The pilgrim’s road is a climb to the next level of koan, where the air thins and mysteries accumulate.

  ‘This world is a stage or market-place passed by pilgrims on their way to the next,’ wrote al-Ghazali in his Alchemy of Happiness.

  We stopped on the saddle to pick a tree with trembling, silvery leaves that a robust old woman in patched clothes and a black headscarf, walking along the road looking for crab apples, told us was poplar. She was the last resident of her village and delighted to have a bit of company. Although she was poor and lonely, she had the forest on her doorstep. She had the nearby spring, and a vegetable garden. All of that was in her stride, in the way she was at home in the edible mountain, on the high road that still smelled of pilgrims, brigands and drovers. Not afraid of wolves, men, memories or the future.

  Perhaps that’s what it means to be at home, in this life.

  We began our descent into the valley at the end of time. The sun was out of view. We pulled over. A shower of sun-struck rain fell over the city white like a polis. Then the shower head moved across and watered Old Woods.

  When you look at Nikopolis ad Mestum and Heraclea Sintica, you can’t help but feel that the fate of all human cities is to be reclaimed by the non-human. It is only a matter of time.

  But those who ever lived in the sister valleys of Struma and Mesta had access to something that was not a matter of time: wonder. Wonder never runs out.

  ‘Sisters,’ Sanusha said, elated. But Gyulten had gone off into the bushes.

  ‘Isn’t it nice to see other parts of the world,’ Sanusha turned to me. ‘Then come home and fall in love with it, as if for the first time.’

  Merciful herb

  Vanga was in conversation with the plants in her garden. When people who’d lost a loved one came to her, she asked them to bring a potted plant with them so that the plant would absorb some of the distress they felt and it wouldn’t all fall onto her. The plant was her merciful friend. ‘Don’t bring me cut flowers,’ she said, ‘they’re like children with their hands cut off, bring me a living plant.’ She then ended up with thousands of potted plants outside her house. She’d take them out of the pots, feel their roots and some of them were planted in the ground and given a better life.

  I still don’t know what merciful herb is.

  ‘A local name,’ said Trendafilka on the phone. ‘I probably know it but under another name.’

  ‘Merciful herb? Not for me. Get me the Enchanter, that’s the one I need,’ said Gyulten who had love troubles. Everyone has love troubles, sooner or later.

  ‘We’ll make a herbalist out of you yet,’ said Rocky the Enchanter. ‘Never heard of it, but then again, every herb is merciful herb. You just have to get to know it.’

  ‘Merciful herb, how can I describe it to you?’ said Sanusha. ‘It doesn’t look anything special. It doesn’t taste anything special. I can’t even remember why I’m looking for it. Some things are like that.’

  The Horse Whisperer

  Emin met me by the marigold beds of the Birches Hotel.

  ‘I was looking for you yesterday,’ he was talking and walking across the meadow with his large strides and flicked his fringe with a toss of the head. His hair was otherwise shorn. ‘Shefket said you wanted to meet me.’

  ‘And your horses.’

  ‘They’re up. It’s a trek.’

  He stank of long-unwashed clothes. His T-shirt was threadbare. His feet were slender. We sat down and I ordered two salads which I ate alone. He only drank water. At one point, he brought out a lurid white lump and nibbled on it: sheep lard. He avoided eye contact and talked to the space before him in a stream of consciousness, like someone with a neurological disorder.

  ‘When I drink water from this plastic bottle, I can taste the plastic. I have a glass bottle in my rucksack. I’m not competent, I had low grades at school, but plastic is killing the river. There’s a drinking fountain at the end of The Birches where the road to here begins. When I wake up at night, I go there. The water runs warm in winter and cold in summer. That water’s clean. No plastic.’

  His energy was high-wired, torrential like a river in spring. He lived in the Ranger with his mother who had beautiful cheekbones and was bent at a 90 degree angle, and his blind brother.

  ‘They’ve been through a lot,’ said Gyulten when I told her I was meeting him. ‘But I don’t know him. He’s always up in the hills.’

