Winter 1521

Two months had passed since Lucas got the letter from his father. Since then, war had broken out in Europe, and Spain and France were in the heart of the battle. With momentum on their side, Castilla’s and Aragon’s hope to flank the Count of Foix and Biggore to the south did not go according to plan. Before they were given a chance to rout the Count and his forces on the French side of the border to end the conflict once and for all; the Count, with the help of the King of France, utilized the warm fall to move his men over mountain passes quickly before winter encroached. Almost thirty thousand French men now sat just to their north along the Iberian side of the Pyrenees. The French took no time to swiftly attack Navarre again. Not only did Roncul and Ronceviux fall, but news came also that so did Amaiur, along with much of the coast of northern Navarre by late fall.

The French now had control of both borders of the northern Pyrenees, and here Lucas’s Spanish contingent was, lying just to the south in Lourdes, trapped on the French side of the mountain, the winter keeping them from passing back into Aragon territory.

The fact his father’s letter even made it to Lucas seemed like much of a miracle to him. “It must have barely passed through Roncal and made its way through Anzanigo up the Rio Gállego over the mountains.” The same route they took earlier in the late summer to arrive here in Lourdes. Knowing Anzanigo was still in Spanish hands, Lucas had sent a return letter quickly back in the fall before the winter mountain passes closed. He described the situation, the intelligence he had received, and his location in Lourdes, hoping his father’s connections in the Castilian court could relieve him from the line.

Aside from the letter though, a much bigger problem was still weighing on his mind. Since snow had now entrenched the mountains handily before Christmas, there was no way to return to Castilla via the southern passes yet alone home to Aranda de Duero. With the French controlling much of the northern roads in Navarre leading to inland Castilla, Lucas was left without many options, stuck behind the enemy side of the line until Spanish forces pushed back.

Even with war on the northern horizon though, not much had changed in Lourdes amidst the Roman Chateau. Ocassionally, one of the men would walk by his quarters offering condolences but also the affirmation of the grand red buck kill that would “be remembered for decades.”

Lucas thought, “They must be trying their best to fill the void with the praise. After all, how much more than ‘I’m sorry Lucas’ could they say?”

It was going to be an odd Christmas, his first away from home, the first without his mother. Even more so now, he wanted nothing but to be with his father and brother; amidst the fermenting cellars and vintages and the preparations for pruning. Something to do with his hands, something to bring life to one day, something different than the granite of the walls, a place to breathe; Yet, winter had come and he was still waiting here, packed and ready but unable to leave.

He just didn’t feel himself.

“I guess that’s what happens when your mother dies . . .” Lucas thought.

He needed some space to get his mind right, to do something. He wanted nothing but to be on his way, but he was informed his father’s return letter might not arrive till late spring, and still then, there were no guarantees.

“What if they move us into the fighting in Navarre? Or to the King’s great new battle against the French in Northern Italy? Will there be no stopping this machine? Where will this blood trail lead?”

“More men, ground into the gear of death, for something less than the weight of an eternal purpose? All for the changing of simple boundaries, borders, lands, kingdoms?”

“Fighting the Moors and crusades entailed taking back Christian lands and defending their homes, but now here we are fighting for already settled Christian estates and fiefdoms.”

The frustration at their garrison’s entrapment weighed more and more on Lucas’s mind.

“The animals were fine to die for an earthly need, but death for him he was sure would have to come only after aspiring to some great eternal calling.” 

His superiors, seeing Lucas antsy to be on the move, granted orders for him to leave the Chateau each night beyond the walls to stretch one of the horse’s legs. He was given a different horse each night to walk with as a companion in the silence. He had gotten used to a similar route, walking westward of the Chateau tower, away from the town’s lights. The river and caves there in the countryside seemed to describe much of what Lucas felt as he waited for his father’s dispatch.

“His father was a respectable man and had once fought for the crown of Castilla valiantly. Surely a small favor of one man to be relieved back home wouldn’t be too much to ask.”

Lucas reasoned on the trail as this small town of Lourdes slept sleepily.

The beech trees stood scattered like his heart amongst the dispersed river. Which with the warm fall and now fast freezing winter, seemed much more like a dried-up stream. The caves echoed and recalled the emptiness he felt in his heart for a mother who in his life was so warm and benign.

“Mom . . . how did it happen?”

The rush of thoughts whirled through his mind. His father’s letter was so short and he was left without any answers. His mind sifted through the thousands of possibilities, scattered amongst the beech, a thought for every tree. On this night, passing by one of the caves, he crossed the river to sit within its empty embrace and was brought to his knees.

It’s hard to describe his mother’s kindheartedness and all she meant for the three men in the family. Ever since he was a boy, running through the streets of Aranda de Duero, her presence seemed to permeate amongst all the town’s activities.

First, was the finishing of the grand church, Santa María La Real, upon his mother’s first arriving in town with their father. Lucia and Deigo were newlyweds seeking a small village’s simplicity. She saw to it to ensure the church’s finishing. Immediately she helped Simon, the master architect of the cathedral of Burgos, to find local labor to finish the job. By the time his father and mother had arrived, Simon still needed to complete the church’s interior and its grand doors.

