Sharpe's Eagle (24 page)

Sharpe and Harper strolled to the river's edge where the Battalion's leading picquets were
settling for a night's guard duty. Two men of the Light Company, dressed in greatcoats, nodded at
Sharpe and jerked their thumbs across the river. A French picquet stood watching them, three men
smoking pipes, while another Frenchman filled his canteen at the water's edge. The man looked up,
saw the Riflemen, and raised a hand. He shouted something but they did not understand him. Sharpe
shivered slightly. The sun had lost its heat, was reddening in the west, and the chill of the
night was already making itself felt. He waved back at the Frenchman and turned back towards the
cork grove.

Now was the time for the rituals before battle. Sharpe walked through the trees and chatted
with men who prepared themselves with the obsessions for detail that all men thought might
protect them in the chaos of the fight. The Riflemen had stripped their locks, pinned the massive
rifle main springs with nails, and brushed every scrap of dirt from the machinery. Men put new
flints in their muskets or rifles, unscrewed them and put them in again, looking for the perfect
fit that would never come loose, turn sideways, or shatter in the pan. Pots of boiling water were
carried carefully from the fires and poured into the barrels of the guns to flush out every last
powder deposit, because tomorrow a man's life might depend on how fast he could reload his
musket. Joining the noise of the insects were the sounds of hundreds of stones rubbing endlessly
on bayonets, the countrymen sharpening the blades as they used to sharpen reaping hooks or
wide-bladed scythes. Men repaired uniforms, sewed on buttons, made new laces, as though to be
comfortable was to be safer. Sharpe had been through the ritual a hundred times; he would go
through it again tonight the way that a knight in times far past must have strapped every piece
of armour, tightened each piece, delayed the next until the first was secure. Some Riflemen
emptied all the fine powder from their horns and spread the black grains on clean white cloth to
ensure there were no damp lumps that could clog the measuring spout in battle. There were the
same jokes: ,Don't wear your hat tomorrow, Sarge, the French might see your face and die
laughing." That one always worked as long as the Sergeant did not see which man had shouted from
the shadows; other men were asked to go and sleep with the French so their snoring would keep the
enemy awake; the stale jokes were as much a part of the battle as the bullets which would begin
to fly at first light.

Sharpe walked past the fires, swapping jokes, accepting tots of hoarded spirits, feeling the
edges of bayonets, telling the men that the next day would not be bad. Nor should it be. The
combined British and Spanish far outnumbered the French; the allies had the initiative, the
battle should be short, swift, and victory almost a certainty. He listened to men boasting of the
deeds they would perform next day and knew that the words covered their fear; it was right that
they should. Other men, more quietly, asked him what it would be like. He smiled and told them
they would see in the morning, but it would not be as bad as they feared, and shrugged away his
knowledge of the chaos they would all have to surmount when the attacking infantry walked into
the storm of canister and musket shot. He left the fires behind, skirted the bigger blaze where
the officers' servants prepared the thin stew of salt beef that was the last of the hoarded
supplies, and out of the trees altogether. In the last light of dusk he could see a farmhouse
five hundred yards away where earlier he had seen the sixteenth Light Dragoons go with their
horses. He crossed the fields and went into the yard. A line of troopers in blue and scarlet
uniforms waited by the armourer. Sharpe waited for them to finish and then unsheathed the huge
sword and carried it to the wheel. This was part of his ritual, to have the sword sharpened by a
cavalry armourer because they made a finer edge, and the armourer looked at his Rifleman's
uniform and grinned. He was an old soldier, too old to ride into battle, but he had seen it all,
done it all himself. He took the blade from Sharpe, tested it with a broad thumb, and then
pressed it onto the pedalled stone. The sparks flowed off the wheel, the blade sang; the man
swept it lovingly up and down the edge and then sharpened the top six inches of the back blade.
He wiped the sword with an oily piece of leather.

"Get yourself a German one, Captain." It was an old argument, whether the Kligenthal blades
were better than the British. Sharpe shook his head. "I've eaten German swords with this
one."

The armourer cackled a toothless laugh and peered down the edge. "There you are, Captain. Take
care of it."

