insist, senhor, they insist!’ Pires was pleading now. ‘And if our own troops don’t come, the British will.’
‘Os ingleses por mar,’ Ferragus snarled, and he used his left hand to punch Pires in the face. The blow was swift and extraordinarily powerful, a straight jab that broke the feitor’s nose and sent him staggering back with blood pouring from his nostrils. Ferragus followed fast, using his wounded right hand to thump Pires in the belly. The blow hurt Ferragus, but he ignored the pain because that was what a man must do. Pain must be endured. If a man could not take pain then he should not fight, and Ferragus backed Pires against the warehouse wall and systematically punched him, left and right, each blow travelling a short distance, but landing with hammer force. The fists drove into the feitor’s body, cracking his ribs and breaking his cheekbones, and blood spattered on Ferragus’s hands and sleeves, but he was oblivious of the blood just as he was oblivious of the pain in his hand and groin. He was doing what he loved to do and he hit even harder, silencing the feitor’s pathetic screams and yelps, seeing the man’s breath come bubbling and pink as his huge fists crunched the broken ribs into the lungs. It took awesome strength to do this. To kill a man with bare hands without strangling him.
Pires slumped against the wall. He no longer resembled a man, though he lived. His visible flesh was swollen, bloody, pulpy. His eyes had closed, his nose was destroyed, his face was a mask of blood, his teeth were broken, his lips were split to ribbons, his chest was crushed, his belly was pounded, yet still he managed to stay upright against the warehouse wall. His ruined face looked blindly from side to side, then a fist caught him on the jaw and the bone broke with an audible crack and Pires tottered, groaned and fell at last.
‘Hold him up,’ Ferragus said, stripping off his coat and shirt.
Two men seized Pires under his arms and hauled him upright and Ferragus stepped in close and punched with a vicious intensity. His fists did not travel far, these were not wild swinging clouts, but short, precise blows that landed with sickening force. He worked on the man’s belly, then moved up to his chest, pounding it so that Pires’s head flopped with every strike and his bloody mouth sprayed drops of reddened spittle onto Ferragus’s chest. He went on punching until the man’s head jerked back and then flopped sideways like a puppet whose crown-string had snapped. There was a rattling noise from the battered throat, Ferragus hit him one last time and then stepped back. ‘Put him in the cellar,’ Ferragus ordered, ‘and slit his belly.’
‘Slit his belly?’ one of the men asked, thinking he had misheard.
‘Give the rats something to work on,’ Ferragus said, ‘because the sooner they’re done with him, the sooner he’s gone.’ He crossed to Miguel who gave him a rag with which he wiped the blood and spittle from his chest and arms that were covered in tattoos. There were anchors wrapped in chains on both his forearms, three mermaids on his chest, and snakes encircling his vast upper arms. On his back was a warship under full sail, its sky-scrapers aloft, studding sails spread, and at its stern a British flag. He pulled on his shirt, then a coat, and watched the corpse being dragged to the back of the warehouse where a trapdoor opened into a cellar. There was already one belly-slitted corpse rotting in that darkness, the remnants of a man who had tried to betray Ferragus’s hoard to the authorities. Now another had tried, failed and died.
Ferragus locked the warehouse. If the French did not come, he thought, then this food could be sold legally and at a profit, and if they did come, then it might mean a greater profit. The next few hours would reveal all. He made the sign of the cross, then went to find a tavern because he had killed a man and was thirsty.
No one came from battalion to give Sharpe orders, which suited him just fine. He was standing guard on the rocky knoll where, he reckoned, a hundred French infantry were keeping their heads well down because of his desultory rifle fire. He wished he had enough men to shift the voltigeurs off the hill, for their presence was an invitation to the enemy to try for the summit again. They could throw a couple of battalions up to the knoll and use them to attack along the spur, and such a move might be encouraged by the new French attack that was heating up a mile to the north. Sharpe went a small way along the spur, too far probably because a couple of musket shots whirred past him as he crouched and took out his telescope. He ignored the voltigeurs, knowing they were shooting far beyond a musket’s accurate range, and he stared at the vast French columns climbing the better road that twisted up to the village just beneath the ridge’s northern crest. A stone windmill, its sails and vanes taken away and machinery dismantled like every other mill in central Portugal, stood near the crest itself and there was a knot of horsemen beside the stumpy tower, but Sharpe could not see any troops except for the two French columns that were halfway up the road and a third, smaller column, some way behind. The huge French formations looked dark against the slope. British and Portuguese guns were blasting shot from the crest, blurring his view with their grey-white smoke.
‘Sir! Mister Sharpe, sir!’ It was Patrick Harper who called.
Sharpe collapsed the telescope and walked back, seeing as he went what had prompted Harper’s call. Two companies of brown-coated cazadores were approaching the spur and Sharpe supposed the Portuguese troops had orders to clear the rocky knoll of the enemy. A pair of nine-pounders were being repositioned to support their attack, but Sharpe did not hold out much chance for it. The cazadores numbered about the same as the voltigeurs, but the French had cover and it would be a nasty fight if they decided to make a stand.
‘I didn’t want you in the way when those gunners started firing,’ Harper explained, jerking his head towards the pair of nine-pounders.
‘Decent of you, Pat.’
‘If you died, sir, then Slingsby would take over,’ Harper said without a trace of insubordination.
‘You wouldn’t want that?’ Sharpe asked.
‘I’m from Donegal, sir, and I put up with whatever the good Lord sends to trouble me.’
‘He sent me, Pat, he sent me.’
‘Mysterious are the ways of the Lord,’ Harris put in.
The cazadores were waiting fifty paces behind Sharpe. He ignored them, instead asking again if any of the men had seen Dodd. Mister Iliffe, who had not heard Sharpe ask before, nodded nervously. ‘He was running, sir.’
‘Where?’
‘When we were almost cut off, sir? Down the hill. Going like a hare.’ Which matched what Carter, Dodd’s partner, had thought. The two men had very nearly been trapped by the voltigeurs and Dodd had elected the fast way out, downhill, while Carter had been lucky to escape uphill with nothing more serious than a musket ball in his pack, which he claimed had only helped him along. Sharpe reckoned Dodd would rejoin later. He was a countryman, could read ground, and doubtless he would avoid the French and climb up the southern part of the ridge. Whatever, there was nothing Sharpe could do about him now.
‘So are we going to help the Portuguese boys?’ Harper asked.
‘Not on your bloody life,’ Sharpe said, ‘not unless they bring a whole bloody battalion.’
‘He’s coming to ask you,’ Harper said in warning, nodding towards a slim Portuguese officer who approached the light company. His brown uniform had black facings and his high-fronted shako had a long black plume. Sharpe noted that the officer wore a heavy cavalry sword and, unusually, carried a rifle. Sharpe could think of only one officer who was so armed, himself, and he felt irritated that there should be another officer with the same weapons, but then the approaching man took off his black-plumed barretina and smiled broadly.
‘Good God,’ Sharpe said.
