Bright Middle
Of the Road
Weekly short stories, poems and travel writing

 

 

​This week I'd like to share an interpretation of the legend of the Eguzkilorri. This is a kind of sunflower that grows in the North of Spain, in the mountain heights of the Pyrenees. It is unusual in that it doesn't grow tall, but stays close to the ground like a thistle, surrounded by a dense circle of thorns. It is a hugely important symbol to the Basques of the North, but I have chosen just one aspect to explore.

In my first year here I lived and working at an Eco-school, with a small team giving one week immersives, combining English and adventures into the mountains, to sixty 12-14 year olds from schools all around the region. I asked some of them on our usual Monday hike about the strange sunflower that was hung up on village doors along the way. They said it was to keep away witches. I did a little more research, and discovered a legend that the witches would be so fascinated by the thorns around the central flower, that they would keep counting them all through the night, and so be distracted from entering the house, disappearing at first light.

Basque folklore and history, has a long and complex intimacy with the witch figure. Mari, the central goddess of their pre-christian pantheon, had a counsel of witches to advise her, and they exerted a powerful influence on the four elements from up on their mountain strongholds. The story is set today, imagining that Mari allows her counsel to go down for a strictly limited, and to see their familiar mountain sunflowers at home in a different world. The story imagines one that stayed out too long.

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The Witch’s Sunflower

Only at certain hours of the night do they land, but land they do. In the Basque Country in particular; a land of secrets the cold and rain keeps well, and the brusque winds hug tight, but that the sun shines often shines right over too with reckless heat and brightness.

Witches, in truth, still visit villages here sometimes. Those that still hang up the Eguzkilorris, those sunflowers that don’t grow on tall stems, but bloom among a cradle of thorns, fair and strange, high up in the Pyrenees. They are hung as a protection against witches and evil spirits. Yet the Greatest goddess of the Basques, Mari, has a counsel of witches to debate with even now.

Perhaps it makes sense. It might not be good to go out of your door of an evening and see one up close. She might be too beautiful for your senses to bear.

The legend says that Mari’s counsellors can be entranced by the thorns of the Eguzkilorri. That they can’t help but keep counting them, and so don’t enter the house. Maybe they’d love to stay and count forever, to wonder at each resistance humans have to those thoughts that rise up free as the mountain air, electrifying the pine needles at the broomstick’s back, imparting some strange charge to their evergreen lines, charging and lifting them out of nowhere. It might be magnificent, to a witch’s eyes, to have thorns, endless thorns, to give the sunflower a new home below the mountain.

Mari gives her counsellors leave sometimes to go down, and walk about the night streets of the villages. In the eyes of foxes maybe, in the eyes of the berries and the flowers of hedges, and to gaze for a strictly set time on the Eguzkilorris hung up on the doors. This is the story of one who stayed out too long.

Midnight is the strict limit. Even one minute past is a dangerous breach. But for some reason this particular witch didn’t mark the time that night.

It was Halloween, and a thousand spirits were rushing about on describable and indescribable businesses. They didn’t pay any attention to her, nor she to them. Her mind, sat in a wild hedge spilling over a nearby fence onto the dirt road, was at rest on the green fire of the thorns, even though they had long lost their green by now. Then, as the hours grew, she approached it closer, until the moon had mercy and allowed her to stand by it, invisible, almost right in the middle of the road.

She was struck by how at home the mountain flower she knew best-how at home it was against this human door. One by one, the thorns, greening before her eyes even though they were long dried and dead, one by one, like a greening clock, they told her some of the stories of the house, of the people inside. It was this dead clock becoming green again, ticking into life under the moon and the Halloween stars, that eclipsed her mind even to the very strictest of Mari’s orders.

The dawn sun had climbe over every cloud, climbing over them all, overcoming them all as it always did somehow. The witch had not. She was shamelessly still pressed against the door, crouched against it, sat sleeping warm against the chill air of the season.

Then all of a sudden it was pushed open.

The woman of the house, seeing the strange figure all in black pushed back, rushed to help her at once. Aintzane had thought it was her daughter. She liked to go about at night sometimes when she couldn’t sleep.

