Sharpe's Rifles (28 page)

The rain stopped two hours before the dawn. There was no wind. Frost made the grass brittle.
The cigars were finished, but their usefulness was ended anyway for a mist silted the last
valleys before the city.

When the rain stopped, Vivar called a halt.

He stopped because there was a danger that the French might have put heavy picquets into the
villages which lay in the hills about the city. Refugees from Santiago de Com-postela knew of no
such precautions, but Vivar guarded against it by ordering that any piece of equipment which
might rattle or clang must be tied down. Musket and rifle-slings, canteens and mess tins, all
were muffled. It still seemed to Sharpe, as they moved off, that the troops made sufficient noise
to wake the dead; horseshoes clicked on stone, iron boot-heels thumped frosted earth, but no
French picquet startled the darkness with a volley of musketry to warn the distant
city.

The Riflemen now led the march. Vivar followed with his cavalry, but the greenjackets led
because they were the experienced infantry who would spearhead the attack. Cavalry could not
assault a barricaded town; only infantry could achieve such a thing, and this time it had to be
done without loaded firearms. Sharpe had reluctantly agreed that his Riflemen would make the
assault with the bayonet alone.

A flintlock was a precarious thing. Even uncocked the weapon could fire if the flint’s doghead
snagged on a twig, was dragged back, then released. Such a shot, however accidental, would alert
French sentries.

It was one thing to order men not to fire; to tell them that their lives depended on a silent
approach, but in the misted darkness just before dawn, when a man’s blood was at its coldest and
his fears warmest, a cat’s squawl could be enough to scare a Rifleman and make him fire blind
into the night. Just one such shot would bring Frenchmen tumbling from their
guardhouses.

And so, though yielding the point had added to Sharpe’s dread, he had seen the force of
Vivar’s pleading and so had agreed to advance with empty weapons. Now no shot could startle the
night.

Yet still the French could be forewarned. Such fears were Sharpe’s tumultuous companions on
the long and ever more halting march. Perhaps the French had their own spies in the mountains
who, just as the refugees had betrayed information to Vivar, had betrayed Vivar to the city? Or
perhaps de l’Eclin, a man whose ruthlessness was absolute, had whipped the truth from Louisa?
Perhaps artillery had been fetched from Corunna and waited, charged with canister, to greet the
fumbling attackers? Attackers, moreover, who would be tired, cold, and without loaded guns. The
first moments of such a fight would be slaughter.

Sharpe’s fears burgeoned and, away from Vivar’s indomitable cheerfulness, he let the doubts
gnaw at him. He could not express those doubts, for to do so would destroy whatever confidence
his men might have in his leadership. He could only hope that he conveyed the same certainty as
Patrick Harper who seemed to march eagerly over the last steep miles. Once, as they splashed
through a soggy reach of grassland beneath the dark line of a pinewood, Harper spoke
enthusiastically of just how grand it would be to see Miss Louisa again. “She’s a brave lass,
sir.”

“And a foolish one,” Sharpe replied sourly, still angry that her life had been
risked.

Yet Louisa was the reverse of Sharpe’s fear; the consolation which, like a tiny beacon in an
immense darkness, kept him going. She was his hope, but arrayed against that hope were the demons
of fear. Those demons became more sinister with every forced halt. Sharpe’s guide, a blacksmith
from the city, was leading a circuitous route that would avoid the villages and the man stopped
frequently to sniff the air as though he could find his way by scent alone.

At last satisfied, he increased his pace. The Riflemen slithered down a steep hill, reaching a
stream that had flooded the meadows and turned the valley’s bottom into a morass of frost and
shallow water. Sharpe’s guide stopped at the margin of the marsh. ‘Agua, senor.“

“What does he want?” Sharpe hissed.

“Saying something about water,” Harper replied.

“I know it’s God-damned water.” Sharpe started forward, but the guide dared to pluck at the
Rifleman’s sleeve.

“Agua bendita! Senor!“

“Ah!” It was Harper who understood. “He wants the holy water, sir, so he does.”

Sharpe swore at the idiocy of the request. The Riflemen were late and this fool demanded that
he sprinkle a morass with holy water? “Come on!”

“Are you sure…“ Harper began.

