Sharpe's Rifles (35 page)

“After dark?”

“At dusk.” Sharpe frowned. “Maybe earlier.”

Harper followed him over a ditch and an embankment. The two Riflemen were walking towards a
slew of buildings that straggled like a limb from the city’s south-western corner and which could
shelter de I’Eclin’s men as they approached. “We’ll have to put men in the houses,” Harper
said.

Sharpe seemed not to hear. “I don’t like it.”

“A thousand Dragoons? Who would?”

“De I’Eclin’s a clever bastard.” Sharpe was half-talking to himself. “A clever, clever bloody
bastard. And he’s especially clever when he’s attacking.” He turned and stared at the city’s
barricaded streets. The obstacles were manned by Cazadores and by the brown-coated volunteers who
were piling brushwood into fires that could illuminate a night attack. They were doing, in fact,
exactly what the French had done the night before, yet surely Colonel de l’Eclin would foresee
all these preparations? So what would the Frenchman do? “He’s going to be bloody clever,
Sergeant, and I don’t know how clever.”

“He can’t fly,” Harper said stoically, “and he doesn’t have time to dig a bloody tunnel, so he
has to come in through one of the streets, doesn’t he?”

The stolid good sense made Sharpe suppose he was seeing danger where there was none. Better,
he thought, to rely on his first instincts. “He’ll send his cavalry on a feint there,” he pointed
to the smooth western ground, “and when he thinks we’re all staring that way, he’ll send
dismounted men in from the south. They’ll be ordered to break that barricade,” he pointed to the
street which led from the city to the church, “and his cavalry will swerve in behind
them.”

Harper turned to judge for himself, and seemed to find Sharpe’s words convincing. “And so long
as we’re on the hill or in those houses,” he nodded towards the straggling buildings that lay
outside the defences, “we’ll murder the bastard.” The big Irishman picked up a sprig of laurel
and twisted the pliant wood in his fingers. “But what really worries me, sir, is not holding the
bastard off, but what happens when we withdraw? They’ll be flooding into those streets like
devils on a spree, so they will.”

Sharpe was also worried about that moment of retreat. Once Vivar’s business in the cathedral
was done, the signal would be given and a great mass of people would flee eastwards. There would
be volunteers, Riflemen, Cazadores, priests, and whatever townspeople no longer cared to stay
under French occupation; all jostling and running into the darkness. Vivar had planned to have
his cavalry protect the retreat, but Sharpe knew what savage chaos could overtake his men in the
streets when the French Dragoons realized that barricades had been abandoned. He shrugged. “We’ll
just have to run like hell.”

“And that’s the truth,” Harper said gloomily. He tossed away the crumpled twig.

Sharpe stared at the twisted scrap of laurel. “Good God!”

“What have I done now?”

“Jesus wept!” Sharpe clicked his fingers. “I want half the men in those houses,” he pointed at
the line of buildings which led from the south-western barricade, and enfiladed the southern
approach to the city, “and the rest on the hill.” He began running towards the city. Til be back,
Sergeant!“

“What’s up with him?” Hagman asked when the Sergeant returned to the hilltop.

“The doxie turned him down,” Harper said with evident satisfaction, “so you owes me a
shilling, Dan. She’s marrying the Major, so she is.”

“I thought she was soft as lights on Mr Sharpe!” Hagman said ruefully.

“She’s got more sense than to marry him. He ain’t ready for a chain and shackle, is he? She
needs someone a bit steady, she does.”

“But he was sotted on her.”

“He would be, wouldn’t he? He’ll fall in love with anything in a petticoat. I’ve seen his type
before. Got the sense of a half-witted sheep when it comes to women.” Harper spat. “It’s a good
job he’s got me to look after him now.”

“You!”

“I can handle him, Dan. Just as I can handle you lot. Right, you Protestant scum! The French
are coming for supper, so let’s be getting ready for the bastards!”

Newly cleaned rifles pointed south and west. The green-jackets were waiting for the dusk and
for the coming of a chasseur.

The idea buzzed in Sharpe’s head as he ran uphill towards the city centre. Colonel de l’Eclin
could be clever, but so could the defenders. He stopped in the main plaza and asked a Cazador
where Major Vivar might be. The cavalryman pointed to the smaller northern plaza beyond the
bridge which joined the bishop’s palace to the cathedral. That plaza was still crammed with
people, though instead of yelling defiance at the trapped Frenchmen, the crowd was now eerily
quiet. Even the bells had fallen silent.

