Wolves in Winter Read Free

respect for the ancient learning of the lands of the East.
    My father was not a doctor, but that learning taught him how to cure sickness. Often, after consulting his books, he would take me with him to the slopes above town to gather plants that he
stewed and ground to make medicines for the people who would tap at the door after dark. Sometimes they paid him, if they were rich, but many did not. Not that his kindness served him anything, in
the end. That last spring, we would go up to the meadows as we had always done, where the new grass was a pale gold-green and the hills were carpeted with crocuses, opening their flimsy violet
petals to the ripening sun. He named them for me, set them softly in my hands so that I should know their touch and smell, told me of their qualities and how they might be used.
    ‘We’ll never starve, little Mura,’ he would tell me, ‘for people are always sick, and they are always afraid.’
    Fear had come to Toledo by then. Fire and fear and treachery blazed through our city which had once been celebrated for its knowledge and harmony. The Castilian queen and her husband, Ferdinand
of Aragon, called out their troops to drive away the infidel, and the city turned upon itself like a rabid dog. Families who had lived for generations as Christians were persecuted as
morisco
, heretics who secretly worshipped the Moorish God. Neighbours whispered against each other in the market and each day the bell of my father’s shop rang less often, until weeks
would go by when nothing but the sweet mountain breezes stealing in through the shutters disturbed the golden dust on the heaped volumes. My father began to parcel up his treasures and send them
away, to merchants in Venice and Paris where the danger was not so great, and at night I would hear the scratch of his pen as he went over his accounts, squinting behind his seeing glass in the
light of a single tallow candle, sighing over how long he might hold out against ruin.
    My father began to insist that we attended Mass each week in the still-unfinished cathedral, and afterwards he would walk about with my hand tucked into his arm, bowing politely to everyone he
recognised, making sure we were seen. Although the bags of rice in the larder slumped and grew thin, and we no longer ate meat except on holidays, I was not afraid. I was glad that my father had
more time for me, now that he was no longer at his correspondence at all hours, tracing out the works his clients sought. My papa had always been so gentle with me, so careful and patient. He had
fed and bathed and dressed me from a babe, with all the tenderness I knew my mother would have shown; but he had often been weary and distracted, and those nights when his friends came to drink
wine and talk with him in the parlour I had known better than to disturb him. Talk, I knew, was his only pleasure now my mother was gone. So, now that my father’s friends had left Toledo, and
those that remained would greet one another with no more than a swift flicker of eyes as they passed in the streets, my father had time for me.
    He began, with increasing urgency, to talk to me of the old learning. He would stroke my hair in the warm light of the stove and whisper to me, as I fell towards sleep, of Zoroaster of Chaldea
whose learning was carried to Egypt, where the ibis-headed god Thoth invented writing. How King Solomon had learned to summon angels, and how all the arts derived from the seven principles of
grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, music, geography and astronomy. These were my childhood stories, the names of the
magi
the heroes of my fairytales, kings who travelled on camels over
golden deserts, summoning magical creatures from the movements of the stars. Like all odd children, I did not think it odd.
    The only time I ever saw my father angry was when I questioned his passion. I was a good Christian girl, I knew my catechism and I asked my father whether it was right to speak of such