The King's Gold Read online

  Things were more evenhanded now. Copons, whom I could identify by his short stature, was locked in combat with an opponent who, between blows, kept uttering the most terrible oaths, until, suddenly, his curses were replaced by groans. Don Francisco was limping back and forth between two adversaries—both far less skilled than he—and fighting with his usual panache. Meanwhile, Captain Alatriste, who had sought Malatesta out in the midst of the skirmish, was doing battle with him a little way off, next to one of the stone fountains. They and their swords stood out against the shimmer of moonlight on water, as they lunged and drew back, performing feints and body feints and terrifying thrusts. I noticed that the Italian had abandoned both his loquacity and his wretched whistling. It was not a night to waste one’s breath on fripperies.

  A shadow came between me and them. My arm was aching now from so much movement, and I was beginning to feel tired. Lunges and slices began to rain down on me, and I retreated, covering myself as best I could, which I did pretty successfully. I was afraid I might fall into one of the ponds, which I knew were somewhere behind me, although, of course, a soaking is always preferable to a stabbing. I was rescued from this dilemma by Copons, who, having rid himself of his adversary, now confronted mine, forcing him to deal with attacks from two fronts. Copons fought like a machine, closing on the other man and forcing him to pay more attention to him than to me. I decided to slip around to his side and knife the man as soon as Copons got in his next blow, and was just about to do so when, from the direction of the Hospital del Amor de Dios, beyond the stone pillars, came lights and voices crying, “Halt!” and “Stop in the name of the king’s justice!”

  “The bluebottles are here!” muttered Quevedo in between sword thrusts.

  The first one to take to his heels was the man under attack by Copons and me, and before you could say knife, don Francisco found himself alone as well. Of our opponents, three lay on the ground, and a fourth was crawling away into the bushes, moaning. We went over to join the captain, and when we reached the fountain, found him, sword in hand, staring into the shadows into which Gualterio Malatesta had disappeared.

  “Let’s go,” said Quevedo.

  The lights and voices of the constables were getting ever closer. They were still calling out in the name of the king and of justice, but they were in no hurry to arrive, fearful of the situation they might find themselves in.

  “What about Íñigo?” asked the captain, still gazing after his vanished enemy.

  “Íñigo’s fine.”

  That was when Alatriste turned to look at me. In the faint glow of moonlight, I thought I could see his eyes fixed on me.

  “Never do that again,” he said.

  I swore that I never would. Then we picked up our hats and cloaks and ran off into the shadows under the elm trees.

  Many years have passed since then. Now, whenever I go back to Seville, I visit the Alameda—which has barely changed since I first saw it—and there, time and again, I let my mind fill up with memories. There are certain places that mark the geography of a man’s life, and that was one of them, as was the Portillo de las Ánimas, as were the dungeons of Toledo, the plains of Breda, and the fields of Rocroi. The Alameda de Hércules, however, occupies a special place. During my time in Flanders, I had, without noticing it, matured, but I only knew this on that night in Seville, when I found myself alone, face to face with the Italian and his henchmen and wielding a sword. Angélica de Alquézar and Gualterio Malatesta had unwittingly done me the great favor of making me realize that. And thus I learned that it is easy to fight when your comrades are near or when the woman you love is watching you, giving you vigor and courage. The hard thing is to fight alone in the dark, with no other witnesses but your honor and your conscience. With no reward and no hope.

  By God, it’s been a long road. All the people in this story—the captain, Quevedo, Gualterio Malatesta, Angélica de Alquézar—died a long time ago, and only in these pages can I make them live again and recapture them exactly as they were. Their ghosts, some loved, some loathed, remain intact in my memory, along with that whole harsh, violent, fascinating time that, for me, will always be the Spain of my youth, and the Spain of Captain Alatriste. Now my hair is gray, and my memories are as bittersweet as all clear-sighted memories are, and I share the same weariness with which they all seemed to be burdened. With the passing years I have learned that one pays for clear-sightedness with despair, and that the life we Spaniards lead has always been a slow road to nowhere. While traveling my section of that road I have lost many things and gained a few more. Now, on this apparently interminable journey—it even occurs to me sometimes that perhaps I, Íñigo Balboa, will never die—I can at least enjoy the resignation of memories and silence. And now, at last, I understand why all the heroes I admired then were so very weary.

  I hardly slept that night. Lying on my mattress, I could hear the captain’s steady breathing while I watched the moon slip behind one corner of the open window. My head was as hot as if I were suffering from the ague and my sheets were drenched in sweat. From the nearby bawdy house came the occasional sound of a woman laughing or the chords of a guitar.

  Feverish and unable to sleep, I left my bed, went over to the window in my bare feet, and leaned on the sill. In the moonlight, the rooftops looked unreal and the clothes hung out to dry on the flat roofs resembled white shrouds. I was, of course, thinking about Angélica.

  I didn’t hear Captain Alatriste until he was by my side. He was wearing only his nightshirt and was, like me, bare-foot. He, too, stood gazing into the darkness, saying nothing, and out of the corner of my eye I could see his aquiline nose, his pale eyes absorbed in the strange light from outside, and the bushy mustache that only emphasized his formidable soldier’s profile.

