The Pirates of the Levant (3 page)

Almeria coast, the corsairs had carried off and enslaved seventy-four men, women and children from one village, having first plundered it and crucified the mayor and eleven others whose names they had on a list. A woman who had managed to escape was later able to confirm that several of the attackers were Moriscos and former villagers.

Everyone had an account to settle on that turbulent Mediterranean frontier. It was a melting-pot of races, languages and age-old hatreds. In the case of the Moriscos, who knew every bay, water-hole and path of the country to which they were returning to take their revenge, they enjoyed an advantage that Miguel de Cervantes — who knew a lot about corsairs, as both soldier and captive — described in his play
Life in Algiers:

Because I've known this land from birth

And all its entrances and exits,

I know how best to fight upon its earth.

'You were there, weren't you?' Urdemalas asked. 'In 1609, when the Moriscos were expelled from Valencia?'

Alatriste nodded. There were few secrets on board a small ship. Urdemalas and he had friends in common, and Alatriste, although not an officer, received extra pay for taking on the duties of corporal. The sailor and the veteran soldier respected each other, but they also kept their distance.

'They say,' Urdemalas went on, 'that you helped to crush the rebels, the ones who took to the hills.'

'I did,' Alatriste replied.

That was one way of putting it, he thought. The searches carried out among the steep, rocky hills, sweating beneath the sun; the ambushes, the sudden attacks, the reprisals, the killings. There had been cruelty on both sides, and the poor people caught in the middle, both Christians and Moriscos, had paid the highest price, with the numerous rapes and murders going unpunished. And then there were those long lines of unfortunates trudging the roads, forced to leave their homes and sell off cheap what they couldn't take with them, harassed and plundered by peasants and soldiers alike — many soldiers even deserted in order to steal from them. The paths they trod led to ships, and to exile. As Gaspar Aguilar wrote:

Strip them of their house and all their wealth,

Ye powers that rule the world;

For alms, leave them their lives and petty health

'By my life,' said Captain Urdemalas with a cynical smile, 'you don't seem very proud of service done for God and King.'

Alatriste gave him a hard look, then slowly smoothed his moustache.

'Are you referring to the service performed today, Captain, or to that performed in 1609?'

He spoke very clearly and coldly, almost softly. Urdemalas glanced uneasily at Lieutenant Muelas, the pilot and the other corporal.

'I have no criticism of your performance today,' he replied in quite a different tone, studying Alatriste's face as if he were counting the scars. 'With ten men like you, I could take Algiers in a night. It's just that ...'

'It's just what?'

'Well,' Urdemalas said with a shrug. 'There are no secrets here. People say you were unhappy about what happened in Valencia and that you took your sword and your services elsewhere.'

'And do you have an opinion on the matter, Captain?'

Urdemalas' eyes followed the movement made by Alatriste's left hand, for it was no longer smoothing his moustache but was by his side, just inches away from the scratched and battered hilt of his sword. Urdemalas was a determined man, as everyone knew, but every man has his reputation, and Diego Alatriste's had preceded him onto the
Mulata.
Mere words, one might say, but, having seen how he had fought that day, even the lowliest cabin boy was convinced. Urdemalas knew this better than anyone.

'No, no opinion at all, I assure you,' he said. 'Everyone's different, after all, but you can't stop people talking.'

He maintained the same firm, frank tone, and Alatriste considered the matter carefully. There was not, he concluded, anything to object to in either the captain's voice or his words. He was a wise man. And prudent too.

'Well, if that's what they say,' Alatriste said at last, 'they're quite right.'

Ensign Muelas thought it best to change tack a little.

'I'm from Vejer myself,' he said. 'And I remember how the Turks used to attack us with the help of the Moriscos who lived there — they told them when they could most easily catch us unawares. A neighbour's son went out to herd the goats ... or maybe he went off fishing with his father ... anyway, he woke up in a souk in Barbary. He's probably like one of these renegades here, up to goodness knows what ... Not to mention what they do to the women.'

The pilot and the other corporal nodded grimly. They knew about the villages built high up, away from the shore, as a precaution against the Barbary pirates who scoured the sea and haunted the coast; and they knew how afraid the villagers were of the pirates' boldness and of their embittered Morisco neighbours. They knew, too, about the bloody rebellions led by the Moriscos who refused to accept baptism and the authority of the King, about their complicity with Barbary and the secret petitions made to France, to the Lutherans and to the Great Turk to join them in a general uprising. After the wars of Granada and the Alpuj arras, attempts to disperse them had failed, as had Philip Ill's ineffectual policy of conversion, and three hundred thousand Moriscos — an enormous number in a population of only nine million — had settled on the vulnerable Levant and Andalusian coasts. Almost none of them were true Christians, and they remained rebellious, ungovernable and proud — like the Spaniards they also were — dreaming of their lost liberty and independence, and unwilling to become part of the Catholic nation, forged a century ago, that was intent on waging war on all fronts; against the greed and envy of France and England, against Protestant heresy and against the immense power of the Turks. This was why, until their eventual expulsion, the last Muslims in the Peninsula had been a dagger permanently pointed at the side of a Spain that was, at the time, master of one half the world and at war with the other.

'You could never feel at ease,' Muelas went on. 'From Valencia to Gibraltar, the old Christians were caught between the Moriscos in the mountains and the pirates at sea. These supposed Christian converts, so suspiciously reluctant to eat pork, would send signals at night, then help their friends to disembark and plunder the villages ...'

Diego Alatriste shook his head. He knew that this wasn't the whole story.

'There were honest people too,' he said, 'newly converted Christians who genuinely believed and were faithful subjects of the King. I knew a few in Flanders. They were helpful and hard-working. There wasn't a gentleman, villain, friar or beggar among them. In that respect, it's true, they didn't seem like Spaniards.'

