Sharpe's Honor

by Bernard Cornwell

  The hammering still echoed in the room. He went to the window and saw, where the sentries paced their monotonous beats on the ramparts, that the guns which had defied Wellington last year were being destroyed. Their trunnions, the great knobs that held the barrels to the carriages, were being sawn through. When the hacksaws were halfway through, a man would give a great blow with a sledgehammer to shear the bronze clean. The blows rang dolorously through the courtyard. To make sure that the guns were far beyond repair they were being spiked as well, then heaved over the ramparts to fall onto the precipitous rocks below. The noise was shattering. He groaned. ‘Oh God!’

  Sharpe lay on the bed. He would never drink again, never. On the other hand, of course, the hair of the dog that bit you was the only specific against rabies. Half the British army went to their rest drunk and could only face the next day by drinking the night’s dregs. He opened one eye and stared gloomily at an unopened bottle of champagne on the table.

  He fetched it, frowned at it, then shrugged. He jammed it between his legs, and twisted the cork with his left hand. It popped boomingly. The sheer effort of pulling the cork seemed to have left him weaker then a kitten. The champagne foamed onto his overalls.

  He tried it. It took the taste of vomit from his mouth. It even tasted good. He drank some more.

  He lay back again, holding the champagne in his left hand, and remembered the parole on the table. He was supposed to sign it, then his escape would be engineered by those people in the French army who did not want peace with Spain. It all seemed so complicated this morning. He only knew that by signing the paper and then escaping he was sacrificing all honour.

  The door opened again and he lay still as the breakfast, supplied by courtesy of General Verigny, was put onto the table. He knew what it would be. Hot chocolate, bread, butter, and cheese. ‘Mercy.’ At least, he thought, he was learning some French.

  An hour later, with the breakfast and half the champagne inside him, he decided he was feeling distinctly better. The day, he thought, even had promise. He looked at the parole. He could not sign it, he told himself, because it would be unworthy of him. He would have to escape instead. He would have to go to Wellington with this news, but not by sacrificing his honour. Captain d‘Alembord had said that honour was merely a word to hide a man’s sins, and La Marquesa had laughed at the word, but Sharpe knew what it meant. It meant he could never live with himself if he signed the paper and let Montbrun engineer his escape. Honour was conscience. He walked away from the table, from the temptation of the parole, and carried the champagne to the barred window.

  He stared down, bottle in hand, at the piles of artillery shells that glistened faintly from the rain that had fallen in the night. An officer was checking the fuses. It would be a hell of a bang, Sharpe thought, and he wondered if he would get a view of it from the Great Road.

  He could hear womens’ voices. There were an extraordinary number of women with this army. What was it that Verigny had said yesterday? Sharpe frowned, then smiled. This army was a walking brothel.

  He turned from the window and crossed to the table where the parole, splashed with red wine stains, still waited for his signature. He tried to make sense of the French words, but could not. Even so, he knew what it said. He promised not to escape, nor in any way assist the forces of Britain or her allies against the French armies until he was either exchanged or released from the bond.

  He told himself he should sign it. Escape was impossible. He should sign it and refuse to accept La Marquesa’s offer of escape. He thought of travelling in her coach, the curtains drawn, and he remembered her saying that she loved him. He looked at the quill. Was it dishonour to sign the parole and then carry news of the secret treaty to Wellington? Did his country come before honour? Had Helene spoken the truth? Would she want him when the war was over, when he was a discarded soldier? She had spoken of three thousand guineas. He shut his eyes, imagining three thousand guineas. A man could live a whole life on three thousand guineas.

  He picked up the quill. He dipped it in the ink and then, with quick strokes, scored it again and again through the paragraphs of the parole. He tipped the ink bottle onto the paper, obliterating the words, destroying the parole. He laughed and walked back to the window.

  Beneath him, from a doorway, a cavalry officer emerged into the dawn light. The man was gorgeously uniformed, his white breeches as skin-tight as General Verigny’s. Sharpe wondered if such men greased their legs with oil or butter to achieve so tight a fit. He would not be surprised. Cavalry officers would do anything to look like palace flunkies.

