22

At noon, Luis del Rio, the King’s governor in Antwerp, entered the silent city. With two columns of mounted lancers at his back he rode along the main street toward the heart of the city, where stood the tower he was building. No bells rang, no crowds of citizens rushed out to greet him—not even a beggar appeared to ply the governor’s generosity for a coin. He rode through Antwerp as if through a graveyard.

As he rode, he remembered how he had first seen this city, standing among her elms and poplars like a bride in her bower; then the streets had surged with carts and coaches, merchants on foot surrounded by their retainers, packmen bawling out their wares from door to door, messengers racing to and from the Bourse. How it had amazed him then to hear Greek and German spoken here as freely as Dutch or French! The streets for all their traffic were clean as church floors; the houses, trimmed with paint and gilt, were kept like monuments.

Now the wind tossed dead leaves and garbage along the pavement and the houses were decaying into rubble.

The people had left, the many-tongued merchants, the packmen, the rich and the poor; not all had left, but enough to hollow out the city like a shell. Of those who stayed behind, no one bought or sold, not in real ways, not since the tax fell on them. How they lived from day to day the King’s governor could not tell and was afraid to think about.

He was coming to the heart of the town, by the brown tide of the Schelde. On his left the street opened up on the great square before the Bourse, whose doors were nailed closed. A winter fire had gutted the building and collapsed the roof; even the pigeons had deserted it now, although a stork’s nest rested on the peak of the end wall.

There was a woman walking down the street ahead of him.

The sight was so unusual it held all his interest. The ground dipped down under her feet, falling away toward the river, so that she stood up against the empty sky: a tall woman in a shawl, leaning on a staff. As he came even with her, she stopped to watch him pass. A bundle hung on her shoulder. He had seen so many leaving; it startled him to see someone return.

They passed by one another, not fifteen feet apart. A tall woman, with a broad plain peasant face, who leaned on her staff and calmly watched the Spaniard ride by. Something in her look held his attention. He twisted in his saddle to keep his gaze on her as she fell behind him. Some power in her face, in her tall shape. Yet she was only a woman of the people. He straightened up, assuming a more military bearing, to ride into his citadel, where at last someone would cheer.

Hanneke watched the King’s governor go past, thinking not of him but of the devastated city around her. It was almost like a foreign place to her, so different was it from the city where she had grown up.

She went down past the empty Bourse into the brewery district, where the wooden tanks stood empty and collapsing from neglect, their iron bands sprung, and their hollows noisy with birds; the canals and pipes of the waterworks were full of lily pads.

In the street behind the Brewmasters’ Guildhall there were people, at last, not Spanish soldiers, but Dutch; a little boy sat on the edge of the pavement beating disconsolately at the cobblestones with a stick, and a woman was pulling a two-wheeled cart down the walk from a ruined house. Beyond, several doors down, a man sat in the doorway of the bakery, staring at nothing.

Hanneke quickened her step, her eyes on his face. Slowly she recognized him, feature by feature. He was much changed. Coming to a stop before him, she waited for him to notice her, but he was sunk deep in thought, his forehead gathered into a frown, and he ignored her.

She said, “God’s greeting to you, Michael. Don’t you recognize me?”

He looked up. His cheeks were clawed with deep harsh lines. Like a burst of light the recognition of her hit him, and he got heavily up and came slowly out into the street to meet her, saying nothing. The intensity of his look unnerved her, and she began to speak, to parry that fierce stare, but before the words were half begun, he surrounded her in an embrace and hugged her to him with a crushing strength.

She pressed her face against his shoulder. For the first time she felt truly home.

At last his hard grip eased, and they stepped apart, their hands on one another’s arms. She said, “I’m so glad to find you here—everything seems so changed.”

“Oh, yes,” he said, thinly. “Very changed. Come inside. There’s nothing we can say out here.”

He led her into the front of the shop, where he and his mother had sold their cherry buns and soft sweet bread; now nothing stood there but the empty shelves, thick with dust. Michael opened the counter and they went into the rear of the shop.

A fire burned in the hearth. He drew a stool up to it and made her sit. Hanneke slipped her bundle down from her shoulder with a sigh. She watched him rummage in the back of the kitchen and return with a small loaf of bread, a jar of jam, and a little wooden pot of beer.

She sniffed. This room, once ripe with odors of yeast and flour, now smelled of nothing but cobwebs. She said, “Are you not a baker anymore, Michael?”

“Not since my mother died,” he said. “Since they tied the tenth penny to our necks, I have not sold a crumb of bread.”

Sitting on the hearth, he cut the little loaf in two and put one piece solemnly before her. She made no move toward it.

“Then how do you eat?” she asked. “What of your custom—the people who depend on you?”

