November Excerpt: The Year of Red Snow (Patreon)

I've been working like crazy, but I can't show you any of it. I'm finishing Mass Effect: Annihilation, and I have an ironclad NDA. Not allowed to release any part of it before publication day. Since this is my first media tie-in novel, I feel confined. But there's not much I can do about it. Other than the vague "it involves the Quarians" press release Bioware put out, they haven't allowed any info about the book into the wild, so neither can I.

So I delved deep to find something no one else has read for you in November.

This was meant to be the beginning of a novel called The Year of Red Snow, about a small italian village in 1815, the Year Without a Summer, when volcanic activity ruined the global climate and, among many other things, caused red snow to fall in parts of Europe all year long. I wrote this in...2012 or 2013 I believe. Some of it earlier than that.

I still want to write it, but what I wrote didn't seem to come together the way I wanted it to, and though I still really want to write the book, it got backburnered in favor of stories that might keep my electrical bill paid. (This is what happens when I take longer than a couple of months to write something. I wander off.) 

I desperately hope to get back to it someday. In the meantime, you get the first several chapters of the Novel That Never Was...

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Part One: A Necklace of Objects

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

-Mary Shelley
The Churchbells

To begin at the end:

Down in the valley of Mirtillo, someone is ringing the bells, opening up the night to let the dark in. The big copper bowls bong out over the moonless town and the sea thumps somewhere far off. The stars settle down on orange trees and olive boughs, on cypresses like fingers imploring or accusing, on shadowed copses of humble, useful gum and cork, on fields of stunted lavender and withered thyme, on bilberry hedges bruised with dead fruit, on the quiet silver Sogno river, pouring thick as half-frozen liquor through orchards heavy with lemons hard and small that will never grow golden now.

It is the end of the world. 

Red snow creaks gently all around. It hangs in blood-colored icicles from every eave, squeaks in glittering garnet crusts on every turn of road and curve of hill. In windows round and squared and thin and thick it piles like ruby dust. It still falls, dark, soft, soundless over a village called Mirtillo, clasped close by mountains and sunk into sleep, or death. 

The red snow fills up Agapeto’s slim little boat and Mafalda’s sheep-troughs, black-eyed Osso’s rag cart, Calogero’s baskets that once groaned with bread. Blood-colored ice slicks every twig of the great fig tree in the center of town, the tree planted by a saint, whose branches shade each of four roads spoking out from the market square. Those heavy boughs witness every handshake over a bull’s black head, every marriage trothed in Mirtillo, every child baptized in golden juice, and once, just once, a witch burned until dead. It piles up little scarlet mounds in the barrels of frozen laundry lying round the common well, linen whitecaps slicing out of the frost. The snow falls through a hole one or the other of the Traghetto brothers shot in the roof of the taverna with a Venetian pistol. 

There is also a hole in the ceiling of the sprawling Czanalla house. Snow sifts down onto the thick, sweet-smelling books of old Orfeo’s library, painstakingly collected by uncles, cousins, grandfathers, even the odd aunt who traveled to Rome, Berlin, Geneva, Constantinople, even London. Every volume now owns a chapter of snow, frozen red sheets hidden between honest pages.

And strangest of all, the snow, that bloody, ruby snow, fills up the open hands of maidens lying here and there like discarded toys, in the market square, on the road up to the nunnery, below the slowly turning blades of the Baldovino windmill, in the sheep-pens like sweet lambs. Their eyes rest shut, serene, and perhaps they are only dreaming, waiting to be wakened like a girl in a story. Their chests lift and fall but who can be sure? It might be breath, it might be the sharp, edged wind. Someone has put crowns of old, dry violets and roses on their heads and on their breasts. Someone has seen to it that their hair is combed and shining. The end of everything is no reason to shirk off work.

Someone has to ring the bells at the end of the world, so that God will know it is over. That we have finished down here, and are closing up all the doors, nailing down the windows, eating up the stores so that nothing will go to waste. Annunziata rings the bells tonight from the tower of St. Orsina-in-the-Briars. It is hard; she is not a big person. The Abbess Serapia did it as long as Nunzia can remember, with her skinny arms like onionstalks, and she cannot imagine how those thin bones must have ached. 

