rebels. But you believe Don Blas to be alive, yes?’
Sharpe hesitated, but Ardiles had favoured him with a revelation, and Sharpe’s truth was nowhere near so dangerous, so he told it. ‘No.’
‘So why are you here?’
‘Because I’ve been paid to look for him. Maybe I shall find his dead body?’ Because even that, Sharpe had decided, would give Louisa some small comfort. It would, at the very least, offer her certainty and if Sharpe could arrange to have the body carried home to Spain then Louisa could bury Don Blas in his family’s vault in the great cathedral in Santiago de Compostela.
Ardiles scoffed at Sharpe’s mild hopes. He waved northwards through the spitting sleet and the spume and the wild waves’ turmoil. ‘That’s a whole continent up there! Not an English farmyard! You won’t find a single body in a continent, Englishman, not if someone else has decided to hide it.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘Because if my tale of carrying Don Blas to meet the rebels is right, then Don Blas was not just a soldier, but a soldier playing politics, and that’s a more dangerous pastime than fighting. Besides, if the Spanish high command decides not to help you, how will you achieve anything?’
‘By bribes?’ Sharpe suggested.
Ardiles laughed. ‘I wish you luck, Englishman, but if you’re offering money they’ll just tell you what you want to hear until you’ve no money left, then they’ll clean their knife blades in your guts. Take my advice! Vivar’s dead! Go home!’
Sharpe crouched against a sudden attack of wind-slathered foam that shrieked down the deck and smashed white against the helmsman and his companion. ‘What I don’t understand,’ Sharpe shouted when the sea had sucked itself out of the scuppers, ‘is why the rebels haven’t boasted about Don Blas’s death! If you’re a rebel and you kill or capture your enemy’s commander, why keep it a secret? Why not trumpet your success?’
‘You expect sense out of Chile?’ Ardiles asked cynically.
Sharpe ducked again as the wind flailed more salt foam across the quarterdeck. ‘Don Blas’s widow doesn’t believe it was the rebels who attacked her husband. She thinks it was Captain-General Bautista.’
Ardiles looked grimmer than ever. ‘Then Don Blas’s widow had best keep her thoughts to herself. Bautista is not a man to antagonize. He has pride, a memory, and a taste for cruelty.’
‘And for corruption?’ Sharpe asked.
Ardiles paused, as though weighing the good sense of continuing this conversation, then he shrugged. ‘Miguel Bautista is the prince of thieves, but that doesn’t mean he won’t one day be the ruler of Spain. How else do men become great, except by extortion and fear? I will give you some advice, Englishman.’ Ardiles’s voice had become fierce with intensity. ‘Don’t make an enemy of Bautista. You hear me?’
‘Of course.’ The warning seemed extraordinary to Sharpe; a testimony to the real fear that Miguel Bautista, Vivar’s erstwhile enemy, inspired.
Ardiles suddenly grinned, as though he wanted to erase the grimness of his last words. ‘The trouble with Don Blas, Englishman, was that he was very close to being a saint. He was an honourable man, and you know what happens to honourable men – they prove to be an embarrassment. This world isn’t governed by honourable men, but by lawyers and politicians, and whenever such scum come across an honest man they have to kill him.’ The ship shuddered as a huge wave smashed ragged down the port gunwale. Ardiles laughed at the weather’s malevolence, then looked again at Sharpe. ‘Take my advice, Englishman! Go home! I’ll be sailing back to Spain in a week’s time, which gives you just long enough to visit the chingana behind the church in Valdivia, after which you should sail home to your wife.’
‘The chingana?’ Sharpe asked.
‘A chingana is where you go for a chingada,’ Ardiles said unhelpfully. ‘A chingana is either a tavern that sells whores, or a whorehouse that sells liquor, and the chingana behind the church in Valdivia has half-breed girls who give chingadas that leave men gasping for life. It’s the best whorehouse for miles. You know how you can tell which is the best whorehouse in a Spanish town?’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s the one where all the priests go, and this one is where the bishop goes! So visit the mestiza whores, then go home and tell Vivar’s wife that her husband’s body was eaten by wild pigs!’
But Sharpe had not been paid to go home and tell stories. He had taken Doña Louisa’s money, and he was far from home, and he would not go back defeated. He would find Don Blas, no matter how deep the forest or high the hill. If Don Blas still had form, then Sharpe would find it.
He had sworn as much, and he would keep his promise. He would find Don Blas.
Albatrosses ghosted alongside the Espiritu Santo’s rigging. The frigate, Cape Horn left far behind her, was sailing before a friendly wind on a swirling current of icy water. Dolphins followed the frigate, while whales surfaced and rolled on either flank.
‘Christ, but there’s some meat on those bloody fish!’ Harper said in admiration as a great whale plunged past the Espiritu Santo. The ship was sailing north along the Chilean coast, out of sight of land, though the proximity of the shore was marked by the towering white clouds which heaped above the Andes. Inshore, the sailors said, were yet stranger creatures: penguins and sea lions, mermaids and turtles, but the frigate was staying well clear of the uncharted Chilean coastline so that Harper, to his regret, was denied a chance of glimpsing such strange monsters. Ardiles, still hoping to capture his own monster, Lord Cochrane, continued to exercise his guns even though his men were already as well-trained as any gunners Sharpe had ever seen.
Yet it seemed there was to be no victory over the devil Cochrane on this voyage, for the Espiritu Santo’s lookouts saw no other ships till the frigate at last closed on the land. Then the lookouts glimpsed a harmless fleet of small fishing vessels that dragged their nets through the cold offshore rollers. The men aboard the fishing boats claimed not to have seen any rebel warships. ‘Though God only knows if they’re telling the truth,’ Lieutenant Otero told Sharpe. Land was still out of sight, but everyone on board knew that the voyage was ending. Seamen were repairing their clothes, sewing up huge rents in breeches and darning their shirts in readiness to meet the girls of Valdivia. ‘One day more, just one day more,’ Lieutenant Otero told Sharpe after the noon sight, and sure enough, next dawn, Sharpe woke to see the dark streak of land filling the eastern horizon.
That afternoon, under a faltering wind, a friendly tide helped the Espiritu Santo into Valdivia’s harbour. Sharpe and Harper stood on deck and stared at the massive fortifications that guarded this last Spanish stronghold on the Chilean coast. The headland which protected the harbour was crowned by the English fort, which in turn could lock its cannon fire with the guns of Fort San Carlos. Both forts lay under the protection of the artillery in the Chorocomayo Fort which had been built on the headland’s highest point. Beyond San Carlos, and still on the headland which formed the harbour’s western side, lay Fort Amargos and Corral Castle. The Espiritu Santo’s First Lieutenant proudly pointed out each succeeding strongpoint as the frigate edged her way around the headland. ‘In Chile,’ Otero explained yet again, ‘armies move by sea because the roads are so bad, but no army could ever take Valdivia unless they first capture this harbour, and I just wish Cochrane would try to capture it! We’d destroy him!’
Sharpe believed him, for there were yet more defences to add their guns to the five forts of the western shore. Across the harbour mouth, where the huge Pacific swells shattered white on dark rocks, was the biggest fort of all, Fort Niebla, while in the harbour’s centre, head on to any attacking ships, lay the guns and ramparts of Manzanera Island. The harbour would be a trap, sucking an attacker inside to where he would be ringed with high guns hammering heated shot down onto his wooden decks.
Only two of the forts, Corral Castle and Fort Niebla, were modern stone-walled forts.