by Jo Baker
It was full winter and still the company had not reached Salamander, the lizard-city. Now they seemed to be wheeling east again across the arid scrub. James could not make sense of these twists and turns, unless the city itself was scuttling off as they approached.
The locals hid their livestock and their food: it was the only explanation for the empty stockades and shambles and barns and smallholdings. The soldiers stole and scavenged what they could, and still they were always hungry.
Late one afternoon, James’s detachment scraped through a little oak wood, in the hopes of finding hidden sheep or cattle or, failing that, wildfowl. It did not look promising, but hunger kept them going. The wood was thin and dry, and silent even of birds. A picked-clean place, not even a pigeon left to coo. They walked on in bitter silence, cold, their breath misting, their feet shushing through the dry fallen leaves at the bottom of a gully. Pye was just turning to speak, no doubt to give it all up for a bad job, when there was a thunder of footfalls and a grunting, wheezing earthy sound; James spun round to see a wild pig bundling down at them from the top of the slope. Pye turned aside and swiftly loaded his pistol. He hit the beast square in its bristly muzzle, rendering it a mess of blood and brain, and still it kept bowling on down at them, under its own dead weight; James dodged, Pye leapt aside, the others scattered. The beast, being four-fifths dead already, hit the bottom of the gully, and stopped there, its front legs crumpling. They just stood looking at it. Then, with a wheezing, snortling noise, it keeled over on one side, bubbling with blood. A moment’s silence, then James laughed: the relief. For the first time in a long time, the spun-tight knot inside him slipped loose. They would eat well that night.
“Anyone got any apples on ’em?” Sergeant Pye said. “Applesauce.”
“Eggs,” James said. “Ham and eggs.”
He crouched by the fallen creature, and saw her swollen, reddened dugs.
“It’s a sow. There’s a litter nearby.” James got back to his feet. “Listen.”
It was very cold. The light was failing. They stood in silence. The sound was almost too high-pitched to hear: a faint, almost bat-like squeaking. He raised a hand and beckoned for the others to follow. Halfway up the slope, they came upon a den dug into the bank between tree roots; a clutch of half-a-dozen piglets stared back at them with their small eyes. They were sturdy, milk-and-acorn-fed; they blinked pale lashes at the men. Then James reached in to take one, and the lot of them scattered squealing. The men scrambled after them, skidded down the banks; laughing, cursing, calling out to one another, all lost to the chase, as if this was home, and they were chasing greased piglets through the fair.
James caught one by its scruff and rammed it between his knees. He stuck its throat with his bayonet. It twitched and bled. Back at the farm Old Misery would have caught the blood in a bucket to make blood-puddings. He would never have believed he could have come to miss the old bitch and her cooking.
They strolled along with their Brown Besses slung on their shoulders and the sow swinging from a pole they’d cut and now carried between two of them, her young hanging like moles from another. It was night now, but the moon had risen, and it gave a reassuring light to their hike back to camp.
There was just a second between James noticing that he was happy, and then realizing that he was afraid. He glanced around him—they were tracking along the bottom of a dry gully, between rocks and low-growing juniper; parched winter grasses brushed against his gaiters. All was blue and white in the moonlight, and nothing had changed, but they were in danger. He knew it in his creeping flesh. No obvious, immediate threat, not like a musket in your face, or a full-grown hog charging at you: the kind of danger you wander into oblivious, and whistling.
He slipped his musket off his shoulder. “Sir?”
Rock and grass, and higher up, a screen of goat-willow, and an outcrop of stone. All was still. But it was a shallow kind of stillness, like a breath held.
“Sergeant Pye, sir?”
Pye glanced towards him, and his smile collapsed. He raised a hand to quell the noise. His own voice was a whisper.
“You see something, country-boy?”
The men were all silent now, scanning the gully, reaching for their weapons. A shift in temperature: they had been careless; Pye had let them.
“Well, well, my lovelies,” Pye breathed. “Pick up your petticoats, let’s be getting back.”
