The King's Gold Read online

  “It is not the custom of the well-born to suffer such outrages,” he said.

  “I don’t care two figs whether it is or not,” retorted the constable in surly tones.

  With this refined remark, the scene was set. As for my master, he remained very still and quiet, studying the constable and his companions, the catchpoles. He cut an imposing figure in the half-light, with his aquiline profile and his bushy mustache beneath the broad brim of his hat. Or rather, so it seemed to me, who knew him well. I touched the hilt of my dagger. I would have given anything for a sword, because there were five of them and we were only four. I immediately and regretfully corrected myself. With my few inches of steel, we were really only three and a half.

  “Hand over your swords,” said the constable, “and be so good as to come with us.”

  “These are important people,” Quevedo said, in one last attempt to save the situation.

  “Right, and I’m the Duque de Alba.”

  It was clear that the constable was determined to have his way, and to make two and two add up to five if necessary. This was his parish, and he was being watched by his parishioners. The four catchpoles unsheathed their swords and spread out to form a wide semicircle around us.

  “If we get out of this alive and no one identifies us,” Guadalmedina whispered coolly, his voice muffled behind his cloak, “that will be that, but if not, gentlemen, the nearest church in which to seek sanctuary is the San Francisco.”

  The constable and his men were getting ever closer. In their black clothes, the catchpoles merged with the shadows. Underneath the arch, the onlookers encouraged them with mocking applause. “Go on, teach ’em a lesson, Sánchez,” someone said to the constable in a bantering tone. Unhurriedly, confidently, and boldly, the said Sánchez stuck his staff of office in his belt and grasped his sword in his right hand and a huge pistol in his left.

  “I’ll count up to three,” he said, coming closer. “One . . .”

  Don Francisco de Quevedo pushed me gently behind him, interposing himself between the catchpoles and me. Guadalmedina was watching Captain Alatriste, who was still standing impassively in the same place, judging distances and turning his body very slowly so as not to lose sight of the face of the catchpole nearest to him but still keeping an eye on the others. I noticed that Guadalmedina was checking to see who my master was looking at, and then, turning away, he fixed on another, as if satisfied that my master would deal with the first man.

  “Two . . .”

  Quevedo was removing his short cape. “There’s nothing for it et cetera, et cetera,” he muttered as he undid the fastening on his cape and wrapped the cloth around his left arm. Guadalmedina, for his part, had arranged his cloak so as to protect his torso from the knife thrusts that were about to rain down upon him. I stepped away from Quevedo and went to stand next to the captain. His right hand was moving toward the guard of his sword and the left was resting on the hilt of his dagger. I could hear his slow, steady breathing. I realized suddenly that I had not seen him kill a man for several months, not since Breda.

  “Three,” said the constable, raising his pistol and glancing back at the onlookers. “In the name of the king, and of the law . . .”

  He had not even finished speaking when Guadalmedina fired one of his pistols at point-blank range, which sent the constable reeling backward, his face still turned away. A woman underneath the archway screamed, and an expectant murmur ran through the shadows, for the spectacle of fellow Spaniards quarreling and knifing one another has long been a popular Spanish sport. And then, as one, Quevedo, Alatriste, and Guadalmedina reached for their blades; seven bare lengths of steel glinted in the street; and then everything happened with diabolical speed: cling, clang, sparks flying, catchpoles shouting, “Stop in the name of the king!” and more cries and murmurs from the spectators. I, too, had unsheathed my dagger, though I did nothing with it, for in less time than it takes to say an Ave Maria, Guadalmedina had skewered the upper arm of one catchpole, Quevedo had slashed the face of another, leaving him leaning against the wall, hands pressed to the wound, and bleeding like a stuck pig, and Alatriste, sword in one hand and dagger in the other, wielding both as if they were bolts of lightning, had put two spans of Toledan steel through the chest of a third, who cried out, “Holy Mother of God,” before detaching himself from the blade and falling to the ground, vomiting gobbets of blood as dark as black ink. It all happened so fast that the fourth catchpole didn’t think twice and took to his heels when my master suddenly rounded on him as his next victim. At that point, I sheathed my dagger and went over to pick up one of the swords lying on the ground, the constable’s sword, and as I did so, two or three of the onlookers, who had misread the situation at the start, stepping forward to come to the aid of the catchpoles, stopped short when they saw how quickly everything had been resolved, and stood very still and circumspect, watching the captain, Guadalmedina, and Quevedo, who turned on them with their naked blades, ready to continue their harvest. I took up a position beside my companions and placed myself on guard; and the hand that held the sword was trembling not with anxiety but with excitement: I would have given anything to have contributed a sword thrust of my own to the fight. However, the would-be combatants from the small crowd were fast losing their desire to join in. They hung back prudently, muttering this and that, let’s just wait and see, eh, while the other onlookers jeered at them and we walked slowly backward away from the scene, leaving the street bathed in blood: one catchpole dead, the constable with his pistol shot more dead than alive and with not even enough breath to call for a confessor, the one with the cut to his arm stanching the wound the best he could, and the man with the slashed face kneeling by the wall, moaning behind a mask of blood.

