He picked up a rifle horn, turned it over and saw it had been holed by a bullet. He nevertheless wrenched off the horn's metal spout and shoved it into a capacious pocket of his bloodstained apron. "El Lobo is in San Cristobal," he said again.
"How do you know?" Sharpe asked.
"I am El Castrador!" the gross man said boastfully, then squatted beside a blackening corpse. He prised open the dead man's jaws with his big fingers.
"Is it true, señor, that you can sell the teeth of the dead?"
"In London, yes."
"For gold?"
"They pay gold, yes. Or silver," Sharpe said. The plundered teeth were made into sets of dentures for rich clients who wanted something better than replacement teeth made from bone or ivory.
El Castrador peeled the corpse's lips back to reveal a handsome set of incisors. "If I take the teeth out, señor, will you buy them from me? Then you can send them to London for a profit. You and me, eh? We can do business."
"I'm too busy to do business," Sharpe said, hiding his distaste. "Besides, we only take French teeth."
"And the French take British teeth to sell in Paris, yes? So the French bite with your teeth and you bite with theirs, and neither of you will bite with your own." El Castrador laughed as he straightened from the corpse. "Maybe they will buy teeth in Madrid," he said speculatively.
"Where's San Cristobal?" Sharpe changed the subject.
"Over the hills," El Castrador said vaguely.
"Show me." Sharpe pulled the big man towards the eastern ramparts. "Show me," he said again as they reached the firestep.
El Castrador indicated the track that twisted up into the hills on the valley's far side, the same track down which Juanita de Elia had fled from the pursuing dragoons. "You follow that path for five miles," El Castrador said,
"and you will come to San Cristobal. It is not a big place, but it is the only place you can reach by that road."
"And how do you know Loup is there?" Sharpe asked.
"Because my cousin saw him arrive there this morning. My cousin said he was carrying wounded men with him."
Sharpe gazed eastwards. Five miles. Say two hours if the moon was unclouded or six hours if it was jet dark. "What was your cousin doing there?" he asked.
"He once lived in the village, señor. He goes to watch it from time to time."
A pity, Sharpe thought, that no one had been watching Loup the previous evening. "Tell me about San Cristobal," he said.
It was a village, the Spaniard said, high in the hills. Not a large village, but prosperous with a fine church, a plaza, and a number of substantial stone houses. The place had once been famous for rearing bulls destined for the fighting rings of the small frontier towns. "But no more," El Castrador said.
"The French stewed the last bulls."
"Is it a hill-top village?" Sharpe asked.
El Castrador shook his head. "It sits in a valley like that one"-he waved at the eastern valley-"but not so deep. No trees grow there, señor, and a man cannot get close to San Cristobal without being seen. And El Lobo has built walls across all the gaps between the houses and he keeps watchmen in the church's bell tower. You cannot get close." El Castrador issued the warning in a worried voice. "You are thinking of going there?"
Sharpe did not answer for a long time. Of course he was thinking of going there, but to what purpose? Loup had a brigade of men while Sharpe had half a company. "How close can I get without being seen?" he asked.
El Castrador shrugged. "A half-mile? But there is also a defile there, a valley where the road runs. I've often thought we could trap Loup there. He used to scout the valley before he rode through it, but not now. Now he is too confident."
So go to the defile, Sharpe thought, and watch. Just watch. Nothing else. No attack, no ambush, no disobedience, no heroics, just a reconnaissance. And after all, he told himself, Wellington's order to take the Real Companïa
Irlandesa to the army headquarters at Vilar Formoso did not detail the route he must take. Nothing specifically forbade Sharpe taking a long, circuitous journey via San Cristobal, but he knew, even as he thought of that evasion, that it was specious. The sensible thing was to forget Loup, but it cut against all his instincts to be beaten and just lie down and accept the beating. "Does Loup have artillery at San Cristobal?" he asked the partisan.
"No, señor."
Sharpe wondered if Loup had arranged for this intelligence to reach him. Was
Loup enticing Sharpe into a trap? "Would you come with us, señor?" he asked El
Castrador, suspecting that the partisan would never come if Loup was the inspiration behind this news of the brigade's whereabouts.
"To watch Loup," the Spaniard asked guardedly, "or to fight him?"
"To watch him," Sharpe said, knowing it was not the honest answer.
The Spaniard nodded. "You haven't enough men to fight him," he added to explain his cautious question.
Privately Sharpe agreed. He did not have enough men, not unless he could surprise Loup or maybe ambush him in the defile. One rifle bullet, well aimed, would kill a man as surely as a full battalion attack, and when Sharpe thought of Oliveira's mangled and tortured body he reckoned that Loup deserved that bullet. So maybe tonight, Sharpe thought, he could take his riflemen to San
Cristobal and pray for a private revenge in the defile at dawn. "I would welcome your help," Sharpe told El Castrador, flattering the man.
"In a week's time, señor," El Castrador said, "I can assemble a respectable troop."
"We go tonight," Sharpe said.
"Tonight?" The Spaniard was appalled.
