‘It’s all right, Frau,’ says a small voice. Daniel, loosing the mule’s bridle. His nose is running and she resists the urge to wipe it with her skirts. He scrambles into the seat and holds out a sticky hand to her, pulling her up, skinny legs shaking.

‘Thank you,’ says Lisbet, as he jumps down.

‘Wait.’ Agnethe turns to the sacks, opens one. ‘Take some.’

She jerks her head at the boy, who is hovering uncertainly. ‘Come on.’

He doesn’t wait to be asked again, and plunges his hands into the sack. He scoops up a mound, and another, and, as if worried she will change her mind, scurries off with it, making a tray of his jerkin. Lisbet thinks too late to shout after him, offer a ride, but he is already out of calling distance. Stray flour sifts through to the ground, making a tracery of his path, and she hopes he will have some left by the time he reaches home.

One dancing

The story of her birth is the story of a comet. At the moment Gepa Bauer’s mother felt the first pain of her coming, her papa saw it, a burning star ripping the dark sky for three days while her mother laboured on all fours like a beast, her husband and sons sleeping in the barn because they were scared of her pain, of the blood, of the wise woman who came with sweet mallow and iron tongs. To the east, the comet found a farmer’s field and scorched it fully, furrowed so deep those who were there said it was like a tunnel to Hell carved in the soil. As it tore the ground, Gepa was born feet first and the agony broke her mother’s mind.

From that day she was the omen, the bad sign looked for in the fields when the crops failed. She was loved despite these calamities, but at eight her mind followed her mother’s, and both of them were cast onto the Church’s mercy. In an almshouse with twenty-four other women, she at last found friends, all of them cursed, all of them damned, and together they could link hands and dance to music no one else could hear. When they danced, they were one body with many hands and many feet, one breath in their chests and one pulse in their wrists.

When the last of their mothers died, they left the city Gepa was born in, and went to another city, a bigger city, full of churches and men that could pay to keep her in her wrong mind and in good shoes. She and her friends were peeled apart, by marriage or children or disease, and suddenly it was years later, whole seasons of starvation and pox and sex, and she was alone in the city, and she did not know her name.

She calls on her mother and her mother comes, her face wiped smooth as it was when they tipped her into the mass grave, and her mother takes her hand, and her mother leads her to the market square where oftentimes she and her friends would hold hands and weave through the crowds lifting purses and blowing kisses, their hair fresh braided and fragrant.