come—staggering in its distance. My old life was gone, burned to ashes, and there was nothing left ahead but these strange people and endless vistas of ice. All the pressure of the past months collected in my chest, heavy as a rock, pressing down, pressing hard, until I could not breathe. Panic, swift and electric, moved through me. My skin moistened with sweat. My breath quickened. The room spun around and around and around. I gasped for air, buried my face in my hands, and sobbed with fear.
I was dimly aware of movement from the table, and then Ciba pressed a jug of water into my hands. I recognized the jug—its pattern was the same as Dolores’s china in the salon, the Bavarian farm scene with roosters painted in French blue, a gift from Vita, like so much else. It was a small thing, but seeing this familiar object, this human object, calmed me. I drank the water, my hands trembling. Ciba was clearly worried and gestured for me to drink more. In the face of her kindness I began to cry.
Ciba squatted down onto the fur, the weight of her stomach ready to topple her. She took my head between her hands and looked at me, her large brown eyes warm and reassuring. She wiped the tears from my cheeks and spoke to me. I didn’t know what she said, but her voice was soft, maternal, and while she was younger than me, I was comforted in a way I had not felt since my mother died.
Thirty-Two
For the rest of the spring and into the summer, I remained in Aki and Ciba’s stone hut. Vita, and the castle, felt far away. I slept on the bear fur, warmed by the fire and a thin wool blanket. I ate with them at their makeshift table, walked with them on the trails above the village to gather mushrooms and nuts, worked in their garden, and slowly—over the course of many weeks—became part of their lives.
At the same time each day, Ciba, Aki, and I walked with the others to the hot spring, where we bathed together. They were a ritualistic group, so set in their ways that their patterns never changed. There was not a day without foraging or tending the garden. Never a day without going to the hot spring. Never a day without meeting in the grotto to feast and sing. They lived simply, without the comforts of modern life, but also without its anxieties. If it rained, they faced the tempest without question, their wet bodies tattooed by flashes of lightning. When it was hot, they stripped down, and their pale skin burned to blisters. They faced the sun and the snow and the rain with relentless heartiness, their bodies adapted to survive the brutality of nature.
At the grotto, we roasted whatever had been caught that day—rabbit or deer or ibex or marmot—and ate together before the fire. Over time, the others lost their wariness of me. Jabi stopped glaring at me. The children—three girls and a boy—were no longer afraid to approach me. I cooked with the Icemen and ate with them. I hunted with them and tended the garden with them. Ciba spoke to me in her language as though I understood it and gradually, after weeks of confusion, I began to recognize a word here, a word there, then more and more.
Some nights, I replayed the lineage that connected me to them, moving back in time, from me, to my father, to Giovanni to Vita, Vita to Ambrose, Ambrose to Vittorio, Vittorio to Leopold, and then, like a stream guttering into a river, this tribe. I imagined Leopold sitting with us, Zyana at his side, eating from the communal bowl. I was falling in love with these people as Leopold had fallen in love with them so many generations before.
In those moments of happiness, with my skin hot from the fire and the sky a sheet of stars, I thought of Luca, freezing under this same sky. We were so small, so insignificant, compared to the galaxies shimmering beyond, so powerless to change the realities of nature. And yet, such beauty, such marvelous beauty, was a tonic to our suffering. I hoped that Luca had died with the stars blazing above him, and that their cold beauty had given him comfort at the end.
Most mornings, I worked in the garden. I weeded the plants and carried water in a bucket from a stream and poured