136 - Seven Tales of Andalusia
136 - Seven Tales of AndalusiaUpdate: 2024-05-20
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//THERE ARE GHOSTS IN THESE MOUNTAINS
//THOSE DEAD, AND THOSE LIVING STILL
//EACH HAS A STORY THEIR OWN
//EACH THE STORY OF SPAIN
THE WRONG STATION PRESENTS "SEVEN TALES OF ANDALUSIA"
--Written by Alexander Saxton, and performed by Anthony Botelho. Support The Wrong Station by subscribing at www.patreon.com/thewrongstation.
The Wrong Station contains explicit content and mature themes. Episode-specific warnings can be found at www.wrongstation.com/c-w.
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Transcript
00:00:00
[Strains]
00:00:02
Oh, wonderful piece of art in the process!
00:00:08
Red Bull is they seem.
00:00:10
Are not the results of Mrs.
00:00:11
Harry.
00:00:12
[Strains]
00:00:16
You may wish to adjust the dial.
00:00:20
You're currently too busy.
00:00:23
The wrong station.
00:00:25
[Strains]
00:00:29
[Strains]
00:00:33
[Strains]
00:00:37
[Strains]
00:00:41
[Strains]
00:00:45
[Strains]
00:00:49
[Strains]
00:00:53
[Strains]
00:00:57
[Strains]
00:01:01
[Strains]
00:01:05
[Strains]
00:01:09
My name is Amaro Jesus Maria Ruiz Gommeles de la Square.
00:01:18
And I come from a bloodline of Asturian nobles, dating all the way back to the gods.
00:01:24
My father was an officer in the guards of Spain.
00:01:27
And it was my honor at age 7 to watch him die as a gentleman to the blade of Plato exposito, who some call El Espatacim.
00:01:36
Son, my father said as he bled out in unbelievable pain.
00:01:40
Never forget what it looks like to die as a Spaniard.
00:01:44
Indeed, I never did forget.
00:01:47
Neither did I weep, for it would be shameful for the son of a guard of Spain to weep.
00:01:52
And I am proud to say I have never wept even once in my life or death since then.
00:01:58
Now, through various adventures which I shall not relate, my family Ruiz came into the inheritance of an end illusion castle several generations ago.
00:02:09
Though my part of the family, a cadet branch remained in the north and held little intercourse with our bizarre southern cousins.
00:02:17
Yet one month before I came of age, a letter arrived bearing the seal of the counts of a square.
00:02:22
It seemed the con they had passed, and since so many had died in the wars of succession, I was the only male heir.
00:02:30
The inheritance hung in a single condition that I arrived within one year to wed my cousin, Graziella.
00:02:37
The letter came with a locket which enclosed the portrait of the young lady.
00:02:41
I could not believe my good luck.
00:02:43
I ran to tell my mother the good news.
00:02:45
She was praying in the family chapel, but as I crossed its threshold an inauspicious thing happened, the letter in my hands crumbled to dust.
00:02:54
Well, pious woman, my mother took this as an omen.
00:02:58
She begged me not to travel south, but the son of a guard of Spain is slaved in no superstition.
00:03:04
And, anyway, the locket had not crumbled.
00:03:08
Ignoring her wishes, I left home and began my long journey south.
00:03:12
And, allusion, you could see for yourself, of barren and lonesome this land has become.
00:03:17
The rebellions and expulsions of moors and moriscos, the wars, plagues, the great poverty upon which our once great Spain has fallen, once held the world in her hands and destroyed oceans with continents of plunder on her back.
00:03:32
And did she come to this?
00:03:38
Where did we go wrong?
00:03:38
It was under the shadow of these very mountains, the Sierra Morena, that I arrived the shell of a burned demon.
00:03:45
My supplies were low, my stomach empty.
00:03:48
But the only person who greeted me was a half-burned body swinging slowly with an egg from the in-sign post.
00:03:55
A sign hung around his neck.
00:03:57
It was a dorsaladol, the Skinner.
00:04:01
"We must start this, senior," I said to him.
