“I’ll see you again, Martín,” said Alatriste.
He took Saldaña’s second pistol and stuck it in his belt. Then he kicked open the carriage door and jumped out, a pistol in his right hand and a sword in his left. “I just hope my wounded leg doesn’t let me down,” he thought. A catchpole was already there, shouting to his comrades that the prisoner was trying to escape. The man was holding a torch and struggling, single-handed, to unsheathe his sword, and so, without thinking twice, Alatriste shot him point-blank in the chest; the blast lit up the man’s face as it hurled him backward into the shadows. Alatriste’s military instinct alerted him to the smell of a harquebus lit and ready to fire. Its owner was on the coachman’s seat; there was no time to lose. He threw down the discharged pistol and took out the second one in order to shoot the man above. At that moment, however, another catchpole came running toward him, brandishing a sword. Alatriste had to choose. He pointed the pistol and stopped the running man in his tracks. The man was still clinging to a wheel of the carriage for support as Alatriste raced to the edge of the road and hurled himself down the slope that led to the stream and the river. Two men made as if to follow him, and a shot from a harquebus blazed forth from on top of the carriage: the bullet whistled past him and was lost in the darkness. He scrambled to his feet among the undergrowth, his face and hands all scratched, ready to start running again despite his painful leg, but his pursuers were on him already. Two black shapes came panting and stumbling their way through the bushes, shouting: “Halt! Halt! Give yourself up in the name of the king!” Two of them at once and so near as well. He had no alternative but to turn and face them, his sword at the ready; and when the first one reached him, he did not wait, but lunged straight at him, driving his blade into the man’s chest. The catchpole screamed and fell to the ground, while the other man hung back, prudently. Alatriste could see several more torches approaching down the path now. He set off running into the darkness, downhill, keeping close to the trees, guided by the sound of the nearby river. He found himself at last in the reedbeds and felt the mud beneath his boots. Luckily, the river was still full after the recent rains. He stuck his sword in his belt, waded in until the water was shoulder high, and then let himself be carried along by the current.
He swam downriver as far as the little islands, and from there returned to the shore. He walked through the reedbeds, splashing through the mud, until he was nearly at the Segovia bridge. He rested awhile to recover his breath, tied a handkerchief around the wound in his thigh, and then, shivering in his drenched clothes—he had lost cloak and hat in the scuffle—passed underneath the stone arches, avoiding the sentry box at the Puerta de Segovia. From there he walked slowly up to the heights of San Francisco, where, via a small stream that was used as a kind of drain, he could enter the city unseen. At that hour, he thought, there would be a swarm of constables out looking for him. He obviously couldn’t go back to the Inn of the Turk, nor to Juan Vicuña’s place. Taking refuge in a church would serve no purpose either, not even with Master Pérez’s Jesuit brethren. In any matter involving a king, Saint Peter’s jurisdiction was no match for that of the sword. His one chance lay in the poorest areas, where royal justice would not dare to venture at that hour of the night, and even during the day would do so only in a large band. Taking shelter in the shadows, he cautiously made his way as far as Plaza de la Cebada, and from there—taking the very narrowest of streets, and hurrying across the broader thoroughfares of Calle de Embajadores and Calle del Mesón de Paredes—he got as far as the fountain of Lavapiés, where Madrid’s lowest inns and taverns and bawdy houses were to be found. He needed a place where he could hide away and think—he found Gualterio Malatesta’s presence in Camino de las Minillas disconcerting in the extreme—but he had not a single doubloon with which to pay for such a haven. He mentally reviewed the friends he had in that area, weighing up which of them would be loyal enough not to betray him for thirty pieces of silver when a price was put on his head the next day. Immersed in these black thoughts, he turned and walked as far as Calle de la Comadre, where, at the door of the various whorehouses, lit by the torches and the little lanterns in the hallways, half a dozen prostitutes were plying their sad trade. Then he said to himself: “Perhaps God does exist and doesn’t merely content himself with watching from afar while chance or the devil play fast and loose with mankind.” For who should he see outside one of the taverns, slapping a whore about the face and looking every inch the ruffian, with the brim of his hat pulled down over one bushy eyebrow, but Bartolo Cagafuego.
7. THE FENCER’S ARMS
Don Francisco de Quevedo angrily threw down his cloak and hat on a stool and unfastened his ruff. The news could not be worse. “There’s nothing to be done,” he said, unbuckling his sword. “Guadalmedina refuses even to talk about the matter.”
I stared out of the window. The threatening, gray clouds filling the Madrid sky above the rooftops of Calle del Niño made everything seem even grimmer. Don Francisco had spent two hours with Guadalmedina, trying, unsuccessfully, to convince the king’s confidant of Captain Alatriste’s innocence. Álvaro de la Marca had said that even if Alatriste were the victim of a conspiracy, his flight from justice had complicated everything. Quite apart from killing two catchpoles and badly wounding a third, he had left Saldaña with a broken nose and inflicted further injuries on the count himself. “In short,” concluded don Francisco, “he’s determined to see him hanged.”
“But they were friends,” I protested.
“No friendship could withstand this. Furthermore, this really is a very strange affair.”
“I hope at least you believe his story.”
The poet sat down in the armchair made of walnut in which the late Duke of Osuna used to sit when he visited the house. On the table next to it lay paper and quills, a copper inkwell and sandbox, as well as a snuffbox and several books, among them a Seneca and a Plutarch.
“If I didn’t believe the captain,” he said, “I wouldn’t have gone to see Guadalmedina.”
He stretched out his legs and crossed his ankles. He was looking abstractedly at a sheet of paper, the top half of which bore his own clear, vigorous handwriting—the first four lines of a sonnet which I had read while I was waiting.
He that denies me what’s only gained by stealth
Acts quite rightly and deprives me of nothing,
For low ambition, brought to pass with loathing,
Brings with it much dishonor, naught of wealth.
I went over to where don Francisco kept his wine—a sideboard decorated with a frieze made of squares of green glass, beneath a painting depicting Troy ablaze—and poured a large glass of wine. Don Francisco took a pinch of the snuff. He was not a great smoker, but he was fond of that powder made from leaves brought from the Indies.
“I’ve known your master for a long time, my boy,” he went on. “He may be stubborn, he may sometimes go too far, but I know he would never raise his hand against the king.”
“The count knows him too,” I said, handing him the glass.