The Sun Over Breda

(Written beneath the walls of Breda, the first day of April of one thousand six hundred twenty-five)

From the trench I could hear the Hollanders digging. Diego Alatriste clamped his ear to one of the piles driven into the ground to support the fascines and gabions of the sap, and once again heard the muffled rrish-rrish traveling through the entrails of the earth. For a week now the soldiers in Breda had been working night and day to intercept the trench and mine we were digging toward the ravelin they called The Cemetery. Inch by inch, our men were advancing with our mine and the enemy with their countermine; we planning to set barrels of powder to explode beneath the Dutch fortifications and they determined to set off a friendly blast beneath the feet of the Catholic king’s sappers. It was all a question of hard work and speed, of who dug more quickly and was able to light his fuses first.

“Accursed animal,” said Garrote.

His head was cocked and his eyes alert, a typical stance, positioned behind the gabions with his musket pointed between boards serving as an embrasure, its cord soaked and smoking. He wrinkled his nose, nauseated. The “accursed animal” was a mule that had been lying dead in the sun for three days only a short distance from the trench on land claimed by neither side. It had strayed from the Spanish camp and had had time to sashay back and forth between enemy positions until a musket ball fired from the wall, zap!, stopped it in its tracks, and now it lay there, feet in the air, stinking, and buzzing with flies.

“You’ve been there a long time, and you haven’t got a Hollander yet,” Mendieta commented.

“I almost have,” said Garrote.

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 Malagüeño, 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.