The King's Gold (15 page)

I heard them whispering. Those who knew how to add up were busy making calculations.

“Is it a fixed amount?” asked Sangonera. “Or do they share out the total among those who survive?”

Jaqueta gave the same low chuckle.

“We won’t find out until afterward. It’s a way of making sure that in the heat and noise of the fighting, we don’t stab one another in the back.”

The horizon was growing red behind the trees, allowing glimpses of scrub and of the pleasant orchards that sometimes grew down as far as the banks of the river. In the end, I got up and made my way past the sleeping bodies to the stern, to join the captain. The master of the boat, who wore a serge smock and a faded cap on his head, declined when I offered him some wine from the wineskin I’d brought for the captain. He was leaning one elbow on the tiller, intent on estimating the distance from the banks, on the breeze filling the sail, and on any loose logs on the shore that might be dragged downstream. He had a very tanned face, and up until then I hadn’t heard him say a word, nor would I thereafter. Alatriste took a draft of wine and ate the proffered piece of bread and cured meat. I stayed by his side, watching the cloudless sky and the light growing brighter on the horizon. On the river, everything was still very gray and hazy, and the men lying in the bottom of the boat remained immersed in darkness.

“How’s Olmedilla doing?” asked the captain, looking across at where the accountant lay.

“He’s finally managed to fall asleep after spending all night shivering.”

My master gave a faint smile. “He’s not used to this kind of thing,” he said.

I smiled too. We were used to it. He and I. “Is he coming aboard the
urca
with us?” I asked.

Alatriste shrugged. “Who knows?” he said.

“We’ll have to look out for him,” I murmured, somewhat concerned.

“Every man will have to look out for himself. When the moment comes, you just worry about yourself.”

We fell silent, passing the wineskin from one to the other. My master chewed on his bread for a while.

“You’ve grown up a lot,” he said between mouthfuls.

He was still watching me thoughtfully. I felt a sweet wave of satisfaction warm my blood.

“I want to be a soldier,” I blurted out.

“I thought after Breda, you’d have had enough.”

“No, that’s what I want to be. Like my father.”

He stopped chewing and studied me for a while longer, then, in the end, he gave a lift of his chin, indicating the men lying in the boat. “It’s hardly a great future,” he said.

We remained for a while without talking, rocked by the swaying of the boat. Now the landscape behind the trees was growing red and the shadows less gray.

“Besides,” Alatriste said suddenly, “it’ll be a couple of years before they’d let you join a company. And we’ve been neglecting your education. So, the day after tomorrow—”

“I read well,” I said, interrupting him. “I have a reasonably neat hand, I know the Latin declensions and how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide.”

“That’s not enough. Master Pérez is a good man and he can complete your education once we’re back in Madrid.”

He fell silent again in order to cast another glance at the sleeping men. The easterly light emphasized the scars on his face.

“In this world,” he said at last, “the pen can sometimes take you where the sword cannot.”

“Well, it’s not fair,” I retorted.

“Possibly not.”

He had taken a while to respond, and I thought there was a good deal of bitterness in that “possibly not.” For my part, I merely shrugged beneath my blanket. At sixteen, I was sure that I would go wherever I needed to go and arrive wherever I needed to arrive. And as far as I was concerned, Master Pérez had nothing to do with it.

“It isn’t yet the day after tomorrow, Captain.”

I said this with something like relief, defiantly, staring obstinately at the river ahead. I didn’t need to turn around to know that Alatriste was studying me closely, and when I did turn my face, I saw that his sea-green eyes were tinged with red from the rising sun.

“You’re right,” he said, handing me the wineskin. “We still have a long way to go.”

