The Sun Over Breda

A PLUME BOOK

THE SUN OVER BREDA

Internationally acclaimed and bestselling author ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE began his career as a war journalist, but now writes fiction full-time. His seven books, including The Queen of the South and Captain Alatriste, have been translated into more than twenty-nine languages in more than fifty countries. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide.

Praise for Arturo Pérez-Reverte and

the Adventures of Captain Alatriste

“Hard-boiled, 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.”

—Detroit Free Press

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

—USA Today

“A feast of dark historical detail and believable danger in which celebrated historical figures, such as poet Francisco de Quevedo and painter Velázquez, are mixed in for authentic flavor.”

—The Denver Post

“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

THE SUN OVER BREDA

Arturo Pérez-Reverte

A PLUME BOOK

PLUME

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

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, 2007

Excerpt from The King’s Gold copyright © Arturo Pérez-Reverte, 2008

All rights reserved

REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

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

Pérez-Reverte, Arturo.

[Sol de Breda. English]

The sun over Breda / Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

p. cm.

ISBN: 1-4295-6754-6

I. Title.

PQ6666.E765S6513 2007 2007000541

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.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

For Jean Schalekamp,

damned heretic, translator, and friend

A troop of soldiers marches by:

strong, bearded, weapons shouldered,

following their captain’s lead.

Spanish captain, who knew Flanders,

Mexico, Italy, and the Andes,

Of what exploits are left to dream?

—C. S. DEL RÍO,

La esfera

THE SUN OVER BREDA

CONTENTS

1. SURPRISE ATTACK

2. THE DUTCH WINTER

3. THE MUTINY

4. TWO VETERANS

5. THE LOYAL INFANTRY

6. ATTACK WITHOUT QUARTER

7. THE SIEGE

8. ATTACK BY NIGHT

9. THE COLONEL AND THE BANNER

EPILOGUE

1. SURPRISE ATTACK

’Pon my oath, the canals of these Dutch are damp on autumn mornings. Somewhere above the curtain of fog that veiled the dike, a blurred sun shone palely on the silhouettes moving along the road in the direction of the city, now opening its gates for the morning market. That sun was a cold, Calvinist, invisible star unworthy of the name, its dirty gray light falling on oxcarts, countrymen laden with baskets of vegetables, women in white headdresses carrying cheeses and jugs of milk.

I was slowly making my way through the mist with my knapsacks over my shoulder, my teeth clenched to keep them from chattering. I took a quick look at the embankment of the dike where fog blended into the water, and could spy nothing but vague brushstrokes of rushes, grass, and trees. It is true that for a moment I thought I glimpsed a dull reflection of metal, perhaps a morion or cuirass or even naked steel, but it was only for an instant and then the humid breath rising from the canal closed over it again. The girl walking by my side must also have seen it, because she shot me an uneasy glance from beneath the folds of the scarf that covered most of her head and face. She then turned her eyes toward the Dutch sentinels, outfitted with breastplate, helmet, and halberd, whom we could now make out—dark gray upon gray—at the outer gate of the wall, beside the drawbridge.

The city, which, in reality, was nothing more than a large town, was called Oudkerk, and it lay at the confluence of the Ooster canal, the Merck River, and the delta we Spaniards call the Mosa and the Flemish call the Maas. The city’s importance was mostly military, for it controlled access to the canal along which the heretic rebels sent aid to their besieged compatriots in Breda, some three leagues away. The garrison there housed a citizen militia and two regular companies, one of them English. In addition, the fortifications were solid, and the main gate, protected by a bulwark, moat, and drawbridge, was impossible to take by ordinary means. Which was precisely why dawn found me in that place.

I suppose you may have recognized who I am. My name is Íñigo Balboa, and at the time of this tale I was fourteen years old. And may no one take it as presumption when I tell you that he who is skillful with the dagger lives to be a veteran and that I, despite my youth, was a specialist in that art. After dangerous adventures played out in the Madrid of our king, Philip IV, in which I found myself forced to take up pistol and sword, and was once only a step away from the gallows, I had spent the last twelve months with my master, Captain Alatriste, in the Flanders army. This came about when the Tercio Viejo de Cartagena, after traveling by ship to Genoa, had come inland by way of Milan and the so-called Camino Español to join the heart of the war with the rebellious provinces. The era of glorious captains, glorious attacks, and glorious booty was now long past, and the conflict had become a kind of long and tedious chess game in which strongholds were besieged, changed hands, and were besieged again, bravery often counting for less than patience.

It was just such an episode that had brought me there that early morning, walking along in the fog toward the Dutch sentinels at the Oudkerk gate as if it were something I did every day—I and the young girl beside me, whose face was scarcely visible, the two of us surrounded by country folk, geese, oxen, and carts. We walked a little farther, even after one of the peasants, who seemed rather dark-skinned for this landscape and these people, where nearly everyone was blond, with fair skin and light eyes, passed by muttering something under his breath that sounded very much like an Ave Maria. He was hurrying as if he wanted to catch up with a group of four walking a little ahead of us; they, too, unusually thin and dark.

And then, at almost the same time, we all—the four in front of us, the latecomer, the girl in the scarf, and I—came together at the place where the sentinels were posted outside the drawbridge and the gate. One of the guards was a plump, pink-skinned corporal wrapped in a black cape; the other had a long blond mustache that I remember very well because he said something in Flemish, undoubtedly a lewd remark, to the young girl, and laughed aloud. And then suddenly he wasn’t laughing, because the thin peasant of the Ave Maria had pulled a dagger from his doublet and was slitting the corporal’s throat. Blood spurted out in a stream so strong that it stained my knapsacks just as I was opening them to distribute the well-oiled pistols hidden inside to the four other peasants, in whose hands daggers flashed like lightning. The plump corporal opened his mouth to raise the alarm, but that was all he could do, because before he was able to utter a single syllable, a quickly drawn dagger traced a line above the neck plate of his corselet, slicing his gullet from ear to ear. By the time he had fallen into the moat, I had dropped my knapsacks and, with my own dagger between my teeth, was scrambling like a squirrel up the strut of the drawbridge. Meanwhile the girl in the scarf, who had shed her scarf and was not even a girl but a youth who answered to the name of Jaime Correas, was climbing up the other side. Like me, he shoved a wooden wedge into the mechanism of the drawbridge and then cut its ropes and pulleys.

Oudkerk awoke as never before in its history, because the four with the pistols and he of the Ave Maria raced like demons along the bulwarks, stabbing and shooting anything that moved. At the same time, my companion and I, having put the bridge out of commission, were sliding down the chains when a hoarse roar erupted from the shore of the dike: the cries of a hundred and fifty men who had spent the night in the fog, in water up to their waists, and who now emerged shouting “Santiago! Santiago! Spain and Santiago!”—the traditional battle cry in praise of their country and their patron saint. Resolved to work off the paralyzing cold with blood and fire, they swarmed up the embankment with swords in hand, ran along the dike toward the drawbridge and the gate, occupied the bulwark, and then, to the terror of the Dutch who were scattering in all directions like crazed geese, entered the town, killing right and left.

Today the history books speak of the assault on Oudkerk as a massacre. They mention the “Spanish fury” at Antwerp, and maintain that the Tercio Viejo de Cartagena acted with singular cruelty that day. Well, no one said that to me, because I was there. It is true that those first moments were marked by pitiless carnage, but will Your Mercies tell me how else, with only a hundred and fifty men, one could take a fortified Dutch town with a garrison of seven hundred? Only the horror of an unexpected and merciless attack would so quickly break the spine of those heretics, so our men applied themselves to the task with the professional rigor of experienced soldiers. The orders of Colonel don Pedro de la Daga had been to start the raid with many deaths in order to terrify the defenders and force them to a swift surrender but not to begin the sacking of the town until victory was assured. So I will spare you further details and say only that the scene was a chaos of harquebus shot, yelling, and flashing swords, and that no Dutch male over fifteen or sixteen who encountered our men in the first moments of the assault—whether fighting, fleeing, or surrendering—lived to tell of it.

Our colonel was right: The enemy’s panic was our best ally, and we did not lose many men—ten or twelve, at most, counting both dead and wounded—which is, pardiez, few enough when compared to the two hundred heretics the town was to bury the next day, and bearing in mind how smoothly Oudkerk fell into our hands. We met the strongest resistance at the city hall, where some twenty Englishmen were able to regroup in some order. The English had been allied with the rebels ever since our lord and king had refused their Prince of Wales the hand of our Infanta María, so when the first Spaniards arrived in the town square with blood dripping from daggers, pikes, and swords, and the English welcomed them with musket volleys from the balcony of the city hall, our soldiers took it very personally. With gunpowder, tow, and tar, they set fire to the hall with the twenty Englishmen inside, then shot and knifed every one of them as they came out—those who did come out.

Then began the sacking. According to military custom, in cities that did not surrender according to the proper stipulations or that were taken by assault, the victors were entitled to enter and sack. Thus, fired with greed for booty, each soldier fought as if ten and swore for a hundred. And as Oudkerk had not surrendered—the heretic governor had been shot in the first moments and the burgomaster simultaneously hanged at the door of his house and, furthermore, as the town had been won, in a word, through pure Spanish bollocks—no one had to sign a formal order allowing us Spaniards to break into any houses we deemed promising—which was all of them—and make off with anything that took our fancy. This, as you may imagine, resulted in some painful scenes. The burghers of Flanders, like anywhere else, tended to be reluctant to be relieved of their belongings, and many had to be convinced by the tip of a sword. Soon the streets were filled with soldiers carrying a colorful variety of spoils through smoke, trampled draperies, smashed furniture, and bodies, many of which were barefoot or naked, and whose blood formed dark pools on the cobbles, blood the soldiers slipped in and the dogs lapped up. Your Mercies can imagine the picture.

There was no violation of women, at least no tolerated violation; nor was there drunkenness among the troops, for often, even in the most disciplined soldiers, the latter gives way to the former. Orders in regard to this matter were as clean-cut as the edge of a Toledo blade, for our general, don Ambrosio Spínola, did not want to antagonize the local populace still further; it was enough to be slashed and sacked without the added outrage of having their women molested. So on the eve of the attack, to make things perfectly clear—and because a lesson is always better than a lecture—two or three soldiers who had been convicted for crimes against the gentle sex were hanged. No unit and no company is perfect. Even in Christ’s, which was one he had recruited himself, there was one who betrayed him, another who denied him, and yet another who failed to believe him. The fact is that in Oudkerk, the preventative warning worked wonders, and except for an occasional isolated case, inevitable when dealing with soldiers drunk with victory and booty, the virtue of the Flemish women, whatever it may have been, remained intact. For the moment.

The city hall burned right down until there was nothing left but the weathervane. I was with Jaime Correas, both of us happy that we had saved our hides at the gate of the bulwark and that we had carried out our assigned mission to the satisfaction of all, except, of course, the Dutch. In my knapsacks, recovered after the fight and still stained with the blood of the Dutchman with the blond mustache, we stowed everything of value we could find: silver cutlery, a few gold coins, a gold chain we had taken from the corpse of a burgher, and a new and magnificent pair of pewter jugs. My companion had donned a handsome plumed morion that had belonged to an Englishman who no longer had a head on which to display it, and I was strutting around in a fine silver-trimmed red velvet doublet I’d found in an abandoned house we had ransacked at our pleasure.

Jaime, like me, was a mochilero, that is, a lowly aide or soldier’s page, and together we had lived through enough exhaustion and hardship to think of ourselves as good comrades. For Jaime, the booty and the success of events at the drawbridge, which don Carmelo Bragado, the captain of our company, had promised to reward if all went well, was consolation for having been disguised as a girl; we had drawn lots for that, but it had nonetheless left him somewhat embarrassed. As for me, by this point in my Flanders adventure I had decided that I wanted to be a soldier when I reached the required age, and all the excitement had induced a kind of vertigo, a youthful intoxication tasting of gunpowder, glory, and exaltation. That is how, ’fore God, a lad the same age as the number of lines in a sonnet comes to witness a war when the goddess Fortuna decrees that he will not play the part of victim but of witness and, at times, of precocious executioner. But I have already told Your Mercies, on a different occasion, that those were times when a life, even one’s own, was worth less than the steel used to take it. Difficult and cruel times. Hard times.

I was telling you that we had reached the square of the city hall, and we stayed there awhile, fascinated by the fire and the dead Englishmen, many of whom were blond or red-haired and freckled, piled up naked by the doors. From time to time we came across Spaniards laden with booty or groups of terrified Hollanders watching from the columns of the square, huddled together like sheep under the watchful eyes of our comrades, who were armed to the teeth. We went over to take a look. There were women, old men, and children but few adult males. I recall a youth about our age who looked at us with an expression somewhere between sullen and curious, and blond, pale-skinned women who stood wide-eyed beneath their white headdresses, their blue, fearful eyes observing our dark-haired soldiers. Our men were not as tall as the Flemish men, but they had full mustaches, heavy beards, and strong legs. Each had a musket over his shoulder and a sword in his hand, and each was clad in leather and metal stained with grime, blood, gunpowder, and mud from the dike. I will never forget the way those people looked at us Spaniards, there in Oudkerk as in so many other places: the blend of hatred and fear when they saw us enter their cities and march past their houses, covered with the dust of the road, bristling with iron, and ragged as urchins, boisterous at times but more dangerous when not. Proud, even in misery, as Bartolomé Torres Naharro wrote in his Soldadesca.

In war, come what may,there is this much I can say,if a man has two handsgold will surely roll his way.

We were the loyal infantry of the Catholic king: volunteers, all of us, in search of fortune or glory; men of honor but often also the dregs of the Spanish empire; rabble given to mutiny, who demonstrated flawless iron discipline but only when facing enemy fire. Dauntless and terrible even in defeat, the Spanish tercios, a training school for the best soldiers Europe had produced in two centuries, comprised the most efficient military machine anyone had ever commanded on a field of battle. Although at that time, with the age of the great assaults over and with artillery taking the fore, the war in Flanders had become one long succession of sieges, of mines and trenches, and our infantry was no longer the splendid military force our great Philip II had put his faith in when he wrote his famous letter to his ambassador to the pope:

I do not plan, nor do I wish, to be the lord of heretics. Yet if the situation cannot be remedied as I would have it, without resorting to weapons, then I am determined to take them up, and neither the danger in which I place myself nor the ruin of those lands, nor of the rest of those still mine, can prevent me from doing what a Christian, God-fearing prince must do in His service.

And that, pardiez, is how it was. After long decades of crossing swords with half the world without achieving much more than icy feet and hot heads, very soon there would be nothing left for Spain than to watch her tercios die on fields of battle like the one at Rocroi, faithful to their reputation—lacking anything else—taciturn and impassive when their lines formed into those “human towers and walls” the Frenchman Bossuet wrote of with such admiration. But yes, there is this: We fucked them good and hard. Even though our men and their generals were no equal to those in the days of the Duque de Alba and Alejandro Farnesio, Spanish soldiers continued to be Europe’s nightmare for some time: they who had captured a French king in Pavia, triumphed in San Quintín, sacked Rome and Antwerp, taken Amiens and Ostend, killed ten thousand enemies in the attack on Jemmigen, eight thousand in Maastricht, and nine thousand in Sluys, wielding steel in water up to their waists. We were the very wrath of God, and it took only one glance at us to understand why: We were a rough and rowdy horde from the dry lands of the south, fighting in hostile foreign lands where there was no possible retreat and defeat meant annihilation. Driven men, some by the poverty and hunger they meant to leave behind and others by ambition for land, fortune, and glory, to whom the song of the gentle youth in Don Quijote might apply:

It is necessity thatcarries me to war;for had I money,I would ne’er have come this far.

And those other old and eloquent lines:

I do battle out of need,and once seated in the saddle,Castile grows ever vasterbeneath the hoofbeats of my steed.

So. The fact is that we were still there and would continue thus for several years more, enlarging Castile with the blades of our swords or as God and the devil had taught us in Oudkerk. The banner of our company was flying from the balcony of a house in the square, and my comrade, Jaime Correas, who was a mochilero in the squad of Second Lieutenant Coto, went there to look for his people. I went on a bit farther, past the front of the city hall to escape the terrible heat of the fire, and as I rounded the building I saw two individuals piling up the books and documents they were carrying out of the door as fast as they could. What they were doing did not appear to be pillaging—it would be rare in the midst of widespread sacking for anyone to bother about books—but instead they seemed to be rescuing what they could from the fire. I went to take a closer look. Your Mercies may recall that I had some experience of the written word from my days in la Villa y Corte de las Españas, that is, Madrid, owing to my friendship with don Francisco de Quevedo, who had given me Plutarch to read; Dómine Pérez’s lessons in Latin and grammar; my taste for Lope’s theater; and my master Captain Alatriste’s habit of reading wherever there was a book to be read.

One of the men carrying books out and piling them in the street was an elderly Dutchman with long white hair. He was wearing black, as pastors there did, with a dirty collar and gray hose. He did not, however, appear to be a religious man, if one may call those who preach the doctrines of that heretic Calvin religious—may lightning strike the whoreson in hell or wherever he may be stewing. In the end, I took him to be a secretary or city official trying to rescue books from the conflagration. I would have passed right by had I not noticed that the other individual, staggering through the smoke with his arms filled with books, wore the red band of the Spanish soldiers. He was a young man, bareheaded, and his face was covered with sweat and soot, as if he had already made many trips into the depths of the blazing inferno the building had become. A sword swung from his baldric, and he was wearing high boots blackened from charred wood and debris. He seemed to give little importance to the smoking sleeve of his doublet, not even when, finally noticing it as he set his load of books on the ground, he put it out with a couple of distracted swipes. At that moment he looked up and saw me. He had a thin, angular face and a trim chestnut-brown mustache that flowed into a short pear-shaped beard beneath his lower lip. I judged him to be between twenty and twenty-five years old.

“You could give me a hand,” he grunted, when he noticed the faded aspa, the red Saint Andrew’s cross, I wore sewn to my doublet, “instead of standing there gawking.”

He glanced toward the columns of the square, where a few women and children were taking in the scene, and wiped the sweat from his face with the singed sleeve.

“God help me,” he said, “but I am burning with thirst.”

He turned and, accompanied by the fellow in black, ran back to search for more books. After considering the situation for an instant, I raced to the nearest house, where a frightened Dutch family was watching with curiosity in front of a door that had been battered off its hinges.

“Drinken,” I said, holding out my two pewter jugs. I pantomimed drinking and then clapped one hand to the hilt of my dagger. The Dutch understood both word and gesture, for they filled the jugs with water, and I returned to where the two men were stacking books from another foray. When they saw the jugs, they dispatched the contents without taking a breath. Before plunging once more into the smoke, the Spaniard turned to me.

“Thank you,” he said very simply.

