Tea leaves in Zaragoza - IV

“Something had hit me in the face …” the voice of the old man is faint now, but it seems that one can hear again the voice of a boy who is fleeing among the bushes, beyond the sea, in a land of crazy, feverish, fierce Latins.
“Unu fustixeddu de modditzi¹, a large lentisk branch, securely tied to a picket barely in turn fastened to a horse hair … you brush lightly against it … and it springs in your face … two faccis nieddas², dressed in a scale armor like the Byzantine, and with pointed helms, tumbled down … and then Lussurgiu, the blacksmith, hit them on the head ‘a smemoriadura’³ with the iron mace and knocked them out like two steers. The brain of one of them was spilling out from his eyes and nose … the other one, just a boy, was only stunned … and grandpa said he was the guy we needed …”.
Thus they dragged him by the feet … they cut off the head and hands of the other guy and put them in a basket together with some leaves, just in the way one does with figs, so that flies wouldn’t eat them too quickly …”
The boy who had hoped to get away is woken up with some kicks and a rubbing with nettle, a bucket of water is too precious to be wasted in this dusty plain, and as he opens his eyes he sees many leather- and iron-bound feet and spear tips under his nose, and once more drums rolling inside his head, now as in the previous dream, when he was fleeing among the bushes, or in the present dream, when he’s seeing endless hordes of warriors wearing horned elms, or perhaps the warriors themselves have horns on their heads because what’s seeing are not helms, but iron heads of unspeakable demons, horrible results of some pagan magic rite, magic as old as the stones of this hostile land … madness madness madness … but a heavy hand grabs him by his hair and forces him to look on “Mira, facci niedda, s’urtima cosa ki bisi, e bai, bai a du contai in Thuniss…hommini ki beniri innoi po gherrai nexidi cosa sua…mira…”⁴.
An endless forest of spears, shaking horns, surrounded by clouds of dust and by fires, smoky fires and drums and shrill flutes “s’urtima cosa ki bisi”⁵, then the knife thrusting inside the eye sockets, ripping out the eyes, taking away his eyesight forever.
The old man is breathing heavily, writhing in terror, as if he were living again through the moments which he has already seen so many times in his dreams, in many endless restless nights which left him exhausted and covered in cold sweat at the first light of dawn, when he had to lead the prayers. The gray-clad man bends toward him, lowering his voice: “Grandpa sent the young man back, after having plugged the bloody eye sockets with tar pitch and salted water, together with a negro whose tongue – but not eyes – had been ripped off … they plugged a tar-soaked cloth in his mouth to stop the blood, too … and they tied their ankles together, the blinded man and the muted man, they hung on their back sheep-skin bertulas⁶ filled with the heads of the other guys and they sent them back to the beach, to tell the horror which they had found in Monte Acutzu … and he told me that for years to come the faccis nieddas did not show up around … they feared the rage of the demons that had massacred so many of their men. Many helms and many spears, many fires and many drums, just a few warriors … a staged scene as the last thing that a terrified boy would see … a nice practical joke for the brigantes⁷, don’t you think so, holy man?”

(continues)
(previous)

¹ Unu fustixeddu de modditzi a small lentisk branch
² Faccis nieddas blackfaces
³ a smemoriadura with memory-erasing effect
⁴ Mira, facci niedda, s’urtima cosa ki bisi, e bai, bai a du contai in Thuniss…hommini ki beniri innoi po gherrai nexidi cosa sua…mira… Look, blackface, the last thing you are going to see, and go tell it in Tunis, ... a man who comes here to wage war doesn’t know what he is doing.
⁵ s’urtima cosa ki bisi The last thing you are going to see
⁶ bertulas pannier
⁷ brigantes brigands

