Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  Time passed, though, and Cristòfol was sent away by the master of his order to carry important messages to foreign lands. He would be away for many months, perhaps years.

  The two lovers met for a last time at midnight by the spring, barely able to contain their grief. Cristòfol swore that he would never forget her, and would remain faithful throughout his absence.

  ‘Will you promise to wait for me?’ he asked Oras.

  ‘I promise,’ she said. ‘But you need no oaths from me. Let the water of this spring bear witness to my love. May it speak the truth if I lie.’

  And so the lovers were parted, and Cristòfol was sent abroad. Years passed, and he was away for far longer than he had expected. But eventually, after many adventures, he found himself once more riding through the Maestrat, past rocky lime-stone cliffs, the scent of crushed thyme underfoot as his horse headed its way up to the little town of Benassal, home of his beloved Oras.

  Before telling anyone he had returned, he made his way straight to the little spring he had dreamed of so often while he had been away. There was no one there, but as he dismounted from his horse and bent down to drink from the cool, fresh water, thoughts of the beautiful Moorish girl filling his mind, he caught an image on the surface of the pool. And to his horror, he saw Oras held in the embrace of another man. She had broken her promise, and the water of the spring, bound by the girl’s oath, spoke the truth of what had happened.

  Unable to contain his sorrow, Cristòfol took out his dagger and stabbed himself in the heart, his body falling like a stone. There he was found motionless by the locals, and soon the Templar master was informed.

  When he heard the story of Cristòfol and his love for Oras, the master commanded that a hermitage be built near the site of the spring where the two lovers had met. And there it stands to this day, on top of Mount Montcàtil, a monument to St Christopher and to the poor Templar knight whose heart was broken by the Moorish girl.

  Others insist that Oras did remain true to her beloved knight, but that after years of refusal was finally forced by her father to marry another man. Yet her love for Cristòfol never diminished, and she waited patiently for him, visiting the spring every day to look for him. On the day of Cristòfol’s return, she was delayed by a messenger appearing at her door; when she finally went down to the spring she found her dear knight already dead from grief, the treacherous image of her in her husband’s arms still shimmering on the surface of the water. Consumed by grief, she threw herself into the pool and was lost in the depths, joining him in death that she might finally be reunited with her beloved Cristòfol.

  FEBRUARY

  Februarius in the Latin tongue is called Shabat in Syriac and Esfandmah in Persian. It is made up of twenty-eight and a quarter days. This is the month when the cold begins to grow weaker and the warmth begins to rise in the ground. Wells, springs and rivers are filled once more with water and the humours begin to flow up the trunks of trees.

  Now the bees begin to hatch in their hives and, according to Abu al-Khayr, trees begin to develop their greenery and vines sprout new leaves.

  Now is the time for planting roses, lilies and aromatic plants. It is also a good time for planting trees, which will flourish.

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

  THE ALMONDS ARE starting to blossom – almost half the trees are now in flower, despite the late arrival of winter. After a very hot January, some more snow has arrived, although mostly higher up and north of Penyagolosa. So the peaks above the house are covered in a powdering of white, while just a couple of hundred metres below the almond blossom gives almost the same effect, as though the one were mirroring the other. It is the most beautiful time of the year, the bright white and pink – soon to emerge from the remaining trees – bringing early life to the land. The winds and then – hopefully – the rains will come before long. But for the time being we walk around the fields, revelling in the low sunshine catching the petals as they burst from the trees.

  *

  It had been a while since I’d been down to check on the beehives. Tucked away in a corner behind an olive tree, and with so much else going on, it was easy to forget they were even there sometimes.

  Besides, I wasn’t quite sure what – if anything – I was supposed to be doing with them. Arcadio had mentioned that May was the time for harvesting, and then again in August if there was any rain during the summer. But this was becoming rarer and rarer. In the meantime they got on with whatever bees did, and we just had to wait.

