Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  The words rattled around in Emil’s head before settling.

  “Wait,” he said. “What?”

  “Red shoes,” his mother said. “The color was supposed to help cure the afflicted.”

  “Papa didn’t say anything about that,” Emil said.

  “It’s barely a footnote in the history,” his mother said, taping gauze over his burn. “Shoes dyed red with carmine, or madder, and then blessed with holy water and balsam oil and the sign of the cross. It’s a detail so small that most accounts leave it out entirely. But it’s something, isn’t it? The thought that a color could cure a fever sent by heaven or hell.”

  “Red shoes,” Emil said. “Back then. This was a real thing?”

  “Dozens, even hundreds of pairs.” She set the last piece of tape. “The city ordered them made. Strasbourg’s most powerful men paid for the leather and dye, the work of the city’s craftsmen, and the travel of priests to Saverne to bless them. It’s a strange fact in a strange corner of history, n’est-ce pas?”

  Emil set his free hand against the edge of the table. He didn’t realize until he did it that he was trying to steady himself, stop everything from moving.

  Red shoes.

  However much this was about him and Rosella, it was just as much about her family and his.

  They were up against five centuries in more ways than she knew.

  Why did we stop being friends? she’d asked him.

  He’d let her think it was just that he couldn’t take the teasing, the jokes about them being girlfriend and boyfriend. But it had never been about that, not really.

  It was because her family’s prayers to la Virgen de Guadalupe let her understand his grandmother’s prayers to Sara la Kali. It was because their families both celebrated their dead as much as they mourned them. It was because the Olivas’ familiarity with curanderas meant she understood him telling her about drabarimos, and the work of a drabarni.

  It was because she always used the word Romani, instead of the slur most of their classmates turned it into.

  Every time Rosella didn’t reject something about Emil, it made it harder for him to reject it about himself.

  He didn’t fight to stay friends with her, because it would have meant fighting to keep some part of himself he knew he couldn’t have.

  That was the truth he didn’t give her, because he didn’t really know it until now: Why did we stop being friends? Because you understood a part of me I had to pretend didn’t exist.

  This time, he would tell her the truth she needed to know, that she wasn’t just wearing red shoes her family had made.

  She was wearing five hundred years of history.

  Strasbourg had pinned its hope on red shoes to cure the dancing plague.

  And now, five hundred years later, it was Rosella’s family who’d made the red shoes enchanting Briar Meadow.

  Rosella, the girl who knew him the way few gadje ever would. Rosella, the only girl he’d ever told the names of his family’s vitsi, a girl who spoke the language of brown-skinned saints and food offered to the dead.

  She was the girl the red shoes had come for, and that some thread of the dancing plague had come back for.

  When he found her, in the tree-darkened shadows, he couldn’t let that fever have her again.

  He caught up with her. He set his hand on the waist of her dress and he held her. At first it was a try at keeping her still, so the fever wouldn’t take her.

  Instead, it took him with her.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  Blutgerichtsbarkeit.

  Blood justice.

  Ius gladii.

  The right hand of the sword.

  High justice.

  Such virtuous words placed on men’s whims for who lives and who dies.

  Lala waits in the dim between lanes, folding herself into the shadow of the Tour du Bourreau. She sets her back teeth, hoping it will quiet the rhythm of her heart.

  Spectators have gathered along the route, treating a burning as a diversion, a show little different from a tournament or a troupe of famed jongleurs. Merchants show off tunics embroidered with compasses. Grand seigneurs wear their ermine, and sleeves so wide that their servants must take care not to crush them. Hats form a sea of such varied color and shape that it seems fanfare fitting a coronation.

  Blood court.

  At least that name is halfway honest. Proceedings painted in blood.

  Lala’s rage is all that keeps her from withering with grief and fear. Its heat spurs her on.

  She peers out, like a girl beneath trees, as though waiting for a royal procession in a forest. Patient as the sort of thief they consider all like her to be.

  When the executioner and sergeants lead Alifair out, it is all she can do not to fall to the stone at her feet. He squints into the light, as though bewildered by the existence of the sun. The grime of stone grays not only his cheeks and clothes, but the rope on his wrists. His eyes look not frightened but hardened, and far-off, and she wonders how much of him is left.

  She stills her breath.

  She waits until they near where she hides, on their procession from the executioner’s tower to the stake waiting for him at the Pont du Corbeau.

  When they pass, she emerges, smooth as a darting fox.

  She is small and quick enough to slip into the space before them, barring their path.

  The sergeants draw back, as though she has appeared from the stone itself.

  “You have stolen from me,” she declares, not with grief, but with the cold voice of an affronted queen.

  The crowd, gathered to watch a condemned man’s progress to the place of his death, watches her.

  The sergeants regard her as though she might be ill, or as though she might burst into dance. Not two lanes over, the afflicted continue with bleeding heels and paled eyes.

  Alifair watches her as though he is desperately trying to comprehend her words, as though she has spoken in a language he does not know.

  The executioner grunts in a way that shakes his wide shoulders. “Stay off, little girl. Give the men their room to work.”

