“At this pace, a full day, sir,” Antoni had lied, after pretending to make some calculations, and the gentleman Jaume Pallard had admitted, “I won’t make it, Antoni, I won’t make it.” And Antoni knew that if not for a miracle, the gentleman would never make it. With their mediocre and overtaxed animals, moving forward over rocky terrain through which the gentleman had obstinately decided to take a shortcut, it would take them at least two days. But with a fever that wouldn’t lessen and bloody vomiting that smelled of sulfur, Lord Pallard’s hours on earth seemed to be very few. “Is this your valley, Antoni?” the gentleman asked, and Antoni responded yes. At one point, it had been. “And what’s that peak over there?” “The Pic de les Bruixes, sir.” “Let’s make a stop. After all, any place is a good place to die. Right, Antoni?” And the squire responded yes again, but said that the gentleman was not going to die. What else could he say? Any place. Although, for Antoni Barral, exposed as he was to the aggressive whiff of black fever that had infected and was killing his master, that valley that returned him to his origins might actually be the best place. His place.
After ten years of absence, years of war, violence, hate, and death, Antoni had barely managed to recognize the place. And not because the valley had radically changed: it was just that he was a different man now, like anyone who has ever lived through war and had made blood run. Antoni was able to identify it by the eternal outline of the mountains, the dark and treeless mound of the Pic de les Bruixes, the creek’s stubborn path plagued with coarse turns, and the intense green that made it distinct in the entire region. Nevertheless, what had once been an orchard, with its olive trees and vineyards, its fields of wheat and barley, the most beautiful flocks of sheep and goats in the region, had become mere brambles in which some rocks and blackened wood piled up, marking the site where there had been a dwelling, a stable, or a silo for grains and grasses. All of it obliterated by the war, all of it conquered by neglect. Not even the bleating of sheep broke the silence. No cocks sang out. The desolation was complete and, for Antoni Barral, was overwhelmingly an omen.
It had been exactly ten years since the Catalans of the Kingdom of Aragon had battled among themselves: enough time and effort to devastate everything. They had fought in Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, on the coast and in the valleys, in any corner of the country. They had gone to war for King Joan, against King Joan, for Prince Carles even after the prince had already died. They battled for the right to the land, to mobility, to keep or eliminate tributes. Some even said that they had fought for the kingdom’s independence from outside powers both visible or as ethereal as ghosts: the king of France, who was trying to take over the lands of the rich county of Roussillon, extending beyond the Pyrenees and promised by the Aragon king in return for the French sovereign’s military aid; the ambitious monarch of Portugal, inclined to increase his territories; the powerful René of Anjou, Lord of Provence. Although many claimed they knew why they were fighting and which side they were on, Antoni had the impression that many had also forgotten their reasons and their loyalties many times over, that these had changed throughout the years during which they’d devoted themselves to killing one another, as if there wasn’t already enough accumulated death, as if hating one another were the main design of their existences. As if being against one another constituted part of their ancestral spirit.
With the exhaustion of the battle, few remembered that the war had begun as a conflict of radical factions, who had widely extended the defense of their great interests, dragging the kingdom with them, involving both gentlemen and peasant farmers, generating great chaos. Sometimes, the disputes escalated without giving anyone time to consider what side they should or wanted to favor, and men ended up linked as troops, forced by more or less fortuitous circumstances, as had happened with Antoni Barral, a rural farmer and servant, squire to the powerful family of the Pallards. Antoni did not know or want to know anything about wars in which people like him always ended up the losers, but even so, he’d had to spend ten years of his life in a fratricidal fight that he never completely understood, in which there was no defined winner in the end, but rather a commitment to finally laying down arms out of sheer exhaustion. Because as time went by and pacts were made, it came to be that fighting for or against the monarch boiled down to a simple question of geography or loyalty to a master or the real desire to do away with something that did not work or that someone had decided did not work. And suddenly, regions, cities, towns, hamlets, even families found themselves divided, considered one another enemies to feed a devastating civil war that, a decade later, had not left any victors or conquerors, nor had it changed the country for the better: everything would be the same. Actually, worse. All of Catalonia was a wasteland populated by corpses, and the king was still the king, and the mediocrity into which the kingdom had fallen was a burden as heavy as the Pyrenees that the squire was now beholding. Thank God, after ten vain and devastating years, Antoni Barral had held on to something that, in reality, barely belonged to him: his life.
