Sharpe stopped. There were shouts below. ‘Captain!’
‘Up here! On the church roof!’
He could hear footsteps below, pounding in the alleyway, and he suspected the Partisans were abandoning the unequal conflict. He stopped and took hold of El Catolico’s rapier. The wound hurt, but Sharpe knew he had been lucky; the blade had gone through the outer muscles and the blood and pain were worse than the damage. He pulled at the sword, clenching his teeth, and it slid free. He held the rapier in his hands, felt its fine balance, and knew he could never have defeated it except for the madness of driving his body on to the inlaid blade and denying El Catolico his skill.
The Spaniard moaned, still unconscious, and Sharpe crossed to him, bleeding and limping, and looked down at his enemy. His eyes were closed, the lids flickering slightly, and Sharpe took his own sword, put it at El Catolico’s throat. ‘A butcher’s blade, eh?’ He stabbed down till the point hit the roof, twisted it, then kicked the neck free of the blade. ‘That was for Claud Hardy.’ There would be no fiefdom in the mountains, no private kingdom, for El Catolico.
There was a thumping on the trapdoor. ‘Who’s that?’
‘Sergeant Harper!’
‘Wait!’
He pushed the ladder to one side and the trapdoor was pushed up and Harper appeared, a smoking torch in one hand. The Irishman looked first at Sharpe, then at the body. ‘God save Ireland. What were you doing, sir? A competition to see who could bleed the most?’
‘He wanted to kill me.’
The eyebrows went up. ‘Really?’ Harper looked at the dead man. ‘He was a fine swordsman, sir. How did you do it?’
Sharpe told him. How he had gone for the eyes, failed, so had impaled himself on the sword. Harper listened, shook his head.
‘You’re a bloody fool, sir. Let’s see the leg.’
Teresa came up, followed by Lossow and Knowles, and the story had to be told again, and Sharpe felt the tension flow out of him. He watched Teresa kneel by the body.
‘Does it upset you?’
She shook her head, busy at something, and Sharpe watched as she searched beneath the blood-stained clothes and found, round the dead man’s waist, a money-belt thick with coins. She opened one of the pockets.
‘Gold.’
‘Keep it.’
Sharpe was feeling his leg, tracing the wound, and he knew he had been lucky and that the blade had torn a smaller wound than his stupidity deserved. He looked up at Harper. ‘I’ll need the maggots.’
Harper grinned. In a tin box he kept fat white maggots that lived only on dead flesh, spurning healthy tissue, and nothing cleaned a simple wound better than a handful dropped into the cut and bound in with a bandage. The Irishman took Sharpe’s sash as a temporary dressing, bound it tight. ‘It’ll mend, sir.’
Lossow looked at the body. ‘What now?’
‘Now?’ Sharpe wanted a glass of wine, another plate of that stew. ‘Nothing. They have another leader. We still have to hand the gold over.’
Teresa spoke in Spanish, angry and vehement, and Sharpe smiled.
‘What was that, sir?’ Knowles was stunned by the blood on the roof.
‘I don’t think she likes the new leaders.’ Sharpe flexed his left arm. ‘If El Catolico’s Lieutenants don’t produce the gold, then they may not be leaders much longer. Is that right?’
She nodded.
‘Then who will be?’ Knowles sat down on the parapet.
‘La Aguja.’ Sharpe had trouble pronouncing the Spanish
‘J -‘
Teresa laughed, pleased, and Harper looked up from his own excursion into El Catolico’s pockets.
‘La what?’
‘La Aguja. The Needle. Teresa. We have a bargain.’
Knowles looked astonished. Teresa? Miss Moreno?’
‘Why not? She fights better than most of them.’ He had made up the name, saw that it pleased her. ‘But to make that happen we must keep the gold from the Spanish, get it out of the city, and finish this job.’
Lossow sighed, scraped his unused sabre back into its curved scabbard. ‘Which brings us back to the old question, my friend. How?’
Sharpe had dreaded this moment, wanted to lead them gently towards it, but it had come. ‘Who’s stopping us?’