8. BARRA DE SANLÚCAR

The sun was directly above us as we passed the inn at Tarifa, where the Guadalquivir turns westward and you begin to see the marshlands of Doña Ana on the right-hand bank. The fertile fields of Aljarafe and the leafy shores of Coria and Puebla slowly gave way to sand dunes, pinewoods, and dense scrub, out of which emerged the occasional fallow deer or wild boar. It grew hotter and more humid, and in the boat, the men folded up their cloaks, unclasped capes, and unbuttoned buff coats and doublets. They were crammed together like herrings in a barrel, and the bright light of day revealed scarred, ill-shaved faces, as well as ferocious beards and mustaches that did little to belie the piles of weapons, leather belts, and baldrics, the swords, half-swords, daggers, and pistols that each of them kept nearby. Their grubby clothes and skin—made grimy by the elements, and by lack of sleep and the journey—gave off a raw, rough smell that I knew so well from Flanders. It was the smell of men at war. The smell of war itself.

I sat slightly apart with Sebastián Copons and the accountant Olmedilla, for although the latter kept as aloof as ever, I nevertheless felt under a moral obligation, among such a rabble, to keep an eye on him. We shared the wine and the provisions, and although neither Copons, the old soldier from Huesca, nor the functionary from the royal treasury were men of many—or indeed even few—words, I kept close by them out of a sense of loyalty: Copons because of our shared experience in Flanders, and Olmedilla because of the particular circumstances we found ourselves in. As for Captain Alatriste, he spent the twelve leagues of the journey in his own fashion, seated in the stern with the master of the boat, occasionally dropping asleep but only for a matter of minutes at a time and otherwise barely taking his eyes off the other men. When he did sleep, he lowered his hat over his face, in order, it seemed, not to be seen to be sleeping. When awake, he studied each man carefully in turn, as if he had the ability to delve into their virtues and their vices and to know them better. He watched how they ate, yawned, slept, how they reacted—phlegmatically or with ill humor—as they were each dealt a hand from Guzmán Ramírez’s deck of cards, gambling away money they did not yet have. He noticed who drank a lot and who little, who was talkative, who boastful, and who silent; he noticed Enríquez el Zurdo’s oaths, the mulatto Campuzano’s thunderous laugh, and the stillness of Saramago el Portugués, who spent the whole voyage lying on his cape, serenely reading a book. Some were silent or discreet, like El Caballero de Illescas, the sailor Suárez, or the Vizcayan Mascarúa, and some seemed awkward and out of place, like Bartolo Cagafuego, who knew no one and kept making abortive attempts to strike up conversations. There was no shortage of witty and amusing talkers, such as Pencho Bullas or the ever-cheerful ruffian Juan Eslava, who was regaling his fellows with details of how he had personally benefited from the wonders of powdered rhinoceros horn. Then there were the pricklier characters like Ginesillo el Lindo, with his immaculate appearance, equivocal smile, and dangerous gaze, or Andresito el de los Cincuenta, who had a way of spitting out of the side of his mouth, or mean bastards like El Bravo de los Galeones, with his face crisscrossed with scars that were clearly not just the work of a particularly careless barber. And so while our boat sailed downriver, one man would be telling tales of his adventures with women or at the gaming table, another would be roundly cursing as he threw the dice to pass the time, and yet another would be retailing anecdotes, whether true or false, from some hypothetical soldier’s life that embraced the Battle of Roncesvalles and even took in a couple of campaigns fought under the leadership of the Lusitanian, Viriathus. And all of this was spiced with a large dose of oaths, curses, braggartry, and hyperbole.

“I swear by Christ that I’m a Christian as pure of blood and as noble as the king himself,” I heard one man say.

“Well, I, by God, am purer than that,” retorted another. “After all, the king is half Flemish.”

To hear them, you would have thought our boat was filled by the very cream of Aragon, Navarre, and the two Castiles, Old and New. This was a coinage common to every purse, and even in such a restricted space and among such a small group as ours, each man played the part of a proud, distinguished native of this region or that, one side joining forces against another, with Extremadurans, Andalusians, Vizcayans, and Valencians taking it in turns to heap reproaches on one another, brandishing the vices and misfortunes of every province, with much heavy banter and joking, and all agreeing on one thing: their shared hatred of the Castilians—and with every man presuming to be a hundred times worthier than he actually was. This gang of roughs thrown together by chance was like a Spain in miniature, for the gravity and honor and national pride depicted in the plays of Lope, Tirso, and others had vanished with the old century and now existed only in the theater. All that remained was arrogance and cruelty, and when you considered the high regard in which we held ourselves, our violent customs, and our scorn for other provinces and nations, one could understand why the Spanish were, quite rightly, hated throughout Europe and half the known world.