  “They’ll tell you where to find us on the king’s galleys!” cried Guadalmedina in a suitably defiant tone, while we dodged around the nearest corner. This was a clever ploy on his part, for it would place the blame for that night’s fighting on the soldiers whom the constable had, to his cost, believed us to be.

  The constable and his catchpoles

  Were eager for the kill,

  But I taught those turds a lesson

  And one was sent to Hell.

  As we strolled along Calle de Harinas, toward the gate of El Arenal, don Francisco de Quevedo was making up a few more scatological lines of poetry, all the while on the lookout for a tavern where he could toast both his poetry and us with some good wine. Guadalmedina was laughing, delighted with the whole business. An excellent move and very well played, damn it! Captain Alatriste, meanwhile, had cleaned the blade of his sword with a kerchief he kept in his pouch, and when he had replaced his sword in its sheath, he walked on in silence, occupied in thoughts impossible to penetrate. And I walked along beside him, carrying the constable’s sword and feeling as proud as don Quixote.

  4. THE QUEEN’S MAID OF HONOR

  Diego Alatriste was waiting, leaning against a wall, amongst pots of geraniums and basil, in the shade of a porchway in Calle del Mesón del Moro. Without his cloak, but with his hat on, his sword and dagger in his belt, and his doublet open over a clean, neatly darned shirt, he was intently watching the house of the Genoese merchant Garaffa. The house was almost at the gates of the old Jewish quarter in Seville, near the convent of the Discalced Carmelites and the old Doña Elvira playhouse, and it was very quiet at that hour, with few passersby and only the occasional woman sweeping the entrance to her house or watering her plants. In earlier days, when he was serving as a soldier on the king’s galleys, Alatriste had often visited that quarter, never imagining that, later on, when he returned from Italy in the year sixteen hundred sixteen, he would spend a long time there, most of it in the company of ruffians and other people quick to draw their swords, in the famous Cathedral courtyard, the Patio de los Naranjos, which was a meeting place for the boldest and most cunning of Seville’s criminal class. After the repression of the Moriscos in Valencia, as you may perhaps remember, the captain ha
d asked to leave his regiment in order to enlist as a soldier in Naples—“where,” he reasoned, “if I have to slit the throats of infidels, they will at least be able to defend themselves”—and he remained embarked until the naval battle of sixteen hundred fifteen, when, after a devastating raid on the Turkish coast with five galleys and more than a thousand comrades, he and his fellow soldiers returned to Italy with plenty of plunder and he led a life of pleasure in Naples. This ended as such things tend to end in youth, with a woman and another man, with a mark on the face for the woman and a sword thrust for the man, and Diego Alatriste fleeing Naples thanks to the help of his old friend Captain don Alonso de Contreras, who stowed him away on a galley bound for Sanlúcar and Seville. And that was how, before he moved on to Madrid, this former soldier came to earn his living as a paid swordsman in Seville, that Babylon and breeding ground for all vices, taking refuge by day among ruffians and scoundrels in the famous Cathedral courtyard and by night sallying forth to carry out the duties of his profession, one in which any man with courage and a good sword, and with sufficient luck and skill, could easily earn his daily bread. Such legendary ruffians as Gonzalo Xeniz, Gayoso, Ahumada, and the great Pedro Vázquez de Escamilla—who recognized only one kind of king, the king in the deck of cards—they were all long gone, undone by a knife thrust or by the disease of the noose, for in work such as theirs, finding oneself strung up by the neck was a highly contagious complaint. However, in the Patio de los Naranjos and in the royal prison, where he also took up temporary residence with some regularity, Alatriste had met many a worthy successor to such historic rogues, experts in how to stab, cut, and slash, although he, too, soon made a name for himself in that illustrious brotherhood, skilled as he was in the sword thrust perfected by the celebrated ruffian Gayona, as well as in many others proper to his art.

