“It is time,” said Diego Alatriste.
He was crouched at the entrance of the main tunnel with his band, and Captain Bragado was watching from a short distance away in the sap, kneeling with the rest of Alatriste’s squad and a dozen more from his bandera, ready to lend a hand if the occasion demanded. Alatriste was accompanied by Mendieta, Copons, Garrote, the Galician Rivas, and the two Olivares brothers. Manuel Rivas was an extremely trustworthy and courageous youth, a fine-boned, blue-eyed lad who spoke a less-than-exemplary Spanish with the strong accent of Finisterre. As for the Olivareses, they looked like twins, though they weren’t. They had very similar features, with Gypsy-like faces and hair, and thick black beards edging up to generous Semitic noses that from a league away shouted the presence of great-grandparents who would have balked at eating bacon. That mattered not one whit to their comrades, for questions of purity of blood never arose in the tercios; it was believed that if a man spilled his blood in battle, that blood had circulated through pure hidalgo veins. The two brothers were always together: They slept back to back, shared every last crumb of bread, and watched out for each other in battle.
“Who will go first?” asked Alatriste.
Garrote did not step forward, apparently absorbed in running his finger along the edge of his dagger blade. Pale, and with a grimace, Rivas made as if to move forward, but Copons, economical as usual in both actions and words, picked up some straws from the ground and offered them to his comrades. It was Mendieta who drew the shortest. He looked at it for a long time and then without a word adjusted his dagger, laid his hat and sword on the ground, picked up the small primed pistol Alatriste handed him, and entered the tunnel, carrying a short, very sharp spade in the other hand. Behind him went Alatriste and Copons, they too removing hats and swords and tightening their leather buffcoats. The others followed in single file as Bragado and those staying behind watched in silence.
The beginning of the main gallery was lit by a pitch torch, its oily light illuminating the sweat on the naked torsos of the German sappers who had taken a break in their labors and were leaning on their picks and spades as they watched the men pass. The Germans were as good at digging as they were at fighting, especially when they were sober and well paid. Even their women, who, laden like mules, were coming and going with provisions from the camp, did their part by carrying large baskets and tools. Their corporal, a red-bearded fellow with arms like Alpujarras hams, guided the group through the labyrinth of passages. The tunnel grew lower and narrower the closer they came to the Dutch lines. Finally the sapper stopped at the mouth of a caponniere no more than three feet high. Light from a hanging oil lamp fell on a slow fuse that disappeared into the darkness, sinister as a black serpent.
“Eine vara, one,” said the German, indicating with spread hands the width of the earthen wall that separated the end of the caponniere from the Dutch passageway.
Alatriste nodded, and they all moved away from the opening, backs against the wall as they knotted kerchiefs around their faces to protect mouths and noses. The German gave them a big smile.
“Zum Teufel!” he said. Then he picked up the lantern and lit the fuse.
Bones. The tunnel ran beneath The Cemetery, and now bones were dropping down everywhere, mixed with earth. Long bones and short, fleshless skulls, tibias, vertebrae. Whole skeletons shrouded in torn and dirty winding sheets, clothing reduced to shreds by time. These remnants were mixed with dust and rubble, rotted splinters of coffins, fragments of headstones, and a nauseating stench flooded the caponniere. After the explosion, Diego Alatriste and the other men started to crawl toward the breach, crossing paths with rats squealing in terror. There was an opening to the sky that allowed a little light and air to filter through, and they passed beneath that pale glimmer, veiled in the smoke of burnt powder, before entering the shadows on the other side, the source of moans and cries in foreign voices. Alatriste was wet with sweat beneath his buffcoat, and his mouth was dry and gritty behind the protective kerchief. He dragged himself forward on his elbows. Something round rolled toward him, pushed by the feet of the man ahead of him; it was a human skull. The rest of a skeleton shattered from its coffin by the explosion and the subsequent collapse shifted beneath his arms as he pulled himself over the remains and splintered bones scraped his thighs.
He was not thinking. He crawled along inch by inch, jaws clenched and eyes closed to keep out the dirt, barely able to breathe. He felt nothing. Muscles knotted with tension were indifferent to any purpose other than to allow him to emerge alive from that journey through the kingdom of the dead and permit him to see the light of day once more. During those moments, his consciousness registered no sensation but the diligent repetition of the mechanical, professional acts of soldiering. He was resigned to the inevitable, and that drove him forward, that and the fact that one comrade was in front of him and another followed at his heels. That was the place Fate had assigned him on this earth—or, to be more precise, beneath it—and nothing he could think or feel was going to change it. Absurd, therefore, to waste time and concentration on anything other than dragging himself along with his pistol in one hand and dagger in the other, and all for no reason but to repeat the macabre ritual men have repeated through the centuries: killing to stay alive. Beyond such beautiful simplicity, nothing had meaning. His king and his country—whatever the true country of Captain Alatriste might be—were too far away from that subterranean hell to matter, too far from that blackness at whose end he continued to hear, ever closer, the laments of the Dutch sappers who had been caught by the explosion. There was no doubt that Mendieta had reached them, because now Alatriste could hear muffled blows, the slicing and cracking of flesh and bones dealt by the short-handled spade, which, according to the sounds, the Biscayan was swinging freely.
Beyond the rubble, the bones, and the dust, the caponniere widened into a larger space. It was the Dutch tunnel, now a scene of shadowy pandemonium. Still burning in a corner was the wick of a tallow lantern that was about to go out; it gave off a dim reddish light, barely enough to suggest the vague outlines of the shadows moaning nearby. Alatriste rolled out of the caponniere onto his knees, stuffed his pistol into his belt, and felt around with his free hand. Mendieta was wielding his spade without mercy, and a Dutch voice suddenly erupted in howls. Someone stumbled from the mouth of the caponniere onto the captain’s back; he could hear his comrades arriving one after the other. A pistol shot briefly lit the area, revealing bodies dragging themselves across the ground or lying motionless. The same fleeting flash illuminated Mendieta’s spade, red with blood.
A current of air from the depths of the Dutch tunnel was blowing dust and smoke toward the caponniere, and Alatriste cautiously felt his way toward it. He bumped into something alive, alive enough that a Flemish curse preceded the flash of a shot that nearly blinded the captain and singed the hairs on his face. He lunged forward, grabbed his adversary, and slashed twice, up and across, meeting only air, and then another two slashes forward, the second finding flesh. He heard a scream and then the sound of a body scrabbling away; in a second, Alatriste was after him, guided by the fleeing man’s cries of pain. He trapped him finally, catching him by the foot, and drove his dagger from that foot upward, again and again, until his prey ceased to shout or move.