Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2. Bernard Cornwell
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crossed to the remnants of a side altar and picked up a candle that had been burning on the floor. He took it to the pile of splintered furniture that had been laced with powder from the dragoons’ carbine ammunition. He placed the candle deep in the pile and backed away. For a moment the flame flickered small and insignificant, then there was a hiss and a bright fire streaked up the pile’s centre. The wounded men cried aloud as smoke began to curl towards the beams and as Vuillard and the dragoons retreated towards the door. ‘They flap like fish.’ The Brigadier spoke of the men who tried to drag themselves towards the fire in the vain hope of extinguishing it. Vuillard laughed. ‘The rain will slow things,’ he told Christopher, ‘but not by much.’ The fire was crackling now, spewing thick smoke. ‘It’s when the roof catches fire that they die,’ Vuillard said, ‘and it takes quite a time. Best not to stay though.’
The dragoons left, locking the church behind them. A dozen men stayed out in the rain to make certain that the fire did not go out or, more unlikely, that no one escaped from the flames, while Vuillard led Christopher and a half-dozen other officers to the village’s largest tavern which was cheerfully lit by scores of candles and lamps. ‘The infantry will report to us here,’ Vuillard explained, ‘so we must find something to pass the time, eh?’
‘Indeed.’ Christopher plucked off his cocked hat as he stooped through the tavern door.
‘We’ll have a meal,’ Brigadier Vuillard said, ‘and what passes in this country for wine.’ He stopped in the main room where the village’s girls had been lined against a wall. ‘What do you think?’ he asked Christopher.
‘Tempting,’ Christopher said.
‘Indeed.’ Vuillard still did not entirely trust Christopher. The Englishman was too aloof, but now, Vuillard thought, he would put him to the test. ‘Take your choice,’ he said, pointing to the girls. The men guarding the girls grinned. The girls were crying softly.
Christopher took a pace towards the captives. If the Englishman was squeamish, Vuillard thought, then that would betray scruples or, worse, a sympathy for the Portuguese. There were even some in the French army who expressed such sympathies, officers who argued that by maltreating the Portuguese the army only made their own problems worse, but Vuillard, like most Frenchmen, believed that the Portuguese needed to be punished with such severity that none would ever dare lift a finger against the French again. Rape, theft and wanton destruction were, to Vuillard, defensive tactics and now he wanted to see Christopher join him in an act of war. He wanted to see the aloof Englishman behave like the French in their moment of triumph. ‘Be quick,’ Vuillard said, ‘I promised my men they could have the ones we don’t want.’
‘I’ll take the small girl,’ Christopher said wolfishly, ‘the redhead.’
She screamed, but there was much screaming that night in Vila Real de Zedes.
As there was on the hill to the south.
Sharpe ran. He shouted at his men to get to the top of the hill as fast as they could and then he scrambled up the slope and he had gone a hundred yards before he calmed down and realized that he was doing this all wrong. ‘Rifles!’ he shouted. ‘Packs off!’
He let his men unburden themselves until they carried only their weapons, haversacks and cartridge boxes. Lieutenant Vicente’s men did the same. Six Portuguese and the same number of riflemen would stay to guard the discarded packs and bags and greatcoats and cuts of smoked meat, while the rest followed Sharpe and Vicente up the slope. They went much faster now. ‘Did you see the bastards up there?’ Harper panted.
‘No,’ Sharpe said, but he knew the French would want to take the fort because it was the highest ground for miles, and that meant they had probably sent a company or more to loop about the south and sneak up the hill. So it was a race. Sharpe had no proof that the French were in the race, but he did not underestimate them. They would be coming and all he could pray was that they were not there already.
The rain fell harder. No gun would fire in this weather. This was going to be a fight of wet steel, fists and rifle butts. Sharpe’s boots slipped on sodden turf and skidded on rock. He was getting short of breath, but at least he had climbed the flanking slope and was now on the path that led up the northern spine of the hill, and his men had widened and strengthened the path, cutting steps in the steepest places and pegging the risers with wedges of birch. It had been invented work to keep them busy, but it was all worth it now because it quickened the pace. Sharpe was still leading with a dozen riflemen close behind. He decided he would not close ranks before they reached the top. This was a scramble where the devil really would take the hindmost so the important thing was to reach the summit, and he looked up into the whirl of rain and cloud and he saw nothing up there but wet rock and the sudden reflected sheen of a lightning bolt slithering down a sheer stone face. He thought of the village and knew it was doomed. He wished he could do something about that, but he did not have enough men to defend the village and he had tried to warn them.
The rain was driving into his face, blinding him. He slithered as he ran. There was a stitch in his side, his legs were like fire and the breath rasped in his throat. The rifle was slung on his shoulder, bouncing there, the stock thumping into his left thigh as he tried to draw the sword, but then he had to let go of the hilt to steady himself against a rock as his boots slid wildly out from under him. Harper was twenty paces back, panting. Vicente was gaining on Sharpe who dragged his sword free of its scabbard, pushed himself away from the boulder and forced himself on again. Lightning flickered to the east, outlining black hills and a sky slanting with water. The thunder crackled across the heavens, filling them with angry noise, and Sharpe felt as though he were climbing into the heart of the storm, climbing to join the gods of war. The gale tore at him. His shako was long gone. The wind shrieked, moaned, was drowned by thunder and burdened by rain and Sharpe thought he would never reach the top and suddenly he was beside the first wall, the place where the path zigzagged between two of the small redoubts his men had built, and a dagger of lightning stabbed down into the void that opened wet and dark to his right. For a wild second he thought the hilltop was empty and then he saw the flash of a blade reflecting the storm’s white fire and knew the French were already there.
Dulong’s voltigeurs had arrived just seconds before and had taken the watchtower, but they had not had time to occupy the northernmost redoubts where Sharpe’s men now appeared. ‘Throw them out!’ Dulong roared at his men.
‘Kill the bastards!’ Sharpe shouted and his blade scraped along a bayonet, jarred against the muzzle of the musket and he threw himself forward, driving the man back, and hammered his forehead against the man’s nose and the first riflemen were past him and the blades were ringing in the near dark. Sharpe banged the hilt of his sword into the face of the man he had put down, plucked the musket from him and threw it out into the void, then pushed on to where a group of Frenchmen were readying to defend the summit. They aimed their muskets and Sharpe hoped to God he was right and that no flintlock would ever fire in this wet fury. Two men struggled to his left and Sharpe slid the sword into a blue jacket, twisting it in the ribs, and the Frenchman threw himself sideways to escape the blade and Sharpe saw it was Harper hammering at the man with a rifle butt.
‘God save Ireland.’ Harper, wild-eyed, stared up at the French guarding the watchtower.
‘We’re going to charge those bastards!’ Sharpe shouted at the riflemen coming up behind.
‘God save Ireland.’
‘Tirez!’ a French officer shouted and a dozen flints fell on steel and the sparks flashed and died in the rain.
‘Now kill them!’ Sharpe roared. ‘Just bloody kill them!’ Because the French were on his hilltop, on his land, and he felt a rage fit to match the anger of the storm-filled sky. He ran uphill and the French muskets reached down with their long bayonets and Sharpe remembered fighting on the steep breach at Gawilghur and he did now what he had done then, reached under the bayonet and grabbed a man’s ankle and tugged. The Frenchman screamed as he was pulled down the hill to where three sword bayonets chopped at him, and then Vicente’s Portuguese, realizing they could not shoot the French, began hurling rocks at them and the big stones drew blood, made men