Purity of Blood

A PLUME BOOK

PURITY OF BLOOD

ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE is the internationally bestselling author of The Queen of the South and Captain Alatriste. He lives near Madrid, Spain.

“Hardboiled, mordantly funny, unapologetically entertaining.”—Time

“Wonderful, stirring entertainment.”—The New York Times Book Review

“It’s great fun in the tradition of historical swashbucklers such as The Three Musketeers or The Scarlet Pimpernel.”—The Boston Globe

“Few contemporary writers conjure up derring-do as well as Arturo Pérez-Reverte, a Spanish literary maestro. The true thrill lies in Pérez-Reverte’s deft plotting and thread-the-needle resolutions.”—The Christian Science Monitor

“Thrilling…we have to persuade Putnam to release them as quickly as possible.”—Detroit Free Press

“Grabs the reader from the get-go with its moody evocation of a lost time.”—USA Today

“In between the flash and clanging of swordplay, Alatriste navigates the perilous dungeons of Inquisition-era Madrid. Absolutely riveting from beginning to end.”—Entertainment Weekly

“Pérez-Reverte’s pacing is swift and suspenseful, the narrative voice both crisply cinematic and true to the setting of seventeenth-century Spain…A feast of dark historical detail and believable danger.”—The Denver Post

“Purity of Blood hits the high note of Captain Alatriste and sustains the series’ uncommon verve.”—The New York Times

“Intrigue and double-dealing in seventeenth-century Madrid…Pérez-Reverte is a master at evoking the particular color of the times, with brothels, taverns, torero arenas, and dark alleyways.”—Los Angeles Times

ALSO BY ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE

Captain Alatriste

The Flanders Panel

The Club Dumas The Seville Communion

The Fencing Master

The Nautical Chart

The Queen of the South

PURITY OF BLOOD

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

TRANSLATED FROM THE SPANISH BY

Margaret Sayers Peden

A PLUME BOOK

PLUME

Published by Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Previously published in a Putnam edition.

Copyright © Arturo Pérez-Reverte, 1997

English translation copyright © Margaret Sayers Peden, 2006

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

The Library of Congress has catalogued the Putnam edition as follows:

Pérez-Reverte, Arturo.

[Limpieza de sangre. English] Purity of blood / Arturo Pérez-Reverte; translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden.

p. cm. ISBN: 1-4295-2325-5 I. Peden, Margaret Sayers. II. Title. PQ6666.E765L5613 2006 2005050984 863'.64—dc22

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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For Carlota,

for whom there is no choice

but to fight…

Glory and honor blazoned on the quarters of the escutcheon, hidalgos, poets, priests, fabulous Americas, ladies-in-waiting,

galleys that apprehend the infidel, gibbets by the roadside, adventures, and swords flashing on every corner.

TOMÁS BORRÁS,

Castilla

PURITY OF BLOOD

CONTENTS

I. SEÑOR QUEVEDO’S DIFFICULT MOMENT

II. THE NECK AND THE NOOSE

III. MADRID STEEL

IV. THE ASSAULT

V. IN GOD’S NAME

VI. SAN GINÉS ALLEY

VII. MEN OF ONE BOOK

VIII. A NOCTURNAL VISIT

IX.AUTO - DA - FÉ

X. UNFINISHED BUSINESS

EPILOGUE

I. SEÑOR QUEVEDO’S DIFFICULT MOMENT

That day there were bullfights in the Plaza Mayor, but constable Martín Saldaña’s festive fire had been doused. A woman had been found in a sedan chair in front of the church of San Ginés, strangled. In her hand was a pouch containing fifty escudos and a handwritten, unsigned note bearing the words, For masses for your soul.

A pious old woman on her way to early church had found the body. She advised the sacristan, and he had informed the parish priest who, after a hurried absolution, sub conditione, made a report to the authorities. By the time the chief constable showed up to make his token appearance in the small plaza of San Ginés, local residents and curious bystanders were milling around the sedan chair. The chair and its contents had become the object of a local pilgrimage, and a number of Saldaña’s catchpoles were needed to hold back the crowd while the judge and the scribe drew up their documents and Martín Saldaña made his cursory examination of the corpse.

The chief constable set about his task in the most leisurely fashion, as if he had time to burn. Perhaps it was because of his history as a former soldier—he had served in Flanders before his wife (at least it was said it had been she) obtained his present position for him. In any case, Madrid’s chief constable went about his duties at a pace that a certain satiric poet—the gifted-in-wealth-as-well-as-talent Ruiz de Villaseca—had described in a poisonous décima as paso de buey, an ox’s pace. It was a clear allusion to the lethargy with which the chief constable picked up his staff of office, or attempted to parry the staffs his wife welcomed.

In any case, if it is true that Martín Saldaña was slow in certain things, he was definitely not so when it came to drawing his sword, or dagger, or poniard, or the well-oiled pistols he was wont to wear in his waistband—all of which clanged like sounds issuing from a smithy. On the night of the third day after the aforementioned décima had circulated among the gossipers gathered at the mentidero of San Felipe, the most popular of Madrid’s rumor mills, this same now-not-so-gifted Villaseca had been found at the very door to this house with three sword-tailored buttonholes in his body. He was now extremely well qualified—whether from Purgatory, Hell, or wherever—to confirm exactly how swiftly the constable could move.

The fact is that from the calm and collected inspection the head constable made of the cadaver, almost nothing was learned. The dead woman was mature, nearer fifty than forty, dressed in a voluminous black gown and a headdress that lent her the look of a duenna, or a lady’s companion. Her purse held a rosary, along with a key and a crumpled religious card depicting the Virgin of Atocha. Around the victim’s neck was a gold chain bearing a medallion of Saint Águeda. Her own features suggested that in her younger days she had been well favored. There were no signs of violence other than the silk cord still cutting into her neck, and her mouth, frozen in the rictus of death. From her color, and the rigor, the constable concluded that she had been strangled the preceding night, in that same sedan chair, before being carried to church.

The detail of the pouch with money for masses for her soul indicated a twisted sense of humor—or, conversely, great Christian charity. After all, in the dark, violent, and contradictory Spain of our Catholic King Philip IV, in which dissolute wastrels and rough-living braggarts howled for confession at the top of their lungs after being shot or run through by a sword, it was not unusual to encounter a pious swordsman.

Martín Saldaña told us about the event late that afternoon. Or, to be more precise, told Captain Alatriste. We met him at the Guadalajara gate, returning among the crowd from the Plaza Mayor after he had completed his inquiries regarding the murdered woman. Her body had been laid out in Santa Cruz in one of the coffins for hanged prisoners, in hopes that someone might identify her. The constable merely mentioned the murder in passing, more interested in the performance of the afternoon’s bulls; at that time in Madrid, street crimes were common, but afternoons of bulls and cañas were growing scarce.

Cañas, a kind of tourney on horseback between teams of fine gentlemen, in which our lord and king himself sometimes participated, had become very mannered—a contest between pretty-boys and fops, tending more toward flourishing and flirting and ladies than toward cracking heads, as God would have it. They were not in any way what they had been in days of the wars between the Moors and the Christians, or even in the lifetime of our young monarch’s grandfather, the great Philip II. As for the bulls, they were still, in that first third of the century, a passion of the Spanish people. Of the more than seventy thousand residents of Madrid, two thirds flocked to the Plaza Mayor every time the bulls challenged the courage and skill of the caballeros who confronted them. Because in those days, hidalgos, grandees of Spain, even men of royal blood, had no hesitation about riding out into the plaza on their finest steeds to bury the dagger-point of their rejón, the long wooden lance, in the withers of a fine Jarama bull. Or one of them might just as readily dismount and bring the bull down with his sword, amid the applause of the crowd that gathered either beneath the arches of the plaza—in the case of the common folk—or on balconies rented for as much as twenty-five or fifty escudos by courtiers and papal and foreign ambassadors.

These events were then celebrated in ballads and poems—either elegant, or comic and grotesque—events that Madrid’s cleverest minds quickly seized upon to sharpen their wit. Such as the time a bull chased a constable, and the public took the side of the bull—officers of the law did not then, as they do not today, enjoy great popular favor; and:

The bull had good reason that dayto pursue the object of mirth,for of the four horns in the frayonly two had been there at birth.

On one occasion the Admiral of Castile, while fighting, on horseback, an unusually large bull, accidentally wounded the Conde de Cabra instead of the beast. That was cause for the following famous lines—turning on the pun of the name Cabra, which means “goat”—to race through the most busily buzzing mentideros of Madrid.

A thousand and more have won fame,but only the Admiral, abra-cadabra,is the first, with his trusty lance,to turn a bull into a Cabra.

It is understandable, then, returning to that Sunday of the murdered woman, that Martín Saldaña would bring Diego Alatriste up-to-date on what had kept him away from the afternoon’s sport. The captain, in turn, recounted the details of the bullfights, which Their Majesties, the king and queen, had witnessed from the balcony of the Casa de la Panadería—and the captain and I standing among the ordinary public, eating piñon nuts and lupin seeds in the shade of the Pañeros arch.

There had been four bulls, all fiery; and both the Conde de Puñoenrostro and the Conde de Guadalmedina had been outstanding in placing their rejones. A Jarama bull had killed the latter count’s horse, and he, very brave, very much the cavalier, had jumped to the ground, slashed the animal’s tendons, and dispatched it with two good thrusts of his sword. That feat had earned a fluttering of ladies’ fans, the approval of the king, and a smile from the queen—who, as word later had it, scarcely had taken her eyes off him, for Guadalmedina was a fine figure of a man.

The final bull added a last colorful note when it attacked the royal guard. As you may know, Your Mercies, three units of guardsmen—Spanish, German, and one of harquebusiers—always stood in formation below the royal box, lined up shoulder to shoulder and with halberds at the ready. They were forbidden to break rank, even should a bull charge them with all the animus of a Turk. That afternoon the snorting animal had made straight for the guards, bothered not a whit by the halberds, and had taken with him on a tour of the ring, impaled upon a wicked horn, one of the large blond Germans. The hapless guard found himself being separated from his innards amidst a chorus of Himmels and Mein Gotts. Sacraments were administered there in the plaza.

“He was slipping around on his own guts, like that lieutenant in Ostend,” Diego Alatriste concluded. “You remember him? The one in our fifth assault on the del Caballo redoubt…Ortiz was his name. Or Ruiz. Something like that.”

Martín Saldaña nodded, stroking his graying beard, which he wore partly to hide the scar he had received twenty years before, around the third or fourth year of the century, during that same attack on the walls of Ostend.

They had poured out of the trenches at the break of dawn—Saldaña, Alatriste, and five hundred other men, among them my father, Lope Balboa. They’d swarmed the terreplein, with Captain Tomás de la Cuesta in the lead, followed closely by that lieutenant Ortiz, or Ruiz—oh, what the devil was he called?—carrying the flag bearing the cross of Saint Andrew.

Before climbing over the parapet, they had taken the first line of the Dutchmen’s trenches with nothing but small arms, under constant enemy fire from above. They had spent half an hour in hand-to-hand fighting as musket fire whizzed around them. That was where Martín Saldaña had received the slash across his face and Diego Alatriste the one above his left eyebrow. Lieutenant Ortiz-Ruiz was hit by a musket ball fired at point-blank range, blowing away half his belly. His intestines spilled out and dragged on the ground and he struggled to hold them in with both hands as he ran to escape the battle. He did not have the chance, because almost immediately he was killed by a shot to the head.

Finally, Captain de la Cuesta, himself as bloody as an Ecce Homo, had said, “Caballeros, we have done all we can; let any man who can save his hide.” My father and another short, tough soldier from Aragon, one Sebastián Copons, had helped Saldaña and Diego Alatriste get back to the Spanish trenches, with every Dutchman in the world firing at them from the walls. As they ran, they cursed God and the Virgin, or commended themselves to them, which in such cases was one and the same thing. And still someone had the time and fortitude to pick up poor Ortiz-Ruiz’s banner rather than leave it on the bulwarks of the heretics, along with his corpse and those of two hundred comrades who were not going on into Ostend, or back to the trenches—or anywhere at all.

“Ortiz, I think it was,” Saldaña concluded finally.

They had, a good year later, avenged the lieutenant and the two hundred other men, as well as those who left their hides in earlier, or later, assaults upon the Dutch del Caballo redoubt. Finally, after the eighth or ninth attempt, Saldaña, Alatriste, Copons, my father, and the other veterans of the Tercio Viejo de Cartagena, succeeded in battling their way inside the walls on the strength of nothing but bollocks. The Dutch began shouting Srinden, srinden, which I think means “friends,” or “comrades,” and then something that sounded like Veijiven ons over: “We surrender.” And that was when Captain de la Cuesta, who was deaf to any foreign tongue but who had a stupendous memory, said, “We do not understand your srinden or veijiven—or anything your whoring mothers taught you—but we will show no mercy, you hear that? Not one heretic left alive.” And when Diego Alatriste and the others at last raised the shredded, battle-worn cross of Saint Andrew above the bulwarks—the very same one poor Ortiz had carried before departing this world tangled in his own guts—they were drenched in the Dutch blood dripping from the blades of their daggers and swords.

“Someone told me you are going back,” Saldaña said, after he had brought us up-to-date.

“I may.”

Although I was still dazzled by the bulls, my eyes were filled with the people pouring out of the plaza and along Calle Mayor: Fine ladies and gentlemen rapped out “Fetch my coach” and then climbed into their carriages and rode away, and caballeros on horseback, and elegant courtiers headed toward San Felipe or the flagstone courtyard of the palace. At the time, I listened very carefully to the chief constable’s words. In that year of 1623, the second in the reign of our young King Philip, the war in Flanders had resumed, creating the need for more money, more tercios, and more men. General Ambrosio Spínola was recruiting soldiers throughout Europe, and hundreds of veterans were hurrying to enlist under their old flags. The Tercio de Cartagena, decimated at Julich at the time my father was killed, and totally annihilated a year later in Fleurus, was being re-formed. Soon it would be following the Camino Español, a familiar route to the Low Countries, to play a part in the siege of the stronghold of Breda—or Bredá, as we called it then. Although the wound Diego Alatriste had received in Fleurus had not completely healed, I was aware that he had been in contact with old comrades, with the intent of returning to its ranks. In recent days, the captain had made his living as a sword for hire, and despite that—or precisely because of it—he had made some powerful enemies at court. It would not be a bad idea to put some distance between them and him for a time.

“It might be for the best.” Saldaña looked at Alatriste meaningfully. “Madrid has become dangerous. Will you take the boy?”

We were walking among a crowd of people just passing the closed silver shops, heading in the direction of the Puerta del Sol. The captain looked at me quickly, and made an ambiguous gesture.

“He may be too young,” he said.

Beneath the chief constable’s thick mustache I could make out a smile. As I admired the butts of his gleaming pistols, the dagger, and the sword with the wide guard, all of which hung from the waist of his buffcoat—a padded defense against knifings received in the course of his duties—he had laid his broad, hard hand on my head. That hand, I thought, might once have shaken my father’s.

“Not too young for some things, I believe.” Saldaña’s smile stretched wider, partly amused and partly devilish. For he knew what I had done the night of the adventure of the two Englishmen. “And anyway, you were his age when you enlisted.”

This was true. Nearly a long quarter of a century before, the second son of an old family, with no standing in the world, thirteen years old and barely in command of writing, the four skills of arithmetic, and a taste of Latin, Diego Alatriste had run away from both school and home. In those desperate straits he reached Madrid, and by lying about his age was able to enlist as a drummer boy in one of the tercios leaving for Flanders under the command of King Philip’s heir, the infante Alberto.

“Those were different times,” the captain protested.

He had stepped aside to allow two señoritas with the air of high-priced harlots to pass, escorted by their gallants. Saldaña, who seemed to know them, tipped his hat, not without obvious sarcasm, which triggered an irate look from one of the dandies. It was a look that vanished like magic when he saw all the iron the head constable was toting.

“You are right about that,” said Saldaña provocatively. “Those were different times, and different men.”

“And different kings.”

The head constable, whose eyes were still on the women, turned to Alatriste with a slight start, and then shot a sideways glance at me.

“Come, Diego, do not say such things before the boy.” He looked around, uneasy. “And do not compromise me, by Christ. Remember, I am the Law.”

“I am not compromising you. I have never failed in my duty to my king, whoever he may be. But I have served three, and I tell you that there are kings, and there are kings.”

Saldaña stroked his beard. “God help us.”

“God or whoever your draw your comfort from.”

The head constable gave me another uneasy glance before turning back to Alatriste. I observed that he had unconsciously rested one hand on the pommel of his sword.

“You wouldn’t be looking for a quarrel, would you, Diego?” The constable, heavyset and strong but slightly shorter than the captain, stood a little straighter and stepped in front of Alatriste.

The captain did not answer. His gray-green eyes locked with Saldaña’s, expressionless beneath the broad brim of his hat. The two men stared at each other, nose to nose, their old soldier’s faces crisscrossed with fine wrinkles and scars. Some passersby stared at them with curiosity. In that turbulent, ruined, but still proud Spain—in truth, pride was all we had left in our pockets—no one took back a word lightly spoken, and even close friends were capable of knifing each other over an ill-timed comment or denial.

He spoke, he walked by, he looked,rash, unguarded words resound,once spoken, too late, in a tricethe meadow is a dueling ground.

Only three days before, right in the middle of Rúa Prado, the Marqués de Novoa’s coachman had knifed his master six times because he had called him a lout, and fights over a “Move out of my way” were commonplace. So for an instant, I thought that the two of them might go at each other there in the street. But they did not. For if it is true that the constable was entirely capable—and he had proved it before—of putting a friend in prison, even blow off his head in the exercise of his authority, it is no less true that he had never raised the specter of the law against Diego Alatriste over personal differences. That twisted ethic was very typical of the era among belligerent men, and I myself, who lived in that world in my youth, as well as the rest of my life, can testify that in the most soulless scoundrels, rogues, soldiers, and hired swords, I had found more respect for certain codes and unwritten rules than in people of supposedly honorable condition. Martín Saldaña was such a man, and his quarrels and squabbles were settled with a sword, man to man, without hiding behind the authority of the king or any of his underlings.

But thanks to God, their exchange had been in quiet voices, without making a public stir or doing irreparable damage to the old, tough, and contentious friendship between the two veterans. At any rate, Calle Mayor after a fiesta de toros, with all Madrid packed into the streets, was no place for hot words, or steel, or anything else. So in the end, Saldaña let the air out of his lungs with a hoarse sigh. All of a sudden he seemed relaxed, and in his dark eyes, still directed at Captain Alatriste, I thought I glimpsed the spark of a smile.

“One day, Diego, you are going to end up murdered.”

“Perhaps. If so, no one better to do it than you.”

Now it was Alatriste who was smiling beneath his thick soldier’s mustache. I saw Saldaña wag his head with comic distress.

“We would do well,” he said, “to change the subject.”

He had reached out with a quick, almost clumsy, gesture—at once rough and friendly—and jabbed the captain’s shoulder.

“Come, then. Buy me a drink.”

