Luncheon was served beside a waterfall. Hummingbirds darted into a bank of wildflowers. The wine was heady. One of the girls, a dark-skinned mestizo, waded in the waterfall's pool, urged by her friends ever farther into the deepening water until her skirt was hitched high about her thighs and the young officers cheered their glimpse of dark, tantalizing skin. Marquinez, sitting beside Sharpe, was more interested in a patrol of a dozen cavalrymen that idled southward on small, wiry horses. Marquinez raised a languid hand to acknowledge the patrol's presence, then looked back to Sharpe. "What did you think of the Captain-General?»
A dangerous question, and one that Sharpe parried easily. "He seemed very efficient."
"He's a man of genius," Marquinez said enthusiastically.
"Genius?" Sharpe could not hide his scepticism.
"Customs dues have increased threefold under his rule, so have tax revenues. We have firm government at last!" Sharpe glanced at his companion's handsome face, expecting to see cynicism there, but Marquinez clearly meant every word he said. "And once we have all the guns we need," Marquinez went on, "we'll reconquer the northern regions."
"You'd best be asking Madrid for some good infantry," Sharpe said.
Marquinez shook his head. "You don't understand Chile, Colonel. The rebels think they're invincible, so sooner or later they will come to our fortresses, and they will be slaughtered, and everyone will recognize the Captain-General's genius." Marquinez tossed pebbles into the pool. Sharpe was watching the mestizo girl who, her thighs and skirt soaking, climbed onto the bank. "You find her pretty?" Marquinez suddenly asked.
"Yes. Who wouldn't?"
"They're pretty when they're young. By the time they're twenty and have two children they look like cavalry mules." Marquinez fished a watch from his waistcoat pocket. "We must be leaving you, Colonel. You know your way from here?"
"Indeed." Sharpe had been well coached by Blair in the route he must take. He and Harper would climb into the hills where their travel permit dictated that they must spend the night at a high fortress. Tomorrow they would ride down into the wilder country that sprawled across the border of the southern province. It was in that unsettled country, close to the hell-dark forests where embittered Indian tribes lived, that Bias Vivar had died. Blair and Marquinez had both assured Sharpe that the border country had been tamed since Vivar's death, and that the highway could be used in perfect safety. "There have been no rebels there since Bias Vivar died," Marquinez said. "There have been some highway robberies, but nothing, I think, that should worry either you or Mister Harper."
"They're welcome to try, so they are," Harper had said, and indeed he and Sharpe fairly bristled with weapons. Sharpe wore his big butcher's blade of a sword, the sword with which he had fought through Portugal, Spain and France, and then at the field of Waterloo. It was no ordinary infantry officer's sword, but instead the killing blade of a trooper from Britain's Heavy Cavalry. Soldiers armed with just such big swords had carved a corps of veteran French infantry into bloody ruin at Waterloo, capturing two Eagles as they did it. The sword was reckoned a bad weapon by experts—unbalanced, ugly and too long in its blade—but Sharpe had used it to lethal effect often enough, and by now he had a sentimental attachment to it. He also had a loaded Baker rifle slung on one shoulder, and had two pistols in his belt.
Harper was even more fiercely armed. He too carried a rifle and two pistols, and had a saber at his waist, yet the Irishman also carried his own favorite weapon; a seven-barreled gun, made for Britain's navy, yet too powerful for any but the biggest and most robust men to fire. The navy, which had wanted a weapon that could be fired like an overweight shotgun from the rigging onto an enemy's deck, had abandoned the weapon because of its propensity to shatter the shoulders of the men pulling its trigger, but in Patrick Harper the seven-barreled gun had found a soldier capable of taming its brute ferocity. The gun was a cluster of seven half-inch barrels which were fired by a single lock, and was, in its effect, like a small cannon loaded with grapeshot. Sharpe was hoping that any highway robber, seeing the weapon, let alone the swords, rifles and pistols, would think twice before trying to steal the strongbox.
"Bloody odd, when you think about it," Harper broke their companionable silence an hour after they had parted from Marquinez.
"What's odd?"
"That there wasn't any room on the frigate. It was a bloody big boat." Harper frowned. "You don't think the buggers want us on this road so they can do us some mischief, do you?"
Sharpe had been wondering the same thing, but unaware how best to prepare for such trouble, he had not thought to perturb Harper by talking about it. Yet there was something altogether too convenient about the ease with which Marquinez had given them all the necessary permits but then denied them the chance to travel on the Espiritu Santo, something which suggested that maybe Sharpe and Harper were not intended to reach Puerto Crucero after all. "But I think we're safe today," Sharpe said.
"Too many people about, eh?" Harper suggested.
"Exactly." They were riding through a plump and populated countryside on a road that was intermittently busy with other travelers; a friar walking barefoot, a farmer driving a wagon of tobacco leaves to Valdivia, a herdsman with a score of small bony cattle. This was not the place to commit murder and theft; that would come tomorrow in the wilder southern hills.
"So what do we do tomorrow?" Harper asked.
"We ride very carefully," Sharpe answered laconically. He was not as sanguine as he sounded, but he did not know how else to plan against a mere possibility of ambush and he was unwilling to think of just turning back. He had come to Chile to find Bias Vivar and, even if his old friend was dead, he would still do his best to carry him home.
That night, in obedience to their travel permits, they stopped at a timber-walled fort that had been built so high above the surrounding land that it had been nicknamed the Celestial Fort. Its simple log ramparts stared east to the mountains and west to the sea. To the north of the Celestial Fort, at the foot of the steep ridge that gave the fort its commanding height, was a small ragged village that was inhabited by natives who worked a nearby tobacco plantation. To the south, like a sullen warning of the dangers to come, were line after line of dark, wooded ridges. "I trust you brought your own food?" the fort's commander, a cavalry Captain named Morillo, greeted Sharpe and Harper.
"Yes."
"I'd like to feed you, but rations are scarce." Morillo gave Sharpe back the travel permits while his men eyed the newcomers warily. Morillo was a tall young man with a weathered face. His eyes were cautious and watchful, the eyes of a soldier. His job was to lead his cavalrymen on long, aggressive patrols down the highway, deterring any rebels who might think of ambushing its traffic. "Not that we have rebels here now," Morillo said. "The last Captain-General swept these valleys clean. He was a cavalryman, so he knew how to attack." There was an unspoken criticism in the words, suggesting that the new Captain-General knew only how to defend.
"I knew Vivar well," Sharpe said. "I rode with him in Spain. At Santiago de Compostela."
Morillo stared at Sharpe with momentary disbelief. "You were at Santiago when the French attacked the cathedral?"
"I was in the cathedral when they broke the truce."
"I was a child then, but I remember the stories. My God, but what times they were." Morillo frowned in thought for a few seconds, then abruptly twisted to stare across the fort's parade ground, which was an expanse of smoothly trampled earth. "Do you know Sergeant Dregara?"