The Sun Over Breda

As for me, my sentiments regarding the captain were beginning to be ambiguous, although I was barely aware of it. On the one hand, I obeyed him implicitly, offering him the sincere devotion that Your Mercies know so well. On the other hand, like any youth growing out of his boyhood, I was beginning to feel the weight of his shadow. Flanders had catalyzed the transformations in me natural for a boy who lived among soldiers and who furthermore had had the opportunity to fight for his life, his reputation, and his king. Also, I had recently been troubled by questions that my master’s silences no longer answered. All of this was making me consider the possibility of enlisting as a soldier, and although I was not yet old enough—it was rare at that time to serve if one was younger than seventeen or eighteen, which meant I would have to lie—somehow I thought that a turn of fortune might somehow facilitate my ambition. After all, Captain Alatriste himself had enlisted when he was barely fifteen, during the siege of Hulst. That had been during the famous exercise conceived to divert the enemy from a planned attack on the fort of La Estrella, when mochileros, pages, and every available servant had marched out armed with pikes, banners, and drums and paraded along a dike, tricking the enemy into taking them for replacement troops. The assault that followed was bloody; so bloody that most of the youths, finding themselves with weapons and their zeal kindled by the battle, ran to back up their masters, courageously jumping into the fire. Diego Alatriste, who at that time was a drummer in the bandera of Captain Pérez de Espila, went with them. Some, Alatriste among them, fought so bravely that Prince Albert, who was already governor of Flanders and was personally overseeing the siege, rewarded them by letting them enlist.

“It came this morning with the post from Spain.”

I took the letter the captain was holding out to me. It was written on fine paper; the seal was intact, and my name was on the front:

Señor don Diego Alatriste

^* Attention of Íñigo Balboa ^*

In the Bandera of Captain don Carmelo Bragado, of the Cartagena Tercio ^* Military post of Flanders

My hands trembled as I turned over the envelope sealed with the initials A. de A. Without a word, and feeling Alatriste’s eyes on me, I slowly walked some distance away to where the Germans’ women were washing clothes by a narrow branch of the river. The Germans, like some Spaniards, took as their women former whores who assuaged their desires and also relieved them of the misery of washing soldiers’ clothing. In addition, some sold liquors, firewood, tobacco, and pipes to those who needed them, and I have already written how in Breda I saw German women working in the trenches to help their husbands. Near the makeshift laundry, where a tree that had been felled and trimmed for cutting firewood lay across a large rock, I sat, unable to tear my eyes from those initials, incredulously holding Angélica’s letter in my hands. I knew that the captain was watching me the whole time, so I waited for my heart to stop pounding and then, trying not to reveal my impatience, I broke the seal and unfolded the letter.