The Sea Beggars (19 page)

“I'm going to wait until he crosses the river, back him up against it, and hack him into little pieces,” said Don Federico curtly. “In the meantime, however, my men have not been paid. Something I hope you mean to rectify.”

“I think,” Alva said, “you would be shrewd not to allow him to cross the river.”

“I can't fight him with a river between us.”

“He outnumbers you by almost two to one.”

“His men are rabble. Mine are Spanish troops. But if they are not paid, they will not fight. When will you have the money here?”

Alva was looking around the camp again. The age betrayed by his hands showed little in his face. His beard was gray and his hair gray, but the hard ledges of his cheekbones and chin and the intensity of his eyes belonged to a man younger than his sixty years. Don Federico tore his envious gaze away and fastened it on the fine order of his campfires. He would be old himself before his father died and left the world to him—old, and out of time.

“Keep him from crossing the river,” Alva said, “and his rabble will become more rabble every day. In the end they will dissolve, like sugar in the rain, without a drop of Spanish blood shed.”

They had come to the central campfire. There a table had been put up, and the cook was standing ready beside it, with a page at his heels carrying a large covered dish. Alva made no effort to dismount. He brushed his mustache back, his attention on the tent, the neat stack of firewood, the careful laying out of camp chairs and tools.

“I've never known you to shrink from the shedding of blood,” said Don Federico, suspicious now. “When will I have the money to pay my troops? Then each one will fight like six of Orange's fools.”

Alva twisted his gray mustache. “I have no money.”

His son hissed between his teeth. That was the meat of the problem.

“When Orange is turned back, and these people in Brussels see there is no hope at all, they will vote me my taxes. In the meantime, the King will send a shipment of silver by sea.”

“Which you expect when?”

Alva's shoulders moved. He let his reins slide; a groom ran up to hold his horse. “When it comes. There is some difficulty with the plate fleet from the Indies.” He dismounted, stepping down away from his son into the darkness, and turned to the table.

Don Federico sat still a moment, staring at the back of his father's head. Things were so simple in battle; one struck and won, or struck and died. The complications that grew up around this simple process infuriated him. Money, and the lack of it; orders, and the reasons for them; policy, and the playing off of cause against cause—none of it meant anything on the battlefield. But now he was to have no battlefield.

“Come and eat,” his father said.

With a growl he dismounted and went to sit at the right hand of the Duke of Alva.

In the drizzle of the next dawn, the Prince of Orange's brother Louis of Nassau led a charge of cavalry across the ford, and before the Spanish army could respond, seized the wood and the little hill to the north of the Spanish camp. The Spanish feinted, as if to attack, but then withdrew, and the Prince could take the rest of his unwieldy army across into the Low Countries.

They marched up the road that led into the heart of the Provinces. The Spanish army moved with them, but ever out of sight, and Orange knew that at the first sign of disorganization in his army the Duke of Alva would attack him. Therefore he sent on his brother and a troop of cavalry to the nearest town of size, to ask for shelter there.

His brother galloped away in the midafternoon; in the evening, as the army was marching down into a narrow valley quilted with fields and vineyards, Louis came back, very red in the face.

“They will not let us in,” he said.

Orange stiffened in his saddle. He was tired and the rapid coming of the night alarmed him, with his men so far from a defensible camp. “What do you mean?”

“They have shut the gates—they say they will not let you in, as you would not let in the Beggars before Antwerp, and anyway most of them are Catholic.”

The soldiers nearest them overheard this exchange, and the word ran off through the army. Orange's fingers tightened around his saddlebow; grimly he felt the lash of retribution in this event.

He faced his brother. “They have the right, I suppose. We must find a campground.”

“Up ahead, near the middle of the valley, there is a village.”

“Will they let us in?” Orange said, with a fine edge of sarcasm in his voice. He gathered his reins and signaled the advance.

His brother fell in beside him. “I say seize the town. We could do it, especially under cover of night.”