  He was recalling all this now with a pang of nostalgia, less perhaps for the past than for his lost youth, and he was doing so not a stone’s throw from the very playhouse where, as a young man, he had grown to love the plays of Lope, Tirso de Molina, and others—there he saw for the first time The Dog in the Manger and The Shy Man at the Palace—on nights that opened with poetry and staged fights and closed with taverns, wine, complaisant whores, jolly companions, and knives. This dangerous, fascinating Seville still existed, and any change was to be sought not in the city but in himself. Time does not pass in vain, he thought, as he stood leaning in the shady porchway. And a man grows old inside, just as his heart does.

  “Death and damnation, Captain Alatriste, but it’s a small world!”

  The captain spun around in surprise to see who it was who had spoken his name. It was strange to see Sebastián Copons so far from a Flemish trench and uttering more than eight words together. It took the captain a few seconds to return to the very recent past: the sea voyage, his recent farewell to Copons in Cádiz, the latter’s intention to spend a few days’ leave there and then to travel up to Seville on his way north.

  “It’s good to see you, Sebastián.”

  This was both true and not true. It was not, in fact, good to see him at that precise moment, and while they clasped each other’s arms with the sober affection of two old comrades, he glanced over Copons’s shoulder at the far end of the street. Fortunately, Copons could be relied on. He could get rid of Copons without causing offense, knowing that he would understand. That, after all, was the good thing about a real friend: he trusted you to deal the cards fairly and never insisted on checking the deck.

  “Are you stopping in Seville?” he asked.

  “For a while.”

  Copons, small, thin, and wiry, was dressed, as ever, in soldier’s garb, in jerkin, baldric, sword, and boots. Beneath his hat, on his left temple, was the scar left by the gash that Alatriste himself had bandaged a year ago, during the battle at the Ruyter mill.

  “How about a drink to celebrate, Diego?”

  “Later.”

  Copons looked at him, surprised and intrigued, before half turning to follow the direction of his gaze.

  “You’re busy.”

  “Something like that.”

  Copons again inspected the street, searching for clues as to what was keeping his comrade there. Then, instinctively, he touched the hilt of his sword.

  “Do you need me?” he asked phlegmatically.

  “Not right now,” replied Alatriste with a warm smile that wrinkled his weathered face. “But there might be something for you before you leave Seville. Would you be interested?”

  “Are you in on it?”

  “Yes, and it’s well paid too.”

  “I’d do it even if it weren’t.”

  At this point, Alatriste spotted the accountant Olmedilla at the end of the street. He was dressed, as always, entirely in black, tightly buttoned up to his ruff, wearing a narrow-brimmed hat and the air of an anonymous government official come straight from the Real Audiencia.

  “I have to go, but meet me later at Becerra’s.”

  Placing one hand on his friend’s shoulder, he said nothing more, but with apparent unconcern, crossed the street to join the accountant by the house on the corner: a two-story brick building with a discreet gateway leading to an inner courtyard. They went in without knocking and without speaking to each other, exchanging only a brief, knowing glance. Alatriste had his hand on the hilt of his sword and Olmedilla remained as sour-faced as ever. An elderly servant came out, wiping his hands on his apron and looking anxious and inquisitive.

