The Siege

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  “Admit it is too much to ask.”

  “I admit it.”

  The corsair is staring at the wisps of luminous sea spray. Of all the men in the world, Lolita thinks suddenly, of all those I have met or will ever meet, he is the one I know best. And he has only held me once.

  “Why should I do it?”

  She hesitates before answering, still stunned by the realization. By the unspoken power she has glimpsed for the first time. Everything suddenly seems so simple, so obvious, that she is astounded by her own naïveté: by how she could have surrendered that night—so long ago already, impossible now—have pressed herself against his chest, breathed in his scent, feeling beneath her awkward, tremulous hands his brawny muscular back. More firm, more solid than she could ever have imagined. Not until this moment did she realize the fearful consequences that fleeting moment imposed upon this man now standing, head bowed, staring at the sea.

  “Because I am asking you.”

  She says this firmly, but is careful in her words and her tone, keenly aware that the slightest false move might cause Lobo to look up, to see her in a different light, to awaken from this dream of phosphorescent spray. Then everything would be lost in the darkness gathering in the shadows at the foot of the sea wall.

  “They might kill me,” he says with touching simplicity. “Me and all my men.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t know whether the crew will agree to it … No one can force them. Not even me.”

  “I know that, too.”

  “You …”

  He has lifted his head and is looking at her in the last glimmer of light; but for him it is too late. When she hears this last word, Lolita falters for an instant in her purpose, but she immediately feels her determination return and holds her tongue. There is nothing but the sound of the wind, the lapping of water on the rocks.

  “Damnation,” whispers Pépé Lobo.

  Lolita is surprised by the terseness and precision of the word. And so she remains silent. Not all victories are sweet, she is thinking. Not victories such as this.

  “You have never known anything about me,” says the corsair.

  It is not a regret, she realizes; simply a matter-of-fact observation. Sad, perhaps. Or resigned.

  “You are wrong. I know everything about you.”

  She spoke more warmly than she intended; realizing this, she pauses for a moment, uncertain. Once again she feels that fleeting weakness of surrender, a moment of tenderness. They are too far apart tonight for her to breathe his scent.

  “Everything,” she says again, her tone more brusque.

  Now she finds herself thinking about what she has said and realizes it is the truth.

  “That is why I came to you,” she adds quickly. “Because I know everything I need to know.”

  She sees him turn away. He cannot bring himself to look at her face—or perhaps he needs to hide his own.

  “I will need to think … to talk to my crew. I cannot promise anything.”

  “Of course. I understand. But we do not have much time.”

  A smack. He slams his hands hard against the parapet. The slap echoes against the bare stone.

  “Listen. I cannot promise anything, and you cannot expect me to do it.”

  Lolita is staring at him intently, almost in surprise. Men are fools, she thinks. Even this one.

  “You are wrong. As I already told you, I can.”

  Seeing him move toward her, she takes a step back.

  “You kissed me once, Captain.”

  She says this as though the memory will be enough to keep him at bay. The sailor laughs again. This time his laugh is louder, more bitter—and one Lolita finds unpleasant.

  “And that,” he says, “gives you the right to do as you please with my life?”

  “No. It gives me the right to look at you as I am doing now.”

  “Curse the way you look at me, señora. And curse this city.”

  He takes another step toward her, and defiantly she backs away. And so they stand, frozen, facing one another. Watching each other in the gathering darkness.

  “If this were any other place in the world, I would—”

  Pépé Lobo suddenly breaks off, as if the dying light robs him of words, confounding any argument he might make. And he is probably right, she thinks. For that I am indebted to him.

  “As would I,” she says gently.

  There is nothing calculated in what she says. Her voice is quiet, the words a fond regret passing between them. She cannot see his eyes, but she sees him shake his head forlornly.

  “Cádiz,” she hears him murmur.

  “Yes. Cádiz.”

  Only now does she dare to touch him, hesitantly, like a little girl approaching some furious animal. She lets her hand rest gently, weightlessly, on his shoulder. And beneath her fingers, through the fabric of his frockcoat, she feels the corsair’s tense muscles tremble.