But then she saw the strange hair, and the strange eyes beneath the broad brimmed hat. Felt the strange material, smooth as bat wings combed clean of nightmares, smoothed into dark silks.

Her hand recoiled. She looked back and forth, quick as a blackbird across the village road. There was no one about. It was still early.

Her husband followed her groggily, scythes in hand for him and the kids, for the last corn of the harvest. He dropped them immediately.

“Help me get her inside!” She hissed. He obeyed at once.

They shambled her into their room while the children were still waking in theirs. A chill wind swung open the door and followed them in.

“Where am I, By Mari and the Mountain?! Why am I not at home??!...I’ve stayed out! By Mari, I’ve stayed out! The stupidest mistake a witch can make! And I don’t even remember the reason …” The witch’s voice came out like a wild river, but with fluency-there wasn’t a shudder of hysteria. Yet Aintzane frowned at the score of sweat drops that already bloomed on her brow. She could be struggling with the air here, so much closer to the earth than she might be used to. “Kepa, would you please take the children outside for the day? There is still the last of the harvest work, and you might play a game or two in the fields. I’m not sure what good or ill this is, but there could be a sickness beginning in here. The door needs to be shut!”

“What about you?”

“You know full well it’s not me that needs worrying about. Get into the air for a day, and we’ll see what’s happened by the end of it! We may have to throw our guest out yet if dangers grow sudden, and too far and fast beyond our ken.”

He digested the words quickly, and was stunned for a moment, as he always had been, by the warmth of the beauty that still lived in his wife’s face and steered her lines like a helmsman of wonderful talent. “We’ll get out into it! You take care! Take strength and luck.” He threw up his hand, and she caught the good wind in his wave. Then he shut the door and was gone.

Aintzane sat looking for a moment at the broomstick Kepa had leant against the wall, within reaching distance of the witch. She frowned at the trust in the gesture.

She remembered one she’d made with her daughter. It had the same dense tangle of evergreen pine shoots clustered around dried herbs, like green fingers exerting a dogged grip on the last scents and the last life of the autumn.

Could she really fly up into the air on such a thing?

Aintzane believed in the legends with all of her heart, but to see one of their objects face to face was something else. A storm of feelings was inside like the child she’d once been. She was taken aback, although her beauty came from another source entirely, by how much certain mannerisms of the witch reminded her of her daughter. Izaro, upon turning eleven-she was fourteen now- had decided she needed to make frequent visits to the garden at night, even on those nights when the chill air swept down from the mountain. “It’s the only way I can practice telling the old stories,” she’d told her decisively the month before. “I can’t hear the echo properly in this house with all of you talking and walking around so much.”

Her eyes had narrowed. She had wrapped her daughter in layers of different substance and thickness, and had made her promise that she would share what she said one day with other things than the garden plants and the stars over the village. Sometimes she would watch her from the window. Once she had allowed herself to creep out, and crouch among the borders like a statue, crouched listening with her eyes shut. And then she had allowed herself, that once, to scare every wit out of her daughter with a leap and a shriek as if she were one of Mari’s counsellors herself.

Outside now, beyond the rich wood of the door, winds with immense teeth of cold, much sharper and fiercer than normal, were brewing up clouds and hunting down that great mid-morning sun that is special to the Basque region. She wondered about Kepa and the kids out there. She hope he had brought their neck-scarfs. He must have. She hadn’t heard him come back inside.

“You are a fool indeed,” she said, turning, “and perhaps a fool beyond help, to have disobeyed Mari’s main command, and to have disobeyed it so thoroughly.” For a moment she was stunned by her own voice, at the undercurrent of belief that drove it so fiercely, as if she were not in the twenty first century, but suddenly in a moment a thousand years ago. “You are one of Mari’s without a doubt. But a fool nonetheless, and fools have no power to bring winds so fierce and strange as the ones brewing outside. Even if Mari has tightened her friendship with Our Lord in being able to turn the elements so against us, even for one strange wild day, I won’t believe its for a silly girl who stayed out too long. Neither witch nor angel, not the ones I know in my gut anyway, would go about stirring such pots over such a trifle. Not even on Halloween.”

