‘Like I was about to give birth,’ she said. She went into the bathroom, expelled something bloody and passed out on the floor. Her son found her in the morning when hungry clients outside became concerned and called him.

  A black mass the size of an egg had come out. Another scan in the local hospital showed no evidence of a tumour. Reeling with shock, she took the bus to the capital again and explained to the oncologist what had happened. He didn’t believe her. She hardly believed it either. I imagine his face as he listened to her, the woman with a regional accent on death’s door, explaining that she had taken Cuckoo-pint. He immediately put her through every scan, not quite believing his eyes. He called colleagues as witnesses.

  ‘Then he said: “This is unprofessional, but I’ll give you a hug. Because it’s not every day that I see a miracle.”’

  She wept then, realising it was true. She was going to live after all.

  The follow-up was easy. She had to keep to a strict diet to heal the raw tissue left by the tumour and there were some more polyps to purge. She kept up her diet of goat cheese, sheep yogurt, vegetables, olives and no wheat or meat.

  She continued taking her self-administered cocktail of herbs, but in smaller doses. ‘For maintenance,’ she said, and the oncologist encouraged her to stick with her herbal regime, seeing that it worked. Though he was alarmed by her annual ‘maintenance’ use of Cuckoo-pint and advised her to stop it, which she ignored. And she kept up the smoking too.

  ‘Coltsfoot!’ She crouched in the fallen leaves under some oak trees self-seeded in the last fifty years. We were returning to the hotel. ‘Not flowering anymore, but the leaves are good for chest infections and abdominal cramps. It purges.’

  ‘And you never know when you might need purging,’ I finished her sentence and we laughed.

  We picked the broad, dark, lily-like leaf with an attractive white underside. A plant with two sides, like Gyulten herself – the dark side and the silver lining. I thought of Rocky and the three young Roma with the 69 kilos of coltsfoot.

  ‘What do you call it in English?’ she asked, and laughed about the coltsfoot.

  In Scotland, it was once called son afore the father, because unusually, the yellow flowers appear before the leaves. People used the silky petal-threads for stuffing pillows and birds continue to use it for their nests.

  ‘So that’s it,’ Gyulten said and rose to her feet, a bagful of leaf. ‘This is how I resurrected myself. I expelled the polyps too, with smaller doses of Cuckoo-pint. And the oncologist hugged me again. And now the whole village picks elderberries come autumn!’

  Elderberry had been one of the ingredients of her cocktail and Gyulten’s recovery had created an elderberry frenzy among the women of The Birches. Once the tumour was gone, she started taking care of her appearance too. And reflected on her life.

  She had married at fifteen to avoid a worse fate. Her parents were of the controlling variety. Everyone’s parents here were of the controlling variety. Gyulten’s generation had seen the last of the parental extremists. Parents tried to marry their daughters off as soon as they finished primary school to prevent them leaving for the city to study and live in the Communist Party headquarters dorms and God forbid, marry the oppressor.

  All three girls in the family submitted to the parents’ will, except Gyulten. Gyulten wanted to study and have a worldly life, but they’d lined up a guy for her from a relatively well-off family.

  ‘But I didn’t like him. And because I had nowhere to go, I ran to another guy who I did like and who’d already asked me out.’

  They ran away from The Birches and lived in a hotel for a week. But they could go no further. Under Communism you couldn’t relocate unless the state decided. You couldn’t run away. They’d always find you and bring you back, kicking and screaming.

  ‘So we returned to The Birches and got married, like good kids. I gave birth the next year. In short, I didn’t have a youth at all.’

  That’s why she was such a young grandmother. That’s why she was having a second youth now. She went to a beautician, bought fine clothes and took holidays in other parts of the country on her own to get away from the pressure cooker of the village.

  But there was a further chapter to her parents’ story. Gyulten had been so hurt by them for forcing her into marriage when she wanted to study that she cut off all contact with them. Soon after her marriage, her father suddenly became ill. It was terminal and he was only in his thirties. Her mother the herbalist tried everything. Gyulten agreed to visit, not realising he was on his deathbed.

  ‘And he said to me from his bed: “Did you curse me, my child? Was it you that cursed me? I know you have the power.’