  “She is loyal to her own,” he said at last.

  That “she” in his mouth made me tremble. Then I nodded, still without saying a word. I was at an age when I would have argued with anything else he might have had to say on the subject, but not with that unexpected comment. It was something I could understand.

  “It’s only natural,” he added.

  I didn’t know whether he was referring to Angélica or to my own warring emotions. Suddenly I felt a feeling of unease rising up inside me, a strange sadness.

  “I love her,” I murmured.

  No sooner had I spoken these words than I felt intensely ashamed, but the captain did not make fun of me, nor did he offer me any trite words of advice. He simply stood there, not moving, contemplating the night.

  “We all love once,” he said. “Or, indeed, several times.”

  “Several times?”

  My question seemed to catch him off guard. He paused for a moment, as if he thought it his duty to say something more but didn’t quite know what. He cleared his throat. I noticed him shifting uncomfortably.

  “One day it stops,” he said at last. “That’s all.”

  “I’ll always love her.”

  The captain hesitated before responding. “Of course,” he said.

  He remained silent for a moment, then said again very softly, “Of course.”

  I felt him raising one hand to place it on my shoulder, just as he had in Flanders on the day that Sebastián Copons slit the throat of that wounded Dutchman after the battle of the Ruyter mill. This time, however, he did not complete his gesture.

  “Your father . . .”

  Again, he left these words hanging inconclusively in the air. Perhaps, I thought, he wanted to tell me that his friend Lope Balboa would have been proud to see me that night, sword and dagger in hand, alone against seven men, and only sixteen years old. Or to hear his son saying that he was in love with a woman.

  “You did very well in the Alameda just now.”

  I blushed with pride. In Captain Alatriste’s mouth these words were worth a Genoese banker’s ransom. It was the equivalent of a king commanding a subject to don his hat in his presence.

  “I knew it was a trap,” I sa
id. The last thing I wanted was for him to think that I had fallen into the trap like some novice.

  The captain nodded reassuringly. “I know you did. And I know that it wasn’t intended for you.”

  “Angélica de Alquézar,” I said as steadily as I could, “is entirely my affair.”

  Now he remained silent for a long time. I was staring obstinately out of the window and the captain was watching me.

  “Of course,” he said again at last.

  The scenes of that day kept crowding into my mind. I touched my mouth, where she had placed her lips. “If you survive,” she had said, “you can claim the rest.” Then I turned pale at the thought of those seven shadows emerging out of the darkness beneath the trees. My shoulder still hurt from the knife thrust stopped by the captain’s buff coat and my tow-stuffed doublet.

  “One day,” I muttered, almost thinking out loud, “I’ll kill Gualterio Malatesta.”

  I heard the captain chuckle. There was no mockery in that laughter, no scorn for my young man’s arrogance. It was a gentle laugh, warm and affectionate.

  “Possibly,” he said, “but first, I must have a go at killing him myself.”

  The next day, we planted our imaginary flag and started recruiting. We did so as discreetly as possible, with no ensigns, no drumroll, and no sergeants. And Seville was the ideal place to provide the kind of men we required. If you bear in mind that man’s first father was a thief, his first mother a liar, and their first son a murderer—for there’s nothing new under the sun—this was all confirmed in that rich and turbulent city, where the Ten Commandments weren’t so much broken as hacked to pieces with a knife. Seville, with its taverns, bawdy houses, and gaming dens, with the Patio de Los Naranjos and even the royal prison—which quite rightly bore the title of the Spanish Empire’s capital of crime—abounded in purveyors of stranglings and dealers in sword thrusts; and this was only natural in a city populated by gentlemen of fortune, hidalgos of thievery, caballeros who appeared to live on air and with not a thought for the morrow, and monks of the Holy Order of Intrigue, where judges and constables could be silenced with a gag of silver. It was, in short, a university for the biggest rogues God ever created, full of churches offering sanctuary, and a place where men would kill on credit for a maravedí, for a woman, or for a word.

  Remember Gonzalo Xeniz,

  Gayoso and Ahumada,

  Those butchers of bodies

  And scarrers of faces . . .

  The problem was that in a city like Seville and, indeed, in the whole of Spain, where all was bravado and effrontery, many of these self-proclaimed killers were nothing but talk, young ruffians full of valiant oaths, who, in their cups, claimed to have dispatched between twenty and thirty men, boasting of murders they hadn’t committed and of wars in which they hadn’t served, of how they were as happy to kill with their bare hands as with a knife or a sword, strutting and swaggering, in buff coats and hats as large as parasols, and sporting black looks, goatees, and mustaches that resembled the guard on a dagger; however, come the moment of truth, twenty of them together wouldn’t have been capable of seeing off one drunk constable, and if tortured on the rack, they would have confessed everything at the first turn of the screw. If you were not to be dazzled by such an apparent abundance of fine swordsmen, you had to know who you were dealing with, as Captain Alatriste certainly did. Thus, trusting to the captain’s keen eye, we began our levy in the taverns of La Heria and Triana, in search of old acquaintances who were men of few words but had a ready hand with the sword, who were not stage villains but genuine ruffians, men who would kill without giving their victims time to confess, so that no one afterward could go telling tales to the law. The kind of man who, when questioned under pain of death, and when the torturer turned the screw, would offer as guarantors only his own throat and spine, and remain entirely dumb, except to say naught or “My name’s Nobody” or to call on the Church itself for aid, but otherwise offer no information, not even if someone promised to dub him a Knight of Calatrava.

