journey—gave off a raw, rough smell that I knew so well from Flanders. It was the smell of men at war. The smell of war itself.
I sat slightly apart with Sebastian Copons and the accountant Olmedilla, for although the latter kept as aloof as ever, I nevertheless felt under a moral obligation, among such a rabble, to keep an eye on him. We shared the wine and the provisions, and although neither Copons, the old soldier from Huesca, nor the functionary from the royal treasury were men of many—or indeed even few—words, I kept close by them out of a sense of loyalty: Copons because of our shared experience in Flanders, and Olmedilla because of the particular circumstances we found ourselves in. As for Captain Alatriste, he spent the twelve leagues of the journey in his own fashion, seated in the stern with the master of the boat, occasionally dropping asleep but only for a matter of minutes at a time and otherwise barely taking his eyes off the other men. When he did sleep, he lowered his hat over his face, in order, it seemed, not to be seen to be sleeping. When awake, he studied each man carefully in turn, as if he had the ability to delve into their virtues and their vices and to know them better. He watched how they ate, yawned, slept, how they reacted—phlegmatically or with ill humor—as they were each dealt a hand from Guzman Ramirez’s deck of cards, gambling away money they did not yet have. He noticed who drank a lot and who little, who was talkative, who boastful, and who silent; he noticed Enriquez el Zurdo’s oaths, the mulatto Campuzano’s thunderous laugh, and the stillness of Saramago el Portugues, who spent the whole voyage lying on his cape, serenely reading a book. Some were silent or discreet, like El Caballero de Illescas, the sailor Suarez, or the Vizcayan Mascarua, and some seemed awkward and out of place, like Bartolo Cagafuego, who knew no one and kept making abortive attempts to strike up conversations. There was no shortage of witty and amusing talkers, such as Pencho Bullas or the ever- cheerful ruffian Juan Eslava, who was regaling his fellows with details of how he had personally benefited from the wonders of powdered rhinoceros horn. Then there were the pricklier characters like Ginesillo el Lindo, with his immaculate appearance, equivocal smile, and dangerous gaze, or Andresito el de los Cincuenta, who had a way of spitting out of the side of his mouth, or mean bastards like El Bravo de los Galeones, with his face crisscrossed with scars that were clearly not just the work of a particularly careless barber. And so while our boat sailed downriver, one man would be telling tales of his adventures with women or at the gaming table, another would be roundly cursing as he threw the dice to pass the time, and yet another would be retailing anecdotes, whether true or false, from some hypothetical soldier’s life that embraced the Battle of Roncesvalles and even took in a couple of campaigns fought under the leadership of the Lusitanian, Viriathus. And all of this was spiced with a large dose of oaths, curses, braggartry, and hyperbole.
“I swear by Christ that I’m a Christian as pure of blood and as noble as the king himself,” I heard one man say.
“Well, I, by God, am purer than that,” retorted another. “After all, the king is half Flemish.”
To hear them, you would have thought our boat was filled by the very cream of Aragon, Navarre, and the two Castiles, Old and New. This was a coinage common to every purse, and even in such a restricted space and among such a small group as ours, each man played the part of a proud, distinguished native of this region or that, one side joining forces against another, with Extremadurans, Andalusians, Vizcayans, and Valencians taking it in turns to heap reproaches on one another, brandishing the vices and misfortunes of every province, with much heavy banter and joking, and all agreeing on one thing: their shared hatred of the Castilians—and with every man presuming to be a hundred times worthier than he actually was. This gang of roughs thrown together by chance was like a Spain in miniature, for the gravity and honor and national pride depicted in the plays of Lope, Tirso, and others had vanished with the old century and now existed only in the theater. All that remained was arrogance and cruelty, and when you considered the high regard in which we held ourselves, our violent customs, and our scorn for other provinces and nations, one could understand why the Spanish were, quite rightly, hated throughout Europe and half the known world.