  We had arrived back in the tranquil hotel grounds and drank from Fatmé’s fountain.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘I said: “Yes, I cursed you. Because you took my life away from me.”’

  Her father seemed relieved.

  ‘He said, “I forgive you. Please forgive me too. I need you to forgive me.”’

  Now Gyulten was crying, and so was I.

  ‘I said: “I forgive you, Dad.” He died the same night. I was so mad at him, I hadn’t imagined that he could actually die.’

  She was only a teenager. But her mother was there too, furious and accusatory in her grief and locked in a power struggle with her daughter to this day.

  ‘It’s when there’s not enough love,’ Gyulten said, ‘that these things happen. I hope I’ve done it differently with my children.’

  This was the shadow realm, the ancient darkness that eats its children to engorge itself with power. In his last moments, Gyulten’s father had glimpsed this and freed himself of it.

  ‘Where there is love, there is no need for power. Where power predominates, love cannot thrive,’ Carl Jung wrote. It is true on a small scale in families and on a large scale everywhere.

  The two men’s patterns of illness were similar, and similar to her own: sudden onset, rapid decline, malignancy in the digestive organs. She could not rescue her father and her husband. But she had done the hardest thing of all: she’d rescued herself.

  We ordered jars of sheep’s yogurt from the hotel kitchen.

  ‘Look, that’s funda,’ Gyulten got up and examined Shefket’s marigolds.

  ‘Not all marigolds are equal,’ she said. ‘A friend shrank her uterine tumour with this. Two weeks of strong tea and she avoided surgery.’

  Funda was a local name for orange marigold. At Fatmé’s fountain we took turns to swing in a hammock.

  ‘Look, that’s soapy flower over there! Let’s wash.’

  By the pond were tufted pink flowers I hadn’t noticed before. Soapwort.

  ‘When you’re high up all summer without soap, you go to the soapy flower.’

  Gyulten rubbed a flower head between her wet fingers. It became frothy. Delighted like children, we soaped up and washed our hands in the pond.

  My friendship with Gyulten continued.

  And so did another one. I saw Lords and Ladies that summer above The Birches and was startled by their scarlet berries clustered along poker stems. Forget mandrake – this was the original magical plant. Even the words ‘Arum maculatum’ are a spell. Cuckoo-pint is a polite version of Cuckoo-pintle: penis. And Lords and Ladies is a Victorian euphemism; the plant’s male and female parts look like they’re copulating. Before that, people called it Devils and Angels. The red berries are produced by the female parts and the male part has a hairy insect-trap with what botanists describe as a ‘fecal odour’, then the insects are released after being pollinated. The word arum has unclear origins and goes back to Egyptian or Hebrew when it might have meant ‘reed-like’.

  It’s part of the lily genus and Culpeper categorises its government and virtues ‘under the dominion of Mars’. It was used as an antidote for ‘poison and the plague’ in his time and combined with sheep’s milk – sheep’s milk! – it healed ‘ulcers of the bowels’ and brought on ‘women’s menses, and purges them after child-bearing’.

  Two springs later, I was walking along my Scottish river past some giant reeds, when I saw a patch of inviting leaves that looked like common sorrel. I crouched under the elder tree where they lived. It wasn’t sorrel. But they were friendly-looking leaves. I picked one and chewed its tip and swallowed, but something wasn’t right and I tried to spit it out. Too late: my mouth began to burn and one side of my face tingled. I belatedly snapped it on my Plantsnap app. It was Arum maculatum. I hadn’t recognised it so early in the season without its red berries and when the leaves were much lighter. I’d also read that it was rare in Scotland and didn’t expect to see it at sea-level.

  My throat constricted as I walked, then ran, home. A quick online search revealed that only the root, or a tincture extract of the dried leaves and berries was used medicinally, never fresh. All parts of the plant are poisonous. Never touch the leaves without gloves. Ingesting them raw can lead to neurological damage and death. I began to sweat. It was the weekend and we were in another lockdown. I flicked open the ‘Poisonous Species’ section of my forager book and sure enough: Hemlock and Lords and Ladies are Britain’s top two deadly ground plants. ‘Lords-and-ladies looks completely different at each stage of its growth,’ the author warned, too late.

