The King's Gold (18 page)

I was beginning to lose consciousness. I’ve done all I could, I thought, trying to console myself before falling into the black hole opening up at my feet. I wasn’t thinking about Angélica or about anything else. As I grew steadily weaker, I rested my head against the gunwale, and then it seemed to me that everything around me was moving. It must be my head spinning, I decided. But then I noticed that the noise of battle had abated and all the shouting and the ruckus were happening farther off, toward the waist of the ship and toward the prow. A few men ran past, jumping over me, almost kicking me in their haste to escape and plunge into the water. I heard splashes and cries of panic. I looked up, bewildered. Someone had apparently climbed the mainmast and was cutting the gaskets, because the mainsail suddenly unfurled and dropped down, half filled by the breeze. Then my mouth twisted into a foolish, happy grimace intended as a smile, for I knew then that we had won, that the group boarding at the prow had managed to cut the anchor cable, and the galleon was now drifting in the night toward the sandbanks of San Jacinto.

I hope I have what it takes and that I don’t give in, thought Diego Alatriste, steadying himself again and grasping his sword. I hope this Sicilian dog has the decency not to ask for mercy, because I’m going to kill him anyway, and I don’t want to do it when he’s disarmed. With that thought, and spurred on by the urgent need to finish the business there and then and make no last-minute errors, he gathered together what strength he had and unleashed a series of furious thrusts, so fast and brutal that even the best fencer in the world would have been unable to riposte. Malatesta retreated, defending himself with difficulty, but he still had sufficient sangfroid, when the captain was delivering his final thrust, to make a high, oblique slashing movement with his knife that missed the captain’s face by a hair’s breadth. This pause was enough for Malatesta to cast a rapid glance around him, to see how things stood on the deck, and to realize that the galleon was drifting toward the shore.

“I was wrong, Alatriste. This time you win.”

He had barely finished speaking when the captain made a jab at his eye with the point of his sword, and the Italian ground his teeth and let out a scream, raising the back of his free hand to his cut face, now streaming with blood. Even then he showed great aplomb and managed to strike out furiously and blindly, almost piercing Alatriste’s buff coat and forcing him to retreat a little.

“Oh, go to hell,” muttered Malatesta. “You and the gold.”

Then he hurled his sword at the captain, hoping to hit his face, scrambled onto the shrouds, and leapt like a shadow into the darkness. Alatriste ran to the gunwale, lashing the air with his blade, but all he could hear was a dull splash in the black waters. And he stood there, stock-still and exhausted, staring stupidly into the dark sea.

“Sorry I’m late, Diego,” said a voice behind him.

Sebastián Copons was at his side, breathing hard, his scarf still tied around his head and his sword in his hand, his face covered in blood as if by a mask. Alatriste nodded, his thoughts still absent.

“Many losses?” asked the captain.

“About half.”

“And Íñigo?”

“Not too bad. A small wound to the chest but no damage to the lung.”

Alatriste nodded again, and continued staring at the sinister black stain of the sea. Behind him, he heard the triumphant shouts of his men, and the screams of the last defenders of the
Niklaasbergen
having their throats cut as they surrendered.

I felt better once I had stanched the flow of blood and the strength returned to my legs. Sebastián Copons had put a makeshift bandage on my wound, and with the help of Bartolo Cagafuego I went to join the others at the foot of the quarterdeck steps. Various men were clearing the deck by throwing corpses overboard, first plundering them for any objects of value they might find. The bodies dropped into the sea with a macabre splash, and I never found out exactly how many of the ship’s crew, Flemish and Spanish, died that night. Fifteen or twenty, possibly more. The others had jumped overboard during the fighting and were swimming or drowning in the wake left by the galleon, which was now heading for the sandbanks, nudged along by a breeze from the northeast.

