The Sun Over Breda

My hand was numb from gripping my dagger so tightly, and out of pure clumsiness I dropped it. I bent down to pick it up, and when I stood, I saw Hollanders rushing toward us, shouting at the top of their lungs. Musket balls were whizzing by, and a wall of pikes crashed above my head. I sensed men dropping around me, and again I gripped my dagger, wanting nothing more than to be out of the fray, convinced that my hour had come. Something struck a blow to my head that staggered me, and countless pinpoints of light swam before my eyes. I half-fainted, but I did not let go of my dagger, determined to carry it with me to wherever I was going. All I wanted was not to be found without it in my hand. Then I thought of my mother, and I prayed. Padre nuestro—Our Father—suddenly flashed into my mind. Gure Aita, Padre nuestro, I repeated over and over in Basque and in Spanish, dazed, unable to remember the rest of the prayer. In that instant someone grabbed my jerkin and dragged me across the grass, over the dead and wounded. Blindly, I made two weak swings with my blade, thinking I was dealing with an enemy, until I felt a pinch on the nape of my neck and then another that stopped my pitiful swipes. I was deposited inside a small circle of legs and mud-stained boots, overhearing the clash of weapons—clinnng, cur-rac, swish-swash, cloc, chasss—a sinister concert of torn flesh, shattered bones, and guttural sounds from throats exhaling fury, pain, fear, and agony. In the background, behind the rows still holding firm around our standards, the proud, impassive tum-tum-tum of the drum continued to beat for our poor old Spain.

“They’re falling back!…After them!…They’re falling back!”

The tercio had held. So many men in the first rows lay where they had fallen that the piles of corpses replicated the formation as it had been at the beginning of the battle. Bugles were blowing, and the sound of the drum was more intense as more were now headed our way. Along the dike and the Ruyter mill road we saw fluttering banners and relief pikes coming to our aid. A squad of Italian cavalry carrying harquebusiers on the croups of their mounts galloped past our flank, the horsemen saluting as they raced by to overrun the Dutch, who, having come for wool and instead been shorn themselves, were retreating in defeat and gratifying disorder, seeking the safety of the woods. The vanguard of our comrades, coseletes, pikemen, with short lances and musketeers, had already reached the field on the other side of the road, where Soest’s Walloon tercio had been chopped to pieces, albeit with no little honor.

“After them! After them!…Close in for Spain!…Close in!”

Our camp was yelling victory at the top of their voices, and men who had fought all morning in obstinate silence were exuberantly calling out the names of the Virgen Santísima and Santiago. Exhausted veterans set down their weapons to kiss rosaries and medallions. The drum was pounding without mercy, without quarter, marking the pursuit and capture of the conquered enemy, a time for collecting spoils and for making them pay dearly for our dead and for the arduous day they had put us through. The lines of the tercio were breaking up to chase after the heretics, catching first the wounded and the stragglers, then splitting open heads, lopping off limbs, and cutting throats. In short, mercy for no man. For if the Spanish infantry was fierce in attacking or defending, it was twice as fierce when taking revenge. The Italians and Walloons were not far behind, the latter fervently desiring blood in return for that their Soest comrades had shed. The landscape was dotted with thousands of men racing about helter-skelter, killing, then killing again, pillaging the wounded and dead scattered across the field, so badly butchered that at times the most intact body piece was an ear.

Captain Alatriste and his comrades were participating like everyone else, as heatedly as Your Mercies could imagine. I was trying to keep up with them, still stunned by the melee and by the egg-sized lump on my head but yelling as wildly as any. Along the way, I took a splendid short Solingen sword from the first dead enemy I came across and, sheathing my dagger, moved on, thrusting that fine German blade at anything dead or alive in my path, like someone stabbing blood sausages. It was carnage, game, and madness all rolled into one, and what had once been a battle had turned into a slaughter of young English bulls and Flemish cuts. Some did not even defend themselves, like the group we caught up with splashing waist deep in a peat bog. There, we descended on them, taking a fine catch of Calvinists, plunging our swords into them, slicing and ripping right and left, deaf to their pleas and to upraised hands begging for mercy, until the blackish water was bright red and they were floating in it like chopped tuna fish.

We did a lot of killing, for we had a place to do it. And since there were so many, we could not stop with a few. The hunt went on for a league and lasted till nightfall, and by then my fellow mochileros had joined in, along with local peasants who knew no band other than their greed, and even some vivandières, whores, and sutlers who had migrated to Oudkerk, drawn by the smell of booty. They followed after the soldiers, plundering anything that was left, a flock of crows leaving in their passing nothing but naked corpses. I was still in the chase, keeping up with those in the vanguard, not feeling the exhaustion of the day, as if fury and desire for revenge had given me strength to go on to the end of the world. I was—and may God forgive me if it be His wish—hoarse from yelling and red with the blood of those wretched Dutch. A pink dusk was closing over the burning villages on the far side of the forest, and there was no canal, no path, no road along the dike that was free of the dead. At that point, bone-weary, we stopped by a small cluster of five or six houses where even the domestic animals had been killed. A group of Dutch stragglers had hidden there, and finishing them off took the last moments of light. Finally, in the reddish glow of burning roofs, we calmed down, little by little, our pouches stuffed with booty, and here and there men began to drop to the ground, suddenly seized by untold fatigue, breathing like beaten animals. Only a fool maintains that victory is joy. As our senses slowly returned we fell silent, avoiding one another’s eyes, as if ashamed of our filthy hair standing on end, our black, strained faces, reddened eyes, the crust of blood drying on our clothing and weapons. Now the only sound was the sputtering of the fire and creaking of beams collapsing among the flames, but occasionally from the night around us came shouts and gunfire from those who continued the kill.

Bruised and battered, I squatted down by the side of a house, my back against the wall. My eyes were tearing; I was breathing with difficulty and was tortured by thirst. In the light of the fire I saw Curro Garrote knotting into a cloth the rings, chains, and silver buttons he had scavenged from the dead. Mendieta was stretched out face down; you would have thought he was as stone-cold dead as the Hollander corpses strewn about were it not for his raucous snores. Other Spaniards were sitting in groups or alone, and among them I thought I recognized Captain Bragado with one arm in a sling. Gradually, low-pitched voices reached my ears, mostly queries about the fate of some comrade or other. Someone asked about Llop and was answered by silence. A few men made small fires to roast strips of meat they had cut from the dead farm animals, and soldiers slowly began to congregate around the flames. After a while they were talking in normal voices, and then someone said something, a comment or a jest, that drew a laugh. I remember the profound impression that laugh made on me, for I had come to believe that at the end of that long day men’s laughter had vanished forever from the face of the earth.

I turned toward Captain Alatriste and saw that he was looking at me. He was sitting against the wall a few paces away, with his legs drawn up and his arms around his knees. He was still holding his harquebus. Sebastián Copons was by his side, his head resting against the wall, his sword between his legs. His face was marred by the large dark scab on his temple that had been revealed when his bandage slipped down around his neck. The men’s outlines were etched against the glow from a house burning nearby, brighter from time to time as the flames leaped and played. Diego Alatriste’s eyes, gleaming in the firelight, were observing me with a kind of quizzical intensity, as if he were trying to read inside me. I was both ashamed and proud, exhausted yet with an energy that made my heart pound, horrified, sad, bitter, but happy to be alive. And I swear to Your Mercies that following a battle, a man can harbor all these sensations and emotions, and many more, at the same time. The captain kept watching me in silence, more a scrutiny than anything else, to the point that finally I began to feel uncomfortable. I had expected praise, an encouraging smile, something that expressed his esteem for my having conducted myself like a man. That was why I was disconcerted by that observation in which I could discern nothing other than the imperturbable absorption I had seen on other occasions: an expression, or absence of expression, that I could never penetrate. Nor could I until many years later when one day, now a full-grown man, I was surprised to find that I too had, or thought I had, that same gaze.

Uncomfortable, I decided to do something to break the tension. I stretched my aching body, put the German sword in my belt beside the dagger, and got to my feet.

“Shall I look for something to eat and drink, Captain?”

Light from the flames danced on his face. It was several moments before he answered, and when he did he limited himself to a nod, his aquiline face long beneath the thick mustache. He never took his eyes from me as I turned and followed my shadow.

The conflagration outside cast its light though an open window, tingeing the walls with red. Everywhere the house was in chaos: broken furniture, scorched curtains on the floor, drawers upside down, scattered belongings. Rubble crunched beneath my feet as I walked back and forth looking for a cupboard or some larder not yet ransacked by our rapacious comrades. I remember the immense sadness that permeated that dark, plundered dwelling, the lives that had given warmth to its rooms now gone, the desolation and ruin of what once had been a hearth where undoubtedly a child had laughed and two adults had exchanged tender caresses and words of love. And so the curiosity of someone prowling at will through a place to which he would ordinarily not be invited gave way to a growing melancholy. I thought of my own home in Oñate caught in the destruction of war, of my poor mother and little sisters fleeing, or perhaps worse, their rooms trampled through by some young foreigner who, like me, saw spread across the floor the broken, burned, humble remains of our memories and our lives. And with the selfishness natural in a soldier, I was happy to be in Flanders and not in Spain. I can assure Your Mercies that in the business of war, the misfortunes visited on foreigners are always of some consolation. And at such times, the person who has no one in the world, and who risks no fondness for anything but his own skin, is to be envied.

I found nothing worth the search. I stopped a moment to relieve myself against the wall and was buttoning my trousers when something stopped me short. I held my breath an instant, listening, and then I heard it again. It was a prolonged moan, a weak lament coming from the far end of a narrow corridor filled with debris. I might have thought it was an animal in pain except that from time to time I could hear a human timbre. So, quietly, I unsheathed my dagger—in such a narrow space my newly acquired sword was not manageable—and, back to the wall, I slipped closer to find out what it was.

There was enough light from the fires outside to light half the room, projecting shadows with reddish outlines onto a wall covered with a slashed tapestry. Beneath that hanging, propped in the niche between the wall and a battered armoire, slumped a man. The light glinting from his breastplate confirmed that he was a soldier and illuminated a long, blond, tangled head of hair filthy with mud and blood, very pale eyes, and a terrible burn that had left one whole side of his face raw. He was motionless, his eyes staring into the light coming through the window, and from his half-opened lips issued the lament I had heard from the corridor: a hushed, constant moaning interrupted at times by incomprehensible words spoken in a strange tongue.

I crept toward him, cautious, still holding the dagger and watching his hands to ascertain whether he was holding a weapon, though that poor wretch was not in any condition to hold a thing. He looked like a traveler sitting by the shore of the Styx, someone the boatman Charon had left behind, forgotten, on his last crossing. I crouched down beside him, examining him with curiosity; he seemed not to be aware I was there. He kept staring toward the window, motionless, uttering that interminable keening, those fragmented, unrecognizable words, even when I touched his arm with the tip of my dagger. His face was a frightening representation of Janus: one side reasonably intact, the other a pudding of raw flesh glittering with droplets of blood. His hands, too, had been burned. I had seen several dead Hollanders in the flaming stables at the back of the house, and I surmised that this man, wounded in the skirmish, had dragged himself through the smoldering embers to take refuge here.

“Flamink?” I asked.

There was no answer but his endless groans. I concluded that he was a young man, not much older than I, and by the breastplate and clothing, was one of the soldiers from the Light Horse that had charged us that morning near the Ruyter mill. Perhaps we had fought near each other when the Dutch and English attempted to break through our formation and we Spaniards desperately fought for our lives. War, I reasoned, took strange twists and turns, curious swings of fortune. Nevertheless, with the horror of the day behind me and the Dutch on the run, I felt neither hostility nor rancor. I had seen many Spaniards die that day but even more enemies. At the moment, the scales were balanced; this was a defenseless man, and I was sated with blood, so I put away my dagger and went outside to Captain Alatriste and the others.

“There is a man inside,” I said. “A soldier.”

The captain, who had not changed position since I left, scarcely bothered to look up.

“Spanish or Dutch?”

“Dutch, I think. Or English. And he’s wounded.”

Alatriste nodded slowly, as if at this hour of the night it would have been strange to come across a heretic alive and in good health. Then he shrugged his shoulders, as if asking me why I had come to tell him this.

“I thought,” I suggested, “that we might help him.”

At last he looked at me, and he did so very slowly; in the firelight I watched his head turn toward me.

“You thought,” he murmured.

“Yes.”

For another moment he said nothing, just stared at me. Then he half-turned toward Sebastián Copons, still by his side, head against the wall, mouth closed, the bloody kerchief loose around his neck. Alatriste exchanged a glance with him and then looked back toward me. In the long silence I heard the flames crackling.

“You thought,” he repeated, absorbed.

Painfully he got to his feet, as if he were numb all over and it cost him to his very bones to move an inch. He seemed reluctant and very weary. I watched Copons get up and join him.

“Where is he?”

“In the house.”

I led them through the rooms and down the corridor to the back. The heretic was still propped between the armoire and the wall. Alatriste stopped on the threshold and looked around before going over to him. He bent down a little and observed him.

“He is Dutch,” he concluded finally.

“Can we help him?” I asked.

Captain Alatriste’s shadow on the wall did not move.

“Of course.”

I felt Sebastián Copons pass by me. His boots shuffled through the broken crockery on the floor as he approached the wounded man. Then Alatriste came over to me and Copons reached toward the sheath over his kidneys and pulled out his vizcaína.

“Let’s go,” the captain said.

Stupefied, I resisted the pressure of his hand on my shoulder as I watched Copons place his dagger to the neck of the Dutch soldier and slit his throat from ear to ear. Shaking, I raised my eyes toward Alatriste’s dark face. I could not see his eyes, though I knew they were on me.

“H-h-he was…” I stammered.

Then I stopped, for words suddenly seemed pointless. With an involuntary gesture of rejection, I shook the captain’s hand from my shoulder, but he kept it there, holding on like an iron clamp. Copons stood up and, after cleaning the blade of his dagger on the victim’s clothing, replaced it in its sheath. Then he went out into the corridor before I could even blink.

I turned brusquely, feeling my shoulder at last free. I took two steps toward the young man who was now dead. Nothing about the scene had changed, except that his lament had ceased and a dark, thick, shining veil had descended from the gorget of his armor, the red blending with the splendor of the firelight at the window. He seemed more alone than before, a solitude so pitiable that I felt an intense, deep pain, as if it were I, or part of me, who was sitting on that floor, back against the wall, eyes fixed and open, staring at the night. I know, I thought, that someone somewhere is waiting for the return of this man who won’t be going anywhere. Perhaps a mother, a sweetheart, a sister, or a father is praying for him, for his health, for his life, for his return. And there may be a bed where he slept as a boy and a landscape he watched grow and change. And no one there knows he is dead.

I do not know how long I stood there, silently staring at the corpse, but after a while I heard a stirring, and without having to turn I knew that Captain Alatriste had stayed there all the time by my side. I smelled the familiar harsh scent of sweat, leather, and the metal of his clothing and weapons, and then I heard his voice.

“A man knows when the end has come. That man knew.”

I did not answer. I was still contemplating the corpse’s slit throat. Now his blood was forming an enormous dark stain around his legs, which were stretched out in front of him. It is incredible, I thought, the amount of blood we have in our bodies, at least two or three azumbres, and how easy it is to spill it.

“That is all we could do for him,” Alatriste added.

Again I had no answer and stood a while longer without speaking. Finally I heard him move again. Alatriste came close a moment, as if wondering whether or not to speak to me, as if there were countless unspoken words between us that would never be said if he did not say them now. But he said nothing, and finally his footsteps headed toward the corridor.

