The Sun Over Breda

He smoothed his mustache, buckled on the belt that held his sword and vizcaina dagger, thrust his pistol into his waistband, and picked up the wide-brimmed hat with the perennially frowsy red plume. Then slowly, very slowly, he turned to Mendieta.

“Colonels always arrive midmorning,” he said, and from his cold, gray-green eyes it was impossible to know whether he was speaking seriously or in jest. “Which is why we ourselves must get up so early.”

2. THE DUTCH WINTER

Weeks went by, then months, and we were well into winter. And although our general don Ambrosio Spinola had the rebellious provinces on the rack again, we were losing Flanders; bit by bit it slipped away, until finally we lost it completely. If you will, Your Mercies, consider very carefully that when I say Flanders was slipping away, I mean that only the powerful Spanish military machine maintained the gradually weakening link to those distant lands from which a letter—even by the fastest post horses—took three weeks to reach Madrid. To the north the Estates General, backed by France, England, Venice, and the other enemies of Spain, were being strengthened in their rebellion thanks to the cult of Calvinism, which was more useful in the business dealings of their burghers and merchants than the oppressive, antiquated true religion, which seemed so impractical to those who preferred to deal with a God who applauded revenue, and were shaking off the yoke of a too-distant centralist and authoritarian Castilian monarchy. For their part, the Catholic states of the south, though still loyal, were beginning to grow weary both of the cost of a war that had been going on for eighty years and of the excessive demands and damage done by soldiers who were increasingly thought of as occupying troops. All these things were poisoning the air, and to that we must add the decadence of Spain itself, in which a well-intentioned but ineffective king, an intelligent but overly ambitious prime minister, a sterile aristocracy, a corrupt officialdom, and a clergy as stupid as it was fanatic were hurtling us headfirst into the abyss. Catalonia and Portugal were on the point of withdrawing from the crown; the latter, forever.

Stultified among kings, aristocrats, and priests, with church and civil traditions that diminished those who tried to earn an honorable living with their hands, we Spaniards preferred to seek our fortune by fighting in Flanders or conquering America, pursuing the stroke of luck that would allow us to live like lords without paying taxes or lifting a finger. That was what caused our looms and lathes to fall silent, what depopulated and impoverished Spain, and what reduced us first to a legion of adventurers, then to a people of mendicant hidalgos, and finally to a rabble of base Sancho Panzas. And that was also how the vast heritage bequeathed to our lord and king by his grandfathers, that Spain upon which the sun never set—for when that star sank below one of her horizons it rose upon another— continued to be what she was, thanks only to the gold the galleons brought from the Indies, and the pikes—the famous lances Diego Velazquez would very soon immortalize—of the veteran armies. For those reasons, despite our decadence, we were not yet disdained and were even still feared. So it was timely and just—as well as a slap in the face to other nations—that one could say:

Who spoke here of war? Is our memory still clear?When the name Castile is spokendoes the earth still shake with fear?

I hope that Your Mercies will make allowances when I so immodestly include myself in this panorama, but at that point in the Flanders campaign, that very young Inigo Balboa you knew during the adventure of the two Englishmen, and later in the incident at the convent, was no longer quite so young. The winter of ’24, which the Viejo Tercio de Cartagena spent garrisoned in Oudkerk, found me in the full vigor of my youth. I have already said that the smell of gunpowder was nothing new to me, and although I could not, because of my age, carry a pike, sword, or harquebus in combat, my status as the mochilero of the squad in which Captain Alatriste served had made me a veteran of every imaginable adventure. My instincts were already those of a soldier: I could smell a lighted harquebus cord half a league away, I knew the pounds and ounces of every cannon ball or musket shot by the sound, and I was developing a singular talent in the task we mochileros called foraging: incursions into surrounding territory, scavenging for firewood and food. Our raids were indispensable when, as now, the land had been devastated by war, supplies were short, and everyone had to scramble for himself. Ours was not an easy task, and the proof is that in Amiens, the French and English had killed some eighty mochileros, some only twelve years old, as they foraged through the countryside— inhuman butchery, even in time of war—which the Spaniards appropriately avenged by knifing two hundred of Albion’s soldiers, because those who dole it out must also be able to take it. And if in the long run the subjects of the queens and kings of England beleaguered us in many campaigns, it is fair to record that we, in turn, dispatched not a few, and that, without being as robust as they or as blond or as loudmouthed when drinking beer, when it came to arrogance, no one ever put us in the shade. Besides, if the Englishman fought with the courage of national pride, we did so out of national desperation, which was not—no definitely not—chickenfeed. So, we made them pay with their accursed hides, theirs, and so many others.

Well, this was just—it’s nothing really—a leg I lost, blown off by a volley.What can those Lutheran dogs be thinking,to take my legs but leave me my hands.

In short: During that winter of wavering light, fog, and gray rain, I foraged and pillaged and scavenged from one end of that Flemish land to the other. It was not arid like the greater part of Spain—God did not smile upon us even in that—but nearly all green, like the fields of my native Onate, though much flatter and scored with rivers and canals. In such activities—stealing hens, digging turnips, holding my dagger to the throats of peasants as hungry as I and taking their meager store of food—I revealed myself to be a consummate specialist. I did, and would in years to come, many things I am not proud to remember, but I survived the winter, I aided my comrades, and I became a man in all the disparate and terrible meanings of the word.

To serve my king, I took up the sword’ere downy fuzz covered my lip.

Words Lope wrote about himself. I also lost my virginity, or my virtue, which is the way the good Domine Perez put it. For at that point, in Flanders, half-lad and half-soldier, that was one of the few things I had left to lose. But that is a very personal and intimate story, and I have no intention of detailing it here for Your Mercies.

Diego Alatriste’s squad was the principal unit fighting under the banner of Captain don Carmelo Bragado, and it was formed only of the best: not a lily-livered man among them, only soldiers quick with a sword and born to suffer and to fight. All of them were veterans who had under their belts at least the Palatinate campaign or years of service in the Mediterranean with the tercios of Naples or Sicily, which was the case of the Malagueno Curro Garrote. Others, like the Mallorcan Jose Llop or the Basque Mendieta, had fought in Flanders, before the Twelve Years’ truce, and the yellowed service records of a few, like Copons, who was from Huesca, and like Alatriste himself, went back as far as the last years of our good Philip II, may God hold that good king in glory. It was under Philip’s old banners that—as Lope would say—the swords and beards of those two had appeared simultaneously.

Taking losses and additions into account, the squad usually numbered between ten and fifteen men, depending on the situation, and it had no specific function in the company other than to move quickly and back up others in their various actions, carrying half a dozen harquebuses and about as many muskets. The squad operated in a unique way: It had no cabo, the leader appointed by the captain, for in any engagement they were under the direct orders of Captain Bragado himself, who might use them in the line with others from the unit or give them a free hand in surprise attacks, scouting missions, skirmishes, and raids. They were all, as I said, conditioned to gunfire and expert in their responsibilities, and it was perhaps for that reason that in their operations—even without having identified a leader or acting under a formal hierarchy of any sort—they had, in a kind of tacit accord, bestowed authority on Diego Alatriste.

As for the three escudos that went along with being head of the squad, it was Captain Bragado who collected them, in addition to the wages of forty escudos due as actual captain of the unit, since that was how he was listed in the documents of the tercio. Although he was a man of stature, owing to his family background, and a reasonable officer as long as his discipline was not questioned, don Carmelo Bragado was one of those men who hears clink and says mine. He never let so much as a maravedi get past him, and even went so far as to keep dead and deserters on the rolls