I fumbled open our bundle of clothes and donned my new buff coat, still stiff and thick enough to protect my upper body from knife thrusts. Then I made sure my sandals were firmly tied on and that my dagger was securely attached to my belt with a length of cord wound around the hilt, and, finally, I placed the stolen constable’s sword in my leather baldric. All around me, men were speaking softly, taking one last swig from the wineskins, and relieving themselves before going into action. Alatriste and Copons had their heads close together as the latter received his final instructions. When I stepped back, I bumped into Olmedilla, who recognized me and gave me a little pat on the back, which, in a man of such sourness, might be considered an expression of affection. I saw that he, too, was wearing a sword at his waist.
“Let’s go,” said Alatriste.
We set off, our feet sinking into the sand. I could identify some of the shadows who passed me: the tall, slender figure of Saramago el Portugués, the heavy bulk of Bartolo Cagafuego, the slight silhouette of Sebastián Copons. Someone made some derisory remark, and I heard the muffled laughter of the mulatto Campuzano. The captain’s voice boomed out, demanding silence, and after that no one spoke.
As we passed the wood, I heard the braying of a mule and, curious, peered into the dark. There were mules and horses hidden amongst the trees and the indistinct shapes of people standing next to them. These were doubtless the people who, later on, when the galleon had foundered on the bar, would be in charge of unloading all the gold. As if to confirm my suspicions, three black silhouettes emerged from behind the pines, and Olmedilla and the captain paused to hold a whispered conversation with them. I thought I recognized the “hunters” we had seen earlier. Then they vanished, Alatriste gave an order, and we set off again. Now we were climbing the steep slope of a dune, plunging in up to our ankles, the outlines of our bodies standing out more clearly against the pale sand. At the top, the sound of the sea reached us and the breeze caressed our faces. As far as the horizon—as black as the sky itself—stretched a long dark stain filled with the tiny luminous dots of ship’s lanterns, so that it seemed as if the stars were reflected in the sea. Far off, on the other shore, we could see the lights of Sanlúcar.
We went down to the beach, the sand dulling the sound of our steps. Behind me, I heard the voice of Saramago el Portugués, reciting softly to himself:
“But staying with the pilots on the sand,
And being eager to determine where I stand,
I pause and calculate the bright sun’s height
Then mark our spot, exactly, on the chart.”
Someone asked what the devil he was mumbling about, and Saramago responded calmly, in his soft, cultivated Portuguese voice, that he was reciting some lines from Camões, which made a change from those wretches Lope and Cervantes, and that before he went into battle, he always recited whatever came into his heart, and that if anyone was affronted to hear a few lines from The Lusiads, he would be more than happy to fight it out with him and his mother.
“That’s all we need,” muttered someone.
There were no further comments. Saramago el Portugués resumed his mumbled recitation, and we continued on. Next to the cane fence surrounding the tidal pool created by the fishermen for their fish stocks, we saw two boats waiting, with a man in each of them. We gathered expectantly on the shore.
“The men in my group, come with me,” said Alatriste.
He was hatless, but had now donned his buff coat, and his sword and dagger hung at his belt. The men duly divided into their allotted groups. They exchanged farewells and wishes of good luck, even the odd joke and the inevitable boasts about how many men they intended to relieve of their souls. There were also cases of ill-disguised nerves, stumblings in the dark, and curses. Sebastián Copons walked past us, followed by his men.
“Give me a little time,” the captain said to him in a low voice. “But not too much.”
Copons gave his usual silent nod and waited while his men got into the boat. The last to embark was the accountant Olmedilla. His black clothes made him seem darker still. He splashed about heroically in the water, tangled up in his own sword, while they helped him in.
“And take care of him, too, if you can,” Alatriste said to Copons.
“God’s teeth, Diego,” replied Copons, who was tying his neckerchief around his head. “That’s too many orders for one night.”
Alatriste chuckled. “Who would have thought it, eh, Sebastián? Cutting Flemish throats in Sanlúcar.”
Copons grunted. “Well, when it comes to cutting throats, one place is as good as any other.”
