Free Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson

tested the blade with his thumb, and we saw it run red. There was a sheep in a cage near-by. It was the custom to try out the axe beforehand for those of noble birth. Two men took the sheep struggling from the cage and held it, its legs buckled underneath itself, while the executioner with a single straight swing whistled through the fleece and the muscle and the bone and did it so clean that I fancied I might pick up the head and sew it back on and let the sheep run off.
    There was a half-hearted cheer from the crew, who ran a skewer through the animal's body and put it to roast over their fires. The head and the fleece were given to a beggar.
    It was not until the afternoon that the King appeared in his linen shirt, his beard trimmed and nothing of him shivering, though many a spectator had fainted with cold. He knelt down and rested his head on the block, and I saw Tradescant's face stream with tears that froze at once and lay on his cheeks like diamonds. The King gave the signal, and a moment later his head was wrapped in a white cloth and his body was carried away.
    In the Crown of Thorns that night Tradescant made plans to take ship and leave us. I saw the look on Jordan's face and my heart became a captive in a locked room. I couldn't reach him now. I knew he would go.
    I went outside and walked until the lights of the inn were specks in the distance and I was alone with the river flowing out to sea.
    At a dancing school in a remote place, Fortunata teaches her pupils to become points of light.
    They begin with her as early as six or seven and some stay for the rest of their lives.
    Most, she releases like butterflies over a flowering world. Bodies that could have bent double and grown numb she maintains as metal in a fiery furnace, tempering, stretching, forcing sinews into impossible shapes and calling her an nature.
    She believes that we are fallen creatures who once knew how to fly. She says that light burns in our bodies and threatens to dissolve us at any moment. How else can we account for so many of us who disappear?
    It is her job to channel the light lying in the solar plexus, along the arms, along the legs, forcing it into fingertips and feet, forcing it out so that her dancers sweat tongues of flame.
    To her dancers she says, 'Through the body, the body is conquered.'
    She asks them to meditate on a five-pointed star in the belly and to watch the points push outwards, the fifth point into the head. She spins them, impaled with light, arms upraised, one leg at a triangle across the other thigh, one foot, on point, on a penny coin, and spins them, until all features are blurred, until the human being most resembles a freed spirit from a darkened jar. One after the other she spins them, like a juggler keeping plates on sticks; one after the other she runs up and down the line as one slows or another threatens to fall from dizziness. And at a single moment, when all are spinning in harmony down the long hall, she hears music escaping from their heads and backs and livers and spleens. Each has a tone like cut glass. The noise is deafening. And it is then that the spinning seems to stop, that the wild gyration of the dancers passes from movement into infinity.
    Who are they that shine in gold like Apostles in a church window at midday?
    The polished wooden floor glows with the heat of their bodies, and one by one they crumble over and lie exhausted on the ground.
    Fortunata refreshes them and the dance begins again.

    In the world there is a horror of plagues. Of mysterious diseases that wipe out towns and cities, leaving empty churches and bedclothes that must be burned. Holy water and crosses and mountain air and the protection of saints and a diet of watercress are all thought to save us as a species from rotting. But what can save us as a species from love? A man sold me a necklace made of chicken bones; he said these chickens were the direct descendants of the chickens who had scratted round the crib at