Longbourn (34 page)

Then the order came to march to Salamanca. The infantry could go as the crow flew; the cavalry and gunners would have to take the long way round, by the better roads.

The five men of their detachment travelled together: Pye, who was their sergeant, and in command; the spongeman who was James, and still considered green; the loader, who was an old hand called Stephenson; the ventsman, who had a broad scar on one cheek and his side teeth missing; last was a taciturn fellow with a broken nose: he kept the portfire, and lit the charge. Flanking their spans of horses and the gun, they trailed the red flow of cavalry, were followed only by the ammunition and supply wagons. At midday they lay in the gun’s shade and she shielded them from the glare.

It was indeed the long way round. They marched east, along a lush, marshy valley, the roads rutted and wet and screened by reeds that hissed in the wind. They turned north. The terrain became mountainous and hard. And the war became, for James, the shifting of an awkward object over difficult terrain in impossible weather. The Army was a vast segmented creature, forever lengthening and compacting, breaking into sections and re-forming.

By October, the five of them, and the four horses, were still dragging
the nine-pounder across the wide land, dust rising from the wheels and worn shoes. They dug in on downhills, weight pitted against the pull of the gun; they clattered it across streams, the limber piled with the attendant kit. The rocky ground was cruel. They stumbled, shoved and cursed.

The horses grew thin; one of them died, and the No. 3, who had been a slaughterman in his old life, butchered her, and they ate well, and rolled and packed strips of horse meat to take with them. She was replaced with a Spanish horse, taken from a farmer who had protested, and then threatened them with a sickle, and when they had pushed him away he had come back at them screaming, and thrashed around when he was held down, and then was silenced by a bayonet.

“I did warn him,” Pye said, wiping the blade on the grass.

Nobody could afford to lose a horse. Not a dirt farmer like him, anyway. A horse’s labour made the difference between a decent harvest, and the slide towards starvation. Without it, the farmer and his family were already heading for death’s door; Pye had just opened it for him, and ushered him through.

James tried his few words of Spanish out on the mare. Nonsense—obscenities and requests for beer and cake—though the sounds of it seemed to soothe her. She blinked at him with her sloe-eyes, and buffeted him with her muzzle. Her face was like old velvet stretched over wicker.

His sleep thin in the chill of an autumn night in Extremadura, curled under the nine-pounder, James would dream that the gun was his mother and he was her whelp; the other four, Sergeant Pye and all, were the rest of her stinking litter.

He plugged his ears with moss, against the sounds of the town and of the camp; of music, sex and fighting.

It was full winter and still the company had not reached Salamander, the lizard-city. Now they seemed to be wheeling east again across the arid scrub. James could not make sense of these twists and turns, unless the city itself was scuttling off as they approached.

The locals hid their livestock and their food: it was the only explanation for the empty stockades and shambles and barns and
smallholdings. The soldiers stole and scavenged what they could, and still they were always hungry.

Late one afternoon, James’s detachment scraped through a little oak wood, in the hopes of finding hidden sheep or cattle or, failing that, wildfowl. It did not look promising, but hunger kept them going. The wood was thin and dry, and silent even of birds. A picked-clean place, not even a pigeon left to coo. They walked on in bitter silence, cold, their breath misting, their feet shushing through the dry fallen leaves at the bottom of a gully. Pye was just turning to speak, no doubt to give it all up for a bad job, when there was a thunder of footfalls and a grunting, wheezing earthy sound; James spun round to see a wild pig bundling down at them from the top of the slope. Pye turned aside and swiftly loaded his pistol. He hit the beast square in its bristly muzzle, rendering it a mess of blood and brain, and still it kept bowling on down at them, under its own dead weight; James dodged, Pye leapt aside, the others scattered. The beast, being four-fifths dead already, hit the bottom of the gully, and stopped there, its front legs crumpling. They just stood looking at it. Then, with a wheezing, snortling noise, it keeled over on one side, bubbling with blood. A moment’s silence, then James laughed: the relief. For the first time in a long time, the spun-tight knot inside him slipped loose. They would eat well that night.

“Anyone got any apples on ’em?” Sergeant Pye said. “Applesauce.”

