`Yes. A slaughterman. You should have heard of him. He is famous.’
`And he guards the convent?’
Angel sucked on the disintegrating tube of tobacco. `So it is said. He will guard the mesa, not the convent.’
`The table?’
The convent is on a mountain, yes? Very high with a flat top, a mesa. There are few paths up, senor, so it is easy to guard.’
`Where is it?’
`Two days’ ride? There.’ He pointed to the north-east.
`Have you been there?’
`No.’ Angel disgustedly threw the remains of his cigar into the fire. He had somehow not mastered the knack of twisting the paper and tobacco exactly right. `I have heard of it though.’
Sharpe was trying to make sense, any kind of sense, from Angel’s news. The Inquisition? That coincidence made the boy’s tale seem true, but why should the Inquisition want to kidnap Helene? Or why, for that matter, would the Slaughterman be guarding the convent where she was held?
He asked the boy, and Angel shrugged. `Who knows? He is not a man you can ask.’
`What kind of man is he?’
The boy frowned. `He kills Frenchmen.’ He paid the compliment dubiously. `But he kills his own people, too, yes? He once shot twelve men of a village because the villagers had refused his men food. He rode in at the siesta time and shot them. Even Mina cannot control him.’ Angel spoke of the man who had been made general of all the Partisans. Mina had been known to execute men such as El Matarife who persecuted their own countrymen. Angel was making himself another cigar. The French are scared of him. It’s said that he once put the heads of fifty Frenchmen on the Great Road, one every mile through the mountains so the French would find them. That was near Vitoria where he comes from.’ The boy laughed. `He kills slowly. They say he has a leather coat made from French skins. Some say he is mad.’
`Can we find him?’
`Si.’ Angel said it as though the question was unnecessary. `So we ride to the mountains?’
`We ride to the mountains.’
They rode north east to where the mountains became dizzying crags, the hunting grounds of eagles, a land of awesome valleys and of waterfalls that seethed from the low clouds of morning to fall scores of feet into cold, upland streams.
They rode north east into a land where the inhabitants were few, and those inhabitants so poor and frightened that they fled when they saw two strange horsemen coming. Some of the people here, Angel said, would not even know there was a war on. `They’re not even Spanish!’ He said it scathingly.
`Not Spanish?’
`They’re Basques. They have their own language.’
`So who are they?’
Angel shrugged dismissively. `They live here.’ He obviously had nothing more to say about them.
Angel, it seemed to Sharpe, was fretting. They had come into these northern mountains and were far from the French. They were far from the war and, from what Angel had heard in Burgos, far from the excitement.
The rumours in Burgos said that the British had at last marched, and were attacking in the north. The French northern army was retreating and Sharpe had seen the vanguard of that army as it approached Burgos. Angel feared the campaign would be over before he could kill again. Sharpe laughed. `It won’t be over.’
`You promise?’
`I promise. How do we find El Matarife?’
`He finds us, sehor. Do you think he doesn’t know there’s an Englishman in the hills?’
`Just remember not to call me Sharpe.’
`Si, sehor.’ Angel grinned. `What are you called now?’
Sharpe smiled. He remembered the suave, regretful officer who had conducted his prosecution. `Vaughn. Major Vaughn.’
He rode between high rocks, beneath the eagles, and he searched for the Marquesa and for the Slaughterman.
El Matarife, like Angel, fretted at being so far from the richer pickings that were to be had to the south. These high, deep valleys were poor, there were few French to be ambushed, and little to be stolen from the meagre villages. He had two French prisoners with him, playthings for his entertainment.