“We smuggle in the bread we eat,” he said. “Everything we need, we bring in by secret ways, at night.”

“We.”

One of his broad sloping shoulders rose and fell. He took the lid from the pot of beer. “Those of us who are left. Calvinists, some of them. Clement was a great man among us, at the beginning. Now he is dead; someone else has taken his place. As each one dies, there is always someone else to take his place—what is the saying, about the demons in the swine?” An unpleasant smile crooked his mouth. “‘Our name is legion, for we are many.’”

“You are the demons, and the Spanish are the swine,” she said. “It is apt, I suppose. What of your mother?”

“The Spaniards murdered her.”

Hanneke’s mouth fell open. “Your mother? But she was—”

“The day you disappeared, I went everywhere looking for you, and when I came back, she was hanging from the sign.”

“Oh, sweet Heaven.”

“Where did you go? Why did you go without telling me?” The words burst from him with a long-restrained fury. For a moment he faced her, wounded, soft as the boy he had been when she left. “All this time I have wondered—I have dreaded knowing—why did you leave me?”

She said, “Carlos—the Spanish soldier—he attacked me, and I … killed him.”

She watched his face for some sign of revulsion. The boy Michael would have been revolted; but this harsh, haunted man was not. His face flattened with satisfaction. “Good blow.”

“I was afraid—if I went to you, they would blame you for it, so I went out of Antwerp.”

“A good-struck blow.” He gripped her hands and kissed her.

“I think not,” she said. “I wish I had not done it.”

“Bah. He was Spanish. But where have you been?”

“Away,” she said. “Looking for a place to rest, at first, and then I saw what must be done, and I came back here.”

“And you are here now,” he said, and took her hand and kissed it. When she did not draw back, he leaned toward her and pressed his lips to hers. She trembled, but she let him do it; she knew this stranger would demand of her what Michael had only asked for.

“Tell me where you have been. Did you go far?”

“Far enough,” she said. “Far enough to see I had to return here to do God’s work.”

He leaned back. He was much thinner than she remembered him, which made him seem much older. “And what work is that? Are you still Calvinist?”

“Yes,” she said, surprised. “Aren’t you?”

“No.”

“But—how can you fight the Spanish and not be Calvinist?” She shrugged. “Are you demon, or are you swine? I cannot see—”

“You don’t see,” he said, roughly. “But you will, when you’ve been here awhile.” He caught her hand and held tight to the fingers. “I’ll make you see, Hanneke.”

She stared at him, their hands still linked, with the feeling of seeing him across the black void of an abyss. The wind came and rattled the window. A sifting of pale flour floated down from the rafters. Hanneke turned her gaze to scan the gloomy silent room. The old woman was here still, somewhere, watching over her son; the past still had him by the heart. She tugged her hand free of his grip.

“Michael, the time has come to break free of the old ways. God is calling on us to make His kingdom on earth—”

“I need no new kingdom,” he said. “Only to make the old one the way it ought to be—the way it was. I need you, Hanneke. I need my woman to give me comfort, while I fight for what belongs to me.”

“Michael,” she said. “No.”

He was reaching for her hand again. “You can’t have come back after so long, and not give me what I need. I’ve been waiting for you for so long …” Painfully he clutched her hand and pulled her toward him, his face lean with hunger.

She sprang up to her feet, her hand imprisoned in his grasp. They faced each other like battlers. In an instant, she saw that it was true: they were enemies. He was Catholic, bound to the old ways, and she was free of that. God had set her free.

In an undertone, she said, “Michael, let me go.”

“You can’t have come back now and not be what I want,” he cried.

“Michael—” She jerked her head around, toward some thin sound from the street. “What’s that?”

He lifted his head to listen. In the silence of the bakery, all sound seemed damped away to nothing. Hanneke raised her eyes again, toward the ceiling coated with flour, as if she might meet the gaze of the old woman, watching. Then again she heard the distant blast of a trumpet.

Michael pulled her toward the door. “Outside.”

They went out through the side door, past the brick ovens in the yard, out to the street. There, three Spanish horsemen were riding down the center of the street toward them, one with a trumpet and two with the long red pennants of the army, curling and uncurling like serpents in the air above them.

Hanneke and Michael stopped at the low wall along the side of the street; now before the half-ruined houses on either hand, other people appeared, sheltering behind gates, beside fences, and under trees, half hiding from the soldiers.

They stopped directly before her; the trumpeter put his shining horn to his lips, and the metal shriek rang out.

“Soldiers of the King! Soldiers of the King!”

The cry was in Spanish, but every Dutchman understood it, having heard it a thousand times before. Hanneke closed her fingers on the fence. The generals were summoning an army, making ready to march. She wheeled toward Michael.

“Where are they going?”

