196. A Voice and an Autograph

 196.  A Voice and an Autograph

Once we had entered Galicia, my main concern was to make it to shelter every night of our trip before it got dark, this being a region crammed with supernatural beings of many kinds, some ancient Celtic and some ancient Roman, and many others from absolutely anywhere else, including the lowest of the underworlds.  Not all of these beings were always friendly, just as Don Caralampio had warned us.

The countryside was of great beauty, but the ups and downs and curves on the path we followed to Laza made our trip dizzying. We stopped by the Camba river, where I washed off all the pollen and dust on me in the cleanest but also coldest water I stepped into during our trip. That helped me recover somewhat.  

Alpin decided to lunch on the four great cheeses of Galicia, and the Leafies flew off to find them. These are Cebreira, which is made with cows’ milk, and can be had fresh or cured and tastes somewhat like yoghourt and smells like butter, Arzua Ulloa, fresh or semi-cured, soft and creamy, San Simón, carefully smoked with barkless birch wood and tasting of earth and rain, and Tetilla Gallega.  Shaped like a female breast, this last cheese is very milky with a salty touch. Alpin had heard it tasted best with spinach, and that is how he wanted and had it. He also had a cauldron full of milk with chestnuts, fennel, cinnamon and salt, and a second cauldron of walnut soup, both accompanied by endless slices of fried bread with nutmeg. For dessert he ate two dozen loafs of bica, a sponge cake with a touch of lemon. A light meal, he said, because we were in such great haste. I, to reach cover and avoid the perils of the night and he…to make us take a detour and visit the valley of Medeiros, where, he said, he would throw a fit if he didn’t get to see the famous Celtic queen’s stone seat.

I think we did get to see this throne, for, as we approached the valley, we saw a superb woman, perhaps the Celtic queen herself,  sitting on a stone chair. The seated lady was watching over the valley from the top of a mountain and didn’t look like she wanted friends. We didn’t bother her. We never even went near. We left her territory as fast as we could. 

“Darn!” cried Alpin. “There’s a treasure buried right under that woman, but I guess there’s no chance of stealing it with her sitting there with I am a fiend! written all over her sour face. No wonder they called her Lupa the Shewolf.”

“If I had known that was why you wanted to see this chair, we would never have wasted our precious time coming here.”

“Which is why I didn’t tell you so,” replied Alpin. “Wish me better luck on our way back, Arley.”

I didn’t bother to answer.  Not knowing if we were going backwards or forwards, we reappeared in Laza and spent the night at an inn – I learned about this the next morning -  which was supposedly haunted by the ghosts of two drunken village idiots who had once been persauded by local bullies to fight like gladiators with wooden swords over the pit of an olive one had swallowed and the other wanted back. The storm fairies, very active in this region, must have seen the original fight from up above and waxed furious, for a tremendous bolt of lightning struck a  cornice and it crashed to the ground killing the fight’s organizers. The duelists succeeded in killing each other too, and having a fixation of the kind some ghosts have with repeating traumatic experiences, all the ghosts of those that had been involved would repeat the fight over and over on unspecified nights, so there was no avoiding the ruckus the duelists and their instigators raised. Fortunately, they did not show up the night we slept there.

The next day we reached the city of Ourense,  and stopped on the old Roman bridge that divides the city into a new zone and an old one. While Alpin stuffed himself on faux ham and faux codfish and real chestnut croquettes, and dish after dish of potatoes and turnip greens boiled in salt water, of which he had more than our horses and mules all together despite their taste for these vegetables,  I made plans to stop by the charcas or puddles, hot and cold thermal wells, from which I had been asked to take a few bottles of water back home. Once there, we decided to try the waters ourselves, to relax a bit, like in a spa, and it turned out to be a good idea. When we were done, we rode off to Cea, where we would spend the night at the Monastery of Bear Lair (Oseira) which has both a fay and a mortal  hostel.

The monastery is set on a terrifyingly craggy mountain and is an extraordinary building, both in the mortal world and ours.  Since summer nights are long, we got there in time to watch the sun set, or at least, the Leafies and our steeds and I did, sitting among the ghosts of once  wild  but now tame bears. We were so entraced staring at the sky that Alpin sneaked off and found his own way to a shop the mortal monks had there, where they sold convent-baked cookies and other sweets. He left it bare. This was the only time I had lost control of my charge so far. But it still posed a problem, because though fairy gold will do to pay others, if they don’t spend it quickly, it disappears and returns to its original fay owner’s pocket. No one had seen Alpin empty the place, but I felt sorry about the theft, and not wanting it to be one, I left a small but valuable ruby that would not vanish by itself. I had brought some such stones with me in case we had a problem of this sort.

We got up before dawn the next morning, and were able to overhear the ghosts of monks singing matins. Something strange happened then, and I should have taken warning but didn’t. Someone sang a solo, and that someone’s beautiful voice sounded familiar. But I thought it was only a voice and could be anyone’s. Perhaps it was best that I didn’t recognize that voice just then, for this would have given me something more to worry about. Unnecesarily because irremediably.

