Sharpe's Escape (38 page)

"I thought no one was supposed to be here. Weren't they ordered to Lisbon?"

"Folk had a choice," Sharpe explained, "they could either go to Lisbon or climb into high ground. My guess is these hills are full of people. We just have to hope they're friendly."

"Why wouldn't they be?"

"How would you feel about an army that says you must leave home? Which tears down your mills, destroys your harvest and breaks your ovens? They hate the French, but they've not much love for us either."

They slept under the trees. Sharpe did not light a fire, for he had no idea who was in these hills or how they regarded soldiers. They woke early, cold and damp, and set off uphill in the gray first light. Vicente led, following a path that climbed steadily eastwards towards a range of rocky peaks, the highest of which was crowned with the stump of an ancient tower. "An
atalaia
," Vicente said.

"A what?"

"
Atalaia
. A watchtower. They are very old. They were built to keep a look out for the Moors." Vicente crossed himself. "Some were turned into windmills, others just decay. When we get to that one we will be able to see the route ahead."

The sun, streaked with purple and pink clouds, was behind them. The day was warming, helped by a southern wind. Off to the south, far away, a ragged smear of smoke rose from a valley, evidence that the French were searching the countryside, but Sharpe was confident no horsemen would climb this high. There was nothing up here to steal except heather, gorse and rock.

Both girls were suffering. The path was stony and Sarah's bare feet were too tender for the hard going so Sharpe made her wear his boots, first wrapping her feet in strips of cloth that he tore from the ragged hem of what was left of her dress. "You'll still get blisters," he warned her, but for a time she made better progress. Joana, more used to hardship, kept going, though the soles of her feet were bleeding. And still they climbed, sometimes losing sight of the watchtower as the path twisted through gullies. "Goat paths," Vicente guessed. "Nothing else could live up here."

They dropped into a small high valley where a tiny stream trickled between mossy rocks and Sharpe filled their canteens, then distributed the last of the food he had taken from Ferragus's warehouse. Joana was massaging her feet and Sarah was trying not to show the pain of her newly forming blisters. Sharpe jerked his head to Harper. "You and me," he said, "up that hill." Harper looked at the hill looming to their left. It lay north of them, off their path, and his face showed puzzlement as to why Sharpe should want to climb it. "Give them a rest," Sharpe said, and he took his boots back from Sarah who gratefully put her feet into the water. "We can see a long way from that peak," Sharpe said. Perhaps not as far as they would from the watchtower, but going up the hill was an excuse to give the girls some time to recover.

They climbed. "How are your feet?" Harper asked.

"Cut to bloody pieces," Sharpe said.

"I was thinking I should give my boots to Joana."

"She'd probably think she was wearing a boat on each foot," Sharpe said.

"She's managing, though. A tough one, that."

"Needs to be if she's going to endure you, Pat."

"Soft as lights with women, I am."

They climbed straight up through the tangling heather, the slope every bit as steep as the one the French had assailed at Bussaco, and both stopped talking long before they reached the summit. They were saving their breath. Sweat was pouring down Sharpe's face as he neared the peak which was crowned with a scatter of rocks and he kept looking up, willing the rocks to get closer, and it was on his fourth or fifth glance that he saw the small movement, saw the foreshortened barrel moving and he threw himself sideways. "Down, Pat!"

Sharpe was pushing the rifle forward when the musket fired. The puff of smoke blossomed among the rocks and the bullet ripped through the heather between him and Harper, and Sharpe immediately stood and, his tiredness forgotten, ran diagonally up the hill, daring anyone else on the summit to take a shot at him, but no shot sounded. Instead he could hear the clatter of a ramrod on a barrel and he knew whoever had fired was reloading and he swerved uphill, always watching the rocks for the sight of another barrel, and then he saw the man, a young man, just rising from behind a boulder, and Sharpe stopped and brought the rifle up. The young man saw him then, saw the soldier fifty paces from where he had expected him to be, and he began to move the musket and then understood that one more inch of movement would mean that the green-jacketed soldier would pull the trigger and he went very still. "Put the gun down," Sharpe said.