  A MAP OF the Port of Cádiz as drawn up by Brigadier Don Vicente Tofiño de San Miguel of the Royal Armada. Pépé Lobo stands, poring over the printed chart of the bay, calculating distances with a pair of compasses set to precisely one nautical mile, according to the scale in the top right corner. Lit by the gimbal lamp mounted on the bulkhead, the map is spread out on the desk of the narrow cabin underneath a skylight, whose glass is covered by a thin layer of salt. This blurs the cloudless, star-strewn sky that is wheeling slowly about the Pole Star, high above the long boom, the furled sail and the lone mast of the cutter. The bulkheads and the cross-timbers creak with every strong gust from the nor’easter that whistles through the rigging; it hauls on the mooring chain, sending violent shivers through the Culebra, which cants slowly to port, to starboard, anchored over three fathoms in sand and mud between the breakwater at San Felipe and the rocks at Las Corrales.

  “The men are on deck,” says Ricardo Maraña, clambering down the companion ladder.

  “How many are we short?”

  “The bo’sun has just arrived with eight more men … There are only six still ashore.”

  “Could be worse.”

  “Could be.”

  Coming over to the desk, Maraña peers at the map. Moving across the coarse paper, Pépé Lobo spins the compasses, measuring out the exact distance—three miles—separating the cutter from the gun battery in the French fort of Santa Catalina, on the easternmost point of the cove at Rota. From this point, heading westward, the coast describes the five-mile sweeping double curve of the inlet, from the fort to the small headland on Puntilla, and from here to the cape at Rota. The captain of the Culebra has penciled a circle around each of the six French gun batteries defending this stretch of coast: aside from Santa Catalina, with its long-range field guns, they are the Ciudad Vieja, Arenilla, Puntilla, Gallina and the 16-pound cannons the Imperial Army has positioned within villages around the little wharf at Rota.

  “Right now, the darkness and the tide are in our favor,” explains Pépé Lobo. “We can take a port tack, hauling the wind as far as the sandbank at Galera … From there we tack as far as Puntilla, then we run down the coast, careful to take soundings, working to windward as much as possible. The advantage is that no one will expect the enemy to come from that side … If anyone does spot us, it will be some time before they realize we’re not a French ship.”

  The first officer is still bent, impassive, over the map. Pépé Lobo sees that he is carefully studying the three penciled circles on the far left of the inlet. The young man says nothing, but Lobo knows what he is thinking: there are too many cannons, and they are too close. To reach its target, the Culebra will have to glide through the darkness past a long line of guns. All it would take is one suspicious sentry, one rocket flare, one patrol boat, and they would have the full might of all these batteries firing at them at point-blank range. And the oak sides of the cutter, which is as lithe and nimble as a girl, are not those of a ship of the line. There is a limit to the beating they can take before she sinks.

  �
��What do you think, pilot?”

  Maraña gives an apathetic shrug. Pépé Lobo knows his first officer would have the same reaction if he were suggesting they make straight for Santa Catalina fort and shoot it out with the heavy field guns.

  “If the wind shifts even a little, we’ll not be able to get close to where the Marco Bruto is moored.”

  He says this coolly, as always, with his usual professional detachment. And not a word about the gun batteries. Yet, like his captain, Maraña knows that if they cannot do this before daybreak, and the French cannons come upon them at dawn, then neither the Culebra nor the ship she is to recapture will ever leave the cove.

  “In that case, too bad,” says Lobo. “We simply sail on, and that’s an end to it.”

  The two men stand up and Pépé Lobo stows the map. Then he looks at Ricardo Maraña. The first mate has not offered a single opinion since the captain confided his intention to rescue the Marco Bruto. His only questions have been technical ones, related to the maneuver and how the crew of the Culebra should be deployed to execute the plan. Now, with his elegant, long-tailed frockcoat buttoned to the throat, the lieutenant wears his usual expression of ennui, as though in the coming hours they were intending to conduct some commonplace operation—a tiresome, routine maneuver.

  “What do the men think?”