00:04:04
Everyone knows the Sierra Morena are haunted, but the empire of Spain was not forged by timid men.
00:04:10
And so, under heavy skies, I entered the dead Skinner's Inn and made camp in the only room with walls in the roof.
00:04:17
His night fell, a dry rain began, and I fell asleep with a sound of drops in the dust outside.
00:04:24
Shortly at midnight, I was woken, with a sound of reverie in the next room over.
00:04:30
Music and laughter, it was still raining and too dark to see all the dorsaladors swinging a few yards from my open window, but there was a mouth-watering scent of roasted flesh coming under the door,
00:04:42
and so I climbed from my bedroal and washed my face with rainwater.
00:04:46
As presentable as a man might be in a situation, I stepped into the next room.
00:04:51
There I found not the empty stretch of shot rubble I'd seen in the daytime, but a wide, low ceiling tall, jostling with sturdy tables and red-cheeked travellers.
00:05:01
A merifier blazed in the hearth in that my arrival, the other guests turned to cheer, raising ale tankarts.
00:05:08
"You eggs!" a sleepy head as I decided to join us.
00:05:11
A smiling cabalero pressed a puter goblet into my hand shouting, "Drink, man!" "You look like you could use it."
00:05:18
And he was pushed aside by musicians who harassed me with their guitars, and tried to drop the coin in their hat, and a nay were shoved aside by several beauties, whose bold and roving hands pushed me into a seat.
00:05:30
"Eet!" they commanded.
00:05:32
"You look famished, and one brushed my cheek with her eyelashes and whispered, "You'll need your strength for later."
00:05:39
I blushed, but before anybody could make a body remark, plateaus of roast pork were flung done before me.
00:05:47
I needed no encouragement, for the meat smelled better than anything.
00:05:50
I lifted one beautifully scorched shank and sank my teeth.
00:05:53
Sweet God!
00:05:55
The release of juices was like nothing I can politely describe.
00:05:58
That evening it was like the old days it never ended, like Spain still basked in the golden age of the Trastamera.
00:06:05
I fed and devoured, cleaning the shank to its red bone and letting the hot marrow spurt upon my lips.
00:06:12
Only as I started on a second shank, I noticed a young woman seated at my table.
00:06:17
Like me she seemed to be an outsider to this rowdy group.
00:06:21
"Seniora, will you not eat?
00:06:22
You look pale with hunger."
00:06:25
"No, I am of the Jewish faith.
00:06:28
I must not touch pork."
00:06:31
"But surely, Senora, if you're starving."
00:06:34
I could see she was tempted and offered her fresh mound of broiled meat, with water running down from her mouth she succumbed, peeling away one red morsel.
00:06:44
The Talmud does make allowances.
00:06:47
Yet no sooner had she swallowed than she turned pale and shuddered.
00:06:51
"Do not like the taste, Senora."
00:06:54
I shrugged, feasted and drank much wine, and danced the ladies, and feasted and feasted and feasted some more.
00:07:02
All the world was flush and my appetite was endless.
00:07:05
Perhaps I drank as much as I ate, for I do not recall the rest of the night.
00:07:12
When I awoke it was done, and I was lying tangled and damp in my bedroom, my hands and face blackened with ash and stinking fat.
00:07:23
I was lying underneath the slowly spinning body of Helde Solador, his charred face grinned down at me, the sockets empty,
00:07:33
smile orange.
00:07:35
One of the body's legs had been known to the bone in the night, and its femur cracked for a rancid pulp, as they're down to fat and ash in my hands.
00:07:46
It could not be.
00:07:49
Somebody rushed nearby.
00:07:51
In the dry grass but the tavern wall crouched that Jewish girl I had met the night before, she was watering cracked stems with her tears and bile, as she cast wild eyes over her shoulder toward me,
00:08:02
I could tell from the blackness on her lips which meat she had tasted of the night before.
00:08:07
This must be what I deserve, she told me, staring at her own vomit.
00:08:12
In truth, I was inwardly consumed by the same horror I saw in her eyes.
