Mulberries and smoke. That's what Neri Bostoli tastes now. He can't stop remembering: ice from Venezia in a wooden box. Cristina's juice-stained chin. Her scarlet fingers finding cold beneath moss, already weeping vapor. Her tongue creeping toward the ice—pink, apprehensive. Her gasp. Her laugh. Then her laughter quit like a door slammed shut. Her pulling him to bed, placing his hand on her stomach. Her winter-cold mouth when they kissed, mulberry tongue against his.
Smoke filled the city and all wore its stench. Robert the cannibal, executed in the piazza. His burning and the fog and night gave Neri the idea to attempt midnight mass. The fog had decided it. He will make his way to San Piero flanked by his four armed men—his first appearance since the Tartoli destroyed the Bostoli tower.
His family murdered. Cristina violated and left naked in the street, the baby Meo gone. He sent her to San Damiano after. Twelve months in her incubation cell exposed to the dragon slayers bones and she hadn't delivered. Her belly swollen but nothing stirs. The monks who tend her say she moves with strange purpose. On first report they claimed she sings to shadows in the evening, but they soon realized her songs are for the bats as they emerge one by one from crevices in the stonework on the walls circling the sacred hill, and up high from gaps under the eaves of the old Cathedral.
Her voice moves like her head—quick turns, soft phrases, sudden bright calls thrown at different points on the wall, into the sky. A whispered note here. A piercing tremolo there. She's learned where they exit and sings them out one by one.
They insist there's something inside her not human. A spirit in suspended gestation. Neri doesn't know which would be worse. That she carries the proof of his family's destruction or that she carries something else entirely.
Yesterday in drizzle and darkness and cold, the cannibal was tied to the stake in the piazza next to Santa Maria and the charge was read:
Robert, once styled penitent, who confessed before the Apostolic See his great sin. Who, when captured by Saracens with his wife and daughter, was commanded by their chief to kill his own child when famine came. By reason of this order and urged on by pangs of hunger, he killed and ate his daughter. When commanded a second time, he killed his own wife, though when her flesh was cooked and served before him he could not eat. For these crimes our Holy Father Pope Innocent the Third assigned penance: that he never hereafter eat meat, that he wander three years as pilgrim to the shrines of saints, and return to receive further judgment.
This same Robert, having completed his wandering, did willfully violate the mercy shown him. He stole meat from the hospitality of San Piero Maggiore, a sacred offering in Christ's name to pilgrims and the poor. By these acts he has shown himself unrepentant, demon-worn, and beyond the benevolent reach of even our Lord Jesus. For theft, for sacrilege, and for breaking his penance, he is condemned to be purged by fire.
Demons conspired to quell the initial flame. It smoked, filling the piazza and choking the crowd. The cannibal seemed to fall limp and sleep. The crowd watched in silence as the men lighting the pyre struggled amongst themselves to set the blaze. He didn't move again until the flames reached his legs and made them pop and dance. His scream was small and the rain fell harder as the demons left his body and moved into the clouds. The fire turned to dense smoke and the men were forced to the tavern where they drank too much and forgot their duty.
Tonight the rain has become fog. Both weather and also something older. A formless deep, darkness on the face of waters. It moves without wind, dense and aware, making the city disappear then revealing it without context—stairs descending into abyss, a fellow citizen suddenly manifest. Neri pulls his cloak across his face but the smell of wet ash and rendered fat finds him anyway and he knows he's in the piazza, moving up through the center as cannibal glow undulates in the distance through the breaks.
His guards move close. Flanking him with short blades, their faces wrapped against the smoke. They know the Tartoli are somewhere in the void. Have known since Neri had Tommaso's father killed—a message sent when the Tartoli encroached on Bostoli wool routes. Neri left the body in the road leading to the exchange. Both a message and a kindness, he thought. He could have fed the body to the Arno in pieces and left them with a relic.
The fog parts again and Neri sees burned timbers and a flash of red. Christmas silk, maybe. Then lavender scent cuts through the smoke and Neri is suddenly lost in what was. His mouth waters and his jaw tightens. A physical fact that arrives before the image.
She rubbed it between her palms before coming to bed. Oiled her skin with it. He can still feel her hands on his chest, pushing him back into the pillows. Still see the way her hair fell across his face when she leaned down to touch her nose to his. The way she could make him lose all sense, all control, reduce him to just breath and wanting and the sound she made—that low laugh that became growl.
The baby's laugh was hers. Free and unguarded, a laugh refusing to modulate its joy.
The memories pushed in on him and he opened the vein and let them in like opium. He remembered her songs to his nieces and nephews at night. Not the sacred hymns the nurses sang. Funny songs. Songs about donkeys falling in wells and priests who couldn't remember their Latin. The children would beg for them. Our parents would tell her to sing proper lullabies. She'd ignore them all and sing about a bishop who married a goat.
"Night is solemn enough," she said. "We chase happy dreams."
Neri climbs. A boot slips. The guards cluster tighter.
The slip loosens another memory and an image of Cristina six months pregnant with Meo. She sings about a dancing turnip. Their niece giggles so hard she falls off the bed. Neri's mother, frantically trying to still them all, "You'll never get them to sleep with such nonsense." Cristina smiled and sang the one about the magistrate who swallowed a bee.
The guards call softly to one another. They know they're near the destination and near where the Tartoli likely wait.
San Piero's bells ring and the men startle and grunt to one another like a ripple across a wave.
Neri's hand falls from the knife. He exhales as the fog parts to reveal San Piero ablaze with hundreds of lamps.
