"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.
Part Three
THE LINES OF TORRES VEDRAS
CHAPTER 11
Vicente 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.
"What you do," Vicente told him, "is take your men southwards and attack the French. You'll find foraging parties in the foothills. Kill them. Keep killing them. And in the meantime you give us shoes and clothes for the women, and guides to take us after Major Ferreira."
A woman in the settlement looked at the wound in Vicente's shoulder and said it was healing well, then rewrapped it in moss and a new bandage. Shoes and footcloths were found for Sarah and Joana, but the only dresses were heavy and black, not garments suitable for traveling miles across rough country, and Sarah persuaded the women to give up some boys' breeches, shirts and jackets instead. There was little food in the village, but some hard bread and goat's cheese were wrapped in cloth and given to them and then, near midday, they set off. They had, so far as Vicente could gauge, some sixty miles still to travel before they reached the River Tagus where, he hoped, they could find a boat that would carry them downstream towards Lisbon and the British and Portuguese armies.