And that was that. A few steps farther on, we stopped at the Herradores tavern, which was filled, as always, with lackeys, squires, porters, and old women willing to be hired out as duennas, mothers, or aunts. A serving girl set two jugs of Valdemoro on the wine-stained table, which Alatriste and the head constable tossed down in a nonce, for their verbal sparring had quickened their thirst. I, not yet fourteen, had to settle for a glass of water from the large jug, since the captain never allowed me a taste of wine except what we dipped our bread into at breakfast—there was not always money for chocolate—or, when I was not well, to restore my color. Although Caridad la Lebrijana, on the sly, would sometimes give me slices of bread sprinkled with wine and sugar, a treat to which I, a boy without two coins to rub together to buy sweets, was greatly addicted.

In regard to wine, the captain told me that I would have plenty of time in my life to drink till I burst, if I wished; that it was never too late for a man to do that, adding that he had known too many good men who ended up lost in the fumes of Bacchus’s grapes.

He told me these things little by little, for as I’ve said, Alatriste was a man of few words, and his silences often said more than when he spoke aloud. The fact is that later, when I, too, was a soldier—among many other things—I sometimes did tip my jug too much. But I was always civil when I was tippling, and in me it never became a vice—I had others that were worse—but only an occasional stimulus and diversion. And I believe that I owe my moderation to Captain Alatriste, although he never preached that homily by example. On the contrary, I well remember his long, silent drinking bouts. Unlike other men, he did not often have his wine in company, nor did his bottles make him jolly. His way of drinking was calm, deliberate, and melancholy. And when the wine began to take effect, he would close up like a clam and avoid his friends.

In truth, every time I remember him drunk, it was alone in our lodgings on Calle del Arcabuz, on the courtyard that opened to the back of the Tavern of the Turk. He would sit motionless before his glass, jug, or bottle, his eyes fixed on the wall where he hung his sword, dagger, and hat, as if contemplating images that only he and his obstinate silence could evoke. And by the way his mouth tightened beneath his veteran’s mustache, I would take an oath that the images were not those a man contemplates, or relives, gladly. If it is true that each of us carries his specters within him, those of Diego Alatriste y Tenorio were not servile or friendly or good company. But, as I heard him say once, shrugging his shoulders in the way that was so typical of him—half resignation and half indifference—an honorable man can choose the way and the place he dies, but no one can choose the things he remembers.

Activity at the mentidero of San Felipe was at its peak. The steps and terrace of the church facing Calle Mayor were an anthill: people chattering in groups, strolling around greeting acquaintances, elbowing their way to a place at the railing from which they could watch the coaches and crowds filling the street below in the stylized promenade they called the rúa. That was where Martín Saldaña bid us farewell. We were not, however, alone for long, for shortly thereafter we ran into El Tuerto Fadrique, the one-eyed apothecary at Puerta Cerrada, and Dómine Pérez; they, too had just come from the spectacle of the bulls, and were still praising them. In fact, it had been the dómine who had administered the sacraments to the German guard whose traveling papers had just been signed by the Jarama bull. The Jesuit was recounting all the details, telling how the queen, being young, and French, had turned pale and nearly swooned in the royal box, and how our lord and king had gallantly taken her hand to comfort her. However, instead of retiring, as many expected she would do, she had stayed on at the Casa de la Panadería. Her gesture was so appreciated by the public that when she and the king rose, signaling the end of the spectacle, they were favored with a warm ovation, to which Philip the Fourth, young and refined as he was, responded by doffing his hat.

I have already told Your Mercies, on a different occasion, that in the first third of the century, the people of Madrid, despite their natural fondness for mischief and malice, still harbored a certain naiveté in regard to such royal gestures. It was an ingenuousness that time and disasters would replace with disillusion, rancor, and shame. But at the time of this tale, our monarch was still a young man, and Spain, although already corrupt, and with mortal ulcers eating her heart, maintained her appearance, all her dazzle and politesse. We were still a force to be reckoned with, and would continue to be for some time, until we bled the last soldier and the last maravedí dry. Holland despised us; England feared us; the Turk was ever hovering ’round; the France of Richelieu was gritting its teeth; the Holy Father received our grave, black-clad ambassadors with caution; and all Europe trembled at the sight of our tercios—still the best infantry in the world—as if the rat-a-tat-tat of the drums came from the Devil’s own drumsticks. And I, who lived through those years, and those that came later, I swear to Your Mercies that in that century we were still what no country had ever been before.

And when the sun that had shed its light on Tenochtitlán, Pavia, San Quintín, Lepanto, and Breda finally set, the horizon glowed red with our blood—but also that of our enemies. As it had that day in Rocroi when I left the dagger Captain Alatriste had given me in the body of a Frenchman. Your Mercies will agree that we Spanish should have devoted all that effort and courage to building a decent nation, instead of squandering it on absurd wars, roguery, corruption, chimeras, and holy water. And that is very true. But I am reporting how it was. And furthermore, not all peoples are equally rational in choosing their opportunities or their destinies, nor equally cynical in later justifying to History or to themselves what they have done. As for us, we were men of our century. We did not choose to be born and to live in that often miserable but sometimes magnificent Spain, it was our fate. But it was our Spain. And that is the unhappy patria—or whatever word they use nowadays—that like it or not I carry under my skin, in my weary eyes, and in my memory.

It is in that memory that I see, as if it were yesterday, don Francisco de Quevedo at the foot of the San Felipe steps. He was, as always, wearing strict black, except for the starched white collar and red cross of Santiago on the left side of his doublet. And although the afternoon was sunny, he had flung over his shoulders the long cape he wore to disguise his lameness, a dark cloak whose tail was lifted by the sheath of the sword upon which his hand rested so casually. He was talking with some acquaintances, hat in hand, when a lady’s greyhound roaming nearby nosed close enough to brush his gloved right hand. The lady was standing by the footboard of her coach, conversing with two caballeros—and she was pretty. As the hound meandered by, don Francisco patted its head, at the same time sending a quick and courtly glance toward its mistress. The greyhound trotted back to her as if it were a messenger of the caress, and the lady rewarded the poet’s tribute with a smile and a flutter of her fan, both received by don Francisco with a slight nod as he twisted his luxuriant mustache between thumb and forefinger.

Poet, swordsman, and highly celebrated wit at court, don Francisco was also a gallant man who enjoyed a reputation among the ladies. Stoic, lucid, caustic, courageous, elegant even with his limp, he was a man of goodwill despite his hot temper, generous with his friends and unyielding to his enemies. He could dispatch an adversary as easily with two quatrains as with a duel on de la Vega hill, enchant a lady with genteel courtesy and a sonnet, or surround himself with the philosophers, academicians, and learned men who treasured his entertaining witticisms and his company. The good don Miguel de Cervantes—the greatest genius of all time, no matter how those English heretics chirp on about their Shakespeare—had been seated at God’s right hand seven years ago when he had put his foot in the stirrup and given up his soul to the one who gave it to him. But before he died, even Cervantes had called don Francisco an excellent poet and a compleat caballero in these famous verses:

The scourge of mindless poets, he willat dagger point drive from Parnassusall the evils we fear will o’ertake us.

That afternoon, Señor Quevedo was, as he was wont, passing time on the steps of San Felipe while le tout Madrid ambled along Calle Mayor after their afternoon of watching the bulls—an entertainment the poet did not greatly enjoy. When he saw Captain Alatriste, who was strolling with Dómine Pérez, El Tuerto Fadrique, and me, he politely excused himself to his companions. I had no inkling of how profoundly that chance meeting was going to affect us, putting all our lives in danger—particularly mine—nor how fate delights in sketching bizarre designs with men’s fortunes. If, as don Francisco came toward us with his usual affable expression that afternoon, someone had told us that the mystery of the dead woman was going to involve us in some way, the smile with which Captain Alatriste greeted the poet would have frozen on his lips. But one never knows how the dice will fall, and they are always cast before anyone even notices.

“I have a favor to ask of you,” said don Francisco.

Between Señor Quevedo and Captain Alatriste, those words were a pure formality. That was obvious in the look, almost a reproach, the captain gave Quevedo in response. We had taken our leave of the Jesuit and the apothecary, and were now in the Puerta del Sol, walking past the awnings of the stalls around the fountain at the Buen Suceso church. The idle liked to sit on its rim and listen to the water playing, or gaze toward the façade of the church and the royal hospital. The captain and his friend were walking ahead of me, side by side, and I remember how they blended into and then emerged from the crowd in the fading light of dusk, the poet in his usual dark clothing, with his cape folded over his arm, and by his side, the captain in a brown doublet, modest square collar, and nicely fitting hose, his sword and dagger, as always, at his waist.

“I am greatly obliged, don Francisco, that you are sugarcoating the pill I am to swallow,” said Alatriste. “But please go directly to the second act.”

At the reference to a second act, I heard the poet’s quiet laugh. We were all remembering what had happened only a few steps from here during the time of the adventure of the two Englishmen. How don Francisco had come to the captain’s aid in the course of an ugly scuffle in which steel had flashed like lightning.

“I have some friends, people I am fond of,” said don Francisco. “And they want to talk with you.”

He had turned around to see whether I was listening to the conversation, and seemed relieved when it appeared that I was taking in the sights of the plaza. I was, however, listening to every word. In that Madrid and that Spain, an alert youth matures quickly, and despite my youth I already suspected that it did no harm to keep my ears open. Just the opposite. In life, danger lies not in not knowing, but in revealing that you do: It is always good to have a sense of the music before the dance begins.

“That has the sound of a potential employ,” the captain was saying.

It was a euphemism, of course. Diego Alatriste’s line of “employ” tended to take place in dark alleyways, at so much per swordthrust. A slash across the face, slicing off the ear of a creditor or of a bastard dallying with one’s wife, a pistol shot at point-blank range, or a handspan of steel in a man’s throat—all that was classified and the pay set by scale. In that very plaza, at any given time, there were at least a dozen professionals who were available for such arrangements.

“Yes.” The poet nodded, adjusting his eyeglasses. “And well-paid employ, of course.”

Diego Alatriste looked long and hard at his companion. I studied the captain’s aquiline profile beneath the broad brim of the hat on which the one note of color was a frowsy red plume.

“It is clear that today you are making an effort to annoy me, don Francisco,” he said finally. “Do you imply that I would charge for a service done Your Mercy?”

“It is not for me. It is for a father and his two young sons. They have a problem and have sought my advice.”

From high atop the lapis lazuli and alabaster fountain, a sculpture of Diana the locals had dubbed Mariblanca, White Mary, looked down upon us as water sang out of the pipes at her feet. The last light was languishing. Rough-looking soldiers and assassins with huge mustaches, broad swords, and a way of standing with their feet planted solidly apart, very “I am dangerous,” were clumped in groups in front of the closed doors of the silk and woolen and book shops, or drinking wine at one of the wretched street stalls. The plaza swarmed with blind men, beggars, and whores whose short mantles separated them from decent ladies in full-length cloaks. Some of the soldiers were known to Alatriste. They greeted him from a distance, and he responded distractedly, touching the brim of his hat.

“Are you involved in the matter?” Alatriste asked.

Don Francisco gave an ambiguous shrug. “Only partly. But for reasons you will soon understand, I must see it through to the end.”

We kept passing hard-looking men with shifty eyes who sauntered along the iron rails that set off the atrium of the Buen Suceso church. That atrium, and the nearby Calle Montera, were frequented by men with big talk and large swords. Altercations were common, and entry to the church had been blocked so that after a dispute fugitives could not run into the church for sanctuary. There not even the Law could touch them. They called such escape “safe harboring,” or used the euphemisms “going to mass” or “taking a quiet moment of prayer.”

“Dangerous?” asked Alatriste.

“Very.”

“It will involve swordplay, I imagine.”

“I hope not. But there are greater risks than being wounded.”

The captain walked on a bit, contemplating in silence the chapel of La Victoria convent that rose behind the houses at the end of the plaza, there at the top of San Jerónimo road. It was not possible to walk around a corner in that city without coming across a church.

“And why me?” he asked finally.

Don Francisco laughed again, quietly, as before.

“’Sblood,” he said. “Because you are my friend. And also because try as they may—executioner, court recorder, scribe—you never sing when you are fated to swing, turning lengths of cords into chords.”

Thoughtfully, the captain ran his fingers around the neck of his collar. “Well paid, I believe you said.”

“That I did.”

“By you, Your Mercy?”

“How would you have it? The only way I know to get a fire blazing is to feed it.”

Alatriste’s hand was still at his throat. “Every time you propose a commission that is well paid, it involves placing my neck in the executioner’s noose.”

“And that is also true in this case,” the poet admitted.

“By the good Christ, that is fine encouragement you offer me.”

“It would be deceitful to lie to you.”

As he answered, the captain’s sarcasm was palpable. “And how is it that you always become involved in such affairs, don Francisco? Only now have you been returned to the king’s favor following your long dispute with the Duque de Osuna.”

“Therein lies the quid of the quo, my friend,” the poet lamented. “Curse the good nature that leads me into such misadventures. But there are commitments and…my honor is at stake.”

“And your head, you say.”

Now it was don Francisco who looked with mocking amusement at Diego Alatriste. “And also yours, Captain, if you decide to accompany me.”

The “if you decide” was superfluous, and both knew it. Even so, the captain’s pensive smile lingered on his lips. He looked from side to side, skirted a pile of stinking garbage, distractedly greeted a woman with a scandalously low décolletage who winked at him from a wine shop, and finally threw his hands up.

“And why should I do it? My old tercio leaves for Flanders shortly, and I am seriously considering a change of scenery.”

“Why should you do it?” Don Francisco stroked his mustache and his goatee. “Well, by my faith, I do not know. Perhaps because when a friend is in difficulty, we have no choice but to fight.”

“Fight? A moment ago you were rather confident that there would be no dispute.”

The captain had turned to study don Francisco closely. By now the sky over Madrid was growing dark, and the first shadows stretched toward us from the squalid alleyways that led to the plaza. The outlines of objects were beginning to blur, along with the features of passersby. Someone in one of the shops lighted a lantern. Beneath the brim of don Francisco’s felt hat, the light reflected from the lenses of his eyeglasses.

“That is true,” the poet said. “But should something go wrong, perhaps one element that might not be missing would be a bit of swordplay.”

Again he laughed, always in that quiet tone, and with little humor. And at the end, I heard the same laugh from Captain Alatriste. After that, not a word from either. I was in a state of wonderment, knowing I was being led toward new adventures and perils. I followed their dark, hushed silhouettes. Then don Francisco said good-bye, and Captain Alatriste stood alone a moment, motionless and silent in the darkness. I dared not go to him or speak a word. He stood there as if he had forgotten my presence, until the bells in La Victoria tolled nine on the clock.

II. THE NECK AND THE NOOSE

They came the next morning. I heard their footsteps on the creaking staircase that led up from the courtyard, and when I ran to open the door, the captain was already there, in his shirtsleeves and looking very serious. I had observed that during the night he had cleaned his pistols, and that one had been left, oiled and ready, on the table near the beam where his belt with the sword and dagger hung from a nail.

“Go outside for a walk, Íñigo.”

I obeyed, but when I went out into the hall I met don Francisco de Quevedo on the top steps. He was accompanied by three caballeros, though he acted as if he didn’t know them. I noted that they had not used the door on Calle Arcabuz, but the one between our courtyard and Caridad la Lebrijana’s tavern, the entrance on Calle Toledo, which was used less often and was, therefore, more discreet. Don Francisco cuffed me on the cheek affectionately before he went into our rooms, and I continued on along the gallery, but not before I sneaked a quick look at his companions. One was an older man, quite gray. The other two were young, one about eighteen and the other not far into his twenties. Nice-looking youths who bore a certain resemblance to each other; perhaps brothers or close relatives. All three were dressed in traveling clothes, and something about them said “not Madrileños.”

I swear to Your Mercies that I was a well-mannered and discreet young lad. I am not a meddler, nor was I then. But to a boy of thirteen, the world is a fascinating spectacle and he wants to taste every morsel. To that we must add the words I had overheard between Señor de Quevedo and Captain Alatriste the evening before. So if I am to be honest, I must confess that I went around the gallery, pulled myself up to the roof with all the agility of my youth, and, after scooting along an eave to a window, cautiously reentered the house. I squatted at the back of a cupboard in my room, where a certain crack allowed me to see and hear everything that was happening on the other side. I was careful not to make a sound, and determined not to miss a single detail of this business in which, according to don Francisco’s own words, both Diego Alatriste and he were gambling their lives. What I did not know—God save me!—was how I would come within a hair of losing my own.

“You are aware,” the captain was summing up, “that the penalty for breaking into a convent is death.”

Don Francisco de Quevedo nodded but said nothing. He had made the introductions and then stepped aside, letting the visitors speak. Of those three, it was the older man who had led the conversation. He was sitting beside the table that held his hat, a jug of wine no one had touched, and the captain’s pistol.

“The danger is real,” the older man said. “But there is no other way to rescue my daughter.”

I later learned that his name was Vicente de la Cruz; he was from an old family in Valencia and only temporarily in Madrid. He was thin, with white hair and beard, and though he must have been over sixty years old, he was vigorous and erect in his gait. His sons, the elder of whom had yet to see twenty-five, looked very much like him. Their names were don Jerónimo and don Luis. The latter was the younger; already very poised, though not more than eighteen. The three men were wearing simple traveling or hunting garb, the father in a black woolen shirt and blue doublet, and his sons in dark green cloth with trim of the same color. Each carried a sword and dagger in an old-fashioned baldric. Their hair was cut very short, and they shared a candid expression that accentuated the family resemblance.

“Who are the priests?” asked Alatriste.

He was leaning against an exposed beam in the wall, his thumbs hooked into his belt, mulling it all over. His eye was more on Señor Quevedo than the visitors, as if asking him what the Devil he had got him into. For his part, the poet, at the window, was staring at the neighboring rooftops as if none of this had anything to do with him. Only from time to time did he send Alatriste a dispassionate glance—very much the bystander—or study his nails with unwonted attention.

“Fray Juan Coroado and Fray Julián Garzo,” don Vicente replied. “They own and run the convent, and Sor Josefa, the prioress, speaks only through them. The rest of the nuns either have thrown their lot in with them, or live in fear.”

Again Captain Alatriste looked at don Franciso de Quevedo, and this time he caught his eye. I am sorry, the poet’s silence seemed to say. You are the only one who can help me.

“Fray Juan, the chaplain,” don Vicente continued, “is the minion of the Conde de Olivares. His father, Amandio Coroado, founded the convent of the Adoratrices Benitas at his own expense, and is, in addition, the only Portuguese banker the king’s favorite can rely on. Now that Olivares is attempting to cease his dealings with the Genoese, Coroado is his ace card for getting money out of Portugal to fund the war in Flanders. For that reason, Fray Juan, his son, enjoys absolute impunity in the convent and outside it.”

“These are very serious accusations.”

“They have been proved time and again. This Juan Coroada is not some simple, credulous priest, like so many; not one of the Illuminati, not a mere petitioner, not a fanatic. He is thirty years old. He has money, position at court, and he cuts a handsome figure. He is a pervert who has turned the convent into his private seraglio.”

“There is a more explicit word, Father,” put in the younger of the sons. His voice trembled with anger, and he was almost stuttering; anyone could see that he was restraining himself out of respect for his father.

Don Vicente de la Cruz reprimanded him, frowning. “Perhaps. But as your sister is there, dare not be so bold as to speak it.”

