Arturo Perez-Reverte - The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

“He’s a very brave lad, Captain. You should be proud of him, and I can assure you that I, too, hope he gets out of this all right.”

“So do I. Then, one day, he can kill you.”

Malatesta was about to go over and join his men, leaving one to guard Alatriste.

“Yes, perhaps,” he said. Then he turned around and once more fixed Alatriste with his dark eyes. “As with you, someone will have to kill me sometime.”

It was drizzling harder now, drenching our faces. With the two mules almost at a gallop, the carriage was clattering along toward La Fresneda beneath the gray sky and past the dark poplars flanking the road. We had found the driver lying on one of the seats inside the carriage, sleeping off the effects of the wine he had drunk, which was why Rafael de Cózar, his sword tucked in his belt, was the one now holding the reins and urging on the mules. Cózar was not entirely sober himself, but the activity, the cooling rain, and a kind of obscure determination that seemed lately to have taken hold of him, were all helping to dissipate the vinous vapors. He was racing along in the carriage, urging the mules on with shouts and lashes of the whip, and I could not help but ask myself uneasily if this speed was a tribute to his skill as a driver or merely the irresponsible behavior of a drunkard. Whatever the truth of the matter, the carriage seemed positively to fly. I was sitting beside Cózar, wrapped in the coachman’s cloak, hanging on as best I could, ready to throw myself off if we overturned. I closed my eyes each time the actor took a bend in the road, or when the mules or the lurchings of the carriage spattered us with mud.

I was just pondering what I was going to say or do in La Fresneda, when we left behind us the lead-gray smudge of the lake—glimpsed through the branches of the trees—and I saw, still far off, the stepped Flemish roof of the royal hunting lodge. At that point, the road forked, and the left fork led into the leafy wood; when I looked down that path, I saw a mule and four horses half hidden round a bend. I pointed this out to Cózar, who pulled so violently on the reins that one of the mules almost bolted and the carriage nearly overturned. I jumped down from the seat, cautiously looking all around. The dawn was far advanced now, although, beneath the rain-laden sky, the countryside still looked dark. Perhaps, I thought fearfully, there was nothing to be done and going to the hunting lodge itself would be a waste of time. I was still hesitating when Cózar took the decision for us both: he, too, jumped from the driver’s seat, but fell face first into an enormous puddle, got up, shook himself, then, tripping over his own sword, fell in again. He got to his feet, cursing angrily. His face was covered in mud, filthy water was dripping from his side whiskers and mustache, and yet his eyes were shining. For some strange reason, for all his cursing, he seemed to be enjoying himself hugely.

“Have at ’em,” he said, “whoever they are.”

I took my borrowed cloak and picked up the coachman’s sword, for the coachman had, during that rackety journey, slid to the floor of the carriage and lay there, snoring like a baby. The sword was of very poor quality, but that and my dagger were better than nothing, and there was no time to lose. Utter confidence, Captain Bragado used to say in Flanders, was dangerous when discussing any preliminary plan of attack, but vital at the moment of execution. And that moment had arrived. I indicated the horses tethered to the trees.

“I’m going to take a look. You go to the lodge and ask for help.”

“Certainly not, my boy. I wouldn’t miss this for anything in the world. We’re in it together.”

Cózar seemed a different man, and he probably was. Even his tone of voice was not the same. I wondered what role he was playing. He suddenly went over to the coachman, who was still asleep in the carriage, and started slapping him so hard that the noise startled the mules.

“Wake up, you fool!” he demanded with all the authority of a duke. “Spain needs you.”

A moment later, the coachman—still dazed and, I imagine, suspecting that his master was not quite right in the head—was cracking the whip and driving on to La Fresneda to give the alarm. He seemed a rather dim-witted fellow, and so Cózar, in order not to complicate matters further, had given him some very elementary instructions: “Go to the hunting lodge, kick up a fuss, and bring as many people back here with you as you can. Explanations will follow.

“If, of course, we live to provide them,” he added dramatically, for my benefit.

Then he solemnly folded back his cloak, adjusted his sword, and set off into the woods, a small, determined figure. A few paces later, he tripped over his sword again and fell face forward into the mud.

“God save me,” he said from where he lay on the ground, “I’ll pickle the next man who pushes me.”

I helped him up, and he once again brushed down his clothes. “I just hope the coachman can convince the people at La Fresneda,” I thought despairingly. “Or that the captain, wherever he is, can sort things out alone. Because if everything depends on Cózar and me, Spain will be left without a king just as sure as I was left without a father.”

The hunting horn sounded again. Still sitting with his back to the tree trunk, Diego Alatriste noticed the man guarding him turn in the direction from which the sound had come. He was the same short, bearded, broad-shouldered fellow he had seen at the staging post at Galapagar before the ambush. He was also, it seemed, a man of few words and had not moved since Malatesta left, standing motionless beneath the increasingly heavy rain, with only a short waxed cape as protection. As Alatriste could appreciate better than anyone, the fellow was clearly accustomed to this life, the kind of man to whom you say: stay there, kill, die, and who will carry out those orders without a murmur; the kind of man who could be a hero when it came to attacking a Flemish bastion or a Turkish galley, or a murderer when it came to private matters. There was no easy way of drawing a line between the two. It all depended on how the dice fell—the dice of life—or on whether you were dealt the seven of clubs or the whore of hearts.

When the sound of the horn had died away, the ruffian rubbed the back of his neck and glanced at his prisoner. Then he came over to him and looked at him dully for a moment before unsheathing his knife. With his bound hands in his lap, Alatriste rested his head back against the trunk of the tree, keeping his eyes fixed on the blade. He felt an unpleasant tingling in his groin. Perhaps, he thought, Malatesta had changed his mind and was delegating the task to his subordinate. What a grubby way to die, sitting in the mud, tied hand and foot, his throat slit like a pig’s, and with a long future ahead of him in the history books as an exemplary regicide. Shit.

“If you try to escape,” warned the man dispassionately, “I’ll pin you to that tree.”

Alatriste blinked away the rain running down his face. Apparently the fellow had other plans. Instead of slitting his throat, the man was cutting the ropes binding his ankles.

“Get up,” the man said, giving him a shove.

The captain got to his feet, the other man never once taking his eyes off him and keeping the blade only an inch from his throat. He gave the captain another shove.

“Come on.”

Alatriste finally understood. They were not going to kill him now only to have to drag his corpse over to the king’s body, leaving tracks in the mud and the scrub. He would simply have to walk to the site of that double execution, measuring out, step by step, what was left of his time and his life. It occurred to him, on the other hand, that this was also an opportunity, his very last. After all, as things stood, he might as well consider himself dead and buried, so anything else was a bonus.