The King's Gold by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page B

kept in his pouch, and when he had replaced his sword in its sheath, he walked on in silence, occupied in thoughts impossible to penetrate. And I walked along beside him, carrying the constable’s sword and feeling as proud as don Quixote.

4. THE QUEEN’S MAID OF HONOR
    Diego Alatriste was waiting, leaning against a wall, amongst pots of geraniums and basil, in the shade of a porchway in Calle del Mesón del Moro. Without his cloak, but with his hat on, his sword and dagger in his belt, and his doublet open over a clean, neatly darned shirt, he was intently watching the house of the Genoese merchant Garaffa. The house was almost at the gates of the old Jewish quarter in Seville, near the convent of the Discalced Carmelites and the old Doña Elvira playhouse, and it was very quiet at that hour, with few passersby and only the occasional woman sweeping the entrance to her house or watering her plants. In earlier days, when he was serving as a soldier on the king’s galleys, Alatriste had often visited that quarter, never imagining that, later on, when he returned from Italy in the year sixteen hundred sixteen, he would spend a long time there, most of it in the company of ruffians and other people quick to draw their swords, in the famous Cathedral courtyard, the Patio de los Naranjos, which was a meeting place for the boldest and most cunning of Seville’s criminal class. After the repression of the Moriscos in Valencia, as you may perhaps remember, the captain had asked to leave his regiment in order to enlist as a soldier in Naples—“where,” he reasoned, “if I have to slit the throats of infidels, they will at least be able to defend themselves”—and he remained embarked until the naval battle of sixteen hundred fifteen, when, after a devastating raid on the Turkish coast with five galleys and more than a thousand comrades, he and his fellow soldiers returned to Italy with plenty of plunder and he led a life of pleasure in Naples. This ended as such things tend to end in youth, with a woman and another man, with a mark on the face for the woman and a sword thrust for the man, and Diego Alatriste fleeing Naples thanks to the help of his old friend Captain don Alonso de Contreras, who stowed him away on a galley bound for Sanlúcar and Seville. And that was how, before he moved on to Madrid, this former soldier came to earn his living as a paid swordsman in Seville, that Babylon and breeding ground for all vices, taking refuge by day among ruffians and scoundrels in the famous Cathedral courtyard and by night sallying forth to carry out the duties of his profession, one in which any man with courage and a good sword, and with sufficient luck and skill, could easily earn his daily bread. Such legendary ruffians as Gonzalo Xeniz, Gayoso, Ahumada, and the great Pedro Vázquez de Escamilla—who recognized only one kind of king, the king in the deck of cards—they were all long gone, undone by a knife thrust or by the disease of the noose, for in work such as theirs, finding oneself strung up by the neck was a highly contagious complaint. However, in the Patio de los Naranjos and in the royal prison, where he also took up temporary residence with some regularity, Alatriste had met many a worthy successor to such historic rogues, experts in how to stab, cut, and slash, although he, too, soon made a name for himself in that illustrious brotherhood, skilled as he was in the sword thrust perfected by the celebrated ruffian Gayona, as well as in many others proper to his art.
    He was recalling all this now with a pang of nostalgia, less perhaps for the past than for his lost youth, and he was doing so not a stone’s throw from the very playhouse where, as a young man, he had grown to love the plays of Lope, Tirso de Molina, and others—there he saw for the first time The Dog in the Manger and The Shy Man at the Palace —on nights that opened with poetry and staged fights and closed with taverns, wine, complaisant