The youth paled and bowed his head, as his elder brother, less vocal and more self-possessed, put a hand on his arm.

“And the other priest?” pressed Alatriste.

The light falling through the window illuminated the side of the captain’s face, leaving the other side in shadow. It highlighted his scars: the one over the left eyebrow and another, more recent, at the hairline in the center of his brow, a souvenir of the skirmish in the yard of El Príncipe theater. The third visible scar, across the back of his left hand, was also recent and also from a dagger. That had been acquired in the ambush at the Gate of Lost Souls. Unseen, covered by clothing, were four others, the latest being the wound that had mustered him out of the Battle of Fleurus, the one that some nights kept him from sleeping.

“Fray Julián Garzo is the confessor,” don Vicente de la Cruz replied. “Another admirable church leader. He has an uncle on the Council of Castile. That renders him untouchable, like his confrere.”

“In other words, two men to watch out for.”

Don Luis, the younger son, could barely contain himself, his fist squeezing the pommel of his sword. “What you mean is two dogs, two swine.”

He was choking on his repressed anger, and that made him seem even younger; that, and the blond, still unshaven, fuzz on his upper lip. His father sent him another frowning glance, demanding silence before he continued.

“The fact is,” he said, “that the walls of La Adoración convent are thick enough to silence all that goes on within them: a chaplain who veils his lasciviousness beneath a hypocritical mysticism, a stupid and credulous prioress, and a congregation of unfortunate women who have been convinced that they have celestial visions or are possessed of the Devil.” The caballero ran his fingers through his beard as he spoke, and it was obvious that acting with equanimity and decorum was costing him dear. “They are even told that through love for and obedience to the chaplain they may find the way to God, and that certain intimacies and unchaste acts proposed by the spiritual director are the pathway to perfection.”

Diego Alatriste was far from being surprised. In the Spain of our very Catholic monarch, Philip IV, faith was usually sincere, but its external manifestations often resulted in hypocrisy in the privileged, and superstition in the common folk. In that broad panorama, many clergy were fanatic and ignorant, a vulgar assemblage of ne’erdo-wells who wanted to escape employment or military service; some, ambitious and immoral, hoped to better their social situation, more devoted to their own good than to the glory of God. While the poor paid taxes from which the rich and the religious by profession were excluded, legal scholars argued whether ecclesiastic immunity was or was not a divine right. And there were many who took advantage of the tonsure to satisfy contemptible appetites and self-interest. The result was that side by side with unquestionably honorable and saintly clerics, one also found the vile and avaricious: priests who had concubines and bastard children, confessors who preyed on women in the confessional, nuns who entertained lovers, convents that were havens for illicit affairs. These scandals that were the daily, if not exactly hallowed, bread.

“No one has condemned what is happening there?”

Don Vicente de la Cruz nodded dejectedly. “Yes. I myself. I even sent a detailed reminder to the Conde de Olivares, the king’s right hand, but have no reply.”

“And the Inquisition?”

“They are informed. I had a conversation with a member of the Supreme Council. He promised to attend to my request, and I know that he sent two Trinitarian examiners to look into the matter. But between the efforts of Father Coroado and Father Garzo, and the collaboration of the prioress, they were convinced that all was in order, and they left with only good things to say.”

“Which is by all accounts strange,” interposed don Francisco de Quevedo. “The Inquisition has been keeping a sharp eye on the Conde de Olivares, and this would be a good pretext for harassing him.”

The Valencian shrugged. “That is what we believed. But no doubt they decided they would be spending too much good coin to protect a simple novice. Furthermore, Sor Josefa, the prioress, enjoys a reputation at court for being a pious woman. She devotes a daily mass and special prayers to Olivares, and the king and queen, of course, asking God to send them male heirs. That assures her respect and prestige, when in fact, except for a smattering of inconsequential knowledge, she is merely a foolish woman who has been sucked into the whirlpool of the chaplain’s charm. The case is not unusual, now that every prioress worth her salt must have at least five stigmata and exude the scent of sanctity.”

Don Vicente smiled with bitterness and scorn. “Her mystic aspirations, her desire to be center stage, her dreams of grandeur, and her connections, have led her to believe that she is a new Santa Teresa. In addition, ducats fall like rain from Father Coroado’s fingers, making La Adoración the wealthiest convent in Madrid. More than a few families want to place their daughters there.”

I was listening through the chink in the wall, not overly shocked despite my youth. In a society in which religion and immorality went hand in hand, confessors were notorious for taking tyrannical possession of the souls, and at times the bodies, of devout women—with scandalous consequences.

As for the influence of those in the religious life, it was immense. Different orders formed enmities and alliances among themselves. Priests forbade their faithful to reconcile with other congregations, and when it was their whim, they blithely severed family ties, even counseled disobedience of authority. Neither was it unusual to see clerics who preyed on women employ a mystic-amatory language that evoked the divine, nor veil prurient passions and appetites, ambition and lust, under the guise of spiritual exercises. The figure of the predatory priest was well known, and widely satirized, in that century, as in these explicit verses from La cueva de Meliso.

Inside, you will hear the confessionsof beauteous servants of God.You may treat them as wives.They believe they live honorable livesand that you are purging demonic obsessions.

It was not surprising, in that time of superstition and sanctimoniousness, that such wickedness prevailed, given that we Spaniards lived in so little accord, badly fed, and worse governed amidst collective pessimism and disillusion. Sometimes we sought the consolation of religion because we felt we were on the brink of an abyss, and others for simple, bare-faced, earthly gain.

This situation was aggravated by the numbers of priests and nuns who had no calling for the cloth—there were more than nine thousand convents when I was a boy—the result of the practice of penniless noble families who, unable to wed their daughters with traditional decorum, instead directed them to the religious life, or incarcerated them against their will following some worldly indiscretion. Cloisters were filled with women who did not wish to be nuns. It was they to whom don Luis Hurtado de Toledo—the author, or, to be more accurate, the translator, of Palmerin of England—was referring in these famous lines.

For our fathers, having commendedour family’s fortunes to their sons,depriving us, have intendedto imprison us in this place whereGod is outrageously offended.

Don Francisco de Quevedo had not moved from his place by the window; he seemed removed from the conversation, staring vacantly at the cats wandering across the roof tiles like idle soldiers. Captain Alatriste gave him a long look before turning back to don Vicente de la Cruz.

“I do not yet understand,” he said, “how your daughter came to find herself in this situation.”

The elderly man was slow to reply. The same light that accentuated the captain’s scars split his brow with a deep vertical furrow that spoke of his profound grief.

“Elvira came to Madrid with two other novices when La Adoración was founded, about a year ago. They were accompanied by a duenna, a woman who had been highly recommended to us, who was to wait upon them until they took their vows.”

“And what does this duenna say?”

The captain’s question was met with a silence thick enough to be sliced with a scimitar. Don Vicente de la Cruz was staring at his bony, gnarled, but still strong right hand where it rested on the table. His sons were scowling at the floor as if studying something in front of their boots. I had observed that don Jerónimo, the elder son, rougher and more taciturn than his brother, had a hard, piercing gaze that I had seen in only a few men, something I was learning to take as warning. The look of a man who while others strut about clanking their swords against the furniture and boasting in loud voices, sits quietly in a corner of the gaming house, unblinking, taking in every detail, not opening his mouth, until suddenly he gets up and without changing expression walks over and skewers you with a sword. Captain Alatriste himself was such a man; and I, from being so long near him, was beginning to recognize the type.

“We do not know what has become of the duenna,” don Vicente said finally. “She disappeared a few days ago.”

Again that silence. This time don Francisco de Quevedo took his gaze from the roof tiles and the cats. His deeply melancholy eyes met those of Diego Alatriste.

“Disappeared,” the captain repeated, as if turning the words over in his mind.

Don Vicente de la Cruz’s sons were still examining the floor. Finally the father abruptly nodded. It seemed he could not take his eyes from the motionless hand on the table beside the hat, the jug of wine, and the captain’s pistol.

“Yes,” he said. “She cannot be found.”

Don Francisco de Quevedo moved away from the window and took a few steps into the room, stopping beside Alatriste. “They say,” he murmured, “that she served as a go-between for Fray Juan Coroado.”

“And she has disappeared.”

For a few instants the captain and don Francisco stood toe to toe.

“So we have heard,” the poet finally affirmed.

“I understand.”

Even I, in my hiding place, understood, though I didn’t yet comprehend exactly what role don Francisco was playing in such a scabrous affair. As for the rest of it, perhaps the pouch that Martín Saldaña had found in the possession of the strangled woman in the sedan chair, could not, after all, buy enough masses to save her soul.

Wide-eyed, I peered through the chink in the cupboard, beginning to feel more respect for don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons. He did not seem as aged now, or his sons as young. After all, I thought, shuddering, it was their sister and daughter who was involved. I had sisters of my own back in Oñate, and I do not know how far I might go to avenge them.

“Now,” the father continued, “the prioress says that Elvira has turned her back on the world forever. We have not been able to visit her for eight months.”

“Why has she not run away?”

Don Vicente made a helpless gesture. “She is under their sway in what happens to her. The nuns and the novices spy on one another. Imagine the scene: visions and exorcisms, confessions used to practice unholy ceremonies behind closed doors, under the pretext of cleansing the nuns of devils, jealousy, envy—all their petty convent quarrels.” The Valencian’s stoic expression crumpled into a picture of pain. “Nearly all the sisters are very young, like Elvira. Any who do not believe they are possessed of a demon, or have celestial visions, invent them to attract attention. The stupid prioress, who has no will of her own, is in the hands of the chaplain, whom she considers a saint. And Fray Juan and his acolyte roam from cell to cell giving solace and comfort.”

“Have you, Your Mercy, spoken with the chaplain?”

“Once. And I swear on the life of our king that had we not been in the locutory of the convent I would have killed him on the spot.” Don Vicente de la Cruz held up his inert right hand, incensed, as if he lamented that it was not bathed in blood.

“Despite my gray hairs, he laughed in my face with unbearable insolence. Because our family…”

He stopped mid-sentence and looked at his sons. The younger was deathly pale, without a drop of color in his face, and his brother was looking away with that frightening expression of his.

“In truth,” their father continued, “the purity of our blood is not categorical. My great-grandfather was a convert to the Faith, and my grandfather was harassed by the Inquisition. All that took a great deal of money to resolve. That swine, Padre Coroado, knew how to play that card. He threatened to denounce my daughter for having Jewish blood…and us as well.”

“Which is not true,” the younger son intervened. “Although we have the misfortune of not being old Christians, our family is without blemish. The proof of that is that don Pedro Téllez, the Duque de Osuna, honored my father with his confidence when he served under him in Sicily.”

He stopped suddenly; his pallor changed to pomegranate red. I watched Captain Alatriste look at don Francisco: now the connection was clear. During his reign as Viceroy of Sicily, and later Naples, the Duque de Osuna had been Quevedo’s friend, and Quevedo, too, had suffered during Osuna’s fall from favor. It was obvious that the obligation that bound the poet to don Vicente de la Cruz was to be found in that tangle of relationships, and that the Valencian’s misfortune and abandonment at court was mud stirred from that dust. In addition, don Francisco knew how it was to find oneself abandoned by people who in other times had sought one’s favors and influence.

“What is the plan?” the captain asked.

I heard in his voice a tone I knew very well: resignation, and an absence of illusions concerning the chances for success or failure. An exhausted, silent resolve, stripped of any concerns other than technical details, the veteran soldier matter-of-factly preparing to confront a bad assignment that was part of his job. Often, in the years ahead, when we were to share adventures and fight in the wars of our lord and king, I recognized that same tone and that unemotional expression that so uniquely hardened the gray-green eyes of the captain after the long immobility of waiting during a campaign, when the drums sounded and the tercios marched toward the enemy at that awesome, stately pace beneath the tattered flags that had led us to both glory and disaster. That same look, and that same tone of infinite weariness, became mine many years later: the day when I stood among the remnants of a Spanish formation, dagger between my teeth, pistol in one hand and unsheathed sword in the other. There, I watched the French cavalry form their last charge, as in Flanders, rosy with blood, a sun went down…one that for two centuries had inspired fear and respect throughout the world.

But that morning in Madrid, in ’23, Rocroi existed only in the dark pages of Destiny, and two decades would pass before that fateful encounter. Our king was young and gallant, Madrid was the capital of two worlds, the old and the new, and I myself was a beardless youth. I crouched impatiently at the crack in a cupboard, waiting for the answer to the question the captain had posed: What plan had don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons, through the good offices of don Francisco de Quevedo, come to present? As the grieving father prepared to answer, a cat jumped through the window and slipped between my legs. I tried, quietly, to brush it away, but it refused to leave. Then I moved too brusquely, and a broom and a tin dust bin crashed to the floor. And when I looked up, horrified, the door had been flung open and the elder son of don Vicente de la Cruz was standing before me, dagger in hand.

“I believed you to be inflexible in regard to purity of blood, don Francisco,” said Captain Alatriste, when we three were alone. “I never imagined that you would place your neck in a noose for a family of Jew-turned-Christian conversos.”

I glimpsed a smile of affectionate indulgence beneath the captain’s mustache. Seated at our table, wearing the face of a man with few friends, Señor de Quevedo was dispatching the jug of wine that until that moment no one had touched. After reaching an accord with the captain, don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons had left.

“Everything has its…charm,” the poet murmured.

“I have no doubt. But if your much-loved Luis de Góngora catches scent of this, you should prepare to be lambasted. His sonnet will drop you to your knees.”

“A pox on him.”

But it was true. In a time when hatred of Jews and heretics was considered an indispensable component of faith—only a few years earlier, the aforementioned Lope, as well as good don Miguel de Cervantes, had crowed over the expulsion of the Moors—don Francisco de Quevedo, who prided himself on being an old Christian from Santander, was not exactly noted for his tolerance of anyone whose purity of blood was dubious. On the contrary, he often used that theme when aiming darts at his adversaries—and especially don Luis de Góngora, to whom he attributed Jewish blood.

Why should Greek be a tongue you debase?and not Hebrew? We know you master that,it is as clear as the nose on your face.

The great satirist liked to intersperse such compliments with allusions to Góngora’s sodomy, as he did in a certain famous sonnet that concludes,

Your legs are worse than my poor two.I limp, it’s true, but they do not gothe places your third leg leads you to.

Yet here he was, getting his own hands dirty: don Francisco Gómez de Quevedo y Villegas, he of the habit of Santiago and proven family purity, lord of la Torre de Juan Abad, scourge of Judaizers, heretics, sodomites, and assorted Latinate court poets, risking life and honor, plotting nothing less than to violate the sanctity of a cloister in order to aid a family of Valencian conversos. Even I, at my tender age, recognized the terrible implications.

“A pox on him, by Christ,” the poet repeated.

I suppose that any sane man would be swearing—in Greek, even Hebrew, both languages that don Francisco was familiar with—had he found himself in Quevedo’s starched white collar. And Captain Alatriste, who was not in Quevedo’s gorget, but faced ruin enough in his own, was well aware of that.

The captain had not moved from his place against the wall throughout the conversation with our visitors, and his thumbs were still hooked over his belt. He had not shifted position even when Jerónimo de la Cruz returned to the room, dagger in hand, leading me by the ear. Alatriste merely ordered the man to release me, in a tone that inspired my captor, after only an instant’s hesitation, to obey. As for me, the awkward moment past, I was huddled in a corner, still red with embarrassment, trying to pass unnoticed. It had taken a certain effort to convince the father and sons that although disobedient, I was a prudent lad and could be trusted. Don Francisco himself had to speak for me. But the beans had been spilled—I had heard everything—and don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons would have to put their faith in me. Although when it came down to it—as the captain clarified very deliberately, casting cold, intimidating looks at each of the three in turn—this was no longer a situation in which they could offer an opinion or have a choice. That declaration was followed by a long and weighty silence, after which my involvement was not questioned again.

“They are good people,” Quevedo said finally. “And blood or no blood, no one can accuse them of not being good Catholics.” He paused in search of further justification. “And when we were in Italy, don Vicente performed a number of services for me. It would have been wicked not to hold out a hand to him.”

Captain Alatriste nodded his understanding, and beneath his military mustache I could see the same irrepressible smile.

“All that you say is well and good,” the captain acknowledged. “But I press my point about Góngora. After all, Your Mercy is constantly dwelling on his Semitic nose and his aversion to the flesh of the pig. You remember when you wrote,

“No white shows in your hair,so old Christian you cannot be:sonofa something, no question there,but son of pure blood? A mockery.”

Don Francisco smoothed his mustache and goatee, half pleased that the captain remembered his verses, and half annoyed by the bantering way he recited them.

“By the good Christ, Alatriste, what a good—and, I might add, badly timed—memory you have.”

Alatriste burst out laughing, unable to contain himself any longer, which did not improve the poet’s humor.

“I can just imagine what your enemy will write,” said the captain, beating a dead horse, holding his fingers as if he were writing on air.

“You say, don Francisco, I am a filthy Jewish pig,while you dance to the tune of a lively Hebrew jig…

“What do you think?”

Don Franciso’s face grew even more dour. Were it not Diego Alatriste speaking, his tormentor would have tasted steel some time ago.

“Bad, and with very little flair,” was all he said, dispiritedly. “Those lines could, in fact, have been written by that Cordovan sodomite, or that other friend of yours, the Conde de Guadalmedina, whose behavior as a caballero I do not contest, but who as a poet is the mortification of Parnassus. As for Góngora, that puerile asshole, that proparoxytonic, euphistic versifier, that dabbler in vortices, tricliniums, promptuaria, and vacillating Icaruses, that shadow on the sun and eructation of the wind…he is the last thing that worries me now. I do fear, however, that I have brought you into a bad business.” He gripped the jug of wine more tightly and took another swig, glancing in my direction. “And the lad.”

The lad—that is, I—was still in the corner. The cat had strolled past me three times, and I had made every effort to get in a good kick, with little success. I saw that Alatriste, too, was looking at me, and he was no longer smiling. Finally he shrugged his shoulders.

“The lad got himself into it,” he declared calmly. “As for me, do not concern yourself.” He pointed to the pouch of gold escudos in the center of the table. “They have paid, and that eases all cares.”

“Perhaps.”

The poet did not seem convinced, and Alatriste’s lips again twisted with irony.

“What the devil, don Francisco. It is a little late for regrets, now that you’ve already got me dressed for the ball.”

Dejected, the poet took a swallow, and then another. His eyes had begun to water.

“But to turn a convent upside down,” he said, underscoring the obvious, “is not a trifling matter.”

“Nor is taking La Goleta, pardiez!” The captain strode to the table, where he picked up his pistol and removed the primer and charge. “They tell that my mother’s great-uncle, a man well known in the day of Charles the Fifth, broke into a convent one day in Seville.”

Don Francisco looked up, interested. “Was he one who inspired Tirso’s play?”

“So they say.”

“I was not aware that you were related.”

“Well, now you know it. Spain is a pocket handkerchief: here everyone knows everyone, and all roads cross.”

Quevedo’s eyeglasses were dangling from their cord. Thoughtful, he held them a moment but did not place them on his nose. Instead, they dropped from his fingers to again hang above the embroidered cross on his chest, and he reached instead for the wine. He drank a long, last draught, gazing lugubriously at the captain over the lip of the jug.

