Héctor embraced me enthusiastically at the entrance to my apartment. Iago was carrying a briefcase. I ushered them inside.
We sat around the coffee table in the living room, and I gave them the salvaged copy of Diago Vela’s chronicle.
“Here it is. The current Lord of Nograro is going to begin the necessary paperwork to donate it to you legally. But it’s finally yours again.”
Iago brushed the leather spine with his finger, forgetting to put on his glove in his eagerness to examine the book.
“It’s been so long…” he whispered.
“Our family has had to wait many years for this moment,” said Héctor. “We can’t thank you enough for all that you’ve done, Unai. Iago has something for you, too—a letter. We’d like to show you what’s in it.”
Iago pulled out a plastic sleeve with an old parchment inside. It looked like he had brought it back with him after a trip through time.
“The day Deba was abducted, you asked me about Yennego. I didn’t want to trouble you during this hard time, but I’ve brought something for you to see today.”
“What is it?”
“A letter from Onneca de Maestu addressed to Diago Vela just before she died in 1202, not long after the siege ended. She had the white plague, what we now call tuberculosis. She sent him this, knowing she was dying.”
Iago handed me the document. I waited for him to read it aloud. He recited it from memory:
“My beloved Diago,
“Yennego fell into the moat. I found him drowned, but I feared you would not believe me, after I behaved so deplorably upon learning that Alix de Salcedo was with child a second time. His remains rest in my father’s tomb. You will find two bodies there. This tragedy was followed closely by the siege. I never even found the courage to tell my husband, Nagorno, who adored the boy. I was not a good aunt to him; I was never affectionate. I saw in Yennego the son who was denied to me, the son you and I should rightly have had. And yet, all that matters to me now is your soul, for mine is already departing my body. I have no wish to leave with this burden. You must grieve for him at my father’s graveside.
“This letter is a part of the Vela family’s private correspondence and has remained in the family’s possession over the centuries. It postdates Count Don Vela’s chronicle, which explains why he makes no reference to it. And why we never learn what becomes of Yennego in the novel The Lords of Time.”
“So, Yennego died in an accident,” I murmured. “If only Onneca had revealed what she knew, she could have spared a great deal of suffering.”
Iago nodded silently as he carefully put the parchment away.
“There’s something else we want to share with you,” he said. “Let’s go out for a stroll around the Old Quarter. I haven’t walked these streets after a snowfall in ages.”
I looked at my phone for the time.
“All right. But Grandfather has taken Deba to play at the Jardín de Etxanobe, and I have to pick them up soon.”
“We’d love to say hello to him. It’s good to know that old heart of his is still going strong,” said Iago.
The three of us headed toward the Plaza de Matxete.
“You told us the DNA tests prove that you’re related to Chancellor Pero López de Ayala. There are a couple of important details about your ancestor’s legacy that we feel you ought to know,” said Héctor. “The Nograros were one of the rival families during the feud between the Ayalas and the Callejas. But it’s a shame there’s nothing on these streets to show what the Ayalas did for Vitoria. Look, can you see that building over there?”
They had brought me to the top of the San Bartolomé steps.
“That was the South Gate, where people and goods arriving from Castile entered the town. You see that rough section of wall?” Héctor pointed to the entrance of Villa Suso palace. “Those stones are over a thousand years old. They are part of the first wall erected by Diago Vela’s ancestor, the first Count Don Vela. The Vela family always served as the town’s protectors. Back in the seventh century, they erected the Old Forge, beneath what is now the Old Cathedral. They lived in a long house called the chieftain’s dwelling. They also built the well, the cemetery, and the carved headstones that archaeologists have recently uncovered.”
Then the brothers asked me to turn around and look at one of the buildings, currently home to the city council’s social services department.
“That’s where the Ayala family built their palace in Vitoria, next to the earliest Gasteiz chapel, now the Chapel of Nuestra Señora de los Dolores inside Sant Viçente Church. That’s where the city’s charter was granted. They held meetings and carried out trials here, on hallowed ground. And if you look farther down, at the Arquillos del Juicio, you can see that the tradition was preserved, passed down to us in the form of a name.”