  Maraña shrugs his shoulders. “Opinions vary. But the promise of an extra forty thousand reales and the prospect of a bounty for recapturing the ship have cheered them.”

  “Have many requested leave to go ashore?”

  “Not that I am aware of. Brasero has them on a short leash.”

  “Make sure you wear your pistol, Lieutenant. Just in case.”

  Opening a locker in the bulkhead, the captain takes out a loaded weapon and tucks it into his belt, beneath his frockcoat. He is no more apprehensive than usual, but realizes that this is a delicate moment—with the safety of land nearby, there is still time for crewmen to ask awkward questions, to plot among themselves, before they get under way. Though it may sail under a flag that bears a three-towered castle and a lion rampant crowned, a corsair ship lacks the rigorous discipline of the Royal Armada; the line is more easily crossed between restlessness and mutiny. Once at sea and in the heat of action, every man will do what is expected, will fight for his ship and for his life. He will defend his own interests. These men have spent many months at sea, suffering hardship and danger. They are owed money, money that they could lose were they to fail to fulfill the contracts they signed. Once at sea, it will be too late for second thoughts.

  Ricardo Maraña is standing at the foot of the companion ladder, stifling a coughing fit. Not for the first time, Pépé Lobo admires his first mate’s unruffled calm. In the glow of the paraffin lamp, the pallid lips Maraña has just wiped with a kerchief—spotted with blood, as usual—seem paler than usual. They flicker into the briefest of smiles as Lobo comes toward him, adopting the more formal tone they use on deck.

  “Ready for action, pilot?”

  “Ready, Captain.”

  Before they climb the ladder, Pépé Lobo pauses for an instant.

  “Have you something to say?”

  Maraña’s smile broadens. It is cold and aloof as always. It is the same smile he flashes when in some sleazy bar, shuffling cards over a table piled high with money; he wins or loses with the same equanimity, without blinking, as indifferent to chance as he is to the life in which his ravaged lungs are pitted in a suicidal struggle. To achieve such perfect disregard requires a long lineage, Lobo thinks; it requires countless generations of gamblers or good breeding—possibly both.

  “Why would I have something to say, Captain?”

  “You’re right. Let’s go up.”

  As they step on to the wet, slippery deck beneath the star-strewn sky, the crew gather into dark groups in the bow, between the mast and the bowsprit. The wind, which has not shifted, blows hard through the rigging, the taut ropes vibrating like the strings of a harp. Scattered city lights glow off the port bow, beyond the silhouettes of the 6-pounders lashed to their gunports.

  “Nostromo!”

  The sturdy figure of Brasero the bo’sun steps forward.

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “Crew?”

  “Forty-one, not counting yourselves, señor.”

  Pépé Lobo walks over to the bilge pump behind the anchor winch. The men move aside to let him pass, their conversations petering out. Lobo cannot see their faces, nor they his. Even the stiff wind is not enough to eliminate the smell of bodies and tattered clothes: sweat, vomit, rotgut wine from taverns left hardly an hour beforehand, the dankness of loose women. The unmistakable reek that, since the dawn of time, has followed every sailor when he comes aboard.

  “We are going to steal ourselves a ship,” Lobo says, raising his voice.

  He speaks for less than a minute. He is not a man of words, and his crew have no fondness for speeches. Besides, they are corsairs, not hapless conscripts aboard a warship who are forced to read the Royal Armada ordinance every week to instill in them the fear of God and of their superiors: threats of corporal punishment, including death, and if that were not enough, the fires of hell itself. With corsairs, it is enough to talk of bounty, and if possible, to offer precise figures. So this is what he does. Briefly, in short, clear sentences, he reminds them of their earnings to date, the monies being held by the Prize Court and the 40,000 reales that will be shared among them, in addition to the reward for recapturing this ship, increasing their total earnings, since signing on, by a fifth. On the far shore of the bay, he says, there are French corsairs; maybe the Culebra will have a fight on her hands while they hug the shoreline, but the darkness and the wind are in their favor. And on the way back—he speaks of this as though it is a certainty, though he cannot help but notice the mute, skeptical expression on Ricardo Maraña’s face—the allied guns will provide cover.