“Well, by the good Christ, I venture that your uncle, that trickster Don Juan, had a bad third act.”

III. MADRID STEEL

The next morning found me at mass with Diego Alatriste and Señor de Quevedo, a rather momentous event. Don Francisco, both because of his Santander heritage and his cross of Santiago, felt it a point of honor to fulfill the rituals of the Church, but the captain was not moved a hair by a Dominus or a vobiscum. It is, however, only fair to point out that for all his oaths, moderate in themselves, for all the blasphemy and By Gods, only standard in his former profession, never in all the years I spent at his side did I hear Alatriste speak a word against religion. Not even when, in the Tavern of the Turk, his friends’ controversial comments left Dómine Pérez in the middle and no maxim with a breath of life. Alatriste did not practice Catholicism but he respected tonsures, robes, and wimples in the same way that he respected the authority and the person of ourlord and king. Perhaps it was his discipline as a soldier, or it may have been the stoic indifference that seemed to govern his moods and his character. A further detail: though he so seldom attended mass himself, the captain always obliged me to pay my dues to God every Sunday and feast day, whether in the company of Caridad la Lebrijana—like all former whores, La Lebrijana was extremely pious—or Dómine Pérez. And two days a week, at Alatriste’s insistence, the good priest taught me grammar, a little Latin, and enough catechism and Sacred History that, as the captain said, no one would take me for a Turk or an accursed heretic.

He was a man of many contradictions. Not much later, in Flanders, I had occasion to see him kneeling with bowed head as the tercios were preparing for combat and the chaplains were going up and down the rows blessing all the men. He did not do it to affect piety but, rather, to show respect for comrades who were going off to die believing in the efficacy of the whole rigmarole. Alatriste’s God was neither placated by laud nor offended by oaths; He was a powerful and dispassionate being who did not manipulate the puppets on the stage of life, but merely observed them. And it was also He who, with reasons incomprehensible to the actors in the human comedy—why not just call it a farce—operated the stage machinery, causing lethal trapdoors to open or revolving panels to shift suddenly, sometimes imprisoning you in shackles and other times—a literal deus ex machina—extracting you from the most dire situations. It might all be due to that long-ago prime motion and efficient cause that Dómine Pérez mentioned one fine afternoon when he had been a bit too free with the sweet wine and was attempting to explain Saint Thomas’s five proofs to us. But as for the captain, his interpretation of the matter was possibly closer to what the Romans—if I am not deceived by the Latin I learned from that same dómine—called fatum.

I remember a taciturn Alatriste, when enemy artillery was creating significant lacunae in our ranks, and all around, fellow soldiers were making the sign of the cross, commending themselves to Christ and the most blessed Virgin. Suddenly you heard them reciting prayers they had learned as children, and the captain murmuring “Amen” along with them, so they would not feel alone when they fell to the ground and died. His cold, gray-green eyes nevertheless were fixed on the undulating rows of the enemy cavalry, on the musket fire issuing from the terreplein of a dike, on the smoking bombs that snaked across the ground before exploding in a burst that left the Devil well supplied. It was evident that “Amen” did not bind him in any way, as one could read in the absorbed gaze of an old soldier attentive only to the monotonous drumroll from the center of the tercio, a beat as slow and calm as the tranquil pace of the Spanish infantry and the serene beating of his heart. Because Captain Alatriste served God as he served his king. He had no reason to love God, even to admire Him, but being who he was, he afforded the deity his respect.

One day when we had taken a bellyful of steel and shot on the banks of the Merck River, near Breda, I saw Alatriste do battle for a flag and the corpse of our field marshal. And I know that although he was willing to sacrifice his hide—and for good measure mine—for that dead body sieved by musket balls, he did not give a fig for either don Pedro de la Daga or the flag. That was what was puzzling about the captain: he could show respect for a God who did not matter to him, fight for a cause in which he did not believe, get drunk with an enemy, or die for an officer or a king he scorned.

Yes, we went to mass, although the motive was far from pious. The church, as Your Mercies will undoubtedly have suspected, was the one attached to the convent of La Adoración. Las Benitas was near the palace and almost straight across from the convent of La Encarnación, which was next to the small plaza of the same name. Las Benitas’s eight-o’clock mass was in vogue, for that was where Teresa de Guzmán, the wife of the Conde de Olivares, came to worship. Furthermore, the chaplain, don Juan Coroado, had a reputation for cutting a fine figure before the altar and preaching a fine homily from the pulpit. So the church was frequented not only by truly religious women but also by ladies of good breeding, drawn there by the Condesa de Olivares or by the chaplain, and by other women who had no breeding at all, but pretended to. Even harlots and flamboyant actresses—as pious in matters of dogma as the next—dropped in with the required devotion, thickly powdered and rouged beneath the folds of their mantillas and fine black silks, and dripping with laces from Lorraine and Provence—those from Flanders being reserved for ladies of greater substance. And since the presence of so many ladies, genteel or otherwise, drew more males than lice to a muleteer’s doublet, the famed eight-o’clock mass filled the small church from altar to atrium. Some female worshipers had eyes only for God, while others sent volleys of Cupid’s darts flying above their fans. Gallants lurked behind columns or beside the font to offer the ladies holy water; beggars sat on the steps outside the door, exhibiting their sores and pustules and the mutilations supposedly earned in Flanders, even Lepanto, and wrangling over the best places at the exit from the mass, ready to berate arrogantly, as their right, the caballeros and damas who gave themselves airs but would not allow a wretched copper coin to see the light of day.

The three of us positioned ourselves near the door, at a spot from which we could survey both the nave of the church and the choir, and the iron lattice that divided the church from the convent. At that moment, the nave was so jammed with people that had there been only one or two more, the Christ on the main altar would have had to be portrayed hanged, arms at his side, rather than crucified. I watched the captain, hat in hand and cape over his arm, study the plan of the building, just as, when we reached the church, his alert eyes had registered every detail of the garden walls and the façade of the convent. The mass had progressed to the liturgy of the word, and when the celebrant turned to the assembly I was at last able to see the face of the renowned chaplain Coroado, who was reeling off Latin with eloquence, finesse, and aplomb. He seemed to be well favored, elegant beneath the chasuble, thick black hair tonsured and trimmed at the nape of his neck. His eyes were dark and penetrating, and it was not difficult to imagine their effect upon the daughters of Eve, especially in the case of nuns whose order closed off all contact with the world and the opposite sex.

I was incapable of looking at the man without thinking of everything I knew about him, and about the convent in which he made a dressing gown of his cassock. I must apologize for mentioning the ill feeling and indignation caused by his ritualized performance, the fatuous unction with which he celebrated Christ’s sacrifice. I was astounded that no one among the assembly shouted out “sacrilege,” or “hypocrite,” and that I saw nothing around me but devotion, even admiration, in the eyes of many women. But that is the way of life, and that was but one of the first times, among no few to come, that I was taught a useful lesson about how appearances trump truth, and how villains hide their vices behind masks of piety, honor, and decency. And that to denounce evildoers without proof, attack them without weapons, trust blindly in reason or justice, is often the fastest road toward one’s own perdition, while the scoundrels who use influence or money as a shield remain untouched. Another lesson that I learned early on is that it is a grave error to align our fortunes with those of the powerful, for we are more certain to lose than to win. Better to wait, not rush or flounder about, until time or chance brings the adversary within range of our blade: something that in Spain—here, sooner or later, we all go up and come down the same stairway—is normal, even inevitable and expected. And if not, patience. After all, God has the last word; He shuffles all the cards.

“Second chapel on the left,” whispered don Francisco. “Behind the grille.”

Captain Alatriste, whose eyes were focused on the altar, stood riveted a moment longer, then turned to look in the direction the poet indicated. I followed his gaze toward the chapel that connected the church with the convent, where the black-and-white headdresses of nuns and novices could be glimpsed through the heavy iron lattice, to which, apparently, because of the severity of the cloister rules, spikes had been added to keep any man from approaching too closely. That was our Spain: severe rigor and ceremony, all intimidating spikes, divisive grilles, and grand façades. In the midst of the disasters in Europe, the Cortes of Castile were arguing the dogma of the Immaculate Conception, while predatory priests, nuns without calling, officials, judges, nobles—every mother’s son—were quietly raking in fortunes. Indeed, the nation that was mistress of two worlds was becoming the courtyard of the master thief Monipodio, providing an opportunity for larceny and envy and a paradise for go-betweens and Pharisees, all patched together with honors, bought consciences, widespread hunger, and unrestrained wickedness to ease it along.

“What do you think, Captain?”

The poet had spoken very quietly, taking advantage of the moment the parishioners were reciting the profession of faith. In one hand he held his hat, and the other hand was on the pommel of his sword; he was staring straight ahead with a deceptively abstracted air, as if he had nothing but the liturgy on his mind.

“Difficult,” Alatriste replied.

The poet’s deep sigh blended into the Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero, which the communicants were praying in chorus. A little farther away, in the shelter of a column, attempting to pass as unobserved among the crowd as a thief in a circle of scribes, I saw the elder son of don Vicente de la Cruz, the one who had discovered me when the traitorous cat startled me in my hiding place. His face was partially muffled and he was staring toward the nuns’ chapel. I wondered whether Elvira de la Cruz was there, and if she could see her brother. The natural romanticism of a youth of my years shot off after the image of that young girl I had never met, but whom I imagined to be a beautiful, tormented prisoner awaiting liberation. The hours in her cell must have become interminable, waiting for a signal, a message, a note announcing that she should be ready to escape. Spurred by my imagination, which flowed so freely at moments that it made me feel like a hero in a book of chivalry—after all, fate had made me a part of this enterprise—I squinted hard, trying to pick out Elvira behind the iron latticework that shut her off from the world, and after a moment I saw white fingertips rest for an instant between the heavy bars. I stood there a long time, enchanted, openmouthed, hoping to see the hand appear again, until a well-disguised pinch on the nape of my neck snapped me out of my reverie. Then, against my will, I turned and looked straight ahead, as discreet as anyone could wish. And when the celebrant turned toward us to say “Dominus vobiscum,” I looked at his hypocritical face, and without blinking responded, “Et cum spiritu tuo,” with such devotion and piety that had my poor old mother seen and heard me, she would have rejoiced.

We left with the Ite, missa est. A splendid sun was shining, heightening the colors of the geranium and caraway plants at the windows of La Encarnación across the street. Don Francisco lagged behind, for he knew everyone in Madrid—he had as many friends as enemies—and was enjoying flirting with some of the ladies and conversing with their companions, peering between them from time to time to catch a glimpse of the captain and me as we strolled alongside the wall of Las Benitas’s garden. I noticed that the captain was paying special attention to a small door, locked from inside, in the brick wall that was ten feet tall at that point. He also took note of a carriage guard at the corner that would make it possible for someone with sufficient agility to leap over the top. I watched as his keen eyes studied the little door as if he were searching for breaches in an enemy wall. I knew he was interested because he was making that gesture so typical of him: stroking his mustache with two fingers, a sign that usually—reflectively or angrily—preceded putting a hand to his sword when someone was beginning to try his patience. It was at this juncture that the elder son of don Vicente de la Cruz, his hat pulled low on his forehead, caught up with us, though he gave no sign of recognizing us. I observed, however, by the way he was walking and guardedly looking around, that he too was inspecting Las Benitas’s walls.

At that moment a small incident occurred that I relate here because it is a good example of Diego Alatriste’s nature. We had paused a moment as the captain pretended to be adjusting his belt in order to examine the lock of the door, when we were overtaken by a foursome leaving mass: a pair of foppish young men accompanying two rather common, but beautiful, women. One of the men, the one wearing a velvet doublet with slashed sleeves, a multitude of ribbons and bows, and a silver-embroidered band around the crown of his hat, bumped into me and then, ill-humoredly, shoved me aside, calling me a little pissant. I was not as yet carrying a dagger, because of my youth, but a few years later that discourtesy would have cost him, however well dressed he might be, a stab in the groin with the dagger. Soon, in Flanders, I would carry one as if I’d never been without it.

But at that time I still had no choice but to eat insults without seasoning and without recourse, unless Captain Alatriste determined to take my defense upon himself. Which is precisely what he did, and I must tell you that his actions led me to consider that, despite his often surly ways and silences, the captain held me in esteem. And if Your Mercies will forgive me, I will say that he had good reason, pardiez, considering certain pistol shots I had fired on his behalf some time ago at the Gate of Lost Souls.

The fact is that when he heard this dandy debase me, the captain turned, slowly, serenely. On his face was the look of glacial calm that those who know him consider fair notice that it is advisable to take three steps back.

“By God, Íñigo”—the captain seemed to be speaking to me, although he was staring hard at the offender—“I do believe that this caballero has confused you with some rogue of his acquaintance.”

I said nothing, not a word, for it was obvious what was happening. The coxcomb, hearing himself addressed, had stopped, and his companions with him. He was the kind of man who uses his own shadow as a kind of mirror. At the captain’s “By God,” he had placed a white hand displaying a large gold and diamond ring upon the guard of his sword, and with the evident sarcasm of that “caballero,” his fingers drummed a tune on the pommel. His arrogant eyes looked Diego Alatriste up and down. When he had completed the inspection, however—after noting the captain’s sword with the guard scratched and nicked from other blades, the battle scars on his face, the cold eyes beneath the broad-brimmed hat—the arrogance was not quite as noticeable as it had been.

Even so, he replied. “And what happens,” he said disagreeably, “if I am not confused and if I am certain of what I say…eh?”

His answer had sounded firm, which was in the man’s favor, although that final hesitation had not escaped me, nor the swift glances he threw toward his companion and the two ladies. In those days, a man might well let himself be killed for the sake of his reputation, and the only things that could not be forgiven were cowardice and dishonor. After all, honor was supposed to be the exclusive patrimony of the hidalgo; and the hidalgo, unlike the plebeian who bore all the tributes and taxes, neither worked nor contributed to the royal treasury. The famous plays of Lope, Tirso, and Calderón often made reference to the chivalric tradition of earlier centuries, but what actually set the tone of the society was the prevalence of scoundrels and swindlers of every stripe. Those hyperboles of honor and dishonor glossed over the business—quite serious, of course—of living without working or paying taxes.

Very slowly, taking his time, the captain ran two fingers over his mustache. And then, with the same hand, without ostentation or exaggeration, he pulled back his cape, further exposing, in addition to his sword, the dagger he wore over his kidney, on the left side.

“What happens,” Alatriste replied in measured tones, “if you are not confused? Well, perhaps Your Mercies may find the troublemaker whom I am sure you have mistaken for this lad, if you will come along with me to the de la Vega gate.”

The de la Vega gate, which was not far away, was one of the places on the outskirts of the city where men went to resolve their quarrels. And the gesture of freeing up, without further preamble, the Toledo and Biscay weapons had not gone unnoticed by anyone present. Nor had the plural, “Your Mercies,” which brought his companion into the game.

The women raised their eyebrows, intrigued, for their gender was a guarantee of safe conduct, allowing them to be privileged spectators. For his part, the second individual—another popinjay distinguished by his goatee, large lace collar, and suede gloves—who had witnessed the prologue with a superior smile, suddenly stopped smiling. It was one thing to go for a stroll with a friend and to bluster a bit before the two ladies, but it was a far different matter to find oneself in a confrontation with a fellow who had the look of a soldier and who, out of the blue, was suggesting they bypass formalities and settle the business immediately with their swords. The companion’s expression said, This is not one of those all-for-show braggarts you see on Calle Montera, and he communicated this thought further by quietly moving back a few steps. As for the pretty-boy himself, his pallor betrayed that he was thinking exactly the same thing, although his position was more delicate. He had spoken a little too freely, and the problem with words is that once spoken, they cannot find their way back to the speaker alone. Sometimes they have to be returned on the tip of a sword.

“The boy was not to blame,” said the companion.

He had spoken like an hidalgo, voice firm and calm, but conciliation was evident in his words. He wanted to remove himself from the center of things and in addition provide his friend with a way out, giving him a foothold whereby he could end the incident without his doublet slashed as generously as his sleeves.

I saw the dandy uncurl the fingers of his right hand and then close them again. He hesitated. Things could be worse. By pure arithmetic, it was two against one, and had he discovered the least sign of discomfort or emotion in Diego Alatriste he might have gone forward—on de la Vega hill, or right there. But there was something about the captain’s cool demeanor, an indifference so absolute that it transcended his immobility and his silences that counseled “proceed with great caution.” I knew exactly what was going through his head: a man who challenges a pair of well-armed strangers either is very sure of himself and his sword, or he is mad. And neither of the two possibilities was to be treated lightly. Even so, I have to say that the caballero was not fainthearted. He did not want to fight, but neither did he want to lose face; so for a few instants more he locked eyes with the captain. Then he looked toward me, as if seeing me for the first time.

“I agree that the boy was not to blame,” he said finally.

The women smiled, though not without a little disappointment at being deprived of entertainment. The friend contained a sigh of relief. As for me, it did not matter whether the pretty-boy apologized or not. I was attuned to Captain Alatriste’s profile beneath the brim of his hat, his thick mustache, his chin, badly shaved that morning, his scars, the gray-green, expressionless eyes that had looked into a void only he could contemplate. Then I looked at his worn and mended doublet, the ancient cape, the modest collar washed time and time again by Caridad la Lebrijana, the dull reflection of the sun on the sword guard and dagger grip protruding from his belt. And I was conscious of a dual and magnificent privilege: that man had been my father’s friend, and now he was also mine, ready to fight on my behalf over a mere word.

Or maybe, in truth, he was doing it for himself. Perhaps the king’s wars, the patrons who hired his sword, the friends who embroiled him in dangerous undertakings, the loose-tongued fops and dandies, even I myself, were simply pretexts that allowed Alatriste to fight because—as don Francisco de Quevedo would have said—there was no choice but to fight, regardless of God, and against whatever there was to be against. And don Francisco himself was now hurrying to join us, sniffing a conflict, though a bit late.

I would have followed Captain Alatriste to the Gates of Hell at one word, one gesture, one smile. I was far from suspecting that that was precisely where he was leading me.

I believe I have already spoken of Angélica de Alquézar. Over the years, when I was a soldier like Diego Alatriste—and played other roles that will be told in good time—life placed women in my path. I am not given to the bluff and bluster of the tavern, nor to lyrical nostalgia, but since the tale demands some comment, I shall boil the matter down and state that I loved a certain number of them, and that I recall others with tenderness, indifference, or—most often the case—with a happy and complicit smile. That is the highest laurel a man may hope for, to emerge from such sweet embraces unscathed, with his purse little diminished, his health reasonable, and his esteem intact.

That being said, I shall affirm to Your Mercies that of all the women whose paths crossed mine, the niece of the royal secretary, Luis de Alquézar, was without doubt the most beautiful, the most intelligent, the most seductive, and the most evil. You will make the objection, perhaps, that my youth may have made me excessively vulnerable—remember that at the time of this story I was a lad from the Basque country, not yet fourteen, who had been in Madrid no more than a year. But that was not the case. Even later, when I was a man grown and Angélica was in the full bloom of her womanhood, my sentiments were unchanged. It was like loving the Devil, even knowing who he is.

