Sacred Sierra (31 page)

When the Christians eventually conquered the village, they heard the story of incredible wealth that had been spirited away to the nearby mountains, and they searched and searched for it. But no matter how hard they tried, they never found anything. Eventually, as they scoured the land, they came across an old Moor who had stayed behind after his companions had fled, and they tortured him to tell them where the treasure was hidden. With his last breath, the old Moor gave the secret away. But, he added, there was only one way to break the enchantment that protected the gold. The Christian soldiers listened eagerly.

‘You must take a very sharp sack needle,’ the Moor said, the life ebbing away from him, ‘and enter the cave at midnight on Midsummer’s Eve. A ferocious bull is waiting there, standing guard. When it charges at you, you must stand firm and plunge the needle into the bull’s back, right between his shoulder blades. Then, and only then, will the spell be broken and the bull will turn into a statue of gold. You must leave the cave without ever looking back, for if you do the golden bull will turn into dust before your very eyes. A moment’s bravery, and patience, will be rewarded with a lifetime of wealth.’

And with that the Moor fell to the floor and died.

Midsummer’s Eve was the following day, and at midnight the Christian soldiers lined up outside the cave on the slopes of the Eagle’s Rock to have their chance at winning the gold. First went the captain,
with
dreams of unimaginable wealth. Perhaps, he thought, with all that gold he might even become a king. So wielding a sack needle between his fingers, he stormed into the cave at the stroke of midnight and disappeared into the darkness.

The soldiers outside waited and waited, but the captain didn’t reappear. Eventually the second in command decided to go in after him. Where his commander had failed, he thought, he would succeed. Perhaps he might become a lord with all that gold. And so, too, he vanished into the blackness of the cave.

The soldiers outside waited and waited … and waited. But still no one came out. Some of them were beginning to grow afraid. But the sergeant stepped forward. He would go in and find the treasure. Perhaps, he thought, with all that gold, he could buy a big house and become a landowner. So with sack needle in hand he rushed into the cave … and disappeared.

And they say there are still some men out at the entrance to the cave, waiting for their chance to challenge the bull. But to this day no one has succeeded. The story has lived on, though, and the cave can still be visited, on the slopes of the Eagle’s Rock. Perhaps one day its secrets will be revealed.

MAY

The Latin month
Maius
is called
Ayar
in Syriac and
Khordadmah
in Persian. It is made up of thirty-one days and is the last month of spring. All trees except for the fig will now need regular watering. On the first day of this month bulls are let loose to mate with cows; in the Babylonia area they leave them together like this for forty days, the first calves being born eleven months later. According to Azib, during this month people on the coast in places such as Malaga and Medina Sidonia start harvesting, while in the countryside around Cordoba, towards the end of the month, the first onions are picked. From my observations, in Seville this is the time for sowing late fennel, for eating a month later
.

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

THE BELLS FROM
the cows on the other side of the valley tinkle away in a seemingly random fashion, coming and going on the easterly breeze. I pick up my binoculars and stare out towards the animals – a cow as white as snow is meandering towards an abandoned farmhouse on the opposite hillside, jumping over stone walls in search of fresh grass and herbs. It is an amazing sight – her whiteness contrasting with the dark-green vegetation surrounding her. Then, just above, I notice a black shadow: it is half hidden among the bushes, but then moves out towards the white cow. I see a huge creature with gigantic, pale horns jutting out from its forehead – a bull, the kind that tries to kill people at village fiestas, is roaming freely on the other side of the valley. The cow seems unperturbed, but I can’t help myself uttering a quiet, pensive ‘Holy shit’ as I catch sight of the beast. It doesn’t seem such a long way away.

We’ve harvested the artichokes down near the beehives – catching
them
just before they got too dry. Salud prepared them in the Spanish way, stripping the outer leaves, then cutting the heart into slices and cooking them
a la plancha
with a little oil and salt and a few squirts of lemon juice. They were already a little too tough, but still delicious.