00:08:17
But what could a man do?
00:08:20
Weep?
00:08:21
No, this was all a trick.
00:08:23
We could not have tasted human flesh.
00:08:26
I'd like to taste too much.
00:08:29
"Senora, I mustered what dignity I could.
00:08:32
Forgive my foolish behavior last night.
00:08:35
It tell me, who are you?
00:08:37
And what brings you to these haunted hills?
00:08:40
Her eyes flickered up to the body and then back down to my own greasy chin."
00:08:45
She said, "My name is Rekel of Nazareth."
00:08:50
"I suppose there's no harm in telling you now since my family is ruined, and our secret name is known in Seville.
00:08:56
We were conversesos, forcibly converted in the days of the Trastomerra, but we secretly kept our faith for many generations.
00:09:04
It may surprise you that we have escaped the Inquisition for so long, even as we rose in the world, and indeed we would not have except for two things.
00:09:14
First, our wealth, which came from investment and sugar plantations in the new world.
00:09:21
Second, and this, you may not believe, but the second reason for our success is that our family has been blessed for many generations by the attention of one of the Bene Elohim,
00:09:31
an angel.
00:09:33
If you know the story, he was one of those angels who defected from heaven with Semezai, and came to earth to satisfy their "play with the daughters of Eve,
00:09:44
be getting a race of giants."
00:09:46
"Aretzikafa," our family's angel, had once fallen in love with a girl named Miriam, but after their union she died terribly in childbirth.
00:09:56
And so, after weeping for 100 years, Aretzikafa promised to protect Miriam's family for a thousand generations.
00:10:03
It was because of him my ancestors were able to escape the auto-defei.
00:10:07
He has intervened in our affairs many times since.
00:10:11
But it wasn't until I turned 18 that I laid eyes upon him.
00:10:15
In those days my father's fortunes were retent.
00:10:18
He had bought chairs in a "slave ship," which had sunk, and had decided to summon Aretzikafa to ask for help.
00:10:24
"My sister, Cajadia, and I, being curious, hit ourselves in the cupboard to watch.
00:10:30
As the eldest of her I wish now I'd been good enough to prevent us."
00:10:34
Though perhaps what came next was only God's punishment.
00:10:38
"For the angel who came to my father's window was more beautiful than anything I had ever seen.
00:10:44
Twice my father's eye, golden-limbed and jasper-eyed.
00:10:49
His wings were those at the long black frigate bird, and his only clothing a loincloth of shearest gauze.
00:10:56
I caught my breath, and the angel heard, flinging one arm toward the cabinet doors, which opened themselves to reveal me in Cajadia.
00:11:04
I felt naked under that jasper gaze.
00:11:08
But after only a moment the sky-bued pupils turned on my sister and widened.
00:11:14
In the breath of wind Aretzikafa was kneeling at her feet.
00:11:18
Miriam, he called her.
00:11:22
I was crushed.
00:11:25
It is strange to have your sister courted by an angel.
00:11:28
Whereas a young cabalero might stand beneath her window with a loot.
00:11:32
We were instead treated to instruments of strange sound from beyond the world's edge.
00:11:37
Stead of a rose left upon the threshold.
00:11:39
We received golden flowers of live tender and bitter metal thorn, who sent intoxicated like wine.
00:11:46
As a family we were unsettled.
00:11:49
My mother disapproved.
00:11:51
She was much older than her, and how can I marry?
00:11:55
It will only bring dishonor.
00:11:57
But my father despared.
00:11:59
How can we deny him?
00:12:01
He has been our patron since before the days of Abraham.
00:12:04
As for me, I only felt jealousy.
00:12:08
I had fallen in love with Aretzikafa from the first moment, and I was tormented.
00:12:13
How often did I embarrass myself by strutting past the shadowed lane and often did I paint myself up in the childish hope he would realize the eldest sister deserved this heart.
00:12:24
But my efforts came to nothing, and my jealousy turned to bitterness, not the object of my love, of course, but that she who deserved at least.