On the deck, still slippery with blood, lay our own dead. Those of us who had boarded at the stern had borne the brunt. There they lay, motionless, hair disheveled, eyes open or closed, in the precise pose in which the Fates had struck: Sangonera, Mascarúa, El Caballero de Illescas, and the Murcian, Pencho Bullas. Guzmán Ramírez had been lost to the sea, and Andresito el de los Cincuenta was moaning softly as he lay huddled and dying next to a gun carriage, a doublet thrown over him to cover his spilled guts. Less badly wounded were Enríquez el Zurdo, the mulatto Campuzano, and Saramago el Portugués. There was another corpse stretched out on deck, and I stared at it for a while in surprise at the unexpectedness of the sight: the accountant Olmedilla’s eyes remained half open, as if, right up until the last moment, he had kept watch to ensure that his duty to those who paid his salary was duly carried out. He was rather paler than usual, his customary ill-tempered sneer fixed forever beneath the mousy mustache, as if he regretted not having had time to set everything down in ink and in a neat hand on the standard official document. The mask of death made him look more than usually insignificant, very still and very alone. They told me he had boarded along with the group at the prow, clambering over ropes with touching ineptitude, lashing out blindly with a sword he barely knew how to use, and that he had died at once, without a murmur of complaint, and all for some gold that was not his own, for a king whom he had glimpsed only occasionally from afar, who did not know his name, and who would not even have spoken to him had he walked past him in a room.

When Alatriste saw me, he came over and gently touched the wound, then placed one hand on my shoulder. By the light of the lantern I could see that his eyes retained the same absorbed expression as during the fighting, indifferent to everything around us.

“Pleased to see you, lad.”

But I knew this wasn’t true. He might well feel pleased later on, when his pulse had returned to normal and order was restored, but at that moment, his words were mere words. His thoughts were still fixed on Gualterio Malatesta and on the galleon now drifting toward the sandbanks of San Jacinto. He scarcely looked at our dead comrades and gave Olmedilla’s body only the most cursory of glances. Nothing seemed to surprise him, or alter the fact that he was still alive and still had things to do. He dispatched Juan Eslava to the leeward side to report on whether we had yet reached the sandbank or the shallows; he ordered Juan Jaqueta to make sure that no enemies remained hidden on board; and repeated the order that no one, for any reason, should go belowdecks. On pain of death, he said somberly, and Jaqueta, after looking at him hard, nodded. Then, accompanied by Sebastián Copons, Alatriste went down into the bowels of the ship. I would not have missed this for the world, and so I took advantage of my position as my master’s page and followed behind, despite the pain from my wound, and doing my best to make no sudden movements that might make it bleed still more.

Copons was carrying a lantern and a pistol he’d picked up from the deck, and Alatriste had his sword unsheathed. We scoured every berth and hold, but found no one—we saw a table set, with the food untouched on the dozen or so plates—and finally we reached some steps that led down into the darkness. At the bottom was a door closed with a great iron bar and two padlocks. Copons handed me the lantern and went in search of a boarding ax, and it took only a few blows to break down the door. I held the lantern up to light the interior.

“God’s teeth!” murmured Copons.

There were the gold and silver for which we had fought and killed. Stored away like ballast in the hold, the treasure was piled up in various barrels and boxes, all roped securely together. The ingots and bars lining the hold glowed like some extraordinary golden dream. In the distant mines of Peru and Mexico, far from the light of the sun, thousands of Indian slaves, under the lash of the overseer, had ruined their health and lost their lives in order that this precious metal should reach these shores, and all to repay the Empire’s debts, to finance the armies and wars in which Spain was enbroiled with half of Europe, to swell the fortunes of bankers, officials, and unscrupulous aristocrats, and, in this case, to line the pockets of the king himself. The gold bars glinted in Captain Alatriste’s dark pupils and in Copons’s wide eyes. And I watched, fascinated.

“What fools we are, Diego,” said Copons.

And there was no doubt about it, we were fools. I saw the captain slowly nod agreement. We were fools not to hoist the sails—had we known how to do it—and to keep sailing, not toward the sandbanks but out toward the open sea, into waters that bathed shores inhabited by free men, with no master, no god, and no king.

“Holy Mother!” said a voice behind us.

We turned around. El Bravo de los Galeones and the sailor Suárez were standing on the steps, staring at the treasure, slack-jawed with amazement. They were carrying their weapons in their hands and, over their shoulders, sacks into which they had been stashing anything of value they came across.

“What are you doing here?” asked Alatriste.

Anyone who knew him would have taken great care how he answered. El Bravo de los Galeones, however, did not.

“Just having a bit of a walkabout,” he replied brazenly.