Inside, Frankincense clouds the air, mixing with beeswax and lamp oil. The weight of the sacred in every breath. A rebirth to the men, and to Neri. Still, they took defensive positions around the nave. The monks' voices rise from the chancel in plainsong: Dominus dixit ad me: Filius meus es tu, ego hodie genui te. The Lord said to me: You are my son, this day have I begotten you.
Neri goes to the front and takes his spot. Behind him sit other merchants and clergy and behind them the common people. The Christmas procession has already passed—the deacon bearing the great Gospel book, the subdeacons with their candles, the bishop in white vestments heavy with gold thread. Now the Gospel is being chanted. Luke's account of the census, the journey to Bethlehem, the inn with no room. Et peperit filium suum primogenitum. And she brought forth her firstborn son.
The parishioners near Neri are not listening. They exchange urgent whispers, turning to look toward the north wall. There, barely visible in the lamp-shadows, stand three figures. Two brothers in grey habits, barefoot, flanking a woman in dark tunic. Hood drawn.
Il santo, someone whispers. The brothers stand motionless, eyes closed, lips moving in silent prayer.
Those nearest the woman hear muttering beneath the Latin chant—they expect to hear a recitation of the horrors they all know by heart, but it is not. It is a barely discernable song:
One summer morn he gaped to speak
(His mouth was wide, his wit was weak),
A honey bee flew straight and true
Right down his throat—what could he do?
Neri can't hear her, but he sees her and knows her shape. He can see those at her side looking around in confusion.
It is Cristina.
It is only six months since his son Bartalameo was born. The baby they called Meo who laughed more than he cried. Neri cannot shake the final moment. Meo under Cristina's skirt with the copper pot on his head—a too large helmet, wobbling—laughing when called to say goodbye, a tiny copper echo between her legs. Cristina lifted her skirt and the sudden light made the child pause. His head steadied—unsteady before like a peony too heavy on its stem. He centered himself for just a breath. Became aware of something. Some thought forming. The pot tilted enough and Neri could see his son's dark round eyes looking at him.
Outside in the fog the Tartoli assemble.
Marco and Pietro and Luca. Names might have been names once. Tommaso's sons his nephews his instruments. They stand as vapor between San Piero and the city below. Invisible to those climbing to Mass.
A year since that night in the tower.
The mother had lost her slipper. Memory suspended. Her bare leg twisted behind her. The gamurra torn open down the front. Her camicia shoved into her screaming mouth. Blood soaked through white linen like the Guelph cross. The slippers tied together with a strip of torn chemise to make something red to remember.
Red somewhere in the white. Slippers worn around the fog's neck. The fog remembering.
Luca tossed the baby out the window like a sack of meal. But who is Luca now. Just a thought in vapor. The sound of it. Tommaso guffawing. The sound of the baby on the street below. The greatest joke. Tommaso had never heard a funnier joke. All of it dissolving into white.
She she she. The thinking that. Make her again she. But no thinker anymore. Just the thought itself suspended. Scream and weep. She a puddle underneath. Fourth or fifth to have her. Beating her as if a game to see who could fuck her to death first.
The fog thinks these things and the thoughts become vapor.
Oh, she said. As if commenting on sudden rain or the smell of fresh bread coming through the window. This was the moment she pissed herself. She had already watched Luca toss her grandchild out the window. And she had watched him split her daughter with his cock. And right before her throat was slit, she said, Oh. Marco kept repeating it in his mind. Trying to understand that tiny, involuntary sound she made and it breaking the spell but there was no logic to it.
Philosophy says seed carries form from man to woman. There flesh quickens, organs take place, rational soul enters—becomes complete human animal. But what quickens in her belly is neither complete nor human nor properly ensouled. What quickens in the mist above the deep is neither complete nor human nor properly ensouled.
The Mass ends. Ite, missa est. Go, it is finished.
Neri moves toward the north wall. Toward the figure in grey. He needs to see her face. To speak her name.
But the Saint has already taken her hand.
They move toward the door. She doesn't turn. Doesn't look back. Her voice continues, soft and fragmenting:
Night is solemn, night is long— We chase... we chase...
They step into the fog. The song goes with them, fading—
the happy...
Then silence.
Neri stands in the emptying church. The parishioners flow around him like water around stone. His guards move close, touching his arms. Time to leave. Time to go.
Outside the fog is total.
Cristina gone. Where? It is Christmas morning. First light he will find her and bring her home.
His guards array themselves around him with lamps raised. But the lamps do not shine. The light strangled.
They move down the steps feeling for the bottom with their toes.
The guards call to each other. Voices without bodies slowly drifting apart.
One lamp falls. A grunt.
He will rebuild the tower. Stone by stone. The Bostoli tower will rise again and she will sing from its windows.
Second lamp drops. Silence where a man was.
He will hire riders. Ten fast horses. They will bring ice from the ghiacciaie in the mountains. He will buy the trade routes. Buy the ice merchants themselves if he has to. Whatever it takes. He will keep her supplied through summer. A villa in the Apennines where it stays cool. Higher up where—
Third lamp clatters down steps.
Running. Silence.
Rooms of ice. She will never be without. The wooden boxes from Venezia. Moss and vapor. Her scarlet fingers finding cold. Her gasp. Her laugh. Meo will grow and she will sing to him and they will—
Through the vapor: red. His mother's Christmas dress. No. Cristina's winter skirt.
The blade cold across his throat. Then warmth running down.
He will go back to that moment. Keep them there. In that room with the ice. Her mulberry tongue. Her winter-cold mouth. He will not let them leave. He will buy the ghiacciai. All of them. The mines. The merchants. The routes. Whatever it takes to bring her ice. To make her—
Lavender.
He smells it.