Sharpe's Gold (23 page)

'So, at dawn tomorrow we destroy the garrison.'

There was a moment's utter silence, broken by Knowles. 'We can't!'

Teresa laughed at the sheer joy of it. 'We can!'

'God in his heaven!' Lossow's face was appalled, fascinated.

Harper did not seem surprised. 'How?'

So Sharpe told them.

Almeida stirred early, that Monday morning; it was well before first light as men
stamped their boots on cobbled streets and made the small talk that is the talisman against
great events. The war, after all, had come to the border town, and between the defenders'
outer glacis and the masked guns of the French, the hopes and fears of Europe were
concentrated. In far-off cities men looked at maps. If Almeida could hold, then perhaps
Portugal could be saved, but they knew better. Eight weeks at the most, they said, and
probably just six, and then Massena's troops would have Lisbon at their mercy. The British
had had their run and now it was over, the last hurdles to be cleared, but in St Petersburg
and Vienna, Stockholm and Berlin, they let the maps curl up and wondered where the
victorious blue-jacketed troops would be next sent. A pity about the British, but what
did anyone expect?

Cox was on the southern ramparts, standing by a brazier, waiting for the first light to
show him the new French batteries. Yesterday the French had fired a few shots, destroying
the telegraph, but today, Cox knew, things would begin in earnest. He hoped for a great
defence, a struggle that would make the history books, that would block the French till the
rains of late autumn could save Portugal; but he also imagined the siege guns, the paths
blasted through the great walls, and then the screaming, steel-tipped battalions that
would come forward in the night to drown his hopes in chaos and defeat. Cox and the French
both knew the town was the last obstacle to French victory, and, hope as Cox did, in his
heart he did not believe that the town could hold out till the roads were swamped and the
rivers made impassable by rain.

High above Cox, by the castle and cathedral that topped Almeida's hill, Sharpe pushed
open the bakery door. The ovens were curved shapes in the blackness, cold to the touch, and
Teresa shivered beside him despite being swathed in the Rifleman's long green
greatcoat. He ached. His leg, shoulder, the sliced cuts either side of his waist, and a head
that throbbed after talking too deep into the early morning.

Knowles had pleaded, 'There must be another way!'

'Tell me.'

Now, in the cold silence, Sharpe still tried to find another way. To talk to Cox? Or
Kearsey? But only Sharpe knew how desperately Wellington needed the gold. To Cox and
Kearsey it was unimaginable that a few thousand gold coins could save Portugal, and Sharpe
could not tell them how, because he had not been told. He damned the secrecy. It would mean
death for hundreds; but if the gold did not get through it would mean a lost war.

Teresa would be gone, anyway. In a few hours they would part, he to the army, she back to
the hills and her own fight. He held her close, smelling her hair, wanting to be with her, but
then they stepped apart as footsteps sounded outside and Patrick Harper pushed open the
door and peered into the gloom.

'Sir?'

'We're here. Did you get it?'

'No problem.' Harper sounded happy enough. He gestured past Helmut. 'One barrel of
powder, sir, compliments of Tom Garrard.'

'Did he ask what it was for?'

Harper shook his head. 'He said if it was for you, sir, it was all right.' He helped the
German bring the great keg through the door. 'Bloody heavy, sir.'

'Will you need help?'

Harper straightened up with a scoffing look. 'An officer carrying a barrel, sir?
This is the army! No. We got it here; we'll do the rest.'

'You know what to do?'

The question was unnecessary. Sharpe looked through the dirty window, across the Plaza,
and in the thin light saw that the cathedral doors were still shut. Perhaps the pile of
cartridges had been moved. Had Wellington sent a messenger on a fast horse with orders for
Cox on the half chance that Sharpe was in Almeida? He forced his mind away from the nagging
questions.

'Let's get on with it.'

Helmut borrowed Harper's bayonet and chipped at the centre of the barrel, making a
hole, widening it till it was the size of a musket muzzle. He grunted his satisfaction.
Harper nodded at Sharpe. 'We'll be on our way.' He sounded casual. Sharpe made himself
grin.