I followed him. I set my knapsacks on the ground and took off my velvet doublet, not because as he thanked me he had smiled nor because I was touched by his singed sleeve and his smoke-reddened eyes, but because suddenly that anonymous soldier had made me realize that at times there are more important things than collecting booty, even if the latter can sometimes be worth a hundred times one’s yearly pay. So I took as deep a breath as I could, and, covering my mouth and nose with a handkerchief I extracted from my pouch, I ducked my head to avoid the sputtering beams that were threatening to collapse and ran blindly into the smoke. I pulled books from the flaming shelves until the heat became asphyxiating and the embers floating in the air burned my throat with every breath. Most of the books were ashes by now, dust that was not “enamored,” as it was in that beautiful and distant sonnet by don Francisco de Quevedo, but only a sad residue, all the hours of study, all the love, all the intelligence, all the lives that could have illuminated other lives now vanished.

We made our last trip before the ceiling of the library collapsed in an explosion of flames that roared at our backs. Outside, we stood gasping for air, stupefied, clammy with sweat, our eyes tearing from the smoke. At our feet were around two hundred books and old documents. A tenth, I calculated, of what had burned inside the library. On his knees beside the pile, drained by his efforts, the Dutchman in black coughed and wept. When he had caught his breath, the soldier smiled at me as he had when I brought the water.

“What is your name, lad?”

I stood a little straighter, swallowing my last cough.

“Íñigo Balboa,” I said. “From the bandera of Captain don Carmelo Bragado.”

That was not strictly accurate. It was true that the bandera was indeed the one Diego Alatriste fought with and therefore mine, but in the tercios a mochilero was considered little more than a servant or bearer, not a soldier. But that did not seem to matter to the stranger.

“Thank you, Íñigo Balboa,” he said.

His smile widened, lighting up a face gleaming with sweat and black with smoke.

“Someday,” he added, “you will remember what you did today.”

A curious thing, by my faith. He had no way to divine it, but, as Your Mercies witness, it was true what that soldier said. I do remember very well. He put one hand on my shoulder and grasped one of my hands with the other. His was a strong, warm clasp. And then, without exchanging a word with the Dutchman stacking books in piles as if they were a precious treasure (and now I know that they were), he turned and walked away.

Several years would go by before I again encountered the anonymous soldier I had helped one foggy autumn day during the sacking of Oudkerk. In all that time I had never learned his name. It was only later, when I was a grown man, that I had the good fortune to meet him again, in Madrid and in circumstances that have nothing to do with the thread of the present tale. By then he was no longer an obscure soldier, and, despite the years that had passed since that morning long ago, he still remembered my name. And I at last would know his: He was Pedro Calderón, the famous playwright Pedro Calderón de la Barca, known throughout Spain.

But let us return to Oudkerk. After the soldier and I left the square, I went in search of Captain Alatriste, whom I found in good health, along with the rest of his squad. They were gathered around a small bonfire in the rear garden of a house that backed onto the dock of the canal, near the city wall. The captain and his comrades had been ordered to attack that section of the town, burn the ships at the docks, and secure the rear gate, thereby cutting off the retreat of enemy troops. When I caught up with the captain, the charred remains of burned ships were smoldering along the shore, and traces of the recent battle were visible on the dock, in the gardens, and in the houses.

“Íñigo,” said the captain.

His smile was weary and a little distant, and he had that look that remains imprinted on soldiers following a difficult battle, a look that the veterans of the tercios called “the last stand,” a look that during the time I had spent in Flanders I had learned to distinguish from other looks, such as that of weariness, resignation, fear, and absolute resolve. This was the look that stays in the eyes after other emotions have passed through them, the precise expression Captain Alatriste’s face wore at that moment. He was sitting on a bench, his elbow on the table by his side, his left leg extended as if it pained him. His knee-high boots were covered with mud, and he was wearing a dirty brown-sleeved doublet; it was unbuttoned, allowing me a glimpse of his usual buffcoat beneath it. His hat lay on the table beside a pistol—I could see it had been fired—and his belt with his sword and dagger.

“Come over to the fire.”

Gratefully, I obeyed as I took in the corpses of three Dutchmen lying close by: one on the planking of the nearby dock, another beneath the table. The third Dutchman was sprawled face down at the threshold of the back door of the house and held a halberd that had not served to save his life—or anything else for that matter. I observed that his pockets had been turned inside out, his corselet and shoes had been removed, and two fingers of one hand were missing, doubtless because whoever had taken his rings had been in a hurry. A brownish-red trail of blood led across the garden to the spot where the captain was sitting.

“That one won’t feel the cold any longer,” said one of the soldiers.

From the strong accent I did not need to turn to turn around to know that the person who had spoken was Mendieta, a Basque like myself, a thick-browed, burly man from Biscay whose mustache was almost as impressive as my master’s. The little troupe was completed by Curro Garrote, a Malagüeño from Los Percheles, so tanned he looked like a Moor; the Mallorcan José Llop; and Sebastián Copons, an old comrade of Captain Alatriste from earlier campaigns. Copons was a dried-up little man from Aragon, as tough as the mother who gave him birth, and his face might had been carved from the stone of Mallos de Riglos. Sitting nearby were three others from the squad: the Olivares brothers and the Galician, Rivas.

All of them knew of my difficult assignment at the drawbridge and were happy to see me alive and well, though they did not make any great show of it. For one thing, it was not the first time I had smelled powder in Flanders, and, besides, they had their own affairs to think about. Beyond that, they were not the kind of soldier who makes a fuss over something that was, in truth, considered the duty of anyone in the pay of our king. Although in our case—or, rather in theirs, for we mochileros did not have the right to claim benefits or wages—the tercio had gone a long time without seeing the color of a piece of eight.

Nor did Diego Alatriste outdo himself in his welcome. I have already said that he limited his greeting to a slight smile, twisting his mustache as if he were thinking about something else. But when he saw that I was hanging around like a good dog hoping to be petted by its master, he complimented my red velvet doublet and in the end offered me a hunk of bread and some sausages his companions were roasting over the fire. Their clothing was still wet after the night spent in the waters of the canal, and their faces, dirty and greasy from their vigil and the subsequent battle, reflected their exhaustion. They were nonetheless in good humor. They were alive, everything had gone well, the town was again Catholic and subject to our lord and king, and the booty—several sacks and knotted cloths piled in a corner—was reasonable.

“After a three months’ fast from pay,” commented Curro Garrote, cleaning the bloody rings of the dead Dutchman, “this is a reprieve.”

From the other side of the town came the sound of bugles and drums. The fog was beginning to lift, and that allowed us to see a thin line of soldiers moving along the Ooster dike. The long pikes advancing through the last remnants of gray fog resembled a field of swaying reeds, and a short-lived ray of sun, sent ahead as if it were a scout, glinted off the metal of their lances, morions, and corselets and reproduced them in the quiet waters of the canal. At their head came horses and banners bearing the good and ancient cross of Saint Andrew, or of Burgundy: the red aspa insignia of the Spanish tercios.

“Here comes Jiñalasoga,” said Garrote. Jiñalasoga was the nickname the veterans had given don Pedro de la Daga, colonel of the Viejo Tercio de Cartagena. In the soldier’s tongue of the time, jiñar meant—begging your pardon, Your Mercies—“to empty your bowels,” that is, “to shit.” This may sound a little common, here in this tale, but, pardiez, we were soldiers, not San Plácido nuns. As for the soga part, no one who knew our colonel’s taste for hanging his men for disciplinary offenses could harbor any doubt regarding the appropriateness of “rope” in his sobriquet. The fact is that Jiñalasoga, more formally, Colonel don Pedro de la Daga—either will do—was commanding the relief forces of Captain don Hernán Torralba and was coming along the dike to take official possession of Oudkerk.

“He gets here midmorning,” grumbled Mendieta, “after all the slashing’s been done.”

Diego Alatriste slowly got to his feet; I saw that he did so with difficulty and that the leg he had stretched before him was giving him constant pain. I knew that this was not a new wound but, rather, a year-old injury to his hip he’d received in the alleyways near the Plaza Mayor in Madrid at the time of his next-to-last encounter with his old enemy, Gualterio Malatesta. Dampness precipitated a rheumatic pain, and the night spent in the waters of the Ooster was no prescription for a cure.

“Let’s go take a look.”

He smoothed his mustache, buckled on the belt that held his sword and vizcaína dagger, thrust his pistol into his waistband, and picked up the wide-brimmed hat with the perennially frowsy red plume. Then slowly, very slowly, he turned to Mendieta.

“Colonels always arrive midmorning,” he said, and from his cold, gray-green eyes it was impossible to know whether he was speaking seriously or in jest. “Which is why we ourselves must get up so early.”

2. THE DUTCH WINTER

Weeks went by, then months, and we were well into winter. And although our general don Ambrosio Spínola had the rebellious provinces on the rack again, we were losing Flanders; bit by bit it slipped away, until finally we lost it completely. If you will, Your Mercies, consider very carefully that when I say Flanders was slipping away, I mean that only the powerful Spanish military machine maintained the gradually weakening link to those distant lands from which a letter—even by the fastest post horses—took three weeks to reach Madrid. To the north the Estates General, backed by France, England, Venice, and the other enemies of Spain, were being strengthened in their rebellion thanks to the cult of Calvinism, which was more useful in the business dealings of their burghers and merchants than the oppressive, antiquated true religion, which seemed so impractical to those who preferred to deal with a God who applauded revenue, and were shaking off the yoke of a too-distant centralist and authoritarian Castilian monarchy. For their part, the Catholic states of the south, though still loyal, were beginning to grow weary both of the cost of a war that had been going on for eighty years and of the excessive demands and damage done by soldiers who were increasingly thought of as occupying troops. All these things were poisoning the air, and to that we must add the decadence of Spain itself, in which a well-intentioned but ineffective king, an intelligent but overly ambitious prime minister, a sterile aristocracy, a corrupt officialdom, and a clergy as stupid as it was fanatic were hurtling us headfirst into the abyss. Catalonia and Portugal were on the point of withdrawing from the crown; the latter, forever.

Stultified among kings, aristocrats, and priests, with church and civil traditions that diminished those who tried to earn an honorable living with their hands, we Spaniards preferred to seek our fortune by fighting in Flanders or conquering America, pursuing the stroke of luck that would allow us to live like lords without paying taxes or lifting a finger. That was what caused our looms and lathes to fall silent, what depopulated and impoverished Spain, and what reduced us first to a legion of adventurers, then to a people of mendicant hidalgos, and finally to a rabble of base Sancho Panzas. And that was also how the vast heritage bequeathed to our lord and king by his grandfathers, that Spain upon which the sun never set—for when that star sank below one of her horizons it rose upon another—continued to be what she was, thanks only to the gold the galleons brought from the Indies, and the pikes—the famous lances Diego Velázquez would very soon immortalize—of the veteran armies. For those reasons, despite our decadence, we were not yet disdained and were even still feared. So it was timely and just—as well as a slap in the face to other nations—that one could say:

Who spoke here of war?Is our memory still clear?When the name Castile is spokendoes the earth still shake with fear?

I hope that Your Mercies will make allowances when I so immodestly include myself in this panorama, but at that point in the Flanders campaign, that very young Íñigo Balboa you knew during the adventure of the two Englishmen, and later in the incident at the convent, was no longer quite so young. The winter of ’24, which the Viejo Tercio de Cartagena spent garrisoned in Oudkerk, found me in the full vigor of my youth. I have already said that the smell of gunpowder was nothing new to me, and although I could not, because of my age, carry a pike, sword, or harquebus in combat, my status as the mochilero of the squad in which Captain Alatriste served had made me a veteran of every imaginable adventure. My instincts were already those of a soldier: I could smell a lighted harquebus cord half a league away, I knew the pounds and ounces of every cannon ball or musket shot by the sound, and I was developing a singular talent in the task we mochileros called foraging: incursions into surrounding territory, scavenging for firewood and food. Our raids were indispensable when, as now, the land had been devastated by war, supplies were short, and everyone had to scramble for himself. Ours was not an easy task, and the proof is that in Amiens, the French and English had killed some eighty mochileros, some only twelve years old, as they foraged through the countryside—inhuman butchery, even in time of war—which the Spaniards appropriately avenged by knifing two hundred of Albion’s soldiers, because those who dole it out must also be able to take it. And if in the long run the subjects of the queens and kings of England beleaguered us in many campaigns, it is fair to record that we, in turn, dispatched not a few, and that, without being as robust as they or as blond or as loudmouthed when drinking beer, when it came to arrogance, no one ever put us in the shade. Besides, if the Englishman fought with the courage of national pride, we did so out of national desperation, which was not—no definitely not—chickenfeed. So, we made them pay with their accursed hides, theirs, and so many others.

Well, this was just—it’s nothing really—a leg I lost, blown off by a volley.What can those Lutheran dogs be thinking,to take my legs but leave me my hands.

In short: During that winter of wavering light, fog, and gray rain, I foraged and pillaged and scavenged from one end of that Flemish land to the other. It was not arid like the greater part of Spain—God did not smile upon us even in that—but nearly all green, like the fields of my native Oñate, though much flatter and scored with rivers and canals. In such activities—stealing hens, digging turnips, holding my dagger to the throats of peasants as hungry as I and taking their meager store of food—I revealed myself to be a consummate specialist. I did, and would in years to come, many things I am not proud to remember, but I survived the winter, I aided my comrades, and I became a man in all the disparate and terrible meanings of the word.

To serve my king, I took up the sword’ere downy fuzz covered my lip.

Words Lope wrote about himself. I also lost my virginity, or my virtue, which is the way the good Dómine Pérez put it. For at that point, in Flanders, half-lad and half-soldier, that was one of the few things I had left to lose. But that is a very personal and intimate story, and I have no intention of detailing it here for Your Mercies.

Diego Alatriste’s squad was the principal unit fighting under the banner of Captain don Carmelo Bragado, and it was formed only of the best: not a lily-livered man among them, only soldiers quick with a sword and born to suffer and to fight. All of them were veterans who had under their belts at least the Palatinate campaign or years of service in the Mediterranean with the tercios of Naples or Sicily, which was the case of the Malagüeño Curro Garrote. Others, like the Mallorcan José Llop or the Basque Mendieta, had fought in Flanders, before the Twelve Years’ truce, and the yellowed service records of a few, like Copons, who was from Huesca, and like Alatriste himself, went back as far as the last years of our good Philip II, may God hold that good king in glory. It was under Philip’s old banners that—as Lope would say—the swords and beards of those two had appeared simultaneously.

Taking losses and additions into account, the squad usually numbered between ten and fifteen men, depending on the situation, and it had no specific function in the company other than to move quickly and back up others in their various actions, carrying half a dozen harquebuses and about as many muskets. The squad operated in a unique way: It had no cabo, the leader appointed by the captain, for in any engagement they were under the direct orders of Captain Bragado himself, who might use them in the line with others from the unit or give them a free hand in surprise attacks, scouting missions, skirmishes, and raids. They were all, as I said, conditioned to gunfire and expert in their responsibilities, and it was perhaps for that reason that in their operations—even without having identified a leader or acting under a formal hierarchy of any sort—they had, in a kind of tacit accord, bestowed authority on Diego Alatriste.

As for the three escudos that went along with being head of the squad, it was Captain Bragado who collected them, in addition to the wages of forty escudos due as actual captain of the unit, since that was how he was listed in the documents of the tercio. Although he was a man of stature, owing to his family background, and a reasonable officer as long as his discipline was not questioned, don Carmelo Bragado was one of those men who hears clink and says mine. He never let so much as a maravedí get past him, and even went so far as to keep dead and deserters on the rolls in order to collect their pay…when there was pay. However, I have to say that it was a widespread practice, and in Bragado’s favor we can say two things: He never refused to help soldiers in need, and he personally had twice proposed Diego Alatriste’s promotion to squad leader, though both times Alatriste had declined.

As to the esteem in which Bragado held my master, I need say only that four years earlier at White Mountain, when General Tilly’s first assault and second attack under the orders of Count Bouquoy and Colonel don Guillermo Verdugo failed, Alatriste and Captain Bragado (and Lope Balboa, my father, right along with them) had climbed shoulder to shoulder up the slopes, fighting for every foot of corpse-strewn terrain. Then a year after that, on the plains of Fleurus, when don Gonzalo de Córdoba won the battle but the Cartagena tercio was nearly annihilated after holding fast against several cavalry charges, Diego Alatriste was among the last of the dauntless Spaniards who never broke ranks around the flag that, with the standard bearer dead, along with all the other officers, was held high by Captain Bragado himself. And, pardiez, in that time, and among those men, such things still counted for something.

It was raining in Flanders. ’Pon my word, it rained pitchforks and anvils that accursed autumn and through that whole accursed winter, turning to pure mud the flat, shifting, swampy land that was crossed in every direction by rivers, canals, and dikes that seemed to have been laid out by the hand of the devil himself. It rained for days, for weeks, for months, until the gray landscape of low clouds was completely erased. It was a strange land with an unfamiliar tongue, populated by people who despised and at the same time feared us; a countryside denuded by the season and the war, lacking any defense against the cold, the wind, and the water. There were no peaches in that land, or figs, or cherries, or peppers, or saffron, or olives, or oil, or oranges, or rosemary, or pines, or laurels, or cypresses. There was not even any sun, only a tepid disk that moved indolently behind a veil of clouds. The place our iron-and-leather-clad men had come from, men who plodded on though their bodies yearned for the clear skies of the south, was far away, as far as the ends of the earth. And those rough, proud soldiers, now in the lands of the north repaying the courtesy of a visit received centuries before at the fall of the Roman empire, recognized that they were very few in number and a great distance from any friendly country.

Niccolò Machiavelli had already written that the courage of our infantry grew out of necessity. As the Florentine writer acknowledged, quite against his pleasure, for he could never bear the Spanish, “Fighting in a strange land, and seeing themselves, absent the possibility of fleeing, forced to die or conquer, makes them very good soldiers.” Applied to Flanders, that is absolutely true: there were never more than twenty thousand Spaniards in that land and never more than eight thousand together in one place. But that was the impetus that allowed us to be masters of Europe for a century and a half: knowing that only victories kept us safe among hostile peoples and that if defeated we had nowhere we could reach on foot. That was why we fought to the end with the cruelty of our ancestors, the courage of men who expect nothing, the religious fanaticism and insolence that one of our captains, don Diego de Acuña, expressed better than anyone in his famous, passionate, and truculent toast:

To Spain; and may he who wishesto defend her die an honorable death,and may he who is traitor to herbe dishonored to his last breath;may no cross mark his remains,may his burial ground remain unblessed,and may he lack a loyal sonto close his eyes in Christian rest.

As I was telling Your Mercies, the morning that Captain Bragado made an inspection visit to the advanced posts where his bandera was quartered, it was raining down in buckets. The captain was from León, in the Bierzo district. He was a large man, about six feet tall, and to get him through the mud and mire he had somewhere requisitioned a Dutch workhorse, a large animal with strong legs appropriate for its burden. Diego Alatriste was leaning against the window, watching the rivulets of rain sliding down the thick glass panes, when he saw his captain coming along the dike on horseback, his sodden hat brim drooping from the unceasing rain and a waxed cape over his shoulders.

“Warm a little wine,” Alatriste said to the woman at his back.

