Sharpe’s Rifles: The French Invasion of Galicia, January 1809
Bernard Cornwell
Lieutenant Richard Sharpe and a detachment of riflemen join the assault of a strong French force holding the Holy City of Santiago de Compostela.Cut off from the rest of the army and surrounded, their only hope of escape is to accept the help of the Spanish, but this assistance comes at a price: to join the assault on the holy city of Santiago de Compostela, held by a strong French force. There is little Sharpe would enjoy more.Soldier, hero, rogue – Sharpe is the man you always want on your side. Born in poverty, he joined the army to escape jail and climbed the ranks by sheer brutal courage. He knows no other family than the regiment of the 95th Rifles whose green jacket he proudly wears.
SHARPE’S
RIFLES
Richard Sharpe and the French Invasion
of Galicia, January 1809
BERNARD CORNWELL
Copyright
This novel is a work of fiction. The incidents and some of the characters portrayed in it, while based on real historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Collins 1988
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1989
Copyright © Rifleman Productions Ltd 1988
Map © John Gilkes 2011
Bernard Cornwell asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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Source ISBN: 9780006176978
Ebook Edition © JULY 2009 ISBN: 9780007338733
Version: 2017-05-06
Sharpe’s Rifles is for Carolyn Ryan
‘Sharpe is the epitome of a nineteenth-century, romantic working-class hero. Cool, flash and fragrant … Escape and enjoy’
Daily Express
Table of Contents
Cover (#ucb849e7d-bf39-5024-b88b-3b067edef412)
Title Page (#ue9921fca-ad30-5cf5-843d-4f081243e9f6)
Copyright (#u641ce97d-6c41-5faa-8026-fb1eeb559a4a)
Dedication (#uf0951d8d-e5e9-5185-8bb5-0940df93371f)
Epigraph (#u0301e383-dba2-508d-81e2-c3cb03431e11)
Map (#u058f4307-451e-5b03-b712-c8733affb24d)
Prologue (#u8560d80a-cc24-5ba5-8ab9-a7854041a705)
Chapter One (#u9490270d-af34-50fc-abf3-f13f22fb4150)
Chapter Two (#u92e1dd0a-1394-5ad5-831a-07f3191f19ed)
Chapter Three (#u7e679e78-46f3-5220-bda1-a6520cabc8ef)
Chapter Four (#ue6b91032-3354-51e2-a229-b38b522a0495)
Chapter Five (#uec66878c-938a-5c39-84d3-157a226db965)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
Historical Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Sharpe’s Story (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
The SHARPE Series (in chronological order) (#litres_trial_promo)
The SHARPE Series (in order of publication) (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Bernard Cornwell (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
The prize was a strongbox.
A Spanish Major was struggling to save the box, while a chasseur Colonel of Napoleon’s Imperial Guard had been ordered to capture it. The Frenchman had been unleashed to the task; told that he could destroy or kill whatever or whoever tried to obstruct him.
The strongbox itself was a chest made of a wood so old that it appeared as black and shiny as coal. The wood was bound with two iron bands that, though pitted with ancient rust, were still strong. The old chest was two feet long, eighteen inches wide, and as many inches high. It was locked with two hasps that were fastened with brass padlocks. The joint between the humped lid and the chest was sealed with red seals, some of them so old that they were now little more than wisps of wax imbedded in the grain of the ancient wood. An oilcloth had been sewn around the strong box to protect it from the weather, or rather to protect the fate of Spain that lay hidden inside.
On the second day of 1809 the chasseur Colonel almost captured the strongbox. He had been given a Regiment of French Dragoons and those horsemen caught up with the Spaniards close to the city of Leon. The Spaniards only escaped by climbing into the high mountains where they were forced to abandon their horses, for no horse could climb the steep, ice-slicked tracks where Major Blas Vivar sought refuge.
It was winter, the worst winter in Spanish memory, and the very worst time to be in the northern Spanish mountains, but the French had given Major Vivar no choice. Napoleon’s armies had taken Madrid in December, and Blas Vivar had fled with the strongbox just one hour before the enemy horsemen had entered the capital. He had ridden with one hundred and ten Cazadores; the mounted ‘hunters’ who carried a straight-bladed sword and a short-barrelled carbine. But the hunters had become the hunted as, in a nightmare journey across Spain, Vivar had twisted and turned to avoid his French pursuers. He had hoped to find safety in General Romana’s northern army, but, only two days before the Dragoons forced them into the hills, Romana was defeated. Vivar was alone now, stranded in the mountains, with just ninety of his men left. The others had died.
They had died for the strongbox which the survivors carried through a frozen countryside. Snow thickened in the passes. When there was a thaw it only came in the form of rain; a pelting, relentless rain that turned the mountain paths into mud which froze hard in the long nights. Frostbite decimated the Cazadores. In the worst of the cold the survivors sheltered in caves or in high deserted farmsteads.
On one such day, when the wind drove a bitter snowfall from the west, Vivar’s men hunched in the miserable shelter of a narrow gully high on a mountain’s crest. Blas Vivar himself lay at the gully’s rim and stared into the valley through a long-barrelled telescope. He stared at the enemy.
Brown cloaks hid the pale green coats of the French Dragoons. These Frenchmen had followed Vivar every mile of his bitter journey but, while he struggled in the highlands, they rode in the valleys where there were roads, bridges, and shelter. On some days the weather would stop the French and Vivar would dare to hope that he had lost them, but whenever the snow eased for a few hours, the dreaded shapes would always appear again. Now, lying in the shivering wind, Vivar could see the enemy horsemen unsaddling in a small village that lay in the valley’s bottom. The French would have fires and food in the village, their horses would have shelter and hay, while his men sobbed because of the cold which lashed the mountainside.
‘Are they there?’ Vivar’s second in command, Lieutenant Davila, climbed up from the gully.
‘They’re there.’
‘The chasseur?’
‘Yes.’ Vivar was staring directly at two horsemen in the village street. One was the chasseur Colonel of the Imperial Guard, gaudy in his scarlet pelisse, dark green overalls and colback, a round hat made of thick black fur.
The other wore no uniform; instead he was dressed in a black, tight-waisted riding coat above white boots. Vivar feared the black-coated horseman more than he feared the chasseur, for it was he who guided the Dragoons’ pursuit. The black-coated man knew where Blas Vivar was heading, he knew where he could be stopped, and he knew the power of the object that was hidden in the ironbound box.
Lieutenant Davila crouched in the snow next to Vivar. Neither man looked like a soldier any more. They were swathed in cloaks made from common sacking. Their faces, boots, and hands were wrapped in rags. Yet, beneath their makeshift cloaks they wore the scarlet uniforms of a Cazador elite company, and they were each as hard and efficient as any man who struggled in the French wars.
Davila borrowed Vivar’s glass and stared into the valley. Driven snow blurred the view, but he could see the splash of the scarlet pelisse hanging from the chasseur’s right shoulder. ‘Why doesn’t he wear a cloak?’ he grumbled.
‘He’s showing how tough he is,’ Vivar said curtly.
Davila shifted the glass to see yet more Dragoons coming to the village. Some of the Frenchmen led limping horses. All carried swords and carbines. ‘I thought we’d lost them,’ he said sadly.
‘We’ll only lose them when we bury the last one.’ Vivar slid down from the skyline. He had a face hardened by sun and wind, a pugnacious face, but saved from coarseness by the dark eyes that could spark with humour and understanding. Now, watching his men shiver in the narrow gully, those eyes were rimmed with red. ‘How much food is left?’
‘Enough for two days.’
‘If I did not know better,’ Vivar’s voice was scarcely audible above the wind’s noise, ‘I would think God had abandoned Spain.’
Lieutenant Davila said nothing. A gust of wind snatched snow from the crest and whirled it in a glittering billow above their heads. The French, he thought bitterly, would be stealing food, firewood, and women in the valley. Children would be screaming. The men in the village would be tortured to reveal whether or not they had seen a tattered band of Cazadores carrying a strongbox. They would truthfully deny any such sighting, but the French would kill them just the same and the man in the black coat and white boots would watch without a flicker of emotion crossing his face. Davila closed his eyes. He had not known what it was to hate until this war had begun, and now he did not know if he would ever root the hate out of his soul.
‘We’ll separate,’ Vivar said suddenly.
‘Don Blas?’ Davila, his thoughts elsewhere, had misheard.
‘I shall take the strongbox and eighty men,’ Vivar spoke slowly, ‘and you will wait here with the other men. When we’re gone, and when the French are gone, you will go south. You will not move until you are sure the valley is empty. That chasseur is clever, and he may already have guessed what I am thinking. So wait, Diego! Wait till you are certain, then wait another day. Do you understand?’
‘I understand.’
Vivar, despite his agonizing tiredness and the cold that leached into his very bones, found some enthusiasm to invest his words with hope. ‘Go to Orense, Diego, and see if there are any of our men left. Tell them I need them! Tell them I need horses and men. Take those men and horses to Santiago, and if I’m not there, ride east till you find me.’
Davila nodded. There was an obvious question to ask, but he could not bring himself to speak.
Vivar understood anyway. ‘If the French have captured the strongbox,’ he said bleakly, ‘then you will know. They will trumpet their capture across Spain, Diego, and you will know because the war will be lost.’
Davila shivered beneath his ragged cloaks. ‘If you go west, Don Blas, you may find the British?’
Vivar spat to show his opinion of the British army.
‘They would help you?’ Davila insisted.
‘Would you trust the English with what is in the strongbox?’
Davila considered his answer, then shrugged. ‘No.’
Vivar eased himself to the crest once more and stared down at the village. ‘Perhaps those devils will meet the British. Then one pack of barbarians can kill the other.’ He shuddered with the cold. ‘If I had enough men, Diego, I would fill hell with the souls of those Frenchmen. But I do not have the men. So fetch them for me!’
‘I will try, Don Blas.’ It was as much of a promise as Davila dared offer, for no Spaniard could feel hopeful in these early days of 1809. The Spanish King was a prisoner in France, and the brother of the French Emperor had been enthroned in Madrid. The armies of Spain, which had shown such fine defiance the previous year, had been crushed by Napoleon, and the British army, sent to help them, was being chased ignominiously towards the sea. All that was left to Spain were fragments of its broken armies, the defiance of its proud people, and the strongbox.
The next morning, Vivar’s men carried the strongbox to the west. Lieutenant Davila watched as the French Dragoons saddled their horses and abandoned a village that had been plundered and from which the smoke rose into a cold sky. The Dragoons might not know where Blas Vivar was, but the man in the black coat and white boots knew precisely where the Major was going, and so the French forced their horses to the west. Davila waited a full day; then, in a downpour of rain that turned the snow to slush and the paths to thick mud, he went south.
The hunters and the hunted were moving again, inching their intricate paths across a wintry land, and the hunted were seeking the miracle that might yet save Spain and snatch a glorious victory from defeat.
CHAPTER ONE
More than a hundred men were abandoned in the village. There was nothing to be done for them. They were drunk. A score of women stayed with them. They were drunk too.
Not just drunk, but insensible. The men had broken into a tavern’s storeroom and found great barrels of last year’s vintage with which they had diluted their misery. Now, in a bleak dawn, they lay about the village like the victims of a plague.
The drunks were redcoats. They had joined the British army because of crime or desperation, and because the army gave them a third of a pint of rum a day. Last night they had found heaven in a miserable tavern in a miserable Spanish town on a miserable flint road that led to the sea. They had got drunk, so now they would be left to the mercy of the French.
A tall Lieutenant in the green jacket of the 95th Rifles moved among the bodies which lay in the stable yard of the plundered tavern. His interest was not in the stupefied drunks, but in some wooden crates that had been jettisoned from an ox-drawn waggon to make space for wounded and frost-bitten men. The crates, like so much else that the army was now too weak to carry, would have been left for the pursuing French, except that the Lieutenant had discovered that they contained rifle ammunition. He was rescuing it. He had already filled the packs and pouches of his Battalion with as many of the precious cartridges as the Riflemen could carry; now he and one Rifleman crammed yet more into the panniers of the Battalion’s last mule.
Rifleman Cooper finished the job then stared at the remaining crates. ‘What do we do with them, sir?’
‘Burn it all.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Cooper gave a brief laugh, then gestured at the drunks in the yard. ‘You’ll bleedin’ kill ’em!’
‘If we don’t, the French will.’ The Lieutenant had a slash of a scar on his left cheek that gave him a broodingly savage face. ‘You want the French to start killing us with our own gunpowder?’
Cooper did not much care what the French did. At this moment he cared about a drunken girl who lay in the yard’s corner. ‘Pity to kill her, sir. She’s a nice little thing.’
‘Leave her for the French.’
Cooper stooped to pull open the girl’s bodice to reveal her breasts. She stirred in the cold air, but did not waken. Her hair was stained with vomit, her dress with wine, yet she was a pretty girl. She was perhaps fifteen or sixteen years old, she had married a soldier and followed him to the wars. Now she was drunk and the French would have her. ‘Wake up!’ he said.
‘Leave her!’ All the same the Lieutenant could not resist crossing the yard to look down at the girl’s nakedness. ‘Stupid bitch,’ he said sourly.
A Major appeared in the yard’s entrance. ‘Quarter-master?’
The Lieutenant turned. ‘Sir?’
The Major had a small wiry moustache and a malevolent expression. ‘When you’ve finished undressing women, Quartermaster, perhaps you’d be good enough to join the rest of us?’
‘I was going to burn these crates first, sir.’
‘Bugger the crates, Quartermaster. Just hurry up!’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Unless you’d prefer to stay here? I doubt the army would miss you?’
The Lieutenant did not reply. Six months ago, when he had joined this Battalion, no officer would have spoken thus in front of the men, but the retreat had jaded tempers and brought hidden antagonisms to the surface. Men who would normally have treated each other with wary respect or even a forced cordiality, now snapped like rabid dogs. And Major Warren Dunnett hated the Quartermaster. It was a livid, irrational and consuming hatred, and the Quartermaster’s annoying response was to ignore it. That, and his air of competence, could provoke Major Dunnett into a livid anger. ‘Who in Christ’s holy name does he think he is?’ he exploded to Captain Murray outside the tavern. ‘Does he think the whole bloody army will wait for him?’
‘He’s just doing his job, isn’t he?’ John Murray was a mild and fair man.
‘He’s not doing his job. He’s gaping at some whore’s tits.’ Dunnett spat. ‘I didn’t bloody want him in this Battalion, and I still don’t bloody want him in the Battalion. The Colonel only took him as a favour to Willie Lawford. What the hell is this bloody army coming to? He’s a jumped-up sergeant, Johnny! He isn’t even a real officer! And in the Rifles, too!’
Murray suspected that Dunnett was jealous of the Quartermaster. It was a rare thing for a man to join Britain’s army as a private soldier and to rise into the officers’ mess. The Quartermaster had done that. He had carried a musket in the red-coated ranks, become a Sergeant, then, as a reward for an act of suicidal bravery on a battlefield, he had been made into an officer. The other officers were wary of the new Lieutenant’s past, fearing that his competence in battle would show up their own inexperience. They need not have worried, for the Colonel had kept the new Lieutenant from the battle-line by making him into the Battalion’s Quartermaster; an appointment based on the principle that any man who had served in the ranks and as a Sergeant would know every trick of the Quartermaster’s criminal trade.
