Sharpe's Devil s-21

by Бернард Корнуэлл

  "They did," Sharpe agreed. He had seen soldiers run before, but never so easily as this. At Waterloo the French had run, but only after they had fought all day with snarling courage, yet these Spanish defenders, after firing a handful of volleys, had simply collapsed. Sharpe, given the citadel to defend, would have sheltered his men as soon as the frigate fired her first broadside, then counterattacked the moment the cannonade lifted, but the Spanish defenses and the morale of the garrison had proved as brittle as eggshells. The royal forces had been on the very edge of victory, but no one on the Spanish side had realized it or had nown how to capitalize on it. "They've rotted away," Sharpe said in the tone of a man suddenly understanding a truth. "Maybe all the Spaniards here are rotten." He was suddenly assailed by a fantastic vision of Cochrane, with his diminishing band of heroes, capturing fortress after fortress, and more and more Spaniards running pell-mell for safety until, at the end, there was nowhere to run and Chile would be united under its rebel government.

  A cheer turned Sharpe around. From the top ramparts of the citadel's main tower, above the great audience chamber, a marine tossed a roll of plundered cloth that cascaded and rippled to hang like a monstrous banner from the battlements. Another marine cut the halyard that held the Spanish flag.

  "So what now?" Harper asked.

  "We dig up Bias Vivar and take him home." Sharpe was wiping the blade of Cochrane's spare sword clean. It was a good sword, nicely balanced and with a wickedly sharp edge, but it lacked the ugly killing weight of his old Heavy Cavalry blade.

  "Do you think that bugger Bautista might still be here?" Harper was watching a small group of Spanish officers walk under guard from the large tower toward the barrack rooms.

  "Bautista will have buggered off days ago." Sharpe scrubbed at the sticky blood with the corner of his coat, then grinned because he could almost hear Lucille's exasperated complaint, for he suddenly realized that this coat was none other than his good dark green kerseymere that Lucille liked so much and which was such a trouble to clean. “I'm going to be in the doghouse when I get home, he told Harper, "for fighting in my best coat."

  "Women don't understand these things."

  Somewhere in the citadel a child cried. Sharpe supposed that most of the men in the Spanish garrison would have taken themselves wives, and now those women would be finding new protectors. Major Miller, his tarred moustache looking more perky than ever, was protecting two such girls, one on each arm. "Did you enjoy yourself?" he called up to Sharpe.

  "I did, thank you."

  "I can offer you a fruit of victory, perhaps?" Miller gestured at the girls.

  "Keep them, Major," Sharp^smiled, then turned to stare from the rampart far across the hills to where the ragged Andean peaks tore at the sky. The smoke of volcanoes was a brown smear in the new morning's sunlight. 'Thank God," he said quietly.

  "What for?" Harper asked.

  "Because it's over, Patrick." Sharpe was still overwhelmed by the sense of relief. "Honor is even. Cochrane rescued us from the Espiritu Santo, and we've helped him capture this place, and we don't need to do anything more. We can go home. It's a pity to have lost my sword, but I'll not be needing it again, not in this life, and I don't give a bugger about the next. As for Louisa's money, well, she wanted it spent on finding her husband, and we've found him, so it's over. We've fought our last fight."

  Harper smiled. "Maybe we have at that."

  Sharpe turned and looked down at the garrison church where Vivar lay buried. He saw rebels carrying gold out of the church, and he guessed that they had ripped apart the ornate altar screen. A cheer from the tower suggested that yet more treasure had been discovered. "Do you want to join in?" Sharpe invited Harper.

  "I'm all right. Just glad to be in one piece." The Irishman yawned hugely. "But I'm tired, so I am."

  "We can sleep today. All day." Sharpe pushed himself away from the wall. "But first we've got to lift a gravestone."

  They had come to journey's end, to the grave of a friend, and this time there was no one to stop them from retrieving Vivar's body from its cold tomb. The citadel had fallen, Cochrane was victorious, and Sharpe could go home.

  The paving slab that bore Bias Vivar's initials had been replaced, but the stoneworkers' tools were still in the side chapel and, with Harper's help, Sharpe inserted the crowbar beside the big sandstone slab. "Ready?" Sharpe asked. "Heave."