It was then that I turned around. I felt a mute, tranquil rage that I had never known until that night. A desperate anger, as bitter as Alatriste’s own silences.

“Do you mean to say, Your Mercy, Captain, that we have just performed a good work? A good service?”

I had never spoken to him in that tone before. The footsteps stopped, and Alatriste’s voice sounded strangely opaque. I imagined his gray-green eyes in the penumbra, staring vacantly into the void.

“When the moment comes,” he said, “pray to God that someone will do the same for you.”

That is what happened that night when Sebastián Copons slit the throat of the wounded Hollander and I shrugged away Captain Alatriste’s hand. That was how, scarcely without realizing, I crossed that shadowy line that every lucid man crosses sooner or later. There, alone, standing before that corpse, I began to look at the world in a very different way. I knew myself in possession of a terrible truth that until that instant I had intuited only in Captain Alatriste’s glaucous gaze: He who kills from afar knows nothing at all about the act of killing. He who kills from afar derives no lesson from life or from death; he neither risks nor stains his hands with blood, nor hears the breathing of his adversary, nor reads the fear, courage, or indifference in his eyes. He who kills from afar tests neither his arm, his heart, nor his conscience, nor does he create ghosts that will later haunt him every single night for the rest of his life. He who kills from afar is a knave who commends to others the dirty and terrible task that is his own. He who kills from afar is worse than other men, because he does not know anger, loathing, and vengeance, the terrible passion of flesh and of blood as they meet steel, but he is equally innocent of pity and remorse. For that reason, he who kills from afar does not know what he has lost.

7. THE SIEGE

From Íñigo Balboa to don Francisco de Quevedo Villegas * To his attention in the Tavern of the Turk

Esteemed don Francisco:I am writing to Your Mercy at the request of Captain Alatriste so that you may see, he says, the progress I am making with the written word. Please, however, excuse the errors. I can tell you that I am continuing with my reading, when that is possible, and seizing the opportunity to practice good penmanship whenever I can. In idle moments, which in the life of a mochilero and that of a soldier are as many or more than others have, I am learning from Padre Salanueva the declinations and verbs in Latin. Padre Salanueva is chaplain of our tercio, and as the soldiers say, he is many leagues from being a man of God, but he owes money or favors to my master. The fact is that he treats me with fondness and devotes the time he is sober (he is one of those who drinks more wine than he consecrates) to bettering my education with Caesar’s Commentaries and such religious books as the Old and New Testaments. And speaking of books, I must thank you, Your Mercy, for sending me El ingenioso caballero don Quijote de la Mancha, second part of El ingenioso hidalgo, which I am reading with the same pleasure and diligence as the first.As to our life in Flanders, you will, Y.M., know that it has undergone some changes in recent times. With winter’s end, our duty along the Ooster canal ended as well. The old Cartagena tercio is now to be found beneath the very walls of Breda, taking part in a siege. It is a hard life, for the Dutch have fortified their stronghold well, and everything is sap and countersap, mine and countermine, trench and tunnel, so that our travails are more similar to a mole’s than a soldier’s. This life is nothing but discomfort, dirt, and lice beyond endurance and, furthermore, a labor exposed to attacks made from the stronghold and constant fire from their harquebusiers. The walls of the town are not of brick but of dirt. That makes it difficult to dig out a sap, or tunnel, because of the assault of our artillery battery. The walls are supported by fifteen well-protected bulwarks and surrounded by fosses—water-filled ditches—with fourteen ravelins, all of it so well arranged that each of the walls, bulwarks, ravelins, and fosses works in defense of the other, so much so that our approaches have been extremely difficult, costing labor and lives.The defense of the city is in the hands of Justin of Nassau, a Dutchman and a relative of the other Nassau, Maurice. And consider that at the Ginneken gate he has French and Walloons, English at the Den Bosch gate, and Flemish and Scots at the Antwerp gate, all of them conversant in matters of war, so that it is not possible to take the town by assault. Thence the necessity for the patient encirclement, which our general don Ambrosio Spínola is maintaining with great effort and sacrifice, using fifteen tercios from Catholic nations. Among them are Spaniards, as would be expected, the least in number but it is they who are always called on for dangerous tasks that require experienced and disciplined men.You would marvel, Y.M., if you saw with your own eyes the ingenuity of the siege tactics and the inventiveness with which they have been conceived. They are the amazement of the whole of Europe, for each village and fort around the town is united by trenches and bulwarks to impede the sorties of the besieged and to prevent them from receiving aid from outside. In our camp, weeks at a time go by when we use the pick and the trenching spade more often than the pike and the harquebus.This country is flat, with meadows and trees, little wine, and insalubrious water, and it is now devastated and destitute from the war, so that provisions are becoming scarce indeed. A measure of wheat—when it can be found—costs eight florins. Even the price of turnip seeds is up in the clouds. The villagers and suppliers from nearby towns dare not, unless by stealth, bring anything to our camp. Some Spanish soldiers, who care less for their reputation than for their hunger, eat the meat of dead horses, which is wretched provender. We mochileros go out to forage, sometimes traveling far, even in enemy territory, where we risk exposure to the heretic cavalry that at times overtakes our scattered scavengers and kills us at will. I myself have found myself entrusting my health no few times to the fleetness of my legs. Want is widespread, as I said, as much in our trenches as within the city. That plays to our benefit, and to that of the true religion, for the French, English, Scots, and Flemish garrisoned in the town, accustomed to a life of greater indulgence, suffer more from hunger and privations than those of our camp and especially we Spaniards. For our camp is mostly old soldiers used to suffering inside Spain and to fighting outside of it, with no need for succor other than a crust of hard bread and a little water or wine to continue the fight.And as to our own health, I am doing well. Tomorrow will mark my fifteenth birthday, and I have grown a good bit. Captain Alatriste is as he always is, with little meat on his bones and few words in his mouth. These privations seem not to affect him unduly. Perhaps because, as he says (twisting his mustache with one of those grimaces that could be taken as a smile), he has done without for most of his life, and the soldier becomes accustomed to everything, especially misery. You are already aware that he is a man little given to taking up a quill to write a letter. But he charges me to tell you that he appreciates yours. He also bids me greet you with all his deference and all his affection. And asks that you convey the same to his friends at the Tavern of the Turk, and to La Lebrijana.And one last thing. I know from the captain that Y.M. is often in the palace these days. That being the case, it is possible that you may come across a girl, or young lady, named Angélica de Alquézar, whose acquaintance you must already have made. She was, and perhaps is still, a menina serving her majesty the queen. Should you in fact meet her, I would ask of you a very particular service. If the occasion arises, will you tell her that Íñigo Balboa is in Flanders serving our lord and king and the holy Catholic faith, and that he has learned to fight honorably, like a Spaniard and a soldier? Should you do this for me, my most esteemed don Francisco, the affection and friendship I have always professed for you will be greater still.May God care for you and care for us all.Íñigo Balboa Aguirre

(Written beneath the walls of Breda, the first day of April of one thousand six hundred twenty-five)

From the trench I could hear the Hollanders digging. Diego Alatriste clamped his ear to one of the piles driven into the ground to support the fascines and gabions of the sap, and once again heard the muffled rrish-rrish traveling through the entrails of the earth. For a week now the soldiers in Breda had been working night and day to intercept the trench and mine we were digging toward the ravelin they called The Cemetery. Inch by inch, our men were advancing with our mine and the enemy with their countermine; we planning to set barrels of powder to explode beneath the Dutch fortifications and they determined to set off a friendly blast beneath the feet of the Catholic king’s sappers. It was all a question of hard work and speed, of who dug more quickly and was able to light his fuses first.

“Accursed animal,” said Garrote.

His head was cocked and his eyes alert, a typical stance, positioned behind the gabions with his musket pointed between boards serving as an embrasure, its cord soaked and smoking. He wrinkled his nose, nauseated. The “accursed animal” was a mule that had been lying dead in the sun for three days only a short distance from the trench on land claimed by neither side. It had strayed from the Spanish camp and had had time to sashay back and forth between enemy positions until a musket ball fired from the wall, zap!, stopped it in its tracks, and now it lay there, feet in the air, stinking, and buzzing with flies.

“You’ve been there a long time, and you haven’t got a Hollander yet,” Mendieta commented.

“I almost have,” said Garrote.

Mendieta was sitting at the bottom of the sap, at Garrote’s feet, picking off lice with solemn Basque meticulousness: In the trenches, not content with living like kings in our hair and our rags, lice would come out and stroll around like Madrid gentlemen. The Biscayan had spoken without much interest, absorbed in his task. His beard was untrimmed and his clothing torn and grimy, like everyone else’s there, including Alatriste himself.

“Can you see him, more or less?”

Garrote nodded. He had taken off his hat to offer less of a target for the harquebusiers across the way. His curly hair was caught back in a greasy ponytail.

“Not now, no. But once in a while he chances a look, and the next time I’ll have the whoreson.”

Alatriste ventured a quick look of his own above the parapet, attempting to stay under the cover of the timber and fascines. The man was perhaps one of the Dutch sappers working at the mouth of their tunnel some twenty varas ahead, well within range. However much he tried to remain hidden, his digging exposed him a little, not too much, barely his head, but enough for Garrote, who was not in any hurry and was considered a fine marksman, to keep him in sight until he had a sure shot. The Malagüeño, a man who believed in give and take, wanted to return the favor of the mule.

Some eighteen or twenty Spaniards were in the trench, one of the most advanced, which zigzagged along a short distance away from the Dutch positions. Diego Alatriste’s squad spent two weeks of every three there, with the rest of Captain Bragado’s bandera, distributed among the nearby saps and fosses, all of them situated between the Cemetery ravelin and the Merck River, at two lengths of a harquebus shot from the main wall and citadel of Breda.

“Ah, here’s my heretic,” Garrote murmured.

Mendieta, who had just found a louse and was examining it with familiar curiosity before crushing it between his fingernails, looked up with interest.

“You have a Hollander?”

“I have him.”

“Speed him to hell, then.”

“That is my plan.”

After running his tongue over his lips, Garrote had blown on the cord of his harquebus and was now carefully cheeking the musket, half-closing his left eye, his index finger caressing the trigger as if it were the nipple of a half-ducat harlot. Rising up a little farther, Alatriste had a fleeting view of an incautious bare head sticking up from the Dutch trench.

“Another maggot dying in mortal sin,” he heard Garrote comment.

Then came the sound of the shot, and with the flash of scorched powder Alatriste saw the head disappear. Three or four yells of fury followed, and three or four musket balls threw up earth on the Spanish parapet. Garrote, who had sunk back down again into the trench, laughed to himself, his smoking musket propped between his legs. Outside he heard more shots and insults shouted in Flemish.

“Tell them to go bugger themselves,” said Mendieta, locating another louse.

Sebastián Copons opened one eye and closed it again. Garrote’s musket fire had interrupted his siesta at the foot of the parapet, where his head was resting on a filthy blanket. The Olivares brothers, curious, poked their bushy heads around a corner of the trench. Alatriste had crouched down and was sitting with his back against the terreplein. He dug through his pouch, searching for the chunk of hard black bread he had put there the day before. He put it in his mouth and moistened it with saliva before he began chewing it, ever so slowly. With the stench of the dead mule and the foul air in the sap it was not an exquisite repast, but neither was there much choice, and even a simple crust of bread was a feast worthy of a king. No one would bring new provisions until nightfall, under the shelter of darkness.

Mendieta allowed the new louse to crawl down the back of his hand. Finally, bored with the game, he crushed it. Garrote was cleaning the still-warm barrel of his harquebus with a ramrod, humming an Italian tune.

“Oh, to be in Naples,” he said after a bit, flashing a smile that gleamed white in his swarthy Moorish face.

Everyone knew that Curro Garrote had served two years in the tercio of Sicily and four in Naples, forced to make a change of scene following a number of murky adventures involving women, knives, nocturnal burglaries, and a death, obligatory time spent in the prison of Vicaría, and another, voluntary, stay in the safe haven of the church of La Capela, a well-known bolt-hole.

To he who left me his cape,and fleeing from me, escaped,what can the Law hope?when in the land of the popehe’ll not pay his part in the scrape.

So between one thing and another, Garrote had sailed with the galleys of our lord and king along the Barbary Coast and in the Aegean Sea, plundering the land of the infidels and pirating carmoussels and other Turkish vessels. During those years, he said, he had collected sufficient booty to retire without any worries. And so he would have done had he not crossed paths with too many women and been so irresistibly drawn to gaming. For at the sight of a pair of dice or deck of cards, the Malagüeño was one of those men who play hard and are capable of gambling away the sun before it comes up.

“Italy,” he repeated in a low voice, with a faraway look and a rascally smile lingering on his lips.

He said it the way one pronounces the name of a woman, and Captain Alatriste could understand why. Although he did not speak freely as Garrote did, he, too, had his recollections of Italy, which must have seemed even more pleasant in a trench in Flanders. Like every soldier who had been posted there, he longed for that land, or perhaps what he truly longed for was to be young again beneath the generous blue skies of the Mediterranean. At twenty-seven, after being mustered out of his tercio following the suppression of rebellious Moors in Valencia, he had enlisted in the tercio of Naples and fought against Turks, Berbers, and Venetians. On the galleys of the Marqués de Santa Cruz his eyes had seen the infidel squadrons blaze before La Goleta; with Captain Contreras, the isles of the Adriatic; and in the fateful shallows of the Kerkennahs, he had witnessed the water turn red with Spanish blood. Aided by a companion named Diego Duque de Estrada, he escaped from that place dragging the young and badly wounded Álvaro de la Marca, the future Conde de Guadalmedina.

During those years of his youth, good fortune and the delights of Italy had alternated with no few labors and perils, although none could embitter the sweet recollection of the arbors of grapes on the gentle slopes of Vesuvius, the comrades, the music, the wine in the Chorrillo tavern, and the beautiful women. Between good and bad times, in the year ’13, his galley was captured at the mouth of the Constantinople canal, riddled to the mast top with Turks’ arrows and with half its crew cut to ribbons. Wounded in one leg, Alatriste was liberated when the ship holding him captive was captured in turn. Two years later, the fifteenth of the century, when Alatriste had reached the age of Christ, he was one of sixteen hundred Spaniards and Italians who, with a flotilla of five ships, despoiled the coast of the Levant for four months, later disembarking in Naples with a wealth of booty. There, once again, the wheel of Fortune spun, and his life was turned upside down. An olive-skinned woman, half Italian and half Spanish, with dark hair and large eyes—the kind who claims to be frightened when she sees a mouse but is perfectly relaxed with half a company of harquebusiers—had begun by asking him for a gift of some Genoa plums, then it was a gold necklace, and finally silk gowns. It ended, as often happens, when she had purged him of his last maravedí. Then the plot thickened, in the style of Lope’s plays, with an inopportune visit and a stranger in a nightshirt in a place he shouldn’t be. The sight of the alternate in his shirttails substantially weakened the credence of the little minx’s protests as, wide-eyed, she identified the fellow as her cousin, though he seemed to be more what the English would call a kissing cousin. Furthermore, Diego Alatriste was far too old to have the wool pulled over his eyes so easily. So, after one of the woman’s cheeks had been embellished by an oblique cut with the knife, and the intruder in the nightshirt by half a sword blade through his chest—in his haste this presumed cousin had come out to fight without his breeches, which seemed to have diminished his brio at the hour when it came to proving himself a good swordsman—Diego Alatriste took to his heels before being hauled off to prison. A precaution which, at that juncture, consisted of a hasty departure for Spain, thanks to the favor granted by an old acquaintance, the previously mentioned Alonso de Contreras, with whom, both only lads, he had left for Flanders at the age of thirteen, following the standards of Prince Albert.

