The King's Gold

by Arturo Pérez-Reverte

  I made use of the voyage to read, with great delight and profit, Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache, and other books that Captain Alatriste had either brought with him or acquired on board; these were, if I remember rightly, The Life of the Squire, Marcos de Obregón, a volume of Suetonius, and the second part of The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quijote de la Mancha. There was also, as far as I was concerned, a practical aspect to the voyage that would, in time, prove extremely useful, for after my experiences in Flanders, where I had acquired all the skills of war, Captain Alatriste and his colleagues took it upon themselves to train me in swordplay. I was rapidly approaching the age of sixteen; my body had filled out, and the hardships endured in Flanders had strengthened my limbs, tested my mettle, and toughened my resolve. Diego Alatriste knew better than anyone that a steel blade can place the most humble man on the same footing as a monarch, and that when all the cards are stacked against you, knowing how to handle a fine piece of Toledo steel provides a more than decent way of earning one’s daily bread—or, indeed, of defending it. To complete my education, which had had its harsh beginnings in Flanders, he had decided to teach me the secrets of fencing, and to this end, every day, we would seek out an empty part of the deck, where our comrades would make room for us or even form a circle to watch with expert eye, proffering opinions and advice and larding these comments with accounts of feats and exploits sometimes more imagined than real. In that world of connoisseurs and experts—for, as I once said, there is no better fencing master than the man who has felt cold steel in his own flesh—Captain Alatriste and I practiced thrusts, feints, attacks, and retreats, strikes performed with the palm up and with the palm down, wounds inflicted with the point of the sword and with the edge of the blade, and various other techniques at the disposal of the professional swordsman. Thus I learned all the tricks of the trade: how to grab my opponent’s sword and then drive my blade into his chest; how to draw my blade back, slashing his face as I did so; how to slice and to thrust with both sword and dagger; how to use a lantern to dazzle, or even the light of the sun; how to make unashamed use of feet and elbows, or of the many ways of wrapping my cloak around my opponent’s blade and then finishing him off in a trice. In short, I learned everything that goes into making the skilled swordsman. And although we could not know it at the time, I would soon be presented with an opportunity to put all this into practice, for a letter awaited us in Cádiz, along with a friend in Seville and an extraordinary adventure that would take place at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. But all of this I will unfold in the fullness of time.

  Dear Captain Alatriste,

  You will perhaps be surprised to receive this letter, which serves, first and foremost, to welcome you on your return to Spain, which I hope has been happily concluded.

  Thanks to the news you sent me from Antwerp—where your face, bold Spaniard, doubtless made even the River Scheldt grow pale—I have been able to follow your steps, and I hope that, despite cruel Neptune’s traps, you continue safe and well, as, too, our dear Íñigo. If so, you have arrived at precisely the right moment. For if, upon your arrival in Cádiz, the Indies fleet has still not arrived, I must ask you to come at once to Seville by whatever means possible. The king is currently in this city of Betis, on a visit to Andalusia with Her Majesty the queen, and since I am, thankfully, still in favor with Philip IV and with his Atlas, the Conde-Duque de Olivares (although, of course, yesterday is gone, tomorrow has not yet come, and one untimely sonnet or epigram could easily cost me another period of exile in my personal Enxine Sea— Torre de Juan Abad), I am here in his illustrious company, doing a little of everything, and, apparently, a great deal of nothing, at least officially. As to the unofficial, I will tell you about that in detail when I have the pleasure of once more embracing you in Seville. I can say no more until then, only to remark that since the matter requires your participation, it is (naturally) a matter requiring swords.

  I send you my very warmest regards, and greetings also from the Conde de Guadalmedina, who is here with me, looking as handsome as ever and busily seducing all the ladies of Seville.