The group assigned to the attack on the bow was also embarking. I went with them, waded into the water, scrambled over the edge of the boat, and sat down on a bench. A moment later, the captain joined us.
“Start rowing,” he said.
We tied the oars to the tholes and began rowing away from the shore, while the sailor took the tiller and guided us toward a nearby light that shimmered on the water ruffled by the breeze. The other boat remained a silent presence close by, the oars entering and leaving the water as quietly as possible.
“Slowly now,” said Alatriste, “slowly.”
Seated next to Bartolo Cagafuego, my feet resting on the bench in front of me, I bent forward with each stroke, then threw my body back, pulling hard on the oar. Thus the end of each movement left me staring up at the stars shining brightly in the vault of the sky. As I bent forward, I sometimes turned and looked back past the heads of my comrades. The lantern at the galleon’s stern was getting closer and closer.
“So,” muttered Cagafuego to himself, “I didn’t escape the galleys after all.”
The other boat began to move away from ours, with the small figure of Copons standing up in the prow. It soon vanished into the dark and all we could hear was the faint sound of its oars. Then, not even that. The breeze was fresher now and the boat rocked on the slight swell, forcing us to pay more attention to the rhythm of our rowing. At the halfway point, the captain told us to change places, so that we would not be too tired by the time it came to boarding the ship. Pencho Bullas took my place and Mascarúa took that occupied by Cagafuego.
“Quiet now, and be careful,” said Alatriste.
We were very close to the galleon. I could see in more detail its dark, solid bulk, the masts silhouetted against the night sky. The lantern lit on the quarterdeck indicated exactly where the stern was. There was another lantern illuminating the shrouds, the rigging, and the bottom of the mainmast, and light filtered out from two of the gunports that had been left open. There was no one to be seen.
“Stop rowing!” Alatriste whispered urgently.
The men stopped, and the boat bobbed about on the swell. We were less than twenty yards from the vast stern. The light from the lantern was reflected in the water, almost right under our noses. On the side nearest the stern, a small rowing boat was moored, and a rope ladder dangled down into it.
“Prepare the grappling irons.”
From beneath the benches, the men produced four grappling hooks with knotted ropes attached to them.
“Start rowing again, but very quietly and very slowly.”
We began to move, with the sailor steering us toward the rowing boat and the ladder. Thus we passed beneath the high, black stern, seeking out the shadows where the light from the lantern did not reach. We were all looking up, holding our breath, afraid that a face might appear at any moment and be followed swiftly by a warning shout and a hail of bullets or a cannonade. Finally, the oars were placed in the bottom of the boat, and we glided forward until we touched the side of the galleon, next to the rowing boat and immediately beneath the ladder. The noise of that collision was, I thought, enough to have woken the entire bay, but no one inside cried out; there was no word of alarm. A shiver of tension ran through the boat while the men unwrapped their weapons and got ready to climb the ladder. I fastened the hooks on my buff coat. For a moment, Captain Alatriste’s face came ve
ry close to mine. I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew he was looking at me.
“It’s every man for himself now,” he said quietly.
I nodded, knowing that he could not see me nod. Then I felt his hand squeeze my shoulder, firmly, briefly. I looked up and swallowed hard. The deck was some five or six cubits above our heads.
“Up you go!” whispered the captain.
At last I could see his face lit by the distant light of the lantern, the hawklike nose above his mustache as he began to scale the ladder, looking upward, his sword and dagger clinking at his waist. I followed without thinking and heard the other men, making no attempt to be quiet now, throw the grappling irons over the edge of the ship where they clattered onto the deck and clunked into place as they attached to the gunwale. Now there was only the effort of climbing, the sense of haste, the almost painful tension that gripped muscles and stomach as I grasped the sides of the rope ladder and hauled myself up, step by step, feet slipping on the damp, slimy planks that formed the hull of the ship.
“Oh, shit!” someone said below me.