'Go slowly.'

He wanted to tell the Sergeant that he did not have to do it, it was Sharpe's dirty-work,
but he knew what the Irishman would have said. Instead he watched as the two men, one tall
and the other short, picked up the barrel by its ends, jiggled it until powder was
flowing from the hole, and then started an awkward progress out the door and across the
Plaza. They kept to the gutter, Helmut above it and Harper below, which made the task
easier, and Sharpe, through the window, watched as the powder trickled into the shadow of
the stone trough and went, inexorably, towards the cathedral. He could not believe what he
was doing, driven by the General's 'must' and the questions came back. Could Cox be
persuaded? Perhaps, even worse, gold had arrived from London and all this was for
nothing, and then, in a heart-stopping moment, the cathedral doors opened and two
sentries came out, adjusting their shakoes, and Sharpe knew they must see what was
happening. He clenched his fists, and Teresa, beside him at the dirty glass pane, was
moving her lips in what seemed to be a silent and inappropriate prayer.

'Sharpe!'

He turned, startled, and saw Lossow. 'You frightened me.'

'It's a guilty conscience.' The German stood in the doorway and nodded down the hill,
away from the cathedral. 'We have the house open. The cellar door.'

'I'll see you there.'

Sharpe planned to light the fuse and then run back to a house they had chosen, a house with
a deep cellar that opened on to the street. Lossow did not move. He looked at the two
Sergeants, still ignored by the sentries.

'I don't believe this, my friend. I hope you're right.'

So do I, thought Sharpe, so do I. It was madness, pure madness, and he put his arm round
the girl and watched as the two Sergeants threaded the bollards which kept traffic and
market-stalls from encroaching on the cathedral's ground. The sentries were watching the
two Sergeants, seeing nothing unusual in two men carrying a barrel, not even stirring
as they put it down, on one end, hard by the smaller door.

'God.' Lossow whispered the word, watching with them, as Helmut squatted by the barrel
and began to work a strake loose so that the fuse could reach the remaining powder in the
keg. Harper strolled the twenty yards to the sentries, chatted with them, and Sharpe
thought of the men who must die. The sentries would surely see the German splintering the
wood! But no, they laughed with Harper, and suddenly Helmut was walking back, yawning,
and the Irishman waved at the sentries and followed him.

Sharpe took out the tinder-box, the cigar, and with hands that were shaky he struck flint
on steel and blew the charred linen in the box into a flame. He lit the cigar, puffed it,
hated the taste until the tip glowed red.

Lossow watched him. 'You're sure?'

A shrug. 'I'm sure.'

The two Sergeants appeared at the doorway and Lossow spoke in German to Helmut, then
turned to Sharpe. 'Good luck, my friend. We see you in a minute.'

Sharpe nodded, the two Germans left, and he drew on the cigar again. He looked at the
Irishman in the doorway.

'Take Teresa.'

'No.' Harper was stubborn. 'I stay with you.'

'And me.' Teresa smiled at him.

The girl held his arm as he went into the street. The sky was pearl grey over the
cathedral with a wisp of cloud that would soon turn white. It promised to be a beautiful
day. He drew on the cigar again and through his mind went jumbled images of the men who had
built the cathedral, carved the saints that guarded its doors, knelt on its wide flagstones,
been married there, seen their children baptized in its granite font, and been carried on
their last visit up its pillared chancel. He thought of the dry voice saying 'must', of the
priest whitewashing the rood-screen, of the Battalion with its wives and children, the
bodies in the cellar, and he leaned down and touched the cigar tip to the powder, and it
sparked and fizzed, the flame beginning its journey.

The first French shell, fired from an ugly little howitzer in a deep pit, burst on the
Plaza, and flames shot through the smoke as the casing burst into unnumbered fragments
that needled outwards. Before Sharpe could move, before the first explosion had ceased,
the second howitzer's shell landed, bounced, rolled to the powder trail just yards from the
cathedral, hit a bollard, and the sentries dived for shelter as it flamed crashingly
apart, and Sharpe knew that there was no time to reach the cellar. He plucked at Teresa and
Harper.

