Chapter 13
Equal parts history, legend, and magic, stories flowed in their veins.
Zaneta’s own beginning, the tale her mother, Allegra, had relayed to her since she was old enough to hear it, was that Zaneta had been born as far from the sea as possible on their small island.
Later, Zaneta often wondered if that had been some sort of portent or even a curse, a foreboding of the time when she would spend months away from the Sardegnan shore.
The family had been on a rare summer holiday on their home island, one where they’d packed up baskets of food and all four children, no small task.
Despite her late pregnancy, her mother said, something urged her to make the trip to the Giara di Gesturi, though, except for the panoramic views of the coastline and towns below, the region was neither especially hospitable nor beautiful.
Nevertheless, the story went, Allegra and Johann took their two daughters and two sons to the plateau, and there they spent an afternoon picnicking, feasting on cucumbers and melons, figs, and eggplant bruschetta.
The boys, Lev and Avi, lobbed bigger and bigger rocks as they pretended to smash boulders.
The day had been warm and especially so on the high volcanic plain dotted with inclining cork trees and scrub olives, forced to grow at an angle by the strong mistral winds.
Herds of hardy wild Giara horses foraged among the rocky soil, and the two sisters picked out their favorites: Marta liked the pretty mare with the white blaze covering her face, while Dahlia loved the solid black stallion standing sentry over his mares.
Her mother hadn’t gone to see the horses, nor was the picnic her chief concern.
She told Zaneta she’d wanted to walk again among the nuragic ruins.
It had been almost a year since she’d wandered among the stones, her ears straining to hear whispers of the ghosts there.
So while Johann kept his eye on the children, Allegra drifted through the ancient sanctuaries, trailing her fingers along the basaltic rock walls, all that remained of the mysterious Nuragic people who’d disappeared centuries ago.
Only pieces of their history had been discovered, but Allegra taught her daughters all that she herself had been taught, dutifully transferring the stories of their craft and its origins.
That day on the plain, she’d told Zaneta, time slipped away, and she’d let herself get too tired, too hot.
She’d been caught up in imagining the people who must have lived in the towers and built the enormous graves and temples.
She’d hunted, she admitted, poking among the stones for some overlooked treasure—an impossibly ancient spindle or shuttle, something that could never have survived the wind and weather of such a place.
“I know how it sounds.” Zaneta remembered her mother’s voice, clear as a bell.
“Something demanded I be there that day. I felt such a connection to the stones, warm on my hand, and the ground beneath my feet. And you decided right then to make your entrance.” Allegra never focused on the birth itself, although knowing what she knew now, Zaneta imagined it couldn’t have been easy, even being her fifth child.
Johann had fallen asleep in the shade of a cork tree, and the children, free and unburdened, had let him snore on, while up the slope his wife labored alone, her shouts carried away with the wind.
When he’d finally woken, with the sun slipped southward on the horizon and his wife not yet returned, Johann and the children had set off to find her.
What a shock they must have had, finding her with a squalling baby girl wrapped in her head shawl, both of them smeared in sticky, dried blood and smudged black with volcanic soot.
Lev and Avi had crossed their wrists and joined hands to hoist their mother off the plain and onto a seat of their own limbs, while Marta and Dahlia took turns carrying their baby sister.
It was impossible, but Zaneta swore she remembered the melodies of the songs her mother and sisters sang on that trip back to the sea as they welcomed another into the line of water women.
She still imagined the touch of her sisters’ arms as their steps lulled her to sleep.