  Nothing happened. "Bloody hell!" Harper said. Behind them, in the nave of the church, a man screamed. The O'Higgins's surgeon, a maudlin Irishman named MacAuley, had ordered the wounded of both sides to be brought into the church where, on a trestle table, he sliced at mangled flesh and sawed at shattered bones. A Dominican monk, who had been a surgeon in the citadel's sick bay, was helping the Irish doctor, as were two orderlies from the Chilean flagship.

  "I hate listening to surgeons working," Harper said, then gave Vivar's gravestone a kick. "It doesn't want to move." The big Irishman spat on both hands, gripped the crowbar firmly and, with his feet solidly planted on either side of the slab, heaved back until the veins stood out on his forehead and sweat dripped down his cheeks. Yet all he succeeded in doing was bending the crowbar's shaft. 'Jesus Christ!" he swore as he let go of the crowbar, 'They've cemented the bugger in place, haven't they?" He went to the side chapel and came back with a sledgehammer. "Stand back."

  Sharpe sensibly stepped back as the Irishman swung, then drove the head of the sledgehammer hard down onto the gravestone. The noise of the impact was like the strike of a cannonball, cracking the gravestone clean across. Harper swung the hammer again and again, grunting as he crazed the obstinate stone into a score of jagged-edged chunks. He finally dropped the hammer when the stone was reduced to rubble. "That's taught the bugger a lesson."

  Lord Cochrane, who had come into the church while Harper was fevershly annihilating the stone, now took out his watch, snapped open its lid, and showed the face to Sharpe. "Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds."

  "My Lord?" Sharpe enquired politely.

  "Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds! See?"

  "Has everyone gone mad around here?" Sharpe asked.

  "Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds is precisely how long it took us to capture the citadel! This watch measures elapsed time, do you see? You press this trigger to start it and this to stop it. I pressed the trigger as our bows touched the wharf, and stopped it when the last defender abandoned the ramparts. In fact I was a bit late, so we probably took less time, but even thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds is rather good for the capture of a citadel this size, don't you think?" His Lordship, who was in an excitedly triumphant mood, snapped the watch lid shut. "I must thank you. Both of you." He graciously bowed to both Sharpe and Harper.

  "We didn't do anything," Sharpe said modestly.

  "Not a great deal," Harper amended Sharpe's modesty.

  "Numbers count for so much," His Lordship said happily. "If I'd attacked with just thirty men then there would have been no hope of victory, but I've discovered that in this kind of war success is gained by small increments. Besides, your presence was worth more than you think. Half of my men fought in the French wars, and they know full well who you are, both of you! And they feel more confident when they know that famous soldiers such as yourselves are fighting beside them."

  Sharpe tried to brush the compliment aside, but Cochrane would have none of his coyness. "They feel precisely the same about my presence in a scrap. They fight better when I'm in command because they believe in me. And because they believe in my luck!"

  "And Mister Sharpe's always been lucky in a fight," Harper added.

  "There you are!" Cochrane beamed. "Napoleon always claimed he'd rather have lucky soldiers than clever ones, though I pride myself on being both."

  Sharpe laughed at His Lordship's immodesty. "Why didn't you tell us you'd arranged to have the O'Higgins fire just over our heads if the attack faltered?"

  "Because if men know you've got an ace hidden up you
r sleeve they expect you to play it whether it's needed or not. I didn't want to run the risk of using the broadside unless I really had to, but if the men had known the broadside might be used they would have held back in the knowledge that the gunners would do some of the hard work for them."

  "It was a brilliant stroke," Sharpe said.

  "How truly you speak, my dear Sharpe." Cochrane at last seemed to notice the destruction wrought by Harper's sledgehammer. "What are you doing, Mister Harper?"

  "Bias Vivar," Harper explained. "He's under here. We're digging him up, only since we were last here the buggers have cemented him in place."

  "The devil they have." Cochrane peered at the mess Harper had made of the slab as though expecting to see Vivar's decayed flesh. "Do you know why people are buried close to altars?" he asked Sharpe airily.

  "No," Sharpe answered in the tone of a man who did not much care about the answer.

  "Because very large numbers of Catholic churches have relics of saints secreted within their altars, of course." Cochrane smiled, as if he had done Sharpe a great favor by revealing the answer.