Sharpe elbowed his way through the crush and saw Vivar standing on a flight of steps which led
to the cathedral’s northern transept. Louisa was with him. Sharpe wished she was not there. The
memory of his boorish behaviour with the Spaniard embarrassed him, and he knew he should
apologize, but the girl’s presence inhibited any such public repentance. Instead he shouted his
idea as he forced his way up the crowded steps. “Caltrops!”

“Caltrops?” Vivar asked. Louisa, unable to translate the unfamiliar word, shrugged.

Sharpe had picked up two wisps of straw as he ran through the city and now, just as Harper had
unwittingly twisted the laurel twig, Sharpe twisted the straw. “Caltrops! But we haven’t got much
time! Can we get the blacksmiths working?”

Vivar stared at the straw, then swore for not thinking of the idea himself. “They’ll work!” He
ran down the steps.

Louisa, left with Sharpe, looked at the twisted straw which still meant nothing to her.
“Caltrops?”

Sharpe scooped some damp mud from the instep of his left boot and rolled it into a ball. He
snapped the straw into four lengths, each about three inches long, and he stuck three of them
into the mud ball to form a three-pointed star. He laid the star on the flat of his hand and
pushed the fourth spike into the mud ball so that it stood vertically. “A caltrop,” he
said.

Louisa shook her head. “I still don’t understand.”

“A medieval weapon made of iron. The cleverness of it is that, whatever way it falls, there’s
always a spike sticking upwards.” He demonstrated by turning the caltrop, and Louisa saw how one
of the spikes, which had first formed part of the three-pointed star, now jutted
upwards.

She understood then. “Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes!”

“Poor horses!”

“Poor us, if the horses catch us.” Sharpe crumpled the straw and mud into a ball that he
tossed away. Proper caltrops, made from iron nails which would be fused and hammered in the fire,
should be scattered thick on the roadways behind the retreating Riflemen. The spikes would easily
pierce the soft frog tissue inside a horse’s hoof walls, and the beasts would rear, twist,
plunge, and panic. “But the horses recover,” he assured Louisa, who seemed upset by the simple
nastiness of the weapon.

“How did you know about them?” she asked.

“They were used against us in India…“ Sharpe’s voice faded away because, for the first time
since he had climbed the cathedral steps, he saw why the crowd was packed so silently in the
plaza.

A rough platform had been constructed at its centre; a platform of wooden planks laid across
wine vats. On it was a high-backed chair which Sharpe at first took to be a throne.

The impression of royal ceremony was heightened by the strange procession which, flanked by
red-uniformed Cazadores, approached the platform. The men in the procession were robed in
sulphurous yellow and capped with red conical hats. Each carried a scrap of paper in his clasped
hands. “The paper,” Louisa said quietly, “is a confession of faith. They’ve been forgiven, you
see, but they must still die.”

Sharpe understood then. The tall chair, far from being a throne, was a garotte. On its high
back was a metal implement, a collar and screw, that was Spain’s preferred method of execution.
It was the first such machine he had seen in Spain.

Priests accompanied the doomed men. “They’re all anfran-cesadosj Louisa said. ”Some served as
guides to French cavalry, others betrayed partisans.“

“You intend to watch?” Sharpe sounded shocked. If Louisa blanched at the thought of pricking a
horse’s hoof, how was she to bear watching a man’s neck being broken?

“I’ve never seen an execution.”

Sharpe glanced down at her. “And you want to?”

“I suspect I shall be forced to see many unfamiliar things in the next years, don’t
you?”

The first man was pushed up to the platform where he was forced into the chair. The iron
collar was prised around his neck. The sacrist, Father Alzaga, stood beside the executioner. ”Pax
et misericordia et tranquillitas! ” He shouted the words into the victim’s ear as the executioner
went behind the chair, and shouted them again as the lever which turned the screw was snatched
tight. The screw constricted the collar with impressive speed so that, almost before the second
Latin injunction was over, the body in the chair jerked up and slumped back. The crowd seemed to
sigh.

Louisa turned away. “I wish…“ she began, but could not finish.