“Eggs,” James said. “Ham and eggs.”

He crouched by the fallen creature, and saw her swollen, reddened dugs.

“It’s a sow. There’s a litter nearby.” James got back to his feet. “Listen.”

It was very cold. The light was failing. They stood in silence. The sound was almost too high-pitched to hear: a faint, almost bat-like squeaking. He raised a hand and beckoned for the others to follow. Halfway up the slope, they came upon a den dug into the bank between tree roots; a clutch of half-a-dozen piglets stared back at them with their small eyes. They were sturdy, milk-and-acorn-fed; they blinked pale lashes at the men. Then James reached in to take one, and the lot of them scattered squealing. The men scrambled after them, skidded down the banks; laughing, cursing, calling out to one another, all lost to the chase, as if this was home, and they were chasing greased piglets through the fair.

James caught one by its scruff and rammed it between his knees. He stuck its throat with his bayonet. It twitched and bled. Back at the farm Old Misery would have caught the blood in a bucket to make blood-puddings. He would never have believed he could have come to miss the old bitch and her cooking.

They strolled along with their Brown Besses slung on their shoulders and the sow swinging from a pole they’d cut and now carried between two of them, her young hanging like moles from another. It was night now, but the moon had risen, and it gave a reassuring light to their hike back to camp.

There was just a second between James noticing that he was happy, and then realizing that he was afraid. He glanced around him—they were tracking along the bottom of a dry gully, between rocks and low-growing juniper; parched winter grasses brushed against his gaiters. All was blue and white in the moonlight, and nothing had changed, but they were in danger. He knew it in his creeping flesh. No obvious, immediate threat, not like a musket in your face, or a full-grown hog charging at you: the kind of danger you wander into oblivious, and whistling.

He slipped his musket off his shoulder. “Sir?”

Rock and grass, and higher up, a screen of goat-willow, and an outcrop of stone. All was still. But it was a shallow kind of stillness, like a breath held.

“Sergeant Pye, sir?”

Pye glanced towards him, and his smile collapsed. He raised a hand to quell the noise. His own voice was a whisper.

“You see something, country-boy?”

The men were all silent now, scanning the gully, reaching for their weapons. A shift in temperature: they had been careless; Pye had let them.

“Well, well, my lovelies,” Pye breathed. “Pick up your petticoats, let’s be getting back.”

No more talk, just the thud of boots on the dry ground, and the rasp of breath in dry throats. Once they’d cleared the gully, there was about a mile down the hillside to the camp. Past that scrubby twisted pine
there, and they’d be out into open terrain, and the worst of it would be over.

A hundred yards. Seventy. Fifty still to go. They would get away with it. It looked as though they had got away with it.

Pye must have thought the same, because he turned to speak over his shoulder: “You had me spooked, there, Jimmy-boy—”

And that was when the shot cracked out.

The men ducked, fumbling their muskets. James was on one knee, then on his belly, Brown Bess wedged to his shoulder, scanning: everything was silver, shadows, grainy in the moonlight. Beside him, Sergeant Pye hissed out orders. The gunshot echoed down the gully, a messy sound, bouncing off the rock. James searched the skyline, the scrubby trees, the outcrops. Silence.

“Deje las armas!”

Scrambling, twisting on the ground, James scanned around for the speaker. No sign of movement, no shifting or rustling.

“
O matamos a todos ahora
.”

“Put them down,” Pye said. “Put down your muskets.”

The men looked to him, pale faces in the night. The sergeant jerked his head: get on with it. They were in the open: they could not fight an enemy that they could not see. Pye, the sweat on his forehead catching the light, set the example and laid down his weapon; James complied reluctantly, laying the cool weight of her down upon the scrubby grass. The others followed suit, the gunmetal making dull clinks as the barrels slid together.

Then they drew close, back to back. James felt his shoulder brushed by Pye’s, his arm jostled by Stephenson’s. He could hear their breaths, coming fast and harsh. He still searched around him. The pigs lay trussed and abandoned in the dust.

