The Pirates of the Levant by Arturo Pérez-Reverte Page A

adult Moors, who would add a few maravedies to our share of the booty. Anyway, this boy was walking alongside a mule on which a dozen heads were slung in two bunches on either side of the saddle. Well, if the life of any clear- thinking man is full of ghosts that come to him in the dark and keep him from sleeping — and by God, my life has more than its share — what stays with me is the image of that grubby, barefoot, runny-nosed child, his tears carving dirty trails down his dusty cheeks, walking next to the mule, and returning again and again, however often the guards drove him off, to brush away the flies from his father's severed head.
The House of La Salka was both a brothel and a smoke- room, and that is where we set up our quarters the following day, as soon as the sale of booty was over. The whole of Oran had been celebrating since the previous night when, with the last light of day, once we had left the livestock in the pens at Las Piletas, near the river, we had made our triumphal entry through the Tlemcen gate, marching in squadrons with the captives before us, flanked by soldiers bearing arms. We marched along the road which was lit up with torches, heading straight for the main church. There, the slaves, hands bound, were paraded past the Holy Sacrament that the priest had brought to the door, accompanied by clergy, cross and holy water. And once the Te Deum had been sung in recognition of our victory, every owl went off to his own olive tree until the following day, when the real celebrations began, for the sale of slaves proved highly lucrative, bringing in the goodly sum of forty-nine thousand six hundred ducats. Once the governor's share had been deducted as well as the King's quint, which, in Oran, was used to buy supplies and munitions, and once what was owed to the officers, the Church, the veterans' hospital and the mogataces had been paid out, the Captain and I found ourselves richer by five hundred and sixty reales each, which meant that we had the agreeable weight of seventy fine pieces of eight in our respective
purses. Sebastian Copons, given his rank and position, earned somewhat more.
As soon as we had collected our money from the house of a relative of the interpreter Aron Cansino — we almost had to get our knives out at one point because he wanted to fob us off with coins that had not been weighed or that were worn too smooth at the edges — we decided, naturally enough,to spend a little of it. And there the three of us were, in the house of La Salka, enjoying ourselves to the hilt.
The owner of the brothel was a middle-aged Moorish woman, baptised a Christian, the widow of a soldier, and an old acquaintance of Sebastian Copons, who assured us that, within reasonable limits, she was thoroughly trustworthy. The whorehouse was near the Marina gate, sitting among the terraced houses behind the old tower. From the roof there was a pleasant view over the countryside, with the castle of San Gregorio to the left, dominating the bay full of galley and other ships below; and in the background, like a greyish' wedge between the port and the blue immensity of the Mediterranean, stood the fort of Mazalquivir, its gigantic cross standing before it.
The sun was already setting over the sea, and its warm rays fell on Captain Alatriste, Copons and myself as we sat on soft leather cushions in one corner of the roof terrace, our every wish granted, well supplied with drink and food and the other things one finds in such places. We were accompanied by three of La Salka's girls with whom, shortly before, we had shared rather more than words, although we had stopped short of the final trench; for the Captain and Copons, very sensibly, had managed to persuade me that it was one thing to take pleasure in female company and quite another to loose one's bow, so to speak, and risk catching the French disease or any of the many other illnesses with which such public
women — extremely public in the case of Oran —