They dance to nothing. A hundred souls in a dark barn, jerking and swaying and flinging their arms, and not one drum, not one pipe, not a single note in the air to move them. I have seen madness. I have seen the falling sickness take a man and shake him like a rag. This is worse, for these ones smile.
Each has a little cage of horn clamped over both ears. Whatever whispers to them comes through that, I think, the way a devil whispers to a witch: privately, so no honest man beside her can hear the bargain being struck. Some caged in blue light, some in red, some in green, and each color a different silence, so that a girl laughing at nothing turns to the man beside her, and he is laughing at a different nothing, and still they clasp hands.
They agree on the joy. They cannot agree on its cause.
I stood among them and heard only the shuffle of feet and their breathing and the odd shriek. It is the sound of a threshing floor with no grain. All that labor of the body, all that sweat wrung out, and no wheat, no water carried, no wall raised, nothing to show the good Lord come Judgment but a night spent worshipping a whisper only they could hear.
We danced too, in my village, at the harvest, when the fiddle was loud enough for the whole green to stamp as one beast. That was a poor thing, I see now. These have found a way to be merry and alone at once.
I pray it is only foolishness.
I fear it is practice.