  “We are here in the name of the Holy Office of the Inquisition,” said Olmedilla with terrible coldness.

  The servant’s expression changed, for in Garaffa’s house and indeed in the whole of Seville, these were not words to be taken lightly. And so when Alatriste, one hand still on the hilt of his sword, indicated a room, the servant entered it as meekly as a lamb, allowing himself, without a murmur of protest, to be bound and gagged and locked in. When Alatriste came back out into the courtyard, he found Olmedilla waiting behind an enormous potted fern and twiddling his thumbs impatiently. There was another silent exchange of glances, and the two men went across the courtyard to a closed door. Then Alatriste unsheathed his sword, flung open the door, and strode into a spacious study furnished with a desk, a cupboard, a copper brazier, and a few leather chairs. The light from a high, barred window, half covered by latticework shutters, cast innumerable tiny luminous squares onto the head and shoulders of a stout, middle-aged man in silk robe and slippers, who started to his feet. This time Olmedilla did not invoke the Holy Office or anything else, he merely followed Alatriste into the room, and after a quick look around, his eye alighted with professional satisfaction on the open cupboard stuffed with papers. Just the way a cat, thought the captain, would have licked its lips at the sight of a sardine placed half an inch from its whiskers. As for the owner of the house, Jerónimo Garaffa, all the blood seemed to have drained from his face; he stood very quietly, mouth agape, both hands resting on the table on which a sealing-wax candle was burning. When he stood up, he spilled half an inkwell over the paper on which he had been writing when the intruders burst in. His dyed hair was covered by a snood and his waxed mustache by a net. He continued to hold the pen between his fingers as if he had forgotten it was there, transfixed in horror by the sword Captain Alatriste was pressing to his throat.

  “So you have no idea what we’re talking about.”

  The accountant Olmedilla, as comfortably esconced behind the desk as if he were in his own office, briefly raised his eyes from the papers to see Jerónimo Garaffa, still with his snood on, anxiously shaking his head. He was sitting on a chair, his hands tied to the chair back. It was not particularly warm in the room, but large beads of sweat were already running from his hair into his side-whiskers, and his face smelled of gum arabic, collyria, and barber’s lotions.

  “I swear to you, sir . . .”

  Olmedilla interrupted this protest with an abrupt wave of his hand and resumed his scrutiny of the documents before him. A
bove the mustache net, which gave his face the grotesque appearance of a Carnival mask, Garaffa’s eyes turned to rest on Diego Alatriste, who was listening in silence, leaning against the wall, sword sheathed, arms folded. He must have found Alatriste’s icy eyes more troubling even than Olmedilla’s abrupt manner, for he turned back to the accountant like someone forced to choose the lesser of two evils. After a long, oppressive silence, the accountant abandoned the documents he was studying, sat back in his chair, hands clasped, and, again twiddling his thumbs, stared at Garaffa. It seemed to Alatriste that he looked even more the part of the gray government-office mouse, except that now his expression was that of a mouse with very bad indigestion who keeps swallowing bile.

  “Let’s get this quite straight now,” said Olmedilla very coldly and deliberately. “You know what I’m talking about and we know that you know. Everything else is a pure waste of time.”

  Garaffa’s mouth was so dry that it took him three attempts before he could articulate a word.

  “I swear by Christ Our Lord,” he said in a hoarse voice, his foreign accent made more marked by fear, “that I know nothing about this Flemish ship.”

  “Christ has nothing to do with it!”

  “This is an outrage. I demand that the law . . .”

  Garaffa’s final attempt to give some substance to his protest ended in a sob. The mere sight of Diego Alatriste’s face told him that the law to which he was referring—and which he was doubtless accustomed to buying with a few lovely pieces of eight—only existed somewhere very far from that room and that there was no help to be had.

  “Where will the Virgen de Regla anchor?” asked Olmedilla very quietly.

  “I don’t know. Holy Mother of God, I swear I don’t know what you’re talking about.”