The almshouses are overrun, the graveyards too. The end of the world is coming, from the streets to the churches they proclaim it. Geiler, the Trumpet of Strasbourg Cathedral, is eight years dead but his words are daubed on walls, echoed from the pulpits of the cathedral: There is not one among us who can be saved. The comet that dragged its fiery tail over the turn of the century and damned them is lifted from its crater and placed on an altar, but too late.

She prays as she walks, though her rosary is long gone, the clay beads cracking between her teeth like bird bones.

Frau Troffea swirls a thread of light through her fingers, soft as lambswool. Sweat runs down her lip, and her back, soaks the reeking cloth of her dress. The sun has seared the soles of her feet where she fell asleep outside a tavern at midday. The drink – it is new for her, and something they can ill afford, but the ruined wheat is good enough for beer – that alone is plentiful. Her husband has not come looking for her all night. Her feet are chafing on the cobbles, and it is good to feel them again, the blisters making way for new skin.

Her route takes her through the horse market, built when Strasbourg had a different centre so that it would stand at the edges. Now there are complaints from the cathedral of the smell, but Frau Troffea likes it: sour and strong enough to coat her tongue. She opens her mouth, fills her lungs.

It has grown like an unwieldy beast, this city. In her youth it was fat off wealth, and so the fleas came crawling. Trade is long diminished but still there are new faces every day, dark faces amongst them like the devils were already here, flooding the hospital with their filth. The Holy Roman Empire is locked in battle with the Ottoman Turks, engaged in a struggle for their very souls. She cannot read but knows there are pamphlets about them, the Turks who threaten their empire, their homes. They are the enemy but they come anyway, claiming to flee the same hordes that fight for them.

Frau Troffea is vigilant against such lies.

She spends her days watchful for the infidels, sees them even in church though there holy incense burns thick enough to make your jaw lock. She checks her body each night for bites and signs of incubi, finds only bones grown harder beneath her melting flesh.

The market square is listless and sways before her. She searches the closed-up stalls, the dusty ground, the grates clogged with muck dried hard by heat. She smells the sweet and the shit of it, of her city, baking under the relentless, blessed, accursed sun. Her head is full of it as she searches, hands raking the dust, thick handfuls of dirt. She murmurs a prayer like an incantation, as though God would drop loaves from the sky. But nothing falls except heat on her back, her calves, the burnt soles of her feet, and she wonders again why her husband has not come looking for her.