A cry of alarm rang out above our heads, and when I looked up, I saw a face peering down at us, half lit by the lantern. The expression on the man’s face was one of horror, as if unable to believe his eyes, as he watched us climbing toward him. He may have died still not quite believing, because Captain Alatriste, who had reached him by then, stuck his dagger in his throat, right up to the hilt, and the man disappeared from view. Now more voices could be heard above, and the sound of people running about belowdecks. A few heads peeped cautiously out from the gunports and immediately drew back, shouting in Flemish. The captain’s boots scuffed against my face when he reached the top and jumped onto the deck. At that moment, another face appeared over the edge, a little farther off, on the quarterdeck; we saw a lit fuse, then a flash, and a harquebus shot rang out; something very fast and hard ripped past us, ending in a squelch of pierced flesh and broken bones. Someone beside me, climbing up from the boat, fell backward into the sea with a splash, but without uttering a word.
“Go on! Keep going!” shouted the men behind me, driving one another onward.
Teeth gritted, head hunched right down between my shoulders, I climbed what remained of the ladder as quickly as possible, clambered over the edge, stepped onto the deck, and immediately slipped in a huge puddle of blood. I got to my feet, sticky and stunned, leaning on the motionless body of the slain sailor, and behind me the bearded face of Bartolo Cagafuego appeared over the edge, his eyes bulging with tension, his gap-toothed grimace made even fiercer by the enormous machete gripped between his few remaining teeth. We were standing at the foot of the mizzenmast, next to the ladder that led up to the quarterdeck. More of our group had now reached the deck via the ropes secured by grappling hooks, and it was a miracle that the whole galleon wasn’t awake to give us a warm welcome, what with that single harquebus shot and the racket made by sundry noises—the clatter of footsteps and the hiss of swords as they left their sheaths.
I took my sword in my right hand and my dagger in my left, looking wildly about in search of the enemy. And then I saw a whole horde of armed men swarming onto the deck from down below, and I saw that most were as blond and burly as the men I had known in Flanders, and that there were more of them to the stern and in the waist, between the quarterdeck and the forecastle, and I saw as well that there were far too many of them, and that Captain Alatriste was fighting like a madman to reach the quarterdeck. I rushed to help my master, without waiting to see if Cagafuego and the others were following or not. I did so muttering the name of Angélica as a final prayer, and my last lucid thought, as I hurled myself into the fight with a furious howl, was that if Sebastián Copons did not arrive in time, the Niklaasbergen adventure would be our last.
9. OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIES
The hand and the arm grow tired of killing too. Diego Alatriste would gladly have given what remained of his life—which was perhaps very little—to lay down his weapons and lie quietly in a corner, just for a while. At that stage, he was fighting out of a mixture of fatalism and habit, and his feeling of indifference as to the result may, paradoxically, have been what kept him alive in the midst of all the clash and confusion. He was fighting with his usual serenity, without thinking, trusting in his keen eye and swift reactions. For men like him and in situations like that, the most effective way of keeping fate at bay was to leave imagination aside and put one’s trust in pure instinct.
Using his foot for leverage, he wrenched his sword from the body of the man he had just skewered. All around him there were shouts, curses, moans, and from time to time the gloom was lit up by a shot from a pistol or from a Flemish harquebus, offering a glimpse of groups of men furiously knifing one another and of puddles of blood that slithered into the scuppers as the ship tilted.
In the grip of a singular clarity, he parried a thrust from a scimitar, dodged another, and responded by plunging his sword vainly into the void, yet he gave this error no thought. The other man drew back and turned his attention to someone else, who was attacking him from behind. Alatriste took advantage of that pause to lean against the bulkhead for a moment and rest. The steps to the quarterdeck stood before him, lit from above by a lantern; they appeared to be free. He had had to fight three men to get there; no one had warned him that there would be such a large company on board. The high poop deck, he thought, would provide a useful stronghold until Copons arrived with his men, but when Alatriste looked around him, he found that most of his party were engaged in fighting for their lives and had barely moved from the spot where they had boarded.