We hit the road again, wandering through brambles and briars. Alpin would stop whenever he saw one loaded with plump blackberries, and I, who worry about everything, couldn’t help asking him, “How can you even look at those fruits without your blood turning into ice?” I was afraid something might happen to him again from eating blackberries. But he waved my fears aside and having none of his own, dauntlessly downed all the blackberries he could find.      

We stopped to have lunch in a recreational area near Lalín, where Alpin swallowed bowl after bowl of chickpea stew and munched on peppers stuffed with vegetables and rice. I am used to seeing Alpin down his food, but now and again, I prefer not to watch him do it. This was one of those times. I wandered a little ways off and sat with my back to him on a log that was a sort of bridge between two mounds with a miniature ravine below them. When I got up and turned towards Alpin again, I  saw he had made friends with a family of ghosts that was looking too interested in the quantities of food our fridge was producing. They moved away before I got to them, but they had planted a seed in Alpin’s mind.

“When we get to Santiago I want to stay at Aunt Pomba’s,” he said.

“You have an aunt named Pomba?” I asked.

“Nah, that’s just what people call this witch out of respect.”

“You want to sleep in the house of a witch? What do you know about her?”

Fairies and witches are different. Witches are a lot more conflictive than we are, and do not avoid trouble like we do, but tend to seek it, whether to make it or fight it. That is why they are different from us. They are magical beings with a fascination with power, and want to control things other than themselves. This makes many of them prone to violence. A witch that was once a fairy is someone that wants more power than he or she initially had. Those witches that were once fairies are held by us to have degenerated, and are considered one wrong step away from becoming mortal. We do not harm them, though they can be a danger to us. We don’t even shun them openly. We merely keep our distance and are polite but wary when we deal with them, because they are often, though not always, dangerous. As I said, they always want something, and it could be something they might try to force us to give them. Above all, fairies value their liberty. And witches have been known to enslave free spirits.That said, need I say more? Only to add, because it is true, that there are good witches, for all their aggressive, controlling ways.  

“I was chatting about fairy treasures with these people who were admiring my fridge.”

“They will want to steal it,” I warned, being by nature suspicious.

“Yeah, probably. Who wouldn’t?” said Alpin calmly. “What I know about this Pomba is that she is a fortuneteller. I want to ask her…well, what my Clepeta looks like. This has been one long drag of a snail-like trip, and I need to know if going all the way to the end of the earth will be worth it.”

“You should have consulted your own crystal ball before sallying forth.”

“Maybe.”

“You can do it now.”

It would make my day if Alpin drew out his crystal ball and saw that Clepeta was a fright and we could return home immediately. But there was no such luck.

“I’ve already seen Clepeta,” said Alpin. “She’s hot. But I want the fortuneteller to tell me all about Galician women and how to court them and such.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “This girl wants a husband desperately, or she  would never have hired the blundering Bluebell Twins. You smile at her and offer her flowers and chocolates and perfume and a ring that’s glossy enough to be the envy of her friends and she will probably have you. If she won’t, it will be because someone has gotten to her before you.”

“You know, Arley, diamonds are forever. They are more forever than any woman’s love.”

“What do you mean?”

“That I like diamonds,” said Alpin.

“And you would sooner not marry Clepeta than give a diamond ring up?”

“No. That’s not it. You’ll find out what I mean. Just be patient.”

Being more worried about having to sleep outdoors than about diamonds being forever, I didn’t question Alpin further. Instead, we left for Silleda, on a road that was like a curled up snake.

When we got to the Monastery of St. Lawrence of the Coalminer (Carboeiro), we found that in the fay world it was relatively busy and had a fine hostel, but in the mortal world it was rather abandoned. Alpin being quite talkative this day, he learned from some other voyager that Silleda was famous for its melindres. These were different from the ones we had tasted in Toledo, where melindres are tiny, dougnut-shaped bits of marzipan decorated with meringue. Here melindres were sugary, fried doughnuts. Alpin busied himself stuffing on the latter and I went to see to our steeds.

“You’ve done a great job,” I told them. “If all goes well as it has till now, our next stop will be Santiago. I want you to enter the city triumphantly. I have heard there is a magnificent spa for fairy horses up here, next to the hostel. You say you are all well, but even so, I will have you seen to at this  grooming stable and have the experts check you out.”