“You’re saying that we’re standing on hallowed ground?”
“This is the site of the first cemetery in the village of Gasteiz,” Héctor said, nodding. “The old Sant Viçente fortress had its own cemetery.”
“We want to tell you that the Velas and Chancellor Ayala belonged to the same branch of the family,” Iago said. “Back in the fourteenth century, Chancellor Ayala’s father, Fernán Pérez de Ayala, recorded his family genealogy in a book called El árbol de la Casa de Ayala. He stated: ‘My ancestor Don Vela made the town walls in Victoria, Álava.’ Contemporary historians never gave this much credence, as it was common for noble families to seek legendary status for their lineage at the time. Count Don Vela was already a legend, so it made sense that Ayala would claim kinship. Yet one detail didn’t match up: the date when the wall was built. Historians had always believed that Sancho the Sixth, Sancho the Wise, built the wall when he granted Victoria’s charter in 1181. It made perfect sense: he bestowed privileges on the townsfolk and then built the wall to defend them against the King of Castile.”
“But that’s not true?”
“Carbon dating has recently proved that these walls are at least a hundred years older than we had previously thought. They date from around 1080, during the reign of Alfonso the First, the Battler. But if that was the case, who was behind their construction? Archaeologists began to look at Fernán Pérez de Ayala’s book again. How did he know the walls were built a hundred years earlier? Maybe he was telling the truth after all.”
“But that doesn’t prove that the Ayalas were descendants of the Velas,” I said.
“No, and this is where we need you to promise confidentiality,” Iago said.
“You have my word. You know that.”
“In Lope García de Salazar’s Bienandanzas e fortunas, which he wrote at the end of the fifteenth century, he says, and I quote: ‘The said Count Don Vela, Lord of Ayala, who lived in the Basques and Latin speakers, died and is buried in the Cathedral of Santa María de Respaldiça.’ ”
“Why is that confidential?”
“It isn’t. There is documentation of Count Don Vela’s funeral, which confirms that the body buried at Santa María de Respaldiça was indeed his. As there were properties at stake, and Héctor and I want to keep the family estate intact, we were obliged to prove that our ancestor, Don Vela, was a direct descendant of the Ayala family branch in Quejana. So a few years ago we obtained permission from the bishop to take some DNA samples from the chancellor’s bones. The results confirmed that the two men were related and came from the same branch of the family, which enabled us to recover our family inheritance, retrieving lands and lost legacies. It was all done privately, and the newspapers never found out about it. We’d like it to stay that way.”
I gaped at them, as if I were seeing them for the first time.
“Then you also belong to a lost branch of the chancellor’s family,” I managed to say. “I just assumed that side of my family had died out and that the surname López de Ayala came from somewhere else. Th
at’s why I’m finding it hard to assimilate the result of that DNA test.”
“Yes, that’s the common assumption, and we hope it stays that way. We don’t want to attract people’s attention. And yes, our DNA matches the chancellor’s.”
“So that means we’re family?” I said, a slight catch in my voice.
“Apparently so,” Iago said with a smile. “Come on. Don’t you have to pick up your daughter and grandfather?”
We walked down Fray Zacarías Martínez, formerly Calle de las Tenderías, and found the two of them in the middle of a snowball fight.
Deba was wearing a little red beret Grandfather had given her to cover her cropped hair. He said it helped him see her more easily. He had stubbornly kept on bringing her to the park where Tasio had assaulted him before kidnapping her. Grandfather had instilled his philosophy in me and in Germán, and now he did so with Deba: we wouldn’t let bad things get the best of us and turn our setbacks into trauma.
“Santiago, how are you?” Iago asked, walking straight over to Grandfather.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?” Grandfather asked, wiping the snow off his beret.