The captain smoothed his mustache, his eyes as hard and fixed as glass beads. “I said no one was to come down here.”

“Yeah, well,” said El Bravo dismissively. He was smiling greedily, a fierce look on his scarred, marked face. “And now we know why.”

He was gazing wildly at the glittering treasure. Then he exchanged a glance with Suárez, who had put his sack down on the steps and was scratching his head incredulously, stunned by what lay before him.

“It seems to me, comrade,” said El Bravo de los Galeones, “that we should tell the others about this. That would be a fine trick—”

The word became a mere gurgle in his throat as Alatriste, without warning, stuck his sword through El Bravo’s breast, so quickly that by the time the ruffian had a chance to stare down in stupefaction at the wound inflicted, the blade had already been removed. Mouth agape and uttering an agonized sigh, El Bravo fell forward onto the captain, who pushed him away, leaving him to roll down the steps and land at the very foot of a barrel of silver. When he saw this, Suárez let out a horrified “Dear God!” and instinctively raised the scimitar he was carrying; then he seemed to think better of it, for he turned on his heel and started climbing back up the steps as fast as he could, stifling a scream of terror. And he continued to scream that muffled scream until Sebastián Copons, who had unsheathed his dagger, caught up with him, grabbed his foot, and knocked him down; then, straddling his body, he yanked Suárez’s head up by the hair and deftly cut his throat. I watched this scene, frozen in horror. Not daring to move a muscle, I saw Alatriste wiping the gore from his sword on the prone body of El Bravo, whose blood was now soiling the gold ingots piled up on the floor. Then he did something strange: he spat, as if he had something dirty in his mouth. He spat into the air as if he were making some comment to himself, or like someone uttering a silent oath, and when his eyes met mine, I shuddered, because he was looking at me as if he didn’t know me, and for an instant I was afraid he might kill me as well.

“Watch the stairs,” he said to Copons.

From where he was kneeling beside the inert corpse on which he was cleaning his dagger, Copons nodded. Then Alatriste walked past him, without so much as a glance at the sailor’s dead body, and went back up on deck. I followed him, glad to leave behind me the awful scene in the hold, and once up aloft, I noticed that Alatriste had paused to take a deep breath, as if desperate for the air that had been lacking down below. Then Juan Eslava shouted to us from the gunwale and, almost simultaneously, we felt the keel of the ship grind into the sand. All movement ceased, and the deck listed slightly to one side. The men were pointing at the lights moving on the shore, coming to meet us. The
Niklaasbergen
had run aground in the shallows of San Jacinto.

We went over to the gunwale. There were boats rowing toward us in the dark, and a line of lights was approaching slowly from the end of the spit of sand, where the water beneath the galleon looked bright and clear in the lantern light.

Alatriste glanced at the deck.

“Right, let’s go,” he said to Juan Jaqueta.

The latter hesitated for a moment.

“Where are Suárez and El Bravo?” he asked uneasily. “I’m sorry, Captain, but I couldn’t help it.” He suddenly paused, studying my master’s face in the light near the quarterdeck. “I’m sorry, but to stop them, I’d have had to kill them.”

He fell silent.

“Kill them,” he repeated in soft, bewildered tones.

This sounded more like a question than a statement. But there was no reply. Alatriste was still looking around him.

“It’s time we left the ship,” he said, addressing the men on deck. “Help the wounded off.”

Jaqueta was still watching him. He seemed to be waiting for an answer.

“What happened?” he asked grimly.

“They’re not coming.”

He had turned at last to face Jaqueta, very coldly and calmly. Jaqueta opened his mouth, but said nothing. He stood like that for a moment, then turned to the other men, urging them to obey the captain’s orders. The boats and the lights were coming nearer, and our men began to climb down the rope ladder to the tongue of sand, uncovered by the low tide, on which the galleon had run aground. Bartolo Cagafuego and the mulatto Campuzano, whose head was swathed in a huge bandage like a turban, were carefully helping Enríquez el Zurdo off the ship; El Zurdo was bleeding profusely from a broken nose and had a couple of nasty cuts to his arms. Ginesillo el Lindo, in turn, went to the aid of Saramago, who was limping painfully from a long gash in his thigh.