Abandoning both the drunks and the remaining ammunition to the French, the Quartermaster emerged from the tavern yard. It began to rain; a sleet-cold rain that spat from the east onto the three hundred Riflemen who waited in the village street. These Riflemen were the army’s rearguard; a rearguard dressed in rags like a mockery of soldiers, or like some monstrous army of beggars. Men and officers alike were draped and bundled in whatever scraps of cloth they had begged or stolen on the march, the soles of their boots held in place by knotted twine. Their unshaven faces were wrapped with filthy scarves against the bitter wind. Their eyes were red-rimmed and vacant, their cheeks were sunken, and their eyebrows whitened by frost. Some men had lost their shakos and wore peasant hats with floppy brims. They looked a beaten, ragtag unit, but they were still Riflemen and every Baker rifle had an oiled lock and, gripped in its doghead, a sharp-edged flint.
Major Dunnett, who commanded this half Battalion, marched them westwards. They had been marching since Christmas Eve, and now it was a week into January. Always west away from the victorious French whose overwhelming numbers were swamping Spain, and every day of the march was a torture of cold and hunger and pain. In some Battalions all discipline had disappeared and the paths of such units were littered with the bodies of men who had given up hope. Some of the dead were women; the wives who had been permitted to travel with the army to Spain. Others were children. The survivors were now so hardened to horror that they could trudge past the frozen body of a child and feel nothing.
Yet if the army had been broken on the rack of ice-storms and a frozen wind that cut like a chasseur’s sabre, there were still some men who marched in good formation and who, when ordered, turned to keep the French pursuit at bay. Those were the hard men, the good men; the Guards and the Light Infantry, the elite of Sir John Moore’s army that had marched into the centre of Spain to cut off Napoleon’s supply roads. They had marched expecting victory, but the Emperor had turned on them with a savage speed and overwhelming numbers, so now this small British army retreated towards the ships that would take them home.
Dunnett’s three hundred Riflemen seemed alone in a frozen wilderness. Somewhere ahead of them was the bulk of the retreating army, and somewhere behind were the pursuing French, but the Riflemen’s world was the pack of the man in front, the sleet, their tiredness, and the pain of bellies cramped by hunger.
An hour from the village they reached a stream crossed by a stone bridge. British cavalry waited there with news that some artillery was floundering on a slope two miles ahead. The cavalry’s commander suggested that Dunnett’s Rifles wait by the bridge. ‘Give us time to help the gunners to the ridge, then we’ll come back for you.’
‘How long?’ Dunnett asked testily.
‘An hour? No longer.’
The Riflemen waited. They had done this a score of times in the last two weeks, and doubtless they would do it a score of times again. They were the sting in the army’s tail. If they were lucky this day no Frenchman would bother them, but the probability was that, sometime in the next hour, the enemy vanguard would appear. That vanguard would be cavalry on tired horses. The French would make a token attack, the Riflemen would fire a couple of volleys; then, because neither side had an advantage, the French would let the greenjackets trudge on. It was soldiering; boring, cold, dispiriting, and one or two Riflemen and one or two Frenchmen would die because of it.
The Riflemen formed in companies to bar the road west of the bridge. They shivered and stared east. Sergeants paced behind their ranks. The officers, all of whom had lost their horses to the cold, stood in front of their companies. No one spoke. Perhaps some of the men dreamed of the Navy’s ships that were supposed to be waiting for them at the end of this long road, but more likely their thoughts were of nothing but cold and hunger.
The Lieutenant who had been made into the Battalion’s Quartermaster wandered aimlessly onto the stone bridge and stared into the stinging sleet. He was now the closest man to the enemy, twenty paces ahead of the greenjacketed line, and that piqued Major Warren Dunnett who saw an unspoken arrogance in the Lieutenant’s chosen position. ‘Bugger him.’ Dunnett crossed to Captain Murray’s side.
‘He’s harmless.’ Murray spoke with his customary mildness.
‘He’s a jumped-up bloody nothing.’
Murray smiled. ‘He’s a damned efficient Quartermaster, Warren. When did your men last have so much ammunition?’
‘His job is to arrange my bed for tonight, not loiter here in the hope of proving how well he can fight. Look at him!’ Dunnett, like a man with an itching sore that he could not stop scratching, stared at the Quartermaster. ‘He thinks he’s still in the ranks, doesn’t he? Once a peasant, always one, that’s what I say. Why’s he carrying a rifle?’
‘I really couldn’t say.’
The rifle was the Quartermaster’s eccentricity, and an unfitting one, for a Quartermaster needed lists and ink and quills and tally-sticks, not a weapon. He needed to be able to forage for food or ferret out shelters in apparently overcrowded billets. He needed a nose to smell out rotten beef, scales to weigh ration flour, and stubbornness to resist the depredations of other Quartermasters. He did not need weapons, yet the new Lieutenant always carried a rifle as well as his regulation sabre. The two weapons seemed to be a statement of intent; that he wanted to fight rather than be a Quartermaster, yet to most of the greenjackets the weapons were a rather pathetic pretension carried by a man who, whatever his past, was now nothing more than an ageing Lieutenant.
Dunnett stamped his cold feet on the road. ‘I’ll send the flank companies back first, Johnny. You can cover.’
‘Yes, sir. Do we wait for our horse?’
‘Bugger the cavalry.’ Dunnett offered the infantryman’s automatic scorn of the mounted arm. ‘I’m waiting five more minutes. It can’t take this long to clear some bloody guns off the road. Do you see anything, Quartermaster?’ The question was asked mockingly.
‘No, sir.’ The Lieutenant took off his shako and pushed a hand through hair that was long, black, and made greasy by days of campaigning. His greatcoat hung open and he wore neither scarf nor gloves. Either he could not afford them, or else he was boasting that he was too tough to need such comforts. That arrogance made Dunnett wish that the new Lieutenant, so eager for a fight, would be cut down by the enemy horsemen.
Except there were no enemy horsemen in sight. Perhaps the rain and the wind and the God-damned bloody cold had driven the French to shelter in the last village. Or perhaps the drunken women had proved too irresistible a lure. Whichever it was, there were no Frenchmen in sight, just sleet and low clouds driven to turmoil by a freshening wind.
Major Dunnett swore nervously. The four companies seemed alone in a wilderness of rain and frost, four companies of forgotten soldiers in a lost war, and Dunnett made up his mind that he could wait no longer. ‘We’re going.’
Whistles blew. The two flank companies turned and, like the walking dead, shambled up the road. The two centre companies stayed at the bridge under Captain Murray’s command. In five minutes or so, when the flank companies had stopped to provide cover, it would be Murray’s turn to withdraw.
The Riflemen liked Captain John Murray. He was a proper gentleman, they said, and it was a fly bastard who could fool him; but if you were straight with him, then the Captain would treat you fair. Murray had a thin and humorous face, quick to smile and swift with a jest. It was because of officers like him that these Riflemen could still shoulder arms and march with an echo of the élan they had learned on the parade ground at Shorncliffe.
‘Sir!’ It was the Quartermaster who still stood on the bridge and drew Murray’s attention to the east where a figure moved in the sleet. ‘One of ours,’ he called after a moment.
The single figure, staggering and weaving, was a redcoat. He had no musket, no shako, nor boots. His naked feet left bloodstains on the road’s flint bed.
‘That’ll learn him,’ Captain Murray said. ‘You see, lads, the perils of drink?’
It was not much of a joke, merely the imitation of a preacher who had once lectured the Battalion against the evils of liquor, but it made the Riflemen smile. Their lips might be cracked and bloody with the cold, but a smile was still better than despair.
The redcoat, one of the drunks abandoned in the last village, seemed to flap a feeble hand towards the rearguard. Some instinct had awoken and driven him onto the road and kept him travelling westwards towards safety. He stumbled past the flensed and frozen carcass of a horse, then tried to run.
‘’Ware cavalry!’ the new Lieutenant shouted.
‘Rifles,’ Captain Murray called, ‘present!’
Rags were snatched from rifle locks. Men’s hands, though numb with the cold, moved quickly.
Because, in the white mist of sleet and ice, there were other shapes. Horsemen.
The shapes were grotesque apparitions in the grey rain. Dark shapes. Scabbards, cloaks, plumes and carbine holsters made the ragged outlines of French cavalry. Dragoons.
‘Steady, lads, steady!’ Captain Murray’s voice was calm. The new Lieutenant had gone to the company’s left flank where his mule was hobbled.
The redcoat twisted off the road, jumped a frozen ditch, then screamed like a pig in a slaughteryard. A Dragoon had caught the man, and the long straight sword sliced down to open his face from brow to chin. Blood speckled the frosted earth. Another horseman, riding from the other flank, hissed his steel blade to cut into the fugitive’s scalp. The drunken redcoat fell to his knees, crying, and the Dragoons rode over him and spurred towards the two companies which barred the road. The small stream would be no obstacle to their charge.
‘Serrez! Serrez!’ The French word of command came clear to the Riflemen. It meant ‘close up!’ The Dragoons bunched, booted knee to booted knee, and the new Lieutenant had time to see the odd pigtails which framed their faces before Captain Murray shouted the order to fire.
Perhaps eighty of the rifles fired. The rest were too damp, but eighty bullets, at less than a hundred yards, shattered the single squadron into a maelstrom of floundering horses, falling men, and panic. The scream of a dying horse flayed the cold day.
‘Reload!’
Sergeant Williams was on the right flank of Murray’s company. He seized one of the damp rifles which had not fired, scooped the wet sludge from its pan, and loaded it with dry powder from his horn. ‘Pick your targets! Fire as you will!’
The new Lieutenant peered through the dirty grey smoke to find an enemy officer. He saw a horseman shouting at the broken cavalry. He aimed, and the rifle bruised his shoulder as he fired. He thought he saw the Frenchman fall, but could not be sure. A riderless horse galloped away from the road with blood dripping from its saddle-cloth.
More rifles fired. Their flames spat two feet clear of the muzzles. The French had scattered, using the sleet as a screen to blur the Riflemen’s aim. Their first charge, designed only to discover what quality of rearguard faced them, had failed, and now they were content to harass the greenjackets from a distance.
The two companies that had retreated westwards under Dunnett had formed now. A whistle blew, telling Murray that he could safely fall back. The French beyond the bridge opened a ragged and inaccurate fire with their short-barrelled carbines. They fired from the saddle, making it even less likely that their bullets would find a mark.
‘Retire!’ Murray shouted.
A few rifles spat a last time, then the men turned and scrambled up the road. They forgot their hunger and desperate tiredness; fear gave them speed, and they ran towards the two formed companies who could hold another French charge at bay. For the next few minutes it would be a cat and mouse game between tired cavalry and cold Riflemen, until either the French abandoned the effort, or British cavalry arrived to drive the enemy away.
Rifleman Cooper cut the hobble of the Quartermaster’s mule and dragged the recalcitrant beast up the road. Murray gave the mule a cut on its backside with his heavy sword, making it leap forward. ‘Why don’t you let it go?’ he shouted at the Lieutenant.
‘Because I damn well need it.’ The Lieutenant ordered Cooper to take the mule off the road and up the northern hillside to clear the field of fire for Dunnett’s two companies. The greenjackets were trained to the skirmish line, to the loose chain of men who took shelter and sniped at the enemy, but on this retreat the men in green formed ranks as tight as the redcoats and used their rifles for volley fire.
‘Form! Form!’ Sergeant Williams was shouting at Murray’s company. The French advanced gingerly to the bridge. There were perhaps a hundred of them, a vanguard mounted on horses that looked desperately tired and weak. No horse should have been campaigning in this weather and on these bitter mountain roads, but the Emperor had launched these Frenchmen to finish off the British army and so the horses would be whipped to death if that meant victory. Their hooves were wrapped in rags to give purchase on slippery roads.
‘Rifles! Fix swords!’ Dunnett shouted. The long sword-bayonets were tugged from scabbards and clipped onto the muzzles of the loaded rifles. The command was probably unnecessary. The French did not look as though they would try another charge, but fixed swords was the rule for when facing cavalry, so Dunnett ordered it.
The Lieutenant loaded his rifle. Captain Murray wiped moisture from the blade of his Heavy Cavalry sword which, like the Lieutenant’s rifle, was an eccentricity. Rifle officers were expected to wear a light curved sabre, but Murray preferred the straight-bladed trooper’s sword that could crush a man’s skull with its weight alone.
The enemy Dragoons dismounted. They left their horses at the bridge and formed a skirmish line that spread either side of the road. ‘They don’t want to play,’ Murray said chidingly, then he twisted round in hope of a glimpse of the British cavalry. There was none.
‘Fall back by companies!’ Major Dunnett shouted. ‘Johnny! Take your two back!’
‘Fifty paces, go!’ Murray’s two companies, accompanied by the Quartermaster and his mule, stumbled back the fifty yards and formed a new line across the road. ‘Front rank kneel!’ Murray shouted.
‘We’re always running away.’ The speaker was Rifleman Harper. He was a huge man, an Irish giant in a small-statured army, and a troublemaker. He had a broad, flat face with sandy eyebrows that now were whitened by frozen sleet. ‘Why don’t we go down there and choke the bastards to death. They must have bloody food in those bloody packs.’ He twisted round to stare westwards. ‘And where the hell’s our bloody cavalry?’
‘Shut up! Face front!’ It was the Quartermaster who snapped the order.
Harper gave him a lingering look, full of insolence and disdain, then turned back to watch Major Dunnett’s companies withdraw. The Dragoons were dull shapes in the middle distance. Sometimes a carbine fired and the wind snatched at a smear of grey smoke. A greenjacket was hit in the leg and swore at the enemy.
The new Lieutenant guessed it was now about two hours before midday. This fighting retreat should be over by early afternoon, after which he would have to hurry ahead to find some cattleshed or church where the men could spend the night. He hoped a commissary officer would appear with a sack of flour that, mixed with water and roasted over a fire of cowdung, would have to suffice as supper and breakfast. With luck a dead horse would provide meat. In the morning, the men would wake with stomach cramps. They would again form ranks; they would march, then they would turn to fight off these same Dragoons.
Dragoons who now seemed happy to let the Riflemen slip away. ‘They’re not very eager today,’ the Lieutenant grumbled.
‘They’re dreaming of home,’ Murray said wistfully. ‘Of chicken and garlic in a pot, good red wine, and a plump girl in bed. Who wants to die in a miserable place like this if that’s waiting for you?’
‘We’ll retire by column of half companies!’ Dunnett, convinced that the enemy would not risk closing the gap, planned to turn his back on them and simply march away. ‘Captain Murray? Your men first, if you please.’
But before Murray could give an order, the new Lieutenant’s voice called in urgent warning, ‘’ware cavalry behind!’
‘They’re ours, you fool!’ Dunnett’s distaste for the Quartermaster could not be disguised.
‘Oh, Christ!’ Murray had turned to look up the road along which the four companies must retreat. ‘Rear rank! About turn! Major Dunnett! They’re crapauds!’