He said it in an elementary Flemish—“Verwarm wijn” were his words—then continued to watch through the window as the woman poked the miserable peat fire, then set atop the stove a tin jug she took from the table where a few bread crusts and boiled cabbage were being dispatched by Copons, Mendieta, and the others. Everything looked dirty. Soot from the stove had blackened the wall and the ceiling, and the smell of bodies too long enclosed within the four walls of the house and the odor of dampness filtering through the beams and roof tiles could have been cut with any of the daggers or swords scattered around the room among harquebuses, goatskin buffcoats, heavy outdoor gear, and dirty clothing. It smelled of barracks, of winter, and of misery. It smelled of soldiers and of Flanders.

The grayish light sifting through the window accentuated the scars and hollows on Diego Alatriste’s unshaven face, making the fixed clarity of his eyes even colder. He was in his shirtsleeves, with his doublet thrown over his shoulders and two harquebus cords knotted below his knees to hold up the legs of his cobbled leather boots. Without moving from the window, he watched as Captain Bragado got off his horse, pushed open the door, and then, shaking the water from his hat and cape, came inside with a pair of oaths and a “By the good Christ,” cursing the rain, the mud, and all of Flanders.

“Go on eating, men,” he said, “since you have something to eat.”

The soldiers, who had half-risen, went back to their meager rations, and Bragado, whose clothing began to steam as he neared the stove, accepted the piece of hard bread and bowl with the last of the cabbage offered him by Mendieta. The captain studied the woman closely as he accepted the jar of warm wine she put into his hands, and after warming his fingers on the metal, he drank with short sips, casting sideways glances at the man who had not moved from the window.

“By God, Capitán Alatriste,” he ventured after a bit. “You are not badly quartered here.”

It was extraordinary to hear the captain of the unit address Diego Alatriste as Capitán so naturally, which proves to what point Alatriste and his honorary rank were known to all and respected even by his superiors. As Carmelo Bragado spoke, he turned covetous eyes toward the woman, who was some thirty years old and blonde like nearly all the women of her land. She was not particularly pretty: Her hands were reddened by work and her teeth were uneven, but she had fair skin, broad hips beneath her skirts, and full breasts that threatened to overflow the bodice tightly laced in the style of the women painted in that era by Peter Paul Rubens. In sum, she had the look of a healthy goose that Flemish countrywomen tend to have when they are not overly ripe. And all this—as Captain Bragado and even the most dimwitted recruit could have divined merely by observing the way the girl and Diego Alatriste ignored each other in public—was much to the displeasure of her husband, a well-off, fiftyish peasant with a sour face. He roamed about, forcing himself to be subservient to the feared, gruff foreigners he hated with all his soul but that fortune had sent him with a billeting warrant. A husband who had no choice but to swallow his anger and despair each night when after hearing his wife slip silently from his side, he listened to the barely muffled moans in the crunching corn-husk pallet where Alatriste slept. How that had come about is something that belongs to the private life of the couple. In any case, the husband received certain advantages in exchange: His house, his property, and his neck were saved, something that could not be said in every place Spaniards were quartered. Cuckolded he may have been, but at least his wife was sneaking off to one man, and one of high rank at that, and not to several, or by force. After all, in Flanders, as in any place and any time of war, a man who does not find ways to console himself is miserably discontented. The greatest solace for nearly everyone was surviving, and that husband, whatever else, was alive.

“I bring orders,” Captain Bragado said, “for an incursion along the Geertruidenberg road. Without too much killing. Only to pry loose a little information.”

“Prisoners?” asked Alatriste.

“Two or three would not go amiss. Apparently our General Spínola believes that the Dutch are preparing to send help to Breda by boat, taking advantage of the rising waters from the rains. It would be helpful if a few men went a league in that direction to confirm the rumor. Done quietly, of course. Discreetly.”

Quietly or with bugles blaring, a league through that rain and the mud of the roads was asking a lot, but none of the men showed any surprise. They knew that the same rain kept the Dutch in their bunkers and trenches and that they would be snoring like pigs while a handful of Spaniards slipped by beneath their noses.

Diego Alatriste stroked his mustache. “When do we leave?”

“Now.”

“Number of men?”

“The whole squad.”

That brought a curse from one of the men at the table, and Captain Bragado whirled around, eyes shooting sparks. All heads were lowered, all eyes cast down. Alatriste, who had recognized the voice of Curro Garrote, sent the Malagüeño a reproachful look.

“Perhaps,” Bragado said very slowly, “one of these soldiers has something to say on the subject.”

He had set the jar of wine down on the table without finishing it and had placed his hand to the hilt of his sword. His strong yellow teeth were gritted beneath his mustache. The effect was extremely disagreeable: They looked like the teeth of a bulldog ready to attack.

“No one has anything to say,” Alatriste replied.

“Better so.”

Garrote had looked up, piqued by that “no one.” He was a thin, dark-skinned rough-and-tumble type with a sparse beard that curled like those of the Turks he had fought against while in the galleys of Naples and Sicily. His hair was long and greasy, and he wore a gold earring in his left ear. There was none in the right because, according to him, a Turk’s scimitar had sliced off the lobe while Garrote was on the island of Cyprus, though others attributed the loss to a certain knife fight in a whorehouse in Ragusa.

“But,” he broke in, “I do have something to say to señor Capitán Bragado. Three things. One is that it is all the same to the son of my mother whether we walk two leagues in the rain with Hollanders, with Turks, or with their whoring mothers…”

He spoke firmly, adamantly, verging on impertinence, and his companions watched with expectation, some with visible approval. They were all veterans, and obedience to the military hierarchy was natural, but so was arrogance, for their status as soldiers also made them all hidalgos. The tradition of discipline, the bone and sinew of the old tercios, had been recognized even by an Englishman, a certain Gascoigne, when writing about the Spanish Fury and his account of the sacking of Antwerp. He had said, “The Walloons and the Germans are as undisciplined as the Spanish are admirable for their discipline.” Which is no small recognition from an English author when he is speaking of Spaniards. As for arrogance, it is not wasted time to recount the opinion of don Francisco de Valdez, who had been a captain, a sergeant-major, and then a colonel, and who therefore knew a spade for a spade, when he affirmed in his Espejo y disciplina militar that “nearly always they abhor to be bound to order, particularly the Spanish infantryman, who, being more choleric than others, has little patience.” These men were nothing like the deliberate and phlegmatic Flemish, who, though avaricious in the extreme, did not lie or fly into a rage but proceeded with great calm. The courage and fortitude of the Spaniards in Flanders, which along with their conduct in adversity forged the miracle of iron discipline on the field of battle, also made them less than gentle in other circumstances, such as dealing with their superiors, who had to move cautiously and with great tact. It was not a rare occurrence, despite the threat of the gallows, for a simple soldier to knife a sergeant or a captain over real or supposed offenses, embarrassing punishment, even a word out of place.

Knowing all this, Bragado turned to Diego Alatriste, as if to ask, wordlessly, his judgment of the situation, but he was met only with an impassive face. Alatriste was a person who let each man assume responsibility for what he said and what he did.

“You spoke of three things,” said Bragado, turning again to Garrote with a great amount of calm but even more menacing sangfroid. “What are the other two?”

“It has been a long time since any cloth has come our way, and we are wearing rags,” the Malagüeño continued, entirely unintimidated. “No provender reaches us, and since sacking is forbidden, we are reduced to near starvation. These vile Hollanders hide their best victuals, and when they don’t, they ask for gold in exchange.” He pointed with rancor toward their host, who was watching from the other room. “I am sure that if we could tickle his ribs with a dagger, that dog would somehow discover a full pantry or a buried pot filled with nice, shiny florins.”

Captain Bragado was listening patiently; he still appeared to be calm but had not taken his hand from the hilt of his Toledo steel.

“And the third?”

Garrote raised his tone slightly, just enough to express arrogance without overdoing it. He knew that Bragado was not a man to tolerate a word meant to best him, not from his veteran soldiers…not even from the pope. But from the king? Well, he had no choice but to accept that.

“The third and principal item, Capitán, is that these good soldiers, who with good reason you address as Your Mercies, have not collected pay in five months.”

This time quiet murmurs of agreement ran around the table. Only the Aragonese Copons said nothing; he was staring at the crust of bread he had been crumbling into his bowl and then scooping out with his fingers. The captain turned to Diego Alatriste, still at his place by the window. Alatriste’s lips did not move, and he held Bragado’s gaze.

“And do you stand by that, Capitán?” Bragado asked him gruffly.

Alatriste shrugged his shoulders, his expression inscrutable. “I stand by what I say,” he stated. “And at times I stand by what my comrades do, but at the moment, I have said nothing, and they have done nothing.”

“But this soldier has gifted us with his opinion.”

“Opinions belong to those who hold them.”

“And that is why you have nothing to say and why you are looking at me in that way, señor Alatriste?”

“That is why I have nothing to say and why, Capitán, I am looking at you.”

Bragado studied him carefully and then slowly acquiesced. The two knew each other well, and in addition, the officer had good judgment when it came to distinguishing between firmness and affront. After a moment he withdrew his hand from his sword and touched his chin, but as he glanced at the men around the table, the hand returned to the hilt of his sword.

“No one has collected his pay,” he said finally, and he seemed to be speaking to Alatriste, as if it had been he and not Garrote who had spoken, as if he were the one who merited an answer. “Not Your Mercies, nor I myself. Not our colonel, nor even General Spínola. Withal that don Ambrosio is Genoese and from a family of bankers!”

Diego Alatriste listened in silence and said nothing. His gray-green eyes were still locked with those of the officer. Bragado had not served in Flanders before the Twelve Year’s Truce, but Alatriste had, and during that time mutinies had been the order of the day. Both knew that Alatriste had more than once experienced mutiny at close hand, when the troops had refused to fight after months, even years, of not collecting their wages. He had never, however, counted himself among the insurgents, not even when the precarious financial situation of Spain had institutionalized mutiny as the one means by which troops obtained their due. The other alternative was sacking, as in Rome and Antwerp:

I have come here without foodbut should I request a morselI am shown a thousand Dutchmenand an impregnable castle.

Nonetheless, in that campaign, except in the case of places taken by attack or in the heat of action, it had been General Spínola’s policy not to inflict excessive violence upon the civilian population, so as not to exacerbate their already exhausted sympathies. Breda, should it fall, would not be sacked, and the fatigue of those who besieged it would not be rewarded. Therefore, facing the prospect of no booty and no pay, the soldiers were beginning to wear long faces and to huddle in corners and whisper. Even a dolt could read the signs.

“Furthermore, as far as I am aware,” Bragado continued, “only soldiers of other nations claim their pay before they fight.”

That, too, was very true. With no money to be had, reputation was all we had left, and it is well known that within the Spanish tercios it was a point of honor neither to demand back pay nor to mutiny before a battle, so that no one could say we had acted out of fear. Even on the dunes of Nieuport and in Alost, troops who were already rebelling suspended their demands and charged into combat. Unlike the Swiss, Italians, English, and Germans, who often asked for unpaid wages as a condition for their service, Spanish soldiers mutinied only after victory.

“I believed,” was Bragado’s last comment, “that I was dealing with Spaniards, not Germans.”

That cutting remark had the desired effect, and the men shifted uneasily in their chairs as they heard Garrote mutter “’Sblood,” as if someone had maligned his mother. At that, Diego Alatriste’s pale green eyes showed the spark of a smile. That insult always worked a miracle; no further word of protest was heard among the veteran soldiers seated at the table, and the officer, now relaxed, was seen to return Alatriste’s hint of a smile. Old dog to old dog.

“Your Mercies must leave immediately,” Bragado said, ending the discussion.

Alatriste again stroked his mustache with two fingers. Then he turned to his comrades. “You heard the captain,” he said.

The men began to get to their feet, Garrote grumbling, the others resigned. Sebastián Copons—small, thin, knotted, and tough as an aged grapevine—had been on his feet for some time, buckling on his weapons without awaiting orders from anyone, as if all the delays, all the unpaid wages, even the very treasure of the king of Persia, all led him to this miserable day: he, a fatalist, like the Moors whose necks were being cut by his marauding ancestors a few centuries earlier. Diego Alatriste watched him put on his hat and cape and go outside to notify other soldiers of the squad who were quartered in the house next door. They had been together through many campaigns, from the days of Ostend to Fleurus and now Breda, and in all those years no one had heard more than thirty words from him.

“’Pon my soul, I almost forgot this,” Bragado exclaimed.

He had picked up the jar of wine and was draining it, all the time eyeing the Flemish woman, who was cleaning scraps from the table. Without interrupting his drinking, holding the jug high, he dug into his doublet, pulled out a letter, and handed it to Diego Alatriste.

“This came for you a week ago.”

The missive was closed with sealing wax, and raindrops had slightly smeared the ink of the address. Alatriste read the name of the sender on the back: From don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas, La Bardiza Inn, Madrid.

As the woman passed by Alatriste without looking at him, one of her firm full breasts brushed against him. Steel glinted as it was slipped into scabbards, and well-oiled leather gleamed. Alatriste picked up his buffcoat and slowly belted it before asking for the baldric with his sword and dagger. Outside, rain continued to beat against the windowpanes.

“Two prisoners at least,” Bragado insisted.

The men were ready: mustaches, beards, hats, folds of waxed capes covered with mended tears and clumsy patches; light arms, appropriate for the job they were about to do; no muskets or pikes or other impediments, only good and simple steel: swords and daggers from Toledo, Sahagún, Milan, and Biscay. Also an occasional pistol poked out of the wearer’s clothing, but it would be useless with powder saturated by so much rain. Between them they also had a few crusts of bread and some rope to tie up Hollanders. And those empty, indifferent gazes of old soldiers prepared to face the hazards of their office once again before one day returning to their homeland marked by a crazy quilt of scars, with no bed to lie in or wine to drink and no hearth for baking their bread. And if they didn’t achieve this, they would be what in soldier’s cant were called terratenientes, landowners, claiming five feet of hard-fought Flemish soil in which they would find eternal sleep, with a hymn in praise of Spain forever on their lips.

Bragado finished his wine. Diego Alatriste accompanied him to the door, and the officer left without further conversation: no exchanges, no good-byes. The men watched their commander ride off down the dike on the back of his old field horse, crossing paths with Sebastián Copons, who was on his way back to the house.

Alatriste felt the woman’s eyes on him, but he did not turn to look at her. Without explaining whether they were parting only for hours or forever, he pushed open the door and went out into the rain, immediately feeling water through the cracked soles of his boots. The wetness seeped into the marrow of his bones, stirring the aches of old wounds. He sighed quietly and began to walk, hearing his companions splashing through the mud behind him, following him in the direction of the dike where Copons was standing as motionless as a small, strong statue beneath the steady downpour.

“What a cesspool of a life,” someone muttered.

And without further words, with heads lowered, wrapped in their soaked capes, the line of Spaniards faded into the gray landscape.

From don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas todon Alatriste y Tenorio * Tercio Viejo de Cartagena ^*Military post of Flanders

I hope, my esteemed captain, that upon receipt of the present you are, Y.M., healthy and of one piece.

In regard to my own condition, I am writing to you having recently emerged from an abominable flux of humors that, evincing itself in fevers, had laid me low for several days. Now, thanks to a merciful God, I am fine and can send you both my constant affection and my greetings.I hazard that you are deeply engaged in the affair at Breda, which is a business that buzzes from mouth to mouth at Court because of its importance to the future of our monarchy and to the Catholic faith, and also because it is said that the military machine set in motion has seen no equal since the days when Julius Caesar besieged Alesia. Here it is ventured that the stronghold will be definitively won from the Dutch and that it will fall like a ripe plum…although there is always someone who points out that don Ambrosio Spínola is taking his time and that ripe fruit must be eaten in season or it becomes full of worms. Whatever the case, since you have never lacked a sturdy heart, I wish you good fortune in the assaults, trenches, mines, countermines, and other diabolical inventions that keep you engaged in such clamorous affairs.Once, I heard Y.M. say that war is clean, and I understood your argument fully, to the point that at times I cannot but consider you to be correct. Here in La Villa y Corte, our city of Madrid, the enemy does not wear breastplate and helmet but, rather, toga, cassock, or silk doublet, and he never attacks face on but prefers ambush. In that particular, please know that everything is as it has always been, only worse. I have faith still in the intent of the conde-duque, but I fear that not even his desires will prevail. We Spanish have fewer tears than reasons to weep, for it is a vain labor to offer light to the blind, words to the deaf, science to the ignorant, and honor to monarchs. Here the same types continue to flourish: the blond and powerful caballero is still soldier, horse, and king in any matter, and he who is honest does naught but harm himself. As for me, I continue to make no progress in my eternal suit concerning the Torre de Juan Abad, each day battling this wretched and venal legal system and its practitioners that God, weary of confining monstrosities to hell, instead visits upon us. And I assure you, Capitán, that never before have I found myself among such toads as those in the Providencia square. And regarding that subject, please allow me to regale you with a sonnet inspired by my recent calamities:

You scatter judgments like grain tossed to geese,selling the law you do not comprehend,dispensing only what brings you gold, andcoveting, more than Jason, the Golden Fleece.

Both rights divine and those of mortal manin your interpretation are debased,and whether you are cruel, or affect grace,each sentence is shrewdly tailored to your plan

Plaints of the poor you coldly set asideLending your ear only to he who pays:personal gain, not rule of law, your guide.

And as your greed cannot be mollified,either wash your hands, as Pilate did,or hang like Judas, with coins but vilified.