Our own expedition naturally enjoyed its share of all these vices, and virtue would have been about as natural a sight as the Devil plucking a harp and wearing a halo and a pair of white wings. However nasty, cruel, and boastful our fellow travelers were, they nonetheless had certain things in common: they were bound by their greed for the promised gold; their baldrics, belts, and sheaths were kept oiled and polished with professional care; and their burnished weapons glinted in the sunlight when they took them out to sharpen or clean them. Accustomed as he was to these people and this life, Captain Alatriste was doubtless coolly comparing these men with others he had known in other places, and would thus be able to guess or foresee how each man would react when night fell. He could, in other words, tell who would be worthy of his trust and who not.
It was still light when we rounded the final long bend of the river, on whose banks rose the white mountains of the salt marshes. Between the sandy shore and the pinewoods we could see the port of Bonanza, its bay already crowded with moored galleys and ships, and farther off, clearly visible in the afternoon sun, stood the tower of the Iglesia Mayor and the tallest of Sanlucar de Barrameda’s houses. Then the sailor furled the sail, and the master steered the boat toward the opposite shore, seeking out the right-hand margin of the broad current that, a league and a half downstream, would flow out into the sea.
We disembarked—getting our feet wet in the process—in the shelter of a large dune that reached its tongue of sand down into the river. Three men watching from a clump of pines came to meet us. They were dressed in dun-colored clothes, like hunters, but as they approached, we saw that their swords and pistols were hardly the kind one would use to go hunting for rabbits. Olmedilla greeted the apparent leader, a man with a ginger mustache and a military bearing that his rustic outfit did little to disguise. While they withdrew to converse in private, our troop of men clustered together in the shade of the pines. We lay for a while on the needle-carpeted sand, watching Olmedilla, who was still talking and occasionally nodding impassively. Now and then, the two men would look across at a raised area of land farther off, about five hundred paces along the riverbank, and about which the man with the ginger mustache seemed to be giving detailed explanations. Olmedilla finally bade farewell to the supposed hunters, who, after casting an inquisitive glance in our direction, set off into the pines; the accountant then rejoined us, moving across the sandy landscape like some strange black smudge.
“Everything is in place,” he said.
Then he took my master aside and they spoke together for a while in low voices. And sometimes, while he was talking, Alatriste stopped staring down at his boots to look across at us. Then Olmedilla fell silent, and I saw the captain ask two questions to which Olmedilla replied twice in the affirmative. Then they crouched down, and Alatriste took out his dagger and started tracing lines with it in the sand; and whenever he glanced up to ask Olmedilla something, the latter nodded again. All of this took some time, and afterward the captain stood quite still, thinking. Then he rejoined us and explained how we were to attack the
“We’ll split into two groups, one per boat. The first group will attack the quarterdeck, trying to make as much noise as possible, but there must be no firing of guns. We will leave our pistols here.”
There was some murmuring, and a few of the men exchanged disgruntled looks. A timely pistol shot meant you could kill a man straight off, more quickly than with a sword and from a safe distance too.
The captain went on: “We’re going to be fighting in the dark and at very close quarters, and I don’t want us killing one another by mistake. Besides, if someone’s pistol should go off accidentally, they’ll fire on us with their harquebuses from the galleon before we’ve even climbed on board.”
He paused, quietly observing the men.
“Who amongst you has served the king?”
Almost everyone raised his hand.
Grave-faced and with his thumbs hooked in his belt, Alatriste studied them one by one. His voice was as ice- cold as his eyes. “I mean those of you who really have fought as soldiers.”
Many hesitated, embarrassed and looking shiftily around. A couple of men put their hands down, but others kept them up, until, under Alatriste’s sustained gaze, more men lowered their hands as well. Only Copons, Juan Jaqueta, Sangonera, Enriquez el Zurdo, and Andresito el de los Cincuenta kept their hands up. Alatriste also picked out Eslava, Saramago el Portugues, Ginesillo el Lindo, and the sailor Suarez.
“These nine men will form the group that will attack from the bow. In order to take the crew by surprise and from behind, you will only board the ship when those at the stern are already fighting on the quarterdeck. The idea is that you board very quietly via the anchor and make your way along the deck, and then we all meet up at the stern.”
“Is there someone in charge of each group?” asked Pencho Bullas.
“There is: Sebastian Copons at the bow, and me at the stern with you, Cagafuego, Campuzano, Guzman