God alone knew how, but a new enemy had appeared behind. There was no time to wonder where they had come from, only to turn and face the three fresh squadrons of Dragoons. The French cavalry rode with open cloaks which revealed their pink-faced green coats. They carried drawn swords. They were led, curiously, by a chasseur; an officer in the red coat, scarlet pelisse and black fur hat of the Emperor’s Imperial Guard. Alongside him, mounted on a big roan, was an equally strange figure; a man dressed in a black riding coat and boots that were gleaming white.
Dunnett gaped at the new enemy. Riflemen frantically reloaded empty weapons. The Quartermaster knelt, braced his rifle by looping its sling about his left elbow, and fired at the chasseur.
He missed. Rifleman Harper jeered.
A trumpet sounded from the enemy. There was death in its shrill note.
The chasseur’s sabre was raised. Beside him the man in the civilian coat drew a long slim sword. The cavalry broke into the trot and the new Lieutenant could hear the hooves on the frozen ground. The Regiment of Dragoons still rode in squadrons that could be distinguished by the colour of their horses. The first squadron was on black horses, the second on bays, and the third on chestnuts; it was an arrangement common in peacetime, but rare in battle that swiftly diluted the pattern with remounts. The trumpeters were on greys, as were the three men who carried the guidons on their long staffs. The small flags were bright against the low clouds. The Dragoons’ long swords were even brighter, like blades of pale ice.
Major Dunnett realized his Riflemen were in danger of annihilation. ‘Rally square! Rally! Rally!’
The greenjackets contracted into the rally square; a clumsy formation whereby men crowded together for protection against cavalry. Any man who found himself in the front rank knelt and jammed his rifle butt into the turf so that his sword-bayonet’s blade could be held rigid. Others reloaded their rifles, skinning their frozen knuckles on the sword-bayonets’ long blades as they rammed the charges home. Rifleman Cooper and his mule sheltered in the middle of the square.
The chestnut squadron wheeled from the rear of the French charge, drew carbines, and dismounted. The other two squadrons spurred into the canter. They were still a hundred paces away and would not rowel their horses to the gallop till they were very close to their target.
‘Fire!’ Dunnett shouted.
Those Riflemen who had reloaded fired.
A dozen saddles were emptied. The Riflemen jostled each other, shaking themselves into ranks so that the rally square became a real square from which every rifle could fire. There were three ranks of them now, each plumed with bayonets.
‘Fire!’ More rifles spat, more cavalry fell, then the chasseur officer, instead of pressing the charge home, wheeled his horse away and the two squadrons sheered off to unmask the dismounted men who now opened fire with their carbines. The first Dragoons, the company which had waited by the bridge, closed on the square’s eastern face.
The rally square made a perfect target for the dismounted Dragoons. If the Riflemen shook themselves into line to sweep the makeshift infantry away, then the mounted cavalry would spur their horses back into motion and the greenjackets would become mincemeat. The chasseur Colonel, the Lieutenant thought, was a clever bastard; a clever French bastard who would kill some good Riflemen this day.
Those Riflemen began to fall. The centre of the square soon became a charnel house of wounded men, of blood, screams and hopeless prayer. The rain was stinging harder, wetting the rifle pans, but enough black powder fired to spit bullets at the enemy who, crouched in the grass, made small and elusive targets.
The two mounted squadrons had wheeled away to the west, and now reformed. They would charge along the line of the road, and the frozen steel of their heavy straight swords would burn like fire when it cut home. Except, so long as the Riflemen stayed together, and so long as their unbroken ranks bristled with the pale blades, the horsemen could not hurt them. But the enemy carbines were taking a fearful toll. And when enough Riflemen had fallen the cavalry charge would split the weakened square with the ease of a sword shattering a rotten apple.
Dunnett knew it, and he looked for salvation. He saw it in the low cloud which misted the hillside just two hundred yards to the north. If the greenjackets could climb into the obscuring shroud of those clouds, they would be safe. He hesitated over the decision. A Sergeant fell back into the square, killed clean by a ball through his brain. A Rifleman screamed as a bullet struck his lower belly. Another, shot in the foot, checked his sob of pain as he methodically reloaded his weapon.
Dunnett glanced up the hill at the cloud’s refuge. He stroked his small bristly moustache that was beaded with rain, then made his decision. ‘Uphill! Uphill! Keep ranks!’
The square inched uphill. The wounded screamed as they were carried. French bullets still thumped home and the greenjacket formation became ragged as men stopped to return the fire or help the casualties. Their progress was desperately slow, too slow for Major Dunnett’s frayed nerves. ‘Break and run! Break and run!’
‘No!’ The new Lieutenant shouted the countermand, but he was ignored. Dunnett’s order was given, and now it was a race. If the greenjackets could reach cover before the cavalry could reach them then they would live, but if the chasseur officer had judged his distance right, then he would win.
The red-coated chasseur had judged very well indeed.
The greenjackets ran, but over the sound of their hoarse breath and the pounding of their boots came the swelling thunder of the hooves.
A man turned and saw the bared teeth of a horse. He heard a sword hissing above the sound of the trumpet. The Rifleman screamed.
Then came chaos and slaughter.
The horsemen split the greenjackets apart then wheeled to the killing. The great swords chopped and speared. The new Lieutenant had a glimpse of a man with pigtails swinging beneath his helmet’s rim. He twisted aside and felt the wind of the Dragoon’s sword on his face. Another horseman rode at him, but he swung his rifle by its muzzle to crack the horse over the mouth. The horse screamed, reared, and the Lieutenant ran on. He was shouting for men to close on him, but the greenjackets were scattered and running for their lives. The Battalion’s mule bolted eastwards and Cooper, stubbornly trying to save his belongings which were strapped to the beast’s panniers, was killed by a sword stroke.
Major Dunnett was ridden down to the turf. A seventeen-year-old Lieutenant was caught by two Dragoons. The first blinded him with a slashing backstroke, the second stabbed into his chest. Still the horsemen came. Their horses stank with saddlesores because they had been ridden too hard, but they had been trained to this work. A Rifleman’s cheek was flensed from his face and his mouth bubbled with blood and saliva. The French grunted as they hacked. This was a cavalryman’s paradise; broken infantry and firm ground.
The new Lieutenant still shouted as he climbed. ‘Rifles! To me! To me! To me!’ The chasseur must have heard him, for he turned his big black horse and spurred towards the Englishman.
The Lieutenant saw him coming, slung his empty rifle, and drew his sabre. ‘Come on, you bastard!’
The chasseur held his own sabre in his right hand and, to make his killing cut easy, directed his horse to the left of the Rifleman. The Lieutenant waited to swing his curved blade at the horse’s mouth. The cut would stop its charge dead, making it rear and twist away. He had seen off more horsemen than he could remember with such a stroke. The skill lay in the timing, and the Lieutenant hoped that the horse’s panicked evasion would shake the rider loose. He wanted that clever chasseur dead.
A touch of the Frenchman’s spurs seemed to make the horse lunge forward for the killing stroke and the Lieutenant swung his sabre and saw he had been fooled. The horse checked and swerved in a manoeuvre which spoke of hours of patient training. The sabre hissed in empty space. The chasseur was not right-handed but left, and he had changed hands as his horse broke to the right. His blade glittered as it swept down, aimed at the Rifleman’s neck.
The Lieutenant had been fooled. He had swung early and into nothing, and he was off balance. The chasseur, knowing this Englishman was dead, was planning his next kill even before his sabre stroke went home. He had killed more men than he could remember with this simple trick. Now he would add a Rifle officer to all the Austrians, Prussians, Russians, and Spaniards who had not been skilful enough.
But the chasseur’s sabre did not cut home. With a speed that was astonishing, the Rifleman managed to recover his blade into the parry. The sabres met with a clash that jarred both men’s arms. The Lieutenant’s four-guinea blade shattered, but not before it had taken the force from the Frenchman’s slashing cut.
The momentum of the chasseur’s horse took him past the Englishman. The Frenchman turned back, astonished by the parry, and saw him turning to run uphill. For a second he was tempted to follow, but there were other, easier, targets down the hill. He spurred away.
The Lieutenant threw away his broken sabre and scrambled towards the low cloud. ‘Rifles! Rifles!’ Men heard and closed on him. They scrambled uphill together and made a large enough group to deter the enemy. The Dragoons went for individuals, the men most easily killed, and they took pleasure in thus avenging all the horsemen who had been put down by rifle bullets, all the Frenchmen who had jerked and bled their lives away on the long pursuit, and all the jeers that the Riflemen had sent through the biting air in the last bitter weeks.
Captain Murray joined the new Lieutenant. ‘Outfoxed us, by God!’ He sounded surprised.
The small group of Riflemen reached safety short of the clouds, up where the litter of rocks made the ground too uneven for the Dragoons to follow. There Murray stopped his men and stared, appalled, at the carnage beneath.
The Dragoons rode among the dead and the defeated. Riflemen with slashed faces reeled among them, others lay motionless until grasping hands turned the dead bodies and began ripping at pouches and pockets. The Quartermaster watched as Major Dunnett was pulled to his feet and his uniform searched for plunder. Dunnett was lucky. He was alive and a prisoner. One Rifleman ran downhill, still trying to escape, and the man in the black coat and white boots rode after him and, with a chilling skill, chopped down once.
‘Bastards.’ Murray, knowing there was no more fighting to do, sheathed his Heavy Cavalry sword. ‘Goddamned bloody crapaud bastards!’
Fifty Riflemen, survivors from all four companies, had been saved from the rout. Sergeant Williams was with them, as was Rifleman Harper. Some of the men were bleeding. A Sergeant was trying to staunch a terrible slash in his shoulder. A youngster was white-lipped and shaking. Murray and the new Lieutenant were the only officers to have escaped the massacre.
‘We’ll work our way east,’ Murray said calmly. ‘Maybe we can reach the army after dark.’
A morose swearword sounded from the big Irishman and the two officers glanced down the valley to see the British cavalry at last appear in the drizzle. The chasseur saw them at the same time, and the French trumpet called the Dragoons into order. The British, seeing the enemy’s preparedness, and finding no sign of infantry, withdrew.
The Riflemen on the cloud’s edge jeered at their retreating cavalry. Murray whipped round. ‘Silence!’
But the jeer had drawn the attention of the dismounted Dragoons on the slope below, and they believed the mocking sound had been aimed at them. Some of them seized carbines, others took up fallen rifles, and they fired a ragged volley at the small group of survivors.
The bullets hissed and whiplashed past the greenjackets. The ragged volley missed, except for one fatal bullet that ricocheted from a rock into Captain Murray’s side. The force of the bullet spun him round and threw him face down onto the hillside. His left hand scrabbled at the thin turf while his right groped in the blood at his waist.
‘Go on! Leave me!’ His voice was scarcely more than a whisper.
Rifleman Harper jumped down the slope and plucked Murray into his huge arms. The Captain sighed a terrible moan of pain as he was lifted. Below him the French were scrambling uphill, eager to complete their victory by taking these last Riflemen prisoner.
‘Follow me!’ The Lieutenant led the small group into the clouds. The French fired again, and the bullets flickered past, but the Riflemen were lost in the whiteness now. For the moment, at least, they were safe.
The Lieutenant found a hollow among the rocks that offered some shelter from the cold. The wounded were laid there while picquets were set to guard its perimeter. Murray had gone as white as cartridge paper. ‘I didn’t think they could beat us, Dick.’
‘I don’t understand where they came from.’ The Lieutenant’s scarred face, Murray thought, made him look like an executioner. ‘They didn’t get past us. They couldn’t!’
‘They must have done.’ Murray sighed, then gestured to Rifleman Harper who, with a gentleness that seemed odd in a man so big, first unstrapped the Captain’s sword belt, then unpeeled his clothes from the wound. It was clear that Harper knew his business, and so the Lieutenant went to peer down the fogged hillside for a sight of the enemy. He could neither see nor hear anything. The Dragoons evidently thought the band of survivors too small to worry about. The fifty Riflemen had become the flotsam of war, mere splinters hacked from a sinking endeavour, and if the French had known that the fugitives were led by a Quartermaster, they might have been even more contemptuous.
But the Quartermaster had first fought the French fifteen years before, and he had been fighting ever since. The stranded Riflemen might call him the new Lieutenant, and they might invest the word ‘new’ with all the scorn of old soldiers, but that was because they did not know their man. They thought of him as nothing more than a jumped-up Sergeant, and they were wrong. He was a soldier, and his name was Richard Sharpe.
CHAPTER TWO
In the night, Lieutenant Sharpe took a patrol westwards along the high crest. He had hoped to determine whether the French held the place where the road crossed the ridge, but in the freezing darkness and among the jumble of rocks, he lost his bearings and grudgingly went back to the hollow where the Riflemen sheltered.
The cloud lifted before dawn, letting the first wan light reveal the main body of the French pursuit in the valley which lay to the south. The enemy cavalry was already gone to the west, and Sharpe stared down at Marshal Soult’s infantry which marched in dogged pursuit of Sir John Moore’s army.
‘We’re bloody cut off.’ Sergeant Williams offered his pessimistic assessment to Sharpe who, instead of replying, went to squat beside the wounded men. Captain Murray slept fitfully, shivering beneath a half-dozen greatcoats. The Sergeant who had been slashed across the neck and shoulders had died in the night. Sharpe covered the man’s face with a shako.
‘He’s a jumped-up bit of nothing.’ Williams stared malevolently at Lieutenant Sharpe’s back. ‘He ain’t an officer, Harps. Not a real one.’
Rifleman Harper was sharpening his sword-bayonet, doing the job with the obsessive concentration of a man who knows his life depends on his weapons.
‘Not a proper officer,’ Williams went on. ‘Not a gentleman. Just a jumped-up Sergeant, isn’t he?’
‘That’s all.’ Harper looked at the Lieutenant, seeing the scars on the officer’s face and the hard line of his jaw.
‘If he thinks he’s giving me orders, he’s a bugger. He ain’t no better than I am, is he?’
Harper’s reply was a grunt, and not the agreement which would have given the Sergeant the encouragement he wanted. Williams waited for Harper’s support, but the Irishman merely squinted along the edge of his bayonet, then carefully sheathed the long blade.
Williams spat. ‘Put a bloody sash and sword on them and they think they’re God Almighty. He’s not a real Rifle, just a bloody Quartermaster, Harps!’
‘Nothing else,’ Harper agreed.
‘Bloody jumped-up storekeeper, ain’t he?’
Sharpe turned quickly and Williams, even though it was impossible, felt that he had been overheard. The Lieutenant’s eyes were hard as flint. ‘Sergeant Williams!’
‘Sir.’ Williams, despite his assertion of disobedience, stepped dutifully towards Lieutenant Sharpe.
‘Shelter.’ Sharpe pointed down into the northern valley where, far beneath them and slowly being revealed by a shredding mist, a stone farmstead could be seen. ‘Get the wounded down there.’
Williams hissed a dubious breath between yellowed teeth. ‘I dunno as how they should be moved, sir. The Captain’s …’
‘I said get the wounded down there, Sergeant.’ Sharpe had stepped away, but now turned back. ‘I didn’t ask for a debate on the God-damned matter. Move.’