I am still polishing the first line, but I have faith that the sense will please you. As for other matters, verses and earthly justice aside, all is going well. At court, the star of your friend Quevedo is still in the ascent, of which I make no complaint, and I am again well regarded in the house of the conde-duque and at the palace, perhaps because in recent days I have guarded my tongue and put my sword into safekeeping, despite my natural impulse to disencumber both one and the other. But a man must live, and given that I know exile, lawsuits, prisons, and affliction far too well, I think it will not stain my reputation to allow myself a truce and grant a period of quiet to my elusive fortunes. For that reason, each day I attempt to remember that one must proffer thanks to kings and powerful men, though there be no cause, and never voice a complaint, though there be cause to spare.But when I told you that I have kept my Toledo blade safely put away, I did not tell you the whole truth; in point of fact I unsheathed it some days ago to strike, as one would a servant or a lowlife, a certain servile and talentless poetaster, one Garciposadas, who in a number of villainous verses discredited poor Cervantes—may he reign in glory—alleging that Cervantes wrote the Quijote with his maimed hand, that it was an insignificant work of little substance; poorly written prose with little to claim it as literature, and that many people read it speaks only of the tastes of common people. He vowed that the book affords little benefit and that tomorrow no one will remember it. This knave, whose pen spews foul venom, is a bosom friend of that sodomite Góngora, which says it all.One night, when I was more inclined to philosophize with my wine than waste time on swine, I met the varlet himself at the door of the Longinos tavern, the famous gathering place for Góngora’s followers, the bulwark of resplendence, tricliniums, purplessences, and umbrageous waves of undulating sea. He was accompanied by two sycophants who would grovel to carry his wine: the bachiller Echevarría and the licenciado Ernesto Ayala, schooled reprobates—the latter grander than the first—who piss bile and maintain that the only authentic poetry is the gibberish, that is the Góngoberish, that no one but the select can appreciate. That select few being, of course, themselves and their companions. These coxcombs spend their lives belittling what others write, though they are incapable of stringing together fourteen lines to make a sonnet themselves. I was there with the Duque de Medinaceli and a number of young masked caballeros, all of them from the brotherhood of San Martín de Valdeiglesias, and we spent a happy while trimming the ears of those scoundrels (who, if truth be known, suffered no more than a few scratches), until the catchpoles arrived to impose peace, and we departed, and that was the end of that.Here’s a truth, speaking as we were of lowlife. The news about the royal secretary, Luis de Alquézar, the man you so deeply admire, is that he continues to hold a privileged position in the palace, occupying himself with ever more important affairs of state, and that he, like everyone at court, is amassing a fortune at an outrageously rapid rate. As you know, he has a niece who by now is a very beautiful girl and is waiting upon the queen as one of her meninas. In regard to the uncle, it is fortunate that you find yourself at some distance; upon your return from Flanders you must be on your guard against him. One never knows how far the poison spit by serpents will reach.And since I am speaking of serpents, I must tell Y.M. that some weeks ago I thought I saw that Italian with whom, I believe, you have unfinished business. I happened upon him in front of Lucio’s hostelry on Cava Baja, and, if it was truly he, he seemed to be enjoying excellent health. Which causes me to reflect that he is recovering remarkably well from your most recent conversations. He looked at me for an instant as if he recognized me and then went off down the street without a word. A sinister individual, one might say in passing, dressed in black from head to toe, with that pitted face and his enormous sword hanging from his belt. Someone to whom I discreetly mentioned the encounter told me that he is the leader of a small band of thugs and ruffians Alquézar keeps on a fixed wage, and who act as his evangelists in sinister assaults. This is a business, I venture, that Your Mercy will have to face one day—one way or another—since he who leaves the offender alive also leaves alivehis vengeance.I continue to be a faithful patron of the Tavern of the Turk, where your friends charge me with wishing you well, and I send effusive greetings from Caridad la Lebrijana, who, from what is said—and I have no proof to say it is a lie—feels your absence and reserves for you your old room on Calle del Arcabuz. She is still in good health, one might almost say in full bloom, which is not inconsequential. Martín Saldaña is convalescing from a nocturnal conflict with some ruffians who were attempting to gain refuge in San Ginés. He received a wound from one of their swords but will certainly recover. It is said that he killed three.I do not wish to rob you of more time. I ask only that you transmit my affection to young Íñigo, who by now must be a fine young lad and gallant emulator of Mars, having as he has Y.M. to act as his spiritual guide, in the manner of Virgil and Achilles. Recall to him, if you so please, my sonnet on youth and prudence, adding, again if it please you, these other verses with which I am still wrestling:

To the soldier, wounds are but misery,adding nothing to his true fame,nor does serving add glory to his name:naught but a chimera to warm his reverie….

Although, what can I say about these things, esteemed captain, that Y.M. does not recognize to the fullest extent.May God keep you in his care always, my friend.Yours,Fran. de Quevedo Villegas

P.S. You are sorely missed on the steps of San Felipe and at performances of Lope’s plays. I also forgot to tell you that I received a letter from a certain lad whom you may remember, the last of an unfortunate family. Apparently, after attending, in his way, to unfinished matters in Madrid, he was able to make his way to the Indies under an assumed name. I imagined that you might be pleased to hear that news.

3. THE MUTINY

Later, after the bull had bolted from the pen, there was great tattle and prattling about whether anyone had seen it coming, but the pure truth is that no one did anything to prevent it. The spark that set everything off was not the Flanders winter, which was not especially severe that year. There was no frost or snow, although the rains were a major hardship aggravated by the lack of food, the diminished population in the villages, and our responsibilities around Breda. But those things all come with the profession, and Spanish troops could endure the travails of war with patience. Wages, however, were a different matter. Many veterans had known poverty following their discharge and the reforms brought about by the Twelve Years’ Truce with the Dutch; they knew in their bones that service in the name of our lord and king demanded a high price when it came to dying and offered little reward when it came to surviving. And I have already noted on this subject that more than a few soldiers, whether they were old, mutilated, or with long campaign records stashed in the tubular containers they carried, had to beg in the streets and squares of our mean-spirited Spain, where again and again the same people amassed wealth while those who had given their health, blood, and life to preserve the true religion, the estates, and the wealth of our monarch remained buried and forgotten. There was hunger in Europe, in Spain, and in the military. The tercios had been waging war against the entire world for a long century and were beginning to not know precisely why, whether it was to defend indulgences or to enable the Court of Madrid to continue believing, amidst its balls and soirées, that it still ruled the world.

These men no longer had even the comfort of considering themselves professional because they weren’t being paid, and there is nothing like hunger to undercut discipline and conscience. So the matter of arrears complicated the situation in Flanders; for if that winter some tercios, including those of allied nations, twice received half their wages, the Cartagena tercio never saw so much as an escudo. The reasons for that are not within my ken, although at the time it was attributed to bad administration of the finances of our colonel, don Pedro de la Daga, and to some obscure affair of lost or appropriated monies. The reality is that several of the fifteen Spanish, Italian, Burgundian, Walloon, and German tercios maintaining the tight circle around Breda under the direct supervision of don Ambrosio Spínola had some incentive, some hope, but ours, scattered in small advance postings outside the city, counted itself among the troops placed on a long financial fast by the king. It was creating a dangerous atmosphere, for as Lope wrote in El asalto de Mastrique (“The Attack on Maastricht”):

As long as a man is not yet deadalways give him drink and bread;is there naught but plodding onendlessly, with all hope gone?I have honored that tattered banner,But no man should suffer in this manner,So, for God or king, hear what I say,I’ll not go hungry another day!

Add to that the fact that our deployment along the banks of the Ooster canal was in the closest position to the enemy, and therefore the most vulnerable to attack. We knew that Maurice of Nassau, general of the rebellious estates, was raising an army to come to the aid of Breda, within which another Nassau, Justin, was holding out with forty-seven companies of Hollanders, French, and English. These latter nations were, as Your Mercies are aware, always right in the thick of things when the opportunity arose to dip their bread in our stewpot. Indisputable was the fact that the army of the Catholic king was walking on the edge of a very sharp sword, twelve hours’ march from the nearest loyal cities, while the Dutch were but three or four hours from theirs. The Cartagena tercios’ orders were to thwart every attack that sought to approach our troops from the rear, thus assuring that our comrades entrenched around Breda would have time to prepare for any onslaught and not be forced to withdraw in shame or be drawn into an unequal battle. That placed a few squads in the scattered alignment that, in military jargon, was called the centinela perdida (the assignment of “forlorn hope”), advance units whose mission was to sound the call to arms but whose chances of surviving were summed up nicely by the pessimistic phrase in the line of duty. Captain Bragado’s bandera had been chosen for that task, as they were long-suffering, experienced in the misery of war, and capable—with or without leaders or officers—of fighting on a small stretch of land when the odds were stacked against them. But perhaps too much was riding on the patience of a few, and I must, in all justice, say that Colonel don Pedro de la Daga, maliciously called Jiñalasoga, was the one who precipitated the conflict with his imperious behavior…highly improper in a man well born and commander of a Spanish tercio.

I well remember that on that fateful day there was some sun, though it was Dutch sun, and that I was busy making the most of it. I was sitting on a stone bench near the gate of the house and reading, with great pleasure and benefit, a book Captain Alatriste used to lend me so that I could practice. It was a worn first edition, with countless signs of mold and rough treatment, of the first part of El ingenioso hidalgo don Quijote de la Mancha. It had been printed in Madrid during the fifth year of the century—only six years before I was born—by Juan de la Cuesta. It was a wondrous book by the good don Miguel de Cervantes, who was an inspired genius and ill-starred compatriot. Had he been born English, or one of those accursed Frenchies, the cock would have crowed a different tune for this illustrious one-armed man during his lifetime, and not just to give him posthumous glory, a fate that a begrudging nation like ours tends to reserve for good and decent people, especially in the best of cases. I was fascinated by the book, its adventures and happenings, and moved by the sublime madness of the last caballero andante, the gallant Don Quijote, and also by the knowledge—Diego Alatriste had apprised me of this—that during the most exalted moments the centuries had ever seen, when galleys laden with Spanish infantrymen confronted the fearsome Turkish armada in the Gulf of Lepanto, one of the valiant men who fought with sword in hand that day had been don Miguel, a poor and loyal soldier of his country, of his God, and of his king, as Diego Alatriste and my father later became, and as I myself proposed to be.

I was that morning, as I was saying, reading in the sunshine and pausing from time to time to consider some of the meaty arguments proposed. I, too, had my Dulcinea, as perhaps some of Your Mercies may recall, although my travails of love came not from the disdain of the mistress of my heart but from her perfidy, a circumstance of which I have previously given account when narrating earlier adventures. But even though I had seen myself on the verge of sacrificing honor and life in that sweet trap—the memory of a certain vile talisman sears my memory—I could not forget the vision of blond corkscrew curls and eyes as blue as the sky over Madrid or of a smile identical to the devil’s when, through Eve’s intercession, he tempted Adam to sink his teeth into the fabled apple. The object of my concerns, I calculated, must by now be about thirteen or fourteen years old, and when I imagined her at court participating in soirées and flirtatious carriage rides, surrounded by pages and handsome youths and dandies, I felt for the first time the black scourge of jealousy. Not even my youth, ever more vigorous, or the portents and perils of Flanders, or the nearby presence of the army of vivandières and trulls who followed the soldiers, or the Flemish women themselves—to whom, by my faith, we Spaniards were not always as hostile as we were to their fathers, brothers, and husbands—could make me forget Angélica de Alquézar.

I was mulling over these thoughts when a variety of sounds and commotion drew me from my reading. A general muster of the tercio had been issued, and soldiers were running hither and yon collecting weapons and appurtenances. The colonel had summoned the troops to a flat area just outside Oudkerk, which town we had taken by force some time back and turned into the principal quarters of the Spanish garrison northwest of Breda. My comrade, Jaime Correas, who showed up with the men from Lieutenant Coto’s squad, told me as we joined the others on the way to the appointed location, about a mile from Oudkerk, that the review of the troops had been ordered overnight, called to resolve some very ugly questions of discipline involving a confrontation between soldiers and officers the previous day. This was the rumor circulating among the troops and the mochileros as we walked along the dike toward the nearby plain. The subject was being discussed from every viewpoint, and commands occasionally shouted by the sergeants were not enough to quiet the men.

Jaime, walking beside me, was carrying two short pikes, a brass helmet weighing twenty pounds, and a musket from the squad he served. I myself had Diego Alatriste’s and Mendieta’s harquebuses, a calfskin pack stuffed to the top, and several flasks of powder. Jaime was bringing me up to date as we walked along. It seems that in light of the need to fortify Oudkerk with bastions and trenches, regular soldiers had been asked to do the job, digging sod and carrying fascines (bundles of sticks to aid fortification) for the battlements, with the promise of pay that would remedy the poverty in which, as I have said, they all found themselves because of wages owed and scarcity of provisions. Put a different way, wages to which they were entitled but had not received could be earned a second time by those willing to put shoulder to the wheel, and at the end of each day’s labor they would receive the agreed-upon stipend. Many in the tercio accepted this means of improving their situation, but some spoke up, saying that if there was good coin to be had, their back pay should come first and then the fortifications and that they should not have to work to earn what was already owed them by rights. They said they would rather go without than resort to this remedy, forcing hunger to compete so vilely with honor, and that an hidalgo—for every soldier called himself that—deserved more and that it was better to die of misery and maintain their good name than to owe their well-being to spades and hoes.

In the midst of all this commotion, groups of men had been milling around and trading words amongst themselves, when a sergeant from a certain company mistreated a harquebusier from the bandera of Captain Torralba. This soldier and a comrade, short-tempered despite recognizing by his halberd that the aggressor was a sergeant, jumped into the fire, and, wielding their swords a little too freely, they gravely wounded their offender, only a miracle preventing them from dispatching him to his reward. So it was expected that the colonel would make a public example of the guilty parties and that, with the exception of those on watch, he wanted the entire tercio to witness it.

In these and related discussions we mochileros made our way along with the troops, and even in the squad of Diego Alatriste I heard different views about the affair: Curro Garrote being the most stirred up and, as usual, Sebastián Copons the most indifferent. From time to time I shot uneasy looks at my master to see if I could read his opinion, but he was walking along without a word, as if he heard nothing: sword and dagger in his belt, and the tail of his short cape swinging to the rhythm of his steps. He was tight-lipped when anyone spoke to him, and his face was unreadable beneath the wide brim of his hat.

“Hang them!” said don Pedro de la Daga.

In the eerie silence of the esplanade, the colonel’s voice sounded sharp and cold. The companies were aligned to form three sides of a great rectangle with the banner of each in the center: pikemen and coseletes (soldiers so called because of the armor they wore) lining the sides and detachments of harquebusiers at each corner. The twelve hundred soldiers of the tercio were so quiet and motionless that a botfly could have been heard among the rows. Under different circumstances it would have been a beautiful sight: all those men lined up with such precision, not sumptuously dressed, it is true—their clothing was covered with patches that at times were no more than rags, and they were even more poorly shod—but their weapons were oiled in accord with regulations, and their breastplates, helmets, pike heads, and harquebus barrels had been conscientiously cleaned and polished. Mucrone corusco, “with shining sword,” the chaplain of the tercio, Padre Salanueva, would undoubtedly have said, had he been sober. Every man was wearing or, rather, had sewed onto his doublet or buffcoat, as I had, the faded aspa, the crimson cross of Saint Andrew, also known as the cross of Burgundy, an insignia that allowed Spaniards to recognize a fellow soldier in combat. And on the fourth side of the rectangle, next to the flag of the tercio itself, surrounded by his principal officers and the six German halberdiers of his personal guard, was don Pedro de la Daga on horseback, his proud head bare, lace collar white against his tooled cuirass, cuisses of good Milanese steel, damascened sword at his side, antelope gloves, right hand on his hip and reins in his left.

“From a dead tree,” he added.

Then, with a flick of the reins, he made his mount rear and wheel to face each of the twelve companies of the tercio, as if defying any inclination to discuss his order, which added to a dishonorable death by hanging the insult that the adjudged would not swing from a leafy green branch. I was with the other mochileros, close behind the troop formation, keeping our distance from the women, the curious, and the rabble watching the spectacle from afar. I was a few paces behind Diego Alatriste’s squad, and I could see some of the soldiers in the last rows, Garrote among them, mumbling under their breath when they heard de la Daga’s words. As for Alatriste, his eyes were fixed on the colonel, and his face was as emotionless as ever.

Don Pedro de la Daga must have been about fifty, a small man from Valladolid, with bright eyes, a quick wit, and long experience in the military, though little esteemed by his troops. It was said that his sour temperament came from bilious humors, that is, a constipated nature. A favorite of our General Spínola and with influential patrons in Madrid, de la Daga had made his reputation as a sergeant-major in the Palatinate campaign and had been granted command of the Cartagena tercio after a falconet ball blew off don Enrique Monzón’s leg in Fleurus. Jiñalasoga was not a nickname someone dreamed up out of nowhere; our maestre was one of those men who, like Tiberius, chose to be despised and feared by his men, using such means to impose discipline. That he was courageous in battle was indisputable. He scorned danger as he did his soldiers (you recall that his personal escort consisted of German halberdiers), and he had a good head for strategy. He was close-fisted with money, sparing with favors, and cruel with punishment.

When the two prisoners heard the sentence, they showed little reaction; they already knew the outcome of the affair; not even they could get away with running through a sergeant. The rules of the game were clearly established. The two men stood in the center of the rectangle, guarded by the chief bailiff of the tercio, both bareheaded and their hands tied behind their backs. One was older and had many scars, gray hair, and an enormous mustache; he was the one who had made the first move against their victim, and seemed the calmer of the two. The second was somewhat younger, thin, heavily bearded, and while the elder man kept looking up to the sky, as if none of this had anything to do with him, the thinner one showed more signs of dejection, looking down at the ground, then toward his comrades, then at the hooves of the colonel’s horse only a short distance away. But, like his companion, he comported himself well.

At a signal from the bailiff there was a drum roll, and don Pedro de la Daga’s bugler blasted a few notes to seal the matter.

“Do the adjudged have anything to say?”

A shiver of expectation ran through the companies, and the forest of pikes seemed to tilt forward, the way the wind bows grain, as those holding them leaned in, trying to hear. Then we all watched the bailiff, who had approached the prisoners, tilt his head to one side and listen to something the elder of the two was saying. He looked toward the colonel, who nodded assent, not out of benevolence but because it was the traditional protocol. Then those of us on the esplanade heard the gray-haired man say that he was an old soldier and, like his comrade, a man who had performed his duty up to the present day. Dying went with the profession, but to die of rope fever—whether from a green or dead or devil-may-take-it limb didn’t matter, pardiez—was an unfitting insult to soldiers like themselves who had always put their legs into their breeches like true men. So, seeing that they were to be shuffled off this coil, he and his comrade were asking if it could be by harquebus ball, the way a Spaniard and man of courage dies, not hanged like peasants. And if in the end it was the cost that was the essential factor, he would provide the balls for the harquebuses and save the good colonel the expense. His own were cast from good Escombreras lead, surplus from provisions that he kept in his powder flask, and they wouldn’t do him any damn good where he was going. But be it known, he said, no matter the method, rope or harquebus or singing camp songs, his comrade and he were being sent on their way with a half year of lost pay still owed to them.

Once he had spoken, the veteran shrugged his shoulders with a resigned air and stoically spat on the ground between his boots. His companion spat too, and there were no further words. A long silence ensued, and then, from high atop his horse, don Pedro de la Daga, still with his fist on his hip and not moved in the least by the request, repeated, unrelenting, “Hang them!” At that, a clamor arose from among the various banderas that set the officers on their heels, and there was agitation in the rows of soldiers. Some even fell out of line and shouted, and no orders from the sergeants and captains could put an end to the tumult. Watching all this uproar openmouthed, I turned toward Captain Alatriste to see which side he was taking. He was shaking his head very slowly, as if he had lived through all of this before.

The mutinies in Flanders, offspring of poor discipline deriving from bad administration, were the illness that sapped the prestige of the Spanish monarchy, whose decline in the rebellious provinces—even in those that remained loyal—owed more to mutinous troops than to the actual conduct of the war. Already in my time, insurrection was the one sure way to collect wages. The mutineers would take a city and barricade themselves inside it; indeed, some of the worst sacking in all of Flanders came at the hands of troops seeking compensation for unpaid wages. In any case, it is fair to point out that we were not the only ones. For if we Spanish, as patient as we were cruel, resorted to blood and fire, the Walloon, Italian, and German troops did the same, and they reached the peak of infamy when they sold the forts of San Andrés and Crevecoeur to the enemy, something the Spanish never did. It was not that they were not willing, but they preferred to avoid shame and preserve their reputations. ’Sblood! It is one thing to kill and sack over not being paid, but treachery and acts affecting honor are a different matter.