  She stays in their path.

  “I demand the return of my demon,” she says.

  The last word stings, having to call Alifair the word.

  Forgive me, she breathes within her soul, looking at him. I can find no other way.

  She turns to those watching, some in clothing dulled by work, some in the fine gowns and hose of the richest merchants.

  “I demand return of all my demons,” she tells the crowd.

  Their eyes widen. They watch her as though she is possessed.

  “Return them to me”—Lala imagines her eyes flaring as candle flame—“or the damnation of this town will be on your heads.”

  With this, the pausing crowd draws in a sharper breath, thrilling not just with fear, but with new gossip. They glance down the lanes, where the afflicted dancers throw their limbs.

  The executioner grabs her and forces her through the street. “What do we say?” he asks the sergeants. “Shall we have two in a morning?”

  They shove her forward so she cannot see Alifair. But she can feel his eyes on her back, the questions he cannot ask. What in the name of heaven and earth are you doing? Why are you doing this?

  They lead them both toward the Pont du Corbeau. Maybe by the time they arrive there will be two stakes erected.

  Along the way, she notices those whom she has asked for favors, those who either wish her gone from Strasbourg, or who wish life for Alifair.

  As the sergeants prod her along, Lala casts her eyes on one, then another, then another, each time a cue. With each sharp turn of her head, each cut of her gaze, they drift into the streets. They toss their bodies about, moaning as though the devil himself has gone into them. They flail and spin. They jump and leap, sending finely gowned women screaming.

  The sergeants stop hard. Though they are behind her, and she cannot see their faces, she can hear the choked pulling in o
f their next horrified breaths.

  They watch the scene, more stricken in one moment than this city has ever seen. Each newly afflicted begins dancing, as though a mere look from Lala has made them do it.

  Please, they all breathe, low as the drone of bees but clear enough to be heard.

  Help us.

  Keep our souls from her wickedness.

  Their voices rise from small pleas to desperate shouts, each calling out their beseechings as they play the part of the dance claiming them.

  The executioner gives Lala a hard shove.

  But a sergeant calls out.

  “Bring the friar,” he shouts. “Now.”

  She hears his worry, how if he does not pass this obligation on to a holy man, he will be blamed for the failure. It has already happened once, the council and the physicians facing the embarrassment of having excluded the Church, and only making things worse.

  Lala is what the sergeant expects of a Romani woman, what all the rulers decided she was when they forbade her and her aunt from their borders. To such men, she is nothing but sin and danger. And for all the times she has hated this, for all the times she has wished they would see the faith in her heart, in this one moment, she is thankful for their ignorance.

  Rosella

  Pain and life sparked through the shoes. It lit up all those little tears in my muscle and made my ankles feel brittle as glass.

  The red shoes bucked under me.

  My body’s instinct was to run, to hide in the dark cast by the trees’ overlapping shadows. My parents were already so terrified of how these shoes held to my body, terrified of me. What would they do if they saw how the red shoes made me dance?

  As the last gold in the sky cooled, the swirling heat of the red shoes rose up through my ankles. The delicate pain in each muscle brightened.

  Once when I was little, my father told me that the moon was spiraling very slowly, an inch or so a year, away from the earth. When he found me crying in my room about it, crying millions of years in advance for our lost moon, he told me it was better that way. He told me that if, instead, the moon was spiraling toward the earth, it wasn’t as though one day we’d be able to stand on our tallest ladders and touch it. Instead, our gravity would break it apart like a sugar cookie, all the glowing pieces strewn out across the sky.

  Now I had a pained sympathy for that almost-moon. I was breaking apart under the force of the red shoes. They were my gravity, my earth, the part of me that made me move. They possessed my body so completely there was no fight left in me. I would scatter in pieces across the night.

  The moment before the red shoes spun me deeper into the trees, he was there, as suddenly as a boy the dusk had made. He took hold of my waist and my shoulder and he held on to me.

  This time, when the shoes took me, he went with me.

  I held on to him, hard enough that we stayed with each other. The force of the shoes seemed like something he was drawing into him, something he was trying to take on.

  I could have blamed it on the glimmer, how I pulled him deeper into the trees, a sliver-of-moon early evening that thickened the wood and ash smell of autumn. I could have pretended it was the same swirling magic that brought us the coywolves and light-bulb fireflies.

  But the truth was that, in that moment, every memory I had of us lived in the heat between my body and his.

  Setting ladybugs loose in his yard, little guards against the mites and whiteflies eating his mother’s geraniums.

  Hanging a glass hummingbird feeder outside his great-aunt’s window in the weeks before she died, so she would see the bright flashes of their wings in the early hours before anyone was up and with her in her room.

  Holding on our tongues the bright lilac candies his father swore by to prevent colds, how they looked like plums but tasted like lavender.

  Fennel and caraway and plumajillo, the handfuls of scents that were his house meeting mine.

  Fire in every color.

  How, in his house, fairy tales were neither just the sparkle of fairy lights nor blood on glass slippers. They were beautiful and dangerous all at once, the glossed candy red of a poison apple.

