"Shit," Sharpe said, not sure what he should do now. Joana made the decision. She ran down the hill, easily evading Harper's attempt to stop her, and she screamed at the men holding Vicente. She stood twenty yards from them and told them what had happened in Coimbra, how the French had raped and stolen and killed, and said how she had been dragged to a room by three Frenchmen and how the British soldiers had saved her. She unbuttoned the shirt to show them her torn dress, then she cursed the partisans because they had been fooled by their true enemies. "You trust Ferragus?" she asked them. "Has Ferragus ever shown you a kindness? And if these men are spies, why are they here? Why do they not travel with the French?" One man evidently tried to answer her, but she spat at him. "You are doing the enemy's work," she said scornfully. "You want your wife and daughters to be raped? Or are you not man enough to have a wife? You play with goats instead, do you?" She spat at him a second time, buttoned the shirt and turned back up the hill.

Four men followed her. They came cautiously, their muskets held towards Sharpe and Harper, and they stopped a safe distance away and asked a question. Joana answered them.

"She's saying," Sarah translated for Sharpe, "that you burned the food in the city that Ferragus would have sold to the French." Joana was evidently telling the four men more than that for she went on, spitting out words like bullets, her tone scornful, and Sarah smiled. "If she was my pupil," she said, "I'd wash her mouth out with soap."

"Good job I'm not your pupil," Sharpe said. The four men, evidently shamed by Joana's passion, glanced up at him and he saw the doubt on their faces and, on impulse, he pulled the young man to his feet. The four muskets immediately twitched upwards. "Go," Sharpe told the young man, releasing his hold on the frayed collar, "go and tell them we mean no harm."

Sarah translated and the young man, with a nod of gratitude, ran down the hill to his companions, the tallest of whom slung his musket and walked slowly up the hill. He still asked questions that Joana answered, but eventually he offered Sharpe a curt nod and invited the strangers to talk with him. "Does that mean they believe us?" Sharpe asked.

"They're not sure," Sarah answered.

It took the best part of an hour's talking to persuade the men that they had been deceived by Major Ferreira, and it was only when Vicente put his right hand on a crucifix and swore on his life, on his wife's soul and on the life of his baby child that the men accepted that Sharpe and his companions were not traitors, and then they took the fugitives to a small, high village that was little more than a sprawl of hovels where goatherds stayed in the summer. The place was now crammed with refugees who were waiting for the war to pass. The men were armed, mostly with British muskets that Ferreira had supplied, and that was why they had trusted the Major, though enough of the fugitives were familiar with the Major's brother and had been worried when Ferragus came to their settlement. Others knew of Vicente's family, and they were helpful in persuading Soriano that the Portuguese officer was telling the truth. "There were five of them," Soriano told Vicente, "and we gave them mules. The only mules we had."

"Did they say where they were going?"

"Eastwards, senhor."

"To Castelo Branco?"

"Then to the river," Soriano confirmed. He had been a miller, though his mill had been dismantled and its precious wooden mechanism burned and he did not know how he was to make a living now that he was behind the French lines.

"What you do," Vicente told him, "is take your men southwards and attack the French. You'll find foraging parties in the foothills. Kill them. Keep killing them. And in the meantime you give us shoes and clothes for the women, and guides to take us after Major Ferreira."

A woman in the settlement looked at the wound in Vicente's shoulder and said it was healing well, then rewrapped it in moss and a new bandage. Shoes and footcloths were found for Sarah and Joana, but the only dresses were heavy and black, not garments suitable for traveling miles across rough country, and Sarah persuaded the women to give up some boys' breeches, shirts and jackets instead. There was little food in the village, but some hard bread and goat's cheese were wrapped in cloth and given to them and then, near midday, they set off. They had, so far as Vicente could gauge, some sixty miles still to travel before they reached the River Tagus where, he hoped, they could find a boat that would carry them downstream towards Lisbon and the British and Portuguese armies.

"Three days' walking," Sharpe said, "maybe less."

"Twenty miles a day?" Sarah sounded dubious.

"We should do better than that," Sharpe insisted. The army reckoned to march fifteen miles a day, but the army was encumbered with guns, baggage and walking wounded. General Craufurd, vainly trying to reach Talavera in time for the battle, had marched the Light Brigade over forty miles in a day, but that had been on half-decent roads and Sharpe knew his route would be across country, up hill and down dale, following the paths where no French patrol would dare to ride. He would be lucky, he thought, if they reached the river in four days, and that meant he would fail because the Ferreira brothers had mules and would probably complete the journey in two.

He thought about that as they walked eastwards. It was high, bare country, barren and empty, though they could see settlements far below in the valleys. It would be a long unrewarding walk, he thought, because by the time they reached the river and found a boat the brothers would be a long way ahead, probably in Lisbon, and Sharpe knew the army would never give him permission to pursue the feud into the city. "Is Castelo Branco," he asked Vicente, "the only route to the river?"

Vicente shook his head. "It's the safe route," he said. "No French. And this road leads there."

"Call this a road?" It was a track, fit for men and mules, but hardly deserving the name of road. Sharpe turned and saw that the watchtower close to where they had encountered Soriano was still visible. "We'll never catch the bastards," he grumbled.

Vicente stopped and scratched a rough map in the earth with his foot. It showed the Tagus curling east out of Spain, then turning south towards the sea and so narrowing the peninsula on which Lisbon was built. "What they are doing," he said, "is going directly east, but if you want to take a risk we can go south across the Serra da Lousa. Those hills are not so high as these, but the French could be there."

Sharpe looked at the crude map. "But we'd reach the river farther south?"

"We'll reach the Zezere"-Vicente scratched another river, this one a tributary of the Tagus-"and if we follow the Zezere then it will come to the Tagus well south of where they're going."

"Save a day?"

"If there are no French." Vicente sounded dubious. "The farther south we go the more likely we are to meet them."

"But it will save a day?"

"Maybe more."

"Then let's do it."

So they turned south and saw no dragoons, no Frenchmen and few Portuguese. On the second day after their encounter with Soriano's men it began to rain: a gray, Atlantic drizzle that soaked them all to the bone and left them chilled and sore, but it was downhill now, going from the bare hilltops into pastureland and vineyards and small walled fields. The three escorts left them, not wanting to go into the Zezere valley where the French might be, but Sharpe, throwing caution to the wind, followed a road down to the river. It was dusk when they came to the fast-flowing Zezere which was dappled by rain, and they spent the night in a small shrine beneath the outstretched hand of a plaster saint whose shoulders were thick with bird dung. Next morning they crossed the river at a place where the water foamed white across gaunt and slippery boulders. Harper made a short rope by joining the rifle and musket slings, then they helped each other from stone to stone, wading where they had to, and it took much longer than Sharpe had hoped, but once on the far bank he felt more secure. The French army was on the road to Lisbon and that was now over twenty miles to the west, on the river's opposite bank, and he reckoned any French foraging parties would stay on that side of the Zezere and so he walked openly on the eastern bank. It was still hard going, for the river flowed fast through high hills, twisting between great rocky shoulders, but it became easier the farther south they went and by the afternoon they were following tracks which led from village to village. A few inhabitants were still in their cottages and they reported seeing no enemy. They were poor folk, but they offered the strangers cheese and bread and fish.