"I saw a bullfight once," Sharpe said, "and the matador gave the bull the killing stroke, the one over the neck and down through the shoulders, and the bull staggered, then sank to its knees. The man pulled the sword out and turned away with his arms raised in triumph. You can guess what happened."
El Castrador nodded. "The bull rose?"
"A horn in the small of the man's back," Sharpe confirmed. "Well, I am the bull, señor, and I confess to being wounded, but Loup's back is turned. So tonight, when he thinks we're too weak to move, we march."
"But only to watch him," the partisan said cautiously. He had been scorched by
Loup too often to risk a fight.
"To watch," Sharpe lied, "just to watch."
He was truthful with Harper. He took his friend to the top of the gatehouse tower from where the two riflemen stared across the eastern valley towards the hazed country where the village of San Cristobal was hidden. "I don't honestly know why I'm going," Sharpe confessed, "and we've got no orders to go and I'm not even sure we can do a damned thing when we get there. But there's a reason for going." He paused, suddenly feeling awkward. Sharpe found it hard to articulate his more private thoughts, perhaps because to do so exposed a vulnerability and few soldiers were good at doing that, and what he wanted to say was that a soldier was only as good as his last battle and Sharpe's last battle had been this disaster that had left San Isidro smoking and bloody. And there were plenty of carping fools in the army who would be glad that the upstart from the ranks had at last got his comeuppance, all of which meant that Sharpe must strike back at Loup or else lose his reputation as a lucky and victorious soldier.
"You have to beat the blood out of Loup?" Harper broke the silence with his suggestion.
"I don't have enough men to do that," Sharpe said. "The riflemen will come with me, but I can't order Donaju's men to San Cristobal. The whole idea's probably a waste of time, Pat, but there's a chance, a half-chance, that I can get that one-eyed bastard in my rifle sight."
"You'd be surprised," Harper said. "There's more than a few of the Real
Companïa Irlandesa who'd love to come with us. I don't know about the officers, but Sergeant Major Noonan will come, and that fellow Rourke, and there's a wild bugger called Leon O'Reilly who wants nothing more than to kill
Crapauds and there's plenty more like him. They've got something to p
rove, you see. That they're not all as yellow as Kiely."
Sharpe smiled, then shrugged. "It probably is all a waste of time, Pat," he repeated.
"So what else were you planning on doing tonight?"
"Nothing," Sharpe said, "nothing at all." Yet he knew that if he marched to another defeat he would risk everything he had ever earned, but he also knew that not to go, however hopeless the prospect of revenge, was to accept the beating Loup had administered and Sharpe was too proud to accept that licking.
He would most likely achieve nothing by marching to San Cristobal, yet march he must.
They marched after dark. Donaju insisted on coming, and fifty of his men came too. More would have marched, but Sharpe wanted most of the Real Companïa
Irlandesa to stay behind and guard the families and baggage. Everyone and everything left in the San Isidro Fort had been moved into the gatehouse just in case Loup did come back to finish off his previous night's work. "Which would just be my bloody luck," Sharpe said. "Me marching to shoot him and him marching to geld me." He had his riflemen ranging ahead as scouts just in case the French were returning to the San Isidro.
"What do we do if we meet them?" Donaju asked.
"Hide," Sharpe said. "Seventy of us can't beat a thousand of them, not in the open." An ambush might work this night, but not a firefight on open, level moonlit ground against an overwhelming enemy. "And I hate night fighting,"
Sharpe went on. "I was captured in a bloody night fight in India. We were blundering around in the sodding dark with no one knowing what they were doing or why except for the Indians, and they knew well enough. They were firing rockets at us. The things were no bloody use as weapons, but at night their fire blinded us and the next thing I knew there were twenty big buggers with fixed bayonets all around me."
"Where was that?" Donaju asked.
"Seringapatam."
"What business did you have in India?" Donaju asked in evident disapproval.
"Same business I've got here," Sharpe said curtly. "Killing the King's enemies."
El Castrador wanted to know what they were talking about, so Donaju translated. The partisan was suffering because Sharpe had refused to let anyone ride a horse so El Castrador's horse, like the horses of the Spanish-
Irish officers, was being led at the column's rear. Sharpe had insisted on the precaution because men on horses were liable to ride away from the line of march and the sight of a mounted man on a crest could easily serve to alert a
French patrol. Sharpe had similarly insisted that no man carry a loaded musket in case a stumble snapped a lock and fired a shot that would carry far in the still, almost windless night.