The young man did not understand him. He looked from Sharpe to Harper, who was now climbing towards his other side. "Put the bloody gun down!" Sharpe snarled and walked forward, keeping the rifle at his shoulder. "Down!"

"
Arma!
" Harper called. "
Por terra!
"

The young man looked as if he would twist and run away. "Go on, son," Sharpe said, "give me an excuse." And then the boy put the musket down and looked terrified as the two green men came up either side of him. He dropped behind a boulder, cowering there, expecting to be shot.

"Jesus," Sharpe said, for now he was on the hilltop and he could see that the young man had been a lookout, and that on the long downwards sweep of the far slope there were a score of other men, some of them bunched where the path that Sharpe and his companions had been using crossed the hill's shoulder. A half-dozen others, evidently alerted by the young man, were climbing towards the hilltop, but they stopped abruptly when they saw Sharpe and Harper appear on the summit.

"You were sleeping, son, weren't you?" Sharpe said. "Didn't see us till it was too late."

The young man did not understand and just looked helplessly from Sharpe to Harper.

"That was good, Pat," Sharpe said, picking up the young man's musket and tossing it to one side. "You learned Portuguese quickly."

"Picked up a word or two, sir."

Sharpe laughed. "So what do these buggers want, eh?" He turned and gazed at the six closest men who were staring up the long slope. They were all civilians, refugees or possibly partisans. They were two hundred paces away and one had a dog, almost a wolf, on a rope leash. The dog was barking and trying to get away from his master to attack up the hill. All the men had muskets. Sharpe turned away and looked down to where Vicente was gazing up the slope, and Sharpe beckoned him. He waited, then saw Vicente and the two women begin to climb. "Best if we're all in the same place," he explained to Harper, then turned back because one of the six men had fired his musket. The men down the hill could not see their companion, who was hidden by the boulder, and perhaps they assumed he had escaped and so one of them opened fire. The ball went wild. Sharpe did not even hear it pass, but then a second man fired. The dog, excited by the sound of gunfire, was howling now, howling and leaping. A third man fired and this time the ball snapped past Sharpe's head.

"They need a bloody lesson," Sharpe said. He strode to the young man, pulled him to his feet and put the rifle to his head. The muskets stopped firing.

"We could shoot the bloody dog." Harper suggested.

"You can be sure to kill it at two hundred paces?" Sharpe asked. "And not just wound it? Because if you just wing it, Pat, that dog will want a mouthful of Irish meat as revenge."

"Better to shoot this bastard, sir, you're right," Harper said, standing on the other side of their terrified prisoner. The six men were now arguing amongst each other, while the rest, those who looked as if they had been waiting in ambush where the path crossed the lower crest, began to climb to the summit.

"There's almost thirty of them," Harper said. "We'll be hard put to deal with thirty."

"Fifteen each?" Sharpe suggested flippantly, then shook his head. "It won't come to that." He hoped it would not, but first he needed Vicente on the hilltop so that he could talk with the men.

Who began to spread out so that Sharpe could not get past them.

They had been waiting for him and he had come to them. And they had orders to kill.

V
ICENTE REACHED SHARPE and Harper first, outclimbing the two women, who were hampered by their ragged skirts and bare feet. Vicente glanced at the armed men watching them, then talked to the young man who sounded ever more reluctant to answer as Vicente's voice grew angrier. "They were told to look out for us," Vicente finally explained to Sharpe, "and kill us."

"Kill us? Why?"

"Because they say we're traitors," Vicente spat angrily. "Major Ferreira was here with his brother and three other men. They said we'd been talking with the French and were now trying to reach our army to spy on it." He turned back to the young man and said something in a furious tone, then looked back to Sharpe. "And they believed him! They're fools!"

"They don't know us," Sharpe said, nodding at the men down the hill, "and maybe they do know Ferreira?"

"They know him," Vicente confirmed. "He provided those weapons earlier in the year." He nodded towards the guns the men were holding, then turned back to the young man, asked a question, received a one-word answer and immediately started down the hill.

"Where are you going?" Sharpe called after him.

