Sharpe’s rifles

by Bernard Cornwell

  “It isn’t gentle, Miss Louisa! They’ll hack about like bloody butchers! They may not even notice you’re a girl till they’ve sliced half your face away. Now bugger off! You’re too pretty to be killed by these bastards!”

  “I’m staying!”

  Colonel de l’Eclin raised his sabre again. Sharpe could hear the creak of saddles now. “Hagman? That cheating bastard is yours.”

  “Sir!”

  Sharpe forgot Louisa. He crammed himself between two of his front-rank men and held his sword high. “Wait for my word! I’m not going to fire till the bastards are breathing down our necks! But when they come we’re going to make these sons of whores wish they hadn’t been bloody born!” The approaching horses tossed their heads nervously. They knew what was coming, and Sharpe allowed himself a moment’s pity for the butchery that he must inflict. “Aim at the horses!” he reminded his men. “Forget the riders, kill the horses!”

  “For what we are about to receive,” Harper said.

  Riflemen licked powder-gritted lips. They nervously checked that the rifle pans were primed and the flints well seated in the leather-lined dogheads. Their mouths were dry and their stomachs tender. The vibration of the trotting horses was palpable in the soil, like the passing of great guns on a nearby road. Or, Sharpe thought, like the tremor of thunder on a sultry day that presaged the stab of lightning.

  Colondel de l’Eclin lowered his curved blade in the signal for his men to go into the canter. In a few seconds, Sharpe knew, the trumpet would call for the gallop and the big horses would surge forward. He took a breath, knowing he must judge the moment for this one volley to exquisite perfection.

  Then the lightning struck.

  There were only just over fifty men, but they were Vivar’s elite company, the crimson-coated Cazadores, who burst from the city to charge downhill. It was a tired squadron, wearied by a night and day of fighting, but above them, like a ripple of glory in the dark sky, flew the gonfalon of Santiago Matamoros. The scarlet cross was bright as blood.

  “Santiago!” Vivar led them. Vivar spurred them on. Vivar screamed the war cry that could snatch a miracle from defeat. “Santiago!”

  The slope gave the Cazadores’s charge speed, while the banner gave them the courage of martyrs. They struck the edge of the first French line like a thunderbolt and the swords carved bloody ruin into the Dragoons. De l’Eclin was shouting, turning, trying to realign his men, but the banner of the saint was driving deep into the French squadron. The gonfalon’s long tail was already flecked with an enemy’s blood.

  “Charge!” Sharpe was running. “Charge!”

  The second French squadron spurred forward, but Vivar had foreseen it and swerved right to take his men into their centre. Behind him was a chaos of milling horses. Cavalry hacked at cavalry.

  “Halt!” Sharpe held both arms out to bar his men’s mad rush. “Steady, lads! One volley. Aim left! Aim at the horses! Fire!”

  The Riflemen fired at the untouched horsemen on the right of the French charge. Horses fell screaming to the mud. Dragoons kicked boots from stirrups and rolled away from their dying beasts. “Now kill the bastards!” Sharpe screamed the incantation as he ran. “Kill! Kill!”

  A rabble of men ran to the broken French line. There were Riflemen, Cazadores, and country men who had left -their homes to carry war against an invader. Dragoons hacked down with long swords, but the rabble surrounded them and slashed at horses and clawed men from their saddles. This was not how an army fought, but how an untutored people took terror to an enemy.

  Colonel de l’Eclin swivelled his horse to keep the rabble at bay. His sabre hissed to kill a Cazador, lunged to drive a Spaniard back, and sliced to parry a Rifleman’s sword-bayonet. The Dragoons were being driven to the boggy ground where the horses slithered and slipped. A trumpeter was dragged from his grey horse and savaged with knives. Knots of Frenchmen tried to hack through the mob. Sharpe used both hands to hack down at a horse’s neck, then swung back to send its rider clean from the saddle. A woman from the city sawed with a knife at the fallen Frenchman’s neck. Fugitives were running back from the stream’s eastern bank, coming to join a slaughter.

  A trumpet drove the third French squadron into the chaos. The field was bloody, but still the white gonfalon floated high where Bias Vivar drove his crimson elite like a blade into the enemy. A Spanish Sergeant held the great banner that had been hung from a cross-staff on a pole. He waved it so that the silk made a serpentine challenge in the dusk.