'The ovens!'

They ran, through the door and over the counter, and he picked up the girl and thrust her
head-first into the great brick cave of the bread oven. Harper was clambering into the
second and Sharpe waited till Teresa was at the back and then he heard an explosion. It
was small enough, scarcely audible over the crash of French shells and the distant sound of
the Portuguese batteries' reply, and he knew, as he climbed in behind the girl, that the
barrel had exploded, and he wondered if the cathedral door had held the blast, or if the
cartridges had been moved, and then there was a second explosion, louder and more
ominous, and Teresa gripped his thigh where it was wounded, and the second explosion
seemed to go on, like a muffled volley from a battle in deep fog, and he knew that the
cartridges, down in their stacks behind the door, were setting each other of in an
unstoppable chain of explosions.

He wondered, crouched foetus-like in the oven, what was happening in the cathedral. He
saw, in his mind's eye, the lurid flames, gouting shafts of light, and then there was a
bigger explosion and he knew that the chain had reached the powder stacked at the top of
the steps, and it was all done now. Nothing could prevent it. The guards in the cathedral
were dead; the great rood was looking down on its last seconds; the eternal presence would
soon be swatted out.

Another French shell exploded, the fragments clashing on the bakery walls, and it was
drowned by a seething roar, growing and terrifying, and in the first crypt, crate by crate,
cartridge by cartridge, the ammunition of Almeida was exploding. The stabbing flames
were reaching the weakened curtain; the men in the deep crypt would be on their knees, or in
panic, the powder for the great guns all round them.

He had thought that the sound could only grow till it was the last sound on earth, but it
seemed to die into silence that was merely the crackling of flames, and Sharpe, knowing it
was foolish, uncurled his head and looked through the gap between the oven and its iron
door, and he could not believe that the leather curtain had held, and then the hill moved.
The sound came, not through the air but through the ground itself, like the groaning of rock,
and the whole cathedral turned to dust, smoke, and flames that were the colour of blood that
scorched through the utter blackness.

The French gunners, pausing with shells in their hands, jumped to the top of their pits
and looked past the low grey ramparts and crossed themselves. The centre of the town had
gone, turned into one giant flame that rolled up and up, and became a boiling cloud of
darkness. Men could see things in the flame: great stones, timbers, carried upwards as if
they were feathers, and then the shock hit the gunners like a giant, hot wind that came with
the sound. It was like all the thunder of all the world poured into one town for one moment
for one glimpse of the world's end.

The cathedral disappeared, turned into flame, and the castle was scythed clean from the
ground, the stones tumbling like toy things. Houses were scoured into flaming shards; the
blast took the north of the town, unroofed half the southern slope, and the bakery
collapsed on to the ovens, and Sharpe, deafened and gasping, choked on the thick dust and
heated air, and the girl gripped him, prayed for her soul, and the blast went past like the
breath of the Apocalypse.

On the ramparts the Portuguese died as the wind plucked them outwards. The great
defences, nearest the cathedral, were smashed down, and debris filled the ditches so that
a huge, flat road was hammered into the heart of the fortress, and still the powder caught.
New boilings of flame and smoke writhed into the horror over Almeida, shudder after
shudder, a convulsive spasm of the hilltop and the monstrous explosions died, leaving
only fire and darkness, the stench of hell, a silence where men were deafened by
destruction.

A French gunner, old in his trade, who had once taught a young Corsican Lieutenant how
to lay a gun, spat on his hand and touched it to the hot muzzle of the barrel that had fired
the last shot. The French were silent, unbelieving, and in the killing-ground before them
stones, tiles, and burnt flesh dropped like the devil's rain.

Twenty-five miles away, in Celorico, they heard the sound and the General put down his
fork and went to the window and knew, with terrible certainty, what it was. There was no
gold. And now the fortress that could have bought him six weeks of failing hope had gone. The
smoke came later, a huge grey curtain that smeared the eastern sky, turned morning
sunlight into dusk, and edged the border hills with crimson like a harbinger of the armies
that would follow the cloud to the sea.

Almeida had been destroyed.

