"But we partisans kill more French than you English," El Castrador said, "so it is only right that we should be worth more." Sharpe tactfully refrained from asking whether there was any reward on El Castrador's own matted and lice-ridden head. Sharpe suspected the man had lost most of his power because of his defeats, but at least, Sharpe thought, El Castrador lived while most of his men were dead, killed by the wolf after being cut in the same way that El Castrador had cut his captives. There were times when Sharpe was very glad he did not fight the guerrilla.
El Castrador raised the wineskin again, spurted the wine into his mouth, swallowed, belched again, then breathed an effluent gust towards Sharpe. "So why do you want to see me, Englishman?"
Sharpe told him. The telling took a good while for though El Castrador was a brutal man, he was not especially clever and Sharpe had to explain his requirements several times before the big man understood. In the end, though, El Castrador nodded. "Tonight, you say?"
"I would be pleased. And grateful."
"But how grateful?" El Castrador shot a sly look at the Englishman. "Shall I tell you what I need? Muskets! Or even rifles like that!" He touched the barrel of Sharpe's Baker rifle which was propped against the vine's trunk.
"I can bring you muskets," Sharpe said, though he did not yet know how. The Real Companпa Irlandesa needed muskets much more desperately than this great butcher of a man did, and Sharpe did not even know how he was to supply those weapons. Hogan would never agree to give the Real Companпa Irlandesa new muskets, yet if Sharpe was to turn King Ferdinand's palace guard into a decent infantry unit then he would need to find them guns somehow. "Rifles I can't get," he said, "but muskets, yes. But I'll need a week."
"Muskets, then," El Castrador agreed, "and there is something else."
"Go on," Sharpe said warily.
"I want revenge for my daughters," El Castrador said with tears in his eyes. "I want Brigadier Loup and this knife to meet each other." He held up the small, bone-handled cutter. "I want your help, Englishman. Teresa says you can fight, so fight with me and help me catch El Lobo."
Sharpe suspected this second request would prove even more difficult than the first, but he nodded anyway. "You know where Loup can be found?"
El Castrador nodded. "Usually at a village called San Cristobal. He drove out the inhabitants, blocked the streets and fortified the houses. A stoat could not get near without being spotted. Sanchez says it would take a thousand men and a battery of artillery to take San Cristobal."
Sharpe grunted at the news. Sanchez was one of the best guerrilla leaders and if Sanchez reckoned San Cristobal was virtually impregnable, then Sharpe would believe him. "You said 'usually'. So he's not always at San Cristobal?"
"He goes where he likes, seсor," El Castrador said moodily. "Sometimes he takes over a village for a few nights, sometimes he would put his men in the fort where you now live, sometimes he would use Fort Concepciфn. Loup, seсor, is a law to himself." El Castrador paused. "But La Aguja says you are also a law unto yourself. If any man can defeat El Lobo, seсor, it must be you. And there is a place near San Cristobal, a defile, where he can be ambushed."
El Castrador offered this last detail as an enticement, but Sharpe ignored the lure. "I will do all a man can do," he promised.
"Then I shall help you tonight," El Castrador assured Sharpe in return. "Look for my gift in the morning, seсor," he said, then stood and shouted a command to the men he had evidently left outside the inn. Hooves clattered loud in the little street. "And next week," the partisan added, "I shall come for my reward. Don't let me down, Captain."
Sharpe watched the gross man go, then hefted the wineskin. He was tempted to drain it, but knew that a bellyful of sour wine would make his journey back to San Isidro doubly hard and so, instead, he poured the liquid over the roots of the ravaged vine. Maybe, he thought, it would help the vine repair itself. Wine to grapes, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. He picked up his hat, slung his rifle, and walked home.
That night, despite all Captain Donaju's precautions, three more guardsmen deserted. More men might have tried, but shortly after midnight a series of terrible screams sounded from the valley and any other men tempted to try their luck across the frontier decided to wait for another day. At dawn next morning, when Rifleman Harris was leading a convoy down the mountainside to fetch water from the stream to augment the trickle that the fort's well provided, he found the three men. He came back to Sharpe white-faced. "It's horrible, sir. Horrible."
"See that cart?" Sharpe pointed across the fort's courtyard to a handcart. "Get it down there, put them in and bring them back."
"Do we have to?" Rifleman Thompson asked, aghast.
"Yes, you bloody do. And Harris?"
"Sir?"
"Put this in with them," and Sharpe handed Harris a sack holding a heavy object. Harris began to untie the sack's mouth. "Not here, Harris," Sharpe said, "do it down there. And only you and our lads to see what you're doing."
By eight o'clock Sharpe had the one hundred and twenty-seven remaining guardsmen on parade, together with all their junior officers. Sharpe was the senior officer left inside the fort, for both Lord Kiely and Colonel Runciman had spent the night at army headquarters where they had gone to plead with the Assistant Commissary General for muskets and ammunition. Father Sarsfield was visiting a fellow priest in Guarda, while both Kiely's majors and three of his captains had gone hunting. Dona Juanita de Elia had also taken her hounds in search of hares, but had spurned the company of the Irish officers. "I hunt alone," she said, and then had scorned Sharpe's warning of patrolling Frenchmen. "In coming here, Captain," she told Sharpe, "I escaped every Frenchman in Spain. Worry about yourself, not me." Then she had spurred away with her hounds loping behind.
So now, bereft of their senior officers, the Real Companпa Irlandesa lined in four ranks beneath one of the empty gun platforms that served Sharpe as a podium. It had rained in the night and the flags on the crumbling battlements lifted reluctantly to the morning wind as Harris and Thompson manoeuvred the handcart up one of the ramps which led from the magazines to the gun platforms. They pushed the vehicle with its sordid cargo to Sharpe's side, then tipped the handles up so that the cart's bed faced the four ranks. There was an intake of breath, then a communal groan sounded from the ranks. At least one guardsman vomited while most just looked away or closed their eyes. "Look at them!" Sharpe snapped. "Look!"
He forced the guardsmen to look at the three mutilated naked bodies, and especially at the bloody, gut-churning mess dug out of the centre of each corpse and at the rictus of horror and pain on each dead face. Then Sharpe reached past one of the cold, white, stiff shoulders to drag free a steel-grey helmet plumed with coarse grey hair. He set it on one of the uptilted cart shafts. It was the same helmet that Harris had collected as a keepsake from the high settlement where Sharpe had discovered the massacred villagers and where Perkins had met Miranda who now followed the young rifleman with a touching and pathetic devotion. It was the same helmet that Sharpe had given back to Harris in the sack earlier that morning.
"Look at the bodies!" Sharpe ordered the Real Companпa Irlandesa. "And listen! The French believe there are two kinds of people in Spain: those who are for them and those who are against them, and there ain't a man among you who can escape that judgement. Either you fight for the French or you fight against them, and that isn't my decision, that's what the French have decided." He pointed to the three bodies. "That's what the French do. They know you're here now. They're watching you, they're wondering who and what you are, and until they know the answers they'll treat you like an enemy. And that's how the Frogs treat their enemies." He pointed to the bloody holes carved into the dead men's crotches.