I believe that I have recounted previously that youthful or not, I was obsessively in love with that señorita. Mine was not yet the passion that comes with years and time, when flesh and blood are blended with dreams, and everything takes on a diffuse and dangerous tone. At the time I am referring to, mine was a kind of hypnotic attraction, like peering into an abyss that tempts you and terrifies you at the same time. Only later—the adventure of the convent and of the dead woman was merely a station on that Via Crucis—I learned how misleading the blond curls and blue eyes of that angelic-looking girl could be, the cause of my so often finding myself on the verge of sacrificing my honor and my life. In spite of everything, however, I went on loving her to the end. And even now when Angélica de Alquézar and the others are gone, familiar ghosts in my memory, I swear to God above and to all the demons of Hell—where she is most surely a bright flame today—that I love her still. At times, when memories seem so sweet that I long even for old enemies, I go and stand before the portrait Diego Velázquez painted of her, and stay for hours looking at her in silence, painfully aware that I never truly knew her. But along with the scars that she inflicted, my old heart still holds the conviction that that girl, that woman who inflicted upon me every evil she was capable of, also, in her way, loved me till the day she died.

At the time of this story, however, all that lay before me. The morning that I followed her carriage to the Acero fountain, beyond the Manzanares and the Segovia bridge, Angélica de Alquézar was simply a fascinating enigma. I have already written that she used to ride down Calle Toledo on the way between her domicile and the palace, where she served as a menina, waiting upon the queen and the princesses. The house where she lived, an old mansion on the corner of La Encomienda and Los Embajadores, belonged to her uncle, Luis de Alquézar. It had been the property of the Marqués de Ortígolas until he—ruined by a well-known actress in La Cruz theater, who choked more life out of him than a hangman his victims—had to sell it to satisfy his creditors. Luis de Alquézar had never married, and his one known weakness, aside from the voracious exercise of power that had earned him his position at court, was his orphaned niece, the daughter of a sister who had perished with her husband, a duke, during the storm that lashed the fleet of the Indies in ’21.

I had watched her pass by, as was my habit, from my post at the door of the Tavern of the Turk. Sometimes I followed her two-mule carriage to the Plaza Mayor, or sometimes to the very flagstones of the palace, where I turned and followed my footsteps home. All for the fleeting reward of one of her disturbingly blue glances—which on occasion she deigned to grant me before focusing on some detail of the landscape, or turning toward the duenna who usually accompanied her: a hypocritical, vinegary old woman as worn and thin as a student’s purse. The duenna was one of those creatures of whom it could honestly be said,

Never without her scapular,with more herbs and balms and flummerythan all the nostrums that line the shelvesof the city’s most bustling pharmacy.

I had, as you perhaps recall, exchanged a few words with Angélica during the adventure of the two Englishmen, and I always suspected that, knowingly or not, she had contributed to our being attacked in El Príncipe theater, where Captain Alatriste came within a hair of losing his hide. But no one is completely in control of whom he hates or whom he loves; so, even knowing that, the blonde girl continued to bewitch me. And my intuition that it was all a devilishly dangerous game did nothing but spur my imagination.

So I followed her that morning through the Guadalajara gate and de la Villa plaza. It was a brilliant day, but instead of continuing toward the palace, her carriage rolled down the de la Vega hill onto the Segovia bridge and across the river whose thin trickle was the eternal source of burlesque and ridicule from the city’s poets. Even the usually cultured and exquisite don Luis de Góngora—quoted here with an apology to Señor de Quevedo—contributed the pretty lines that follow.

An ass drank you in yesterday,and today you are the piss it passed.

I learned later that Angélica had during that time fallen quite pale, and her physician had recommended outings among the groves and promenades near El Duque garden and the Casa de Campo. He’d also prescribed the renowned waters of the Acero fountain, widely believed to cure, among other things, ladies suffering from amenorrhea, or interruption of various delicate female functions. A fountain described by Lope in one of his plays:

Take a walk tomorrow,if you can endurea good half-dipper ofAcero-laced water,the miraculous unblocking cure.

Angélica was still very young for that type of problem, but it is true that the cool shade there, the sun and the healing air, were good for her. So that was where she was heading, with carriage, coachman, and duenna, and me following some distance behind. On the other side of the bridge and the river, damas and caballeros were strolling beneath the arching trees. In the Madrid of that day, just as I mentioned in regard to the church of Las Benitas, wherever there were ladies—and the Acero fountain attracted not a few, with or without duennas—there also boiled a pot full of gallants, procurers, amorous rendezvous, and other encounters, any of which, fueled by jealousy, might lead to an exchange of words and insults, drawn swords, and a paseo ended with swordplay. In that hypocritical Spain, always a slave to appearances and “What will people say?” where the honor of fathers and husbands was measured by the chastity of their wives and daughters—to the point of not letting them leave the house—activities that were in principle innocent, such as taking the waters or going to mass, engendered a muddle of adventures, intrigues, and liaisons.

I am pretending, my beloved husband,to be needing “regulation,”that I may deceive a jealous fatherand an aunt’s intimidation.

So I apologize to Your Mercies for the youthful spirit of chivalry and adventure with which I followed behind the coach of my beloved, knowing I was heading to a place well known for intrigue, and lamenting only that I was not yet old enough to wear a gleaming sword at my belt with which to carve rivals into little pieces. I was a long way from imagining that, with time, my wishes would be fulfilled, point by point. But when the hour actually came for me to kill for Angélica de Alquézar—and I did kill for her—neither she nor I were children. All my romancing had ceased, and life was no longer a game.

Pardiez. I wander in circles, with digressions and leaps in time that take me away from the thread of my tale. So I shall pick it up again by calling Your Mercies’ attention to something central to my story: the enthusiasm at seeing my beloved that caused me to commit a careless act I would later deeply regret.

Ever since don Vicente de la Cruz’s visit I had thought I detected the movement of suspicious people around our house. Nothing truly disturbing, it is true; only a couple of faces that were not usually seen either on Calle del Arcabuz or in the Tavern of the Turk. I suppose that this in itself was not overly strange, for on Cava Baja, as well as other streets in the neighborhood, there were a number of inns. But that morning I had noticed something I would have given more consideration to had I not been waiting for Angélica to pass by. It was only later that I gave it proper thought, when I had ample time to mull over the events that had brought me to the sinister place I found myself in. Or where, to be more accurate, I found myself forced to go.

It had happened that after we returned from the mass at the church of Las Benitas, I stood at the tavern door, and Diego Alatriste went on to Calle de los Correos, where he had business at the letter-office. And at that moment, as the captain was walking up Toledo, two strangers strolling past the fruit stands with an innocent air exchanged a few words in a low voice before one of them turned and followed the captain. I watched from where I was, wondering whether it was a chance move or whether the two were planning some thievery, when Angélica’s carriage went by and erased everything but her from my mind. And yet, as I later had bitter opportunity to lament, the ear-to-ear mustaches, the wide-brimmed hats pulled down in swashbuckling fashion, the swords and daggers, and the swaggering walk of those two bullies, should have made me dog their steps. But God, the Devil, or whoever plays us life’s pranks, always watches with amusement as through carelessness, pride, or ignorance, we find ourselves walking on the sharp edge of the knife.

She was as beautiful as Lucifer before his expulsion from Paradise. Her carriage had stopped beneath the poplar trees lining the road, and she had got out of the coach to stroll around the fountain. She had not yet outgrown her blond curls, and the lustrous cloth of her dress, as blue as her eyes, seemed to have been cut from the cloudless sky that framed the rooftops and towers of Madrid, its ancient wall, and the solid mass of the palace. After the coachman hobbled his mules, he had gone to join his fellow drivers, and the duenna had gone to fill a receptacle with water from the famed fountain. Angélica was alone. I felt my heart thumping as I drew closer beneath the trees, and from a distance I watched as she graciously greeted a few young friends who were having a little social, and then, after stealing a glance toward the distant chaperone, accepted a treat they offered her.

At that moment, I would have given all my youth and all my dreams to be, instead of a humble, beardless page, one of the dashing hidalgos—or at least men who resembled hidalgos—following the paths, twisting their mustaches as they sighted appealing señoritas, addressing a few clever words to them, hat in hand, fist elegantly posed on a hip or on the pommel of a sword. It was undoubtedly true that there were also ordinary folk there, no few of them, and with experience I learned that in those days, as in ours, not everything that glisters is good breeding, for there were whores and rogues among them who gave themselves airs out of vanity or a wish to improve their lot. Whatever their background, however dubious, Jew or Moor, it was enough to have bad handwriting, speak slowly and gravely, have debts, ride a horse, and carry a sword, in order to pass oneself off as a gentleman. But to my young eyes, anyone who wore a cape and sword—or clog shoes, fine petticoats, and farthingales—seemed to me to be a person of quality. At that point, I did not know much of the world.

A few dandies rode by on horseback, making their mounts rear and curvet as they neared a coach filled with ladies—or doxies—flirting with them whoever they were, and I wished with all my heart to be one of them, to rein in my horse and address Angélica in exquisite phrases. By now, she had penetrated deeper into the grove and, gathering up her underskirts with infinite grace, was meandering among the ferns that bordered the banks of the stream. Her eyes seemed to be fixed on the ground, and as I drew closer I could see that she was following the path of a long line of industrious ants scurrying back and forth with the discipline of German infantrymen. More venturesome than ever before, I took a few more steps in her direction before some twigs snapped beneath my feet. She looked up at me. Or it might be more accurate to say that the sky and her gown and her gaze enveloped me like a warm mist, and I felt my head whirl the way it did in the Tavern of the Turk from the vapors of wine spilled on the table, clouding my senses and making everything seem very slow and far away.

“I know you,” she said.

She did not smile, nor did she seem surprised or displeased by my presence. She looked at me with curiosity, in the way that mothers and older sisters look before they say “You have grown a good inch,” or “Your voice is changing.” To my good fortune, I was wearing an old but clean doublet that had no patches, and passable breeches; also, following the captain’s orders, I had washed my face and ears. I strove to pass her scrutiny without flinching, and after a brief struggle with my innate shyness, I was able to return her gaze serenely.

“My name is Íñigo Balboa,” I said.

“I know. You are the friend of that Captain Triste, or Batristre.”

She spoke with a very familiar tone, as she might to a friend or a servant. But she had said “friend” of the captain, and not “page” or “servant.” More, she had remembered who I was. That alone—which in other circumstances might not be calming in the least, since my name or Alatriste’s on the lips of the niece of Luis de Alquézar was more a promise of danger than cause for satisfaction—seemed to me completely adorable, making me happier than the gift of new doublet and breeches of Castile woolen. Angélica remembered my name. And with it, a portion of the life that I was resolved to place at her feet, sacrificing it to her without so much as blinking. I felt, and I wonder if you will truly know what I mean, like a man run through with a dagger: that I would live as long as it was not pulled out, and that removing it would kill me.

“Have you come for the healing waters?” I asked, to break the silence that the intensity of her gaze had made unbearable.

She wrinkled her nose and pouted. “I eat too many sweets,” she said. Then she shrugged her shoulders in a childish way, as if that was a stupid concern. She looked toward the fountain where her duenna was standing talking with a acquaintance.

“It’s ridiculous,” she added scornfully.

I deduced that Angélica de Alquézar did not hold the highest regard for the dragon charged with looking after her, nor of the physics of physicians who with their bloodletting and remedies dispatched more Christians than the hangman of Seville.

“So I imagine,” I replied courteously. “Everyone knows that sweets are good for one’s health.” I vaguely remembered having heard the pharmacist Fadrique say something similar in the tavern. “They build up the blood and the humors. I am sure that a honey bun, or a fritter, or custards, do more to stimulate melancholy humors than water from that fountain.”

I stopped, hesitant to go any further, for I had exhausted my pharmaceutical knowledge.

“You have a funny accent,” she said.

“It’s Basque,” I replied. “I was born in Oñate.”

“I thought that Basques cut off their words,” she said, and recited an old Basque saying, imitating their clipped speech: “If you put down the lance and pick up the sword, soon you will see who has the last word…”

She laughed. If it did not sound pretentious, I would tell you that her laughter was argentine. It rang like the polished silver that artisans in the port of Guadalajara hang on the door of their shops on Corpus Christi feast day.

“That is how persons from Biscay talk.” I was unsure of the difference, but I was vaguely irritated. “Oñate is in Guipúzcoa.”

I felt a compelling need to impress her, without the least notion of how. Clumsily, I tried to pick up the thread of my disquisition on the beneficial properties of sweets. I lowered my voice to sound more manly. “Now. In regard to melancholy humors…”

I was interrupted when a dog raced toward us, a large brown mastiff that had been charging about the area. Instinctively, I stepped between it and Angélica. The dog ran off without looking for a fight, as had the lion from don Quixote, and when I turned to look again, Angélica was observing me as she had when I first spoke, her curiosity apparent.

“And what do you know of my humors?”

A note of defiance resonated in her voice, and those intensely blue eyes had become very serious; there was no suggestion of a child in them. Those lips! Still parted after her question. That soft, rounded chin. Those blond spirals of curls touching shoulders covered with delicate Flemish lace. I was enslaved. I tried to swallow without being obvious.

“I know nothing, as yet,” I replied, as candidly as I could. “But I know I would give my life for you.”

I may have blushed as I spoke those words, but there are things you must say when it is time to say them, or risk regretting it all your life. Although what one may later regret is having spoken them at all.

“I would give my life,” I repeated.

There was a long, thrilling silence. The chaperone was coming back, black beneath her white headgear, like a magpie of bad omen, with the flask of water in her hand. The dragon was about to retake possession of my damsel, so I started to leave, wanting to put distance between us. But Angélica was still studying me as if she were able to read my thoughts. She put her hands to her throat and pulled out a delicate gold chain with a small charm hanging from it. She undid the clasp, and put the chain in my hands.

“Perhaps one day you may die,” she whispered.

As she spoke those words, her enigmatic eyes never left mine, and at the same time, a smile came to her lips. It was a smile so beautiful, so perfect, so filled with all the light in a Spanish sky vast as the abyss of her eyes, that I wanted to die that instant, sword in hand, shouting her name as there in Flanders my father had shouted the name of his king, his homeland, and his flag. After all was said and done, I thought, maybe those things were all one and the same.

IV. THE ASSAULT

Far in the distance, a dog barked four times, and after that…silence. Well armed, with pistol, sword, and dagger at his waist, Captain Alatriste looked at the moon that seemed about to impale itself upon the tower of Las Benitas convent, and then, turning his head from side to side, his eyes swept the shadowy corners of La Encarnación plaza. The coast was clear.

The captain adjusted his buffalo skin jerkin and tossed back the tails of the short cape over his shoulders. As if that had been a signal, three dark silhouettes emerged from the gloom, two from one side of the plaza and one from the other, and moved toward the convent wall. Light shone from one window; almost immediately it was extinguished, then quickly relighted.

“It is she,” whispered don Francisco de Quevedo.

He was stationed beside the wall, all in black—hat, clothing, and cape—and he had not drunk a drop all night despite the chill—in order, he said, to have a steady hand. I could not see him, but I heard him slowly draw his sword halfway from its scabbard and then let it drop back, testing whether it moved smoothly. And I also heard him mutter a few words of his own composition:

“Night could not overcome my sorrowsnor give peace to my vexations…”

I wondered briefly whether don Francisco was reciting verse to relieve his anxiety, to counter the cold, or whether he truly had ice in his veins and was capable of composing poems at the very Gates of Hell. Whatever the case, this was not the time to give the proper due to the flower of his satiric genius. My attention was focused on the captain, whose dark profile, masked by shadow, was still as a statue beneath the broad brim of his hat. The three dark shapes that had slipped across the plaza earlier were also frozen, attempting to remain unseen. The dog barked again, only twice this time, and from the hill of Los Caños del Peral came, as answer, the faint nickers of the mules of the waiting coach. With that sound, Diego Alatriste turned toward me. His eyes were palest gray in the moonlight.

“Be very cautious,” he said.

He put his hand on my shoulder. I took a deep breath and bolted across the plaza, feeling like the boy who stuck his head in the wolf’s mouth, aware of the captain’s eyes on me. In my ears, the homage don Francisco was kind enough to improvise, rewriting some verses of his own:

“How easily he scales the high wall of stonespurred on by his youth.”

My heart was pounding as hard as it had earlier that day when I had been so close to Angélica de Alquézar. Or perhaps more. I felt an almost unbearable tightness in my stomach and my throat, and unfamiliar drums were sounding in my ears as I passed the crouching shapes of don Vicente de la Cruz and his two sons. They were huddled against the wall, and I could see the glint of metal from between the folds of their capes.

“Quickly, lad,” whispered the father, impatient.

I nodded, and followed the wall toward the carriage guard at the corner. There I surreptitiously crossed myself, commending myself to the same God whose holy sanctuary I was about to violate. With no difficulty at all—at the time I was as agile as a monkey—I climbed up onto the pillar, then, teetering slightly on its narrow ledge, I reached for the wall and pulled myself up. I sat there an instant, astride, bent low so as not to be silhouetted against the moonlight. On one side below were the street and the plaza, and the silent shapes of my companions hugging the wall; on the other lay the shadowy silence of Las Benitas’s garden, broken only by the intermittent chirping of a cricket. I waited until the beating of my heart faded from my eardrums before moving again. And when I did, I felt the charm Angélica de Alquézar had given me at the Acero fountain swing out from inside my shirt, and heard the chink! as it struck stone.

I had spent hours studying it. It looked very old, and on it were engraved some strange and fascinating symbols.

I stuffed the amulet back into my shirt, where it lay against my bare skin, hoping and praying that it would bring me the luck I would need in this venture. The branches of the nearest apple tree scratched my face as I swung forward onto a limb and then, after hanging by my hands a few seconds, dropped the six or seven feet to the ground. I fell and rolled, without significant damage, brushed the dirt from my clothing, and, praying to the Holy Mother of God that there were no unchained dogs about, I followed the wall back to the small door and carefully drew back the bolt. The moment it was open, don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons slipped inside, wrapped in capes and weapons drawn, and ran quickly across the garden, their steps muffled by the soft earth. As for me, my job was done.

I had played my part like a lad with real backbone. Without adventures, we would never know our heroes. So I went back out to the street, well satisfied, and unhesitatingly crossed the plaza. The captain’s instructions had been very precise: Go right home by the shortest route. Leaving Las Benitas and La Encarnación behind, I started up the hill along the low parapet, serene and swollen with pride because everything had been as smooth as silk. Then I was struck by the temptation to linger just a bit near the waiting coach in order to glimpse the rescued damsel—if only by moonlight and for an instant—when her father and brothers spirited her away.

I hesitated a moment, torn between discipline and indulgence: a struggle that was never concluded. For it was in that moment of irresolution that I heard the first shot.

There were at least ten of them, Diego Alatriste calculated, as he unsheathed his dagger and his sword. And in the patio of the convent, a few more. They came from every direction. From dark corners and doorways, from the street and the plaza, burnished steel gleamed and cries of “Hold! By the authority of the Inquisition!” and “In the name of the King!” thundered through the night. More shots sounded inside the convent wall, and a tangle of figures and flashing swords could be seen at the small door. For a moment, Alatriste thought he glimpsed a novice’s white headdress amid the clashing blades, but that image was erased by the flash of more pistol shots.

