thought, he had been congratulating himself on how easy it had been, and now it was all collapsing. He pulled Hagman’s rifle to him, slung it beside his own and picked up the old poacher who gave a gasp and a whimper and shook his head. ‘Leave me, sir.’
‘I’m not leaving you, Dan.’
‘Hurts, sir, it hurts,’ Hagman whimpered again. His face was deathly pale and there was a trickle of blood spilling from his mouth, and then Harper was at Sharpe’s side and took Hagman out of his arms. ‘Leave me here,’ Hagman said softly.
‘Take him, Pat!’ Sharpe said, and then some rifles fired from the vineyard and muskets banged behind him and the air was whistling with balls as Sharpe pushed Harper on. He followed, walking backwards, watching the blue French uniforms appear in the mist of smoke left by their own ragged volley.
‘Come on, sir!’ Harper shouted, letting Sharpe know he had Hagman in the scanty shelter of the vines.
‘Carry him north,’ Sharpe said when he reached the vineyard.
‘He’s hurting bad, sir.’
‘Carry him! Get him out of here.’
Sharpe watched the French. Three companies of infantry had attacked the pasture, but they made no effort to follow Sharpe north. They must have seen the column of Portuguese and British troops winding through the vineyards accompanied by the dozen captured horses and a crowd of frightened villagers, but they did not follow. It seemed they wanted Barca d’Avintas more than they wanted Sharpe’s men dead. Even when Sharpe established himself on a knoll a half-mile north of the village and stared at the French through his telescope, they did not come near to threaten him. They could easily have chased him away with dragoons, but instead they chopped up the skiff that Sharpe had rescued and then set the fragments alight. ‘They’re closing off the river,’ Sharpe said to Vicente.
‘Closing the river?’ Vicente did not understand.
‘Making sure they’ve got the only boats. They don’t want British or Portuguese troops crossing the river, attacking them in the rear. Which means it’s going to be bloody hard for us to go the other way.’ Sharpe turned as Harper came near, and saw that the big Irish Sergeant’s hands were bloody. ‘How is he?’
Harper shook his head. ‘He’s in a terrible bad way, sir,’ he said gloomily. ‘I think the bloody ball’s in his lung. Coughing red bubbles he is, when he can cough at all. Poor Dan.’
‘I’m not leaving him,’ Sharpe said obstinately. He knew he had left Tarrant behind, and there were men like Williamson who had been friends of Tarrant who would resent that Sharpe was not doing the same with Hagman, but Tarrant had been a drunk and a troublemaker while Dan Hagman was valuable. He was the oldest man among Sharpe’s riflemen and he had a wealth of common sense that made him a steadying influence. Besides, Sharpe liked the old poacher. ‘Make a stretcher, Pat,’ he said, ‘and carry him.’
They made a stretcher out of jackets that had their sleeves threaded onto two poles cut from an ash tree and while it was being fashioned Sharpe and Vicente watched the French and discussed how they were to escape them. ‘What we must do,’ the Portuguese Lieutenant said, ‘is go east. To Amarante.’ He smoothed a patch of bare earth and scratched a crude map with a splinter of wood. ‘This is the Douro,’ he said, ‘and here is Porto. We are here’ – he tapped the river very close to the city – ‘and the nearest bridge is at Amarante.’ He made a cross mark well to the east. ‘We could be there tomorrow or perhaps the day after.’
‘So can they,’ Sharpe said grimly, and he nodded towards the village.
A gun had just appeared from among the trees where the French had waited so long before attacking Sharpe’s men. The cannon was drawn by six horses, three of which were ridden by gunners in their dark-blue uniforms. The gun itself, a twelve-pounder, was attached to its limber which was a light two-wheeled cart that served as a ready magazine and as an axle for the heavy gun’s trail. Behind the gun was another team of four horses, these pulling a coffin-like caisson that carried a spare gun wheel on its stern. The caisson, which was being ridden by a half-dozen gunners, held the cannon’s ammunition. Even from half a mile away Sharpe could hear the clink of the chains and thump of the wheels. He watched in silence as an howitzer came into sight, then a second twelve-pounder, and after that a troop of hussars.
‘Do you think they’re coming here?’ Vicente asked with alarm.
‘No,’ Sharpe said. ‘They’re not interested in fugitives. They’re going to Amarante.’
‘This is not the good road to Amarante. In fact it goes nowhere. They’ll have to strike north to the main road.’
‘They don’t know that yet,’ Sharpe guessed, ‘they’re taking any road east that they can find.’ Infantry had now appeared from the trees, then another battery of artillery. Sharpe was watching a small army march eastwards and there was only one reason to send so many men and guns to the east and that was to capture the bridge at Amarante and so protect the French left flank. ‘Amarante,’ Sharpe said, ‘that’s where the bastards are going.’
‘Then we can’t,’ Vicente said.
‘We can go,’ Sharpe said, ‘we just can’t go on that road. You say there’s a main road?’
‘Up here,’ Vicente said, and scratched the earth to show another road to the north of them. ‘That is the high road,’ Vicente said. ‘The French are probably on that as well. Do you really have to go to Amarante?’
‘I’ve got to cross the river,’ Sharpe said, ‘and there’s a bridge there, and there’s a Portuguese army there, and just because the bloody Frogs are going there doesn’t mean that they’ll capture the bridge.’ And if they did, he thought, then he could go north from Amarante until he found a crossing place, then follow the Tamega’s far bank south until he reached a stretch of the Douro unguarded by the French. ‘So how do we reach Amarante if we don’t go by road? Can we go across country?’
Vicente nodded. ‘We go north to a village here’ – he pointed to an empty space on his map – ‘and then turn east. The village is on the edge of the hills, the beginning of the – what do you call it? The wilderness. We used to go there.’
‘We?’ Sharpe asked. ‘The poets and philosophers?’
‘We would walk there,’ Vicente said, ‘spend the night in the tavern and walk back. I doubt there will be Frenchmen there. It is not on the road to Amarante. Not on any road.’
‘So we go to the village at the edge of the wilderness,’ Sharpe said. ‘What’s it called?’
‘Vila Real de Zedes,’ Vicente said. ‘It is called that because the vineyards there once belonged to the King, but that was long ago. Now they are the property of –’
‘Vila Real de what?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Zedes,’ Vicente said, puzzled by Sharpe’s tone and even more puzzled by the smile on Sharpe’s face. ‘You know the place?’
‘I don’t know it,’ Sharpe said, ‘but there’s a girl I want to meet there.’
‘A girl!’ Vicente sounded disapproving.
‘A nineteen-year-old girl,’ Sharpe said, ‘and believe it or not, it’s a duty.’ He turned