The steeds said I had done a fine job too and were pleased to visit the spa. It turned out to be run by slavic fairies. I have no idea how Mr. R.D. Krakula and his employees got here, but they were very impressed to hear our animals belonged to Queen Titania’s own stables and were looked after by the legendary No no Darcy, a great hero to them. They took special care with our animals so as not to appear to be less able than the Dark Man and left our horses and mules looking shimmeringly clean and radiantly healthy. They even tended to Dolphus and Vinny’s fireflies, and made them look like flying jewels. Dreamboat was showing me how well his solid gold horseshoes had been polished, when, from the corner of my eye, I caught fleeting sight of some banners that seemed to be saying something to me. Though my brain had reacted to more than one design on these cloths, I was only conscious of one that reminded me of the coat of arms of my maternal grandfather AEternus Virbonus. But what would anything of his be doing here? Grandpapa hated having to leave home and could only be very rarely persuaded to do so. He hated to be seen and, if you wished to see him, you had to go all the way to his artificially lit castle, hidden by a thick veil, which neither sunlight not moonlight penetrated. Not that you would probably want to see him. When he wasn’t amusing himself at one of his hobbies or playing games with his servants, he was very cantankerous, especially if you had interrupted his fun, which was always the case, for that was all he was ever at except raving when bothered. He never gave any importance to anything you said except to yell for his attendants to go and fix whatever was the problem. He would yell for his attendants to go fix the problem even if all that was happening was that his granddaughters Heather and Thistle had baked a magnificent birthday cake for him and were trying to get him to blow out the candles on it.

“Don’t you worry about your grandpapa, dears,” Mum would say to us. “At least he doesn’t give any trouble.” She insisted he was happy in his own world and that was the least trouble a very selfish old man could give.

I was about to give the matter no further thought when Mr. Krakula himself appeared making signs to us that he had something to say before we left. He was waving what turned out to be an autograph book.

“It’s quite an honour to have been visited twice today by members of such an illustrious fairy family,” he said. “I imagine you will meet with your uncles at the hostel tonight.”

“My uncles?”

“Yes, young sir. Look here.”

And he proudly showed me the pages of the autograph book my uncles had just signed. Yes, there, among hoof prints of illustrious equine clients, were the signatures of two of my uncles.  

“Demetrius Estraricus Richearth, young sir. And here Intempestivus Wildgale.”

“I had no idea…” I started to speak, but broke off.

“None, sir?”

“Have you any idea why they are here, sir?”

“None, sir!” 

To me this could only mean one thing. Uncle Rich was still being silly about Clepeta.

Being me, I signed the book too and, while our steeds left their prints, immediately began to have daymares about what a quarrel between Alpin and Uncle Rich might be like, and how disastrously unequal it would be if  Uncle Wild chose to intervene and back his brother, and whether I should support Alpin or not. But first…it was time for me to draw out my crystal ball and see what kind of a Helen this Clepeta might be. Would she be worth a Trojan war?

When I saw Clepeta, I instantly remembered how the Bluebell twins had described her.

“She has a bright and sunny disposition. Everything about her is sunny and bright.”

The lady in her forties I was seeing had a face as round and as red as the sun.

Even standing out in the rain, her face still looked like a mediaeval drawing of the sun.

Blowing in the wind, her messy locks, which were indeed golden, just as the twins had said, were like the sun’s rays jutting from her head in all directions.

Her also indeed sea-blue eyes, unquestionably bulging, though perhaps from effort, were fixed on a fish she was cleaning with visibly over-worked and weather-beaten hands. Her mouth was clamped tight, so determined was she to clean the fish, and therefore there was no telling much about this feature.

Suddenly Clepeta banged a large fish against a rock, knocking it unconscious, and drew out a deba knife and cleanly whacked off  its head in ine fell blow. She picked up both pieces of her victim and cast them into a cauldron. Then she wiped the sweat and rain off her face with her hands.

I don’t like to speak ill of anyone, least of all a lady looking for love. Besides, tastes are not to be argued about. I had no idea what sort of person Uncle Rich, who was the youngest, the wealthiest and, probably, as my sister Heather had said, the cutest of Queen Titania’s brothers, might care to marry. Uncle Wildgale had suggested he was capable of marrying weird women. So perhaps…

I couldn’t understand why Alpin had described this woman as hot. Hot and sweaty she had looked, yes, though also wet from the rain. But not what Alpin would call hot. Would she whack off his head with her knife if he looked again and chose not to marry her? Maybe Alpin was just saying he had seen her but had really been too lazy to check her out. Fairies are fussy about the way things look together and tend to mate with those that look right next to them. Harmony is important to us. And Clepeta looked so much older than Alpin. But maybe if Richearth, who at least looked like he was in his twenties, which was about half the age Clepeta looked, got to her before Alpin, I would have nothing to worry about. Surely Richearth and especially Wildgale, who were really hundreds of years old each, were capable of looking after themselves and each other too. And they were so foolhardy they were likely to have dealt with women with knives before. Would it be decent of me to let them ride ahead instead of trying to get Alpin to Clepeta before they got to her? Because I was sorely tempted to.

“Just go with the flow,” I said to myself. “Don’t force it. No changing plans. Let what has to happen happen.”  And I began to hum “Que será, será, whatever will be will be!”

Still, I felt I was being wicked. I never go with the flow. I always try to control it. I felt like I was turning into a mean warlock. How awful!