The Sun Over Breda

Mendieta was sitting at the bottom of the sap, at Garrote’s feet, picking off lice with solemn Basque meticulousness: In the trenches, not content with living like kings in our hair and our rags, lice would come out and stroll around like Madrid gentlemen. The Biscayan had spoken without much interest, absorbed in his task. His beard was untrimmed and his clothing torn and grimy, like everyone else’s there, including Alatriste himself.

“Can you see him, more or less?”

Garrote nodded. He had taken off his hat to offer less of a target for the harquebusiers across the way. His curly hair was caught back in a greasy ponytail.

“Not now, no. But once in a while he chances a look, and the next time I’ll have the whoreson.”

Alatriste ventured a quick look of his own above the parapet, attempting to stay under the cover of the timber and fascines. The man was perhaps one of the Dutch sappers working at the mouth of their tunnel some twenty varas ahead, well within range. However much he tried to remain hidden, his digging exposed him a little, not too much, barely his head, but enough for Garrote, who was not in any hurry and was considered a fine marksman, to keep him in sight until he had a sure shot. The Malagueno, a man who believed in give and take, wanted to return the favor of the mule.

Some eighteen or twenty Spaniards were in the trench, one of the most advanced, which zigzagged along a short distance away from the Dutch positions. Diego Alatriste’s squad spent two weeks of every three there, with the rest of Captain Bragado’s bandera, distributed among the nearby saps and fosses, all of them situated between the Cemetery ravelin and the Merck River, at two lengths of a harquebus shot from the main wall and citadel of Breda.

“Ah, here’s my heretic,” Garrote murmured.

Mendieta, who had just found a louse and was examining it with familiar curiosity before crushing it between his fingernails, looked up with interest.

“You have a Hollander?”

“I have him.”

“Speed him to hell, then.”

“That is my plan.”

After running his tongue over his lips, Garrote had blown on the cord of his harquebus and was now carefully cheeking the musket, half-closing his left eye, his index finger caressing the trigger as if it were the nipple of a half-ducat harlot. Rising up a little farther, Alatriste had a fleeting view of an incautious bare head sticking up from the Dutch trench.

“Another maggot dying in mortal sin,” he heard Garrote comment.

Then came the sound of the shot, and with the flash of scorched powder Alatriste saw the head disappear. Three or four yells of fury followed, and three or four musket balls threw up earth on the Spanish parapet. Garrote, who had sunk back down again into the trench, laughed to himself, his smoking musket propped between his legs. Outside he heard more shots and insults shouted in Flemish.

“Tell them to go bugger themselves,” said Mendieta, locating another louse.

Sebastian Copons opened one eye and closed it again. Garrote’s musket fire had interrupted his siesta at the foot of the parapet, where his head was resting on a filthy blanket. The Olivares brothers, curious, poked their bushy heads around a corner of the trench. Alatriste had crouched down and was sitting with his back against the terreplein. He dug through his pouch, searching for the chunk of hard black bread he had put there the day before. He put it in his mouth and moistened it with saliva before he began chewing it, ever so slowly. With the stench of the dead mule and the foul air in the sap it was not an exquisite repast, but neither was there much choice, and even a simple crust of bread was a feast worthy of a king. No one would bring new provisions until nightfall, under the shelter of darkness.

Mendieta allowed the new louse to crawl down the back of his hand. Finally, bored with the game, he crushed it. Garrote was cleaning the still-warm barrel of his harquebus with a ramrod, humming an Italian tune.

“Oh, to be in Naples,” he said after a bit, flashing a smile that gleamed white in his swarthy Moorish face.

Everyone knew that Curro Garrote had served two years in the tercio of Sicily and four in Naples, forced to make a change of scene following a number of murky adventures involving women, knives, nocturnal burglaries, and a death, obligatory time spent in the prison of Vicaria, and another, voluntary, stay in the safe haven of the church of La Capela, a well-known bolt-hole.

To he who left me his cape,and fleeing from me, escaped,what can the Law hope?when in the land of the popehe’ll not pay his part in the scrape.

So between one thing and another, Garrote had sailed with the galleys of our lord and king along the Barbary Coast and in the Aegean Sea, plundering the land of the infidels and pirating carmoussels and other Turkish vessels. During those years, he said, he had collected sufficient booty to retire without any worries. And so he would have done had he not crossed paths with too many women and been so irresistibly drawn to gaming. For at the sight of a pair of dice or deck of cards, the Malagueno was one of those men who play hard and are capable of gambling away the sun before it comes up.

“Italy,” he repeated in a low voice, with a faraway look and a rascally smile lingering on his lips.

He said it the way one pronounces the name of a woman, and Captain Alatriste could understand why. Although he did not speak freely as Garrote did, he, too, had his recollections of Italy, which must have seemed even more pleasant in a trench in Flanders. Like every soldier who had been posted there, he longed for that land, or perhaps what he truly longed for was to be young again beneath the generous blue skies of the Mediterranean. At twenty-seven, after being mustered out of his tercio following the suppression of rebellious Moors in Valencia, he had enlisted in the tercio of Naples and fought against Turks, Berbers, and Venetians. On the galleys of the Marques de Santa Cruz his eyes had seen the infidel squadrons blaze before La Goleta; with Captain Contreras, the isles of the Adriatic; and in the fateful shallows of the Kerkennahs, he had witnessed the water turn red with Spanish blood. Aided by a companion named Diego Duque de Estrada, he escaped from that place dragging the young and badly wounded Alvaro de la Marca, the future Conde de Guadalmedina.

During those years of his youth, good fortune and the delights of Italy had alternated with no few labors and perils, although none could embitter the sweet recollection of the arbors of grapes on the gentle slopes of Vesuvius, the comrades, the music, the wine in the Chorrillo tavern, and the beautiful women. Between good and bad times, in the year ’13, his galley was captured at the mouth of the Constantinople canal, riddled to the mast top with Turks’ arrows and with half its crew cut to ribbons. Wounded in one leg, Alatriste was liberated when the ship holding him captive was captured in turn. Two years later, the fifteenth of the century, when Alatriste had reached