Dark and Deepest Red(72)

Emil flicked the burner on under the kettle, knowing his father never turned down caffeine, no matter the hour.

“What are you doing up?” his father asked without looking away from the page.

The answer to that question felt like it had a hundred corners. It had all the edges and points of the stellate shapes Luke built on weekends.

But Emil could start here.

“That blue cloth you were talking about,” Emil said, taking cups down from the cabinet. “What were you trying to tell me?”

Now his father looked up.

“The blue cloth you showed me the picture of,” Emil said.

“I know what you mean,” his father said.

“So what were you gonna tell me about it?”

His father cast his eyes back toward the book in front of him, and Emil worried that he’d shrug, say it’s not important.

His father took a breath in, pausing before speaking, like Emil had seen him do in lecture halls when he’d visited campus.

“You know.” His father took off his readers. “The things our ancestors did in the sixteenth century would probably be of particular interest to you.”

Emil sat down across from his father. “Why’s that?”

“What they did,” his father said. “Dyeing blue with woad. Making ink from oak apples and rust. It’s all chemistry. The right composition gives you the right color.” He folded his glasses, a sign that he would talk for a while. “You’d like it.”

It was the first door opening.





Der Streuobstwiese, 1518


The news arrives with the first breath of autumn.

The dancing plague has faded from Strasbourg. Word comes along with pilfered items brought by those who have not denounced them, who still aid them in secret.

The fever has passed like a storm, and it slowly becomes a thing that anyone outside of Alsace will not know as rumor or fact, truth or morality tale.

There is talk that the afflicted were taken to Saverne, another attempt, and this time given wooden crosses, which made them fall before the image of Saint Vitus and recover their senses. Others say the cure was holy water and balsam oil, and the avoidance of all drums and tambourines. Many insist it was pairs of red shoes that banished the sickness, while others say the red shoes were given only to those cured, as a sign of their healing.

All will have their versions, meant to explain, as one would of fireflies in winter, or lightning appearing in a cloudless night.

Lala lifts her face toward the hillsides, the soft air on her cheek.

The light itself has grown less white and more golden, almost amber. In summer, the color of wildflowers is washed pale by the brightness, but now the shades deepen. The blues and pinks become rich as rivers and berries.

Traveled men used to say they could see the cathedral spire from across the Rhein, from as far as the Black Forest. They could spot it more easily than half the castles in Alsace.

Lala cannot see it now. Not from here.

But she shuts her eyes and sends on the wind her prayer for all la fièvre de la danse took. Especially one girl, remembered to Lala as her friend, remembered to so many others as the Lily of Strasbourg.

Autumn deepens, and her bibio’s command does not diminish with the growth of her belly. She assigns the work of fetching water, fishing, gathering fruit or nuts or firewood. She instructs the craftsmen to teach those with strong backs and ready hands. They build houses, first from sticks and straw, and then wattle and daub, bracing for the coming November. She looks on as they construct the frameworks of timber, filling in the spaces with woven twigs, daubing with mud that dries into hard walls.

It is the beginning of their meadow orchard. It will become a place where their lord’s rich friends will buy ink or dyed cloth. Moon pears or carved wooden beads. Perfume of roses, orange blossom, pine. Bread with petals baked in.

But tonight they pause their building. Tonight, the two bakers’ apprentices go back and forth from an oven built with stones and lined with clay. The cheesemaker’s widow and the woman Lala once assumed was her sister milk cows they have stolen back from their farm. The boy and girl who ran away together debate what can stand in for animal’s blood in a recipe—crushed plums? Wild figs? The milk of mushrooms dyed purple with violets?

It is one of the last warm evenings of the season. The yellow has started at the edges of the aspen leaves, penning in the green at the center. Thanks to Geruscha’s hand, the moon pears grow heavy on the wild trees, the first of the rare fruits their meadow orchard will boast.

Tonight, Lala has the smell of lavender and rosemary on her skin. Tonight, Aldessa binds herbs into a fat bouquet and tells Alifair to bathe with it, shooing him away from his work on the land.

Here, the world opens, like a bud loosening under rain and sun. Here, Lala will wear cloth she embroiders herself with clovers and roses, the sun and the moon, all the things the world forbade her. And maybe, one day, the delicate cloth of a dikhle covering her head.

Tonight, Bibio Dorenia helps Lala into her blue dress, the one always meant for her wedding day, the one she wore when she left the city walls. Lala has since embroidered the edges, and the layers of her underskirt lap at her feet, like water on a shore.

Her bibio finishes lacing the bodice.

“Thank you,” Lala says, giving such weight to the words, she hopes her aunt will understand.