Bong, bong, bong. 

The heavens hear Mirtillo clapping up the boards and pulling linens smooth. The stars hear Mirtillo breaking her candles and leaving her gates open.

Fire does not unburn. Cows do not unmilk. What happened in this place cannot unhappen. God once willed Mirtillo to swell so beautiful and fat that once every family ate meat at night, through to Christmastide, and had golden balls of butter as sweet as candies wrapped in linen at their tables. He blessed Mirtillo so lavishly that He sent not only one but two of his blessed Saints to plant bilberry brambles and fig trees and pick chestnuts here. You could almost taste His favor on the wind here once.

You can hear it now. The sigh of it as it softly passes away from them, like the steam off of a cooling cake. 

Annunziata rings the bells and her hands shiver. She remembers the taste of that long ago butter, melting into salt and cream on her tongue. That is what the favor of God tastes like. But the will of God is a thread worked on a wheel—His divine Hand pinches the thread, holds all the world taut and ready, though some years are thick and some are thin, and threads will always catch and snarl—but when He lets go we just unravel into nothing. Into sheep-wisps and flax flowers and terrible red snowflakes falling, falling, falling forever.

This was a good place. If you had seen it, you would have thought to yourself: perhaps I will stay here, and make my children under these cypresses, midwifed by fireflies. 

A wind stirs itself and snuffles down the hills. It is a sweet wind. It smells of spring, dim but near, apple blossoms and the first shoots of pea and garlic, of new milk, and new wool, of fresh green wood and rich, deep mud. The wind looks in at the Bragadin bakery. The shelves stand bare of loaves save one or two lonely ice-glazed rounds of seedy, umbral rye. It breathes through the Czanalla house, all its fine windows open so that the stars can steal in, all its heirs silent or gone, the great candelabra black and snuffed on a stone table. The wind turns slow, eddying circles in the market like a dozen night-brocaded dancers, looking for bitter greens, looking for goat milk or hard new gourds, but finding only endless snow the color of rust. The wind buys up the ice by the armful, blowing it in sprays and drifts, filling up the dry fountain carved by Piero Herami before he went to Florence to make his fortune: A sleeping black marble woman lies in state, her hands tangled in stone flowers, her hair pooling and flowing to make a great basin. Out of her mouth clean water once flowed sweet and clear, but now her blue-white mouth overflows only with red icicles like blood. 

The wind gives up on the market and whistles down to the taverna, trying the door and the windows and the roof, thirsty and a little cross. Neither Agnolo Falachiavi, proprietor, nor any of sons answer, but they would like to, to take in the wind and brush the cold off its shoulders, sit it down and give it a good, if dented and well-used, cup of something murky and hot. The wind finds no one to welcome it, it finds no one at home in all of Mirtillo, save Annunziata, up in the tower of the Correct Chapel, which is to say Father Afanasio’s beloved St. Anthony of the Desert, finishing her tolling of the almost-dawn, shivering in this moonless matins.

Look at her. 

She is wearing her widow’s weeds, for she is Mirtillo’s widow, bound up in crepe and jet, the heavy Czanalla onyx glittering dully at her throat, its dark cameo gleaming like depthless water. Her hair braids round her head like a crown. She is not young anymore, but who is, these days? The wind whirls up to her, happy to discover the living, happy to flush her cheeks and lift the lace of her hem. 

She had a mother. She had sisters. She had one brother who died and one who lived. She had a husband and a lover and they were not the same man. If the snow like a blanket of baleful red gems meant to punish Mirtillo for tiny sins of that sort, she was hardly the worst of them. While the bell makes bronze ripples in the dark air, she thinks of stealing between her house and her lover’s house all those years ago. It felt like eating meat every night. It felt like the years when every cow gave milk and every line broke with the weight of fish. God alone made it possible to feed a body so well, and she is not sorry she supped when the table was set. She had a father and she had a daughter. She had one son who died and one son who lived. She had cousins like wildflowers. She owned three books of her very own, though it took her whole life to collect that many. She owned three black hens for every book, two goats, a bolt of real silk the color of the sea which she kept hidden in her roof for twenty years, and an iron pot as round as a belly. It should have been enough. 