No more talk, just the thud of boots on the dry ground, and the rasp of breath in dry throats. Once they’d cleared the gully, there was about a mile down the hillside to the camp. Past that scrubby twisted pine there, and they’d be out into open terrain, and the worst of it would be over.
A hundred yards. Seventy. Fifty still to go. They would get away with it. It looked as though they had got away with it.
Pye must have thought the same, because he turned to speak over his shoulder: “You had me spooked, there, Jimmy-boy—”
And that was when the shot cracked out.
The men ducked, fumbling their muskets. James was on one knee, then on his belly, Brown Bess wedged to his shoulder, scanning: everything was silver, shadows, grainy in the moonlight. Beside him, Sergeant Pye hissed out orders. The gunshot echoed down the gully, a messy sound, bouncing off the rock. James searched the skyline, the scrubby trees, the outcrops. Silence.
“Deje las armas!”
Scrambling, twisting on the ground, James scanned around for the speaker. No sign of movement, no shifting or rustling.
“O matamos a todos ahora.”
“Put them down,” Pye said. “Put down your muskets.”
The men looked to him, pale faces in the night. The sergeant jerked his head: get on with it. They were in the open: they could not fight an enemy that they could not see. Pye, the sweat on his forehead catching the light, set the example and laid down his weapon; James complied reluctantly, laying the cool weight of her down upon the scrubby grass. The others followed suit, the gunmetal making dull clinks as the barrels slid together.
Then they drew close, back to back. James felt his shoulder brushed by Pye’s, his arm jostled by Stephenson’s. He could hear their breaths, coming fast and harsh. He still searched around him. The pigs lay trussed and abandoned in the dust.
Then there was movement, up on the hillside. James nudged Pye, jutted his chin: the bandits appeared from amongst the rocks. They came slithering down, scuffing through the dirt, and gathered around the soldiers. James saw the whiteness of a young boy’s teeth as he grinned. The men had an outdoor smell about them, musky, like deer; an old man bent and scooped up the muskets and held them under his arm like a bunch of firewood. And their leader, face as craggy as the land, said something in Spanish, of which James recognized a few words: ingleses, idiotas and hijos de puta. They were all as thin as grass.
The sow and piglets were lifted and carried away, swinging from their poles, up some path through the rocks that you wouldn’t know was there unless you actually saw those men walking it. Then the troop of them just melted into the dark, and disappeared. James was left with an impression of a broad white-toothed grin, lingering in the air when the men themselves were gone.
Someone let out a low whistle.
Someone else said, “Bastards.”
Pye wiped his forehead with a sleeve. “We were lucky.”
“That was lucky?”
“That’s just our dinner gone. It could have been worse. They could have gutted us. If we were French, they would’ve cut off our cocks and made us eat ’em.”
And then Pye turned and trudged on, towards the end of the gully, under the scrubby twisted pine.
At a crossroads outside Alba de Tormes, where they paused to water the horses one bitter winter morning, James read the milestone: Salamanca 15 Millas.
James said, “We could be there by nightfall.”
Sergeant Pye grinned. “We’ll all be having Salamancan buttered buns tonight!”
Then the order came down the column, with a ripp
led sigh like wind through barley: they were to return to Portugal. James stopped in his tracks, just watching as the men wheeled the horses round, slipping and clattering on the mud and stones, and the gun carriage drew off, heading west again. Then he stirred himself and ran to catch up. He put his shoulder to the carriage, too, and they heaved the gun away. Away from Salamanca. Away from where they had been struggling towards all this time.
It was December. The skies were bare and white; snow swirled across the fields.
At Sahagún de Campos, James came to know that the hunger he had felt before was nothing. This was a new creature, and it was stronger, fiercer, tighter than he had ever known: it gnawed at his gut, crazed his teeth, squeezed his temples, made him sharp-eyed, twitchy and quick to anger.
When they came upon the town it was thronged with soldiers; the French had just been driven out. A great victory, the officers were saying, and against overwhelming odds. It would go down in history, like Crécy or Agincourt. Whenever Englishmen spoke of glories, and the French of humiliation and disgrace, they would talk of Sahagún de Campos, and shake their heads in awe.
