Dark and Deepest Red

by Anna-Marie McLemore

  With each twirl, I felt the shape of my own forming words, how they mirrored the ones I’d heard as a little girl, listening at the workroom door. I tasted my abuela’s defiance, the metallic glint of it, her willingness to destroy part of herself so no one could take it. I’ll save you the bother of carrying them home.

  My story was not a fairy tale of a cruel-hearted girl whose shoes danced her to death, or a kindhearted one who threw her red shoes into the river. This was not a story about a wicked queen made to wear iron heels, or a lovely, golden-haired girl in slippers of glass.

  This had been about a fever, a nightmare, a dance made into a curse.

  It was about women turning their own fears into their sharpest blades.

  When my own voice came, it was so brazen and laughing I didn’t recognize it. It sounded like a higher, filmier version of how I remembered my abuela’s voice, what my grandmother might have sounded like at my age.

  I knew it was my own voice only by the feeling of it breaking out of my throat.

  “I’ll save you the trouble of making me dance,” I said into the night air, to the glimmer, to the red shoes on my feet, to a fever that had come back after five hundred years.

  With those words came the unsteady sense that the ground was breaking apart underneath me. Like my reckless dance had enough force to crack sidewalk and pavement and cold-packed dirt.

  But when I looked down, it wasn’t the ground breaking apart.

  It was the red shoes, tearing along their sewn-together seams. They split open across the red cloth, as though the shoes were being sliced to pieces again while still on my feet. As though my abuela’s scissors were dancing with me, unseen and flitting alongside each of my steps.

  The shoes were tearing back into the confetti my abuela had cut years ago.

  I drove my feet into the ground, dancing in time with the memory of my grandmother’s scissors, flashing silver.

  I’ll save you the trouble.

  I’ll dance myself.

  I danced, my words their own blades. They slipped into the seams. They slid between the red cloth and my skin.

  I’ll save you the trouble.

  I’ll make myself dance.

  And I danced the red shoes to pieces.

  Strasbourg, 1518

  All in Strasbourg must imagine them leaving to plague some other town, or vanishing into the mountains or forest. They walk deeper into the countryside, the rumor of their possession scaring away thieves. When they must walk at night, they dance and shriek as though they are afflicted, and none draw near.

  Though she did not know it, Lala has kept good company in her fear of Li livres de jostice et de plet. So has Alifair, who is far from the only soul in Strasbourg whose being and heart do not match the name he was once christened with.

  There are so many who live or love in ways they have had to hide.

  There are others with them who carry different weights in their hearts. A girl and boy in love who would be made to marry others. A man who does not wish to marry at all. A woman who has learned blacksmithing at the side of her brothers and father, but would not be allowed to practice the trade.

  They all follow not only Lala but Alifair, this boy whose kindness has been a lamp to them. They follow Tante Dorenia, who even with child walks in a way that leads.

  Tante Dorenia, who Lala can now call Bibio out loud. She can call her Aunt in the language her mother and father would have given her little pieces of, like bits of bread and honey.

  They find greens and wild horseradish in the woods, blackberries and acorns, mushrooms that Lala brushes dirt from and that Bibio Dorenia inspects. They sleep outside in the summer warmth, though already Lala thinks of autumn, especially for her bibio’s child. Some of them have family in the villages and plains, who might let them sleep in attics or barns. Some have allies in Strasbourg, who bring belongings from their abandoned homes; when these go missing, it is further counted as witchcraft or sorcery.

  “We will make our living selling rare things,” Bibio Dorenia tells them all as her belly grows and the season deepens. “Beautiful dyes like our woad. Violet champignons from beneath the pine trees. Baskets woven of unboiled branches. Marchpane jewels.” She nods to the boy who was a baker’s apprentice. “Liqueurs we make ourselves. Delicate fruits like golden plums.” She smiles at Geruscha, who has always had a hand for the more temperamental trees. “We will make ourselves a town that seems crafted so much of magic it will sound as a dream to any who speak of it.”

  They thrill to her as though she is an enchantress spinning a story.

  When Lala was a little girl, her bibio used to tell her of an ancient people, die Phönizier, known for their skill in navigating by the stars and for tinting glass. From rock and sea snail shells, they made dye as violet as the twilight sky, and no one dared attack their ships, for they were the only ones who knew how to craft purple rich enough for a king.

  Lala does not know if it is true. But she must believe it now, when her bibio tells the story again. They will be a place of purple, an outpost of the rare, so others will think twice before harming them.

  They are still looking for where they will stop for autumn when her bibio wakes Lala and Alifair early, and leads them to a meadow fringed with aspen trees.

  “You both like them so much, why not?” Bibio Dorenia spreads her hands toward the winking green leaves.

  Lala looks around, fearing hunters or guards rushing from the woods. “This is a lord’s pasturage.”

  “It is.” Her bibio casts a proud look over the meadow. “He rather likes the idea of having a fairyland on his estate. That, and the things we will make, will be our greatest power.”

  “So we’re to be figures in his menagerie,” Alifair says, sounding more worried than indignant.

  “Perhaps we would be,” her bibio says. “If our keeper was not the greatest peacock of all.”

  Alifair shakes his head, uncomprehending.

  Bibio Dorenia lifts her eyebrows at them both. “He is a lord in affrèrement with his best knight.”

  Alifair’s wry laugh sounds as a whisper, a breath through the trees.

  Bibio Dorenia presses her lips together into a small smile. “Un pain, un vin, et une bourse.”