It could never be enough.

The bells stop. The hour is rung. 

The dove-colored dawn lays a shroud over the valley, even as the sheath of red ice closing in the great fig tree begins to melt.

The Book

The reason I know so much is because when my mother had me in her belly, she very secretly devoured a book. This sounds strange, I know, but I am sure it is true for several reasons. One is, my mother Violetta Alunni told me the story and then much later Donna Czanalla told me the same story and they do not speak to each other much any more on account of my sisters, which I will tell you about in a little while. 

I took a long time to be born. Nunzia, my mother used to say to me, by the time you were born I was already pregnant with your sister. That’s not true, really. My nearest sister, Innocenza, is two full years younger because my father the astrologer Corrado Alunni went on pilgrimage, which Alunni men must do before dotage to atone for the behavior of the quite dead Efisio Alunni, whom it pleased God to make my double-great grandfather. Otherwise I would have a closer sister and maybe Cenza would like me better. Another reason I am sure the story is true is that once, when I happened to become locked into a certain library for three days, I found a book with neat, pretty teeth marks on it like little arcs of stars, and someone had torn all the pages out. 

Another reason is that no one would admit to having eaten a book who did not, because a book costs more money than a child, even one who knows as much as me.

What happened was this: my mother had been going to have me for nine months and a little bit more already, and little by little, like an onion growing, she had been getting hungry for paper. Everyone knows pregnant women crave odd meals, but you must admit paper is not the right thing at all. Violetta suffered a shame over what she wanted, and could not tell anyone. But day after day I did not see fit to be born and she could not stop thinking about how powerfully satisfying it would be to open a book and peel off a page the way you peel off the skin of an orange, and pop it in her mouth. She even dreamed of eating Father Cirino’s Bible, which has a huge pink pearl on the cover. She dreamed that she pried off the pearl and swallowed it like a cherry, and then followed that up with Genesis—it tasted of good heavy bread. And then Exodus—sweet like plums! And Ruth—rich as eggs! Then Proverbs (grapes!) and Isaiah (fish cheeks!) and Ecclesiastes (venison, still bloody in the middle!) and finally the Song of Songs, which melted like new cream on her tongue. My mother said she tried to hold back from the New Testament in her dream, because she is a good Christian woman, but in the end the illuminations dripped with honey and oil and she could not help herself. 

When Violetta Alunni woke from her dream she felt her heart had burned up with hunger like a puddled candle and she could not deny herself any more. So in the night she went to the only folk in Mirtillo who have books to spare, and that is the Czanalla house, and that is Donna Alessandra Czanalla, who always wears a black dressing gown to mourn for the day passed which cannot be lived again. That is the sort of thing a Czanalla does, because when a person does not have to pull on any beast’s sore teats to get milk, they must fill up their brains with something. Please, Donna Alessandra, she said, for everyone must be polite to the Czanallas, who are rich, but not rich enough to buy titles in Rome for their sons, only rich enough to make us use our prettiest words and curtsey. Please, Donna Alessandra, said my mother, I am suffering. My child wants paper, she wants a book, and if she does not have it I fear she will never be born.

Donna Alessandra looked at her for a long time, and made my mother stand in the cold, shivering and chattering, because that was her right as a rich person. Finally, she brought my mother inside the great house they call the Cask, all the way down the hallway with the red Calabrian carpet, past the kitchen with mint and tarragon and basil hanging from the ceiling like long hair, passed the parlor and the morning room, to the little library where I would much later get locked up for three days. The library is almost perfectly round, with only one flat wall, for it takes up the bottom of the north tower. The Czanallas have two long shelves of books which stretch all the way around the round wall. Does it need to be any specific book? Donna Alessandra said, and she was not making fun of my mother, only trying to understand what she wanted. Please do not eat our Dante. 

My mother shook her head. It could be any book. Donna Alessandra ran her long fingers along the spines until she came to a small one that she felt she could part with. And there, in the dark, on the bare wooden floor, my mother sat on the floor holding her belly with one hand and stuffing pages from a somewhat unlovely translation of The Odyssey into her mouth. 

