The Sun Over Breda

I do battle out of need,and once seated in the saddle,Castile grows ever vasterbeneath the hoofbeats of my steed.

So. The fact is that we were still there and would continue thus for several years more, enlarging Castile with the blades of our swords or as God and the devil had taught us in Oudkerk. The banner of our company was flying from the balcony of a house in the square, and my comrade, Jaime Correas, who was a mochilero in the squad of Second Lieutenant Coto, went there to look for his people. I went on a bit farther, past the front of the city hall to escape the terrible heat of the fire, and as I rounded the building I saw two individuals piling up the books and documents they were carrying out of the door as fast as they could. What they were doing did not appear to be pillaging—it would be rare in the midst of widespread sacking for anyone to bother about books—but instead they seemed to be rescuing what they could from the fire. I went to take a closer look. Your Mercies may recall that I had some experience of the written word from my days in la Villa y Corte de las Españas, that is, Madrid, owing to my friendship with don Francisco de Quevedo, who had given me Plutarch to read; Dómine Pérez’s lessons in Latin and grammar; my taste for Lope’s theater; and my master Captain Alatriste’s habit of reading wherever there was a book to be read.

One of the men carrying books out and piling them in the street was an elderly Dutchman with long white hair. He was wearing black, as pastors there did, with a dirty collar and gray hose. He did not, however, appear to be a religious man, if one may call those who preach the doctrines of that heretic Calvin religious—may lightning strike the whoreson in hell or wherever he may be stewing. In the end, I took him to be a secretary or city official trying to rescue books from the conflagration. I would have passed right by had I not noticed that the other individual, staggering through the smoke with his arms filled with books, wore the red band of the Spanish soldiers. He was a young man, bareheaded, and his face was covered with sweat and soot, as if he had already made many trips into the depths of the blazing inferno the building had become. A sword swung from his baldric, and he was wearing high boots blackened from charred wood and debris. He seemed to give little importance to the smoking sleeve of his doublet, not even when, finally noticing it as he set his load of books on the ground, he put it out with a couple of distracted swipes. At that moment he looked up and saw me. He had a thin, angular face and a trim chestnut-brown mustache that flowed into a short pear-shaped beard beneath his lower lip. I judged him to be between twenty and twenty-five years old.

“You could give me a hand,” he grunted, when he noticed the faded aspa, the red Saint Andrew’s cross, I wore sewn to my doublet, “instead of standing there gawking.”

He glanced toward the columns of the square, where a few women and children were taking in the scene, and wiped the sweat from his face with the singed sleeve.

“God help me,” he said, “but I am burning with thirst.”

He turned and, accompanied by the fellow in black, ran back to search for more books. After considering the situation for an instant, I raced to the nearest house, where a frightened Dutch family was watching with curiosity in front of a door that had been battered off its hinges.

“Drinken,” I said, holding out my two pewter jugs. I pantomimed drinking and then clapped one hand to the hilt of my dagger. The Dutch understood both word and gesture, for they filled the jugs with water, and I returned to where the two men were stacking books from another foray. When they saw the jugs, they dispatched the contents without taking a breath. Before plunging once more into the smoke, the Spaniard turned to me.

“Thank you,” he said very simply.