  The man straightened his pelisse, tilted his hat to a more rakish angle, then blew smoke into the air. He took a cigar from his mouth, inspected the sky to judge the weather, then strolled towards the keep. The weak light was reflected from his gold scabbard furnishings and from the gold wire that was looped and braided on his blue jacket. He walked slowly, forced to the pace by the tightness of his breeches, but looking languorous and confident. He avoided the puddles that still remained in the courtyard, jealous of the brilliant shine on his spurred boots.

  Smoke dribbled back from the man’s cigar. He stepped over one of the fuses, then tapped ash onto a pile of shells. Sharpe watched, disbelieving. The cavalryman walked on, disdaining his surroundings. Another cloud of smoke drifted up from his cigar and then, with superb unconcern, the man tossed the cigar stub behind him onto the tangle of fuses. He disappeared into the keep.

  No one seemed to have noticed. The Engineer officer who had been examining the fuses had gone. The sentries on the walls stared outwards. Two infantrymen who carried a great, steaming pot over the yard were busy with their own thoughts.

  Sharpe looked back at the piles of shells. Was it his imagination, or was there a small wisp of smoke coming from where the cigar had landed?

  It was just his imagination, he decided.

  He noticed that, despite the wound, he was gripping the bars of the window with his right hand. He uncurled his fingers.

  Some men walked beneath his window. They laughed loudly.

  It was not his imagination. The cigar stub was burning through to the powder core of the fuses. Smoke drifted up more thickly.

  Sharpe froze. If he gave the warning he would stay a prisoner. If he did not there would be death and chaos, quite possibly his own death. But if he risked that, then the chaos would be on his side. He could use it to escape, he could forget the parole, he would be free and his honour would be intact.

  The smoke was thickening now, rising up to drift eastward. An artilleryman crossed the yard from a magazine against the far wall. He passed within ten feet of the smoke, but noticed nothing. He was eating a hunk of bread and staring up at the sky which threatened rain. There were men on the walls, on the keep’s roof, yet none of them saw a thing.

  Sharpe bit his lip. His left hand gripped the champagne.

  The smoke turned to fire. One moment there was a grey haze, the next there was the hiss of fuses and the sparks were shooting up from the fire that snaked along the white line.

  The gunner, the bread held to his mouth, stopped. He stared unbelieving at the fire-snakes. One disappeared into a pile of shells, would be eating at the first shell’s fuse, and then the gunner shouted, pointed with his loaf, and started to run.

  The shell exploded.

  It lifted the other shells into the air, fuses spinning, and then a second exploded, a third, and suddenly the courtyard was a maelstrom of fire and shell casing, and men were bellowing at each other to run, and Sharpe went back from the window. There were fuses leading into the keep and he had just seen, through the smoke, a streak of bright fire dart into the massive stones.

  He backed slowly away. There was no safety in leaving the room. The stairway led only to the courtyard where the shells exploded. He had to stay in the room and survive whatever happened.

  He tipped the cot bed over, sheltering himself behind the straw mattress, and, just as he had done so, the hill of
Burgos Castle moved.

  Deep beneath the keep, in the cellars and in the mine shafts that had been dug to oppose the British mines of the year before, the powder had been stacked. Barrel after barrel was down there, packed in the rock, and now the fire found it.

  It blew.

  It did not shatter outwards. There was more than enough powder to scythe the hilltop bare, to obliterate the walls, church, bastions, guns, and gates, but the rock-bound cellars acted as a giant mortar and hurled the blast upwards into the air until the flame spikes touched and pierced the low cloud, and still it went on, hurling stones and shells high into the air beyond the cloud and following with the rumbling, billowing, dark cloud that was fed by new blasts and pierced through by new flames as more stacks of powder were reached by the fire that destroyed the keep and thundered the sound miles out into the countryside.

  Sharpe huddled against the wall.

  The bed seemed to thump on him, the air was like a great, warm fist that pounded all about him and left only silence where there had been nothing but sound.

  He was deafened.