00:12:36
I now believe Kadea was terrified of the angel and his intentions, though she did not speak about it to the sister that hated her.
00:12:43
My bitterness only grew, and so when I heard the latch on her bedroom window open late one night, I rolled over and begged and put a pillow over my ears.
00:12:52
Let Kadea dishonor herself, I thought.
00:12:56
Oh God, forgive me, forgive me.
00:13:00
My soul has known no rest since that night.
00:13:03
Now with the taste of human flesh upon my lips, I know it never will.
00:13:09
Kadea's pregnancy showed immediately.
00:13:12
By three weeks she was walking like a woman of five months, my parents locked her inside to protect the family honor.
00:13:18
But by then the neighbors had already noticed her swelling belly, and nothing could hide the titanic moans of her morning sickness in acturnal misery.
00:13:25
But the fourth month she was beyond any pregnancy I've ever heard of.
00:13:29
She filled first the bed and then the room.
00:13:32
Her beauty was gone.
00:13:34
She was shrunken, her hair turning white as the baby devoured her from inside.
00:13:39
She ate so much the rumour began to spread we were hiding a family in our basement.
00:13:44
But at Sikoffa did not show his face, except for one hour each night after midnight, when he'd appear at her bedside to weep and beg for her forgiveness she wouldn't grant.
00:13:57
At six months my sister died.
00:14:00
None of us were there when it happened, where we were sitting in the parlour, speaking with a kindly Dominican who'd been sniffing around our home.
00:14:08
We feared he was an agent of the Inquisition.
00:14:11
The moment after Kadea's death, her baby was born.
00:14:17
I say, baby, yet no world could be less appropriate for what came bursting through our walls.
00:14:23
Soft and pink and squalling.
00:14:26
It was three times larger than a bull, its many arms and kicking feet and reed the body more dragon-like than that of any child.
00:14:34
My father was crushed by falling rubble.
00:14:36
My mother, perhaps, arrives.
00:14:39
I fled as the nephew descended on the old friar, weeping with its great infant head, biting the black robes as though clamping to a mother's breast, there to give suck upon the crimson milk.
00:14:51
Since then I have traveled in desperation, wondering ever deeper on the shadow of these hunted mountains.
00:14:58
On my first night in his hills, freezing in the lawn, I came across the campfire of a stranger, and he was so lean and terrible, his body so bloody from ankle to wrists that I thought at first he must have been one of the many ghosts that wander here.
00:15:12
But he welcomed me warmly to his fire, and to ease my fear, he told me that his name was Clato Exposito.
00:15:22
And that is the name suggests, I am an orphan who is left outside the house of God and Nima Peru.
00:15:28
From the earliest days of my life I knew I was a boy, that the nuns insisted on the resting me in girls' clothes and telling me, I would one day become a nun and bride of Christ.
00:15:39
However, these wicked women could not smother the manhood of Spain which thrived in my heart, and which since then I have proven to any fool brave enough to speak with my sword.
00:15:50
And yet there's a small child trapped in the convent, I was I to know what future awaited, I was weak, and haven't been raised far from the world like training my nature demanded, I was beset with grave challenges,
00:16:03
I could I escape that iron bower.
00:16:07
Ironically, another woman was to rescue me, my salvation and damnation both.
00:16:14
She lived in great poverty, practicing the herbalist trade in those slums beyond the convent walls, though withered and obscene with warts and frightening, she was kind enough to hide me from the nuns from time to time,
00:16:27
and generous with sugar despite her meagerestation.
00:16:31
At night, sometimes, she would appear at my window and tell me secrets of the world.
00:16:37
My window was very high up, so perhaps she climbed, the stones seemed perfectly smooth by day.
00:16:44
She would tell me about Kuraka, Telujusko, and why his ghost walked wailing down the banks of the remake, howling we will not disappear.
00:16:52
She would tell me about the great cruelty of the Incas, and the greater cruelty of the Spanish, and at last she asked me one night if I would like to be a man, and if I would like to escape.