Furthermore, it was the moment to look after his own health. The cry “By the authority of the Inquisition!” was enough to make anyone’s blood run cold. But now he was fighting to save his skin, and in such circumstances it mattered little whether against the Inquisition or the magistrate’s constables: throat slashed by a secular dagger, or sprinkled with holy water; neither was desirable. With his dagger he blocked a thrust from a shadow that seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. He drove back the apparition with three two-handed slashes and an oath, and out of the corner of his eye saw don Francisco de Quevedo fending off another two men. It scarcely seemed necessary—and it would have cost him precious breath needed for other purposes—to yell “We’ve been betrayed,” or something of the kind, so don Francisco and the captain applied themselves to their task, keeping their mouths more or less closed. Whoever the responsible party might be, it was clearly an ambush, and there was nothing to do now but make them pay with their lights.

The man Alatriste had driven off closed in again, and the captain, perceiving the flash of the enemy blade, set his feet, and just in time parried a patinando. He took one step forward, then another, clasped the adversary’s sword between his elbow and ribs, thrust his own forward, and heard the rewarding cry when his blade sliced across his opponent’s face. Fortunately, the champions of the Inquisition were not as skilled as Amadis of Gaul, and that was what turned the tide.

Alatriste stepped back in the darkness until his back was to a wall, and seized the brief respite to see how don Francisco was faring. The poet, faithful to his proven skill, limping and cursing under his breath, was holding his two attackers at bay. But reinforcements were arriving, and soon the friends would not have hands enough to butcher so much meat. Fortunately, most of the attackers were clustered near the convent wall, where the confusion and yelling were increasing by the minute. It was obvious that don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons were candidates for memorials. The captain smelled the acrid odor of lighted fuses.

“We have no choice but to flee,” he bellowed to don Francisco, trying to make himself heard above the cling, cling, clang of blades.

“Precisely what I have been attempting to do,” the poet shouted in return, between mighty slashes. “For some time now!”

He had dispatched one of his adversaries and was retreating parallel to the wall, with the second swordsman tight to his blade. A new shadow suddenly appeared before Alatriste, or perhaps it was the man he had driven off, returning now with the legions of Mohammed to wreak vengeance for the affront to his face. Sparks flew as sword clashed against sword and against stone. The captain, left arm held to protect his face, waited until his adversary shifted his feet for a better line of engagement, then lunged forward and landed a staggering kick. He lashed out with sword, dagger, and again sword. When his enemy tried to stand upright, at least half the captain’s blade was protruding from his back.

“Blessed Mary, Mother of God,” he heard the man mutter, air escaping as Alatriste pulled the sword from his chest. He blasphemed, again invoked the Virgin, and dropped to his knees beside the wall, as his sword fell between his thighs with a metallic ring.

In front of the convent, a dark figure broke swiftly from the swirl of figures. Then came the fire from the harquebuses, and street and plaza were alight in a fiesta of rockets and gunpowder. Balls whizzed past the captain and don Francisco, and one flattened itself on the wall between them.

“Fuck,” said Quevedo.

This was not a time for meter and rhyme. And men were still arriving. Alatriste, wet with sweat beneath the buffcoat that had already saved him from at least three wounds that night, looked around, searching for the best way to escape. As don Francisco retreated from his assailant, he backed into the captain. The poet had had the identical thought. Escape.

“Let every dog,” said Quevedo, panting, between a feint and a thrust, “lick his own bollocks.”

His second adversary was by now rolling, wounded, at his feet, but a third had come along, and don Francisco was getting winded. The captain, who was less engaged, clamped his dagger between his teeth, and with his left hand pulled his pistol from his belt; when he was but a handspan from the enemy harassing the poet, he fired a shot that blew away half the man’s jaw. The flash of the shot temporarily stopped any who were thinking of joining the fray, so, taking advantage of the interruption, and not awaiting an invitation, don Francisco, very spry despite his lameness, broke away, running fleetly.

After waiting a few seconds to further discourage anyone who might follow, Alatriste did the same, choosing for his retreat an alleyway that he had scouted out earlier. This was the custom of veteran soldiers, who establish escape routes before a combat, for when a bad card is dealt, there is not always sufficient time or clarity of judgment to make such useful appraisals. The narrow street he had chosen ran beneath an arch and ended at a wall that he easily leapt over, landing on a chicken coop and waking the hens. Someone lighted a lantern and shouted something from a window; by then the captain was across the courtyard, tripping in the darkness but without hurting himself. After climbing over a fence, he was free and in a reasonably good state of health, except for a few scratches and a mouth drier than the sand dunes at Nieuwpoort. He found a dark corner where he could catch his breath, wondering whether don Franciso de Quevedo had gotten away safely. Once he could hear something besides his own gasping, he listened carefully: no shots or yells from the direction of the convent.

No one, pardiez, would give a maravedí for the skin of don Vicente de la Cruz and his sons. In the little likely case that one of them was left alive.

He heard running, like that of armed men, and there was a glare of lanterns at the corner. Then all was silent again. Rested, and in command of himself, he lingered a long while in the darkness. He was trembling; the sweat beneath his buffcoat was now chill, but he paid little attention. He kept turning over and over the question of who had set that trap for them.

The shots and the clanging blades had made me retrace my steps, as I asked myself what could be happening in La Encarnación plaza. I started running back toward it, but prudence quickly gained the upper hand. He who loses his head—goes one of the soldiers’ sayings I had learned from the captain—ends up really losing that head, often with the unwelcome assistance of a rope. So I stopped, with my heart jumping out of my breast, as I tried to decide what was the best thing to do. Would I be a help or a hindrance to my friends?

That was the situation when I heard the sound of running footsteps and the hair-raising cry of “By the authority of the Inquisition!” which in that day, as I have already recounted to Your Mercies, would raise gooseflesh on the most villainous of men. It spurred me to action, I can assure you, and with the greatest caution, I had in a trice taken refuge behind the low stone parapet that served as a kind of railing down the length of the hill. I had scarcely got my breath back from my scramble over the wall when I heard footsteps nearby, more shots and cries, and the clash of steel. I had put aside my concerns about the fate of the captain and don Francisco and begun to worry about my own, when a body came tumbling over the low wall beside me.

I was ready to sprint from that place like a hare, but the new arrival uttered a mournful moan that made me turn and look at him. There was enough moonlight that I was able to recognize the younger of the two de la Cruz brothers, the one called don Luis, who had fled from the convent badly wounded. As I went toward him, he staggered to his feet and looked at me with frightened eyes that glowed feverishly in the scant light. I ran my fingers over his face, as blind men do to recognize people, and he fell toward me, prey to something that for an instant I took to be a faint, but, when I put out my hands to steady him, I learned was loss of blood from his wounds. Don Luis was perforated with stabs and shot from a harquebus, and when he collapsed into my arms I smelled sweat mixed with the sickeningly sweet scent of blood.

“Help me, boy,” he murmured.

He had spoken so quietly that I could barely hear his words, and the breath it cost him to speak seemed to have weakened him further. I tried to get him to stand, pulling him by one arm, but he was very heavy and his wounds made him nearly lifeless. All I got from him was a prolonged moan of pain. He had lost his sword, and the only weapon he had left was the dagger at his waist—I had touched the grip when I tried to lift him.

“Help me,” he repeated.

In his present state, he seemed much younger, closer to my own age; and everything that had impressed me earlier, his elegance and charm, had vanished completely. He was older than I, and a handsome man, but he had as many holes as a sieve. I was unhurt, and his only hope, which made me feel strangely responsible. So, restraining my natural inclination to leave him there and look for safe haven as fast as my legs could carry me, I stayed on.

I pressed as close to him as I could, pulled his arms around my neck, and tried to lift him onto my back, but he was limp and slippery from his own blood. I swiped my hand over my face, despairing, and as I did, bathed myself with the viscous liquid dripping on me. Don Luis had fallen back again against the stone wall, and was now suffering very little. I tried to feel for one of the large holes through which his soul was escaping, thinking I would plug it with a linen handkerchief I had pulled from my pouch, but by the time I found a hole and put my fingers in it—like Doubting Saint Thomas—I knew that it was futile, and that the young man was not going to see the dawn.

I felt unnaturally lucid. It is time to get going, Íñigo, I told myself. The shots and the din had faded from the plaza, and the silence, if possible, was even more menacing. Again I thought of the captain and don Francisco. By now they could be dead, imprisoned, or fleeing; none of the three possibilities was encouraging, however much my confidence in the poet’s sword and my master’s serenity inclined me to believe they were safely away or taking refuge in one of the few churches open at this early morning hour.

I got up slowly. Luis de la Cruz was on the ground, curled into a ball and no longer moaning. He was dying, and all I heard was his breathing, growing steadily weaker and more irregular, punctuated from time to time by a sinister gargle. He was not strong enough to ask me to help him or to call me “boy.” He was drowning in his own blood, which was spreading slowly into a large dark pool gleaming in the light of the moon.

A single shot from a pistol or harquebus rang out in the distance, as if it had been fired at someone being pursued, and I clung to that sound, hoping it might have been aimed—unsuccessfully—at the fleet shadow of Captain Alatriste running to safety in the darkness. As for my own young hide, it was time to find sanctuary for it. So once more I bent over the dying man. I pulled out the dagger that would be of no help to him in his journey, and stood up, ready to quit that unhappy place.

But, could that be music? A kind of ti-ri-tu, ta-ta from someone whistling behind me. The sound turned me to ice, and my fingers, sticky with the blood of Luis de la Cruz, tightened on his dagger grip. I turned very slowly, holding the dagger high, and as I did, moonlight glanced from the blade. At the far end of the low stone wall was a familiar shape: a dark silhouette cloaked in a cape and a black wide-brimmed hat. Recognizing who it was, I knew that the trap was lethal, and that I had sprung it.

“So, boy, we meet again,” said the shadow.

Gualterio Malatesta’s gruff, grating voice resounding in the silence of the night was a sentence of death. Your Mercies will ask why the Devil I stood there, flat-footed, instead of flying out of there like a soul in the arms of the Devil—or one fleeing from him. The reasons are two. For one, the Italian’s appearance had left me as frozen as a post sunk in the ground; the second, my enemy was standing directly in the path I had to take to escape the pocket where poor Luis de la Cruz lay. Whatever the reason, there I was, holding the dagger before me as Malatesta calmly looked me over, as if he were already at the Gates of Hell.

“We meet again,” he repeated.

Then he moved away from the wall, almost as if too lazy to stir himself, and took a step toward me. Only one. I could see that his sword was still in the scabbard. I shifted my dagger slightly, and again it gleamed softly between us.

“Give that to me,” he said.

I clenched my teeth but did not answer. I did not want him to know how frightened I was. Beside me, on the ground, the dying man uttered one last moan, and then, no more death rattles. Ignoring my naked blade, Malatesta took two more steps in my direction, and bent down with interest.

“Less work for the hangman.”

As he spoke, he prodded the dead youth with one foot. Then he turned back toward me. Despite the darkness, I could tell he was surprised to see me still holding the dagger.

“Drop it, boy,” he muttered, almost as if I weren’t there.

Now I could see other shadows, armed men coming toward us; and yes, they were carrying pistols and unsheathed daggers and swords. Light shone around the corner, beamed above our heads, and started down the hill. I watched the black shadow of the Italian gliding across Luis de la Cruz. The young man lay motionless, curled up on the ground. Had it not been for the open eyes staring straight ahead, I would have said he had fallen asleep in a large red puddle.

The lantern was coming closer, and now Malatesta’s shadow fell on me. He was silhouetted against the light, and metallic reflections sparked off the approaching men. Still I had not lowered the dagger. And when the lantern stopped beside us, it lighted one side of the Italian’s thin, pockmarked and scarred face, reminding me of a sinister moonscape. Above his mustache, which he wore trimmed in a thin line, eyes as black as his clothing studied me with amused attention.

“You are a prisoner of the Holy Inquisition, boy,” he said, and in his mouth the terrible words, accompanied by a smile that was pure menace, sounded like a mockery.

I was too terrified to reply or to move, so I did neither. I stood stock-still, the dagger held high. I imagine that to anyone looking on, my inaction could have been interpreted as resolve. That may have been why I caught a flash of curiosity, or interest, in my enemy’s black gaze. Almost immediately, some of the constables encircling us made a move to take me, but Malatesta stopped them with a gesture. Then, slowly, as if giving me the opportunity to reflect, he drew his sword from the sheath: an enormous sword with an interminable blade, huge quillons, and a wide guard. He contemplated that blade for a few instants, then slowly raised it until it glittered before me. Compared with that monster, my dagger seemed ridiculous.

But it was my dagger. And so, although my arm was beginning to feel as if it were made of lead, I held it steady, not flinching, staring into the eyes of the Italian like someone hypnotized by a snake.

“The lad has gall.”

I heard laughter from among the shadows behind the lantern. Malatesta reached out with his sword and ticked the tip of my dagger. The sound made the hair rise on the back of my neck.

“Now drop it,” he said.

Again someone laughed, and that laughter fired my blood. I swung with all my might, hoping to rip Malatesta’s sword from his hand, and the sound rang out like a challenge. Suddenly, before I could react, I saw the tip of his sword two inches from my face, motionless, as if he were considering whether or not to run me through. Again I struck out with the dagger, but his blade had disappeared and I swung into empty space.

There was renewed laughter. I felt an infinite sorrow, a grief that brought tears, not to my eyes—which my pride kept dry—but to my heart and throat. And I learned that there are some things no man can tolerate though it cost him his life or, precisely, because that life would not be worth living if he yielded. And in my sadness I remembered the hills and green fields of my childhood, and chimney smoke on the damp morning air, and the memory of my father’s hard, rough hands, the scratchy whisper of his soldier’s mustache the day he embraced me for the last time—I being but a boy—as he went off to meet his fate below the walls of Julich. And I felt the warmth of our hearth, and I could see the figure of my mother bent over by the fire, sewing, or cooking, and hear the laughter of my little sisters playing nearby. And I longed desperately for the warmth of my bed on a cold winter morning. And then it was the sky, blue as Angélica de Alquézar’s eyes, that I longed to have overhead when life ended—rather than darkness and lantern light, so somber and sad. But no one chooses his moment, and this was, without doubt, mine.

I am going to die, I told myself. And with all the vigor of my thirteen years, and all the desperation of the many beautiful things that I would now never know, ever, I focused on the gleaming tip of the enemy steel and commended my soul to God, clumsily, with a quick prayer my mother had taught me in her Basque tongue as soon as I could speak. Then, sure that my father would welcome me with widespread arms and a smile of pride on his lips, I gripped the dagger, closed my eyes, and, blindly swinging, threw myself against Gualterio Malatesta’s sword.

I lived. Later, every time I tried to remember that moment, I could re-create it only through a rapid succession of sensations: the last glint of the sword before me, the fatigue in my arm raining blows right and left, my forward lunge toward nothing, not sword, not pain, not resistance. Then suddenly, contact with a solid, hard body, and clothing, a strong hand restraining me, or rather embracing me as if fearing I would hurt myself. And trying to free my arm to use the dagger, and as I struggled without a sound, a voice with a vaguely Italian accent whispering, “Easy there, easy!” almost with tenderness, pinning me as if I were going to wound myself with my own weapon. And then, as I kept swinging, with my face buried in dark cloth that smelled a little of sweat and a little of leather and metal, the hand that seemed to embrace or protect me slowly twisted my arm, not cruelly, until I had to drop the dagger. Near tears, and wishing I could cry, I seized that arm with rage, like a pit bull ready to die on the spot. And I did not let go until that same hand closed into a fist, and a blow behind my ear shattered the night into a thousand pieces, and I sank into a sudden deep and brutal sleep. A black, bottomless void that I fell into without a cry or a moan, prepared to meet my Maker, like a good soldier.

Later I dreamed that I hadn’t died.

And I was terrified by the certainty that I was going to wake up.

V. IN GOD’S NAME

I awakened suddenly, hurting all over, in the darkness of a moving coach with drawn curtains. I felt a strange weight around my wrists, and when I moved, heard a metallic clicking that filled me with dread. My wrists were secured with iron cuffs, and they in turn were fastened by a chain to the floor of the coach. Through chinks in the curtains I glimpsed light, and learned that it was well past dawn. Whatever the actual time, I had no idea how long it had been since I was captured. The carriage was moving at a normal pace, and at times, on a hill, I would hear the crack of a whip and shouts of the coachman as he laid into the mules. I also heard the sound of horses’ hooves, dropping back and then catching up. I was being driven, then, out of the city, chained, and with an escort. And according to what I had heard when taken prisoner, I had fallen into the clutches of the Inquisition. I did not have to stretch my imagination to conclude the obvious: If anyone had a black future ahead of him, it was I.

I wept. I burst into disconsolate tears in the dark pitching of the carriage. No one could see me there. I cried until I had no tears left, and then, snuffling, I pushed back into a corner to wait, rigid with fright. Like every Spaniard of the time, I had heard enough about the practices of the Inquisition—that sinister shadow that had loomed over our lives for years and years and years—to know my destination: the dreaded secret dungeons of the Holy Office, in Toledo.

I am sure, Your Mercies, that I have spoken of the Inquisition. One thing I know: it was no worse here than in other countries of Europe, although the Dutch, English, French, and Lutherans, who were our natural enemies, proclaimed it part of the infamous Black Legend they called upon to justify the sacking of the Spanish empire in the hour of her decline. True it is that the Holy Office, which was created to guard the orthodoxy of the Faith, was more rigorous in Spain than in Italy and Portugal, for example, and worse yet in the Antilles. But the Inquisition also existed other places. And furthermore, with that excuse or without it, the Germans, French, and English sent more nonbelievers, witches, and wretched poor up in smoke than all the victims burned at the stake in Spain.

Here, thanks to the punctilious bureaucracy of the Austrian monarchy, each and every human they turned to cracklings—many, but not all that many—was duly recorded under history of trial, name, and surname. Something that cannot be claimed by the vile frogs of the most Christian King of France, the accursed heretics farther north, or an eternally treacherous, vile, and piratical England. For when they got their fires going, they did it joyfully and wholeheartedly, with no order or harmony, and according to whim and self-interest—damned, hypocritical swine. Added to that, secular justice was as cruel as its ecclesiastical counterpart, and the general public equally so, owing to a lack of culture and the masses’ fondness for seeing neighbors drawn and quartered.

It is also the fact that the Inquisition often acted as an arm of the government under such kings as our fourth Philip, who left in its hands the oversight of new Christians and Jewish sympathizers, the persecution of witches, bigamists, and sodomites, even the authority to censor books and combat the smuggling of weapons, horses, and legal and counterfeit currency. The latter responsibility was due to the argument that smugglers and counterfeiters greatly harmed the interests of the monarchy, and he who was enemy of the monarchy—the defender of the Faith—was also, to keep it short and simple, the enemy of God.

Nevertheless, despite the slander of foreigners, and even though not all trials were resolved at the stake and one might find examples of piety and justice, the Inquisition, like any excessive power placed in the hands of man, was ominous. And the decadence we Spanish were suffering across the world—seeds that produced, and will continue to produce, fields of thistles and nettles—can be explained, primarily, by suppression of liberty, cultural isolation, loss of confidence, and the religious obscurantism created by the Holy Office. So great was the fear it spread that even collaborating agents of the Inquisition, its so-called “family”—a post that could be bought—enjoyed complete immunity. To say the words “a familiar of the Holy Office” was the same as saying spy or informer, and of those there were some twenty thousand in the Spain of our Catholic Philip.

