Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  Loup jumped off the bridge as Sharpe splashed into the stream and the two men met halfway, thigh-deep in a pool made by a dam of bodies and discoloured by their blood. The swords clashed, Loup lunged, but Sharpe parried and swung, only to have his own blow parried. He kicked at Loup's knee, but the deep water impeded him and he almost fell and opened himself to a scything swing of

  Loup's straight sword, but Sharpe recovered at the last moment and deflected the blow with the hilt of his sword which he rammed forward at Loup's wall- eye. The Brigadier stepped hurriedly back, tripped, but gained his balance with another vicious swing of the sword. The wider battle was still being fought, but both the British and the French left the two swordsmen alone. The

  French were going to earth in the walls and gardens of the stream's eastern bank where their first attacks of the day had started, while the British and

  Portuguese were hunting the last enemy out of the village proper. While in the stream the two battle-crazed men swung their clumsy swords like clubs.

  They were evenly matched. Loup was the better swordsman, but he lacked

  Sharpe's height and reach and he was more accustomed to fighting on horseback than on foot. The two swung, stabbed and parried in a grotesque mockery of the fine art of fencing. Their movements were slowed by the stream and by their tiredness, while the finesse of swordfighting was wasted on blades as long and cumbersome as heavy cavalry swords. The sound of the two swords was reminiscent of a blacksmith's shop.

  "Bastard," Sharpe said, and cut. "Bastard," he said again and rammed the point forward.

  Loup parried the lunge. "This is for my two murdered men," he said and cut the sword upward, forcing Sharpe to an awkward parry. Loup spat an insult then lunged his sword at Sharpe's face, making the rifleman stagger sideways.

  Sharpe returned the lunge and shouted in triumph as his sword sliced into

  Loup's midriff, but he had only succeeded in piercing the Frenchman's sabretache that now trapped the point of his sword as Loup waded forward to give the killing blow. Sharpe stepped forward as well, closing the gap to stop the lunge and butting with his head as he got close. The Frenchman avoided the butt and brought up his knee. Sharpe hit him with his left hand, then wrenched his sword free and hit Loup with the hilt just as the Brigadier's sword guard clouted him stingingly on the left side of his head.

  The two men reeled apart. They stared at each other, but they no longer traded insults for they needed all their strength for the fight. Muskets snapped across the stream, but still no one interfered with the duellists, recognizing that they were fighting the battle of honour that belonged to them alone. A group of grey-uniformed men watched from the eastern bank while a mix of riflemen, guardsmen, Rangers and Highlanders cheered Sharpe from the west.

  Sharpe scooped water up with his left hand and splashed it on his mouth. He licked his lips. "Time to finish you," he said thickly and waded forward. Loup raised his sword as Sharpe swung, parried the blow, then parried again. Sharpe had found a new, desperate energy and he gave the Frenchman stroke after stroke, huge strokes, great slashing cuts of the heavy sword that beat down

  Loup's guard and followed each other so fast that the Frenchman had no time to disengage and turn his own blade into the attack. He went back, beaten by

  Sharpe's strength, and blow by blow his defence weakened as Sharpe, teeth gritted, went on swinging. One last blow rang on Loup's upheld sword to drive the grey Frenchman down onto his knees in the water and Sharpe screamed his victory as he raised the sword for one last terrible strike.

  "Watch out, sir!" Harper called desperately.

  Sharpe glanced to his left to see a grey-uniformed dragoon mounted on a grey horse and with a plume of black, shining hair hanging from his helmet to his waist. He was holding a short-barrelled carbine aimed dead at Sharpe. Sharpe stepped back, checking the killing stroke, and saw that the black hair was not a helmet's plume at all. "Juanita!" he shouted. She would save Loup just as she had once kept Lord Kiely alive, only she had saved Kiely to preserve her excuse for staying behind British lines while she would keep Loup alive for love. "Juanita!" Sharpe called, appealing to that one memory of a grey dawn in a grey wolf's bed in the high hills.

