The Pirates of the Levant (6 page)

'That's how it is with the people here — they're desperate, ragged and hungry.' Copons lowered his voice. 'It's hardly surprising that the weakest-willed, or those who simply can't take any more, desert as soon as they can. Diego, do you remember Yndurain, the Basque? The one who defended that old hamlet in Fleurus, along with Utrera, Barrena and the others, until the only ones left were himself and a bugler?'

The Captain nodded and asked what had become of the man. Copons stared into his mug, turned aside in order to spit under the table and then looked at him again.

'He was here for five years and hadn't been paid for the last three. About two months ago, he had words with a sergeant. He stabbed him with his knife and jumped over the wall, along with another comrade who was on guard duty. I'm told that, with great difficulty, they finally arrived in Mostaganem, where they promptly joined the Moors, but who can say ...'

He and the Captain exchanged knowing looks; my former master took another sip of wine and shrugged. It was resigned shrug — for himself, for his friend and for the others, all of them, for poor, unhappy Spain. At that moment,I recalled some lines from a play I had seen a couple of yea before in Madrid. They had shocked me then, but now I understood:

I, a soldier, on bended knee

Surrender my embattled blade;

I can no longer stand to be

Both brave and badly paid

'Can you imagine,' the Captain suddenly said to Copons, 'Yndurain salaaming to Mecca?' He gave a kind of half-smile.

Copons gave an identical smile, only briefer. They were sceptical, entirely lacking in humour, the smiles of old soldiers with no illusions.

'And yet,' replied Copons, 'when the drum rolls, we never , lack for swords.'

This was very true, as the passage of time would continue to- prove. However abandoned, neglected and poverty-stricken these North African garrison towns were, there was rarely a. shortage of men available to defend them when the need arose. And this was done without payment, without help and without glory, out of desperation, pride and concern for reputation. And so as not to end up as slaves. I know of what I speak, as you, dear reader, will learn from this story. There has always been a certain kind of man for whom, at the final moment, paying dearly for his life has brought some degree of consolation. Among Spaniards, this was a familiar story, and so it went until, one by one, those towns, forgotten by God and by the King, fell into the hands of Turks or Moors.

This had already happened in Algiers in the previous century, when Barbarossa attacked El Penon. One hundred and fifty Spanish soldiers were blocking the entrance to the harbour there, and what happened? Spain abandoned them to their fate and they waited in vain for help to come. 'The Emperor,' according to his chronicler Father Prudencio de Sandoval, 'had more important matters to deal with at the time.' The soldiers fought like the men they were, and, after sixteen days of artillery fire that demolished the redoubt stone by stone, the Turks took only fifty prisoners who were battered and wounded. Barbarossa, enraged at such fierce resistance, had one of the prisoners, Captain Martin de Vargas, beaten to death with sticks. As for Larache, a few years after the events I am describing, it was attacked by twenty thousand enemy troops, who were repelled by a mere one hundred and fifty Spanish soldiers and fifty ex-soldiers who all fought like demons. The loss and recovery of the so-called Tower of the Jew was particularly fiercely fought — all to defend six thousand feet of city wall.

Oran, too, had honourably withstood various assaults; indeed, one provided the inspiration for Don Miguel de Cervantes' play
The Brave Spaniard.
We also owe to Cervantes — he was not a veteran of the Battle of Lepanto for nothing — two sonnets written in memory of the thousands of soldiers who died fighting, abandoned by their King - a very Spanish custom. The poems, which he included in
Don Quixote,
recall the defenders of the fort of La Goleta, opposite Tunis, who were killed after resisting twenty-two attacks by the Turks and killing twenty-five thousand of the enemy, so that, of the few Spaniards who survived, not one was captured unscathed.

'Life failed before valour did,' says one of those sonnets, and the second begins:

From this battered, sterile land From these clods of earth brought low Three thousand soldiers' holy souls Rose, still living, to a better home. Having first, in vain, spent all The strength and effort of their arms, Until, at last, so few, so weary, To the enemy's blade they gave their life.

