Sacred Sierra by Jason Webster Read Free Book Online Page B

‘Burn like buggery. Better off with more oaks. Harder, denser wood – not that you’ll ever get to see them fully grown in your lifetime, though,’ he laughed. ‘Perhaps not even your children. Grandchildren maybe.’
    *
    There was hardly a sound. The street lights had been switched off and a hush fell on the crowd as it huddled around the edge of the village square, waiting. I saw a gap at the top of one of the wooden scaffolds nearby and climbed up to watch next to a couple of teenage boys with wild, energised looks.
    ‘
Ahora viene
,’ they said as I lifted myself up beside them. ‘It’s coming.’
    A single light was now shining down on the empty stage below, while in the middle of the sawdust-covered floor a small metal cage, just big enough to accommodate possibly two people inside had been erected. It was painted red, but large ugly scratches up and down the thick, solid bars bore witness to the hammering it had received on previous occasions. Doubtless it had saved countless lives over the years.
    Some of the boys on the other side of the square were already breaking away from the relative safety of similar cages lining the edge in anticipation of the spectacle to begin. Naked from the waist up, they held their T-shirts in one hand and darted sharply in and out, as though practising their moves for when the moment came, with cheers of encouragement from their friends and girlfriends behind them. For a second I wondered about going in myself, feeling the intense thrill of mortal danger, but held back: I would wait and see how my body reacted once the bull finally appeared: which would be the stronger emotion – excitement or chilling fear?
    ‘Are you going to go down?’ I asked the boys beside me.
    ‘
Claro
– of course.’
    It was, I told myself, a teenagers’ thing, not something someone in his late thirties should be getting involved in. Until I saw a man clearly the other side of fifty suddenly dash out of his cage and back in again, just as the young boys were doing, his paunch bouncing like a medicine ball above the thin leather belt holding up his trousers.
    September had drawn to a close and the village was celebrating the feast of its patron saint, the Archangel Michael, marking the end of the harvest period. The centre had been cut off and fenced in for the big event. Our first proper month on the farm had ended, but already it felt as if we had been there far longer. I was confident we could manage with what we had taken on, but had niggling doubts nonetheless. The problem with steep learning curves, I thought as I looked out at the ring, was exactly that – they were steep.
    At that moment the bull charged suddenly into the square, catching us all unawares. There was a scream and a surge in the noise of the crowd as it darted out from a side road into the open. It was smaller than the half-tonne animals used in professional bullfights, but it had the same dull, deadly expression, the same powerful body that could toss a grown man high into the air, and the same smell of dung, sweat and blood about it. What was different, though, was the presence of great torches on the end of each horn above his head, their fiery light illuminating the bull’s face and reflecting from his black, empty eyes. A
bou embolat
– a ‘fireball bull’. It was the most terrifying sight: in the heart of the blackened night here was this ancient symbol of fertility, like the sun bursting out in a proud, violent blaze looking for new blood to help irrigate the barren land.
    Memories of what I’d read about the ancient symbolism of bulls and bullfighting flew from my mind as the creature started crashing wildly about the square, enraged by the flames bursting from the ends of its horns, and by the young men buzzing around it like flies. I stood transfixed on the scaffold as it was quickly surrounded by six or seven of them darting and dodging in front of it and then flying back as fast as their legs could carry them