Sharpe 21 - Sharpe's Devil (30 page)

The men whose powder had been soaked when their boats overturned at the sea's edge were denoted to carry the fence sections. Those men would lead the charge. The rest would follow behind and, once the twin makeshift bridges were in place, stream across to bring terror to a fort. It would be a desperate throw, but better than being trapped on the beach by three companies of infantry. And, despite Cochrane's avowed intention to carry every fort tonight, Sharpe knew that just this single strong point would save the expedition. If Cochrane possessed just one fort then he would have guns and walls with which to defeat a Spanish counterattack, and so make a stand till the men left on the ships could arrange a rescue. Lord Cochrane might yet live, if this one fort would fall.

The fence sections had been nailed to their posts, and each nail needed nothing more than a strong wrench with a bayonet to be wrested free. Sharpe experimented on a couple of naiW, then, satisfied, he slid down into the ditch's bottom where he reloaded the pistol he had fired from the boat. He checked that his other pistol was primed, then nodded at the men standing by the posts. “Go!” he said.

The men ripped the fence nails free. There was a splintering sound, the wavering of two great sections of wood, then the fence was falling. “Take hold of it!” Harper shouted. “Together now! Lift it, turn! Now go!”

“Charge!” Sharpe shouted, and he stumbled up the ditch side into the moonlight. Behind him the sea was a flicker of silver and black, while ahead of him the fortress walls were shadowed dark. The two pistols were in his belt, the sword in his hand. “Cochrane!” he shouted, “Cochrane!”

The men carrying the fence sections were lumbering across the tangle of ferns and grasses. The charge was slow, much slower than Sharpe had anticipated, made so by the weight of the cumbersome timber ramps. The carrying parties were advancing at scarcely more than a walking pace, but without the ramps the attack must fail, and so Sharpe knew he must hold his patience.

The single sentry on the fort's western wall gaped for a second, unslung his musket, decided that there were too many attackers for his single cartridge to destroy, and so turned to shout for help. His cry was drowned as the cannons cracked the night apart, slitting the moonlit darkness with their sharp stabs of flame. The wind carried the smoke toward Cochrane, away from Sharpe. The sentry shouted again, and this time he was heard.

“Cochrane!” Sharpe shouted, “Cochrane!” And suddenly men began to appear at the wall ahead. “Spread out!” Sharpe called. The first stabs of flame showed dark red on the ramparts. A ball fluttered near Sharpe, another flicked through the grass, a third cracked off one of the fence sections. The men carrying the makeshift ramps were running faster now, but the other men, unencumbered with the heavy burdens, were outstripping them, sprinting across the headland as though there would be security in the deep black shadows of the fort's ditch. i Sharpe ran with them. There were just fifty yards to go. The muskets crashed from the wall ahead. A man fell cursing to Sharpe’s left, his hands clutching at his thigh. Sharpe could smell blood in the night—blood and powder smoke, the old and too familiar smells. Thirty yards, twenty, and another volley whipped overhead. The Spanish were firing high—the error of all inexperienced troops. The first of Sharpe's men were at the ditch. “Take aim!” Sharpe shouted at them, “Aim for their bellies!”

He put his sword into his left hand as he dragged one of his two pistols free. He cocked it, dropped to one knee beside the ditch, and took aim. The defenders were silhouetted against the moonlit sky while the attackers were dark shapes against the darker ground. Sharpe found a target, lowered the muzzle to the man's belly, fired. Sparks jetted bright and the recoil jarred up Sharpe's arm. The smoke blossomed, but when it was snatched away by the wind the man was gone, plucked off the fort's ramparts. Those ramparts were ten feet above Sharpe and twelve feet away. Then the first of the fence sections arrived and Harper was yelling at the men to plant its leading edge at the side of the ditch, then to lever the whole thing up and over, like a giant trapdoor that swung in the night to crash sickeningly against the sloping earth wall. The makeshift ramp lodged some three feet below the parapet, but that was close enough. “Come on!” Sharpe shouted. “Follow me!”

