Sharpe’s rifles

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Of course.”

  “The Irishman, Patrick Harper. Release him.”

  “Release him?” Sharpe was taken aback, not by the request as such, but by the sudden change in Vivar’s manner. A moment before he had been vengeful and steel-hard, now he was diffidently polite, like a petitioner.

  “I know,” Vivar said hastily, “that the Irishman’s sin is grievous. He deserves to be flogged half to death, if not beyond death, but he did a thing most precious to me.”

  Sharpe, embarrassed by Vivar’s humble tone, shrugged. “Of course.”

  “I shall talk to him, and tell him his duties of obedience.”

  “He can be released.” Sharpe had already half persuaded himself of the necessity of releasing Harper, if only to prove his own reasonableness to Sergeant Williams.

  “I’ve already released him,” Vivar admitted, “but I thought it best to seek your approval.” He grinned, saw that Sharpe would offer no protest, then stooped to pick up a fallen French helmet. He ripped away the canvas cover which both protected the fine brass and prevented it from reflecting the sunlight to betray the Dragoon’s position. “A pretty bauble,” he said scathingly, “something to hang on the staircase when the war’s over.”

  Sharpe was not interested in a dented Dragoon’s helmet; instead he was realizing that the ‘thing most precious’ Harper had done for Vivar was to protect the strongbox. He remembered the horror on the Spaniard’s face when he thought the chest might be lost. Like a stab of sunlight searing through a rent in dark clouds, Sharpe at last understood. The chasseur had been chasing Vivar, and that chase had unwittingly drawn the Dragoons across the tail of the British army where they had casually broken four companies of Riflemen, but then they had kept going. Not after the retreating British, but after the strongbox. “What’s in the chest, Major?” he asked accusingly.

  “I told you, papers,” Vivar answered carelessly as he tore away the last shreds of canvas from the helmet.

  “The French came here to capture that strongbox.”

  “The prisoners told me they came for food. I’m sure they were speaking the truth, Lieutenant. Men who face death usually do, and they all told me the same story. They were a forage party.” Vivar polished the helmet’s brass with his sleeve, then held the helmet out for Sharpe’s inspection. “Shoddy workmanship. See how badly the chinstrap is riveted?”

  Sharpe again ignored the helmet. “They came here for that chest, didn’t they? They’ve been following you, and they must have known you had to cross these mountains.”

  Vivar frowned at the helmet. “I don’t think I shall keep it. I shall find a better one before the killing’s done.”

  “They’re the same men who attacked our rearguard. We’re lucky they didn’t send the whole Regiment up here, Major!”

  “The prisoners said that only the men on fit horses could come this far.” It seemed a partial affirmation of Sharpe’s suspicions, but Vivar immediately denied the rest. “I assure you they only came here for forage and food. They told me they’ve stripped the villages in the valley bare, so now they must climb high for their food.”

  “What’s in the chest, Major?” Sharpe persisted.

  “Curiosity!” Vivar turned away and began to walk towards the village. “Curiosity!” He drew back his arm and hurled the helmet far into the void where the plateau dropped steeply away. The helmet glittered, turned, then fell with a crash into the undergrowth. “Curiosity! An English disease, Lieutenant, which leads to death. Avoid it!”

  The fires died in the night, all but for one burning house that Vivar’s men fed with wood cut from the surrounding trees in which they roasted hunks of horsemeat that had been threaded onto their swords. The Riflemen cooked the horsemeat on their ramrods. All were glad that the villagers’ bodies had been buried. The picquets were pulled back to the very edge of the burnt village where they shivered in the cold wind. The afternoon rain had stopped at dusk, and in the night there were even gaps in the high flying clouds which allowed a wan moonlight to illumine the jagged hills from which the snow had part-melted to leave the landscape looking strangely leprous. Somewhere in those hills a wolf howled.

  Sharpe’s men provided the sentries for the first half of the night. At midnight he walked around the village and spoke a few awkward words with each man. The conversations were stilted because none of the greenjackets could forget the morning when they had conspired for Sharpe’s death, but a Welshman, Jenkins, more loquacious than the others, wondered where Sir John Moore’s army was now.

