The Betrayal at the Battle of Hilarión

On a bitter winter night, our protagonist, the brave and innocent hero Pedro Zarquillo, couldn’t sleep. Between cold sweats and old nightmares, he woke. Somber, he reached over and switched on the desk lamp.

As he sifted through the stacks of papers he kept for his studies and research, he suddenly found an old manuscript he didn’t recognize. Startled, he moved to the living room and lit the fireplace to examine this mysterious document he’d stumbled upon so unexpectedly among the rest. It was a letter from the twelfth century:

“Dear Pedro, You must come swiftly to our aid after Scruffy’s affront. Enemy troops from the wicked Kingdom of Terrares are encamped and entrenched around our walls, preparing their final assault on our Kingdom of Hilarión. There you must command the allied forces from the Kingdoms of Frontala, Moratela, and Talavica, who wait with hope for your leadership to defeat the enemy and free our land once and for all.

From your friend in time,
Queen Slava.”

Castillo de Belmonte, Cuenca
Rodaje de la película
"El Cid" (1961)

As soon as Pedro read that closing “from your friend in time,” his face lit up for a heartbeat. But reality settled back in, and after a brief drift of thoughts he decided to return to bed. “I’m too old to keep believing in these timeless hallucinations. I hope they leave me soon…”

Just as he was about to fall asleep again, a sliver of icy air slipped in through the bedroom window. He leaned out and saw, once more, his faithful white horse, Luciérnaga. He looked around and realized dawn was breaking. To his surprise, the concrete blocks of twenty-first-century buildings, heirs of the industrial revolution, had vanished from the landscape. All he could see were dirt paths and ancient huts, from a pre-modern era.

He studied his noble, loyal horse’s eyes and, in a deep voice, asked, “Do you want more adventure, my faithful Luciérnaga?” Finding that same hunger for the road shining back at him, Pedro chose to embark on this new mission.

Dawn scraped a thin light over the plains of Hilarión. Frost breathed out of the earth; mail shirts smoked like small chimneys in the cold. Pedro Zarquillo touched his brow to Luciérnaga’s and felt the horse’s steady warmth answer him back. Across the plain, the black lines of Terrares clenched the city walls. Behind him, the allied banners of Frontala, Moratela, and Talavica shivered like nervous promises.

“Now,” he said. 

The first charge hammered forward, shields up, teeth set, the world reduced to the iron logic of impact. Arrows fell in dark sheaves. Men shouted the old words that make courage sound like family. For one blazing hour, the allies held. They even laughed once, incredulous and wild, when Spartera sang through a Terrares standard and bent it into a question the enemy could never answer.

Then the rumor came, easy as poison: a flanking column, huge as a legend, swallowing the rear. It was nobody and nowhere, and suddenly everywhere. One captain stepped back to “re-form,” another to “guard the supply,” and fear did what fear does best: it invented a strategy. In less than a prayer, the field behind Pedro turned to wind.

He faced the emptiness, heard only the clatter of retreat, and understood.

“So be it,” he told the cold.

He drove Spartera point-first into the ground. The blade hummed low, like a bell under snow. Pedro unbuckled the dented pauldron, unlaced his gauntlets, and laid them by the sword. He took off his helm and let the air touch his hair as if for last rites.

“No sword today,” he told Luciérnaga. “Only a vow.”

Dances With Wolves
(1990)

He walked. Then he ran, unarmed, head high, straight at the black sea of Terrares.

At first they laughed, a single man, barehanded, is a joke that war loves to hear. Then the captains found their voices. “Loose!”

The sky darkened. Arrows hissed like a thousand snakes set free. Pedro did not swerve. The shafts slid past him with the whisper of reeds in a river. A dozen struck the ground in a neat crescent at his heels, as if measuring him. “Again!” the captains cried, insulted by math that would not add up.

A second volley: heavier, closer, crueler. Bolts, javelins, sling-stones, flint-spit from a hundred small hates. Most missed, but one iron edge dipped low and bit his shoulder. Heat bloomed; his sleeve went dark. Pedro staggered, then fell still, letting his limbs slacken and his breath thin, the old Templar discipline of silence turning him to a quiet shape on the ground.

The front rank of Terrares closed. A captain strode up to seal the tale with a final thrust. He raised his sword for the finishing stroke... and metal rang as if struck on an anvil. For one instant only, when the blade met Pedro’s body, flesh had the strength of stone. Sparks spat; the captain reeled back with a cry that sounded too young for his armor. “Witchcraft!” someone shouted. “A relic!” hissed another.

Back to the Future Part III
(1990)

The point of the sword showed a bright nick, and courage showed a darker one. Pedro’s eyes opened. He rose, slowly, bleeding, unarmed, and began to walk through them again. Blades lifted. Hands trembled. He passed the first rank, shouldering through like a penitent late for vespers. The second rank split, insulted by its own hesitation. In the third, a captain swung; the blade stopped short, as if the arm had remembered another promise first.

“Strike!” someone screamed.

“No,” someone else whispered, and could not explain why.

Pedro moved among them with open palms, as if blessing; with steady eyes, as if naming, as calmly that made noise feel childish. Men who had hired their bravery by the hour suddenly felt overdrawn. Shame poured through the line like cold water finding cracks. Somewhere, a horn meant for advance acquired a stutter that sounded exactly like retreat.

Terrares broke.

Not all at once; routs are made of small decisions. A step back disguised as a pivot. A shield lowered to “check the strap.” A runner sent to “fetch the reserves” who did not come back. Commanders shouted shape into the panic and got only nouns for their effort.

Pedro, breath ragged now, turned in the center of the wreck, still unarmed. His hands bled from someone else’s blade. In his mouth, the taste of iron and winter. He did not roar. He merely stood, thin, bright, impassive, and the standing was enough. The enemy’s courage, seeing itself reflected in that posture, looked away.

On Hilarión’s wall, the bells began. The sound leapt tower to tower until even the frost tried to thaw for it. Doors unbarred; a hundred lilies shook out their clean white flags. Children, always first to trust what adults only vote for, shouted his name.

The Last Crusade
(1989)

Pedro walked back across the field he had taken with nothing, and arrived where Spartera waited, upright like a witness. He wrapped his fingers around the hilt. The sword’s fuller, long and bright as a held breath, caught the weak sun and returned it seasoned. For a heartbeat he remembered the lectures of his Templar masters, how the Order had been born in the early twelfth century, meant not for conquest but for service, for guarding the road where pilgrims risked their small, stubborn hopes.

He remembered, too, what those old chansons taught: that a single figure can steady a wavering chorus, and that the tale is sung in tiradas, scenes cut to the bone, where deeds speak first and names emerge later.

He raised Spartera toward the walls. The cheer that answered him did not flatter; it recognized. He swayed then, the world tilting a degree to the right, pain arriving in a blink. Luciérnaga came at once, the white horse lowering his great head to Pedro’s shoulder. “Easy,” Pedro said, and heard how thin his voice had become.

On the plain, the remnants of Terrares ran in untidy threads toward the horizon. A few turned to look back, as if to make sure he was real, and found that he was, which, in its way, was worse. The captains left behind, Beltrán, Iseo, Moraín, watched from far off, their excuses still warm in their mouths, and felt those excuses cool.

Pedro slid Spartera into its sheath and tasted the question that had haunted him since The Oak’s Castle: that the treasure, the Grail, the vow, call it what you will, was never an object but a hunger that trains the heart toward service, toward the work done for others without witnesses.

He put a hand to Luciérnaga’s neck.

“Come,” he said. “There’s a city to free.”

The Lord of The Rings
(1954-55)

They moved toward the gate as the bells kept speaking and the morning finally remembered that it was daylight.

Then Pedro awoke. He realized he was still in his bed in the twenty-first century. Exhausted and thirsty from the adventure, he went to the kitchen and poured a glass of fresh milk. He went to take a walk and while crossing the city, he looked up and saw an ad on a building that read:

“Be aware of your friends. Some of them are not.”

Then he noticed his left shoulder ached. He touched it with his right hand and found it bandaged, the linen warm with perfumed ointments. The memory of the handwritten letter on his desk returned, and Queen Slava’s voice moved softly through his mind:

“Thanks for freeing us once again, dear Pedro. You’ve freed yourself too.”

Original plot and ideas by Pablo Gómez-Abajo
Closing idea by Almudena Martín-Albo Huertas
Draft text enhanced by Gen-AI

Happy Day of La Almudena. Happy Madrid’s Day!