“And sometimes the boys died?” Sharpe guessed.
El Castrador shrugged. “Boys are easily replaced, my friend. One cannot afford to be sentimental about small children.” He jetted more red wine down his vast gullet. “I had eight boys, only three survived and that, believe me, is two too many.”
“No girls?”
“Four.” El Castrador fell silent for a second or two, then sighed. “That French bastard Loup took them. You know of Loup?”
“I know him.”
“He took them and gave them to his men. El Lobo and his men like young girls.” He touched the knife at his belt, then gave Sharpe a long speculative look. “So you are La Aguja’s Englishman.”
Sharpe nodded.
“Ah! Teresa!” The Spaniard sighed. “We were angry when we heard she had given herself to an Englishman, but now I see you, Captain, I can understand. How is she?”
“Fighting the French near Badajoz, but she sends her greetings.” In fact Teresa had not written to Sharpe in weeks, but her name was a talisman among all the partisans and had been sufficient to arrange this meeting with the man who had been so roundly defeated by Brigadier Loup. Loup had tamed this part of the Spanish frontier and wherever Sharpe went he heard the Frenchman’s name mentioned with an awed hatred. Every piece of mischief was the fault of Loup, every death, every house fire, every flood, every sick child, every robbed hive, every stillborn calf, every unseasonable frost; all were the wolf’s work.
“She will be proud of you, Englishman,” El Castrador said.
“She will?” Sharpe asked. “Why?”
“Because El Lobo has placed a price on your head,” El Castrador said. “Did you not know?”
“I didn’t know.”
“One hundred dollars,” El Castrador said slowly, with relish, as though he was tempted by the price himself.
“A pittance,” Sharpe said disparagingly. Twenty-five pounds might be a small fortune to most people, a good year’s pay indeed for most working folk, but still Sharpe reckoned his life was worth more than twenty-five pounds. “The reward on Teresa’s head is two hundred dollars,” he said resentfully.
“But we partisans kill more French than you English,” El Castrador said, “so it is only right that we should be worth more.” Sharpe tactfully refrained from asking whether there was any reward on El Castrador’s own matted and lice-ridden head. Sharpe suspected the man had lost most of his power because of his defeats, but at least, Sharpe thought, El Castrador lived while most of his men were dead, killed by the wolf after being cut in the same way that El Castrador had cut his captives. There were times when Sharpe was very glad he did not fight the guerrilla.
El Castrador raised the wineskin again, spurted the wine into his mouth, swallowed, belched again, then breathed an effluent gust toward Sharpe. “So why do you want to see me, Englishman?”
Sharpe told him. The telling took a good while, for though El Castrador was a brutal man, he was not especially clever and Sharpe had to explain his requirements several times before the big man understood. In the end, though, El Castrador nodded. “Tonight, you say?”
“I would be pleased. And grateful.”
“But how grateful?” El Castrador shot a sly look at the Englishman. “Shall I tell you what I need? Muskets! Or even rifles like that!” He touched the barrel of Sharpe’s Baker rifle which was propped against the vine’s trunk.
“I can bring you muskets,” Sharpe said, though he did not yet know how. The Real Compañía Irlandesa needed muskets much more desperately than this great butcher of a man did, and Sharpe did not even know how he was to supply those weapons. Hogan would never agree to give the Real Compañía Irlandesa new muskets, yet if Sharpe was to turn King Ferdinand’s palace guard into a decent infantry unit, then he would need to find them guns somehow. “Rifles I can’t get,” he said, “but muskets, yes. But I’ll need a week.”
“Muskets, then,” El Castrador agreed, “and there is something else.”
“Go on,” Sharpe said warily.
“I want revenge for my daughters,” El Castrador said with tears in his eyes. “I want Brigadier Loup and this knife to meet each other.” He held up the small, bone-handled cutter. “I want your help, Englishman. Teresa says you can fight, so fight with me and help me catch El Lobo.”
Sharpe suspected this second request would prove even more difficult than the first, but he nodded anyway. “You know where Loup can be found?”