“It was very quick,” Sharpe said in wonderment.

There was a thump as the dead body was pushed off the chair, then a scraping sound as it was
dragged off the platform. Louisa, no longer watching, did not speak till after the next shout
from Father Alzaga signified that another traitor had met his end. “Do you think badly of me,
Lieutenant?”

“For watching an execution?” Sharpe waited till the second body was released from the collar.
“Why on earth should I? There are usually more women at a public hanging than men.”

“I don’t mean that.”

He looked down at her and was instantly embarrassed. “I would not think badly of
you.”

“It was that night in the fortress.” There was a plea in Louisa’s voice, as if she desperately
needed Sharpe to understand what had happened. “You remember? When Don Bias showed us the
gonfalon and told us the tale of the last battle? I think I was trapped then.”

“Trapped?”

“I like his nonsense. I was brought up to hate Catholics; to despise them for their ignorance
and fear them for their malevolence, but no one ever told me of their glory!”

“Glory?”

“I’m bored with plain chapels.” Louisa watched the executions as she spoke, though Sharpe
doubted whether she was even aware that men died on the crude scaffold. “I’m bored with being
told I’m a sinner and that my salvation depends only on my own dogged repentance. I want, just
once, to see the hand of God come in all its glory to touch us. I want a miracle, Lieutenant. I
want to feel so very small in front of that miracle, and that doesn’t make any sense to you at
all, does it?”

Sharpe watched a man die. “You want the gonfalon.”

“No!” Louisa was almost scornful. “I do not believe for one small second, Lieutenant, that
Santiago fetched that flag from heaven. I believe the gonfalon is merely an old banner that one
of Don Bias’s ancestors carried into battle. The miracle lies in what the gonfalon does, not in
what it is! If we survive today, Lieutenant, then we will have achieved a miracle. But we would
not have done it, nor even tried to do it, without the gonfalon!” She paused, wanting some
confirmation from Sharpe, but he said nothing. She shrugged ruefully. “You still think it’s all a
nonsense, don’t you?”

Still Sharpe said nothing. For him the gonfalon, whether nonsensical or not, was an
irrelevance. He had not come to Santiago de Compostela for the gonfalon. He had thought it was
for this girl, but that dream was dead. Yet there was something else that had fetched him to this
city. He had come to prove that a whoreson Sergeant, patted on the head by a patronizing army and
made into a Quartermaster, could be as good, as God-damned bloody good, as any born officer. And
that could not be proved without the help of the men in green jackets who waited for the enemy,
and Sharpe was suddenly swept with an affection for those Riflemen. It was an affection he had
not felt since he had been a Sergeant and had held the power of life and death over a company of
redcoats.

A scream jerked his attention back to the plaza where a recalcitrant prisoner fought against
the hands which pushed him up to the platform. The man’s fight was useless. He was forced to the
garotte and strapped into the chair. The iron was bent around his neck and the collar’s tongue
inserted into the slot where the screw would draw it tight. Alzaga made the sign of the cross.
‘Pax et misericordia et tranquillitasr

The prisoner’s yellow-frocked body jerked in a spasm as the collar gripped his neck to break
his spine and choke the breath from him. His thin hands scrabbled at the arms of the chair, then
the body slumped down. Sharpe supposed that swift death would have been the Count of Mouromorto’s
fate if he had not stayed safe inside the French-held palace. “Why,” he asked Louisa suddenly,
“did the Count stay in the city?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

Sharpe shrugged. “I’ve never seen him apart from de l’Eclin before. And that Colonel is a very
clever man.”

“You’re clever, too,” Louisa said warmly. “How many soldiers know about caltrops?”

Vivar pushed through the crowd and climbed the steps. “The forges are being heated. By six
o’clock you’ll have a few hundred of the things. Where do you want them?”

“Just send them to me,” Sharpe said.

“When you hear the bells next ring, you’ll know the gonfalon is unfurled. That’s when you can
withdraw.”

“Make it soon!”

“Shortly after six,” Vivar said. “It can’t be sooner. Have you seen what the French did to the
cathedral?”

“No.” But nor did Sharpe care. He only cared about a clever French Colonel, a chasseur of the
Imperial Guard, then a single rifle shot sounded from the south-west, and he ran.