Then there was movement, up on the hillside. James nudged Pye, jutted his chin: the bandits appeared from amongst the rocks. They came slithering down, scuffing through the dirt, and gathered around the soldiers. James saw the whiteness of a young boy’s teeth as he grinned. The men had an outdoor smell about them, musky, like deer; an old man bent and scooped up the muskets and held them under his arm like a bunch of firewood. And their leader, face as craggy as the land, said something in Spanish, of which James recognized a few words:
ingleses, idiotas
and
hijos de puta
. They were all as thin as grass.

The sow and piglets were lifted and carried away, swinging from their poles, up some path through the rocks that you wouldn’t know was there unless you actually saw those men walking it. Then the troop of them just melted into the dark, and disappeared. James was left with an impression of a broad white-toothed grin, lingering in the air when the men themselves were gone.

Someone let out a low whistle.

Someone else said, “Bastards.”

Pye wiped his forehead with a sleeve. “We were lucky.”

“That was lucky?”

“That’s just our dinner gone. It could have been worse. They could have gutted us. If we were French, they would’ve cut off our cocks and made us eat ’em.”

And then Pye turned and trudged on, towards the end of the gully, under the scrubby twisted pine.

At a crossroads outside Alba de Tormes, where they paused to water the horses one bitter winter morning, James read the milestone:
Salamanca 15 Millas
.

James said, “We could be there by nightfall.”

Sergeant Pye grinned. “We’ll all be having Salamancan buttered buns tonight!”

Then the order came down the column, with a rippled sigh like wind through barley: they were to return to Portugal. James stopped in his tracks, just watching as the men wheeled the horses round, slipping and clattering on the mud and stones, and the gun carriage drew off, heading west again. Then he stirred himself and ran to catch up. He put his shoulder to the carriage, too, and they heaved the gun away. Away from Salamanca. Away from where they had been struggling towards all this time.

It was December. The skies were bare and white; snow swirled across the fields.

At Sahagún de Campos, James came to know that the hunger he had felt before was nothing. This was a new creature, and it was stronger, fiercer, tighter than he had ever known: it gnawed at his gut, crazed his
teeth, squeezed his temples, made him sharp-eyed, twitchy and quick to anger.

When they came upon the town it was thronged with soldiers; the French had just been driven out. A great victory, the officers were saying, and against overwhelming odds. It would go down in history, like Crécy or Agincourt. Whenever Englishmen spoke of glories, and the French of humiliation and disgrace, they would talk of Sahagún de Campos, and shake their heads in awe.

The town was uncouth, filthy, violent. In the dark streets behind the San Tirso church, under its archways, the wraiths gathered. They washed up in a tide-line, huge eyes catching the light, bones bulging at knee and elbow.

The redcoats and the gunners would go there; soldiers will take their comforts where they can. And God knows, the women, and the children, they sold themselves willingly enough. If will could be said to come into it, at times like that.

But the thing was—Pye laughed and swigged his tumbler of rough wine, a one-too-many tumbler that was tipping him over the edge of leery cheerfulness into queasy confidences—a fresh bit of flesh, insofar as anything in this godforsaken cesspit was fresh, it was stupidly easy to get; these youngsters were all so ready to be duped. You didn’t even have to give them anything—just the promise was enough; they wanted to trust you. They were just so callow, so stupidly young. And when you’d done what you liked, and you didn’t hand over your biscuit or your bit of bread, what would a girl like that be able to do about it? Fight you for it? Ha! Pull a
knife
on you?

James, sick, swilled down his wine, and did not look at Pye.

He took to ghosting through the narrow streets himself. He didn’t desire those little bags of bones; he couldn’t fathom how anybody could—they fostered in him instead an aching sympathy, and a sharper outrage. He understood now the joy of everything that he had been so desperate to shrug off: a warm bed, a cup of milk, the next day unspooling just the same as the day before, and the only pressing need being for a good smooth stone to throw at the thieving crows.

He came upon a ragged girl, lugging a smaller boy on her hip. James had a bit of bread about him—he fumbled it out, offered it to her. She looked at it, and then at him. Then, with a slow blink, she put the boy
down, and murmured something in the child’s ear that made him sit and stick his thumb in his mouth. She came up to James, hang-dog, unbuttoning.