00:17:04
Of course, she knew the answer already.
00:17:07
The price was low.
00:17:09
To be free, I need merely bring her the head of a nun.
00:17:13
I left, for the price was lower than she knew, and when she had opened the door to my cell, I crept down to the infirmary, where sister Francesca had been lying since her death by stroke the day before.
00:17:25
There were no metal tools in that room, so I was forced to strike the sister's head from her shoulders by means of a large, loose-paying stone.
00:17:33
But my patron, when I returned with it to my cell, was most pleased.
00:17:38
Only acts of violence and will can bring power of the kind you seek, she told me, and so we must train ourselves to commit them.
00:17:47
Sit with me then, young Plato, edit with me, and by this morning you will be free.
00:17:53
She took the head and produced a small knife, and began to peel sister Francesca's head like an orange, and as we ate those little slips of flesh together,
00:18:04
she began to finally tell me of a wrong tale.
00:18:07
She told me, "My name is Ego Skiña, and my family comes from Zucaramandi in Nevada.
00:18:14
My parents were of the faith of witches, and forced to flee the vast country when they were discovered performing the black right of a Calare underneath the full moon.
00:18:22
My father was fortunate enough to be trampled to death by the horseshoes of the Inquisition, but my mother was captured and subjected to unimaginable torture.
00:18:31
First they boiled her feet in oil, and then when the meat was golden and crisp, they brought mad men from the Bedlam House in La Grona to eat that flesh to the bone, even as she watched.
00:18:42
Next they bound her biceps and cloth, until her forearms swelled, and then used hammers to smash them open.
00:18:49
Finally, the poor woman's her come to her injuries and died.
00:18:52
She was pregnant with me at the time.
00:18:55
I was born seven days later, and given over to the care of the nuns.
00:19:00
However, at the coming of menstrual blood in the night of my 13th birthday, I was awakened by a pounding on my chamber door.
00:19:08
I tried to ignore it, but when I hid my head beneath the pillow, the door opened by itself, and my mother strode into the chamber.
00:19:16
Because her corpse had been burned after my unexpected post-mortem birth, her body was still crackling and seared, and seeping with clear fluids that sputter across my floor.
00:19:27
From that time on, she came to me each night, and taught me all she knew of, a calare and the witch's faith.
00:19:35
I couldn't hurt her power, she told me.
00:19:38
Only a simple right was necessary, a type of take of her flesh, and since her body had long since been burned, all that remained of her flesh was to be found within that of the joys,
00:19:50
madmen at the Bedlam House in La Grona.
00:19:52
Perhaps you can begin to guess what I did next.
00:19:56
Raising a covenant as I was, it was no difficult thing for me to find employment with the church in that God for a second place.
00:20:03
I was very patient.
00:20:05
For three years I fed and clothed, and cleaned those lost and wild souls.
00:20:09
On the first day of the fourth, I drug the sister, and with it all sixty inmates, all nine at the men and women who worked with me.
00:20:18
Because the inmates were mad, I did not blame them for tasting my mother's flesh, and so rather than kill them, I merely used a small knife to carve holes into each of their bellies while they slept,
00:20:31
removing thin swirls of liver, which I fried in chilies and oil in an eight.
00:20:37
I did not know which of the sixty inmates had tasted my mother's flesh, and it wasn't until I tasted the liver of the fifty-third of the madmen that the veil of dark power came down over my eyes,
00:20:48
muting all light.
00:20:51
My dead mother's memories flowed through me, and I knew which of the men and women who worked with me at once taken those madmen to torment her.
00:20:59
Those I dragged to the same cage where the sleeping madmen were just beginning now to wake, and locked the door behind them.
00:21:06
The others I gave a quick death, cutting their throats to the bone.
00:21:11
As the madmen woke, the pain from their bleeding bellies sent them into a frenzy.
00:21:16
They fell upon their caged keepers, and I sat in silence outside the bars, and watched as they were destroyed.
00:21:23
After that, I fled to Grono, up into the mountains, pursued by the horses at the inquisition.