  “God knows,” Sharpe said. “Far away.”

  “Defeated, sir?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But Boney left, sir?” The question was asked eagerly, as if the Emperor’s absence gave the fugitive Riflemen renewed hope.

  “So we were told.” Napoleon was supposed to have left Spain already, but that was small reason for optimism. He had no need to stay. Everywhere his enemies were in retreat, and his Marshals, who had conquered Europe, could be trusted to finish Spain and Portugal.

  Sharpe walked on past the burned-out houses. The sole of his right boot was hanging loose, and his trousers gaped at his thighs. At least he had repaired the broken scabbard, yet otherwise his uniform hung off him like a scarecrow’s rags. He went to the place where the road climbed up towards the canyon and where, beside a stone trough that the women who had once lived in this village had used as a washing place, a three-man picquet was posted. “See anything?”

  “Not a thing, sir. Quiet as a dry alehouse.”

  It was Harper who had answered and who now rose up, huge and formidable, from the shadow of the trough. The two men stared at each other, then, awkwardly, the Irishman pulled off his shako in the formal salute. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “The Major talked to me, he did. We was frightened, you see, sir, and…“

  “I said it doesn’t matter!”

  Harper nodded. His broken nose was still swollen and would never again be straight. The big Irishman grinned. “If you’ll not mind me saying it, sir, but you’ve got a punch on you like a Ballinderry heifer.”

  The comment might have been offered as a peace-token, but Sharpe’s memory of the fight in the ruined farmhouse was too fresh and too sore to accept it. “I’ve let you off a damned sharp hook, Rifleman Harper, but that does not give you the God-damned right to say whatever comes into your head. So put your bloody hat on, and go back to work.”

  Sharpe turned and walked away, ready to whip round instantly if a single insolent sound was uttered, but Harper had the sense to keep silent. The wind made the only noise, a sighing sound as it passed through the trees before lifting the sparks of the big fire high into the night. Sharpe went close to the fire, letting its heat warm his chilled and wet uniform. He supposed he had blundered again, that he should have accepted the friendly words as the peace-offering they were undoubtedly meant to be, but his pride had stung him into savagery.

  “You should get some sleep, sir.” It was Sergeant Williams, muffled against the cold, who appeared in the firelight. “I’ll look after the lads.”

  “I can’t sleep.”

  “No.” The word was said as agreement. “It’s thinking of them dead nippers what does it.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bastards,” Williams said. He held his hands towards the blaze. “There was one no older than my Mary.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Five, sir. Pretty wee thing, she is. Not like her father.”

  Sharpe smiled. “Did your wife come out to Spain with you?”

  “No, sir. Helps in her da’s bakery, she does. He wasn’t too pleased when she married a soldier, but they never are.”

  That’s true.“

  The Sergeant stretched. “But I’ll have some rare tales to tell when I get back to Spitalfields.” He was silent for a moment, perhaps thinking of home. “Funny, really.”

  “What is?”

  “Why these
bastards came all this way to get supplies. Isn’t that what the Major said, sir?”

  “Yes.” French forces were supposed to live off the land, stealing what they could to stay alive, but Sharpe, like

  Williams, could not believe that the enemy horsemen had climbed to this remote village when other, more tempting places lay in the valleys. “They were the same men,” he said, “who attacked us on the road.” Which, in a way, had worked to Sharpe’s advantage, because the French Dragoons, unable to resist using the captured rifles, had proved inept with the unfamiliar weapons.

  Sergeant Williams nodded. “Bugger in a red coat, right?”

  “Yes. And a fellow in black.”

  “It’s my belief they’re after that box the Spanish lads are carrying.” Williams lowered his voice as though one of the sleeping Cazadores might hear him. “It’s the sort of box you carry jewels in, isn’t it? Could be a King’s bloody ransom in that thing, sir.”

  “Major Vivar says it holds papers.”

  “Papers!” The Sergeant’s voice was scornful.

