Sharpe's Rifles (10 page)

Sharpe now saw what Vivar planned, and saw that it was brave to the point of idiocy. Ignoring
the Dragoons behind the barricade he would pour all his fire into the horsemen. He was trusting
the Riflemen to keep the dismounted Dragoons occupied, and Sharpe paced along his line of
marksmen and shouted their targets to them. “That bugger by the tree. Kill him!” He saw a man
fire in a hurry and he kicked his leg. “Aim properly, you bastard!” Sharpe looked for the
telltale scatter of discarded powder which would betray a man who only half-charged his rifle to
spare his shoulder the mule-hard kick of the butt, but none of the Riflemen were using that cheap
expediency.

Two men at Vivar’s right file were down. They were the price Vivar had to pay. The cavalry was
galloping at speed now, their hooves flinging up great gobs of dirty snow and soil.

“Take aim!” Vivar stood on the exposed right flank, the one closest to the barricade and where
the greatest danger lay. He raised his sword. “Wait for it, wait for it!”

The snow was thin on the flat ground beside the road. The horses’ hooves thrummed the turf,
and the long swords reflected the pale light. The trumpet hurled them on, faster, and the
horsemen shouted the first challenge. The Spaniards had not formed a square, but were risking all
on one crushing volley from men in line. Only disciplined troops could stand in line against a
cavalry charge.

“Fire!” Vivar’s sword flashed down.

The Spanish carbines flamed. Horses tumbled. Blood, men and snow made a whirling chaos.
Something screamed, but whether man or horse, Sharpe could not tell. Then, over the scream, came
Vivar’s war shout. ”Santiago! Santiago!“

The Galicians cheered, then charged. Not at the barricade, but towards the broken
horsemen.

“Jesus Christ!” a Rifleman close to Sharpe muttered, then lowered his weapon. “They’re
bleeding mad!”

But it was a magnificent madness. Sharpe’s men watched and he barked at them to keep firing at
the enemy behind the barricade. He permitted himself to watch as the tough Galician soldiers
discarded their firearms and drew their own long swords. They climbed over the dead horses and
stabbed down at dazed Dragoons. Others seized bridles or dragged at riders.

The Frenchmen behind the barricade stood to make their own charge and Sharpe shouted a warning
at Vivar, but one which he knew the Spaniard would never hear. He turned. “Sergeant Williams!
Keep your men here! The rest of you! Follow!”

The Riflemen ran in a frenzied scramble down the hill. They made a ragged charge that would
take the last Dragoons in the flank, and the French saw them coming, hesitated, then fled.
Vivar’s men were taking prisoners or rounding up riderless horses, while the surviving Frenchmen
scrambled away to safety. The battle was over. The ambushed, outnumbered, had snatched an
impossible victory, and the snow stank of blood and smoke.

Then gunfire sounded from the canyon behind Sharpe.

Vivar turned, his face ashen.

A rifle fired, its sound amplified by the echo of rock walls.

“Lieutenant!” Vivar gestured desperately towards the canyon. “Lieutenant!” There was a genuine
despair in his voice.

Sharpe turned and ran towards the chasm. The gunfire was sudden and brusque. He could see
Sergeant Williams firing downwards, and he knew there must have been more Frenchmen hidden at the
canyon’s far end; men who would have blocked the panicked retreat they had expected to provoke.
Instead those men must be advancing up the canyon to take Vivar and Sharpe in the rear.

Except they had been stopped by one man. Rifleman Harper had found the rifle of a fallen man
and, using the corpse of the mule as a bastion, was holding off the handful of Dragoons. He had
cut the bonds from his wrists, using a bayonet that had slashed deep wounds into his hands, but,
despite the bleeding cuts, he still loaded and fired his rifle with a fearful precision. A dead
French horse and a wounded Dragoon witnessed to the Irishman’s skill. He screamed his Gaelic
challenge at the others, daring them to come closer. He turned, wild-eyed, as Sharpe appeared,
then turned scornfully back to face the French.

Sharpe lined his Rifles across the road. “Take aim!” The chasseur in his red pelisse and black
fur hat was in the gorge. Next to him rode the tall man in a black riding coat and white
boots.

“Fire!” Sharpe shouted.