He forgot about the quarterdeck and returned to the fray. He encountered someone’s back, possibly that of the man who had escaped him before, and plunged his dagger into his opponent’s kidneys, turning the blade so as to cause as much damage as possible, and then yanking it out as the fellow dropped to the floor, screaming like a man condemned. A shot nearby dazzled him, and knowing that none of his men was carrying a pistol, he slashed his way blindly toward the source of that flash. He collided with someone, made a grab for him, but skidded and fell on the blood-washed deck, meanwhile headbutting the other man in the face, again and again, until he could get a grip on his own dagger and slip it in between them. The Fleming screamed as he felt the knife go in and crawled away on all fours. Alatriste spun around, and a body fell on top of him, murmuring in Spanish, “Holy Mother of God, Holy Mother of God.” He had no idea who the man was and had no time to find out. He pushed the body away and, sword in his right hand and dagger in his left, scrambled to his feet, with a sense that the darkness around him was growing red. The screams and the shouting were truly horrendous, and it was impossible now to take more than three steps without slipping in the blood.
Cling, clang. Everything seemed to happen so slowly that he was surprised that in between each thrust he made his adversaries did not dish out ten or twelve in return. He felt a blow to his cheek, very hard, and his mouth filled with the familiar, metallic taste of blood. He raised his sword up high in order to slash a nearby face—a whitish blur that vanished with a yelp. In the come-and-go of battle, Alatriste found himself back at the steps leading to the quarterdeck, where there was more light. Then he realized that he was still clutching under his arm a sword he had taken off someone who knows how long ago. He dropped it and whirled around, dagger at the ready, sensing that there were enemies behind him, and at that moment, just as he was about to deal a counterblow with his sword, he recognized the fierce, bearded face of Bartolo Cagafuego, who was crazily hitting out at anyone in his path, his lips flecked with foam. Alatriste turned in the other direction, seeking someone to fight, just in time to see a boarding pike being propelled toward his face. He dodged, parried, thrust, and then drove his sword in, bruising his fingers when the point of his blade stopped with a crunch as it hit bone. He stepped back to free his weapon and, when he did so, stumbled over some coiled cordage and fell so heavily against the ladder that he
thought for a moment he had broken his spine. Now someone was trying to batter him with the butt of a harquebus and so he crouched down to protect his head. He collided with yet another man, whether friend or foe he could not tell; he hesitated, then stuck his knife in and drew it out again. His back really hurt, and he longed to cry out to gain some relief—emitting a long, half-suppressed moan was always a good way to take the edge off pain—but not a sound did he utter. His head was buzzing, he could still taste blood in his mouth, and his fingers were numb from gripping sword and dagger. For a moment, he was filled by a desire to jump overboard. I’m too old for this, he thought desolately.
He paused long enough to catch his breath, then returned reluctantly to the fray. This is where you die, he said to himself. And at that precise moment, as he stood at the foot of the steps, encircled by the light from the lantern, someone shouted his name. Bewildered, Alatriste turned, sword at the ready. And he swallowed hard, scarcely able to believe his eyes. May they crucify me on Golgotha, he thought, if it isn’t Gualterio Malatesta.
Pencho Bullas died at my side. The Murcian was caught up in a knife fight with a Flemish sailor, when, suddenly, the latter shot him in the head, at such close range that his head was ripped off at the jaw, spattering me with blood and brain. However, even before the Fleming had lowered his pistol, I had slit his throat with my sword, very hard and fast, and the man fell on top of Bullas, gurgling something in his own strange tongue. I whirled my sword about my head to fend off anyone attempting to close on me. The steps up to the quarterdeck were too far away for me to reach, and so I did as everyone else was trying to do: tried to keep myself alive long enough for Sebastián Copons to get us out of there. I didn’t even have breath enough to utter the names of Angélica or Christ himself; I needed all the breath I had to save my own skin. For a while, I managed to dodge whatever thrusts and blows came my way, returning as many as I could. Sometimes, amid the confusion of the fight, I thought I could see Captain Alatriste in the distance, but my efforts to reach him were in vain. We were separated by too many men killing and being killed.
The King's Gold Page 17