  Your friend, always,

  Francisco de Quevedo Villegas

  Diego Alatriste put the letter away in his doublet and climbed into the skiff beside me amongst the bundles containing our luggage. The boatmen’s voices rang out as they leaned upon the oars, which splashed in the water, and we gradually left behind us the Jesús Nazareno, where it lay motionless in the still water, along with the other galleons, so imposing with their high, pitch-black sides, their red paint and gilt glinting in the daylight, the spars and the tangled rigging rising up into the sky. Shortly afterward, we were back on land, feeling the ground sway beneath our uncertain feet. After weeks confined to the deck of a ship, we found it bewildering to be amongst so many people and with so much space in which to move about. We delighted in the food on display outside the shops: oranges, lemons, raisins, plums, salt meat, and fish, the white bread in the bakeries, the pungent smell of spices, and the familiar voices touting all kinds of unusual goods and merchandise: paper from Genoa, wax from Barbary, wines from Sanlúcar, Jerez, and El Puerto de Santa María, sugar from Motril . . . The captain stopped at a barber’s, who shaved him and trimmed his hair and mustache, and I remained at his side, gazing happily about me. In those days, Cádiz had not yet displaced Seville in importance as regards the route to and from the Indies, and the city was still small, with only four or five inns and taverns, but its streets, frequented by people from Genoa and Portugal, and by black slaves and Moors, were bathed in a dazzling light, the air was transparent, and everything was bright and cheerful and a world away from Flanders. There was barely a trace of the recent battle, although everywhere one saw soldiers and armed civilians, and the Cathedral square, our next stop after the barber’s, was packed with people going to church to give thanks to God that the city had been saved from being plundered and burned. A messenger, a freed black slave sent by don Francisco de Quevedo, was waiting for us there as arranged, and while we took a cool drink at an inn and ate a few slices of tuna with white bread and green beans drizzled with olive oil, he explained the situation. After the alarm provoked by the English attack, every horse in town had been requisitioned, and the safest way, therefore, to reach Seville was to cross over to El Puerto de Santa María, where the king’s galleys were anchored, and there board a galley that was preparing to sail up the Guadalquivir to Seville. He had, he said, arranged for a small boat with a skipper and four sailors to take us to El Puerto, and so we returned to the port and, on the way, were given documents signed by the Duque de Fernandina—a passport granting free passage and embarkation as far as Seville “to Diego Alatriste y Tenorio, one of the king’s soldiers on leave from Flanders, and to his servant Íñigo Balboa Aguirre.”

  In the port, where bundles of soldiers’ luggage and equipment were being piled high, we bade farewell to the few comrades still lingering there—as caught up in their card games as they were with the local whores, who, in their distinctive half-capes, were taking full advantage of the recent disembarkation to seize what booty they could. When we said our goodbyes, Curro Garrote was already back on dry land, crouched beside a gaming table that guaranteed more tricks and surprises than spring itself, and playing cards as if his life depended on it, his doublet open and his one good hand resting, just in case, on the pommel of his dagger, while his other hand traveled back and forth between his mug of wine and his cards, which came and went accompanied by curses, oaths, and blasphemies, as he saw half the contents of his purse disappearing into someone else’s. The Malagueño nevertheless interrupted his activities to wish us luck, adding that he would see us again somewhere, here or there.

  “And if not there,” he concluded, “then in Hell.”

  Next, we said goodbye to Sebastián Copons, who, as you will remember, was an old soldier from Huesca, small, thin, and wiry, and even less given to talking than Captain Alatriste. Copons said that he was thinking of spendi
ng a few days’ leave in Cádiz and would then, like us, travel up to Seville. He was fifty, with many campaigns behind him and far too many scars on his body—the latest, earned at the Ruyter mill, had traced a line from his forehead to his ear—and it was, he said, perhaps time to be thinking about going back to Cillas de Ansó, the little village where he’d been born. A young wife and a bit of land of his own would suit him fine, if, that is, he could get used to driving a spade into the earth rather than a sword into the guts of Lutherans. My master and he arranged to meet up again in Seville, at Becerra’s. And when they said goodbye, I noticed that they embraced in silence, with no fuss, but with a stoicism typical of both.