“Come on!” Sharpe’s voice was made harsher by the fears which seethed inside him. This whole
expedition was misbegotten and mad! Yet pride would not let him turn back, nor would it let him
make an obeisance towards Vivar’s water-sprites. “I haven’t got any bloody holy water!” he
growled. “Anyway, it’s superstitious bloody nonsense, Sergeant, and you know it.”

“I don’t know that at all, sir.”

“Come on!” Sharpe led the way through the stream and cursed because his tattered boots let in
cold water. The Riflemen, oblivious to the cause of the small delay at the water’s edge,
followed. This mist seemed thicker in the valley’s bottom and the guide, who had splashed through
the stream with Sharpe, hesitated on the far bank.

“Hurry!” Sharpe growled, though it was a pointless admonition for the blacksmith spoke no
English. “Hurry! Hurry!”

The guide, clearly flustered, indicated a narrow sheep track that angled up the further slope.
As he climbed, Sharpe realized they must have come very close to the city, which was betrayed by
the mephitic stink of its streets that seemed to him to be a foretaste of the horror that awaited
his men.

Sharpe suddenly realized that the thump and chink of moving cavalry had been left behind, and
he knew Vivar must have sent the Cazadores on their northward detour which was designed to take
them far from the ears of French sentries. The ill-trained volunteer infantry should be some two
or three hundred yards behind Sharpe by now. The Riflemen were isolated, ahead of the attack, and
now very close to the holy city of St James.

And they were late, for the mist was being silvered by the first hint of the false dawn.
Sharpe could see Harper beside him, he could even see the beads of moisture on the peak of
Harper’s shako. He had lost his own shako in the battle at the farm, and now wore a Cazador’s
forage cap instead. The cap was a pale grey and Sharpe was seized with the sudden irrational
knowledge that the light-coloured cloth would make his head a target for some French marksman on
the hill above. He snatched it off and threw it into some brambles. He could feel the thump of
his heart. His belly was tender and his mouth dry.

The blacksmith, going very cautiously now, led the Riflemen across a rough pasture and into a
grove of elm trees that grew at the hill’s summit. The bare branches dripped and the mist wavered
in the darkness. Sharpe could smell a fire, though he could not see it. He wondered if it
belonged to one of the French guardposts and the thought of the waiting sentries made him feel
horribly alone and vulnerable. The dawn was coming. This was the moment when he should be
attacking, but the mist masked the landmarks which Vivar had coached him to expect. To his right
there should be a church, to his left the loom of the city, and he should not be on a hilltop,
but in a deep ravine which would hide the Riflemen’s approach.

Sharpe, lacking those landmarks, supposed there was still further to go, that they yet had to
drop down into the ravine, but the blacksmith checked under the trees and, in dumbshow, indicated
that the city lay to their left. Sharpe did not respond, and the guide plucked again at the
Rifleman’s green sleeve and pointed to the left. “Santiago! Santiago!”

“Jesus bloody wept.” Sharpe dropped to one knee.

“Sir?” Harper knelt beside him.

“We’re in the wrong bloody place!”

“God save Ireland.” The Sergeant’s voice was scarce above a whisper. The guide, unable to gain
an understandable response from the greenjackets, disappeared into the darkness.

Sharpe swore again . He was in the wrong place. That mistake worried and irritated him, but
what angered him more was the knowledge that Vivar would say it was because the spirits of the
stream, the xanes, had been slighted. God damn it, but that was nonsense! All the same Sharpe had
gone astray, he was late, and he did not know where Vivar’s other troops were. The fears took
hold of him. This was not how an attack should start! There should be bugles and banners in the
mist! Instead he was alone, lost, far ahead of the Cazadores and volunteers. He told himself he
had known this would happen! He had seen it happen before, in India, where good troops, forced to
a night attack, had become lost, frightened, and beaten.

“What do we do, sir?” Harper asked.

Sharpe did not answer, because he did not know. He was tempted to say they would pull back in
an abandonment of the whole attack, but then a shape moved to his left, boots rustled the frosted
grass, and the blacksmith re-appeared in the mist with Bias Vivar at his side. “You’ve come too
far,” Vivar whispered.

“God damn it, I know!”

The blacksmith was evidently trying to explain how the Riflemen had risked the mischief of the
xanes, but Vivar could spare no time for such regrets. He waved the man away and knelt beside
Sharpe. “It’s two hundred paces to the church. That way.” Vivar pointed to his left. The church
should have been to their right.

