murner had written. I must tell you about the manuscript. I have not spoken of it before because I did not know how to speak of it honestly without appearing to have lost my reason, and I could not speak of it dishonestly because you would have known. You have always known.

The preparation is not my idea. I want to be clear about this, though I suspect it will not comfort you. The concept — of introducing a weakened disease to prevent the stronger one — comes from a text I cannot fully explain. I found it, or it found me, in the winter of 1496, among a collection of manuscripts I purchased from the estate of a physician in Freiburg who had died without heirs. Most were commonplace. This one was not.

It is written in Latin of a strange kind — correct, but with a flatness to it, a precision, that does not read like a man thinking but like a man transcribing something that was not originally in Latin at all. It describes the mechanism of disease in terms I did not have words for and have since had to invent. It describes the preparation in exact detail, as if the author had performed it many times. There are marginal notes in a different hand — older, I think, though I am no judge of such things — that reference earlier attempts. Earlier iterations. The dates in the marginal notes, Heinrich. One of them is 1212. Another is 1284.

I think someone has been trying this for a very long time. I think I am not the first person to read this manuscript and attempt what it describes. I think the others also failed, in their own ways and in their own times, and that the failure is recorded in the margins as a kind of — I do not have the word. A kind of patient notation. As if whatever wrote this expects to wait as long as necessary.

I believe the preparation works. I believe the principle is sound. I also believe I have made an error somewhere that I cannot locate, and I am afraid, Heinrich, that I will not live long enough to find it.

Burn this letter. Keep the preparation. Someone after us will understand it better than we do.

Yours in God and in science, which I have come to believe are not as different as we were taught,

C. Murner. Basel, November 1503.

The candle had burned low. Outside, distantly, Sattler could hear the scrape of feet on cobblestone. The dancers did not stop for night. He had already known this but it struck him again now as a fact with new weight.

He set the letter down very carefully, as if it might break.

“The manuscript,” he said. “Does Heinrich still have it?”

Anna Schreiber looked at him with her steady, unsentimental eyes.

“No,” she said. “But I do.”

IV. The Manuscript

It was smaller than he expected. He had imagined something imposing — a great folio, perhaps, the kind of volume that announced its own importance through sheer physical weight. What Anna Schreiber placed on the table between them was barely larger than his own journal. Bound in leather that had once been brown and was now the colour of old skin. No title on the cover. No mark of any kind.

He reached for it and stopped.

“It won’t harm you,” Anna Schreiber said. “I have handled it many times. Heinrich handled it for years.”

“I know,” Sattler said. He was not sure why he had stopped. Some instinct older than his training. He picked it up.

The leather was oddly smooth under his fingers. Not worn smooth — smooth in the way of something that had never quite had the texture of ordinary things. He opened it.

The parchment was thin and browned at the edges, the script tight and careful. In the lower margin a thin, bone‑coloured figure moved beside the text, the familiar danse‑macabre flourish scribes added out of habit, no more meaningful than a decorative knot.

The Latin was as Murner had described. Correct, precise, and somehow airless — the Latin of a man, or something that wrote like a man, that had learned the language perfectly and understood none of its music. He had read legal documents with more warmth. But the content…

He read slowly. Then he went back and read again.

The mechanism of disease described in the first pages was not the mechanism he had been taught. It was not the mechanism anyone had been taught, as far as he knew. It spoke of agents too small to see — he paused on this, read it three times, accepted it and moved on the way he had learned to accept difficult diagnoses — that entered the body through specific channels and multiplied within it according to specific rules. It spoke of the body’s response to these agents as a form of memory. Not thought. Not humour or spirit or divine intervention. Memory. The body, once exposed to a thing, remembered it. And remembering, resisted.

It was, he thought, the most terrifying thing he had ever read. Not because it was wrong. Because he could not find a place where it was wrong.

The preparation was described in the middle section with a precision that made Murner’s letters look like approximations. Which, Sattler now understood, they were. Murner had done his best with the instructions and his best had been extraordinary — a man of the fifteenth century reading a text written in no century he could identify, implementing a procedure for which he had none of the necessary tools or understanding, and getting close enough to right that some people had been genuinely protected.

Close enough to right. Not right.

The error was in the margins.