It took the best part of the morning, but they succeeded in carrying the wounded down to the derelict farm. The dryest building was a stone barn, built on rock pillars that were meant to keep vermin at bay, and with a roof surmounted by crosses so that, from a distance, it looked like a small crude church. The ruined house and byres yielded damp and fungus-ridden timbers that, split and shredded with cartridge powder, were coaxed into a fire that slowly warmed the wounded men. Rifleman Hagman, a toothless, middle-aged Cheshireman, went to hunt for food, while the Lieutenant put picquets on the goat tracks that led east and west.
‘Captain Murray’s in a poorly way, sir.’ Sergeant Williams cornered Sharpe when the Lieutenant returned to the barn. ‘He needs a surgeon, sir.’
‘Hardly possible, is it?’
‘Unless we … that is …’ The Sergeant, a squat, red-faced man, could not say what was in his mind.
‘Unless we surrender to the French?’ Sharpe asked acidly.
Williams looked into the Lieutenant’s eyes. They were curious eyes, almost reptilian in their present coldness. The Sergeant found a truculence to brace his argument. ‘At least the crapauds have got surgeons, sir.’
‘In one hour,’ Sharpe’s voice implied that he had not even heard Williams’s words, ‘I’ll inspect every man’s rifle. Make sure they’re ready.’
Williams stared belligerently at the officer, but could not summon the courage necessary for disobedience. He nodded curtly and turned away.
Captain Murray was propped against a pile of packs inside the barn. He offered Sharpe a feeble smile. ‘What will you do?’
‘Sergeant Williams thinks I should take you to a French surgeon.’
Murray grimaced. ‘I asked what you wanted to do.’
Sharpe sat beside the Captain. ‘Rejoin.’
Murray nodded. He was cradling a mug of tea, a precious gift from one of the Riflemen who had hoarded the leaves in the bottom of his ammunition pouch. ‘You can leave me here.’
‘I can’t …’
‘I’m dying.’ Murray made a deprecatory shrug to show that he wanted no sympathy. His wound was not bleeding over-much, but the Captain’s belly was swelling blue to show that there was bleeding inside. He nodded towards the other three badly wounded men, all of them with great sword cuts on their faces or chests. ‘Leave them too. Where will you go? The coast?’
Sharpe shook his head. ‘We’ll never catch the army now.’
‘Probably not.’ Murray closed his eyes.
Sharpe waited. It had started to rain again and a leak in the stone roof dripped insistently into the fire. He was thinking of his options. The most inviting choice was to attempt to follow Sir John Moore’s army, but they were retreating so fast, and the French now controlled the road that Sharpe must take, and thus he knew he must resist that temptation for it would only lead into captivity. Instead he must go south. Sir John had marched from Lisbon, and a few troops had been left to protect the Portuguese capital, and perhaps that garrison still existed and Sharpe could find it. ‘How far is Lisbon?’ he asked Murray.
The Captain opened his eyes and shrugged. ‘God knows. Four? Five hundred miles?’ He flinched from a stab of pain. ‘It’s probably nearer six hundred on these roads. D’you think we’ve still got troops there?’
‘We can at least find a ship.’
‘If the French don’t get there first. What about Vigo?’
‘The French are more likely to be there than Lisbon.’
‘True.’ The Light Division had been sent to Vigo on a more southerly road. Only a few light troops, like these Riflemen, had been retained to protect Sir John Moore’s retreat. ‘Maybe Lisbon would be best.’ Murray looked past Sharpe and saw how the men were brushing and oiling their rifle locks. He sighed. ‘Don’t be too hard on them.’
‘I’m not.’ Sharpe was instantly defensive.
Murray’s face flickered with a smile. ‘Were you ever commanded by an officer from the ranks?’
Sharpe, smelling criticism, bridled for an instant, then realized that Murray was trying to be helpful. ‘No, sir, never.’
‘The men don’t like it. Stupid, really. They believe officers are born, not made.’ Murray paused to take a breath that made him shudder with pain. He saw Sharpe about to enjoin him to silence, but shook his head. ‘I haven’t got much time. I might as well use what there is. Do you think I’m being damnably rude?’
‘No, sir.’
Murray paused to sip at his tea. ‘They’re good lads.’
‘Yes.’
‘But they have an odd sense of what’s proper. They expect officers to be different, you see. They want them to be privileged. Officers are men who choose to fight, they aren’t forced to it by poverty. Do you understand that?’
‘Yes.’
‘They think you’re really one of them; one of the damned, and they want their officers to be touched by something more than that.’ Murray shook his head sadly. ‘It isn’t very good advice, is it?’
‘It’s very good,’ Sharpe lied.
The wind sighed at the corners of the stone barn and flickered the flames of the small fire. Murray smiled sadly. ‘Let me think of some more practical advice for you. Something that will get you to Lisbon.’ He frowned for an instant, then turned his red-rimmed eyes to Sharpe. ‘Get Patrick Harper on your side.’
Sharpe turned to glance at the men who were crowded at the barn’s far end. The big Irishman seemed to sense that his name had been mentioned for he offered Sharpe a hostile glance.
‘He’s a troublemaker, but the men listen to him. I tried to make him a Chosen Man once,’ Murray instinctively used the Rifle’s old term for a Corporal, ‘but he wouldn’t have it. He’d make a good Sergeant. Hell! Even a good officer if he could read, but he won’t have any of it. But the men listen to him. He’s got Sergeant Williams under his thumb.’
‘I can manage Harper.’ Sharpe said the words with a false conviction. In the short time that he had been with this Battalion, Sharpe had often noticed the Irishman, and he had seen for himself the truth of Captain Murray’s assertion that he was a natural leader. Men crowded to Harper’s campfire, partly to relish his stories, and partly because they wanted his approval. To the officers he liked the Irishman offered a humorous allegiance, while to those he disliked he offered nothing but scorn. And there was something very intimidating about Rifleman Harper; not just because of his size, but because of his air of knowing self-reliance.
‘I’ve no doubt Harper thinks he can manage you. He’s a hard man,’ Murray paused, then smiled, ‘but he’s filled with sentimentality.’
‘So he has a weakness,’ Sharpe said harshly.
‘Is that a weakness?’ Murray shrugged. ‘I doubt it. But now you’ll think I’m weak. When I’m dead, you see,’ and again he had to shake his head to stop Sharpe interjecting, ‘when I’m dead,’ he repeated, ‘I want you to take my sword. I’ll tell Williams you’re to have it.’
Sharpe looked at the Heavy Cavalry sword that was propped in its metal scabbard against the wall. It looked an awkward and clumsy weapon, but Sharpe could not make any such objection to the gift now. ‘Thank you.’ He said it awkwardly. He was not used to receiving personal favours, nor had he learned to be gracious in accepting them.
‘It isn’t much of a sword,’ Murray said, ‘but it’ll replace the one you lost. And if the men see you carrying it …’ he was unable to finish the sentence.
‘They’ll think I’m a real officer?’ The words betrayed Sharpe’s resentment.
‘They’ll think I liked you,’ Murray spoke in gentle correction, ‘and that will help.’
Sharpe, reproved by the tone in the dying man’s voice, again muttered his thanks.
Murray shrugged. ‘I watched you yesterday. You’re good in a fight, aren’t you?’
‘For a Quartermaster?’
Murray ignored the self-pity. ‘You’ve seen a lot of battles?’
‘Yes.’
‘That wasn’t very tactful of you,’ Murray smiled, ‘new Lieutenants aren’t supposed to be more experienced than their seniors.’ The Captain looked up at the broken roof. ‘Bloody silly place to die, isn’t it?’
‘I’m going to keep you alive.’
‘I suspect you can do many things, Lieutenant Sharpe, but you’re not a miracle worker.’
Murray slept after that. All the Riflemen rested that day. The rain was insistent and, in mid-afternoon, turned to a heavy, wet snow which, by nightfall, was settling on the shoulders of the closest hills. Hagman had snared two rabbits, thin fare, but something to flavour the few beans and scraps of bread that the men had hoarded in their knapsacks. There were no cooking cauldrons, but the men used tin mugs as saucepans.
Sharpe left the barn at dusk and went to the cold shelter of the ruined farmhouse to watch the night fall. It was not much of a house, merely four broken stone walls that had once held up a timber and sod roof. One door faced east, another west, and from the eastern door Sharpe could see far down a valley that now whirled and bellied with snow. Once, when the driving snow was lifted by the wind, he thought he saw the grey smear of smoke at the valley’s end; evidence, perhaps, of a tiny village where they could find shelter, then the snow blanketed the view again. He shivered, and it seemed impossible that this was Spain.
Footsteps made him turn. Rifleman Harper ducked under the western door of the small house, saw Sharpe, and checked. He waved a hand at some fallen roof beams that were embedded in stones and turf. ‘Timber, sir,’ he explained his errand, ‘for the fire.’
‘Carry on.’ Sharpe watched as the Irishman took hold of the rotted timbers and snapped them clear of their obstructions. Harper seemed to resent being watched, for he straightened up and stared at the Lieutenant. ‘So what are we doing, sir?’
For a second Sharpe took offence at the surly tone, then realized that Harper was only asking what every man in the company wanted to know. ‘We’re going home.’
‘You mean England?’
‘I mean back to the army.’ Sharpe suddenly wished he faced this journey alone, unencumbered by resentful men. ‘We’ll have to go south. To Lisbon.’
Harper crossed to the doorway where he stooped to stare eastwards. ‘I didn’t think you meant Donegal.’
‘Is that where you come from?’
‘Aye.’ Harper watched the snow settle in the darkening valley. ‘Donegal looks something like this, so it does. Only this is a better land.’
‘Better?’ Sharpe was surprised. He was also obscurely pleased that the big man had deigned to have this conversation which made him suddenly more likeable.
‘Better?’ Sharpe had to ask again.
‘The English never ruled here. Did they, sir?’ The insolence was back. Harper, standing, stared down at the sitting Sharpe and there was nothing but scorn in his voice. ‘This is unsoiled country, so it is.’
Sharpe knew he had been lured into the question which had released this man’s derision. ‘I thought you were fetching timber.’
‘I was.’
‘Then fetch it and go.’
Later, after he had visited the shivering picquets, Sharpe went back to the barn and sat by the wall where he listened to the low voices of the men who gathered about Rifleman Harper. They laughed softly, letting Sharpe know that he was excluded from the company of soldiers, even of the damned. He was alone.
Murray died in the night. He did it without noise or fuss, just sliding decorously into death.
‘The lads want to bury him.’ Williams said it as though he expected Sharpe to disapprove.
Sharpe was standing in the barn’s doorway. ‘Of course.’
‘He said to give you this.’ Williams held out the big sword.
It was an awkward moment and Sharpe was aware of the men’s gaze as he took the cumbersome weapon. ‘Thank you, Sergeant.’
‘He always said it was better than a sabre in a fight, sir,’ Williams said. ‘Puts the fear of God into the bloody Frogs, it does. Right butcher’s blade, it is.’
‘I’m sure.’
The moment of intimacy, forged by the gift of the sword, seemed to give Williams confidence. ‘We were talking last night, sir.’
‘We?’
‘Me and the lads.’
‘And?’ Sharpe jumped from the barn’s raised doorway into a world made dazzling by new snow. The whole valley glittered under a pale sun that was threatened by thickening clouds.
The Sergeant followed him. ‘They’re not going, sir. Not going south.’ His tone was respectful, but very firm.
Sharpe walked away from the barn. His boots squeaked in the fresh snow. They also let in damp because, like the boots of the men he was supposed to command, they were torn, gaping, and barely held together with rags and twine; hardly the footwear of a privileged officer whom these frightened Riflemen would follow through the valley of the shadow of death. ‘And who made that decision, Sergeant?’
‘We all did, sir.’
‘Since when, Sergeant, has this army been a …’ Sharpe paused, trying to remember the word he had once heard at a mess dinner. ‘A democracy?’
Williams had never heard the word. ‘A what, sir?’
Sharpe could not explain what it meant, so tried a different approach. ‘Since when did Sergeants outrank Lieutenants?’
‘It isn’t that, sir.’ Williams was embarrassed.
‘Then what is it?’
The Sergeant hesitated, but he was being watched by men who clustered in the barn’s gaping entrance, and under their critical gaze he found courage and volubility. ‘It’s madness, sir. That’s what it is. We can’t go south in this weather! We’ll starve! And we don’t even know if there’s still a garrison at Lisbon.’
‘That’s true, we don’t.’
‘So we’ll go north, sir.’ Williams said it confidingly, as though he did Sharpe a great favour by the suggestion. ‘There are ports up there, sir, and we’ll find a boat. I mean the Navy’s still off the coast, sir. They’ll find us.’
‘How do you know the Navy’s there?’
Williams shrugged modestly. ‘It isn’t me who knows, sir.’
‘Harper?’ Sharpe guessed.
‘Harps! Lord no, sir. He’s just a bog-Paddy, isn’t he? He wouldn’t know nothing, sir. No, it’s Rifleman Tongue, sir. He’s a clever man. He can read. It was the drink that did him in, sir, you see. Only the drink. But he’s an educated man, sir, and he told us, see, how the Navy’s off the coast, sir, and how we can go north and find a boat.’ Williams, encouraged by Sharpe’s silence, gestured towards the steep northern hills. ‘It can’t be far, sir, not to the coast. Maybe three days? Four?’
Sharpe walked a few paces further from the barn. The snow was about four inches thick, though it had drifted into deeper tracts where the ground was hollowed. It was not too deep for marching, which was all Sharpe cared about this morning. The clouds were beginning to mist the sun as Sharpe glanced into the Sergeant’s face. ‘Has it occurred to you, Sergeant, that the French are invading this country from the north and east?’
‘Are they, sir?’
‘And that if we go north, we’re likely to march straight into them? Or is that what you want? You were quite ready to surrender yesterday.’
‘We might have to be a bit clever, sir. Dodge about a bit.’ Williams made the matter of avoiding the French sound like a child’s game of hide and seek.
Sharpe raised his voice so that every man could hear him. ‘We’re going south, Sergeant. We’ll head down this valley today and find shelter tonight. After that we turn south. We leave in one hour.’
‘Sir …’
‘One hour, Sergeant! So if you wish to dig a grave for Captain Murray, start now. And if you wish to disobey me, Sergeant Williams, then make the grave large enough for yourself as well. Do you understand me?’
Williams paused, wanting to offer defiance, but he quailed before Sharpe’s gaze. There was a moment of tension when authority trembled in the balance, then he nodded acceptance. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Then get on with it.’
Sharpe turned away. He was shaking inside. He had sounded calm enough giving Williams his parting orders, but he was not at all certain those orders would be obeyed. These men had no habit of obeying Lieutenant Sharpe. They were cold, far from home, surrounded by the enemy, and convinced that a journey north would take them to safety far faster than a journey to the south. They knew their own army had been outmanoeuvred and driven into retreat, and they had seen the remnants of the Spanish armies that had been similarly broken and scattered. The French spread victorious across the land, and these Riflemen were bereft and frightened.
Sharpe was also frightened. These men could call the bluff of his tenuous authority with a terrifying ease. Worse, if they perceived him as a threat to their survival, then he could only expect a blade in the back. His name would be recorded as an officer who had died in the débâcle of Sir John Moore’s retreat, or perhaps his death would not even be noticed by anyone for he had no family. He was not even sure he had friends any more, for when a man was lifted from the ranks into the officers’ mess he left his friends far behind.
