OLD FRIENDS AND OLD ENEMIESThe hand and the arm grow tired of killing too. Diego Alatriste would gladly have given what remained of his life—which was perhaps very little—to lay down his weapons and lie quietly in a corner, just for a while. At that stage, he was fighting out of a mixture of fatalism and habit, and his feeling of indifference as to the result may, paradoxically, have been what kept him alive in the midst of all the clash and confusion. He was fighting with his usual serenity, without thinking, trusting in his keen eye and swift reactions. For men like him and in situations like that, the most effective way of keeping fate at bay was to leave imagination aside and put one’s trust in pure instinct.Using his foot for leverage, he wrenched his sword from the body of the man he had just skewered. All around him there were shouts, curses, moans, and from time to time the gloom was lit up by a shot from a pistol or from a Flemish harquebus, offering a glimpse of groups of men furiously knifing one another and of puddles of blood that slithered into the scuppers as the ship tilted.In the grip of a singular clarity, he parried a thrust from a scimitar, dodged another, and responded by plunging his sword vainly into the void, yet he gave this error no thought.