  Reading that some English foragers accidentally made soup from the leaves and didn’t die, and that medieval Scandinavians made flour from the dried roots in times of famine was not reassuring. I saw myself in hospital with my stomach pumped by people in masks. I dialled Rocky the Enchanter.

  He laughed.

  ‘We’ll make a herbalist out of you yet!’ he said. ‘Like I said, you must get to know plants in the flesh. That’s where the power is. Not in books. And now’s the season for Snake Spindle!’

  ‘Should I go to first aid?’ I croaked.

  ‘I’m your first aid,’ he said. ‘Did you swallow it, how much? That’s fine. Eat something to settle your gut. Did I say it cures bowel tumours?’

  ‘I don’t have a bowel tumour,’ I said, ‘But my throat is closing up.’

  ‘Relax,’ Rocky said. ‘Did I tell you about the time when I went picking a plant whose name is a secret and the boss from the pharma company instructed me to use gloves. Off I went, picking it with my gloves, then I sat down to have some sausage for lunch. I must have touched a branch with my bare fingers and then eaten the sausage. Well! I didn’t leave the toilet for three days after that.’

  He wouldn’t tell me the name of the plant. It was a secret.

  ‘May is a fine month. All sorts of plants come up. The other day I was picking black bryony. With gloves of course. And I was chewing myself some echinacea root. Well! I could have climbed a peak and made love for a year. That’s how echinacea root makes you feel, my friend. Thank God I was in a forest or I might’ve disgraced myself. How are you getting on with mursala? I hope you’re taking juniper breaks.’

  I felt calmer, but still called Gyulten.

  ‘Funny you’re calling, cos I just got back from the cemetery where the best crop of it grows. I sat at my husband’s grave, then my father’s. And I picked myself a few roots. They’re like onion bulbs, but starchy. I was cleaning them when you called.’

  ‘Half of my face is numb,’ I said.

  ‘Take a spoon of honey,’ she said. ‘I put it in a bit of bread myself.’

  ‘Aren’t you gonna dry those roots first?’

  ‘Nah. It’s strongest raw and now’s the time. In a couple of weeks, it’ll be over.’

  ‘But it says not to eat it raw,’ I protested feebly and opened a honey jar.

  Gyulten laughed her smoker’s laughter. Nothing was going to stand between her and her annual maintenance course.

  ‘And if I were you,’ she added, ‘I’d go to that patch and dig up a few plants, dry the bulbs and keep them in a wee jar for a rainy day.’

  When the shock of it passed, I returned to the patch. I was too scared to dig anything up, but I sat beside it – as Rocky would advise. And I swear I heard the chuckle, ambiguous and smart, of the creature called Arum maculatum.

  Snake-spindle cocktail

  Black elderberry

  Yellow gentian

  Lords and Ladies (Cuckoo-pint, Arum maculatum, ‘Snake Spindle’)

  Elderberry is for strength, Gyulten said. Gentian tones the viscera. And Lords and Ladies is for cancer.

  Gyulten prepared elderberry by an extraction method: a layer of berries and a layer of sugar, which after forty days ends up as a thick fermented syrup. Some dry the berry bunches and take a few berries a day throughout the winter, for immunity. One winter I spoke to Gyulten on the phone: ‘Have you made your elderberry syrup yet?’ she asked. ‘Good. Are you taking it? What are you waiting for, sister, get onto it!’

  I was surrounded by elder whose only function until now I’d thought to be as a hayfever trigger, when it flowers. The berries blacken in September. I made a winter syrup by boiling the berries with cinnamon and adding honey at the end to avoid sugar. I also discovered that if you ingest them red, you’ll throw up immediately. That’s called an emetic, a useful property when you poison yourself and actually need to throw up.

  Here, people call gentian ‘queen of the herbs’, and it is one of the main magical plants. Zmeys and intestinal tapeworms don’t like gentian, the way vampires don’t like garlic. That’s because gentian is anti-bacterial and gently purging. Gyulten called it by its folk name: bitter root. This is a clue to its main function: bitter herbs stimulate and cleanse the digestive-hepatic ways and gentian is used in folk medicine to flush out parasites in the gut. Hildegard of Bingen recommends it as a powder taken in warm wine for purging ‘fever in the stomach’.

