The Pirates of the Levant (4 page)

The pilot, hands tied behind his back, was hoisted straight up onto the yard, kicking furiously and without another lance to consign his soul to God. As for the other wounded corsairs, regardless of whether they were Moriscos or not, they were thrown unceremoniously, hands bound, into the sea. There was only one man left standing, and because he been stabbed in the neck, he could not be hanged. His wound was half a span long, although no vein had been cut and he wasn't bleeding much — indeed, viewed from one side, the poor devil looked as fresh as a daisy, albeit somewhat pale. But the overseer was of the opinion that if they hanged him, the wound in his neck would tear, which would make for a very ugly scene. The Captain took one look at him and agreed, so the man ended up being tossed into the sea along with his comrades.

I went in search of Diego Alatriste, almost feeling my way in the dark. A gentle north-east wind was blowing, the moon had not yet come up and the sky was thick with stars. The deck was packed with soldiers and sailors resting after the battle, having first eaten some salt fish and drunk a little wine to restore their strength, and I won't say that they stank, although they did, because I myself was part of the stink and was, I'm sure, contributing more than my fair share of odours and emanations.

The galley-men had stowed their oars, leaving the ship to the care of the favourable wind, and had received some hardtack and a little oil and vinegar, which they ate lying down between their benches, talking quietly, and occasionally singing softly to pass the time or complaining about their cuts and bruises. The lines from a song drifted over to me, accompanied by the clink of chains and the slapping of hands on the leather that covered the benches:

I'll have it known

Through all the lands

That Christian galleys,

Short of feet,

Are always short of hands.

It was a night like many others. The
Mulata
was heading south on a calm sea, gliding slowly through the darkness, with its great sails billowing and swaying above the deck like two pale stains that alternately concealed and revealed the starry sky. I found Captain Alatriste at the prow of the ship, next to where the ropes and cables were kept. He was standing utterly still, leaning against the netting stretched over the side of the ship and gazing at the dark sea and sky. Towards the west, a trace of reddish light was still visible. We talked a little about the events of the day, and I asked him if what the men were saying was true — that we were heading for Melilla and not Oran.

'Our Captain doesn't want to remain at sea too long with so many captives on board,' he replied. 'Melilla is closer, which is why he prefers to sell them there. Then we can continue on our way ... less heavily laden.'

'And richer too,' I added, smiling. I had done my calculations, as had everyone else, and had worked out that the day should bring us at least two hundred
escudos.

The Captain shifted position slightly. It was growing cool in the darkness and I realised he was fastening his buff coat.

'Don't get your hopes up,' he said at last. 'Slaves don't fetch such a good price in Melilla, but because we're alone, near the coast and forty leagues from Oran, Urdemalas is anxious to avoid any more encounters.'

I was pleased, nonetheless, for I had never visited Melilla. Captain Alatriste was quick to put me straight, though, telling me that the town was little more than a small fortress built on a rock beneath Mount Gurugu: a few fortified houses ready for battle and surrounded, as were all Spanish enclaves on the African coast, by hostile
alarbes. Alarbe
or
alarabe —
if I may enlighten the idle reader — was the name we gave to the bellicose, untrustworthy Moors from the countryside, to distinguish them from the city Moors, whom we simply referred to as Moors, in order to differentiate them, in turn — although they were, in fact, Berbers — from the Turks of Turkey, of whom there was never any shortage, for they were always shuttling back and forth from Constantinople. That was where the Great Turk lived, and Moors and Berbers, or whatever you called them, all paid fealty to him in one way or another. And that is why, to simplify matters, we called them all Turks. 'I wonder if the Turks will come this year,' we would say, regardless of whether they actually were from Turkey or not and regardless, too, of whether a Turkish fusta or galliot was from Saleh, Tunis or Anatolia.