My mother said the relief broke inside her like a bone, and she wept as she ate. It did not taste like sweet plums or rich eggs or heavy, good bread. It tasted like old pages and glue and dry ink. The satisfaction, the astrologer’s wife Violetta Alunni said, was of the heart, not of the body.

And just as she swallowed Odysseus slaughtering the suitors and Athena bellowing for peace, I chose that moment to come into the world, and all of the sudden I was in such a hurry you’d think my heels had caught fire. Donna Alessandra judged no time to call the midwife Pietronella Guaritora, and besides, hadn’t she lay down with seven children and gotten up with five—a good enough tally for any woman? Donna Alessandra slipped off her black dressing gown and lay my mother upon it, held her knees apart and stroked her hair, called her Violettina and a good girl, even though I do not think she is older than my mother by many years. 

The business of me did not take long. My mother cried out, and Alessandra Czanalla strained with her, their foreheads pressed together, their long black hair mingled into a dark curtain that hid me, at first, from the moonlit world. She seemed so big, my mother said, like she could hold my whole body and yours in her arms and have room enough for a barrel of wine and a bushel of wheat besides. 

There was not too much blood.

And that is how I came to be born in the Czanalla library, with the moon just coming up, and the rope connecting me to Violetta Alunni severed with Alessandra Czanalla’s good white teeth. Neither of them saw the little eyes peeking in through the great blackwood door—little Orfeo Czanalla, but two years old, his heart thumping in his thin chest like a tiny fox.

The Cup of So-So Wine

When I say my father is an astrologer, you should not be impressed. He does not have long robes or much of a beard, and in addition to astrology he grows peppers and grain and onions and apples and bilberries, and suffers on account of our belligerent cow and angry chickens, who seem to have suffered some disappointment in life and take it out on us whenever they can. 

Also, my father knows nothing about astrology. 

When he was young and had a sheep instead of a cow, my father Corrado Alunni fell in love with Dormitia Czanalla, the youngest child of old Eustorgio Czanalla, the fat wrinkled dragon who can be blamed not only for Donna Alessandra but her brothers, her marriage to Uberto, the third son of a Spanish knight, and the Czanalla fortune, which they owe to wine and the Patriarch in Constantinople, but I will tell you about all that later for the Czanallas have their fingers in everything in Mirtillo. I was telling you that my father loved Dormitia Czanalla, which was easy to do because she was very beautiful and healthy and she had gone to Turkey with her father when she was younger and thus knew about spices and precious stones and could read a little Greek. 

My father Corrado Alunni was far too poor for her and he couldn’t read anything much. He owned the following things: two sheep who had had a feud in their youth and couldn’t stand the sight of each other, three chickens but no rooster, a dog whom the sheep snapped at and herded into the forest every morning, a small house built by his grandfather Gasparo Alunni with a parcel of land purchased by his father Tammaro Alunni from Beppe Sparacello the asparagus seller for the price of a cup of wine per night for the rest of Beppe’s daysand never the worst shelf bottle, mind you remember that, boy. My father struggled to put that cup of wine on the bar of the Basilica each night, never the good bottle but never the worst, cursing his sheep and praying for the onions to take. Even on my wedding day he excused himself to go and put the same cup full of the same wine into Beppe’s palsied hands and guide his blind old mouth to the rim. 

Father Afanasio, who arrived from Sardinia to take up the Chapel of St. Anthony in the Desert from Father Cirino when I was seven years of age, disapproves of Agnolo Falachiavi and his squall of children calling their tavern after St. Peter’s best house. He chases after them to change it at Lent and at Pentecost every year. The virtue of a village is a delicate meal, and our old priest know to keep one eye on the pot. Father Cirino still lives in the rectory, in contemplation, he says, allowing the beautiful ecclesiastical music of St. Luke’s verbs to wash up on him—but really, he has taught himself French and reads old tales of Lancelot and Percival by firelight, his ink-stained fingers trembling.

Dormitia Czanalla loved my father, too. This is interesting because of the ways that the world repeats itself, as though God is trying to tell one story while we muddle it up down here, getting our lines wrong and forgetting the costumes He has laid out for us until He just starts all over again with children. Dormitia Czanalla loved my father for the way he listened to her stories of Turkey, for his handsome jaw, and for his sheep who made her laugh. But of course it was impossible. Eustorgio Czanalla actually laughed when his son Nicostrato told him of the suit.