00:21:29
But in a black cave that night, I called upon an aim of a calare, as I sat beside my little fire, a great black goat in the shape of a man strode up out of the darkness and took me against the bare rock.
00:21:44
At dawn, I wandered out of my cave and found no horsemen of the inquisition waiting for me.
00:21:50
I was somewhere else, in some other range of dark mountains.
00:21:54
I wandered under the dim sun, and as night fell again, I came upon two men eating dinner by the crossroads.
00:22:01
The elder fire was merry, and they were feasting upon meat from a ribcai to roast it upon the glowing coals.
00:22:08
Neither of them had any skin upon their bodies, yet they both seemed quite friendly as they welcomed me to eat.
00:22:15
I asked how, if it wasn't impolite, they had come to lose their skins, and this is what they told me, quite cheerfully speaking in unison.
00:22:27
They said, "I am Kanurone, and I am Kanemayo, and we first became lovers who are working as sailors on body-slaveship, though our love was pure,
00:22:39
we were sick at heart because we had no shared tongue.
00:22:42
Kanurone's people, you understand, are gallu travellers, and because of their mistreatment, hated the pile, the Spanish.
00:22:51
And so his people never learned the language of Spain, only speaking her own dialect.
00:22:57
When Kanurone came aboard the ship, it was with a cow-yum man whose father had been a spaniard and was able to translate.
00:23:04
Kanemayo, meanwhile, was born in Haiti, in a tiny village in the mountains.
00:23:09
I only spoke tiny.
00:23:12
Like me, he went to see in the company of a mestizo translator, but many accidents happen at sea, and the time came when no men on board could speak with either of us,
00:23:23
and this put us at a double loss.
00:23:26
First, because we could not speak to each other, and second, because we were now vulnerable.
00:23:31
Our captain planned to sell us both his slaves, and so, through glances, sounds and clues of smell, we began to plan our escape.
00:23:41
We could think of only two places where we might be safe.
00:23:44
One was in the mountains of Haiti, the other, the haunted peaks of the Sierra Morena, where Kanurone was born.
00:23:51
By mute conversation, we decided Haiti would be best, yet fate had other plans.
00:23:58
Halfway across the middle passage, a strange warm wind blew up, and with it, the unworldly sound of instruments neither of us had ever heard.
00:24:08
I, Kanurone, saw nothing in the storm.
00:24:11
While I saw the semi-Hurigan, son of the wild mother of storms, with his black wings and golden body.
00:24:19
Our ship was driven eastward against the rocks, only we too survived, using our sign language to communicate over the strange warm wind of that tempest.
00:24:29
At last, we found ourselves washed ashore, on the beach thick with bodies, mingled black and white.
00:24:36
So depopulated was the land where we came ashore, that took us three days to realize we were in Spain.
00:24:42
Making our way upstream along the Guadalcavir, we came at last upon the Sierra Morena, where we survived as bandits, searching fruitlessly for some of Kanurone's people to take us in.
00:24:54
But when a group of calute travelers came upon us at last, they were horrified by what we'd become, or they arrived just as we were squatting over the bodies of a Marisco family.
00:25:05
Their coins were in our fists, their blood was up to our shoulders.
00:25:09
And so we were without hope when we arrived the roadside in.
00:25:13
It was burned and abandoned to the dry winds, and the burnt body of a man hung from his neck out front.
00:25:20
His shins were cracked and not.
00:25:22
The sign around his neck read, "El de Solador."
00:25:26
We fell asleep inside the inn as rain began to fall.
00:25:30
When we awoke, music and laughter came from the next room, and when we entered, strange revelers awaited us with cheers and food and drink.
00:25:39
The meat was exquisite.
00:25:41
We could not eat enough, such rich dripping pork.
00:25:45
When the next sun rose, we found ourselves lying beneath El de Solador, our mouths smeared with his charred flesh.
00:25:52
We were both quite sick.
00:25:55
We fled the great distance and rested on the hill tops that night.