Your Mercies should be aware of what the Inquisition meant in a country like ours, in which a charging bull could not move Justice as quickly as pieces of eight, where everything up to the Most Holy Sacrament was for sale, and where, in addition, every man and woman alive had a quarrel to be adjudged. No two Spaniards—and by my faith this is still the case—took their breakfast chocolate the same way: one drank only chocolate from Oaxaca; another took his black; this one with milk; that one with fried bread; and yet another in a bowl with sweet French bread. Similarly, it was necessary no longer to be a good Catholic and old Christian, but only to appear to be. And nothing made one seem a more enthusiastic defender of the Faith than to betray those who were not, or those who because of old rancor, jealousy, envy, or quarrels made good prospects. Who knows? Some of those prospects might actually be nonbelievers.

As was to be expected, denunciations fell like rain, and “I have it on good authority” and “Everyone knows” rattled down like hail. When the implacable finger of the Holy Office pointed toward some poor wretch, he immediately found himself abandoned by patrons, friends, and relatives. Son accused father, wife accused husband, and prisoner betrayed accomplices, or invented them, if he hoped to escape torture and death.

And there was I, at thirteen, trapped in that sinister web, knowing what awaited me and not daring to think about it. I knew stories of people who had taken their own lives to escape the horror of the prison I was being carried to. I must confess that in that dark carriage, I came to understand why. It would have been easier and more dignified, my thoughts ran, had I speared myself on Gualterio Malatesta’s sword and ended everything quickly and cleanly. But there was little doubt that Divine Providence wished me to suffer this test. Curled in my corner, I sighed deeply, resigned to confronting what lay ahead without hope of rescue.

Although it would not have hurt my feelings, I mused, had Providence, divine or otherwise, assigned that Herculean labor to someone else.

During the rest of the journey I thought of Captain Alatriste. I hoped with all my soul that he was safe, maybe somewhere nearby, planning to free me. But I did not hold that hope long. Even if he had escaped the extremely clever trap set by his enemies, this was not a chivalric romance filled with fabulous feats of knight-errantry; the shackles clicking to the swaying of the coach were not fantasy but real. And so, too, were my fear and loneliness, and my uncertain fate. Or certain, according to the point of view. The fact is that later, life—the passing years, adventures, loves, and the wars of our lord and king—caused me to lose faith in many things. But I had already, young as I was at the time, ceased to believe in miracles.

The carriage came to a stop. I heard the coachman unhitch the mules, and knew that we had stopped at a post house. I was trying to calculate where we might be when the coach door opened. The sudden glare dazzled me—for it was now the late afternoon of the next day—and for a few seconds I was blinded. I rubbed my eyes, and when I opened them, there stood Gualterio Malatesta, observing me. As always, he was in severe black: gloves and boots, the plume in his hat, and the line of mustache that accentuated the fineness of his features, forcing the contrast between the first impression of pulchritude and, at closer look, a face so marred by pockmarks and scars that it suggested a battlefield. At his back, across a broad sweep of land and about half a league away, I could see Toledo glowing in the golden light of the setting sun, its ancient walls crowned by the palace of Emperor Charles V.

“We say good-bye here, boy,” said Malatesta.

I stared at him, confused. I must have looked terrible, with the dried blood of poor Luis de la Cruz all over my face and clothing, along with the usual wear of a journey. For a moment, I thought I saw a frown on the Italian’s brow, as if he was not happy with my state, or my situation. I simply stared, uncomprehending.

“They take over here,” he added finally.

He nearly smiled that slow, cruel, and dangerous smile of his that revealed teeth as white as the eyeteeth of a wolf. But it vanished immediately, as if he had changed his mind. Perhaps he judged that I was already so browbeaten that he would not humiliate me further. Actually, he did not seem all that comfortable. He observed me a moment longer, and then, his expression unreadable, put his hand on the door.

“Where are they taking me?” I asked.

My voice sounded weak, so unfamiliar it could have belonged to someone else. The Italian did not answer. His eyes, black as death, stared at me without blinking. When Gualterio Malatesta looked at you, you always wondered if he had eyelids.

“There.”

With his chin, he gestured toward the city over his shoulder. I saw his hand on the door as the hand of the executioner, and the door as the stone on my tomb. I tried to find some way to prolong what instinct told me was to be my last moment of sunlight for a while.

“Why? What have I done?”

Again he did not answer. He simply stared. I could hear mules being brought up, and as they harnessed the new pair the carriage shook. I saw several men, armed to the teeth, pass behind the Italian, and in their midst the black and white robes of a pair of Dominican priests. One glanced toward me as he went by, indifferent, as if instead of seeing a human he were observing an object. That look was the most frightening thing I had as yet experienced.

“I am sorry, boy,” said Malatesta.

He seemed to have read the horror in my thoughts. And may the Devil take me if in that moment I did not believe he was sincere. It was but an instant, however—those four words and a flash in the blackness of his gaze. When I tried to pursue the shred of compassion I thought I had glimpsed, I met only the impassive mask of an assassin. The carriage door was beginning to close.

“What news of the captain?” I asked with anguish, frantic to stay a few more instants in the sun.

Not another word from Gualterio Malatesta. A beam of sunlight shone on his somber face. And then I did see an expression I could not doubt, a quick flash of rage and spite. It lasted only a second, and then it was gone, hidden behind the cruel grimace, the dangerous, bloodthirsty smile that twisted his pale, cold lips. But my heart leaped with joy, for I knew, with every bone in my body, that Diego Alatriste had eluded the ambush.

Malatesta slammed the carriage door, and I was again in darkness. I heard shouted orders, a horse galloping away, and then the coachman’s whip. The mules started off, and the carriage began to roll toward a place where not even God would be on my side.

The hopelessness of being in the hands of an all-powerful apparatus devoid of emotion, and thereby of pity, struck me the moment I emerged from the coach into a dismal inner courtyard that dusk made even more somber. After my shackles were removed, I was led to an underground room by four constables of the Holy Office and the two Dominicans I had seen at the post house.

I will spare Your Mercies the details, but after I was stripped and thoroughly searched, I was subjected to a preliminary interrogation by a scribe who demanded to know my name, age, the names of my father and mother, those of my four grandparents and eight great-grandparents, my current dwelling, and my place of origin. Then, in a routine tone, the scribe tested me on elementary Christian knowledge by making me recite the Lord’s Prayer and the Ave Maria. Finally, he asked me the names of any persons who might be connected with my situation.

I asked what my situation was, but he did not tell me. I asked why I was there, and he did not answer that either. When he persisted in asking for names, I did not answer, pretending to be confused and afraid—although if I am to be frank, I didn’t need to pretend. When my questioner persisted, I burst into tears, and that seemed to be enough for the moment, for he put his quill into the inkwell, scattered powder over the page, and put away his sheets of paper. On the strength of that experience, I resolved to resort to weeping any time I found myself in a tight spot, although I feared that weeping would not require any great effort on my part. If there was one thing I would not lack for, I surmised in my misery, it would be reason for shedding tears.

After that, believing the interview was over, I found it had been only a proem, a prologue: the first act had not yet begun. This I learned when I was taken into a square room without windows or embrasures, lit by a large candelabrum. The only furnishings were a large table, another smaller one holding writing materials, and a few benches. The two priests I’d seen at the post house were seated at the large table, along with a third individual wearing a large gold cross around his neck. With his dark beard and black robe he looked convincingly like an officer of the court, or a judge. At the smaller table was a scribe very different from the one who had conducted the preliminary questioning, a crowlike man who put down the smallest detail of what was said, and, to my growing fear, probably things I had not said. Two constables, one tall and strong-looking and the other redheaded and thin, were my guards. On the wall hung an enormous crucifix, the occupant of which had undoubtedly passed through the hands of this very tribunal.

As I learned from that point on, the most fearsome thing about being a prisoner in the secret dungeons of the Inquisition was that no one told you what your crime had been, or what proof or witnesses they had against you—nothing about anything. The inquisitors limited themselves to posing question after question, and the scribe to noting it all down, while you addled your brain trying to decide whether what you were saying weighed on the side of your release or of your condemnation. It was possible to spend weeks, months, even years there without knowing the exact reasons, with the added aggravation that if your answers were not satisfactory, they would resort to torture in order to facilitate your confession and obtain the proofs they needed. And when you were tortured, you would begin to answer willy-nilly, not knowing what you should be saying. Everything led to desperation, to the conscious or unconscious betrayal of friends, of you yourself, and at times to madness and death. That was one way of dying other than being led in your white robe and conical hat to the scaffold, with a garotte around your neck, a pyre of dry kindling beneath your feet, and your neighbors and former friends shouting their approval, enchanted with the spectacle.

I did at least know why I was there, though there was little consolation in the knowledge. And because I knew that, after the first questions, I soon found myself in serious straits. Especially when the younger priest, the one who had glanced at me with such indifference, asked for the names of my accomplices.

“Accomplices in what, Ilustrísimo?”

“I am not called Ilustrísimo,” he replied darkly, his large tonsured bald spot gleaming in the light from the candelabrum. “I am asking for the names of your accomplices in the sacrilege.”

The roles had been assigned, as in a play. While the man with the dark beard and black cloak sat in silence, like a judge who listens and deliberates before handing out his sentence, the two priests were skillfully playing their parts: the younger, the role of implacable inquisitor; the other, plumper and more placid in expression, the benevolent confidant. But I had lived in Madrid long enough to smell a ruse, so I determined not to trust either one, and to act as if I didn’t see the man in the black robe.

An added complication was that I did not know how much they knew. And I hadn’t the least idea whether my sacrilege—as it had just been defined—was the one they were referring to. Because, in talking with someone who has the power to make you regret it, it is just as dangerous to ask for one card too few as one card too many. Indeed, it can be ruinous even to say, “I’ll stay.”

“I have no accomplices, Reverend Father.” I addressed the plump one, but with little hope. “Nor have I committed a sacrilege.”

“You deny,” the younger asked, “that in the company of others you profaned the convent of the Adoratrices Benitas?”

Well, that was something, even if that something gave me gooseflesh when I imagined the consequences. It was a specific accusation. I denied it, of course. And following that, I denied knowing—even by sight—the wounded man whom, on my way home, I had accidentally run into behind the low wall on Caños del Peral hill. I also denied that I had resisted arrest by the agents of the Holy Office. I denied everything to the end, everything I could, except the unarguable fact that I had been holding a dagger when the long arm of the Inquisition reached out to pull me in, and that another man’s blood still crusted my doublet. As it was impossible to deny that, I plunged into a maze of circumlocutions and explanations that had no bearing on the case. Finally I unleashed the tears, as a last resort in fending off new questions.

That tribunal, however, had seen many tears fall, so the priests, the man in the robe, and the scribe simply waited until my jeremiad had ended. It appeared that they had time to burn—not a direction I wanted my thoughts to take—and that, aside from their indifference, neither cruel nor reproachful, and their asking the same questions over and over with monotonous persistence, was the most disquieting aspect of the interrogation. Although I tried to maintain the air of nonchalance and confidence appropriate for an innocent, that was what terrified me about those men: their coldness and their patience. After a dozen “No” and “I don’t know,” even the plump cleric had dropped his mask, and it was obvious that I would have to travel many leagues to find a hint of compassion.

I had not eaten a bite in more than twenty-four hours, and I was beginning to feel faint, even though I was seated on a bench. Having exhausted the ploy of the tears, I began to consider the possibilities of a faint. Considering the way I was feeling, it would not be a pretense. That was when the priest said something that hurtled me toward an honest swoon.

“What do you know of one Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, often known as Captain Alatriste?”

This is it, Íñigo, I thought. The end. End of denials, and pointless blather. From here on, anything you say, even what you confirm or disprove before that scribe who is setting down your every last sigh, can be used against the captain. So you are through talking, let that take you where it takes you. Despite my situation and my whirling head, and despite the boundless panic sinking its claws into my entrails, I decided, calling upon my last shreds of strength, that nothing, not those priests, not the secret dungeons, not the Supreme Council, not the Pope of Rome, would tear a word from me that would endanger Captain Alatriste.

“Answer the question,” the younger priest ordered.

I did not. I concentrated on the floor before me, on a paving stone split by a crack with as many sharp turns as my luck. And I was staring at the same crack when one of the constables standing behind me, obeying an order issued by the priest without a change of expression, stepped forward and struck a blow to the nape of my neck that was like being clubbed. From the force of it, I calculated that it came from the taller and stronger of the two.

“Answer the question,” the priest repeated.

I stared at the crack without a peep, and was stunned by a blow stronger than the first. Tears as sincere as the pain in my bruised neck flowed despite my attempt to contain them. I swiped them away with the back of my hand; this was not the moment I wanted to cry.

“Answer the question.”

I bit my lips so there would be no chance I would open my mouth, and saw the crack in the floor speeding toward me as my eardrums rang, boom, like the tympanum of a drum. This time the constable had knocked me to the ground. And the stones were as cold as the voice I heard above me.

“Answer the question.”

The words came from a great distance, like echoes in a bad dream. A hand pulled me onto my back, and I saw the face of the redheaded guard bending over me, and behind him, that of the priest who had been questioning me. I could not contain a moan of desperation and hopelessness, because I knew that nothing would get me out of that place, and that they had all the time in the world. As for me, I had barely started down the road I was going to travel to hell, and I was in no rush to continue. So I fainted, just as the redhead had grabbed my doublet to drag me to my feet. And—I call as witness the Christ looking down on me from the wall—this time I did not have to feign at all.

I do not know how many hours went by in the damp cell where my only company was an enormous rat that spent its time peering at me from a dark drain in one corner. I slept and chased bedbugs in my clothing to keep occupied, and three times I wolfed down the hard bread and bowl of nauseating pottage a somber jailer set at the door to my cell with a great clatter of locks and keys.

I was plotting a way to get close enough to the rat to kill it, for its presence filled me with terror every time I felt myself drifting off to sleep, when the red-haired constable and the one round as a tub—God had been as generous with him as with me—came for me.

After making our way through ever more sinister corridors, I found myself in a room similar to the first, but with certain shadowy additions in regard to company and furnishings. Behind the table, joining the man with the dark beard and robe, the scribe with the crow’s beak, and the Dominicans, there was a third priest of the same order, whom the others treated with great respect and servility. Just seeing him, I was afraid. He had short gray hair cut in the shape of a helmet across his brow. His cheeks were sunken, the hands emerging from the sleeves of his habit were fleshless claws, and it was especially the fanatic, feverish gleam of eyes that seemed consumed with fever that caused me to wish never to have him as my enemy. Compared with him, the other two priests were Little Sisters of the Poor. And there was something more. At one side of the room stood a rack with ropes waiting to tear limbs from their sockets. In this room, there was nowhere for me to sit, and my legs, barely able to hold me as it was, began to tremble. A big fish was needed here for so many cats.

Again I will spare Your Mercies the details of the interminable interrogation to which I was subjected by my old acquaintances, the Dominicans, while black-robe and the new inquisitor listened and kept their silence, the constables stood like rocks behind me, and the scribe kept dipping his quill into the inkwell to note down each and every one of my answers, and my silences. This time, thanks to the participation of the new arrival—he kept passing the interrogators papers that they read attentively before posing new questions—I was able to form an idea of what I had fallen into. The horrifying word “Judaizer” was pronounced at least five times, and with each mention my hair stood on end. Those eight letters had delivered many people to the stake.

“Did you know that the blood of the de la Cruz family is not pure?”

My head reeled with those words, for I was not unaware of their sinister implication. Ever since the Jews had been expelled by the Reyes Católicos, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabel, the Inquisition had rigorously pursued the remnants of the Mosaic faith, particularly the conversos who were secretly faithful to the religion of their grandfathers. In a hypocritical Spain that gave such importance to appearances, where even the lowest of the low paraded himself as an hidalgo and old Christian, hatred of Jews was widespread, and papers, purchased or authentic, documenting one’s purity of blood were indispensable if one were to obtain position or high office. And while the powerful grew rich in scandalous business dealings, shielding themselves behind masses and public charities, a violent and vengeful people killed their hunger and boredom by kissing relics, buying indulgences, and enthusiastically persecuting witches, heretics, and Judaizers. And as I once said when referring to Señor de Quevedo and others, not even the finest Spanish minds were strangers to that climate of hatred and repudiation of heterodoxy. For example, consider these words from the great Lope de Vega.

Cruel nation, which Hadrian exiled,only to make its way to Spain,has oppressed and defiledour Holy Christian empire,and with persistent barbaritydefamed the Spanish Monarchy.

Or that other great playwright, don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, who would later put these words in the mouth of one of his famous characters:

Oh, the accursed swine!Many burned at the stake,and it gave me such joyto see them blaze, that I said,as I fanned the flames,“Heretic dogs, behold a judgeof the Holy Inquisition.”

Not to forget don Francisco de Quevedo—the same Quevedo who, in the dark of night, without hesitation hastened to effect a point of honor and aid a friend of converso blood, himself composed no few verses and lines of prose reviling the tribe of Moses. In our day, with the Protestants and Moors burned or exiled, the incorporation of the Kingdom of Portugal during the reign of our good and great Philip II had provided an abundance of secret or public Jews into which to sink our collective teeth, and the Inquisition kept sniffing around them like the jackal noses out carrion. And Jews were another of the reasons that brought the king’s favorite, don Gaspar de Guzmán, the Conde de Olivares, into a confrontation with the Supreme Council. In his attempt to keep the vast heritage of the Austrias intact, as he squeezed dry the exhausted purses of vassals and threatened the selfish interests of nobles, waged a war in Flanders, and struggled to break the backs of Aragon and Catalonia, the Conde-Duque, as he was known, weary of the monarchy’s being held hostage to Genoese bankers, wished to replace them with Portuguese brokers. Their purity of blood might be in doubt, but their money was old Christian, clean, and available to fill Spain’s empty coffers. That plan put the favorite at cross-purposes with the councils of state, the Inquisition, and the papal nuncio himself, while our lord and king, good-natured and extremely religious, weak in matters of conscience as in many other things, wavered indecisively. In the end, he chose to beat the last maravedí out of all his subjects rather than contaminate the Faith.

All of which, to put it in a nutshell, was like making bread from hosts, or the other way ’round…however you look at it, a disaster. And as time went on, by midcentury, with the Conde de Olivares’s fall from favor, the Holy Office’s bill came due for collection and it unleashed one of the cruelest persecutions of converted Jews known to Spain. That was the ruin of Olivares’s project, and many crucial Hispano-Portuguese bankers and suppliers took themselves off to other countries such as Holland, and with them their wealth and their commerce, to the benefit of the enemies of our crown. In other words, it all ended with our royally fucking ourselves over. And I say “ended,” because between the nobles and the priests here, and the heretics there, and the whore who gave birth to them all, we bled till there was no blood left to bleed. The skinny dog gets the fleas, and we Spanish do not need anyone to ruin us; when it comes to the killing blow, we can deliver it ourselves.

So, in short, there I was, a beardless youth in the midst of all these maneuverings and machinations, and I was about to pay with my young neck. I sighed disconsolately. Then I looked toward my questioner, still the younger Dominican. The scribe was waiting, his pen poised above the paper, looking at me as if I were someone who presented every qualification for becoming good charcoal.