“Tell him to come back when he has rented for himself another life from Beppe Sparacello. An Alunni can have a Dormitia when the stars speak.”

Forgive me. I go too fast.

There are many girls named Dormitia in Mirtillo. It all comes on account of our saint. 

Before Mirtillo was called Mirtillo because it was just a forest hiding next to the mountains, full of wolves and fell worms and stags and wildcats, a woman named Orsina, perhaps Macedonian, perhaps Slav, fled a pagan prince who locked her in a great iron birdcage because she would not marry him. Every night he came to her and said: “Silver bear of my heart, open your cage to me.” 

And when Orsina refused, the prince opened her cage himself and lay with her anyway, furious and ashamed. 

Every night she refused, because she was Christian and he was not, yes, but also because she would do nothing for a man who liked cages so well. Finally, the prince knew that though he could have her body she would never be his. He ordered that Orsina be put into men’s clothes, her breasts bound, her hair cut off and sent into his army which was then preparing to invade Umbria. If the silver bear would not have him, she would die without a name in the Italian mud. 

Orsina fought, though no one would give her a helmet, for the prince forbade it. She fought though no one would give her a shield, under the prince’s orders. She fought though they gave her only a child’s wooden sword. And when the battle had done and the men slept in their tents, Orsina simply walked out of the camp and into the forest, never looking behind her.

The first miracle of St. Orsina was this: in the midst of the wood full of wolves and worms and stags and wildcats, she came upon a ancient church, crumbling but sound. A courtyard all of dark stone with a brook flowing nearby, and a small chapel, and cloisters and an apothecary’s garden, turned to a hensbane jungle with time. Orsina looked over every stone, and found in many places carvings and figures that told her it was not a Christian place, but something much older. She blessed the grounds as she had seen priests do, and thanked God for her fortune and her safety, for Orsina was with child. She washed the blood from her body in the brook, unbound her breasts, put her wooden sword on the altar where it rests even now, and began to pull the weeds from the garden in the place she meant to live.

It is the Abbey of St. Orsina-in-the-Briars now. You can find the old carvings if you know where to look. Orfeo and I ran away from our lessons once and discovered a small room in the rear of the Chapel of the Dormition. On the blackstone walls we saw etched stars and the sun and women with full bellies and wild hair, painted horses and goats with groaning udders.

Orsina delivered of her child in midwinter. In her travails she suffered her second miracle: a vision sent to her of the Mother of Christ in the late days of her life. Mary wandered in a dry wilderness, her bones and other parts eager to rest and give up this life. The Holy Mother came upon a cave and lay down upon the cool stone. Her heart glowed like a burning ruby, and she knew a piercing pain in her hands and her feet. But then Mary fell into a deep sleep, as deep as death, and slept for three days and nights, the shadow of her son. In this time Orsina dreamed the dreams of Mary in her Dormition, and when in her vision Mary woke in the cave and was ascended bodily to heaven, the saint’s pain passed, and she held an infant girl in her arms, which she named Dormitia.

Word spread among the villages of Umbria that a holy woman had taken up residence in the old black church. Those who sought her out beat back the wolves and worms and stags and wildcats of the forest and made a road. They asked her: will my daughter survive her fever? They asked her: will the rain come in time for my grain to grow? They asked her: what did Mary dream, when she slept in the cave you speak of?

Little Dormitia laughed and played with the supplicants, and none of them knew what was to be done with a holy woman who had a child and no husband. But Orsina said to them: your daughter will survive if you give her burdock root and keep her washed in the brook. She said: the rain is God’s to give. She said: Mary dreamt of a bilberry branch heavy with fruit, and each of the berries had a name. One was Tiferet. One was Yesod. She ate of the smallest fruit, called Malkut, and out of it came a star which said to her: woman, why do you not weep? And the Mother of God answered the star: because I am the world.

