La Vida Loca

"This," puffed Viola, "is not what I expected to be doing."

Bert shifted his backpack slightly so that it would be more comfortable. They were in southern Spain, heading towards one of the many white villages that dot the hills in that part of the world. This pueblo blanco was different to most, however. Muggle tourists discovered that, no matter how hard they tried, they could not find the road leading to the village. They'd give up their search, complaining about bad Spanish roads and poor-quality maps. Santa Maria de los Milagros, named after its church as so many Spanish villages are, was the Spanish equivalent of Hogsmeade, and Muggles could never set foot there.

More than anywhere else in Europe, witches and wizards had been persecuted in Spain, thanks to the notorious Spanish Inquisition, and at one point Santa Maria de los Milagros was home to the only ones left in the country.

"Let's sit down and have a drink," said Bert.

Viola gratefully agreed. She sat at the side of the road and pulled out her water bottle. Bert had said very little to her ever since they floo into a fireplace in a house owned by an expat witch in Marbella. Viola had thought the woman's green top and purple trousers would make her stand out as obviously not a Muggle, but Bert assured Viola that all Muggles dressed rather outlandishly to play golf, which the witch was heading out to do. Since then he'd been quiet. He seemed to be brooding about something. "You've done this sort of thing before?" She made the statement a question.

"Once. But you know Eth - she sends you off to do one thing, and halfway through you realise she was planning something else all along. The end result should be the same, she just doesn't tell you all her ways of reaching it."

"So you think this is going to be more difficult than it looks?"

Bert nodded. "Visit a town, ask to see a spell book, memorise spell and leave? It's never going to be that easy."

"If it were, she'd have done it," Viola noted.

"No, if it were that easy, the Death Eaters would have done it," Bert told her.

The little village seemed to shimmer in the heat haze. Or was it shimmering in reality? "I did this area in History of Magic," Viola reminisced. "That was my best subject at school.

"Yeah, Eth always reckoned you were the reason she got an O in it for her OWL and NEWT... what happened here?" Bert took a long swig of mineral water from his own bottle.

"The Spanish Inquisition. The British witch hunts were a joke; they only killed poor, harmless Muggles. The Spanish Inquisition... they were deadly. Spain's wizarding community's only really recovered in the last hundred years or so. Some wizards moved to the Americas to escape the Inquisition, some went to North Africa. Hundreds more were slaughtered, along with Muggles of all faiths." Viola thought back to the tales of the siege of Santa Maria de los Milagros, with the Inquisition unable to get in but sealing the village off so no one could get out, of the desperate wizards transfiguring anything they could find into food, completely trapped in the days before Floo powder was invented.

"Well, we'll probably hear about it in the village," Bert said. "But we need to get there first. Let's go!"

**

High in the hills above them, Dedalera Cortes Garcia looked down on the two travellers. Strangers, she thought, but ones who can pass through our defences. She flicked a long strand of chocolate-brown hair back over her shoulder. Most foreign wizards quickly learned that they were not welcome in Santa Maria de los Milagros, and tended to form their own little communities elsewhere, although their infrequent visits kept the locals up to date with what was happening in the rest of the world. Unlike many other villagers, Dedalera was keen to meet new people. What she really wanted was to get away from the village all together.

Nimble as a goat, as they travelled along the dusty road below, she skipped across boulders and around bushes, following them. Around her the grass moved as though stirred by invisible feet.

**

Entering the village via the dusty track, Bert felt like he'd stepped into Clint Eastwood's shoes. The sun beat down, and there were no people to be seen anywhere. I'm the man with no name, he thought, so the gravedigger must be around here somewhere. He looked around slowly. A donkey snorted contemptuously at them from where it was tethered outside what appeared to be a bar.

"This doesn't feel very friendly," Viola whispered. "Where is everyone?"

"I don't know," Bert said quietly. Most Spanish villages were lively places, with locals crowding the streets, chatting happily, hooting car horns, and calling across the road to neighbours. The sense of community and friendliness that attracted most tourists to rural Spain was completely absent. Wizards! Bert thought. They never make anyone feel welcome. "Let's have a sit-down and something to eat in the bar," Bert decided, "and then see if anyone can help us with the book."

The donkey watched them all the way to the door, and attempted bad-temperedly to bite Bert's rucksack as they passed him.

