Eh, the gold was all gone, but I had plenty of silver to eat.

If I could not dig my way out, the only other exit was through the door. The door was thick, locked, and iron plated. But wait-it was iron plated on the outside. There had been no reason to plate the inside.

I examined the door with candlelight.

A slender crack existed between the door and the frame. Wiggling back and forth with the iron bar, I would be able to widen it. If I could break away enough of the wood, I would be able to push back the metal locking device with the bar. But I would not have the noise from the explosions to cover my prying. And the guards would no longer have their attention drawn to the play.

During the inspection, we had failed to ask where the guards slept. I tried to remember if I had seen beds anywhere, but nothing came to mind. It made sense that one would sleep on the ground floor and the other on the upper floor. But when it came to the Spanish bureaucracy, common sense and common practice were not always the same.

There was also the front door to consider, but it would be an easier task than the vault door. It was held by two iron bars rather than a lock, because a lock would not be strong enough. If the front door of the mint was to be attacked, it would be by battering ram from the outside. But inside, the bars were easy to slip aside.

I had no choice but to attack the storage vault door immediately, praying that the two guards would drink a little wine or beer and discuss the play before going to bed.

Using the bar, I broke away wood, making as little noise as I could. When the bar sc.r.a.ped the iron lock, my excitement increased, but it would only sc.r.a.pe. I could not get the lock to slide back. Anxiety took the place of excitement, and panic threatened to overwhelm me. Aaaak! I jabbed the iron bar in deep enough to kill the door and jerked the bar to the side. The lock broke, and I swung the door open. But I had made enough noise not only to wake the guards, but the twenty thousand sacrificial victims of the last great Aztec human feast.

I ran down the mint hallway for the front door, the cool air on my sweaty face. Pushing aside the door bars, I heard a shout behind me. A club smacked the door as I flung it open and rushed out. I ran by the corral. It was deserted.

Shouts followed me, but I paid no heed to them as I ran down the street and around a corner. I had to make it to where the boat would be loaded before Mateo got a knife in his back and I was captured by soldados.

Three men were beside the boat when I came running up to it. They were shadowy figures to me in the darkness. I could not tell if Mateo was among them.

"Mateo!" I shouted.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.do! You made it."

Bravo! Mateo was still alive.

"Did you think that-" I heard footfalls behind me and spun out of the path. Enrique was behind me. His dagger caught air as I twisted away.

My own dagger was in my hand, and I charged against him, shoving it into his gut. He grunted and stared at me. I could see the whites of his eyes and smell sour salsa on his breath as he gasped.

I jerked the knife out and stepped back. Another of the banditos was on the ground in a gathering pool of blood. Mateo's sword flashed in the moonlight, and the other one caught the blade on the side of his neck. The wounded man staggered backward and fell into the lake.

"Are you all right?" I asked Mateo.

"A scratch to my back. I suspected Enrique's story was false. When I started to question him with my blade, he ran into the darkness."

Horses hooves and shouts filled the night air.

"Andale!" Mateo said. "We have a lake to cross."

After we reached the other side of the lake where our horses were pastured, Mateo was philosophical about the loss of our three comrades in arms.

"We would have had to kill them even if they did not try to stab our backs. After we divided the treasure, they would have soon been captured with their share because they would have exposed their wealth to others. It would have been a waste of thievery to give treasure back to the viceroy after we so cleverly stole it."

We packed most of the Holy Office's confiscated gems and enough gold ducats to fulfill our needs to be gentlemen of quality for a lifetime. The rest of the booty, a great quant.i.ty of gold and silver and the remainder of the jewelry, we placed in a cave, carefully concealing the existence of the cave with rocks and brush.

We rode for Veracruz, hoping our booty would not be found by an indio who thought he'd stumbled onto Montezuma's lost mine.

We had booked pa.s.sage with a lobo boat that crisscrossed the ocean in between the annual voyages of the treasure fleet.

Our destination was Seville, the queen of Cities.

ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHT.

I would ride a dragon across the Fire Mountains before crossing an ocean in a boat. For three weeks we were tossed like a cork on waves the size of mountains, blown by winds sent by the G.o.ds to punish me for my innumerable transgressions. The sea's vomit-sickness ravaged me. What little I could eat, I vomited. By the time we reached the peninsula that housed Spain and Portugal, I had lost weight and any interest I ever had in being a sailor.