  We set our lips and hands against each other, and we were our age now, more careful than we were as children but also more reckless, with more of our lives at our backs. He paused his hand at the hem of my shirt until I nodded, my forehead against his. I kept my hand on his belt but didn’t go further until he gave me the same yes.

  When the red shoes tried to take me again, I drew him down into the leaves with me. I held him so close that even the fierce and relentless magic folded into their stitching could not find its way between us. They could not drag me out from under him.

  I kept him on top of me, asking him with my whispers and my hands to hold me down as the red shoes tried to take me. I gave him my hands, and he held them against the ground, his palms to mine, fingers interlaced.

  Shared between Emil and me, the red shoes’ spell and power became something we could almost hold. Kept between our bodies, we owned it, and it shifted, becoming so small and dim compared to the light between our hands.

  The shoes pulled at me, and the force buckled through my body. He kept on top of me, my arms locked across his back. For this moment, the frightening magic in the red shoes was ours. With our lips and our fingers, we spun it from curse to enchantment. Even this spell of velvet and beads could not rip us apart.

  For those minutes, I was any other Briar Meadow girl in a pair of red shoes. Lovesick and brazen, with salt on my lips and fireweed honey on my tongue. My red shoes were mischief instead of wrath. They were defiance and flirtation emerging from a tissue paper–lined box. For this night, I shared the common enchantment of anyone wearing a pair of red Oliva shoes.

  I could have told myself I didn’t mean to hold on to Emil as hard as I did, that the intertwining of our limbs was all the fault of the red shoes, that slipping my fingers into his belt loop was more reaction than decision.

  But I stayed, and he let me. And when I reached for the top button of his jeans, we were a blur of half questions, clumsy and nervous.

  Do you …—and the answer, Yes.

  Or, Are you sure? And the same answer, Yes.

  And the hesitant, pausing laugh when we both realized neither of us had done this before, so neither of us knew how to lead.

  The force of the shoes threw me again, and he held me tighter. His hand, first tentative as it grazed my thigh, now gripped it.

  The shoes could possess me, but right now, I could decide what I did with the twirl and bucking of my own body.

  He was on top of me, keeping me to this point on the ground.

  I found his certainty in that nod, that yes. But with the will of the shoes moving me, I was the one driving this. I led him from underneath him.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  And so they bring the friar, who has been waiting with the stake at the Pont du Corbeau.

  Or, they would, if every soul dancing for Alifair’s life did not bar the way.

  Their dance roils and shifts in lines. They gather into packs and then skitter out. They send the watching crowd scurrying in all directions. They block the quay so that startled onlookers cannot escape them.

  Along the way are more who either wish to see Alifair free, or wish to see Lala gone from the city walls forever, or both. Lala sets her gaze upon them, and they writhe and scream and beg the good men who hold her to save them from her wickedness.

  A few keep her eye a moment longer than they must. A young woman on the bridge winks in a way so small only Lala catches it. An old man near the quay inclines his head toward the sergeant, with a small smile of contempt, before throwing himself into an imitation of the dance.

  A brother and sister toss themselves into the canal, pretending the dance has done it to them. They flail as though they are still dancing in the water as a few men scramble to fish them out.

  Geruscha and Henne feign falling to the ground as though struck by a m
arsh light.

  Their act is even better than they promised Lala. They could both be on a stage.

  Aldessa, the flax farmer’s cousin, sees them both, and a light comes into her eyes. A moment later, she imitates them, feigning tormented dancing.

  “Bring someone!” the elder sergeant bellows. “Bring a priest, for God’s sake! Any of them!”

  The dancers impede the friar’s progress. They block the canon priests. Lala can see their tall, proud heads bobbing to see past the afflicted.

  How odd, that the only holy man who can find his way in, the only one the newly afflicted allow to pass, is the kindhearted priest of l’Église Saint-Pierre-le-Vieux.

  “Here, old man,” the executioner demands.

  The elder sergeant grabs Lala by the hair and commands that she stop, but before he can snap her head back, Sewastian, the younger sergeant, eases his grip away.

  “I’ll handle her,” Sewastian says. “It is you who should address the priest.”

  And so the older sergeant does.

  “This woman has the devil in her,” he says. “She afflicts simply by laying eyes upon those she passes.”

  The crowd parts before the priest. He gives an exaggerated lowering of his eyes and shaking of his head, as though it pains him to have lost one of his flock. He moves his lips and appears to be praying.

  Lala wonders if it is all a performance or if he prays in earnest, perhaps that this will not conclude with Lala and Alifair swallowed by flame and him at the end of a rope.

  The elder sergeant waves a hand, and Sewastian pushes Lala forward. He keeps his large palms on her shoulders, and Lala cannot tell if the rhythm she feels in his fingers is her fear or his.

  She longs to look back at Alifair so badly it stings her eyes. But Sewastian holds her fast.

  “Will her death free us?” the older sergeant asks, and though Lala cannot see his face, she hears the rage and worry in his voice, the way her unruly possession humiliates him in the very streets he has been charged to command.