He ran across the makeshift bridge. The wooden palings bounced under Sharpe's boots. A musket flamed ahead, then with men on either side of him, he leaped for the rampart's top and the Spaniards were backing away, terrified of this sudden assault. Sharpe was screaming like a wild thing, his sword chopping down hard, and a defender was at his feet, squirming and screaming. Harper swung his cutlass like a bullock-killer, almost decapitating a man. The second bridge thumped into place and yet more men swarmed up its palings. Sharpe was leading the assault toward the cannon. An infantryman lunged with his bayonet, and Sharpe knocked it aside and rammed the hilt of his sword into the man's face. The rest of the defenders, terrified by this horror that had sprung from their flank, were running away, leaving the ramparts open for Sharpe and his assault party to reach the fort's northern bastions where the guns faced out to sea.

“Cochrane! Cochrane!” the attackers shouted, and to Sharpe their ragged chorus of voices sounded desperately thin, but it was enough to terrify the gunners who turned and bolted from their embrasures. The defending infantry, swept off the wall's top, were milling uncertainly in the courtyard beneath, and now the gunners added to the panic. Sharpe dragged his second pistol free, aimed it down into the melee, and pulled the trigger.

“Cochrane!” He turned and bellowed the name into the darkness, down toward the white-fretted beach where the abandoned longboats still rolled and crashed in the tumbling surf. “Cochrane!”

“Sharpe?” Cochrane's voice sounded from the dark dunes.

“It's ours! Come on!” Christ, Sharpe thought, but they had done it! They had done it! His men were flooding into the first embrasure, hitting the captured gun with their cutlasses so that its barrel rang like a bell. “Come on, Cochrane! We've won!”

“Reload!” Harper was bellowing. “Reload!” He jumped down into the gunpit beside Sharpe. “Those bastards will counterattack.” He nodded toward the fort's courtyard.

“Let's go for them!” Sharpe said.

Behind him the slope was suddenly swarming with Cochrane's men. Sharpe did not wait for them to reach the fort, but instead shouted at his men to attack the panicked Spaniards in the fort's courtyard. An officer was trying to rally the fugitives, and if he succeeded, and if the gunners recaptured their weapons, then Cochrane's men would be cut down in swaths. Sharpe had less than fifty men, and there were at least two hundred in the courtyard, but they were demoralized and they must not be allowed to recover their wits. “Come on!” Sharpe screamed. “Finish them off!”He charged.

Harper and a flood of maddened men came with him. Cutlasses chopped down, swords stabbed, pikes ripped at frightened men, but suddenly the enemy was melting away, running, because the panicked Spaniards had thrown open the fort's gate and were fleeing across the moonlit heath of the headland. They had left the Spanish flag flying on its staff beside the semaphore gallows, had abandoned their guns and were now running toward another fort that was visible from the ramparts of the captured Fort Ingles.

“After them!” Sharpe screamed, “After them!”

This was an added madness. One fort had fallen, and one captured fort was enough to guarantee Cochrane's survival. A hundred determined men could hold this fort by manhandling the guns to the land-facing ramparts and blasting away the Spanish counterattacks while Cochrane ferried his men off the beach to the waiting frigates, but suddenly Sharpe saw a chance to take a second fortress and so he took it.

He took the mad chance because he remembered a horror from long ago, a horror he had witnessed in Spain when, riding with German horsemen, he had seen a French square broken.

The survivors of that broken square had fled toward a second square which, opening its ranks to let in their fellow Frenchmen, had also opened themselves to the crazed horses and blood-spattered swords of the King's German Legion. The big horsemen had been riding among the fugitives and had broken that second square. The survivors of the second square, together with the few men who still lived from the first, had run for a third square which, rather than let itself be turned into a slaughterhouse, had opened fire on their own men. They had still gone down, ridden into hell by big horses and screaming cavalrymen.

Now Sharpe reckoned he could work a similar effect. The demoralized fugitives from Fort Ingles were running toward Fort San Carlos which, not more than four hundred yards away, was opening its gates to receive them. In the moonlight, and in the confusion, he reckoned his men would be indistinguishable from the fugitives. “On!” he shouted at his fifty men, “On!”

