Sacred Sierra

by Jason Webster

  Passa, passa, bon germá

  Passa, passa i no m’anomenes

  per la flor del lliri blau

  m’han mort en riu d’arenes.

  Carry on, my good brother

  But do not mention my name

  For the sake of the iris flower

  My death in this sandbank is to blame.

  The eldest prince was filled with fear when he heard this, but the King ordered him to ride over the same spot, and as soon as his horse stepped over where the young prince was buried, the flute’s song changed again.

  Passa, passa, mal germá

  passa, passa, i no m’anomes

  per la flor del lliri blau

  m’has mort en riu d’arenes.

  Carry on, oh evil brother,

  But do not mention my name.

  For the sake of the iris flower

  My death in this sandbank you are to blame.

  So the King ordered that the young prince be dug up from out of the sandbank, and, miraculously, he was still alive. But he was missing a finger, for that was the reed that the shepherd had picked and turned into a flute.

  So the young prince told the King everything that had happened, and the King named him heir to the throne. The second brother was pardoned, but the eldest was sent into exile and was never seen again.

  *

  I went down to the village to collect the mail.

  ‘Bad news about Concha.’ Jordi the postman was scurrying around his office, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose as he sorted out that morning’s deliveries, but he still had time for gossip, and greeted me with a clenched fist.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘They’ll try and get rid of her, I reckon,’ he said.

  ‘I thought her job was for life.’

  ‘Yeah, but …’

  He made a face, then jerked his head to the side in the direction of the mayor’s office. The powers that be, he seemed to suggest, were going to get the knives out.

  ‘Surely you’d do something about it,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t just stand by and watch while they did that. What about all this talk of activism and workers’ rights?’

  He looked shocked at the very thought.

  ‘We’re not going to start a bloody revolution over one lost job!’ he said. He muttered under his breath as he searched through the letters addressed to us, wrapped them up with an elastic band and then handed them over with a grimace. In the tiny world of the village and surrounding area, Jordi was a useful person to know: it didn’t do to start making enemies.

  ‘Concha’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘She’s a fighter. Known her a long time. She’ll get back on her feet. Sink close to the bottom first. But she’ll be fine in a few months, trying to take over the world, as usual.’

  He smiled and I walked out.

  By the fountain in the square I flicked through the official looking envelopes, but something squeezed in the middle of them caught my eye: a postcard from a relative in England. I lifted it out and found myself staring at an image I hadn’t seen for a long time. I flicked it over: it was a brief message, just a greeting from someone living up in Lancashire, where my family originated. But it was the photograph on the front that most caught my imagination: a simple shape of a long, green hill, unmistakeable and wholly evocative to anyone who has ever known it. I stood still, gazing at it, lost for a few moments, then went to look for a place to sit in the bar across the square. I needed to savour the memories suddenly filling my brain.

  *

  Pendle Hill was just a few feet short of officially being a mountain, but it rose large above the undulating green-grey landscape: a focal point, a reference, a place to glance up to from the cobbled streets and rows of matchbox houses of the towns that sat at its feet. For years the grime and the smog had blotted it out of sight completely, factories and mills coughing out dense black coal smoke, but it stayed fixed in the collective imagination, like a memory of a blissful childhood. Pendle, where they had all come from, and where they all wished to return.

  Physically, it was an unremarkable hill, for all the importance people gave it – a long, gently rising slope running east to west that eventually came to a stop and fell down more steeply just in time to prevent it from crossing into Yorkshire. It looked something like a giant, sleeping creature. There were no trees covering its sides, no sharp edges, or cliff-faces. From a distance it seemed complete, smooth and had a gentleness about it that was reflected in the eyes of local people whenever they mentioned its name. Pendle was more than just a hill.

  Anywhere else it might have gone unnoticed altogether, and might not even have had a name – just another ridge overshadowed by taller, more magnificent presences towering over it and jostling for our attention. Yet here, amid the low slopes and rust-coloured riverbeds, it stood in full view, a temple to a different world.

  There was magic in the land around there – a magic you could sense very strongly, as though you might touch it, or see it, or feel it with your fingertips. It ran in the ground itself, like a current, charging the rocks and trees with a spark and energy that set the place apart. Down south, where we lived, because of my father’s work, an activity like hanging a rope from a branch to make a swing was all about finding a tree strong enough and securing the knots properly. Here, where we came to visit my grandmother, you felt the trees were living beings: choose the wrong one – perhaps one that was known for its ill temper or for not liking children – and the consequences could be severe. I knew all this without being told – the land was alive, vital, different, and to be respected.