  The Count of Mouromorto saw the challenge and despised it. That streamer of silk was everything he hated in Spain; it stood for the old ways, for the domination of church over ideas, for the tyranny of a God he had rejected, and so the Count raked back his spurs and drove his horse into the men who guarded the gonfalon.

  “He’s mine!” Vivar yelled again and again. “Mine! Mine!”

  The brothers’ swords met, scraped, disengaged. Vivar’s horse turned into the enemy as it was trained to, and Vivar lunged. The Count parried. A Cazador rode to take him in the rear, but Vivar shouted at the man to stay clear. “He’s mine!”

  The Count gave two quick hard blows that would have driven a weaker man from the saddle. Vivar parried both, back-cut, and turned the cut into a lunge that drew blood from his brother’s thigh. The blood dripped onto the white boots.

  The Count touched his horse with a spur; it went sideways, then, to another touch, lunged back. Mouromorto snarled, knowing that this battle was won as his long sword lunged at his brother.

  But Vivar leaned back in the saddle, right back, so that his brother’s blade hissed past him and could not be brought back fast enough as he straightened and speared his own sword forward. The steel juddered into Mouromorto’s belly. Their eyes met, and Vivar twisted the blade. He felt pity, and knew he could not afford pity. “Traitor!” He twisted the blade again, then raised his boot to push the horse away and disengage his long sword. The steel shuddered free, blood gushed onto the Count’s pommel, and his scream was an agony that died as he fell onto the blood-soaked mud.

  “Santiago!” Vivar shouted in triumph, and the shout was carried across the small valley as the Cazadores rallied to the banner of the dead saint and raised their swords against the third French squadron.

  The Riflemen were hunting among the remnants of the first two squadrons. Dragoons were turning their horses to flee, knowing they had been beaten by the savagery of the attack. A Cazador’s sword opened the throat of the French standard bearer, and the Spaniard seized the enemy guidon and raised it high in celebration of victory. Colonel de l’Eclin saw the capture of the small flag and knew that he was beaten; beaten by the great white gonfalon of Matamoros.

  “Back!” The chasseur knew when a fight was hopeless, and knew when it was better to save a handful of men who could fight again.

  “No!” Sharpe saw the Colonel order the retreat, and he ran towards the Frenchman. “No!” His ankle still hurt from his jump from the cathedral platform, the pain made his run ungainly and the soggy ground half tripped him, but he forced himself on. He outstripped his Riflemen and still shouted in frustrated anger. “You bastard! No!”

  De l’Eclin heard the insult. He turned, saw Sharpe was isolated from the greenjacketed men and, as any cavalry officer would, he accepted the challenge. He rode at Sharpe, remembering when he had fought the Rifleman before that he had used the simple ruse of switching his sabre from right to left hand. That stratagem could not be repeated, instead the Colonel would rowel his horse at the last moment so that the black stallion surged into a killing speed that would put all its momentum behind his sabre stroke. Sharpe waited with his sword ready to swing at the horse’s mouth. Someone shouted at him to jump aside, but the Rifleman held his ground as the big black horse bore down on him. De l’Eclin was holding his sabre so that its point would spear into Sharpe’s ribs, but in the very last second, just as the spurred horse surged for the kill, the Frenchman changed his stroke. He did it with the quickness
of a snake striking, raising and turning the blade so that it would slash down onto Sharpe’s bare head. De l’Eclin shouted in triumph as his sabre came down and as the Rifleman, whose sword had missed his horse, crumpled beneath that stroke.

  But Sharpe had not cut at de l’Eclin’s horse. Instead, with a speed to match the chasseur’s own, he had raised the strong blade above his head and held it there like a quarterstaff to take the sabre’s impact. That impact drove Sharpe down, almost to his knees, but not before his right hand released the sword’s hilt and snatched for the chasseur’s sword arm. Sharpe’s sword thumped on his own shoulder, driven by the deflected sabre-blade, but his fingers had seized de l’Eclin’s wrist strap. He released the sword blade from his left hand and hooked his fingers about the Frenchman’s wrist.