And the third miracle happened not to Orsina but to her daughter. When she turned eleven she began to suffer spells. When she excited herself or strained too much as the endless work of defending the church against the wind and rain and wolves, or became angry at a drunk friar who called her mother a whore and a witch, Dormitia would go red in the cheek and faint away, lying upon the ground as if dead. She would stay thus for three days and nights, no matter the cold or the heat, and then wake as though nothing had happened. If a soul tried to move her, she would cry out in her sleep: my heart! A thorn of gold burns there! And the supplicants would cross themselves and leave her where she lay.

There were seventeen Dormitias in Mirtillo when I was small. None of them were born with the name. St. Orsina, who has never been sniffed at by Rome, but is our saint all the same, wrote down her visions of Mary’s dreams and the dreams of her daughter and called it The Book of Sleep. She went out into a meadow below the cliffs of her cloisters and planted a fig branch and a bilberry branch and watered them with her tears. This is the heart of Mirtillo, and I had my baptism there. She had no more children, nor did Dormitia marry, but in every generation since, some few girls have, near their eleventh birthday, begun to faint away and lie sleeping upon the unfriendly earth for three days and nights. In time, families called this a sign of divine favor, and watched their daughters closely for signs of sleepiness. If she fell into a swoon, they renamed her Dormitia and a great festival was held for her, in which the men of the town crowned her in bilberries and hefted her up on a good chair, carrying her through the square with singing and fiddles. 

Every man in Mirtillo dreams of marrying a Dormitia. They are all beautiful and clever with their hands and speech, and it is said they tell only their husbands what they dream. And if a mother is a Dormitia, well, maybe her child will be too, and we will all drown in dowries.

My youngest sister is a Dormitia, and it is on account of this that Donna Alessandra hates her, even though she let her eat one of her books. Donna Alessandra has had five children and no Dormitias, though her sister is one and her mother was one. She keeps a purse of shame in her heart and in it she sees my sister’s face. Hate is stranger even than love. I know that now. When I was young I though everything was love, even that sour soup that Donna Alessandra kept in her larder for my mother Violetta Alunni.

When he heard what Eustorgio Czanalla said, my father Corrado Alunni looked up in the sky and said: but the stars do speak! He went to Don Czanalla and pled his case, that by his own utterance consent had been given. 

“If the stars speak to you, write my fortune for me, draw the great chart in my name. I will give you pen and paper. If you accomplish it, we will call them a bride-gift. If not, you will have to pay for them, and the cost will be more than a cup of wine.”

Eustorgio knew my father did not have his letters. He leaned in with a gloat waiting in his cheeks, looking forward to a good laugh at a poor person, which is the best kind of laughing, if you asked him. 

My father did not even know that Sagittarius comes after Scorpio. But his love for Dormitia Czanalla burned in his heart like a golden thorn. He began to draw upon the paper. 

First, he drew two sheep quarrelling. “You were born under the sign of Sheep Who Would Be the Shepherd,” he said, and drew a dog in a sheep’s pen. “With the moon in the sign of the Thwarted Sheepdog. This is very fortunate, though it indicates a stubborn nature and a propensity for anger.” My father drew three chickens. “Mercury was passing out of the house of the Maiden Hens at the hour of your birth,” he went on. “This is unlucky.” Eustorgio’s eyes clouded and he opened his mouth to shout. “If you were a woman,” Corrado Alunni hurried on. “For then you might never marry. But for a man it promises a wife and plenty of mistresses, for the only rooster on the farm can choose his henhouse.” Don Czanalla liked this better, for he had nearly convinced Chiara Calogaro, the baker’s fat fair haired daughter to spread her buttered-bread thighs for him. 

My father drew a cup of wine. “Venus, the planet of love, has moved into the sign of the Cup of So-So Wine. The heavens suggest you seek in your heart for a generosity which has not yet seen the sun, that it might turn green and put out shoots.”

The drawings my father made were not perfect, but they were charming. The sheeps’ faces looked angry and the chickens drooped their tails in loneliness. Eustorgio Czanalla had his laugh, but it was not at my father’s expense.

“You certainly are a cup of so-so wine,” he chuckled. “And my Dormitia must have the best vintage. Be happy elsewhere, Corradino, and keep the paper and pen. They are worth more than your house. Sell them and improve your lot—or else come back every month and cast my heavens and I will give you a little more parchment, so that you may continue your craft.”