They ran with him. A broad beaten track led from Fort Ingles to Fort San Carlos which, unlike the north-facing Fort Ingles, looked east across the neck of the harbor. Sharpe pushed a running Spaniard in the back, driving the man down into a ditch beside the road. He was among the Spaniards now, but they took no notice of him, nor of any of the other panting seamen who had infiltrated their ranks. The Spanish infantrymen cared only about reaching the safety of Fort San Carlos. The defenders of that second fort were standing on their ramparts, staring into the moonlight and trying to make sense of the confusion that had erupted on the headland's tip.

Some of the fleeing Spaniards at last understood their danger. An officer shouted and lashed his sword at a seaman who calmly rammed his pike into the man's ribs. Some of the running infantrymen broke off the road, running south toward the headland's farther fortresses. Cochrane had reached the first fort and, understanding what was happening, had already launched his men along the path behind Sharpe. The defenders of Fort San Carlos, seeing that second wave of attackers, assumed them to be their only threat. Muskets stabbed flame into the gathering darkness and the balls whipped over the heads of Sharpe's men.

Sharpe reached the bridge over the ditch of Fort San Carlos. The gateway was crammed with desperate men. Some, trying to escape their pursuers, clambered up the sides of the ramparts and Sharpe joined them, pulling himself up the steep earth slope. The defenses facing inland were negligible, designed to deter rather than hold off any real assault, perhaps because the fort's builders had never really expected an enemy to attack from the land. These forts were designed to pour a destructive cannonade down onto attacking ships, not to repel a madcap assault from the land. Corral Castle, the southernmost fort on the headland, had been built to resist such an assault, and Chorocomayo Castle, high on the headland's spine, was equipped with field artillery designed to keep a land attack from reaching the headland's neck, but no one had expected a landing on the Aguada del Ingles and then a crazy shrieking assault in the blood-sodden darkness.

Sharpens boots flailed for a grip on the earth slope, and a Spanish defender, assuming him to be a refugee from Fort Ingles, reached down to help. Sharpe let the man pull him to the summit, thanked him, then tipped him down into the ditch. He swung his sword back, slicing at another man who wriggled desperately away. Two sailors from the Kitty ran past Sharpe, driving forward with fixed bayonets. The Spanish defenders did not wait for the challenge, but just fled. “Cochrane!” Sharpe shouted, “Cochrane!” He drove his attackers toward the men firing at Fort Ingles who, nervous of being trapped, were already abandoning the ramparts and edging backward. Harper was in the gateway, slashing and screaming at the men who blocked the entrance.

Then, with a suddenness that bespoke their desperate and fragile morale, the defenders of Fort San Carlos shattered just as the garrison of Fort Ingles had broken. The gunners, who were in their embrasures overlooking the moon-washed waters of the harbor, turned to see a churning mass of fighting men silhouetted on their western ramparts. They saw more men scramble onto the walls and they feared that the flood of men would wash down to swamp the courtyard and bring bayonets to the gunpits, and so the gunners fled. They leaped from their embrasures, scrambled up the ditch's far side and ran south toward the third fort, Amargos, that lay a half mile away and, like San Carlos, faced east onto the harbor.

The Spanish infantry, seeing the gunners go and realizing that there was nothing left to defend, broke as well. Sharpe, still on the western ramparts, cupped his hands and screamed toward Cochrane's men. “They're running! Go south! South!” he shouted in English. “Do you hear me, Cochrane?”

“I hear you!” the voice came back.

“They're running for the next fort!”

“Tally-ho! Tally-ho!” And Cochrane, throwing all caution to the wind, turned his men off the track to charge south toward Fort Amargos. The headland echoed with the yelps and cheers of the hunting rebels. Miller's drummers were trying to beat a quick tattoo, but the pace of the advance was too swift for such formal encouragement. The defenders of Fort San Carlos, denied the use of their gate, spilled over their earthen walls to flee toward safety. Now two sets of men were running for Fort Amargos whose defenders, thinking they were all loyal Spanish forces, opened its wooden gates to receive them.