00:25:58
But the sound of heart-foot steps awoke us, and we found a handsome man with very dark skin, seated across from us at our fire.
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His legs were bare-bone from the knees to the tips of his toes, but he smiled and welcomed each of us in our own language.
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This came as a surprise for it had been long since either of us had heard those tongues spoken.
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And so before he killed us, we sat with him as he relaxed and spread his charred legs.
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He told us his name was Yaffet.
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And that, although my family has lived under the Muslim kings of Bornu for many centuries, we have always been followers of the Jewish faith, and have made our way in foreign lands through our mastery of the Kabbalah.
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Because I was raised early to the languages of Hebrew, Arabic, Fula, Iwando, Al-Ibalan, and a secret tongue of the Elohim.
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I became delighted with the study of tongues and quickly picked up any language I stumbled upon, including those of the Spanish sailors and their slaves, who often came to our port.
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Arabic and Taino, Basque and Mur, Calu and Dutch and Aztec and Arocanian.
00:27:06
So many peoples brought together in the lands of Spain, and all of them squandered.
00:27:12
It was my bad luck to be born at the time when Bornu was crumbling, and so while traveling between cities as a young man, I was captured and forced into slavery, sold downriver to those same Spanish.
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Fortunately, I was not without allies.
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For my family has been blessed for many generations by one of the many Elohim, an angel.
00:27:34
Indeed, if you are familiar with the story, he was one of those who defected from heaven under Semazay and came to earth to slake their lust upon the daughters of Eve, by getting a race of giants.
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Our family's angel, Retsikafa, had once fallen deeply in love with a woman named Miriam, but she died terribly in childbirth.
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Therefore, after weeping for seventy years, the angel bout to protect Miriam's family for a thousand generations, and it was known among our family that he looked after us still.
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For three generations before, he had taken to wife the younger sister of one of my four bears, in whom they said the beauty of Miriam had been reborn.
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She had not survived the childbirth, and so it was that as I suffered in a slave ship, Retsikafa came to my aid upon the waters and drove the vessel east against the rocks of Spain.
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Every solar board descended to the deep.
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Only I, who descended from Miriam the beloved, was carried on a warm wind back across the waters to the land.
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"Retsikafa," I asked, "will you not take me home?"
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"No, Yovat, I must be in Seville this night," said he.
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"For your grandmother Miriam has been reborn."
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Before I could ask further questions, he had left me in a shore, and vanished northward on a swift wind.
00:28:51
I made my way up the Guadarca veer into the dark Sierra Morena, and there, without food or friendship or prospects, I was forced to use the powers of Kabbalah to call upon evil spirits.
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The Serim, the male goat, I found lurking in his mountains, and brought me gifts of clothing and food, which he took from those four lawn souls he found lurking in his hills.
00:29:13
According to the terms of our contract, it took only their skins, but left them their lives.
00:29:20
This state of affairs continued for many months, and the Inquisition came.
00:29:26
With their own powers, they drove away the Serim.
00:29:29
After that, they cooked me in boiling oil, and hanged me by the neck at the ruined inn.
00:29:36
There I hung for many weeks, aware of every dreary moment.
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"Someone must come by, I told myself."
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And at last, someone did.
00:29:46
She was a woman of extraordinary beauty, despite the obvious stab wounds to her bodies.
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Her skin was dusky as the sunset, her hair darker than the bottom of the sea.
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She had with her many servants, and by her order they cut me down.
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"Sir, you look starved," said she.
00:30:04
"Will you not come to my castle to eat?"
00:30:07
"Of course," bear lady.
00:30:09
A short way up the road behind that haunted inn, we came to an alabaster castle, shimmering softly in a darkness between midnight and cock's crow.
00:30:18
Within those walls were splendid or injuries, and several skeletons crucified upside down.
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In a great hall we sat to dine on golden dishes of cousco, with silver forks and spoons of Zacatechus, and the food we ate was the thrown flesh of those who had gone down with slave ships.
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"My lady," I asked, seeking to flatteren the swin her affection.
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"Who are you that keeps such a generous table?"
