TE17 Mysterious Montenegro

Join the Dance

Chapter 4

In an official building with an open window on its façade facing the rue des Arcades, the mayor of Strasbourg, dripping in sweat, receives his advisory board in his office like hedoes everyTuesday.

“So, my four Stettmeister, how’s the city faring since last time?”

While the weathervane creaks on top of the city hall, one of the members says regrettably:

“The plague is taking its toll inside the fortifications, Ammeister Drachenfels, just like leprosy, cholera, the even rarer English sweating sickness that kills in two days, syphilis in the brothel saunas of the Petite France neighborhood recently imported by mercenaries who survived and made it back from Italy. And then there’s typhoid that. . .” “Yes, very good. I get it!” the Ammeister interrupts. “We’ve been helping on the epidemic side of things since January. But what a year, 1518. It’s walking all over my authority! . . .” Andreas Drachenfels regrets. Seated on a stool in the shadow of a wall, this fat brewer elected in the middle of July by Strasbourg business representatives now finds himself at the head of the city and can’t take it anymore: “Without considering that an unlikely string of severely cold weather, floods, and drought have completely destroyed all of our harvests for the fourth year in a row, the people of Strasbourg who are dying because of it. . . Me, after a while. . .” 119