Sharpe supposed he should turn back to impose his will on the makeshift company, but he was too shaken, and unwilling to face their resentment. He persuaded himself that he had a useful task to perform in the ruined farmhouse where, with a horrid feeling that he evaded his real duty, he took out his telescope.
Lieutenant Richard Sharpe was not a wealthy man. His uniform was no better than those of the men he led, except that his threadbare officer’s trousers had silver buttons down their seams. His boots were as ragged, his rations as poor, and his weapons as battered as any of the other Riflemen’s equipment. Yet he possessed one object of value and beauty.
It was the telescope; a beautiful instrument made by Matthew Burge in London and presented to Sergeant Richard Sharpe by General Sir Arthur Wellesley. There was a brass plate recording the date of the battle in India where Sharpe, a redcoat then, had saved the General’s life. That act had also brought a battlefield commission and, staring through the glass, he now resented that commission. It had made him a man apart, an enemy to his own kind. There had been a time when men crowded about Richard Sharpe’s campfire, and sought Richard Sharpe’s approval, but no longer.
Sharpe gazed down the valley to where, in the dusk’s snowstorm, he thought he had seen the grey smear of smoke from a village’s fires. Now, through the finely ground lenses, he saw the stone buildings and small high arch of a church’s bell tower. So there was a village just a few hours’ march away and, however poor, it would have some hoarded food; grain and beans would be buried in wax-sealed pots and hams hanging in chimneys. The thought of food was suddenly poignant and overwhelming.
He edged the telescope right, scanning the glaring brilliance of the snow. A tree hung with icicles skidded across the lens. A sudden movement made Sharpe stop the slewing glass, but it was only a raven flapping black against a white hillside. Behind the raven a churned line of footsteps showed where men had slithered down the hill into dead ground.
Sharpe stared. The tracks were fresh. Why had the picquets not raised an alarm? He moved the glass to look at the shallow trench in the snow that marked the line of the goat track and he saw that the picquets were gone. He swore silently. The men were already in mutiny. God damn them! He slammed the tubes of the spyglass shut, stood, and turned.
He turned to see Rifleman Harper standing in the hovel’s western doorway. He must have approached with a catlike stealth, for Sharpe had heard nothing. ‘We’re not going south,’ the Irishman said flatly. He seemed somewhat startled that Sharpe had moved so suddenly but his voice was implacable.
‘I don’t give a damn what you think. Just get out and get ready.’
‘No.’
Sharpe laid the telescope on his haversack that he had placed with his new sword and battered rifle on the window-sill of the ruined house. There was a choice now. He could reason and cajole, persuade and plead, or he could exercise the authority of his rank. He was too cold and too hungry to adopt the laborious course, and so he fell back on rank. ‘You’re under arrest, Rifleman.’
Harper ignored the words. ‘We’re not going, sir, and that’s that.’
‘Sergeant Williams!’ Sharpe shouted through the door of the hovel that faced towards the barn. The Riflemen stood in an arc about the shallow grave they had scooped in the snow. They watched, and their stillness was evidence that Harper was their emissary and spokesman this morning. Williams did not move.
‘Sergeant Williams!’
‘He’s not coming,’ Harper said. ‘It’s very simple, sir. We’re not going south. We’ll go north to the coast. We talked about it, so we did, and that’s where we’re going. You can come or stay. It’s all the same to us.’
Sharpe stood very still, disguising the fear that pricked his skin cold and churned in his hungry belly. If he went north then he tacitly agreed with this mutiny, he accepted it, and with that acceptance he lost every shred of his authority. Yet if he insisted on going south he was inviting his own murder. ‘We’re going south.’
‘You don’t understand, sir.’
‘Oh, I do. I understand very well. You’ve decided to go north, but you’re scared to death that I might go south on my own and reach the Lisbon garrison. Then I report you for disobedience and mutiny. They’ll stand you by your own grave, Harper, and shoot you.’
‘You’ll never make it to the south, sir.’
‘What you mean, Harper, is that you’ve been sent here to make sure I don’t survive. A dead officer can’t betray a mutiny, isn’t that right?’
Sharpe could see from the Irishman’s expression that his words had been accurate. Harper shifted uneasily. He was a huge man, four inches taller than Sharpe’s six feet, and with a broad body that betrayed a massive strength. Doubtless the other Riflemen were content to let Harper do their dirty work, and perhaps only he had the guts to do it. Or perhaps his nation’s hatred of the English would make this murder into a pleasure.
‘Well?’ Sharpe insisted. ‘Am I right?’
Harper licked his lips, then put his hand to the brass hilt of his bayonet. ‘You can come with us, sir.’
Sharpe let the silence drag out, then, as though surrendering to the inevitable, he nodded wearily. ‘I don’t seem to have much choice, do I?’
‘No, sir.’ Harper’s voice betrayed relief that he would not have to kill the officer.
‘Bring those things.’ Sharpe nodded at his haversack and weapons.
Harper, somewhat astonished to receive the peremptory order, nevertheless bent over to pick up the haversack. He was still bending when he saw he had been tricked. Harper began to twist away but, before he could protect himself, Sharpe had kicked him in the belly. It was a massive kick, thumping deep into the hard flesh, and Sharpe followed it with a two-handed blow that slammed down onto the back of Harper’s neck.
Sharpe was amazed that the Irishman could even stand. Another man would have been winded and stunned, but not him. He shook his head like a cornered boar, staggered backwards, then succeeded in straightening himself to receive Sharpe’s next blows. The officer’s right fist slammed into the big man’s belly, then his left followed.
It was like hitting teak, but the blows hurt Harper. Not enough. The Irishman grunted, then lurched forward. Sharpe ducked, hit again, then his head seemed to explode like a cannon firing as a huge fist slammed into the side of his skull. He butted his head forward and felt it smash on the other man’s face, then his arms and chest were being hugged in a great, rib-cracking embrace.
Sharpe raised his right foot and raked his heel down Harper’s shin. It must have hurt, but the grip did not lessen and Sharpe had no weapon left but his teeth. He bit the Irishman’s cheek, clamping his teeth down, tasting the blood, and the pain was enough to force Harper to release his huge embrace to hit at the officer’s head.
Sharpe was faster. He had grown up in a rookery where he had learned every trick of cheating and brutality. He punched Harper’s throat, then slammed a boot into his groin. Any other man would have been blubbing by now, shrivelling away from the pain, but Harper just seemed to shudder, then bored in again with his overwhelming strength.
‘Bastard.’ Sharpe hissed the word, ducked, feinted, then threw himself backwards so that he bounced off the blackened stone wall and used the momentum of his recoil to drive his bunched fists into the other man’s belly. Harper’s head came forward, and Sharpe butted again; then, through the whirl of lights that seared across his vision, he brought his fists backwards and forwards across the Irishman’s face.
Harper would not back down. He punched back, and drew blood from Sharpe’s nose and lips, then drove him reeling backwards. Sharpe slipped on snow, tripped on the floor’s rubble, and fell. He saw the massive boot coming, and twisted clear. He came up from the floor, snarling through blood, and grabbed Harper’s crossbelt. The Irishman was himself off balance now and Sharpe turned him, swung him, then let go. Harper spun away, staggered, and fell against the wall. A stone gouged blood down his left cheek.
Sharpe was hurting. His ribs were tender, his head spinning, and his face bloody. He saw the other greenjackets edging closer to where the two men fought. Their faces showed disbelief, and Sharpe knew that not one of them would intervene to help Harper. The big Irishman had been delegated to do this job, and would be left alone to finish it.
Harper spat, stared at Sharpe through a mask of blood, then heaved himself to his feet. He found his bayonet and drew it.
‘Use that, you Irish bastard, and I’ll kill you.’
Harper said nothing, and there was something very terrifying in his silence.
‘Bastard,’ Sharpe said again. He glanced towards his new sword, but the Irishman had edged round to bar that salvation.
Harper stepped forward, coming slowly, the sword-bayonet held like a fighter’s knife. He lunged with it once, sending Sharpe to one side, then lunged again, quick and hard, hoping to catch the officer off balance.
Sharpe, expecting the second lunge, avoided it. He saw the flicker of astonishment on the big man’s face. Harper was good, he was younger than Sharpe, but he had not fought a man with Sharpe’s quickness. Nor had he been hurt so much in a long time, and the flicker of surprise turned to pain as Sharpe’s fists slapped at his eyes. Harper slashed with the bayonet, using it now to drive his attacker away, and Sharpe let the blade come at him. He felt it slice at his forearm, he ignored it, and rammed the heel of his hand forward to break the Irishman’s nose. He clawed at Harper’s eyes, trying to hook them out of his skull. The Irishman wrenched away and Sharpe pushed him off balance again. Fire seared at his arm, the fire of warm blood drawn by steel, but the pain went as Harper fell.
Sharpe followed fast. He kicked once, twice, crunching his boot into the big man’s ribs, then he seized the bayonet, cutting his fingers, and stamped his heel onto Harper’s wrist. The weapon came away. Sharpe reversed it. He was panting now, his breath misting in the frigid air. Blood dripped from his hand to run down the blade. There was more blood on the snow which had drifted through the hovel’s broken roof and gaping doors.
The Irishman saw his death above him. He rolled, then jerked back towards Sharpe with a stone in his hand. He lunged with the stone, smashing it onto the point of the descending blade and the shock of it numbed Sharpe’s arm. He had never fought such power, never. He tried to drive the weapon down again, but Harper had heaved up and Sharpe cried aloud as the rock thumped into his belly. He fell onto the wall behind, his hand still numb where it held the bayonet.
He saw that Harper’s face had changed. Until that moment the big Irishman had seemed as dispassionate as a butcher, but now there was a berserker look on his face. It was the face of a man goaded into battle-fury, and Sharpe understood that till now Harper had been reluctantly doing a necessary job that had suddenly become a passion. The Irishman spoke for the first time since the fight had begun, but in Gaelic, a language Sharpe had never understood. He only understood that the words were an insult that would be the threnody of his death as Harper used the stone to crush his skull.
‘Come on, you bastard.’ Sharpe was trying to massage life back into his numbed arm. ‘You Irish scum. You bog-Paddy bloody bastard. Come on!’
Harper peeled bloody lips back from bloody teeth. He screamed a challenge, charged, and Sharpe used the chasseur’s trick. He switched the blade from his right to his left hand and screamed his own challenge. He lunged.
Then the world exploded.
A noise like the thunder of doom crashed in Sharpe’s ear, and a flash of flame seared close to his face with a sudden warmth. He flinched, then heard the whip-crack of a bullet ricocheting from the hovel’s wall.
Sharpe thought one of the other Riflemen had at last summoned up the courage to help Harper. Desperate as a cornered animal, he twisted snarling from the foul smell of the gunpowder smoke, then saw that the Irishman was as astonished as himself. The stone still grasped in his massive fist, Harper was staring at a newcomer who stood in the east-facing door.
‘I thought you were here to fight the French?’ The voice was amused, mocking, superior. ‘Or do the British have nothing better to do than squabble like rats?’
The speaker was a cavalry officer in the scarlet uniform of the Spanish Cazadores, or rather the remnants of such a uniform for it was so torn and shabby that it might have been a beggar’s rags. The gold braid which edged the man’s yellow collar was tarnished and the chain-slings of his sword were rusted. The black boots that reached midway up his thighs were ripped. A sacking cloak hung from his shoulders. His men, who had made the tracks in the snow and who now formed a rough cordon to the east of the farmhouse, were in a similar condition, but Sharpe noted, with a soldier’s eye, that all these Spanish cavalrymen had retained their swords and carbines. The officer held a short-barrelled and smoking pistol that he lowered to his side.
‘Who the devil are you?’ Still holding the bayonet, Sharpe was ready to lunge. He was indeed like a cornered rat; bloody, salivating, and vicious.
‘My name is Major Blas Vivar.’ Vivar was a man of middle height with a tough face. He looked, as did his men, as though he had been through hell in the last days, yet he was not so exhausted that his voice did not betray derision for what he had just witnessed. ‘Who are you?’
Sharpe had to spit blood before he could answer. ‘Lieutenant Richard Sharpe of the 95th. The Rifles,’ he added.
‘And him?’ Vivar looked at Harper.
‘He’s under arrest,’ Sharpe said. He threw down the sword-bayonet and pushed Harper in the chest. ‘Out! Out!’ He pushed him through the hovel’s door, out to where the other greenjackets waited in the snow. ‘Sergeant Williams!’
‘Sir?’ Williams stared with awe at their bloodied faces. ‘Sir?’
‘Rifleman Harper is under close arrest.’ Sharpe shoved Harper a last time, tumbling him into the snow, then turned back to the Spaniard’s mocking gaze.
‘You seem to be in trouble, Lieutenant?’ Vivar’s derision was made worse by the amusement in his voice.
The shame of the situation galled Sharpe, just as the Spaniard’s tone stung him. ‘It’s none of your business.’
‘Sir,’ Major Vivar chided him.
‘None of your bloody business, sir.’
Vivar shrugged. ‘This is Spain, Lieutenant. What happens here is more my business than yours, I think?’ His English was excellent, and spoken with a cold courtesy that made Sharpe feel mulish.
But the Englishman could not help his mulishness. ‘All we want to do,’ Sharpe smeared blood from his mouth onto his dark green sleeve, ‘is get out of your damned country.’
There was a hint of renewed anger in the Spaniard’s eyes. ‘I think I shall be glad to see you gone, Lieutenant. So perhaps I’d better help you leave?’
Sharpe, for better or worse, had found an ally.
CHAPTER THREE
‘Defeat,’ Blas Vivar said, ‘destroys discipline. You teach an army to march, to fight, to obey orders.’ Each virtue was stressed by a downward slash of the razor which spattered soapy water onto the kitchen floor. ‘But,’ he shrugged, ‘defeat brings ruin.’
Sharpe knew that the Spaniard was trying to find excuses for the disgraceful exhibition at the ruined farmstead. That was kind of him, but Sharpe was in no mood for kindness and he could find nothing to say in reply.
‘And that farmhouse is unlucky.’ Vivar turned back to the mirror fragment which he had propped on the window-ledge. ‘It always has been. In my grandfather’s time there was a murder there. Over a woman, naturally. And in my father’s time there was a suicide.’ He made the sign of the cross with the razor, then carefully shaved the angle of his jaw. ‘It’s haunted, Lieutenant. At night you can see ghosts there. It is a bad place. You are lucky I found you. You want to use this razor?’
‘I have my own.’
Vivar dried his blade and stowed it, with the mirror, in its leather case. Then he watched pensively as Sharpe spooned up the beans and pigs’ ears that the village priest had provided as supper. ‘Do you think,’ Vivar asked softly, ‘that, after your skirmish, the Dragoons followed your army?’
‘I didn’t see.’
‘Let us hope they did.’ Vivar ladled some of the mixture onto his own plate. ‘Perhaps they think I’ve joined the British retreat, yes?’
‘Perhaps.’ Sharpe wondered why Vivar was so interested in the French Dragoons who had been led by a red-coated chasseur and a black-coated civilian. He had eagerly questioned Sharpe about every detail of the fight by the bridge, but what most interested the Spaniard was which direction the enemy horsemen had taken after the fight, to which enquiry Sharpe could only offer his supposition that the Dragoons had ridden in pursuit of Sir John Moore’s army.
