“Well?” Vivar was impatient.
“Of course he’ll help!” Louisa said with a fervour that showed in the brightness of her eyes.
The men ignored her, and still Sharpe said nothing.
“I cannot make you help me,” the Major^said softly, “and if you refuse, Lieutenant, I shall give you supplies and a guide to see you safely to the south. Perhaps the British are still in Lisbon? If not, you will find a ship somewhere along the coast. Good military practice demands that you forget this superstitious nonsense and march south, does it not?”
“Yes,” Sharpe replied bleakly.
“But victory is not always won by sense, Lieutenant. Logic and reason can be tumbled by faith and pride. I have the faith that an ancient miracle will work, and I am driven by pride. I must avenge my brother’s treachery, or else the name Vivar will stink through the annals of Spain.” Vivar spoke these words in a commonplace manner, as if avenging fraternal treachery was an everyday part of any humdrum existence. Now he looked into Sharpe’s eyes and spoke in a very different tone. “So I beg your help. You are a soldier, and I believe God has provided you as an instrument for this work.”
Sharpe knew how difficult it was for Vivar to make the appeal, for he was a proud man, not used to being a supplicant. Father Alzaga protested with an incoherent and throaty growl as Sharpe still hesitated. Nearly half a minute passed before the Englishman at last spoke. “There is a price for my help, Major.”
Vivar bridled immediately. “A price?”
Sharpe told him and, by telling Vivar, he accepted the madness. For the sake of his Riflemen, he would rouse a saint from an eternity’s sleep. He would go to the city of the field of stars and take it from the enemy. But only for a price.
The next day, after the morning parade, Sharpe left the fortress and walked to a place from where he could see for miles across the winter landscape. The far hills were stark and pale, sharp as steel against the sky’s whiteness. The wind was cold; a wind to sap the strength of men and horses. If Vivar did not move soon, he thought, then the Spaniard’s horses would be unable to march. „
Sharpe sat alone at the track’s edge where the hillside fell steeply away. He gathered a handful of pebbles, each about the size of a musket ball, and shied them at a white boulder some twenty paces down the hill. He told himself that if he hit it five times running then it would be safe to march on the cathedral city. The first four pebbles struck clean, bouncing off into the weeds and scree of the slope. He was almost tempted to throw the fifth askew, but instead the pebble bounced plumb from the boulder’s centre. God damn it, but he was mad! Last night, overcome with the solemnity of the occasion, he had allowed himself to be swept away by Vivar’s skilled telling of an ancient myth. The banner of a saint dead two thousand years! He threw another pebble and watched it skim over the boulder to fall into a patch of ragweed which, in Spain, was called St James’s grass.
He stared into the far distance where a frost still lay in those folds of the hills which the sun had not yet touched. A wind fretted at the high tower and thick bulwarks of the fort behind him. The wind felt immeasurably clean and cold, like a dose of commonsense after the wit-fuddling darkness and candle-stench of the night before. It was madness, God-damned madness! Sharpe had let himself be talked into it, and he knew he had also been influenced by Louisa’s enthusiasm for the whole idiotic business. He threw a whole handful of the pebbles which, like canister splitting apart from a cannon’s muzzle, spattered about the white boulder.
Footsteps sounded behind Sharpe, stopping a few paces away. There was a pause, then a surly voice. “You wanted me, sir?”
Sharpe stood. He pulled his sword straight, then turned to stare into Harper’s resentful eyes.
Harper hesitated, then took off his hat in the formal salute. “Sir.”
“Harper.”
Another pause. Harper glanced away from the officer, then looked back. “It isn’t fair, sir. Not at all, sir.”
“Don’t be so bloody pathetic. Who ever expected fairness in a soldier’s life?”
Harper stiffened at Sharpe’s tone, but would not flinch from it. “Sergeant Williams was a fair man. So was Captain Murray.”
“And they’re dead men. We don’t stay alive by being agreeable, Harper. We stay alive by being quicker and nastier than the enemy. You’ve got the stripes?”
Harper hesitated again, then nodded reluctantly. He fished in his ammunition pouch and brought out a set of Sergeant’s chevrons that had been newly stitched in white silk. He showed them to Sharpe, then shook his head. “I still say it ain’t fair, sir.” This had been Sharpe’s price: that Vivar would persuade the Irishman of his duty. If Harper would accept a Sergeantcy, then Sharpe would march on Santiago de Compostela. The Major had been amused by the price, but had agreed to exact it.
“I’m not accepting the stripes to please you, sir.” Harper was deliberately provocative, as though he hoped to change Sharpe’s mind by a display of insolence. “I’m just doing it for the Major. He told me about his flag, sir, and I’ll take it into the cathedral for him, then throw these stripes back at you.”
“You’re a Sergeant at my pleasure, Harper. For as long as I need you and want you. That’s my price, and that’s what you accept.”
There was silence. The wind fretted at the hill’s crest and fluttered the silk stripes in Harper’s hand. Sharpe wondered where such a rich and lustrous material had been found in this remote fortress, then forgot the speculation as he realized that once again he had taken the wrong course. He had let his hostility show when instead he should have demonstrated his need of this big man’s co-operation. Just as Bias Vivar had humbled himself to ask for Sharpe’s help, so Sharpe now had to show some humility to bring this man to his side.
“I didn’t want the stripes when I was first offered them,” Sharpe said awkwardly.
Harper shrugged as if to show that Sharpe’s odd admission was of no interest to him.
“I didn’t want to become an officer’s guard dog,” Sharpe went on. “My friends were in the ranks, my enemies were Sergeants and officers.”
That must have touched a sympathetic chord for the
Irishman gave a half-grudging and half-amused grimace.
Sharpe stooped and picked up some pebbles. He flicked one at the white rock and watched it ricochet down the hill. “When we rejoin Battalion they’ll probably put me back in the stores and you can go back to the ranks.” Sharpe said it as a sop to the Irishman’s pride, as a half-promise that Harper would not be forced to keep the white stripes, but he could not keep the resentment from his voice. “Does that satisfy you?”
“Yes, sir.” Harper’s agreement sounded neither heartfelt nor bitter, merely the acknowledgement of a wary truce.
“You don’t have to like me,” Sharpe said, “but just remember I was fighting battles when this Battalion was still being formed. When you were growing up, I was carrying a musket. And I’m still alive. And I haven’t stayed alive by being fair, but by being good. And if we’re going to survive this shambles, Harper, we’ve all got to be good.”
“We are good. Major Vivar said so.” Harper spoke defensively.
“We’re half-good,” Sharpe spoke with a sudden intensity, “but we’re going to be the bloody best. We’re going to be the cocks of the dirtiest dunghill in Europe. We’re going to make the French shiver to think of us. We’re going to be good!”
Harper’s eyes were unreadable; as cold and hard as the stones of the hillside, but there was a stirring of interest in his voice now. “And you need me to do it?”
“Yes, I do. Not to be a bloody lapdog. Your job is to fight for the men. Not like Williams, who wanted you all to like him, but by making them good. That way we all stand a chance of going home when this war’s over. You want to see Ireland again, don’t you?”
“Aye, I do.”
“Well, you won’t see it again if you fight against your own side as well as the bloody French.”
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,
