The Sun Over Breda

His smile widened, lighting up a face gleaming with sweat and black with smoke.

“Someday,” he added, “you will remember what you did today.”

A curious thing, by my faith. He had no way to divine it, but, as Your Mercies witness, it was true what that soldier said. I do remember very well. He put one hand on my shoulder and grasped one of my hands with the other. His was a strong, warm clasp. And then, without exchanging a word with the Dutchman stacking books in piles as if they were a precious treasure (and now I know that they were), he turned and walked away.

Several years would go by before I again encountered the anonymous soldier I had helped one foggy autumn day during the sacking of Oudkerk. In all that time I had never learned his name. It was only later, when I was a grown man, that I had the good fortune to meet him again, in Madrid and in circumstances that have nothing to do with the thread of the present tale. By then he was no longer an obscure soldier, and, despite the years that had passed since that morning long ago, he still remembered my name. And I at last would know his: He was Pedro Calderon, the famous playwright Pedro Calderon de la Barca, known throughout Spain.

But let us return to Oudkerk. After the soldier and I left the square, I went in search of Captain Alatriste, whom I found in good health, along with the rest of his squad. They were gathered around a small bonfire in the rear garden of a house that backed onto the dock of the canal, near the city wall. The captain and his comrades had been ordered to attack that section of the town, burn the ships at the docks, and secure the rear gate, thereby cutting off the retreat of enemy troops. When I caught up with the captain, the charred remains of burned ships were smoldering along the shore, and traces of the recent battle were visible on the dock, in the gardens, and in the houses.

“Inigo,” said the captain.

His smile was weary and a little distant, and he had that look that remains imprinted on soldiers following a difficult battle, a look that the veterans of the tercios called “the last stand,” a look that during the time I had spent in Flanders I had learned to distinguish from other looks, such as that of weariness, resignation, fear, and absolute resolve. This was the look that stays in the eyes after other emotions have passed through them, the precise expression Captain Alatriste’s face wore at that moment. He was sitting on a bench, his elbow on the table by his side, his left leg extended as if it pained him. His knee-high boots were covered with mud, and he was wearing a dirty brown-sleeved doublet; it was unbuttoned, allowing me a glimpse of his usual buffcoat beneath it. His hat lay on the table beside a pistol—I could see it had been fired—and his belt with his sword and dagger.

“Come over to the fire.”

Gratefully, I obeyed as I took in the corpses of three Dutchmen lying close by: one on the planking of the nearby dock, another beneath the table. The third Dutchman was sprawled face down at the threshold of the back door of the house and held a halberd that had not served to save his life—or anything else for that matter. I observed that his pockets had been turned inside out, his corselet and shoes had been removed, and two fingers of one hand were missing, doubtless because whoever had taken his rings had been in a hurry. A brownish-red trail of blood led across the garden to the spot where the captain was sitting.

“That one won’t feel the cold any longer,” said one of the soldiers.

From the strong accent I did not need to turn to turn around to know that the person who had spoken was Mendieta, a Basque like myself, a thick-browed, burly man from Biscay whose mustache was almost as impressive as my master’s. The little troupe was completed by Curro Garrote, a Malagueno from Los Percheles, so tanned he looked like a Moor; the Mallorcan Jose Llop; and Sebastian Copons, an old comrade of Captain Alatriste from earlier campaigns. Copons was a dried-up little man from Aragon, as tough as the mother who gave him birth, and his face might had been carved from the stone of Mallos de Riglos. Sitting nearby were three others from the squad: the Olivares brothers and the Galician, Rivas.

All of them knew of my difficult assignment at the drawbridge and were happy to see me alive and well, though they did not make any great show of it. For one thing, it was not the first time I had smelled powder in Flanders, and, besides, they had their own affairs to think about. Beyond that, they were not the kind of soldier who makes a fuss over something that was, in truth, considered the duty of anyone in the pay of our king. Although in our case —or, rather in theirs, for we mochileros did not have the right to claim benefits or wages—the tercio had gone a long time without seeing the color of a piece of eight.

Nor did Diego Alatriste outdo himself in his welcome. I have already said that he limited his greeting to a slight smile, twisting his mustache as if he were thinking about something else. But when he saw that I was hanging around like a good dog hoping to be petted by its master, he complimented my red velvet doublet and in the end offered me a hunk of bread and some sausages his companions were roasting over the fire. Their clothing was still wet after the night spent in the waters of the canal, and their faces, dirty and greasy from their vigil and the subsequent battle, reflected their exhaustion. They were nonetheless in good humor. They were alive, everything had gone well, the town was again Catholic and subject to our lord and king, and the booty—several sacks and knotted cloths piled in a corner—was reasonable.

“After a three months’ fast from pay,” commented Curro Garrote, cleaning the bloody rings of the dead Dutchman, “this is a reprieve.”

From the other side of the town came the sound of bugles and drums. The fog was beginning to lift, and that allowed us to see a thin line of soldiers moving along the Ooster dike. The long pikes advancing through the last remnants of gray fog resembled a field of swaying reeds, and a short-lived ray of sun, sent ahead as if it were a scout, glinted off the metal of their lances, morions, and corselets and reproduced them in the quiet waters of the canal. At their head came horses and banners bearing the good and ancient cross of Saint Andrew, or of Burgundy: the red aspa insignia of the Spanish tercios.

“Here comes Jinalasoga,” said Garrote. Jinalasoga was the nickname the veterans had given don Pedro de la Daga, colonel of the Viejo Tercio de Cartagena. In the soldier’s tongue of the time, jinar meant—begging your pardon, Your Mercies—“to empty your bowels,” that is, “to shit.” This may sound a little common, here in this tale, but, pardiez, we were soldiers, not San Placido nuns. As for the soga part, no one who knew our colonel’s taste for hanging his men for disciplinary offenses could harbor any doubt regarding the appropriateness of “rope” in his sobriquet. The fact is that Jinalasoga, more formally, Colonel don Pedro de la Daga—either will do—was commanding the relief forces of Captain don Hernan Torralba and was coming along the dike to take official possession of Oudkerk.

“He gets here midmorning,” grumbled Mendieta, “after all the slashing’s been done.”

Diego Alatriste slowly got to his feet; I saw that he did so with difficulty and that the leg he had stretched before him was giving him constant pain. I knew that this was not a new wound but, rather, a year-old injury to his hip he’d received in the alleyways near the Plaza Mayor in Madrid at the time of his next-to-last encounter with his old enemy, Gualterio Malatesta. Dampness precipitated a rheumatic pain, and the night spent in the waters of the Ooster was no prescription for a cure.

“Let’s go take a look.”