  ‘Nobody does what he does anymore, because like I said, living with herd animals is for old-fashioned lovers only. You lose money,’ said Metko.

  ‘He keeps the horses out of stubbornness,’ said an old shepherd. ‘Some call him crazy.’

  ‘He should get cows with subsidies and get rid of the horses. The Gypsies will buy them off him for meat or logging,’ said a pragmatic young shepherd. ‘But he’s a fanatic.’

  Emin unzipped his bumbag, spat on his hand and took out a wad of banknotes and started counting them.

  ‘They say I look like a beggar but I have money, don’t think I don’t.’

  He placed the banknotes on the table and the breeze picked them up. I caught them and put them down on the pile again. He was airing them like linen in a cupboard. Often, he wouldn’t bother to collect his pay for the day and it was given to his mother later. ‘It’s too little,’ he’d shout, ‘it won’t fix my problems!’ Then he’d complain about not being paid and rant at people without looking at them. He couldn’t be stopped. Then he’d walk away fast with his unhinged gait, spitting on the ground with contempt for those who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. He did general labour – unloading lorries for the local shop owners, splitting and stacking logs, pouring cement. He did this because his trade had ended. He was the end of an era and the horses were its legacy.

  For twenty-five years, he and his father had been log transporters on horseback, on the hand-made samar saddles which were not crafted anymore. With their herd of wild-grazing horses, they’d ply this ancient trade across the valleys, carrying logs from remote parts of the forests over snowy passes, often sleeping in the open.

  Some jobs required them to walk with the horses for two days, crossing from one mountain range to another along paths that nobody else remembered. This is the single most dangerous outdoor work since the time of the gladiators. You could be crushed by a tree, fall into a precipice with your horses, have a horse break a leg and get hernias from lifting the raw logs. That’s without counting the large predators.

  ‘A raw log a metre long is heavy like iron,’ Emin said.

  It had to be lifted high enough to be loaded onto the saddle. That meant first, hip-level, then shoulder-level, like a weightlifter. It took two. A Karakachan horse could carry 200 kilograms on a saddle.

  ‘It’s the Wild West,’ Emin said. ‘You’ve got to be a bit tough. Like the horses. Or you drop dead. Like the horses. Sometimes when I walk those paths, my tears fall on the ground. I remember everything.’

  His father died and Emin couldn’t carry on alone. But he also knew that the era of the beast of burden was over. He was glad to free his horses of it, let them roam free and breed them naturally. But even wild, they were still his horses and he had to make sure they didn’t graze on someone’s meadow and get poisoned or shot, or stolen. Or attacked by wolves in spring–summer.

  ‘I sleep with them up to five months of the year, till the wee ones toughen up. Cos they’re like children. The Haflinger lost two foals. A male the other year and a female last year. I found two legs. She’s pregnant again.’

  A horse pregnancy lasts eleven months.

  ‘Then there was this orphan, her mother died but she survived the winter in the snow. Then a wolf got her in spring. But didn’t eat her. I found her with her throat ripped open, still alive. She died in my arms. You take it in your arms, like a child. You feel its pain. Horses cry. Wolves are wicked animals.’

  He started counting banknotes again on the table.

  ‘Are you going to buy me?’ I laughed. He put the banknotes back inside.

  ‘I like to carry cash when I go places and meet people. In case I see a nice horse or something else catches my eye.’

  For me, this meeting was one of many. For him, it was a date. He had ceremonially come with money, his way of showing me that he was a contender.

  ‘Once the father and I sold a stallion for 500. Cos his leg was broken. We knew he was going for meat. He was family. But we had no choice.’

  The choice was to shoot the horse. A few men in the region still transported logs on horseback, mostly Gypsies from the slum. The profession had been much degraded. I saw the odd bloodied saddled horse along Maiden Gorge, being overloaded with logs by men as wretched as the horse, a painful sight.

  ‘There’s no market for my savages,’ Emin started making small piles of coins on the table. ‘If I sell a horse, I have to make sure it’s not for meat. They buy it by the kilo.’

