Harper mounted his horse. He had made himself rich beyond the wildest dreams of the wildest Irishman that ever marched to war, and, like a true friend, he had made Sharpe rich too. Of course the Englishman had not noticed, but that was Mr Sharpe. Mr Sharpe was thinking of someone else, of another treasure. Harper looked into the seething mass of plunderers. ‘Where the hell is he?’

Sharpe had disappeared. Harper stood in his stirrups and stared about the seething mass of people who swarmed around the half-stripped wagons. The setting sun bathed the whole scene in a vivid, blood-red light. There was laughter and tears all about him. ‘Where the hell is he?’

‘There, senor’ Angel was still standing on the wagon. He pointed south. ‘El Matarifel’

‘What?’

The boy was pointing at a band of horsemen. In their lead was a man who looked half-beast, a hulking brute with a face of thick hair, a man who had a woman held on her belly over his saddle. The woman, Harper saw, had hair the colour of fine gold.

Harper urged his horse through the crowd. He saw how many armed men were with the bearded man. He saw too, that Sharpe was riding alone towards them and he knew that Sharpe, in this savage mood, would think nothing of taking on all those horsemen with his sword. Only one thing puzzled Harper and that was the presence, in Sharpe’s left hand, of a great length of silver chain. Harper cocked his seven-barrelled gun and rode, a rich man, to the fight.

CHAPTER 27

Sharpe had seen El Matarife. The Partisan, with a group of his men, was stripping one of the French wagons that had brought the defeated army’s arrears of pay. Some of his men unloaded the gold twenty franc pieces, the rest kept other looters away. El Matarife had La Marquesa over his saddle.

Sharpe knew he could not defeat all of them. There were twenty muskets there that would snatch him from the saddle and leave her to the mercy of the bearded man. Yet El Matarife, Sharpe knew, would not be able to resist a challenge to his manhood. There was one way, and one way only, that this fight must be fought.

He swerved Carbine towards La Marquesa’s abandoned carriage. He drew his sword and, reaching the vehicle, he leaned down, grasped the last trace chain, and hacked with his sword at the leather strap which held it to the splinter-bar.

He looped the chain in his left hand, and turned towards his enemy.

Weeks before, he thought, he had been foolish enough to accept a challenge to a duel. Now he would issue the challenge.

He rode towards the wagon, and the men who ripped at the chests stopped when they saw him coming. They called to their leader and El Matarife, who had been told that this man was dead, crossed himself and stared at the tall Rifleman who came out of the scarlet lit chaos. ‘Shoot him!’

But no one moved. The Rifleman had tossed a silver chain onto the ground into the mud that was thick with unwanted silver dollars, and he stared with savage loathing at the bearded man. ‘Are you a coward, Matarife? Do you only fight women?’

Still none of them moved. Those who had been scooping handfuls of gold from the broken chests stared at the tall Englishman who, slowly, his eyes on El Matarife, dismounted. Sharpe unbuckled his sword. He laid it, with his haversack, beside the wheel of the wagon.

El Matarife looked down at the chain, then back to Sharpe as the Rifleman looped the silver links about his upper left arm. Sharpe left a length of the chain to swing free from his arm. ‘Are you a coward, Matarife?’

El Matarife’s answer was to swing himself from his saddle. He dragged La Marquesa down and pushed her towards his men, shouting at them to hold her and keep her. She cried out as she stumbled, as a man reached down and seized her golden hair and held her against the flank of his horse, and as she turned and saw Sharpe standing in the wheel-churned mud and silver.

‘Richard!’ Her eyes were huge, staring in disbelief. Like her captor, in a half-forgotten gesture from her past, she touched her face, her belly, and her breasts in the sign of the cross. ‘Richard?’

‘Helene.’ He smiled at her, seeing her fear, her astonishment, her beauty. Even here the sight of that unfair loveliness struck into his soul like a dagger.

Behind Sharpe, Harper curbed his horse. He took Carbine’s rein, then leaned down and retrieved Sharpe’s sword and haversack. ‘Behind you, sir!’

‘Watch the bastards, Patrick! Put a bullet into them if they take her away!’ Sharpe had spoken in Spanish, a language that Harper had learned from Isabella.

‘Consider it done, sir.’

The Partisans were awed by the huge man who sat on his horse with his two guns, one of them larger than any gun they had ever seen held by a man. Beside Harper was Angel with his rifle in his practised hands. Angel was staring at the woman he thought more beautiful than lust.

The sky was darkening towards night, the west reddened with the sun’s setting. Skeins of smoke, dark blue-grey.against the cloudless sky, stretched above the field of plunder in delicate rills. They were the gun’s detritus, the drifting remnants of the battle that had been and gone on Vitoria’s plain.

El Matanfe shrugged off his heavy cloak. ‘You can ride away, Englishman, You will live.’

Sharpe laughed. ‘I shall count the ways of your death, coward.’

El Matanfe stooped, picked up the chain, and knotted it about his upper arm. He drew his knife and, with a patronising smile on his wet lips that showed through the thick hair of his face, threw it to Sharpe.

It turned in the air, catching the dying sun, and landed at Sharpe’s feet.

It was bone handled, with a blade as long as a bayonet’s. The blade looked delicate. It was thin, needle pointed, and its two edges were feathered where it had been sharpened on the stone. This weapon, Sharpe knew, would draw blood at the lightest stroke. In El Matarife’s comfortable grip, taken from one of his lieutenants, was a similar blade; as bright, as sharp, as deadly.

El Matanfe stepped backwards and the silver chain slowly lifted from the mud. The links clinked softly. The Partisan smiled. ‘You’re a dead man, Englishman.’

Sharpe remembered the terrible skill with which his enemy had taken the eyes from the French prisoner. He waited.

El Matarife’s men were silent. From the city came the jangling of church bells, announcing that the French were gone and that the first Allied troops were in the narrow streets. The chain tightened. The sun reddened its links.

The Slaughterman smiled. His poleaxe was stuck into the ground at the edge of the circle made by his men. He pulled against Sharpe’s strength until the silver links were as taut as a bar of steel, and the only evidence of the huge strengths that opposed each other were the scraps of mud that fell from the tight links.

Sharpe felt the pressure on his arm. El Matanfe was pulling with extraordinary force. Sharpe pulled back and saw the Slaughterman’s eyes judging him.

The Slaughterman jerked. Sharpe’s arm came up, he jerked back, and the Slaughterman was grunting and pulling, and Sharpe was jarred forward. He pulled back, knowing he did not have the same brute strength as his enemy, but when he saw the Slaughterman smile and gather his strength for a massive pull, Sharpe jumped forward to throw the man off balance.

The Slaughterman was ready, he had expected it, invited it, and he closed the ten foot gap with lightning speed and his knife slashed up towards Sharpe, bright in the dusk light. The Rifleman swerved, not bothering to reply, backed away, and his left hand caught the chain for greater leverage and he pulled on it with all his power and the Slaughterman did not move.

El Matanfe looked at Sharpe’s gritted teeth and laughed. ‘Your death will be slow, Englishman.’