Bernard Cornwell – 1809 01 Sharpe’S Rifles

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.”