I’ve been popping up every now and then to check up on the truffle trees. It seems one or two more have been wiped out since the wild boar destroyed so much of my work earlier in the year. Just the sight of it is enough to bring on sharp stomach pains. God damn those stupid animals. But I remember some of the herbal lore Arcadio has passed on and bend down to pick up some sprigs of
mançanilla vera
– cotton lavender. A small, greyish, unassuming plant, it pops up everywhere, and is perhaps even more common than either rosemary or thyme. Back at the house, I steep it in hot water for a few minutes; it is very soothing, and in minutes my indigestion – or whatever it is – has gone. Not that it can bring back my truffle trees …

*

Arcadio came up to help me harvest our first batch of honey. It seemed a miracle we could get any at all, what with having lost one colony already, and the general lack of rain limiting the amount of blossom available for the bees. But May was the traditional month for gathering honey.

He found me lime-rendering the walls of our bedroom: a sticky, tiring business, so I was happy to be distracted for a while working on something else. I had some lumps of cow dung left over from the last time, so we grabbed them, put on our gear, and headed down to the hives. I still wasn’t entirely convinced the smoking cow dung did very much to calm the bees down: they got pretty excited – and aggressive – no matter how much I blew on them. In fact, Arcadio just gave them a couple of puffs of the stuff and then got down to opening the hive up and hauling out the frames, all gummed up with wax. At least, I thought, we could give them a proper shot of it before antagonising them, so I picked up the smoker can and blasted away, but to no visible effect. Perhaps we could try burning something a bit stronger the next time …

Ibn al-Awam talked quite a bit about beekeeping, but I was disappointed to find he didn’t seem to have any tips on tranquillising
them
. Quite the reverse: he revelled in the story of how a whole army of Kurds was wiped out when the people of a town they were attacking – possibly Al-Qaria – set their bees on them. The Kurds ran away so quickly the defenders were able to raid their baggage train. Apart from that, it was interesting to note how, quoting Aristotle, he referred to the queen of a colony as a ‘king’.

‘Mestral blowing today,’ Arcadio said. ‘North-east wind. That’s good. They don’t like the Llevant coming in from the sea. Humidity puts them in a bad mood.’

We pulled out three or four of the frames, leaving the remaining ones so as not to deprive the bees too much of their own stocks. As long as I had this one colony we’d be all right, although I’d heard queen bees could be sent to you through the post. Arcadio turned up his nose when I mentioned it.

‘You’ll be fine. I’ll find you another colony if it comes to that.’ He sniffed. ‘Bees through the post …’

We carried the frames back up to the
era
to extract the honey. Arcadio had brought a big green metal tub in the back of the car – an extractor, where the frames were dropped and then spun round quickly inside like a merry-go-round, the centrifugal force pushing the honey out of the comb and down into the tub, from where it could be tapped off. He’d mentioned it before, but said that for the small quantities we were going to get it wasn’t worth lifting it out of the car.

‘Bring me a bowl, and some pieces of linen or material,’ he said.

We didn’t have any spare sheets, so I took him a piece of mosquito netting instead.

‘Will this do?’

‘Perfect,’ he said.

Kneeling down, he placed the netting over the bowl, fixing it in place with some stones lying around. Then, breaking handfuls of sticky honeycomb from off the frame, he started squeezing it, the honey oozing out between his fingers and down on top of the netting. This acted as a filter, clearer, purer honey then dripping down into the bowl below.

‘Your turn,’ he said.

Cautiously, I tried to copy him, grabbing pieces of the dark, strongly
smelling
wax from the frame, peeling it away from the wires that keyed it in, then pulping it between my hands, watching in fascination as a multi-coloured goo poured thickly down into the bowl. Apart from the light tones of the honey, there were dead bees, lumps of bright, orange pollen, and a whole host of other elements in there which I struggled to identify: royal jelly, perhaps? Propolis? What was that brown streaky stuff that seemed to be mixed in with it all?

After a few minutes, we finished, and an enormous great lump of squashed beeswax was sitting on top of the netting at the mouth of the bowl, the last drops of the honey slowly filtering down.

‘Leave it like that in a safe place overnight,’ Arcadio said. ‘By morning it’ll all be through. Got a fairly good amount there – almost a couple of kilos.’

A few bees had already found us and were buzzing around energetically as we walked over to the house to wash our hands. We should leave the tools and the frames outside, Arcadio said. The bees themselves would clean them up for us as they tried to recuperate tiny lost amounts of the food supplies we had so arrogantly stolen from them.