Inside, the bar was pleasant enough. Traditional tiles adorned the walls and floor, keeping things cool, and barrels of wine were stacked to the ceiling. Hams and smoked peppers hung from the ceiling. The scent of delicious food wafted from the kitchen out the back. The barman watched them in a manner that reminded Bert of the donkey outside.

"Hello," said Viola brightly. "I'm..."

"No hablo Inglés," stated the barman, with a scowl.

Bert hadn't employed Carlos at his restaurant, The Herbalist, for nothing. He could speak fairly good Spanish, although he was best at talking about food and hurling insults along the lines of the various animals that might be in a person's ancestry. He slipped into the tongue with ease. "Hello," he explained. "I'm Byrtnoth Hawley and this is Miss Viola Beanacre, and we'd like a glass of dry sherry each and..." he looked at the blackboard listing the day's specials, "stewed lamb with almonds, please."

"Two Reales."

Bert pulled a purse of Spanish wizarding money from his pocket and paid. The barman's face fell, as though he hadn't expected anyone outside the village to carry Reales. Bert wasn't sure where Ethelina had got the antique coins, and didn't want to know any details. He suspected it was through some shady deal, and might have involved goblins.

A glass of sherry cheered Viola immensely, and the stew, when it arrived, was excellent. Bert was a big fan of Spanish cooking - the Spaniards didn't wax lyrical about food as the Italians or French did, they just got on with making exquisite meals and snacks. "This is great," Viola enthused. "More like what I was hoping for."

"I reckon I could do a variation on this for the restaurant."

"You can cook? I can't cook. My first husband said..."

Bert interrupted. "First husband? Your surname's Beanacre still."

"I kept my own one for professional reasons. Good thing too, as it turned out. Anyway, he said that I couldn't even boil an egg, so to prove him wrong I got a hard-boiled egg from a friend and cast a warming Charm on it, all ready to serve up, but I overheated it and it exploded."

"Ah." Bert mopped round his dish with the bread provided.

"Haven't you ever been married?"

"No. I lived with someone once."

"And?"

"Don't you ever stop asking personal questions?"

"Of course not, I'm a journalist. So, what was she? Pureblood? Half-blood?"

"Muggle," Bert admitted tetchily. "But she got fed up of me never taking her to meet my family, and left. I went on a few dates with a witch recently but it didn't work. I've had a few girlfriends, and that's my entire love life. Happy?"

"I only asked!" Viola exclaimed. "You are so touchy. Now, where do we find this Cortes Somoza fellow?"

The barman, who'd been eavesdropping, stiffened, and they both glanced at him. "There is no one here with that name!" he told Bert, then rushed round and started clearing away their dishes. "The bar is closed now. There is nothing to see in this town. You must go."

Pushed out onto the street, the door slammed behind them, and they heard the lock click into place. The malevolent donkey was still there. It reminded Bert of his twin. "I take it back," Viola told him. "You're a paragon of openness. That bloke was touchy."

"This is Ethelina's little surprise," Bert mused. "I bet she knew we'd have trouble." They surveyed the dusty street.

"Let's go to the church," Viola said suddenly.

"Oh, very good," Bert laughed. "We've got nowhere to stay, no one to help us, and you want to go sightseeing!"

She grabbed his sleeve and dragged him towards the whitewashed building. "Even if there's no Cortes Somoza here now, there may have been once. Looking at the names on tombstones will tell us that.

Around the corner of the bar, Dedalera twitched. They were looking for her father! That meant they might be here to help her. Clutching her medal of Santa Maria as she followed the strangers, she silently prayed to the saint for one small miracle for herself.

Looking around the church of Santa Maria de los Milagros, Bert reflected on how his work for Ethelina had sent him into a chapel once before, and he had ended up excavating the remains of his best boyhood friend.

Viola was nosing around memorial stones. "Aha! Cortes. There were plenty of them here once... oh, erm, drat." She bit back the swear word she'd been going to use, remembering where she was. "The last names carved in were a couple of years ago. Maybe they're all dead after all."

Bert said nothing. The statue of the saint wore glittering golden robes and looked down in a kindly fashion. He could imagine her looking down in that same sweet, sorrowful way on the besieged villagers hundreds of years ago. In front of her candles burned. A young girl came to stand beside him, lit another candle and placed it in a holder. "I light one when I dare," she told him in Spanish. "For my father. I ask her to look after him... to keep him safe in Heaven."

He looked down at her. She seemed to be about ten years old, and was dressed in robes that were grubby and far too small. Bert lit a candle too. "That's a good prayer. Who looks after you now?"