He almost missed it — a note in that second hand Murner had described, cramped and precise, in Latin that was subtly different from the main text. Older, he thought, or perhaps just written by someone for whom Latin was even less natural than it was for the primary author. He had to tilt the page toward the candle to read it.

The interaction with prior resistance is not accounted for in the base preparation. Those who have survived previous exposure carry a modified response. In these subjects the preparation does not teach. It conflicts. The result is neurological. We have observed this in previous iterations. It must be corrected before distribution. This is the third notation of this error.

Sattler read it twice. Then he sat back in his chair and looked at the ceiling of Anna Schreiber’s kitchen for a long time.

The third notation.

He looked at the margin again. Below the note, in the same hand, were two dates. Just the years. Nothing else.

1212. 1284.

He thought about children marching toward a sea that would not part. He thought about a piper and a hillside and a town that woke one morning to silence. He thought about the dancing plague of 1374 and the bodies along the Rhine. He thought about whoever had written that marginal note — calmly, precisely, the way a physician notes a complication — and had written it not once but three times across three centuries and had apparently not stopped trying.

“Frau Schreiber,” he said, without looking away from the ceiling. “Do you know where this manuscript came from before the Freiburg physician?”

“No.”

“Do you know how old it is?”

A pause. “Heinrich tried to establish that. He could not.”

Sattler nodded slowly. He looked back down at the manuscript. At the end of the final page, below the last line of the preparation’s instructions, there was one more marginal note. He had not seen it before — it was small, almost flush with the binding, easy to miss.

It was not in Latin.

He did not recognise the script. He was an educated man — he had Greek, he had some Hebrew, he had passing familiarity with Arabic letterforms from his study of Ibn Sina. This was none of those things. It was precise and regular and utterly foreign and it was clearly, unmistakably, a script designed to carry meaning.

He stared at it for a long time.

Then he closed the manuscript carefully and placed it on the table and looked at Anna Schreiber.

“Murner was right,” he said. “The principle is sound. The preparation works. The error is identifiable and in theory correctable.” He paused. “Someone knew this before Murner. Long before Murner. Someone has been attempting this for at least three hundred years and possibly considerably longer.”

Anna Schreiber looked at him without expression. “And the dancers?”

“The dancers,” Sattler said carefully, “are the proof that the principle works. They received the preparation. Their bodies responded to it. The response is catastrophic and it is killing them, but it is a response — a specific, identifiable, biological response to a specific intervention.” He heard his own voice as if from a distance, steady and clinical, the voice he used when the diagnosis was very bad and the patient needed him not to flinch. “They are not cursed. They are not punished. They are not mad.”

He looked at the manuscript on the table between them.

“They are the third attempt,” he said. “And whoever is making these attempts has been noting the error for three hundred years and has not yet managed to correct it.”

Outside, distantly, the feet scraped on the cobblestones. Sattler listened to them for a moment — that rhythm with no regard for any music offered to it, following something nobody else could hear — and felt, for the first time since he had entered the Pfennigturm square, that he understood what he was listening to.

Not madness. Not God’s punishment. Not the vengeance of Saint Vitus.

A message. Sent by something with the patience of centuries, to bodies that could almost but not quite receive it. The dancers were not following music.

They were trying to answer it.

V. What Remains

The report Sattler delivered to Sebastian Brant on the morning of the tenth of August was four pages long, written in his clearest hand, and contained almost none of what he knew.

It described the dancing sickness as a fever of the blood, origin uncertain, likely exacerbated by the heat and the prevailing conditions of want and anxiety that had burdened Strasbourg’s poor for three consecutive years of failed harvest. It recommended isolation of the afflicted, cessation of the musical accompaniment that had demonstrably worsened the contagion, and a ban on public dancing. It said nothing about Conrad Murner. It said nothing about apothecary preparations distributed through the Rhine valley twenty years ago. It said nothing about a manuscript written in no hand he could identify, in a script that belonged to no language he had ever encountered, with marginal notes spanning three centuries of failed attempts to save human lives.

He was not a coward. He had thought carefully about this.