  The Dominican surgeon, his white gown streaked and spattered with bright new blood, had come to the altar to protest to Lord Cochrane about the spoliation being wrought by Harper, but Cochrane turned on the man and brusquely told him to shut up. "And why," Cochrane continued blithely to Sharpe, "do you think the relics in the altar are important to the dead?"

  "I really don't know," Sharpe said.

  "Because, my dear Sharpe, of what will happen on the Day of Judgment."

  Harper had fetched a spade with which he chipped away the fragments of limestone. "They have used bloody cement!" he said in exasperation. "Goddamn them. Why did they do that? It was just shingle when we tried to pull him out before!"

  "They used cement," Cochrane said, "because they don't want you to dig him up."

  "The Day of Judgment?" Sharpe, interested at last, asked Cochrane.

  His Lordship, who had been examining the mangled remains of the altar screen, turned around. "Because, my dear Sharpe, common sense tells our Papist brethren that, at the sound of the last trump when the dead rise incorruptible, the saints will rise faster than us mere sinners. The rate of resurrection, so the doctrine claims, will depend on the holiness of the man or woman being raised from the dead, and naturally the saints will rise first and travel fastest to heaven. Thus the wise Papist, leaving nothing to chance, is buried close to the altar because it contains a saint's relic which, on the Day of Judgment, will go speedily to heaven, creating a draught of wind which will catch up those close to the altar and drag them up to heaven with it."

  "He'll be dragged up in a barrowload of cement and shingle if he tries to fly out of this bloody grave," Harper grumbled.

  Cochrane, who seemed to Sharpe to be taking an inordinate interest in the exhumation, peered down at the mangled grave. "Why don't I have some prisoners do the digging for you?"

  Harper tossed the spade down in acceptance of the offer and Cochrane, having shouted for some prisoners to be fetched, stirred the cemented shingle with his toe. "Why on earth do you want to take Vivar's body back to Spain?"

  "Because that's where his widow wants him," Sharpe said.

  "Ah, a woman's whim! I hope my wife would not wish the same. I can't imagine being slopped home in a vat of brandy like poor Nelson, though I suppose if one must face eternity, then one might as well slip into it drunk." Cochrane, who had been pacing about the church choir, suddenly stopped, placed one foot dramatically ahead of the other, clasped a left hand across his breast, and declaimed in a mighty voice that momentarily stilled even the moaning of the wounded:

  "Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note, As his corse to the rampart we hurried!"

  His Lordship applauded his own rendering of the lines. "Who wrote that?"

  "An Irishman!" MacAuley shouted from the nave of the church.

  "Was it now?" Cochrane enquired skeptically, then whirled on Sharpe. 'You know the poem, Sharpe?"

  "No, my Lord."

  "You don't!" Cochrane sounded astonished, then again assumed his declamatory pose:

  "But he lay like a warrior taking his rest, With his martial cloak around him"

  "The verses, you understand, refer to the burial of Sir John Moore. Did you know Moore?"

  "I met him," Sharpe said laconically, recalling a hurried conversation on a snow-bright hillside in Galicia. French dragoons had been leading their horses down an icy road on the far side of a wide valley toward a shivering greenjacket rear guard, and Lieutenant General Sir John Moore, shaking with the cold, had courteously enquired of Lieutenant Richard Sharpe whether the enemy horsemen had been more bothersome than usual that morning. That distracted conversation, Sharpe now remembered, must have been held only days before he had met Major Bias Vivar of the Cazadores.

  "So you will remember that Moore was buried on the battlefield of Corunna," Cochrane continued, "and without any nonsense of being carried home to his ever-loving wife. Soldiers normally lie where they fall, so why would this wife want General Vivar taken home? Why does she not leave him in peace?"

  "Because the family has a particular connection with the cathedral in Santiago de Compostela." Sharpe offered the best explanation he could.

  "Ah! There are more powerful relics in a cathedral, you see," Cochrane sounded gloomy. "In Spain he'll be buried by Saint James himself, not by some sniveling little Chilean holy man. He'll be in heaven before the rest of us will have had a chance to pick our resurrected noses or scratch our resurrected arses."

