‘Ida—’ She pulls free as the crush starts to tighten, and Ida is snatched away by the current of the crowd.

Lisbet is carried along too. Without her friend’s hand, she feels unmoored, and it is all she can do to stay upright, her belly wrapped in her arms, the smell and the heat and the sound unbearable. And then she is borne through the bottleneck of the gate and the stage is before her, and it is worse than she could have imagined if she had allowed herself to imagine it at all.

There are not hundreds, maybe three dozen, but it is impossible to count them precisely, moving as they do without rhythm or pattern, held to the stage by hands that bat and slap them from the edges of the platform. The stage stands at head height, so the dancers seem to float over the crowd, demonic angels swooping and spinning. They are all women, all loose-haired and wide-eyed, all wheeling and skipping. Their clogs lie abandoned, strewn across the stage, feet already bloody, sending speckles flying like mist over the new-laid planks, which still hold the smell of the forest.

Lisbet sways, nearly falls, but in this crowd it would be fatal. She forces herself to plant her feet, juts out her elbows to protect her belly. Mixed throughout the dancers are men, broad and bearded, and clearly not possessed by whatever music has seized the women. Lisbet watches as one snatches a woman about the waist and swings her around in a wild circle, knocking another dancer to the floor. The fallen woman leaps up immediately, limping slightly as she hops.

‘Leave her. Please God, leave her,’ says Lisbet to herself, an incantation spoken loud enough for a woman beside her to take notice.

‘They are the council’s men,’ she says, without taking her eyes off the dancers. ‘Ordered to keep them dancing.’

‘They think that is the cure?’ says Lisbet. Her vision is blurring, catching on the women’s feet and hair, dragging like a fish on a hook.

The woman shrugs. ‘Musicians are coming soon. They hope to play the mania out of them.’

‘Surely music will only make them dance harder.’

Lisbet loses her footing again as more people push through the gate and propel her towards the stage. She feels caught in a net, moving as though in a nightmare towards the stage with its devilish load. Her foot sinks into horseshit, she feels the grain of it seep into her clogs and the smell of it made fresh again. Hands are upstretched to the stage, grasping the dancers’ feet, snatching for tokens of cloth and hair, as though they are living saints. Lisbet clings to her belly like a raft as she is brought to the stage.

This close, they are suddenly less frightening, their faces transported. They make no sound but heavy breath, their eyes skimming the crowd like stones, skipping the jeering faces, lifted to somewhere else. A woman of Sophey’s age with a curve to her back looms over Lisbet and bends like a girl, her arms thrown out, head tipped back in ecstasy, a gold chain encircling her wrist. Her bare feet lift and stamp: she smiles, showing pink gums. She is heedless of the crowd baying and jeering, is only her body and its limits, entirely of her flesh and outside it.