‘If you’re right, Lieutenant,’ Vivar raised a mug of wine in an ironic toast, ‘then that is the best news I’ve had in two weeks.’
‘Why were they pursuing you?’
‘They weren’t pursuing me,’ Vivar said. ‘They’re pursuing anyone in uniform, anyone. They just happened to catch my scent a few days ago. I want to be sure they’re not waiting in the next valley.’ Vivar explained to Sharpe that he had been travelling westwards but, forced into the highlands, he had lost all his horses and a good number of his men. He had been driven down to this small village by his desperate need for food and shelter.
That food had been willingly given. As the soldiers entered the small settlement Sharpe had noted how glad the villagers were to see Major Blas Vivar. Some of the men had even tried to kiss the Major’s hand, while the village priest, hurrying from his house, had ordered the women to heat up their ovens and uncover their winter stores. The soldiers, both Spanish and British, had been warmly welcomed. ‘My father,’ Vivar now explained to Sharpe, ‘was a lord in these mountains.’
‘Does that mean you’re a lord?’
‘I am the younger son. My brother is the Count now.’ Vivar crossed himself at this mention of his brother, a sign which Sharpe took to denote respect. ‘I am an hidalgo, of course,’ he went on, ‘so these people call me Don Blas.’
Sharpe shrugged. ‘Hidalgo?’
Vivar politely disguised his surprise at Sharpe’s ignorance. ‘An hidalgo, Lieutenant, is a man who can trace his blood back to the old Christians of Spain. Pure blood, you understand, without a taint of Moor or Jew in it. I am hidalgo.’ He said it with a simple pride which made the claim all the more impressive. ‘And your father? He is a lord, too?’
‘I don’t know who my father is, or was.’
‘You don’t know …’ Vivar’s initial reaction was curiosity, then the implication of bastardy made him drop the subject. It was clear that Sharpe had fallen even lower in the Spaniard’s opinion. The Major glanced out of the window, judging the day’s dying. ‘So what will you do now, Lieutenant?’
‘I’m going south. To Lisbon.’
‘To take a ship home?’
Sharpe ignored the hint of scorn which suggested he was running away from the fight. ‘To take a ship home,’ he confirmed.
‘You have a map?’
‘No.’
Vivar broke a piece of bread to mop up the gravy. ‘You will find there are no roads south in these mountains.’
‘None?’
‘None passable in winter, and certainly not in this winter. You will have to go east to Astorga, or west to the sea, before you will find a southern road open.’
‘The French are to the east?’
‘The French are everywhere.’ Vivar leaned back and stared at Sharpe. ‘I’m going west. Do you wish to join me?’
Sharpe knew that his chances of surviving in this strange land were slim. He had no map, spoke no Spanish, and had only the haziest notion of Spanish geography, yet at the same time Sharpe had no desire to ally himself with this aristocratic Spaniard who had witnessed his disgrace. There could be no more damning indictment of an officer’s failure of command than to be discovered brawling with one of his own men, and that sense of shame made him hesitate.
‘Or are you tempted to surrender?’ Vivar asked harshly.
‘Never.’ Sharpe’s answer was equally harsh.
His tone, so unexpectedly firm, made the Spaniard smile. Then Vivar glanced out of the window again. ‘We leave in an hour, Lieutenant. Tonight we cross the high road, and that must be done in darkness.’ He looked back at the Englishman. ‘Do you put yourself under my command?’
And Sharpe, who really had no choices left, agreed.
What was so very galling to Sharpe was that his Riflemen immediately accepted Vivar’s leadership. That dusk, parading in the trampled snow in front of the tiny church, the greenjackets listened to the Spaniard’s explanation. It was foolish, Vivar said, to try to go north, for the enemy was marching to secure the coastal harbours. To attempt to rejoin the retreating British army was equally foolish, for it meant dogging the French footsteps and the enemy would simply turn and snap them up as prisoners. Their best course lay south, but first it would be necessary to march westwards. Sharpe watched the Riflemen’s faces and for a second he hated them as they nodded their willing comprehension.
So tonight, Vivar said, they must cross the road on which the main French army advanced. He doubted if the road was garrisoned, but the Riflemen must be ready for a brief fight. He knew they would fight well. Were they not the vaunted British greencoats? He was proud to fight beside them. Sharpe saw the Riflemen grin. He also saw how Vivar had the easy manner of a born officer and for a second Sharpe hated the Spaniard too.
Rifleman Harper was missing from the ranks. The Irishman was under arrest and, by Sharpe’s orders, his wrists were first bound together then tied by a length of rope to the tail of a mule which the Major had commandeered from one of the villagers. The mule was carrying a great square chest that was wrapped in oilcloth and guarded by four of Vivar’s Spaniards who also, by default, acted as guards over the prisoner.
‘He’s an Irishman?’ Vivar asked Sharpe.
‘Yes.’
‘I like the Irish. What will you do with him?’
‘I don’t know.’ Sharpe would have liked to have shot Harper there and then, but that would have turned the other Riflemen’s dislike into pure hatred. Besides, to circumvent the army’s careful disciplinary process and shoot him out of hand would have been to demonstrate a disdain of authority as great as that which had earned Harper punishment in the first place.
‘Wouldn’t we march faster if he was untied?’ Vivar asked.
‘And encourage him to desert to the French?’
‘The discipline of your men is your own affair,’ Vivar said delicately, thus intimating that he thought Sharpe had mishandled the whole business.
Sharpe pretended to ignore his disapproval. He knew the Spaniard despised him, for so far Vivar had seen nothing but incompetence from Sharpe, and it was an incompetence made worse by comparison with his own easy authority. Vivar had not just rescued the British soldiers from their precarious refuge in the old farm, but from their officer as well, and every Rifleman in the makeshift Company knew it.
Sharpe stood alone as the troops formed into companies for the march. The Spaniards would lead, then would come the mule with its box-shaped burden, and the Riflemen would bring up the rear. Sharpe knew he should say something to his men, that he should encourage them or inspect their equipment, do anything which would assert his authority, but he could not face their mocking eyes and so he stayed apart from them.
Major Vivar, apparently oblivious to Sharpe’s misery, crossed to the village priest and knelt in the snow for a benediction. Afterwards he accepted a small object from the priest, but what it was Sharpe could not tell.
It was a bitter night. The thin snowfall had stopped at dusk and gradually the clouds cleared in the eastern sky to reveal a brightness of cold stars. A fitful wind whipped the fallen snow into airy and fantastic shapes that curled and glinted above the path on which the men trudged like doomed animals. Their faces were wrapped with rags against the pitiless cold and their packs chafed their shoulders raw, yet Major Vivar seemed imbued with an inexhaustible energy. He roamed up and down the column, encouraging men in Spanish and English, telling them they were the best soldiers in the world. His enthusiasm was infectious forcing a grudging admiration from Richard Sharpe who saw how the scarlet-uniformed cavalrymen almost worshipped their officer.
‘They’re Galicians.’ Vivar gestured at his Cazadores.
‘Local men?’ Sharpe asked.
‘The best in Spain.’ His pride was obvious. ‘They mock us in Madrid, Lieutenant. They say we Galicians are country fools, but I’d rather lead one country fool into battle than ten men from the city.’
‘I come from a city.’ Sharpe’s voice was surly.
Vivar laughed, but said nothing.
At midnight they crossed the road which led to the sea and saw evidence that the French had already passed. The road’s muddy surface had been ridged high by the guns, then frozen hard. On either verge white mounds showed where corpses had been left unburied. No enemy was in sight, no town or village lights showed in the valley, the soldiers were alone in an immensity of white cold.
An hour later they came to a river. Small bare oaks grew thick on its banks. Vivar scouted eastwards until he found a place where the freezing water ran shallow across gravel and between rocks that offered some kind of footing for the tired men but, before he would allow a single man to try the crossing, he took a small phial from his pouch. He uncorked it, then sprinkled some liquid into the river. ‘Safe now.’
‘Safe?’ Sharpe was intrigued.
‘Holy water, Lieutenant. The priest in the village gave it to me.’ Vivar seemed to think the explanation sufficient, but Sharpe demanded to know more.
‘Xanes, of course,’ the Spaniard said, then turned and ordered his Sergeant to lead the way.
‘Xanes?’ Sharpe stumbled over the odd world.
‘Water spirits.’ Vivar was entirely serious. ‘They live in every stream, Lieutenant, and can be mischievous. If we did not scare them away, they might lead us astray.’
‘Ghosts?’ Sharpe could not hide his astonishment.
‘No. A ghost, Lieutenant, is a creature that cannot escape from the earth. A ghost is a soul in torment, someone who lived and offended the Holy Sacraments. A xana was never human. A xana is,’ he shrugged, ‘a creature? Like an otter, or a water rat. Just something that lives in the stream. You must have them in England, surely?’
‘Not that I know of.’
Vivar looked appalled, then crossed himself. ‘Will you go now?’
Sharpe crossed the fast-flowing stream, safe from malicious sprites, and watched as his Riflemen followed. They avoided looking at him. Sergeant Williams, who carried the pack of a wounded man, stepped into deeper water rather than scramble up the bank where the officer stood.
The mule was prodded across the stream and Sharpe noticed with what care the soldiers guarded the oil-cloth-covered chest. He supposed it contained Major Vivar’s clothes and belongings. Harper, still tied to the packmule, spat towards him, a gesture Sharpe chose to ignore.
‘Now we climb,’ Vivar said with a note of satisfaction, as if the coming hardship was to be welcomed.
They climbed. They struggled up a steeply rising valley where the rocks were glossed by ice and the trees dripped snow onto their heads. The wind rose and the sky clouded again.
It began to sleet. The wind howled about their muffled ears. Men were sobbing with the misery and effort, but somehow Vivar kept them moving. ‘Upwards! Upwards! Where the cavalry can’t go, eh? Go on! Higher! Let’s join the angels! What’s the matter with you, Marcos? Your father would have danced up this slope when he was twice your age! You want the Englishmen to think a Spaniard has no strength? Shame on you! Climb!’
By dawn they had reached a saddle in the hills. Vivar led the exhausted men to a cave that was hidden by ice-sheathed laurels. ‘I shot a bear here,’ he told Sharpe proudly. ‘I was twelve, and my father sent me out alone to kill a bear.’ He snapped off a branch and tossed it towards the men who were building a fire. ‘That was twenty years ago.’ He spoke with a kind of wonder that so much time had passed.
Sharpe noted that Vivar was exactly his own age but, coming from the nobility was already a Major, while Sharpe came from the gutter and only an extraordinary stroke of fate had made him into a Lieutenant. He doubted if he would ever see another promotion, nor, seeing how badly he had handled these greenjackets, did he think he deserved one.
Vivar watched as the chest was fetched from the mule’s back and placed in the cave-mouth. He sat beside it, with a protective arm over its humped surface, and Sharpe saw that there was almost a reverence in the way he treated the box. Surely, Sharpe thought, no man, having endured the frozen hell that Vivar had been through, would take such care to protect a chest if it only contained clothes? ‘What’s in it?’ Sharpe asked.
‘Just papers.’ Vivar stared out at the creeping dawn. ‘Modern war generates papers, yes?’
It was not a question that demanded an answer, but rather a comment to discourage further questions. Sharpe asked none.
Vivar took off his cocked hat and carefully removed a half-smoked cigar that was stored inside its sweatband. He gave an apologetic shrug that he had no cigar to offer Sharpe, then struck a flame from his tinder box. The pungent smell of tobacco teased Sharpe’s nostrils. ‘I saved it,’ Vivar said, ‘till I was close to home.’
‘Very close?’
Vivar waved the cigar in a gesture that encompassed the whole view. ‘My father was lord of all this land.’
‘Will we go to your house?’
‘I hope to see you safe on your southern road first.’
Sharpe, piqued by the curiosity the poor have about the lordly rich, felt oddly disappointed. ‘Is it a large house?’
‘Which house?’ Vivar asked drily. ‘There are three, all of them large. One is an abandoned castle, one is in the city of Orense, and one is in the country. They all belong to my brother, but Tomas has never loved Galicia. He prefers to live where there are kings and courtiers so, on his sufferance, I can call the houses mine.’
‘Lucky you,’ Sharpe said sourly.
‘To live in a great house?’ Vivar shook his head. ‘Your house may be more humble, Lieutenant, but at least you can call it your own. Mine is in a country taken by the French.’ He stared at Rifleman Harper who, still tied to the mule’s tail, hunched in the wet snow. ‘Just as his is in a country taken by the English.’
The bitterness of the accusation surprised Sharpe who, beginning to admire the Spaniard, was disconcerted to hear such sudden hostility. Perhaps Vivar himself thought he had spoken too harshly, for he offered Sharpe a rueful shrug. ‘You have to understand that my wife’s mother was Irish. Her family settled here to escape your persecution.’
‘Is that how you learned English?’
‘That, and from good tutors.’ Vivar drew on the cigar. A slip of snow, loosened by the fire in the cave, slid from the lip of rock. ‘My father believed that we should speak the language of the enemy.’ He spoke with a wry amusement. ‘It seems strange that you and I should now be fighting on the same side, does it not? I was raised to believe that the English are heathenish barbarians, enemies of God and the true faith, and now I must convince myself that you are our friends.’
‘At least we have the same enemies,’ Sharpe said.
‘Perhaps that is a more accurate description,’ he agreed.
The two officers sat in an awkward silence. The smoke from Vivar’s cigar whirled above the snow to disappear in the misting dawn. Sharpe, feeling the silence hang heavy between them, asked if the Major’s wife was waiting in one of the three houses.
Vivar paused before answering, and when he did so his voice was as bleak as the country they watched. ‘My wife died seven years ago. I was on garrison duty in Florida, and the yellow fever took her.’
Like most men to whom such a revelation is vouchsafed, Sharpe had not the first idea how to respond. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said clumsily.
‘She died,’ Vivar went on relentlessly, ‘as did both of my small children. I had hoped my son would come back here to kill his first bear, as I did, but God willed it otherwise.’ There was another silence, even more awkward than the first. ‘And you, Lieutenant? Are you married?’
‘I can’t afford to marry.’
‘Then find a wealthy woman,’ Vivar said with a grim earnestness.
‘No wealthy woman would have me,’ Sharpe said, then, seeing the puzzlement on the Spaniard’s face, he explained. ‘I wasn’t born to the right family, Major. My mother was a whore. What you call a puta.’
‘I know the word, Lieutenant.’ Vivar’s tone was level, but it could not disguise his distaste. ‘I’m not sure I believe you,’ he said finally.
Sharpe was angered by the imputation of dishonesty. ‘Why the hell should I care what you believe?’
‘I don’t suppose you should.’ Vivar carefully wrapped and stored the remains of his cigar, then leaned back against the chest. ‘You watch now, Lieutenant, and I’ll sleep for an hour.’ He tipped the hat over his eyes and Sharpe saw the bedraggled sprig of rosemary that was pinned to its crown. All Vivar’s men wore the rosemary, and Sharpe supposed it was some regimental tradition.
Below them the Irishman stirred. Sharpe hoped that the cold was slicing to the very marrow of Harper’s bones. He hoped the Irishman’s broken nose, hidden beneath a snow-whitened scarf, was hurting like the devil. Harper, as if sensing these malevolent thoughts, turned to stare at the officer and the look in his eyes, beneath their frosted brows, told Sharpe that so long as Harper lived, and so long as nights were dark, he should beware.