  I was sorry to leave Copons and Garrote, even though, despite all we’d been through together, I had never warmed to the latter, with his curly hair, his gold earring, and his disreputable air, but they were the only two comrades from our company in Breda who had traveled back to Cádiz with us. All the others had, in one way or another, been left behind: Llop from Mallorca and Rivas from Galicia were lying six feet under the Flemish earth, one at the Ruyter mill and the other in the barracks at Terheyden. Mendieta from Vizcaya—always assuming he was alive to tell the tale—would be lying in a gloomy military hospital in Brussels, prostrated by the black vomit, and the Olivares brothers, taking with them as page my friend Jaime Correas, had reenlisted for a new campaign in the regiment led by don Francisco de Medina, when our Cartagena regiment, which had suffered so much during the long siege of Breda, was temporarily disbanded. The war in Flanders had been going on for a long time, and it was said that after all the money and lives the last few years had cost, the Conde-Duque de Olivares, minister and favorite of our King Philip IV, had decided to place our army there on a defensive footing only, in order to cut expenses, reducing the fighting force to an indispensable minimum. The fact is that six thousand soldiers had been discharged either voluntarily or by force, which is why the Jesús Nazareno was returning to Spain full of veterans, some of them old and infirm, some having been paid off, either because they’d completed the regulation period of service or because they were being posted on to different regiments and units in Spain itself or around the Mediterranean. Many of them were weary of war and its perils, and might well have agreed with that character in a Lope de Vega play:

  What have the Lutherans

  ever done to me?

  The Lord Jesus made them,

  And He can slay them—

  If He so chooses—

  Far more easily than we.

  The freed slave sent by don Francisco de Quevedo also took his leave of us in Cádiz, having first shown us to our boat. We climbed aboard and were rowed away from the shore, and after we had again passed our imposing galleons—it was strange to see them from so low down—the skipper, judging that the wind was right, gave orders for the sail to be raised. Thus we crossed the bay, heading for the mouth of the Guadalete, and at evening we joined the Levantina, an elegant galley anchored along with many others in the middle of the river—all with their lateen yards and spars tied up on deck—opposite the great salt mountains that rose like heaps of snow on the left bank. The city, white and tawny, stretched away to the right, with the tall castle tower protecting the mouth of the anchorage. El Puerto de Santa María was the main base for the king’s galleys, and my master knew it from the time when he set sail against the Turks and the Berbers. As for the galleys, those war machines propelled by human blood and muscle, he knew far more about them than most would care to. That is why, after presenting ourselves to the captain of the Levantina, who glanced at our passport and gave us permission to stay on board, Alatriste found us a comfortable place near a crossbow embrasure—having first greased the palm of the galleymaster in charge of the rabble with a silver piece of eight—and remained awake all night, his back resting against our luggage and his dagger at the ready. As he explained in a whisper, a faint smile on his lips, it would take at least three hundred years in Purgatory before even the most honest of galley slaves—from the captain down to the last forced man—was given his discharge papers and allowed into Heaven.

  I slept wrapped in my blanket, untroubled by the cockroaches and lice scampering over me, for they were hardly a novelty after my experiences on our long voyage on the Jesús Nazareno. Any ship or vessel is home to gallant legions of rats, bedbugs, fleas, and all manner of creeping things who were quite capable of eating a cabin boy alive and who observed neither Fridays nor Lent. And whenever I woke to scratch myself, I would see close by me Diego Alatriste’s wide eyes, as pale as if they were made of the same light as the moon moving slowly above our heads and above the masts. I thought of his joke about galley slaves being discharged from Purgatory.

  The truth is I’d never heard him give a reason why he had asked Captain Bragado for us to be discharged after the Breda campaign, and I couldn’t get a word out of him either then or afterward; however, I sensed that I might have had something to do with the decision. Only years later did I learn that, at one point, Alatriste had considered the possibility, one among many, of traveling with me to the Indies. As I have told you before, the captain had, in his fashion, looked after me ever since my father’s death in battle at Jülich in the year 1621, and had apparently now reached the conclusion that, after my experience with the army in Flanders, useful for a lad born into that particular period and with my particular talents—as long as I did not leave behind me there health, life, and conscience—it was time to prepare for my education and my future by returning to Spain. Alatriste did not believe that a career as soldier was the best choice for the son of his friend Lope Balboa, although I proved him wrong about that, when—after Nördlingen, the defense of Fuenterrabía, and the wars of Portugal and Catalonia—I was made ensign at Rocroi and, after leading a company of two hundred men, was appointed lieutenant of the Royal Mail and, later, captain of the Spanish guard of King Philip IV.