El Castrador nodded. “Usually at a village called San Cristóbal. He drove out the inhabitants, blocked the streets and fortified the houses. A stoat could not get near without being spotted. Sanchez says it would take a thousand men and a battery of artillery to take San Cristóbal.”
Sharpe grunted at the news. Sanchez was one of the best guerrilla leaders, and if Sanchez reckoned San Cristóbal was virtually impregnable, then Sharpe would believe him. “You said ‘usually.’ So he’s not always at San Cristóbal?”
“He goes where he likes, señor,” El Castrador said moodily. “Sometimes he takes over a village for a few nights, sometimes he would put his men in the fort where you now live, sometimes he would use Fort Concepción. Loup, señor, is a law to himself.” El Castrador paused. “But La Aguja says you are also a law unto yourself. If any man can defeat El Lobo, señor, it must be you. And there is a place near San Cristóbal, a defile, where he can be ambushed.”
El Castrador offered this last detail as an enticement, but Sharpe ignored the lure. “I will do all a man can do,” he promised.
“Then I shall help you tonight,” El Castrador assured Sharpe in return. “Look for my gift in the morning, señor,” he said, then stood and shouted a command to the men he had evidently left outside the inn. Hooves clattered loud in the little street. “And next week,” the partisan added, “I shall come for my reward. Don’t let me down, Captain.”
Sharpe watched the gross man go, then hefted the wineskin. He was tempted to drain it, but knew that a bellyful of sour wine would make his journey back to San Isidro doubly hard and so, instead, he poured the liquid over the roots of the ravaged vine. Maybe, he thought, it would help the vine repair itself. Wine to grapes, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. He picked up his hat, slung his rifle, and walked home.
That night, despite all Captain Donaju’s precautions, three more guardsmen deserted. More men might have tried, but shortly after midnight a series of terrible screams sounded from the valley and any other men tempted to try their luck across the frontier decided to wait for another day. At dawn next morning, when Rifleman Harris was leading a convoy down the mountainside to fetch water from the stream to augment the trickle that the fort’s well provided, he found the three men. He came back to Sharpe white-faced. “It’s horrible, sir. Horrible.”
“See that cart?” Sharpe pointed across the fort’s courtyard to a handcart. “Get it down there, put them in and bring them back.”
“Do we have to?” Rifleman Thompson asked, aghast.
“Yes, you bloody do. And Harris?”
“Sir?”
“Put this in with them,” and Sharpe handed Harris a sack holding a heavy object. Harris began to untie the sack’s mouth. “Not here, Harris,” Sharpe said, “do it down there. And only you and our lads to see what you’re doing.”
By eight o’clock Sharpe had the one hundred and twenty-seven remaining guardsmen on parade, together with all their junior officers. Sharpe was the senior officer left inside the fort, for both Lord Kiely and Colonel Runciman had spent the night at army headquarters where they had gone to plead with the assistant commissary general for muskets and ammunition. Father Sarsfield was visiting a fellow priest in Guarda, while both Kiely’s majors and three of his captains had gone hunting. Doña Juanita de Elia had also taken her hounds in search of hares, but had spurned the company of the Irish officers. “I hunt alone,” she said, and then had scorned Sharpe’s warning of patrolling Frenchmen. “In coming here, Captain,” she told Sharpe, “I escaped every
Frenchman in Spain. Worry about yourself, not me.” Then she had spurred away with her hounds loping behind.
So now, bereft of their senior officers, the Real Compañía Irlandesa lined in four ranks beneath one of the empty gun platforms that served Sharpe as a podium. It had rained in the night and the flags on the crumbling battlements lifted reluctantly to the morning wind as Harris and Thompson maneuvered the handcart up one of the ramps which led from the magazines to the gun platforms. They pushed the vehicle with its sordid cargo to Sharpe’s side, then tipped the handles up so that the cart’s bed faced the four ranks. There was an intake of breath, then a communal groan sounded from the ranks. At least one guardsman vomited while most just looked away or closed their eyes. “Look at them!” Sharpe snapped. “Look!”