  He could feel shock after shock thudding the stone floor. He guessed that the shells were cracking open in the courtyard, and then there was a bigger blast, a thunder that pierced even his deafness, and he felt fragments spatter on the mattress that shielded him.

  Silence again.

  He was breathing dust. The thudding had stopped, but the room seemed to be shifting like the cabin of a ship under way.

  He stood up, pushing the bed away, and saw the air was filled with white fog. It was not smoke, but powdered lime shaken from the walls and ceiling which now hung suspended in the room and stung his eyes.

  He spat the dust out of his mouth.

  The bottle of champagne was still in his hand. He swilled his mouth with it, spat again, then drank. The whole world seemed to be moving. The door was open, blown flat by the blast. The table had fallen and he saw, yet did not understand, that the ink bottle was rolling back and forth on the floorboards like the weight of a pendulum.

  He went to the window. The room seemed to lurch as a ship lurched when caught by a sudden wind.

  He had seen Almeida after the explosion and this reminded him of the Portuguese fortress. There was the same stench of roasted flesh, the same fire and dust in the silence.

  The keep was a boiling cauldron of flame and smoke. He could not imagine how so much smoke could be roiled out of stone. There was a ringing in his ears, insistent and annoying. He hit the side of his head with his hand.

  A man screamed beneath him. His clothes were gone, his body was blackened, and blood showed on his back. The sound made Sharpe aware that he could hear.

  Time to go, he thought, and the realisation was so odd that he did not move. A magazine exploded somewhere and spewed a lance of flame into the boiling smoke. The floor shifted again.

  He heard a rumble to his right, felt the sudden shock of the floor tilting, a movement that made him drop the champagne and grip the window bar for support. A crack had appeared in the wall, a crack that widened as he watched. Jesus! The old houses built against the courtyard wall were slumping down!

  Go, he thought, go! He frowned, turned, and slapped his waist to check his sword was in its slings. It was.

  Walking to the door was like walking the deck of a ship. He feared that even his footsteps might tip the precarious balance of the fragile house, that at any moment he would be felled by the falling masonry and collapsing floors.

  The building shuddered again. A man shouted outside, then another, and Sharpe stepped over the threshold to see the young, cheerful guard lying dead. A shell had come through the landing window and blown him apart.

  Masonry rumbled. A crack sounded like a whiplash. He jumped recklessly down the rubble and dust-choked stairs. His uniform was thick with the white dust. Instinctively, as he reached the door to the courtyard, he began to beat it off, then stopped. It was as good a disguise as he could hope for.

  Masonry fell somewhere, provoking shouts, and Sharpe knew that soon men would be in the castle who were not dazed, men who would begin the process of rescue and recovery. He hurried into the courtyard and turned left, towards the gate, and saw there a knot of men who stared aghast into the glimpse of hell that had been the keep.

  He turned. He walked away from them, going towards the fire, but keeping the wall close to his right. He passed dead men, wounded men, men who cried, men who were past crying. The flesh smelt thick. He wished he had kept hold of the champagne to clear the taste of dust and smoke from his mouth.

  Then a crash, a splintering, growing, hellish noise erupted to his right in the building where he had been prisoner, and he had a glimpse of the walls falling, of roof beams coming like lances through the breaking stones, and then it was blotted by dust and he was running, the stones falling, and he felt a massive blow on his leg that twisted him to his side, threw him down, and his mouth, nose, ears and eyes were thick with the dust and the noise and he was crawling blindly towards the light.

  He felt his leg. It seemed whole. He drew it up, pushed, and staggered to his feet. Someone shouted, but Sharpe could barely help himself. He felt sick again, choking on dust, limping from the bruise on his leg.

  He went on. He was going away from the gate where the enemy were gathered, going ever closer to the fire. He could feel the heat, a scorching, terrible, searing heat that made him swerve back to his right and there, in a tunnel of the wall, he saw daylight.

  He went down the tunnel, cannoning off the walls, his scabbard scraping the stone. At the far end there was a shattered door, and beneath it steps that led down to a ruined church that clung high on the rock hill of the castle.