Everyone stared at him in silence. Then, the ensign bit off a piece of fingernail and spat it over the side of the boat.

'That's beside the point. We had to put a stop to all that worrying, all those terrible acts. With God's help, we did, and it's over now.'

Alatriste thought to himself that it certainly wasn't over yet. The silent civil war between Spaniards was still being waged elsewhere and by other means. A few Moriscos, very few, had managed to return to Spain secretly, helped by their neighbours, as had happened in Campo de Calatrava. As for the others, they took both their anger and their nostalgia for a lost homeland to the corsair towns of Barbary; and the power of the Turks and of North Africa had been strengthened by exiled
mudejares
— unconverted Muslims — from Granada and Andalusia, and by the
tagarinos
— Muslims who passed as Spaniards — from Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, who were skilled in many trades, particularly those that then proved useful to the corsair enterprise.

Such men were often to be found as harquebusiers — there were a dozen of them on the captured galliot — and as well as bringing with them their knowledge of the coasts and the villages, they built ships, made firearms and powder arms, and they knew better than anyone how to sell the slaves they captured. They also became skilful captains, pilots and crews of galleys and fustas. Their hatred and their courage, their skill as marksmen and their determination to give no quarter in battle, meant that they were as good as the best Turkish soldiers and better than those crews composed solely of Moors. This is why they were the fiercest of corsairs, the most pitiless of slave-traders and Spain's greatest enemy in the Mediterranean.

'You have to admit they're brave though,' commented the pilot. 'The bastards fought like tigers.'

Alatriste was gazing down at the water surrounding the galley and the galliot which was strewn with the debris of combat. Almost all the dead had gone under by now. Only a few, due to the air trapped in their clothes or their lungs, floated tranquilly on the surface, just like the old ghosts that floated in his memory. Not even he would have denied the need for that expulsion. Times were harsh and neither Spain nor Europe, nor the world, was in placatory mood. But he had been troubled by the manner of the expulsion: the bureaucratic coldness and the military brutality, crowned, in the end, by an appalling lack of humanity — 'they should be prevented from taking so much money with them, for some are quite happy to leave', wrote Don Pedro de Toledo, chief of the Spanish galleys, to the King.

And so, in 1610, when he was twenty-eight, the soldier Diego Alatriste, a veteran of the old Cartagena regiment — brought from Flanders with the aim of crushing the Morisco rebels — had asked to be released from his unit and had enlisted in Naples to fight the Turks in the eastern Mediterranean. If he was going to have to slit the throats of infidels, he argued, he would prefer infidels who were at least capable of defending themselves. Twenty years on, here he was — one of life's little ironies — doing exactly the same thing.

'In 1610 and 1611, I was in charge of transporting the beasts from Denia to the beaches of Oran,' Captain Urdemalas said. 'The dogs.'

He placed special emphasis on the word 'dogs' and fixed Diego Alatriste with a hard stare.

'Dogs ...' said Alatriste thoughtfully.

He remembered the lines of rebels chained together, being taken to the mercury mines in Almaden. Not one returned. And the old Morisco in a small Valencian village, the only one who had not been expelled because of his great age and infirmity; he had been stoned to death by the village boys, without a single neighbour, not even the parish priest, doing anything to stop them.

'Dogs come in all shapes and sizes,' he concluded. Alatriste was smiling bitterly, his green eyes fixed on those of Urdemalas. And from the expression on the latter's face, he knew that he liked neither the look nor the smile. But he knew, too — for he could weigh up men at a glance — that Urdemalas would be very careful not to give voice to his feelings. After all, no one could be said to have shown a lack of respect here.

Then again, not everything happened on board ship, where military discipline ruled out open dispute. Life was full of moonless nights, ports with dark, silent alleyways, discreet places where a galley-captain, with only his sword to rely on, might easily find himself with a foot of steel between chest and back before he could say 'Amen'. And so, when Diego Alatriste seasoned both look and smile with a pinch of insolence, Captain Urdemalas observed for a moment how Alatriste's hand was again resting, with apparent nonchalance, near the hilt of his sword, and then transferred his gaze to the sea.

Chapter 2. SEND A HUNDRED LANCERS TO ORAN

When the galliot finally sank, I looked back at the lifeless bodies of its captain, pilot and the three Moriscos silhouette against the fading light. They hung from the lateen yard, their feet almost touching the sea as if they were about to swallowed up by its shadow. Among them was one of young men, on whose private parts, alas, Sergeant Albaladejo had found incriminating hair. The other boy, fortunately stillhairless, had been put to row, as had some of the other captives; the rest were in chains in the hold.

The Morisco pilot, who turned out to be Valencian, ha sworn in good Castilian, and with the noose already round his neck, that despite being expelled from Spain as a boy, h was a true convert and had always lived a Christian life, claimed he was as indifferent to the sect of the Prophet that Christian in Oran who said:

I don't deny our Lord nor yet accept Mohammed, And if I seem to be a Moor in voice and dress, I do so simply for the riches I'll possess.

He had only been circumcised, he claimed, to silence wicked tongues when he was living in Algiers and Saleh. Captain Urdemalas replied that he was very pleased to hear this, for since he had clearly been such a good Christian, he would soon die as one too and with no chaplain on board, he would need only a credo and an Our Father to be ready for the next life. For that reason, Captain Urdemalas said he would be perfectly happy to grant the pilot a little time before hanging him by the neck. The Morisco took this very badly and blasphemed against God and the Holy Virgin, less in Castilian this time and more in the lingua franca of Barbary laced with the dialect of the Valencian Muslims. He only paused in these insults to spit a well-aimed gob of saliva Captain Urdemalas' boot. At this point the Captain halted the ceremony, and said that there would be no bloody credos either.