Chapter XV. In which is told the unlucky adventure Don Quixote ran into when he ran into some heartless Yangüeses

The sage Cide Hamete Benengeli tells that, as soon as Don Quixote had taken leave of his hosts and of all who were present at the burial of the shepherd Grisóstomo, he and his squire went into the same wood into which they had seen the shepherdess Marcela go; and after riding through it for more than two hours, searching for her everywhere without being able to find her, they came to a halt in a meadow full of fresh grass, beside which ran a stream so gentle and so cool that it invited, and indeed compelled, them to spend there the hours of the midday heat, which was beginning to set in fiercely.

Don Quixote and Sancho dismounted, and, leaving the donkey and Rocinante free to graze at their ease on the plentiful grass that grew there, they plundered the saddlebags, and, without any ceremony, in good peace and fellowship, master and man ate what they found in them.

Sancho had not troubled to hobble Rocinante, sure that he knew him to be so meek and so little given to lust that all the mares in the pastures of Córdoba would not lead him astray. Fate, then, and the devil, who does not always sleep, ordained that there was grazing in that valley a herd of Galician ponies belonging to some Galician muleteers, whose custom it is to take their midday rest with their string of animals in spots and places where there is grass and water; and the one where Don Quixote happened to be suited the Galicians very well. It happened, then, that Rocinante took a fancy to sport with those fair lady ponies; and, leaving his natural pace and habit as soon as he smelled them, without asking his master’s leave, he broke into a smart little trot and went off to make his need known to them. But they, who, as it seemed, must have had more mind to graze than to anything else, received him with their hooves and their teeth in such a way that in a short while his girths were broken and he was left without a saddle, as bare as he was born. But what he must have felt more was that the muleteers, seeing the violence being done to their mares, ran up with stakes and gave him so many blows that they knocked him down on the ground in a sorry state.

By this time Don Quixote and Sancho, who had seen Rocinante’s beating, came up panting; and Don Quixote said to Sancho:

“From what I see, Sancho, my friend, these are not knights but base folk of low breeding. I say this because you may well help me take due vengeance for the outrage done to Rocinante before our very eyes.”

“What the devil kind of vengeance are we to take,” answered Sancho, “if there are more than twenty of them and no more than two of us, and maybe only one and a half?”

“I am worth a hundred,” replied Don Quixote.

And, without further speeches, he laid hand to his sword and charged the Galicians, and Sancho Panza did the same, stirred and moved by his master’s example. And at the very first, Don Quixote dealt one of them a slash that laid open the leather jerkin he was wearing, along with a good part of his back. The Galicians, seeing themselves so mistreated by those two men alone when there were so many of them, ran to their stakes, and, catching the two of them in the middle, began to rain blows on them thick and fast with great zeal and vehemence. The truth is that at the second stroke they brought Sancho to the ground, and the same befell Don Quixote, for all his skill and his good courage; and his luck would have it that he fell at the feet of Rocinante, who had not yet got up; which shows the fury with which stakes pound when they are put in rough and angry hands.

The Galicians, then, seeing the mischief they had done, loaded up their animals as fast as they could and went on their way, leaving the two adventurers in a sorry plight and a worse temper.

The first to feel his hurts was Sancho Panza; and, finding himself beside his master, he said in a weak and pitiful voice:

“Señor Don Quixote! Oh, Señor Don Quixote!”

“What is it, brother Sancho?” answered Don Quixote, in the same faint and doleful tone as Sancho.

“I’d like, if it’s possible,” answered Sancho Panza, “for your grace to give me two swallows of that drink of Feo Blas, the Ugly Blas, if your grace has it there to hand. Maybe it will do some good for broken bones the way it does for wounds.”

“Why, if I had it here, unhappy man that I am, what would we lack?” answered Don Quixote. “But I swear to you, Sancho Panza, on the faith of a knight-errant, that before two days have passed, unless fortune orders otherwise, I will have it in my possession, or my hands will fail me badly.”

“Well, in how many days does your grace think we’ll be able to move our feet?” replied Sancho Panza.