The march was not hard. The first hour was the worst, for they had to climb the steep hill opposite the San Isidro, but once over the crest the road kept to fairly level ground. It was a drover's road, grassy, wide and easy marching in the cool night air. The route wound lazily between rocky outcrops where enemy picquets could have been hidden. Normally Sharpe would have reconnoitred such dangerous places, but this night he pushed his scouts urgently ahead. He was in a dangerous and fatalistic mood. Maybe, he thought, this reckless march was the aftermath of defeat, a kind of shocked reaction in which a man lashed out blindly, and this daft expedition under the half-moon was undoubtedly blind, for Sharpe knew in his inmost soul that the unfinished business between himself and Brigadier Loup would almost certainly stay unfinished. No man could expect to march by night towards a fortified village that he had not reconnoitred and then spring an ambush. The odds were that the small expedition would watch the village from afar, Sharpe would conclude that nothing could be achieved against its walls or in the nearby defile, and in the dawn the guards and riflemen would march back to San Isidro with nothing but sore feet and a wasted night.
It was just after midnight when the column reached the low ridge that overlooked the valley of San Cristobal. Sharpe rested the men behind the crest while he climbed to the top with El Castrador, Donaju and Harper. The four men lay in the rocks and watched.
The grey stone of the village was blanched near white by the moonlight which cast stark shadows from the intricate web of stone walls that marked the fields around the small settlement. The lime-washed bell tower of the church seemed to glow, so clear was the night and so bright the half-moon that hung above the glimmering hills. Sharpe trained his telescope on the tower and, though he could plainly see the untidy stork's nest on top and the sheen of the moon glancing from a bell suspended in the tower's arched opening, he could see no sentries there. But nor would he necessarily expect to see a picquet, for any man keeping watch through a cold long night in a high vulnerable place would be likely to huddle for shelter in a corner of the tower.
San Cristobal looked as though it had been a pleasant village before Loup's brigade came to evict the inhabitants and destroy their livelihood. The sturdy field walls had been built to keep fighting bulls safely penned, and those bulls had paid for the church and houses that all showed a touch of affluence in the lens of Sharpe's telescope. At Fuentes de Onoro, the tiny village where he had first met El Castrador, the cottages had been mostly low and virtually windowless, but some of San Cristobal's houses had two storeys and nearly all the outward-facing walls possessed windows and even, in one case, a small balcony. Sharpe assumed there would be picquets in half those windows.
He traced the line of the drover's road with his telescope to see that where a track left the road to become the village's main street a stone wall had been built between two houses. There was a gap in the wall, but Sharpe could just make out the shadowy hint of a second wall beyond the first. He made a zigzag motion with his hand as he looked at El Castrador. "The gate, señor?"
"Si. Three walls!" El Castrador exaggerated the zigzag gesture to show how complicated the maze-like entrance was. Such a maze would slow down any attacker while Loup's men poured musket fire down from the upper windows.
"How do they get their horses inside?" Donaju asked in Spanish.
"Around the far side," El Castrador answered. "There is a gate. Very strong.
And the defile, señor, is on the far side of the village. Where the road goes into the hills, see? We should go there?"
"Christ, no," Sharpe said. His hope in El Castrador's defile had vanished the moment he saw where it was. The gorge might be a perfect place for a surprise attack, but it was too far away and Sharpe knew he would have no chance of reaching it before daylight. So much for his hopes of ambush.
He turned the spyglass back to the village just in time to see a flicker of motion. He tensed, then saw it was merely a puff of smoke coming from a chimney deep in the village. The smoke had been there all the time, but someone must have dumped wood on the fire or else tried to revive a hearth of smouldering embers with a pair of bellows and so provoked the sudden gust of smoke.
"They're all tucked up in bed," Donaju said. "Safe and sound."
Sharpe edged the telescope across the village roofs. "No flag," he said at last. "Does he usually fly a flag?" he asked El Castrador.
The big man shrugged. "Sometimes yes, sometimes no." He plainly did not know the answer.
Sharpe collapsed the telescope. "Put a dozen men on guard, Donaju," he ordered, "and tell the rest to sleep a while. Pat? Send Latimer and a couple of the lads to that knoll." He indicated a rocky height that would offer the best view of the surrounding country. "And you and the rest of the rifles will come with me."
Harper paused as though he wanted to ask for details of what they planned to do, then decided mute obedience was the best course and slid back off the crest. Donaju frowned. "I can't come with you?"
"Someone has to take charge if I die," Sharpe said. "So keep watch, stay here till three in the morning, and if you haven't heard from me by then, go home."
"And what do you plan to do there?" Donaju asked, gesturing towards the village.
"It doesn't smell right," Sharpe said. "I can't explain it, but it doesn't smell right. So I'm just
going to take a look. Nothing more, Donaju, just a look."
Captain Donaju was still unhappy at being excluded from Sharpe's patrol, yet he did not like to contradict Sharpe's plans. Sharpe, after all, was a fighting soldier and Donaju had only one night's experience of battle. "What do I tell the British if you die?" he asked Sharpe chidingly.
"To take my boots off before they bury me," Sharpe said. "I don't want blisters through eternity." He turned to see Harper leading a file of riflemen up the slope. "Ready, Pat?"
"Aye, sir."
"You'll stay here," Sharpe said to El Castrador, not quite as a question, but not quite a direct order either.
"I shall wait here, señor." The partisan's tone betrayed that he had no wish to get any closer to the wolf's lair.
Sharpe's Battle Page 19