  “Well, I don’t suppose we’re going to find out,” Sharpe said. “And I wouldn’t recommend being too inquisitive, Sergeant. The Major doesn’t take kindly to curiosity.”

  “No, sir.” Williams sounded disappointed at his lack of enthusiasm.

  But Sharpe merely hid his own inquisitiveness for, after a few more moments of desultory conversation and after bidding the Sergeant a good night, he went softly and slowly towards the church. He used the stealth he had learned as a child in the London rookery where, if a boy did not steal, he starved.

  He walked round the church, then stood for a long time in the shadows by the door. He listened. He heard the fire’s crackle and the wind’s rising noise, but nothing else. Still he waited, straining to hear a single sound from within the old stone building. He heard nothing. He could smell the fallen and burnt timbers within the building, but he could sense no human presence. The nearest Spaniards were thirty paces away, rolled in their cloaks, asleep.

  The church door was ajar. Sharpe edged through and, once inside the church, stopped again.

  Moonlight illuminated the sanctuary. The walls were scorched black, the altar was gone, yet Vivar’s men had begun to clear the desecration by forcing the burnt roof timbers aside to make an aisle which led to the altar steps. At the top of those steps, black like the walls, was the strongbox.

  Sharpe waited. He looked round the building’s small interior; watching for movement, but there was none. A small black window opened on the church’s southern wall, but that was the only aperture. Nothing showed in the opening, except darkness, suggesting that the small window opened into a cupboard or a deep shelf.

  Sharpe walked forward between the fallen timbers, some of which still smouldered. Once his loose right sole crunched a black lump of burnt wood, but that was the only sound he made.

  He stopped at the foot of the two steps which had led to the altar and squatted there. Curled on the lid of the strongbox was a jet rosary, its small crucifix shining in the moonlight. Within this box, Sharpe thought, lay something that had drawn French soldiers into the frozen highlands. Vivar had said it was papers, but even the most religious of men would not guard papers with a crucifix.

  The chest was wrapped in oilcloth that had been sewn tight. During the fight two bullets had embedded themselves in the big box, breaking the cloth, and Sharpe, fingering under the holes and past the lumpen bullets, felt the hard smoothness of the wood. He traced the shapes of the hasps and padlocks beneath the oilcloth. The padlocks were old-fashioned ball-locks that Sharpe knew he could open in seconds with a rifle’s cleaning pin.

  He rocked back on his heels, staring at the chest. Four Riflemen had died because of it and yet more might die, and that, Sharpe decided, gave him the right to know what lay inside. He knew he would not be able to disguise that the box had been opened, but he had no intention of stealing its contents so had no scruples about leaving the oilcloth torn and the locks picked.

  He reached into his jacket pocket and brought out the clasp knife he used for food. He opened its blade and reached forward to cut the cloth.

  “Touch it, Englishman, and you die.”

  Sharpe twisted to his right. The click of a pistol’s lock sounded from the small dark window. “Major?”

  “The sick could watch the Mass from this window, Lieutenant.” Vivar’s voice sounded from the blackness. “It’s a good place for a sentry,”

  “What is the sentry guarding?”

  “Just papers.” Vivar’s voice was cold. “Put your knife away, Lieutenant, and stay there.”

  Sharpe obeyed. After a moment the Major appeared in the church doorway. “Don’t do that again, Lieutenant. I will kill to protect what is in that box.”

  Sharpe felt like a small boy caught by a watchman, but he tried to brazen out the confrontation. “Papers?”

  “Papers,” Vivar said bleakly. He looked up at the sky where silvered clouds flew fast beside the moon. “It isn’t a night for killing, Englishman. The estadea are already restless.” He walked up the aisle. “Now I think you should try to sleep. We have far to go in the morning.”

  Sharpe, chastened, went past Vivar to the church door. With one hand on the jamb, he turned to look back at the chest. Vivar, his back to him, was already on his knees in front of the mysterious strongbox.

  Sharpe, embarrassed to see a man praying, paused.

  “Yes, Lieutenant?” Vivar had not turned round.

  “Did your prisoners tell you who the chasseur is? The man in red who led them here?”

