The Grote Markt burned bright with masks and flames, torchlight casting leaping shadows across banners and painted stalls. Smoke from roasting meat curled into the night, thick and greasy, mingling with the sharper tang of sweat, ale, and damp wool pressed too close. Drums rolled like thunder, flutes skirled high and shrill, and above it all came the restless murmur of hundreds of voices — laughter, jeers, the calls of hawkers who had not yet packed away their wares.
Katelijne clutched Edwin's sleeve as they slipped into the square, their masks hiding what their eyes betrayed: wonder and unease.
'We shouldn't linger,' Edwin muttered, though he was the one leading her on, his black leather mask snug across his brow. They had told their parents a lie — a small one, but enough. That they were weary from the day's festivities and would retire early. Instead they had stolen into the night, cloaked and masked, indistinguishable from the tide of strangers.
It was nothing like the parade. By day, the guilds had marched in proud procession, order stitched into every banner. By night, Carnival was a beast loosed from its leash. Sailors fresh off the Scheldt reeled shoulder to shoulder with apprentices in borrowed masks. A pair of merchants shouted at one another in German, half drunk and swaying, while nearby a pickpocket's hand darted for a purse and vanished before the victim noticed.
Katelijne's eyes caught on a couple pressed against a doorway — masks tilted, mouths locked — bold as saints carved on a roodscreen. A circle of men threw dice in the mud, their jeers sharp with drink, while children darted between legs, chasing ribbons trampled underfoot. The square smelled of grease and sweat, of torches guttering, of wine spilled thick as blood on the cobbles.
She drew her cloak tighter but could not look away. For all the filth and danger, the sight of so many bodies and voices tumbling together felt intoxicating — a city alive in a way she had never known.
Masked figures jostled shoulder to shoulder, faces painted as saints and devils, nuns, popes, and leering beasts. A pope tottered past with a wineskin, arm in arm with a red-faced devil; a woman in feathers shrieked with laughter as she spilled ribbons from her bodice into the hands of grasping boys. The crowd stank of wine and sweat, their steps uneven, their gestures too wild.
Katelijne's pulse quickened. To be among such a throng, cloaked and anonymous, was both terrifying and intoxicating. She had never been so close to the city's breath — hot, wild, unrestrained. She tried to steady herself with thoughts of Floris, of her mother's approving smile, of her father's guild, but those certainties seemed thin against the weight of drums and torches.
A drumbeat rolled louder, low and insistent, cutting through the restless noise of the square. The throng shifted as if the beat itself tugged their bodies forward. Torches flared against the scaffolding raised at the square's heart, shadows rearing high on the walls of the guildhalls, and a voice boomed across the marketplace:
'Make way! Make way! The battle begins — Carnival against Lent! Fools against saints, pies against fish! Who will conquer Antwerp tonight?'
The cry splintered into cheers and jeers. Tankards were raised, sausages waved like banners, a fishmonger brandished a haddock from his stall as if it were a sword. Katelijne felt herself swept forward, her slippers slipping on grease-slick cobbles, and she clutched Edwin's sleeve as though it might tether her. He stood rigid, shoulders squared against the surge, yet even he could not quite keep his eyes from the stage.
Around them voices tangled — wagers shouted, chants rising: "Carnival! Carnival!" answered by the stubborn cry of "Lent! Lent!" Students clambered onto a cart for a better view, their masked faces lit garish orange in the torchlight. Even beggars shuffled closer, drawn by the promise of bread tossed as props.
Then they came: a ragged, dazzling procession tumbling into the torchlight.
First a fiddler in motley, bow darting so fast the tune seemed to trip over itself. Behind him staggered a man padded into a great belly, sausages draped about his neck, pies perched on his head like a crown, a roasted goose leg clutched high. He bellowed, voice booming over the crowd:
'I am Carnival, king of feast and folly! Who needs sermons when you have sausages?'
The crowd roared approval, some waving mugs in salute. Katelijne's own lips twitched before she could stop them.
Opposite him strode a stern figure in plain black, a wooden fish swinging from her hand. Her stick rapped the boards like a judge's gavel. 'And I, Lent, come to remind you that bellies too full turn men to beasts. You feast today, but tomorrow you crawl! What is your greasy meat beside salvation?'
'Fish! Fool fish!' shrieked a parrot from the shoulder of a jester bounding between them, patched cloak flying, grin flashing in the torchlight. The bird flapped, bobbing its head, and the square erupted in laughter.