Tea leaves in Zaragoza - III

The old man remained silent, intent, as if his eyes were once again open under the linen blindfold that went from his brow, wrapped up in his turban, down to his nose.
“A ship came from Thuniss to the waters in front of Crabonaxis¹ and the brigantes² came down in large numbers … they wanted salt, they wanted timber, they wanted slaves … they wanted our blood, as always … they climbed up the watchtower while the men on top used up all of their arrows without wasting a single one … they were so many … and they could climb up to the top eventually … and they caught them, they castrated them and they disfigured them … then they made their way to the villages.
The balentes³ came from the mountains and from the other parts of the coast to find the Ten Horses Tower burned down and its defenders impaled among the arrow-riddled corpses of the brigantes … the plunderers had moved inland. The balentes were too few to attack them in an open field so they finished off the dying, buried their dead and tracked down their enemies without attacking them at once even if they had new weapons, bought from the Pisans, paid for with the gold of the matres⁴ and kept well-oiled … even a saintly man like you knows what is a crossbow, doesn’t he?”
The old man shuddered … and a voice welled up again in his mind, the voice of Daoud, the convert Jew, who looked at the Berber pierced by the hissing bolts who had broken through the Damascus steel armor and felled to the ground the formidable warrior between the lentisks of the clearing “They have crossbows, the crossbows that Sheitan, be he one thousand times cursed, delivered to the Franks and the Greeks to ruin the believers …”. He shut up suddenly, realizing he had spoken inadvertently, lost in the thought of those terrible moments.
“Not Sheitan, old man, but Guglielmo di Massaciuccoli, an old rascal from Pisa, who got us to pay through the nose for them … but grandpa told me that that time they worked wonders … iron-covered brigantes with their plate armors pierced through like pigs, one by one in the dust vomiting blood on the slopes of Monte Acutzu⁵ … and the balentes shot from well-hidden positions, protected by the bushes and by the archers … who could nothing against the armored Saracen warriors, but could nail the light-armored men who raided the shrubland looking for the crossbowmen … and it was then, while the night was falling, that grandpa got an idea.”
We were sitting in the krakkiri⁶, a fogu sturau⁷, with the stars above us, our black hoods over our heads, dressed in our chainmail armors oiled with olive dregs and sheep fat.
“They are too many”, grandpa said, leaning onto his matzocca⁸ “and without heavy cavalry we will never push them back into the sea. We can get heavy cavalry only if we borrow gold from Pisa to pay Angles and Teutons … but in that way we would just be switching from one slavery to the next.” “You travelled” Buikku⁹ said, sharpening a two-foot bolt “you saw how the Teutons and the Persians fight, and the Varyags from Rus as well, the ones that serve the Caesar who rules Bysantium … what can we do?”.
“People say that far away … where the sun rises, and perhaps even beyond that, some men live, as small as we are, their skin yellow as gold … or yellow as piss, according to others … these men learnt something that we also know … in sa gherra perdinti tottus, finzas su ki binciri¹⁰ … and so they figured out that when an enemy marches against you, you have to scare them, scare them with thoughts of huge, unreasonable threats, get them to believe that your strength is immense, superhuman and unmatchable, get them to think that your ten warriors are actually a thousand, that your horses are not one hundred but one hundred times one hundred, and your arrows a hundred times that … and the news must not come from you, but from one of them who has seen - or he believes he has seen - and comes back to tell the story … crazed with fear …”.
The old man was breathing slowly, while the old memories welled up … memories of a time when the sun was not only heat on your face, but dazzling light, sparkles on the sea waves, coloured flowers in wheat fields, flashing weapons and burning fires … arrows whistled while they were running among the bushes … their armor was not as much of a protection as something of a hindrance: crossbows bolts broke easily through them and they could not flush out the crossbowmen hiding in the wild olive and juniper bushes, those who had tried to get to them had ended up with a slashed throat or a spear in their back. Most of the Tunisian raiders were far away, towards the course of the river … and their group of five had made the mistake of chasing a young shepherdess hoping to bring her back to the camp to take advantage of her at leisure … but they had realized too late that she was running away without hurry … and she was choosing a precise path, not running crazily like a gazelle pursued by a pack of jackals … and when two of them had fallen into a hole covered with leafy branches, skewering themselves on reed bundles which had been tied together with rush leaves and kept apart from each other with a stone in the middle of the bundle, they had understood it was a trap … horned helms had appeared between the bushes … a deep beastly growl vibrated in the air and the hunters, turned into prey, were afraid to think to what could be chasing them in that heat filled with cicadas’ songs. Arrows, drums, horn calls in their ears and the breath is becoming short, and that growl behind you …
“And if the enemy thinks that a thousand men are getting to him and not just ten … or that those who torment him are daemons vomited out from Earth’s innards or generated by a magic spell … he will be looking back while he’s racing away … and you will wait for him by the wayside and you will put a spear through him head on …” Run, run as much as you can … the hillside is steep but we can do it because over there the creek is already showing and our gulet¹¹ is in the waters just behind … and we can do it if we run, if they don’t catch us, if they think we are dead too, if Daoud and the other guys climb up till here … Abdhul wasn’t anymore with them and turning around they see him fallen on the ground, with two arrows in his neck, spitting red drool, his mouth already covered with flies … they run away crazy with fear while the drums are getting closer and closer behind them, they run on the track that should lead them to the sea …

(continues)
(previous)

¹ Crabonaxis
² brigantes: brigands
³ balentes: valiant men
⁴ matres: mothers
⁵ Monte Acutzu
⁶ Krakkiri
⁷ a fogu sturau: with our fires out
⁸ matzocca
⁹ Buikku: Sardinian version of the name that in Italian is Salvatore
¹⁰ in sa gherra perdinti tottus, finzas su ki binciri: In war they all lose, even those who win
¹¹ gulet: a kind of sailing vessel