  Lords and Ladies root can be taken fresh or dried, a rice-sized piece a day with food, and for no more than two weeks. This was the key ingredient in Gyulten’s cocktail. In Scotland, the root was made into pills for ringworm and constipation. The medicinal-deadly components in it are hydrogen cyanide and coniine, also contained in hemlock. But what made my throat burn was the calcium oxalate, whose purpose is to repel grazing animals. In agricultural societies, babies were put in their cradle with a dried leaf of Arum maculatum to repel demons, but also to make the babies sleepy with its sedative chemicals, just like belladonna and tobacco which release nicotine to attract certain larvae and make them sleepy. Too bad if the baby decided to nibble on the leaf! Folk medicine here recommends that women take the male (top) part of the plant and men take the female (bottom) part.

  Now I knew how Gyulten had expelled her large tumour with such shocking speed: It was the ‘double, double’ bind of gentian and Lords and Ladies.

  ‘Everything is poison,’ said Paracelsus, ‘it all depends on the dose.’ Venom is the root of all things pharmaceutical. The Greek φάρμακα – farmaka – originally meant medicine, poison, spell and a set of magical objects, all in one.

  The Magician and the High Priestess, the first two archetypes of the tarot arcana, are medicinal and convey this well. Tarot is a hermetic narrative in twenty-one archetypal images based on the hero’s journey; from the fool to the world’s soul or anima mundi. Tarot is a repository of ancient knowledge. It is also the easiest way to access the basics of alchemy today. The magician is the magus-pharmacologist. On his table is the full set of tools to connect heaven with Earth, the material with the spirit world: cup-vessel; pentacle-ore; wand-torch and sword-idea. They symbolise the elements of water, earth, fire and air. But older yet than the magus is the three-bodied goddess Hecate whose tools are the wheel, the fire-torch, the serpent and the dagger. And Hecate’s even older avatar is the Egyptian goddess Isis with the sun in her crown of cow horns. These proto-witches live on in the high priestess. Seated in the intra-dimensional gateway where the fabric is thin, holding the book of mysteries with pomegranates like female genitalia behind her, she is celibate like a nun or an Orphic oracle. Celibate, not sexless, she belongs to herself. One of the most enigmatic archetypes of the Hermetica, she won’t show you her tools but you can see the result. The sun in her crown and the moon at her feet, where her cape becomes the ocean. She has brought down the moon.

  I Sever to Sever

  Once the festivities ended, the Birches Hotel became quiet again. In my rooms, the herbs I picked with Gyulten were drying on newspapers. They were like flatmates who occasionally muttered as they lost moisture, shifted position and shrank.

  In the morning, from Fatmé’s fountain, I glimpsed a tall skinny figure with a knapsack on the forest road. He moved so fast he looked like he was gliding, and then he was gone.

  ‘The guy with the horses, you missed him again,’ said Shefket who wandered around with his watering hose and now I spied his marigolds with new eyes.

  People were busy. Gyulten worked and slept, and I saw her on weekends. Metko was decorating a house. There was a construction boom in The Birches because of the money earned abroad and property was expensive. Houses competed for size and price, but often sat empty like mausoleums to success, complete with beige synthetic carpets.

  At night, the restaurant’s playlist was on a loop and I listened to the Greek song ‘Mavro Trientafilo’ (Black Rose), over and over. Then I slept at the bottom of the forest-well like a frog. One night, a voice clearly said the names of plants in my dream and I was shown their shapes. This happened again the next night, but in the morning my recall was blurry. Except for one word: silivryak. A voice said: look for this, it is silivryak. I forgot its shape and had no idea what it was, plus the internet was down. The hotel grounds were deserted so I drove down to the village to get provisions and ran into Kadrié K., the singer.

  ‘Ah, I wondered what happened to you!’ she said.

  She was a ruddy woman with a robust voice and personality. We had only met online before and kept missing each other in the flesh. She had an expansive quality that welcomed you into the club without making you pass any tests.

  ‘Silivryak is immortal flower,’ she said. ‘We don’t have it here. But if you’re into plants, come on Wednesday. I’m going out for Metya Chaush. A friend’s daughter has a bad rash on her face. Wear good shoes, there are snakes.’