‘We’ll teach them to respect the bayonet! Wait for it! Wait for it!’
The Partisans had no intention of charging the small Company. The horsemen split into two groups and galloped either side of the bedraggled soldiers, almost ignoring them. El Catolico was there, a smile of triumph on his face, and he swept off his hat in an ironic gesture as he went past, thirty yards away and untouchable. Teresa jerked towards him, but Harper held her firm, and she watched as the horsemen went on towards the fortress and the river. Sharpe knew what they were doing. The Company would be blocked in, trapped in the valley, and El Catolico would wait until the rest of the Partisans, summoned from the south, came to his support.
He wiped rain from his face. ‘Come on.’ There was nowhere to go, so the best thing was to go on. Perhaps El Catolico could be threatened, a bayonet at Teresa’s throat, but in Sharpe’s mind he could envisage only failure, defeat. El Catolico had never been fooled. They must have known Sharpe had gone north, and while the Company struggled over the foul uplands the Spaniard had brought his followers along the easy road. Sharpe cursed himself for a fool, for an optimistic fool, but there was nothing to be done. He listened to the boots scuffing on the wet surface, the hiss of the rain, the splashing of the ever-rising stream, and he let his eyes look at the far, shrouded hills across the river, then at the stone of the small fort that had been built, centuries before, to protect the upland valleys from marauders crossing from Portugal, and then he looked right, farther north, at the spur of the hills that almost reached the river, and saw, on the blurred horizon, the shape of a horseman who had a strange, square hat.
‘Down! Down! Down!’
Something, an instinct, a half-perceived blur, told him the French patrol had only just arrived on the skyline. He forced the men down, into the streambed, burying the Light Company into cover. They scrambled behind the shallow turf-bank, wet faces looking to him for explanation, receiving none as he pushed them down.
El Catolico was much, much slower. Sharpe, lying next to Harper and the girl, watched the Partisans ride towards the ford, and it was not until the French lancers were moving, trotting almost sedately down the slope, that the grey figure wheeled, waved his arm, and the Partisans urged their tired mounts into a gallop. The Spaniards rode back into the valley, scattering as they picked their own course, and the lancers, a different regiment from the Poles’, chose their targets and went for them with levelled blades and spurts of bright water from their hooves. Sharpe, peering between tufts of grass, could see twenty lancers, but, looking back to the northern skyline, he saw more appear, and then a group at the place where the hills almost met the river, and he realized that a full French regiment was there, coming south, and as he tried to find rhyme or reason in their presence he saw the girl jerk the rope free, scrabble backwards, and she was up, white dress brilliant in the murk, and running south towards the hills, to where El Catolico and his men were desperately fleeing. He pushed Harper down.
‘Stay there!’
The girl stumbled on the far bank of the stream, lost her balance, turned and saw Sharpe coming. She seemed to panic, for she ran downstream, past a wide bend in the water, and turned south again. They must see her! Sharpe shouted at her to get down, but the wind snatched away the words and he forced himself on, getting closer, and leapt at her. He crashed into her as she turned to look where he was and his weight drove her into the gravel beside the stream. She fought at him, snarling, her fingernails scratching at his eyes, but he bore” her down, his weight crushing her, took her wrists and forced them apart, ground them into the small sharp stones, and used all his strength to keep them still. She kicked at him and he hooked his legs over hers, hammered them down, not caring if he hurt her, thinking only of the eight feet ten inches of lance that could pin them both like wriggling insects. The stream ran cold round his ankles and he knew that Teresa must be lying in water to her waist, but there was no time to care about that because there were hooves near, and he thrust down his head, cracking her forehead, as a horse splashed by them in the stream.