Sharpe’s Rifles: The French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809

Sharpe followed fast. He kicked once, twice, crunching his boot into the big man’s ribs, then he seized the bayonet, cutting his fingers, and stamped his heel onto Harper’s wrist. The weapon came away. Sharpe reversed it. He was panting now, his breath misting in the frigid air. Blood dripped from his hand to run down the blade. There was more blood on the snow which had drifted through the hovel’s broken roof and gaping doors.

The Irishman saw his death above him. He rolled, then jerked back towards Sharpe with a stone in his hand. He lunged with the stone, smashing it onto the point of the descending blade and the shock of it numbed Sharpe’s arm. He had never fought such power, never. He tried to drive the weapon down again, but Harper had heaved up and Sharpe cried aloud as the rock thumped into his belly. He fell onto the wall behind, his hand still numb where it held the bayonet.

He saw that Harper’s face had changed. Until that moment the big Irishman had seemed as dispassionate as a butcher, but now there was a berserker look on his face. It was the face of a man goaded into battle-fury, and Sharpe understood that till now Harper had been reluctantly doing a necessary job that had suddenly become a passion. The Irishman spoke for the first time since the fight had begun, but in Gaelic, a language Sharpe had never understood. He only understood that the words were an insult that would be the threnody of his death as Harper used the stone to crush his skull.

‘Come on, you bastard.’ Sharpe was trying to massage life back into his numbed arm. ‘You Irish scum. You bog-Paddy bloody bastard. Come on!’

Harper peeled bloody lips back from bloody teeth. He screamed a challenge, charged, and Sharpe used the chasseur’s trick. He switched the blade from his right to his left hand and screamed his own challenge. He lunged.

Then the world exploded.

A noise like the thunder of doom crashed in Sharpe’s ear, and a flash of flame seared close to his face with a sudden warmth. He flinched, then heard the whip-crack of a bullet ricocheting from the hovel’s wall.

Sharpe thought one of the other Riflemen had at last summoned up the courage to help Harper. Desperate as a cornered animal, he twisted snarling from the foul smell of the gunpowder smoke, then saw that the Irishman was as astonished as himself. The stone still grasped in his massive fist, Harper was staring at a newcomer who stood in the east-facing door.

‘I thought you were here to fight the French?’ The voice was amused, mocking, superior. ‘Or do the British have nothing better to do than squabble like rats?’

The speaker was a cavalry officer in the scarlet uniform of the Spanish Cazadores, or rather the remnants of such a uniform for it was so torn and shabby that it might have been a beggar’s rags. The gold braid which edged the man’s yellow collar was tarnished and the chain-slings of his sword were rusted. The black boots that reached midway up his thighs were ripped. A sacking cloak hung from his shoulders. His men, who had made the tracks in the snow and who now formed a rough cordon to the east of the farmhouse, were in a similar condition, but Sharpe noted, with a soldier’s eye, that all these Spanish cavalrymen had retained their swords and carbines. The officer held a short-barrelled and smoking pistol that he lowered to his side.

‘Who the devil are you?’ Still holding the bayonet, Sharpe was ready to lunge. He was indeed like a cornered rat; bloody, salivating, and vicious.

‘My name is Major Blas Vivar.’ Vivar was a man of middle height with a tough face. He looked, as did his men, as though he had been through hell in the last days, yet he was not so exhausted that his voice did not betray derision for what he had just witnessed. ‘Who are you?’

Sharpe had to spit blood before he could answer. ‘Lieutenant Richard Sharpe of the 95th. The Rifles,’ he added.

‘And him?’ Vivar looked at Harper.

‘He’s under arrest,’ Sharpe said. He threw down the sword-bayonet and pushed Harper in the chest. ‘Out! Out!’ He pushed him through the hovel’s door, out to where the other greenjackets waited in the snow. ‘Sergeant Williams!’

‘Sir?’ Williams stared with awe at their bloodied faces. ‘Sir?’

‘Rifleman Harper is under close arrest.’ Sharpe shoved Harper a last time, tumbling him into the snow, then turned back to the Spaniard’s mocking gaze.

‘You seem to be in trouble, Lieutenant?’ Vivar’s derision was made worse by the amusement in his voice.

The shame of the situation galled Sharpe, just as the Spaniard’s tone stung him. ‘It’s none of your business.’

‘Sir,’ Major Vivar chided him.

‘None of your bloody business, sir.’

Vivar shrugged. ‘This is Spain, Lieutenant. What happens here is more my business than yours, I think?’ His English was excellent, and spoken with a cold courtesy that made Sharpe feel mulish.