Aintzane blinked quickly several times, checking herself. She clutched her necklace, a stone with a basque cross cut into it. She remembered her class of thirty in the capital. They would be there on Monday. She would have to be there on Monday too, to teach them English and Basque, no matter what happened this festival weekend. 

“It’s the house…” The witch said, suddenly sitting up, as if she’d listened to something beyond Aintzane’s words. A new knowledge was shining in her face. “That’s why I stayed! I remember…By the Mountain, things are not so bad now. I know why..!”

“Our house?!” This troubled Aintzane more than any thing else. “What would you know about our house??! Only our ancestors dream in this house. Only they have the right. Sometimes, when all is quiet, I think sometimes…I think I can almost hear the little hum of the conversations they might be having. They feel like the gentlest yet strongest yet fullest that we have, not so often. Yet Kepa’s father, and his grandfather too yet more-they were no great talkers while alive. I wonder what they could be talking about now, and to whom.”

The witch was still sitting up, paying Aintzane sudden and full attention. Her eyes were wide, but many of the sweat-drops of sweat had gone. “We know your houses, only in secret words like this. Like a hermit we can’t see, humming a song in the mountain air. But once we knew them better. Once, a long time ago, there was a hope, I don’t know when it was; it might even go as far back as when the wooden roof of this house, the beech trees that made it, were nothing but the silly dream of a stone. How did stone become seed? I don’t know. But Mari tells us of a dream we shared with those stones and first trees, that we helped them in the end to give up, to share. Sometimes it is a wish of ours, one with its roots all the way back then in a time I’m not sure even Mari can name, to stay out for longer than just a night, to see how everything’s getting on down here since we left it all that time ago. Maybe Mari even wished such a thing once, when she was young, if she ever was. Where would we get it from if not from her? Even if she never speaks of it.”

Aintzane shuddered. She looked longer than before at the figure that her sat across from her hugging her knees, the one that was looking suddenly right back at her, and for much longer than before. She became suddenly uneasy. She couldn’t describe it, but the witch’s features, beautiful before, had changed, only a little, and yet somehow momentously, like the little shifts forward you sometimes feel that make a definite change in the day. The witch had the broad, brave brow of the women of the village, the smooth dark eyebrows over it like a caught and captured sight of the mountain on a clear day, caught in those subtle dark lines that rested over their eyes, settling all the winds and swift-changing weathers of their features. But at the very back of her pupils- almost solid they seemed-almost like the chunks of dark shining mineral she’d pick up sometimes on the way up the mountain, there was a light that felt to her like the trace of a star. One that had dared to share its fate with her, to come all the way down here with her, to survive in the witch’s eyes so very far from home.

Aintzane looked at her even longer, struggling now not to flinch and turn away. The climbing chestnut bunches of her hair seemed to dance between the densely worked lines of the bark of that tree, and the smooth meteor-sheen over the conkers at their wooden fingertips-those that were released from their green spiked shells by the first children to notice autumn.

Aintzane felt a lump grow suddenly in her throat at how the men of the next village would notice her, let alone the men in the cities beyond.

The witch smiled a little, turning to the wind outside the window. “I know why I’m here,” she said, much more slowly, “Mari would like to bless the house.”

They still had a couple of acres of land outside, where they grew sweetcorn for the market in Gasteiz, the Basque Capital. They had pigs and sheep and chickens too, well-reared and well-trusted meat for the villages roundabout. Kepa kept it all alive. They had two dogs, quite old now, that with their ambling and their barking at friends and strangers and the wind, made sure the dreams of the fields were not so quiet as they could sometimes be.

But it was Unax above all who helped them not to fall silent. Interested in every tool his father struggled with over the fields, sometimes before school, more often after, he’d go out with him every time in spite of weather. He was nine years old, but Kepa was surprised at that something in his lungs that kept talking about his day even as he spaded down spaces for roots and hacked at corn.

Today it was unusually difficult. His sister Izaro was dancing with the frost-toothed winds in her layers, like an onion set free. But for all their work and games the mountain winds kept coming, fighting their voices, bending the corn low. The tall green stalks that remained standing with the season had to bow down closer than normal to the earth, sharing the gesture to take and lift the winds. Kepa watched with his son, and Izaro danced alone, in all her layers, whispering stories to the field a little way away.

