The Sun Over Breda

Fair dice and loaded dice rolled across drumheads, and cards were as handily shuffled as if the action were taking place in the Potro square in Córdoba or the Patio de los Naranjos in Seville. There were numerous card games where players could throw in their money, among them rentoy, manilla, quínolas, and pintas

. The center of the camp was one enormous gaming house, with “I’m in” and “I’m out,” and more swearing than artillery fire, with a “Damn that whore of gold” here and an “It’s your play” there, and not least a “’Fore God and your blessed mother.” Those who talk loudest in such moments are the ones who in battle show more fear than iron in their spine but who make a great show of courage in the rear guard and who who wield the swords on cards faster than they unsheathe their own. One soldier gambled away the six months of pay that had been his reason to mutiny, losing it through blows of fate as mortal as any dagger. In fact, such blows were not always metaphorical; from time to time cheating would be revealed—a shaved card, a pin-pricked king, a die weighted with quicksilver—and then the air thickened with “’Pon my life” and “’Pon your life,” “You lie through your teeth,” and worse, followed by a downpour of blows as daggers cut, swords slashed, and blood was spilled that had nothing to do with the barber or with the art of Hippocrates.

What rabble is this? What men, what breeds?Soldiers, Spaniards, plumes, and finery,

words, wit, lies, and gallantry,Arrogance, bravura, and foul deeds.

I have already told Your Mercies that it was during this time that my virtue, like many other things, was carried off on the winds of Flanders. And in that regard I ended that day visiting, with Jaime Correas, a wheeled conveyance sheltered beneath a canvas and some boards where a certain pater brothelia

, a pious enough calling where there is want, offered three or four of his parishioners to assuage manly woes.

There are six or seven varietiesof women, Otón, who sin,all of them strolling along these shores,

shall we gather one in?

One of those “varieties” was a flamboyantly robed girl, fair of mien and limb and of a reasonable age, and my comrade and I had invested a good part of the booty we had harvested during the sacking of Oudkerk in her company. We had no jingling purse that day, but the girl, half Spanish, half Italian, a wench who called herself Clara de Mendoza—I never met a trollop who did not boast of being a de Mendoza or de Guzmán though she came from a line of swineherds—had looked on us with favorable eyes for some reason that escapes me, unless it was the insolence of our years and perhaps her belief that she who takes a young and grateful youth as a client will keep him all her life. At the end of the day we went down to her neck of the woods, more to look than with coins to spend. The vivacious Mendoza, though she was occupied in activities proper to her office, nonetheless sent a friendly word our way, along with a dazzling, if somewhat snaggletoothed, smile. A certain loudmouthed soldier who was consorting with her at that moment did not take kindly to this. He was a fellow from Valencia, with a chestnut mustache and villainous beard, a burly, pugnacious type, and with his “Be off with you, forsooth!” he added a kick for my comrade and a slap for me, apportioning us equal shares. The punch to my cheek was more painful to my honor than to my face, and my youthful spirit, which a quasi-military life had not made more tolerant when confronted with such nonsense, duly responded. My right hand, of its own accord, went to the belt where my good Toledo dagger was snugged against my kidneys.

“Appreciate, Your Mercy,” I said, “the disparity between our persons.”