A physician in Strasbourg in 1518 who presented the city council with evidence of a non-human intelligence attempting to inoculate the population against plague across multiple centuries would not be heard. He would be burned, or he would be committed, or — most likely — he would simply be ignored, which was in some ways worse. The manuscript would be destroyed. The letters would be destroyed. The error that had now been noted three times in those cramped precise margins would remain uncorrected for another generation, or another century, and whatever was making these attempts would make them again into a world that still lacked the framework to receive them.

He had one advantage that the author of those marginal notes apparently did not. He was here. He was inside the time in question. He could read the manuscript and he could read Murner’s letters and he could hold both against each other and see, with the clarity of a man who had spent twenty years looking for patterns in suffering, exactly where the calculation had gone wrong.

The interaction with prior resistance. Those who had survived previous exposure. The preparation did not teach them. It conflicted.

It was, in the end, a problem of dosage and sequencing. Murner had understood the principle and misread the instruction. The manuscript’s Latin was flat and precise and translated imperfectly into the assumptions of a fifteenth-century physician. Murner had done what any man of his training would do — he had interpreted the text through what he already knew, and what he already knew was not enough, and people had died for the gap between the two.

Sattler had spent three nights at Anna Schreiber’s table, with the manuscript open beside Murner’s letters, working through the preparation step by step. He had Heinrich Schreiber’s stock still in the back room — old, some of it degraded, but enough to work with. He had his own training. He had, more importantly, the error itself, noted in the margin in that cramped second hand, which told him not just that the mistake had been made but approximately where to look for it.

He thought he could correct it.

He was not certain. He was a physician in 1518 with no understanding of the mechanisms the manuscript described, working from a text he could only partially interpret, attempting to repair the work of a dead genius who had himself only partially interpreted it. The probability of success was not something he could calculate. But the probability of anyone else attempting it, in this century or the next, seemed to him considerably lower.

He had made Anna Schreiber a promise. He had told her what he intended and she had looked at him for a long moment with those steady unsentimental eyes and then she had said: Heinrich would have wanted this. Which was not quite the same as saying she wanted it, but was enough.

The dancers were gone from the Pfennigturm square by the time he walked back through it on the evening of the tenth. Some had collapsed and been carried home. Some had been transported, per Brant’s eventual decree, to the shrine of Saint Vitus on the hilltop, where the priests had given them red shoes sprinkled with holy water and crosses drawn in consecrated oil, and had prayed over them in Latin, and where — whether through divine intervention or simple exhaustion or the mercy of cooler air at altitude — some of them had stopped. Old Georg Kessler had died four days ago. The girl with the formidable eyes had survived. He did not know yet what that meant, medically speaking. He intended to find out.

He stood in the empty square for a while. The cobblestones were worn smooth where the feet had been. Someone had removed the stage the musicians had played on. There was no sign remaining of what had happened here except the worn stones and a single shoe, small, a child’s, abandoned at the edge of the square near the fountain.

He thought about 1212. He thought about 1284. He thought about whoever had written those dates in the margin and what it meant to attempt something across such an expanse of time — to fail, and note the failure, and wait, and try again. He did not know what that entity was. He did not think he had the vocabulary to know, or that the vocabulary existed yet in any human language. He knew only that it was trying to do what he was trying to do, which was to keep people alive in the face of a disease that did not care about them at all.

He found, to his surprise, that he felt something close to kinship with it.

He picked up the child’s shoe and set it on the edge of the fountain so that whoever had lost it might find it again. He stood there for a moment. It was a small thing. It was not nothing. He did it carefully, the way you do something when it is the only thing left to do for a person, and you know it, and you do it anyway. Then he walked back through the Kronenburg Gate toward the Gerbergasse, with the manuscript under his arm and Murner’s letters in his bag and a head full of calculations he would not share with anyone alive.

Behind him the square was silent. The stones remembered the rhythm for a while longer — or perhaps he only imagined that — and then the city settled back into its ordinary noises, the river and the tanneries and the distant sound of the cathedral bell counting out the hours, and Strasbourg went on the way cities do, carrying its dead and its living together in the same narrow streets, not knowing the difference.

He had work to do.

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©2026 Geoff Allshorn. I acknowledge the Wurundjeri-Willam people, the Traditional Custodians of the land on which this blog was prepared, and show my respect for Elders past and present. Editorial and historical research assistance: Claude AI; Artist: CoPilot AI.