The corn was dancing so bravely that Kepa, for the first time in his life, almost didn’t want to cut it down. “Izaro!” He could just about shout over the wind. “Is it time to go back?!” Why was he asking such a question to his daughter?

“You need to cut off the last heads! They’re weighing them down.” She shouted back, leaping through the bitter breezes. “Unax should do it!! That layabout has hardly lifted a finger today!” He put up a finger at her, hearing her somehow over the wind while keeping the football up flying over his feet in the shelter of the last corn. “Both of you!” he said, sharply and suddenly, throwing the scythes at their feet. “Both of you do it! I think your mother is preparing a little party tonight for Halloween. Put in some work for it! Work for it against the weather just like your ancestors did!!”

He turned away from them for a moment, after he felt the old tools gripped securely in their hands. He turned to watch the great strokes of cloud harnessed rain coming down from the mountain towards them. They looked to his eyes, for a moment, like the reins on a plough cart strung over a leading ox. But the ox was, of course, no longe there. The fields down below the mountain seemed to him the ox, even the awkward swings of his children with the old tools seemed to him now the ox as he turned back. The scene went through his eyes into his heart against the wind. This was the kind of thing his wife must see all the time, perhaps, right at the back of her eyes, in that part of her that was still after all these years a secret.

But indeed this was a treacherous chill in the air! Even Unax with his Athetico shirt hugging him faithfully beneath all layers, even though Izaro was wrapped in as many layers as the earth. He knew that within the half hour it was time to get them back, whether there was a witch in his house or not.    

“We have a special, a surprise guest tonight-for Halloween,” he said with a normalcy of tone that surprised him.

His children seared quickly through a dozen questions about who in their extended family it could be, excitement ebbing and flowing mercilessly over every name.

“It’s not anyone you know. It’s an old friend of your mother’s, I think-from her school days.” His daughter’s eyes fastened upon him like talons. “Who is it, Dad?!”

“I don’t know myself, Izaro. She never told me about her before. No more questions now.”

They knocked at the door and were let in at once.

The witch stood beside their mother, half a head taller, straight as the corn stalks, in her robe of a cloth that was difficult to name. It was halfway chestnut bark, halfway bear-hide.

“Great costume!” Izaro couldn’t help but enthuse at first sight. “You’re an old friend of mum’s?? How can that be? You’re at least twenty years younger!!!”

Aintzane shot Kepa a look. His eyes blinked slowly. “Izaro, Unax. This is not an old friend. A real live witch is our guest tonight. Please don’t be afraid. She has just stayed out a little long. You both know the story. We just need to make sure she gets home safely. There is a little ceremony we must prepare, and quickly. The witch is going to tell the story of our mountain sunflower. Unfortunately its not fit for our ears, and we will die if we hear it. But Mari needs the witch to tell it to bless the house, and to renew her kinship with rock and hearth and stone. It seems she has been too long alone on the mountain. I will not talk about such things more than I need to. You must all help me get it ready. Whoever desires to speak with the witch may do so before the ceremony. But before! Only before and not after. If you speak to her or even look at her during the ceremony Mari will surely toss your soul outside into the mountain winds. You have a house. You have a school. Listen to them outside. What do they have? Nothing. Nothing but moaning voices. Listen to them. Listen very carefully, and then think about whether you want to be curious, or whether you want to show some respect for things that are beyond what you know, and perhaps beyond what all of us will ever know.”

Their mother’s eyes were like those coals at the centre of the hearth, their fierce solidity at home for a moment in the very heart of the fire. Izaro, the most curious creature of them all, was the first to break their frightened silence. “It’s ok, Mum. We’ll do it-whatever you say. Please tell us what to do.”

“We’ll do it. Don’t worry.” Unax spoke up suddenly too, looking into the eyes of the witch. All of the simple red and white stripes of his t-shirt courage his mother had burnt away, and yet he found he could look into the witch’s eyes without fear.