As I said, all this sacrifice was futile. After Lepanto, which marked the extreme point of the collision between the two great Mediterranean powers, the Turk had turned his interest more to Persia and Eastern Europe and our Kings had turned theirs to Flanders and the Atlantic. Philip IV showed no interest either, discouraged by his minister, the Count-Duke of Olivares, who disliked ports and galleys (not that he ever visited such places; the stench, he said, would give him a headache). Olivares despised sailors, too, for he considered theirs to be a low and vulgar occupation, fit only for Dutchmen — except, that is, when it brought back from the Indies the gold he needed for his wars. And so, what with Kings, their favourites and one thing and another, once the days of the great corsair fleets and the stalemate of various empires' naval chess games were over, the Mediterranean became a blurred frontier, the realm of low-grade pirates from the countries along its shores; and piracy, while it changed the course of many lives and many fortunes, did nothing to quicken the pulse of History. Also, more than a century had passed since the conclusion of the Christian Reconquest, a period that had lasted nearly eight hundred years during which we Spaniards had forged our identity; and the subsequent policy of carrying the fight into Islamic territory, once backed by Cardinal Cisneros and the old Duke of Medina Sidonia, had now been abandoned. Africa held very little interest for a Spain that was at daggers drawn with half the world.

The garrison towns in Barbary were more symbolic than anything else. They were maintained only in order to keep the corsairs at bay, as well as France, Holland and England, who, watching for the arrival of our galleons in Cadiz, did their utmost to establish themselves there with their pirates, as they had in the Caribbean. They were always snapping at our heels, which is why we would not leave the way free for them, although in the corsair republics they were already well supplied with consuls and merchants. And although we will return to this subject, I will only say that, years later, Tangiers ended up belonging to the King of England for two decades — thanks to the Portuguese rebellion — and that during the siege of La Mamora in 1628, a year after the events I am describing, the men digging the trenches and directing the siegeworks were English sappers. Well, bastards of a feather will flock together.

We went out for a stroll. Copons guided us through the narrow, whitewashed streets with their tightly packed houses, which, apart from the flat roofs, reminded me a little of Toledo; the buildings had solid stone quoins and few windows, the latter being set low and protected by blinds or shutters. The damp sea air had caused the plaster and rendering to flake, leaving dark ugly patches. Add to this the swarms of flies, the clothes strung along washing lines, the ragged children playing in courtyards, the occasional crippled soldier sitting on a stone bench or on the steps outside his house, eyeing us suspiciously, and you have a fairly faithful picture of how Oran appeared to me. Yet there was also something inescapably military about the place, for in essence the town was a vast barracks inhabited by soldiers and their families.

As I discovered, it was spread over quite a large area and was arranged on different levels, with no shortage of ordinary shops, as well as bakers, butchers and taverns. The grand, well-proportioned kasbah, which housed the governor and was the military headquarters, dated from the days of the Moors — some said from Roman times — and it contained a; magnificent parade ground. The town also had a prison, amilitary hospital, a Jewish quarter — to my surprise, there were still Jews living there — and various monasteries: Franciscan,' Mercedarian and Dominican; and in the eastern section of the medina, there were several ancient mosques that had been converted into churches, the main one having been, transformed by Cardinal Cisneros, at the time of the Conquest, into the Church of Our Lady Victorious. And everywhere, in, the streets, in the cramped squares, beneath canvas awnings and in doorways, people stood absolutely still — women glimpsed behind shutters; men, many of them veteran soldiers? maimed and scarred and clothed in rags, their crutches leaning, against the wall beside them — all of them staring into space. I thought of that former comrade, Yndurain, whom I had never met, leaping over the wall at dead of night, prepared to go over to the Moors rather than stay here, and a shudder ran through me.

