„We’re moving, sir,” Williamson said. „Bridge is up, sir.” He knuckled his forehead to Christopher, then turned his leering face on Kate. „Help you onto the horse, ma’am?”
„I can manage,” Kate said coldly, but she was forced to drop the damp blanket to climb into the saddle and she knew that both Christopher and Williamson were staring at her legs in their tight hussar breeches.
A cheer came from the bridge as the first cavalrymen led their horses over the precarious roadway. The sound prompted the infantry to stand, pick up their muskets and packs, and shuffle toward the makeshift crossing.
„One more bridge,” Christopher assured Kate, „and we’re safe.”
Just one more bridge. The Leaper.
And above them, high in the hills, Richard Sharpe was already marching toward it. Toward the last bridge in Portugal. The Saltador.
CHAPTER 11
It had been at dawn that Sharpe and Hogan saw their fears were realized. Several hundred French infantry were across the Ponte Nova, the ordenanqa were nothing but bodies in a plundered village, and energetic work parties were remaking the roadway across the Cavado’s white water. The long and winding defile echoed with sporadic musket shots as Portuguese peasants, attracted to the beleaguered army like ravens to meat, took long-range shots. Sharpe saw a hundred voltigeurs in open order climb a hill to drive off one brave band that had dared to approach within two hundred paces of the stalled column. There was a flurry of shots, the French skirmishers scoured the hill and then trudged back to the crowded road. There was no sign of any British pursuit, but Hogan guessed that Wellesley’s army was still a half-day’s march behind the French. „He won’t have followed the French directly,” he explained, „he won’t have crossed the Serra de Santa Catalina like they did. He’ll have stayed on the roads, so he went to Braga first and now he’s marching eastward. As for us… „He stared down at the captured bridge. „We’d best shift ourselves to the Saltador,” he said grimly, „because it’s our last chance.”
To Sharpe it seemed there was no chance at all. More than twenty thousand French fugitives darkened the valley beneath him and Christopher was lost somewhere in that mass and how Sharpe was ever to find the renegade he did not know. But he pulled on his threadbare coat and picked up his rifle and followed Hogan who, Sharpe saw, was similarly pessimistic while Harper, perversely, was oddly cheerful, even when they had to wade through a tributary of the Cavado which ran waist deep through a steep defile which fell toward the larger river. Hogan’s mule baulked at the cold, fast water and the Captain proposed abandoning the animal, but then Javali smacked the beast hard across the face and, while it was still blinking, picked it up and carried it bodily through the wide stream. The riflemen cheered the display of strength while the mule, safe on the opposite bank, snapped its yellow teeth at the goatherd who simply smacked it again. „Useful lad, that,” Harper said approvingly. The big Irish Sergeant was soaked to the skin and as cold and tired as any of the other men, but he seemed to relish the hardship. „It’s no worse than herding back home,” he maintained as they trudged on. „I remember once my uncle was taking a flock of mutton, prime meat the lot of them, walking them on the hoof to Belfast and half the buggers ran like shite when we’d not even got to Letterkenny! Jesus, all that money gone to waste.”
„Did you get them back?” Perkins asked.
„You’re joking, lad. I searched half the bloody night and all I got was a clip round the ear from my uncle. Mind you, it was his fault, he’d never herded so much as a rabbit before and didn’t know one end of a sheep from the other, but he was told there was good cash for mutton in Belfast so he stole the flock off a skinflint in Colcarney and set off to make his fortune.”
„Do you have wolves in Ireland?” Vicente wanted to know.
„In red coats,” Harper said, and saw Sharpe scowl. „My grandfather now,” he went on hurriedly, „claimed to see a pack of them at Derrynagrial. Big, they were, he said, and with red eyes and teeth like graveyard stones and he told my grandmother that they chased him all the way to the Glenleheel bridge, but he was a drunk. Jesus, he could soak the stuff up.”
Javali wanted to know what they were talking about and immediately had his own tales of wolves attacking his goats and how he had fought one with nothing but a stick and a sharp-edged stone, and then he claimed to have raised a wolf cub and told how the village priest had insisted on killing it because the devil lived in wolves, and Sergeant Macedo said that was true and described how a sentry at Almeida had been eaten by wolves one cold winter’s night.
„Do you have wolves in England?” Vicente asked Sharpe.
„Only lawyers.”
„Richard!” Hogan chided him.
They were going north now. The road that the French would use from Ponte Nova to the Spanish frontier twisted into the hills until it met another tributary of the Cavado, the Misarella, and the Saltador bridge crossed the upper reaches of that river. Sharpe would rather have gone down to the road and marched ahead of the French, but Hogan would not hear of it. The enemy, he said, would put dragoons across the Cavado as soon as the bridge was repaired and the road was no place to be caught by horsemen, and so they stayed in the high ground that became ever more rugged, stony and difficult. Their progress was painfully slow because they were forced to make long detours when precipices or slopes of scree barred their way, and for every mile they went forward they had to walk three, and Sharpe knew the French were now advancing up the valley and gaining fast, for their progress was signaled by scattered musket shots from the hills about the Misarella’s defile. Those shots, fired at too long a range by men activated by hatred, sounded closer and closer until, at mid-morning, the French came into view.
A hundred dragoons led, but not far behind them was infantry, and these men were not a panicked rabble, but marching in good order. Javali, the moment he saw them, growled incoherently, grabbed a handful of powder from his bag, half of which he spilled as he tried to push it into his musket’s barrel. He rammed down a bullet, primed his musket and shot into the valley. It was not apparent that he hit an enemy, but he gave a small joyful shuffle and then loaded the musket again. „You were right, Richard,” Hogan said ruefully, „we should have used the road.” The French were overtaking them now.
„You were right, sir,” Sharpe said. „People like him”-he jerked his head toward the wild-bearded Javali-”would have been taking shots at us all morning.”
„Maybe,” Hogan said. He swayed on the mule’s back, then glanced down again at the French. „Pray the Saltador has been broken,” he said, but he did not sound hopeful.
They had to clamber down into a saddle of the hills, then climb again to another hog-backed ridge littered with the massive rounded boulders. They lost sight of the fast-flowing Misarella and of the French on the road beside it, but they could hear the occasional flurry of musket shots which told of partisans sniping into the valley.
„God grant the Portuguese have got to the bridge,” Hogan said for the tenth or twentieth time since dawn. If all had gone well then the Portuguese forces advancing northward in parallel to Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army should have blocked the French at Ruivaens, so cutting the last eastward road to Spain, and then sent a brigade into the hills to plug the final escape route at the Saltador. If all had gone well the Portuguese should now be barring the mountain road with cannon and infantry, but the weather had slowed their march as it had slowed Wellesley’s pursuit and the only men waiting for Marshal Soult at the Saltador were more ordenanqa.