My father took his prize but not his wife. That very evening Drago Acqua’s daughter dropped her pails of milk in the field and fell asleep, weeping through her dreams and calling out for a son she did not have. For three days and nights the farmhands brought roses and bilberries and lilies to lay on her breast, and water to moisten her lips, and on the third night when she woke brought her back into Mirtillo on a good chair. 

At the festival my father saw the hunstman Bartolo Acciaio’s daughter dancing in a red skirt. Above her head the sign of the Cup of So-So-Wine glowed, and he never thought of Dormitia Czanalla again, which is just as well by me.
Six Clay Jars

Dormitia Czanalla lies in the vineyards asleep. Grape leaves cast shadows on her face, her dark eyebrows, her slight breasts. Her brothers have put a crown of fig flowers on her head, and a pillow of rosemary and peppermint under her bare feet. It is summer, 1738, and Dormitia looks as though she has miscarried in the fields. Her lap is stained red with the petals of wild roses the Ghirlanda twins gathered in the forest within sight of a lean half-grown wolf who stared at the flowers as the boys wound the vines around their fingers, pricking their brown skin with the fuzzy, soft thorns. 

Dormitia is dreaming. In the past she has dreamed of the bilberry branch and eaten the berry with the star inside. She has dreamed of the face of her future husband, the unyielding judge Ferro Caito, who will give over every decision in their shared life to her to make room in his heart for the verdicts he must give every Saturday. She has dreamed of St. Orsina in the secret room behind the Chapel of the Dormition, her skin covered with those disquieting etchings of two-horned dogs and gravid women and suns spinning within suns. 

But now she is dreaming of little Annunziata Alunni, who has not been born yet. It comforts her to see the children of Corrado, to see that he will be happy and his daughters will have their letters even if he did not. She has dreamed of them before and it fills her with warmth as though she carried the girls herself. 

She also dreams of the potter Scevola Piatto, who has been born. She is peering into his windows at the jars on his hearth, on his meager dinner of boiled fish, on the four thick plaits closed up in a peachwood box with Orsina’s thorned heart on its lid. She has dreamed of him before, too. She does not like those dreams. When she sees Piatto in the market, his eyes follow her like a lean half-grown wolf. She always walks quickly the other way and finds her brothers, who have knives in their boots. Dormitia also has a knife in her boot, but out of propriety she prefers to convince her brothers to draw theirs first.

Dormitia swims in the sea of Mirtillo.

The world of Annunziata is colored indigo. It is the end of summer, the Year of Our Lord 1761 and Annunziata is helping her mother with the bilberry jam. She likes to help. She is six, and her little fingers want to dip into the thick, blue-violet sludge and suck it up. She has tried once already and gotten scorched. Her fingers gleam purple and shiny from the hot berries. The preserves pot bubbles and spits out bilberry juice as Nunzia’s mother pours the honey and drops in the apple pieces that will thicken up that runny syrup. 

Dormitia likes the smell of the Alunni house. Bilberries, wax, milk, wool, fresh wood. She smiles in her sleep as she remembers the belligerent sheep whose lambs, judging by the sounds out in the garden, have chosen to continue their parents’ feud. Oh, the taste of the other wives I might have been! The taste of Corrado’s kisses! The pull of his daughters at my breast!

Dormitia imagines this serious, intent young girl as her own. Her nose would have been longer and bonier, her brow higher, but so much in her would still be Corrado, his jaw and his leonine hair and his clever hands. Put some licorice roots in, darling, she imagines herself saying to this phantom daughter. They make the preserves taste deep and dark as earth.

It has been a good year. The jam will hold up all winter. Nunzia likes pouring the wax lid into Scevola Piatto's clay jars best. She is waiting for that moment, the late heavy sun lighting up the milky flowing paraffin like pale gold.

