“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 pope
he’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 m
atter, 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.