'So what do you make of Oran?' Copons asked me.

'It's as if the town were sleeping,' I replied. 'All these people ... standing so still, staring.'

Copons nodded and wiped the sweat from his face.

'People only wake up when the Moors attack or when we organise a cavalcade,' he said. 'Having a scimitar at your throat or pelf in your pocket works wonders.' At this point, he turned to Captain Alatriste. 'And speaking of pelf, you've arrived at just the right time. Something's afoot.'

There was a flicker of interest in the Captain's pale eyes, beneath the broad brim of his hat. We had just reached the arched Tlemcen gate, on the opposite side of the town to the harbour, where a few reluctant stonemasons — Moorish slaves and Spanish convicts, I noticed — were trying to patch up the crumbling wall. Copons greeted the sentinels sitting in the shade and then we strolled outside the town. From there we could see the village of Ifre — inhabited by friendly Moors — situated about two harquebus shots from the town wall. That whole section was in a parlous state, with bushy plants growing in between the stones, many of which had fallen to the ground. The sentry box was dilapidated and roofless, and the wooden drawbridge over the narrow moat — almost entirely clogged with rubble and filth — was so rotten that it creaked beneath our feet. It was a miracle, I thought, that the town could resist any attack at all.

'A cavalcade?' asked Captain Alatriste.

Copons gave him a knowing look. 'Possibly.'

'Where?'

'No one's saying, but I suspect it will be over there.' He indicated the Tlemcen road that ran south through the nearby fields. 'There are a few Arabs in that direction who are none too happy about paying their taxes. There are livestock and people — so there'll be some decent booty to be had.'

'Hostile Moors?'

'They can be, if it serves our purpose.'

I was watching Copons and listening intently. This business of cavalcades intrigued me, and so I asked for more details.

'Remember those raids we used to go on in Flanders?' he said. 'Well, it's the same here: you leave at night, march quickly and in silence, and then you strike. We never further than eight leagues from Oran, just in case.'

'And you take harquebuses?'

Copons shook his head. 'As few as possible. The whole thing is very much hand-to-hand so as not to waste gunpowder If the village is near, we take people and livestock. If it's further away, we just take people and jewellery. Then march back as fast as we can, see what we've got, sell it and share out the booty.'

'And there's plenty of it?'

'That depends. With slaves we can earn maybe forty
escudos
or more. A healthy female of child-bearing age, a strong Black man or a young Moor means thirty
reales
in the pot. If they're suckling babes and in good health, ten ... We did well out of the last cavalcade. I made eighty
escudos,
and that's double my year's wages.'

'Which is why the King doesn't pay you.'

'As if he damn well would ...'

We were nearing the fertile, leafy banks of the river, along which there were mills and a few waterwheels. I admired the view — the green terraced fields dotted with trees, the town with its kasbah perched halfway up the hill and downriver, the sea, spreading out like a blue fan into the distance. An old Moor and a little boy passed us on their way into town. They were both wearing threadbare djellabas and carrying baskets full of vegetables on their backs.

'Without the cavalcades and what these fields produce,' added Copons, 'we wouldn't survive. Until you arrived, we'd spent four months with just a bushel of wheat per month and sixteen
reales
for any soldier with a family. You've seen the state of the people here, almost naked because their clothes are literally falling off their backs. It's the old Flanders trick, eh, Diego? You want your pay? Well, see that castle full of Dutchmen over there? Go and attack it and then we'll pay you. Moors or heretics, it's all the same to the King.'

'Do they take the royal quint from you here as well?' I asked.

'Of course,' said Copons. There was the King's quint, and the governor's 'jewel', as it was known. The latter got the pick of the bunch: the best slaves, even a village chief's entire family. Then it was the turn of the officers, with the normal soldiers last in line, according to how much they earned. Even people who hadn't gone on the cavalcade had a right to a share. Not forgetting the Church.

'You mean the monks dip their fingers in too?'