Two hours after dawn the sleet turned to a persistent rain that cut runnels in the snow, dripped from trees, and transformed the bright world into a grey and dirty place of cold misery. The strongbox was put back on the mule and the sentries posted on its flanks. Harper, who had finally been allowed into the cave’s shelter, was tied once more to the animal’s tail.
Their route lay downhill. They followed a streambed which tumbled to the bottom of a valley so huge that it dwarfed the hundred soldiers into insignificant dark scraps. In front of them was an even wider, deeper valley which lay athwart the first. It was an immense space of wind and sleet. ‘We cross that valley,’ Vivar explained, ‘climb those far hills, then we drop down to the pilgrim way. That will lead you west to the coast road.’
First, though, the two officers used their telescopes to search the wide valley. No horsemen stirred there, indeed no living thing broke the grey monotony of its landscape. ‘What’s the pilgrim way?’ Sharpe asked.
‘The road to Santiago de Compostela. You’ve heard of it?’
‘Never.’
Vivar was clearly annoyed by the Englishman’s ignorance. ‘You’ve heard of St James?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘He was an apostle, Lieutenant, and he is buried at Santiago de Compostela. Santiago is his name. He is Spain’s patron saint, and in the old days thousands upon thousands of Christians visited his shrine. Not just Spaniards, but the devout of all Christendom.’
‘In the old days?’ Sharpe asked.
‘A few still visit, but the world is not what it used to be. The devil stalks abroad, Lieutenant.’
They waded a stream and Sharpe noted how this time Vivar took no precautions against the water spirits. He asked why and the Spaniard explained that the xanes were only troublesome at night.
Sharpe scoffed at the assertion. ‘I’ve crossed a thousand streams at night and never been troubled.’
‘How would you know? Perhaps you’ve taken a thousand wrong turnings! You’re like a blind man describing colour!’
Sharpe heard the anger in the Spaniard’s voice, but he would not back down. ‘Perhaps you’re only troubled if you believe in the spirits. I don’t.’
Vivar spat left and right to ward off evil. ‘Do you know what Voltaire called the English?’
Sharpe had not even heard of Voltaire, but a man raised from the ranks to the officers’ mess becomes adept at hiding his ignorance. ‘I’m sure he admired us.’
Vivar sneered at his reply. ‘He said the English are a people without God. I think it is true. Do you believe in God, Lieutenant?’
Sharpe heard the intensity in the question, but could not match it with any responding interest. ‘I never think about it.’
‘You don’t think about it?’ Vivar was horrified.
Sharpe bridled. ‘Why the hell should I?’
‘Because without God there is nothing. Nothing, nothing, nothing!’ The Spaniard’s sudden passion was furious. ‘Nothing!’ He shouted the word again, astonishing the tired men who twisted to see what had prompted such an outburst.
The two officers walked in embarrassed silence, breaking a virgin field of snow with their boots. The snow was pitted by rain and turning yellow where it thawed into ditches. A village lay two miles to their right, but Vivar was hurrying now and was unwilling to turn aside. They pushed through a brake of trees and Sharpe wondered why the Spaniard had not thought it necessary to throw picquets ahead of the marching men, but he assumed Vivar must be certain that no Frenchmen had yet penetrated this far from the main roads. He did not like to mention it, for the atmosphere was strained enough between them.
They crossed the wider valley and began to climb again. Vivar was using tracks he had known since childhood, tracks that climbed from the frozen fields to a treacherous mountain road which zigzagged perilously up the steep slope. They passed a wayside shrine where Vivar crossed himself. His men followed his example, as did the Irishmen among his greenjackets. There were fifteen of them; fifteen troublemakers who would hate Sharpe because of Rifleman Harper.
Sergeant Williams must have had much the same thoughts, for he caught up with Sharpe and, with a sheepish expression, fell into step with him. ‘It wasn’t Harps’s fault, sir.’
‘What wasn’t?’
‘What happened yesterday, sir.’
Sharpe knew the Sergeant was trying to make peace, but his embarrassment at his loss of dignity made his response harsh. ‘You mean you were all agreed?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You all agreed to murder an officer?’
Williams flinched from the accusation. ‘It wasn’t like that, sir.’
‘Don’t tell me what it was like, you bastard! If you were all agreed, Sergeant, then you all deserve a flogging, even if none of you had the guts to help Harper.’
Williams did not like the charge of cowardice. ‘Harps insisted on doing it alone, sir. He said it should be a fair fight or none at all.’
Sharpe was too angry to be affected by this curious revelation of a mutineer’s honour. ‘You want me to weep for him?’ He knew he had handled these men wrongly, utterly wrongly, but he did not know how else he could have behaved. Perhaps Captain Murray had been right. Perhaps officers were born to it, perhaps you needed privileged birth to have Vivar’s easy authority, and Sharpe’s resentment made him snap at the greenjackets who shambled past him on the wet road. ‘Stop straggling! You’re bloody soldiers, not prinking choirboys. Pick your bloody feet up! Move it!’
They moved. One of the greenjackets muttered a word of command and the rest fell into step, shouldered arms, and began to march as only the Light Infantry could march. They were showing the Lieutenant that they were still the best. They were showing their derision for him by displaying their skill and Major Vivar’s good humour was restored by the arrogant demonstration. He watched the greenjackets scatter his own men aside, then called for them to slow down and resume their place at the rear of the column. He was still laughing when Sharpe caught up with him.
‘You sounded like a Sergeant, Lieutenant,’ Vivar said.
‘I was a Sergeant once. I was the best God-damned bloody Sergeant in the God-damned bloody army.’
The Spaniard was astonished. ‘You were a Sergeant?’
‘Do you think the son of a whore would be allowed to join as an officer? I was a Sergeant, and a private before that.’
Vivar stared at the Englishman as though he had suddenly sprouted horns. ‘I didn’t know your army promoted from the ranks?’ Whatever anger he had felt with Sharpe an hour or so before evaporated into a fascinated curiosity.
‘It’s rare. But men like me don’t become real officers, Major. It’s a reward, you see, for being a fool. For being stupidly brave. And then they make us into Drillmasters or Quartermasters. They think we can manage those tasks. We’re not given fighting commands.’ Sharpe’s bitterness was rank in the cold morning, and he supposed he was making the self-pitying confession because it explained his failures to this competent Spanish officer. ‘They think we all take to drink, and perhaps we do. Who wants to be an officer, anyway?’
But Vivar was not interested in Sharpe’s misery. ‘So you’ve seen much fighting?’
‘In India. And in Portugal last year.’
Vivar’s opinion of Sharpe was changing. Till now he had seen the Englishman as an ageing, unsuccessful Lieutenant who had failed to either buy or win promotion. Now he saw that Sharpe’s promotion had been extraordinary, far beyond the dreams of a common man. ‘Do you like battle?’
It seemed an odd question to Sharpe, but he answered it as best he could. ‘I have no other skill.’
‘Then I think you will make a good officer, Lieutenant. There’ll be much fighting before Napoleon is sent down to roast in hell.’
They climbed another mile, until the slope flattened out and the troops trudged between immense rocks that loomed above the road. Vivar, his friendliness restored, told Sharpe that a battle had been fought in this high place where the eagles nested. The Moors had used this same road and the Christian archers had ambushed them from the rocks on either side. ‘We drove them back and made the very road stink with their blood.’ Vivar stared at the towering bluffs as if the stone still echoed with the screams of dying pagans. ‘That must be nearly nine hundred years ago.’ He spoke as if it were yesterday, and he himself had carried a sword to the fight. ‘Each year the villagers celebrate a Mass to remember the event.’
‘There’s a village here?’
‘A mile beyond the gorge. We can rest there.’
Sharpe saw what a magnificent site the canyon made for an ambush. The Christian forces, hidden in the high rocks, would have had an eagle’s view of the road and the Moors, climbing to the gorge, would have been watched every step of the way to the killing arrows. ‘And how do you know the French aren’t waiting for us?’ Emboldened by Vivar’s renewed affability, he raised the question which had worried him earlier. ‘We’ve got no picquets.’
‘Because the French won’t have reached this far into Spain,’ Vivar said confidently, ‘and if they had, then the villagers would have sent warning down all the roads, and even if the warnings missed us, we’d smell the French horses.’ The French, always careless of their cavalry horses, drove them until their saddle and crupper sores could be smelt half a mile away. ‘One day,’ Vivar added cheerfully, ‘the French will flog their last horse to death and we’ll ride over that loathsome country.’ The thought gave him a renewed energy and he turned towards the marching men. ‘Not far before you can rest!’
At which point, from above the gorge where the Moors had been ambushed, and in front of Sharpe where the road led down towards the pilgrim way, the French opened fire.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sharpe saw Vivar dive to the right side of the road, and threw himself to the left. The big, unfamiliar sword at Sharpe’s hip clanged on a rock, then the rifle was at his shoulder and he tore away the scrap of rag that kept rain from the gunpowder in the rifle’s pan. A French bullet gouged wet snow two inches to his right, another slapped with a vicious crack into the stone face above him. A man screamed behind him.
Dragoons. God-damned bloody Dragoons. Green coats and pink facings. No horses. Dismounted Dragoons with short carbines. Sharpe, recovering from his astonishment at the ambush, tried to make sense of the chaos of fear and noise that had erupted in the winter’s cold. He saw puffs of grey smoke, dirty as the thawing snow, in an arc about his front. The French had thrown a low barricade of stones across the road about sixty paces from the canyon’s mouth. It was long range for the French carbines, but that did not matter. The dismounted Dragoons who lined the peaks of the immense and sheer cliffs either side of the gorge were the men doing the damage.
Sharpe rolled onto his back. A bullet cracked into the snow where his head had been a second before. He could see the Dragoons standing on the lips of the chasm, firing down into the deathtrap of the road where, nine hundred years before, the Moors had been slaughtered.
Vivar’s men had scattered. They crouched at the base of the rocks and fired upwards. Vivar was shouting at them, calling for them to form a line, to advance. He was planning to charge the men who barred the road. Instinctively Sharpe knew that the French had foreseen that move, which was why they had not made their barricade in the gorge, but beyond it. They wanted to lure the ambushed out into the plateau, and there could only be one reason for that. The French had cavalry waiting, cavalry with long straight swords that would butcher unprotected infantry.
Even as that realization struck him, Sharpe also realized that he was acting like a Rifleman, not like an officer. He had taken shelter, he was looking for a target, and he did not know what his men were doing back in the gorge. Not that he had any desire to go back into that trap of rock and bullets, but such was an officer’s duty and so he picked himself up and ran.
He shouldered through the assembling Spaniards, saw that the mule lay kicking and bleeding, then was aware of a buzzing and cracking about his ears. The carbine bullets were spitting down into the gorge, ricocheting wildly, filling the air with a tangle of death. He saw a greenjacket lying on his belly. Blood had spewed from the man’s mouth to stain a square yard of melting snow. A rifle cracked to Sharpe’s left, then one to his right. The greenjackets had taken what cover they could and were trying to kill the Frenchmen above. It occurred to him that the French should have put more men on the heights, that the volume of their fire was too small to overwhelm the road. The thought was so surprising that he stood quite still and gaped at the high skyline.
He was right. The French had just enough men on the heights to pin the ambush down, yet the killing would not be done by those men, but by others. That knowledge gave Sharpe hope, and told him what he must do. He began by striding down the road’s centre and shouting for his men. ‘Rifles! To me! To me!’
The Riflemen did not move. A bullet slapped into the snow beside Sharpe. The French cavalrymen, more used to the sword than the carbine, were aiming high, but that common fault was small consolation amidst their bullets. Sharpe again shouted for the Riflemen to come to him but, naturally enough, they preferred the small shelter offered at the base of the cliffs. He dragged one man out of a rock cleft. ‘That way! Run! Wait for me at the end of the gorge.’ He rousted others. ‘On your feet! Move!’ He kicked more men to their feet. ‘Sergeant Williams?’
‘Sir?’ The reply came from further down the chasm, somewhere beyond the skeins of rifle smoke that were trapped by the rock walls.
‘If we stay here we’re dead ’uns. Rifles! Follow me!’
They followed. Sharpe had no time to reflect on the irony that men who had so recently tried to kill him now obeyed his orders. They obeyed because Sharpe knew what needed to be done, and the certainty of his knowledge was strong in him, and it was that certainty which fetched the greenjackets out of their scanty shelter. They also followed because the only other man they might have trusted, Harper, was not with them, but still tied to the wounded mule’s tail.
‘Follow! Follow!’ Sharpe jumped a wounded Spaniard, twisted as a bullet slashed past his face, then turned to his right. He had led his men almost to the mouth of the canyon, just behind the place where Vivar still formed his own dismounted cavalrymen into line. Once, years before, a fall of rock had slid down to make a shoulder of scree and turf and, though the slope was perilously steep, and made even more perilous by the melting snow, it offered a short cut to the hillside which, in turn, led to the heights above. Sharpe scrambled up the rockfall, using his rifle as a staff, and behind him, in ones and twos, the Riflemen followed.
‘Skirmish order!’ Sharpe paused at the top of the first steep slope to shrug off his encumbering pack. ‘Spread out!’
Some of the Riflemen suddenly realized what was expected of them. They were supposed to assault a steep and slippery slope at the top of which the French would be protected by the natural bastions of jumbled rock. Some of them hesitated and looked for cover. ‘Move!’ Sharpe’s voice was louder than the gunfire. ‘Move! Skirmish order! Move!’
They moved, not because of any confidence in Sharpe, but because the habit of obedience under fire ran deep.
Sharpe knew that to stay in the gorge was to die. The French wanted them in there, pinned by the carbines above to be slaughtered by the Dragoons who would charge from the roadblock. The only way to prise this ambush apart was to attack one of its jaws. Men would die in the attempt, but not so many as would die in the blood-reeking sludge and horror on the roadway.
Sharpe heard Vivar shout a word of command in Spanish, but he ignored it. The Major must do what he thought fit, and Sharpe would do as he thought best, and the strange exaltation of battle suddenly gripped him. Here, in the filthy stench of powder smoke, he felt at home. This had been his life for sixteen years. Other men learned to plough fields or to shape wood, but Sharpe had learned how to use a musket or rifle, sword or bayonet, and how to turn an enemy’s flank or assault a fortress. He knew fear, which was every soldier’s familiar companion, but Sharpe also knew how to turn the enemy’s own fear to his advantage.
High above Sharpe, silhouetted against the grey clouds, a French officer redeployed his men to face the new threat. The dismounted Dragoons who had lined the canyon’s edge must now scramble to their right to face this unexpected attack on their flank. They moved urgently, and the first French bullets hissed whip-quick in the freezing air.
‘I want fire! I want fire!’ Sharpe shouted as he climbed, and was rewarded by the cracks of the Baker rifles. The Riflemen were doing what they were trained to do. One man fired as his partner moved. The Dragoons, still searching for new positions in the high rocks, would hear the bullets spin past their ears. The French did not use rifles, preferring the faster musket, but a musket was a clumsy weapon compared to the slow-loading Baker.