  The local topography gave clues to this: a group of trees in the middle of a field on the other side of the village was known as the Seven Sisters, while the Nine Brothers sat below them just a few yards away. Bee, as we called my grandmother, puffing away on her Embassy No. 1 cigarettes, always said there were fairies living there. I went as often as I could, hoping to see one. Then, when the sun came out – a rare event in the wettest part of the country – she would hurry us all out of the door to go for a walk down to the Sandbanks – a secluded spot in the fields below the village where a brook flattened out as it passed through some trees, a brief stretch of sandy shore – the nearest equivalent we had to a beach during our inland summer holidays. We always had to be careful on our way down as we approached the low wooden bridge across the stream: a troll lived underneath and he would get very angry if we woke him up: we always had to make sure Grandma was with us when we crossed over, otherwise he might come out and gobble us up. And then there was the fairy wall – a long stretch of dry-stone wall made up of the local dark slate, permanently damp and covered in ivies and lichens. But here, Bee never failed to tell us, if we left a coin in one of the cracks on our way down, and then were able to find it again on our way back up, the fairies would have imbued it with magic, and it would bring us good luck. And she would open her purse and hand out penny and twopenny pieces that we held excitedly in the palms of our hands, each of us running off to find our own secret hiding place for the fairies to find it. Needless to say, an hour or two later, tired from playing down at the Sandbanks, with aching legs and moaning that it was too far to walk back home, we never found our coins again, no matter how hard we tried to remember the exact spot we’d left them in.

  ‘The fairies have them now,’ Bee would say. It was compensation, of a sort.

  The fairies and trolls were only part of the story, however. More important for Pendle and the villages and towns surrounding it were the local witches. It was said that at certain times of year, around spring, when people would perform a pilgrimage of sorts on Good Friday to the top of the hill, you could see the form of a witch on the side of Pendle, the diagonal path leading up to the summit marking her broomstick, while the heather in bloom marked the shape of her peaked hat. For years I looked and looked, trying to see the figure supposedly there – a testament of nature to the long history of witches in the area – but without success. Until one day
, long after Bee had died, as I was driving along the lanes past the village, I finally saw her there, flying up into the leaden sky. Bee was no witch, but she came from a place where witches formed part of the landscape.

  My memories of her were less clear than I would have liked: she died before my ninth birthday, but she was a huge presence – large not just physically, but in spirit. I remembered her with reddish hair, burst capillaries around her cheekbones. She smiled a lot, and her thick rubbery skin would be squeezed upwards towards her eyes as she gave deep belly laughs. She seemed to be busy and active most of the time, wringing clothes dry with a mangle in the living room, chopping potatoes for dinner, feeding Boyo, the cat, with yesterday’s leftovers, searching frantically for a match or cigarette lighter, bending down stiffly to embrace and kiss us, her beloved grandchildren, unaware, as we scampered around the tiny space of her council house, that we would have her for so short a time. Whenever there was a pause or lull, in a flash she would ease her enormous behind on to a stool by the piano and start bashing out traditional songs and music-hall numbers, singing as loudly and gaily as she could to drown out the occasional dud note struck on the keyboard by her thick working fingers. A heavy knock would come on the wall from the neighbours, jealous that so much fun was being had next door, but the songs would carry on regardless, children, adults, the whole family joining in.

  ‘Stick it up your jumper,’ Bee would cry out at the complaining one-eyed Methodist on the other side of the wall, before crashing away on another number.

  ‘Dance, dance, wherever you may be …’

  A scream, the music would stop, and she’d rush into the kitchen, where the chips – long since forgotten – had either burned or caught fire.

  ‘Right,’ she’d say once the crisis had been dealt with, walking back into the living room wiping her hands on her apron, ‘Cuppa tea?’ It would be salad and bread again for dinner.

  Illness struck her lungs and her legs, and in a short time she became less mobile. But unable to bustle around as she once had, she would sit with us and tell stories, placing us on her knee, or else sitting in deckchairs on the tiny patch of communal lawn outside the front door. Atlantic winds soon brought an end to our attempts at sunbathing, but there was always time for some little anecdote or tale. And the Witches of Pendle was one of our favourites.

  They had lived, she said, in the next village along, beyond the mill where she used to work – a group of old women with black cats curled under their feet, long noses with warts on the end and big black hats with brims as wide as tables. And they would fly about the midnight sky on broomsticks, causing trouble and mischief wherever they went. But if they liked you, and you paid them in gold, they might help you with one of their magical spells, or a powerful potion, made from frogs’ legs, bats’ wings and secret herbs and flowers that only the witches knew where to find. Some said they were in league with the fairies, others that they could only marry trolls, but they were special people, to be respected, and sometimes feared.

  There had been more of them in the past, she said. Now there were hardly any left. Perhaps none at all. Many years ago, men like the one next door who banged on the walls with his walking stick had come and taken them all away and hanged them in a public square in the city, where their magic, which came from the earth of the countryside, could not help them.

  ‘It was Pendle, you see, the hill which gave it to them. Take them away from Pendle and they couldn’t do anything.’

  Sometimes she’d wonder aloud if the old woman who was known to live in a cottage beyond the woods was a witch. If so, she was the last one left. She had a black cat, that was sure, and someone said they’d seen jars on her shelves filled with all kinds of strange and wonderful things – perhaps potions and their ingredients. But it was probably just talk. You shouldn’t pay too much notice. And no, we couldn’t go and visit her.

