Sacred Sierra (14 page)

‘She had TB. After the war. She was sad because her elder brother died fighting at the front. Used to live here with her and her parents.’

We spent most of that night lying awake in bed: me trying to convince Salud there were no such things as ghosts; she trying to convince herself she really enjoyed life out on a mountain.

The next day I went scouting around the back of the house. On her way out Marina had quickly pointed at a tree and identified it as the one under which the girl was supposedly buried. I kicked around the base of it, as though half expecting to uncover a finger pointing out at me or something. The tree could be the right age – less than a hundred years old, I reckoned, but there were a few others planted in the same area of about the same age: nothing seemed to say this was a special spot, a place where someone might have buried their little girl.

Still pondering this, I heard Arcadio’s Land Rover pull up on the
era
behind me. The car door opened and he walked over to where I was standing.

‘You don’t know about some people here in the 1920s or 1930s losing a little girl, do you?’ He was certainly old enough, I thought, to have been around then, and would have heard something. ‘Died of tuberculosis?’

‘Little girl?’ he said. ‘Don’t know anything about that.’

I heaved a sigh of relief.
Duendes
, ghosts. Those bloody witches had virtually lost us a good night’s sleep with all their stories. I looked forward to telling Salud when I saw her. Creepy-crawlies were one thing. The supernatural was something else.

‘There was a boy, though,’ Arcadio said. My smile dropped. ‘Son of the farmer who used to live up here.’ He looked me straight with his small, intense yellow eyes.

‘Sent him to the front during the war. Got killed near Teruel. Family never got over it.’

I tried to speak, but couldn’t say anything.

‘Terrible thing, war,’ he said.

Part II

Air

The Story of the Charcoal-burner’s Daughter

ONCE UPON A
time there was a poor old charcoal-burner who lived in the forest with his daughter. One day, not having anything to eat, the charcoal-burner went to the King to ask for alms. The King was very impressed by the way the man spoke.

‘How did you learn to talk like that?’ he asked.

‘From my daughter,’ said the charcoal-burner. ‘Poverty and hunger have made her the cleverest in all the land.’

‘If that is so,’ said the King, ‘I shall marry her myself. Here,’ he said, ‘take these eggs and tell your daughter to hatch them so that we may have chickens for when we are married.’

So the charcoal-burner took the eggs back to his home and gave them to his daughter, telling her everything that had happened. The daughter, though, weighed the eggs in her hands and realised they had been hard-boiled. It was a trick.

‘Let me sleep on it, father,’ she said, ‘and I will come up with a solution.’

The next morning she took a handful of oats and ground them into flour.

‘You see this?’ she said to her father. ‘I want you to go to the King and tell him to sow this so that we might have oats to feed the chickens we shall have when we are married.’

The charcoal-burner did as she said and gave the message to the King. The King was very surprised. But he thought for a moment, and he pulled out a piece of cloth which he proceeded to cut up into tiny pieces.

‘Take this to your daughter, and tell her to make swaddling clothes out of it for our first-born child, God willing,’ he said.

‘How on earth will my daughter get out of this one?’ thought the charcoal-burner. And he took the rags back to his home in the forest and told his daughter what had happened.

‘Let me sleep on it, father,’ she said. ‘And I will come up with a solution.’

The next morning she took some branches of wood and broke them into little twigs.

‘Take these to the King,’ she told her father, ‘and tell him to make a cradle out of them for our first-born child.’

The charcoal-burner did as she asked, and gave the message to the King. Once again the King was speechless on hearing the reply. But he thought for a moment and said: ‘Take this basket back to your daughter, and tell her to fill it with laughter.’

The poor old charcoal-burner trudged back to the forest.

‘He’s really done it this time,’ he thought. And he tried laughing into the basket himself, ha-ha-ha. But every time he looked inside to see if it was still there the laughter seemed to have slipped away.

When he got back home he told his daughter what had happened.