A bullet hissed by Sharpe. He thought it must have been a rifle bullet fired from behind him and he wondered if one of his men, hating him, had aimed at his back. There was no time for that fear now though it was a real fear, for in India he had known more than one unpopular officer shot in the back. ‘Faster! Faster! Left! Left!’
Sharpe was gambling on his instinct that the men who had been positioned on the heights were only enough to hold the ambush down, and he hoped he was stretching those men too thin. He went further left, forcing the French to move again. He saw a face in the rocks ahead, a moustached face framed by the odd pigtails of the French Dragoons. Dragons was the French and Spanish name for them, and that thought wisped by Sharpe as the face disappeared behind a puff of smoke and again he heard the distinctive smack of a rifle bullet. A rifle! A Baker! He suddenly knew these must be the same men who had split apart Dunnett’s four companies of Riflemen at the bridge; they were using captured British rifles, and the memory of that defeat gave him a new anger which drove him onwards.
Sharpe turned abruptly towards the centre of the enemy’s weakened line. Somewhere on the hillside behind he had abandoned his unfired rifle and drawn his new sword. The weapon would make him a mark to the Dragoons, an officer to be shot, but it also made him visible to his men.
His legs were hurting with the effort of climbing. The slope was steep and ice-slick, and every footfall slid back before it took purchase. Anger had driven him up the hill, but now fear made him frail. Sharpe was panting, too out of breath to shout any more, conscious only of the need to close the gap on the French. He had a sudden certainty that he would die. He would die here, because even a Dragon could not fail to kill him at this short range. But still he climbed. What mattered was to prise open this jaw of the trap so that Vivar’s men could escape up the hill. Sharpe’s heart pounded in his chest, his muscles burned, his bruises ached, and he wondered whether he would feel the bullet that killed him. Would it strike clean, throwing him back to slide in blood and thawing snow down the slope? At least his men would know he was no coward. He would show the bastards how a real soldier died.
A Spanish volley sounded beneath him, but that was another battle. Further off a trumpet sounded, but it had nothing to do with Sharpe. His world was a few yards of slush with rocks beyond. He saw a shard of white struck by a bullet from a rock and knew some of his men were firing to give cover. He could hear other Riflemen following him, cursing as they slipped on the icy slope. He saw flashes of pale green in the rocks – Dragoons – and he jerked aside from a puff of smoke and the crash of the carbine rang in his ears. He wondered if he was dreaming, if he was already dead, then his left boot found a firm foothold on an outcrop of stone and he pushed desperately upwards.
Two guns hammered at him. Sharpe was screaming incoherently now; a scream of pure fear turning into a killing rage. He hated the whole world. He saw a Dragoon scrambling backwards with a ramrod in his hand and the big sword, Murray’s gift, cleaved down to smash into the man’s ribs. There was a moment when the blade was gripped by the flesh, but he twisted the steel free and swung it left so that blood drops spewed into the face of a French officer who lunged with his own sword at Sharpe’s belly. Sharpe let the enemy blade come, twisted aside, then rammed the guard of his heavy sword into the Frenchman’s face. A bone cracked, there was more blood, then the officer was on the ground and Sharpe was smashing at the man’s face with the disc hilt of his sword. A greenjacket ran past, sword-bayonet already bloodied, then another Rifleman was among the rocks.
Sharpe stood, reversed the sword, and stabbed down. On the long slope beneath him he could see two men who, in their green coats, lay like discarded rag dolls. A carbine fired to Sharpe’s left and up there, unprotected from the wind, the smoke was snatched clean away to show a frightened Dragoon turning to run.
Sergeant Williams shot the man, then stabbed him with his bayonet. He was shouting like a fiend. Other Riflemen reached the summit. A knot of Frenchmen tried to form a rally square at the canyon’s edge and Sharpe shouted for his men to attack. The greenjackets scrambled over patchy snow that was flecked red. Their faces were stained with powder and their lips were drawn back in a snarl as they moved like a wolfpack towards the Dragoons, who did not wait for the charge but broke and fled.
Bullets hissed from the Dragoons positioned on the far side of the gorge. A Rifleman spun, fell, then spat blood as he struggled to his hands and knees.
‘Sergeant Williams! Kill those bastards!’ Sharpe pointed across the canyon. ‘Get their bloody heads down!’
‘Sir!’
The trumpet sounded again and Sharpe veered back towards the slope he had climbed. At its foot Vivar had formed his men, but the French had expected it. Their main force had been barricaded on the road and now, from the Spaniard’s left flank, a company of Dragoons was lined for the charge. ‘You!’ Sharpe grabbed a greenjacket. ‘You!’ Another. ‘Kill those buggers.’
The rifles snapped at the horsemen. ‘Aim low!’ His voice was snatched by the wind. ‘Low!’ A horse went down. A man fell back from his saddle. Sharpe found a rifle among the rocks, loaded it, and fired downwards. Sergeant Williams had a dozen men sniping over the canyon, but the rest of the greenjackets were now pouring fire at the cavalry. They could not stop the charge, but they could unsettle it. A riderless horse stampeded in the snow, while another dragged a bleeding man across the charge’s face.
Vivar retreated. His thin line of men would have been turned into carrion by the Dragoon’s swords, and so the Major took shelter in the gorge. The French commander must have realized that his own charge was doomed, for the horsemen were pulled back. If the cavalry had funnelled themselves into the rocks, and done so without the help of cover from above, they would have been massacred by rifle fire.
Stalemate. Somewhere a wounded man sobbed in a terrible wailing voice. A limping horse tried to rejoin the cavalry’s ranks, but fell. Cartridge wadding smoked in the snow. Sharpe did not know whether two minutes or two hours had passed. He felt the cold seep back into his bones; a cold that had been vanquished by the sudden emergency. He grinned to himself, proud of his greenjackets’ achievement. It had been done with a ruthless speed which had unbalanced the enemy and taken away their advantage, and now there was stalemate.
The French still barred the road, but Sharpe’s Riflemen could harass those sheltering behind the low barricade, and they did so with the grim enjoyment of men revenging themselves. Two French prisoners had been taken on the heights; two miserable Dragoons who were shoved into a hollow of the rocks and guarded by a savage-looking Rifleman. Sharpe guessed there had never been more than three dozen Dragoons on each side of the chasm, and he could see no more than sixty or seventy either behind the barricade or in the ranks of the aborted charge. This could only be a detachment of Dragoons, a handful sent into the mountains.
‘Lieutenant!’ Vivar shouted from beneath Sharpe. The Spaniard was hidden by the loom of the rocks.
‘Major?’
‘If I reach the barricade, can you give me fire?’
‘You’ll never make it!’ If Vivar attacked the barricade, then his flank would again be open to the horsemen. Sharpe had seen what Dragoons could do to scattered infantry, and he feared for Vivar’s dismounted Cazadores. The carbine was not the Dragoons’ real weapon; they relished the power of their long straight swords and they prayed for rash fools on whom to wield the killing blades.
‘Englishman!’ Vivar shouted again.
‘Major?’
‘I spit on your opinion! Give me fire!’
‘Fool,’ Sharpe muttered, then shouted at his men, ‘Keep their heads down!’
Vivar’s men broke cover in a column of threes. The first time he had attacked, Vivar had made a line, but now he aimed his men like a human battering ram at the road’s obstruction. The Galicians did not march forward, but ran. Smoke puffed from the barricade and Sharpe’s men opened fire.
The mounted Dragoons, just forty strong, saw the scarlet-coated enemy come into the open. The horses wheeled and were spurred into a trot. Vivar ignored them. A Spaniard fell, and his comrades swerved round his body and reformed beyond. A trumpet sounded high and shrill, then at last the Major stopped his men and turned them towards the threatened flank.
Sharpe now saw what Vivar planned, and saw that it was brave to the point of idiocy. Ignoring the Dragoons behind the barricade he would pour all his fire into the horsemen. He was trusting the Riflemen to keep the dismounted Dragoons occupied, and Sharpe paced along his line of marksmen and shouted their targets to them. ‘That bugger by the tree. Kill him!’ He saw a man fire in a hurry and he kicked his leg. ‘Aim properly, you bastard!’ Sharpe looked for the telltale scatter of discarded powder which would betray a man who only half-charged his rifle to spare his shoulder the mule-hard kick of the butt, but none of the Riflemen were using that cheap expediency.
Two men at Vivar’s right file were down. They were the price Vivar had to pay. The cavalry was galloping at speed now, their hooves flinging up great gobs of dirty snow and soil.
‘Take aim!’ Vivar stood on the exposed right flank, the one closest to the barricade and where the greatest danger lay. He raised his sword. ‘Wait for it, wait for it!’
The snow was thin on the flat ground beside the road. The horses’ hooves thrummed the turf, and the long swords reflected the pale light. The trumpet hurled them on, faster, and the horsemen shouted the first challenge. The Spaniards had not formed a square, but were risking all on one crushing volley from men in line. Only disciplined troops could stand in line against a cavalry charge.
‘Fire!’ Vivar’s sword flashed down.
The Spanish carbines flamed. Horses tumbled. Blood, men and snow made a whirling chaos. Something screamed, but whether man or horse, Sharpe could not tell. Then, over the scream, came Vivar’s war shout. ‘Santiago! Santiago!’
The Galicians cheered, then charged. Not at the barricade, but towards the broken horsemen.
‘Jesus Christ!’ a Rifleman close to Sharpe muttered, then lowered his weapon. ‘They’re bleeding mad!’
But it was a magnificent madness. Sharpe’s men watched and he barked at them to keep firing at the enemy behind the barricade. He permitted himself to watch as the tough Galician soldiers discarded their firearms and drew their own long swords. They climbed over the dead horses and stabbed down at dazed Dragoons. Others seized bridles or dragged at riders.
The Frenchmen behind the barricade stood to make their own charge and Sharpe shouted a warning at Vivar, but one which he knew the Spaniard would never hear. He turned. ‘Sergeant Williams! Keep your men here! The rest of you! Follow!’
The Riflemen ran in a frenzied scramble down the hill. They made a ragged charge that would take the last Dragoons in the flank, and the French saw them coming, hesitated, then fled. Vivar’s men were taking prisoners or rounding up riderless horses, while the surviving Frenchmen scrambled away to safety. The battle was over. The ambushed, outnumbered, had snatched an impossible victory, and the snow stank of blood and smoke.
Then gunfire sounded from the canyon behind Sharpe.
Vivar turned, his face ashen.
A rifle fired, its sound amplified by the echo of rock walls.
‘Lieutenant!’ Vivar gestured desperately towards the canyon. ‘Lieutenant!’ There was a genuine despair in his voice.
Sharpe turned and ran towards the chasm. The gun-fire was sudden and brusque. He could see Sergeant Williams firing downwards, and he knew there must have been more Frenchmen hidden at the canyon’s far end; men who would have blocked the panicked retreat they had expected to provoke. Instead those men must be advancing up the canyon to take Vivar and Sharpe in the rear.
Except they had been stopped by one man. Rifleman Harper had found the rifle of a fallen man and, using the corpse of the mule as a bastion, was holding off the handful of Dragoons. He had cut the bonds from his wrists, using a bayonet that had slashed deep wounds into his hands, but, despite the bleeding cuts, he still loaded and fired his rifle with a fearful precision. A dead French horse and a wounded Dragoon witnessed to the Irishman’s skill. He screamed his Gaelic challenge at the others, daring them to come closer. He turned, wild-eyed, as Sharpe appeared, then turned scornfully back to face the French.
Sharpe lined his Rifles across the road. ‘Take aim!’ The chasseur in his red pelisse and black fur hat was in the gorge. Next to him rode the tall man in a black riding coat and white boots.
‘Fire!’ Sharpe shouted.
A dozen rifles flamed. Bullets whined in ricochet, and two more horsemen fell. The man in red and the man in black were safe. They seemed to stare directly into Sharpe’s eyes for an instant, then a fusillade from above made them turn their horses and spur away to safety. The Riflemen jeered, and Sharpe snapped them into silence. ‘And reload!’
The French had gone. Water dripped from thawing icicles that hung from rocks. A wounded horse whinnied. The filthy smoke of gunfire drifted in the gorge. A Rifleman vomited blood, then sighed. Another man wept. The wounded horse was silenced by a rifle shot, and the sound slammed in brutal echoes from the rock walls.
Footsteps sounded behind Sharpe. It was Blas Vivar who walked past him, past the greenjackets, and knelt by the mule. He carefully unstrapped the strongbox from the dead beast’s harness. Then, standing, he looked up at Harper. ‘You saved it, my friend.’
‘I did, sir?’ It was clear the Irishman had no idea what value Vivar placed on the chest.
The Spaniard reached up to the huge man and kissed both his cheeks. One of Sharpe’s Riflemen sniggered, then was shamed to silence by the moment’s solemnity.
‘You saved it,’ Vivar said again, and there were tears in his eyes. Then he lifted the strongbox and carried it back up the canyon.
Sharpe followed. His men, silent and cold, came down to the roadway. There was no exultation in victory for, unnoticed until this moment, and far beyond the abandoned French barricade, a smear of grey smoke rose into the winter air. It rose from the village, and the smoke was grey as a pauper’s shroud and carried the stench of death and fire.
And from it, like dark snow, ashes fell on a bloodied land.
CHAPTER FIVE
The villagers could have sent no warning of the French presence for there was no village any more, nor villagers.
The fires must have been set just as the ambush was sprung, for the houses still burned fiercely. The corpses, though, had frozen hard. The French had killed the people, then sheltered in their houses as they waited for Vivar’s small column to reach the high canyon.
It had never been much of a village; a poor place of goats and sheep, and of people who made a living from high pastures. The houses lay in a hollow sheltered by dwarf oaks and chestnut trees. Potatoes had grown in a few small fields that were edged with wild mulberries and furze. The houses had been mere thatched huts with dungheaps at their doors. They had been shared by men and animals alike, just as the houses Sharpe’s own Riflemen had known in England had been, and that nostalgic resemblance added to the poignancy of the day.
If anything could add to the poignancy of children and babies killed, of women raped, or of men crucified. Sergeant Williams, who had known his share of horror in a bad world, vomited. One of the Spanish infantrymen turned in silence on a French captive and, before Vivar could utter a word, disembowelled the man. Only then did the Cazador utter a howl of hatred.
Vivar ignored the killing and the howl. Instead, with an odd formality, he marched to Sharpe. ‘Would you …’ he began, but found it hard to continue. The stench of those bodies which burned inside the houses was thick. He swallowed. ‘Would you place picquets, Lieutenant?’
‘Yes, sir.’
That, at least, took the Riflemen away from the bodies of slaughtered infants and the burning hovels. All that was left of the village’s buildings were the church walls; walls of stone which could not be burned, though the church’s timber roof still flamed high to spew smoke above the valley’s rim where, among the trees, Sharpe placed his sentries. The French, if they still lingered, were invisible.
‘Why did they do it, sir?’ Dodd, a quiet man, appealed to Sharpe.
Sharpe could offer no answer.
Gataker, as fly a rogue as any in the army, stared empty-eyed at the landscape. Isaiah Tongue, whose education had been wasted by gin, winced as a terrible scream sounded from the village; then, realizing that the scream must have come from a captured Frenchman, spat to show that it had not troubled him.
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