In the somnolent afternoon Sharpe felt restless. He had no family to write to and no desire to join Harper vainly tempting non-existent fish with his maggots. Hogan was sleeping, snoring gently in a patch of shade, so Sharpe got up from the grass, took his rifle, and strolled towards the picquet line and beyond. It was a beautiful day. No cloud disturbed the sky, the water in the stream flowed clear, a whisper of a breeze stirred the grass and flickered the pale leaves of the olive trees. He walked between the stream and a field of growing corn, jumped a crude, wicker dam that stopped an irrigation channel, and into a rock-strewn field of stunted olives. Nothing moved. Insects buzzed and clicked, a horse whinnied from the camp site, the sound of the water faded behind him. Someone had told him it was July. Perhaps it was his birthday. He did not know on which day he had been born, but before his mother died he remembered her calling him a July-baby, or was it June? He remembered little else of her. Dark hair and a voice in the darkness. She had died when he was an infant, and there was no other family.
The landscape crouched beneath the heat, still and silent, the Battalion swallowed up in the countryside as though it did not exist. He looked back down the road the Battalion had marched and far away, too far to see properly, there was a dust cloud where the main army was still on the road. He sat beside a gnarled tree trunk, rifle across his knees, and stared into the heat haze. A lizard darted across the ground, paused, looked at him, then ran up a tree trunk and froze as if he would lose sight of it because of its stillness. A speck of movement in the sky made him look up, and high in the blue a hawk slid silently, its wings motionless, its head searching the ground for prey. Patrick would have known instantly what it was but to Sharpe the bird was just another hunter, and today, he thought, there is nothing for us hunters and, as if in agreement, the bird stirred its wings and in a moment had gone out of view. He felt comfortable and lazy, at peace with the world, glad to be a Rifleman in Spain. He looked at the stunted olives with their promise of a thin harvest and wondered what family would shake the branches in the autumn, whose lives were bounded by the stream, the shallow fields, and the high, climbing road he would probably never see again.
Then there was a noise. Too hesitant and far off to sound an alarm in his head, but strange and persistent enough to make him alert and send his right hand to curl unconsciously round the narrow part of the rifle’s stock. There were horses on the road, only two from the sound of their hooves, but they were moving slowly and uncer-tainly, and the sound suggested that something was wrong. He doubted that the French would have cavalry patrols in this part of Spain but he still got to his feet and moved silendy through the grove, instinctively choosing a path that kept his green uniform hidden and shadowed until he stood in the bright sunlight and surprised the traveller.
It was the girl. She was still dressed like a man, in the black trousers and boots, with the same wide-brimmed hat that shadowed her beauty. She was walking, or rather limping like her horse, and at the sight of Sharpe she stopped and looked at him angrily, as if she was annoyed at being seen unexpectedly. The servant, a slight, dark man leading the heavily loaded mule, stopped ten paces behind and stared mutely at the tall, scarred Rifleman. The mare also looked at Sharpe, swished its tail at the flies, and stood patiendy with one hind leg lifted off the ground. The shoe was hanging loose, held by a single nail, and the animal must have suffered agonies on the heat of the stony road. Sharpe nodded at the hind foot. “Why didn’t you take the shoe off?”