Sharpe, his men disorganized and exhausted by their attacks on the first two forts, did not join the assault on Fort Amargos. Instead he jumped down to the courtyard and crossed to the flagpole that was nothing but a thin tree trunk skinned of its bark. He sawed with his sword till the flag fluttered free. Lieutenant Cabral, foraging through the fort's buildings, found a thin horse shivering in a stable. He offered to ride after Cochrane and bring back news of the night, an offer Sharpe gratefully accepted. Then, when picquets had been set on the captured ramparts and search parties sent to find the wounded, Sharpe sheathed his sword and walked to the gun embrasures.

Harper joined him. Most of the Kitty's sailors were ransacking the fort, hurling bedding out of the log huts and hunting for coins in abandoned valises and rucksacks. A Midshipman, deputed by Sharpe to bring a butcher's bill, reported that he had found just three dead Spaniards and one dead rebel.

“God save Ireland,” Harper said in amazement, “but that wasn't a battle, it was more like herding cattle!”

“They think we're devils,” the Midshipman said. “I spoke to a wounded man and he said their bullets can't kill us. We're charmed, you see. We're protected by magic.”

“No wonder the poor sods ran,” Harper made the sign of the cross, then gave a huge yawn.

Sharpe sent the Midshipman to find Cochrane's surgeon, MacAuley. There were six men badly wounded, all Spaniards. Some of the Kitty's men had sword cuts, and one had a bullet in his thigh, but otherwise the injuries were paltry. Sharpe had never known a victory to come so cheap. “Cochrane was right,” he said to Harper. Or perhaps it had been the Spaniards who had defeated themselves, for men who believe in demons can be defeated easily.

Sharpe leaned on a gun embrasure and stared at the moon-glossed water of Valdivia Harbor. A score of ships, their cabin lights like cottage windows bright in the night, lay in the great bay, while across the water, perhaps a thousand yards away, a blaze of torches shone in Fort Niebla. Beside the fort was the entrance to the River Valdivia, leading to the town where supposedly Bias Vivar was a prisoner.

“We could give those bastards a shot or two?” Harper nodded toward the lights of Fort Niebla.

“They're out of musket range,” Sharpe said idly.

“Not with muskets. With these buggers!” Harper slapped the nearest cannon. It was a massive thirty-six pounder, a ship-killing lump of artillery that had a depressed barrel in expectation of enemy ships coming through the harbor's entrance channel. The gun's roundshot would be held in place by a rope ring rammed against the ball to stop it rolling down the inclined barrel. A quill filled with a finely mealed powder stuck from the cannon's touch-hole, and a portfire smoked and fizzed inside a protective barrel at the back of the gunpit. All the gun needed was to be re-aimed, then fired.

“Why not?” Sharpe said, then turned the cannon's elevating screw until it pointed to a spot just above the far Fort Niebla. Harper had already levered the trail around. Sharpe plucked the portfire from its barrel and blew on its burning tip till the fuse glowed a brilliant red. “Would you like to do the honors?”

“You do this one,” Harper said, “and I'll do the next.”

Sharpe stood to one side, reached over, and touched the glowing match to the quill in the touchhole. The fire flashed down to the charge, the gun crashed back on its carriage and a cloud of smoke billowed to hide the harbor. Men cheered as the ball screamed away across the water. Burning scraps of wad floated down the hillside and started small fires in the grass.

Harper fired the next gun, and so they went down the embrasures, sending the heavy shots toward the distant fort. Sharpe doubted that the cannonfire would do any damage, for he had no training in aiming such big guns, yet the shots were an expression of relief, even of joy. The defenders at Fort Niebla, doubtless confused by the noises and alarms of the night, did not fire back.

As the sound of the last shot echoed around the confining hills of the harbor, Sharpe looked south and saw that Cochrane's men were swarming across the ramparts of Fort Amargos. The fort's Spanish defenders were a fleeing rabble, the gate gaped open, and its flag was captured. Others of Cochrane's men, diverted from the newly captured Fort Amargos, were scrambling up the headland's central ridge to attack the gun emplacements of Fort Chorocomayo. Musket fire splintered the night as the attackers climbed. Cheers sounded from the ridge, a bugle called, and out in the harbor the nervous crews of neutral ships displayed bright lanterns in their rigging, advertizing to any attackers that they had no part in this night's fighting.

