Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sharpe led his men southwards behind the crest until a broken stretch of rocks offered a patch of shadow that took them safe down to the nearest stone wall.

  They moved fast, despite having to go at a crouch, for the shadows of the stone walls offered black lanes of invisibility that angled towards the village. Halfway across the valley floor Sharpe stopped and made a cautious reconnaissance with his telescope. He could see now that all the lower windows in the village had been blocked with stone, leaving only the inaccessible upper windows free for lookouts. He could also see the foundations of houses that had been demolished outside the village's defensive perimeter so that no attacker would have shelter close to San Cristobal. Loup had taken the additional precaution of knocking down the drystone walls that lay within close musket range of the village. Sharpe could get as near as sixty or seventy paces, but after that he would be as visible as a blowfly on a limewashed wall.

  "Bugger's taking no chances," Harper said.

  "Can you blame him?" Sharpe answered. "I'd knock down a few walls to stop El

  Castrador practising his technique on me."

  "So what do we do?" Harper asked.

  "Don't know yet."

  Nor did Sharpe know. He had come to within rifle range of his enemy's stronghold and he could feel no prickle of fear. Indeed, he could feel no apprehension at all. Maybe, he thought, Loup was not here. Or maybe, more worryingly, Sharpe's instincts were out of kilter. Maybe Loup was the puppetmaster here and he was enticing Sharpe ever closer, lulling his victim into a fatal sense of security.

  "Someone's there," Harper said, anticipating Sharpe's thoughts, "else there'd be no smoke."

  "Sensible thing to do," Sharpe said, "is for us to bugger off out of here and go to bed."

  "Sensible thing to do," Harper said, "is get out the bloody army and die in bed."

  "But that's not why we joined, is it?"

  "Speak for yourself, sir. I just joined to get a square meal," Harper said. He primed his rifle, then similarly armed the seven-barrel gun. "Getting killed wasn't really part of the idea at all."

  "I joined so as not to be strung from a gallows," Sharpe said. He primed his own rifle, then gazed again at the village's moonwashed walls. "Damn it," he said, "I'm going closer." It was like the game children played when they tried to see how close they could creep to a victim without their movements being observed, and suddenly, in Sharpe's mind, the village assumed a childlike menace, almost as though it were a malevolent but sleeping castle that must be approached with enormous stealth in case it stirred and destroyed him. Yet why bother to risk destruction, he asked himself? And he could give himself no answer to the question, except that he had not come this close to the stronghold of the man who had made himself into Sharpe's bitterest enemy just to turn and walk ignom-iniously away. "Watch the windows," he told his men, then he sneaked along the base of the shadowed wall until at last the stones ran out and there was only a spill of fallen rocks to show where once the wall had stood.

  But at least that spill of stones offered a patchy tangle of concealing shadows. Sharpe stared at that tangle, wondering if the shadows were sufficient to hide a man and then he looked up at the village. Nothing stirred except the haze of woodsmoke tugged by the night's small wind.

  "Come back, sir!" Harper called softly.

  But instead Sharpe took a breath, lay flat and edged out into the moonlight.

  He was slithering like a snake between the rocks, so slowly that he trusted no watcher would detect his moving shape amidst the patchwork of shadows. His belt and looped uniform kept snagging on stones, but each time he eased himself free and crept a few feet onwards before freezing to listen again. He was anticipating the telltale sound of a musket being cocked, the heavy double click that would presage a crashing shot. He heard nothing except the soft sound of the wind. Not even a dog barked.

