By Paul Carrier
This fourth outing in the Captain Alatriste series by Spanish novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte finds our swashbuckling hero, Diego Alatriste, on a mission to protect the cargo of a royal 17th-century treasure fleet as it sails back to Spain from the New World.
Politically connected thieves have a fortune in stolen gold and silver stashed in a secret hold aboard one of the ships. Alatriste, a swordsman for hire and erstwhile army officer, is contracted by agents of the king to thwart the theft, so the smuggled riches can be deposited in the royal treasury.
As always in this series, Alatriste comes across in The King's Gold as a weary and taciturn but honor-bound mercenary who remains true to himself in a ruthless world. Inigo Balboa, his young and devoted ward, serves as the novel’s narrator.
What makes this series so enjoyable, in addition to the strong characterization, the convincing period details and the inevitable swordplay and derring-do, is Pérez-Reverte’s language.
It casts a spell.
“Any ship or vessel is home to gallant legions of rats, bedbugs, fleas, and all manner of creeping things who are quite capable of eating a cabin boy alive and who observed neither Fridays nor Lent,” young Inigo writes at one point early on in his adventures with Alatriste.
American readers accustomed to historical fiction featuring British characters, as such fiction often does, will get an entertaining jolt from Pérez-Reverte’s decidedly Spanish perspective. To the chauvinistic and xenophobic Spaniards in The King's Gold, for example, Lutherans are despicable heretics and Queen Elizabeth I of England is a - well, think of a five-letter word that rhymes with itch and you’ll get the idea.
Pérez-Reverte’s seductive prose evokes the mystery and intrigue of a long-gone Spanish empire that was plagued by corruption, decay and cruelty but also blessed with grandeur and a fictional hero devoted in equal measure to duty and his own survival.