The town was uncouth, filthy, violent. In the dark streets behind the San Tirso church, under its archways, the wraiths gathered. They washed up in a tide-line, huge eyes catching the light, bones bulging at knee and elbow.
The redcoats and the gunners would go there; soldiers will take their comforts where they can. And God knows, the women, and the children, they sold themselves willingly enough. If will could be said to come into it, at times like that.
But the thing was—Pye laughed and swigged his tumbler of rough wine, a one-too-many tumbler that was tipping him over the edge of leery cheerfulness into queasy confidences—a fresh bit of flesh, insofar as anything in this godforsaken cesspit was fresh, it was stupidly easy to get; these youngsters were all so ready to be duped. You didn’t even have to give them anything—just the promise was enough; they wanted to trust you. They were just so callow, so stupidly young. And when you’d done what you liked, and you didn’t hand over your biscuit or your bit of bread, what would a girl like that be able to do about it? Fight you for it? Ha! Pull a knife on you?
James, sick, swilled down his wine, and did not look at Pye.
He took to ghosting through the narrow streets himself. He didn’t desire those little bags of bones; he couldn’t fathom how anybody could—they fostered in him instead an aching sympathy, and a sharper outrage. He understood now the joy of everything that he had been so desperate to shrug off: a warm bed, a cup of milk, the next day unspooling just the same as the day before, and the only pressing need being for a good smooth stone to throw at the thieving crows.
He came upon a ragged girl, lugging a smaller boy on her hip. James had a bit of bread about him—he fumbled it out, offered it to her. She looked at it, and then at him. Then, with a slow blink, she put the boy down, and murmured something in the child’s ear that made him sit and stick his thumb in his mouth. She came up to James, hang-dog, unbuttoning.
James fumbled the crust into her hands; he held up his own and stepped back, shaking his head. “No. No.”
He turned and strode away, leaving her there, bread clutched tight in dirty fingers, not knowing what to do. When he glanced back from the corner of the alleyway, he saw her crouching by the little boy; she had broken the crust in half, and was watching the little one gum at the hard stuff while she chewed her own.
He walked away, guilty and ill-at-ease. It would delay an end, perhaps. He was not even certain that was to the good.
He saw Pye there, walking the cloisters of San Tirso. His distinctive laugh, a dark coat flitting through the shadows.
He saw Pye lifting something bone-thin and tiny up against a wall, and fumbling with his britches buttons.
He saw Pye sauntering along with a ration pack, a flock of children following him, silent and wide-eyed.
James clenched and unclenched his fists. To witness this, and do nothing: it was a stain on him.
Hunger made his sleep thin and ragged: famine figures clutched at him, their cracked lips sucked at his. He woke shivering; there were crows circling above.
Two nights before Christmas, the order came to move off. The night was raw. There was snow threatening, but no frost, so that all was bitter cold and wet as they struck camp and harnessed the horses to the gun carriage.
The horses were in their traces, the guns under canvas to keep off the sleet, and Sergeant Pye had not turned up. James was dispatched to find him; he knew where to look. Round the back of San Tirso, he came upon him in a sidestreet, his cock in his hand, trying to piss. Pye looked up, feverish and pained. He saw James, and tucked his prick away.
“Had a bit of bad luck there,” he said.
“Sir.”
“You won’t say a word, eh, Jimmy-boy.” He pulled at his britches, easing the fabric away from a sore.
“Sir.”
He tugged his coat straight. “Well?”
“We’re under marching orders, sir.”
“Well, hop to it, then. Get a bloody move on.”
The troops stumbled away from Sahagún in the spitting snow. Feet blistered and chilblained, they picked their way along to find the French, and fight them. The roads deep in slush, rutted and slithery, they had gone maybe three shivering impossible miles, when a dispatch rider sped along the creeping column, spattering mud, flying like the devil himself. James lifted his head, wiped his eyes, wondered for a moment, and then just trudged on. Half a mile later, the order tumbled back along the line: turn about. A massive movement of French troops had been spotted to the south. Napoleon was coming, and was moving to outflank them. Now they had to run.
