“Go, damn it!” he said.
The entrance to the corridor leading to the cloister was lit up now with torches, and there was the sound of clanking weapons and people talking. “In the name of the king,” said a distant voice. “In the name of the law.” And that cry in the name of a dead king made my scalp creep.
“Run!”
And by my life, I did. Running because you want to run is not the same as having to run. I swear to God that if a precipice had opened up before me, I would have leapt unhesitatingly over it. Blind with panic, I ran through the undergrowth, past trees, across fields, jumping fences and walls, splashing through the stream and climbing out and up toward the city. And only when I was safe, far from that accursed cloister, did I drop to the ground, half mad with horror and fear, heart pounding, lungs burning, and a thousand pins and needles pricking neck and temples. Only then did I stop to wonder what may have happened to Captain Alatriste.
He limped over to the wall, looking for the best path to follow. Fighting with so many men at once had worn him down; the cut to his thigh was not that deep, but it was still bleeding. Besides, knowing the identity of the corpse lying in the cloister was enough to shake anyone’s composure and lower his spirits. Despite his wound, fear—had he felt any—might have lent wings to his feet, but he did not feel afraid, only a grim sense of desolation at the trick played on him by Fate. A black, despairing melancholy. The utter certainty that his luck had finally run out.
The lights were filling the cloister now. He could see them glinting through the trees and the undergrowth. Voices and shadows everywhere. “Tomorrow,” he thought, “the whole of Europe and the world will tremble when they learn what has happened.”
He took a run at the wall, about five cubits high. He tried twice, but failed. Christ’s blood! The pain from the wound in his leg was too much.
“Here he is!” cried a voice behind him.
He turned slowly around, resigned, his sword held firmly in his hand. Four men were coming toward him through the garden, lighting their way with torches. He had no difficulty in recognizing the Count of Guadalmedina, who had his arm in a sling. The others were Martín Saldaña and a couple of constables. Behind them, he saw catchpoles moving about in the cloister.
“Give yourself up, in the name of the king.”
These words brought a wry smile to Alatriste’s lips. In the name of what king, he felt like asking. He looked at Guadalmedina, who was standing there, sword sheathed, hand on hip, regarding him, as he never had before, with utter scorn. The splint on his arm was clearly a souvenir from their encounter in Calle de los Peligros. More unfinished business.
“Only some of this is my doing,” said Alatriste.
No one seemed to believe him. Martín Saldaña was grave-faced. He had his staff of office tucked in his belt, his sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.
“Give yourself up,” he warned again, “or I’ll kill you.”
The captain reflected for a moment. He knew the fate that awaited regicides: he would be tortured to death and his body quartered. Not a very pleasant prospect.
“It would be better if you killed me.”
He was looking at the bearded face of the man who, up until that night, had been his friend—he was losing friends at an alarming rate—and he saw him hesitate, just for a moment. They both knew that Alatriste had no wish to be taken prisoner. Saldaña exchanged a rapid glance with Guadalmedina, and the latter almost imperceptibly shook his head. We need him alive, the gesture said, so that we can try to get him to talk.
“Disarm him,” ordered Guadalmedina.
The two catchpoles carrying the torches stepped forward, and Alatriste raised his sword. Martín Saldaña’s pistol was pointing straight at his stomach. “I could force him to fire,” he thought. “I just need to meet the barrel full on and with a little luck . . . True, a bullet in the gut hurts more than one in the head, and you take longer to die, but there’s no alternative. Martín might not refuse me that.”
Saldaña himself seemed to be pondering the matter deeply.
“Diego,” he said suddenly.
Alatriste looked at him, surprised. It sounded like an introduction to a longer speech, and his comrade from Flanders was not the most verbose of men, certainly not in a situation like this.
“It isn’t worth it,” added Saldaña after a pause.
“What isn’t worth it?”
Saldaña was still thinking. He raised his sword hand and scratched his beard with the cross-guard, then said:
“Letting yourself get killed for no good reason.”
“Leave any explanations for later,” Guadalmedina said brusquely.
Alatriste leaned against the wall, confused. There was something that didn’t quite fit. Saldaña, his pistol still leveled at Alatriste, was looking at Guadalmedina now, frowning.
“Later might be too late,” Saldaña said sullenly.
Guadalmedina paused to think, head to one side. Then he stood studying them both for a while. Finally, he seemed convinced. His eyes fell on Saldaña’s pistol and he sighed.
“It wasn’t the king,” he said.