While pregnant with his brother Timoteo, his mom had helped recruit the young farm boys to help carry the limestone from the quarries to be carved for the doors to the church. She had an entire system worked out amongst their families. In the season between planting and harvest, when work was low on the farm, the young boys in the morning would work in exchange for Catechism teaching. At noon, she’d gather them around the square. The boys, sitting on the limestone bricks and wearied from the morning work, would eat bread gifted from the old woman at the local bakery. From their fillings, Lucia would share with them the “daily bread” from which they were to truly partake.

She’d share with them the news of God’s great company, of his life here on earth in Jerusalem, of his presence now in the Tabernacle. She‘d share with them the Church’s lessons on virtue and their heavenly reward above. She’d answer their questions about Mass, and teach the basics of Latin she had learned as a girl not quite their age, guiding them through the words they would use on Sundays for worship and praise. When the time came to be decided what to put on the front of Santa María La Real’s plateresque’s facade. She was the one to recommend to Simon that the carrying of the cross, crucifixion, and resurrection be the events displayed. An ode to the boy’s labor and toil and to the joy on there faces when hearing the teachings of Christ’s life. Why Simon relented to her artistic request she didn’t quite know, but which her Father would hear much later in their days. The simplicity and grandness of Christ’s life and teaching was what Lucia’s life also so easily portrayed. The doors were a testment to her faithfulness in proclaiming the glory of Christ.

She helped in the church’s first decorations when it opened to the community, she would also help organize the yearly processions to the hermitage on the celebration of the Virgen de las Viñas. From the moment they stepped foot into town, she was always around the parish and its activities. The town seemed to love her, as she’d drop by the shops to offer prayers and condolences. There wasn’t a detail of their lives she didn’t seem to remember. She was always loyal, always encouraging when another family was stretched by some great suffering.

Eventually, Lucas remembered the day as a young boy when his mother came home skipping and singing. She had quietly hoped for the whole town to hear stories of the vast world beyond, and that day was the day her dream would start to take form. She was given permission to work with the monastery, to formally educate the young, to teach them how to read, as well as a chance to organize and restore their small library.

Aranda de Duero was always grateful to have in their town an educated woman from the Pyrenees. They’d tell his father he was lucky to marry a woman so caring and so bold. Truth be told, they were lucky to have each other, both beyond the town’s simplicity, with adventures of lives past that occasionally around the fire, Lucas and Timoteo. would earn the right to be told.

“They had met in Aragon”

His father would always say as the boys stoked and reclined around their fire warmed home, the flames flickered off his dark olive skin and grey-grizzled beard. They couldn't imagine all that he had seen and done. A whole nother mysterious life seemed to lie within their father’s memory.

“Back during Ferdinand’s and Isabella’s reign . . . Those days were an exciting time on the Iberian peninsula, Aragon’s and Castilla’s kingdoms were united and Spain was becoming an international force unlike ever before. The Moors had surrendered in Granada and voyages had returned from expeditions west, mumblings were saying an entire world was opening up on the western horizon” 

Wonder had filled the boys’ minds.

“I was sent as a seasoned soldier turned ambassador on an emissary mission to France. The party consisted of military and political men from Castilla and Aragon to the new king of France The former French king, militant against Italy and Spain, had just passed away. Castilla and Aragon were hopeful his cousin’s rise to the throne would mean peace for the Spanish and French kingdoms”

“Along the journey to Paris, I had met a seasoned Aragonese man who took me under his wing. He told me it was his second trip to France. The first was when he was a young man, not too far of a journey, just across the mountains from his village in the Aragonese Pyrenees.”

“On that first trip, the man had gone to negotiate a peace treaty between his and the neighboring French County. Little did he know a young French woman in that County would catch his eye, yet alone become his future bride. ‘I have a daughter you should meet!’ The man had told me rather jokingly.”

“Upon an invitation, I decided to stay with the man and his family on our return journey from Paris. I spent the entire summer in the Pyrenees; hunting, fishing, and catching your mother’s eye. She wasn’t too different than her own mother, always looking for a foreign man!”

Their father would emphasize, egging their mother on, as they all sat around the fire.

“When I returned to Castilla, I wrote her for a year on end. Then, as in the ancient bible stories where the groom goes to fetch his bride taking her to his home, I went back to Aragon to marry her in a small little mountain church and brought her to Castilla to start our new life.”

At that point, the boys would often then look to their mother to see the glistening of the fire reflecting in her eyes as she gazed upon her husband and his storytelling with great fondness. Her eyes crinkled with a pure satisfaction when he spoke of their wedding day. She had much paler skin compared to their Father’s olive. Where his hair grizzled grey around those boyhood fires, her’s was a sandy straight brown. She preferred to wear it up and short rather than keep it down. She was taller than her husband by an inch. But knowing both their personalities you’d think they were one in the same with the way they carried themselves. He was Castilian, her ancestry was Aragonese and French.