"I look after myself," she told him. "This village is dangerous to me. But I heard you outside the bar; you are here to see my father. You have come all this way to visit a dead man. I am Dedalera Cortes Garcia, and there are no more of my family left."

Bert crouched down to Dedalera's level. "My name is Byrtnoth. I'm here from England, with that lady over there. Her name is Viola. You're safe with us - but why is the village dangerous to you?" The child said nothing.

Viola had joined them so quietly, Bert didn't know how long she'd been standing behind them. She smiled at the child. Bert explained to her what Dedalera had said.

Bert asked, "If this place is dangerous, Dedalera, can you take us somewhere safe?"

Dedalera smiled and nodded. "Come to my house."

As they left the church, Dedalera seemed to fade somehow into the background. Viola frowned. "I haven't seen anyone hide that naturally since Lucy at school, and she grew up to become a jewel thief."

They had trouble following Dedalera; she blended so easily into her surroundings. Their backpacks felt heavier under the blazing sun, and Viola was sweating. Why, thought Viola grumpily, do I always end up smelling like a troll every time I spend any time with this man? Bert, meanwhile, kept darting off the road to pull bits off bushes and plants. Ethelina had given him a supply of preserving jars and instructions to bring home anything he thought might be interesting. Even if his finds turned out to be ordinary, someone somewhere would want them.

When they reached it, Dedalera's 'house', while large, was a ruin, a few remnants of whitewash clinging to some of the stones. It had no glass in the windows, just rusty iron grilles over the apertures, and part of the roof was missing. The child waved them inside, and then darted round the back. She returned with a dead rabbit in a home-made trap, smiling. "We will eat well, strangers!" Viola pulled a face, but Bert looked keen to get his hands on the bunny.

Most of the furniture in the room Dedalera clearly lived in was in fragments, but all the fragments appeared to be there, so Viola whipped her wand out and set about Reparo-ing them. Her repairs were good enough to join the largest pieces together, although small fragments and splinters remained unattached. Fixing things perfectly took real skill, especially when they'd been broken for so long, and it was really a job for specialist wizards. Dedalera watched her, then pulled out a wand that was clearly too big for her and tried the Charm.

"You roll your 'r's too much," Viola told her. "Reparo!"

Bert translated.

"Rrrrreparrrrro!" burred Dedalera.

"There must be a Spanish equivalent," Bert told Viola.

"I never learned foreign spells," Viola told him. "Ask her where she got that wand."

Bert obliged, adding, "In our country, children get their first wands at the age of 11, before they go to school."

"It was my father's wand," Dedalera told him. "It keeps me safe. It used to keep him safe, too, but bad men killed him anyway." She pointed at a slumbering portrait of an old man. "Now I have only my grandfather."

"And they will kill you too?"

Dedalera shook her head. "I am the last. They all want to keep me."

Bert passed all this on to Viola, who looked grave. "I don't understand what she's talking about. Can't we take her back with us? Poor little thing, half-starved, not cared for." Viola pulled one of her nicer robes, a deep rose-coloured garment, out of her backpack. She'd hoped to wear the robes on an evening out in romantic Seville. She sighed. The colour would suit Dedalera. Tapping them with her wand, she uttered the words to shrink them, and handed them to the girl. The look of pleasure that crossed the child's face was worth the sacrifice. As Dedalera ran off to put them on, Bert walked over to the makeshift cooking area and started preparing the rabbit.

"Do the Spanish wizards have some sort of Social Services?" Bert asked.

"I don't think there are enough of them for that," Viola said grimly. "But I'm helping this little girl if it's the last thing I do."

Dedalera returned, beaming, and hugged Viola. Viola hugged her back, then released her and crouched down. "Happy!" she said, running her finger along her own smiling mouth.

"'Appy!" Dedalera repeated, mimicking the action.

"Viola... book," Viola said, pretending to open a book.

Dedalera looked at her suspiciously. "'Appy." She didn't sound happy.

"Book," Viola repeated, with actions.

Bert called, in Spanish, across from the ancient table where he was skinning and gutting the rabbit. "Dedalera, we were sent to look at a book that your father had. We don't want to take it away, we just need to learn a spell in it."

She skipped over to him. Viola looked disgruntled. Dedalera poked him and said, "I know the one you want. The book is mine still, you agree?"

"Absolutely. We only need to look at it. Viola has to see it."

