21

The rising sun found Alva on the march, riding south at the head of a column of infantry toward Louis of Nassau, who was trying to sneak over the border from France with an army of Huguenot rabble. News had reached him from The Brill, but The Brill was far away, and unimportant; Alva would deal with that at his leisure, when his border was secure.

On either hand were green fields, young corn growing, and strips of cabbage and onions. The road led him down between two rows of trees, through which the sunlight slanted. Alva was thinking about Louis of Nassau’s impatience and courage, which led him often into attacking when he had not the resources to attack, a weakness Alva meant to use to destroy him.

The thoughts gave him a sense of peace. For months he had been pent up in little rooms, fretting at problems that seemed to grow on the solutions he attempted to apply to them; now at last he had something to do that he understood.

“My lord,” said his son, riding just behind him.

Alva lifted his eyes. Ahead, the road wound down between rows of trees, and on every tree trunk a piece of paper hung.

An aide galloped ahead to bring one to Alva, and he spread it on his saddlebow; he did not signal a halt, and the column moved on, steady, inexorable, south toward Spain’s enemies. The paper was still stiff, the printing clear. If it had been hanging very long, the morning dew would have pulped it and made the ink bleed. Someone had put up these broadsides only moments before Alva saw them. Irritated, he swung his head from side to side, scanning the empty fields. They were out there somewhere, hiding, the villains who did this. Watching him. He lowered his eyes to the broadside.

“What does it say?” He held the paper out to Luis del Rio, on his right.

“On Saint Fool’s Day, as it passes,

The Beggars stole the Duke of Alva’s glasses

“Brill means spectacles in Dutch,” said del Rio, in a badly timed display of superfluous knowledge.

Alva crumpled the broadside. “God’s death on these animals.” With a curt nod to the aide he sent for his map of the Low Countries, and three more aides hurried up the column with it. All the while everyone marched on, without pause, toward the battle in the future.

The map, held up between the hands of two aides while the third led their horses on, resolved the problem of The Brill into a series of movements over land and water. Alva tapped the waxen cloth with his forefinger, confident of his dominance over it. Still, he did not like what he saw. Those islands and sandspits up and down the coast of the North Sea would be easy to defend, should the Beggars chance to extend their power over them, and The Brill was in the center, well located to extend from. Coldly Alva told himself that from such a holding even the Prince of Orange could withstand the onslaught of an empire.

“Don Federico,” he said crisply. “We shall squash these impudent Beggars now, once and for all. Let them find it was a mistake to venture within my grasp. There is an army at Bergen: take it, and wipe out this thieves’ nest at The Brill.”

“Yes, my lord.”

His son’s voice rang like a clarion. Federico always enjoyed commands far from his father’s overlook.

Alva turned his eyes on del Rio, riding beside him. “You are to return to Antwerp and gather the army quartered there. March them north to The Brill to support Don Federico’s troops.”

“Yes, my lord.”

“God be with you.”

“God is our sword and our shield,” they said in unison, and saluted him. They left him there. Alva rode along a while, staring at the map, wondering why every moment spent studying the position of The Brill should bring him more alarm. With a twitch of his hand he sent the map away and turned his face south, toward Louis of Nassau, toward what was important, more important than The Brill, if only because he understood it better.