The fighting was ending. High on the ridge, under the bright sparks of the stars, musket flashes and cannon flames showed where Fort Chorocomayo briefly resisted Cochrane's assault. Chorocomayo had been constructed to stop an attack from the south, not the north, and the firing flared for only a few minutes before there was a sudden silence and, through the moonlit mist of powder smoke, Sharpe saw the silhouetted flag drop. Chorocomayo, like Amargos and San Carlos and Fort Ingles, had fallen. Three hundred wet and frightened men, coming from the sea, had ripped Valdivia's outer defenses into tatters. “Bloody amazing, is what it is!” Harper said.

“It surely is,” Sharpe agreed, though he knew the worst was yet to come, for the most formidable of the Spanish defense works, Corral Castle, Fort Niebla, Manzanera Island and Valdivia's Citadel, were still in enemy hands, and all those strongholds, save only the gun batteries on Manzanera Island, were stone-walled and properly supplied with glacis, ditches and revetments. Yet those more taxing defenses would have to wait for daylight. Lieutenant Cabral, coming back on his horse, confirmed that Cochrane had called a halt for the night. The attack would continue in the morning, and till then the rebel forces were to stay where they were to eat, sleep and rejoice.

Sharpe washed his sword blade clean in a trough of water, then joined Harper by a brazier where they ate Spanish sausages and a great loaf of bread, all washed down by a skin of harsh red wine. Harper had also found a basket of apples, and their smell reminded Sharpe of Normandy, for an instant, the homesickness was acute as a bullet's strike. He shook it away. The smell of the battle, of powder smoke and blood, was already gone, blown southward by the salty sea wind.

Major Miller, excited and proud, brought a further message from Cochrane. In the morning, Cochrane said, they would bombard the stone forts while the Kitty and the O'Higgins came into the harbor. Once Fort Niebla had surrendered the rebels would make the fourteen-mile journey upriver to attack Valdivia itself. Cochrane clearly had no doubts that the forts would surrender. “They're rotten!” Miller spoke of the defenders. “They've no heart, Sharpe, no belly for a fight!”

“They're badly led.” Sharpe felt sorry for the Spaniards. In the French wars he had seen Spaniards fight with fantastic bravery and enviable skill, yet here, with only a corrupted regime to defend, they had collapsed. “They think we're devils,” Sharpe said, “and that we can't be touched by bullets or blades. It isn't fair to a man to have to fight demons.”

Miller laughed and touched the spiky tips of his moustache. “I always wanted a forked tail. Sleep well, Sharpe. Tomorrow will bring victory!”

“So it will,” Sharpe said, “so it will,” and he hoped the morrow would bring so much more besides. For tomorrow he would reach Valdivia where his sword and his money and his friend all lay captive. But all that must wait for the morning and the new day's battle. Until then, Sharpe slept.

The morning brought clouds and a thin mist through which, in an uncanny silence, Cochrane's two ships slipped like ghost into Valdivia Harbor. The wounded Kitty was low in the water with a list to starboard and her pumps spitting water. She kept close to the western shore and to the protection of the captured guns of Fort San Carlos, while the O'Higgins, larger and more threatening, sailed boldly up the center of the channel. The O'Higgins's gunports were open, but Fort Niebla did not respond to the challenge. Cochrane had ordered the fifty-gun ship to hold her fire, daring to hope that the Spanish would thereby be lulled into quiescence, and now, astonishingly, the harbor's remaining defenders simply stared as the enemy ships passed through the lethal entrance. It was almost as though the Spanish, stunned by the night's events, had become mere spectators to their empire's fall.

It was falling with hardly a shot, collapsing like a rotten tree in a brisk wind. Corral Castle was the first stronghold to surrender. Cochrane ordered one shot fired from Fort Chorocomayo, and within seconds of the roundshot thumping harmlessly into the fort's earthen glacis, the gates were dragged open, the flag was hurried down, and an artillery Major rode out under a flag of truce. The castle's commander, the Major told Cochrane, was drunk, the men were mutinous and the castle belonged to the rebellion. The artillery Major surrendered his sword with indecent haste. “Just send us home to Spain," he told Cochrane.