‘Let me sleep on it, father,’ she said.

The next morning she told her father to go and catch three dozen small birds and place them inside the basket, and cover them with a cloth.

‘Take it to the King when he is sitting down for dinner,’ she said, ‘and say it is from me, and that he is to remove the cloth.’

Now it so turned out that that evening the King had invited a large number of guests to dinner. The charcoal-burner did as his daughter asked and he placed the covered basket in front of the King. But when the King lifted the cloth, all the little birds flew up into the air and darted around the dining hall. Everyone dived for cover; cups of wine were sent flying, food fell to the floor and in the panic all the guests landed in a heap on top of one another. And they thought it was so funny, they laughed and laughed until some of them couldn’t even stand up.

Now the King was aware that the clever girl was getting the better of him, and so he said to the charcoal-burner: ‘Right! Go and tell your daughter she is to come and visit me. But she must come neither dressed nor undressed, neither on the road nor off it, and neither riding nor on foot.’

The charcoal-burner returned home with a heavy heart to pass the
message
on. His daughter slept that night, as usual, and the next morning she said: ‘Father, I want you to go up on to the mountain and catch me the wildest goat there.’

When he was gone, she undressed and wrapped herself in a big piece of netting. Then, when her father returned, she got on the goat’s back and went to see the King. The goat was as wild as the wind, and it bucked and kicked all the way. Sometimes it stayed on the road, while at others it ran off it. And whenever it managed to throw the girl off its back she simply followed behind before leaping back on again.

So as the King had commanded, she was neither dressed nor undressed, neither riding nor on foot, and neither on nor off the road.

When he saw her, the King realised he was defeated, and he agreed they should be married. But he insisted that it would be only on one condition.

‘What is that?’ asked the girl.

‘That you may never give any advice to anyone else. If you do you will have to return to your father’s home in the forest.’

‘And may I not be allowed to take anything with me?’ she said.

‘Well,’ said the King, ‘you could take one jewel with you.’

‘And it wouldn’t matter how big it was?’

‘Any jewel you like,’ he said.

So the King and the clever girl got married and they were very happy together.

Time passed and one day a man came to stay the night at the palace. He had a mare with him and asked where he could stable her.

‘In there,’ said the King’s servants. ‘Next to that horse.’

The next morning the mare had had a foal. But the King claimed it as his.

‘There was no other animal in the stable apart from my horse,’ said the King. ‘The horse must have had the foal.’

The servants tried to tell him that the guest’s mare had been in there as well that night, but the King wouldn’t listen.

‘Don’t argue!’ he shouted.

No one wanted to cross the King, but when the Queen found out about it, she went to find the guest to talk to him.

‘Take this fishing rod and go to that dry pond over there,’ she said.
‘When
the King passes he will ask what you are doing. You must say: “Fishing for sardines”. When he asks how you expect to fish for sardines in a dry pond, you must answer: “It is as easy to fish for sardines in a dry pond as it is for a horse to give birth to a foal”.’

The guest did as the Queen advised and went and sat with the fishing rod by the dry pond. When the King passed he called out:

‘What are you doing?’

‘Fishing for sardines,’ came the guest’s reply.

‘How do expect to fish for sardines in a dry pond?’ laughed the King.

‘As easily as I expect a horse to give birth to a foal,’ said the guest.

The King was furious.

‘Go on, take your foal,’ he said. ‘And never come back!’

Now the King knew the Queen must have given advice to the guest and he went to find her in the palace.

‘You have broken our agreement,’ he said.

‘So that you would not do our guest an injustice,’ she said.

‘Never mind that!’ cried the King. ‘You must leave!’

‘Can we not have one last supper together?’ asked the Queen. ‘And I shall leave tomorrow.’