“Here comes Bragado,” said Garrote.

Captain Carmelo Bragado was coming along the trench, head lowered and hat in hand to offer less of a target, searching out the defilade of enemy harquebusiers posted on the ravelin. Even so, as this robust man from León’s strapping six feet were difficult to hide from Dutch eyes, a pair of musket shots came, ziiing, zaaang, whirring over the parapet in homage to his arrival.

“May God visit them with the pox,” growled Bragado, dropping down between Copons and Alatriste.

He was fanning his sweaty face with the hat in his right hand and resting the left on the hilt of his Toledo blade; that hand, injured in the combat at the Ruyter mill, was missing the first two joints of the ring and little fingers. After a while, just as Diego Alatriste had done before him, he put an ear to one of the posts in the ground and frowned.

“Those heretic moles are in a hurry,” he said.

He leaned back, scratching his mustache where sweat had dripped onto it from the tip of his nose.

“I bring two items of bad news,” he added after a while.

He regarded the misery of the trenches, the debris piled everywhere, the deplorable appearance of the soldiers. His nose wrinkled at the stench from the dead mule.

“Although, among Spaniards,” he quipped, “having only two items of bad news is always good news.”

More time passed before he spoke again; finally he grimaced and again scratched his nose.

“They killed Ulloa last night.”

Someone muttered, “S’blood!” but the others said nothing. Ulloa was a squad corporal, an old soldier with whom they had shared good camaraderie until he earned his final bonus. As Bragado reported in few words, he had gone out to reconnoiter the Dutch trenches with an Italian sergeant, and only the Italian returned.

“With whom did he leave a testament?” Garrote asked with interest.

“With me,” Bragado replied. “A third goes to paying for masses.”

For a time they were silent, and that was all the epitaph Ulloa would receive. Copons went back to his siesta and Mendieta to his quest for lice. Garrote, who had finished cleaning his musket, was chewing his nails and spitting out pieces as black as his soul.

“How is our mine going?” Alatriste wanted to know.

Bragado gave a shrug.

“Very slow. The sappers have run into mud that’s too soft, and water is seeping in from the river. They have a lot of shoring up to do, and that takes time. We fear that the heretics will get to us first and relieve us of our bollocks.”

They heard shots at the far end of the trench, out of view, a heavy volley that lasted only an instant, then everything was calm again. Alatriste looked at his captain, waiting for him to get to impart the other bad news. Bragado never visited them just for the pleasure of stretching his legs.

“Gentlemen,” he said finally, “you have been assigned to the caponnieres.”

“God’s bones!” Garrote blasphemed.

The caponnieres were narrow tunnels excavated by sappers who, protected overhead by blankets, wood, and gabion baskets, dug below the trenches. These burrows were used both for aborting the advance of enemy works and for tunneling deeper in order to reach fosses, saps, and ditches where the men could then explode petards and smoke out the adversary with sulfur and wet straw. It was a grisly way to fight: below ground, in the dark, in passageways so narrow that often the men could move only by crawling along, one by one, choked by heat, dust, and sulfur fumes, engaging opponents like blind moles. The caponnieres near the Cemetery ravelin twisted and turned around the Spaniards’ main tunnel and were very close to those of the Dutch, attempting to counter the enemies’ efforts with their own; often when the soldiers collapsed a wall with a pick or a petard, they came face to face with the sappers on the other side in a melee of flashing daggers and point-blank pistol shots and, of course, the short-handled spades that, for this very reason, were sharpened with whetstones until the edges were keen as knives.

“It is time,” said Diego Alatriste.

He was crouched at the entrance of the main tunnel with his band, and Captain Bragado was watching from a short distance away in the sap, kneeling with the rest of Alatriste’s squad and a dozen more from his bandera, ready to lend a hand if the occasion demanded. Alatriste was accompanied by Mendieta, Copons, Garrote, the Galician Rivas, and the two Olivares brothers. Manuel Rivas was an extremely trustworthy and courageous youth, a fine-boned, blue-eyed lad who spoke a less-than-exemplary Spanish with the strong accent of Finisterre. As for the Olivareses, they looked like twins, though they weren’t. They had very similar features, with Gypsy-like faces and hair, and thick black beards edging up to generous Semitic noses that from a league away shouted the presence of great-grandparents who would have balked at eating bacon. That mattered not one whit to their comrades, for questions of purity of blood never arose in the tercios; it was believed that if a man spilled his blood in battle, that blood had circulated through pure hidalgo veins. The two brothers were always together: They slept back to back, shared every last crumb of bread, and watched out for each other in battle.

“Who will go first?” asked Alatriste.

Garrote did not step forward, apparently absorbed in running his finger along the edge of his dagger blade. Pale, and with a grimace, Rivas made as if to move forward, but Copons, economical as usual in both actions and words, picked up some straws from the ground and offered them to his comrades. It was Mendieta who drew the shortest. He looked at it for a long time and then without a word adjusted his dagger, laid his hat and sword on the ground, picked up the small primed pistol Alatriste handed him, and entered the tunnel, carrying a short, very sharp spade in the other hand. Behind him went Alatriste and Copons, they too removing hats and swords and tightening their leather buffcoats. The others followed in single file as Bragado and those staying behind watched in silence.

The beginning of the main gallery was lit by a pitch torch, its oily light illuminating the sweat on the naked torsos of the German sappers who had taken a break in their labors and were leaning on their picks and spades as they watched the men pass. The Germans were as good at digging as they were at fighting, especially when they were sober and well paid. Even their women, who, laden like mules, were coming and going with provisions from the camp, did their part by carrying large baskets and tools. Their corporal, a red-bearded fellow with arms like Alpujarras hams, guided the group through the labyrinth of passages. The tunnel grew lower and narrower the closer they came to the Dutch lines. Finally the sapper stopped at the mouth of a caponniere no more than three feet high. Light from a hanging oil lamp fell on a slow fuse that disappeared into the darkness, sinister as a black serpent.

“Eine vara, one,” said the German, indicating with spread hands the width of the earthen wall that separated the end of the caponniere from the Dutch passageway.

Alatriste nodded, and they all moved away from the opening, backs against the wall as they knotted kerchiefs around their faces to protect mouths and noses. The German gave them a big smile.

“Zum Teufel!” he said. Then he picked up the lantern and lit the fuse.

Bones. The tunnel ran beneath The Cemetery, and now bones were dropping down everywhere, mixed with earth. Long bones and short, fleshless skulls, tibias, vertebrae. Whole skeletons shrouded in torn and dirty winding sheets, clothing reduced to shreds by time. These remnants were mixed with dust and rubble, rotted splinters of coffins, fragments of headstones, and a nauseating stench flooded the caponniere. After the explosion, Diego Alatriste and the other men started to crawl toward the breach, crossing paths with rats squealing in terror. There was an opening to the sky that allowed a little light and air to filter through, and they passed beneath that pale glimmer, veiled in the smoke of burnt powder, before entering the shadows on the other side, the source of moans and cries in foreign voices. Alatriste was wet with sweat beneath his buffcoat, and his mouth was dry and gritty behind the protective kerchief. He dragged himself forward on his elbows. Something round rolled toward him, pushed by the feet of the man ahead of him; it was a human skull. The rest of a skeleton shattered from its coffin by the explosion and the subsequent collapse shifted beneath his arms as he pulled himself over the remains and splintered bones scraped his thighs.

He was not thinking. He crawled along inch by inch, jaws clenched and eyes closed to keep out the dirt, barely able to breathe. He felt nothing. Muscles knotted with tension were indifferent to any purpose other than to allow him to emerge alive from that journey through the kingdom of the dead and permit him to see the light of day once more. During those moments, his consciousness registered no sensation but the diligent repetition of the mechanical, professional acts of soldiering. He was resigned to the inevitable, and that drove him forward, that and the fact that one comrade was in front of him and another followed at his heels. That was the place Fate had assigned him on this earth—or, to be more precise, beneath it—and nothing he could think or feel was going to change it. Absurd, therefore, to waste time and concentration on anything other than dragging himself along with his pistol in one hand and dagger in the other, and all for no reason but to repeat the macabre ritual men have repeated through the centuries: killing to stay alive. Beyond such beautiful simplicity, nothing had meaning. His king and his country—whatever the true country of Captain Alatriste might be—were too far away from that subterranean hell to matter, too far from that blackness at whose end he continued to hear, ever closer, the laments of the Dutch sappers who had been caught by the explosion. There was no doubt that Mendieta had reached them, because now Alatriste could hear muffled blows, the slicing and cracking of flesh and bones dealt by the short-handled spade, which, according to the sounds, the Biscayan was swinging freely.

Beyond the rubble, the bones, and the dust, the caponniere widened into a larger space. It was the Dutch tunnel, now a scene of shadowy pandemonium. Still burning in a corner was the wick of a tallow lantern that was about to go out; it gave off a dim reddish light, barely enough to suggest the vague outlines of the shadows moaning nearby. Alatriste rolled out of the caponniere onto his knees, stuffed his pistol into his belt, and felt around with his free hand. Mendieta was wielding his spade without mercy, and a Dutch voice suddenly erupted in howls. Someone stumbled from the mouth of the caponniere onto the captain’s back; he could hear his comrades arriving one after the other. A pistol shot briefly lit the area, revealing bodies dragging themselves across the ground or lying motionless. The same fleeting flash illuminated Mendieta’s spade, red with blood.

A current of air from the depths of the Dutch tunnel was blowing dust and smoke toward the caponniere, and Alatriste cautiously felt his way toward it. He bumped into something alive, alive enough that a Flemish curse preceded the flash of a shot that nearly blinded the captain and singed the hairs on his face. He lunged forward, grabbed his adversary, and slashed twice, up and across, meeting only air, and then another two slashes forward, the second finding flesh. He heard a scream and then the sound of a body scrabbling away; in a second, Alatriste was after him, guided by the fleeing man’s cries of pain. He trapped him finally, catching him by the foot, and drove his dagger from that foot upward, again and again, until his prey ceased to shout or move.

“Ik geef mij over!” someone wailed in the shadows.

That was out of place, for everyone knew that no prisoners were taken in the caponnieres, just as the Spaniards, when dealt a bad hand, expected no quarter. The voice soon gurgled in a death rattle when one of the attackers, guided by sound, reached the heretic and silenced him with his dagger. Alatriste heard more sounds of fighting and paused to listen, motionless and alert. There were two more shots, and in their flash, he saw Copons close by, locked in a struggle with a Hollander, rolling across the ground. Then he heard the Olivares brothers calling each other in low voices. Copons and the Dutchman were not making any noise, and for an instant the captain wondered who was alive and who not.

“Sebastián!” he whispered.

Copons answered with a grunt, clarifying any doubt. Now there was almost no sound except for a low moan here and there, some ragged breathing, and the scraping sound of men crawling across the tunnel floor. Alatriste moved forward again on his knees, one hand held before him, groping in the darkness, the other tense and ready by his side, clutching his dagger. The last sputter of the lantern showed that the mouth of the tunnel leading to the enemy trenches was filled with rubble and splintered wood. A body lay sprawled there, motionless, and after striking twice with his dagger to be sure, the Captain crawled over it toward the tunnel. He paused a few instants, listening. There was nothing but silence on the other side, but he caught an odor.

“Sulfur!” he yelled.

The toxic cloud moved slowly down the tunnel, undoubtedly propelled by bellows the Dutch were pumping in order to flood the passage with a haze of burnt straw, tar, and sulfur. They obviously did not have the welfare of any compatriots still alive in mind, or perhaps by that point they were convinced that no one could have survived. The current of air favored their operation, and in less time than it takes to recite an Our Father, the noxious smoke would have poisoned the air. With a sudden sense of urgency, Alatriste scrabbled back through the rubble and bodies, bumped into the comrades clogging the mouth of the caponniere, and finally, after what seemed like years, was again pulling his body rapidly through fallen earth and remains from The Cemetery. The grunts and curses of someone he thought was Garrote pressed him from behind. The captain passed beneath the opening in the ceiling of the caponniere, desperately gasped air from outside, and then continued along the tight passageway, lips pressed and breath held, until over the head of the comrade preceding him he saw light ahead, gradually growing brighter. At last he emerged into the large tunnel, which had been abandoned by the German sappers, and then fell into the Spanish trench. He ripped the kerchief from his mouth and frantically gulped air, then used the cloth to scrub the sweat and dirt from his face. All around him, like cadavers restored to life, were the wan, grimy faces of his comrades, exhausted and blinded by the light. Finally, once his eyes had adjusted, he saw Captain Bragado waiting with the German sappers and the rest of the group.

“Is everyone here?” Bragado asked.

Rivas and one of the Olivares brothers were missing. Pablo, the younger one, his hair and beard no longer black but gray from powder and dirt, started toward the tunnel to look for his brother but was held back by Garrote and Mendieta. The Dutch, enraged by this turn of events, were now sending heavy fire our way from the other side, and musket balls whizzed past heads and bounced off the gabion baskets of the trench.

“Well, we really fucked them,” said Mendieta.

There was no triumph in his tone, only profound weariness. He still had his spade in his hand, covered with clumps of blood and earth. Copons lay on the ground beside Alatriste, breathing with difficulty, his face covered with a shining mask of sweat and clay.

“Whoresons!” the younger of the Olivares brothers shouted. “Heretic sons of beggars’ bawds, may you roast in hell!”

His imprecations ceased as Rivas’s head emerged from the mouth of the tunnel; he was dragging the other Olivares, half suffocated but still alive. The Galician’s blue eyes were bloodshot.

“God a’ mercy.”

His blond hair was smoking with sulfur. He clawed the kerchief from his face, coughing up dirt.

“Thanks be to God,” he said, filling his lungs with fresh air.

One of the Germans brought a small wineskin of water, and the men drank greedily, one after the other.

“Even if it were ass’s piss,” Garrote muttered, spilling water down his chin and chest.

Leaning against the trench wall and feeling Bragado’s eyes on him, Alatriste cleaned the dirt and blood from his vizcaína.

“How is the tunnel?” the officer asked finally.

“Clean as this dagger.”

Without another word Alatriste sheathed the weapon. Then he removed the primer charge from the pistol he had not needed to use.

“Thanks be to God,” Rivas repeated over and over, crossing himself. His blue eyes wept black earth.

Alatriste said nothing aloud, but to himself he said, “Sometimes God seems to have had enough.” Then, sickened with pain and blood, he gazed toward the other side and rested.

8. ATTACK BY NIGHT

In this way the month of April went by, rainy days alternating with clear days. The grass grew greener in the fields and trenches, and on the graves of the dead. Our cannon battered the walls of Breda; the sapping of mines and countermines continued; and every good Christian made use of his harquebus, skirmishing from trench to trench, with an assault from us and a sortie from the Dutch occasionally breaking the monotony of the siege. It was about that time that we began to hear news of terrible shortages, a true famine suffered by the besieged, although those of us doing the besieging were worse off than they. But with this difference: They had been brought up in fertile lands, with rivers and fields and cities regaled by Fortune; we Spaniards had for centuries been watering ours with blood and sweat just to get a scrap of bread. So, since our enemies were fashioned more for pleasure rather than the lack of sustenance, some by nature and others by custom, a number of the English and French in Breda began to abandon their units and come over to our camp, telling us that behind those walls the deaths now numbered some five thousand, including common folk, burghers, and military. From time to time the dawn would see hanging before the walls of the city Dutch spies who had been attempting to deliver increasingly desperate letters between the head of the garrison, Justin of Nassau, and his relative Maurice, who was only a few leagues away and unyielding in his determination to rescue the stronghold by breaking a siege that was now nearing a year in length.