  She smiled. She fired. She turned to flee, but Harper was in the shallows with the seven-barrelled gun at his shoulder and his volley snatched Juanita off her horse in an eruption of blood. Her death screech ended before her falling body struck the ground.

  Sharpe was also falling. He had taken a terrible blow under his right shoulder and the pain was already flickering like fire down his suddenly nerveless hand. He staggered and went to one knee and Loup was suddenly over him, sword aloft. Smoke from a burning house wafted over the stream as Loup shouted his victory and brought the sword slamming down.

  Sharpe hooked the Frenchman's right ankle with his left hand and tugged. Loup shouted as he fell. Sharpe snarled and dived forward, going beneath the falling sword, and he grabbed his own sword blade with his blood-encrusted left hand so that he was holding the three-foot blade like a quarterstaff that he rammed hard across his enemy's neck. Blood from his shoulder was running down to the stream as he drove the Brigadier beneath the water, drove him down to the stream's gravel bed and held him there with the sword. He locked his right arm straight and held the sword tip with his left and clenched his teeth against the pain in his arm as he used all his weight to hold the smaller man down under the hurrying stream. Bubbles showed in the bloody water and were whirled away. Loup kicked and thrashed, but Sharpe held him there, kneeling in the stream so that only his head and bloody shoulder were above water and he kept the sword hard over the dying man's throat to drown the Frenchman like a man would drown a rabid dog.

  Rifles and muskets splintered from the western bank as Sharpe's men drove away

  Loup's infantry from the eastern bank. Those grey infantry had come forward to rescue their Brigadier, but Loup was dying, choking on water and steel, blacking out under the stream. A bullet slapped the water close to Sharpe, but he stayed there, ignoring the pain, just holding the sword hard across his enemy's throat. And slowly, slowly, the last bubbles faded, and slowly, slowly, the struggles beneath Sharpe ceased, and slowly, slowly, Sharpe understood that he had scotched the beast and that Loup, his enemy, was dead and slowly, slowly, Sharpe eased away from the body that floated up to the surface as he staggered, bloody and hurting, back to the western bank where

  Harper caught up with him and hurried him back into the shelter of a bullet- chipped wall. "God save Ireland," Harper said as he eased the wet sword out of

  Sharpe's hand, "but what have you done?"

  "Won, Pat, bloody well won." And, despite the pain, he grinned. For he was a soldier, and he bloody well had won.

  "Stay still, man, for God's sake." The surgeon's voice was slurred and his breath reeked of brandy. He grimaced as he manipulated the probe that was sunk deep in Sharpe's shoulder. The surgeon also held a small pair of tweezers that he constantly darted in and out of the open wound to give jabs of pure agony.

  "The goddamn bullet drove in scraps of your uniform," he said. "Why the hell don't you wear silk? That doesn't fall to pieces."

  "Can't afford silk," Sharpe said. The church stank of blood, pus, faeces and urine. It was night time and Fuentes de Onoro's church was crammed with the wounded of two armies who lay in the smoking rushlight as they waited their turn with the surgeons who would be busy with their hooks and saws and blades all night long.

  "God knows if you'll live." The doctor plucked another scrap of bloody wool out of the wound and scraped it off the tweezer's jaws onto his stained apron.

  He belched a fetid brandy-flavoured breath over Sharpe, then shook his head wearily. "The wound will probably turn septic. They usually do. You'll stink like a leper's latrine, your arm will drop off and in ten days' time you'll be dead. Lots of fever before then, you'll gibber like a lunatic and sweat like a horse, but you'll be a hero back home. Of course it hurts, man. Stop whini
ng like a damned child, for Christ's sake! I never could stand whining bloody children. And sit still, man!"

  Sharpe sat still. The pain of the probe was excruciating, like having a white- hot flesh-hook jammed and twisted into his shoulder joint. He closed his eyes and tried not to listen to the grating sound caused by the surgeon's probe scraping against the bone as he searched for the carbine ball. "Got the little bastard. Hold still." The surgeon found a narrow-nosed set of forceps and eased them into the wound after the probe. "You say a woman did it?"

