He walked forward, his tall French boots crunching on the stones of the path. They would fight where the paths crossed at the graveyard’s centre, where the Marques would try to turn Sharpe into the dazzling sun and run him through with the slim, shining blade.
He stopped opposite his enemy. He stared into the blank, expressionless eyes and he tried to imagine Helene marrying this man. There was a weakness in the fleshy, proud face. Sharpe tried to pin it down, tried to analyse this man whose skill he had to beat. Perhaps, he thought, the Marques was a man born to greatness who had never felt himself worthy. That perhaps was why he prayed so hard and had so much pride.
The Marques stared at Sharpe, seeing the man whom he believed had insulted his wife and tried to assault her. The Marques did not just fight for Helene, nor just for his pride, but for the pride of all Spain that had been humbled by needing to make an Englishman its Generalissimo.
The Marques remembered what the Inquisitor, Father Hacha, had said about this man. Fast, but unskilled. Sharpe, the Marques knew, would try to kill him as if he was an ox. He twitched the fine sword in his hand. It was odd, he thought, that an Inquisitor should carry Helene’s letter. He pushed the thought away.
`You are ready, my Lord?’ Mendofa called.
The Marques’ face gave the smallest twitch. He was ready.
`Major Sharpe?’
`Yes.’
Major Mendora flexed his sword once so that the steel hissed in the air. The Inquisitor stood with a doctor beside the Marques’ coach. D’Alembord looked hopefully towards the cemetery entrance, but it was empty. He felt the hopelessness of this idiocy, and then Mendora called them forward. `Your swords, gentlemen?’
Sharpe’s boots grated on the gravel. If he got into real trouble, he thought, then he could pretend to fall down, scoop up a handful of the stones, and hurl them to blind the big man who came cautiously forward. What had d’Alembord said? He would feint to the right and go left? Or was it the other way round?
He raised his big, straight sword and it looked dull beside the slim, polished blade that came beside it. The swords touched. Sharpe wondered if he detected a quiver in the other man’s grip, but no, the blades rested quietly as Mendora drew his own sword, held it beneath the raised blades, then swept his weapon up to part the two swords and the duel had begun.
Neither man moved.
They watched each other, waiting. Sharpe’s urge was to shout, as he shouted on a battlefield to frighten his opponents, but he felt cowed by the formality of this setting. He was fighting a duel against an aristocrat and he felt that he must behave as they expected him to behave. This was not like battle. This was so cold-blooded, so ritualistic, and it seemed hard to believe that in this warm evening air a man must fall to bleed his life onto the gravel.
The Marques’ sword came slowly down, reached out, touched Sharpe’s blade, then flickered in bright, quick motion, and Sharpe took two steps back.
The Marques still watched him. He had done no more than test Sharpe’s speed. He would test his skill next.
Sharpe tried to shake the odd lethargy away. It seemed impossible that this was real, that death waited here. He saw the Marques come forward again, his heavy tread no clue to the speed that Sharpe had already seen, and Sharpe went forward too, his sword reaching, and the Marques stepped back.
The troops jeered. They wanted blood, they wanted a furious mill with their champion standing over the ripped corpse of the other man.
The Marques tried to oblige. He came forward with surprising speed, his blade flickering past Sharpens guard, looping beneath the heavy cavalry sword and lunging to Sharpe’s right.
Sharpe countered desperately, knowing that the speed had beaten him, but with a luck he did not deserve he felt the Marques’ blade-tip lodge in the tassel hole of his sword’s hilt. It seemed to stick there and Sharpe wrenched his weapon, forcing it towards the Marques, hoping to break the man’s slim blade, but the Marques turned, drew his sword away, and the cheers of the spectators were louder. They had mistaken Sharpe’s desperate counters as a violent attack.