“No,” Orange said briefly.

“We need the protection of a wall! You know this rabble will not be able to defend an open camp.”

“No.”

“William, what a scrupulous man you are at the wrong times!”

Orange gave his brother a quick sideways look and kept silent. The darkness was deepening around them; on either side, he knew, the Spanish army lurked.

“Are you going to let a pack of magistrates decide the fate of the Low Countries?” Louis asked, in a hot voice.

“I don't think there's much—”

A yell from the front of the line interrupted him; another yell came, and a horn blasted. Suddenly the troops marching around Orange began to run forward down the road. Up ahead the shouting spread, and there was a scattering of gunfire.

“We're attacked,” Louis cried, and wheeled his horse around to bring up the columns marching behind them. Orange swung his horse out of the line and galloped up toward the front of the army.

There was no sign of the Spaniards. In the dark the road seemed clogged with soldiers and wagons; ahead the army had lost all its order and was streaming forward, every man at his own pace, toward the little village in the middle of the valley. There was another barrage of small arms fire. Someone screamed.

Orange let out a yell; now he realized what was going on, and he spurred his horse recklessly along the side of the road, careless of the people in his way. His men were looting the village.

Some few of the officers in charge of the vanguard had brought their troops to a halt outside the village; it was they who fired off their pistols into the air to keep their men under control. The hot blasts of their guns flashed in the darkness, feeble against the mounting oceanic turbulence of the army that pressed around them, surging forward, all eyes on the helpless village. Orange galloped through their midst. Most of them leapt out of his path; one man reeled off to one side, knocked away by a glancing blow of the charging horse's forehoof, and one went down under Orange's mount and was trampled. As he rode he drew his pistol from its holster on his saddle.

He galloped into the village, a loose straggle of huts laid out along a twisting little street. As he rode in at one end, a hut at the far end exploded into flame. Red gold light flooded the whole village, and he saw at once what was happening.

His men were breaking into the houses and throwing the poor peasants' belongings into the street. The peasants themselves were scattered all through the place, some crouched down beside their dwellings, trying pitifully to hide, and some engaged in trying to protect their homes; these were being struck down as soon as they took a stand in their own doorways. A soldier ran by Orange down the middle of the street, chasing a girl who ran screaming ahead of him, and little children wandered through the flickering hellish light, their howls lost in the deafening roar of the flames and the rampaging soldiers. Orange drew his other pistol.

He rode up to the nearest house, where a brawny peasant with a hoe was fighting off several German mercenaries, and lifting the heavy pistol Orange shot the frontmost of the Germans in the head.

That swung the others toward him. He held out his second pistol at arm's length and fired it into the face of another of his men, and dropping the weapon he drew out his sword. The mercenaries charged toward him. When he lifted the sword they wheeled around and raced off down the street.

A trumpet blasted. A column of mounted men was pushing into the village. Orange wheeled his horse, ready to block the cavalry's way, and saw his brother leading them. With a broad gesture of his arm he urged the horsemen after him and galloped on through the village, attacking the looters.

The mercenaries were no more willing to fight now than they had ever been. At the first sign of Louis' cavalry they scattered and fled into the safety of the darkness outside the village. Orange rode up and down the street, grimly watching the peasants collect their families and gather together what of their belongings they could find intact. The women wept, standing together in groups to console one another; a young man walked along the center of the street, his face lifted toward Heaven, and his arms full of a trampled child. Louis and his men put out the fire, but the hut was entirely consumed, and several of the other buildings had lost their roofs. Orange stopped at the hut where he had shot the mercenaries and dismounted to retrieve his pistol.

When he straightened, the heavy gun in his hand, a tall old man with a beard rushed up to him.

“Get out!” he cried. “Get out! Go!” He waved his arms at Orange as if he were shooing off chickens. “Go away!”

