El Matanfe stooped, picked up the chain, and knotted it about his upper arm. He drew his knife and, with a patronising smile on his wet lips that showed through the thick hair of his face, threw it to Sharpe.
It turned in the air, catching the dying sun, and landed at Sharpe’s feet.
It was bone handled, with a blade as long as a bayonet’s. The blade looked delicate. It was thin, needle pointed, and its two edges were feathered where it had been sharpened on the stone. This weapon, Sharpe knew, would draw blood at the lightest stroke. In El Matarife’s comfortable grip, taken from one of his lieutenants, was a similar blade; as bright, as sharp, as deadly.
El Matanfe stepped backwards and the silver chain slowly lifted from the mud. The links clinked softly. The Partisan smiled. ‘You’re a dead man, Englishman.’
Sharpe remembered the terrible skill with which his enemy had taken the eyes from the French prisoner. He waited.
El Matarife’s men were silent. From the city came the jangling of church bells, announcing that the French were gone and that the first Allied troops were in the narrow streets. The chain tightened. The sun reddened its links.
The Slaughterman smiled. His poleaxe was stuck into the ground at the edge of the circle made by his men. He pulled against Sharpe’s strength until the silver links were as taut as a bar of steel, and the only evidence of the huge strengths that opposed each other were the scraps of mud that fell from the tight links.
Sharpe felt the pressure on his arm. El Matanfe was pulling with extraordinary force. Sharpe pulled back and saw the Slaughterman’s eyes judging him.
The Slaughterman jerked. Sharpe’s arm came up, he jerked back, and the Slaughterman was grunting and pulling, and Sharpe was jarred forward. He pulled back, knowing he did not have the same brute strength as his enemy, but when he saw the Slaughterman smile and gather his strength for a massive pull, Sharpe jumped forward to throw the man off balance.
The Slaughterman was ready, he had expected it, invited it, and he closed the ten foot gap with lightning speed and his knife slashed up towards Sharpe, bright in the dusk light. The Rifleman swerved, not bothering to reply, backed away, and his left hand caught the chain for greater leverage and he pulled on it with all his power and the Slaughterman did not move.
El Matanfe looked at Sharpe’s gritted teeth and laughed. ‘Your death will be slow, Englishman.’
The crowd, swollen by people from the city, shouted an abrupt, brief shout in appreciation of the Slaughterman’s skill. El Matanfe acknowledged the cheer with a wave of his knife and then hooked his left hand over the chain. He stepped back, tightening it.
The power came. It pulled Sharpe forward. He could not resist it and he saw the Slaughterman smile with the ease of the task. Sharpe braced his feet, but his boots slid in the mire and he was being dragged towards his opponent. Then the jerking began, the vicious, hard jerks that pulled him off balance and he tripped, fell, and the chain was pulling his arm from his socket and when the pressure stopped he rolled to one side, knowing the knife was slicing down, only to hear the Slaughterman laughing.
‘The Englishman is frightened!’
Sharpe stood up. His jacket and overalls were smeared with mud. The crowd was catcalling, jeering him. The Slaughterman had simply made a fool of him to demonstrate his strength. El Matarife was smiling now; smiling with relief and triumph. He had made this kind of fighting his speciality, and he would play with Sharpe as Sharpe had watched him play with the French prisoner.
El Matarife beckoned Sharpe forward. ‘Come, Englishman, come! Come on! Come to your death.’
Sharpe dropped his left arm and flexed it.
He went forward.
El Matarife waited. He was crouching, the knife low. He began to shake the chain, trying to loop it about Sharpe’s blade, but Sharpe simply held his left arm out and the chain went away from him.
‘Come, Englishman.’
They were close now, four feet from each other, both men staring into the other’s eyes, both knives held low. Neither moved. The crowd was silent.
When El Matarife moved it was as fast as a scorpion’s strike, but Sharpe had fought all his life and his own speed matched that of the Spaniard. Sharpe stepped back and the blade hissed past his face. Sharpe smiled.
El Matarife bellowed at him, trying to frighten him, and then looped the chain high so it would fall over Sharpe’s head. Sharpe caught the loop as it came, jerked on it, and sliced up with his knife as the Spaniard’s guard was lifted, and Sharpe saw the sudden fear on the beast’s face as El Matarife realised Sharpe’s speed and as the Rifleman’s knife whipped upwards.
‘Uno,’ El Matarife’s right forearm was bleeding.
The crowd was silent.
Sharpe had gone back as fast as he had moved forward. The Spaniard growled. He had underestimated the Englishman, even let him live as a boast to the crowd, but now El Matarife planned Sharpe’s death. He stepped back, tightening the chain, and began again to try and tug Sharpe off balance, jerking the silver chain with massive strength, but this time Sharpe stepped into the pull, letting himself be dragged forward, and the Slaughterman had to step back and keep stepping back until he was at the edge of the fighting space with nowhere to go and Sharpe laughed at him. ‘You are a traitor, Spaniard, and your mother whored with swine.’
El Matarife roared and leaped forward. The knife seared high, coming at Sharpe’s eyes, dropped, and slashed upwards.
‘
Sharpe would have waking nightmares about that moment for ever. The knife was within a half inch of slicing his belly open, slicing from his groin to his ribs and spilling his guts onto the silvered mud, and he would never know how his body moved so fast or how his right hand, seeing the opening, slashed in to chop at the Spaniard’s passing arm. He shouted as he jumped back.
‘Dos!’
La Marquesa had cried out and hidden her eyes with her hands.
The crowd breathed out a great sigh. The Englishman was not touched. El Matarife was panting, his great chest heaving beneath his black leather coat. Both his forearms were cut.
Harper breathed a huge sigh of relief. ‘God save Ireland.’
‘Will he win?’ Angel asked.
’I don’t know, lad. I tell you one thing.’
‘What?’
‘I’ll shoot that fat bastard through the gut before he kills Mr Sharpe.’
Angel hefted his rifle. ‘I kill him. I’m Spanish.’
The chain tightened as Sharpe stepped back. In his left hand he held the loose end of the chain. He watched El Matarife’s eyes, saw the moment when the Partisan would challenge the pressure of the chain, and Sharpe went suddenly forward. He lunged with the knife, going low, still watching the eyes between their mats of hair, and as the Slaughterman brought up his knife arm to spear the point into Sharpe’s face, the Rifleman whiplashed the silver chain.
The end struck the bestial face, slashing across his eyes to sting and momentarily blind him. and Sharpe turned, kicked, and his right boot-heel was going where he had wanted it to go, thumping into El Matarife’s left knee with sickening force, tearing down and away, grinding kneecap and flesh, and the Slaughterman’s eyes widened in pain as his knife came desperately down in defence.
Sharpe was falling. He saw the blade come, felt it razor into his skin, slicing through his leather boot as if it was cotton, and then he was scrambling away from the huge man and the roar of the crowd was like thunder among the wagons.
‘Una! Una! Una!’
El Matanfe jumped forward and Sharpe heard the cry of pain as his weight went onto the wounded knee. The pain gave Sharpe time to roll to his feet and the crowd, that had been noisy with anticipation, fell into uneasy silence.
Harper, who had seen the boot-heel slam into the knee, smiled to himself.
El Matanfe had not shouted the number with the crowd. His knee was on fire, the pains shooting up to his groin and down to his ankle. He had never faced a man this fast.
