Harper blew out a great breath, almost in exasperation. It was plain he had accepted the stripes, however reluctantly, because Vivar had pressed them on him. Now, with equal reluctance, he was being half-persuaded by Sharpe. “A good few of us will never see home,” he said guardedly, “not if we go to this cathedral for the Major.”
“You think we shouldn’t go?” Sharpe asked with genuine curiosity.
Harper considered. He was not weighing what answer he should give, for his mind was already made up, but rather what tone he should use. He could be surly, thus ensuring that Sharpe knew of his continuing hostility, or he could match Sharpe’s conciliatory manner. He chose neither, but rather spoke in a flat and dutiful voice. “I think we should go, sir.”
“To see a saint on a white horse?”
Again the Irishman teetered between his choices. He stared at the stark horizon, then shrugged as he chose his new course. “It never does to question a miracle, sir. You just take the guts and belly out of it and you’re left with nothing at all.”
Sharpe heard the acquiescence, and knew his price was being paid. Harper would co-operate, but Sharpe wanted that co-operation to be willing. He wanted their fragile truce to become more than an agreement of convenience. “You’re a good Catholic?” he asked, wondering just what sort of a man his new Sergeant was.
“I’m not so devout as the Major, sir. Not many are, are they?” Harper paused. He was making his peace with Sharpe, but there would be no formal declaration of hostility’s end, nor any regrets about the past, but rather a new beginning that must find its halting start on this cold hillside. Both men were too proud for apology, so apologies must be forgotten. “Religion’s for the women, so it is,” Harper went on, “but I make my nod to the Church when I must, and I hope God’s not looking when I don’t want Him to see what I’m doing. But I believe, aye.”
“And you think there’s some usefulness in taking an old flag to a cathedral?”
“Aye, I do,” Harper said flatly, then frowned as he tried to think of an explanation for his bald faith. “Did you see that wee church in Salamanca where the Virgin’s statue had eyes that moved? Your priest there said it was a miracle, but you could see the string the fellow jerked to make the wooden eyeballs twitch!” More relaxed now, he laughed at the memory. “But why go to the trouble of having a string? I asked myself. Because the people want a miracle, that’s why. And just because some people invent a miracle doesn’t mean there aren’t real ones, does it now? It means the opposite, so it does, for why would you imitate something that doesn’t exist? Perhaps it is the real banner. Perhaps we will see St James himself, in all his glory, riding in the sky.” Harper frowned for a second. “But we’ll never know if we don’t try, will we?”
“No.” Sharpe’s agreement was half-hearted, for he could put no credence in Vivar’s superstition. Yet he had wanted Harper’s opinion, for he keenly felt the worry of the night’s decision on him. By what right could a mere Lieutenant order men into battle? His duty, surely, was to take these men to safety, not march them against a French-held city. Yet there was an impulse to adventure which led him there, and Sharpe had wanted to know if Harper would follow the same impulse. It seemed he would, which meant that the other greenjackets would also. “You think the men will fight?” Sharpe asked openly.
“One or two of them will make a fuss.” Harper was scornful of the prospect. “Gataker will squeal, I dare say, but I’ll knock his bloody brains about. Mind you, they’ll want to know what it is they’re fighting for, sir.” He paused. “Why the hell do they call it a gonfalon? It’s a bloody flag, so it is.”
Sharpe, who had had to ask Vivar the same question, smiled. “A gonfalon’s different. It’s a long stringy banner you hang off a cross-staff on a pole. Old-fashioned sort of thing.”
An awkward silence followed. Like strange dogs meeting they had growled at each other, made a rough peace, and now kept a cautious distance. Sharpe ended the silence by nodding down into the valley where, far beneath the high rack, men were arriving. They were villagers; tough ialicians from across the Mouromorto domain; herdsmen, niners, blacksmiths, fishermen, and shepherds. “In one veek,” he asked Harper, “can we knock that lot into infantry?”
“We have to do that, sir?”
“The Major will provide interpreters, and we teach them: o be infantry.”
“In a week?” Harper sounded astonished.
“You believe in miracles, don’t you?” Sharpe said lightly.
Harper replied in kind. He fluttered the stripes in his hand, and grinned. “I believe in miracles, sir.”
“Then let’s get to work, Sergeant.”
“Bloody hell.” It was the first time Harper had heard himself addressed as Sergeant. It seemed to surprise him, then he gave a sly grin and Sharpe, who had trodden the same path years before, knew that the Irishman was secretly pleased. Harper might have fought against the stripes, but they were a recognition of his worth, and he doubtless believed that no other man in the company deserved them. So now Harper had the chevrons, and Sharpe had a Sergeant.
And both men had a miracle to perform.
CHAPTER 12
At night the men would sing around the fire in the courtyard. They did not sing the rumbustious marching songs which could make the miles melt beneath hard boots, but the soft, melancholic tunes of home. They sang of the girls left behind, of mothers, of children, of home.
Each night there was the flicker of campfires in the deep valley beneath the ramparts where Vivar’s volunteers made their encampment. The volunteers came from throughout the Mouromorto domains. They bivouacked where chestnuts grew beside the stream in a sheltered crook of the hill, and they made wood and turf huts. They were peasants who obeyed the ancient call to arms, just as their ancestors had shouldered a scythe blade and marched to face the Moors. Such men would not leave their womenfolk behind, and at night the skirted shapes flickered between the fires and the children cried from the turf huts. Sharpe heard Harper warn the Riflemen against the temptation of the women. “One touch,” he said, “and I’ll crack your skull open like a bloody egg.” There was no trouble, and Sharpe marvelled at the ease with which Harper had assumed his unwanted authority.
By day there was work. Hard work, urgent work, to fashion a victory from defeat. The priests drew a map of the city on which, in careful detail, Vivar plotted the French defences. News of the enemy preparations came daily, fetched to the hills by refugees who fled from the invader and told tales of arrests and killings.
The city was still bounded by the decayed walls of its mediaeval defences. Those walls were gone in places, and in others the houses had spilt outside to make suburbs, yet the French were basing their defence on the ancient line of ramparts. Where the stones had fallen they had made barricades. The defences were not fearsome; Santiago de Compostela was no frontier city, enwrapped in star-trace and ravelins, but the ramparts could still be a terrible obstacle to an infantry attack. “We attack just before dawn,” Vivar announced early in the week.
Sharpe grunted agreement. “What if they have picquets beyond the walls?”
“They will. We ignore them.”
Sharpe heard the first risk being taken, the first corner cut in this desperate lunge for an impossible victory. Vivar was relying on darkness and weariness to fuddle the wits of the French. Yet it would only take one soldier to stumble in the night, for his musket to spark and fire, and the whole attack would be betrayed. Vivar proposed attacking without loaded muskets. There would be time, he said, after the initial surprise for the men to load their guns. Sharpe, an infantryman who relied on his gun far more than a cavalryman like Vivar, hated the idea. Vivar pressed, but the most Sharpe would yield was that he would consider it.