I poured him some wine and we sat down for a moment. The honey bowl was inside a cupboard where we hoped neither the bees – nor anything else – would be able to find it.

‘They want me to have an operation,’ Arcadio said with a funny smile. I had no idea there was anything wrong with him.

‘My eye,’ he said. ‘Got a cataract in my left eye.’

‘Can you see anything with it?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m totally blind on this side.’ And he raised a finger to his affected eye. It was so difficult even to see his eyes sometimes, with all the folds of skin, it was no wonder I hadn’t noticed anything wrong before.

‘And your right eye?’ I said.

‘Oh, that’s not too bad,’ he said. ‘Need that one for driving.’ He laughed. He knew the tracks round here as though they were an extension of himself, so he could probably drive round with no vision at all if need be. Up here in the mountains it still seemed perfectly reasonable for a half-blind eightysomething-year-old to be put-putting
around
in an ancient Land Rover. Perhaps the authorities simply didn’t know, but down in the city his licence would have been revoked before you could blink. Come to think of it, for a second I wondered if Arcadio even had a licence to revoke in the first place.

‘When’s the operation, then?’ I said.

‘Might be next week. Say they’re going to let me know,’ he said.

I could tell he was frightened.

‘I’ve heard it’s very quick and simple for removing cataracts,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you’ll be fine.’

His herbs had kept him going all these years. Unfortunately, I doubted there was a herbal cure for cataracts.

‘Don’t like doctors,’ he said. ‘Never been to one in my life.’

He stopped for a moment as I walked him back to his car. He looked out over the valley. It didn’t matter how much of it he could see, I thought. This landscape was so much a part of him.

‘My daughter wants me to move into the village with her,’ he said. ‘Says I’m getting too old to live in the
mas
.’

He put a finger into his right eye and rubbed it hard.

‘But there’s too much hustle and bustle in the town.’

The ‘town’ had barely a thousand people living in it.

‘I like the silence here.’

*

Salud came back from a walk with her pockets stuffed with
caracoles
– snails.

‘They’ve all come out with the rain,’ she said. ‘Hundreds of them.’

She tossed her catch into a bucket with some water in the bottom and put a lid on tightly.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Coming to get some more?’

We picked up a couple of baskets and headed out into the damp afternoon air. Snails with spiral stripes on their shells were easy to find – many were simply sliding slowly across the paths in front of us, while turning up leaves and poking around bushes produced dozens more.

‘Don’t pick them if they’re near ivy or cypress trees,’ Salud said. ‘Snails love them but it makes them poisonous for humans.’

I’d seen bigger ones, what locals sometimes referred to as
Moros
– Moorish snails. But these were large enough and would do for a couple
of
meals at least. I just hoped Salud remembered all the steps of the complicated process of preparing them for eating. Get it wrong, I seemed to remember, and you might regret it for some time. Some of the snails were eyeing me somewhat suspiciously as I popped them in the basket. What if they’d been tucking into some venomous toadstools just moments before? There was no way of telling.

Thankfully, Salud had done this dozens of times as a girl back home, so it came as second nature to go through the steps of cleaning them.

Firstly, we had to purge them on the inside. This was done by leaving them for about three days in the bucket with a plate of water, some flour and a few twigs of rosemary. On this forced diet, they eventually crapped out anything they might have eaten over the previous few days that could interfere with a human digestive system. Also, the rosemary imparted a subtle flavour when eventually you got round to eating them.

Once they had been purified in this way, you had to wash them on the outside. This involved rinsing them in water mixed with a bit of salt and vinegar. Not surprisingly, the snails didn’t take too kindly to this, and quickly vanished into their shells at the first whiff of the acidic, salty water. So that led to the next technique –
engañarles
– ‘tricking them’ to come out into the open again, so that when you ate them there was actually something sticking out of the shells to grab hold of. To do this we took a large pan of fresh water and placed them inside. The contrast to the vinegar solution of earlier made them pop their heads out again, not without some degree of relief. What they didn’t realise, though, is that the pan was on a low flame to heat the water. Just when they’d all come back to normal and were slithering all over each other, we turned the heat up to full, and they were very quickly boiled to death. After five minutes or so, the snails were now fully purged and edible and ready to be added to a dish.