“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 tim
e 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?”