  "You won't need a wind to carry you, my Lord," the Irish doctor called, "you'll just roll downhill to perdition with the rest of us miserable bastards."

  "You note the respect in which I am held," Cochrane, who clearly relished the comradeship, smiled at Sharpe, then changed into his lamentable Spanish to order the newly arrived prisoners to start digging. Major Suarez, the Spanish officer who had been so cordial to Sharpe when he had first arrived at Puerto Crucero, and who had suffered the misfortune of being captured by Cochrane's men, had insisted on accompanying the three prisoners to protest about their being employed for manual labor, but he calmed down when he recognized Sharpe and when he saw that the digging was hardly of a martial nature. He calmed down even more when Cochrane, ever courteous, invited him to share in the breakfast he had ordered fetched to the church. "Most of your fellow officers escaped capture by running away," Cochrane observed, "so I can only congratulate you on having the courage to stay and fight."

  "Alas, senor, I was asleep," Suarez confessed, then crossed himself as he looked at Vivar's grave.

  "You were here, senor, when the Captain-General was buried?" Cochrane asked politely.

  Suarez nodded. "It was at night. Very late." Cochrane could not resist the invitation.

  "We buried him darkly at dead of night, The sods with our bayonets turning."

  "How dead was the night?" Cochrane asked Suarez, suddenly speaking in Spanish and, when the Major just gaped at him, Cochrane condescended to make the question more intelligible. "What time was Bias Vivar buried?"

  "Past midnight." Suarez gazed at the grave which was now deepening perceptibly. "Father Josef said the Mass and whoever was still awake attended."

  Sharpe, remembering his conversation with Blair, the British Consul in Valdivia, frowned. "I thought a lot of people were invited here for the funeral?"

  "No, senor, that was for a Requiem Mass a week later. But Captain-General Vivar was buried by then."

  "Who filled the grave with cement?" Sharpe asked.

  "The Captain-General ordered it done, after you had left the fortress. I don't know why." Suarez hunched back onto the stone bench that edged the choir. Above him a marble slab recalled the exemplary life of a Colonel's wife who, with all her children, had drowned off Puerto Crucero in 1711. Beside that slab was another, commemorating her husband, who had been killed by heathen savages in 1713. The garrison church was full of such memoria
ls, reminders of how long the Spanish had ruled this harsh coast.

  Cochrane watched the cement being chipped out of the hole, then turned accusingly on the mild Major Suarez. "So what do they say about Vivar's death?"

  "I'm sorry, senor, I don't understand."

  "Did the rebels kill him? Or Bautista?"

  Suarez licked his lips. "I don't know, senor." He reddened, suggesting that gossip in the Citadel pointed to Bautista's guilt, but Suarez's continuing fear of the Captain-General was quite sufficient to impose tact on him. "All I do know," he tried to divert Cochrane with another morsel of gossip, "is that there was much consternation when Captain-General Vivar's body could not be found. I heard that Madrid was asking questions. Many of us were sent to search for the body. I and my company were sent twice to the valley, but—" Suarez shrugged to show that his men had failed to find Vivar's corpse.

  "So who did find it?" Sharpe asked.

  "One of General Bautista's men from Valdivia, serior. A Captain called Marquinez."

  "That greasy bastard," Sharpe said with feeling.

  "The General was much relieved when the body was discovered," Suarez added.

  "And no wonder," Cochrane laughed raucously. "Bloody careless to lose the supremo's body!"

  "This is a church!" the Dominican surgeon, goaded by Cochrane's laughter, snapped in English.

  "MacAuley?" Cochrane called to his own surgeon, "if yon tonsured barber speaks out of turn again, you will fillet the turdhead with your bluntest scalpel, then feed him to the crabs. You hear me?"

  "I hear you, my Lord."

  "Goddamn holy bastards," Cochrane spat the insult toward the monk, then let his temper be triggered by irritation. "You know who crucified our Lord?" he shouted at the Dominican. "Bloody priests and bloody lawyers! That's who! Not the soldiers! The soldiers were just obeying orders, because that's what soldiers are paid to do, but who gave the orders? Priests and lawyers, that's who! And you're still making your mess on God's earth. Jesus Christ, but I should revenge my Savior by slicing your rancid head off your useless body, you foul poxed son of a whore!"