“This is Iago del Castillo, Grandfather,” I said, introducing them. “He found you after the fox took Deba. He gave you CPR and called the ambulance. It’s thanks to him that you’re still alive. And this is his brother, Héctor del Castillo. And it turns out we’re family.”
Grandfather extended his enormous hand to both of them.
“What’s this about us being family?” he asked, bemused.
“Remember when I told you about the tests they ran on the DNA samples taken from Chancellor Ayala’s remains at Quejana? Well, Iago and Héctor ran the same tests and they’re related to him, too. We all come from the same branch of the family.”
“I knew it,” said Grandfather, scrutinizing Iago. “You have blue eyes just like my grandfather Santiago, who left Villaverde when my father was ten.”
“It was a different time, I imagine. I’m so glad your father thrived, and that you lived to see your grandchildren and your great-granddaughter grow up.”
“As am I. And that we’re family,” Grandfather replied. “You know you always have a home in Villaverde.”
“Unai, there’s something we’d like to show all three of you. It’s an old family tradition,” said Iago.
“Of course. Where are you taking us now?”
“To the Old Cathedral’s bell tower.”
“What?”
“As researchers, we’re allowed to access it. And we’ve worked with the director of the Santa María Cathedral Foundation in the past,” Héctor added with a mischievous grin, dangling a bunch of keys in front of us. “Santiago, are you all right to walk up to the tower?”
“With the little one on my shoulders if I have to,” Grandfather replied valiantly.
Soon afterward, the five of us stood behind the guardrail on the Santa María bell tower contemplating the snow-covered rooftops of the white city.
“Magnificent, isn’t it?” murmured Iago.
Even Deba was speechless for a moment. Grandfather broke the silence.
“Look, lad, Grandma’s Sun!” he declared, pointing at some scored lines on one of the stones next to the bell. “Somebody drew one here, too.”
“That’s what we wanted you to show you. Grandma’s Sun, or Grandma’s Flower, is really an eguzkilore, a sunflower,” Iago explained. “Our family has always drawn the symbol to protect the places we’ve lived. Grandmother Lucía drew this one. She is Alix de Salcedo’s great-grandmother in Count Don Vela’s chronicle, and the matriarch of our branch of the Vela and then the Ayala family. The eguzkilore has been passed down through the generations as a reminder.”
And it came to me.
“Do you think I could have inherited this sense of duty? Does protecting the old town run in my veins?” I asked.
“I don’t know, maybe it has more to do with the way your grandfather brought you up. But maybe he inherited it and passed it on to you. Didn’t you say your daughter wanted to open a hospital? Oddly enough, the chancellor’s daughter-in-law founded what later became Santiago hospital.”
“Did you hear that, Deba? You’re the last of the López Ayalas. And if you have children, you must bring them here to show them the drawing of the eguzkilore. That way we’ll all be safe.”
“I like the hospital better,” Deba replied with her delightful self-assurance. “I wanna save lots of lives.”
“Let’s go downstairs. We have one more family secret to share with you,” Iago said.
I suppressed a shiver as we crossed the threshold of Villa Suso.
“Where are we going?”
“This way,” Iago indicated.
He guided us over to the glass lid that covered the remains of the immured lady of Villa Suso.
“This is the resting place of Alix de Salcedo. Diago Vela buried her here,” Iago whispered.
He knelt and placed his hand on the glass that separated them, as though speaking to her.
We all respected his silence, even Deba, who seemed to understand the gravity of the situation. She gripped my hand solemnly.
“Then this lass is our grandmother,” Grandfather observed pithily.
“That’s right, Granddad. She’s Alix de Salcedo; she and Diago had a child.”
“A daughter named Quejana,” said Iago.
“And we’re the descendants of those descendants,” I explained to Deba, filled with emotion.
Then I bowed before her, too, and said my prayer for the last time:
“This is where my hunt ends, Mother. And this is where my life begins, daughter.”
Acknowledgments
This novel forms the crossroads of my two literary universes: the White City Trilogy and the Ancient Family Saga.