Through the left-hand window of the carriage, on the hills overlooking the orchards and the Manzanares River, he could just make out the dark shape of the Alcázar Real. Accompanied by half a dozen constables and catchpoles on foot, all bearing torches, they were on their way to Puente del Parque. Alongside the coachman sat another two guards, one of whom was carrying a harquebus with the match lit. Guadalmedina and Martín Saldaña were in the coach, sitting opposite Captain Alatriste. The latter could hardly believe the story they had just told him.
“We’ve been using him as a double for His Majesty for eight months now; the likeness was quite astonishing,” concluded Guadalmedina. “The same age, the same blue eyes, a similar mouth . . . His name was Ginés Garcia millán and he was a little-known actor from Puerto Lumbreras. He stood in for the king for a few days during the recent visit to Aragon. When we heard that something was being planned for tonight, we decided that he should play the role once more. He knew the risks, but agreed to take part anyway. He was a loyal and valiant subject.”
Alatriste pulled a face.
“A fine reward he got for his loyalty.”
Guadalmedina regarded him in silence, faintly irritated. The torches outside illuminated his aristocratic profile, his neat beard and curled mustache. Another world and another caste. He was supporting his splinted arm with his good hand to protect it from the jolting of the carriage.
“It was doubtless a personal decision,” he said lightly. After all, compared with a monarch, the late Ginés Garcia millán mattered little to him. “His orders were not to appear until we arrived to protect him, but he was determined to play his role to the hilt and he didn’t wait.” He shook his head disapprovingly. “Playing a king was probably the high point of his career.”
“He played the part well, too,” said the captain. “He remained dignified throughout and fought without once uttering a word. I doubt a king would have done the same.”
Martín Saldaña listened impassively, never taking his eyes off Alatriste, his pistol in his lap, cocked and ready. Guadalmedina had removed one glove and was using it to flick away the dust on his fine breeches.
“I don’t believe your story,” he said. “At least not entirely. It’s true, as you say, that there are signs of a fight and there must have been more than one assassin, but who’s to say that you weren’t in league with them?”
“My word.”
“And what else?”
“You know me well enough.”
Guadalmedina snorted, one glove hanging limp in his hand.
“Do I? You haven’t proved very trustworthy of late.”
Alatriste stared hard at the count. Up until that night, no one who said such a thing would have lived long enough to repeat it. Then he turned to Saldaña.
“Don’t you believe me either?”
Saldaña kept his mouth shut. It was clear that it was not his business to believe or disbelieve anything. He was simply doing his job. The actor was dead, the king was alive, and his orders were to guard the prisoner. He kept his thoughts to himself. Any debating he would leave to inquisitors, judges, and theologians.
“It will all become clear in the fullness of time,” said Guadalmedina, drawing on his glove again. “The fact is, you received orders to stay away.”
The captain looked out of the window. They had passed the Puente del Parque, and the carriage was taking them past the city wall, along the dirt road that led to the south side of the Alcázar.
“Where are you taking me?”
“To Caballerizas,” said Guadalmedina.
Alatriste studied Martín Saldaña’s inexpressive face and noticed that he was now gripping the pistol more firmly and pointing it at his chest. “The sly fox knows me well,” he thought. “He knows it was a mistake to give me that information.” Caballerizas, better known as the Slaughterhouse, was the small prison next to the Alcázar stables where prisoners guilty of lèse-majesté were sent to be tortured. It was a sinister place where neither justice nor hope was to be found. There were no judges or lawyers, only torturers, strappado, and a scribe to note down each scream. Two interrogations were enough to leave a man crippled for life.
“So this is as far as I go.”
“Yes,” agreed Guadalmedina. “This is as far as you go. Now you’ll have time to explain everything.”
“I might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb,” thought Alatriste. And never better said. Taking advantage of another sudden jolt of the carriage, he flung himself on Saldaña just as the latter’s pistol was pointing slightly away from him. With the same impetus, he delivered a vicious headbutt to Saldaña’s face and felt the other man’s nose crunch beneath the impact.
Cloc
, it went. Thick, red blood flowed forth, pouring down Saldaña’s beard and chest. By then, Alatriste had snatched the pistol from him and was pointing it straight at Guadalmedina.
“Your weapon,” the captain said.