They could not run. Not with a nine-pounder and horses thin as famine. They dragged themselves along.
They were to march now for La Coruña; the entire force was racing for the sea. The town was still in British hands and readily defensible; they would hole up there until the Navy could evacuate them all. This was not a defeat! Just as you swung back an arm to throw a punch, so an army must draw away, the better to strike again. They would sail for home, and they would regroup, and then they’d be back; they’d show that little Corsican cunt, Pye went on, his venom building, spit gathering at the corners of his mouth, stirring the other men to something almost like warmth, so that their eyes grew less dull, and their shoulders a little less slumped, and they began to recall what it was to be soldiers, and Englishmen, and hold their heads up high. But all James could think was to be back in England. Hedgerows full of birds and berries. Milk. A mild sun. An old fellow who’d nod to you in passing. Who did not expect you to beat him to a bloody mess, steal his dinner, rape his wife, and burn his house down around his ears.
Passing through a village at the tail-end of the company, in the dark fifteenth hour of a thirty-six-hour march, James tripped over something soft and solid. He landed, hands and knees, across it. His fingers were in mud, his shins wet; the road was sodden, and stank of wine and blood, and small things scuttled away in the darkness. He gagged: it was a body; he knew from the smell—blood, urine, and a trace of sweetness—and it was so slight it must be a child. He staggered back to his feet. He shambled on.
Up at the forward pair of horses, he took hold of a bridle, and laid a palm on a velvet neck. He whispered Spanish nonsense, and he kept on marching, one hand on the reassuring endurance of the horse. James’s shoes were sodden tatters, his gaiters rags. His legs were weak, and his stomach sick with famine.
And he was afraid. This was true fear now, not just a battle’s fleeting consciousness of mortality. This was a constant hum that built and grew until nothing else could be thought of, not at all.
When, in the dawn chill, a halt was called, they were out in open cold, the sky pale with high thin cloud. Smoke trailed from low tumbledown buildings half a mile or so from the side of the road. James unhitched the forward pair from the gun carriage, and led them towards the dwelling. He was thinking simply: shelter,
fodder, sleep. And then, as soon as he surfaced, he’d be up and off again. The fear was too sharp to let him rest for long.
The horses stumbled across the rutted field, their heads hanging low. When James heaved open the slumped door, a handful of redcoats looked up from their smoking fire; a couple of them reached for their Brown Besses.
“Gunner,” he said, to explain the blue.
Then they slumped, seeing he was one of theirs. One of them waved him in.
“C’mon, then, if you’re coming. Join the party.”
The place was a shell; the roof was half collapsed. It was a barn, or stable, divided into precarious, worm-holed stalls; there was a little wispy old hay; he led the horses to it, and they lifted mouthfuls and slowly chewed.
The redcoats had built a fire of timber they had scavenged from the building: bits of rafter and board and a fallen roof beam were heaped on the bare flags. The old wood burnt smartly.
“It’s perishing.”
James slumped down and watched the flickering flames. Fear faded to a murmur: the men talked, but he could not follow what they were saying, could not care enough to try, could not even speak, not any more. He leaned back, feet to the fire. He blinked.
When he woke up, the redcoats were gone. So were the horses. When he stumbled out into the daylight, the column was gone too.
Fear now was a creature; it slithered around him, covered his face and got in amongst his hair and he could not breathe and he could not think, and he just stared across the wide poor land, and along the empty road, then spun to look back off the way they’d come from.
He was alone.
Why had the other men not woken him?
That was a thought.
Because they stole the horses.
That was another thought.
It was a faint reassurance, that these thoughts still came.
He shivered, rubbing at his arms.
He looked up at the high pale sun. Midafternoon.
But was it the same day, or was it the next?
Alone now, he found the road paralysing. It sliced across the open land, the fields stubbled or bare with winter; he felt as exposed as a louse on a shaven scalp.