And on the subject of honor, there were still examples as memorable as the business at Cambrai, where things had come to such a disastrous point that the Conde de Fuentes had to ask the soldiers, the “caballeros” of troops then mutinying at Tirlemont, in his most solicitous tones “to be so kind as to assist him” in taking the stronghold. That horde suddenly became a disciplined and fearsome force again and attacked in perfect order, capturing the citadel and the plaza. And it was mutinous troops who bore the worst of the fight in the dunes of Nieuport, where they requested the position of greatest danger because a woman, the infanta Clara Eugenia, had asked for their help. And I should not overlook the mutinies in Alost, where men had refused to accept the conditions offered in person by the Conde de Mansfeld and had allowed to pass, unhindered, several Dutch regiments that were about to wreak terrible damage upon the king’s estates. Those same troops, when finally they received pay and saw that it was not payment in full, would not accept a single maravedí, refusing to fight even though Flanders, Europe itself, was being lost. However, when they learned that in Antwerp six thousand Dutch and fourteen thousand civilians were about to exterminate the one hundred and thirty Spaniards defending the castle, they set out at forced march at three in the morning, crossed the Escalda, placed green twigs in their helmets as an indication that they anticipated victory, and swore either to eat with Christ in Paradise that night or take their supper in Antwerp. In the end, as their lieutenant, Juan de Navarrete, knelt on the counterscarp waving their banner back and forth, they yelled, “Santiago and Spain!” arose as one, and, rushing the Dutch trenches, they stabbed, slit throats, and crushed the heads of any being in their path. In short, they did what they had sworn to do. Juan de Navarrete and another fourteen did in fact dine with Christ—or with whomever courageous men who die on their feet dine with—but the remainder of their comrades ate that night in Antwerp. For if it is all too true that though our poor Spain has never known justice, or good government, or honest public servants, and has been granted kings barely worthy of wearing the crown, she has also never, as God is my witness, lacked for subjects willing to overlook indifference, poverty, and injustice, willing to clench their teeth, unsheathe steel, and fight for the honor of their nation. For when all is said and done, Spain’s honor was the sum of the negligible honor of each individual.

But let us return to Oudkerk. That was the first of the many mutinies that I would witness during the twenty years of adventure and military life that would take me to the last stand of the Spanish infantry at Rocroi, the day when Spain’s sun finally set in Flanders. During the time of my story, this kind of disorder had become a common institution among our troops, and the process, dating back even further than the days of the great emperor Charles V, was carried out in accord with a well-known and precise ritual. So that day men in some of the few companies began yelling “Pay! Pay!” and others joined in with “Mutiny! Mutiny!” And the first company, that of Captain Torralba, the one to which the two condemned men belonged, contributed their part to the furor. Prior to this moment there had been no handbills or conspiracy, so events developed spontaneously. Opinions were divided: Some were on the side of maintaining discipline, while others touted open rebellion. But what truly aggravated matters was the character of our colonel. Another, more flexible man would have set one candle to God and one to the devil, placating both sides, and soothed the soldiers with words they wanted to hear, for never, that I am aware, did words wound a miser where it hurts most: in his purse. I am referring to something in the vein of “My sons,” “My gallant soldiers,” words of that nature, which had been skillfully employed by the Duque de Alba, don Luis de Requesens, and Alejandro Farnesio, who at heart were as inflexible and scornful of their troops as don Pedro de la Daga was of his. But Jiñalasoga was faithful to his sobriquet, and he made it abundantly clear that he did not give a fig about anything his “gallant soldiers” might do or say. So he ordered the bailiff and his German escort to lead the two prisoners to the nearest tree, dead or green, it was all the same to him. Then he ordered his personal company, one-hundred-plus harquebusiers whom he, the colonel, commanded directly, to go to the center of the rectangle with cords lighted and balls in the barrel. This unit, which had also not been paid but which did enjoy certain privileges, obeyed without argument. That fired up spirits even more.

In truth, only about a fourth of the soldiers wanted to mutiny, but the agitators were scattered throughout the banderas, calling for insurrection, and many men could not make up their minds. In ours, Curro Garrote was the one fueling the disorder, finding a chorus in no few comrades, which, despite the efforts of Captain Bragado, threatened to break up the entire formation, as was already happening in some of the other companies. We mochileros ran to our own, determined not to be left out, and Jaime Correas and I pushed through the soldiers who were shouting in all the tongues of Spain, some with steel already bared in their hands. As usual, according to their tongues and lands of origin, men were lining up against one another: Valencians on one side and Andalusians on the other; Leonese confronting Castilians and Galicians; Cataláns, Basques, and Aragonese looking out for themselves and their interests; and the Portuguese, of whom there were a few, watching the groups form and having no part of it.

As a result, there were no two kingdoms or regions in agreement. Looking back, there is no way to explain the Reconquest other than by the fact that the Moors themselves were Spanish. As for Captain Bragado, he had a pistol in one hand and a dagger in the other, and with Lieutenant Coto and Second Lieutenant Minaya, who was the company standard bearer, he was trying to restore calm but with no success at all. From company to company you could begin to hear cries of “Guzmanes out!” This stage of banishing the nobles who were their commanders was a significant aspect of a curious phenomenon that arose during such insurrections. Soldiers always made a gala display of the status they derived from their profession, calling themselves hijosdalgos, men of quality, and they always wanted to make it clear that the mutiny was against their leaders, not the authority of the Catholic king. So, in order to avoid indicting that authority and dishonoring the tercio, a mutual accord was reached between troops and officers that allowed the latter to march out with their flags along with individual soldiers who chose not to disobey. In that way, officers and insignia were left without stain on their honor, the tercio with its reputation intact, and those mutinying could later make a disciplined return to serve the authority that they had never formally renounced. No one wanted a repeat of what had happened to the Leiva tercio, which was dissolved in Tilte following a mutiny, when tearful standard bearers burned their staffs and banners rather than surrender them, veteran soldiers bared chests riddled with scars, captains threw their broken cavalry lances to the ground, and all those rough and formidable men wept from shame and dishonor.

Bowing to tradition, Captain Bragado, with great reluctance, broke from formation, taking with him the unit’s banner, Soto, Minaya, the sergeants, and the few corporals and soldiers who followed. Jaime Correas, enchanted with the pandemonium, ran from one side to the other, finally joining in the call for “Guzmanes out!” I too was fascinated with all the uproar, and at one moment yelled along with everyone else, although I stopped when I saw that the officers were actually leaving the company. As for Diego Alatriste, I can report that I had found a place near him and his friends in the squad. His face was grave; he had placed his harquebus butt-down on the ground and was standing with both hands resting on the mouth of the barrel. In his group, no one was talking, nor did they seem in any way perturbed, the exception being Garrote, who had already fallen in with the other soldiers and was singing the lead part. When finally Bragado and the officers left, my master turned to Mendieta, Rivas, and Llop, who shrugged their shoulders and, without any fuss, joined the group of mutineers. Copons, however, started after the flag and the officers without a comment to anyone. Alatriste breathed a quiet sigh, shouldered his harquebus, and followed Copons. It was then that he noticed that I was right beside him, thrilled to be in the middle of things and with no intention whatsoever of leaving. He gave me a pinch on the nape of my neck that I won’t forget, forcing me to follow him.

“Your king is your king,” he said.

He threaded his way among soldiers who stepped aside to let him pass, and as they watched him leave, no one dared offer a reproach. Once the two of us were out on open ground, we found ourselves near a group of ten or twelve men composed of Bragado and his loyal soldiers, although, like Copons, who stood there without a word as if this had nothing to do with him, Alatriste kept himself a little apart, almost halfway between the loyalists and the company. Alatriste again set his harquebus on the ground, placed his hands over the mouth of the barrel, and with the shadow of his hat rim shading his gray-green eyes, stood stock still, taking everything in.

Jiñalasoga was still as unyielding as iron. The German guards were stringing up the two prisoners amid the riotous clamor of the troops, whose officers, with their banners, had already separated from their units. I could count four companies that were mutinying among the twelve that formed the tercio, and the rebels were beginning to group together with yells and threats. I heard a shot, though I have no idea who fired it, and it hit no one. Then the colonel ordered his bandera to aim harquebuses and muskets in the direction of the mutineers and the loyal soldiers to reposition themselves in his ranks. There were orders, drum rolls, and bugles, and don Pedro de la Daga spurred his horse, sprinting from one side of the field to the other, readying his troops for battle. I have to acknowledge that he showed a lot of backbone, for malcontents could easily have sprayed a shower of harquebus shots that would have left him at the end of his rope. Being courageous and being a whoreson are not always mutually exclusive. Loyal companies were maneuvered into positions facing the rebel soldiers, albeit with manifest reluctance. Then there were more drums and bugles, orders to officers and loyal soldiers to join companies already in formation, and Bragado and the others fell into line. Copons was beside Diego Alatriste and me, but as I said, somewhat apart from the others. And on hearing the order and affirming that the tercio was in place facing the rebels, weapons in hand and slow matches smoking, the two veterans laid their harquebuses on the ground, took off the bandoliers containing twelve charges of powder—the belts they called “the twelve apostles”—and, thus stripped of weapons, set off behind their banner.

I had never seen anything like it. As the soldiers loyal to the tercio took up battle positions, the four mutinying companies took theirs. They, too, adopted battle formation: pikemen in the center and detachments of harquebuses in the corners. In the absence of officers, squad corporals, even ordinary soldiers, took command. With the natural instinct of veterans, the mutineers were aware that lack of order would be their ruin, and that—now here’s a military paradox—only discipline could save. So that without standing down a point, they executed their maneuvers according to traditional patterns, one by one slipping into place in line. Soon we smelled the unmistakable odor of lit saltpeter-soaked harquebus cords and saw forks for the muskets set into the ground, preparing the weapons to be fired.

The colonel was determined to have either blood or obedience. The two sentenced men were already hanging from a tree, and with that matter resolved, the German escorts—tall, blond, and as unfeeling as slabs of meat—again surrounded don Pedro de la Daga, halberds upraised. Their leader gave new orders, the drums, bugles, and fifes sounded one more time, and still with that irritating right fist planted on his hip, Jiñalasoga watched as his loyal companies began to advance toward the mutineers.

“Cartagena tercio! Haaaalt!”

Suddenly everything went silent. Loyal and rebel companies were in close rows some twenty-five meters apart, pikes at the ready and harquebuses loaded. The banners removed from mutinying units joined together the center of the formation, along with the loyal soldiers escorting them. I was right among them, for I wanted to stand beside my master, who had taken his place with the dozen men in his company who had not chosen the other side. With no harquebus, his sword in its scabbard, and his thumbs hooked into his belt, Diego Alatriste gave the impression he was merely an observer; nothing in his attitude indicated that he was prepared to attack his former companions.

“Cartagena tercio! Reaaaaaady harquebuses!”

Down the rows echoed the metallic sounds of harquebusiers packing powder into the pans and smoldering cord in the striker. Through the grayish smoke from the ignited cords I could see the faces of the men we were confronting: tanned, bearded, scarred, with expressions of grim resolve beneath their helmets and ripped hat brims. Triggered by the movements of our harquebusiers, some on the rebel side made the same preparations, and many of the coseletes in the first rows set their pikes. But cries and protests could be heard among them—“Señores, señores, let us use reason!”—and nearly all the harquebuses and pikes of the mutineers were again held upright, giving to understand that it was not their intention to attack their companions. On our side, we all turned to look at de la Daga when his voice resounded across the open field.

“Sergeant-major! Make those men swear obedience to their king.”

Sergeant-Major Idiáquez stepped forward, baton in hand, and demanded that the rebels immediately renounce their demands. It was a mere formality, and Idiáquez, a veteran who had mutinied no few times himself—especially in the year 1598, when unpaid wages and lack of discipline had caused us to lose half of Flanders—intervened briefly and succinctly, returning to our lines without waiting for a reply. For their part, none of the men in front of us seemed to grant any importance to the command the sergeant-major had issued, and all we heard were isolated cries of “Pay! Pay!” After which, as erect as ever in his saddle and implacable in his tooled cuirass, don Pedro de la Daga lifted one antelope-gloved hand.

“Aimmm harquebuses!”

The harquebusiers set their weapons against their cheeks, fingers on the triggers of the strikers, and blew on the lit cords. The heavier fork-mounted muskets were pointed straight at the opposing ranks, where some were beginning to stir in their lines, restless but with no signs of hostility.

“Order to fire! At my command!”

That command boomed across the esplanade, and although some few men in the rebel lines stepped back, I must say that nearly all were dauntless, remaining in place despite the menacing barrels of the loyalists’ harquebuses. I glanced at Diego Alatriste and saw that like most of the soldiers, both those holding weapons on our side and those facing us, stoically waiting to be fired upon, he was looking toward Sergeant-Major Idiáquez. The captains and sergeants of the companies were also looking toward him, but he in turn had his eye on his most supreme excellency the colonel. Who was not looking at anyone, as if he were engaged in an exercise he simply found annoying. Jiñalasoga had already lifted his hand when we all saw—or thought we saw—Idiáquez give a slight negative shake of his head, barely a movement that could not really be called a movement, and therefore it could not be said to contradict discipline, so later, when responsible parties made their inquiries, no one could swear he had seen it. And with that gesture, just at the instant don Pedro de la Daga called “Fire!” the eight loyal companies lowered their pikes and the harquebusiers as a single man and laid their weapons on the ground.

4. TWO VETERANS

It took three days of negotiation, half payment of back wages, and a personal appearance from our General don Ambrosio Spínola to restore obedience among the Oudkerk mutineers. Three days in which the discipline of the old Cartagena tercio was more iron-fisted than ever, with officers and standards of all the companies gathered together in the town and the tercio itself camped outside the walls. I have already reported how the tercios were never more disciplined than when they were mutinying. On this occasion they even reinforced the advanced watch posts to prevent the Dutch from taking advantage of circumstances and falling upon us like pigs upon grain. As for the soldiers, the system of order established by elected representatives functioned very efficiently and without oversight, even going so far as to execute, this time without protest from anyone, five scruffy miscreants who had thought they could sack the town on their own. They were reported by citizens, and in a summary trial, before a tribunal composed of their fellow soldiers, they were sentenced to be shot in front of the cemetery wall, where they would find peace and later glory. In fact, at first there were only four men, but two other criminals guilty of lesser crimes had been sentenced to have their ears cut off, and one of them protested the judgment with many “’Pon my lifes” and “’Fore Gods,” averring that an hidalgo and old Christian like himself, a descendent of Mendozas and Guzmáns, would rather see himself dead than suffer such insult. So, the tribunal—unlike our commander and being composed of soldiers and comrades—was understanding on points of honor and decided to show mercy upon the ear, exchanging it for the ball from a harquebus and without according the scoundrel the change of heart—he was no doubt a fickle hidalgo—that overcame him when he found himself with both ears intact by the cemetery wall.

That was the first time I saw don Ambrosio Spínola y Grimaldi, otherwise known as Marqués de las Balbases, grandee of Spain, captain of the Flanders forces, whose image—wearing blued, gold-studded armor, a general’s baton in his left hand, large white collar of Flemish lace, red sash, and antelope boots, courteously preventing the conquered Dutchman from bowing before him—would live forever in history thanks to the brushes of Diego Velázquez. I will speak more of that famous painting when the time comes, for it is not irrelevant that it was I who, years later, provided the painter with the details he required.

At the time of Oudkerk and Breda our general was fifty-five or fifty-six years old, slim in body and face, pale, with gray beard and hair. His astute and resolute character was not at odds with his Genoese homeland, which he had left by choice in order to serve our kings. A patient soldier favored by fate, he did not have the charisma of the iron man the Duque de Alba, nor the cunning of some of his other ancestors. His enemies at court, a number that increased with each of his successes—it could be no other way among Spaniards—had accused him both of being a foreigner and of becoming overly ambitious. But the indisputable fact was that he had achieved Spain’s grandest military triumphs in the Palatinate and in Flanders, investing his personal fortune in those successes and mortgaging his family estates to pay his troops. He even lost his brother Federico in a naval battle against rebellious Hollanders. In that period his military prestige was enormous, to the degree that when Mauricio de Nassau, a general in the enemy camp, was asked who was the best soldier of the era, he had replied, “Spínola is the second.” Our don Ambrosio was a man with a great deal of backbone, which had earned him a reputation among the troops in campaigns prior to the Twelve Years’ Truce. Diego Alatriste could give personal testimony to that from his own memories of Spínola when he came to lend aid at Sluys, and also during the siege of Ostend. In the latter, the marqués had been in such a dangerous position in the midst of the fray that the soldiers, Alatriste among them, lowered their pikes and harquebuses, refusing to fight until their general took himself to a place of safety.

The day that don Ambrosio Spínola personally broke up the mutiny, many of us watched him as he emerged from the campaign tent where the negotiations had been carried out. His staff and our colonel, hanging his head, filed out behind him. De la Daga was chewing the ends of his mustache, furious that his proposal of hanging one of every ten mutineers to serve as a lesson had not been accepted. But don Ambrosio, with his intelligence and good nature, had declared the matter closed, restoring the formal discipline of the tercios and returning officers and banners to their companies. Eager soldiers lined up before the tables of the paymasters—the money had come from the private coffers of the general—and from all around the camp, sutlers, prostitutes, merchants, and other parasites of war flocked to receive their share of the torrent of gold.

Diego Alatriste was among those in the vicinity of the tent. For this reason, when don Ambrosio Spínola came out, pausing a moment to allow his eyes to adjust to the light, the notes of the bugle drew Alatriste and his companions closer in order to get a good look at the general. As was the custom among the old soldiers, most of them had brushed their oft-mended clothing; their weapons were polished; and even their hats seemed dashing despite stitched tears and holes, for these soldiers who took pride in their way of life were eager to demonstrate that a mutiny was not without its touches of gallantry among the men. This produced a strange paradox: Seldom had the soldiers of the Cartagena tercio looked better than when viewed by their general at the conclusion of the events at Oudkerk. And Spínola—Golden Fleece gleaming upon his gorget, escorted by his select harquebusiers and trailed by his staff, seemed to appreciate the sight as he strolled among the clusters of men who fell back to open a path for him and cheered him wildly just for being who he was and especially for delivering their pay. They also cheered to emphasize the contrast between him and don Pedro de la Daga, who was walking behind his captain-general and stewing over not having an excuse to illustrate the charms of his rope. There was, too, the sting of the admonishment that don Ambrosio had administered to him in private and in great detail, threatening to remove him from his command if he did not care for his soldiers as he would “little girls who were the light of his eyes.” This is precisely what we heard from those who knew, although I doubt the part about the little girls. Everyone knows that compassionate or tyrannical, stupid or wise, all generals and colonels are dogs from the same litter and that none has the least concern for the soldiers, whose unique purpose in their minds is to garner them gold medallions and laurel wreaths. But that day the Spaniards, happy about the felicitous outcome of their mutiny, were ready to accept any rumor and any development. Don Ambrosio was smiling paternally left and right, greeting “his gallant soldiers” and “his sons,” saluting genially from time to time with his baton and occasionally, when he recognized the face of an officer or veteran soldier, devoting a few courteous words directly to him. In short, he was doing his job. And by my faith, he was doing it well.