  There seemed to be a market with Italy where Balkan horse meat was sold. But locally too. There were horse thieves and healthy horses that would be prized elsewhere were carted off to a meat plant somewhere in the country. I didn’t want to imagine the rest.

  ‘That’s like meat taken off my own body. Cos they’re useless buggers, but they’re my family. My father and I, we gave away 170 horses in our time.’ He meant sold.

  ‘Too cheaply. They have no price. Each one I knew personally. Cos they’re like people. There was this black foal. His mother was The Grey and his father was Arap. Then his mother died, she just disappeared up above the middle lake and I couldn’t find her. I slept up there three summers to keep an eye on the orphan. One summer, a wolf bit through his leg, I treated it with pig lard and it healed. Then someone wanted to buy him but cut me down on the price, down to 250. That’s three summers of work, I’d be damned if I give it away. “Three hundred or nothing,” I said! He didn’t budge. Then on St George’s Day, I go up and find the colt sitting on his back legs. His back legs broken. Up above Snake Gully, no way to get transport, it’s all rock. I had to call a guy with a rifle to shoot him, I almost said to shoot me.’

  The colt was shot and Emin had rolled on the ground howling.

  When he described a horse, I could see it – the Haflinger with her white mane, the black stallion Arap, the orphan with its throat ripped open. He became the horse, shook his head, his teeth were horse teeth, his fine-boned face was equine, his body was all muscle and sinew just like a horse. He went on. It was relentless – the births and deaths, the emotion, the vast distances, the impossible terrain. I began to get vertigo, like I was sucked into an air vortex and lifted off the ground.

  ‘Have I tired you out?’ he said. ‘I talk too much. What’s the time?’ He looked at his little old mobile, with buttons. ‘It’s early. If you wanna come up to The Meadow, I’ll wait till you’re rested. If I said anything wrong, I’m sorry.’

  He went off to work on the new house with Shefket again, and I went up to my rooms and fell into the well. When I woke up, it was dark. Emin had waited till dusk then gone up to The Meadow. Instead of a torch, he used a cigarette lighter that didn’t work except for its dim electric nightlight.

  We went two days later. We cut through the forest some of the way, to avoid the dug-out forest road and look for ceps which he collected in a dirty canvas bag. The forest floor was too inclined for human feet, you had to get on all fours. The flank of the mountain was unrelentingly steep and we didn’t meet a soul, except two mushroomers on a motorbike the following morning who almost fell off their bike when they saw Emin with a woman.

  ‘Watch out, these furrows are bad. Not even the horses can pass here anymore. Go through there, it’s easier. Mind your legs, that’s spiky. Here’s a stick. If you’re tired, we’ll stop.’

  We could hear the river below, then we climbed higher and couldn’t. The evening light hummed through the green crowns of the forest like a choir. He touched a branch here and there, like introducing me to a friend.

  ‘This is sycamore maple. That’s wild willow, goats like it. This is aspen, meet aspen. And you know the Balkan pine already. The heart of the tree is used for lighting fires because of its resin.’ We saw a tree that had been hacked and was bleeding resin.

  ‘When I see this, it’s like a piece of my flesh. But it burns well.’

  There was evidence of logging.

  ‘They pick trees where they feel like it now.’ That was the term here – to pick a tree, the way you pick a herb. ‘The easiest is by the side of the road. Cos they’re fat and lazy with their trucks. But they should be using logs from inside the forest, to thin it out in the right places. Not cut healthy trees at random.’

  The horseback log-transporting had been the most environmentally sound way to gather burning wood. Small-scale, labour-intensive, ecologically smart. You leave no mark on the forest.

  Emin was quiet much of the two to three hours it took to reach The Meadow because when he walked fast, he stopped talking. As soon as he stopped walking, the talk returned, unrelenting. It was intimate on the path, it was just us and the forest. I could almost see faces among the trees. With his tatty clothes, sprite-like step and walking stick, Emin looked like Pan. Or Peter Pan.

