Not that anyone would be watching, not while a naked girl ran wildly along the ridge, stopping to turn and hurl stones at an imagined pursuer on the slope hidden from the lancers. Drink or women, Sharpe thought, the bait for soldiers, and Teresa was leading the lancers in a mad rush ever further from the gully. He had her in the glass, shamelessly, and he could hear the excited shouts of the lancers who would be lost to the control of the strung-out officers. They would assume that the Sergeant had found the girl, stripped her, let her get away, and was now pursuing her. Sharpe acknowledged her cleverness and bravery, but for the moment he had time only for the slim, muscled body, for a beauty that he wanted.

Kearsey had limped to the edge of the gully's floor and was looking up at Sharpe. 'What's happening?'

'She's leading them away, sir.' He talked normally, the lancers were way beyond earshot.

Kearsey nodded, as if he had expected the answer. Harper still looked curious. 'How, sir?'

The girl had disappeared behind the summit, and the lancers, all discipline shredded, were panting up the slope a good fifty yards behind. Sharpe grinned at his Sergeant. 'She took her clothes off.'

Kearsey whipped round, aghast. 'You looked!'

'Only to see if I could help, sir.'

'What kind of a man are you, Sharpe?' Kearsey was furious, but Sharpe turned away. What kind of a man was it that would not have looked?

Harper still stood over the unconscious lancer and he sounded aggrieved. 'You might have told me, sir.'

Sharpe turned back. Kearsey had limped away. 'I promised your mother I'd keep you out of trouble. Sorry.' He grinned at the Sergeant again. 'If I'd told you, then the whole damn Company would have wanted a look. Yes? And by now we'd be back in the war instead of being safe.'

Harper grinned. 'Privilege of rank, eh, sir?'

'Something like that.' He thought of the beauty, the shadowed body with its hard stomach, long thighs, and the challenges of the disinterested, almost antagonistic glances that she had given him.

It was two hours before she returned, as silently as she had left, and wearing her white dress. She had done her work well, for the lancers had been recalled, the Sergeant given up, and Casatejada was thronged with Frenchmen. Sharpe guessed that the village had been the centre of a huge operation to clear the Partisans from Massena's supply areas. Kearsey agreed, and the two men watched as other cavalry units came from the north to join the Polish lancers. Dragoons, chasseurs, the uniforms of empire, stirring a dust cloud that would have befitted a whole army, and all spent on chasing Partisans through dry hills.

The girl came up the rim and watched, silently, as the cavalry left her village. Their weapons flashed needles of light through the brown haze of the dust; the ranks seemed endless, the glorious might of France that had ridden down the best cavalry in Europe but could not defeat the Guerrilleros. Sharpe looked at the girl, at Kearsey, who talked with her, and was glad once more that he did not have to fight the Partisans. The only way to win was to kill them all, every one, young and old, and even that, as the French were finding, did not work. He thought of the bodies in the blood of the basement. It was not the war of Talavera.

They spent the night in the gully, cautious lest the French should still be watching, and some time in the small hours the bubbles stopped in Kelly's throat. Pru Kelly, though she did not know it, was a widow again, and Sharpe remembered the small Corporal's smile, his willingness. They buried him at dawn, in a grave scratched from the soil, and they heaped it with rocks that would be forced apart by a fox and perched on by the vultures who would tear his chest further apart.

Kearsey said the words, from memory, and the men stood round the heaped stones awkwardly. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, and in a few weeks, Sharpe thought, Pru Kelly would marry again because that was the way with the women who marched with soldiers. The Polish Sergeant, tied up with musket slings, watched the burial and, for a few moments, stopped his struggles. The new day came, still hot, the rain still keeping away, and the Light Company marched into the empty valley to find their gold.

CHAPTER 9

It was a sweet smell, sticky-sweet, that left a foul deposit somewhere at the top of the nostrils, yet it was impossible to describe why it was so unpleasant. Sharpe had smelt it often enough, so had most of the Company, and they knew it fifty yards from the village. It was not so much a smell, Sharpe thought, as a state of the air, like an invisible mist. It seemed, like a mist, to thicken the air, make breathing difficult, yet all the time to have that sweet promise, as if the corpses the French had left behind were made of sugar and honey.

Not even the dogs had been left alive. A few cats, too difficult to catch, had survived the French, but the dogs, like their owners, had been killed, splayed open with desperate savagery, as if the French thought that death by itself was not enough and a body must be turned inside out if it was not to come magically alive to ambush them again. Only one man lived in the village, one of Sharpe's men left behind in the attack, and the French, true to the curious honour that prevailed between the armies, had left John Rorden propped on a mattress, with bread and water to hand and a bullet somewhere in his pelvis that would kill him before this new day was done.

Ramon, in slow English, told Sharpe that four dozen people had been left in the village, mostly the old or the very young, but they had all died. Sharpe stared at the wrecked houses, the blood splashed on low, white walls.

'Why were they caught?'

Ramon shrugged, waved a bandaged hand. 'They were good.'

'Good?'

'Francese.' He was lost for a word and Sharpe helped.

'Clever?'

The young man nodded. He had his sister's nose, the same dark eyes, but there was a friendliness to him that Sharpe had not seen in Teresa. Ramon shook his head hopelessly. 'They were not all Guerrilleros, yes?' Each group of words was a question, as if he wanted assurance that his English was adequate. Sharpe kept nodding. 'They want peace? But now.' He spoke two quick sentences in Spanish, his tone bitter, and Sharpe knew that those people of the uplands who had tried to stay aloof from the war would be drawn in whether they wanted it or not. Ramon blinked back tears; the dead had been of his village. 'We went there?' He pointed north. 'They were before us, yes? We were…' He described a circle with his two bandaged hands.

'Surrounded?'

'Si.' He looked down at his right hand, at the fingers that poked from the grey bandage, and Sharpe saw the index finger moving as if it were pulling a trigger. Ramon would fight again.

The bodies were not just in the cellar. Some, perhaps for the amusement of the lancers, had been taken to the hermitage to meet their bitter end, and on the steps of the building Sharpe found Isaiah Tongue, the admirer of Napoleon, throwing up the dry bread that had been his breakfast. The Company waited by the hermitage. The prisoner, tall and proud, stood by Sergeant McGovern, and Sharpe stopped by the Scotsman.

'Look after him, Sergeant.'

'Aye, sir. They'll not touch him.' The sturdy face was twisted as if in pain. McGovern, like Tongue, had looked inside the hermitage. 'Savages, sir, that's what they are. Savages!'

'I know.'

There was nothing to say that would reach McGovern's pain, the hurt of a father far from his children who had just seen small, dead bodies. The stench was thick by the hermitage, buzzing with flies, and Sharpe paused by the steps. There was almost a reluctance to go inside, not just because of the bodies, but because of what the hermitage might not contain. The gold. So close, so near to the war's survival, and instead of a feeling of triumph he felt stained, touched by a horror that brought an anger against his job. He climbed the steps, his face a mask, and wondered what his men would do if they found themselves, as they probably would, in a place where the rules no longer counted. He remembered the uncontrollable savagery that followed a siege, the sheer, exploding rage that he had felt after death had touched him a score of times in one small breach and he knew, as the cold air of the hermitage struck him, that this war in Spain, if it should go on, would not be won until British infantry had been fed into the narrow meat grinder of a small gap in a city wall.