Then he came to Captain Alatriste, who was standing apart with his comrades watching the general’s progress. It is true that the group was a striking sight, for as I have written, my master’s squad was composed almost entirely of veteran soldiers, men with copious mustaches and scars on skin like Cordovan leather. Especially attired in all their trappings—bandoliers with the “twelve apostles,” sword, dagger, harquebus, or musket in hand—no one would question that there was no Dutchman or Turk or creature from hell who could stop them once the drums beat the tattoo to charge and give no quarter. Don Ambrosio looked the squad over, admiring the picture they made, and was about to smile and walk on by when he recognized my master, stopped, and said in his soft Spanish with its Italian cadences, “Pardiez, Captain Alatriste. Is it really you? I thought we had left you behind forever in Fleurus.”

Alatriste doffed his hat and stood with it in his left hand, the wrist of his right draped over the barrel of his harquebus.

“Nearly so,” Alatriste replied in measured tones, “as Your Excellency does me the honor of recalling. But it was not my hour.”

The general studied the scars on the veteran’s weathered face. He had first spoken to Alatriste twenty years before, during his attempt to save the day at Sluys when, surprised by a cavalry charge, don Ambrosio had had to take refuge in the square formed by Alatriste and other soldiers. Alongside them, his rank forgotten, the illustrious Genoese had had to fight for his life on foot, using only sword and pistol, throughout an endless day. He had not forgotten that, and nor had Alatriste.

“So I see,” said Spínola. “And in those hedgerows of Fleurus, don Gonzalo de Córdoba told me that you fought like men of honor.”

“Don Gonzalo spoke the truth when he used the word honor, for honors were due. Nearly all my comrades stayed there.”

Spínola scratched his goatee, as if he had just remembered something.

“Did I not promote you to sergeant at that time?”

Alatriste slowly shook his head. “No, Excellency. The ‘sergeant’ came about in ’18, because Your Excellency remembered me from Sluys.”

“Then how is it that you are a foot soldier once again?”

“I lost my rank a year later, because of a duel.”

“Something serious?”

“A lieutenant.”

“Dead?”

“As a doornail.”

The general considered Alatriste’s words and then exchanged a look with the officers surrounding him. He frowned and made a move to walk on.

“As God is my witness,” he said, “I am surprised they didn’t hang you.”

“It was during the Maastrique mutiny, Excellency.”

Alatriste had spoken without a shred of emotion. The general stopped, thinking back.

“Ah, yes, I remember now.” The frown had disappeared, and he was smiling again. “The Germans and the colonel whose life you saved. And for that did I not grant you a warrant of eight escudos?”

Again Alatriste shook his head.

“No, Excellency. That was for White Mountain. When, with Captain Bragado, who is standing over there today, we climbed behind Bucquoi up to the forts above. As for the escudos, they were cut back to four.”

At that, don Ambrosio’s smile slipped from his face. He looked around with a distracted air.

“Well,” he concluded. “At any rate, I am pleased to have seen you again. Is there anything I can do for you?”

Alatriste smiled, though his face changed very little; a barely perceptible light glinted among the wrinkles about his eyes.

“I think not, Excellency. Today I am collecting six months of back pay, and I have no complaint.”

“Good. And this meeting between two old veterans has been pleasant, don’t you agree?” He had put out a hand as if to give Alatriste a friendly pat on the shoulder, but the captain’s steady and sardonic gaze appeared to dissuade him. “I am referring to you and me, of course.”

“Naturally, Excellency.”

“Soldier and, ahem, soldier.”

“Of course.”

Don Ambrosio again cleared his throat, smiled one last time, and looked ahead to the next group. In his mind he had already moved on.

“Good luck, Captain Alatriste.”

“Good luck, Excellency.”

The Marqués de los Balbases, Captain-General of Flanders, continued on. The path to glory and posterity lay before him—though he did not know it, and we were the ones who would do all the hard work—through the magnum opus of Diego Velázquez, but it was also to be the pathway toward calumny and injustice dealt him by the adoptive country he had served so generously. Because while Spínola reaped victories for the king, who was ungrateful like all the kings the world has ever seen, enemies were cutting the ground from beneath his feet at court, far from the fields of battle, discrediting him before the monarch of languid gestures and pallid soul, who, good-natured but weak, always managed to find himself far from where honorable wounds were being received. Instead of adorning himself in the appurtenances of war, this king dressed for palace balls, even the country dances Juan de Esquivel taught in his academy. Only five years after the time we are speaking of, the man who stormed Breda, the intelligent and expert military strategist, the man of courage who loved Spain to the point of sacrifice, was to die ill and disillusioned. Don Francisco de Quevedo would write a poem expressing Spain’s loss.

You subjected the Palatinate,To benefit the Spanish monarchy.Your ideals countering their heresy.In Flanders we badly missed your gallantry,E’en more in Italy…and now this eulogy,amid sorrow we dare not contemplate.

As reward for his noble endeavors he received the standard wages our land of Cains—more stepmother than mother, ever base and miserly—holds for those who love her and serve her well: oblivion, the poison engendered by envy, ingratitude, and dishonor. And the greatest irony was that poor don Ambrosio would die with only an enemy to console him, Julio Mazarino, who, like him, was an Italian by birth, a future cardinal and minister of France, and the only person to comfort him on his deathbed. It was to him that our poor general would confess, with senile delirium: “I die with neither honor nor reputation…They have taken everything from me, money, and honor…I was a decent man…This is not the payment forty years of service deserves.”

It was a few days after the mutiny had calmed that I became embroiled in a singular altercation. It happened the same day the pay was distributed, a day of leave granted our tercio before we returned to the Ooster canal. All Oudkerk was one great Spanish fiesta. Even the faces of the surly Flemish, whom only months before we had slashed and gored, cleared before the rain of gold that showered over the town. The presence of soldiers with full purses had the effect of producing, as if by magic, victuals that had previously been swallowed up by the earth. Beer and wine—the latter more appreciated by our troops, who, like the great Lope de Vega before them, called the former “ass piss”—flowed like water, and even the sun, warm overhead, helped brighten the party and shed its rays upon dancing in the streets, music, and card games. Houses with a sign on the front displaying swans or calabashes—I am referring to brothels and taverns, of course; in Spain we used branches of laurel or pine—were, as the old saying goes, making hay while the sun shines. Blonde, pale-skinned women recovered their hospitable smiles, and that day no few husbands, fathers, and brothers looked, more or less willingly, the other way while their women starched the tail of your shirt. There is no stone so hard that it cannot be softened by the timely clink of that pimp and procuress gold. In addition, the Flemish women, liberal in their behavior and conversation, were not at all like our sanctimonious Spanish women. They willingly allowed you to take their hands and kiss them on the face, and it was not too great a challenge to strike up a friendship with one who claimed to be Catholic, evidenced by the fact that more than a few accompanied our soldiers on their return to Italy or Spain. Nevertheless, none was as perfect as Flora, the heroine of El sitio de Bredá, The Siege of Breda, whom the author, don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, undoubtedly exaggerating a little, endowed with laudable virtues: a Spanish sense of honor and a love for Spaniards that I never came across in any Flemish woman. Nor, I suspect, did Calderón.

But back to my story. I was telling Your Mercies that there in Oudkerk, the usual entourage of troops on campaign—soldiers’ wives, whores, sutlers, gamblers, and people of every ilk—had set up their stalls outside of town, and soldiers were coming and going between these attractions and the town, dressing up threadbare duds with new trifles, plumes on hats, and other fripperies—as the sacristan knows, easy come, easy go. There was wanton disregard of the Ten Commandments, and few theological or cardinal virtues were left inviolate. It was, in short, what the Flemish call kermesse and we Spaniards jolgorio, a rowdy celebration. Or as the veterans put it, we could have been in Italy.

The happy-go-lucky youth in me took in everything that day, as youths will do. Along with Jaime Correas, I saw every sight from Micah to Mecca, and although I was not much of a drinker, I downed the precious grape along with everyone else, among other reasons because drinking and gambling were what soldiers did, and there was no shortage of acquaintances who offered me a quaff free of charge. As for gaming, I did none of that because we mochileros had no pay to collect, past or current, so I had naught to play with. But I stood around watching the circles of soldiers gathered round the drumheads they used for throwing dice and playing cards. For if most of the miles gloriosus among our men were strangers to the Ten Commandments and scarcely knew how to read or write, had writing been based on the markings of a pack of cards, everyone would have been as familiar with the book of prayer as they were with their deck of forty-eight.

Fair dice and loaded dice rolled across drumheads, and cards were as handily shuffled as if the action were taking place in the Potro square in Córdoba or the Patio de los Naranjos in Seville. There were numerous card games where players could throw in their money, among them rentoy, manilla, quínolas, and pintas. The center of the camp was one enormous gaming house, with “I’m in” and “I’m out,” and more swearing than artillery fire, with a “Damn that whore of gold” here and an “It’s your play” there, and not least a “’Fore God and your blessed mother.” Those who talk loudest in such moments are the ones who in battle show more fear than iron in their spine but who make a great show of courage in the rear guard and who who wield the swords on cards faster than they unsheathe their own. One soldier gambled away the six months of pay that had been his reason to mutiny, losing it through blows of fate as mortal as any dagger. In fact, such blows were not always metaphorical; from time to time cheating would be revealed—a shaved card, a pin-pricked king, a die weighted with quicksilver—and then the air thickened with “’Pon my life” and “’Pon your life,” “You lie through your teeth,” and worse, followed by a downpour of blows as daggers cut, swords slashed, and blood was spilled that had nothing to do with the barber or with the art of Hippocrates.

What rabble is this? What men, what breeds?Soldiers, Spaniards, plumes, and finery,words, wit, lies, and gallantry,Arrogance, bravura, and foul deeds.

I have already told Your Mercies that it was during this time that my virtue, like many other things, was carried off on the winds of Flanders. And in that regard I ended that day visiting, with Jaime Correas, a wheeled conveyance sheltered beneath a canvas and some boards where a certain pater brothelia, a pious enough calling where there is want, offered three or four of his parishioners to assuage manly woes.

There are six or seven varietiesof women, Otón, who sin,all of them strolling along these shores,shall we gather one in?

One of those “varieties” was a flamboyantly robed girl, fair of mien and limb and of a reasonable age, and my comrade and I had invested a good part of the booty we had harvested during the sacking of Oudkerk in her company. We had no jingling purse that day, but the girl, half Spanish, half Italian, a wench who called herself Clara de Mendoza—I never met a trollop who did not boast of being a de Mendoza or de Guzmán though she came from a line of swineherds—had looked on us with favorable eyes for some reason that escapes me, unless it was the insolence of our years and perhaps her belief that she who takes a young and grateful youth as a client will keep him all her life. At the end of the day we went down to her neck of the woods, more to look than with coins to spend. The vivacious Mendoza, though she was occupied in activities proper to her office, nonetheless sent a friendly word our way, along with a dazzling, if somewhat snaggletoothed, smile. A certain loudmouthed soldier who was consorting with her at that moment did not take kindly to this. He was a fellow from Valencia, with a chestnut mustache and villainous beard, a burly, pugnacious type, and with his “Be off with you, forsooth!” he added a kick for my comrade and a slap for me, apportioning us equal shares. The punch to my cheek was more painful to my honor than to my face, and my youthful spirit, which a quasi-military life had not made more tolerant when confronted with such nonsense, duly responded. My right hand, of its own accord, went to the belt where my good Toledo dagger was snugged against my kidneys.

“Appreciate, Your Mercy,” I said, “the disparity between our persons.”

I did not actually pull my weapon, but the move was natural to someone born in Oñate, as I had been. As for the “disparity,” I was referring to my being a young mochilero and he a lordly soldier, but this contentious fellow took my words for an insult, thinking that I was questioning his worth. The truth is, the presence of witnesses rubbed this blusterer up the wrong way, and he was also loaded to the gills, for sloshing around in his innards was a great quantity of wine, as his breath betrayed. But without further preamble, the words were scarcely out of my mouth before he came at me like a madman, putting hand to his storied weapon, Durendal. People jumped aside, and not one soul intervened, apparently believing that I was lad enough to back my words with action. May God send down his thunderbolts on those who left me in that pickle. How cruel is the human condition when there is a spectacle to be witnessed, for not one of those bystanders aspired to make redemption his vocation, and I, who at that point in the proceedings could not put my tongue back into its scabbard, had no recourse but to pull out my dagger, hoping to make the game a little more even-handed, or at least to avoid ending my soldierly career like a chicken on a spit.

Life in the service of Captain Alatriste and the army in Flanders had taught me a certain cunning, and I was a vigorous lad of fairly good size. And besides, La Mendoza was watching. So I stepped back from the sword tip, squarely facing the Valencian, who, completely at ease, began to make passes at me with the sharp edges of his sword, the kind of moves that do not kill but that make you happy to leave the scene. I could not run away, however—there was my reputation to consider—and I could not stand fast because of the discrepancy between our blades. I was tempted to throw my dagger at him, but I kept a cool head, despite my foreboding; I was aware that the final curtain would come down if I missed. My opponent kept coming at me with all the tricks of a Turk, and I kept moving back, well aware that I was inferior in weapons, body, strength, and expertise: He had his Toledo blade, was strong as an ox when sober, and skilled, whereas I was a wet-behind-the-ears youth with a dagger and bravado that would not serve me as shield. I envisioned that at least a split head—mine—would be the booty from this campaign.

“Com’ere, then, young capon,” the fellow said.

As he spoke, the wine in his belly caused him to stumble, so without his having to ask twice, I did as he requested. And as with the agility of my young years I was able to dodge his steel, covering my face with my left arm in case he should cut me off midway, I slashed with my dagger: right to left, above and below. Had it been a little longer, that blade would have left the king without a soldier and Valencia without a favorite son. To my good fortune, I jumped clear without major injury, but having only scratched my adversary’s groin—which is where I had aimed my thrust—severing his trouser latchet and drawing a “God’s blood!” that brought laughter from the witnesses and also some applause that, though little consolation, indicated that the crowd was on my side.

My attack, I can safely say, was a mistake, for everyone had seen that I was not some poor defenseless little boy, and now no one would step in or even plan to step in. Even my comrade, Jaime Correas, was urging me on, delighted with my performance in the altercation. The worst part was that with my blow the wine fumes that had befogged my opponent suddenly dissipated; with renewed vigor, he was now ready to make mincemeat of me. Horrified at the thought of going to my reward without confessing but with little choice, I resolved to make a second and final move: I would slip between the Valencian’s sword and his belly, stay in there somehow, and stab and stab and stab until one of the two of us was sent off with a letter for the devil. Lacking absolution and last rites, I would manufacture the necessary explanations. Strangely, years later a French author would write, “A Spaniard, having determined the move he will make with his knife, will carry through though he be cut to pieces,” and when I read that, I thought that nothing could better express the decision I had made confronting the Valencian. I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth, and as my enemy took one of the two-handed swings he was directing at me, I awaited the moment when the tip of his sword reached the point of the arc farthest from me, and planned to lunge at him with my dagger. And I would have done it, pardiez, had powerful hands not grabbed me by an arm and the nape of the neck at the same time a body stepped between me and my enemy. I looked up, dumbfounded, to meet the cold gray-green eyes of Captain Alatriste.

“The boy was not much of a match for a brave man like you.”

The scene had shifted, and now the action was being played out beside the canal and with relative discretion. Diego Alatriste and the Valencian were some fifty strides from the original site, at the foot of the embankment of a dike that hid them from the camp. Up on the dike, considerably higher above them, my master’s friends were keeping away the curious. They were very casual about it but nevertheless formed a barrier that prevented anyone from passing. Llop, Rivas, and Mendieta were there, and a few others, including Sebastián Copons. It was the latter’s iron hands that had plucked me from my imbroglio, and now I was standing beside him, watching what was happening below on the shore of the canal. All around me Alatriste’s friends were acting nonchalant, gazing off in different directions, discouraging anyone attempting to come take a look with fierce glances, twisting of mustaches, and hands poised on the pommels of swords. So that everything would be conducted in the proper manner, they had brought along two of the Valencian’s acquaintances in case witnesses should be needed regarding the settling of affairs.

“You would never,” Alatriste added, “want to be called a baby butcher.”

He said it with ice and derision in his voice, and in return the Valencian growled a blasphemous curse. There was no trace of the vapors of wine left in him, and he was running his left hand over his beard and mustache, piqued, still holding his unsheathed weapon in his right hand. Despite his menacing appearance and the threat of the naked blade, one could read between the lines that he was not entirely inclined toward swordplay, otherwise he would already have launched his attack against the captain, resolved to get in the first thrust. Pride and concern for his reputation had brought him here, along with the questionable state of his honor after his encounter with me, but from time to time he glanced up toward the top of the embankment, as if he still trusted that someone would step in before the matter went any further. The primary focus of his attention, however, was on every act of Diego Alatriste, who very slowly, as if he had all the time in the world, had taken off his hat, then, with measured movements, had pulled the bandolier with the twelve apostles over his head and laid it and his harquebus on the ground near the canal. Now, cool and collected, he was unfastening his doublet.

“A brave man like you,” Alatriste repeated, his eyes locked with the Valencian’s.

The second time the captain had uttered that como vos, “like you,” with such cold sarcasm, the Valencian had snorted with fury, looked up at the men on the embankment, taken one step forward and another to the side, and whipped his sword back and forth. When not used among good acquaintances, friends, or persons of very different status, that vos, rather than uced or “Your Mercy,” was not very courteous and was often considered an insult by the invariably thin-skinned Spaniard. If we consider that in Naples the Conde de Lemos and don Juan de Zúñiga took out their swords—they and all their retinue, even their servants—and that one hundred and fifty blades were drawn that day because one called the other señoría instead of “Excellency” and because the other returned with vuesamerced instead of señoría, it is easy to judge the extent of such sensitivities. It was painstakingly clear that the Valencian could not willingly endure that vos, and that despite his indecision—it was evident that he knew the man standing before him by sight and reputation—he was left with no option but to fight. To sheathe his sword before another soldier who had addressed him as vos, especially as he was brandishing his sword with such swagger, would have been a black mark on his reputation.

In Spanish, the word reputation was, in those days, a very weighty word. Not for nothing had we Spaniards fought for a century and a half in Europe, ruining ourselves to defend the true religion and our reputation, while the Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and other accursed heretics, despite spicing their stew with a lot of Bible and freedom of thought, had fought so that their merchants and their companies in the Indies could earn more money. Reputation was of little concern to them if it did not offer practical advantages. It has always been our way, however, to be guided less by practical sense than by the Ora pronobis and the “What will people say”? So that was how things were in Europe, and that is how things were with us.

