Sharpe 14 - Sharpe's Sword (19 page)

CHAPTER 16

Marmont had marched north, away from the River Tonnes, forty miles to the valley of the River Douro. The dust of the French retreat spiralled high from the wheels, boots and hooves of the army; dust that plumed in the sun over the wheatfields. It was like the thin smoke trail of an unimaginably large grass fire. It faded, carried eastwards by a breeze from the far Atlantic, and the plains of Leon were left empty except for the hovering hawks, the lizards, and the poppies and cornflowers that smeared colour on a bleached land.

On Monday, June 29th, the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul, the British army was swallowed up in the haze of the immense plain. They went north, following Marmont, and all that came back were rumours. One day the people of Salamanca said that there had been a great battle, that the sky had lit up with the flashes of the great guns, but it wasjust a summer storm sheeting the dark horizon with silver and the next day there was another rumour. It was said Wellington was beaten, his head cut off, and then it was the French who had lost, who had soaked the Douro red with their blood, dammed it with their corpses. They were just rumours.

The Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary came and went, then St. Martin’s Day, and a peasant girl in BarbadillO said an angel had appeared to her in a dream. The angel had been armoured in gold and carried a scarlet sword with two blades. The angel had said that the last battle would be fought in Salamanca, that the armies of the north would harrow the city, pour blood in its streets, desecrate the Cathedrals, trample the host, until, in desperation, the earth would open up and swallow the evil and righteous alike. Her village priest, a lazy and sensible man, had her locked away. There was trouble enough in the world without hysterical women, but the rumour spread, and the peasants looked at their young olives and wondered if they would live to see an autumn harvest.

In the north, beyond the Douro, beyond Galicia, across the Pyrenees and France itself, and still further north, a small man led a vast army into Russia. It was an army the like of which the world had not seen since the hooves of the Barbarians came out of the dawn. The war had become unimaginable, so vast that the dreams of a Barbadillo peasant girl were not so far removed from the fears of sober statesmen. Across the Atlantic, beyond the shredded wave crests, the Americans prepared their forces to invade British Canada. It was a world war now, fought from the Great Lakes to the Indian Ocean, from the Russian steppes to the plains of Leon.

Sharpe was alive. A message went north to the South Essex, and another went further north to La Aguja, “the needle‘, and it told of her husband’s injury and urged her to come south. Hogan was not hopeful that his messenger could reach Teresa; the journey was long and the Partisans used secret paths and hiding places.

Sharpe was moved upstairs. He had his own room, small and bare, and Harper and Isabella curtained offone half and lived with him. The doctors said Sharpe would die. The pain, they said, would stay with him, even increase, and the wound would abscess into constant blood and pus. Most of what they said came true. Hogan had ordered Harper to stay, an unnecessary order, but the big Irish Sergeant sometimes found it hard to endure the pain, the smell, the helplessness of his Captain. He and Isabella washed Sharpe, cleaned away the pus, dressed the wound, and listened to the rumours that came back to the small British force left in the city.

A letter came from the Battalion, written by Major Forrest and signed with scores of names. The Light Company wrote their own, penned by Lieutenant Price, decorated by the crosses and signatures of the men, and sometimes Sharpe was lucid and he was pleased with the letters.

Somehow he hung on. Each morning Harper expected to find his Captain dead, but he lived, and even the doctors shrugged and conceded that sometimes, very rarely, a man recovered from that wound. Then Sharpe took the fever. The wound was still abscessed, its dressing changed twice a day, but now Harper and Isabella had to wipe the sweat that poured from Sharpe and listen to the ravings that he muttered day and night.

Isabella found some Rifleman’s trousers, taken from a dead man who was as tall as Sharpe, and she hung them on the wall beneath the jacket and above Sharpe’s boots that Harper had found discarded in the small courtyard. The uniform waited for him, but the doctors had again given up hope. The fever would kill him. Harper wanted to know how they would treat a fever and the doctors tried to fob him off, but the Irishman had heard of some miracle cure, a new cure, something to do with the bark of a South American tree. The doctors had very little of the substance, but Harper frightened them and they yielded it up, grudgingly, and Harper gave it to Sharpe. It seemed to help, yet the doctors had very little of the precious substance. It had only reached them the previous year, it was expensive, and they made it go further by mixing the powdered quinine with black pepper. When the quinine ran out they gave Sharpe quassia bark instead, but still the fever raged, and even the Navy’s remedy, suggested by Lord Spears, which consisted of gunpowder mixed with brandy, did not work.