“For my part,” said the battered knight Don Quixote, “I can say that I cannot set a limit to those days. But I am to blame for all of it, for I should not have laid hand to my sword against men who were not dubbed knights as I am; and so I believe that, as a penalty for having broken the laws of chivalry, the god of battles has allowed this punishment to be dealt me. For which reason, Sancho Panza, you had best take note of what I am about to tell you, for it matters greatly to the health of us both; and it is that when you see that such rabble do us some wrong, you are not to wait for me to lay hand to my sword against them, for I will by no means do it; instead, lay hand to your own sword and punish them to your heart’s content; and if knights should come to their aid and defense, I will know how to defend you and attack them with all my might; for you will already have seen by a thousand signs and trials how far the valor of this mighty arm of mine extends.”

So arrogant had the poor gentleman become with his victory over the valiant Biscayan. But his master’s advice did not seem so good to Sancho Panza that he failed to answer it, saying:

“Sir, I am a peaceable man, meek and quiet, and I know how to disassemble any insult, because I’ve got a wife and children to keep and bring up. So let your grace take this as a warning too, since it can’t be an order: in no way will I lay hand to my sword, either against peasant or against knight; and from here till I stand before God, I forgive all the wrongs they’ve done me and will do me, whether the one who has done them, or does them, or will do them, is high or low, rich or poor, hidalgo or commoner, without excepting any estate or condition whatever.”

When his master heard this, he answered him:

“I wish I had the breath to speak a little at my ease, and that the pain I have in this rib would ease somewhat, so that I might make you understand, Panza, the error you are in. Come here, you sinner: if the wind of fortune, so contrary until now, should turn in our favor, filling the sails of our desire so that we safely and without any hindrance make port in one of the isles I have promised you, what would become of you if, when I won it, I made you lord of it? Will you make it impossible by not being a knight, nor wishing to be one, nor having the courage or the intention to avenge your injuries and defend your lordship? For you must understand that, in kingdoms and provinces lately conquered, the hearts of the natives are never so settled, nor so much on the side of their new lord, that there is no fear of their making some change to upset things again and, as they say, try their luck once more; and so the new possessor must have the understanding to know how to govern himself and the courage to attack and defend himself in whatever may happen.”

“In what has happened to us just now,” answered Sancho, “I’d have liked to have that understanding and that courage your grace speaks of; but I swear to you, on the faith of a poor man, that I’m more in need of poultices than of speeches. See, your grace, whether you can get up, and we’ll help Rocinante, though he doesn’t deserve it, because he was the main cause of this whole pounding. I never would have believed it of Rocinante; I took him for a chaste person and as peaceable as I am. Well, they’re right when they say you need a long time to get to know people, and that there’s nothing sure in this life. Who would have said that after those great slashes your grace gave that unlucky knight-errant there would come, posthaste and hard on their heels, this great storm of blows that has burst over our backs?” “Yours, at least, Sancho,” replied Don Quixote, “must be used to such squalls; but mine, brought up among fine muslins and Holland linen, will plainly feel the pain of this misfortune more. And were it not that I imagine… what am I saying, imagine? I know for certain that all these discomforts are bound up with the exercise of arms, I would let myself die here of sheer vexation.”

To this the squire replied:

“Sir, since these misfortunes are part of the harvest of chivalry, tell me, your grace, whether they happen very often or whether they have set seasons when they come; because it seems to me that after two harvests we’ll be useless for the third, if God in His infinite mercy doesn’t help us.”

“Know, Sancho, my friend,” answered Don Quixote, “that a knight-errant’s life lies open to a thousand perils and misadventures; and, no more and no less, knights-errant are in near potential of becoming kings and emperors, as experience has shown in many different knights whose histories I know through and through. And I could tell you now, if the pain allowed me, of some who by the valor of their arm alone have risen to the high ranks I have spoken of; and these same men found themselves, before and after, in sundry calamities and miseries. For the valiant Amadís of Gaul found himself in the power of his mortal enemy Arcaláus the enchanter, of whom it is held as proven that, while he had him prisoner, he gave him more than two hundred lashes with his horse’s reins, tied to a pillar in a courtyard. And there is even a secret author, and of no small credit, who says that the Knight of Phoebus was caught by a certain trapdoor that gave way under his feet in a certain castle, and on falling he found himself in a deep pit underground, bound hand and foot, and there they gave him one of those things they call clysters, of snow water and sand, which nearly finished him; and if he had not been rescued in that great woe by a sage who was a great friend of his, the poor knight would have fared very badly. So I may well go through this among so many good people; for the affronts those men suffered are greater than those we are suffering now. For I would have you know, Sancho, that wounds dealt with instruments that happen to be in one’s hands are no affront; and this is set down in the law of the duel in express words: that if a shoemaker strikes another with the last he has in his hand, though it is truly made of wood, it will not therefore be said that the man he struck with it has been cudgeled. I say this so that you will not think that, though we have come out of this fray pounded, we have come out of it affronted; for the only weapons those men had, the ones they pounded us with, were their stakes, and none of them, as far as I remember, had rapier, sword, or dagger.”

