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.