In those days, too, came news of a dike that the same Maurice of Nassau was constructing near Sevenberge, two hours’ march from Breda, with the aim of diverting the waters of the Merck toward our camp in order, with the aid of the tides, to flood the Spanish barracks and trenches. Troops and provisions could also be brought to the city by boat. It was a grand, ambitious, and very timely enterprise. Also grand was the number of sappers and boatmen engaged in cutting sod and fascines for fortifications and in transporting stone, trees, and timber for its construction. They had already dug three anchorages lined with rubblework and were progressing from both sides, containing the mud with large wood retaining walls and securing the locks with pontoons and palisades. This news was a great worry to our General Spínola, who was seeking, without finding, an efficient way to prevent us waking in water up to our necks. On this point, it was said by way of jest, we would have to send men from the German tercios to thwart Nassau’s project, because they were a nation that could lend their basic skills to the purpose:

He set that crew of Germans downand then he said to them,“The dike that you see there must goor we will all be drowned.”And I am here to let you knowthat as water was not their drink,that dike vanished from his sight’ere he’d had time to blink.

It was also during those days that Captain Alatriste received an order to present himself in the tent of Colonel don Pedro de la Daga. He went there late in the afternoon, as the sun was setting over the flat landscape, bathing the banks of the dikes in a rosy glow and silhouetting the windmills and trees that stretched toward the swamps in the northwest. Alatriste had smartened himself up as much as he was able: His buffcoat hid his mended shirt; his weapons were burnished to an even brighter sheen; and his belts had been liberally treated with tallow. He entered the tent bareheaded, with his battered hat in one hand and the other resting on the pommel of his sword. He stood there, erect, not opening his mouth until don Pedro de la Daga, who was speaking with other officers, among them Captain Bragado, decided to grant him his attention.

“So here he is,” said the colonel.

Alatriste showed neither uneasiness nor curiosity at the unusual summons, though his attentive eyes did not miss the discreet, calming smile that Bragado sent him from behind the colonel’s back. There were four other officers in the tent, all of whom he knew by sight: don Hernán Torralba, captain of another of the banderas; Sergeant-Major Idiáquez; and two guzmanes, the two caballeros attached to de la Daga’s military staff. Aristocrats and well-bred hidalgos often served without pay in the tercios for love of glory or, which was more common, to establish a reputation before returning to Spain to enjoy the sinecures that would be theirs through influence, friendships, and family. All the men were holding crystal wine goblets that had been filled from bottles on a table covered in books and maps. Alatriste had not seen a crystal goblet since the sacking of Oudkerk. A meeting of shepherds and wine, he said to himself, means one dead sheep.

“Would you care for a little, señor?”

The twist of Jiñalasoga’s lips was meant to be amiable as he indicated the bottles and goblets with a casual sweep of his hand.

“It is good Pedro Ximénez wine,” he added. “We’ve just received it from Málaga.”

Alatriste swallowed hard, hoping that no one would notice. At noon in the trenches he and his comrades had feasted on a few sips of dirty water and bread seasoned with turnip oil. For that reason, he sighed: each to his own. It was in the long run more comfortable to keep one’s distance from one’s superiors, just as they were more comfortable keeping theirs from their inferiors.

“With Your Mercy’s leave,” he said after a moment’s thought, “I will have some another time.”

He had slightly adjusted his stance while speaking, as if to stand at attention, attempting to do so with the proper respect. Even so, the colonel arched an eyebrow and after an instant turned his back to him, ignoring him as if he were preoccupied with the maps on the table. The guzmanes looked Alatriste up and down with curiosity. As for Carmelo Bragado, who was standing in the background beside Captain Torralba, his smile had grown a little broader, but it disappeared when Sergeant-Major Idiáquez took center stage. Ramiro Idiáquez was a veteran with a gray mustache and white hair, which he wore cut very short. An old injury to his nose made it look as if it were slit at the tip, a reminder of the attack and sacking of Calais at the end of the old century, in the days of our good king Philip the Second.

“We have received a challenge,” he said with the brusqueness he used for giving orders and everything else. “Tomorrow morning. Five against five by the Den Bosch gate.”

In those days such events were a normal part of an officer’s duties. Not satisfied with the normal ebb and flow of the war, the antagonists sometimes took things to a personal level, with braggadocio and rodomontades in which the honor of nations and flags was at stake. Even the great Emperor Charles V, to the enjoyment of all Europe, had challenged his enemy Francis I of France to one-on-one combat; the Frenchman, however, and after a great deal of thought, had declined the offer. In the end, history had called in the French toad’s chips when in Pavia he saw his troops demolished, the flower of his nobility annihilated, and he himself lying flat on the ground with the sword of Juan de Urbieta, a citizen of Hernani, resting on his royal gullet.

Then came a brief silence. Alatriste was impassive, hoping that someone would say something more. In the end, it was one of the guzmanes who spoke.

“Yesterday, two vain, self-satisfied Dutch caballeros from Breda came out to deliver the message. Apparently one of our harquebusiers killed a man of some importance in the trenches of the stronghold. They asked for one hour on open ground, five against five, each man carrying two pistols and a sword. Of course, the gauntlet was picked up.”

“Of course!” the second guzmán repeated.

“Men from Campo Látaro’s Italian tercio asked to participate, but it has been decided that we should all be Spanish.”

“Only natural,” put in the other.

Alatriste examined them very slowly. The first to have spoken appeared to be about thirty. He was wearing clothing that heralded his social position, and the baldric of his Toledo sword was of good Moroccan leather tooled in gold. For some reason, despite the war, he had elected to wear his mustache tightly curled. He was disagreeable and haughty. The second man, broader and shorter, was also younger. He affected a slightly Italian style, with a rich collar of Brussels lace and a short velvet doublet with sleeves slashed in satin. The identifying red band both men wore was edged with gold tassels, and their fine leather boots with spurs were very different from the boots Alatriste was wearing at that moment: His were wrapped in rags to keep his toes from peeping out. He could imagine those two enjoying their intimate acquaintance with the colonel, who in turn would, through them, strengthen his connections in Brussels and Madrid, all of them laughing and exchanging thank-yous and Your Mercies. Dogs trotting on the same leash. He knew the name of the first only by reputation: don Carlos del Arco, a native of Burgos and son of a marqués, or son of a something. Alatriste had twice seen him fight, and he was judged to be courageous.

“Don Luis de Bobadilla and I make two,” don Carlos continued. “And we will need an additional three men with livers, not lilies, so we will be on even terms.”

“In truth we are lacking only one,” Sergeant-Major Idiáquez corrected. “To accompany these caballeros I have already chosen Pedro Martín, a brave man from the bandera of Captain Gómez Coloma. And the fourth will probably be Eguiluz, from don Hernán Torralba’s company.”

“A good menu for serving Nassau a bad meal,” the guzmán concluded.

Alatriste digested all this in silence. He knew Martín and Eguiluz, both veteran soldiers who could be trusted when it came to shaking hands with the Dutch, or with anyone else for that matter. Neither would make a bad partner at the fiesta.

“You will be the fifth,” said don Carlos del Arco.

Unblinking, with his hat in one hand and the other on his sword, Alatriste frowned. He did not care for the dandy’s tone or the way he considered Alatriste’s role a fait accompli, especially since this guzmán was not exactly an officer. Nor did he like the gold tassels on his red band or the petulant air of a man who has an endless supply of gold coins in his pouch and a father in Burgos who is a marqués. Finally, he did not like the fact that his commander, Captain Bragado, was standing there without a word to say for himself. Bragado was a good military man, and he knew how to combine those skills with delicate diplomacy, which had stood him in good stead during his career, but Diego Alatriste y Tenorio was not the kind of man to welcome orders from arrogant fops, however daring they might be and however much they drank his colonel’s wine from crystal goblets. All of which caused the affirmative answer he was about to give to linger a moment on his lips. That hesitation was misinterpreted by del Arco.

“Of course,” he said with a snort of disdain, “if you consider the matter too dangerous…”

He left his words hanging in the air and looked around as a smirk appeared on his companion’s face. Ignoring the warning glances Captain Bragado was sending his way, Alatriste took his hand from his sword and fingered his mustache with supreme calm. It was a way as good as any to contain the anger surging from his stomach to his chest, causing his blood to pound slowly, regularly, in his temples. He fixed his icy gaze on one of the caballeros and then on the other for a long moment, so long that the colonel, who had been standing all that time with his back turned, as if none of this concerned him, swung around to observe him. But Alatriste was already addressing Carmelo Bragado.

“I assume that this is your order, mi capitán.”

Bragado slowly put his hand to the back of his neck, rubbing it without answering, and then looked toward Sergeant-Major Idiáquez, whose furious eyes were shooting daggers at the two guzmanes. But then don Pedro de la Daga himself replied.

“There are no orders in questions of honor,” he said insolently. “Each man is answerable for his reputation and his shame.”

When he heard that, Alatriste paled, and his right hand slowly descended toward the hilt of his blade. The look Bragado sent him was now imploring: To show even an inch of blade would mean the gallows. But Alatriste was thinking of something more than an inch. In fact, he was coolly calculating how much time he would need to thrust the sword through the colonel first and then quickly turn to the caballeros. Perhaps he would have time to take one of them, preferably Carlos del Arco, before Idiáquez and Bragado killed him like a dog.

The sergeant-major cleared his throat, visibly perturbed. He was the only person who, because of his rank and privileges in the tercio, could contradict Jiñalasoga. He had also known Diego Alatriste some twenty years, ever since that day in Amiens when, one being a boy and the other a youth whose mustache was just beginning to grow, they had set out together from the Montrecourt ravelin in the company of Captain don Diego de Villalobos: In four hours they had nailed down the enemy artillery and killed the last of the eight hundred Frenchmen manning the trenches, giving in exchange the lives of seventy comrades. Which was not a bad trade, pardiez: eleven of them for every one of us, if my arithmetic is correct, and a bonus of thirty.

“With all due respect, Your Mercy,” Idiáquez intervened, “Diego Alatriste is a veteran soldier. Everyone knows that his reputation is irreproachable. I am sure that—”

The colonel interrupted him with a curt gesture. “Irreproachable reputations are not granted for life.”

“Diego Alatriste is a good soldier,” Captain Bragado spoke up from the background; he had become embarrassed by his own silence.

Don Pedro de la Dago quieted him with another brusque gesture. “Any good soldier—and in my tercio they are as numerous as grains of sand—would give his arm to be at the Den Bosch gate tomorrow morning.”

Diego Alatriste looked straight into the colonel’s eyes. His voice was slow and low, as cold as the fingertips tingling to draw his dagger.

“I use my two arms to comply with my duty to the king. He is the one who pays me…when I am paid.” His pause seemed infinitely long. “As for my honor and my reputation, have no care, Your Mercy, for I see to that, with no need for anyone to offer me duels or give me lessons.”

The colonel looked at Alatriste as if he intended to remember him for the rest of his life. It was clear that he was reviewing in his mind everything he had heard, sentence by sentence, seeking one word, a tone, a nuance, that would allow him to string a rope in the nearest tree. This was so obvious that the hand covered by Alatriste’s hat slid toward his left hip, close to the hilt of his dagger. At the first sign, he thought with resigned calm, I will put this dagger through your throat, pull out my sword, and let God or the devil prevail.

“This man may return to the trenches,” Jiñalasoga said finally.

No doubt the memory of the recent mutiny tempered the colonel’s natural inclination to make use of the noose. Bragado and Idiáquez, who had been watching Diego Alatriste’s hands, seemed to relax with no little relief. Cloaking the relief that he too was feeling, Alatriste nodded respectfully, turned, and walked from the tent into the fresh air, pausing beside the halberds of the German sentinels who could, so easily, have been leading him on a scenic trip to the gallows. He stood stock-still for a moment, gratefully observing a sun that was disappearing below the dikes, a sun that he was now certain of seeing rise the next morning. Then he clapped his hat onto his head and started back to the parapets leading to the Cemetery ravelin.

That night Captain Alatriste, wrapped in his cape, lay awake almost till dawn, gazing up at the stars. It was neither the colonel’s disfavor nor fear of dishonor that kept him awake while his comrades snored around him. He did not give a fig for whatever version of the story might circulate through the tercio, for Idiáquez and Bragado knew him well and would give the episode the report it deserved. Furthermore, as he had said to don Pedro de la Daga, he would earn his own respect among his equals as well as those who were not. No, it was something else that denied him sleep. And that something was his fervent wish that at least one of the guzmanes would survive the next day at the Den Bosch gate. Preferably Carlos del Arco. For then, he told himself as his eyes drank in the firmament, time passes, life takes many turns, and a man never knows what old acquaintance he might meet in just the right place, at just the right time: in the quiet darkness, with no one around to hear the sound of ringing swords.

The next day, with our men watching from our trenches and the enemy from theirs as well as from atop the city walls, five men walked forward from the lines of our lord and king toward the encounter while another five emerged from the Den Bosch gate. These five, according to the rumor running around the camp, were three Dutchmen, a Scot, and a Frenchman. As for ours, Captain Bragado had chosen as the fifth member of the party Second Lieutenant Minaya, a thirty-year-old from the city of Soria: honorable, trustworthy, with good legs and a better hand. Both teams came wearing a sword and two pistols at the waist but no dagger; it was said that the challengers had not included them because everyone knows how dangerous a Spaniard with a dagger can be in close combat.

I had returned the previous night from three days of foraging—which had taken me, along with a crew of mochileros, almost to the banks of the Mosa—and now I was standing in the crowd with my friend Jaime Correas on top of some gabions, for once unafraid of being struck by a musket ball. Hundreds of soldiers were watching from every quarter, and it was rumored that the Marqués de los Balbases, our General Spínola, was himself observing the challenge in the company of don Pedro de la Daga and the captains and colonels of the remaining tercios. As for Diego Alatriste, he was in one of the forward trenches with Copons, Garrote, and others from his squad, with very little to say but with his eyes firmly fixed on the antagonists. Second Lieutenant Minaya, no doubt informed by our Captain Bragado, had done something that was the act of a good comrade: He had come by earlier that morning and asked to borrow one of Alatriste’s pistols, using the pretext that he had some problem with his, and now he was walking to the fight with that pistol at his waist. It said a great deal in his favor and prevented acrimony within the bandera. I will add here that many years later, after Rocroi, when the vagaries of fortune had made me an officer in the Spanish guard of King Philip, our lord and king, I had occasion to do a favor for a young recruit named Minaya. I did so without a moment’s hesitation, remembering the day when his father had the good grace to wear Captain Alatriste’s pistol as he went to the encounter below the walls of Breda.

So there they were that April morning, with a warm sun overhead and thousands of eyes focused on them: five against five. They met in a small meadow that sloped down about a hundred paces toward the Den Bosch gate onto unclaimed land. There were no preliminaries, no doffing of hats or other courtesies. Instead, as one group neared the other they began to fire and to draw their swords, at which both camps of watchers, who had until that instant observed in mortal silence, burst into a clamor of encouraging cries to their respective comrades. I know that from the beginning of time, well-intentioned people have condemned violence and preached peace and God’s word, and I, better than many, know what war does to a man’s body and soul, but despite all that, despite my capacity to reason, despite my common sense and the lucidity lent by years, I cannot help but shiver with admiration when I witness the courage of valiant men. And God knows those men were.