  “No, Lieutenant.” The Spaniard’s voice was very patient, as though by answering he merely humoured a child’s caprice. “I did not think to ask them.”

  “Or the man in black? The civilian?”

  Vivar paused for a second. “Does the wolf know the names of the hounds?”

  “Who is he, Major?”

  The rosary’s beads clicked. “Goodnight, Lieutenant.” .

  Sharpe knew he would fetch no answers, only more mysteries to rival the insubstantiality of the estadea. He half-closed the charred door, then went to his cold bed of bare earth and listened to the wind moan in the spirit-haunted night. Somewhere a wolf howled, and one of the captured horses whinnied softly. In the chapel a man prayed. Sharpe slept.

  Chapter 6

  The Cazadores and Riflemen still went west but, for fear of the French Dragoons, Vivar avoided the easier paths of the pilgrim way, insisting that safety still lay in the uplands. The road, if it could be called a road at all, struggled through the passes of high mountains and across cold streams swollen by meltwater and by the persistent, stinging rain that made the paths as slippery as grease. The wounded men and those who caught a fever of the cold were carried by the captured French horses, but those precious beasts had to be led with an infinite caution if they were to survive on the treacherous tracks. One of the horses carried the strongbox.

  There was no news of the French. During the first two days of the march Sharpe expected to see the threatening silhouettes of the Dragoons on the skyline, but the chasseur andihis men seemed to have vanished. The few people who lived in the highland villages assured Vivar that they had seen no Frenchmen. Some of them did not even know that a foreign enemy was in Spain and, hearing the strange language of Sharpe’s Riflemen, would stare with a suspicious hostility at the strangers. “Not that their own dialect isn’t strange,” Vivar said cheerfully; then, as fluent in the Galician speech as in the more courtly tongue of Spain, he would reassure the peasants that the men in torn green coats were not to be feared.

  After the first few days, and satisfied that the French had lost the scent, Vivar descended to the pilgrim way which proved to be a succession of mingling tracks that twisted through the deeper valleys. The largest roads were reinforced with flint so that carts and carriages could use them, and even though the winter had drowned the flints in mud, the men marched fast and easily on the firmer surface. Ch
estnuts and elm trees grew thick beside the road which led through a country that had so far been free of scavenging armies. The men ate well. There was maize, rye, potatoes, chestnuts, and salted meat in winter store. One night there was even fresh mutton.

  Yet, despite the food and the easier footing, it was not a soft country. One midday, beside a bridge which crossed a deep, dark stream, Sharpe saw three human heads stuck high on wooden poles. The heads had been there for months, and their eyes, tongues, and softer flesh had been eaten by ravens, while what shreds of skin were left on the grisly skulls had turned as black as pitch. ‘Rateros,“ Vivar told Sharpe, ”highwaymen. They think that pilgrims give easy pickings.“

  “Do many pilgrims go to Santiago de Compostela?”

  “Not so many as in the old days. A few lepers still go to be cured, but even they will be stopped by the war.” Vivar nodded towards the lank-haired skulls. “So now those gentlemen will have to use their murderous skills against the French.” The thought cheered him, just as the easier going on the pilgrim way cheered Sharpe’s Riflemen. Sometimes they sang as they marched. They rediscovered old comforts. Vivar bought great blocks of tobacco that had to be rasped into shreds before it could be smoked and some of the Riflemen imitated the Spanish soldiers and twisted the tobacco in paper rather than smoking it in clay pipes. The small villages would always yield generous quantities of a rough, strong cider. Vivar was astonished at the Riflemen’s capacity for the drink, and even more astonished when Sharpe told him that most of the men had only joined the army to get the daily ration of a third of a pint of rum.

  There was no rum to be had but, perhaps because of the plentiful cider, the men were happy; even treating Sharpe with a wary acceptance. The greenjackets had welcomed Harper back into their ranks with unfeigned delight, and Sharpe had again seen how the big man was the real leader of the men. They liked Sergeant Williams, but instinctively expected Harper to make their decisions, and Sharpe noted sourly how it was Harper, rather than himself, who melded these survivors of four separate companies into a single unit.