“No one invited you to bring your candle to this funeral,” the Valencian said hoarsely.

“True,” Alatriste conceded, as if he had thought carefully about candles and funerals, “but I thought that a fine soldier like you”—again that vos—“deserved someone who was more your own size, so I hope to be of service.”

By now Alatriste was in his shirtsleeves, and the stitched tears, patched hose, and old boots tied below the knee with harquebus cord did not diminish his imposing appearance one whit. The water in the canal reflected the gleam of his sword as he drew it from the scabbard.

“If it please you, would you tell me your name?”

The Valencian, who was unfastening a jerkin with as many rips and tears as the captain’s shirt, gave a surly nod. His eyes never left his adversary’s blade.

“My name is García de Candau.”

“A pleasure.” Alatriste had put his left hand behind him, and in it now glinted the Vizcaína, his dagger with the shepherd’s crook guards. “Mine…”

“I know who you are,” the other interrupted. “You are that charlatan captain who gives himself a title he does not possess.”

Atop the embankment, Alatriste’s men looked at each other. The wine had given the Valencian some nerve after all. Those familiar with Diego Alatriste knew that if the man were hoping to get out of this with nothing more than a wound or two and a few weeks on his back, wading into those deep waters was a fatal card to play. We all watched expectantly, determined not to lose a single moment.

Then I saw that Diego Alatriste was smiling. I had lived with him long enough to know that smile: a grimace beneath his mustache, a funereal omen, bloodthirsty as a weary wolf once again preparing for the kill but without passion and without hunger, simply doing its job.

As they pulled the Valencian onto land, blood stained the calm waters of the canal around him. Everything had been done in accord with the rules of fencing and of decency, man to man, feet set, swords slashing, daggers playing, until Captain Alatriste’s blade entered where it was wont. And when questions arose about that death—amid cards, quarrels, and slaughtering knives, three others were dispatched that day, along with half a dozen wounded—the witnesses, all soldiers of our lord and king, and men whose word was trusted, said straight out that the Valencian had fallen into the canal after drinking himself senseless, wounding himself with his own weapon. So the chief bailiff of the tercio, privately relieved, declared the matter closed and bade everyone to go tend his roses. As if that wasn’t enough, that very night the Dutch attacked. And the bailiff, the colonel, the soldiers, Captain Alatriste, and I as well had—God knows it—more urgent things to think about.

5. THE LOYAL INFANTRY

The enemy attacked in the middle of the night, and the men at the “forlorn hope” postings were precisely that, without hope, slaughtered without even the time to flick an eyelash. Informed by his spies, Maurice of Nassau had seized the opportunity offered by the churning waters of the mutiny. Planning to install a relief unit of Dutch and English troops in Breda, he had approached Oudkerk from the north with large numbers of infantry and cavalry, and in their progress they had wreaked havoc and destruction at our advance posts. The Cartagena tercio, along with Don Carlos Soest’s Walloon infantry detachment, which was camped nearby, received the order to intercept the Hollanders and hold them back until our General Spínola could organize the counterattack. So in the middle of the night we were routed from sleep by drums and fifes and calls to collect our weapons. No one who has not lived such moments can imagine the clamor and confusion: lit torches illuminating running, pushing, startled figures, their faces serene, grave, terrorized. There were contradictory orders, captains shouting, sergeants hastily lining up rows of half-asleep, half-dressed soldiers and trying to get them outfitted for battle. All this chaos played out against the deafening rat-a-tat-tat of drums from the camp to the town, people scrambling to their windows and up on the walls, camps being struck, whinnying horses maddened by hands conveying the threat of combat. Battle-torn banners were drawn from their sheaths and unfurled to ripple in the breeze: crosses of Burgundy, bars of Aragon, quarters with castles and lions and chains, all rippling in the red light of torches and bonfires.

Captain Bragado’s company was among the first to march off, leaving behind the fires of the fortified town and camp and plunging into darkness along a dike bordering vast salt marshes and peat bogs. The word ran down the line of soldiers that we were marching to the Ruyter mill, a place the Dutch would have to pass en route to Breda because the land was narrow there, and according to what we’d been told, it was not possible to ford the river anywhere else. I was walking with the other mochileros from Diego Alatriste’s company, carrying his and Sebastián Copons’s harquebuses. I stayed close behind them, for I was also carrying a store of powder and balls and part of their supplies. Despite the dubious privilege of being loaded like a mule, this daily exercise had the benefit of strengthening my arms and legs. We Spaniards always do find a way to shrug off our troubles: From every ill some good will come, or vice versa.

Well, my brothers and señores,you know without my explanationan honor is never, ever, wonexcept with extreme extenuation.

The march was not easy in that murky light, for the moon was new and almost always hidden behind the clouds, so now and again some soldier would stumble, or the line would stop and you would bump into the person ahead of you, and then all along the dike the “’Pon my lifes” and “Pardiezes” erupted like a hailstorm of shot. My master was, as usual, a silent silhouette I followed like the shadow of a shadow. As we walked along, my head and my heart were filled with conflicting emotions: on one hand, a youth’s normal excitement about imminent action, but on the other, misgivings about the darkness and the prospect of battling a substantial number of enemies on open ground. Perhaps that was why it had made such an impression on me when, still in Oudkerk and just as the tercio had fallen in by the torchlight, even the most vocal nonbelievers had taken a moment to kneel and bare their heads as Chaplain Salanueva went up and down the rows giving us general absolution, just in case. For although the padre was a sullen and stupid priest who in his cups always tangled his Latin, he was, after all, the closest thing to a holy man we had. In any case, one thing does not cancel the other, and in a bad situation our soldiers always preferred an Ego te absolvo from a sinner’s hand to heading toward the next world with nothing to cover their sins.

One detail disturbed me greatly, however, and from the comments I heard around me, the veteran soldiers had also given it some thought. As we crossed one of the bridges near the dike, we saw by the light of some lanterns that sappers—those entrusted with disarming the mines—with axes and mattocks were preparing to tear down the bridge behind us, no doubt to deprive the Dutch of a passage through that area. However, that also meant that we ourselves could not expect reinforcements from the rear. And also, if it eventually came to “every man for himself,” it would be impossible to retreat in that direction. There were other bridges, no doubt, but imagine, Your Mercies, the effect that had on us as we marched toward the enemy in that black night.

Nevertheless, with or without a bridge behind us, we reached the Ruyter mill before dawn. From there you could hear the distant bursts of shots as our most advanced harquebusiers kept the Dutch entertained. A bonfire was burning, and in its splendor we could see the miller and his family, a woman and four very young children, all frightened and in their nightclothes, who had been driven from their home and were watching, powerless, as soldiers broke down doors and windows, fortified the upper floor, and piled up demolished furnishings to form a bulwark. As the flames reflected off helmets and corselets, the children sobbed from terror of those rough men clad in steel, and the miller held his head in his hands, watching as his livelihood was ruined, his property devastated, and no one was moved in the least by his fate. In war, tragedy becomes routine, and the soldier’s heart is hardened as much by the misfortune of others as by his own. As for the mill, our colonel had chosen it as a lookout and command post, and we could see don Pedro de la Daga in the doorway, conferring with the Walloon commander, each surrounded by his principal officers and flag bearers. From time to time they turned to look toward the distant fires a half league or so away as well as the hamlets burning in the distance, where the main body of the Dutch seemed to be concentrated.

We were made to march on a little farther, leaving the mill behind, and the companies spread out in the darkness among the hedgerows and beneath the trees, walking through tall wet grass that soaked us to the knees. The order was to not light fires and to wait. Occasionally a nearby shot or a false alarm sent a shudder through our lines, evoking a burst of “Halt!” and “Who goes there?” Fear and watchfulness are bad companions to repose. The men in the vanguard were keeping their harquebus cords lit, and in the dark the red tips glowed like fireflies. The real veterans dropped to the wet ground right there, determined to rest before the battle. Others chose not to or were unable, and were wide awake, alert, their eyes staring into the night, attentive to the sporadic fire of the advance scouts skirmishing nearby.

As for me, I kept as close as I could to Captain Alatriste, who, with the rest of his squad, had gone to lie down by a hedgerow. I followed them, feeling my way, and had the bad luck to run into a patch of brambles that tore at my face and hands. Twice I heard my master’s voice calling me to make sure I was keeping up. Finally he and Sebastián asked for their harquebuses, and they charged me with keeping a cord lit at both ends in case they needed it. So I took my steel and flint from my pack, and in the shelter of the hedge I struck my spark and did what they had ordered me to do. I blew hard on the slow match and hung it on a stick I set in the ground so it would stay dry and lit. Then I curled up with everyone else, trying to rest from the march and perhaps sleep a little. It was no use; it was too cold. Beneath me the wet grass soaked my clothing, and from above, the night dew drenched us thoroughly as if Beelzebub himself had ordered it. Scarcely aware, I pushed closer to the warmth of Diego Alatriste, who lay stretched out with his harquebus tucked between his legs. I could smell the odor of dirty clothes mixed with traces of leather and metal, and pushed closer still, seeking warmth. He did not discourage me but lay absolutely still when he felt me near. Only later, when the coming dawn streaked the sky and I began to shiver, did he turn over an instant and without a word cover me with his old soldier’s cape.

The Hollanders appeared, capable and confident, with the first rays of the sun. Their light cavalry scattered our advance harquebusiers, and in no time they were upon us in close, orderly rows, their aim to take control of the Ruyter mill and the road that led through Oudkerk to Breda. Captain Bragado’s bandera was ordered to form up with the rest of the tercio in a hedge-and-tree-bordered meadow between the marsh and the road. The Walloon infantry of don Carlos Soest—all Flemish Catholics are loyal to our lord and king—lined up on the other side of the road so that between our two tercios we covered a strip a quarter of a league wide through which the Dutch would have to pass. And by my faith, it was an admirable and noble sight, those two tercios stationed in the middle of the meadows with banners flying above a forest of pikes and detachments of harquebuses and muskets covering the front and the flanks, while the gentle roll of the land atop the nearby dikes was filled with the advancing enemy. That day we were going to be one against five; it almost seemed as if Maurice of Nassau had emptied the Estates of inhabitants in order to throw every one of them against us.

“By heaven, this does not augur well,” I heard Captain Bragado say.

“At least they don’t have artillery,” Lieutenant Coto, the standard bearer, pointed out.

“At the moment.”

With eyes squinting beneath the brims of their hats, they, like the rest of us Spaniards, were making a professional assessment of the glinting pikes, breastplates, and helmets that were beginning to blot out the landscape that spread before the Cartagena tercio. Diego Alatriste’s squad was at the forefront, harquebuses at the ready, their muskets resting in forks, musket balls in mouths, ready to be spat into barrels, and cords lit at both ends, forming a protective shield for the left wing of the tercio and aligned in front of the picas secas and coseletes who stood only half an arm’s length from the next. The former had only their pikes as protection while the latter were armored in helmet, gorget, and cuirasses, and waited with their sixteen-foot-long pikes rammed into the ground.

I was within earshot of Captain Alatriste, ready to provide him and his comrades with powder, one-ounce lead shot, and water when they had need of it. My eyes traveled back and forth between the ever-thicker rows of Dutchmen and the expressionless faces of my master and his comrades, who were standing motionless in their positions. There was no conversation among them other than an occasional comment spoken quietly to the nearest companion, an appraising look here and there, a silently mouthed orison, a twist of a mustache, or a tongue run over dry lips. Waiting. Excited by the imminent combat and wanting to be useful, I went over to Captain Alatriste to see if he needed a drink or if there was anything I could bring him, but he scarcely took note of me. He was holding his harquebus by the barrel, with the butt set on the ground, and he had a smoldering cord wrapped around his left wrist, while he intently observed the enemy field with his gray-green eyes. The brim of his hat shaded his face, and his buffcoat was tightly wrapped beneath the bandolier with the twelve apostles and the belt with sword, vizcaína, and powder flask strapped over a faded red band. The aquiline profile dramatized by the enormous mustache, the tanned skin of his face, and the sunken cheeks unshaved since the previous day made him look even leaner than usual.

“Eyes left!” Bragado alerted them, snapping his captain’s short lance to his shoulder.

On our left, between the peat bogs and the nearby trees, several Dutch horsemen were reconnoitering, exploring the lay of the land. Without awaiting orders, Garrote, Llop, and four or five harquebusiers stepped forward a few paces, poured a bit of loose powder into their pans, and, aiming carefully, fired off shots in the direction of the heretics, who pulled up on their reins and retired without further ado. Across the road, the enemy had already reached Soest’s tercio and were battering them at close range with harquebus fire. The Walloons were firing back, shot for shot. I watched as a large company of horse approached with the intention of charging and saw the Walloon pikes tilt forward like a shimmering grove of ash wood and steel, ready to welcome them.

“Here they come,” said Bragado.

Lieutenant Coto, who was armored in a cuirass with chain-mail sleeves—in his role as standard bearer he was exposed to enemy fire and all manner of enemy aggression—took the banner from the hands of his second lieutenant and went to join the other banners in the center of the tercio. Outlined before us by the first horizontal rays of the sun, the Dutch were approaching in their hundreds, reforming their lines through trees and hedges as they came out into the meadow. They were yelling and shouting to keep up their courage, and the many Englishmen with them were as vociferous in fighting as they were in drinking. Still advancing, they lined up in perfect formation two hundred paces away, their harquebusiers already firing at us, though we were out of range.

I have already told Your Mercies, I believe, that despite my experience in Flanders, this was my first combat in open country, and never until then had I witnessed Spaniards steadfastly standing their ground in the face of an attack. What was most memorable was the silence in which they waited, the absolute fixity with which those rows of dark-skinned, bearded men from the most undisciplined land on earth watched the enemy approach with ne’er a word, a flinch, a gesture that had not been regulated in accord with the commands of our lord and king. It was that day, there at the Ruyter mill, that I truly came to understand why our infantry was, and for so long had been, the most feared in all of Europe. The tercio was a faultless, disciplined military machine in which each soldier knew his role; that was their strength and their pride. For those men, a motley army composed of hidalgos, adventurers, and the ruffians and dregs of all the Spains, to fight honorably for the Catholic monarchy and for the true religion conferred on any who did so, even the lowest of the low, a dignity impossible to achieve in any other way.

I left my land to fight in Flanders,Where, though not firstborn nor heir,younger sons, by being soldiersachieved in war what had not been theirs.

The prolific genius of Toledo, Fray Gabriel Téllez, known by the more famous name of Tirso de Molina, wrote very knowingly on this subject. By basking in the unassailable reputation of the tercios, even the basest scalawag had reason to call himself an hidalgo.

My lineage begins with me,for those men are better stillwho institute their ancestry;worse are those who would defamewhat once had been an honored name.

As for the Dutch, they did not waste time putting on such airs, and they did not give a spoiled herring for bloodlines. No, that morning they were headed straight for Breda, valiant, determined to take the shortest route. A few of their muskets were already smoking, having propelled lead balls to the limit of their reach, where they rolled harmlessly across the grass. I saw our maestre don Pedro de la Daga, on his mount beside the standard bearers and heavily armored in Milanese iron, lower the sallet of his helmet with one hand and lift his baton of command with the other. With that, the lead drum sounded, and immediately all the others joined in. That drumming went on forever, and it seemed to have frozen everyone’s blood because a mortal silence fell over the field. The Dutch, so close now we could see their faces, also paused for an instant, hesitating, affected by the drumbeat issuing from the motionless lines blocking their passage. Then, whipped up by their corporals and officers, they resumed their advance, shouting as they came. By now they were very close, some sixty or seventy paces, with pikes at the ready and harquebuses aimed.

Then a cry began to ripple through the tercio, a harsh, defiant shout repeated from line to line, rising in a clamor that drowned out the sound rolling off the drumheads:

“Spain!…Spain!…Close in for Spain!”

That Close in! was an old battle cry, and it always meant one thing: Watch out; Spain is on the attack. When I heard it, I caught my breath and turned to look at Diego Alatriste, but I couldn’t tell whether he had yelled the phrase or not. The first rows of Spaniards were moving forward to the beat of the drums, and the captain was advancing with them, his harquebus loose in his hands, elbow to elbow with his comrades: Sebastián Copons on one side and Mendieta on the other, tight to Captain Bragado’s side and leaving no spaces between them. The entire tercio was marching at the same slow, orderly, proud pace as though they were on parade before the king. Only a few days before, many of these same men had mutinied over unpaid wages, but now they were soldiers: Teeth clenched, mustaches and beards bristling, their rags covered by cuirasses of oiled leather and their weapons polished, they fixed their eyes on the enemy, an intrepid, terrible force that trailed the smoke of lit harquebus cords. I ran behind, not wanting to lose sight of the captain, through heretic fire that was truly raining down on us now that their coseletes and harquebusiers were well within range. I was breathless, deafened by the roar of my own blood, which was pounding in my veins and eardrums as if the tercio’s drums were reverberating in my innards.

The Hollanders’ first round took down one of our men and enveloped us all in a cloud of smoke. When that dissipated I saw Captain Bragado with his captain’s lance upraised. Alatriste and his comrades had stopped, and with complete calm they had blown on their cords and positioned their harquebuses to their cheeks to take aim. And so, in battle mode, some thirty paces from the Hollanders, the old Cartagena tercio entered the fray.

“Close ranks!…Close ranks!”

There had been sun in the sky for two hours, and the tercio had been fighting since dawn. The forward lines of Spanish harquebusiers had held their ground, inflicting considerable damage to the Dutch until, harassed by musket balls and pikes and skirmishes with cavalry, they disengaged, never turning their backs to the enemy as they moved back to join the tercio, where, along with the pikemen, they formed an impenetrable wall. With each charge, each round of fire, the empty spaces left by fallen men were filled by those still standing, and each time the Hollanders attempted to approach, they encountered a barrier of pikes and muskets that had already driven them back twice.

“And here they come again!”

You would have said that the devil was vomiting heretics, for this was the third time they had charged us. Their lances were close upon us again, the pike tips gleaming through the thick smoke. Our officers were hoarse from shouting orders; Captain Bragado had lost his hat in the fracas, and his face was black with gunpowder, but the Dutch blood on his blade ran red and had never had time to dry.

“Pikes at the ready!”

In the forward lines of the squad, less than a foot apart and well protected in their breastplates and helmets of copper and steel, the coseletes took up their long pikes. After rocking the pike in his left hand, the coselete would grasp it with his right and bring it to a horizontal position, ready to trade thrusts with the enemy. Meanwhile, our harquebusiers along the flanks were making serious inroads among the Dutch. I found myself in the midst of them, keeping close to my master’s squad and trying not to get in the way of the men who were loading and shooting. I ran back and forth, bringing this person a supply of powder, that one lead balls, handing another the flask of water I had tied to my bandolier. All the smoke from the muskets hampered both my vision and my sense of smell, filling my eyes with tears. Most of the time I had to fight my way almost blindly among the men who were shouting for me.