Our own expedition naturally enjoyed its share of all these vices, and virtue would have been about as natural a sight as the Devil plucking a harp and wearing a halo and a pair of white wings. However nasty, cruel, and boastful our fellow travelers were, they nonetheless had certain things in common: they were bound by their greed for the promised gold; their baldrics, belts, and sheaths were kept oiled and polished with professional care; and their burnished weapons glinted in the sunlight when they took them out to sharpen or clean them. Accustomed as he was to these people and this life, Captain Alatriste was doubtless coolly comparing these men with others he had known in other places, and would thus be able to guess or foresee how each man would react when night fell. He could, in other words, tell who would be worthy of his trust and who not.

It was still light when we rounded the final long bend of the river, on whose banks rose the white mountains of the salt marshes. Between the sandy shore and the pinewoods we could see the port of Bonanza, its bay already crowded with moored galleys and ships, and farther off, clearly visible in the afternoon sun, stood the tower of the Iglesia Mayor and the tallest of Sanlúcar de Barrameda’s houses. Then the sailor furled the sail, and the master steered the boat toward the opposite shore, seeking out the right-hand margin of the broad current that, a league and a half downstream, would flow out into the sea.

We disembarked—getting our feet wet in the process—in the shelter of a large dune that reached its tongue of sand down into the river. Three men watching from a clump of pines came to meet us. They were dressed in dun-colored clothes, like hunters, but as they approached, we saw that their swords and pistols were hardly the kind one would use to go hunting for rabbits. Olmedilla greeted the apparent leader, a man with a ginger mustache and a military bearing that his rustic outfit did little to disguise. While they withdrew to converse in private, our troop of men clustered together in the shade of the pines. We lay for a while on the needle-carpeted sand, watching Olmedilla, who was still talking and occasionally nodding impassively. Now and then, the two men would look across at a raised area of land farther off, about five hundred paces along the riverbank, and about which the man with the ginger mustache seemed to be giving detailed explanations. Olmedilla finally bade farewell to the supposed hunters, who, after casting an inquisitive glance in our direction, set off into the pines; the accountant then rejoined us, moving across the sandy landscape like some strange black smudge.

“Everything is in place,” he said.

Then he took my master aside and they spoke together for a while in low voices. And sometimes, while he was talking, Alatriste stopped staring down at his boots to look across at us. Then Olmedilla fell silent, and I saw the captain ask two questions to which Olmedilla replied twice in the affirmative. Then they crouched down, and Alatriste took out his dagger and started tracing lines with it in the sand; and whenever he glanced up to ask Olmedilla something, the latter nodded again. All of this took some time, and afterward the captain stood quite still, thinking. Then he rejoined us and explained how we were to attack the
Niklaasbergen
. He did this succinctly, with no superfluous comments.

“We’ll split into two groups, one per boat. The first group will attack the quarterdeck, trying to make as much noise as possible, but there must be no firing of guns. We will leave our pistols here.”

There was some murmuring, and a few of the men exchanged disgruntled looks. A timely pistol shot meant you could kill a man straight off, more quickly than with a sword and from a safe distance too.

The captain went on: “We’re going to be fighting in the dark and at very close quarters, and I don’t want us killing one another by mistake. Besides, if someone’s pistol should go off accidentally, they’ll fire on us with their harquebuses from the galleon before we’ve even climbed on board.”

He paused, quietly observing the men.

“Who amongst you has served the king?”

Almost everyone raised his hand.

Grave-faced and with his thumbs hooked in his belt, Alatriste studied them one by one. His voice was as ice-cold as his eyes. “I mean those of you who really have fought as soldiers.”