She looked like many of the French women here in the mountains. Often, when patrolling around town, Lucas would see glimpses of her in many of the townswomen’s faces. Another reminder of his loss. 

When Lucas was born, he was given a name similar to his mother’s, his skin and sandy hair very much bearing her resemblance. Lucia and Lucas, he looked much more like his mother than he would care to admit. He was always told by his father that he’d fit in amongst the French. Whatever that meant?

In France, his father had picked up many things, one of which was winemaking. That is what led his father and mother to Aranda de Duero, to start a vineyard to hand on to a future family. Land had opened up on Aranda’s outer slopes after a husband and wife were growing older and had no living heirs. Seizing the opportunity, his father took the man up on the offer to cultivate the land. He promised the man to work as a hired hand for a time, to learn the art of the vineyard.

They lived in town for a time in a small home while that former family grew older in their years. His father received as much knowledge as he could from the man and promised to care for the place after he was gone. It was during these years that Timoteo and Lucas were born. When the day came that the man passed, they moved shortly thereafter into the estate home caring for the man’s elderly wife who had now become widowed. Lucia was hopeful the boys would bring life to the estate around her, and she made it a point to look after the woman in her final years.

Life on the vineyard seemed to be the high point in their life as a family. The boys would care for the land with their father. They would run across town on sleepy days, and once they got as old as those first farm boys their mother had formed, they began taking her lessons, usually dropping by the monastery as she cared for the library in the middle of the days. They would join her classes with many of the kids in town, and afterwards, throughout their many moments with her on the estate, she’d tell them about life in Aragon and teach them some French her mother had taught her from her own childhood days.

These were the thoughts Lucas was reminiscing through while on his knees at the cave, tears were trickly down his face and leaving them chalky from the salt. The grace of crying was one which he had not yet recieved. Thoughts of his mother and family, and bygone days seemed but to be the one place of warmth in the dreary winter’s night.

“I must find a way back, if only the memories could pierce through time and change the present reality, getting his father’s letter back over snow covered walls.”

He got up and lingered, pacing around the cave for a thought and a solution. Nothing he could reason would help him find a way to hear back from home and his father before spring rounded the corner. That was, even if more war was not fastly approaching. Finally, he relented and began walking the horse back to the old Roman Chateau.

One of his mother’s lessons then sprang to mind, one which was old as time could tell as far as concerned Lucas’s boyhood mind. It was of the story of a man, trapped along with others in a different cave. Their lives unable to see beyond the cave’s horizons. Their only comfort, but shadows amidst a fire’s light. Then the suspense, the prisoners are freed only to turn their heads to their first glimpse of the fire’s light. The light which promises them more than just shadows and a life trapped down under. Fearful and afraid, caught off guard by the fire’s brightness, so easily do the prisoners then go back to their chains, unrelenting to a new life awaiting them ahead.

‘But wait!” His mother would say,

“Then comes an intruder! Who goes down to the cave to free the prisoners!”

He drags one of them out amidst his kicking and screaming, up and past the fire into the daylight. At first the sun’s light blinds him, but then his eyes adjust to the forms around him. Men once shadows on a wall, suddenly look like trees walking, until eventually a clarity is formed. Life beyond the trapped imprisoned cave’s doors is suddenly realized to be worth what it takes to have its reward. The now freed prisoner then travels back into the dark, facing the death he once experienced, to go back down to the cave to drag the next man out to partake also in a now known gladness of days.

While making his way on the trail, the story and the warmth from the memories at the riverside cave still lingered as he passed the lone house on the river, a shepherd’s quarters who cared for the sheep in the countryside. The house was lit up, but a man was outside, sweeping the path which led to the house’s front door. Lucas nodded and mumbled a word of good night. As he passed by the man, he heard the man call out an affirmation.

“You’re French is good, for a Spanish soldier alright . . . You even have our local accent down.”

“My mother taught me.”

Lucas muttered off the response. A response he seemed almost conditioned to say when speaking with anyone in the village.

“Where was she from?”

The shepherd then pressed on,

“You look like a local, not much like the other Spanish men. I almost mistook you for one as a matter of fact.”

“Just across the mountains on the other side of the peaks, but my mom’s mother was from this side of the Pyrenees . . . She grew up not far from here . . .” 

Lucas returned the reply.

They parted their ways but a thought of the man’s last comment, “I almost mistook you for one,” began stirring inside. Suddenly the entrenched prisoner of Lourdes began to take flight.

A warmth welled up in Lucas as memories of his Mother swelled inside.

The memories could pierce through! They could change his heart and enable him to take action. He wasn’t stuck reliant on his father’s letter till spring, his mother had taught him her own gifts and strengths too, what if he used her teaching to get back home across the border to Aranda de Duero before the war and its machine shifted again its tide? What if that would be the event which could save these men and turn the war’s tide?

A plan started to form in his mind. He immediately got on the horse. Riding quickly back to the old Roman Chateau, he barged into his superior’s quarters . . .

Source: Charles Mercereau / Château Fort de Lourdes / 1860 / Toulouse Municipal Library / WikiMedia Commons / Public Domain