The Biscayan

On the road to Puerto Lápice, in the heat of the afternoon, two figures in black came towards us on mules so tall they might have been camels, masked against the dust and shaded by parasols. Behind them rolled a coach with an escort of horsemen. I learned later that the coach carried a lady from Biscay going to join her husband in Seville, and that the two friars of Saint Benedict merely happened to share her road. I did not learn it at the time.

I told Sancho at once that this would be the most celebrated adventure of the age. Those dark riders, I said, were enchanters, and they had some princess captive in that coach. Sancho said it would be worse than the windmills. He said they were friars, plain as day, that the coach belonged to some travellers, and that the devil was making a fool of me. I told him he still knew nothing about adventures, and that he would see.

01 The friars

I rode into the middle of the road and called upon the black riders to release the noble ladies they were carrying off, or prepare to meet the end their wickedness deserved. The friars stopped, bewildered, and said they were nothing of the kind, only two monks on their own business, and knew nothing of any lady. I told them I was not to be charmed by soft words and rode at the nearer one with my lance down. He had the good sense to fall off his mule before I reached him. The other turned his mule about and went across the fields faster than a rumour.

Sancho, seeing a friar on the ground, got down and began taking off the man's habit, explaining that it was his lawful share of the spoils. The friars' servants had not read the laws of spoils. They knocked him flat and pulled out a good part of his beard. I did not see this, being at the coach window. I am sorry for it, and Sancho has mentioned it more than once.

02 The duel

I told the lady in the coach that she was free, that her captors lay humbled, and that she owed me nothing but one small favour: to go to El Toboso, present herself to the peerless Dulcinea, and tell her what I had done. One of her escort, a Biscayan squire, understood that I meant to send the coach to El Toboso instead of Seville, and he took hold of my lance and told me, in a Castilian that had clearly been through some battles of its own, that if I did not let them go he would kill me. I told him that were he a gentleman I would already have punished him. He said he was every bit as much a gentleman as I was, and the matter was settled.

He was on a sorry hired mule and could not get down from it, so he seized a cushion from the coach to serve as a shield. The lady and her maids began to promise candles to every shrine in Spain. The Biscayan struck first, and it was a mighty blow. It glanced off my shield onto my shoulder, took away a large piece of my helmet, and half my ear with it. I felt it. I will not pretend I did not.

I rose in the stirrups, took my sword in both hands, and brought it down with all my weight upon his cushion and the head behind it. The cushion was no help at all. He began to bleed from nose and mouth, clung to his mule's neck, and when the frightened animal bolted across the field, he came off.

I leapt down and set my sword point before his eyes and told him to yield or lose his head. He was too dazed to answer, and the ladies came running to beg for his life. I granted it on one condition: that he present himself in El Toboso before the lady Dulcinea, to be disposed of as she wished. They promised at once, without asking who she was.

No one in El Toboso has yet reported a Biscayan arriving. This does not surprise me. Seville is a long way, and El Toboso is not on the road to it, and a man who has given his word will keep it in his own time.

Sancho, meanwhile, got up from where the friars' men had left him, saw that I had won, and came to kiss my hand and ask whether this was the island. I told him adventures at crossroads pay only in broken heads and missing ears, but that his island would come. He bound my ear with a rag and a little ointment, very gently, and I thanked him, and I did not tell him it hurt, because a knight does not.

Read nextThe giants of CriptanaThe adventure of the day before, where my lance was lost.

To the learned Arab who is to tell this tale: it was half an ear, no more, and the Biscayan has a sworn errand. Should your pages break off mid-blow, as I suspect they may, finish them in my favour.