Don Luis de Bobadilla, the younger of the two guzmanes, went down with the first shots, while the others closed in on each other with great energy and deadly intent. One of the Dutchmen was felled by a pistol shot that broke his neck, and another of his companions, the Scot, was wounded in the torso, run through by the sword of Pedro Martín, who lost it there. Finding himself with no sword and two discharged pistols, he was then knifed in the throat and chest, falling upon the man he had just killed. As for don Carlos del Arco, he engaged the Frenchman so skillfully that, between thrust and counterthrust, he was able to aim a shot at his face, though he then withdrew from the fight, hobbled by a wicked wound to his thigh. Minaya finished off the Frenchman with Captain Alatriste’s pistol and badly wounded the second Dutchman with his own, emerging without a scratch himself. And Eguiluz, his left hand crippled by a musket ball but with his sword in his right, dealt two clean blows to the last of their opponents, one on an arm and the other to the flank. The heretic, seeing himself wounded and alone, resolved, like Antigone, not to flee exactly, but to fall back and check his resources. The three Spaniards still standing relieved their adversaries of their weapons and their bands, which were orange, according to the custom of those who served the Estates General. They would even have carried the bodies of Bobadilla and Martín to our lines had the Dutch, furious at the outcome, not consoled themselves over their defeat with a hailstorm of musket balls. Our men, therefore, were slowly quitting the field when a musketeer’s lead struck Eguiluz in the kidneys, and although, helped by his companions, he reached the trenches, he died three days later. As for the seven bodies, they lay on open ground almost all day, until there was a brief truce at dusk and each side was able to recover its own.

No one in the tercio questioned Captain Alatriste’s honor. The proof was that a week later, when the decision was made to attack the Sevenberge dike, he and his squad were among the forty-four men chosen for the task. They left our position at sunset, taking advantage of the first night of heavy fog to conceal their movements. They were under the command of Captains Bragado and Torralba, and they all wore their shirts on the outside of their doublets and buffcoats, in order to recognize one another in the dark. This was common practice among Spanish troops as well as the origin of the term encamisadas, being “shirted,” given to night maneuvers. This attack was designed to capitalize on the natural aggressiveness and skill of our men in hand-to-hand combat: infiltrate a heretic camp, catch them unawares, kill as many as possible, burn their barracks and tents—though only when they were about to retire, to prevent providing unnecessary light—and get out at top speed. The troops were carefully chosen, and among Spaniards it was considered an honor to participate in an encamisada, so much so that often there were squabbles among the soldiers who wanted to be one of the party, as it was a bitter affront not to be included. The rules were strict, and customarily the execution of the raid was extremely well disciplined, in order to save lives in the confusion of the night. Of those undertaken in Flanders, the one at Mons was famous: five hundred Germans under salary of the House of Orange dead, their camp burnt to ashes. In another, fifty were chosen to carry out the night foray, but when the appointed hour came, soldiers arrived from every direction, claiming to have been selected. When finally they did set off, instead of the usual silence, there were boisterous arguments in the middle of the night, more like a Moorish raid than a Spanish encamisada, with three hundred men racing along the road, trying to reach the goal ahead of their comrades. The enemy awoke to see coming toward them a swell of maddened, yelling demons in white shirts, slaughtering indiscriminately and brawling among themselves, competing to see who could kill better and more.

But as for Sevenberge, our General Spínola’s plan was to travel the two long hours to the dike with great stealth and silence, surprise those guarding it, and destroy the work, breaching the locks with axes and burning everything in sight. It had been decided that a half-dozen of us mochileros would be needed to carry the equipment for the fire and the sapping. So that night saw me in the line of Spaniards marching along the right bank of the Merck, where the fog was thickest. In the hazy darkness all you could hear was the muffled sound of footsteps—we were wearing espadrilles or boots wrapped in rags, and we knew we would pay with our lives if we were to speak aloud, light a cord, prime pistols or harquebuses—and the white shirts moved through the night like ghostly shrouds. Some time before, I had been forced to sell my beautiful Solingen, for we mochileros were not allowed to carry a sword, so I had only my dagger snugged into my belt. But I was not, pardiez, short of a load: The large pouch over my shoulders was packed with charges of powder and sulfur wrapped in petards, garlands of pitch to set the fires, and two sharpened hatchets for splintering the wood of the locks.

I was trembling with cold despite the coarse wool jerkin I was wearing beneath my shirt, which looked white only at night and had more holes in it than a flute. The fog created an unreal atmosphere around us, soaking my hair and dribbling down my face as if it were fine rain or the chirimiri of my homeland, making everything slippery and causing me to walk with great care, for if I slipped on the wet grass it would mean tumbling into the cold waters of the Merck with ballast of sixty pounds on my back. The night and the misty air allowed me to see about as far as a fried flounder might: two or three vague white splotches before me and two or three behind. The closest soldier, whose progress I was diligently following, was Captain Alatriste. His squad was in the vanguard, preceded only by Captain Bragado and two Walloon guides from the Soest tercio, or what remained of it, whose mission, apart from acting as guides since they knew this region well, consisted of outwitting the Dutch sentinels and getting close enough to cut their throats before they had time to sound the alarm. To do that they had chosen a route that entered enemy territory after passing between large swamps and peat bogs and along very narrow paths that often became dikes where men could walk only in single file.

We crossed over to the side of the river by means of a palisade-reinforced pontoon bridge that led to a dike separating the left bank from the swamps. The white blur of Captain Alatriste moved on in silence, as always. I had watched him slowly equip himself at sunset: buffcoat beneath his shirt and outside it the large belt with sword, dagger, and the pistol Second Lieutenant Minaya had returned to him, its pan well greased to protect it from the wet. He also tied to his belt a small flask of powder, a pouch with ten musket balls, and spare flint, tinder, and steel, should they be needed. Before tying on the powder, he had checked its color, not too black or too gray; its grain, which was hard and fine; and touched a little to his tongue to test the saltpeter. Then he had asked Copons for his whetstone and spent a long time sharpening both edges of his dagger. Those in the lead, which was his group, were not carrying harquebuses or muskets, for the first assault would be made with blades until the site was secured for their comrades. For that task it was best to be lightly armed, with hands free of encumbrance. The quartermaster of our bandera had asked for young and able mochileros, and Jaime Correas and I had volunteered, reminding him that we had already performed well in the surprise attack at Oudkerk. When Captain Alatriste saw me with my shirt on the outside and my dagger in my belt, he had not said that it seemed a good idea to him, but then again, he had not said it didn’t. All he did was nod and point to one of the packs. Then, in the misty light of the bonfires, we all knelt, prayed an Our Father in a murmur that ran down the rows, crossed ourselves, and started off toward the northwest.

The line suddenly stopped, and the men crouched down and in low voices sent back the password, which Captain Bragado had decided only then: Antwerp. Everything had been so well planned before we left that, without need for orders or commentary, a succession of white shirts now filed past me, dividing to the left and right. I heard the splashing of men along both sides of the dike, wading in water up to their waists, and the soldier behind me touched my shoulder and took the pack. His face was a dark blur, and I could hear his agitated breathing as he fastened the straps and continued forward. When I turned back and looked ahead, Captain Alatriste’s shirt had disappeared into the darkness and the fog. Now the last shadows passed me by, fading away with the muted sounds of steel being drawn from sheaths and the soft chink chink of harquebuses and pistols finally being loaded and primed. I went a few steps farther with them, and then I lay face down on the edge of the slope, on the wet grass where the soldiers’ footsteps had churned up mud. Someone crawled up beside me from behind. It was Jaime Correas, and the two of us stayed there, talking in whispers, staring anxiously into the darkness that had swallowed forty-four Spaniards who meant to give the heretics a bad night.

About the time it took for two rosaries passed by. My comrade and I were numb with cold, and we pressed close to share our warmth. We could hear nothing but the water running along the side of the dike leading to the river.

“They’re taking a long time,” Jaime whispered.

I did not answer. At that moment I was thinking of Captain Alatriste in cold water up to his chest, pistol held high to keep the powder dry, a dagger or sword in the other hand, creeping up on the Dutch sentinels guarding the locks. Then I thought of Caridad la Lebrijana and ended up thinking about Angélica de Alquézar as well. Often, I told myself, women do not know what perfection and perdition lie in the hearts of men.

A harquebus shot rang out: only one, distant, isolated, in the night and fog. I estimated it to be more than three hundred paces before us, and we flattened ourselves against the slope even more. The silence returned for an instant, and then a furious succession of shots rang out, pistols and muskets. On edge, feverish from the uproar, Jaime and I tried to peer into the dark but to no avail. Now the firing was coming from both directions, growing louder and more frequent, reverberating across sky and earth as if a storm were discharging its thunder and lightning under the cover of darkness. There was a sharp, loud report, and two more followed. Then we could see that the fog was lifting a little: A pale, milky, then reddish glow grew, diffusing itself in the tiny droplets that filled the air and were reflected in the dark water below the slope where we lay. The Sevenberge dike was aflame.

I never knew how much time had passed, but I do know that in the distance the night was roaring like hell itself. Finally we sat up a little, fascinated, and at that moment we heard the sound of steps running toward us down the dike. Then, a succession of white blurs, shirts racing through the darkness, began to take shape through the fog, passing us and heading in the direction of the Spanish camp. The eruptions of shots continued from the harquebuses ahead of us as the pale silhouettes continued to run past, with the sound of footsteps sloshing through mud, oaths, ragged breathing, and the moan of someone wounded being helped along by his comrades. Now the crack of muskets was coming closer, and the white shirts, which had at first arrived in clusters, were beginning to thin out.

“Let’s go,” said Jaime, jumping up and breaking into a run.

I in turn sprang up, spurred by a wave of panic. I did not want to be left behind, alone. A few stragglers were still passing us, and in each white splotch I tried to make out the silhouette of Captain Alatriste. One shadow was staggering along the dike, running with difficulty, its breathing choked by the moan of pain that escaped with each step. Before the figure reached me it fell and rolled down the slope, and I heard it splash into the water. Without thinking, I jumped down the slope after it, into water up to my knees, feeling through the dark until I touched a motionless body. I felt a corselet beneath the shirt and a bearded face, icy as death itself. It was not the captain.

Shots roared closer with every minute. They seemed to be coming from every direction. I stumbled up the slope to the top of the dike, disoriented, and I realized that I had lost a sense of which was the good side and which the bad. I could no longer see the red glow in the distance, and no one was running past me anymore. Nor could I remember which direction the man who had fallen down had come from or determine in which direction to run. My head was filled with a silent scream of panic. Think! I told myself. Think calmly, Íñigo Balboa, or you will never see the dawn. I knelt on one knee, forcing my reason to tame the wild beating of blood at my temples. The soldier had fallen into quiet water, I remembered. And then I realized that I was hearing the soft sound of the Merck flowing at the bottom of the slope on my right. The river flows toward Sevenberge, I reasoned. And we had come along the right bank, crossing to the left over the pontoon bridge. I was, therefore, facing in the wrong direction. So I turned and began to run, cleaving the dark night as if instead of Hollanders I had the very devil behind me.

I have run like that only a few times in my life. Your Mercies should try it, soaked in water and mud in the black of night. I ran blindly, with my head down, risking a roll down the slope straight into the Merck. As the cold, moist air entered my lungs it turned to fire, and I felt as if my chest were being pricked by red-hot needles. Then, just as I was beginning to wonder if I had gone too far, I came to the pontoons. I grabbed on to the stakes and concentrated on crossing, slipping on the wet wood. I had barely reached the other side, back on solid ground, when a flash lit the darkness and the whir of a harquebus ball passed a hairsbreadth from my head.

“Antwerp!” I yelled, throwing myself to the ground.

“Bugger it,” a voice replied.

Two pale silhouettes, crouched down, were outlined against the fog.

“You’ve just had a lucky escape, comrade,” said the second voice.

I got to my feet and went toward them. I could not see their faces, but I did see the white of their shirts and the sinister shadows of the harquebuses that had been so close to sending me to my rest:

“Did Your Mercies not see my shirt?” I asked, still breathless from running and fright.

“What shirt?” one asked.

I felt my chest, surprised, and did not swear only because I was still not old enough, nor was I in the habit of doing so. During the attack, I had lain face down for so long on the dike, my shirt was now dark with mud.

9. THE COLONEL AND

THE BANNER

During that time, Maurice of Nassau died, to the sorrow of the Estates General and the gratification of the true religion, but not before wresting from us, by way of farewell, the city of Goch, burning the supplies we had stored in Ginneken, and attempting to take Antwerp with a surprise attack that ended up backfiring on him. That heretic, the paladin of Calvin’s abominable sect, would go to hell without allaying his obsessive hunger to end the siege of Breda. To offer our condolences to the Dutch, our cannons spent the day tidily dropping seventy-pound balls on the walls of the city, and at daybreak, through the efforts of our sappers, we blew up a bulwark with thirty good citizens inside, giving them a rather rude awakening and demonstrating that God does not always reward the early riser.

At that point Breda was no longer a matter of military interest to Spain but, rather, one of reputation. The world was in suspense, awaiting the triumph or the failure of the troops of the Catholic king. Even the sultan of the Turks—may Christ visit foul excrescences upon him—was awaiting the outcome to see whether our lord and king would emerge with more or less power. And in Europe the eyes of every king and prince, particularly those of France and England, were focused on the stalemate, eager to benefit from our misfortune or to grieve over Spanish gains, which was equally true in the Mediterranean of the Venetians and even the Roman pope. For His Holiness, despite being the Divinity’s earthly vicar, with all the attendant paraphernalia, and also despite the fact that it was we Spanish who were doing his dirty work in Europe, bankrupting ourselves in defense of God and the Most Blessed Mary, harassed us whenever he could, because he was jealous of our influence in Italy. There is nothing like being powerful and feared for a couple of centuries to cause enemies with malicious intentions, whether or not they wear the pope’s triple crown, to spring up on every side. Under the mantle of pleasant words, smiles, and diplomacy, they take painstaking care in completely buggering you. Although in the case of the sovereign pontiff, his biliousness was, to a degree, understandable. After all, only a century before the problem of Breda, his predecessor, Clement VII, had had to take to his heels, tucking up his cassock as he ran and taking refuge in the Castel Sant’Angelo, when the Spaniards and German mercenaries of our Charles V—who had carried an unpaid bill since the time of El Cid—had attacked his walls and sacked Rome without respecting cardinals’ palaces, or women, or convents. It is therefore only fair we should remember that even popes have a good memory and their own crumb of honor.

“I have a letter for you, Íñigo.”

Surprised, I looked up at Captain Alatriste. He was standing at the entrance to the hut we had constructed of blankets, fascines, and mud, where I was spending time with some of my comrades. He was wearing his hat and had thrown his frayed wool cape around his shoulders, its hem slightly lifted by the sheath of his sword. The broad brim of his hat, the heavy mustache and aquiline nose, accentuated the leanness of his weathered face, now unnaturally pale. He had not been in good health for several days, due to some foul water—our bread was moldy as well, and meat, when we had it, was full of worms—that had set his body on fire and poisoned his blood with fever. The captain, nonetheless, was no friend to bloodletting or purges; he always said those measures killed more often than they cured. So he was just returning from the camp of the sutlers, where an acquaintance who acted as both barber and apothecary had brewed a concoction of herbs to lower his fever.

“A letter for me?”

“So it seems.”

