I found nothing worth the search. I stopped a moment to relieve myself against the wall and was buttoning my trousers when something stopped me short. I held my breath an instant, listening, and then I heard it again. It was a prolonged moan, a weak lament coming from the far end of a narrow corridor filled with debris. I might have thought it was an animal in pain except that from time to time I could hear a human timbre. So, quietly, I unsheathed my dagger—in such a narrow space my newly acquired sword was not manageable—and, back to the wall, I slipped closer to find out what it was.
There was enough light from the fires outside to light half the room, projecting shadows with reddish outlines onto a wall covered with a slashed tapestry. Beneath that hanging, propped in the niche between the wall and a battered armoire, slumped a man. The light glinting from his breastplate confirmed that he was a soldier and illuminated a long, blond, tangled head of hair filthy with mud and blood, very pale eyes, and a terrible burn that had left one whole side of his face raw. He was motionless, his eyes staring into the light coming through the window, and from his half-opened lips issued the lament I had heard from the corridor: a hushed, constant moaning interrupted at times by incomprehensible words spoken in a strange tongue.
I crept toward him, cautious, still holding the dagger and watching his hands to ascertain whether he was holding a weapon, though that poor wretch was not in any condition to hold a thing. He looked like a traveler sitting by the shore of the Styx, someone the boatman Charon had left behind, forgotten, on his last crossing. I crouched down beside him, examining him with curiosity; he seemed not to be aware I was there. He kept staring toward the window, motionless, uttering that interminable keening, those fragmented, unrecognizable words, even when I touched his arm with the tip of my dagger. His face was a frightening representation of Janus: one side reasonably intact, the other a pudding of raw flesh glittering with droplets of blood. His hands, too, had been burned. I had seen several dead Hollanders in the flaming stables at the back of the house, and I surmised that this man, wounded in the skirmish, had dragged himself through the smoldering embers to take refuge here.
“Flamink?” I asked.
There was no answer but his endless groans. I concluded that he was a young man, not much older than I, and by the breastplate and clothing, was one of the soldiers from the Light Horse that had charged us that morning near the Ruyter mill. Perhaps we had fought near each other when the Dutch and English attempted to break through our formation and we Spaniards desperately fought for our lives. War, I reasoned, took strange twists and turns, curious swings of fortune. Nevertheless, with the horror of the day behind me and the Dutch on the run, I felt neither hostility nor rancor. I had seen many Spaniards die that day but even more enemies. At the moment, the scales were balanced; this was a defenseless man, and I was sated with blood, so I put away my dagger and went outside to Captain Alatriste and the others.
“There is a man inside,” I said. “A soldier.”
The captain, who had not changed position since I left, scarcely bothered to look up.
“Spanish or Dutch?”
“Dutch, I think. Or English. And he’s wounded.”
Alatriste nodded slowly, as if at this hour of the night it would have been strange to come across a heretic alive and in good health. Then he shrugged his shoulders, as if asking me why I had come to tell him this.
“I thought,” I suggested, “that we might help him.”
At last he looked at me, and he did so very slowly; in the firelight I watched his head turn toward me.
“You thought,” he murmured.
“Yes.”
For another moment he said nothing, just stared at me. Then he half-turned toward Sebastián Copons, still by his side, head against the wall, mouth closed, the bloody kerchief loose around his neck. Alatriste exchanged a glance with him and then looked back toward me. In the long silence I heard the flames crackling.
“You thought,” he repeated, absorbed.
Painfully he got to his feet, as if he were numb all over and it cost him to his very bones to move an inch. He seemed reluctant and very weary. I watched Copons get up and join him.
“Where is he?”
“In the house.”
I led them through the rooms and down the corridor to the back. The heretic was still propped between the armoire and the wall. Alatriste stopped on the threshold and looked around before going over to him. He bent down a little and observed him.
“He is Dutch,” he concluded finally.
“Can we help him?” I asked.
Captain Alatriste’s shadow on the wall did not move.
“Of course.”
I felt Sebastián Copons pass by me. His boots shuffled through the broken crockery on the floor as he approached the wounded man. Then Alatriste came over to me and Copons reached toward the sheath over his kidneys and pulled out his vizcaína.
“Let’s go,” the captain said.
Stupefied, I resisted the pressure of his hand on my shoulder as I watched Copons place his dagger to the neck of the Dutch soldier and slit his throat from ear to ear. Shaking, I raised my eyes toward Alatriste’s dark face. I could not see his eyes, though I knew they were on me.
“H-h-he was…” I stammered.
Then I stopped, for words suddenly seemed pointless. With an involuntary gesture of rejection, I shook the captain’s hand from my shoulder, but he kept it there, holding on like an iron clamp. Copons stood up and, after cleaning the blade of his dagger on the victim’s clothing, replaced it in its sheath. Then he went out into the corridor before I could even blink.
I turned brusquely, feeling my shoulder at last free. I took two steps toward the young man who was now dead. Nothing about the scene had changed, except that his lament had ceased and a dark, thick, shining veil had descended from the gorget of his armor, the red blending with the splendor of the firelight at the window. He seemed more alone than before, a solitude so pitiable that I felt an intense, deep pain, as if it were I, or part of me, who was sitting on that floor, back against the wall, eyes fixed and open, staring at the night. I know, I thought, that someone somewhere is waiting for the return of this man who won’t be going anywhere. Perhaps a mother, a sweetheart, a sister, or a father is praying for him, for his health, for his life, for his return. And there may be a bed where he slept as a boy and a landscape he watched grow and change. And no one there knows he is dead.