Kearsey was dead, killed in an instant as he said his prayers on the town rampart, and
five hundred other men snatched into eternity by the flame, but Sharpe did not know that
yet. He knew he was dying, of suffocation and heat, and he braced his back against the
smooth, curved interior of the massive oven and pushed with his legs at a charred length of
timber that blocked the door. It collapsed and he pushed himself out, into a nightmare,
and turned to pull Teresa clear. She spoke to him, but he could hear nothing, and he shook
his head and went to the other opening and pushed away some rubble as Harper crawled out,
his face ashen.

The ovens had saved their lives. They were built like small fortresses, with walls more
than three feet thick and a curved roof that had sent the blast harmlessly overhead.
Nothing else remained. The cathedral was a flaming pit, the castle gone, the houses so
much dust and fire, and down the street Sharpe had to look a hundred yards before he saw a
house that had survived the blast, and it was ablaze, the flames licking at the rooms which
had been opened to the world, and the heat was grey around them as he took Teresa's arm.

A man staggered into the road, naked and bleeding, shouting for help, but they ignored
him, ran to the cellar door that was covered with fallen stone, and dragged it clear. There
was a thumping beneath and shouts, and Harper, still dazed, pulled back the stones and the
cellar flap was forced open, and Lossow and Helmut came out. They spoke to Sharpe, who could
not hear, and ran towards their own house, at the bottom of the hill, away from the horror,
through the Portuguese soldiers who stared, open-mouthed, at the inferno that had once
been a cathedral.

Sharpe dropped in the kitchen, found a bottle of the Germans' beer, and knocked the top
of, put it to his lips, and let the cool liquid flow into his stomach. He hit his ears,
shook his head, and his men stared at him. He shook his head again, willing the sound to come
back, and felt tears in his eyes. Damn it, the decision had been made, and he put his head
back and stared at the ceiling and thought of the General, and of the blazing pit, and he
hated himself.

'You had no choice, sir.' Knowles was speaking to him; the voice sounded far away, but he
could hear.

He shook his head. 'There's always a choice.'

'But the war, sir. You said it had to be won.'

Then celebrate it tomorrow, Sharpe thought, or the next day, but dear God, I did not
know, and he remembered the flung bodies, stripped of all dignity, wiped out in an
instant, draped like streaked fungus on the hot rubble.

'I know.' He turned on his men. 'What are you staring at! Get ready to move!'

He hated Wellington, too, because he knew why the General had picked him: because he
wanted a man too proud to fail, and he knew he would do it for the General again.
Ruthlessness was good in a soldier, in a General or a Captain, and men admired it, but
that was no reason to think that the ruthless man did not feel the bloody pain as well.
Sharpe stood up, looked at Lossow.

'We'd better find Cox.'

The town was stunned, bereft of sound except for the crackling of flames and the coughing
of vomit as men found comrades' charred and shrunken bodies. The smell of roast flesh hung
in the air, like the stench of the burning bodies after Talavera, but that, Sharpe
remembered, had been a mistake, an accident of wind and flame, while this chaos, this
glimpse of damnation, had been caused by a powder keg that Sharpe had caused to be pierced
and trailed to the cathedral's door. The bodies were naked, the uniforms seared of by the
blast, and they seemed to have shrunk into small, black mockeries of human beings. A dead
battalion, thought Sharpe, killed for the gold, and he wondered if Wellington himself
would have put the cigar on to the powder, and then he thrust the thought away as Lossow led
the way up a sloping rampart to where Cox surveyed the damage.

It was all over – anyone could see that, the town indefensible – but Cox still hoped.
He had been weeping at the death and destruction, the swath that had gone through his town
and his hopes.

'How?'

There were answers offered by the staff officers with Cox, good answers, and they told
the Brigadier of the French shells that had landed just before the explosion. The
officers looked over the wall at the massing crowd of Frenchmen who had come to stare at
the giant breach in the town's defences, and at the pall of smoke, as men might watch a
once-proud King on his deathbed.

'A shell,' one of the officers told Cox. 'It must have set off the small
ammunition.'