I left Jaime Correas and the others and, brushing the dirt from my breeches, went outside. We were far out of range of the walls, near the palisade where we kept the carts and dray horses, and close to certain ramshackle hovels that served as taverns when there was wine, and as brothels with German, Italian, Flemish, and Spanish women for the troops. It was a favorite place for us mochileros to forage for food, with all the cunning and mischief our calling and our youth lent us as we sought ways to live in comparative comfort. It was rare that we did not return from our pilfering with two or three eggs, some apples, tallow candles, or some useful object we could sell or trade. With such industry I offered some succor to Captain Alatriste and his comrades, and when I had a real stroke of luck I bowed to my own pleasure, which might include a visit, along with Jaime Correas, to La Mendoza’s shack, where, since the conversation between Diego Alatriste and the Valencian Candau on the banks of the dike, my entry had never been disputed. The captain, who knew what I was about, had discreetly admonished me, saying simply that women who follow soldiers are the source of pustules, pestilence, and sword fights. The truth is that I did not know what the captain’s relations with such females had been in other times, but I can say that never in Flanders did I see him enter a house or a tent with a swan swinging at the entrance. I did learn, it is true, that once or twice, with Captain Bragado’s permission, he had gone to Oudkerk, which was now the garrison of a Burgundian bandera, to visit the Flemish woman I have spoken of elsewhere. It was rumored that on his last visit, Alatriste had exchanged harsh words with the husband, whose arse he had ended up kicking into the canal, and had even had to draw his sword when a pair of Burgundians tried to squeeze into a procession they’d not been invited to join. But since that time, he had not been back.

As for me, my sentiments regarding the captain were beginning to be ambiguous, although I was barely aware of it. On the one hand, I obeyed him implicitly, offering him the sincere devotion that Your Mercies know so well. On the other hand, like any youth growing out of his boyhood, I was beginning to feel the weight of his shadow. Flanders had catalyzed the transformations in me natural for a boy who lived among soldiers and who furthermore had had the opportunity to fight for his life, his reputation, and his king. Also, I had recently been troubled by questions that my master’s silences no longer answered. All of this was making me consider the possibility of enlisting as a soldier, and although I was not yet old enough—it was rare at that time to serve if one was younger than seventeen or eighteen, which meant I would have to lie—somehow I thought that a turn of fortune might somehow facilitate my ambition. After all, Captain Alatriste himself had enlisted when he was barely fifteen, during the siege of Hulst. That had been during the famous exercise conceived to divert the enemy from a planned attack on the fort of La Estrella, when mochileros, pages, and every available servant had marched out armed with pikes, banners, and drums and paraded along a dike, tricking the enemy into taking them for replacement troops. The assault that followed was bloody; so bloody that most of the youths, finding themselves with weapons and their zeal kindled by the battle, ran to back up their masters, courageously jumping into the fire. Diego Alatriste, who at that time was a drummer in the bandera of Captain Pérez de Espila, went with them. Some, Alatriste among them, fought so bravely that Prince Albert, who was already governor of Flanders and was personally overseeing the siege, rewarded them by letting them enlist.

“It came this morning with the post from Spain.”

I took the letter the captain was holding out to me. It was written on fine paper; the seal was intact, and my name was on the front:

Señor don Diego Alatriste ^* Attention of Íñigo Balboa ^* In the Bandera of Captain don Carmelo Bragado, of the Cartagena Tercio ^* Military post of Flanders

My hands trembled as I turned over the envelope sealed with the initials A. de A. Without a word, and feeling Alatriste’s eyes on me, I slowly walked some distance away to where the Germans’ women were washing clothes by a narrow branch of the river. The Germans, like some Spaniards, took as their women former whores who assuaged their desires and also relieved them of the misery of washing soldiers’ clothing. In addition, some sold liquors, firewood, tobacco, and pipes to those who needed them, and I have already written how in Breda I saw German women working in the trenches to help their husbands. Near the makeshift laundry, where a tree that had been felled and trimmed for cutting firewood lay across a large rock, I sat, unable to tear my eyes from those initials, incredulously holding Angélica’s letter in my hands. I knew that the captain was watching me the whole time, so I waited for my heart to stop pounding and then, trying not to reveal my impatience, I broke the seal and unfolded the letter.

Señor don Íñigo:I have had notice of your pursuits, and I am pleased to know that you are serving in Flanders. Believe me when I say that I envy you for that.I hope the rancor you hold for me over the difficulties you must have suffered following our last meeting is not too great. After all, I did one day hear you say that you would die for me. Take it therefore as one of life’s tests, and remember that along with the bad times life can also offer satisfactions such as serving our lord and king or, perhaps, receiving this letter of mine.I must confess that I cannot help but recall you every time I pass by the Acero fountain. However, I understand that you lost the handsome amulet I gave you there—something unpardonable in such an accomplished gallant as yourself.I hope to see you someday here at court bedecked in sword and spurs. Until then, count on my memory and my smile.Angélica de Alquézar

P.S. I rejoice that you are still alive. I have plans for you.

I had finished reading the letter—I read it three times, passing from stupor to happiness, and then to melancholy—and had sat for a long time staring at the folded paper lying on the thick patches that repaired the knees of my breeches. I was in Flanders, at war, and she was thinking of me. There will be occasion—should I still have the desire, and the life, to continue recounting to Your Mercies the adventures of Captain Alatriste as well as my own—to detail the plans Angélica de Alquézar had for my person in that twenty-fifth year of the century, she being twelve or thirteen years old at the time and I on the road to fifteen. Plans that, had I divined them, would have made me tremble with both terror and delirium. I shall tell you here only that her beautiful and evil little head, graced with blue eyes and blond curls, would—for some obscure reason that can be explained only by the secrets that certain women hold in the depths of their souls from the time they are young girls—place my neck and my eternal salvation in peril many times in the future. And she would always do it in the same contradictory manner: coldly and deliberately. Yet I believe that at the same time she sought my misfortune, she also loved me. And that was how it would be until she was taken from me—or until I freed myself from her, God mend me, nor am I sure which was the case—by her early and tragic death.

“I wonder if you have something to tell me,” said Captain Alatriste.

He had spoken very softly, with nothing nuanced in his tone. I looked up. He was sitting beside me on the large rock beneath the tree. He held his hat in his hand and was staring with an absent air toward the distant walls of Breda.

“There is not much to say,” I replied.

He nodded slowly, as if accepting what I said, and lightly stroked his mustache. Silence. His motionless profile made me think of a dark eagle resting high on a cliff. I noted the two scars on his face—one on an eyebrow and the other on his forehead—and the one on the back of his left hand, a memento Gualterio Malatesta had bestowed at the Las Animas gate. There were more scars hidden beneath his clothing, eight in total. I looked at the burnished hilt of his sword, the cobbled boots tied around his legs with harquebus cords, the rags visible through the holes in the soles, the mended tears in his threadbare brown cape. Perhaps, I thought, he had once been in love. Perhaps, in his way, he still was, and that included Caridad la Lebrijana and the silent blonde Flemish woman in Oudkerk.

I heard him sigh softly, barely a breath expelled from his lungs, and then he made a move to get to his feet. I handed him the letter. He took it without a word and looked at me closely before he started reading, and now it was I who stared at the distant walls of Breda, as expressionless as he had been a moment before. Out of the corner of my eye I watched the hand with the scar rise to stroke his mustache again. Then he read. Finally I heard the crackle of the paper as he folded it, and once again I held the letter in my hands.

“There are things…” he began after a moment.

Then he stopped, and I thought that was all he would say, which would not have been strange in a man given more to silences than to words.

“Things,” he continued finally, “that they know from the time they are born. Though they are not even aware that they know them.”

Again he cut himself short. I heard him shifting uncomfortably, seeking a way to finish.

“Things it takes us men a lifetime to learn.”

Then silence again, and this time he did not say anything more. Nothing in the vein of “Take care, guard against our enemy’s niece,” or other comments that one might have expected under the circumstances, and that I, as he undoubtedly knew, would have immediately ignored with all the arrogance of insolent youth. For a while he stared at the distant city, then put on his hat and stood up, settling his cape over his shoulders. And as I sat and watched him on his way back to the trenches, I wondered how many women, how many wounds, how many roads, and how many deaths—some owed to others and some to oneself—a man must know for those words to remain unspoken.

It was mid-May when Henry of Nassau, Maurice’s successor, tried to test Fortune one last time, attempting to deliver Breda and to leave our bollocks buried in the ashes. It was the whim of fate that at that time, just on the eve of the day chosen by the Hollanders for their attack, our colonel and some of his staff were making a round of inspections along the northwest dikes and that Captain Alatriste’s squad, chosen that week for the duty, was serving as escort. Don Pedro de la Daga was traveling with his usual ostentation: he and a half-dozen others on horseback with his commander-of-the-tercio standard, six Germans with halberds, and a dozen soldiers, among them Alatriste, Copons, and other comrades on foot, harquebuses and muskets shouldered, clearing the way for the general’s party. I was bringing up the rear, carrying my pack filled with provisions and a supply of powder and balls, looking at the reflection of the string of men and horses in the quiet water of the canals, which the sun was tinting even more red as it sank toward the horizon. It was a peaceful dusk, with a clear sky and pleasant temperature; nothing seemed to announce the events that were about to be unleashed.

There had been movement of Dutch troops in the area, and don Pedro de la Daga had orders from General Spínola to take a look at the Italian positions near the Merck River, on the narrow road of the Sevenberge and Strudenberge dikes, to ascertain whether they needed to be reinforced with a bandera of Spaniards. Jiñalasoga’s intention was to stop for the night at the Terheyden garrison, which was under the command of the sergeant-major of Campo Látaro’s tercio, don Carlos Roma, and to devote the next day to making the necessary arrangements. We arrived at the dikes and the Terheyden fort before sunset, and everything seemed to be going as planned. Our colonel and his officers were lodged in the tents that had been prepared for them, while we were assigned to a small redoubt of wood stakes and gabions beneath the stars, where we wrapped ourselves in our capes after the meager mouthful the Italians, good and happy comrades, offered on our arrival. Captain Alatriste went to the colonel’s tent to inquire if he might offer some service, and don Pedro de la Daga, with his usual disdain, replied that he had no need of him and that he should do as he wished. Upon the captain’s return, as we were in a place unknown to us and there were both honorable and trustworthy men within Látaro’s contingent, he decided that with the Italians or without them we should set up a guard. And so Mendieta was chosen for the first watch, one of the Olivares brothers for the second, and Alatriste kept the third for himself. Mendieta, therefore, took his place close to the fire, his harquebus primed and cord lit, while the rest of us lay down to sleep any which way we could.

Dawn was breaking when I was awakened by strange noises and voices calling “To arms!” I opened my eyes to a dirty gray morning, to find Alatriste and the others moving around me, all in heavy armor, lighting the slow matches of their harquebuses, filling powder pans, and ramming lead into muzzles as fast as they could. Close by I heard a deafening eruption of harquebuses and muskets and, amid the confusion, voices in the tongues of every nation. We later learned that Henry of Nassau had sent his English musketeers, all handpicked, and two hundred coseletes along the narrow dike. At their head was their English colonel, named Ver, who was also supported by French and German troops, his whole force numbering some six thousand, and all of them preceding a Dutch rear guard of heavy artillery, carriages, and cavalry. At first light the English had fallen upon the first Italian redoubt, which was defended by one lieutenant and a small contingent of soldiers, some of whom they blew out with grenades, killing the rest with their swords. Then they had placed harquebusiers in the protection of the redoubt, and with the same felicity and daring had taken the demilune in front of the gate of the fort, scaling the wall by hand and foot. When the Italians defending the trenches saw how far the enemy had advanced and their lack of cover on that side, they threw the handle after the ax head and vacated their position. The English fought with great vigor and honor—there was nothing lacking in their courage—so much so that the Italian company of Captain Camilo Fenice, who had come to defend the fort, saw themselves in a tight situation and showed their backs, with no little shame. Perhaps to make true what Tirso de Molina had said about certain soldiers:

Mutter thirteen curses,sputter thirty ’Pon my lifes,in cards harass the winners,gather in wanton wives;and in skirmishes and battles,or in any grave disputes,all the enemy will see of meis the bottom of my boots.

It was not with verses but straightforward prose that the English reached the tents where our colonel and his officers had spent the night. They found them all outside in their nightshirts, armed however God allowed, fighting with swords and pistols in the midst of fleeing Italians and arriving English. From where we stood, some hundred paces from the tents, we watched the disorderly flight of the Italians and the throngs of English troops, all etched upon the gray dawn in flashes of powder. Diego Alatriste’s first impulse was to lead his squad to the tents, but as soon as he stepped up on the parapet he realized that that would be fruitless, for the Italians were fleeing down the dike and no one was running toward us because there was no way out: At our backs was a small earthen elevation and behind it swampy water. Only don Pedro de la Daga, his officers, and his German escort were making for our redoubt, battling their way, facing, not turning away from, the enemy, who was cutting off access to the retreat others were so vigorously pursuing. All this while, Lieutenant Miguel Chacón was attempting to protect our standard. When Alatriste saw that the small group was trying to reach our position, he lined up his men behind gabions and ordered them to fire continuously and protect de la Daga’s withdrawal, and he himself loaded his harquebus and took shot after shot. I was squatting behind the parapet, hurrying to supply powder and musket balls, when I was called.

Now masses of enemies were upon us, and Lieutenant Chacón was running up the small incline before us when a ball struck him in the back, and he dropped where he was. We could see his bearded face, the gray hair of a veteran soldier, and watched as his clumsy fingers reached for the pole of the standard he had lost as he fell. He succeeded in grasping it and was struggling to his feet when a second shot tumbled him face up. Our standard lay crumpled on the ground beside the corpse of the lieutenant who had fulfilled his duty so honorably. Suddenly Rivas leaped from behind the gabions and ran toward the standard. I have already told Your Mercies that Rivas was from Finisterre, which is like saying the very ends of the earth; he was, pardiez, the last man anyone would have imagined leaving the parapet to retrieve a flag that he could take or leave. But with Galicians one never knows, and there are always men who surprise you. Well, there went our good Rivas, as I was saying, and he was halfway down the incline before he was struck by several musket balls and rolled down the terreplein almost to the feet of don Pedro de la Daga and his officers, who were being battered without mercy by the wave of attackers. The six Germans performing their obligations without imagination or complication, as men do when they are well paid, were killed as God would have it, surrounding their colonel and selling their hides dear. The colonel had had time to buckle on his breastplate, which was the only reason he was still on his feet, though by now he had two or three serious wounds. The English kept coming, shouting, sure of their endeavor; the standard lying halfway down the slope merely fortified their daring, for a captured standard meant fame for the one who won it and shame for the one who lost it. That bit of checked blue-and-white cloth with a red band represented—in a sacrosanct tradition—the honor of Spain and of our lord and king.

“No quarter! No quarter!” the whoresons shouted.

Our fire had downed several of them, but by that point there was nothing that could save don Pedro de la Daga and his officers. One of them, unrecognizable because his face had been cut to ribbons, was trying to hold off the English so the colonel could escape. In all justice, I have to say that Jiñalasoga was faithful to himself to the end. Swatting away the officer who was tugging at his elbow and urging him to climb the hill, he left his sword in the body of one Englishman, blasted the face of another with his pistol, and then, neither ducking nor cringing—as arrogant on the road to hell as he had been in life—he gave himself to the blades of a pack of Englishmen who had recognized his rank and were competing for the spoils.

“No quarter!…No quarter!”

Only two of our officers were left alive, and they ran up the terreplein, taking advantage of the fact that the attackers were too busy feeding on the colonel. One died after a few steps, skewered by a pike. The other, the one with the badly cut face, staggered forward toward the standard, bent to pick it up, stood, and even managed to take three or four steps before he fell, riddled with pistol and musket balls. Again the standard was on the ground, but now no one was focusing on it; we were all too occupied spraying harquebus balls at the English, who were nearing the top of the slope above us, eager to add to the colonel’s body the trophy of our standard. As for me, I was still handing out powder and balls, the supply growing dangerously low. I used the intervals to load and fire the harquebus Rivas had left behind. I loaded it clumsily, for the weapon was enormous in my hands, and it kicked like a mule, almost dislocating my shoulder. Even so, I got off at least five or six shots. I would ram an ounce of lead into the muzzle, carefully fill the pan with powder, and place the cord in the serpentine, concentrating on keeping the pan closed as I blew on the cord, exactly as I had seen the captain and others do so many times. I had eyes only for the combat and ears only for the thunder of the powder whose acrid black smoke was burning my eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Angélica de Alquézar’s letter lay forgotten inside my doublet, next to my heart.

