Arturo Perez-Reverte - The Cavalier in the Yellow Doublet

“Mercy!” he cried, sinking down with one knee on the ground, the other slightly flexed.

The ruffian, who was following behind, was taken by surprise.

“Mercy!” the captain cried again.

Turning around, he just had time to catch the look of scorn in the other man’s eyes. “I thought you had more balls,” that look was saying.

“You mis—” he began.

Even as he was saying this, the man realized he had been tricked; but, momentarily distracted, he was no longer pointing his knife directly at his prisoner, and Alatriste, springing up from his half-kneeling position, was already hurling himself, shoulder first, at the man’s belly. The blow almost dislocated the captain’s shoulder, but he managed to knock the man off his feet. The unfinished word became a roar, and there was a great splashing of mud as the captain, making one fist of his two bound hands, gathered all his strength together to deliver one devastating blow to the man’s face, while the man, in turn, was trying to knife him. Luckily for Alatriste, the knife was quite long; had it been shorter, the man could have knifed him in the ribs there and then. At such close quarters, however, the knife-thrust wasn’t forceful enough to penetrate the captain’s rain-sodden buffcoat and merely slithered off. With one knee the captain pinioned the arm carrying the knife. Despite being bound, he had enough freedom of movement in his hands to grab the man’s jaw and press a thumb into each eye. This was no time for fancy footwork or flourishes or fencing protocol, and so he pressed as hard as he could, mentally counting five, ten, fifteen, until he got to eighteen, and the man let out a yell and stopped struggling. The rain diluted the blood pouring down the face of the fallen man and over the captain’s hands, and the captain, unopposed now, grabbed the knife, placed it point down on the man’s throat and drove it in hard through his neck and into the mud. He held it there, bearing down with the whole weight of his body, trying to restrain the man’s flailing legs, until the man, with a weary sigh that emerged not from his mouth but from the blade stuck in his throat, ceased all movement. Alatriste rolled off and lay on his back in the mud to recover his breath. Then, wrenching the knife from the dead man’s throat, he wedged the handle of the knife between knee and tree trunk and managed to cut the rope binding his hands without severing a vein. While he was doing this, he watched as one of the dead man’s feet began to tremble. “How odd,” he thought, even though he had seen the phenomenon before. Even when a man was dead, it was as if something inside him refused to die.

He pillaged the corpse for anything useful. Sword, knife, pistol. The sword was a good one, from Sahagún, although somewhat shorter than what he was used to. He hurriedly strapped on the leather belt. The hunting knife had a horn handle and was two spans in length; he would have preferred a dagger, but it would do. The pistol probably wouldn’t be much use after the struggle in the mud, but he stuck it in his belt anyway, his hands trembling as the cold took hold of him after all that activity. He gave one last glance at the body: the foot had stopped moving now, and beneath the drumming rain, the blood, like watered-down wine, was spreading all around. The dead man’s clothes were soaked and dirty; they would afford the captain little protection from the cold and so he took only the waxed cape and put it on.

He heard a noise to one side, among the bushes, and unsheathed his sword. The weight of it in his hand was soothing and familiar. “You won’t find it so easy to kill me now,” he said to himself.

I froze. Captain Alatriste was standing before me, with sword in hand, a corpse at his feet, and mud caking his face like a mask. He looked as if he had just emerged from a Flemish marsh, or like a ghost returned from the beyond. He cut short my exclamations of delight and stared at Rafael de Cózar, who had just appeared behind me, splashing through puddles and stepping on branches that snapped as loudly as pistol-shots.

“Good God,” he said, sheathing his sword. “What’s he doing here?”

I explained as briefly as I could, but before I had even finished, the captain had turned and set off, as if he had suddenly lost all interest in my answer.

“Have you given the alarm?” he asked.

“I think so,” I replied, remembering uneasily the coachman’s drunken, bloated face.

“You think so?”

He was striding away into the bushes, and I was following. Behind me I could hear Cózar muttering unintelligibly; sometimes he seemed to be reciting poetry and at others mumbling curses. “Have at ’em,” he would say now and then. “Snip ’em off like a bunch of grapes. Have at ’em! Give them no quarter! Forward for Santiago and Spain!” When we occasionally stopped for the captain to get his bearings, my master would look around, shooting the actor an ill-humored glance before continuing on his way.

From somewhere nearby came the sound of a hunting horn—I thought I had heard it in the distance before we found the captain—and we stood quite still in the rain. The captain raised one finger to his lips, looking first at Cózar and then at me. Then he held out one hand to me, palm down—the silent gesture we used in Flanders to indicate that we should wait while someone else went forward as a scout—and he moved cautiously off into the bushes. I positioned myself very close to the trunk of a tree and made Cózar join me; we stayed there, waiting. Clearly surprised by all these gestures and by the almost military understanding that existed between my master and myself, the actor was about to say something, but I covered his mouth. He nodded sagely, regarding me with a new respect, and I was sure that he would never call me “boy” again. I smiled at him, and he returned my smile. His eyes were bright with excitement. I studied this small, grubby man, dripping water, with his extravagant mustache and his hand ready on his sword. He looked alarmingly fierce, like one of those short, apparently peace-loving men who might suddenly jump up and bite your ear off. Maybe it was just the wine, but Cózar seemed to feel no fear at all. This, I realized, was his finest role. The adventure of a lifetime.

At last the captain returned, as silently as he had left. He looked at me and raised his hand, this time with the palm turned toward me and with his five fingers extended. Five men, I translated mentally. He turned his thumb down: enemies. He then made another gesture, moving his hand from his shoulder to his opposite hip, as if describing a sash, and immediately raised his forefinger. An official, I translated. One. Thumb turned up. A friend. Then I understood who he meant. The red sash was a sign of rank in the army. In that wood, there could be only one high-ranking official.

From the safety of a tree trunk, Diego Alatriste again peered out into the clearing. Twenty paces away, at the foot of a huge oak, was a rock surrounded by a thicket of broom, and next to it stood a young man carrying a gun. He was tall and fair and was wearing a tabard, green breeches, and a peaked hat. His high gaiters were spattered with mud, and he wore no sword at his belt, only a folded pair of gloves and a hunting knife. He was standing very erect and still, with his back to the rock, his head high and one foot slightly in front of the other, as if hoping that such a pose would keep at bay the five men forming a tight semicircle around him.

Alatriste could not hear what the men were saying, only the occasional isolated word, their voices drowned out by the sound of the rain. The man dressed as a huntsman said nothing, and it was Gualterio Malatesta, his black cloak and hat wet and shiny, who did most of the talking. He was the only one who had not yet unsheathed his sword; the others, two of whom were dressed as royal beaters, were standing, swords in hand, on either side of him.