Sharpe put some coins on the wheel frame and held the sword up to the last light of the
western sky. There was a new sheen on the edge, he felt it with his thumb and smiled at the
armourer. "You'll never get a Kligenthal as sharp as that."

The armourer said nothing but from behind him he took out a sabre and handed it to Sharpe.
Sharpe sheathed his sword and took the curved blade. It felt as if it had been made for him; its
balance was a miracle, as if the steel were not there even though it flashed in the red light. He
touched the blade. It would have sliced through silk as cleanly as it must cut through the
breastplate of the French cavalry. "German?" Sharpe asked.

"Yes, Captain. Belongs to our Colonel." The armourer took the blade back. "And I haven't begun
to sharpen it yet!"

Sharpe laughed. The sabre must have cost two hundred guineas. One day, he promised himself,
one day he would own such a sword, not taken from the dead, but a sword that was inscribed with
his name, forged to his height, balanced for his grip. He went back to the trees and in the sky
over the river he could see the glow of the enemy fires where twenty-two thousand Frenchmen were
sharpening their own blades and wondering about the morning. Not many would sleep. Most would
doze through the night, their wakefulness laced with apprehension, searching the eastern sky for
a dawn that might be the last one they would ever see. Sharpe lay awake for part of the night and
rehearsed the next day in his head. The plan was simple enough. The Alberche ran in a curve to
join the River Tagus, and the French were on the inside of the bend. In the morning the Spanish
trumpets would sound, their thirty guns be unleashed, and the infantry would splash across the
shallow river to attack the outnumbered French. And as the French retreated, as assuredly they
must, so Wellesley would throw the British onto their flank. And Marshal Victor would be
destroyed, his army broken between the hammer of the Spanish and the anvil of the British, and as
the blue infantry withdrew the cavalry would come through the water and turn retreat into
carnage. And once that was done, all perhaps before the citizens of Talavera went to their Sunday
morning mass, there would only be King Joseph Bonaparte's twenty thousand men between the allies
and Madrid. It was all so simple. Sharpe slept in his greatcoat, curled by the embers of a fire,
a gilded eagle threading his sleep.

There were no bugles to wake them in the morning, nothing that might alert the French to the
dawn attack instead of the more civilised hour of mid-morning, when most men could be expected to
fight. Sergeants and corporals shook the men awake; soldiers cursed the dew and the cold air that
rasped in their throats. Every man glanced towards the river, but the far bank was shrouded in
mist and darkness; there was nothing to be seen, no sound to be heard. They had been forbidden to
relight the fires in case the sudden lights should warn the French, but somehow they managed to
heat water and threw in the loose tea-leaves, and Sharpe gratefully accepted a tin mug of the
scalding liquid from his Sergeant. Harper was kicking dirt onto the fire; the men had risked a
small blaze rather than go without tea, and he looked up at Sharpe and grinned. "Permission to go
to church, sir?"

Sharpe grinned back. It was Sunday. He tried to work out the date. They had left Plasencia on
the seventeenth and that had been a Monday, and he counted the days forward on his fingers.
Sunday 23 July, 1809. There was still no light in the eastern sky, the stars shone brightly, the
dawn still two hours away. Behind them, on a track that ran between the cork grove and the
fields, there was a rumbling and clanking and cursing as a battery of artillery unlimbered.
Sharpe turned, the tea cradled in his hands, and watched the dim shapes as the horses were led
away and the field guns pointed across the river. They would herald the attack, hurling their
round shot at the French lines, tearing holes in the French Battalions as Sharpe led his
skirmishers into the river. It was cold, too cold to feel any excitement; that would come later.
Now were the hours to feel apprehensive, to tighten belts and buckles, to feel hungry. Sharpe
shivered slightly in his greatcoat, nodded his thanks to Harper, and made his way down the grove
between the lines of his men who stamped their feet and swung their arms and resurrected the more
successful jokes of the previous evening. Somehow they were not as funny in the small hours
before dawn.

He left the trees and walked onto the patch of grass that lay beside the river. His boots
swished through the dew and warned the sentries of his coming. He was challenged, gave the
password, and greeted as he jumped down onto the shingle at the water's edge.

"Anything happening?"

