LITMIR.BIZ

      Sharpe swore. Then, in desperation, he turned the map upside down. ‘Might as well not have a bloody map,’ he said, ‘for all the bloody use it is.’

      ‘We could light a fire with it,’ Sergeant Harper suggested. ‘Good kindling’s hard to come by in these hills.’

      ‘It’s no bloody use for anything else,’ Sharpe said. The hand-drawn map showed a scatter of villages, a few spidery lines for roads, streams or rivers, and some vague hatchings denoting hills, whereas all Sharpe could see was mountains. No roads or villages, just grey, bleak, rock-littered mountains with peaks shrouded by mists, and valleys cut by streams turned white and full by the spring rains. Sharpe had led his company into the high ground on the border between Spain and Portugal and there become lost. His company, forty soldiers carrying packs, haversacks, cartridge cases and weapons, seemed not to care. They were just grateful for the rest and so sat or lay beside the grassy track. Some lit pipes, others slept, while Captain Richard Sharpe turned the map right side up and then, in anger, crumpled it into a ball. ‘We’re bloody lost,’ he said and then, in fairness, corrected himself. ‘I’m bloody lost.’

      ‘My grand-da got lost once,’ Harper said helpfully. ‘He’d bought a bullock from a fellow in Cloghanelly Parish and decided to take a short cut home across the Derryveagh Mountains. Then the fog rolled in and grand-da couldn’t tell his left from his right. Lost like a wee lamb he was, and then the bullock deserted the ranks and bolted into the fog and jumped clear over a cliff into the Barra Valley. Grand-da said you could hear the poor wee beast bellowing all the way down, then there was a thump just like you’d dropped a bagpipe off

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