Now the King had loved his Queen and so he agreed to this last request. But that night the Queen placed a powerful sleeping potion in his wine and he fell fast asleep. When she saw that he wasn’t going to wake up, the Queen ordered a carriage and drove him to her father’s home in the forest. There she lay him down among all the charcoal, with dust and cobwebs falling on his face.

The King was shocked when he woke up in this small, dark place.

‘Where am I?’ he cried.

‘You are at my father’s,’ the Queen said, appearing at his side. ‘The agreement was that I could take one jewel with me should you ever force me to leave. So I looked around the palace, but the only jewel I wanted was you. And now here you are.’

The King laughed loud and long when he heard this, and he realised the clever girl – his Queen – had outwitted him once again.

And so they went back to live in the palace, and thenceforth the King allowed her to give as much advice to whoever she liked. And it is said they are still living happily together to this day.

DECEMBER

After autumn comes winter, which is made up of three months. The first of these is called
December
in Latin
, Kanun el-Awal
in Syriac and
Deymah
in Persian, and is made up of thirty-one days. During this month the days finally stop getting shorter and start getting longer, while the nights begin to wane. It is the time when the
samayemo el-bardi
phenomenon occurs – the cold, so-called Nights of Darkness, which are forty in number: the first twenty coming after the eleventh of the month, lasting until the end, and the second twenty stretching into January. Now narcissus appear, the citrus fruits ripen, and the early almonds blossom. According to Kastos and others, this is the time for laying fertiliser mixed with ash around fruit trees. Azib says in his
Book of Astronomy
that this is also the month for sowing leeks: they should be grown for one year before being pulled up for eating. Finally, this is also when white poppies should be sown
.

Ibn al-Awam,
Kitab al-Falaha
, The Book of Agriculture, 12th century

IT IS SLOWLY
getting colder, but still the sun shines and no rain has fallen since early November. The river, which suddenly kicked back into life at the top of the valley, has dried up once again, only a few remaining puddles hinting at the underground currents that pass along this way. It is always a beautiful sound when the river flows as far as the turning to the house: stopping to open the chain before driving up the final stretch, you hear the gurgling of water just a few feet away on the other side of the pine trees, while in the evening frogs and toads croak along its banks. Water brings life to the area, colours trapped underground bursting forth all of a sudden.

I’ve finally put my hand to rebuilding some of the dry-stone walls.

Or, rather, I’ve tried rebuilding one of them, and it’s yet to fall over, so I’m judging it a success – of sorts. The stones are heavier than I’d realised, and the blood blisters under my nails pay testament to where I didn’t pull my fingers away in time as I plonked them down. It’s an intuitive process: the first section looks awful, and I’ll probably have to pull it down and start all over again. But during the second half it started to come together. And there were even brief moments when, as if in a state of grace, I bent down and picked up just the right stone for the gap I was looking at. You know when this is happening because the stone makes a very satisfactory
whoompf
sound as it falls into place, and it just stays there, not rocking or moving, looking every bit as though it had been there for years, or even centuries. This is one of the great things about a dry-stone wall: if it’s half-decently made, once it’s up it has an ancient, part-of-the-land feel about it.

After about an hour the basic idea behind it seemed to make itself clear: the stones need to lean into the bank being built against, while if they have a flat face of some kind this needs to be facing the front. What happens at the back is unimportant, as it gets filled in with rubble and soil. And despite the temptation to place longer stones lengthwise, thus filling more wall space, I quickly learned that the structure benefited far more by laying them across the width of the wall, pointing into the slope. Viewed from above like this they look almost like teeth, and give a sensation of cutting into the mountain and holding the wall together. But building isn’t always an easy task with the stone we have here, which is rough and uneven. In other areas, particularly to the north and west of Penyagolosa, there are whole fields full of perfectly flat, smooth rocks that would make this task a doddle. We just have to make do with what we’ve got. It’s a start, though, and I notice now that when I’m outside my eyes instinctively start searching the landscape for dry-stone walls, trying to pick up tips and ideas to improve my technique.