The Dance Tree by Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Author:Kiran Millwood Hargrave [Kiran Millwood Hargrave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK
Published: 2022-04-05T17:00:00+00:00

Two hundred and twenty-nine dancing

Dorit is a life-long penitent. As a girl, her mother and father bred atonement into her and her siblings. The ones that survived are shut up in monasteries and a nunnery now, but Dorit has a higher purpose. She cannot bolt herself behind high walls, enclose herself in prayers. It is her calling to follow disaster like a bloodhound, offering up her mind and body in hope of salvation.

To this end, she took the road to Strasbourg. Times are desperate there as in many a city, and worse than in most. Since the comet damned the century, Strasbourg has become infamous, beset by devils. Dorit packs her sharpest shears, collects the ash from her night-time fires. She blunts her teeth on sticks, eats only raw mushrooms and grass. Her belly swells and she does not wash, and she arrives to the city stinking, triumphant.

She is not the first to have struck upon the idea. The road is thronged with men and women, their backs rent by whips, heads shaved, ash smeared over their faces, their breasts, and all of them rosaried and praying. She will have to reach further than her usual penances. She sells her final teeth and has them pulled without a sip of spirits. She refuses the gauze and bleeds openly, letting the thirsty dirt drink it in. With the coin she goes to a tavern and pays three women to leave. They shrug and say they wish to see the dancers anyway.

Dorit follows them. They are hures, it is clear from their dress and their manner, the easy way they throw their bodies through the streets. Dorit has never had such ease. Her body is the site of punishment for all her earthly sins, and all others’ besides. She is proud of her suffering but, watching these women, something in her pangs.

They go to the horse market, but there is not a horse in sight. Instead, a stage that the women mount, beginning to weave through the others that dance there. But it is clear that while they are fakes, most are not. She recognises the glaze, the true apartness a trance can bring. It is a place she has reached only twice, through extreme pain, and the patch where she flensed the skin from her calf itches in the precious memory.

Dorit forces herself among them. It is clearly their first time in the grip of divinity for many. They will wear themselves out fast as a candle in a draught. Even as she watches, a woman collapses, convulsing once, twice, eyes rolled back, white as peeled eggs. Her exhale is long, and when she is trodden on, again and again, she does not flinch. Dead, then.

It is a while before anyone but Dorit notices, and then the dancer is borne aloft over the crowd, limp wrists like wrung-necked doves. She will be taken to a paupers’ pit.

Dorit smiles, her gums bare and tender, and begins to spin. There are martyrs to be made, here.

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