Dormitia’s gaze floats up through the Alunni chimney and over the body of Mirtillo: thirty houses not counting the Cask, twenty fields with not too many rocks and roots in them, their borders policed by glares, chestnut trees racing each other for the sunlight, and rheumy-eyed dogs. Scevola Piatto lives on the banks of the quiet Sogno river, which turns into a waterfall ten miles south, but in Mirtillo provides a steady current to turn the windmill and lazy fish who don’t look too hard at a fresh worm. Dormitia’s attention sinks down, though she shudders and tries to scramble somewhere nicer, to the bakery or home to the Cask where her uncle Alessio is barrelling the wine in oak from Switzerland and throwing up his hands at the cooper Pio Bariletto, who always asks too much and settles for whatever Eustorgio has already set as the prices of barrels plus the use of their studs--this year a big brown bull, last year a ram. Next year it will cost Alessio the services of his prize German stallion. 

But no, the potter’s house draws her down toward the river.

Scevola Piatto has married four times, and widowed four times. He insists he is only unlucky, born under a bad sign. The sign of the Badger Shitting in the Rain Barrel, says Corrado to his wife Violetta, a joke Dormitia longs to share but cannot. Piatto has thrown his most magnificent pots for his wives, four urns on his hearth, their lines so perfect they might as well be Greek, with asphodel and the last trumpet of the world and open, seedy figs so real they look private and obscene, Piatto’s final memories of the joy of marriage. He sends them to sweet, mute Luca Calatafimi the icon painter to color, and when Luca lays his brush against the rosy clay figs his whole self shakes as though he were losing the virginity he will never so much as misplace. 

When Annunziata is thirteen, Scevola Piatto will see her father about her. She is pretty, if not quite beautiful, he will say. Her nose is too big for real beauty, but those eyes! The only girl in Mirtillo with eyes like terra cotta. Her hips say children; her cleverness says a tidy house. I hear she preserves and pickles and can cook a fish stew as well Donna Alessandra herself. No talk of a dowry between us, I’m not a young man and I’ve had enough of trousseaux. I’ll give you six pots a year for her. 

It was not a bad match for the daughter of an astrologer-farmer who still owed on his land. 

No, thinks Dormitia Czanalla. Don’t do it, my love. Save Nunzia for my nephew! For she has also dreamed of Orfeo, and though that is also a sad story, she prefers it to the one that ends this way. She yearns to be Nunzia’s mother so that she can refuse the potter herself.

A shadow falls on the heart of Corrado Alunni and that shadow is called Scevola Piatto. But perhaps he has heard also his lost Dormitia sleeping twenty years before this moment. Time does not argue with the Dormitias. 

Corrado reasons to himself: When a man loses four wives, his luck has dug a hole to die in. Annunziata feels Piatto’s eyes on her and they feel like his hands on a new pot. 

The stars are poor, Scevolitto, I’m sorry. She is too young. 

A year later, Piatto will marry and even poorer girl, Graziana Tessaro, the daughter of the laundress Lia Tessaro, who lost her husband the weaver Abramo to fever on their wedding night but gives all her children his name anyway, feeding them with the coin of half the faithful husbands in Mirtillo. 

Every time Lia cries out in her pleasure, a carrot ripens in the earth. Dormitia Czanalla has dreamt of her, too, and when she does her sleeping body grows warm and heavy.

The body of Scevola Piatto is warm and heavy in his bed with the river clay waiting for him on the edge of the Sogno as certain and sure as money in a Roman bank. Every night, Piatto watches his fifth wife sleep with her strong back rising and falling, her dark nipples showing through her nightdress and her cheeks pricked with red. He watches her sleep and loves her with all his immortal soul. The finest urn he has ever made take shape in his mind.

Poor Graziana. Dormitia moans the name of a girl not yet born in her sleep. Roses fall from her lap, leaving red streaks like menarche on her white dress. It is twilight on the third day of her swoon. When the stars come out the sign of Hay Tied Up On Time will be high in the seventh house of the heavens, and her brothers will have made her a feast of beef and honey and barley and the first wine of the autumn. Her sister Alessandra will stare at her with hollow jealous eyes, but Dormitia will forgive and love her because she has dreamed of her sister’s most secret wish, which is that she lose no more children in her difficult womb. How can she be cold to her sister when she has dreamed inside her? No, she will pour Alessandra and extra measure of wine herself, and later, go to Lia and ask after the little girl growing in her belly.

Sweet Graziana, when you are born I will wear black.