The squire took the reins of Lord Pallard’s mount and decided to descend a little farther, in search of the small forest of oak and beech trees in what appeared to be a bend of the mountain creek. Water, shade, and grass were what they needed at the moment and were all that the fertile valley could offer them during this return journey that would perhaps conclude here. A bad or a good place, it was all the same, Antoni thought. At least it was pretty.
Lord Pallard’s fevers had begun two days before and perhaps the best option would have been to return to Girona, in search of a doctor or a healer or even a witch doctor who, at the very least, would have bled him, placed a poultice on him, and offered him a less terrible way to die. But Jaume Pallard, stubborn and willful, had insisted on continuing on toward Camprodon and from there to the family dominion, convinced at first that his physical strength would allow him to arrive at his destination, from which he’d been absent for several years. The previous day, however, he had awoken with swollen lymph nodes all over his body and had been seized by his first fits of vomiting. Even so, they took up the trek again and Antoni Barral had the premonition that they were both embarking on the path to Hell: with that illness of which almost no one was cured and few who lived near it resisted its invasive capacities for infection. It was well-known in these lands, beyond decimated by the plague before being bled again by the spears and swords of the fratricidal war.
When they crossed the low, crystal-clear stream, they saw a strange oak, of exaggerated proportions, that seemed to reign over the small forest set off by the horseshoe of water. Separated from the rest of its species, without a doubt dead for many years, the tree had kept only two large branches, open like arms, which formed a nearly perfect cross. Meanwhile, its trunk, eaten away by insects and green with moss, seemed cracked in the middle with a deep, dark wound that had never closed up, cauterized by the fire from when a lightning bolt had struck the oak, God only knew how many decades before. Antoni, who had kicked around those valleys for years, found it strange that he had never before noticed such a peculiar tree—though, of course, what most surprised him was seeing, at the foot of the scorched oak, in a strange bowing position, the remains of dry skin, cloth, some strands of white hair, and the bones, eroded by the sun and rain, of what must have been, doubtlessly several years before, a human being. To what real and sentient man had that skeleton now lying under the dried tree belonged? How was it possible that the body had not been completely destroyed by wolves or scavengers? Was it true that predators didn’t eat meat infected by the plague? Hadn’t anyone seen him and decided to give him a proper burial? Even though he knew so much about death, the image of the corpse lying there gave Antoni Barral such a fright that he had decided to get far away from that place, until Lord Pallard gave what was perhaps his last order in this world from his mount: “Let’s get down here, Antoni. Next to the dead oak and the skeleton. That way, I will have eternal company.”
Antoni Barral had been born quite close to that very green valley, in a small, nameless hamlet nestled in that mountainous region whose magnificent range separated the Catalan Garrotxa from the county of Roussillon. His family—peasants, shepherds, coal merchants—had lived in that place forgotten by God and by History since time immemorial, always dependent on the Pallards: each member of the family occupied the social position with which fate had marked them before their conception. It was Antoni’s skills as a rider and hunter that had brought him to the attention of Jaume Pallard, the young lord who was only a few years older than he was. And those skills would come to change his life—for the better, Antoni thought—because he went from the work of tilling the land and tending sheep that had marked his fate, to that of being a squire to the young gentleman, who was so given to undertaking adventures that often transgressed the limits of what was permissible, even for someone of his lineage. Thanks to this close relationship, Antoni was the first of his clan to learn to read and write—and was perhaps the only one who would achieve this for centuries—and he had enjoyed the privilege of sailing to Naples and drinking that kingdom’s strong spirits, of galloping across half the country several times, of wearing leather boots with buckles, and of sleeping at inns in Aragon, Castile, León, and Navarre (more often in stables, this had to be said), places where they drank, ate, and fornicated until they were spent and where they had sung of the deeds, real or imagined, of the wandering knights and the Mediterranean sailors of which Antoni became such a fan. For some reason, one of those stories had always attracted him in particular: that which told of the journeys, glory, and death of the Great Captain Roger de Flor, a character who straddled myth and reality, and who, the story went, had commanded the Falcon of the Temple, the pride of the Templar maestros, which in his time was the largest and most powerful vessel that had ever existed. Later, devoted to piracy by then, Captain Roger de Flor had destroyed the coasts of the Mare Nostrum by commanding a band of corsairs known as the Catalan Company. What a character, that Roger de Flor …
What at first had been an unexpected benefit, capable of changing Antoni’s fortunes, thanks only to his physical skill and natural intelligence, would later seal his fate. History took him by surprise and he found himself where he could not escape: for ten terrible years, Antoni Barral would have to fight next to his master in a war he was keenly aware that he was fighting for the interests of others, the same powers that be as always, the ones who force History.