"No, sir."

The water slid blackly beneath the tendrils of mist. There was an occasional slap and swirl
from the river as a fish twisted and disturbed the surface. Sharpe peered over his cupped hands
and blew on his fingers; there was the faintest dot of red light on the far bank that suddenly
glowed brighter. The French sentry was smoking a cigar or a pipe. Sharpe looked to his left. The
eastern sky at last had a suspicion of colour, a flat silver grey that silhouetted the hills, the
first sign of dawn. He clapped one of the sentries on the shoulder. "Not long now."

He climbed the brief bank between the shingle and the grass and walked back to the trees. From
the French lines he could hear a dog barking, the whinny of a horse, and then the sound of
bugles. They would start lighting their fires, start cooking a breakfast, and hopefully they
would be still eating it when the Spanish bayonets came at them from the west. He suddenly felt a
longing for devilled kidneys and coffee, for any food other than the thin stew and the Tommies
and the old ship's biscuits that the Battalion had lived on for a week. He remembered the garlic
sausage they had collected from the enemy dead at Rolica and hoped he would find some that
morning on the bodies of the men who were grumbling round their fires just across the
river.

Back in the grove he took off his greatcoat, rolled it tight, and strapped it to his pack. He
shivered. He took the rag off the lock of his rifle that had protected it from the dew and tested
the tension of the spring with his thumb. He slung it on his shoulder, slapped his sword, and
started moving the Light Company down to the treeline. The skirmishers would go first, the thin
line of Riflemen and redcoats wading the Alberche to drive off the sentries and lock up the
French Voltigeurs so that they could not blunt the attack of the massed British Battalions which
would follow on to the French flank. He made the men lie down a few feet inside the grove where
they merged into the shadows of the trees, while behind he could see the other nine companies of
the Battalion forming up for the assault that could not be far away.

Dawn crept over the mountains, flooding the valley with a silver-grey light, shrinking the
pools of shadow and revealing the shapes of trees and bushes on the far bank. It would still be a
few moments, Sharpe decided, before the Spanish would break the silence and start the attack. He
walked along the treeline, nodded to the Captain of the Light Company of the 29th who was on his
right flank, made the polite small talk, wishing each other luck, and then strolled back to stand
beside Harper. They did not speak but Sharpe knew the big Irishman was thinking of the promise
Lennox had extracted from them by the bridge. But for Sharpe the Eagle had more urgency. If he
could not pluck it from its perch today there might not be another chance for months and that
meant no chance at all. In a few weeks, unless he could blunt Simmerson's letter, he might be on
a ship for the West Indies and the inevitable fever that made the posting a virtual death
warrant. He thought of Josefina, asleep in the town, her black hair spread on a pillow, and
wondered why suddenly his life had been enmeshed in a series of problems that one month ago he
had not even suspected existed.

Muskets banged erratically in the distance. The men cocked their ears, murmured to each other,
listened to the sporadic firing that rattled up and down the French lines. Lieutenant Knowles
came up to Sharpe and raised his eyebrows in a question. Sharpe shook his head. "They're clearing
their muskets, that's all." The French sentries had been changed and the men going off duty were
getting rid of their charges that might have become damp in the night air. Musket fire would not
herald the attack. Sharpe was waiting for the red flashes that would illumine the western sky
like summer lightning and show that the Spanish artillery was opening the battle. It could not be
far off.

There were shouts from the river. Again the men pricked their ears, strained forward, but
again it was a false alarm. A group of the enemy appeared, chasing and shouting at each other in
horseplay, carrying buckets to the water's edge. One of them held up his bucket and shouted
something to the British bank; his companions all laughed, but Sharpe had no idea what the joke
was.

"Watering horses?" Knowles asked.

"No." Sharpe stifled a yawn. "Artillery buckets. There must be guns to our front." That was
bad news. A dozen men were carrying buckets in which the sponges that damped out the sparks in
discharged guns were dipped. The water in the pails would be black as ink after a few shots, and
if the guns were directly ahead Sharpe knew that the South Essex might be marching into a storm
of canister fragments. He felt tired, achingly tired; he wanted to begin the fight, he wanted the
Eagle out of his dreams.