“Your mother is right in what she says unfortunately. Mari would like to bless the house. You are part of it, just as much as its stacked bricks and the pieces of its roof clustered together. But unfortunately the story is death to human ears. You must be blinded and deafened, and then I hope, Mari will tell speak with my mouth and tell the story through me. I hope then that she will forgive me. I know her spirit plays a dangerous play behind all of its masks of mountain stone.”

“Blinded…and deafened?”

There was such a simple, struggling courage in the boy’s voice that the witch wanted to wrap her arms around him. “It is just some cloth of potato sacks, Unax, for your eyes, and just some beeswax for your ears. You must not hear a word of the story unfortunately. It is for the house alone.”

“I understand you.” They were all surprised by his voice.

“Come here, child. Help us prepare for it.”

And so the family let the witch wrap layers of sackcloth around their eyes, set with dried herbs in between, and then ready the beeswax for their ears their ears. The cloth would be tied taut it around it against the slightest possibility of hearing or looking.

No one spoke for some time. Izaro was strangely silent, for all her questions inside. And then Unax said, while she gently wrapped the dense cloth round his eyes, “What’s it like, really, to be a witch?”

The witch stopped, knelt close to him. She felt Aintzane’s hand sudden and silent on her shoulder.

“What’s it like?..It’s like…waiting outside the door of a house…a house you dearly want to enter. It’s like waiting so long in the cold air outside that it gives you wings, just as your about to give up. And then all of a sudden you’re not waiting any more. You’re flying, flying with every last living thing that puts the last of the golden life of this season against the winter cold. And every dream on the wind that rises up from the houses becomes wordless then, without pictures, totally clear, sprinting and flying together up the mountainside. Our houses in the clouds are built from all this-they have bricks of cloud. They are made of questions like the one you’ve just asked me.”

“I’d like to see them…one day.”

“Perhaps you will, if you are good now. Go up to the mountain one night when you’re older, when the wind is light and there are just a few slow, stupid stubborn clouds! In good company, you will see us Surely you will!!”

They were ready. They sat huddled together on the floor, blind and deaf, together, awaiting the peculiar blessing.

They could hear nothing, could see nothing. Yet, by steady degrees, a warmth began to grow within each of them. Bit by bit, it dissolved the places where the chill of the day still clung. By steady degrees, they became warm almost, huddled together, almost as warm as the fire in the hearth.

In the heart of Unax especially, was a wonder. It felt like the energy to play football forever, to play the best and most beautiful game of his life each time, to feel all the talent of his team on show-the defence as they tackled and sliding swung the ball quick and low into the mid field, to feel the passes there like the skilful exchange of a little world. One they didn’t have to talk about or think about, like a dream that was for that moment, completely clear. He felt ready now. He would play for Athetico after all, in spite of what certain friends might say. But he needed to start training now. Right now!

Kepa was stunned by the burst of strength in the boy. He had been at complete peace just moments before. Then Unax had begun to squirm and hit out wildly with all his limbs. The fingertip of a flailed hand had come up into his blindfold and pulled it askew. He felt Aintzane turn. He gripped her moving calf with his free hand. Within it were wordless words of iron, telling her to keep still. “Unax!” He hissed. The boy was out of control. He could feel tears in his eyes. The boy was like a fireplace in his arms. The blindfold was coming off. At once he slammed both of his hands over his son’s eyes and bound him close. But the blindfold was gone now and he blinked and blinked again. And then his eyes couldn’t close….

His beloved hearth was before him, just the same as it was before. He sighed out a breath, as quiet as he could make it. The witch was moving around. She seemed to be talking to each object in the room. He thanked every god he half and a third and even a thousandth part believed in that he couldn’t hear her voice.  

He had the wonderful impression that she was, somehow, cleaning the room, cleaning with nothing but her voice, sweeping over every familiar object with the words of her story, cleaning them just by talking, and by the dances of her light gestures that swept without a broom. By degrees it felt almost as if he wasn’t in his house, but in some kind of painting of it, like one of those you pass by in a friend’s living room, and never quite notice how good it is because you’re talking and laughing and shouting and arguing so much.

The power of the Basque sun at midmorning, that invincible one that had been somehow been chased away today, the sun that bursts through cold and cloud with the heat and light of the star it was in the beginning-It felt close to him now as an old friend.

