Sharpe's Rifles (11 page)

Sharpe shrugged the compliment away, but he recognized it for one and was secretly rather
pleased. He might not be a born officer, but by God he was a born soldier. He was the son of a
whore, bereft of God, but a God-damned soldier.

There were spades and shovels in the village that, taken back to the mouth of the canyon, were
used to dig graves for the French dead.

Vivar walked with Sharpe to where the shallow graves were being scraped from the hard earth.
The Spaniard stopped by one of the Dragoons who had died in the cavalry charge and whose body had
since been stripped naked. The skin of the dead man’s body was as white as the churned snow,
while his face had been turned brown by exposure to wind and sun. The bloodied face was framed by
pigtails.

”Cadenettes,“ Vivar said abruptly. ”That’s what they call those. What do you call them,
braids?“

“Pigtails.”

“It’s their mark.” He sounded bitter. “Their mark of being special, an elite.”

“Like the rosemary in your men’s hats?”

“No, not like that at all.” Vivar’s abrupt denial checked the words between the two men. They
stood in embarrassed silence above the enemy dead.

Sharpe, feeling uncomfortable, broke the silence. “I wouldn’t have believed it possible for
dismounted cavalry to break horsemen.”

The praise delighted the Major. “Nor would I have believed it possible for infantry to take
that hill. It was stupid of you, Lieutenant, very stupid, and more brave that I could have
dreamed possible. I thank you.”

Sharpe, as ever made awkward by a compliment, tried to shrug it away. “It was my
Riflemen.”

“They did it to please you, I think?” Vivar spoke meaningfully, trying to offer Sharpe some
reassurance. When the Englishman offered no response, the Spaniard’s voice became more intense.
“Men always behave best when they know what is expected of them. Today you showed them what you
wanted, and it was simple victory.”

Sharpe muttered something about luck.

Vivar ignored the evasion. “You led them, Lieutenant, and they knew what was expected of them.
Men should always know what their officers expect of them. I give my Cazadores three rules. They
must not steal unless they will die for not stealing, they must look after their horses before
themselves, and they must fight like heroes. Three rules only, but they work. Give men firm
rules, Lieutenant, and they will follow you.”

Sharpe, standing on the lonely and cold-swept plateau, knew he was being offered a gift by
Major Vivar. Perhaps there were no rules for being an officer, and perhaps the best officers were
born to their excellence, but the Spaniard was offering Sharpe a key to success and, sensing the
value of the gift, he smiled. “Thank you.”

“Rules!” Vivar went on as though Sharpe had not spoken. “Rules make real soldiers, not
child-killers like these bastards.” He kicked the dead Frenchman, then shuddered. Other French
corpses were being dragged across the slurried snow to the shallow grave. Til have one of my men
make some crosses from burnt wood.“ Again Sharpe was surprised by this man. One moment he kicked
the naked corpse of an enemy, the next he was taking care to mark those enemies‘

graves with crosses. Vivar saw his surprise. “It isn’t respect, Lieutenant.”

“No?”

“I fear their estadea, their spirits. The crosses will keep their filthy souls underground.”
Vivar spat onto the body. “You think I’m a fool, but I’ve seen them, Lieutenant. The estadea are
the lost spirits of the doomed dead and they look like a myriad of candles in the night mist.
Their moaning is more terrible even than that.” He jerked his head towards another dying scream
which sounded from the village. “For what they did to the children, Englishman, they deserve
worse.”

Sharpe could not quarrel with the Major’s justification. “Why did they do it?” He could not
imagine killing a child, nor how a man could even dream of such an act.

Vivar walked away from the French corpses, towards the edge of the small plateau across which
the cavalry had charged. “When the French came here, Lieutenant, they were our allies. God damn
our foolishness, but we invited them. They came to attack our enemies, the Portuguese, but once
they were here they decided to stay. They thought Spain was feeble, rotten, defenceless.” Vivar
paused, staring into the great void of the valley. “And maybe we were rotten. Not the people,
Lieutenant. Never think that, never! But the government.” He spat. “So the French despised us.
They thought we were a ripe fruit for the picking, and perhaps we were. Our armies?” Vivar
shrugged in hopelessness. “Men cannot fight if they’re badly led. But the people are not rotten.
The land isn’t rotten,” he slammed his heel into the snow-covered turf. “This is Spain,
Lieutenant, beloved of God, and God will not desert us. Why do you think you and I won
today?”

It was a question that expected no answer, and Sharpe made none.

Vivar gazed again at the far hills where the first rain showed as dark stains against the
horizon. “The French despised us,” he picked up his earlier thought, “but learned to hate us.
They found victory hard in Spain. They even learned to taste defeat. We forced an army to
surrender at Bailen, and when they besieged Saragossa, the people humiliated them. And for that
the French will not forgive us. Now they flood us with armies and think, if they kill us all,
they can beat us.”

“But why do they kill children?” Sharp was still haunted by the memory of small and grievously
tortured bodies.

Vivar grimaced at the question. “You fight against men in uniforms, Lieutenant. You know who
your enemy is because he dresses in a blue coat for you and hangs gold lace on the coat as a
target for your rifles. But the French don’t know who their enemies are. Any man with a knife
could be their enemy, and so they fear us. And to stop us they will make the price of enmity too
high. They will spread a greater fear through Spain, a fear of that!” He turned and jabbed a
finger towards the smear of smoke that still rose from the village. “They fear us, but they will
try to make us fear them even more. And maybe they will succeed.”

The sudden pessimism was startling from a man as indomitable as Bias Vivar. “You truly think
so?” Sharpe asked.

“I think men should fear the death of their children.” Vivar, who had buried his own children,
spoke very bleakly. “But I do not think the French will succeed. They’re victorious now, and the
Spanish people mourn their children and wonder if there is any hope left, but if those people can
be given just one small scrap of hope, just one glint in the darkness, then they will fight!” He
snarled the last words, then, in a quicksilver change of mood, smiled apologetically at Sharpe.
“I have a favour to ask of you.”

“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.”