How many men had he killed during the long years of battle? That he was skilled with a sword—more so, even, than Lord Pallard himself—had kept him alive after much combat, although his own survival depended on the death of others. When the war first started, persuaded by Lord Pallard’s riveting speeches, Antoni had believed that he was entering a struggle that could improve the lives of men of his station. With a certain insistence, there was talk of fighting to break the bonds of peasants’ dependency on the land and on their masters, to end mistreatment and excessive tributes, and to revive the dead masos, those farms that had been abandoned after the most difficult decades of the plague. But, as the battle continued, the young squire lost his way because, suddenly, his masters were fighting for opposing causes, or else new or different ones. What Antoni Barral did learn was that, like so many others, he was in fact no more than a peon moved by the interests of those high enough to surpass all of his understanding. Because he had neither land nor textile workshops nor businesses in Barcelona nor warehouses in Alexandria and Sicily, he was not an oligarch belonging to the bigaires nor a rich merchant belonging to the buscaires. He was not even a devotee of the king or a follower of the prince. He was merely what he was: a skillful sword manipulated by his betters. And thus he would continue to be after the war was won, with his abundant merits and his place in Hell for having killed so many men, the majority of them poor and of his station, just as miserable he was, as dragged along by the avalanche of History as he, in a war that was neither just nor holy. The only consolation for his guilt was having once heard that the war was waged for freedom, that, those in the know said, was one of the main pursuits of upright men, since servitude was comparable to death. Could that freedom also be his?
An intense decade on the battlefield had served to further hone Antoni Barral’s physical abilities and survival skills. Thanks to these, after nestling Lord Pallard next to the dead oak with branches in the shape of a cross, he had managed to trap two hares and even a red partridge that he was now browning over the fire. Relieved by the knowledge that there would be food, he watched the sun set behind the valley while submerging his bare feet in the creek’s soothingly cold and rushing current. A few hours before, Antoni had begun to feel an ache in his joints on top of the accumulated exhaustion after his chase of the hunt. Seated on a rock, he looked at his aching feet, whitened by the water, and they suddenly seemed like strange animals to him, definitely unfamiliar. Lost in contemplation, Antoni Barral was surprised to shake from a sudden chill coming from deep within his body, and he had the illuminating revelation of having been in that same place, in an identical position, perceiving very similar sensations and asking himself the silliest questions: What would you have liked to be in life? What would you have liked to do with your life? Who could think of asking himself something like that? The lives of men like him, those at the bottom of the social ladder, had always been and would continue to be determined by decisions and wills beyond their own, placed in the hands of fortunate men who boasted of wanting to change the world and, at times, truly desired to do so, but who, as Antoni had learned during a long civil war, mostly ended up making it worse. The strange experience of replicating a forgotten personal act, in all certainty only a dream, was so vivid for him that it seemed to have occurred outside of chronology, since he perceived it as if it were fixed just beyond the limit of his memories. Most disturbing of all was that he could also sense, in another sudden flash of insight, that he would repeat this moment in a distant, instant future, one he would not reach in the years that he would spend on this earth. All of these sensations were so outrageous, and yet crystal clear, that they were accompanied by tangible physical feelings but with certain inexplicable details that he could not pinpoint (the scent of lard and the ocean, of poorly tanned hides, of burning incense, of lavender candles), that were vague (could he smell them or not?), their contours altered by a prism, as was occurring now with his submerged feet. He then thought that he was seeing time through a transparent drop of rain, hanging from a branch. Or traversing the years with his gaze fixed on the untarnished lucidity of the tear that an overwhelming and altered mood had brought forth from his eyes.
