The Sun Over Breda

Sebastián 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 Vicaría, 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 pope

he’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 Malagüeño 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 Marqués 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 Álvaro de la Marca, the future Conde de Guadalmedina.