And then there was the intense trading that went on between every nation and these populous corsair cities, where, as well as the local Moorish inhabitants, there were innumerable Christian slaves — Cervantes, Jeronimo de Pasamonte and others experienced this at first hand, and I will leave them to describe it in their own words — as well as Moriscos,

Jews, renegades, sailors and traders from every shore. You can imagine, then, what a complicated world it was, that interior sea bordering Spain to the south and east, a sea that belonged to no one and to everyone; an ambiguous, shifting, dangerous place where diverse races mixed and mingled, making alliances or doing battle, depending on how the dice rolled. It must be said, though, that while France, England, Holland and Venice negotiated with the Turk, and even made alliances with him against other Christian nations — especially against Spain when it suited them, which it nearly always did — we, for all our many errors and contradictions, always held firm to the one true religion, never retracting so much as a syllable. And being both arrogant and powerful, we poured swords, money and blood — until there was no more — into a struggle, which, for a century and a half, kept at bay the Lutherans and the Calvinists in Europe, and the Mohammedans in the Mediterranean.

There, where pants the rebel Belgian, And where the Berber, sweating, stands, Working, the one, with his bare hands, The other wielding his bare sword, To fashion for locks a master key, Locks that long have had a ward, Our fleets its shape, its shape our sea.

I hope Don Francisco de Quevedo will forgive me for mentioning his enemy, Luis de Gongora, who wrote these Gongoristic lines in 1610 in praise of the taking of Larache, which was followed, four years later, by the seizure of La Mamora. Both were Barbary towns which, like all such towns, we took from the Moors by dint of great effort, clung on to through great suffering, and, to our great shame and misfortune, finally lost, as we lost everything, due to our own idleness. In this, as in most things, we should have done as others did, and paid more attention to profit than to reputation, opening ourselves up to the horizons we had discovered and broadened instead of becoming entangled in the sinister soutanes of royal confessors, in the privileges of blood, in our dislike of hard work, in matters of the cross and the sword whilst leaving our intelligence, our nation, our soul to rot. But no one gave us the choice.

In the end, much to History's surprise, a handful of Spaniards was able to make the world pay dearly, by fighting until not one of us was left standing. You will say that this is poor consolation, and you may be right, but we were simply doing our job and we paid no heed to governments, philosophies or theology. We were, after all, merely soldiers.

Captain Alatriste and I watched the last red light fade from the horizon. Now the only thing that distinguished sea and sky was the starry vault beneath which our galley sailed, driven by the east wind, and guided only by the knowledge of the pilot who kept one eye on the North Star and the other on the binnacle, in which the ship's compass was lit by the tenuous glow of a candle. Behind us, near the mainmast, we heard someone ask Captain Urdemalas if they could light the poop-deck lantern, to which he replied that if anyone lit anything, however small, he would personally dash their brains out.

'As for rich soldiers,' Captain Alatriste said after a while, as if he had been turning over my words in his mind, 'I've never yet met one who was rich for very long. It all goes on cards, wine, whores, as you very well know.'

There was a significant pause, brief enough for it not to sound like a reproach, but long enough for it to be just that.

And I knew exactly what he was referring to. We had been together for five years, but had spent only some seven months in Naples and on the galleys, during which time he'd had ample opportunity to notice certain changes in my person. Not only physical ones — for I was as tall as he was now, slim but elegant, with good legs, strong arms and not a bad face — but other deeper and more complex changes. I was aware that, ever since I was a child, the Captain had wanted me to have a future away from the army. He had, for this reason, always tried to encourage me — with the help of his friends Don Francisco de Quevedo and Father Perez — to read good books and translations from the Latin and the Greek. The pen, he used to say, has greater reach than the sword, and someone learned in books and the law and with a good position at Court would always have more of a future than a professional killer. My natural inclination, however, proved impossible to change, and although, thanks to his efforts, I did acquire a taste for literature — after all, here I am, all these years later, writing our history — my destiny was shaped by the character I inherited from my father, who died in Flanders, and by having lived at Captain Alatriste's side since I was thirteen, sharing his dangerous life and adventures. I wanted to be a soldier, and I was; I applied myself to the task with the resolute passion and energy of my youth.

'There are no whores on board, and the wine's scarce and very rough,' I replied, rather wounded by his comment. 'So you have no reason to reprimand me. As for cards, I don't intend giving to a louse the money I risked my life to earn.'

