violently on the reins that one of the mules almost bolted and the carriage nearly overturned. I jumped down from the seat, cautiously looking all around. The dawn was far advanced now, although, beneath the rain-laden sky, the countryside still looked dark. Perhaps, I thought fearfully, there was nothing to be done and going to the hunting lodge itself would be a waste of time. I was still hesitating when Cozar took the decision for us both: he, too, jumped from the driver’s seat, but fell face first into an enormous puddle, got up, shook himself, then, tripping over his own sword, fell in again. He got to his feet, cursing angrily. His face was covered in mud, filthy water was dripping from his side whiskers and mustache, and yet his eyes were shining. For some strange reason, for all his cursing, he seemed to be enjoying himself hugely.
“Have at ’em,” he said, “whoever they are.”
I took my borrowed cloak and picked up the coachman’s sword, for the coachman had, during that rackety journey, slid to the floor of the carriage and lay there, snoring like a baby. The sword was of very poor quality, but that and my dagger were better than nothing, and there was no time to lose. Utter confidence, Captain Bragado used to say in Flanders, was dangerous when discussing any preliminary plan of attack, but vital at the moment of execution. And that moment had arrived. I indicated the horses tethered to the trees.
“I’m going to take a look. You go to the lodge and ask for help.”
“Certainly not, my boy. I wouldn’t miss this for anything in the world. We’re in it together.”
Cozar seemed a different man, and he probably was. Even his tone of voice was not the same. I wondered what role he was playing. He suddenly went over to the coachman, who was still asleep in the carriage, and started slapping him so hard that the noise startled the mules.
“Wake up, you fool!” he demanded with all the authority of a duke. “Spain needs you.”
A moment later, the coachman—still dazed and, I imagine, suspecting that his master was not quite right in the head—was cracking the whip and driving on to La Fresneda to give the alarm. He seemed a rather dim-witted fellow, and so Cozar, in order not to complicate matters further, had given him some very elementary instructions: “Go to the hunting lodge, kick up a fuss, and bring as many people back here with you as you can. Explanations will follow.
“If, of course, we live to provide them,” he added dramatically, for my benefit.
Then he solemnly folded back his cloak, adjusted his sword, and set off into the woods, a small, determined figure. A few paces later, he tripped over his sword again and fell face forward into the mud.
“God save me,” he said from where he lay on the ground, “I’ll pickle the next man who pushes me.”
I helped him up, and he once again brushed down his clothes. “I just hope the coachman can convince the people at La Fresneda,” I thought despairingly. “Or that the captain, wherever he is, can sort things out alone. Because if everything depends on Cozar and me, Spain will be left without a king just as sure as I was left without a father.”
The hunting horn sounded again. Still sitting with his back to the tree trunk, Diego Alatriste noticed the man guarding him turn in the direction from which the sound had come. He was the same short, bearded, broad- shouldered fellow he had seen at the staging post at Galapagar before the ambush. He was also, it seemed, a man of few words and had not moved since Malatesta left, standing motionless beneath the increasingly heavy rain, with only a short waxed cape as protection. As Alatriste could appreciate better than anyone, the fellow was clearly accustomed to this life, the kind of man to whom you say: stay there, kill, die, and who will carry out those orders without a murmur; the kind of man who could be a hero when it came to attacking a Flemish bastion or a Turkish galley, or a murderer when it came to private matters. There was no easy way of drawing a line between the two. It all depended on how the dice fell—the dice of life—or on whether you were dealt the seven of clubs or the whore of hearts.
When the sound of the horn had died away, the ruffian rubbed the back of his neck and glanced at his prisoner. Then he came over to him and looked at him dully for a moment before unsheathing his knife. With his bound hands in his lap, Alatriste rested his head back against the trunk of the tree, keeping his eyes fixed on the blade. He felt an unpleasant tingling in his groin. Perhaps, he thought, Malatesta had changed his mind and was delegating the task to his subordinate. What a grubby way to die, sitting in the mud, tied hand and foot, his throat slit like a pig’s, and with a long future ahead of him in the history books as an exemplary regicide. Shit.
“If you try to escape,” warned the man dispassionately, “I’ll pin you to that tree.”
Alatriste blinked away the rain running down his face. Apparently the fellow had other plans. Instead of slitting his throat, the man was cutting the ropes binding his ankles.
“Get up,” the man said, giving him a shove.
The captain got to his feet, the other man never once taking his eyes off him and keeping the blade only an inch from his throat. He gave the captain another shove.
“Come on.”
Alatriste finally understood. They were not going to kill him now only to have to drag his corpse over to the king’s body, leaving tracks in the mud and the scrub. He would simply have to walk to the site of that double execution, measuring out, step by step, what was left of his time and his life. It occurred to him, on the other hand, that this was also an opportunity, his very last. After all, as things stood, he might as well consider himself dead and buried, so anything else was a bonus.
“Mercy!” he cried, sinking down with one knee on the ground, the other slightly flexed.
The ruffian, who was following behind, was taken by surprise.
“Mercy!” the captain cried again.
Turning around, he just had time to catch the look of scorn in the other man’s eyes. “I thought you had more balls,” that look was saying.
“You mis—” he began.
Even as he was saying this, the man realized he had been tricked; but, momentarily distracted, he was no longer pointing his knife directly at his prisoner, and Alatriste, springing up from his half-kneeling position, was already hurling himself, shoulder first, at the man’s belly. The blow almost dislocated the captain’s shoulder, but he managed to knock the man off his feet. The unfinished word became a roar, and there was a great splashing of mud as the captain, making one fist of his two bound hands, gathered all his strength together to deliver one devastating blow to the man’s face, while the man, in turn, was trying to knife him. Luckily for Alatriste, the knife was quite long; had it been shorter, the man could have knifed him in the ribs there and then. At such close quarters, however, the knife-thrust wasn’t forceful enough to penetrate the captain’s rain-sodden buffcoat and merely slithered off. With one knee the captain pinioned the arm carrying the knife. Despite being bound, he had enough freedom of movement in his hands to grab the man’s jaw and press a thumb into each eye. This was no time for fancy footwork or flourishes or fencing protocol, and so he pressed as hard as he could, mentally counting five, ten, fifteen, until he got to eighteen, and the man let out a yell and stopped struggling. The rain diluted the blood pouring down the face of the fallen man and over the captain’s hands, and the captain, unopposed now, grabbed the knife, placed it point down on the man’s throat and drove it in hard through his neck and into the mud. He held it there, bearing down with the whole weight of his body, trying to restrain the man’s flailing legs, until the man, with a weary sigh that emerged not from his mouth but from the blade stuck in his throat, ceased all movement. Alatriste rolled off and lay on his back in the mud to recover his breath. Then, wrenching the knife from the dead man’s throat, he wedged the handle of the knife between knee and tree trunk and managed to cut the rope binding his hands without severing a vein. While he was doing this, he watched as one of the dead man’s feet began to tremble. “How odd,” he thought, even though he had seen the phenomenon before. Even when a man was dead, it was as if something inside him refused to die.
He pillaged the corpse for anything useful. Sword, knife, pistol. The sword was a good one, from Sahagun, although somewhat shorter than what he was used to. He hurriedly strapped on the leather belt. The hunting knife had a horn handle and was two spans in length; he would have preferred a dagger, but it would do. The pistol probably wouldn’t be much use after the struggle in the mud, but he stuck it in his belt anyway, his hands trembling as the cold took hold of him after all that activity. He gave one last glance at the body: the foot had stopped moving now, and beneath the drumming rain, the blood, like watered-down wine, was spreading all around. The dead man’s clothes were soaked and dirty; they would afford the captain little protection from the cold and so he took
