Dark and Deepest Red(54)

Tante ordered Lala to bring whatever blankets they could find, to stay with him when the delirium came, to talk him through the open-eyed nightmares of the sweat.

“If he dies,” Tante said, her eyes hard and not looking at Lala as they boiled water, “it is on your head.”

Lala had turned, startled.

“I told you both to leave me,” Tante said.

“You are my family,” Lala said. “My blood.”

“And I am all the mother you have,” Tante said. “So you should have done as I ordered.”

“And I suppose you want me to leave him now?” Lala whispered.

“If you’re to be sick now, it’s done. It was done the moment you both disobeyed me and remained here.”

Lala went out of the house. She wrapped her arms around the crab apple tree and sobbed into its bark. She wished the woman in the black and yellow skirts were there in a way so desperate it became an ache in her body.

Now Lala hates this memory, tries to drive it away.

But it stays, fluttering around her like a moth. It brings her to the night she dried sweat from Alifair’s body, soaking through all the sheets and rags they had. In his sleep, he laughed in a way that unnerved her in how much it sounded like crying. He drank water desperately, only to sweat it out within hours. In the dark, he shivered hard enough to tremble the straw mattress.

Lala held on to him, her eyes shut tight, her mouth against his head as she whispered into his hair.

I forbid you to die. I forbid it. I do not give you permission. You have my heart and you cannot take it with you.

After hours on her knees before God, and hours crying out to Sara la Kali, this had been all the prayer she had left in her.

The break of his fever the next morning, the deepening of his breathing, the way she was able to get salt-and-lemon-softened fiddleheads into him, seemed, at the time, as much of a miracle as Lala would ever hope for.

But now, watching him on the wooden stage that was built for the disaster of the great dance, that miracle has dimmed like an ember. She understands, now, that for a girl like herself to love a boy like Alifair would take as many miracles as there are fish in the sea and stars in the heavens.

In the unending moments of waiting for proud men to declare Alifair’s fate, she grows dizzy. Her mind weaves and lands on an old story about an earl and a pope. She does not know if it is true, but the way the story goes is that the pope offered the earl a kingdom so remote that even the earl’s finest horses and best knights could not bring him to it. The earl told the pope that the offer was the same as if he had said, “I give or sell you the moon. Now climb up and take it.”

The boy who now stands, silently accepting his sentence, is as distant to her as the moon. Her kiss would never have made them both a world in which he could be hers. The heat between their fingertips, like ten small, identical stars, could not craft a Strasbourg in which they would both be allowed to live.

When they pronounce the method by which he will die, Lala pitches herself forward.

“Stop,” Tante says, touching her shoulder.

But Lala pushes at the crowd in front of her.

Two sets of soft hands catch her arms.

Not soft because they are smooth; in truth, they are calloused and work hardened.

Soft, because of the lightness of their grip.

“You cannot help him now,” Henne says, tears weakening her voice.

Geruscha has her other arm, and they pull her back.

But Lala will not take her eyes from the boy with the bound wrists and the downcast eyes.

All the canon priests’ talk of mercy, all their posturing that they would show lenience if he made a full confession, it has all been a lie.

Lala cannot climb the steps to the wooden stage and take him. Her desperation cannot bring him closer any more than the sea can pull the moon down to her waters.





Emil


He shocked awake, sitting up in the dark room with sweat soaking the back of his shirt.

The dreams he’d startled out of stayed, a weight on his body. The sound of heels striking the ground. The smell of dust on hillsides, and horses within the city walls, and bloodstained stones.

A blur of the same black hair he and his grandfather had, the mix of curly and straight he always found in old photographs.

Then there was the pierce of a girl’s scream, a woman’s scream, a sound that unfolded like light separating into its colors. The fear, the protest, the taking of blame that should never have been hers. The rush of voices telling her she must take it, that all this fury belonged to her.

He still didn’t get a good look at her face; the memory, passed down through blood, must have been too watered down. But he saw that hair, and the brown of her skin, a brown that might have gotten her mistaken for the daughter of a Turkish father and French mother. A brown that could be blamed on sun or lied away as Italian or even southern German, Black Forest.

The echo of that scream followed him. It was a ringing in his ears, a weight in his forehead, a stirring against the back of his neck.

He shook his head to clear it. The sound stayed with him. He closed his eyes, dug his nails into his palms, paced the floor. Nothing.

It was still with him early in the morning when he went out to the shed.

It was in all of them, truth and history written into their blood. And this was the piece that had come alive in Emil, setting fire to his dreams. Maybe it was because that was where it had started, hundreds of years of being forced out of one place, then the next, then the next, until it seemed like there was no air on earth someone would not object to them breathing.