Orange turned to his horse and mounted; he touched his hat to the old man. “As you wish.” Swiftly he scanned the darkness outside the village, wondering where the Spanish were, and went to find his brother and his brother's trumpeter.

Alva stood in his stirrups. “They are marching toward France.”

Don Federico trotted his horse up beside him; they had come out ahead of their army to this tall hill to see what Orange was doing, when the scouts said he had abandoned his road along the river and was heading south. Alva settled down into his saddle again, smiling. Orange's army was veering off into the tree-masked hills, taking the road south.

“Well, very good,” he said. “I think they are giving up.”

His son said nothing. He knew his son had wanted a battle, but Don Federico had no understanding of the wider nature of the struggle and could be expected to do only the obvious. Alva reached out and clapped the younger man on the shoulder.

“Follow him. Make sure they don't turn back and try to sneak into my Provinces again. I'm going back to Brussels; I have work to do there.”

“Why is he leaving?” Don Federico burst out. “He hasn't been beaten yet.”

“Because he has a heart of feathers,” said Alva. “He will give up when the way gets hard. That's the sort of man he is. I know him. Now follow him and be sure he goes on into France. I don't care what he does there: I hope he makes a lot of trouble for the Dowager, that's all.”

“And you are going back to Brussels,” said Don Federico. “When will you send me the money to pay my troops?”

“When it comes,” Alva said. He smoothed his beard, smiling. “Be patient. The King will send it soon enough, and I will raise my taxes, and we shall have everything firmly in hand.”

7

“Fire!” Pieter roared.

Jan said nothing; with the burning match in his hand he hovered over the waist gun, his gaze pinned to the Spanish merchantman wallowing in the sluggish surf a cable length away.

“Fire, damn you!” Pieter brought the flat of his stick down on Jan's back.

“Shut up, Uncle,” Jan cried, and as he spoke the next onshore wave rolled under the
Wayward Girl
and lifted her until the dark hulk of the Spanish ship fit square in the notch of the culverin's sights. He put the match to the touchhole. With a hiss and a hellish whiff of sulfur the flame shot away into the brass backside of the cannon and an instant later the great gun bellowed its deafening smoky thunder.

The smoke swirled in around the gun. Jan and the two men working with him jumped forward to drag the monster back inboard to be loaded. From the masthead of the
Wayward Girl
came a cheer.

“Got the other mast! Round as a barrel, she is!”

All around the ship the other men roared and cursed and cheered. Pieter whacked Jan on the rump, this time congratulatory.

“Doomshot! That's my nephew.”

Jan with his own hands swabbed the culverin's barrel with a sponge on a staff. He let other people fire the fore and aft guns but he had fallen in love with this waist gun and could hardly bear to let anyone else handle her. Mouse was waiting with the charge. Half-witted though he was, the puny boy was useful for some things. Jan nodded to him and watched while the boy stroked the heavy flannel packet with the gunpowder deep down the gun's long throat.

That done, Jan lifted his eyes to the target.

The
Wayward Girl
rolled and thrashed in the trough of the waves, just outside the surf. Halfway between her and the rocky English beach where the water ended, the Spanish merchantman struggled with the pounding waves.

She had lost one mast in a storm the night before, or the
Wayward Girl
would never have dared take on so huge a ship, three times her weight, carrying over a hundred men. Some of those men were creeping around on the deck, which pitched and bucked with every surging crosswave of the surf; while Jan watched, a few more of the Spanish seamen leapt overboard into the water, to try to swim to shore. Most of the crew clung to the rails and screamed with every wild corkscrew motion of their vessel. Without a mast or a shred of sail to hold her upright, the Spanish ship could roll completely over at any moment.

“She'll run aground any time now,” Pieter said. He stuck his thumb into his belt and squinted toward their target. “Once she does, the sea will break her up. We have to get her out where we can loot her. Let's pound her again. Maybe the rest of the crew will jump for it.”

Jan muttered, “Would you?” He jabbed his hand toward the shingle beach beyond the surf.