A dozen rifles flamed. Bullets whined in ricochet, and two more horsemen fell. The man in red
and the man in black were safe. They seemed to stare directly into Sharpe’s eyes for an instant,
then a fusillade from above made them turn their horses and spur away to safety. The Riflemen
jeered, and Sharpe snapped them into silence. “And reload!”

The French had gone. Water dripped from thawing icicles that hung from rocks. A wounded horse
whinnied. The filthy smoke of gunfire drifted in the gorge. A Rifleman vomited blood, then
sighed. Another man wept. The wounded horse was silenced by a rifle shot, and the sound slammed
in brutal echoes from the rock walls.

Footsteps sounded behind Sharpe. It was Bias Vivar who walked past him, past the greenjackets,
and knelt by the mule. He carefully unstrapped the strongbox from the dead beast’s harness. Then,
standing, he looked up at Harper. “You saved it, my friend.”

“I did, sir?” It was clear the Irishman had no idea what value Vivar placed on the
chest.

The Spaniard reached up to the huge man and kissed both his cheeks. One of Sharpe’s Riflemen
sniggered, then was shamed to silence by the moment’s solemnity.

“You saved it,” Vivar said again, and there were tears in his eyes. Then he lifted the
strongbox and carried it back up the canyon.

Sharpe followed. His men, silent and cold, came down to the roadway. There was no exultation
in victory for, unnoticed until this moment, and far beyond the abandoned French barricade, a
smear of grey smoke rose into the winter air. It rose from the village, and the smoke was grey as
a pauper’s shroud and carried the stench of death and fire.

And from it, like dark snow, ashes fell on a bloodied land.

   
T
he villagers could have sent no warning of the
French presence for there was no village any more, nor villagers.

The fires must have been set just as the ambush was sprung, for the houses still burned
fiercely. The corpses, though, had frozen hard. The French had killed the people, then sheltered
in their houses as they waited for Vivar’s small column to reach the high canyon.

It had never been much of a village; a poor place of goats and sheep, and of people who made a
living from high pastures. The houses lay in a hollow sheltered by dwarf oaks and chestnut trees.
Potatoes had grown in a few small fields that were edged with wild mulberries and furze. The
houses had been mere thatched huts with dungheaps at their doors. They had been shared by men and
animals alike, just as the houses Sharpe’s own Riflemen had known in England had been, and that
nostalgic resemblance added to the poignancy of the day.

If anything could add to the poignancy of children and babies killed, of women raped, or of
men crucified. Sergeant Williams, who had known his share of horror in a bad world, vomited. One
of the Spanish infantrymen turned in silence on a French captive and, before Vivar could utter a
word, disembowelled the man. Only then did the Cazador utter a howl of hatred.

Vivar ignored the killing and the howl. Instead, with an odd formality, he marched to Sharpe.
“Would you…“ he began, but found it hard to continue. The stench of those bodies which burned
inside the houses was thick. He swallowed. ”Would you place picquets, Lieutenant?“

“Yes, sir.”

That, at least, took the Riflemen away from the bodies of slaughtered infants and the burning
hovels. All that was left of the village’s buildings were the church walls; walls of stone which
could not be burned, though the church’s timber roof still flamed high to spew smoke above the
valley’s rim where, among the trees, Sharpe placed his sentries. The French, if they still
lingered, were invisible.

“Why did they do it, sir?” Dodd, a quiet man, appealed to Sharpe.

Sharpe could offer no answer.

Gataker, as fly a rogue as any in the army, stared empty-eyed at the landscape. Isaiah Tongue,
whose education had been wasted by gin, winced as a terrible scream sounded from the village;
then, realizing that the scream must have come from a captured Frenchman, spat to show that it
had not troubled him.

Sharpe moved on, placing more sentries, finally reaching a spot from which, between two great
granite boulders, he could see far to the south. He sat there alone, staring into the immense sky
that promised yet more bad weather. His drawn sword was still in his hand and, almost in a daze,
he tried to push it home into its metal scabbard. The blade, still sticky with blood, stopped
halfway, and he saw to his astonishment that a bullet had pierced the scabbard and driven the
lips of metal inwards.

“Sir?”

Sharpe looked round to see a nervous Sergeant Williams. “Sergeant?”

“We lost four men, sir.”

Sharpe had forgotten to ask, and he cursed himself for the omission. “Who?”