Many hesitated, embarrassed and looking shiftily around. A couple of men put their hands down, but others kept them up, until, under Alatriste’s sustained gaze, more men lowered their hands as well. Only Copons, Juan Jaqueta, Sangonera, Enríquez el Zurdo, and Andresito el de los Cincuenta kept their hands up. Alatriste also picked out Eslava, Saramago el Portugués, Ginesillo el Lindo, and the sailor Suárez.

“These nine men will form the group that will attack from the bow. In order to take the crew by surprise and from behind, you will only board the ship when those at the stern are already fighting on the quarterdeck. The idea is that you board very quietly via the anchor and make your way along the deck, and then we all meet up at the stern.”

“Is there someone in charge of each group?” asked Pencho Bullas.

“There is: Sebastián Copons at the bow, and me at the stern with you, Cagafuego, Campuzano, Guzmán Ramírez, Mascarúa, El Caballero de Illescas, and El Bravo de los Galeones.”

I looked from one to the other, confused at first. The difference in the quality of the men in the two groups was glaringly obvious. Then I realized that Alatriste was placing the best men under Copons’s command, and keeping the least disciplined or least trustworthy men for himself, with the exception perhaps of the mulatto Campuzano and possibly Bartolo Cagafuego, who despite being more braggart than brave, would fight well under the captain’s gaze, if only out of a sense of obligation. This meant that the group attacking the bow was the one that would decide the battle, while those at the stern—mere cannon fodder—would bear the brunt of the fighting. And if things went wrong or those boarding at the bow were greatly delayed, the group at the stern would also suffer the greatest losses.

“The plan,” went on Alatriste, “is to cut the anchor chain so that the ship drifts toward the coast and runs aground on one of the sandbanks opposite San Jacinto Point. For that purpose, the group at the bow will carry with them two axes. We will all remain on board until the ship touches bottom on the bar. Then we will come ashore—the water there is only at chest height—and leave the matter in the hands of others who will be waiting.”

The men again exchanged looks. From the pinewoods came the monotonous whir of cicadas. Apart from the buzz of flies swarming about our heads, that was the only sound to be heard while each man thought his own thoughts.

“Will there be much resistance?” asked Juan Jaqueta, pensively chewing the ends of his mustache.

“I don’t know, but we certainly expect there to be some.”

“How many heretics are there on board?”

“They’re not heretics, they’re Flemish Catholics, but it comes to the same thing. We estimate between twenty and thirty, although many will jump overboard. And there is one important point: As long as there are crew members alive, not one of us will utter a word of Spanish.” Alatriste looked at Saramago el Portugués, who was listening intently with the grave demeanor of a scrawny hidalgo, and with, as usual, a book stuffed in the pocket of his doublet. “It would not go amiss if this gentleman here were to shout something in his own language, and for those of you who know English or Flemish words to let fly with those as well.” The captain allowed himself the flicker of a smile. “The idea is . . . that we are pirates.”

This remark eased the tension. There was laughter, and the men shared amused looks. Amongst such a band of men, this idea was not so very far from the truth.

“And what about those who don’t jump overboard?” asked Mascarúa.

“No crew member will reach the sandbank alive. The more people we frighten at the beginning, the fewer we will have to kill.”

“And what about the wounded, or those who cry mercy?”

“Tonight there is no mercy.”

Some whistled through their teeth. There was mocking applause and subdued laughter.

“And what about our own wounded?” asked Ginesillo el Lindo.

“They will leave the ship with us and be attended to on land. There we will all be paid and, after that, it will be a matter of every owl to his olive tree.”

“And if there are deaths?” El Bravo de los Galeones had a smile on his scarred face. “Do we still earn the same amount each, or divide what’s left between us?”

“We’ll see.”

The ruffian glanced at his comrades and his smile grew wider. “Perhaps it would be a good idea if we could see right now,” he said insinuatingly.

Alatriste very slowly removed his hat and smoothed his hair. Then he put his hat on again. The way he looked at the other man left no room for doubt. “Good? For whom exactly?”