Level A2 · Chapter 32
The two armies of sheep
Two clouds of dust on the road. Don Quixote sees two armies, names their captains and announces the battle. Sancho only hears bleating.
What you will learn
- Talk about what is going to happen using the future tense.
- Form the future of regular verbs and of the ten irregular ones.
- Make a promise, or a guess about the present.
Before you read
Don Quixote is not describing what is in front of him. He is announcing what is about to happen, which is a very different act, and it needs a tense you have not met yet. Watch for verbs ending in -ás, -á, -emos and -án. Almost every one of them carries a written accent, and that accent is not decoration.The story in easy Spanish
Don Quijote y Sancho iban por un camino ancho y polvoriento.
Don Quixote and Sancho were riding along a wide, dusty road.
A lo lejos se levantaba una nube grande de polvo.
In the distance a great cloud of dust was rising.
«Este es el día, Sancho. Hoy verás cosas que nadie cree.»
"This is the day, Sancho. Today you will see things nobody believes."
Explicó que por allí venían dos ejércitos enormes.
He explained that two enormous armies were coming that way.
Uno era del emperador Alifanfarón, señor de la isla Trapobana.
One belonged to the emperor Alifanfarón, lord of the island of Taprobane.
El otro era del rey de los garamantas, su gran enemigo.
The other belonged to the king of the Garamantes, his great enemy.
Luego empezó a nombrar caballeros, uno por uno, con voz alta.
Then he began naming knights, one by one, in a loud voice.
«Aquel de las armas de oro será Laurcalco, señor de la Puente de Plata.»
"That one with the golden armour must be Laurcalco, lord of the Silver Bridge."
«Aquel otro será Micocolembo, gran duque de Quirocia.»
"That other one must be Micocolembo, grand duke of Quirocia."
«¿No oyes los caballos y los tambores? La batalla empezará enseguida.»
"Can you not hear the horses and the drums? The battle will begin at once."
Sancho miraba el campo y no veía ni un soldado.
Sancho looked at the field and could not see a single soldier.
Solo oía balidos de ovejas, y por un rato no dijo nada.
All he could hear was sheep bleating, and for a while he said nothing.
«Señor, aquí no hay ejércitos. Son ovejas y carneros.»
"Sir, there are no armies here. They are ewes and rams."
«Volveremos al camino y no pasará nada. Nadie nos verá.»
"We will go back to the road and nothing will happen. Nobody will see us."
«El miedo te cierra los oídos», contestó don Quijote muy serio.
"Fear is closing your ears," Don Quixote answered, very serious.
«Apártate. Yo solo bastaré para ganar esta guerra.»
"Stand aside. I alone will be enough to win this war."
Bajó al valle con la lanza y mató siete ovejas.
He rode down into the valley with his lance and killed seven sheep.
Los pastores le gritaron y luego cogieron sus hondas.
The shepherds shouted at him and then took up their slings.
Las piedras le rompieron dos costillas y dos dientes.
The stones broke two of his ribs and two of his teeth.
Sancho bajó al valle y lo encontró en el suelo, entre las ovejas.
Sancho went down into the valley and found him on the ground among the sheep.
«Los encantadores cambiaron los soldados en ovejas», dijo el caballero.
"The enchanters turned the soldiers into sheep," said the knight.
«Mañana lo entenderás todo. Mañana volverán a ser hombres.»
"Tomorrow you will understand it all. Tomorrow they will be men again."
Vocabulary
The flock
- el rebaño
- the flock
- la oveja
- the ewe, the sheep
- el carnero
- the ram
- el pastor
- the shepherd
- el balido
- the bleat
- la honda
- the sling
The imagined army
- el ejército
- the army
- el soldado
- the soldier
- el tambor
- the drum
- la batalla
- the battle
- la guerra
- the war
- el emperador
- the emperor
When it is going to happen
- mañana
- tomorrow
- enseguida
- straight away
- dentro de poco
- shortly, in a little while
- pronto
- soon
- algún día
- some day
The simple future
Hoy verás cosas que nadie cree.
La batalla empezará enseguida.
Yo solo bastaré para ganar esta guerra.