  After our bad start together, the bees seemed to have settled down in their new home. There were plenty of rock roses near the hives for nectar, while just a buzz away they had an endless supply of rosemary, thyme and almond blossom, not to mention the gorse, a few apple and peach trees and a host of other wild flowers peppering the hillside. They hadn’t stung me again since the first time, which was a relief, and I’d pop down every now and then to crouch at the front of their hives, watching and listening to them for a while. It was a relaxing pastime, once my fears about being stung had been overcome. I listened to the gentle sound of their flying, a small congregation of them gathered around the entrance, some of them beating their wings to ventilate the inside, others waiting for workers coming back from the fields with news. Every few seconds or so one would dive in, his back legs swollen with bright orange pollen, perhaps approaching the other hive before realising his mistake and diverting off to the one next door: his own. Entranced by the whole thing, I felt I could stay there for hours. And it was as if I could almost begin to detect the mood of the hive by the tone and pitch of their buzzing: a low, continuous drone meant everything was all right; a higher note, more manic sounding, meant they were busy and excited about something, perhaps a new discovery of food; if this went a little bit higher, though, with occasional peaks, it was usually time to back off – they were probably getting angry about something, and it didn’t do to be around them.

  They seemed quiet that day. Approaching from the back, apart from one, maybe two bees flying around it was all very still. It was late afternoon: they tended to be busier in the morning. But in front I noticed that while there was a small group of bees at the entrance to one of the colonies, the other was completely empty. It had never been like this before, and it struck me as strange. I waited for a while, but still no bees appeared. My protective gear was back at the house, nor did I have a smoker and some dried cowshit to hand to calm them, but, my curiosity piqued, I decided to investigate nonetheless. I prised off the lid, stuck with honey and wax to the rest of the box. Still no bees. If I’d done this in any other circumstances I would already have had half a dozen guard bees on my case escorting me from the premises. Instead there was silence and emptiness. I placed the lid on the floor and went to prise away one of the frames. It was bare, dead: nothing. Something writhing at the base of the hive caught my eye, though. Pulling out a couple more frames, I saw a group of worms and grubs pulsating and twisting around one another, piles of larvae already growing up in the corners and at the sides. It was enough to stop myself retching. No bees, though: not one. Not even dead ones. Like the crew of the Mary Celeste, they’d simply vanished.

  Arcadio was philosophical when I told him.

  ‘Happening more and more,’ he said. ‘Lost sixteen hives myself this year. Only got five left.’

  Reports of bees disappearing without trace were becoming common in the news. ‘Colony collapse disorder’ seemed to be a growing problem around the world, and a complete mystery. Of course I’d assumed it would never happen to us: up in the mountains, with fresh, unpolluted air and no mass farming methods for miles, what could possibly affect my bees? Perhaps the theories about pesticides being the cause weren’t quite on the mark.

  ‘They say it’s the mobile phone masts,’ Arcadio said. ‘Disorients the bees. Makes them lose their way.’

  We had mobile coverage – just – up at the farm, and it was an attractive theory – blame
it all on modern technology – but I’d recently seen an article ruling the idea out. Besides, were the signals up here really strong enough to cause something like this? Researchers could say what it wasn’t, but they still didn’t know what it was.

  Perhaps, I wondered, there might be some kind of herbal remedy for the problem, but Arcadio just shrugged. This was a new phenomenon. The plants were good for traditional ailments, not modern mysteries.

  I looked around at our unspoilt, untainted countryside. What on earth could be affecting the bees up here? It just didn’t seem to make sense. But there was something disturbing about it: echoes of a world in disorder, falling apart. Man had been working with bees in this part of the world for thousands of years: the oldest known representations of beekeepers were painted on the walls of a cave in a sierra just a few miles to the south. But now the bees were vanishing – and no one knew why. It was a chilling thought. With no bees to pollinate plants, it was often said life on the planet itself wouldn’t have long to go.

  ‘We’ll split your remaining hive,’ Arcadio said. ‘And try to get you two colonies again. Then again the following year, so you have four.’