Vivar’s force had curled around the city in the night and now approached from the north. The
city’s northern wall had long been destroyed, its stone taken to build the newer houses which
spread beyond the line of mediaeval fortifications along the road which led to Corunna. He had
chosen that road for his approach, not only because it lacked the barrier of a mediaeval wall,
but also because the guards might think that any approaching troops were Frenchmen coming from
Soult’s army.

The church, which served the newer suburb, had been turned into a French guardpost. It lay
three hundred yards outside the main defence line that was composed of barricades. Every road
into the city had such a guardhouse, intended to give an early alarm should Santiago be
assaulted. The sentries of such posts might be killed in an attack, but the noise of their
sacrifice would serve as a warning to the city’s main defences. “I think,” Vivar whispered to
Sharpe, “that God is with us. He’s sent the mist.”

“He’s sent us to the wrong God-damned place.”

The Riflemen should have been a quarter-mile to the south, in the marshy ravine, and they
should have been there an hour before. The ravine snaked behind the church and led up to the
houses just outside the main defences. They had lost the chance to make that secretive approach.
Nor, so close to the enemy and so near to the treacherous wolf-light of dawn, could they spare
the time to creep back through the mist.

“Leave the guardhouse to me,” Vivar said.

“You want me to charge straight past it?”

“Yes.”

Which was easy for Vivar to ask, but it meant a change of plan which put the whole assault in
jeopardy. Because they had come late and to the wrong place, the Riflemen would lose surprise.
Vivar proposed that Sharpe’s assault ignore the guardhouse. That was possible, but the French
sentries would not ignore them. Their reaction would take time. Astonished men lose precious
seconds, and further seconds could be lost if the enemy muskets, dampened by the mist, misfired.
The darkness might even have swallowed the Riflemen before the French fired, but fire they would,
startling the dawn long before the greenjackets had covered the three hundred yards from the
church to the city’s defences. The guards at the barricades would be warned. They would be
waiting and, at best, Vivar’s force could find itself clinging to a few houses on the northern
side of the city and, as the day lightened and the mist shredded, the cavalry would cut off their
retreat. By midday, Sharpe knew, they could all be prisoners of the French.

“Well?” Vivar sensed from Sharpe’s silence and immobility that the Rifleman already believed
the battle lost.

“Where’s your cavalry?” Sharpe asked, not out of interest, but to delay the horrid
decision.

“Davila’s leading them. They’ll be in place. The volunteers are in the pasture behind.”
Receiving no response, Vivar touched Sharpe’s arm. “With or without you, I’ll do it. I have to do
it, Lieutenant. I would not care if the Emperor himself and all the forces of hell guarded the
city, I would have to do it. There is no other way of expunging my family’s shame. I have a
brother who is a traitor, so the treason must be washed away with enemy blood. And God will look
mercifully upon such a wish, Lieutenant. You say you do not believe, but I think on the verge of
battle every man feels the breath of God.”

It was a fine speech, but Sharpe did not relent. “Will God keep the guardhouse
quiet?”

“If he wills it, yes.” The mist was lightening. Sharpe could see the bare pale branches of the
elm above him. Every second’s delay was puting the assault in more jeopardy, and Vivar knew it.
“Well?” he asked again. Still Sharpe said nothing and the Spaniard, with a gesture of disgust,
stood. “We Spanish will do it alone, Lieutenant.”

“Bugger you, no! Rifles!” Sharpe stood. He thought of Louisa; she had said something about
seizing the moment and, despite his demons, Sharpe thought he might lose her if he did not act
now. “Coats and packs off!” The Riflemen, so they could fight unencumbered, obeyed. “And
load!”

Vivar hissed a caution against loading the rifles, but Sharpe would not go into the attack
with neither surprise nor loaded weapons. The risk of a misfire must be endured. He waited till
the last ramrod had been thrust home and the last lock primed. “Fix swords!”

Blades scraped, then clicked as the bayonets’ spring-loaded catches slotted onto the rifle
muzzles. Sharpe slung his own rifle and drew his big clumsy sword. Tn file, Sergeant. Tell the
men not to make a bloody sound!“ He looked at Vivar. Til not have you thinking we didn’t have the
courage.”