Taken completely by surprise, Guadalmedina was about to open his mouth to call for help from those outside, when Alatriste hit him hard in the face with the pistol, just a moment before relieving him of his sword. Killing them wouldn’t solve anything, he decided. He glanced at Saldaña, who was barely moving, like an ox felled by a blow to the back of the neck. He again struck Álvaro de la Marca hard, and the count, unable to defend himself, his arm in a sling, slid between the seats. “You’re damn well not taking me to the Slaughterhouse,” thought the captain. A blood-spattered Saldaña was gazing at him with dazed eyes.
“I’ll see you again, Martín,” said Alatriste.
He took Saldaña’s second pistol and stuck it in his belt. Then he kicked open the carriage door and jumped out, a pistol in his right hand and a sword in his left. “I just hope my wounded leg doesn’t let me down,” he thought. A catchpole was already there, shouting to his comrades that the prisoner was trying to escape. The man was holding a torch and struggling, single-handed, to unsheathe his sword, and so, without thinking twice, Alatriste shot him point-blank in the chest; the blast lit up the man’s face as it hurled him backward into the shadows. Alatriste’s military instinct alerted him to the smell of a harquebus lit and ready to fire. Its owner was on the coachman’s seat; there was no time to lose. He threw down the discharged pistol and took out the second one in order to shoot the man above. At that moment, however, another catchpole came running toward him, brandishing a sword. Alatriste had to choose. He pointed the pistol and stopped the running man in his tracks. The man was still clinging to a wheel of the carriage for support as Alatriste raced to the edge of the road and hurled himself down the slope that led to the stream and the river. Two men made as if to follow him, and a shot from a harquebus blazed forth from on top of the carriage: the bullet whistled past him and was lost in the darkness. He scrambled to his feet among the undergrowth, his face and hands all scratched, ready to start running again despite his painful leg, but his pursuers were on him already. Two black shapes came panting and stumbling their way through the bushes, shouting: “Halt! Halt! Give yourself up in the name of the king!” Two of them at once and so near as well. He had no alternative but to turn and face them, his sword at the ready; and when the first one reached him, he did not wait, but lunged straight at him, driving his blade into the man’s chest. The catchpole screamed and fell to the ground, while the other man hung back, prudently. Alatriste could see several more torches approaching down the path now. He set off running into the darkness, downhill, keeping close to the trees, guided by the sound of the nearby river. He found himself at last in the reedbeds and felt the mud beneath his boots. Luckily, the river was still full after the recent rains. He stuck his sword in his belt, waded in until the water was shoulder high, and then let himself be carried along by the current.
He swam downriver as far as the little islands, and from there returned to the shore. He walked through the reedbeds, splashing through the mud, until he was nearly at the Segovia bridge. He rested awhile to recover his breath, tied a handkerchief around the wound in his thigh, and then, shivering in his drenched clothes—he had lost cloak and hat in the scuffle—passed underneath the stone arches, avoiding the sentry box at the Puerta de Segovia. From there he walked slowly up to the heights of San Francisco, where, via a small stream that was used as a kind of drain, he could enter the city unseen. At that hour, he thought, there would be a swarm of constables out looking for him. He obviously couldn’t go back to the Inn of the Turk, nor to Juan Vicuña’s place. Taking refuge in a church would serve no purpose either, not even with Master Pérez’s Jesuit brethren. In any matter involving a king, Saint Peter’s jurisdiction was no match for that of the sword. His one chance lay in the poorest areas, where royal justice would not dare to venture at that hour of the night, and even during the day would do so only in a large band. Taking shelter in the shadows, he cautiously made his way as far as Plaza de la Cebada, and from there—taking the very narrowest of streets, and hurrying across the broader thoroughfares of Calle de Embajadores and Calle del Mesón de Paredes—he got as far as the fountain of Lavapiés, where Madrid’s lowest inns and taverns and bawdy houses were to be found. He needed a place where he could hide away and think—he found Gualterio Malatesta’s presence in Camino de las Minillas disconcerting in the extreme—but he had not a single doubloon with which to pay for such a haven. He mentally reviewed the friends he had in that area, weighing up which of them would be loyal enough not to betray him for thirty pieces of silver when a price was put on his head the next day. Immersed in these black thoughts, he turned and walked as far as Calle de la Comadre, where, at the door of the various whorehouses, lit by the torches and the little lanterns in the hallways, half a dozen prostitutes were plying their sad trade. Then he said to himself: “Perhaps God does exist and doesn’t merely content himself with watching from afar while chance or the devil play fast and loose with mankind.” For who should he see outside one of the taverns, slapping a whore about the face and looking every inch the ruffian, with the brim of his hat pulled down over one bushy eyebrow, but Bartolo Cagafuego.