This is the easiest tense in the language, and you can have it in five minutes. You do not touch the verb at all. You take the infinitive whole, with its -ar, -er or -ir still attached, and you add one set of endings. One set for all three conjugations, with no exceptions.
| ending | hablar | comer | vivir | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| yo | -é | hablaré | comeré | viviré |
| tú | -ás | hablarás | comerás | vivirás |
| él, ella, usted | -á | hablará | comerá | vivirá |
| nosotros | -emos | hablaremos | comeremos | viviremos |
| vosotros | -éis | hablaréis | comeréis | viviréis |
| ellos, ellas, ustedes | -án | hablarán | comerán | vivirán |
The accents are the tense
Every form carries a written accent except nosotros. This is not a spelling nicety. Hablo is I speak and hablará is he will speak, and in llegara against llegará the tilde is the only thing standing between two different words. If you write the future without accents, you have not written the future.
Ten verbs change their stem, and only their stem
The endings never change. What changes in ten common verbs is the piece in front of them, and they fall into three tidy families:
| family | verbs | example |
|---|---|---|
| the vowel becomes a d | tener, poner, venir, salir | tendré, pondré, vendré, saldré |
| the vowel simply drops | poder, saber, haber, querer | podré, sabré, habrá, querré |
| the stem is cut short | hacer, decir | haré, diré |
That is the entire irregular list. Anything built on these verbs follows them, so mantener gives mantendrá and deshacer gives deshará.
Two jobs, not one
The obvious job is the future: la batalla empezará enseguida, mañana lo entenderás todo. The second job surprises learners, and Don Quixote uses it constantly in this chapter. Spanish also uses the future to guess about the present:
| Spanish | English |
|---|---|
| Aquel será Micocolembo. | That one must be Micocolembo. |
| ¿Qué hora será? | I wonder what time it is. |
| Tendrá cincuenta años. | He must be about fifty. |
| Estarán en la venta. | They are probably at the inn. |
English needs must be, probably or I wonder. Spanish just moves the verb into the future and lets the tense carry the doubt. When Don Quixote names his knights one after another, this is the grammar he is using: he is not predicting, he is identifying, and the tense tells you he cannot actually see them clearly.
Speaking Spanish, you will also hear another future
In everyday Spain, plans for later today or tomorrow very often come out as voy a comer rather than comeré. Both are correct. The tense in this lesson is the one you need for writing, for promises, for solemn announcements and for guessing, which is exactly why a knight errant on a hilltop uses nothing else.
The sheep of Castile and the shepherds’ slings
Two flocks meeting on a road is not a random image. Wool was the engine of the Castilian economy, and every autumn hundreds of thousands of merino sheep walked south from the mountains along the cañadas reales, wide droving roads protected by royal law. Anyone travelling in La Mancha would meet them, and the dust of a flock on a dry road really does look like an army from a distance.
The shepherds who walked beside them were not defenceless. A sling is a strip of leather and a stone, it costs nothing, it makes no noise and in trained hands it is deadly at fifty paces. Shepherds used them against wolves every week of their lives. This is the detail that makes the scene end the way it does: Don Quixote is not beaten by peasants who got lucky, he is beaten by specialists.
And the names are worth a moment. Trapobana is Taprobane, the ancient name for Ceylon, and the Garamantes were a real people of the Libyan desert described by Herodotus and Pliny. Cervantes is not inventing nonsense. He is quoting the geography books of the classical world, which is precisely what a man who has read too much would reach for. The invented part is the knights, Laurcalco and Micocolembo, whose names are pure chivalric music.
Notice, finally, that Sancho stays quiet for a long time. He is not stupid, and he is not convinced. He has just been thrown in a blanket for arguing, and he is learning when to say nothing.
Cervantes in the original
¿No oyes el relinchar de los caballos, el tocar de los clarines, el ruido de los atambores?
Do you not hear the neighing of the horses, the sound of the trumpets, the noise of the drums?
The line matters because it is a question, not a claim. Don Quixote is not lying and he is not performing. He genuinely hears all of it, and Cervantes leaves the reader suspended between two sets of ears, the master’s and the squire’s, without ever telling us which one to trust. Note the three infinitives used as nouns, el relinchar, el tocar, which is a construction Spanish still allows and English handles with -ing. And atambores is the old form of tambores, drums, borrowed from Arabic like so much of the military vocabulary of the period.