  He went closer and closer until at last the jumbled stones ended and there was only moonlit open ground between himself and the high wall of the nearest house. He stared up at the window and saw nothing. He could smell nothing but the rank odour of the dungheaps in the town. No smell of tobacco, no saddle- sores, no stink of unwashed uniforms. There was the faint hint of woodsmoke sweetening the stench of dung, but otherwise no suggestion of human presence in the village. Two bats wheeled close to the wall, their ragged wings flickering black against the limewash. Sharpe, now that he was close to the village, could see the signs of neglect. The limewash was wearing thin, slates had slipped from the roofs and the window frames had been torn apart for firewood. The French had displaced San Cristobal's inhabitants and made it a village of ghosts. Sharpe's heart thumped hard, echoing in his ears as he lay straining for any clue as to what lay behind the blank, silent walls. He cocked his rifle and the clicks sounded unnaturally loud in the night, but no one called a challenge from the village.

  "Bugger it." He had not meant to speak aloud, but had, and as he spoke so he stood up.

  He could almost sense Harper taking a nervous breath a hundred paces behind him. Sharpe stood and waited, and no one spoke, no one called, no one challenged and no one shot. He felt suspended between life and death, almost as if the whole spinning earth had become as fragile as a blown-glass ball that could be shattered by a single loud noise.

  He walked towards the village that lay just twenty paces away. The loudest noises in the night were the sounds of his boots on the grass and of the breath in his throat. He reached out and touched the cold stone wall, and no one fired and no one challenged, and so Sharpe walked on around the village's edge, past the stone-blocked windows and the wall-barricaded streets until he came at last to the maze-like entrance.

  He stopped five paces short of the gate's outer wall. He licked his lips and stared at the dark gap. Was he being watched? Was Loup, like a sorcerer in a tower, drawing him on? Were the French holding their breath and scarcely believing their luck as their victim came to them, step by slow step? Was the night about to explode in stark horror? In gunfire and slaughter, defeat and pain? The thought almost made Sharpe walk away from the village, but his pride stopped him from retreating and the pride was monstrous enough to make him step one pace closer to the labyrinthine gate.

  Then another pace, and another, and suddenly he was there, in the gate's opening itself, and nothing moved. Not a breath stirred. In front of him was the blank second wall with its enticing opening off to Sharpe's left. He sidled into the gap, closed off now from the moonlight and from the sight of his riflemen. He was in the maze, in Loup's trap now, and he edged down the narrow gap between the walls with his rifle pointed and his finger on the trigger.

  He came to the gap and saw a third blank wall ahead, and so he stepped through into the last narrow passage that led to his right and thus to the final gap in the last wall. His feet scraped on stone, his breath boomed. There was moonlight beyond the third wall, but inside the labyrinth it was dark and cold. He had his back pressed hard against the middle wall and he took an odd comfort from the solid feel of the stone. He edged sideways again, tried to ignore the pumping of his heart, then took a deep breath, dropped to one knee and threw himself sideways in one motion so that he was kneeling in the last entrance to Loup's village with his rifle aimed straight down the stone-paved street towards the whitewashed church.

  And in front of him was nothing.

  No one called in triumph, no one sneered, no one ordered his capture.

  Sharpe let out a long breath. It was a cold night, but sweat was trickling down his face and stinging his eyes. He shivered, then lowered the rifle's muzzle.

  And the howling began.

  CHAPTER 6

  "He's mad, Hogan," Wellington said. "Stark mad. Gibbering. Should be locked up in Bedlam where we could pay sixpence to go and mock him. Ever been to

  Bedlam?"

  "Once, my Lord, just the once." Hogan's horse was tired and fretful, for the

  Irishman had ridden long and hard to find the General and he was somewhat confus
ed by the abrupt greeting. Hogan was also in the disobliging mood of a man woken too early, yet he somehow managed to respond to Wellington's jocular greeting in a similar vein. "My sister wanted to see the lunatics, my Lord, but as I recall we only paid tuppence each."

  "They should lock Erskine up," Wellington said grimly, "and charge the populace tuppence apiece to view him. Still, even Erskine should manage this job, eh? All he has to do is stop the place up, not actually capture it."