  ‘What happens if the other colony disappears in the meantime?’ I said.

  He shook his head. There was no answer.

  *

  Cooking with truffles. The main difficulty here is that truffles have a relatively short season and are extraordinarily expensive, so you don’t have much time or, usually, that much material for culinary experimentation. In addition, there is a lot of mythology about truffles to be taken on board and either absorbed or discarded before you can properly appreciate them. Often this comes in a kind of ‘click’ moment, when everything you’ve heard or read about them suddenly makes sense. It’s not easy to describe; only personal experience will really do. It came for Salud one mid-week lunchtime when I presented her with a plate of truffle scrambled eggs. Until that moment she hadn’t really got truffles, and regarded my enthusiasm for these black, smelly tubers with some bewilderment. On previous days (we were taking advantage of suddenly finding ourselves in possession of one medium-sized truffle and two much smaller ones – a gift from the Truffle King) I had presented her with plates of truffle salad, truffle pasta and roast meat in truffle sauce, all of which, sadly, failed to provoke any excitement in her. For this dish, however, I had left a small truffle inside a jar with half a dozen eggs for a day or two on the understanding that the flavour would be absorbed through the shell and into the eggs themselves. Following a French recipe, I scrambled these trufflised creatures in a heavy pan with a generous amount of fresh butter, adding a few shavings of the precious truffle itself to the foaming liquid seconds before pouring in the loosely beaten eggs. The smell drifting up from the pan was mouth-watering, but I had grown used to disappointments in trying to convert that smell into flavour. So I wasn’t holding out too much hope this time.

  The look on Salud’s face when she placed the first forkful into her mouth, however, told me that my efforts had not been in vain. She smiled, raised her eyebrows and looked at me in astonishment.

  ‘¡Qué rico!’

  Her ‘click’ moment had come.

  Something – perhaps it was the butter, perhaps the eggs – had proved to be the perfect vehicle for the complex range of flavours that come in a truffle. Hints of apple and asparagus were there alongside the more usual mushroom and earthy tasting notes, while the thick yellow of the eggs perfectly framed each tiny morsel of black truffle at the bottom of our plates. Not a scrap was left, piece after piece of fresh bread broken off to wipe up all residual flavour. And we immediately placed another half a dozen eggs in the jar with the truffle and sealed it for lunch the next day.

  Another preparation that has had some success is truffle oil, where you simply place whole truffles, or pieces of the stuff, in a bottle with some oil in it and let it stand for a week or so for the flavour to absorb. One thing, though: the olive oil shouldn’t have too strong a flavour. I made the mistake of using unfiltered cold-pressed extra virgin oil – from our first batch of olives from the farm – for the first experiments making truffle oil. Something lighter would have worked better, and have allowed the flavour of the truffles to have come through more strongly.

  Elisabeth Luard’s book Truffles is the best I’ve found on all of this in English.

  *

  I’ve just come back from the truffle-tree plantation and I can still hardly believe what’s happened up there. At least half of the saplings – more than a hundred trees – have been ripped from the ground. It’s almost certainly the wild boar. I expected they might be a problem in around ten years from now, when the first truffles are supposed to appear, but from telltale hoof prints nearby it seems they’re already scouring the area. The large stones I placed around the base of each tree – and which I thought would offer some protection – have simply been tossed aside. I can’t think there’s anything ‘truffly’ to attract them about the saplings – they’re far too young. They must just be looking for roots and acorns. The ground is churned up in that area from working the land in preparation for planting. It’s easy pickings for them.

  It’s too late to replace the missing trees – that will have to wait till next year. Half a winter’s work gone overnight. The best I can hope for is to save the ones remaining. There are whole terraces up there with only one sapling left. The rest have just been wiped out. Bring on the hunters. Let them kill all the bastards.

