Captain Alatriste

and raised my right, armed with the pistol, I saw Diego Alatriste stop in the middle of the plaza, and caught the glint from his useless knife.

I took two steps more, and now the barrel of the pistol was nearly prodding the back of the man in front of me ... but he heard my footsteps and whirled about. I had time to see his face before I pulled the trigger and the pistol went off. The flash of the shot lighted features distorted with surprise. The roar of the gunpowder thundered through the Gate of Lost Souls.

The rest happened even more rapidly. I yelled, or thought I did, partly to alert the captain, and partly because of the terrible pain from the recoil of the weapon; it felt as if my arm had been torn from its socket. But the captain had more warning than he needed from the shot, and when I threw him his sword, over the shoulder of the man in front of me—or over the place where the man in front of me had been—he was already running toward it. He danced aside to avoid being hit, and picked it up the moment it touched the ground. Then, once again, the moon hid behind the clouds. I dropped the discharged pistol, pulled the other from my doublet, and turned toward the two shadows closing in on the captain.

I aimed, holding the pistol with both hands. But I was trembling so hard that the second shot went wild, and this time the recoil knocked me backward to the ground. As I fell, my eyes dazzled by the flash, I had a second's glimpse of two men with swords and daggers, and of Captain Alatriste, sword flashing, battling like a demon.

Diego Alatriste had seen them coming toward him before the first pistol shot. The moment he stepped outside he was watching for something of the sort, and he knew how futile it would be to try to save his hide with his ridiculous knife. The blast of the pistol had shocked him as much as it had the others, and for an instant he had thought he was the target. Then he heard my yell, and still not understanding what the devil I was doing there at such a late hour, he saw his sword flying toward him as if it had fallen from the skies. In the blink of an eye he had it in his hand, just in time to confront two furious, deadly blades.

It was the flash from the second shot that allowed him, once the ball went whizzing by between his attackers and himself, to size up the situation and prepare. Now he knew that one was on his left and the other straight ahead of him, forming an angle of approximately ninety degrees.

The role of the one was to keep him engaged as the other plunged a knife into his ribs or belly from the side.

Alatriste had found himself in similar situations before; it was not an easy task to combat one while protecting himself from another with only a short knife. His defense was to slash a wide swath from right to left, to cut into their space, although to protect his vulnerable left side he was forced to swing more to the left than to the right. The two attackers met move with move, so that after a dozen feints and thrusts they had traced a complete circle around him. Two oblique stabs had glanced off his buffcoat. The cling, clang of the Toledo blades sounded the length and breadth of the plaza, and I have no doubt that had the place been more inhabited, between that noise and my pistol shots the windows would have been filled with observers.

Then Fate, which like the winds of war, favors those who keep a clear head, came to the aid of Diego Alatriste. It was God's will that one of his thrusts went through the quillons of the sword guard and cut either the fingers or the wrist of the adversary at his left, who when he felt the wound, stepped back two paces with a 'For the love of ...' By the time his opponent regrouped, Alatriste had already delivered three two-handed slashes, like three lightning bolts, against the other opponent, who had lost his balance and been forced by the violence of the attack to retreat.

That was all the captain needed to get his feet firmly set, and when the one who had been wounded on the hand advanced, the captain dropped the knife in his left hand, protected his face with his open palm, and lunging forward, thrust a good fourth of his blade into his opponent's chest. His victim's momentum did the rest: the sword drove through to the guard. The man cried out, 'Jesus!' and dropped his sword, which clanged to the ground behind the captain.

The second swordsman, already on the attack, pulled up short. Alatriste leaped backward to pull his sword free of the first man—who had dropped to the ground like a sack of meal—and turned to face his remaining enemy, panting to catch his breath. The clouds had parted just enough to see, in the moonlight. . . the Italian.

'We are even now,' said the captain, gasping for air.

'Delighted to hear that,' the Italian replied, white teeth flashing in his dark face. The words were not yet out of his mouth when he made a quick, low thrust, as visible, and invisible, as the strike of an asp. The captain, who had studied the Italian carefully on the night of the attack on the two Englishmen, was waiting. He shifted to one side, and put out his left hand to parry the thrust, and the enemy sword plunged into thin air—although, as the captain stepped back, he became aware that he had a dagger cut across the back of his hand. Confident that the Italian had not severed a tendon, he reached to the left with his right arm, hand high and sword tip pointing down, parrying with a sharp ting! a second thrust, as surprising and skillful as the first. The Italian retreated one step, and again the two men stood facing each other, breathing noisily. Fatigue was beginning to affect both. The captain moved the fingers of his wounded hand, finding, to his relief, that they responded: the tendons were not cut. He felt blood, dripping warm and slow down his fingers.

'Can we not come to some agreement?' Alatriste asked.

The Italian stood in silence a moment. Then shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'You went too far the other night.' His throaty voice sounded tired. The captain could imagine that, like him, the Italian had had his fill.

'So now?'

'Now it is your head or mine.'

A new silence. Alatriste's erstwhile accomplice made a slight move, and Alatriste responded, without relaxing his guard. Very slowly they circled, each taking the other's measure. Beneath the buffcoat, the captain could feel his shirt soaked in sweat.

'Will you tell me your name?'

'It has no bearing on this.'

'You hide it, then—that is the sign of a scoundrel.' Alatriste heard the Italian's harsh laugh. 'Perhaps. Yet I am a live scoundrel, and you, Captain Alatriste, are a dead man.'

'Not this night.'

His adversary seemed to be taking stock. He glanced toward the inert body of his henchman. Then he looked at me, still on the ground beside the third of the figures who had been lurking in the plaza, and who was now stirring weakly. He must have been badly wounded by my pistol shot, for we could hear him moaning and asking for confession.