Shifting a large pile of what appeared to be broken furniture, Dedalera brought out a heavy, ornate book and took it to Viola. Viola opened it and gasped. "I didn't think I'd ever see one of these! There are said to be only three in existence!"

"What is it?" Bert came over, interested, and Viola waved her wand at him to clean off his rabitty hands. Dedalera pointed at the symbols on the page and started jabbering in a language neither of them spoke.

"It's an original Mayan manuscript, bound into a book. The other three known to exist are in Muggle museums - the Dresden one was covered in Divination at Hogwarts."

"So what does it say?" Bert was eager to know.

Viola stared at him. "I dunno! I failed Ancient Runes OWL, I couldn't even learn the Norse ones!"

Dedalera carried on speaking her mysterious language. "You can read this?" Bert asked.

"Yes, my father taught me," she boasted. "Only my family can speak it."

Great, thought Bert, I'm going to spend all my time translating. "Well, I'm going to have to get you to teach the spell to protect a place to me so I can make Viola learn it."

"Learn it?" Dedalera giggled. "The Thousand Jaguars? But it's the longest one in the book."

"What did she say?" Viola asked.

Bert groaned. "She says, I hope your sleeping bag is comfy because you'll be here some time."

**

After Dedalera had fallen asleep in her newly-Reparo'd, newly-Scourgified bed, Bert and Viola sat outside the front of the house on a rickety bench, looking at the stars. Bert had opened a bottle of excellent Spanish wine.

"I'm never going to trust my sister again," Bert grumbled. "Every time I do anything for her, it ends up being three times more complicated than she promised. And how come you're working for her? Last thing I heard, you were some hotshot reporter."

"Golly!" Viola giggled. "My turn to be interrogated. The editor of the Daily Prophet - Barnabas Cuffe, curse his quill - and I had a difference of opinion with regards to Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter. Dumbledore says You-Know-Who is back."

Bert shuddered. "Ethelina's been convinced the Death Eaters are rising again since they all kicked off at the Quidditch World Cup last year - it's as though she knows things she's not telling me. But why does Dumbledore think You-Know-Who has returned? I mean, there's no real evidence, is there?"

"Nothing hard... but, as you said, I'm good at my job, and I hear things. Sirius Black still hasn't been caught. Why not? You know, I remember him from school, and while you could see some people were destined to go bad, he had none of the signs. Not one. Weird how some people can fool you..."

Viola ticked off several points on her fingers. "Ages ago I heard rumours about something dodgy in Albania. A Ministry witch went missing there, so I went out there and the place was suspiciously normal. Too normal. Mr Crouch from the Ministry was ill for a long time and then died, and I've been given conflicting stories about what he was suffering from, too. With something serious enough to kill him, he should've been in St Mungo's. Why wasn't he? And again the Ministry is acting as though it's all completely normal. It's not.

"Dumbledore has lost several key positions this summer, but he's sticking to his story. My ex-editor reckons Dumbledore is using people's fear to gain power - I'm not so sure. If Dumbledore wanted power, he'd have it by now. Is You-Know-Who back? I don't know. Most people are just guessing. But Dumbledore and Harry Potter say he is, and it's an idea people ought to be allowed to hear, so they can decide for themselves if they think he's wrong."

Bert nodded. "And now we're here for a protection spell."

"Indeed... Have you noticed the runes around your sister's warehouse?"

Bert shook his head. "Why would I?"

"Well, they're there. I don't know enough to know exactly what they mean, but even I can pick out strength and defence. Your sister's gearing up for a siege. Some people think war is coming, but she seems absolutely convinced it's imminent. And if you want a protection spell that'll see you through a siege, the one on Santa Maria de los Milagros is the one to copy. It's been tested by history."

"I hope she's just paranoid."

Viola laughed. "Slytherins are always paranoid. It's why we're natural survivors."

As Bert relaxed, Viola thought about Ethelina. She hadn't seen her friend for some time before asking her for a job. Ethelina had always been tough, even as an 11-year-old. Once, as they shared a bottle of wine to celebrate Viola's first divorce, Ethelina had confessed to starting her business with cash raised from blackmail. It had chilled Viola. Eth had laughed, and told her that she'd passed a full share of the profits on to the blackmailee, who'd found it all quite entertaining in the end. The end justified the means for Ethelina.

What end can you see coming, Ethelina? Viola wondered. Why do you need this spell?