  It took de l’Eclin a second to realize what had happened. Sharpe was clinging on like a hound that had sunk its teeth into a boar’s neck. He was being dragged along the boggy ground. The horse twisted and tried to bite the Rifleman. The chasseur hammered at him with his free hand, but Sharpe hung on, tugged, and tried to find a purchase on the soggy ground. His naked right leg was smeared with mud and blood. The horse tried to shake him loose, just as Sharpe tried to drag the Frenchman out of the saddle. The sabre’s wrist strap was cutting like wire into his fingers.

  De I’Eclin tried to unholster a pistol with his right hand. Harper and a group of greenjackets ran to help. “Leave him! Don’t touch him!” Sharpe shouted.

  “Bugger him!” Harper slammed his rifle butt at the black horse’s mouth and it reared so that de I’Eclin lost his balance and, with Sharpe’s weight pulling him backwards, fell from the saddle.

  Sword-bayonets rose to slash down at the Frenchman. “No!” Sharpe screamed desperately. “No! No!” He had fallen with de I’Eclin and, thumping onto the ground, had lost his grip on his wrist. The Frenchman twisted away from Sharpe, staggered to his feet, and slashed his sabre at the Riflemen who surrounded him. Sharpe’s sword was lost. De I’Eclin glanced to find his horse, then lunged to kill Sharpe.

  Harper fired his rifle.

  “No!” Sharpe’s protest was drowned by the hammer of the gun’s report.

  The bullet took de I’Eclin clean in the mouth. His head jerked back as though yanked by an invisible string. The Frenchman fell, the blood fountaining up into the darkening sky, then his body flopped onto the mud, jerked once more like a newly landed fish, and was still.

  “No?” Harper said indignantly. “The bastard was going to fillet you!”

  “It’s all right.” Sharpe was flexing the fingers of his right hand. “It’s all right. I just didn’t want a hole in his overalls.” He looked at the dead man’s leather-reinforced overalls and tall, beautifully made boots. They were items of great value, and now they were Sharpe’s. “All right, lads. Get his bloody trousers off, and his boots.” The Riflemen stared at Sharpe as though he was mad. “Get his bloody trousers off! I want them. And his boots! Why do you think we came here? Hurry!” Sharpe, though Louisa and a dozen other women watched, stripped off his ojd boots and trousers where he stood. The last of the light was draining from the sky. The remnants of Dragoons had fled. The wounded moaned and scrabbled at the damp grass, while the victors moved among the dead in search of plunder. One of the Riflemen offered Sharpe the glorious pelisse, but he declined it. He did not need such frippery, but he had desperately wanted the red-striped overalls which fitted him as though they had been tailored just for him. And with the overalls came the most precious of all things to any infantryman: good boots. Tall boots of good leather that could march across a country, boots to resist rain, snow, and spirit-haunted streams, good boots that fitted Sharpe as if the cobbler had known this Rifleman would one day need such luxuries. Sharpe prised away the razor-edged spurs, tugged the boots up his calves, then stamped his heels in satisfaction. He buttoned his green jacket and strapped on his sword again. He smiled. An old flag, made new, flaunted a miracle of victory, a red pelisse lay in the mud, and Sharpe had found himself some boots and trousers.

  The old gonfalon, Louisa told Sharpe, was sewn into the new. She had done the work in secret, in the high fortress, before she had left Santiago de Compostela. It had been Major Vivar’s idea, and the task had brought the Spaniard close to the English girl.

  “The Sergeant’s stripes,” she said, “are made from the same silk.”

  Sharpe looked at Harper who walked ahead with the Riflemen. “Don’t tell him, for God’s sake, or he’ll think he’s a miracle worker.”

  “You’re all miracle workers,” Louisa said warmly.

  “We’re just Rifles.”

  Louisa laughed at the modesty which betrayed such a monstrous pride. “But the gonfalon worked a miracle,” she said chidingly. “It wasn’t such nonsense, was it?”

  “It wasn’t nonsense,” Sharpe confessed. He walked beside her horse, ahead of Major Vivar and his Spaniards. “What happens to the gonfalon now?”

  “It goes to Seville or Cadiz; wherever it will be safest. And one day it will be returned to a Spanish King in Madrid.” Already, in the small villages and towns through which the Riflemen marched, the story of the gonfalon was being told. The news raced like a fire in parched grass; telling of a French defeat and a Spanish victory, and of a saint keeping an ancient promise to defend his people.

  “And where do you go now?” Sharpe asked Louisa.