  Wellington was inspecting the grim defences surrounding the French-held town of Almeida. Every now and then a gun would fire from the fortress town and the flat, hard sound of the shot would echo across the rolling country a few seconds after the shot itself had bounced in a flurry of early morning dew and bounded harmlessly off towards fields or woods. Wellington, attended by a dozen aides and gallopers and starkly lit by the long slanting rays of the just risen sun, made a ripe target for the French gunners, but his Lordship ignored their efforts. Instead, almost in mockery of the enemy's marksmanship, he would stop wherever the terrain offered a view and stare at the town which had possessed a peculiar flat-topped appearance ever since the cathedral and castle on Almeida's hill top had exploded in a massive eruption of stored powder. That explosion had forced the British and Portuguese defenders to surrender the fortress town to the French, who in turn were now ringed by

  British troops under the command of Sir William Erskine. Erskine's men were under orders to contain the garrison, not capture it, and indeed none of

  Erskine's guns was large enough to make any impression on the massive star- shaped fortifications. "How many of the scoundrels are in there, Hogan?"

  Wellington asked, ignoring the fact that Hogan would not have ridden hard across country so early in the day without bringing some important news.

  "We think fifteen hundred men, my Lord."

  "Ammunition?"

  "Plenty."

  "And how much food do they have?"

  "My sources say two weeks on half rations which probably means they can last a month. The French do seem able to subsist on nothing, my Lord. Might I suggest we move before a gunner lays an accurate sight? And might I claim your

  Lordship's further attention?"

  Wellington did not move. "I am claiming the gunners' whole attention," the

  General said with heavy humour, "as a means of encouraging them to improve their aim. That way, Hogan, they might relieve me of Erskine." General Erskine was usually drunk, perpetually half blind and reputed to be mad. "Or so the

  Horse Guards confessed to me," Wellington said, expecting Hogan to follow his erratic train of thought. "I wrote to them, Hogan, and complained at being provided with Erskine and do you know what they wrote back?" Wellington had told Hogan this story at least half a dozen times in the last three months, but the Irishman knew how much the General enjoyed the telling of it and so he indulged his master.

  "I fear their reply has momentarily slipped my mind, my Lord."

  "They wrote, Hogan, and I quote, that "no doubt he is sometimes a little mad, but in his lucid intervals he is an uncommonly clever fellow, but he did look a little wild as he embarked!" Wellington gave his great horse-neigh of a laugh. "So will Masséna try to relieve the garrison?"

  Hogan understood from the General's tone that Wellington knew the answer as well as he did himself, and so he sensibly said nothing. The answer, anyway, was obvious, for both Hogan and Wellington understood that Marshal Masséna would not have left fifteen hundred men in Almeida just so they could be starved into surrender and thus forced to spend the rest of the war in some inhospitable prison camp on Dartmoor. Almeida had been garrisoned for a purpose and Hogan, like his master, suspected the purpose was close to its fulfilment.

  A blossom of white smoke marked where a cannon had fired from the ramparts.

  The ball showed itself to Hogan as a dark vertical line that flickered in the sky, a sure sign that the shot was coming straight towards the observer. Now all depended on whether the gun-layer had judged the elevation right. One half-turn too many on the gun's elevating screw and the ball would fall short, one turn too few and it would scream overhead.

  It fell a hundred yards short, then bounced up over Wellington's head to tear through a grove of oaks. Leaves scattered as the shot whipped the branches to and fro. "Their guns are too cold, Hogan," the General said. "They're under- firing."

  "Not by a great deal, my Lord," Hogan said fervently, "and the barrels will warm quickly."

  Wellington chuckled. "Value you life, do you? Well, ride on." His Lordship clicked his tongue and his horse obediently walked on down the slope past a

  British gun battery that was screened from the enemy by an earthwork topped by soil-filled baskets. Many of the gunners were stripped to the waist, some were sleeping, and none seemed to notice the commander passing. Another general might have been annoyed by the battery's casual air, but Wellington's quick eye noted the good condition of the guns and so he merely nodded to the battery commander before waving his aides out of earshot. "So what's your news, Hogan?"

