The Sun Over Breda

During those years of his youth, good fortune and the delights of Italy had alternated with no few labors and perils, although none could embitter the sweet recollection of the arbors of grapes on the gentle slopes of Vesuvius, the comrades, the music, the wine in the Chorrillo tavern, and the beautiful women. Between good and bad times, in the year ’13, his galley was captured at the mouth of the Constantinople canal, riddled to the mast top with Turks’ arrows and with half its crew cut to ribbons. Wounded in one leg, Alatriste was liberated when the ship holding him captive was captured in turn. Two years later, the fifteenth of the century, when Alatriste had reached the age of Christ, he was one of sixteen hundred Spaniards and Italians who, with a flotilla of five ships, despoiled the coast of the Levant for four months, later disembarking in Naples with a wealth of booty. There, once again, the wheel of Fortune spun, and his life was turned upside down. An olive-skinned woman, half Italian and half Spanish, with dark hair and large eyes—the kind who claims to be frightened when she sees a mouse but is perfectly relaxed with half a company of harquebusiers—had begun by asking him for a gift of some Genoa plums, then it was a gold necklace, and finally silk gowns. It ended, as often happens, when she had purged him of his last maravedí. Then the plot thickened, in the style of Lope’s plays, with an inopportune visit and a stranger in a nightshirt in a place he shouldn’t be. The sight of the alternate in his shirttails substantially weakened the credence of the little minx’s protests as, wide-eyed, she identified the fellow as her cousin, though he seemed to be more what the English would call a kissing cousin. Furthermore, Diego Alatriste was far too old to have the wool pulled over his eyes so easily. So, after one of the woman’s cheeks had been embellished by an oblique cut with the knife, and the intruder in the nightshirt by half a sword blade through his chest—in his haste this presumed cousin had come out to fight without his breeches, which seemed to have diminished his brio at the hour when it came to proving himself a good swordsman—Diego Alatriste took to his heels before being hauled off to prison. A precaution which, at that juncture, consisted of a hasty departure for Spain, thanks to the favor granted by an old acquaintance, the previously mentioned Alonso de Contreras, with whom, both only lads, he had left for Flanders at the age of thirteen, following the standards of Prince Albert.

“Here comes Bragado,” said Garrote.

Captain Carmelo Bragado was coming along the trench, head lowered and hat in hand to offer less of a target, searching out the defilade of enemy harquebusiers posted on the ravelin. Even so, as this robust man from León’s strapping six feet were difficult to hide from Dutch eyes, a pair of musket shots came, ziiing, zaaang, whirring over the parapet in homage to his arrival.

“May God visit them with the pox,” growled Bragado, dropping down between Copons and Alatriste.

He was fanning his sweaty face with the hat in his right hand and resting the left on the hilt of his Toledo blade; that hand, injured in the combat at the Ruyter mill, was missing the first two joints of the ring and little fingers. After a while, just as Diego Alatriste had done before him, he put an ear to one of the posts in the ground and frowned.

“Those heretic moles are in a hurry,” he said.

He leaned back, scratching his mustache where sweat had dripped onto it from the tip of his nose.

“I bring two items of bad news,” he added after a while.

He regarded the misery of the trenches, the debris piled everywhere, the deplorable appearance of the soldiers. His nose wrinkled at the stench from the dead mule.

“Although, among Spaniards,” he quipped, “having only two items of bad news is always good news.”

More time passed before he spoke again; finally he grimaced and again scratched his nose.

“They killed Ulloa last night.”

Someone muttered, “S’blood!” but the others said nothing. Ulloa was a squad corporal, an old soldier with whom they had shared good camaraderie until he earned his final bonus. As Bragado reported in few words, he had gone out to reconnoiter the Dutch trenches with an Italian sergeant, and only the Italian returned.

“With whom did he leave a testament?” Garrote asked with interest.

“With me,” Bragado replied. “A third goes to paying for masses.”

For a time they were silent, and that was all the epitaph Ulloa would receive. Copons went back to his siesta and Mendieta to his quest for lice. Garrote, who had finished cleaning his musket, was chewing his nails and spitting out pieces as black as his soul.

“How is our mine going?” Alatriste wanted to know.

Bragado gave a shrug.