But the Englishman could not help his mulishness. ‘All we want to do,’ Sharpe smeared blood from his mouth onto his dark green sleeve, ‘is get out of your damned country.’

There was a hint of renewed anger in the Spaniard’s eyes. ‘I think I shall be glad to see you gone, Lieutenant. So perhaps I’d better help you leave?’

Sharpe, for better or worse, had found an ally.

CHAPTER THREE

‘Defeat,’ Blas Vivar said, ‘destroys discipline. You teach an army to march, to fight, to obey orders.’ Each virtue was stressed by a downward slash of the razor which spattered soapy water onto the kitchen floor. ‘But,’ he shrugged, ‘defeat brings ruin.’

Sharpe knew that the Spaniard was trying to find excuses for the disgraceful exhibition at the ruined farmstead. That was kind of him, but Sharpe was in no mood for kindness and he could find nothing to say in reply.

‘And that farmhouse is unlucky.’ Vivar turned back to the mirror fragment which he had propped on the window-ledge. ‘It always has been. In my grandfather’s time there was a murder there. Over a woman, naturally. And in my father’s time there was a suicide.’ He made the sign of the cross with the razor, then carefully shaved the angle of his jaw. ‘It’s haunted, Lieutenant. At night you can see ghosts there. It is a bad place. You are lucky I found you. You want to use this razor?’

‘I have my own.’

Vivar dried his blade and stowed it, with the mirror, in its leather case. Then he watched pensively as Sharpe spooned up the beans and pigs’ ears that the village priest had provided as supper. ‘Do you think,’ Vivar asked softly, ‘that, after your skirmish, the Dragoons followed your army?’

‘I didn’t see.’

‘Let us hope they did.’ Vivar ladled some of the mixture onto his own plate. ‘Perhaps they think I’ve joined the British retreat, yes?’

‘Perhaps.’ Sharpe wondered why Vivar was so interested in the French Dragoons who had been led by a red-coated chasseur and a black-coated civilian. He had eagerly questioned Sharpe about every detail of the fight by the bridge, but what most interested the Spaniard was which direction the enemy horsemen had taken after the fight, to which enquiry Sharpe could only offer his supposition that the Dragoons had ridden in pursuit of Sir John Moore’s army.

‘If you’re right, Lieutenant,’ Vivar raised a mug of wine in an ironic toast, ‘then that is the best news I’ve had in two weeks.’

‘Why were they pursuing you?’

‘They weren’t pursuing me,’ Vivar said. ‘They’re pursuing anyone in uniform, anyone. They just happened to catch my scent a few days ago. I want to be sure they’re not waiting in the next valley.’ Vivar explained to Sharpe that he had been travelling westwards but, forced into the highlands, he had lost all his horses and a good number of his men. He had been driven down to this small village by his desperate need for food and shelter.

That food had been willingly given. As the soldiers entered the small settlement Sharpe had noted how glad the villagers were to see Major Blas Vivar. Some of the men had even tried to kiss the Major’s hand, while the village priest, hurrying from his house, had ordered the women to heat up their ovens and uncover their winter stores. The soldiers, both Spanish and British, had been warmly welcomed. ‘My father,’ Vivar now explained to Sharpe, ‘was a lord in these mountains.’

‘Does that mean you’re a lord?’

‘I am the younger son. My brother is the Count now.’ Vivar crossed himself at this mention of his brother, a sign which Sharpe took to denote respect. ‘I am an hidalgo, of course,’ he went on, ‘so these people call me Don Blas.’

Sharpe shrugged. ‘Hidalgo?’

Vivar politely disguised his surprise at Sharpe’s ignorance. ‘An hidalgo, Lieutenant, is a man who can trace his blood back to the old Christians of Spain. Pure blood, you understand, without a taint of Moor or Jew in it. I am hidalgo.’ He said it with a simple pride which made the claim all the more impressive. ‘And your father? He is a lord, too?’

‘I don’t know who my father is, or was.’

‘You don’t know …’ Vivar’s initial reaction was curiosity, then the implication of bastardy made him drop the subject. It was clear that Sharpe had fallen even lower in the Spaniard’s opinion. The Major glanced out of the window, judging the day’s dying. ‘So what will you do now, Lieutenant?’

‘I’m going south. To Lisbon.’

‘To take a ship home?’

Sharpe ignored the hint of scorn which suggested he was running away from the fight. ‘To take a ship home,’ he confirmed.

‘You have a map?’

‘No.’

Vivar broke a piece of bread to mop up the gravy. ‘You will find there are no roads south in these mountains.’