There was an army remedy and Harper decided on that.

He carried Sharpe downstairs one morning, stripped him naked, and laid him on the grass of the courtyard just beside the cloister. The Sergeant had already drawn bucket after bucket of well water and carried them to the top cloister where he had filled two rain barrels. He would have preferred to be higher, three floors at least, but the upper cloister was the best he could do. He looked down on the shivering naked body and poured the first barrel in a glittering cold shock that exploded on Sharpe. He cried out, jack-knifed, and the second barrel followed in a cascade that flattened Sharpe, choked him, and then Harper ran downstairs, wrapped Sharpe in a dry blanket, and carried the emaciated body back to the cot. The doctors said that Harper had certainly killed Sharpe with that treatment, yet that night the fever went down and Harper came back from the Cathedral to find Sharpe lucid again.

“How are you feeling, sir?”

“Bloody.” He looked it, too. His eyes were sunk in a pale face.

Harper grinned at him. “You’ll be up soon.”

Harper and Isabella took it in turns to pray. She used the chapel of the Irish College, close and beautiful, but Harper thought God might be nearer to the big Cathedral and he climbed the hill twice a day and he prayed with a childlike intensity. His broad, strong face would screw up in concentration as though the very force of his thoughts could drive the prayer up, past the statues, past the glorious ceiling, and up to a heaven where so many other prayers were clamouring for answers. He lit candles to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes, and he prayed to him, pleaded with him, and once again the doctors began to cautiously suggest that there was a chance; that sometimes men recovered from the wound, and Harper prayed on. Yet he knew something was nüssing. They gave Sharpe medicines when they could, prayers that they did not tell him about, and Harper knew there was something else; something that might persuade Sharpe to live. Something was missing.

Sharpe’s weapons were missing. The Rifle had been stolen in the hospital, the sword broken by Leroux. It took Harper three days, a bribe, but in the end a storekeeper with the Town Major opened up a small warehouse and rummaged through the racks. “Swords,” he muttered to himself, “swords. You can have this one.” He offered Harper a sabre.

“That’s bloody rubbish. It’s got bloody woodworm. I want a Heavy sword, not that bent rubbish.”

The Corporal storekeeper sniffed. He found another sword, this one straight. “Twenty pounds?”

“You want me to try it on you? I’ve paid already.”

The Corporal shrugged. “I have to account for this lot.”

“You poor wee man. And how do you account for the stuff you steal?” Harper went to the racks himself, raked through the weapons, and found a plain, sturdy, Heavy Cavalry blade. „I’ll take this one. Where are your rifles?“

“Rifles? You didn’t say nothing about any rifles.”

“Well I am now.” The huge Sergeant pushed past the storekeeper. “Well?”

The Corporal glanced at the open door. “More than my bloody job’s worth.”

“Your job’s worth cowdung. Now where are the rifles?”

The Corporal reluctantly opened a box. “That’s all we’ve got. Don’t get many.”

Harper picked one up. It was new, beautiful, the lock greased, but it would not do. “Are they all like this?”

“Yes.” The Corporal was nervous.

“You can keep it.” Harper put it back. He would have liked one for himself, let alone Sharpe, but these were the new rifles with the carbine bore, smaller than the old rifles, and he knew that they would never be able to get a reliable source of ammunition. The rifle would have to wait. He grinned at the storekeeper. “Now a scabbard.”

The man shook his head. “Scabbards is difficult.”

Harper pointed the blade at the storekeeper’s throat.

“You’ve got two dollars of mine. That says scabbards are easy. Now give.”