The jester threw up his arms. 'Good people of Antwerp! Will you follow Lent, thin as a herring's tail? Or Carnival, stuffed with sausages till he bursts?'
The crowd bawled back, voices splitting the air, some for Lent, more for Carnival. Katelijne pressed her mask tighter, the silk hot against her cheeks, as though the roar might strip it away.
A lean youth darted forward, cap in hand, chanting in rhyme, his words tumbling quick as dice across the boards:
'One feeds your flesh, one feeds your soul,
One fills the purse, one leaves a hole.
So choose your master, but choose him fast —
For Carnival feasts, while Lent will last!'
The rhyme rang out, caught by the fiddle's rhythm, until the whole square seemed to stamp in time. Children shrieked the lines back at him, clapping mittened hands, while grown men drummed tankards on the boards. Even women with baskets joined in, voices rough with laughter, their cries mingling with the fiddler's squeal.
Katelijne felt the pulse of it drive through her boots, a beat faster than her own heart. Before she realised, her palms were striking together with the rest — soft at first, then louder, until the sting of it flushed her hands. Her laughter bubbled up, unguarded, swept from her like a leaf in a torrent. For an instant she was not Katelijne De Wael, daughter of cloth merchants, but only another masked reveller, lost in the rhythm and the rhyme.
It was intoxicating — this moment where the play blurred into the crowd, and she could almost believe she was part of it, not just watching.
Carnival lunged at the poet with his goose leg, snagged on his own chain of sausages, and crashed flat. The crowd shrieked with delight.
'A miracle!' cried the jester, hauling him up. 'Carnival slain by his own feast!'
'And saved,' Lent retorted, swinging her wooden fish, 'by holiness on a hook!'
'Ugly fish! Ugly fish!' shrieked the parrot, and Katelijne bent double with laughter before she even realised she had given herself away. Edwin's hand brushed her arm in warning, but she only shook her head, helpless, breathless.
The pace quickened — rhymes volleyed like stones, the fiddle screeched higher, sausages swung wild, the fish cracked down like a cudgel. Torchlight twisted everything larger than life: Carnival's pie-crown became a grotesque halo, Lent's rod a spear of judgment, the parrot a grinning demon whispering in the fool's ear.
Katelijne shivered, the laughter in her throat edged with something keener. She ought to be afraid — and she was, a little — yet the fear ran hand in hand with exhilaration, sharpening every sound, every flash of colour, until she felt almost drunk on it.
The crowd pressed closer, the crush of bodies hot and breathless, yet she felt strangely weightless, as if the silk mask had unmoored her from herself. Floris with his jewelled smile, her father with his solemn pride — both seemed far away. Here she was no merchant's daughter, no bride-in-waiting, but only a pair of eyes behind silk, one laugh among hundreds.
The jester darted between Carnival and Lent, mocking one, bowing to the other, until it seemed the whole play bent around his capers. But when he bowed to the crowd, Katelijne felt the gesture fall to her alone. Her laughter tangled with unease, as though joy itself carried danger.
Then he spun, arms flung wide, motley flashing in the torchlight — and his gaze, bright and searching, caught hers.
The world dropped away. Torches guttered, drums faltered, the roar of the square faded to nothing. For a heartbeat she stood suspended in silence, caught fast in his gaze as though the two of them alone remained in all Antwerp.
Sound crashed back — a parrot's shriek, a jeer, the rattle of a drum — so loud it made her flinch. His grin faltered, only for an instant, but in that instant she knew — impossible though it was — that he had recognised her. That he saw her, not the mask.
Her breath caught. Edwin muttered something about leaving before the crowd grew unruly, but she hardly heard him.
The torches flared, the players shouted their last, the bird screeched again — and the moment was gone. Yet in her chest, the spark remained, burning hot and bright as though it had lodged there for good.
The square surged back into clamour — jeers, whistles, mugs scraping high — but Katelijne stood still, the echo of his gaze clinging as surely as smoke to her cloak.
Edwin tugged her arm. Reluctantly, she let him pull her back, though her feet lagged. She glanced once more toward the stage. The jester was bowing low, the parrot shrieking for more, the players grinning as coins clattered into their cap. And yet — for all the laughter that roared around him — she thought she saw something else in his face: the same caught breath that held her now.
She pressed her mask tighter, as if it could shield her from the pull, and let Edwin guide her into the tide of bodies. Around them the torches flared, smoke and laughter rising together — masks and flames in the night — but even as the crowd swallowed her, she knew he would not vanish so easily.