  "Too much news, my Lord, and none of it good," Hogan said. He took off his hat and fanned his face. "Marshal Bessières has joined Masséna, my Lord. Brought a deal of cavalry and artillery with him, but no infantry as far as we can gather."

  "Your partisans?" Wellington was inquiring about the source of Hogan's information.

  "Indeed, my Lord. They shadowed Bessières's march." Hogan took out his snuff box and helped himself to a restorative pinch while Wellington digested the news. Bessières commanded the French army in Northern Spain, an army devoted wholly to fighting partisans, and the news that Bessières had brought troops to reinforce Marshal Masséna hinted that the French were readying themselves for their attempt to relieve the seige of Almeida.

  Wellington rode in silence for a few yards. His route took him up a gentle slope to a grassy crest that offered another view of the enemy fortress. He took out a spyglass and gave the spreading, low walls and the artillery- shattered rooftops a long inspection. Hogan imagined the gunners handspiking their guns around to lay on their new target. Wellington grunted, then snapped the spyglass shut. "So Masséna's coming to resupply these rascals, is he? And if he succeeds, Hogan, they'll have enough supplies to last out till hell goes cold unless we storm the place first, and storming it will take until midsummer at least, and I can't storm Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo at the same time, so Masséna will just have to be stopped. It'll go low, I warrant." This last remark referred to a cannon that had just fired from the walls. The smoke jetted out across the ditch as Hogan tried to catch sight of the missile. The roundshot arrived a second before the sound of the gun. The ball bounced on the slope below the General's party and ricocheted high over his head to crack against an olive tree. Wellington turned his horse away. "But you know what it will mean, Hogan, if I try to stop Masséna in front of Almeida?"

  "The Coa, my Lord."

  "Exactly." If the British and Portuguese army fought the French close to

  Almeida then they would have the deep, fast-flowing River Coa at their backs, and if Masséna succeeded in turning Wellington's right flank, which he would assuredly try to do, then the army would be left with one road, just one road, on which it could retreat if it suffered defeat. And that one road led across a high, narrow bridge over the Coa's otherwise uncrossable gorge, and if the defeated army with all its guns and baggage and women and pack-horses and wounded were to try and cross that one narrow bridge then there would be chaos. And into that chaos would plunge the Emperor's heavy horses with their sword-wielding troopers and thus a fine British army that had thrown the

  French out of Portugal would die on the frontier of Spain and there would be a new bridge over the Seine in Paris and it would bear the odd name of Pont

  Castello Bom in commemoration of the place where André Masséna, Marshal of

  France, would have destroyed Lord Wellington's army. "So we shall have to beat

  Marshal Mass�
�na, won't we?" Wellington said to himself, then turned to Hogan.

  "When will he come, Hogan?"

  "Soon, my Lord, very soon. The stores in Ciudad Rodrigo won't allow them otherwise," Hogan answered. With the arrival of Bessières's men the French now had too many mouths to feed from Ciudad Rodrigo's supply depots, which meant they would have to march soon or starve.

  "So how many does Masséna have now?" Wellington asked.

  "He can put fifty thousand men into the field, my Lord."

  "And I can't put forty thousand against them," Wellington said bitterly. "One day, Hogan, London will come to believe that we can win this war and will actually send us some troops who are not mad, blind or drunk, but till then

  ... ?" He left the question unanswered. "Any more of those damned counterfeit newspapers?"

  Hogan was not surprised by the sudden change of subject. The newspapers describing the fictional atrocities in Ireland had been intended to disaffect the Irish soldiers in the British army. The ploy had failed, but only just, and both Hogan and Wellington feared that the next attempt might be more successful. And if that attempt came on the eve of Masséna's crossing of the frontier to relieve Almeida it could be disastrous. "None, sir," Hogan said,