He lifted one indifferent shoulder, his eyes sharp. “Who cares where they go? As long as they go. Tomorrow, we will bring feasts in.”

Hanneke watched the soldiers ride away, the pennants rippling from their pikes; the sun caught the brass trumpet in an instant’s blinding flash. “They must be going to fight somewhere. Maybe Orange is come again.”

Michael made a sneering sound in his throat. With the side of his shoe he kicked at the leaves piled against the base of the fence. For the first time she saw how thin he was; his shirt hung over his chest like a sail over the hollow air, his spine like a mast, his ribs like curved yards.

He said, with contempt, “Orange. He will not come again—not that fool. It’s the Beggars, up in The Brill—that’s where these will go to fight.”

With a gesture he indicated the street. Two Spanish soldiers had wandered out of the houses across the way, yawning and pulling on their red doublets.

“The Brill,” Hanneke said. She had some vague notion that was a seaport in the north somewhere. “The Beggars are in The Brill?”

He nodded, still watching the soldiers, who were making their way off down the street.

Hanneke sucked in her breath. She had been traveling for what seemed weeks and had heard nothing of this. The news struck her slowly, with a gathering force. The Beggars were in The Brill: The Brill was Calvinist. Was Dutch again. She took a step toward the street, after the soldiers.

Michael gripped her arm. “Where are you going?”

Over her shoulder, she said, “To The Brill.”

“What? To The Brill? You’re mad.” Roughly he yanked her around to face him. “You just came home, Hanneke. This is where you belong. Here you must stay.”

She looked into his face and saw a stranger. The merry good-hearted boy she had known had disappeared behind the dour face of this man shouting orders at her. She wrenched her arm out of his grasp and ran through the gate.

“Hanneke!”

She gathered up her skirts out of her way and ran down the street after the soldiers.

The moment he stepped out the door, del Rio knew something was wrong; he had been dealing with soldiers too long not to hear the ugly temper in the mutter of noise that arose from these men. He went out to the middle of the courtyard, where the groom held his horse. The soldiers were gathering in the parade ground just beyond the south gate, and as he mounted he put himself in view of them over the low unfinished wall.

They were not standing in ranks. Already some thousands of the men quartered in Antwerp had appeared, and the parade ground, sloping off a little toward the muddy Schelde, was red with their jackets. But rather than forming the orderly rows their training required of them, they were massed in clumps, talking. Del Rio’s back tingled with premonition. Most of these men were not Spaniards. Most were German mercenaries, and they had not been paid in months.

He gathered his reins and signaled to his officers, mounted in the courtyard beside him, and slowly they rode out of the half-finished citadel onto the parade ground.

The trumpeters went ahead of the staff, flourishing their long belled horns, so that the red ribbons danced in the sunlight. A blast of brass-throated sound rang out. The troops stilled. Here and there, lines formed among them, as the horns awoke their obedience. Del Rio rode forward toward the high ground, where he could survey them all.

Now he saw that the edges of the gently sloping field swarmed with people—the townsfolk, come to witness. Even the bridge over the river was black with them. Nor were the soldiers gathered here any near the number of men quartered in Antwerp; easily one third of King Philip’s army had not answered the call.

“Men of Spain!” He raised one hand over his head, to command their silence. The lieutenant on his left rode forward to translate his words into German, most of these men of Spain speaking no Spanish.

“Men of Spain! The King has called us forth to serve God and the Crown against those who threaten our faith. I know you will reply as you always have …”

He had given so many of these speeches that the words fell without thought from his lips. His eyes took in the restless mob that faced him, grumbling, angry, and growing angrier; until abruptly a tall fat man with a yellow beard leapt up out of the mass of men in front of del Rio and shouted, “Where’s our money?”

The shout that these words brought from the other soldiers resounded like a thunderclap. Del Rio’s Barb stallion reared up, snorting. While del Rio fought him quiet again, the soldiers yelled and clapped and whistled like night creatures; the trumpeters played shrieks on their trumpets, the commanding sound lost in the tumult.

Then suddenly the soldiery broke forward, like the sea rushing in over the beach. They flooded around del Rio and his horse and his officers and seized them and shook them to and fro. Del Rio drew his sword. It was whipped out of his hand before it had cleared the scabbard. His horse reared again, and as del Rio looked out over a mob of red doublets and shouting faces he began to pray.

“Our money!” The yellow-bearded man roared at him like a great German bear. “Our money! Our money!”

An arm’s length from him the young lieutenant who had been translating wheeled around, his face shining with terror, and flung out his hand to his chief. “Help me!” An instant later a pike took him through the chest. His body flopped like a speared fish. The howling mob hoisted him up overhead and trooped off with him.

“Our money! Our money!”

“There is no money,” del Rio shouted. His hands were slimy with sweat; his back itched, expecting the dagger point between his shoulder blades. “Go to The Brill—destroy the Beggars—they have your money!”

