‘It seems as good a time as any.’
He walked forward, his tall French boots crunching on the stones of the path. They would fight where the paths crossed at the graveyard’s centre, where the Marqués would try to turn Sharpe into the dazzling sun and run him through with the slim, shining blade.
He stopped opposite his enemy. He stared into the blank, expressionless eyes and he tried to imagine Helene marrying this man. There was a weakness in the fleshy, proud face. Sharpe tried to pin it down, tried to analyse this man whose skill he had to beat. Perhaps, he thought, the Marqués was a man born to greatness who had never felt himself worthy. That perhaps was why he prayed so hard and had so much pride.
The Marqués stared at Sharpe, seeing the man whom he believed had insulted his wife and tried to assault her. The Marqués did not just fight for Helene, nor just for his pride, but for the pride of all Spain that had been humbled by needing to make an Englishman its Generalisimo.
The Marqués remembered what the Inquisitor, Father Hacha, had said about this man. Fast, but unskilled. Sharpe, the Marqués knew, would try to kill him as if he was an ox. He twitched the fine sword in his hand. It was odd, he thought, that an Inquisitor should carry Helene’s letter. He pushed the thought away.
‘You are ready, my Lord?’ Mendora called.
The Marqués’s face gave the smallest twitch. He was ready.
‘Major Sharpe?’
‘Yes.’
Major Mendora flexed his sword once so that the steel hissed in the air. The Inquisitor stood with a doctor beside the Marqués’s coach. D’Alembord looked hopefully towards the cemetery entrance, but it was empty. He felt the hopelessness of this idiocy, and then Mendora called them forward. ‘Your swords, gentlemen?’
Sharpe’s boots grated on the gravel. If he got into real trouble, he thought, then he could pretend to fall down, scoop up a handful of the stones, and hurl them to blind the big man who came cautiously forward. What had d’Alembord said? He would feint to the right and go left? Or was it the other way round?
He raised his big, straight sword and it looked dull beside the slim, polished blade that came beside it. The swords touched. Sharpe wondered if he detected a quiver in the other man’s grip, but no, the blades rested quietly as Mendora drew his own sword, held it beneath the raised blades, then swept his weapon up to part the two swords and the duel had begun.
Neither man moved.
They watched each other, waiting. Sharpe’s urge was to shout, as he shouted on a battlefield to frighten his opponents, but he felt cowed by the formality of this setting. He was fighting a duel against an aristocrat and he felt that he must behave as they expected him to behave. This was not like battle. This was so cold-blooded, so ritualistic, and it seemed hard to believe that in this warm evening air a man must fall to bleed his life onto the gravel.
The Marqués’s sword came slowly down, reached out, touched Sharpe’s blade, then flickered in bright, quick motion, and Sharpe took two steps back.
The Marqués still watched him. He had done no more than test Sharpe’s speed. He would test his skill next.
Sharpe tried to shake the odd lethargy away. It seemed impossible that this was real, that death waited here. He saw the Marqués come forward again, his heavy tread no clue to the speed that Sharpe had already seen, and Sharpe went forward too, his sword reaching, and the Marqués stepped back.
The troops jeered. They wanted blood, they wanted a furious mill with their champion standing over the ripped corpse of the other man.
The Marqués tried to oblige. He came forward with surprising speed, his blade flickering past Sharpe’s guard, looping beneath the heavy cavalry sword and lunging to Sharpe’s right.
Sharpe countered desperately, knowing that the speed had beaten him, but with a luck he did not deserve he felt the Marqués’s blade-tip lodge in the tassel hole of his sword’s hilt. It seemed to stick there and Sharpe wrenched his weapon, forcing it towards the Marqués, hoping to break the man’s slim blade, but the Marqués turned, drew his sword away, and the cheers of the spectators were louder. They had mistaken Sharpe’s desperate counters as a violent attack.
The sun was in Sharpe’s eyes. Fluently, easily, the Marqués had turned him.
The Marqués smiled. He had the speed and the skill of this Englishman, and all that mattered now was to choose the manner of Sharpe’s death.
Sharpe seemed to know it, for he attacked suddenly, lunging at the big man, using all his own speed, but his blade never struck home. It rang against the slimmer blade, scraped, flashed sunlight into the spectators’ eyes, and though the Marqués went back on quick feet, he was having no trouble in avoiding the attacks. Only once, when Sharpe pressed close and tried to ram his sword into the Marqués’s eyes, did the Spaniard twist desperately aside and lose his composure. He regained it at once, elegantly parrying the next thrust, turning Sharpe’s blade and counter-attacking from his back foot.
The counter-attack was quick as a hawk, a slashing stab of steel as the Marqués went under his guard, the point rose, and Sharpe swept his enemy’s blade aside, his hand providentially moving in the right direction, but he was regretting he ever chose swords because the Marqués was a fencer of distinction, and Sharpe lunged again, hit nothing, and he saw the smile on the Marqués’s face as the aristocrat coolly parried the attack.
The smile was a mistake.
God damn the aristocracy, and God damn good manners, this was a fight to the death, and Sharpe growled at the man, cursed, and he felt the anger come on him, an anger that always in battle seemed to manifest itself as cold deliberation. It was as if time slowed, as if he could see twice as clearly, and suddenly he knew that if he was to win this fight then he must attack as he had always attacked. He had learned to fight in the gutter and that was where he must take this big, smiling aristocrat who thought he had Sharpe beaten.
The Marqués came forward, his blade seeking to take Sharpe’s sword one way so that he could slide the steel beneath the Englishman’s guard and finish him.
‘She calls you a pig, Spaniard.’ Sharpe saw the flicker of surprise in the Marqués’s face, heard the hiss of disapproval from Mendora. ‘A fat pig, out of breath, son of a sow, pork-brain.’ Sharpe laughed. His sword was down. He was inviting the attack, goading the man.
Captain d’Alembord frowned. It was hardly decent manners, but he sensed something more. Sharpe was now the master here. The Marqués thought he had the Rifleman beaten, but all he had done was to make the Rifleman fight. This no longer looked like a duel to d’Alembord; it looked like a brawl leading to slaughter.
The Marqués wanted to kill. He did not understand why the Englishman’s guard was down. He tried to ignore the insults, but they raked at his pride.
‘Come on, pig! Come on!’ Sharpe stepped to one side, away from the sun, and the Marqués saw the Englishman lose his balance as his boot struck a large stone in the path. He saw the alarm on Sharpe’s face as he flailed his sword arm to stay upright and the Marqués stamped his right foot forward, shouted in triumph, and the sword was piercing at Sharpe.
Who had known that the pretence of losing his balance would invite the straight lunge and who beat the sword aside with a shout that sounded in every part of the cemetery. He brought up his left knee,