  Alonso Fierro, fencing master

  Skilled with sword and dagger,

  Slit many a throat in old Seville,

  One doubloon per funeral.

  Calling on the Church wasn’t, in fact, such a bad idea, for Seville boasted the most famous rogues’ refuge in the world—the Cathedral’s Patio de los Naranjos, whose renown and usefulness is captured in these lines:

  I ran away from Córdoba

  And reached Seville a tired man.

  There I became a gardener

  In the Corral de los Naranjos.

  This was one of the courtyards in the Cathedral, or Iglesia Mayor, which had been built on the site of a former Moorish mosque, just as the Giralda tower had been modeled on a minaret. It was a pleasant, spacious area with a fountain in the middle and was shaded by the orange trees from which it took its name; the main door of this famous courtyard opened onto the Cathedral square and the surrounding steps, which, during the day, like the steps of San Felipe in Madrid, were the favored place for idlers and rogues to meet and talk. Because of the courtyard’s role as sanctuary, it became the chosen place of asylum for desperados and scoundrels and criminals on the run from justice, and there they lived freely and well, visited both day and night by their whores and companions; and those men whom the law was most eager to apprehend only ventured forth into the city in large gangs, so that even the constables themselves dared not confront them. The place has been described by the sharpest quills of Spanish letters, from the great don Miguel de Cervantes to don Francisco de Quevedo, so I need not provide much detail. No picaresque novel, no soldier’s tale or rogue’s story is complete without a mention of Seville and the Patio de los Naranjos. Simply try to imagine the atmosphere of that legendary place, close by the Casa Lonja and the shops selling silk, a place where fugitives from justice and the whole criminal world were as thick as thieves and as snug as bugs in a rug.

  I accompanied the captain on his recruiting campaign, and we visited the Patio during the day, when the light was still good and it was easy to recognize faces. On the steps up to the main entrance beat the pulse of that multifarious and sometimes cruel city of Seville. At that hour, the steps were seething with idlers, sellers of cheap trinkets, strollers, rogues, streetwalkers with their faces half veiled, girl pickpockets disguised as innocent maids accompanied by ancient chaperones and little pages, with light-fingered thieves, beggars, and blades for hire. In the midst of them all, a blind man was selling ballad sheets and singing about the death of Escamilla:

  Brave, bold Escamilla,

  Glory and pride of all Sevilla . . .

  Half a dozen ruffians were gathered beneath the arch of the main doorway and nodded approvingly as they listened to the turbulent story of that legendary swordsman and hired assassin, the very cream of the local villainry. We passed them as we went into the courtyard, and I couldn’t help noticing that the whole group turned to watch Captain Alatriste. Inside, thirty or so fellows, identical in appearance to those at the entrance, were lounging in the shade of the orange trees next to the pleasant fountain. In this market of death, contracts to kill were regularly drawn up and agreed upon. This was the refuge of those who had sliced open someone’s face or relieved many a soul of its corruptible matter. They had more steel about their persons than a Toledo swordsmith, and they all sported Córdoba leather jerkins, turned-down boots, broad-brimmed hats, large mustaches, and a swaggering, bowlegged gait. Otherwise, the Patio resembled a Gypsy encampment, with pots being heated over fires, blankets spread on the ground, bundles of clothing, a few mats on which men were dozing, and a couple of gaming tables, one for cards and the other for dice, where a jug of wine was doing the rounds amongst gamblers intent on wagering their very souls, even though the latter had been in hock to the Devil ever since their owners were weaned. A few ruffians were in close conversation with their women, some of whom were young and others less so, but who all conformed to the same whorish pattern, hard-fa
ced and hardworking, accounting to their pimps for the money they had earned on the street corners of Seville.

  Alatriste stopped by the fountain and looked quickly around. I was right behind him, fascinated by everything I saw. One bold doxy, her cloak folded and draped across her chest as if she were ready for a knife fight, casually and brazenly accosted him, and when they heard her do this, two cutthroats playing dice at one of the tables got up very slowly, giving us a mean, appraising look. They were dressed in typical ruffian style: open-necked shirts with wide Walloon collars, colored hose, and baldrics about a span wide, and equipped with all kinds of swords and daggers. The younger of the two men was carrying on his belt a pistol instead of a dagger and a light cork shield.

  “What can we do for you, sir?” asked one.

  The captain turned to them calmly, his thumbs in his belt, his hat down over his eyes.

  “Nothing, gentlemen,” he said. “I’m looking for a friend.”

  “Perhaps we know him,” said the other man.