  “And while we’re at it,” he adds, “we’ll launch a broadside at the bastard felucca the gabachos have anchored there.”

  Laughter. Lobo walks back along the deck, his men patting his arm and slapping his back. Everything now is instinctive, a result of the bonds that have forged between the crewmen during their long campaigns. It owes less to camaraderie and discipline than to blind obedience and straightforward efficiency. It is the knowledge that they are skippered by a sensible, successful captain who does not take unnecessary risks, who protects his captures, his ship and his crew and, when ashore, manages the spoils of their campaigns wisely. Everyone here knows that hard work and risk come at a price. This is the loyalty Pépé Lobo expects of his men tonight, the commitment he will need to sail through the darkness to the far end of the bay, tacking skillfully, fighting if necessary, to return with the Marco Bruto in tow.

  When he reaches the starboard ladder between the third cannon and the launch stowed on deck, Lobo leans over the gunwale and looks down at the shadowy figure waiting in the rowboat alongside: a servant with the Palma house, an old sailor who usually carries messages when they are in port.

  “Santos!”

  The man stirs—he was clearly dozing.

  “Yes, Commander!”

  “We’re about to set sail. Inform your mistress.”

  “Like a bullet!”

  There is the sound of oars slapping the water as the dark form of the boat sheers off from the cutter, rowing with the wind abeam, heading back to the jetty. Pépé Lobo walks past the helm, back to the stern; he leans on the taffrail on which the boom rests, next to the ship’s chest containing instruments and charts. The wood is wet, but despite the breeze that is coming off the bay, the temperature is mild. His frockcoat unbuttoned over his shirt, Lobo takes the pistol from his belt and stows it in the chest. Then he stares out at the sleeping city behind the line of walls, the twin peaks of the Puerta de Mar beyond the pier, the shadows of the anchored ships; a few lights reflect on the black water amid flecks of spray whipped up by the wind.

  Perhaps righ
t now she is awake, he thinks. Perhaps she is sitting, reading a book, looking up now and again to check the time, imagining what he and his men might be doing at this moment. Perhaps she is anxiously counting the minutes. Or perhaps—and this seems more likely, from what Lobo knows of her—she is asleep, oblivious to everything, dreaming about whatever it is that haunts the dreams of women. For a moment, the corsair imagines the warmth of her body, her eyes as they open in the morning, her languid movements as she wakes, the sun streaming through the window and lighting up her face. It is a sunrise that some of the men aboard the Culebra may not live to see.

  I know everything about you. Those were her words as she stood by the sea wall at dusk, as she asked him to sail his ship and his crew beneath the enemy guns at Rota. I know everything I need to know, she said, and that gives me the right to ask what I am asking; to look at you as I am doing now. Leaning on the damp taffrail, the corsair remembers how, behind the billowing folds of her mantilla, her gaze seemed fixed on the purple darkness while cold, calculating words precise as the scale on a sextant, spilled from her lips. And all the while—with that awkwardness that men have always felt when faced with the enigma of the flesh, of life and death—he watched, not daring to kiss her again, as her face melted into the darkness. On this journey into oblivion—the journey that began as soon as he pored over the map in his cabin—he will take with him nothing but the voice, the physical reality of this woman, her warm, unattainable shape melting into the shadows that are encroaching on their fate. If this were any other place in the world, I would … That was all he managed to say before he broke off; he did not need to say more, for in making this singular confession, everything was sealed between them—the corsair was resigned to the inevitable. Resigned to making this journey without protest, without looking back. Simply one more man setting out on a road of no return, on a sea with no winds to guide him home; with no fears, no regrets—since nothing would be left behind, and he could take nothing with him. But finally, at the last moment, she found the will to speak. And this changed everything. As would I. Her words, as melancholy as the violet light fading on the bay, quavered with an age-old tremor from down the centuries; the keening of a woman in an ancient city looking out over the sea wall. The impossibility of return makes death itself seem even more deadly. And her hand on his arm, as weightless as a sigh, merely sealed his hopeless fate.