  “I go where Don Bias goes, which is wherever there are Frenchmen to be killed.”

  “Not Godalming?”

  She laughed. “I do hope not.”

  “And you’ll be a Countess,” Sharpe said in wonderment.

  “I think that’s better than being Mrs Bufford, though it’s uncommonly nasty of me to say so. And my aunt will never forgive me for becoming a Catholic, so you see some good has come from all this.”

  Sharpe smiled. They had come south, and now they must part. The French were left behind, the snow had melted, and they had come to a shallow valley above which the February wind blew cold. They halted at the valley’s rim. The far crest was in Portugual, and on that foreign skyline Sharpe could see a group of blue-uniformed men. Those men watched the strangers who had come from the Spanish hills.

  Bias Vivar, Count of Mouromorto, dismounted. He thanked the Riflemen one by one, ending with Sharpe whom, to Sharpe’s acute embarrassment, he embraced. “Are you sure you won’t stay, Lieutenant?”

  “I’m tempted, sir, but,” Sharpe shrugged.

  “You wish to show off your new trousers and boots to the British army. I hope they let you keep them.”

  “They won’t if I’m sent back to Britain.”

  “Which I fear you will be,” Vivar said. “While we are left to fight the French. But one day, Lieutenant, when the last Frenchman is dead, you will come back to Spain and celebrate with the Count and Countess of Mouromorto.”

  “I shall, sir.”

  “And I doubt you will still be a Lieutenant?”

  “I imagine I will, sir.” Sharpe looked up at Louisa, and he saw a happiness in her that he could not wish away. He smiled and touched his pouch. “I have your letter.” She had written to her aunt and uncle, telling them they had lost her to the church of Rome and to a Spanish soldier. Sharpe looked back at Vivar. “Thank you, sir.”

  Vivar smiled. “You are an insubordinate bastard, a heathen, and an Englishman. But also my friend. Remember that.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then there was nothing more to say, and the Riflemen filed down the hill towards the stream that was the border with Portugal. Bias Vivar watched as the greenjackets splashed through the water and began to climb the further slope.

  One of the men waiting on the Portuguese crest was impatient to discover who the strangers were. He scrambled downhill towards the Riflemen, and Sharpe saw that the man was a British officer; a middle-aged Captain wearing the blue coat of the Royal Engineers. Sharpe’s heart sank. He was coming back to the strict hierarchy of an army that did not believe ex-S
ergeants, made into officers, should lead fighting troops. He was tempted to turn, flee back across the stream, and take his freedom with Bias Vivar, but the British Captain shouted a question down the hillside and the old constraints of discipline made Sharpe answer it. “Sharpe, sir. Rifles.”

  “Hogan, Engineers. From the Lisbon garrison.” Hogan scrambled down the last few feet. “Where have you come from?”

  “We got separated from Moore’s army, sir.”

  “You did well to get away!” Hogan’s admiration seemed genuine, and was spoken in an Irish accent. “Any French behind you?”

  “We haven’t seen any in a week, sir. They’re having a hell of a time from the Spanish people.”

  “Good! Splendid! Well, come on, man! We’ve got a war to fight!”

  Sharpe did not move. “You mean we’re not running away, sir?”

  “Running away?” Hogan seemed appalled by the question. “Of course we’re not running away. The idea is to make the French run away. They’re sending Wellesley back here. He’s a pompous bastard, but he knows how to fight. Of course we’re not running away!”

  “We’re staying here?”

  “Of course we’re staying! What do you think I’m doing? Mapping a country we intend to abandon? Good God, man, we’re going to stay and fight!” Hogan had an ebullient energy that reminded Sharpe of Bias Vivar. “If the bastard politicians in London don’t lose their nerve we’ll run the bloody French clear back to Paris!”

  Sharpe turned to stare at Louisa. For a moment he was tempted to shout the good news, then he shrugged it off. She would learn soon enough, and it could change nothing. He laughed.

  Hogan led the Riflemen back up the hill. “I suppose your Battalion went back to England?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “If it went to Corunna or Vigo, it did. But I don’t imagine you’ll join them.”

  “No, sir?”

  “We need all the Rifles we can get. If I know Wellesley he’ll want you to stay on. It won’t be official, of course, but we’ll find some cranny to hide you in. Does that worry you?”