The Sun Over Breda Read online

  A PLUME BOOK

  THE SUN OVER BREDA

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

  Praise for Arturo Pérez-Reverte and

  the Adventures of Captain Alatriste

  “Hard-boiled, mordantly funny, unapologetically entertaining.”

  —Time

  “Wonderful, stirring entertainment.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

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

  —The Boston Globe

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

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Thrilling.”

  —Detroit Free Press

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

  —USA Today

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

  —The Denver Post

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

  —Los Angeles Times

  ALSO BY

  ARTURO PÉREZ-REVERTE

  Captain Alatriste

  The Flanders Panel

  The Club Dumas

  The Seville Communion

  The Fencing Master

  The Nautical Chart

  The Queen of the South

  Purity of Blood

  THE SUN OVER BREDA

  Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  A PLUME BOOK

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

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

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

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

  Copyright © Arturo Pérez-Reverte, 2007

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

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

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

  Pérez-Reverte, Arturo.

  [Sol de Breda. English]

  The sun over Breda / Arturo Pérez-Reverte.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 1-4295-6754-6

  I. Title.

  PQ6666.E765S6513 2007 2007000541

  863'.64—dc22

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

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

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

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

  For Jean Schalekamp,

  damned heretic, translator, and friend

  A troop of soldiers marches by:

  strong, bearded, weapons shouldered,

  following their captain’s lead.

  Spanish captain, who knew Flanders,

  Mexico, Italy, and the Andes,

  Of what exploits are left to dream?

  —C. S. DEL RÍO,

  La esfera

  THE SUN OVER BREDA

  CONTENTS

  1. SURPRISE ATTACK

  2. THE DUTCH WINTER

  3. THE MUTINY

  4. TWO VETERANS

  5. THE LOYAL INFANTRY

  6. ATTACK WITHOUT QUARTER

  7. THE SIEGE

  8. ATTACK BY NIGHT

  9. THE COLONEL AND THE BANNER

  EPILOGUE

  1. SURPRISE ATTACK

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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