The Sun Over Breda Read online

  “Let’s go take a look.”

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

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

  2. THE DUTCH WINTER

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

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

  Who spoke here of war?

  Is our memory still clear?

  When the name Castile is spoken

  does the earth still shake with fear?

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

  Well, this was just—it’s nothing really—

  a leg I lost, blown off by a volley.

  What can those Lutheran dogs be thinking,

  to take my legs but leave me my hands.

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

  To serve my king, I took up the sword

  ’ere downy fuzz covered my lip.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  To Spain; and may he who wishes

  to defend her die an honorable death,

  and may he who is traitor to her

  be dishonored to his last breath;

  may no cross mark his remains,

  may his burial ground remain unblessed,

  and may he lack a loyal son

  to close his eyes in Christian rest.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Prisoners?” asked Alatriste.

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