“We won’t move a step until we’re paid!”

Beyond the soldiers, now, del Rio saw, with a certain small surprise, the townspeople were crowding closer. One, a woman, had even pushed in among the soldiers, to hear what they were saying. He dragged his attention from this. He forced his voice steady, his face calm; he looked down on this mad mutinous army like a father on disobedient sons.

“The Beggars stole your money. Destroy them, and the King will give you all you desire, for love of your valor. If you do not, if you continue to defy his wishes, then—”

The yellow-bearded man caught the bridle of del Rio’s horse and dragged the slim head down and sideways in the milling of his arms. “Then we will sack Antwerp!”

Another raw-throated yell went up from the soldiers. The woman elbowed her way even closer. Her face was bright with fury, her eyes direct and clear; she looked up into del Rio’s face and shouted, “You cannot let them. The city is in your charge—on your head, if harm comes to these people who are your responsibility.”

Del Rio blinked at her; he had seen her before somewhere, but his unsettled mind would not connect her with any other memory. A woman of the people. His horse staggered. The yellow-bearded man was wrenching the poor beast’s head around again.

“Our money! Our money, or Antwerp burns!”

Now another outcry rose, this from the townspeople, not the brutal yell of the soldiers, but a wail of terror and rage kept silent too long, bursting forth now irresistibly. They pressed closer around the soldiers, and del Rio saw, in the calm of despair, that they outnumbered the soldiers, and they carried weapons—not pikes, but clubs of wood, and rakes from their gardens, and knives from their kitchens. There were as many women among them as men, which gave their collective voice its higher pitch, its birdlike clarity. He tore his gaze away, back to the yellow beard.

“You are treading the edge of disaster. Now, while you can, form ranks, obey your officers, and make yourselves an army again—”

“The Beggars!”

The clear feminine voice rose above all the racket like a flag above the surge and chaos of the crowd. It was the woman of the people. She had climbed up on something, not far from del Rio; she was pointing out over the crowd toward the river, and her voice pierced the clamor.

“The Beggars! The Beggars are coming!”

A gasp went up from the soldiers and the townspeople alike, as if they drew one breath into one set of lungs. Every head turned. There, on the muddy Schelde, beyond the supply barges tied up at the citadel wharves, a white sail glided, and beyond it another, and beyond that, another still.

“The Beggars. The Beggars are coming!”

The townsfolk roared. They rushed forward in a single mass against the soldiers, and like reeds before the scythe the men of Spain went down.

“Wait,” del Rio shouted, but his voice was lost in the screaming and shouting of the men around him. They were running. The yellow-bearded man still had del Rio’s horse, and he dragged it around by the bridle and led it in a wild plunge down the parade ground. The other soldiers followed in a ride toward the shelter of the citadel.

“Wait,” del Rio shrieked. No one heeded him. He waved his arms and wrenched at his reins; he twisted to look across the surging crowd at the river, where the three sails, drifting closer, revealed themselves to be no more than garbage scows. No one stopped. With the townspeople hewing and clawing at their backs, King Philip’s army fled in a wild rout into the new fortress, del Rio hustled along in their midst, and slammed the gates, and hid.

Hanneke did not think it would last very long. She sat with her knees tucked up to her chest on the pounded earth of the parade ground and watched the people of Antwerp dancing in rings on the lower meadow. They had done a wonderful thing; they had driven off the evil that had hung so long over their heads, but she did not think it would stay away long.

Nearby her was the dead horse she had stood on when she called the name of the Beggars and brought a phantom navy to these people’s aid. A dozen women in bloody aprons were butchering it; they would eat meat tonight. The men were breaking into the supply barges along the river, and would find more food there. But it would not last.

What would last was in the north, where the Beggars had taken a city and could stand, their backs to the ever-nourishing sea. Even now, she knew, from the shortened speech of the Spanish governor, the Duke of Alva was planning a counterattack on The Brill; and that would be the measure of the future, not this business here in Antwerp.

It was there that she was called to go. What called her she had no name for: only, as she sat looking over the slope, the rings of dancers, the women cutting up the dead horse, the children, who finding bits of wood, pretended to fight, the young mothers nursing their babies, the old men standing deep in talk, the citadel behind them, the broad brown reach of the river like a hem along the foot of the slope—she saw in this variety an order, like the order of the starry sky at night, too large for a human mind to comprehend, but clear enough to God. In that order she moved like a wisp of dandelion seed that sailed the wind.

Her brother. She had not heard from him in years, but he had gone to sea. She gave no hope, no longing expectation to finding him ever again, but the wind that brushed her cheek and urged her north was the air that filled his sails. She stood up, shaking the dirt from her dress, and started away down the road.