“If I get out of this,” Garrote growled as he hurried to reload his harquebus, “I will never come back to Flanders, not even for gold.”

In the meantime, the battle continued at the walls of the fort and on the dike below it. When he saw the men deserting Captain Fenice, who had died at the gate doing his duty with great honor and integrity, Sergeant-Major don Carlos Roma armed himself with a sword and buckler and jumped into the path of the fleeing soldiers, attempting to turn them back to the battle. He knew that the dike they had come along was narrow and that if he could slow the attackers, it would be possible to push them back. As they ran into each other, they would clog the road, and only those already there could fight. Thus, little by little, he was evening the battle on that front, and the Italians, now regrouped and with their courage renewed by their sergeant-major, were fighting with good heart, for men of that nation, when they have the will and good reason, know how to fight. They were driving the English away from the wall, halting the main attack.

Things were not going as well for us. A hundred English, in tight formation, were almost within reach of the terreplein, the fallen standard, and the gabions of the redoubt, hindered only by the significant damage our harquebusiers, spitting balls at them from less than twenty paces, continued to inflict.

“We’re running out of powder!” I warned.

It was true. We had enough for only two or three more charges for each man. Curro Garote, cursing like a galley slave, slid down behind the parapet, his arm disabled by a musket ball. Pablo Olivares took over the Malagüeño’s two remaining shots, and continued to fire until he had exhausted those two and his own. Of the others, Juan Cuesta, from Gijón, had been dead for some time, sprawled between some gabions, and Antonio Sánchez, a veteran soldier from Tordesillas, was soon to join him. Fulgencio Puche, from Murcia, dropped with his hands to his face, bleeding through his fingers like a stuck pig. The remaining men fired their last shots.

“This is the end,” said Pablo Olivares.

We looked at one another, undecided, hearing the cries of the English drawing closer up the slope. Their clamor was making me quake with terror, a bottomless despair. We had less time left than it takes to recite the Credo, and no options but the enemy or the swamp. Some men started drawing their swords.

“The standard,” said Alatriste.

Several looked at him as if they did not understand his words. Others, Copons first among them, went and stood by the captain.

“He’s right,” said Mendieta. “Better with the standard.”

I knew what he meant. Better out there with the standard, fighting around it, than here behind the gabions, cornered like rabbits. I no longer felt any fear, only a deep and ancient weariness, and a wish to finish this thing. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep for eternity. I noticed that the hair on my arms was standing on end as I reached back to unsheathe my dagger. Both hand and dagger were trembling, so I gripped it tightly. Alatriste saw me ready myself, and for a fraction of a second his gray-green eyes flashed with something that was both an apology and a smile. Then he bared his Toledo blade, threw off his hat and the belt with the twelve apostles, and without a word jumped up on the parapet.

“Spain!…Close in for Spain!” some yelled, following close behind.

“Not for Spain, no!” Garrote muttered, limping with his sword in his good hand. “My bollocks! Close in for my bollocks!”

I do not know how, but we survived. My recollections of the slope of the Terheyden redoubt are confused, just as they are for that hopeless assault. I know that we jumped to the top of the parapet, some quickly crossed themselves, and then, just as the nearest English were about to pick up our standard, we ran downhill like a pack of savage dogs, howling and brandishing our daggers and swords. They stopped short, terrorized by this unexpected aggression when they thought our resistance had been broken. They were still paralyzed, hands reaching out toward the staff of the flag, when we threw ourselves on them, killing at will. I fell upon the standard, clutching it in my arms, determined that no one would take it from me without first taking my life, and I rolled with it down the terreplein, over the bodies of a dead officer, Lieutenant Chacón, the good Rivas, and over the English that Alatriste and the others were slicing up as they descended the slope. We came with such momentum and ferocity—the strength of desperate men is that they do not expect salvation—that the English, demoralized by our assault and seeing the punishment they were taking, began to lose heart and fell back, tripping over one another. Then one turned his back, and others quickly followed suit. Captain Alatriste, Copons, the Olivares brothers, Garrote, and the others were red with enemy blood and blind from killing. Then, unexpectedly—exactly as I am telling you—the English began to run by the dozen, retreating, and our men were after them, wounding them from behind as they went on this way. They fought forward as far as the corpse of don Pedro de la Daga, then farther, leaving the ground behind them a slaughterhouse. I slipped and rolled down that bloody trail of butchered English with the standard held tightly in my arms, then followed, howling with all my might, yelling my despair, my rage, and the courage of the race of men and women who made me. As God is my witness, I was to know many more battles and combats, some as closely fought as this, but it is when I remember that day that I still burst out weeping like the boy I was, when I see myself barely fifteen years old, clutching that absurd piece of blue-and-white-checked linen, yelling and racing across the blood-soaked slope of the Terheyden redoubt. The day that Captain Alatriste looked for a good place to die, and I, along with his comrades, followed him through the midst of the English troops because we were all going to die one way or other and because we would have been ashamed to let him go alone.

EPILOGUE

The rest is a painting, and it is history. It was already nine years later, when I crossed the street one morning to visit the studio of Diego Velázquez, who was Keeper of the Wardrobe to our lord and king in Madrid. It was a winter day, and an even more disagreeable gray than those days in Flanders. My spurred boots crunched through icy puddles, and despite the protective collar of my cape and the hat set firmly on my head, the cold wind was cutting into my face. I was grateful for the warmth of the dark corridor and, once in the large studio, for the fire happily blazing in the hearth. Large windows lit paintings hanging on the wall, displayed on easels, and stacked back to back on the parquet wood floor. The room smelled of paint, linseed oil, varnishes, and oil of turpentine, and also, deliciously, of chicken broth seasoned with spices and wine, which was simmering in a large kettle beside the hearth.

“Please serve yourself, señor Balboa,” said Velázquez.

Since the day some eleven or twelve years ago that I first saw Velázquez on the steps of San Felipe, the most popular mentidero, or gossip spot, in Madrid, he had lost a good part of his Seville accent, owing, no doubt, to a trip to Italy, life at court, and the patronage of our king, Philip IV. At that moment he was engaged in meticulously cleaning his brushes with a cloth before lining them up on a table. He was dressed in a black jacket spattered with paint, his hair was unruly, and his mustache and goatee were uncombed. Our monarch’s favorite painter never did his toilette until midmorning, when he interrupted his work to rest and fill his stomach after taking advantage of the early-morning light. None of those close to him dared bother him before that midmorning pause. Afterward, he would work a while longer, till the afternoon, when he enjoyed a light meal. Later, if pressing appointments or responsibilities at the palace did not require his presence, he would walk to San Felipe, the Plaza Mayor, or the Prado meadows, often in the company of don Francisco de Quevedo, Alonso Cano, and other friends, disciples, and acquaintances.

I deposited my cape, gloves, and hat on a footstool and went to the kettle, where I poured a dipperful into a glazed clay jug, warming my hands as I sipped it.

“How goes life at the palace?” I asked.

“Slowly.”

We both laughed a little at the old joke. At the time, Velázquez was faced with the daunting task of furnishing paintings for the Hall of Realms in the new Buen Retiro palace. That and other graces had been granted directly by the king, and Velázquez was pleased to have them. It did, however, he sometimes lamented, rob him of the space and peace to work at his own pace. Which was why he had just passed on the duties of usher of the chamber to Juan Bautista del Mazo, as Velázquez was content to accept the honored but less demanding role of keeper of the wardrobe.

“And how is Captain Alatriste?” the painter inquired.

“Well. He sends you his greetings. He has gone to Calle de Francos with don Francisco de Quevedo and Captain Contreras to visit Lope at home.”

“And how is our phoenix?”

“Poorly. The flight of his daughter Antoñita with Cristóbal Tenorio was a harsh blow. He has not yet recovered.”

“I must find a free moment to visit him. Is he much worse, then?”

“Everyone fears that he will not make it through this winter.”

“A pity.”

I drank a couple of sips more. The broth was scalding hot, but it was also reviving me.

“It seems there will be a war with Richelieu,” Velázquez commented.

“That is what I have heard on the steps of San Felipe.”

I went to set the jug on a table, and on the way I paused before a painting on an easel, which was finished, lacking only a coat of varnish. Angélica de Alquézar was breathlessly beautiful in Velázquez’s portrait, dressed in white satin trimmed with gold frogs and tiny pearls, with a mantilla of Brussels lace around her shoulders. I knew it was from Brussels because I had given it to her. Her blue eyes stared out of the portrait with a sardonic gaze, and they seemed to follow my movements around the room, as in fact they had done through so many years of my life. Finding her here made me smile inside; it had been only hours since I left her, gaining the street just before dawn, muffled in my cape and with my hand on the hilt of my sword should her uncle’s hired assassins be waiting for me. I still had her delicious fragrance on my fingertips, on my mouth and skin. I also had on my body the now-healed remembrance of her dagger, and in my thoughts her words of love and loathing, one as sincere as the other was deadly.

“I have brought you,” I said to Velázquez, “a sketch of the Marqués de los Balbases’ sword. An old comrade who saw it many times remembers it well.”

I turned my back to Angélica’s portrait. Then I took out the paper I had folded inside my doublet and handed it to the painter.

“The grip was of bronze and hammered gold. Here, Your Mercy, you will see how the guards were fashioned.”

Velázquez, who had put down his cloth and brushes, contemplated the sketch with a satisfied air.

“As for the plumes on his hat,” I added, “they were undoubtedly white.”

“Excellent,” he said.

He put the paper on the table and looked at the painting, an expansive depiction of the surrender at Breda. It was destined to decorate the Hall of Realms and was enormous; here in the studio it hung on a special frame attached to the wall, with a ladder set before it so that Velázquez could work on the upper portion.

“I finally listened to you,” he added pensively. “Lances instead of standards.”

It was I who had provided him with these details during long conversations we’d had in recent months, after don Francisco de Quevedo had suggested that my cooperation would be helpful in documenting the particulars of the scene. To accomplish his painting Diego Velázquez decided to dispense with the fury of combatants, the clash of steel—all the obligatory subject matter of traditional battle scenes—and instead sought serenity and grandeur. He wanted, as he told me more than once, to achieve a tone that was at once magnanimous and arrogant and also interpreted in the manner he painted: reality not like it was but as he depicted it, expressing things that conformed with truth but were not explicit, so that all the rest, the context and the spirit suggested by the scene, would be the work of the person who viewed it.

“What do you think of it?” he asked softly.

I knew perfectly well that he did not give a fig about my artistic judgment, especially coming, as it did, from a twenty-four-year-old soldier. He was asking for something different; I knew that from the way he was looking at me, not quite trusting and slightly calculating, as my eyes ran over the painting.

“It was like this and not like this,” I said.

I regretted my words the minute they left my lips, for I was afraid I had offended him. But he limited himself to a faint smile.

“Good,” he said. “I am aware that there is no hill of this height near Breda and that the perspective of the background is a little forced.” He took a few steps and stood looking at the painting with his fists on his hips. “But the scene works, and that is what matters.”

“I was not referring to those things.”

“I know what you were referring to.”

He went to the hand with which the Dutch Justin of Nassau was offering the key to our General Spínola—as yet the key was no more than a sketch and a blob of color—and rubbed it a little with his thumb. Then he stepped back, never taking his eyes from the painting; he was focused on the space between their two heads, the area beneath the horizontal butt of the harquebus the soldier who had neither beard nor mustache was carrying over his shoulder, there where the aquiline profile of Captain Alatriste was hinted at, half hidden behind the officers.

“In the end,” he said finally, “it will always be remembered as it is here. When you and I and all the rest of them are dead.”

I was studying the faces of the colonels and captains in the foreground, some still lacking the artist’s finishing touches. Of least importance to me was that, except for Justin of Nassau, the prince of Newburg, don Carlos Coloma, the Marqués de Espinar, the Marqués de Leganés, and Spínola himself, none of the other heads in the main scene corresponded to those of royal personages. I was equally indifferent to the fact that Velázquez had given the features of his fellow artist and friend Alonso Cano to the Dutch harquebusier on the left and that on the right he had utilized features very close to his own for the officer in high boots who was looking out toward the viewer. Nor did I care that the chivalrous gesture of poor don Ambrosio Spínola—who had died in physical pain and shame four years earlier, in Italy—was exactly the same as it had been that morning, while the artist’s rendering of the Dutch general attributed to him more humility and submission than Nassau had shown when he surrendered the city at Balanzón.

What I had been referring to was that in that serene composition—in that “Please do not bow, don Justin, no,” and in the restrained attitude of various officers—something was hidden that I, farther back among the lances but close enough to see clearly, had observed that day: the insolent pride of the conquerors and the ill will and hatred in the eyes of the conquered. The brutality with which we had killed one another and would still do so in the future assured that the graves that filled the landscape of the background amid the misty smoke from burning fires would never be enough to hold the dead.

As for who was in the foreground of the painting and who was not, one thing was certain: We, the loyal and long-suffering infantry, were not. We, the old tercios that had done the dirty work in the mines and caponnieres, carried out encamisada raids in the night, breached the Sevenberge dike with fire and axes, fought at the Ruyter mill and the Terheyden fort, we foot soldiers with our rags and our worn-out weapons, our pustules, our illnesses, and our misery, we were nothing but cannon fodder. Yes, we were the eternal background against which the other Spain, the official Spain of laces and sweeping bows, took possession of the key to the city of Breda—which, as we had feared, we were not allowed to sack—and posed for posterity, indulging themselves in the sham, the luxury, of showing a magnanimous spirit. We are among caballeros, and in Flanders the sun has not yet set.

“It will be a great painting,” I said.

I was sincere. It would be a great painting, and the world would perhaps remember our unfortunate Spain, made resplendent in that canvas on which it was not difficult to sense the breath of immortality issuing from the palette of the greatest painter time had known. The reality, however, my true memories, were to be found in the middle distance of the scene. Inadvertently, my glance kept straying there, beyond the central composition, which did not matter a nun’s fart to me, to the old blue-and-white-checked standard on the shoulder of a bearer with thick hair and mustache, who well could be Lieutenant Chacón, whom I had watched die as he tried to save that same piece of cloth on the slope of the Terheyden redoubt. My eyes went to the harquebusiers—Rivas, Llop, and others who did not return to Spain, or anywhere else for that matter—backs turned to the principal scene, lost in the forest of disciplined lances; the lancers themselves, all anonymous in the painting, were men to whom I could, one by one, give the names of the living and dead comrades who had carried those lances across Europe, holding them high with their sweat and their blood, to demonstrate the truth of what had been written:

Always on the brink of warthey fought, forever grand,in Germany and Flanders, too,in France and upon English land.The very earth bowed down to themtrembling as they passed,and ordinary soldiers, massedin unparalleled campaign,across the world, from East to West,carried the sun of Spain.