I was not using the word 'louse' lightly either. Captain Urdemalas, sick of the quarrels over cards and dice, had banned both, threatening any transgressor with the shackles. But the horse knows more than its rider, and so the soldiers and sailors had invented a new game. We chalked various circles on a piece of board and placed in the very centre one of the many lice that were eating us alive — 'having visitors' we called it — and then we bet on which direction the creature would go.

'When we go back to Naples,' I said in conclusion, 'then we'll see.'

I kept glancing at him out of the corner of my eye, expecting some riposte, but he remained silent, a dark shape by my side being rocked, as I was, by the motion of the boat. The truth was that, however much he tried to protect me, Captain Alatriste could not keep me from the less savoury aspects of military life, not counting the usual risks of the profession, just as, in the years since my poor mother had entrusted me to him, I had found myself embroiled in certain of his own murky enterprises, with grave risk to life and liberty. Now I was a grown man, or about to become one, and the Captain's sage advice, when he proffered it — he was, as you know, a man who preferred sword thrusts to words — did not always find the response he expected, for I believed myself to be a man of the world. And so, because he was experienced, discreet and wise, and because he loved me, he avoided sermonising and tried instead to stay close by in case I needed him. He only imposed his authority — and dear God, he could certainly do that when he needed to — in extreme situations.

As for wine, women and gambling, I admit that he had good reason to be angry with me. My wage of four
escudos
a month, along with the money from previous booties — two Turkish
karamuzals
captured in the Mayna channel, a profitable raid on the coast of Tunis, a ship seized off Cape Passero and a galley off the island of Santa Maura — had been spent, every last penny, in the same soldierly fashion as my comrades had spent theirs, and exactly as the Captain had done in his youth, as he himself would sullenly admit.

In my case, though, my lack of experience and a taste for the new meant that I hurled myself into these pastimes with great gusto. For a spirited Spanish lad such as myself, Naples was paradise: good inns, excellent taverns, beautiful women; in short, everything that could help relieve a soldier of his pay. And, as chance would have it, my fellow page from Flanders, Jaime Correas, was there to assist and encourage me. Having served in Italy for some time, he was no stranger to such vices. I will have occasion to speak of him later, so I will say only that it was in his company, and beneath the frowning gaze of Captain Alatriste, that I had spent a good part of the winter months, when the galleys were out of action, embroiled in various escapades involving gaming houses, taverns and — rather less assiduously on my part — the occasional bawdyhouse.

Not that my former master was the kind of man who could die without confession and stand fearlessly face to face with Christ, far from it, but the truth is that gambling, which has bled many a soldier's purse dry, had never tempted him. On the other hand, if he did occasionally frequent certain ladies practised in the art of love — he didn't need to go to whores, for he always grazed in rich pastures — they were few in number and always reliable. As for Bacchus, the Captain certainly worshipped at his table and had the devil of a thirst. But although he often drank too much, especially when he was angry or melancholy — and that was when he was especially dangerous, because wine dulled neither his senses nor his reactions — he always did so alone and without witnesses. I think that, rather than as a pleasure or a vice, he downed whole tumblers in order to quell the inner torment and demons known only to him and God.

At first light, we cast anchor outside Melilla, the Spanish fortress town captured from the Moors one hundred and thirty years before. And in order to remain safely out of sight of Moorish eyes, we anchored not in the lagoon, but in the narrow inlet of Galapagos cove, sheltered by Melilla's soaring walls and towers. The town's imposing appearance was just that — mere appearance — as I was able to see for myself when I set off to wander through the close-packed, treeless streets and along the city walls. While the galley-captain haggled over a price for the slaves, I saw how neglected it all was. Eight centuries of struggle against Islam had died on that wretched frontier and not a single
maravedi
from the gold and silver brought from the Indies ever reached these shores. What did not end up in the hands of Genoan bankers was stolen by the Dutch and English — Devil take 'em — in the western seas. Flanders and the Indies were the apples of our royal eyes, and our old African enterprise, once so dear to the Catholic kings and to the great Emperor Charles V, was scorned by Philip IV and his favourite, the Count-Duke of Olivares. Indeed, many satirical verses were written on the subject: