„Do you have wolves in England?” Vicente asked Sharpe.
„Only lawyers.”
„Richard!” Hogan chided him.
They were going north now. The road that the French would use from Ponte Nova to the Spanish frontier twisted into the hills until it met another tributary of the Cavado, the Misarella, and the Saltador bridge crossed the upper reaches of that river. Sharpe would rather have gone down to the road and marched ahead of the French, but Hogan would not hear of it. The enemy, he said, would put dragoons across the Cavado as soon as the bridge was repaired and the road was no place to be caught by horsemen, and so they stayed in the high ground that became ever more rugged, stony and difficult. Their progress was painfully slow because they were forced to make long detours when precipices or slopes of scree barred their way, and for every mile they went forward they had to walk three, and Sharpe knew the French were now advancing up the valley and gaining fast, for their progress was signaled by scattered musket shots from the hills about the Misarella’s defile. Those shots, fired at too long a range by men activated by hatred, sounded closer and closer until, at mid-morning, the French came into view.
A hundred dragoons led, but not far behind them was infantry, and these men were not a panicked rabble, but marching in good order. Javali, the moment he saw them, growled incoherently, grabbed a handful of powder from his bag, half of which he spilled as he tried to push it into his musket’s barrel. He rammed down a bullet, primed his musket and shot into the valley. It was not apparent that he hit an enemy, but he gave a small joyful shuffle and then loaded the musket again. „You were right, Richard,” Hogan said ruefully, „we should have used the road.” The French were overtaking them now.
„You were right, sir,” Sharpe said. „People like him”-he jerked his head toward the wild-bearded Javali-”would have been taking shots at us all morning.”
„Maybe,” Hogan said. He swayed on the mule’s back, then glanced down again at the French. „Pray the Saltador has been broken,” he said, but he did not sound hopeful.
They had to clamber down into a saddle of the hills, then climb again to another hog-backed ridge littered with the massive rounded boulders. They lost sight of the fast-flowing Misarella and of the French on the road beside it, but they could hear the occasional flurry of musket shots which told of partisans sniping into the valley.
„God grant the Portuguese have got to the bridge,” Hogan said for the tenth or twentieth time since dawn. If all had gone well then the Portuguese forces advancing northward in parallel to Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army should have blocked the French at Ruivaens, so cutting the last eastward road to Spain, and then sent a brigade into the hills to plug the final escape route at the Saltador. If all had gone well the Portuguese should now be barring the mountain road with cannon and infantry, but the weather had slowed their march as it had slowed Wellesley’s pursuit and the only men waiting for Marshal Soult at the Saltador were more ordenanqa.
There were over a thousand of them, half trained and ill armed, but an English major from the Portuguese staff had ridden ahead to give them advice. His strongest recommendation was to destroy the bridge, but many of the ordenanga came from the hard frontier hills and the soaring arch across the Misarella was the lifeline of their commerce and so they refused to heed Major Warre’s advice. Instead they compromised by knocking off the bridge’s parapets and narrowing its roadway by breaking the roadway’s stones with great sledgehammers, but they insisted on leaving a slim strip of stone to leap the deep ravine, and to defend the ribbon-like arch they barricaded the northern side of the bridge with an abattis made from thorn bushes, and behind that formidable obstacle, and on either side of it, they scraped earthworks behind which they could shelter as they fired at the French with ancient muskets and fowling guns. There was no artillery.