The witch looked up, noticed him, noticed his eyes suddenly, while she turned from the metal sculpture of a sheaf of oats, hammered in to the dark wood above the hearth.

It was his house. His father’s house. All the secret voices, the secret works of the men of his line bound the dense joins between the bricks. He stared into the witch’s eyes, suddenly challenging even her, even Mari Herself to lift him from this place.

She put her eyes to the floor, looking like a tremendous statue before the fireplace. A dread came over him then, as if the house he knew each nook of was in some part the domain, the rightful domain of this alien too. However beautiful she was she was an alien. And yet he couldn’t describe her influence. In one moment it felt like she was renewing the very wrinkles of the bricks, putting a shine into the eyes of the little figures of clay and glass that had stood guard over the hearth since his great-grandparents time. In another he saw, within her eyes equal parts subtle and simple, a power that could wash it all away, that could clean it right down to starkest minerals like a natural force, like storm or fire or flood.    

He held her stare as she lifted her head. It was extremely difficult. She began to walk towards him, deft and precise as a clock hand. Then he felt Aixane’s grip on his forearm, instinctive over the rocks in his blood as the Basque mountain water makes the gathered stones visible to peering birds and deer and boars and schoolchildren. He felt Unax’s breathing calm against his chest. He felt Izaro, an enchanted shadow close by, somewhat separate from all of them, full of stories. He felt so proud of her suddenly. Her stillness, her secrecy, even though she was the biggest talker of them all.

When he looked up again the witch’s face was within touching distance from his. She had knelt down. Her eyes, up close, were just like a chunk of brown mountain top, nothing but dead heather whispering in autumn. But there was a star at the back of her pupils! What was that?! What on earth was that?!

He’d always wanted to keep just one beautiful sight, just one sight of the autumn mountain alive, in its last and greatest life, through every conversation he’d have throughout the year. Through every glass slammed down, through every roar and song, through every pair of friendly dark eyes he knew well, and then were suddenly dark and obscure, as brusque as the Basque suns and crosses that hugged the stone in eternal secrecy and silence. Why couldn’t he just have this one autumn sight, far back behind his eyes, at rest at the back of his mind, to face the world with?

The witch’s lips were still whispering through the story like a long prayer. Her gaze was more like a cat’s now, like something that could discern good or bad by mere scent and proximity. She sniffed him out, his neck and cheeks, and then at once she lifted the blindfold, and with deft gentleness wrapped it back round his head, tightening it again firmly at the last. He let out a breath. He was back in the circle, back with his family again.

Outside the winds had gone silent.

“Thank you.” Then they heard these words, each alone, at the back of their minds, around their shoulders and above their hearts. A voice like sunlight and hearth fire, deeper than the voice of the witch.

An instinct told their senses it was safe to come back. Both witch and broomstick, both were gone. They went to look outside.

Time had passed with unnatural swiftness. Yesterday’s midmorning sun-that had been frozen out and obscured-today was shining through the dawn mists, glowing through every lingering chill of the night.

“We gave her…we gave her some to time fly!! ” Aintzane said, almost shouted into the morning, tears in her eyes suddenly, remembering the awful stories about what had happened to poor humans suspected as witches once here, in her very land and home. She breathed a sigh of relief that she was gone, that no one would else would get a chance to notice her but herself and her family. How she longed to keep like this. “We kept faith that she could tell the story. Now its in in our blood and bones just like this house, and may God keep it that way! Because none of us looked, none of us listened! Haha! What a lesson! Children please don’t look and don’t listen either, actually, to anything I say. In fact best if you don’t pay any attention at all!!”

Kepa took her into his arms. She was surprised, surprised by the gesture, and by the secrets in his grip, secrets she’d never know, shared somehow without words. She could hear Unax now keeping the ball up in the air, passed twenty, and then passed fifty, and then the ball was hovering, with the wings of a low hawk over his feet and she smiled into her husband’s chest and didn’t count any more. And then in her heart she could hear her daughter finding new words out there at the edge of their field where she was, already far away. She couldn’t hear what they were. Good! Good! She didn’t want to hear a single one of them. But it was a clear picture, a fine autumn picture that someone, or something, was hanging up at the back of her mind.

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