As a writer, it has been one of my greatest pleasures to write about the common origin of both families and to reveal that Iago del Castillo; Diago Vela, Lür; and Héctor Dicastillo, Nagorno, Gunnarr, and Lyra are the direct ancestors of Unai Lopez de Ayala. After three decades of creating fiction and living with these characters, they are very dear to my heart and to my readers.
I am very thankful to the entire team at Planeta for their professionalism and good work throughout the editing and publication process of the novels in the White City Trilogy.
Thanks to Antonia Kerrigan, for her effective defense of my editorial interests.
To my readers, thank you for your patience in understanding that writing a five-hundred-page novel is an arduous task that requires several years of intense creative and intellectual work and research. I will always appreciate your common sense and generosity in waiting for my next work.
And finally, thank you to my children and to my husband for making our days the best place to live.
Selected Bibliography
This novel is the result of intensive research, which was very important to me. The following lists are the bulk of a collection of sources I have used to depict, in the most vivid way possible, a fascinating time period.
For the history of the city of Vitoria and medieval Álava:
Andrés, Salvador. Historia de una ciudad: Vitoria. Vol. I. El núcleo medieval. Vitoria, Spain: Bankoa, 1977.
Azkárate Garai-Olaun, Agustín and José Luis Solaun Bustinza. Arqueología e Historia de una ciudad. Los orígenes de Vitoria-Gasteiz (I). Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2013.
———. Arqueología e Historia de una ciudad. Los orígenes de Vitoria-Gasteiz (II). Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2014.
Bazán, Iñaki. De Túbal a Aitor. Historia de Vasconia. Madrid: La Esfera de los Libros, 2002.
Díaz de Durana, José Ramón. Álava en la Baja Edad Media: Crisis, recuperación y transformaciones socioeconómicas (c.1250–1525). Vitoria-Gasteiz: Diputación
Foral de Álava, 1986.
———. Vitoria a fines de la Edad Media. Vitoria-Gasteiz: Diputación Foral de Álava, 1984.
Elizari Huarte, Juan Francisco. Sancho VI el Sabio: Reyes de Navarra. Navarra: Editorial Mintzoa, 2003.
García Fernández, Ernesto. Bilbao, Vitoria y San Sebastiá. Espacios para mercaderes, clérigos y gobernantes en el Medievo y la Modernidad. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 2005.
———. Gobernar la ciudad en la Edad Media. Oligarquías y élites urbanas en el País Vasco. Navarra: Diputación Foral de Álava, 2004.
González Mínguez, César and María del Carmen de la Hoz Díaz de Alda. La infraestructura viaria bajomedieval en Álava. Bilbao: Universidad del País Vasco, 1992.
González de Viñaspre, Roberto and Ricardo Garay Osma. Viaje a Íbita. Estudios históricos del Condado de Treviño. Self-published. Ayuntamiento del Condado de Treviño, 2012.
Imízcoz, Josemari and Paloma Manzanos. Historia de Vitoria. San Sebastián: Editorial Txertoa, 1997.
Inclán Gil, Eduardo. Breve Historia de Álava y sus instituciones. Bilbao: Fundación Popular de Estudios Vascos, 2012.
Lasagabaster, Juan Ignacio. La catedral de Santa María de Vitoria: Primer Congreso europeo sobre restauración de catedrales góticas. Vitoria-Gasteiz: Diputación Foral de Álava, 2011.
Llanos Ortiz de Lándaluce, Armando. Álava en sus manos. Vitoria-Gasteiz: Caja Provincial de Álava, 1983.
Martínez Torres, Luis Miguel. La ruta de la piedra: Camino medieval desde las canteras antiguas de Ajarte hasta la Catedral Vieja de Santa María en Vitoria-Gasteiz. Leioa: Universidad del País Vasco, 2010.
Rivera, Antonio. Historia de Álava. San Sebastián: Editorial Nerea, 2003.
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