  He sat on the steps. He had not quite gathered that he was free, that he was outside the fortress, that the wide world was spread before him and that he was breathing warm, clean air. He wiped his eyes that were stinging with dust and stared at the view.

  The city was spread beneath him along the banks of the River Arlanzon. The spires of the great cathedral dominated the houses, and Sharpe, blinking from the dust and smoke, saw that there were holes torn in the roof of the huge building, holes from which smoke came, and that there was more smoke in the town, buildings burning, and he guessed that the shells had been blasted up and outwards to fall randomly on the city. He knew he must move.

  The castle hill fell two hundred steep feet to the houses. He stumbled down, falling twice, sliding one section in a scrabble of soil, loose stone, and pain.When he got up he saw that the bandage on his right hand was soaked through with fresh, bright blood. Blood was sticky on his face too, the wounds reopened. His leg felt as if it had been struck by a musket ball. He limped the last few yards to the shelter of an alleyway. A woman watched him from a window.

  There were shouts and screams in the city. He could hear the fires burning. ‘Jesus.’ He spoke aloud. He was feeling dazed, his ears ringing. He could hardly remember leaving the castle. He leaned on the wall.

  The woman spat through the window. She would think he was a Frenchman.

  He walked down the alley that stank of the nightsoil that was indiscriminately thrown from the bedrooms. He knew he was free now, but he knew little else.

  He came to the plaza before the magnificent cathedral. He saw civilians running with buckets through the great doors and he glimpsed, as he went forward, the glow of fires deep in the gloom inside: Then he looked right.

  A division of French troops had been forming in the plaza before beginning their march north eastwards. They looked now as if they had been in a battle. Shells had fallen into their ranks and the dead and wounded were scattered on the cobbles. Some screamed, some wandered dazed, others tried to help. Above him the sky was dark with the smoke. Ashes fluttered in the air and fell soft as snow onto the shattered ranks.

  He suddenly felt alarm. He had escaped the castle, only to walk like a fool into a city of the enemy. He went back into an alley, leaned on the wall, and tried to make
plans, tried to force the ringing from his ears and sense into his head. A horse. For God’s sake, a horse. What was it Hogan had once said to him? For some reason the strangeness of the words had stuck. ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse.’ The Irish Major was always saying odd things like that. Sharpe supposed they were lines of poetry, but had not liked to ask.

  He felt sick again. He bent down, his back against the wall, and groaned. He should hide, he decided. He was in no state to steal a horse.

  There were footsteps to his right. He looked and saw men in the darkness of the alley. They wore no uniforms. They stared at him suspiciously.

  He straightened up. ‘Inglés.’ The word was choked by the dust in his throat.

  The man closest to him carried a wooden mallet. He stepped forward, his face twisted with hatred. Sharpe knew they took him for a Frenchman and he shook his head.

  ‘Inglés!’

  He could not draw his sword with his bloody, bandaged right hand. He tried, but the mallet struck him on the head, there was a rush of feet on the cobbles, hisses of anger and curses, and then dozens of boots and fists thumped into him, the mallet swung again, and he was dragged away, beaten half insensible, the blood flowing from his opened wounds.

  They kicked him, dragged him deeper into the alley and into a small, foul courtyard. A man produced a long butcher’s blade, Sharpe tried to ward it off, felt the edge sear into his left hand, then the mallet smashed onto his head again and he knew nothing more.

  The French left Burgos that day, marching north east and leaving the city with its great spire of smoke that drifted up as a mark of their retreat.

  It began to rain as they left, a steady rain that helped extinguish the fires in the city. It seemed the kind of rain that might last for ever.

  The French would have liked to have held Burgos and to have forced Wellington to try once more to take the high fortress on its hill, but Wellington had marched his army to the north, into the hills which common wisdom said were impassable for an army. Wellington’s army was passing the impassable hills, threatening to come south and cut off the French army in Burgos, cutting its supply lines, and so the French went backwards. Back towards the hills about Vitoria where other French armies would join them and they could turn and offer battle.