  "A woman did it," Sharpe said, keeping his eyes closed. A prisoner from Loup's brigade had confirmed that Juanita had indeed advanced with the dragoons. No one in Loup's brigade had thought the French would be dislodged from the village and thrown back over the stream and so no one had told Juanita the danger. Not that she would have listened. She had been an adventuress who loved the smell of fighting and now she was dead.

  So was Loup, and with their death had died General Valverde's last chance of finding a witness to Sharpe's confession to having killed the French prisoners and so precipitating the fiasco at San Isidro. There was only one witness left alive and he had come at dusk to the church where Sharpe had been waiting for the surgeon. "They asked me," Runciman had told Sharpe excitedly. The Colonel had been in the village throughout the fight, and though no one was claiming that the erstwhile Wagon Master General had taken a leading role in the battle, nor was anyone denying that Colonel Runciman had been in the place of greatest danger where he had neither flinched nor shrunk from the fight.

  "Who asked you what, General?" Sharpe had responded.

  "Wellington and that wretched Spanish General." Runciman gabbled in his excitement. "Asked me directly, straight to my face. Had you admitted to shooting two Frenchies? That's what they asked me."

  Sharpe flinched as a man screamed under the surgeon's knife. The amputated arms and feet made a grisly pile beside the altar that served as an operating table. "They asked you," Sharpe said, "and you don't tell lies."

  "So I didn't!" Runciman said. "I said it was a preposterous question. That no gentleman would do such a thing and that you were an officer and therefore a gentleman and that with the greatest of respect to his Lordship I found the question offensive." Runciman bubbled with joy. "And Wellington backed me up!

  Told Valverde he wanted to hear no more allegations against British officers.

  And there's to be no court of inquiry either, Sharpe! Our conduct today, I am told, obviates any need to question the sad events of San Isidro. Quite right too!"

  Sharpe had smiled. He had known he was exonerated from the moment that

  Wellington, just before the Real Companïa Irlandesa's counterattack on the village, had reprimanded him for shooting the French prisoners, but Runciman's excited news was a welcome confirmation of that release. "Congratulations,

  General," Sharpe said. "So what now?"

  "Home, I think. Home. Home." Runciman smiled at the thought. "Maybe I can be of some use in the Hampshire militia? I suggested as much to Wellington and he was kind enough to agree. The militia, he said, needed men with martial experience, men of vision and men with an experience of command, and he was kind enough to suggest I possessed all three qualities. He's a very kind man,

  Wellington. Haven't you discovered that, Sharpe?"

  "Very kind, sir," Sharpe said drily, watching the orderlies hold down a man whose leg was quivering as the surgeons cut at the thigh.

  "So I'm off to England!" Runciman said with delight. "Dear England, all that good food and sensible religion! And you, Sharpe? What of your future?"

  "I'll go on killing Frogs, General. It's all I'm good for." He glanced at the doctor and saw the man was nearly finished with his previous patient and he braced himself for the pain to come. "And the Real Companïa Irlandesa,

  General," he asked, "what happens to them?"

  "Cadiz. But they go as heroes, Sharpe. A battle won! Almeida still invested and Masséna scuttling back to Ciudad Rodrigo. "Pon my word, Sharpe, but we're all heroes now!"

  "I'm sure your father and mother always said you'd be a hero one day,

  General."

  Runciman had shaken his head. "No, Sharpe, they never did. They were hopeful for me, I don't deny it, and no wonder for they were blessed with only the one child and I was that fortunate blessing, and they gave me great gifts, Sharpe, great gifts, but not, I think, heroism."

  "Well, you are a hero, sir," Sharpe said, "and you can tell anyone who asks that I said as much." Sharpe held out his right arm and, despite the pain, shook Runciman's hand. Harper had just appeared at the church doorway and was holding up a bottle to show that there was some consolation waiting when

  Sharpe's bullet was extracted. "I'll see you outside, sir," Sharpe told

  Runciman, "unless you want to watch the surgeon pull out the bullet?"

