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Athene . . .’
    ‘Minerva!’
    ‘Not Minerva,’ said Holando. ‘She was Italian. Though she’s also worth her salt.’
    He peered round. They were all laughing. Even Arturo da Silva with his head on the ground. They were all thinking about Germinal’s librarian, Arturo first of all.
    ‘Worth her salt? You bet you!’ exclaimed Dafonte. ‘I wonder what she’s up to.’
    ‘They go to Pelamios, San Amaro and Cunchas Beach,’ said Leica. ‘Some of them bathe in the nude.’
    ‘You’ve seen them!’
    ‘I have. I’ve seen her on Cunchas Beach dressed in a pair of seaweeds. Divine!’
    ‘Were you taking photos, Leica?’
    ‘No, I was searching for the light. You have to learn to see.’
    ‘What about your sister, Leica, does she bathe under the lighthouse?’ asked Arturo da Silva.
    ‘My sister’s in France. They gave her a grant to do some painting.’
    ‘Shame she can’t come and do some painting with us in Caneiros.’
    ‘I’m sure she’d have loved to.’
    ‘The women go to the seaside and here we are, like sacred rams,’ said Dafonte. ‘On the Celtic mount. Next Sunday, we all have to go down to the sea, dress up in some seaweed and take a dip in classicism.’
    Terranova started scratching at the moss and using his hands to dig with childish glee.
    ‘There must be some treasure down here. Did you never come here with picks, Polka?’
    ‘We did. When we were little. But we never found anything. Except for a siphon-bottle.’
    ‘A Celtic siphon-bottle.’
    ‘That’s right. But what farmers find every time they plough the earth are trenchcoat buttons with Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité written on them. All this you see before you was the site of a terrible battle. The Battle of Elviña. As far as I know, the worst in Galicia’s history. I myself have a button on my jacket. There, on the sleeve.’
    And it was true. His jacket was hanging from the branch of a tree next to the hill-fort wall.
    ‘It smells of treasure,’ said Terranova. ‘I reckon it’s pretty close.’ His digging had become comical as he imitated a dog searching for a buried bone.
    ‘There was some treasure,’ said Seoane. ‘The treasure of the hill-forts and dolmens was routinely pillaged at the start of the seventeenth century. The king authorised one Vázquez de Orxas to excavate all the funerary monuments. He gave him exclusive rights so long as part of the profits found their way to the royal coffers. What’s surprising is that they hadn’t been looted before. The gold in America had run out and unfortunately someone thought of the truth behind the legends. People had disguised the treasure in stories. It was protected by dwarfs, Moorish princesses, winged serpents. The dwarfs were fluent in several languages, knew Latin, just like Polka, and if you spoke their secret language, they opened the door to the treasure. Old Carré told us the story of someone who stuttered and was very successful at finding treasure because the dwarfs thought he was multilingual. But Galicia’s treasure went to pot thanks to an explorer who believed in books no one else believed in and paid attention to old people’s stories. The stories were full of gold. And he wasn’t wrong. In one dolmen, he even unearthed a solid-gold duck.’
    ‘Something will be left. There’s always something left,’ said Terranova. ‘What was the name of that old treasure guide?’
    ‘ The Great Book of St Cyprian ,’ replied Seoane. ‘Probably the most widely read book in Galician history.’
    ‘You anarchists should edit another Book of St Cyprian. A book of treasures. There’s bound to be a wild gold duck around here.’
    ‘The original book was pretty anarchic,’ said Seoane. ‘Apparently you had to be able to read backwards in order to understand it.’
    Polka gazed in the direction of his village.
    In some way, people carried light. In words, in clothes, in gestures. Sounds belonged to the light. He’d been born there. He listened to