  ‘My horses like grazing in that wood. In winter they’ll eat anything, even broom.’

  The green perennial broom shrub used to make domestic sweeping brooms with handles. I made my own: I picked a bunch, tied it at one end and swept my floor. It grew brown as it slowly wilted.

  ‘Here, I found remains of that foal. The bear had buried it for later.’

  ‘Ferns. Like with reeds, when they start shedding you know autumn’s coming.’

  I was concentrating on not falling into a hole in the forest floor.

  ‘Fox,’ he pointed his stick at a fresh print. Further on: ‘Wolf. A big one.’

  ‘Aren’t you scared to walk here at night?’ I asked.

  I was a bit jumpy even now, in daylight and with the best guide. This was a deep dark wood – even if not the original deep dark wood – and it went on. At the end of it were glacial lakes, ridges and stony portals to the western chapters of the mountain. Between here and the highest visible peak, Yanuzov Ridge, were just two houses: the brothers’ hut and a mountain chalet.

  ‘Nothing can touch me,’ he said. ‘Nobody can do anything to me. I’ve walked these paths a million times. In transit, like this. Do you know what’ll kill me? I almost said killed me.’

  ‘Too much walking?’

  ‘No. Loneliness,’ he said. ‘It’s made me feral and demented. Don’t think I don’t know it. It creeps up on you.’

  By the time we reached The Meadow, it was dusk. The peaks were indigo and the sky was a colour I can’t describe. The horses appeared suddenly in a clearing like the chords of a nocturne. They were blue like the mountain and they grazed in the same position, like rhythmic gymnasts. The Meadow was a cathedral. The clearing was its altar.

  I kneeled in the high grasses and took in the scene.

  Emin went up to them, one after the other, walking-talking in a low rumble, hugging their necks, pulling their tails which they didn’t mind. They rubbed his face with their noses, sniffed his hands.

  ‘See, see?’ he was like a bulb switched on. ‘See why I do it now! I do it for these bandits. What do you say, is it worth it or am I crazy?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, not knowing what I was saying or where I was.

  ‘Hey, Grey! Grey!’

  They were all stunning, but the Grey was a queen. She came over slowly and sniffed his hand. There were seventeen of them.

  ‘My savages are Karakachans,’ he said. ‘The Balkan mountain breed. See how they’re small and lean. That’s because of the terrain. That way they can climb even with a load on. The big heavy ones wouldn’t make it here. Like people.’

  ‘Hey, Arap!’ A shiny black stallion lifted his head. ‘Even he doesn’t kick. Look.’ He grabbed his tail. ‘None of them kick! If they kick me, they can kill me on the spot.’

  The adults were all young mares, apart from Arap and another stallion that had never been caught. Actually, most of them hadn’t been caught, they followed the Chocolate One who had a commanding aura, a natural leader. The rest were ‘children’.

  ‘The Chocolate One lets me put a bell on her but she’s not been caught. This one is hers, born in the spring.’

  The foal had pretty white and grey markings across his whole body. Two weeks later, he would be dragged away by wolves, on a night that Emin wasn’t there.

  He hugged a reddish mare by the neck and climbed onto her, to show me that they were tame, though wild. She had knowing eyes and there was something wrong with her legs.

  ‘This is Marta the Red. The eldest here, born May 2000. She’s been birthing foals without fail and they all survive. She’s amazing. We wrecked her legs with the logs but we wrecked ourselves too. Do you want to ride her? You can climb on the water basin first.’

  He helped me up. I’d never been on a horse before. It was surprisingly high. Her reddish foal, fuzzy with youth, shadowed her every move.

  There was no saddle and none of them were cobbled. That was the highland tradition. After an hour with the herd, the thought of any one of them being butchered caused me distress.

  ‘They move together, they’re social animals,’ Emin said. ‘Like people. The Chocolate One leads the others. The guys come and go. The problem is when someone else’s stallion lures them away and breaks up the herd. Then I run my feet off. I run my feet off anyway. I’m always in transit.’