Luka shook his head. “The abbey’s from the twelfth century, but the Saint George church is from the seventeenth. There’s a cemetery there, too, for old nobles from Perast.”
“How do you know?”
“Mama wanted to be buried there,” he said simply. “When nothing was working anymore, she wanted us to take her on a tour of the monasteries and churches, the nicest ones. Remember, Niko? We thought it was a last-resort thing, hedging her bets with all the saints. But really, she just thought they were beautiful. She wanted to say good-bye, and find the right one.”
I snuck a look at Luka, my throat clenching. I hadn’t known that about his mother. Ko?tana had died three years ago from leukemia, and Luka had been wrecked for years after. It was part of the reason I’d never fully believed he’d go to college in Belgrade until he was gone; I couldn’t imagine him leaving his father and Niko after she died. But he had. Life went on.
“I’m sorry,” I said softly, catching Niko’s glistening dark eyes in the rearview mirror. “I didn’t know.”
She pressed her lips into a wavering half smile. “It’s okay. They don’t bury anyone out there anymore, anyway. She’s back in Cattaro. But she’d have liked that we stopped by here, don’t you think, Luka? And that it made us think of her.”
I glanced back out at the islet, the ancient, blocky silhouettes of the church and the abandoned abbey, overgrown with dense vegetation and slender cypress trees. There was a deep and sacred sort of beauty to it, as if it stood still even as the currents of time parted and flowed neatly around it, leaving it untouched. It looked like the kind of place that could keep a soul safe.
“Why aren’t there any trees on Our Lady of the Rocks?” I asked, tracing the outlines of the other islet on the window. The church of the Blessed Mary was stone, too, but more elaborate, with a domed apse, a round bell tower, and what looked like a guardian’s house attached. The rest of the isle was flat and bare, empty of anything green.
“Because it’s man-made, not like Saint George.” He cast me a skeptical look. “Have you really never heard any of this?”
I shrugged. “Mama was never much for churches.”
He craned his neck as he eased us into a parking spot, next to a restaurant tucked behind a grapevine trellis. “I’ll tell you all about it on the ferry. It’s an unusual story, not the kind of thing you forget.”
There were two ferries tagging each other back and forth to the island, and we caught one, ducking our heads beneath the canopy that protected the simple boat on rainy days.
Once settled on the wooden bench that ran down the center, slick with waterproof white paint, Luka continued. “Our Lady isn’t just a Roman Catholic church—it’s a sailors’ votive shrine. They say that in 1452, the Mortesi? brothers, who were recovering from some seafarers’ disease—scurvy, probably—found an icon on a rock in the middle of the bay, a painting of the Madonna and the baby Jesus. Right afterward they made a miraculous recovery. Due to the painting, of course, or possibly the sudden availability of oranges and sauerkraut.”
I nudged him with an elbow to the ribs. “Spoken like a true believer, Damjanac.”
“Just laying out the facts. Anyway, the townspeople took this as a sign that this spot was marked as holy, and began sinking boats heaped with stones around that original rock. They layered a foundation so that the main altar of the shrine would perch on the reef where the painting was found.”
The hull scraped along the islet’s wooden dock, and Luka swung off first once the captain had secured the ropes. Malina and then Niko caught his outstretched hand and hopped off the makeshift steps that had been propped along the boat’s side, heading toward the bronze door of the church’s main portal. I laid my hand on Luka’s palm and lingered on the boat for a moment longer, feeling the lurching bob beneath my feet. The roots of my hair prickled oddly, and I felt suddenly hesitant to step onto the dock.
Luke gave me a little tug and I hopped off, trailing after him reluctantly. “Hail the Queen / Of the Boka sea.” He read the inscription off the bronze door as we walked across the threshold. “You are the red dawn / The shield of our faith.”
“What is that?” I whispered to him. There was none of that cold density in here that some churches exerted, a silent demand for continued silence. But somehow even this cool, sweeter hush felt cloying to me, itchy on my skin.
“A hymn for Our Lady, looks like.”
He wandered off toward the altar, but I stayed in the nave, turning in a little circle over the blue and gray diamond-tiled floor. The ceiling was painted elaborately with celestial motifs, each scene cordoned off by braided gilt. The walls were lavished with framed paintings, the bottom row above the choir benches featuring images I recognized from the Old Testament, of both male and female prophets. The topmost row held four massive paintings, two on each side of the nave, a gleaming silver frieze in between them.
The entire inside of the church was rife with repeating patterns, and again I could feel the beginnings of the gleam swelling in my sight. I wanted to wallow in it, to be delighted in this sudden resurgence—I’d missed it so badly, for so many years—but this felt almost hostile in a way I didn’t remember from before. As if it wanted to multiply this church’s insides into endless fractals and then shatter them, like a mallet brought down on a block of ice.
“Missy?” Luka said, hand on the small of my back. “You okay?”
I took a deep breath. “I’m fine. I just need a minute.”
Trying to narrow my focus, I drew closer to one of the silver plates, an exquisite rendering of a storm-wracked ship with one splintered mast, a cloud-borne Madonna hovering above it in blessing. The metalwork was so finely done that the waves beneath the ship’s prow churned in a fine, almost lacy froth.
“They’re votive plates,” a tentative voice said over my shoulder. “Perast has always been home to sailors. Whenever they survived some tragedy at sea, they would make a solemn oath.”
I turned from the plate. A gangly, green-eyed boy about my age stood behind me, his freckled cheeks flushing adorably when I met his gaze. I smiled at him. “What kind of oath?”
“The sailor would pledge that, if he survived and returned to port, he’d leave some mark on something lasting like silver—usually a picture of whatever kind of ship he’d sailed on, and an inscription naming the vessel and its captain. Local goldsmiths made these plates, here in Perast and in Cattaro.”
“What about these?” I asked, pointing to a silver heart, nestled into the crook of a miniature arm. “What are they for?”