“Ghosts?” Sharpe could not hide his astonishment.
“No. A ghost, Lieutenant, is a creature that cannot escape from the earth. A ghost is a soul in torment, someone who lived and offended the Holy Sacraments. A xana was never human. A xana is,” he shrugged, “a creature? Like an otter, or a water rat. Just something that lives in the stream. You must have them in England, surely?”
“Not that I know of.”
Vivar looked appalled, then crossed himself. “Will you go now?”
Sharpe crossed the fast-flowing stream, safe from malicious sprites, and watched as his Riflemen followed. They avoided looking at him. Sergeant Williams, who carried the pack of a wounded man, stepped into deeper water rather than scramble up the bank where the officer stood.
The mule was prodded across the stream and Sharpe noticed with what care the soldiers guarded the oilcloth-covered chest. He supposed it contained Major Vivar’s clothes and belongings. Harper, still tied to the packmule, spat towards him, a gesture Sharpe chose to ignore.
“Now we climb,” Vivar said with a note of satisfaction, as if the coming hardship was to be welcomed.
They climbed. They struggled up a steeply rising valley where the rocks were glossed by ice and the trees dripped snow onto their heads. The wind rose and the sky clouded again.
It began to sleet. The wind howled about their muffled ears. Men were sobbing with the misery and effort, but somehow Vivar kept them moving. “Upwards! Upwards! Where the cavalry can’t go, eh? Go on! Higher! Let’s join the angels! What’s the matter with you, Marcos? Your father would have danced up this slope when he was twice your age! You want the Englishmen to think a Spaniard has no strength? Shame on you! Climb!”
By dawn they had reached a saddle in the hills. Vivar led the exhausted men to a cave that was hidden by ice-sheathed laurels. “I shot a bear here,” he told Sharpe proudly. “I was twelve, and my father sent me out alone to kill a bear.”
He snapped off a branch and tossed it towards the men who were building a fire. “That was twenty years ago.” He spoke with a kind of wonder that so much time had passed.
Sharpe noted that Vivar was exactly his own age but, coming from the nobility was already a Major, while Sharpe came from the gutter and only an extraordinary stroke of fate had made him into a Lieutenant. He doubted if he would ever see another promotion, nor, seeing how badly he had handled these greenjackets, did he think he deserved one.
Vivar watched as the chest was fetched from the mule’s back and placed in the cave-mouth. He sat beside it, with a protective arm over its humped surface, and Sharpe saw that there was almost a reverence in the way he treated the box. Surely, Sharpe thought, no man, having endured the frozen hell that Vivar had been through, would take such care to protect a chest if it only contained clothes? “What’s in it?” Sharpe asked.
“Just papers.” Vivar stared out at the creeping dawn. “Modern war generates papers, yes?”
It was not a question that demanded an answer, but rather a comment to discourage further questions. Sharpe asked none.
Vivar took off his cocked hat and carefully removed a half-smoked cigar that was stored inside its sweatband. He gave an apologetic shrug that he had no cigar to offer Sharpe, then struck a flame from his tinder box. The pungent smell of tobacco teased Sharpe’s nostrils. “I saved it,” Vivar said, “till I was close to home.”
“Very close?”
Vivar waved the cigar in a gesture that encompassed the whole view. “My father was lord of all this land.”
“Will we go to your house?”
“I hope to see you safe on your southern road first.”
Sharpe, piqued by the curiosity the poor have about the lordly rich, felt oddly disappointed. “Is it a large house?”
“Which house?” Vivar asked drily. “There are three, all of them large. One is an abandoned castle, one is in the city of Orense, and one is in the country. They all belong to my brother, but Tomas has never loved Galicia. He prefers to live where there are kings and courtiers so, on his sufferance, I can call the houses mine.”