Tea leaves in Zaragoza - II

“Enianta de su mari, is faccis nieddas a conca serrada ...”¹ , so the gray-clad man started out, as if he were singing a sad song “enianta de su mari, they came from the sea with s’inzoga² and the sword, with bows and arrows, su fogu e sa mutria mala³ … people that come from the sea, never good news for our land and our people … s’inzoga² for men and women, children and old people, good for them only as pack animals, to be used for work and driven with lashes if it needs, accappiaus a sa mol’e tzugu⁴, their neck tied, carrying a sheep bell so they are heard and easily caught if they try and run away, just like sheep … they came from the sea from Thuniss and Catthraxene, there were more of them than su pipizziri⁵ in August and there were so few of us … and after the inzoga, the sword for those who didn’t submit, and the fire and su presoni⁶.” The eyes of the gray-clad man sparkled, the old man listened intently as if searching for a secret rhythm in that harsh tune, so distant from the harmony of the oft-recited suras.
“Ma s’agatta sa borta, but sometimes” the gray man went on after a short pause “sometimes the sheep too have enough of it, they see too many slaughtered lambs, too much milk drained away with trickery and treason and inzà cumprendinti ki no tenent pastori⁷, they understand then that there is no shepherd caring for them and they are at the mercy of thieves and murderers. This happened in my land, when the Ceasars had to give up control of the seas … and they started up coming from the seas, is istrangios⁸, first the Goths, then the Vandals and then is faccis nieddas⁹ … and we found out we were sheep without shepherd and that the sheep could not take it much longer. Just as when Is Arrubios¹⁰ came, a long time ago, to plunder and round up new slaves, Babbu Mannu¹¹ put swords and arrows in our hands … and new weapons, as the times had changed, and the balentes¹² alone were not enough. And we put then black-sailed ships in the sea, in front of the ghost city of the Ceasars, in the lagoon and in front of the walls of the village of Stampaxi¹³ and rowed them to the open sea, together with the fishermen, just like fishermen, and stopped them there, still, with the oars in the water and with lowered sails. When we then saw a ship with armed men coming in the still faint dawn light, ready with the intzogas² to grab people as slaves from our houses, our churches, our fields, … with their weapons, their armours, their swords, … and so many, as fleas on a dog … and tell me old man, what do sheep do when so many wolves are around? Even if the sheep grew teeth, they know wolves have a bigger mouth … it does not help trying to bite them at their throats … sa berbeghe no abbrancara sos canes¹⁴ … better letting the wolves think they are safe and they have to worry about nothing else as plundering … otherwise wolves join forces, come in a big group, and for the sheep it’s over … so every now and then some ship ended up on a sandbank … because the sea signals had been moved around … we then jumped on the ship, and we killed every single one of them, conca a pari¹⁵, homines et juvenes¹⁶ and all of them into the sea with a stone tied to their feet or their neck, food for the fish … sometimes we let them put their feet on ground … then an arrow on the back every ten steps, from the shore till the hill … and then the knife under women’s garments, in market baskets, among children’s toys … the knife slashing the throats of the faccis nieddas⁹, while waiting for the balentes¹² to come, ever too few, to fight them … some other times we retreated in our towers and down arrows and Greek fire, stones and heads cut in past bardanas¹⁷, and fire on their ships, and underwater swimmers holding knives between their teeth in the praniggiu¹⁸, smooth as a millpond … some other times, is faccis nieddas⁹ who came to sell, sold their stuff, those who came to buy, bought what they wanted, those who came to steal, stole, and those who came for slaves, grabbed them … but this particular time something else happened …”

(continues)
(previous)

¹ “Enianta de su mari, is faccis nieddas a conca serrada ...”: they were coming from the sea, the blackfaces in helms
² s’inzoga: the rope
³ su fogu e sa mutria mala: the fire and the evil ways
⁴ accappiaus a sa mol’e tzugu. tied to the grindstone
⁵ su pipizziri: locusts
⁶ su presoni: the prison
⁷ inzà cumprendinti ki no tenent pastori: they then understand there is no shepherd caring for them
⁸ is istrangios: strangers
⁹ is faccis nieddas: blackfaces
¹⁰ Is Arrubios: the Red People
¹¹ Babbu Mannu: the Great Father
¹³ balentes: valiant men
¹³ Stampaxi: one of the city boroughs of Cagliari, a village at the time of the story
¹⁴ sa berbeghe no abbrancara sos canes: sheep do not grab the neck of dogs
¹⁵ conca a pari
¹⁶ homines et juvenes: men and youngsters
¹⁷ bardanas: task force missions
¹⁸ praniggiu: low waters