Mateo had served on both land and sea for the king. He was singularly unaffected. "I was just a boy when I had to leave the city of my birth and find sanctuary from a blood feud and the king's constables," he told me during the voyage. "A fleet was leaving to fight the Turkish sultan, and I had a berth on one of the ships."

He declined to reveal what had caused his youthful flight from justice, but my experiences with Mateo told me that a woman was somewhere in the comedia of his early life.

"The captain disliked me instantly, no doubt for some youthful indiscretion, and a.s.signed me to the fireboats during the battle with the Infidel fleet. The boats were equipped with wooden cannons painted black, but we were the vanguard of a great naval victory over the Turks."

Wooden cannons? Fireboats? I had never heard of these machines of war and found Mateo's tale fascinating.

"In our age of ships that are the size of small castles, it is hard to sink a ship in battle. A lucky shot to the powder room will send a ship to the bottom, in pieces. But ships are made of wood and wood burns, compadre. Fire is a greater threat to a ship than being outgunned. You can sail out of cannon range, but you can't flee fire onboard. And there is no place to go if the fire gets out of hand. I have seen men onboard ships engulfed in flames throw themselves into the sea to drown rather than have the flames tickle their feet."

A "fireboat," he explained, was a ship refitted so it burned quickly and easily. "Ships are equipped to minimize the flammable material on board. But a fireboat is equipped to maximize burning."

The refitted ships were typically merchant vessels of little value in a battle. "We gutted the ship below deck and built wood chimneys from the hole to above the main deck. We constructed wood troughs in the hole that led to the portholes and the chimneys; then we packed the hole with anything that would burn easily.

"But we had to keep a ship looking like a man-of-war. We painted logs black and mounted them at gunports to make it appear that we were heavily gunned when, in fact, we were unarmed."

"What was the purpose of the troughs under the deck?"

"We poured oil in the troughs and lit it. The oil fires ran down the troughs, spreading the fire throughout the hole, even pouring out of the portholes to put the sides of the ship ablaze. The chimneys were stuffed with flammables and a little black powder."

When the sea battle began, the fireship would set a course for its victim. It would take many hits as it came at the opposing ship, but by the time the enemy realized the danger, that it was not engaging an ordinary warship, the fireboat was beside it. When it came alongside, topside grappling hooks would snag the other ship's rigging, locking them in a lethal embrace.

"We had to set the fires before our lines tangled with those of the other ship, and the timing had to be perfect," he said. "We had to abandon ship in a rowboat and were at the mercy of the enemy guns if we left too soon. We would be consumed by fire and explosions if we were too late."

Once the hooks had tangled the other ship's masts, a powder charge in the chimneys was ignited. "That blasted fire out of the chimneys' mouths into our own sails and the other ship's rigging. The flaming sails meant the end of both ships. Only half a dozen of us manned the vessel; and as soon as the chimneys blew, we jumped into a longboat we had been towing."

Fireboat crews got double pay and bonuses. "But our casualty rates were 50 percent. Most often the crews consisted of men like me who were being punished."

Mateo stared out at the sea, remembering the past. "We Spaniards were the masters of the fireboats, using them against the Infidels in many battles, but we became victims of our own cunning when we fought the English."

A great armada of ships and troops had been a.s.sembled by the Spanish king to invade England and restore the Catholic religion to that blasphemous country, Mateo said. "We were the greatest power in the world then and now. We ruled the land and sea, and our empire embraced the world. The great fleet our king ama.s.sed for the invasion was the Armada Invencible, the largest and most powerful ever a.s.sembled. And it was defeated. But it was not English guns that caused our fleet to break formation and paved the way for a storm to overpower our ships. It was five miserable fireboats. When our fleet was anch.o.r.ed off Calais, the English sent five blazing ships into their midst. Our captains were so terrified of the fiery ships that many of them pulled anchor and fled without firing a shot."

We were a week at sea when Mateo shocked me with an attack.

I awoke to find him bending over me with his dagger in his hand. Before I could move, he slashed my face. I came out of bed with my arms flailing, blood flying from my face.

I grabbed my own dagger and crouched in a corner. "This is what it has come to, eh, compadre? All the treasure is better than half?"