  It seemed the whole village came to the funeral when Bee died – everyone except the one-eyed Methodist from next door. I remember stepping out from a car that pulled up outside the churchyard, standing nervously under the roofed gateway to shelter from the rain amid an ocean of umbrellas and tears. I tried very hard to cry – my sister and cousins were inconsolable – but I felt dry inside: it was all too strange, too weird: life was still just starting; how could I begin to understand it was something that could stop? They cremated her, and buried her ashes in a small hole in the ground that bore no relation to the huge woman she had been. It wasn’t Bee, in fact I knew it had nothing to do with her, with the spirit of the person who had been such a force of both natural and supernatural worlds, and who had marked us all in one way or another, seeming to touch us with an earthy, earthing vitality. Inside the church they sang her favourite song:

  I’ll live in you

  If you’ll live in me

  For I am the Lord

  Of the Dance …

  Then we stepped outside and drove away again, far away from the rain and the songs and the stories. And Pendle Hill, its presence and deep rumbling energy, seemed to disappear from view, a shifting, weakening memory of another world – a slower, quieter, rougher-edged place to be that seemed ever more difficult to cling on to.

  It was time to get back to the farm. I finished the drink, paid and walked out back into the intense light of the square. The same people, the same cars, the same smells and sights as before.

  Everything had changed.

  *

  Real rain started falling, flooding the sky and the land beneath it. Down in the valley below, the first pools formed in the hollows of the dry riverbed, then slowly began to fill up, trickle out, join one another and link to form a tiny brook, then a stream, and finally a full torrent of water, gushing down through the rock and over the oleander bushes, past pine trees and poplars as it raced down to the sea: a river at last. Up at the house we looked out at a granite world, the clouds heavy above us and so close it seemed we could reach out and touch them as they smoked past and then sank down into the gorge. In between running around with buckets and pans as we discovered first one, then another, and another leak in our still-young roof, I watched as the land soaked the water in, darkening and softening as the hours and days passed. It was good rain: steady, not too heavy, persistent. A sudden downpour would scarcely register, skating over the surface, causing flash floods and quickly being lost down on the coast. This was exactly what we needed: hour after hour of simple pluja – rain.

  There was little to do but watch and wait. We carried on with life as best we could, marvelling first at the sheer quantity that was finally falling; we laughed at the leaks: at least we knew now where they were. I thought about my trees and saplings drinking deep and long: this would keep them going for a good while into the summer. When this stopped we could expect no more – bar the odd exceptional summer storm – till late September or October. Two days passed, then a third. Still the rain fell. I lost count of how many buckets and pans of water we had to throw out before replacing them for the drips. We began to run out of dry firewood, the nights still chilly up on the mountain, especially now. The little power we had from the solar panels began to go, too: there was no sun to recharge the batteries. We started eating dinner by candlelight, going to bed early to stay warm and save on electricity. There was food enough to keep us going, and a wind-up radio and mobile phones to keep in touch with the world outside, but a growing danger of being cut off began to prey on our minds: the road to the village ran along the riverbed: if it burst its banks there would be no way for us to get out.

  And yet still the water seemed to enchant us, coming after such a long time without it; it was as if we ourselves were soaking up something of its life and energy along with the soil and rock. The house was made of porous sandstone, and although the walls were almost a metre thick, I was curious rather than concerned to see whether the water would eventually soak through to the inside. In the older part of the house they were held together with nothing more than mud: heavy rain could da
mage the very fabric of the building. But even still I felt wonderment more than worry.

  By the fourth day the rain seemed to ease a little, but still it fell: less persistent, but a drizzle kept the process of rehydration continuing between the heavier bursts. We started contemplating a temporary evacuation, but decided to see how things were in the morning.

  We awoke to birdsong, and the streaming light of dawn breaking through the window. I got up and looked out: everywhere there was water, pools and puddles of it shining up like mirrors from the garden, the patio. The drip, drip of the leaks that had kept us company through the nights had stopped. We walked down to the kitchen and opened up the doors and windows on to the new wet world. Beyond the patio the bees were already buzzing merrily away from flower to flower while beads of light shone from every leaf of every bush and tree. I put on some boots and went out to explore, happy to feel the sun on my face after so many days trapped inside. The sky was clear and blue, the air almost still, with just a slight cooling breeze. I looked down towards the village in the far distance; the valley appeared to have changed its tone: greener, darker, denser. Tree trunks were sodden and almost black against the brilliant sunlight. The ground was soft underfoot, sinking in a way I had never known it to here, water oozing out at the sides where my feet pressed down. I had never loved water so much as now, had never longed so deeply for rain and been so entranced by it once it came. The sun could shine ceaselessly now for months: I didn’t care. The odd shower over the past weeks had done little to break the drought. But now our mountain was sitting like a sponge, and life on the land could continue. There would be plenty of water in the spring, water in the river in the valley, water for everything and everyone.