  However, such a record only shows how right Diego Alatriste was, for although I fought honorably on many a battlefield, like the good Catholic, Spaniard, and Basque that I am, I gained but little reward, and what advantages and promotions I was given were due less to the military life itself and more to the favor of the king, to my relationship with Angélica de Alquézar, and to the good fortune that has always accompanied me. For Spain, rarely a mother and more often a wicked stepmother, always pays very little for the blood of those who spill it in her service, and others with more merit than I were left to rot in the anterooms of indifferent functionaries, in homes for the old and frail, or in convents, just as they had been abandoned to their fate in many a battle and left to rot in the trenches. I was the exception in enjoying good fortune, for in Alatriste’s and my profession, the normal end to a life spent watching bullets rain down on armor was this:

  Broken, scarred and crippled,

  Carrying, if you’re lucky, a letter,

  To present at the door of hospitals

  Where no one ever gets better.

  Not even asking for a reward, a benefice, the captaincy of a company, or even bread for your children, but merely a little charity for having lost your arm in Lepanto, in Flanders, or in Hell itself, and, instead, seeing the door slammed shut in your face with the words:

  So you served His Majesty

  And lost your arm?

  Bad luck, we say!

  But why, pray, should we pay

  For Flanders’ harm?

  And then, of course, Captain Alatriste was growing older. Not old in years, you understand, for at the time—the end of the first quarter of the century—he must have been a little over forty. I mean that he had grown old inside, as was the case with other men like him, who had been fighting for the true religion ever since they were boys, receiving nothing in exchange but scars, travails, and misfortunes. The Breda campaign, in which Alatriste had placed some hopes for himself and for me, had proved hard and unrewarding, with unfair officers, cruel commanders, much sacrifice, and little benefit, and we were all as poor
as when we had started two years before, apart from what we had managed to ransack from Oudkerk and from other pillaging expeditions, and not counting the discharge pay—my master’s, that is, for we servants were unpaid—which, in the form of a few silver escudos, would at least allow us to survive for a few months. Despite all this, the captain would go on to fight again, when life obliged us to serve once more under the Spanish flag, until I saw him die as I had seen him live: standing, his hair and mustache now grizzled, sword in hand, his eyes calm and indifferent, at the Battle of Rocroi, on the day when the best infantry in the world allowed themselves to be defeated merely in order to remain faithful to their king, and to their own legend and glory. And thus, exactly as I had always known him, in good times, of which there were few, and in bad, of which there were many, Captain Alatriste died true to himself and to his own silences. Like a soldier.

  But let us not anticipate stories or events. Long before that, as I was saying, something was already dying inside the man who was then my master. Something indefinable, but of which I first became truly aware on the voyage that brought us back from Flanders. For all my youthful lucidity, however, I still did not quite understand what that something was, and could only watch as a part of Diego Alatriste slowly died. Later, I decided it was a kind of faith, or the remnants of a faith, perhaps a faith in the human condition, or in what heretical unbelievers call fate and what decent men call God. Or perhaps it was the painful certainty that our poor Spain, and Alatriste with her, was sliding down into a bottomless pit, with no hope of anyone getting her or us out of it, not for a long time, not for centuries. And I still wonder if my presence at his side, my youth, and the adoring way I looked at him—for I worshipped him then—did not force him to maintain his composure, a composure that, in other circumstances, might have drowned like mosquitoes in wine, in those mugs of wine of which he occasionally drank far too many, or might else have found resolution in the black, definitive barrel of his pistol.