"To talk to them, of course. Their leader's a man called Soriano."

"They're partisans?"

"Every man in the hills is a partisan," Vicente said, then dropped the rifle from his shoulder, unbuckled his sword belt and, thus unarmed to show he meant no mischief, strode on down the hill.

Sarah and Joana arrived at the crest. Joana began questioning the young man, who seemed even more frightened of her than he had been of Vicente, who had now reached the group of six men and was talking with them. Sarah stood beside Sharpe and gently touched his arm as if reassuring herself. "They want to kill us?"

"They've probably got something else in mind for you and Joana," Sharpe said, "but they want to kill me, Pat and Jorge. Major Ferreira was here. He told them we were enemies."

Sarah asked the young man a question, then turned back to Sharpe. "Ferreira was here last night," she said.

"So the bastard's half a day ahead of us."

"Sir?" Harper was watching down the hill and Sharpe looked to see that the six men had taken Vicente hostage by pointing a musket at his head. The implication was obvious. If Sharpe killed the young man, they would kill Vicente.

"Shit," Sharpe said, not sure what he should do now.

Joana made the decision. She ran down the hill, easily evading Harper's attempt to stop her, and she screamed at the men holding Vicente. She stood twenty yards from them and told them what had happened in Coimbra, how the French had raped and stolen and killed, and said how she had been dragged to a room by three Frenchmen and how the British soldiers had saved her. She unbuttoned the shirt to show them her torn dress, then she cursed the partisans because they had been fooled by their true enemies. "You trust Ferragus?" she asked them. "Has Ferragus ever shown you a kindness? And if these men are spies, why are they here? Why do they not travel with the French?" One man evidently tried to answer her, but she spat at him. "You are doing the enemy's work," she said scornfully. "You want your wife and daughters to be raped? Or are you not man enough to have a wife? You play with goats instead, do you?" She spat at him a second time, buttoned the shirt and turned back up the hill.

Four men followed her. They came cautiously, their muskets held towards Sharpe and Harper, and they stopped a safe distance away and asked a question. Joana answered them.

"She's saying," Sarah translated for Sharpe, "that you burned the food in the city that Ferragus would have sold to the French." Joana was evidently telling the four men more than that for she went on, spitting out words like bullets, her tone scornful, and Sarah smiled. "If she was my pupil," she said, "I'd wash her mouth out with soap."

"Good job I'm not your pupil," Sharpe said. The four men, evidently shamed by Joana's passion, glanced up at him and he saw the doubt on their faces and, on impulse, he pulled the young man to his feet. The four muskets immediately twitched upwards. "Go," Sharpe told the young man, releasing his hold on the frayed collar, "go and tell them we mean no harm."

Sarah translated and the young man, with a nod of gratitude, ran down the hill to his companions, the tallest of whom slung his musket and walked slowly up the hill. He still asked questions that Joana answered, but eventually he offered Sharpe a curt nod and invited the strangers to talk with him. "Does that mean they believe us?" Sharpe asked.

"They're not sure," Sarah answered.

It took the best part of an hour's talking to persuade the men that they had been deceived by Major Ferreira, and it was only when Vicente put his right hand on a crucifix and swore on his life, on his wife's soul and on the life of his baby child that the men accepted that Sharpe and his companions were not traitors, and then they took the fugitives to a small, high village that was little more than a sprawl of hovels where goatherds stayed in the summer. The place was now crammed with refugees who were waiting for the war to pass. The men were armed, mostly with British muskets that Ferreira had supplied, and that was why they had trusted the Major, though enough of the fugitives were familiar with the Major's brother and had been worried when Ferragus came to their settlement. Others knew of Vicente's family, and they were helpful in persuading Soriano that the Portuguese officer was telling the truth. "There were five of them," Soriano told Vicente, "and we gave them mules. The only mules we had."

"Did they say where they were going?"

"Eastwards,
senhor
."

"To Castelo Branco?"

"Then to the river," Soriano confirmed. He had been a miller, though his mill had been dismantled and its precious wooden mechanism burned and he did not know how he was to make a living now that he was behind the French lines.