  "Oh, good Lord, no, Sharpe! My dear parents never thought I'd have the stomach to study medicine and I fear they were right." Runciman had gone pale. "I shall let you suffer alone," he said and backed hastily away with a handkerchief held over his mouth in case the noxious effusions of the hospital gave him a sickness.

  Now the doctor pulled the bullet free of the wound before ramming a dirty rag against Sharpe's shoulder to staunch the flow of blood. "No bones broken," he said, sounding disappointed, "but there are some bone chips off the rib that'll hurt you for a few days. Maybe for ever, if you live. You want to keep the bullet?" he asked Sharpe.

  "No, sir."

  "Not as a keepsake for the ladies?" the doctor asked, then took a flask of brandy from a pocket of his blood-stiffened apron. He took a deep swallow, then used a corner of his bloody apron to wipe the tips of the forceps clean.

  "I know a man in the artillery who has dozens of spent bullets mounted in gold and hung on chains," the surgeon said. "He claims each one lodged near his heart. He's got the scar, you see, to prove it, and he presents a bullet to every woman he wants to roger and tells each silly bitch that he dreamed of a woman who looked just like her when he thought he was dying. It works, he says. He's a pig-ugly scoundrel but he reckons the women can't wait to claw his breeches down." He offered Sharpe the bullet again. "Sure you don't want the damn thing?"

  "Quite sure."

  The doctor tossed the bullet aside. "I'll get you wrapped up," he said. "Keep the bandage damp if you want to live and don't blame me if you die." He walked unsteadily away, calling for an orderly to bandage Sharpe's shoulder.

  "I do hate bloody doctors," Sharpe said as he joined Harper outside the church.

  "My grand-da said the same thing," the Irishman said as he offered Sharpe the bottle of captured brandy. "He only saw a doctor once in all his life and a week later he was dead. Mind you, he was eighty-six at the time."

  Sharpe smiled. "Is he the same one whose bullock dropped off the cliff?"

  "Aye, and bellowed all the way down. Just like when Grogan's pig fell down a well. I think we laughed for a week, but the damned pig wasn't even scratched!

  Just wet."

  Sharpe smiled. "You must tell me about it some time, Pat."

  "So you're staying with us then?"

  "No court of inquiry," Sharpe said. "Runciman told me."

  "They should never have wanted one in the first place," Harper said scornfully, then took the bottle from Sharpe and tipped it to his mouth.

  They wandered through an encampment smeared with the smoke of cooking fires and haunted with the cries of wounded men left on the battlefield. Those cries faded as Sharpe and Harper walked further from the village. Around the fires men sang of their homes far away. The singing was sentimental enough to give

  Sharpe a pang of homesickness even though he knew his home was not in England, but here, in the army, and he could not imagine leaving this home. He was a soldier and he marched where he was ordered to march and he killed the King's enemies when he arrived. That was his job and the army was his home and he loved both even though he knew he would have to fig
ht like a gutter-born bastard for every step of advancement that other men took for granted. And he knew too that he would never be prized for his birth or his wit or his wealth, but would only be reckoned as good as his last fight, but that thought made him smile. For Sharpe's last battle had been against the best soldier France had and Sharpe had drowned the bastard like a rat. Sharpe had won, Loup was dead, and it was over at last: Sharpe's battle.

  Historical Note

  The royal guard of Spain in Napoleonic times consisted of four companies: the

  Spanish, American, Italian and Flemish companies, but alas, no Real Companïa

  Irlandesa. There were, however, three Irish regiments in Spanish service (de

  Irlanda, de Hibernia and de Ultonia), each composed of Irish exiles and their descendants. The British army, too, had more than its share of Irishmen; some

  English county regiments in the Peninsula were more than one third Irish and if the French could ever have disaffected those men then the army would have been in a desperate condition.