He gave. The sword was not like Sharpe’s old sword. This one had not been looked after, it was dull, but it was a Heavy Cavalry sword and Harper set to work on it. The first day he remade the sword’s guard. The guard was slim at the pommel and then it broadened so that it would cover a man’s fist and it ended in a broad circle that guarded against an enemy’s blade sliding down the sword and slicing into a cavalryman’s hand. It was a comfortable guard if a man spent his life in the saddle, but the heavy, steel circle cut into a man’s ribs if he wore the sword as Sharpe would wear it. It was too long a blade to hang comfortably at the waist. The slings of the scabbard would have to be shortened so that the handle and guard of the sword would lie at the bottom of Sharpe’s left rib cage. Harper borrowed a hacksaw, some files, and he worked on the guard. He cut the right hand side of the circle back, past the small holes that could be tasselled for display, right down to within an inch of the blade. He made an edge that was crude, mis-shapen, and ugly, but he filed it obsessively until the shape of the new guard was smooth and easy on the eye. Then he polished the steel until it looked as if it was fresh from the Birmingham factory of Woolley & Deakin.

The handle of the sword was tight on the blade’s tang, but the wooden grip was rough to the palm. Harper took off the backpiece and filed the grip, and then he varnished it with oil and beeswax until the handle was dark brown and shining.

On the second day he remade the blade. The back edge of the sword was straight and the point was made by curving the fore edge back to meet it. That was not the point Sharpe liked. The rifleman liked a blade with two edges, both sharp, and a point that was symmetrical. Harper raked through the workshops of the College and found the wheel the gardeners used to sharpen their scythes. He oiled the wheel, treadled it, and then put the blade onto the stone so that it rang, it shrieked, and the sparks flowed like live-fire from the steel. He worked the back edge, curving the sword’s last two inches until the fore and back edges were the same. He had made a balanced point. Then he polished the sword, holding the blade up to the light to make sure the stone marks were even. The steel gleamed.

Finally, as the afternoon wore on, he sharpened the blade. He gave Sharpe an edge that the Captain had never had, and he worked at it, and worked, and the perfectionist in him would not give up until the fore edge, and the top seven inches of the back, were razor sharp. He let the wheel slow to a stop.

He took a rag and poured olive oil onto the sword. He polished it again, oiled it, and the sword was unrecognisable from the blade he had taken from the storekeeper. It was no Kligenthal, but it was no ordinary sword. He had remade Sharpe’s sword, done it with care and friendship, and he had put into his work all the Celtic magic that he could muster. It was as if in working on the sword he was working on Sharpe himself, and he held the finished blade up to the westering sun and it blazed white light in a dazzling burst. It was made.

He took the sword upstairs, looked forward to Sharpe’s face, and Isabella met him. She was running down the cloister and at first Harper was alarmed, and then he saw the look on her face and she threw herself at him, talked so fast that he had to slow her down, and she gabbled her news. A woman had come, and such a woman! Hair like gold and a coach with four horses! She had visited the hospital and she had given gifts to the wounded men and then - Isabella’s eyes still sparkled at the memory - the woman had come to Sharpe’s room and she had visited the Captain and she had been angry.

Harper slowed her down. “Angry?” The Captain was a hero, wasn’t he? La Marquesa had shouted at the doctors, had told them it was disgusting that a hero should live in such a place and tomorrow La Marquesa was sending a carriage that was to take Sharpe to a house outside the town, a house fey the river, and the best of it was, and here Isabella jumped up and down beside her huge Irishman, clutching at his jacket in her excitement, that the aristocrat had talked to her, Isabella! She and Harper were to go with the Captain. They would have servants, cooks, and Isabella twirled in the cloister and said that La Marquesa had been kind to her, grateful to her, and by the way the Captain was feeling better.

Harper grinned because of her infectious delight. “Say that all again.”

She said it again, and this time she wanted to know where he had been. He had missed La Marquesa, the most gracious person Isabella had ever met, a Queen! Well, almost a Queen, and Harper missed her, and tomorrow they were all moving to a house by the river and they were to have servants! And by the way the Captain is much better.

“What do you mean, better?”

“I changed the bandage, si? She was here! I thought she might visit us. She visit everyone. So I change the bandage and no muck? Patrick! No muck!”

“No pus?”

“No nothing. No muck, no blood.”

“Where is he now?”

She opened her eyes wide because her tale was dramatic. “He sit up in bed, si? Up! He very happy that La Marquesa see him!.” She punched Harper. “And you do not see her! Four horses! And your friend was here.”