  One bread, one wine, and one purse.

  Affrèrement. The bond of brotherhood that allows two men to live together under blessing of the law. Lala has heard the word, but it has always seemed a myth to her.

  Perhaps it is because it is a luxury conferred more upon lords than journeymen.

  “It is, of course,” Bibio Dorenia says with exaggerated piety, “a spiritual bond, no more.” Then she breaks into that smile again. “He will let us live here for first chance to buy the finest of anything we grow or make.”

  Lala shakes her head, marveling. How has she done it? How has a Romni with no husband and a growing belly waltzed into the graces of a lord in the woods and pastures of the Black Forest?

  With the question comes the answer.

  The same way Bibio Dorenia made herself into dyer of the most coveted ink and blue in Strasbourg, at an age little older than Lala is now. The same way she guarded Lala in a country that forbade their very blood.

  She has a will and a heart as shining and deep as iron gall ink.

  Emil

  In his dreams, the air smelled of salt and cloth, of stone and the water skimming by the quays.

  But instead of la fièvre, instead of the screaming, there was the quiet beneath the aspen trees. There was the boy from the Pont du Corbeau, the one with lighter hair. He wore a clean tunic and shirt, his wrists free from the rope Emil had last seen on him.

  Not a boy. A man, Emil realized with a longer look.

  Then there was the girl, the woman, Emil’s relative. Her features looked softened at the edges, as though the centuries were a veil between them.

  She wore that same blue dress, but with her night-black hair crowned with flowers that let off their smell of fruit and sugar.r />
  He could barely take the impact of her, this woman who lived five hundred years before him, whose soul was its own lantern.

  In his dream, she kissed him on the temple, and her touch was both chill and heat, the way stars burned hot but existed in the cold of the sky.

  He took the weight of her blessing, and she walked into the aspen trees, her skirt trailing across the undergrowth.

  The man waiting for her offered his hand. She took it, the light of her warming at his touch.

  Emil couldn’t hear what they were saying as they faded into the trees. All he could catch were the bright laughs and low voices of a girl and a boy walking home together.

  He woke up to the feeling that he wasn’t alone in being awake. He followed it downstairs, to where his father had a half dozen books open on the kitchen table. His usual method, where Emil’s mother instead kept neat stacks of tabbed pages.

  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.

  Thank you for blessing something you would be judged for allowing.

  Thank you for leaving your home and making another, twice, for me.

  Bibio Dorenia nods in a way that makes Lala imagine she understands. She weaves a chaplet of meadow roses into Lala’s hair, the scent of nectar drifting down over her like the lightest snow.

  Geruscha ties a cluster of wild lilies together with rosemary.

  “For memory and fidelity,” Geruscha says, her voice bright as the stars. Lala accepts all Geruscha’s bubbling superstitions, including this morning, when she insisted Lala swallow a rose hip for lifelong happiness.

  Geruscha finishes the knot and offers Lala the bouquet.

  “Wait,” her bibio says before Geruscha can hand the bouquet to Lala.

  Her bibio adds a few sprigs of wood betony and angelica, the purple and bluish flowers that so many thought would ward off witches.

  With that sickle moon of a smile, her bibio gives the bouquet back.

  The older women scatter mint and marjoram to be trod underfoot throughout the night. In with the baskets of flower petals are bits of bright paper, a gift of the manor lord.

  Each time Lala turns her head, the wild roses release a little more of their perfume. It is thick and sweet in the air by the time she faces Alifair, who looks glow-eyed in a way that could be love or could be the other men getting drink into him for his nerves.

  In his best shirt and tunic, he looks more man than boy. There are no oak leaves in his hair. Dust does not frost his forehead. Locks of his hair, still wet from the river, fall before his eyes.

  They stand by the light of an applewood fire, another gift from the lord of the land. Josse,
the declared priest (declared by Bibio Dorenia), calls them man and wife, and the cheer and stamp of the gathered brings the smell of mint into the air. It is so strong Lala feels bewitched by it.

  “You look like the fairies my mother told me about in stories,” Alifair whispers, so skillfully no one notices him speaking to her.

  Her eyes flash to his.

  It is the first time he has offered anything about his growing up, about the family he has lost, without her asking.

  She holds this piece of him, freely given, close, like a locket tucked between her breasts. It makes a flush rise in her face. She wonders if it is visible beneath the way Bibio Dorenia has rouged her cheeks and lips with her tincture of safflower.

  The women help in tying red cloth to join their wrists, a symbol of Alifair becoming her husband.

  She kisses him, brazen as a star moving from its place in the spheres. It is only in the soft touch of his hand under her chin, holding her in their kiss, that she realizes he has wanted this as much as she has. It is only at the taste of his mouth, the bite of the rosemary and mint he holds between his back teeth, that, for this moment, she forgets all that has come before.

  She forgets there is any brighter color in the world than his mouth on hers.

  Rosella

  I found my father hunched over a pair of butterscotch-gold shoes, finishing a seam.

  I wondered how long it would be before he made another pair of red ones.

  My mother would pull out a jar of beads that looked like garnets tomorrow; she had always been the same kind of defiant as my abuela.

  But my father was a little more careful. My mother would have been the one to let the forest cats and the dandelion fluff stay forever, and he would have been the one to remind her they had to let them go.

  He would make shoes as blue as the five-petaled periwinkles spreading alongside our house every spring. And ones as ember bright as the marigolds drying along our windowsills. He would make pairs the same blue-touched green as wet sage.