“They didn’t give me room,” answered Sancho, “to look into all that; for no sooner had I laid hand to my Tizona than they blessed my shoulders with their pine logs, so that they took the sight from my eyes and the strength from my feet and laid me out where I’m lying now, and where it doesn’t trouble me at all to wonder whether the cudgeling was an affront or not, the way the pain of the blows troubles me, which are going to stay printed on my memory as well as on my back.”

“For all that, I would have you know, brother Panza,” replied Don Quixote, “that there is no memory that time does not put an end to, nor pain that death does not consume.”

“Well, what worse misfortune could there be,” replied Panza, “than one that has to wait for time to finish it off and for death to consume it? If this misfortune of ours were one of those that are cured with a couple of poultices, it wouldn’t be so bad; but I’m beginning to see that all the plasters in a hospital won’t be enough even to put them on the mend.”

“Leave off that and draw strength from weakness, Sancho,” answered Don Quixote, “for so will I, and let us see how Rocinante is; for, as it seems to me, the poor creature has not had the smallest share of this misfortune.”

“There’s nothing to wonder at in that,” answered Sancho, “since he’s such a good knight-errant too; what I wonder at is that my donkey has come off free and clear of costs, where we come off clear of ribs.”

“Fortune always leaves a door open in misfortunes, to bring a remedy for them,” said Don Quixote. “I say this because that little beast will be able to make up now for the lack of Rocinante, carrying me from here to some castle where I can be cured of my wounds. And what is more, I will not count such a mount a dishonor, for I remember having read that the good old Silenus, tutor and teacher of the merry god of laughter, made his entry into the hundred-gated city riding very much at his pleasure on a very handsome ass.”

“It may be true that he rode mounted, as your grace says,” answered Sancho, “but there’s a big difference between riding mounted and going slung across like a sack of rubbish.”

To which Don Quixote replied:

“Wounds received in battle give honor rather than take it away. So, Panza, my friend, do not answer me back any more, but, as I have told you, get up as best you can and put me on top of your donkey in whatever way pleases you best, and let us be gone from here before night comes and catches us in this wilderness.”

“But I’ve heard your grace say,” said Panza, “that it’s very much the way of knights-errant to sleep on the moors and in the wilds most of the year, and that they count it great good fortune.”

“That is,” said Don Quixote, “when they can do no better, or when they are in love; and this is so true that there has been a knight who stayed on a rock, in sun and shade and all the harshness of the skies, for two years, without his lady knowing of it. And one of these was Amadís, when, calling himself Beltenebros, he took up his lodging on the Peña Pobre, the Poor Rock, for eight years or eight months, I cannot say which, since I am not too certain of the count: enough that he was there doing penance for I know not what displeasure the lady Oriana caused him. But let us leave this now, Sancho, and be quick, before some other misfortune befalls the donkey, as it did Rocinante.”

“That really would be the devil,” said Sancho.

And, letting out thirty groans and sixty sighs and a hundred and twenty curses and oaths against whoever had brought him there, he got up, stopping bent over halfway, like a Turkish bow, unable to straighten up all the way; and with all this toil he got his ass ready, who had also gone somewhat astray with the excessive freedom of that day. Then he got Rocinante up, who, had he had a tongue to complain with, would surely not have lagged behind Sancho or his master.

In short, Sancho settled Don Quixote on the ass and tied Rocinante on behind; and, leading the ass by the halter, he made his way, more or less, toward where it seemed to him the highroad might be. And fortune, which was steering his affairs from good to better, had not let him go a short league before it brought him to the road, on which he caught sight of an inn that, to his dismay and to Don Quixote’s delight, had to be a castle. Sancho insisted that it was an inn, and his master that it was not, but a castle; and the dispute lasted so long that they had time, without settling it, to reach the place, into which Sancho went, without further inquiry, with his whole string of animals.