Sharpe’s Eagle. Bernard Cornwell

he had caught a quick glimpse of a strange magpie with a long blue tail, unlike anything he had seen before, and he wanted to see another. The expectation and the waiting were part of his content and his pleasure.

      A hare started up in a field next to the road. A voice shouted ‘Mine’ and they all paused while the man knelt, took quick aim, and fired. He missed and Riflemen jeered as the hare twisted and disappeared in the rocks. Daniel Hagman did not miss often, he had learned to shoot from his poacher father, and all the Riflemen were secretly proud of the Cheshire man’s ability with the rifle. As he reloaded he shook his head sorrowfully. ‘Sorry, sir. Getting too old.’

      Sharpe laughed. Hagman was forty but he could still outshoot the rest of the company. The hare had been running at two hundred yards and it would have been a miracle if it had ended up in the evening’s cooking pots.

      ‘We’ll take a rest,’ Sharpe said. ‘Ten minutes.’ He set two men as sentries. The French were miles away, there were British cavalry ahead of them on the road, but soldiers stayed alive by taking precautions and this was strange country so Sharpe kept a watch and the men marched with loaded weapons. He took off his pack and pouches, glad to be rid of the eighty pounds of weight, and sat beside Harper who was leaning back and staring into the clear sky. ‘A hot day for a march, Sergeant.’

      ‘It will be, sir, so it will. But better than that damned cold last winter.’

      Sharpe grinned. ‘You managed to keep warm enough.’

      ‘We did what we could, sir, we did what we could. You remember the Holy Father in the Friary?’ Sharpe nodded but there was no way to stop Patrick Harper once he was launched into a good story. ‘He told us there was no drink in the place! No drink, and we were as cold as the sea in winter! It was a terrible thing to hear a man of God lie so.’

      ‘You taught him a lesson, Sarge!’ Pendleton, the baby of the company, just seventeen and a thief from the streets of Bristol, grinned over the road at the Irishman. Harper nodded. ‘We did, lad. You remember? No priest runs out of drink and we found it. My God, a barrel big enough to drown an army’s thirst and it did us that night. And we tipped the Holy Father head first into the wine to teach him that lying is a mortal sin.’ He laughed at the memory. ‘I could do with a drop right now.’ He looked innocently round the men resting on the verges. ‘Would anyone have a drop?’

      There was silence. Sharpe leaned back and hid his smile. He knew what Harper was doing and he could guess what would happen next. The Rifles were one of the few Regiments that could pick and choose its recruits, rejecting all but the best, but even so it suffered from the besetting sin of the whole army; drunkenness. Sharpe guessed there were at least half a dozen bottles of wine within a few paces and Harper was going to find them. He heard the Sergeant get to his feet. ‘Right! Inspection.’

      ‘Sergeant!’ That was Gataker, too fly for his own good. ‘You inspected the water bottles this morning! You know we haven’t got any.’

      ‘I know you haven’t any in your water bottles but that’s not the same thing, is it?’ There was still no response. ‘Lay your ammunition out! Now!’

      There were groans. Both the Portuguese and the Spanish would gladly sell wine to a man in exchange for a handful of cartridges made with British gunpowder, the finest in the world, and it was a fair bet that if any man had less than his eighty rounds then Harper would find a bottle hid deep in that man’s pack. Sharpe heard the sound of rummaging and scuffling. He opened his eyes to see seven bottles had magically appeared. Harper stood over them triumphantly. ‘We share these out tonight. Well done, lads, I knew you wouldn’t let me down.’ He turned to Sharpe. ‘Do you want a cartridge count, sir?’

      ‘No, we’ll get on.’ He knew the men could be trusted not to sell more than a handful of cartridges. He looked at the huge Irishman. ‘How many cartridges would you have, Sergeant?’

      Harper’s face was sublimely honest. ‘Eighty, sir.’

      ‘Show me your powder horn.’

      Harper smiled. ‘I thought you might like a drop of something tonight, sir?’

      ‘Let’s get on, then.’ Sharpe grinned at Harper’s discomfiture. In addition to the eighty rounds, twenty more than the rest of the army carried, Riflemen also carried a horn of fine powder that made for better shooting when there was time to use it. ‘All right, Sergeant. Ten minutes fast, then we’ll march easy.’

      At midday they found Major Forrest with his small, mounted advance party waving to them from a stand of trees that grew between the road and the stream Harper had been hoping for. The Major led the Riflemen to the spot he had chosen for them. ‘I thought, Sharpe, that it might be best if you were some way from the Colonel?’

      ‘Don’t worry, sir.’ Sharpe grinned at the nervous Major. ‘I think that’s an excellent idea.’

      Forrest was still worried. He looked at Sharpe’s men who were already hacking at the branches. ‘Sir Henry insists on fires being built in straight lines, Sharpe.’

      Sharpe held up his hands. ‘Not a flame out of place, sir, I promise you.’

      An hour later the Battalion arrived and the men threw themselves on to the ground and rested their heads on their packs. Some went to the stream and sat with blistered, swollen feet in the cool water. Sentries were posted, weapons stacked, the smell of tobacco drifted through the trees, and a desultory game of football started far away from the pile of baggage that marked the temporary officers’ mess. Last to arrive were the wives and children mixed with the Portuguese muleteers and their animals, Hogan and his mules, and the herd of cattle, driven by hired labour, that would provide the evening meals until the last beast was killed.

      In the somnolent afternoon Sharpe felt restless. He had no family to write to and no desire to join Harper vainly tempting non-existent fish with his maggots. Hogan was sleeping, snoring gently in a patch of shade, so Sharpe got up from the grass, took his rifle, and strolled towards the picquet line and beyond. It was a beautiful day. No cloud disturbed the sky, the water in the stream flowed clear, a whisper of a breeze stirred the grass and flickered the pale leaves of the olive trees. He walked between the stream and a field of growing corn, jumped a crude, wicker dam that stopped an irrigation channel, and into a rock-strewn field of stunted olives. Nothing moved. Insects buzzed and clicked, a horse whinnied from the camp site, the sound of the water faded behind him. Someone had told him it was July. Perhaps it was his birthday. He did not know on which day he had been born but before his mother died he remembered her calling him a July-baby, or was it June? He remembered little else of her. Dark hair and a voice in the darkness. She had died when he was an infant and there was no other family.

      The landscape crouched beneath the heat, still and silent, the Battalion swallowed up in the countryside as though it did not exist. He looked back down the road the Battalion had marched and far away, too far to see properly, there was a dust cloud where the main army was still on the road. He sat beside a gnarled tree trunk, rifle across his knees, and stared into the heat haze. A lizard darted across the ground, paused, looked at him, then ran up a tree trunk and froze as if he would lose sight of it because of its stillness. A speck of movement in the sky made him look up and high in the blue a hawk slid silently, its wings motionless, its head searching the ground for prey. Patrick would have known instantly what it was but to Sharpe the bird was just another hunter and today, he thought, there is nothing for us hunters and, as if in agreement, the bird stirred its wings and in a moment had gone out of view. He felt comfortable and lazy, at peace with the world, glad to be a Rifleman in Spain. He looked at the stunted olives with their promise of a thin harvest and wondered what family would shake the branches in the autumn, whose lives were bounded by the stream, the shallow fields, and the high, climbing road he would probably never see again.

      Then there was a noise. Too hesitant and far off to sound an alarm in his head, but strange and persistent enough to make him alert and send his right hand to curl unconsciously round the narrow part of the rifle’s stock. There were horses on the road, only two from the sound of their hooves, but they were moving slowly and uncertainly and the sound suggested that something was wrong.