“Esperanza’s Way” opens with backstories of three healing women ...Middle East

Ponferrada

Spring 1259

A mangle-eared mutt cocked his head toward the sky sniffing the breeze, sensing the approaching storm. The dog lowered his head, hunched his shoulders, and sidled into an alley. A concussive boom tore the clouds open, and torrents of rain sluiced over the stone-built town of Ponferrada. Up and down the street people scurried for shelter. 

“Amika, help me haul this table up against the wall out of the rain. It will take both of us.” Gabriela struggled to muscle a heavy oak table under the covered walkway along the ancient pilgrimage route, the Camino de Santiago.

“I’ll be right there,” Amika propped her broom against the wall. Like the dog, she turned a weather eye to the skies. This rain is going to be hard enough to drown fishes, she thought. Together the two women dragged the table under the portico.

“Esperanza, take the jars and bottles inside.” A waif-like girl scooped their wares into a well-worn wicker basket. Her serious demeanor belied her twelve years. 

Inside their stone house on their ancient cobblestone street, an apothecary cabinet, burnished by age to a rich mahogany patina, dominated the room. An intricate warren of compartments and drawers held ointments, elixirs, and infusions. Bundles of herbs hung upside down from the ceiling. A symphony of spicy, citrusy, fruity, minty smells harmonized like a fragrant orchestra. Customers inhaled deeply and their spirits lightened when they walked through the door. When their wares were safely inside, the three companions settled on a bench, warming themselves before a capacious open hearth.

“This is the third downpour we’ve had this month,” Amika said. “It will be a good wildflower season, after it warms up a bit. Esperanza and I will scour the hillsides for wild garlic and sorrel. Won’t we, Esperanza?” Amika placed her work-hardened hand atop the girl’s soft, delicate one.

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The girl turned her smokey grey eyes toward Amika. Roaming hillsides too steep for the farmers’ plough was the greatest pleasure Amika and Esperanza shared. In the two years since Amika discovered the girl curled next to the body of her dead mother along the Camino de Santiago, the two had grown as close as any natural mother and child.

“You’re a good student. You’ve learned so much since we’ve been here.”  She beamed at the girl affectionately pinching her ear.

“I’m too old for that!” Esperanza protested. “I’m twelve years old, almost a young lady!” She tilted her chin up defiantly. 

Amika smiled, her features broadening into an expression of true affection.  “Alright then, no more pinches. I wouldn’t want to annoy my little mountain goat. What would I do without you scampering over the hills for me, when all I can do is limp along behind? I need you.”

Though only nineteen years old, her childhood living rough as an orphan in the wild hills of the Basque country had made Amika wise beyond her years. Her knowledge of plants, learned under the wing of a Wise Woman of the old tradition in her Basque homeland, could fill volumes. The two had ranged over the hills, among the feral grasses and wildflowers, until the antagonism of the Catholic church toward her mentor’s traditional ways forced Amika to flee. Her flight ended here in Ponferrada, at the foot of the Cantabrian Mountains, after an injury crippled her left leg. But all she had learned still lived within her, and she was eager to pass it along to Esperanza, the orphan with stormy grey eyes and an ineffable power to perceive illness. 

“Esperanza’s Way”

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Amika limped along as she taught Esperanza the uses of every plant that grew. 

“God did not create a single plant without a purpose. You just need to learn the virtues of each one. Where others see grasses and flowers, I see foods and medicines,” Amika grew passionate tutoring her young protégé. Under her wing, Esperanza learned quickly, growing from orphaned waif to beloved daughter.

Gabriela mumbled, gripping her woolen shawl tightly around her shoulders as she retreated into the house. She said nothing as she plopped down heavily on a wooden bench facing the hearth. When her stomach was empty, as it was now, her disposition soured and could focus only on satisfying its insistent grumbling.

“The farmers and herders will be happy with the rain,” Amika explained. “They can expect bountiful crops, and fat sheep covered by pelts so thick wolves will be  rewarded with a mouth full of wool rather than a meal.”

Esperanza smiled at the vision of sheep so fat and wooly that they were impenetrable.

“I expect we’ll see many customers coughing and wheezing,” Esperanza predicted. “We will need plenty of mustard greens for poultices, and catmint for fevers.”

“Alright then, I’ll cook up some onion tea and hearty bone broth to comfort the pilgrims along their way to Santiago,” Gabriella added.

“Speaking of cool, wet weather, I have just what we need.” Gabriela heaved herself up off the bench and trundled into the kitchen, emerging with a thick stew of beans, onions, and lentils. A smile crinkled the corners of her blue eyes as she handed Amika and Esperanza wooden bowls and heels of barley bread. The three companions huddled together like birds in a nest. The warmth of affection enfolded them like a well-loved quilt, Gabriela plump as a partridge, Amika tall, lithe and still beautiful, with cupid’s bow lips and acorn-brown eyes, and Esperanza, defiant and serious, her smokey gray eyes peering out from under a wide forehead and springy mouse-brown hair. In the years since their unlikely meeting, they had settled into an amicable partnership that did not require words.

Gabriela had not realized how lonely she had been after her husband’s death. Without the money he earned, she resorted to doing what she did best – cooking. Her husband had not been good company. Taciturn and gruff, he was often hard to live with, but she had loved him, nonetheless. When he died, he left her with nothing but this ancient building. Its dark and joyless interior reflected the gloom of lives together. Its one redeeming feature was that it faced the well-traveled route of the Camino de Santiago.

Every day, an assortment of pilgrims shuffled past her doorway – threadbare penitents, aimless vagabonds, and wealthy grandees riding richly caparisoned horses.

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