  *

  The photograph showed a valley that seemed familiar: poplars lining the banks of a river, green pastures, a little hermitage tucked in at one side. But it had changed: in the middle of the picture stood a great big electricity station, cables and pylons flashing in and out of it like a broken spider’s web. They had come and built, as they said they would, and now the valley where El Clossa had found the sauropod bones had been ruined: a corner of wild, unspoilt and ancient countryside was lost.

  ‘They got the bones out just in time,’ El Clossa said. ‘They’re down in Castellón museum.’

  I handed him back the photograph.

  ‘No water this winter,’ he said as we set off on our walk along the dirt track that ran along the side of the riverbed. ‘This should be full at this time of year.’ He nodded down at the dry, moulded rock, empty pools laid bare like cupped hands pleading to receive nourishment and refreshment. ‘If it doesn’t rain …’

  He hobbled on. The butt of his crutches made their familiar TOK, TOK sound as he propelled himself forward with each step in a complex, whole-body motion, powerful hands pushing against the well-worn handles. The veins stood out against his thickened wrists, a delicate gold chain nestling in the dark hairs of one of his forearms.

  There was little more than twilight down at the bottom of the valley: the low, late winter sun couldn’t penetrate down here, and we walked in heavy shade while catching odd glimpses above of a crystal-blue sky filtering through the pine trees. The only colour came from the pink sand of the track beneath our feet, while the green of the oleander bushes lining the banks of the riverbed contrasted with the sharp white rocks of the mountains rising up on either side. Every so often I caught sight of yellow gorse blooms pushing through, but the landscape felt as if it were on hold down here, waiting patiently, desperately, for the rains to come and restore things to their natural state; to flood the hillsides and send gushing torrents of clear, healing, life-giving water down this parched channel, scratched, like a wound, into the flesh of the earth.

  I had only ever driven up this part of the track – just beyond the turning up to our mountain. After a few miles it ended at a small quarry where a man in a truck came once a day to dig out some chunks of low-grade marble for use in road building. I’d been to have a look once, out of curiosity, but had found little of interest and so had never returned: the village lay in the other direction and this was a dead end; there was nothing else up here. Or so I had thought until El Clossa had informed me otherwise. There wa
s much, he’d said, to be discovered. And so we’d fixed a date to spend the day walking around the area. At least, I walked; what El Clossa did was closer to flying.

  El Clossa had insisted on an early start: there was still little daylight at this time of year and we would need every hour available to complete the route he had in mind. After meeting him down at the chain at the bottom of our road, he’d set off as usual like a rocket: the able-bodied just had to keep up: there was no time for loafing about.

  Crossing the riverbed for a second time as it curled around the track, I wondered aloud about fossils in this area. I’d come across strange forms and shapes in the rocks I used for building dry-stone walls and during the restoration of the house, things that seemed to hint at ancient life, now petrified, buried inside them, but never anything a layman such as myself could identify as a ‘fossil’.

  ‘There are some marine animals around,’ he said, ‘but not a huge number in this particular valley. Some a bit further up, closer to the peak of Penyagolosa.’

  I bent down quickly to pick up a stone at the side of the track that caught my eye – deep red lines running through pale white. It felt good in my hand as I turned it over, rubbing my thumb over the contours, warm and pleasing. Today it lay at the foot of pine trees and gorse bushes, but what else had this rock seen through the millions of years of its life?

  ‘This area is Cretaceous,’ El Clossa said. ‘As most of the province is, except for the south, which is mostly Jurassic and Triassic. There’s some Jurassic rock not far from here, but the Penyagolosa massif – what we’re at the edge of and just about to climb – is Cretaceous.’

  I tried to remember something from my primary school classes about the dinosaurs, and anything else I’d picked up on the subject since. We were in the Mesozoic era, I seemed to remember, made up of the Triassic, then the Jurassic and finally the Cretaceous periods. But when exactly had all this been?

  ‘About a hundred million years ago,’ El Clossa said. ‘Roughly. Give or take thirty or forty million years. That’s when all these rocks around us would have been formed.’