Williams named the dead, though the names meant nothing to Sharpe. “I thought we’d have lost
more,” he said in wonderment.

“Sims is wounded, sir. And Cameron. There are some others, sir, but those are the worst.” The
Sergeant was only doing his job, but he was shaking with nerves as he spoke to his
officer.

Sharpe tried to gather his thoughts, but the memory of the dead children was withering his
senses. He had seen dead children often enough, who had not? In these past weeks he had passed a
score of the army’s children frozen to death in the ghastly retreat, but none of them had been
murdered. He had seen children beaten till their blood ran, but not till they were dead. How
could the French have waited in the village and not first hidden their obscene butchery? How
could they have committed it in the first place?

Williams, troubled by Sharpe’s brooding silence, muttered something about finding a stream
from which the men could fill their canteens. Sharpe nodded. “Make sure the French haven’t fouled
the water, Sergeant.”

“Of course, sir.”

Sharpe twisted to look at the burly man. “And the men did well. Very well.”

“Thank you, sir.” Williams sounded relieved. He flinched as another scream sounded from the
village.

“They did very well.” He said it too hastily, as if trying to distract both their thoughts
from the scream. The French prisoners were being questioned, then would die. Sharpe stared south,
wondering whether the clouds would send rain or snow. He remembered the man in the red coat, the
chasseur of the Imperial Guard, and the man in the black coat beside him. Why those two men
again? Because, he thought, they had known Vivar was coming, yet the one thing the French had not
reckoned on was Riflemen. Sharpe thought of the moment at the hilltop when the first green-jacket
had gone past him, sword-bayonet fixed, and he recalled another failing of his own. He had never
ordered the swords to be fixed, but the men had done it themselves. “The men did very well,”
Sharpe repeated, “tell them that.”

Williams hesitated. “Sir? Wouldn’t it be better if you told them?”

“Me?” Sharpe turned abruptly towards the Sergeant.

“They did it for you, sir.” Williams was embarrassed, and made more so because Sharpe did not
respond to his awkward words. “They were trying to prove something, sir. We all were. And hoping
you’d…“

“Hoping what?” The question was asked too harshly, and Sharpe knew it. “I’m sorry.”

“We were hoping you’d let Harps go, sir. The men like him, you see, and the army’s always let
men offpunishment, sir, if their comrades fight well.”

The bitterness Sharpe felt for the Irishman was too strong to let him grant the request
immediately. Til tell the men they did well, Sergeant.“ He paused. ”And I’ll think about
Harper.“

“Yes, sir.” Sergeant Williams was plainly thankful that, for the first time since he had come
under Sharpe’s orders, the Lieutenant had treated him with some civility.

Sharpe realized that too, and was shocked by it. He had been nervous of leading these men, and
frightened of their insubordination, but he had not understood that they were also frightened of
him. Sharpe knew himself to be a tough man, but he had always thought of himself as a reasonable
one, yet now, in the mirror of William’s nervousness, he saw himself as something far worse; a
bullying man who would use the small authority of his rank to frighten men. In fact, the very
kind of officer Sharpe had most hated when he himself was under their embittered authority. He
felt remorse for all the mistakes he had made with these men, and wondered how to make amends. He
was too proud to apologize, so instead he made an embarrassed confession to the Sergeant. “I
wasn’t sure any of the men would follow me up that hill.”

Williams grunted, half in amusement and half in understanding. “Those lads would, sir. You’ve
got the cream of the Battalion there.”

“The cream?” Sharpe could not hide his surprise.

“The rogues, anyway.” Williams grinned. “Not me, sir. I was never much of a one for a scrap. I
always hoped I’d never have to earn my pay, like.” He laughed. “But these boys, sir, most of them
are right bastards.” The words were said with a kind of admiration. “Stands to reason, sir, if
you think about it. I watched the lads when those crapauds attacked at the bridge, sir. Some were
just ready to give up, but not these lads. They made sure they got away. You’ve got the tough
ones, sir. Except for me. I was just lucky. But if you give these lads a chance to fight, sir,
they’ll follow you.”

“They followed you, too,” Sharpe said. “I saw you on that hilltop. You were good.”

Williams touched the chevrons on his right sleeve. “I’d be ashamed of the stripes if I didn’t
muck in. But no, sir, it was you. Bloody madness, it was, to charge that hill. But it
worked!”