'Oh, God.' Cox was close to tears. 'We should have had a magazine.'

Cox tried to stiffen his will to go on fighting, but they all knew it was done. There was
no ammunition left, nothing to fight with, and the French would understand. There would
be no unpleasantness; the surrender would be discussed in a civilized way, and Cox tried
to stave it off, tried to find hope in the smoke-filled air, but finally agreed.

'Tomorrow, gentlemen, tomorrow. We fly the flag one more night.' He pushed his way
through the group and saw Sharpe and Lossow waiting. 'Sharpe. Lossow. Thank God you're
alive. So many gone.'

'Yes, sir.'

Cox was biting back tears. 'So many.' Sharpe wondered if Tom Garrard had survived. Cox
noticed the blood on the Rifleman's uniform. 'You're wounded?'

'No, sir. I'm all right. Permission to leave, sir?'

Cox nodded, an automatic reaction. The gold was forgotten in the horror of the lost
war.

Sharpe plucked Lossow's sleeve. 'Come on.'

At the bottom of the ramp, a puzzled look on his face, Cesar Moreno waited for them. He
put a hand out to stop Sharpe. 'Teresa?'

Sharpe smiled, the first smile since the explosion. 'She's safe. We're leaving now.'

'And Joaquim?'

'Joaquim?' For a second Sharpe was not certain whom Teresa's father was talking about,
and then he remembered the fight on the rooftop. 'He's dead.'

'And this?' Cesar Moreno's hand was still on Sharpe's sleeve as he looked round the
destruction.

'An accident.'

Moreno looked at him and shrugged. 'Half our men are dead.'

There was nothing Sharpe could say. Lossow broke in. 'The horses?'

Moreno looked at him and shrugged. 'They were not in the house that collapsed. They're all
right.'

'We'll use them!' The German went ahead and Moreno checked Sharpe with a hand.

'She'll take over, I suppose.'

The Rifleman nodded. 'Probably. She can fight.'

Moreno gave a rueful smile. 'She knows whose side to be on.'

Sharpe looked at the smoke, at the flames on the hilltop, smelt the burning. 'Don't we
all?' He shook himself free, turned again to the grey-haired man. 'I'll be back for her, one
day.'

'I know.'

The French had left their lines to gape at the smoking ruins at the northern wall. There
was nothing to stop the Company leaving, and they took the gold and went west, under the
smoke, and back to the army. The war was not lost.

EPILOGUE

'What happened, Richard?'

'Nothing, sir.'

Hogan moved his horse forward to a patch of succulent grass. 'I don't believe you.'

Sharpe stirred in his saddle; he hated riding. 'There was a girl.'

'Is that all?'

'All? She was special.'

The breeze from the sea was cool on his face; the water sparkled with a million flashes
of light, like a giant army of lance-tips, and beating northwards towards the Channel a
frigate laid its grey sails towards the land and left a streak of white in its path.

Hogan watched the ship. 'Despatches.'

'News of victory?' Sharpe's tone was ironic.

'They won't believe it. It's a funny victory.' Hogan stared at the distant horizon,
miles out to sea from the hilltop where their horses stood. 'Do you see the fleet out there?
A convoy going home.'

Sharpe grunted, felt the twinge in his healing shoulder. 'More money for the bloody
merchants. Why couldn't they have sent it here?'

Hogan smiled. 'There's never enough, Richard. Never.'

'There had better be now. After what we did to get it here.'

'What did you do?'

'I told you, nothing.' He stared a challenge at the gentle Irish Major. 'We were sent to
get it, we got it, and we brought it back.'

'The General's pleased.' Hogan said it in a neutral tone.

'He'd bloody better be pleased! For Christ's sake!'

'He thought you were lost.' Hogan's horse moved again, cropping the grass, and the Major
took off his cocked hat and fanned his face. 'Pity about Almeida.'

Sharpe made a face. 'Pity about Almeida.'

Hogan sighed patiently. 'We thought it was done for. We heard the explosion, of course,
and there was no gold. Without the gold there was no chance.'

'There was a little chance.' Sharpe almost spat the words at him and Hogan shrugged.