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She said.
00:30:48
"My name is Graziella, at the house square.
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On my father's side we are of the Gothic blood, but my mother's line is descended from the murish princesses who ruled this land before the Trastomeria.
00:31:01
The land lies ruined.
00:31:03
When I was born it was the richest in all of Iberia, and my father, who had taken both land and wife of the murs, grounded under his heel like the grapes that make fine wine.
00:31:13
I loved him dearly, and as I grew so too did the wealth of our house, and by sound investments in mines and plantations in the new world, we became dazzlingly wealthy.
00:31:25
Though my father wished for a son, my mother refused out of cheerless nature to bear him one, and so I became like a son to him.
00:31:33
I travelled overseas with him, and saw the newest states on savage lands, saw the proud ships sailing to his spandola with their human cargo.
00:31:42
I was the happiest girl, perhaps, to ever live.
00:31:45
But my father grew ill with syphilis, and so returned home in hopes his conqueror would cure him.
00:31:52
But he only became paler, and monstrous, and soon could not even climb out of bed.
00:31:59
Only my mother fed him and handled his food.
00:32:02
Knowing how he hated her, I volunteered to take over, but the woman refused so violently I began to suspect her motives.
00:32:09
I hid myself in a cupboard one night, and waited for my mother to come in and prepare my father's draft.
00:32:15
And when she turned away from him, I saw her shake white powder into his cup.
00:32:20
At this worst thieres confirmed, I leaped from the cupboard, knife and hand, and stabbed her in the chest.
00:32:28
When she fell, I continued to stab.
00:32:31
I can still feel the knife's rough edge sawing through her silicon bodice.
00:32:36
I was at this time 11 years old.
00:32:39
Once the moor was dead, my father called me to his bedside.
00:32:44
"Graziela, why have you made yourself an orphan?"
00:32:48
"Father, don't say such things.
00:32:50
You're strong, you'll live."
00:32:52
But he gave me a hideous smile, and took my bloody fingers in his cold hands.
00:32:58
"I found you a husband," he told me.
00:33:01
"Avour blood.
00:33:03
Obey him.
00:33:05
Work with him.
00:33:06
Keep the family fortunes strong.
00:33:09
Father, you must do it yourself."
00:33:12
But when he did not respond to my tearful words, I looked up and found his ruined face empty.
00:33:21
That night my new husband arrived at the castle between the hours of midnight and Cox Crow.
00:33:27
Unlike me, he was a man fully grown.
00:33:30
His clothing was filthy and torn, and his mouth in the front of his shirt were all smeared with blackened grease, by the bruising around his neck.
00:33:41
I could tell he had been hanged.
00:33:44
"Are you my little wife?"
00:33:47
he asked.
00:33:49
"I only nodded."
00:33:53
He told me, "My name is Amaro Jesus Maria Ruiz Gomeslez del Esquero, and I come from a bloodline of Asturian nobles, dating all the way back to the gods.
00:34:05
My father was an officer in the guards of Spain, and it was my honor to take seven to one."
00:34:11
The wrong station is made possible with the generous support of our listeners on Patreon.
00:34:27
Visit today at patreon.com/thewrongstation.
00:34:30
You can also support us by leaving a rating and review on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever it is you tune into the show.
00:34:37
This week's episode, Seven Tales of And Illusion, was written by Alexander Saxton, and performed by Anthony Batella.
00:34:45
Thank you to Megan Stanley, Gato Blanco, Cody Heller, Cat, Joel Pettigrew, Tanner Hensley, Astra Kim, and H.
00:34:54
Steach, for helping us keep the lights.
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Well, off.
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The wrong station is co-produced by Alexander Saxton, Anthony Batella, and the company of Dwarf H.
00:35:07
Spiel, with news composed and performed by Lawn Citroen, and arranged for the Viola and performed by Viola Schmidt.
00:35:11
You can follow the wrong station on social media, at thewrongstation, and email us at thewrongstation@gmail.com.
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And, until next time, thank you for listening.
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