“Could you give me more water?” the sick man requested, and Antoni Barral emerged from the marvelous and incomprehensible enchantment into which he had fallen. The real smell of the food over the fire must have revived Lord Pallard, who was leaning against the trunk of the dried-out tree on the side opposite the unburied skeleton, so that he had opened his eyes and was almost smiling. Before obeying his master, Antoni again looked at his feet submerged in the creek and saw only that: his feet, solid and now clean, still aching. When he stood up, the squire finally answered his master: “It might make you vomit … At this point—” “Give me water, I’m burning up inside!” his master demanded, and Antoni Barral refilled the cup in the creek and brought it to the gentleman’s lips. Jaume Pallard took the container, raised it himself, and managed to take a few sips. In the brief moment in which Antoni’s hands brushed against the other man’s, he thought that he had never before touched a human being whose skin could peel off from such a fiery temperature. In reality, he was burning, inside and out. Was this the prelude to his entry into the igneous eternal condemnation?
Antoni turned the pieces of meat. “If I die here, don’t bury me,” he heard his master’s voice again. “After all, they’re expecting me in Hell, you know that … Leave me here, near my neighbor. Many years from now there will be two mysteries here, instead of just one. And in the meantime, we’ll keep each other company. Let’s see if my friend will tell me who he was and how he got here.” Antoni Barral nodded. His master was given to these types of thoughts. “Your Grace is going to get better,” Antoni lied, and the man smiled again. “So, if you don’t catch the plague, what will you do with your life, Antoni?” the sick man then asked, and his servant was startled. No one had ever asked him something like that, and the question was coming just after the strange experience he’d had, when he was asking himself the same thing. What was happening in that valley? Were they the playthings of the invisible rulers of the forests and mountains?
“I don’t know, sir,” the servant said at last and explained: “It all depends on you. If you die, I don’t think that your gentlemen brothers will pay me the salary they owe me or give me the lands you have promised.” “Is that why you’re making the effort to lead me home?” “You know very well that’s not the case, sir. I’ve been in your service for twenty years.” “Do we have something on which to write?” “I’m afraid not, sir.” Jaume Pallard smiled. “Then feed me. Your only salvation is that I survive.” “You’ll vomit.” “But first, I’m going to eat. Hares’ thighs are the juiciest meat.”
They ate as night was falling over the valley. Antoni fed the flames to provide them with light and heat in the ever-cold autumn nights in the mountains, and settled Jaume Pallard such that his back was to the skeleton leaning against the dead tree. At some point, he heard the knight speak, as if delirious, of the shameful end of a shameful war that had ruined the country; of how some gentlemen and dignitaries had manipulated the kingdom’s inhabitants into a sense of belonging by saying they were threatened by outside forces, only to hide their true interest in power and riches; of the barely altered fate of the downtrodden peasants after so many years of battle. The civil war, Jaume Pallard said vigorously and with a strange lucidity, had been just one more in the chronicle of wars past and to come: a game of power, the explosion of ambitions, the expression of the worst of the human condition. Listening to his master repeat these arguments, Antoni wondered whether his words were the result of a feverish madness or of mature reasoning, particularly since that rich, powerful man, who himself had often been despotic and whose actions ranged from gallant gestures to regrettable banditry, was expressing ideas that were alarming to Antoni and unforeseen, while simultaneously seeming intimately familiar since he had heard them at other moments of the recently concluded struggle. Or, perhaps he’d gained new understanding thanks to the revealing illumination that typically came with the approach of death. What was happening to him, to this place, in this translucent moment of time?
Night had fallen and, after throwing up, in violent fits, everything he’d consumed, the gentleman Jaume Pallard had fallen into a kind of spasmodic shaking that Antoni calculated would be the prelude to the end. When he lifted him to place him against the trunk of the damaged tree, the squire again felt the heat rising off his master’s skin and onto his hands, and he crossed himself. It was incredible that that boiling-hot man was still alive, he thought. Antoni watched the periodic convulsions that shook the sick man’s body; he was taking care so that his head would not beat against the tree too much, when, almost without warning, he himself was overtaken by a fetid, dark vomiting that tore him apart. He had no doubt: it was not that the hares didn’t agree with him or that he’d swallowed something putrid with the water. His fate as a servant was so tied to Lord Pallard’s that he had also been infected by the black plague.