It was they, Spaniards with several tongues and lands among them but all united in ambition, pride, and suffering, and not the pretentious figures portrayed in the foreground of the canvas, who were the ones to whom the Dutchman was delivering his precious key. To those nameless, faceless troops barely visible on the slope of a hill that never existed, where, at ten o’clock on the morning of 5 June in the twenty-fifth year of the century, regnant in Spain our king don Philip IV, I, along with Captain Alatriste, Sebastian Copons, Curro Garrote, and the remaining survivors of their decimated squad, witnessed the surrender of Breda. And nine years later, in Madrid, standing before Diego Velázquez’s panorama, it seemed that I could again hear the drum and that I was watching, amid the forts and smoking trenches in the distance, near Breda, the slow advance of the old, implacable squads, the pikes and standards of what was the last and best infantry in the world: despised, cruel, arrogant Spaniards disciplined only when under fire, who suffered everything in any assault but would allow no man to raise his voice to them.

EDITOR’S NOTE CONCERNING THE

PRESENCE OF CAPTAIN ALATRISTE IN

DIEGO VELÁZQUEZ’S PAINTING

THE SURRENDER OF BREDA

The alleged presence of Captain Diego Alatriste y Tenorio in the painting The Surrender of Breda has been debated for many years. On the one hand, we have the testimony of Íñigo Balboa, who was witness to the composition of the painting and who has unhesitatingly stated on two occasions that the captain is represented in Velázquez’s canvas. On the other hand, studies of the heads on the right side have resulted in the positive identification of Spínola and established as probable those of Carlos Coloma, the Marqués de Leganés, the Marqués de Espinar, and the prince of Newburg, these according to analyses by Professors Justi, Allende Salazar, Sánchez Cantón, and Temboury Álvarez, but they reject the idea that any of the anonymous heads corresponds to the physical features Íñigo Balboa attributes to the captain.

The bearer holding the standard on his shoulder cannot be Diego Alatriste, nor can the musketeer in the rear, who has no beard or mustache. Similarly eliminated are the pale, bareheaded caballero standing beneath the standard and beside the horse, and the corpulent, dark-skinned, hatless officer standing beneath the horizontal butt of the harquebus, whom Professor Sergio Zamorano from the University of Seville believes to be Captain Carmelo Bragado. Some scholars have argued the possibility that Alatriste was portrayed in the officer on the extreme right, behind the horse, looking toward the viewer, a person other experts, such as Temboury, judge to be Velázquez himself, who thus balanced the supposed inclusion of his friend Alonso Cano at the extreme left as the Dutch harquebusier.

Professor Zamorano similarly points out in his study of the painting, Breda: Realidad y leyenda, that Diego Alatriste’s physical attributes might correspond to those of the officer situated at the right of the canvas, although that man’s features, he suggests, are softer than those described by Íñigo Balboa when he speaks of Captain Alatriste. In any case, as the translator and scholar Miguel Antón of Barcelona writes in his essay “El Capitán Alatriste y la rendición de Bredá,” the age of that caballero, no more than thirty or so, does not coincide with the age of Alatriste in 1625, much less with his fifty-one or fifty-two years in 1634–1635, the date the painting was completed. Neither does the clothing of the officer correspond with what Alatriste, then a simple soldier with the nominal rank of squad corporal, would be wearing in Flanders. There is still the possibility that Alatriste was not represented in the group on the right but among the Spaniards down the slope, in the center of the painting, behind the extended arm of General Spínola. However, a very careful examination of their features and clothing published in Figaro magazine by the specialist Étienne de Montety seems to negate that theory.

And yet, Íñigo Balboa’s affirmation on "Chapter 1: Surprise Attack" of the first volume in this series sounds unequivocal: “…because later, on the bulwarks of Julich…my father was killed by a ball from a harquebus—which was why Diego Velázquez did not include him in his painting Surrender of Breda, as he did his friend and fellow Diego, Alatriste, who is indeed there, behind the horse.” These disconcerting words were for a long time considered by most experts to be less fact than gratuitous affirmation—Balboa’s exaggerated homage to his beloved Captain Alatriste—with no basis in truth. Balboa was a soldier in Flanders and Italy, a standard bearer and lieutenant at Rocroi, lieutenant of the royal mails, and captain of the Guardia Española of King Philip IV before retiring for personal reasons around 1660, at the age of fifty. That was after his marriage to doña Inés Álvarez of Toledo, the widowed Marquesa de Alguazas, and his later disappearance from public life. His memoirs came to light only in 1951, in an auction of books and manuscripts in the Claymore house in London. Arturo Pérez-Reverte used the memoirs as his documented source for The Adventures of Captain Alatriste, and he confesses that for a long time he believed that Íñigo’s assertion that Diego Alatriste did in fact appear in Velázquez’s painting was false.

But chance has finally resolved the mystery, disclosing data that had been overlooked by scholars and by the author of this series of novels based almost entirely on Balboa’s original manuscript.1 In August 1998, when I visited Pérez-Reverte in his home near El Escorial to clear up some editorial matters, he confided to me a discovery he had made accidentally as he was documenting the epilogue of the third volume of the series. Only the day before, while consulting José Camón Aznar’s Velázquez—one of the more definitive works on the author of The Surrender of Breda—Pérez-Reverte had come upon something that had left him stupefied. On pages 508 and 509 of the first volume (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1964), Professor Camón Aznar confirmed that an X-radiographic study of the canvas had validated some of Íñigo Balboa’s affirmations concerning the Velázquez painting that had at first seemed to be contradictory, such as the fact, proved on the X-ray plate, that the artist had originally painted standards instead of lances, not unusual in a painter famous for his pentimentos—modifications made along the way that led him to change outlines, alter compositions, and eliminate objects and persons already painted. In addition to the standards’ being replaced by lances, the horse on the Spaniards’ side was suggested in three different attitudes; in the background, in the correct geographical orientation, toward the Sevenberge dike and the sea, there appears to be an expanse of water and a ship; Spínola was sketched in a more erect position; and, on the Spanish side, it is possible to make out the heads and embroidered collars of additional personages. For reasons we cannot divine, in the definitive version Velázquez overpainted the head of a man who appears to be a noble, and also possibly another. And there is something more: In regard to Diego Alatriste’s presence, which Íñigo Balboa describes as he views the canvas and specifies his exact location—the area beneath the horizontal butt of the harquebus that the soldier without a beard or mustache was carrying over his shoulder—the viewer sees only empty space above the blue doublet of a pikeman whose back is turned.

The true surprise, however—proof that painting, like literature, is but a succession of enigmas and closed envelopes that enclose other closed envelopes—is buried in half a line on page 509 of Camón Aznar’s book and refers to that same very suspicious and empty space where the X-ray revealed that “behind that head one can make out another with an aquiline profile….”

Reality often amuses itself by confirming on its own what seems to us to be fiction. We do not know why Velázquez later decided to eliminate from his masterpiece a head he had already painted. Perhaps later books in this series will clarify that mystery.2 But now, almost four centuries after all that happened, we know that Íñigo Balboa did not lie and that Captain Alatriste was—and still is—on the canvas of The Surrender of Breda.

—The Editor

A SELECTION FROM

A POETRY BOUQUET

BY VARIOUS LIVELY MINDS

OF THIS CITY

Printed in the XVIIth century, lacking the printer’s mark, and conserved in the Condado de Guadalmedina section of the Nuevo Extremo Ducal Archive and Library, Seville

DON FRANCISCO DE QUEVEDO

Inscription to the Marqués Ambrosio Spínola,

Commander of Catholic Forces in Flanders

Sinon, Ulysses, and the Trojan HorseWon the day in Troy with treachery,Whereas in Ostend, leading your troops,It was your sword that crushed the enemy.

As your squads approached their wallsFrisia and Breda foresaw their destiny;Facing your might, the heretic gave way Hisbanners struck, his pennon a mockery.

You subjected the PalatinateTo benefit the Spanish monarchy,Your ideals countering their heresy.

In Flanders, we badly missed your gallantry,E’en more in Italy…and now this eulogyAmid sorrow we dare not contemplate.

THE CABALLERO OF THE YELLOW DOUBLET

To Íñigo Balboa, in his later years

’Pon my oath, no difference can I find’Twixt the young Basque known for his diligenceAnd the hidalgo once a Flanders soldier:That lad gave good account of his existence.

Hearing tales about your dashing swordsman,The orb, envisioning that experience,The flashing blade, the valiant adventure,With military tears bemoans his absence.

His valor was your fortune and your glory,And wonder at the days you lived with himWill be the one reaction to your story.

Because of you, thwarting oblivion,His memory will not be lost through time:Diego de Alatriste, Capitán!

DEFENSE OF THE GARRISON AT TERHEYDEN:

AN EXCERPT FROM ACT III OF THE FAMOUS PLAY

THE SIEGE OF BREDA

by Don Pedro Calderón de la Barca

D. FADRIQUE BAZÁN:Oh, if only Henry would marchThis way, engage the SpanishIn this place, a happy dayIt would be for our intentions!

D. VINCENTE PIMENTEL:We are not so fortunate, señor,As to be granted such a blessing.

ALONSO LADRÓN, CAPTAIN:I would venture that he will joinWith those fat flinflones, the German guard,With whom he is comfortably allied.We are told that when they hear our“Santiago! Close in for Spain!”Even though they know the nameAnd know he is our patron saintAnd one apostle of the twelve,They believe we call the devil,And that without discriminationWe summon devils as well as saints,And that all come to our aid.

D. FRANCISCO DE MEDINA:If Henry leads his troops alongThe Antwerp road, the ItaliansWill be waiting to engage him.

The bugle sounds “To Arms”

D. FADRIQUE:It seems that they are readyingFor battle.

ALONSO:God’s bones!It will be these same ItaliansWho glory in the occasionWhile we Spanish will be watchingWithout a fight!

D. FADRIQUE:Say not so!Allow Colonel de la DagaTo choose for you a numberOf the loyal men of SpainThat in the furor of the battleThey may show what swordplay is!

DON GONZALO FERNÁNDEZ DE CÓRDOBA:They would disobey?

DON FADRIQUE:Not at all!This is a place and time in whichThe man who does not draw his bladeWill cease to call himself a man,And less, a Spaniard.

D. GONZALO:ObedienceIs in war what most confinesAnd makes a prison for a soldier:More praise and more renown are wonBy one who docilely enduresThan by fervor in the fray.

D. FADRIQUE:But were the greater glory notObedience, what prisons wouldThere be that could contain us?

ALONSO:Withal, these Flemish caballerosShould not draw my ire, forIf the tercios be broken,I shall have to fight today.Though I be hanged tomorrow.

Drum rolls

D. VICENTE:Either way is an offense!

Drum rolls

D. FADRIQUE:How fine the voices of the drumsAnd trumpets sound accompanyingThe stirring cadence of the cannon!

D. FRANCISCO DE MEDINA:By heaven, the enemy has fought throughThe Walloons’ last defense!

Drum rolls

D. FADRIQUE:And now draw nigh the Italian lines!

ALONSO:Oh, those accursed flinflones.When our friends combat that foeTheir squads will not prevail.

D. GONZALO:Look, there, see de la Daga…

ALONSO:Aside(Slanderously, Jiñalasoga)

D. GONZALO:See how proudly he succumbsAlong with his brave Spaniards,Resisting to the very end.

Drum rolls

DON FADRIQUE:I am so schooled and practiced inThe matter of obedienceThat when I hear that first command,My blade lies quiet in its sheath!They say the man who stands in placeRather than fight, is the one whoBetter fulfills his obligations!

D. VICENTE:The garrison now lies in ruins.Do you not hear the voices?By God, I now believe thatHe will enter the town tonight!

ALONSO:How mean you?

D. FADRIQUE:The town?Obedience will forgive me,He must not enter.

D. VICENTE:Let us attack,Whether the general be discontentedOr resigned.

D. GONZALO:Oh, caballeros,Lose everything, but do not counterYour instructions.

D. FADRIQUE:We do not failOur obligations, but there are timesThat force a different effort, whenAn order broken is not broken.

D. VICENTE:But, look, there, attend the action,What one man daringly attempts.Muted, the wind stops blowing,The sun is halted in its path.Do you not see the ItalianSergeant-Major, standing againstHenry’s boldly advancing army?With his cries he animatesHis gallant men, and togetherThey forestall the squadsOf the enemy. We must giveThis triumph an eternal name:Carlos Roma, you are most worthy,Deserving that your king shouldHonor you with New World lands,With appointments, and with glory.And now with sword and buckler, soldiersAre erupting onto the field.And following their example, the ItaliansSpring into action. Let themEnjoy the glory and it be weWho witness. For here our envy may beSeen as noble, as too our praise.Spain, which in far greater numberHas been victorious in her battles,Has no reason to omitThe name of Italy from this triumph,For it is they who are the victors.

D. FRANCISCO DE MEDINAThere is another victoryBefore us, another triumph,Which is the rescue of our bannerFrom capture and from offense.This has been done by those fewBrave and valiant Spaniards, theyWho here escorted ColonelDe la Daga, and who restrainedSo fiercely the English troops with theirAmazing, brash, and bold assault.

D. GONZALO:Who was he, then, who led them,Fierce Mars and noble Hector?

ALONSO:Diego Alatriste y Tenorio,The “Captain” is an honoraryTitle, fittingly won amidThe clamor and the roar of cannon.

D. GONZALO:On such an august day as thisMay Alatriste in renownYield only to brave Carlos Roma.Who, along with his men,The king will generously rewardFor being victors in Terheyden.

D. FADRIQUE:In defeat and disarray.The Flemish are retreating, fleetAs the wind; and now all honorFalls to the victors, may theirNoble brows be crowned with laurel,And on a thousand plaques of bronzeEternally their feat shall live,Reaching the limits of the orb.

It must be noted that the verses in italics have been taken from the original manuscript, as they were not included in Primera parte de comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca, collected by don José, Calderón’s brother, and printed in Madrid in the year 1636. Why the poet later chose to delete those lines has not been determined.

^*On Calle de Toledo near La Puerta Cerrada, Madrid

¹Papeles del alférez Balboa (Lieutenant Balboa’s Papers). Manuscript of 478 pages, Madrid, undated. Sold by the Claymore auction house in London, November 25, 1952. Currently located in the Biblioteca Nacional, Madrid.

² The disappearance a posteriori of the two most documented references to Captain Diego Alatriste y Tenorio known to this date is extraordinary. While the testament of Íñigo Balboa and the study of the painting The Surrender of Breda by Velázquez prove that the captain’s image was, for unknown reasons, erased from the canvas on a date later than winter of 1634, we have a first version of a play by Pedro Calderón de la Barca titled The Siege of Breda, and in it, too, there are signs of later manipulation. This first complete version, contemporaneous to the date of the first performance of the play in Madrid—which was written around 1626—and coinciding along general lines with the manuscript copy of the original made by Diego López de Mora in 1632, contains some forty lines that were suppressed in the definitive version. In them explicit reference is made to the death of Colonel don Pedro de la Daga and to the defense of the Terheyden redoubt carried out by Diego Alatriste, whose name is quoted two times in the text. The original fragment, discovered by Professor Klaus Oldenbarnevelt of the Instituto de Estudios Hispánicos at the University of Utrecht, is housed in the archive and library of the Duques del Nuevo Extremo in Seville, and we reproduce it in the appendix at the end of this volume with the kind permission of doña Macarena Bruner de Lebrija, Duquesa del Nuevo Extremo. What is odd is that those forty lines disappear in the canonical version of the work published in 1636 in Madrid by José Calderón, brother of the author, in Primera parte de Comedias de don Pedro Calderón de la Barca. The reason for Alatriste’s disappearance in the play about the siege of Breda, as well as in the Velázquez painting, has to this date not been explained. Unless it was in response to an express order attributable perhaps to King Philip IV or, more likely, the Conde Duque de Olivares, whose disfavor Diego Alatriste may have incurred, again for reasons unknown to us, between 1634 and 1636.

Table of Contents

Cover

Copyright

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