He forced the guardsmen to look at the three mutilated naked bodies, and especially at the bloody, gut-churning mess dug out of the center of each corpse and at the rictus of horror and pain on each dead face. Then Sharpe reached past one of the cold, white, stiff shoulders to drag free a steel gray helmet plumed with coarse gray hair. He set it on one of the uptilted cart shafts. It was the same helmet that Harris had collected as a keepsake from the high settlement where Sharpe had discovered the massacred villagers and where Perkins had met Miranda, who now followed the young rifleman with a touching and pathetic devotion. It was the same helmet that Sharpe had given back to Harris in the sack earlier that morning.
“Look at the bodies!” Sharpe ordered the Real Compañía Irlandesa. “And listen! The French believe there are two kinds of people in Spain: those who are for them and those who are against them, and there ain’t a man among you who can escape that judgment. Either you fight for the French or you fight against them, and that isn’t my decision, that’s what the French have decided.” He pointed to the three bodies. “That’s what the French do. They know you’re here now. They’re watching you, they’re wondering who and what you are, and until they know the answers they’ll treat you like an enemy. And that’s how the Frogs treat their enemies.” He pointed to the bloody holes carved into the dead men’s crotches.
“Which leaves you lot with three choices,” Sharpe went on. “You can run east and have your manhood sliced off by the Frogs, or you can run west and risk being arrested by my army and shot as a deserter, or else you can stay here and learn to be soldiers. And don’t tell me this isn’t your war. You swore an oath to serve the king of Spain, and the king of Spain is a prisoner in France and you were supposed to be his guard. By God, this is your war far more than it’s my war. I never swore an oath to protect Spain, I never had a woman raped by a Frenchman or a child murdered by a dragoon or a harvest stolen and a house burned by a Crapaud forage party. Your country has suffered all those things, and your country is Spain, and if you’d rather fight for Ireland than for Spain, then why in the name of Almighty God did you take the Spanish oath?” He paused. He knew that not every man in the company was a would-be deserter. Many, like Lord Kiely himself, wanted to fight, but there were enough troublemakers to sap the company’s usefulness and Sharpe had decided that this shock treatment was the only way to jar the troublemakers into obedience.
“Or does the oath mean nothing to you?” Sharpe demanded. “Because I’ll tell you what the rest of this army thinks about you, and I mean the rest of this army, including the Connaught Rangers and the Inniskilling Dragoons and the Royal Irish Regiment and the Royal County Down Regiment and the Prince of Wales’s Own Irish Regiment and the Tipperary Regiment and the County of Dublin Regiment and the Duke of York’s Irish Regiment. They say you lot are soft. They say you’re powder-puff soldiers, good for guarding a pisspot in a palace, but not good for a fight. They say you ran away from Ireland once and you’ll run away again. They say you’re about as much use to an army as a pack of singing nuns. They say you’re overdressed and overcoddled. But that’s going to change, because one day you and I will go into battle together and on that day you’re going to have to be good! Bloody good!”
Sharpe hated making speeches, but he had seized these men’s attention or at least the three castrated bodies had gripped their interest and Sharpe’s words were making some kind of sense to them. He pointed east. “Over there,” Sharpe said, and he plucked the helmet off the cart’s shaft, “there’s a man called Loup, a Frenchman, and he leads a regiment of dragoons called the wolf pack, and they wear these helmets and they leave that mark on the men they kill. So we’re going to kill them. We’re going to prove that there isn’t a French regiment in the world that can stand up to an Irish regiment, and we’re going to do that together. And we’re going to do it because this is your war, and your only damned choice is whether you want to die like gelded dogs or fight like men. Now you make up your damned minds what you’re going to do. Sergeant Harper?”
“Sir!”
“One-half hour for breakfast. I want a burial party for these three men, then we begin work.”
“Yes, sir!”
Harris caught Sharpe’s eye as the officer turned away. “Not one word, Harris,” Sharpe said, thrusting the helmet into the rifleman’s belly, “not one bloody word.”
Captain Donaju stopped Sharpe as he walked away from the ramparts. “How do we fight without muskets?”
“I’ll get you muskets, Donaju.”
“How?”
“The same way a soldier gets everything that isn’t issued to him,” Sharpe said, “by theft.”
That night not a single man deserted.
And next morning, though Sharpe did not recognize it at first, the trouble began.
