PIRATES OF THE LEVANT by Arturo Perez-Reverte

Author:Arturo Perez-Reverte
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-09-24T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7. SEE NAPLES AND DIE

The night sky glowed red, Vesuvius infusing everything as far as the eye could see with a strange, ghostly light. On the other side of the city the moon was rising, and thus the outline of Naples, its buildings, hills and towers, the land and the sea, were eerily lit from two different directions, creating a mass of strange shadows. It was a landscape as unreal as that in the canvases Diego Alatriste had watched burn during the sacking of Flanders — real fire consuming painted fire.

He took a deep, pleasurable breath of the warm, salt air as he put on his belt with sword and dagger. He wasn't wearing a cape. Despite the lateness of the hour — the Angelus bell had rung — the temperature was still very pleasant. That, along with the remarkable nocturnal light, lent the city a certain melancholy enchantment. A poet such as Don Francisco de Quevedo would have written a few good — or bad — lines of verse about it, but Alatriste was no poet; his only poetry lay in his Scars and a handful of memories. And so he donned his hat, and after looking both ways — dark nights in remote places were not safe, not even for the Devil — he set off, aware of the sound of his own footsteps, first on the dark stones of the road and then, muffled, on the sandy soil of Chiaia.

As he strolled along, keeping an eye out for any shadows that might be hiding among the fishing boats moored by the sea, he could see at the far end of the beach, the hill of Pizzofalcone and Uovo Castle with its feet in the calm waters. Not a single window was lit, and there were no torches in the streets. Not a breath of wind either. The ancient city of Parthenope was sleeping, wreathed in fire, and Alatriste smiled to himself beneath the broad brim of his hat, remembering. That same light, which only occurred when the old volcano stirred into life, had lit many of his youthful adventures.

That was seventeen years ago now, he thought. He had first come to Italy in 1610, after being caught up in the horror of the Morisco problem in the mountains and on the beaches of Spain. As a soldier on the corsair galleys — leventes, the Turks called them — with plenty of booty from the Greek islands and the Ottoman coast within the grasp of any man with enough balls to go after it, the six years of his first term in the Naples regiment had been among the best years of his life. His purse had always been full between voyages, there were the inns and taverns of Mergellina and Chorrillo, Spanish plays put on at the courtyard theatre, good wine, even better food, a healthy climate, and garrison life in the nearby villages, beneath leafy trees and vine trellises, in the company of comrades and beautiful women.

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