I had just delivered a handful of balls to Captain Alatriste, who was running short. I watched as he dropped several into the pouch he wore hanging over his right thigh, put two in his mouth and another into the muzzle of the harquebus, rammed it home, and then poured loose powder into the pan. He then blew on the cord rolled around his left wrist, placed it in the hammer of the lock, and raised the weapon to his cheek to aim at the nearest Hollander. He performed all those actions almost unconsciously, never taking his eyes from his target, and when the shot sped away I saw a hole open in the iron breastplate of a pikeman wearing an enormous helmet, and the heretic fall backward, disappearing among his comrades.

To our right, pikes clashed with the pikes of heretic coseletes who had joined the attack on us. Diego Alatriste leaned over the hot barrel of his harquebus, spat a ball into the muzzle, coolly repeated his routine, and fired. Traces of his own burned powder covered his face and mustache with gray, making him seem older. His eyes, reddened and encircled with powder residue that accentuated his wrinkles, focused with obstinate concentration on the advance of the Dutch lines, and when he picked out a new target to aim at, he watched his mark as if he feared he would fade from sight, as if killing him and no other were a personal matter. I had the impression that he chose his prey with great care.

“They are here!” shouted Captain Bragado. “Hold!…Hold fast!”

To do that, to hold, God and the king had given Bragado two hands, a sword, and a hundred Spaniards, and it was time to use them to the fullest, because Dutch pikes were coming toward us with lethal intent. Through the roar of shots I heard Mendieta curse with that fervor we Basques are capable of, because the lock of his harquebus had been sheared off. At that moment a lead sparrow flew past my ear, whirrr…pock, and a soldier close behind me went down. On our right the landscape was a forest of entangled Spanish and Dutch pikes, and, with an undulation of steel, part of that line, too, was swinging around to engage us. I saw Mendieta whip his harquebus over and grab it by the barrel to use it as a club. Everyone hastily discharged his last ball.

“Spain!…Santiago!…Spain!”

At our backs, behind the pikes, rippled the shot-shredded crosses of St. Andrew. The Hollanders were right upon us, an avalanche of frightened or terrible eyes and blood-covered faces. Large, blond, courageous heretics were attempting to bury their pikes and halberds in us or run us through with their swords. I watched as Alatriste and Copons, shoulder to shoulder, dropped their harquebuses to the ground and unsheathed their Toledo blades, planting their feet firmly. I also watched as Dutch pikes penetrated our lines, and saw their lances wound and mutilate, twisting in bloody flesh. Diego Alatriste was slashing with sword and dagger among the long ash pikes. I grabbed one as it went by me and a Spaniard beside me plunged his sword into the neck of the Hollander holding the far end; his blood streamed down the shaft onto my hands. Now Spanish pikes were coming to our aid, approaching from behind us to attack the Dutch over our backs and through the spaces left by the dead. Everything was a labyrinth of lances and a crescendo of carnage.

I fought my way toward Alatriste, pushing through our comrades. When a Hollander cut his way through our men with his sword and fell at the captain’s feet, locking his arm around his legs with the intention of pulling him down as well, I gave a loud shout, pulled out my dagger, and sprang toward him, determined to defend my master, even if I was cut to pieces in the process. Blinded by my madness, I fell upon the heretic, flattened my hand over his face, and pressed his head to the ground. Alatriste kicked and pulled to be free of him and twice plunged his sword into the man’s body from above. The Hollander rolled over but was not yet willing to give up the ghost. He was a hearty man, but he was bleeding from his mouth and nose like a Jarama bull at the end of a corrida. I can remember the sticky feel of his blood—red and streaked with gunpowder—and the dirt and blond stubble on his white, freckled face. He fought me, unresigned to dying, whoreson that he was, and I fought him back. Still holding him down with my left hand, I tightened my grip on the dagger in my right and stabbed him three times in the ribs, but I was so close to his chest that all three attempts slid across the leather buffcoat protecting his torso. He felt the blows, for I saw his eyes open wide, and at last he released my master’s legs in order to protect his face, as if he were afraid I would wound him there. He moaned. I was blinded by fear and fury, deranged by this mongrel, who so obstinately refused to die. I stuck the tip of the dagger between the fastenings of his buffcoat. “Neee…srinden…Nee,” the heretic murmured, and I pressed down with all the weight of my body. In less than an Ave Maria he spat up one last vomit of blood, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he lay as still as if he had never had life.

“Spain!…They’re pulling back!…Spaaaain!”

The battered rows of Dutch were withdrawing, treading heedlessly on the corpses of their comrades and leaving the grass seasoned with dead. A few inexperienced Spaniards made as if to pursue them, but the greater number of soldiers stayed where they were. As the men of the Cartagena tercio were nearly all old veterans, they were too practiced in war to break from their lines and risk a flank attack or an ambush. I felt Alatriste’s hand grab the neck of my jerkin and turn me around to see whether I was hurt. When I looked up I saw only those gray-green eyes. Then, without a further word or gesture, he yanked me right off my dead Dutchman, who was now nothing but cold meat. The arm that held his sword seemed to be almost too exhausted even to sheathe the blade he had wiped clean on the buffcoat of the dead man. He had blood on his face, on his hands, and on his clothing, but none of it was his. I looked around. Sebastián Copons, who was searching for his harquebus among a pile of Spanish and Dutch corpses, was covered with his own, bleeding from a gaping wound on his temple.

“Zounds!” the Aragonese blurted, dazed, feeling the two-inch flap of scalp hanging loose over his left ear.

He held the severed skin between a thumb and index finger blackened with blood and powder, not knowing quite what to do with it. Alatriste took a clean linen from his pouch and, after laying the skin back in place as best he could, knotted the cloth around Copons’s head.

“Those blond toads almost got me, Diego.”

“That will be another day.”

Copons shrugged his shoulders. “Another day.”

I stumbled to my feet; the soldiers were falling back into line, moving aside the fallen Dutch. Some seized the opportunity to search the corpses, divesting them of any valuables they found. I saw Garrote rather routinely using his vizcaína to cut off fingers, stuffing the rings they’d held into his pockets, and Mendieta was able to provide himself with a new harquebus.

“Close ranks!” bellowed Captain Bragado.

A hundred paces away, the Dutch reserves were forming up, and among them shone the breastplates of their cavalry. The Spanish soldiers temporarily put aside stripping bodies and again lined up elbow to elbow as the wounded crawled away, escaping the field however they could. We had to pull away our own dead to make room for the formation. The tercio had not yielded an inch of terrain.

That was our amusement for the morning, and we lasted till midday, taking the Hollanders’ charges without giving way, calling out “Santiago!” and “Spain!” as they came toward us. We removed our dead and bandaged our wounded where they had fallen, until the heretics, convinced that this wall of dispassionate men did not intend to budge one inch, began to attack with less enthusiasm. My supplies of powder and musket balls had run dry, and I had turned to requisitioning them from corpses. At times, between attacks when the Dutch were farthest away, I would run a good distance out onto open ground and strip what I needed from their fallen harquebusiers, and more than once I had to come running back like a hare with their musket balls whirring past my ears. I had also used up the water I had brought for my master and his comrades—war raises a devilish thirst—and I made trip after trip to the canal at our backs. That was not a pleasant excursion because I had to pick my way among the wounded and dead we had dragged there, a blood-chilling panorama of appalling mutilations, bleeding stumps, laments in all the tongues of Spain, death rattles, prayers, blasphemies, and Salanueva’s limping Latin as he went back and forth among the soldiers, his hand weary from administering extreme unctions, which, once the oils were exhausted, he gave using only saliva. These fools who prate of the glory of war and majesty of battle should remember the words of the Marqués de Pescara: “May God grant me one hundred years of war and not one day of battle.” They should walk where I walked that morning if they are truly to know the scene: the spectacular stage machinery of banners and bugles, the tall tales invented by the braggarts of the rear guard, the ones whose profiles adorn coins and who are immortalized in statues though they have never heard a shot whistling past their ears, or seen their comrades die, or stained their hands with the blood of an enemy, or run the risk of having their tackle blown off by a musket ball to the groin.

I used the trips back and forth to the canal to take a quick look at the road from the Ruyter mill and Oudkerk to see if help was on the way, but it was always empty. From there I could also see the whole of the field of battle, with the Dutch pushing toward us and our two tercios blocking passage on both sides of the road; Spaniards on my left and Soest’s contingent on the right: an infinity of glinting steel, musket fire, gunpowder smoke, and banners amid a thick forest of pikes. Our Walloon comrades were playing their part well, and theirs, it is true, was the most difficult, squeezed as they were between the heretics’ harquebusiers and brutal charges of Light Horse. Each time they held against a new assault there were fewer pikes in their squad, and although Soest’s soldiers were men of great honor and integrity, they were inevitably losing strength. The danger was that if they gave way, the Dutch would be able to cross their terrain, flank the Cartagena tercio, and gain the advantage. And the Ruyter mill and road to Oudkerk and Breda would be lost.

I went back to my own company with those thoughts playing uneasily on my mind, and I was not encouraged when I passed by our colonel, who was positioned with other mounted officers in the middle of the squad. His armor had stopped a Dutch musket ball, though it had already traveled such a long distance that it left only a fine dent in his tooled Milanese steel breastplate. Except for that, our colonel seemed in good health, unlike his bugler, who had been shot in the mouth and now lay on the ground at his horse’s hooves, with no one giving a fig whether he was bugling or not. I saw that don Pedro de la Daga and his cadre of officers were observing the Walloons’ badly compromised lines with furrowed brows. Even I, inexperienced as I was, understood that if Soest’s tercio collapsed, we Spaniards, with no cavalry to shield us, would have no recourse but to retreat to the Ruyter mill if we were to avoid being flanked. The ruinous effect would be that when the Dutch saw the tercio retreat, they would move on toward Breda. The respect and fear an enemy entertains when it encounters a wall of resolute men is very different from its attitude when it perceives that those men are looking less for a quarrel than for their own continued good health, and even more so at a time when we Spaniards were as renowned for our cruelty in attacking as we were for our pride and imperturbability in the face of death. Until then almost no one had seen the color of our backs, not even on canvas, and our pikes and our reputations were equally esteemed.

The sun was reaching its zenith when the Walloons, having served their king and the true religion with great dignity, finally collapsed. A charge of horse and the pressure of the Dutch infantry finally shredded their lines, and from our side of the road we watched as, despite the efforts of their officers, one section of troops withdrew toward the Ruyter mill and the other, more complete, surged toward us, seeking refuge in our formation. With them, surrounded by officers trying to save the standards, came their maestre, don Carlos Soest, like a condemned man, with his helmet missing and both arms broken by harquebus fire. They rushed toward us in such disorder that they nearly broke up our tercio. Even worse, however, was that right behind them, almost within reach, came the Hollander Horse and Foot, eager to accomplish their task by wiping out two regiments in one fell swoop. To our good fortune, they came straight from their first assault—their lines were ragged, and they were testing their luck to see whether we would come apart in all the confusion—but as I have said, the men of the Cartagena tercio were battle-wise and had seen everything. Almost without receiving orders, after allowing a reasonable number of Walloons to pass, the lines of our right flank closed as if they were made of iron, and harquebuses and muskets loosed an awesome round of fire that dispatched—two for the price of one—a good portion of the tag ends of Soest’s tercio along with the Hollanders pursuing them from the rear.

“Pikes to the right!”

Without hurrying and with the sangfroid their legendary discipline implied, the rows of coseletes on our flank veered to face the Dutch. They drove the butt end of their pikes into the ground, firmed the mud around it with a foot, and pointed the blade end to the front, holding the shafts in their left hands as they unsheathed their swords with their right, preparing to cripple the horses racing toward them.

“Santiago!…Spain and Santiago!”

It was as if the Dutch had hit a solid brick wall. The collision with our right flank was so brutal that long pike shafts buried in the horses broke into pieces, and defenders and attackers were entangled in a muddle of lances, swords, daggers, knives, and harquebuses-turned-clubs.

“Pikes to the front!”

The heretics were also charging the forward side of our square formation, again emerging from the woods but now with the cavalry leading and the coseletes behind. Our harquebusiers again performed their task with the composure of veteran infantry, loading and firing in perfect order with no trace of agitation. Among them I saw Diego Alatriste blow on a slow match, cheek his weapon, and aim. The volley left a large number of Hollanders on the ground, but the main body of soldiers remained, far too many for our own good, and our detachments of harquebusiers, and I with them, were forced to take cover among the pikes. In the confusion I lost sight of my master, and the only one of his comrades I could see was Sebastián Copons—the bandage on his head calling to mind the kerchiefs of his native Aragon—as he put hand to his sword with resolve. A few flustered Spaniards deserted, fleeing past their comrades toward the rear (Iberia did not always give birth to lions), but most stood their ground. Harquebuses blasted, and all around me musket balls dug into flesh. I was showered with a spray of pikeman’s blood as he fell atop me, invoking the Madre de Deus in Portuguese. I slipped from beneath him, freed myself from his lance, which was caught between my legs, only to find myself jostled in the ebb and flow of the battle, immersed in smells of rough, grimy clothing, sweat, powder, and blood.

“Hold!…Spain!…Spaaain!”

At our backs, behind the tightly knit rows protecting the standards, the drums beat on relentlessly. More musket balls whirred and more men fell, and each time the rows closed over the gaps they had left, while I stumbled over the armored bodies that lay scattered about me. I could see almost nothing of what was happening in front of me, and I rose to my tiptoes to look over the shoulders of men in buffcoats and leather, steel breastplates and helmets. I was suffocated by the heat and by the smoke of powder. My head was spinning, and with my last shred of lucidity I reached behind me and pulled out my dagger.

“Oñate!…Oñate!” I yelled with all my soul.

An instant later, with a crack of pike shafts, screams of wounded horses, and clash of swords, the Dutch Light Horse was upon us, and only God could recognize His own.

6. ATTACK WITHOUT QUARTER

At times I look at the painting, and I remember. Not even Diego Velázquez, despite everything I told him, was capable of portraying on canvas—it is barely insinuated in the clouds of smoke and gray fog of the background—the long and deadly road we had to take to compose such a majestic scene, or the lances that lay along that road and would never see the sun rise over Breda. I myself was yet to encounter the blood-dripping steel of those same lances in charnel houses like Nordlingen and Rocroi, which were, respectively, the dying rays of the Spanish star and a terrible sunset for the army of Flanders. And of those battles, like the one that morning at the Ruyter mill, I remember especially the sounds: the cries of the men, the crack of crossed pikes, the clash of steel against steel, the distinct notes of weapons ripping clothing, entering flesh, shattering bones. Once, much later, Angélica de Alquézar asked me in a frivolous tone if there was anything more sinister than the cur-rrunch of a hoe cutting into a potato. Without hesitating I replied, “The cur-rrunch of steel splitting a skull,” and I saw her smile as she stared at me with those blue eyes the devil had granted to her. And then she reached out and with her fingertips touched my eyelids, which were wide open as I again beheld the horror, and then she grazed the mouth that so many times had shouted my fear and my courage and the hands that had gripped steel and spilled blood. She kissed me with her full, warm lips and even smiled as she did it and drew back from me. And now that Angélica is as dead and gone as the Spain I am writing about, I still cannot erase that smile from my memory. It was the same smile that appeared on her lips every time she did something evil, every time she put my life in jeopardy, and every time she kissed my scars, for some of them, pardiez, as I have written elsewhere, were caused by her.

I also remember pride. Among the emotions that flash through one’s head in combat are, first, fear, then ardor and madness. Later, exhaustion, resignation, and indifference filter into the soldier’s soul. But if he survives, and if he is from the good seed from which certain men germinate, there also remains the honor of a duty fulfilled. I am not, Your Mercies, speaking of the soldier’s duty to God or to his king, nor of the inept but honorable soldier who fights to collect his pay, not even of the obligation to friends and comrades. I am referring to something else, something I learned at Captain Alatriste’s side: the duty to fight when one must, aside from the question of nation and flag, the moral burden of a fight that tends not to be occasioned by either of these but by pure chance. I am speaking of when a man grasps his sword in hand, takes his stance, and demands the true price of his hide rather than simply giving it up like a sheep to the slaughter. I am speaking of recognizing, and seizing, what life rarely offers: an opportunity to lose it with dignity and with honor.

So, I was looking for my master. In the midst of all the fury of sword thrusts, pistol shots, and gutted horses treading on their entrails, I pushed and shoved my way with pounding heart, dagger in hand, yelling for Captain Alatriste. There was death on all sides, but by now no one was killing for his king; they just did not want to give up their lives too cheaply. The first rows of our squad were a pandemonium of Spaniards and Hollanders locked in deadly embrace, their orange or red bands the only guide as to whether one should drive in steel or stand shoulder to shoulder with a comrade.

This was my first experience of real combat, a desperate struggle against everything I identified as the enemy. I had been in my fair share of scrapes: shooting a man in Madrid, crossing steel with Gualterio Malatesta, attacking the gate of Oudkerk, in addition to minor skirmishes here and there in Flanders. Not, if you will forgive me, a trivial record for a youth. And only moments before, my dagger had drawn the last breath from the heretic wounded by Captain Alatriste, whose lifeblood stained my jerkin. But never, never until that Dutch charge, had I been in anything like this, sunk in such madness, to the point where chance counted more than courage or skill. Every man was giving his best in the fight, joining together in a mob of men slipping and sliding over the dead and wounded, stabbing each other on grass slick with blood. Pikes and harquebuses were useless now, even swords were of little use, the best weapon for cutting and slicing and stabbing being a dagger or poniard. I do not know how I managed to stay alive through such havoc, but after a few moments—or was it a century? Even time had stopped running as it should—I found myself, bruised, shaken, filled with a mixture of fright and courage, beside Captain Alatriste and his comrades.

By my faith, but they were wolves. In the chaos of those first rows, my master’s squad was grouped together like a formation within a formation, back to back, their swords and daggers so lethal they were like monstrous maws chewing up the enemy. They were not yelling “Spain!” or “Santiago!” to give themselves courage; they fought tight-lipped, saving their breath for killing heretics. God knows they succeeded in this, for there were disemboweled bodies everywhere. Sebastián Copons still had his blood-soaked kerchief around his head; Garrote and Mendieta were wielding broken-off pikes to hold back the Dutch; and Alatriste had his usual dagger in one hand and sword in the other, both of them crimson to the quillons. The Olivares brothers and the Galician Rivas completed the group. As for José Llop, their comrade from Mallorca, he lay on the ground, dead. I was slow to recognize him because a harquebus ball had blown off half his face.

Diego Alatriste seemed to be somewhere far beyond all that. He had thrown off his hat, and tangled, dirty hair fell over his forehead and ears. His legs were planted firmly apart as if nailed to the ground, and all his energy and wrath were concentrated in his eyes, which gleamed red and dangerous in his smoke-blackened face. He fought with calculated efficiency, dealing lethal blows that seemed propelled by hidden springs in his body. He blocked swords and pike blades, slashed out with his dagger, and used each pause in the action to lower his hands and rest a moment before fighting again, as if avariciously conserving the flow of his energy. I worked my way toward him, but he gave no sign of recognition. He was far away, as if he had traveled down a long road and was fighting without looking back, at the very threshold of hell.