Free Sacred Sierra by Jason Webster

been. A couple of beestings!
    ‘Better set them up, then,’ he said.
    ‘You’re putting those hives here?’ Salud asked.
    ‘I’ll explain later,’ I said, and rushed out of the door.
    We drove Arcadio’s car down to a patch of land below the house, next to a white stone outbuilding. Picking up a couple of pallets I’d found lying around, we laid them down next to an olive tree and then carefully carried the hives out and placed them on top. Arcadio, I noticed, was careful to smoke them more thoroughly this time. I wondered if we’d brought a particularly vicious strain of bee into our lives. That would take some explaining …
    ‘Turn them round so the entrance faces the east,’ Arcadio ordered. I did as he said, while he placed a heavy stone on top of each hive to keep the lid firmly down.
    ‘They like to wake up facing the sun,’ he explained. It seemed such a happy image – cute little bees getting up in the morning and heading off to spend the day mooching around the flowers. It was easy to forget for a moment how nasty they could be. I rubbed my stomach gently: the lumps were still delicate and swollen. Bees were the source of all that was sweetness and light, they used to say: sweetness from the honey, light from the candles made from their wax. Right at that moment, though, I never wanted to see another one of the little sods again.
    *
    Salud and I had been together for almost seven years. Marriage, for me, was really more about a state of mind than a ritual performed by a celibate man in a frock, or, even worse, a piece of paper signed by a civil servant. Salud, as far as I was aware, felt more or less the same, and we’d been calling each other husband and wife for some time. Who else could really know the truth of the commitment between us more than we ourselves? God? Perhaps, but I suspected there was little connection between Him and the clergy. The state? The idea was risible.
    And yet Salud’s comment struck a chord. I had never been a great one for rituals: I was never baptised or christened, never confirmed, and missed the graduation ceremony after leaving England for Spain when I finished my degree. I even failed to have a TB jab at school – another minor rite of passage. I didn’t mind any of this: not going through the official bit of ‘getting married’ just seemed a natural continuation of a long trend.
    But something about being on the mountain was changing me. Here I was experiencing a world entirely bound by natural rhythms, where the beginnings and ends of earthly cycles were carefully marked and registered: symbolic doorways through which one passed from one world into another: from summer into autumn, from harvest time to sowing time, dry seasons to wetter seasons. I had known all this at an intellectual level, but now I was beginning to develop a different sense of what these rituals might mean – an understanding that had nothing to do with rational understanding. It was emotional – rituals spoke directly to your feelings with their colour and pageantry – but it was something else as well, something I was struggling to define, something about being connected to the land, about being earthed in some way.
    Marriage – before I came here I could scarcely have thought I would ever do something like that. Now, though, the concept was beginning to feel less alien to me. The earth itself, in a gentle, undemanding sort of way, seemed to be taking us there.
    *
    The twelfth of October – El Día del Pilar, Spain’s national day. It has been fairly quiet here – most of the festivities take place either in Madrid, with a massive military parade, or in Saragossa, where the ‘Virgin of the Pillar’ resides in the cathedral. It marks the proper beginning of autumn, though, and the approach of winter – the sun is already setting behind the Picosa at around six these days.
    Salud received a telephone call from her mother. ‘Should be getting busy up there soon,’ she said.