Sharpe, chastened, went past Vivar to the church door. With one hand on the jamb, he turned to look back at the chest. Vivar, his back to him, was already on his knees in front of the mysterious strongbox.
Sharpe, embarrassed to see a man praying, paused.
“Yes, Lieutenant?” Vivar had not turned round.
“Did your prisoners tell you who the chasseur is? The man in red who led them here?”
“No, Lieutenant.” The Spaniard’s voice was very patient, as though by answering he merely humoured a child’s caprice. “I did not think to ask them.”
“Or the man in black? The civilian?”
Vivar paused for a second. “Does the wolf know the names of the hounds?”
“Who is he, Major?”
The rosary’s beads clicked. “Goodnight, Lieutenant.” .
Sharpe knew he would fetch no answers, only more mysteries to rival the insubstantiality of the estadea. He half-closed the charred door, then went to his cold bed of bare earth and listened to the wind moan in the spirit-haunted night. Somewhere a wolf howled, and one of the captured horses whinnied softly. In the chapel a man prayed. Sharpe slept.
CHAPTER 6
The Cazadores and Riflemen still went west but, for fear of the French Dragoons, Vivar avoided the easier paths of the pilgrim way, insisting that safety still lay in the uplands. The road, if it could be called a road at all, struggled through the passes of high mountains and across cold streams swollen by meltwater and by the persistent, stinging rain that made the paths as slippery as grease. The wounded men and those who caught a fever of the cold were carried by the captured French horses, but those precious beasts had to be led with an infinite caution if they were to survive on the treacherous tracks. One of the horses carried the strongbox.
There was no news of the French. During the first two days of the march Sharpe expected to see the threatening silhouettes of the Dragoons on the skyline, but the chasseur andihis men seemed to have vanished. The few people who lived in the highland villages assured Vivar that they had seen no Frenchmen. Some of them did not even know that a foreign enemy was in Spain and, hearing the strange language of Sharpe’s Riflemen, would stare with a suspicious hostility at the strangers. “Not that their own dialect isn’t strange,” Vivar said cheerfully; then, as fluent in the Galician speech as in the more courtly tongue of Spain, he would reassure the peasants that the men in torn green coats were not to be feared.
After the first few days, and satisfied that the French had lost the scent, Vivar descended to the pilgrim way which proved to be a succession of mingling tracks that twisted through the deeper valleys. The largest roads were reinforced with flint so that carts and carriages could use them, and even though the winter had drowned the flints in mud, the men marched fast and easily on the firmer surface. Chestnuts and elm trees grew thick beside the road which led through a country that had so far been free of scavenging armies. The men ate well. There was maize, rye, potatoes, chestnuts, and salted meat in winter store. One night there was even fresh mutton.
Yet, despite the food and the easier footing, it was not a soft country. One midday, beside a bridge which crossed a deep, dark stream, Sharpe saw three human heads stuck high on wooden poles. The heads had been there for months, and their eyes, tongues, and softer flesh had been eaten by ravens, while what shreds of skin were left on the grisly skulls had turned as black as pitch. ‘Rateros,“ Vivar told Sharpe, ”highwaymen. They think that pilgrims give easy pickings.“
“Do many pilgrims go to Santiago de Compostela?”
“Not so many as in the old days. A few lepers still go to be cured, but even they will be stopped by the war.” Vivar nodded towards the lank-haired skulls. “So now those gentlemen will have to use their murderous skills against the French.” The thought cheered him, just as the easier going on the pilgrim way cheered Sharpe’s Riflemen. Sometimes they sang as they marched. They rediscovered old comforts. Vivar bought great blocks of tobacco that had to be rasped into shreds before it could be smoked and some of the Riflemen imitated the Spanish soldiers and twisted the tobacco in paper rather than smoking it in clay pipes. The small villages would always yield generous quantities of a rough, strong cider. Vivar was astonished at the Riflemen’s capacity for the drink, and even more astonished when Sharpe told him that most of the men had only joined the army to get the daily ration of a third of a pint of rum.