Stirred by the first round of shivers, Antoni approached the hearth as closely as he could and covered himself with a blanket. There was nothing to be done. He thought, nevertheless, that before losing consciousness, he should untie the horses so that they wouldn’t die once they’d exhausted the grass surrounding them, but he knew that he was already losing the strength to stand up. And lacking other alternatives, he began to pray. He was praying, submerged in a litany that left his mind blank, asking for forgiveness for his own faults and excesses he didn’t deserve to bear, clamoring for a new chance in life or in the other promised existence, when he heard a noise that was perhaps fueled by his feverish state, the echo of which bounced off the mountains surrounding the valley: first with a prolonged crack, then a dull thud, one of the branches of the dried oak that gave the tree its cross-like shape had come loose from the dead trunk and fell on the head of Jaume Pallard, who remained lying under the enormous piece of dark wood.
Crawling, Antoni approached his master’s body. He saw a dark stream of blood coming from his forehead, but he was still breathing. How could that burning, dehydrated body, wasted away by plague, have survived the branch’s crushing blow? Antoni tried to move the branch and only managed to displace it. He thought quickly and knew that he could only lift the wood with the help of one, maybe two of the horses. Carrying out an enormous effort, he began the operation of tying the branch with a rope. He assayed and felt how his body was beginning to burn, his joints screaming out their agony, his vision blurred by the pain searing through his temples. Twice he vomited waste with more blood while he was making the beasts pull the limb. When he at last saw that the body of Jaume Pallard was free of the weight of the branch, he cut the rope and, incidentally, let loose the nags. Leaning against the dried trunk, he waited until he’d recovered his breath. Nearly dragging himself, he approached the creek to drink and to dunk his head in the cold current. With what remained of his energy, Antoni Barral—servant, peasant, mountain shepherd, and squire, son of Carles Barral, also servant, peasant, shepherd, and a soldier who’d died in another war that wasn’t his own, grandson of Pau Barral, of the same occupations in peacetime and the same fate in war—allowed himself to fall next to the body of his lord Jaume Pallard, the man thanks to whom he’d come to know the wider world existing beyond his valleys and mountains. He had even had the dream of being able to be a freeman, owner of a piece of land where he had planned to plant robust grapevines brought from the Levant and the Duero lands, of raising goats with long beards and flowing coats typical of those rural places. An impossible dream for a man of his origins and his miserable fate, shaped by decisions that had always surpassed him, manipulated him, even debased him.
When the sun came out the next day, Jaume Pallard opened his eyes and saw with regained clarity the light shining over the valley bed. His head hurt and he touched the wound and the bulge he had on his forehead, over which the blood had dried. How had he been wounded? He couldn’t remember. Next to him, he saw the inert and cold body of his squire, Antoni Barral, with his neck deformed by the buboes that had contributed to his death. But wasn’t he the sick one and Antoni healthy? Was he alive and delirious or dead and on the way to disappearing into the void? Behind Antoni, he saw the large branch, green with moss and lichen, to which he saw tied a rope. At that moment, his thinking became clearer. He looked up and saw that the cross made by the dead oak’s dried branches was missing an arm, without a doubt, the limb that was on the ground in front of him. Then, making great effort, Jaume Pallard dragged himself to the creek’s current and took some sips of water, which felt pleasant despite the ulcers covering his mouth. Exhausted, but with his breathing more settled and fever lowered, he allowed himself to fall backward into the creek so he could feel the miasmas and putrid blood that had come forth from his body run downstream. From that reclined position, he observed the dead oak, split in two by the fall of one of its branches, and then he saw it. Or at least thought he did. No, he saw it, he was seeing it, because he wasn’t delirious or dead. There She rested, seated in what remained of the trunk damaged by lightning and rotted by time. It was a black statue, majestic, without a doubt a very beautiful representation of Our Mother and Lady who with Her left arm held the Child Jesus against Her lap and held out Her right hand in the very direction in which he found himself, on his knees, pointing at him, choosing him. Jaume Pallard knew at that moment that he had witnessed a miracle, and would say so over and over for the remaining thirty years of his life. He was the beneficiary of a miracle. At that moment, he realized why the dried-out corpse was in a prayer position next to the blackened tree. Still prostrate in the creek’s current, his vision fixed on the Black Virgin, he promised to live in chastity for the rest of whatever existence the heavens would grant him, to not unsheathe a sword ever again, and, as soon as was possible, to build on that same site a monument to house and honor that miraculous Virgin who had returned life to him. There he would also bury, beneath the altar, the remains of an unknown man who had died in a posture of adoration of the statue born within the magic tree, and those of Antoni Barral, the faithful servant who had led him to the site where the miracle would bring him back from the world of the dead.