The other wore no uniform; instead he was dressed in a black, tight-waisted riding coat above white boots. Vivar feared the black-coated horseman more than he feared the chasseur, for it was he who guided the Dragoons’ pursuit. The black-coated man knew where Bias Vivar was heading, he knew where he could be stopped, and he knew the power of the object that was hidden in the ironbound box.
Lieutenant Davila crouched in the snow next to Vivar. Neither man looked like a soldier any more. They were swathed in cloaks made from common sacking. Their faces, boots, and hands were wrapped in rags. Yet, beneath their makeshift cloaks they wore the scarlet uniforms of a Cazador elite company, and they were each as hard and efficient as any man who struggled in the French wars.
Davila borrowed Vivar’s glass and stared into the valley. Driven snow blurred the view, but he could see the splash of the scarlet pelisse hanging from the chasseur’s right shoulder. “Why doesn’t he wear a cloak?” he grumbled.
“He’s showing how tough he is,” Vivar said curtly.
Davila shifted the glass to see yet more Dragoons coming to the village. Some of the Frenchmen led limping horses. All carried swords and carbines. “I thought we’d lost them,” he said sadly.
“We’ll only lose them when we bury the last one.” Vivar slid down from the skyline. He had a face hardened by sun and wind, a pugnacious face, but saved from coarseness by the dark eyes that could spark with humour and understanding. Now, watching his men shiver in the narrow gully, those eyes were rimmed with red. “How much food is left?”
“Enough for two days.”
“If I did not know better,” Vivar’s voice was scarcely audible above the wind’s noise, “I would think God had abandoned Spain.”
Lieutenant Davila said nothing. A gust of wind snatched snow from the crest and whirled it in a glittering billow above their heads. The French, he thought bitterly, would be stealing food, firewood, and women in the valley. Children would be screaming. The men in the village would be tortured to reveal whether or not they had seen a tattered band of Cazadores carrying a strongbox. They would truthfully deny any such sighting, but the French would kill them just the same and the man in the black coat and white boots would watch without a flicker of emotion crossing his face. Davila closed his eyes. He had not known what it was to hate until this war had begun, and now he did not know if he would ever root the hate out of his soul.
“We’ll separate,” Vivar said suddenly.
“Don Bias?” Davila, his thoughts elsewhere, had misheard.
“I shall take the strongbox and eighty men,” Vivar spoke slowly, “and you will wait here with the other men. When we’re gone, and when the French are gone, you will go south. You will not move until you are sure the valley is empty. That chasseur is clever, and he may already have guessed what I am thinking. So wait, Diego! Wait till you are certain, then wait another day. Do you understand?”
“I understand.”
Vivar, despite his agonizing tiredness and the cold that leached into his very bones, found some enthusiasm to invest his words with hope. “Go to Orense, Diego, and see if there are any of our men left. Tell them I need them! Tell them I need horses and men. Take those men and horses to Santiago, and if I’m not there, ride east till you find me.”
Davila nodded. There was an obvious question to ask, but he could not bring himself to speak.
Vivar understood anyway. “If the French have captured the strongbox,” he said bleakly, “then you will know. They will trumpet their capture across Spain, Diego, and you will know because the war will be lost.”
Davila shivered beneath his ragged cloaks. “If you go west, Don Bias, you may find the British?”
Vivar spat to show his opinion of the British army.
“They would help you?” Davila insisted.
“Would you trust the English with what is in the strongbox?”
Davila considered his answer, then shrugged. “No.”