“I know no de la Cruz family,” I replied finally, with all the conviction I could muster. “Therefore, I have no way of knowing about the purity of their blood.”

The scribe bent his head as if he had awaited that answer, his pen scratching as he performed his filthy office. The lean old priest never took his eyes from me.

“Do you know,” my tormentor asked, “that Elvira de la Cruz has been accused of inciting Hebrew practices among her fellow nuns and novices?”

I swallowed. Or rather, I tried. Blood of God, I tried. But my mouth was dry as a pebble. The trap had closed, and it was a devilishly malefic one. Again I denied any knowledge, more and more afraid to hazard where all this was leading.

“Do you know that her father and brothers and other accomplices, as Judaizing as she, attempted to free her after she was discovered and confined by the chaplain and the prioress of the convent?”

Now there was an unmistakable scent of scorching meat on the air, and I was the roast. Once again, I wanted to say no, but this time I could not get the words out, and I had to shake my head. But my prosecutor, or whatever he was, did not change expression.

“And you deny that you and your fellows are a part of that Judaic conspiracy?”

At that, as frightened as I was—which was not a little—I was slightly irritated.

“I am a Basque, and an old Christian,” I protested. “As good as my father, who was a soldier, and who died in the king’s war.”

The inquisitor gave a dismissive wave of his hand, as if every Christian died in the king’s wars, and that meant nothing at all. Then the thin, till now silent, priest leaned toward the questioner, whispered a few words into his ear, and the younger man nodded respectfully. He turned toward me, and for the first time spoke. His tone was so menacing and cavernous that all at once I saw the young priest as the non plus ultra of understanding and sympathy.

“Repeat your name,” the lean priest ordered.

“Íñ…Íñigo.” I was so frightened by the Dominican’s severe gaze, the feverish eyes sunken deep in the sockets, that I had stumbled over my own name. He continued, implacable.

“Íñigo and what more.”

“Íñigo Balboa.”

“And your mother’s name.”

“Her name is Amaya Aguirre, Reverend Father.”

I had already gone through all this, it was in the papers, so the repetitions made me even more apprehensive. The priest gave me a fierce, strangely satisfied look.

“Balboa,” he said, “is a Portuguese family name.”

The ground seemed to drop from beneath my feet, for I did not have to be told the effect of that poisonous dart. It was true that my surname was common on the Portuguese border, a region that my grandfather had left to enlist under the banners of the king. Suddenly—I have previously told Your Mercies that I was a bright enough lad—all the ramifications of my situation blazed with such meridional clarity that if there had been an open door I would have shot out of it like a flash.

Out of the corner of my eye, I glanced toward the rack, sitting to one side, waiting. That the Inquisition never used it as punishment but, rather, as an instrument for extracting the truth was a fact I did not find comforting. My one hope was that according to the rules of the Holy Office itself, torture could not be used against people of good reputation, royal ministers, pregnant women, servants—to make them inform against their masters—or anyone younger than fourteen…that is, me. But I was close to that fateful fourteenth, and if these men were capable of finding me Jewish ancestors, they could at their whim add the necessary months to make me eligible for their rope trick. And though the rack made men sing, it was not exactly a guitar.

“My father was not Portuguese,” I protested. “He was a soldier from León, like his father, who at the end of a campaign remained in Oñate and married there. A soldier and an old Christian.”

“That is what everyone says.”

Then I heard the scream. It was the terrible scream of a desperate woman, muffled by distance but so piercing that it found its way along passages and corridors and through a closed door. As if they heard nothing, my inquisitors kept looking at me, unperturbed. And I shivered with fear when the lean priest shifted his eyes toward the rack and then back to me.

“How old are you?” he asked.

The scream came again, a whiplash of horror, and yet again there was no reaction from the others, as if I had been the only one who had heard. Deep in their malevolent sockets, the Dominican’s fanatic eyes were two sentences of death at the stake. I trembled as if I had ague.

“Th-thirteen,” I stammered.

There was an anguishing silence, broken only by the scratching of the scribe’s pen. I hope he put it down right, I thought. Thirteen, not one year more.

That was when the thin priest bore in on me. His eyes gleamed even more brilliantly, with a new and unexpected glitter of scorn and loathing.

“And now,” he said, “we are going to talk about Captain Alatriste.”

VI. SAN GINÉS ALLEY

The gaming house was swarming with people betting their asses, even their souls. Amid the buzz of conversations and the coming and going of cardsharps and bootlickers hoping for tips, Juan Vicuña, a former sergeant of the horse guard wounded at Nieuwpoort, was crossing the room, trying to avoid spilling the Toro wine he was carrying in a jug, and looking around with satisfaction. On the half-dozen tables, cards and dice and money were changing hands, inspiring sighs, Holy Mothers! and flashes of naked greed. Gold and silver coins shone beneath the tallow lamps suspended from the domed brick ceiling, and business was all he could ask.

Vicuña’s watering hole was in a cellar on Cava de San Miguel, very close to the Plaza Mayor; and in it, deals of every sort allowed by the mandates of our lord and king were struck, and also, as Your Mercies may have adjudged, others, scarcely concealed, that were not. The variety was as diverse as the players’ imaginations, which in that day was considerable. They were playing ombre, polla, and one hundred—games that bled you slowly—as well as seven-up, reparólo, and others referred to as “quick and slick” because of the speed with which they left a man without money, speech, or breath. About them, the great Lope had written:

Like drawing out his swordfor one who has occasion,so the game is the persuasionfor one who seeks reward.

True that only a few months before, a royal decree had been issued prohibiting gaming houses, for our fourth Philip was young, well-intentioned, and—amply aided by his pious confessor—he believed in things such as the dogma of the Virgin Mary, the Catholic cause in Europe, and the moral regeneration of his subjects in the Old and New Worlds. Forbidding gambling, like the attempt to close the bawdyhouses, however—not to mention hopes for the Catholic cause in Europe—was wishing for the sky. Because if anything besides theater, running the bulls in the plazas, and something else I will mention in good time, impassioned Spaniards living beneath the rule of the Austrian monarchy, it was gambling.

Towns of three thousand inhabitants wore out eighteen thousand packs of cards each year, and card games were as often played in the streets—where sharps, cheats, and shills improvised games in which to fleece the naive—as they were in legal or clandestine houses, jails, brothels, taverns, and guardposts. Important cities like Madrid and Seville were anthills of meddlers and idlers with coins in their purses, ready to join in around the desencuadernada—the book without a binding, which was what a packet of cards was called—or a Juan Tarafe, a name the lowlife gave to dice games. Everyone gambled, common people and nobility, gentlemen and rogues; even ladies, who though they were not admitted into dens like Juan Vicuña’s, were assiduous patrons of the better gaming houses, as well versed in clubs, trumps, and points as the next one. And as may be expected of a violent, proud, and quick-to-draw-steel people like we were, and are, quarrels born of a game often ended with a “God’s bones!” and a fine collection of stab wounds.

Vicuña made it across the room, though not before carefully eyeing some scholars of the art, which is what he called the charlatans expert in palming and marking cards, men who always had a winner up their sleeves, heedful of where it fell. He also stopped to give a warm greeting to don Raúl de la Poza, an hidalgo from a very wealthy Cuenca family, a black sheep with a taste for the spicier side of life, who was one of his best clients. A man of fixed habits, don Raúl had just arrived, as he did every night, from a brothel on Calle Francos—where he was a regular—and now would not leave until dawn, in time to attend seven-o’clock mass at San Ginés. Escudos were scudding across his table like sea foam on a stormy day, and always churning around him was a court of swindlers and sycophants who snuffed his candles for him, served his wine, and even brought a urinal if he was deep into the game and did not want to abandon a good hand. All in exchange for the barato, the real-or-two tip that came their way after every useful service.

That night, de la Poza was in the company of the Marqués de Abades and other friends. That made Vicuña feel easier, for it was a rare day that three or four swaggering churls were not waiting to relieve de la Poza of his winnings as he left.

Diego Alatriste thanked his host for the Toro wine, quaffing it in one long draught. He was in his shirtsleeves, unshaven, sitting on a straw mattress in the discreet room Vicuña had outfitted in his gaming house so he would have a place to retire and rest. A shutter allowed him to see into the main room without being seen himself. Boots on, sword on the taboret, loaded pistol on the blanket, vizcaína dagger on the pillow, and eyes sharp when from time to time he glanced through the latticed wood, it was obvious that Alatriste was on his guard. The room had a back, nearly secret, door to a passageway that emerged under an arch in the Plaza Mayor. Vicuña noted that the captain had arranged his belongings so that they could be gathered up in a quick retreat toward that door, should it be necessary. In the forty-eight hours he’d spent hiding there, Diego Alatriste had not relaxed except to nod off for forty winks. Even so, late one afternoon when Vicuña came in quietly to see if his friend needed anything, he had been met by the menacing barrel of a pistol pointed right between his eyebrows.

Alatriste did not betray his impatience by asking questions. He handed the empty jar back to Vicuña and waited, looking at him with clear, unwavering eyes whose pupils were dilated in the dim light of the oil lamp on the table.

“He will be waiting for you in a half-hour,” said the old sergeant, “in San Ginés alley.”

“How is he?”

“Fine. He has spent the last two days in the house of his friend the Duque de Medinaceli, and no one has bothered him. His name has not been made public, and the Law, the Inquisition, no one, is after him. The event, whatever it was, has not become public.”

The captain nodded slowly, reflectively. That quiet was not strange, it was logical. The Inquisition never set bells pealing until it had the last of the loose ends well tied up. And things were still half finished. The absence of news might be part of the trap.

“What are they saying in San Felipe?”

“Rumors.” Vicuña shrugged his shoulders. “That there was swordplay at La Encarnación gate, that someone died…They put it down more to the nuns’ swains than anything else.”

“Have they been to my lodgings?”

“No. But Martín Saldaña smells something. He was at the tavern. According to La Lebrijana, he said nothing specific but hinted a lot. The corregidor’s catchpoles are not showing themselves, he said, but there are people around watching. He did not explain who, although he mentioned familiares of the Holy Office. The message is simple. He is not dancing this chaconne, whatever it is, and you had better guard your hide. Apparently this is a delicate business, and it is being carried out with zeal. No one is claiming any knowledge of it.”

“What do you hear of Íñigo?” The captain looked at Vicuña steadily, with no visible emotion. The veteran of Nieuwpoort hesitated, uncomfortable. With his one hand, he kept turning the empty jug around and around.

“Nothing,” he answered finally. “It’s as if the earth swallowed him up.”

For a moment, Alatriste sat without speaking. He stared at the wood planks between his boots and then stood up.

“Have you spoken with Dómine Pérez?”

“He is doing what he can, but it is difficult.” Vicuña watched as the captain put on his rough-skinned buffcoat. “You know that the Jesuit Order and the Holy Office do not exchange confidences, and if they have the boy it may be a while before the dómine learns of it. As soon as he hears anything, he will tell you. He also offers you the Jesuit church, if you want safe haven. He says that the Dominicans cannot take you from there, not even if they swear you killed the papal nuncio.” He glanced through the lattice toward the gaming room, and then looked back toward the captain. “And whatever it is you’ve done, Diego, I hope to God you have not actually killed the nuncio.”

Alatriste asked for his sword and slid it into its scabbard. He cinched it on, and then stuck his flintlock pistol into his belt, after pulling back the hammer to be sure it was well oiled.

“I will tell you about it another time,” he said.

He prepared to leave as he had come, without explanation and without thanks. In the world that he and the veteran sergeant of the horse guard shared, these terms of the arrangement were understood.

Vicuña laughed a loud, soldier’s laugh. “By all that’s holy, Diego. I am your friend, but I am not curious. Besides, I would hate to die of noose poisoning. So it would be best if you never tell me.”

It was deepest night when, with his cape tight around him and hat pulled low, the captain emerged beneath the dark arcades of the Plaza Mayor and walked the short distant toward Calle Nueva. No one among the few stragglers out and about paid any attention to him, except for a lady of the night who when she met him between two arches offered, without much enthusiasm, to reduce his weight by twelve cuarto coins. He crossed through the Guadalajara gate, where a pair of guards were dozing before the closed window shutters of the silver shops, and then, to avoid the constables who tended to station themselves in that area, went down Calle de las Hileras to El Arenal. Finally, he again turned up the hill toward San Ginés alley, where at that hour refugees from the law were wont to gather in the cool night air.

As Your Mercies know, the churches of the period were havens of asylum, where no ordinary law could reach. So anyone who stole, wounded, or killed—all the things they called being “about their work”—could take sanctuary in a church or convent, where the priests, highly jealous of their privileges, would defend him tooth and nail from the royal authorities. So popular was it to plead innocent and seek protection that some of the principal churches were chock-a-block with clients enjoying the sanctity of their refuge. In those crowded communities, one tended to find the cream of society; there was not enough rope to do honor to their genteel gullets. Because of his profession, Diego Alatriste himself had once had to recur to that practice. Even don Francisco de Quevedo, in his youth, had found himself in similar, if not worse, straits when in Venice, he and the Duque de Osuna staged a coup and he had had to escape disguised as a beggar.

The fact is that places such as Los Naranjos courtyard of the Seville cathedral, for example, or a good dozen places in Madrid, among them San Ginés, had gained the dubious privilege of taking in the flower of the city’s braggarts, cutthroats, thieves, and carousers. And all this illustrious brotherhood, which after all had to eat, drink, satisfy its needs, and conduct its personal business, took advantage of the night hours to take a walk, commit new villainy, settle accounts, or whatever opportunity presented itself. These felons also received their friends there, even their whores and cronies, so that by night the area around these churches—even church buildings themselves—became the criminals’ tavern, even their brothel. There, real or invented feats were aired, death sentences were carried out by hired steel, and there, too, throbbed the colorful and ferocious pulse of the dangerous underbelly of Spain: the world of scoundrels, thieves, and other caballeros of the low life, men whose portraits never hung on the walls of palaces but whose existence was recorded in immortal pages. Some of which—and not the worst, certainly—were written by don Francisco.

Mercilessly, they tortured Grullo,who, with the truth at the end of a rope,said, “It wasn’t me”—the defenseof rack and wedding day: No hope.

Or this very celebrated one:

In the house of roguesat the foot of the gallows,for being the cutpurse I wasthey sent me into shadows.

San Ginés alley was one of the favorite sites of these refugees, and at night when they came out to get a breath of air, the alley came to life and temporary stalls were set up to satisfy the fly-by-nights’ hunger. It was a dignified assembly that evaporated as if by incantation as soon as a constable showed his face.

When Diego Alatriste arrived, there were some thirty souls in the narrow alleyway: bullies, petty thieves, a few whores settling accounts with their customers, and idlers and rabble standing around talking or drinking cheap wine from wineskins and demijohns. There was very little light—only a small lantern hanging beneath an arch at the corner of the alley. That area was almost entirely in shadow, and more than half the people present were swathed in their cloaks, so that the atmosphere, although lively with conversation, was tenebrous; entirely appropriate for the kind of appointment that brought the captain there. It was also a place where someone overly curious and inquisitive, or perhaps a constable—if he was not with a patrol and well armed—might in the blink of a “Jesus God!” find it permanently difficult to swallow.

The captain recognized don Francisco de Quevedo despite the collar drawn across his face, and casually made his way toward him. The two of them drifted off to one side, away from the lantern where the poet had been standing, cape collars up and hat brims down to the eyebrows, a look very much in style among the men in the alley.

“My friends have made inquiries,” the poet reported after their first exchange of impressions. “It seems certain that don Vicente and his sons were being watched by the Inquisition. And it smells to me as if someone seized the occasion to kill several birds with one stone. Including you, Captain.”

Then in a low voice, turning away from anyone passing by, don Francisco brought Alatriste up-to-date on everything he had been able to find out. The Holy Office, persistent and patient, very well informed by its spies regarding the de la Cruz family’s intentions, had let them proceed, hoping to catch them in flagrante. The Inquisition’s intent had not been to defend Padre Coroado, just the opposite. Now that he was under the protection of the Conde de Olivares, with whom the Inquisition was waging an undeclared war, they hoped that the scandal would discredit both the convent and its protector. In the process, they would also seize a family of conversos; a burning at the stake never harmed the prestige of the Supreme Council. The problem was that they had been unable to snatch anyone alive. Don Vicente de la Cruz and his younger son, don Luis, had paid a high price, dying in the ambush. The older son, don Jerónimo, although badly wounded, had escaped and was in hiding.

“And what about us?” asked Alatriste.

Light glanced off the poet’s glasses as he shook his head. “No names have been revealed. It was so dark that no one recognized us. And anyone who was near enough to recognize us is in no condition to tell.”

“Nevertheless, they know that we were involved.”

“They may.” Don Francisco made a vague gesture. “But they have no legal proof. As for me, I am beginning once again to bask in the favor of the king and the king’s favorite, Olivares, and as long as I am not caught with my hands in the dough, it will be difficult to do anything to me.” He paused, preoccupied. “As for you, my friend, I do not know what to say. They hope to find something that will indicate your guilt. Or they may be quietly looking for you.”

Two ruffians and a prostitute walked by, arguing heatedly, and don Francisco and the captain moved out of their way, closer to the wall.

“And what has happened to Elvira de la Cruz?”

The poet sighed despondently. “Arrested. The poor girl will bear the worst of it. She is in the secret dungeons in Toledo, and I fear that there will be a burning.”

“And Íñigo?”

The pause stretched into silence. Alatriste’s voice had sounded cool, and void of emotion. He had left me for last. Don Francisco glanced around at the people chatting and strolling in the shadows of the alleyway. He turned to his friend.

“He, too, is in Toledo.” He fell silent, and shook his head with a gesture of impotence. “They caught him near the convent.”

Alatriste said nothing for a long while, watching the movement around him. From the nearby corner came the notes of a guitar.

“He is only a boy,” he said finally. “We must get him out of there.”

“Impossible. You should put your energies toward not joining him there. I imagine that they are counting on his testimony to incriminate us.”

“They would not dare mistreat him.”

Behind the heavy collar, don Francisco laughed his sour, mirthless laugh. “The Inquisition, Captain, dares all things.”

“Then we have to do something.”

He said it very coldly, obstinately, his eyes focused on the end of the passageway, where the guitar continued to play. Don Francisco looked in the same direction.

“I agree,” the poet put in. “But know not what.”

“You have friends at court.”

“I have marshaled them all. I have not forgotten that it was I who got you into this.”

The captain raised a listless hand, brushing away don Francisco’s guilt. It was reasonable that as a friend he expected the poet to do anything in his power to help; it was another matter to blame him for anything. Alatriste had collected his purse for the job, and I was, after all, his responsibility. He was silent for so long that the poet looked at him uneasily.

“Do not think of turning yourself in,” he murmured. “That would help no one, least of all yourself.”

Still Alatriste did not speak. Three or four of the refugees from justice had begun chatting nearby, with a lot of “ol’ frens,” “ol’ cumr’d,” “fine cab’lleros we”—things none of them had ever been in danger of being. They were tossing names around, fast and furious. Hellion, Devilspawn, Maniferro—a man with a hand of iron and famous in the world of Cervantes’s master criminal Monipodio. Then the captain did speak.