A whole barn of children, and not one of them dancing.
I have seen dancing. After the harvest, when the tithe is paid and the ale is out, we dance until our legs give and the fiddler's arm goes dead, close as sheaves, laughing, sweating, glad to be alive one more year. That is dancing. This is not that.
Here the children stand pressed to the walls like beasts that fear the middle of the pen. The boys clump on one side, the girls on the other, and between them lies a stretch of empty floor no wider than a cart, and none will cross it. A great dark room, lit by lamps that flash and change color with no candle and no flame in them, which I will not think on too long lest I be led into error.
The music is louder than thunder and comes from nowhere I can see, no piper, no drum, no man at all. Some of them mouth the words. Some only look at the little glowing tablets in their hands, the way a monk looks into his book, praying to be delivered.
They are not hungry. Not one is thin. No winter has thinned them, no fever, no want. They have every good thing and they stand miserable in the dark, sick with a fear I cannot name, a fear of one another.
The Lord gave these children full bellies and long lives and no plague at their door. And still they suffer. I begin to think suffering is not sent from outside a man. I begin to think we carry the seed of it in us, and it will grow in any soil, fat or lean.