“It’s a bad business, Sharpe,” Colonel Runciman said. “My God, man, but it’s a bad business.”
“What is, General?”
“You haven’t heard?” Runciman asked.
“About the muskets, you mean?” Sharpe asked, assuming that Runciman must be referring to his visit to the army headquarters, a visit that had ended in predictable failure. Runciman and Kiely had returned with no muskets, no ammunition, no blankets, no pipe clay, no boots, no knapsacks and not even a promise of money for the unit’s back pay. Wellington’s parsimony was doubtless intended to draw the fangs of the Real Compañía Irlandesa, but it gave Sharpe horrid problems. He was struggling to raise the guardsmen’s morale, but without weapons and equipment that morale was doomed. Worse still, Sharpe knew he was close to enemy lines, and if the French did attack then it would be no consolation to know that the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s defeat had been a part of Hogan’s plans, not if Sharpe was himself involved in the debacle. Hogan might want the Real Compañía Irlandesa destroyed, but Sharpe needed it armed and dangerous in case Brigadier Loup came calling.
“I wasn’t talking about muskets, Sharpe,” Runciman said, “but about the news from Ireland. You really haven’t heard?”
“No, sir.”
Runciman shook his head, making his jowls wobble. “It seems there are new problems in Ireland, Sharpe. Damned bad business. Bloody rebels making trouble, troops fighting back, women and children dead. River Erne blocked with bodies at Belleek. Talk of rape. Dear me. I really thought that ’98 had settled the Irish business once and for all, but it seems not. The damned papists are making trouble again. Dear me, dear me. Why did God allow the papists to flourish? They try us Christians so sorely. Ah, well.” Runciman sighed. “We’ll have to break some skulls over there, just as we did when Tone rebelled in ’98.”
Sharpe reflected that if the remedy had failed in 1798 then it was just as likely to be ineffective in 1811, but he thought it tactful not to say as much.
“It might mean trouble here, General,” he said instead, “when the Irish troops hear about it?”
“That’s why we have the lash, Sharpe.”
“We might have the lash, General, but we don’t have muskets. And I was just wondering, sir, exactly how a wagon master general orders his convoys about.”
Runciman goggled at Sharpe, amazed at the apparently inappropriate question. “Paper, of course, paper!
Orders!”
Sharpe smiled. “And you’re still wagon master general, sir, isn’t that so? Because they haven’t replaced you. I doubt they can find a man to fill your shoes, sir.”
“Kind of you to say so, Sharpe, most kind.” Runciman looked slightly surprised at receiving a compliment, but tried not to show too much unfamiliarity with the experience. “And it’s probably true,” he added.
“And I was wondering, General, how we might divert a wagon or two of weapons up to the fort here?”
Runciman gaped at Sharpe. “Steal them, you mean?”
“I wouldn’t call it theft, General,” Sharpe said reproachfully, “not when they’re being employed against the enemy. We’re just reallocating the guns, sir, if you see what I mean. Eventually, sir, the army will have to equip us, so why don’t we anticipate the order now? We can always catch up with the paperwork later.”
Runciman shook his head wildly, dislodging the careful strands of long hair that he obsessively brushed over his balding pate. “It can’t be done, Sharpe, it can’t be done! It’s against all precedence. Against all arrangements! Damn it, man, it’s against regulations! I could be court-martialed! Think of the disgrace!” Runciman shuddered at the thought. “I’m astonished, Sharpe,” he went on, “even disappointed, that you should make such a suggestion. I know you were denied a gentleman’s breeding or even an education, but I had still expected better from you! A gentleman does not steal, he does not lie, he does not demean a woman, he honors God and the king. These attributes are not beyond you, Sharpe!”
Sharpe went to the door of Runciman’s quarters. The colonel’s day parlor was the old guard room in one of the gatehouse towers and, with the fortress’s ancient gates propped open, the doorway offered a stunning view south. Sharpe leaned on a doorpost. “What happened, General,” he asked when Runciman’s sermon had petered out, “when a wagon went missing? You must have lost some wagons to thieves?”
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 4: Sharpe's Escape, Sharpe's Fury, Sharpe's Battle Page 84