'No, not a chance you'd want, Richard.'

Sharpe let his anger sink; he thought of the girl, watched the frigate flap its sails and
bend into its next tack. 'Which would you rather have had, sir?' His voice was very cold, very
far away. 'The gold, or Almeida?'

Hogan pulled his horse's head up. 'The gold, Richard. You know that.'

'You're sure?'

Hogan nodded. 'Very sure. Thousands might have died without the gold.'

'But we don't know that."

Hogan waved his arm at the landscape. 'We do.'

It was a miracle, perhaps one of the greatest feats of military engineering, and it
had taken up the gold. The gold had been needed, desperately needed, or the work would
never have been finished and the ten thousand labourers, some of whom Sharpe could see,
could have packed up their shovels and picks and simply waited for the French. Sharpe
watched the giant scrapers, hauled by lines of men and oxen, shaping the hills.

'What do you call it?'

'The Lines of Torres Vedras.'

Three lines barred the Lisbon peninsula, three giant fortifications made with the
hills themselves, fortifications that dwarfed the granite-works at Almeida. The first
line, on which they rode, was twenty-six miles long, stretching from the Atlantic to the
Tagus, and there were two others behind it. The hills had been steepened, crowned with gun
batteries, and the lowland flooded. Behind the hillcrests sunken roads meant that the
twenty-five thousand garrison troops could move unseen by the French, and the deep
valleys, where they could not be filled, were blocked with thorn-trees, thousands of them,
so that from the air it must have looked as if a giant's child had shaped the landscape the
way a boy played with a few square inches of wet soil by a stream.

Sharpe stared eastwards, at the unending line, and he found it hard to believe. So much
work, so many escarpments made by hand, crowned with hundreds of guns cased in stone forts,
their embrasures looking to the north, to the plain where Massena would be checked.

Hogan rode alongside him. 'We can't stop him, Richard, not till he gets here. And here he
stays.'

'And we're back there.' Sharpe pointed towards Lisbon, thirty miles to the south.

Hogan nodded. 'It's simple. He'll never break the lines, never; they're too strong. And
he can't go round; the Navy's there. So here he stops, and the rains start, and in a couple of
months he'll be starving and we come out again to reconquer Portugal.'

'And on into Spain?' Sharpe asked.

'On into Spain.' Hogan sighed, waved again at the huge scar of the unbelievable
fortress. 'And we ran out of money. We had to get money.'

'And you got it.'

Hogan bowed to him. 'Thank you. Tell me about the girl?'

Sharpe told him as they rode towards Lisbon, crossing the second and third lines that
would never be used. He remembered the parting after they had left the river fortress,
unchallenged, and the Light Company, clumsily mounted on the Spanish horses, had
bounced after Lossow's Germans. One French patrol had come near them, but the Germans had
wheeled to meet it, their sabres drawn in one hissing movement, and the French had sheered
away. They had stopped beside the Coa and Sharpe had handed Teresa the one thousand gold
coins he had promised.

She had smiled at him. 'This will be enough.'

'Enough?'

'For our needs. We go on fighting.'

The wind had brought the stench of burning and death into the hills and Sharpe had looked
at her, at the dark, hawklike beauty.

'You can stay with us."

She had smiled. 'No. But you can come back. One day.'

He had nodded at the rifle slung on her shoulder. 'Give it to Ramon. I promised.'

She looked surprised. 'It's mine!'

'No.' He had unslung his own rifle, checked the butt-plate, that all the cleaning
equipment was there, and handed it across with his ammunition pouch. 'This is yours. With
my love. I'll get another one.'

She had smiled, shaken her head. 'I'm sorry.'

'So am I. We'll meet again.'

'I know.' She turned her horse and waved.

'Kill a lot of French!' he shouted.

'All there are!'

And she was gone, galloping with her father and his men, her men, up to the secret paths
that would lead them home, to the war of the knife and ambush, and he missed her, missed
her.

He smiled at Hogan. 'You heard about Hardy?'

'Sad. He has a brother. Did you know?'

'No.'

Hogan nodded. 'A Naval Lieutenant. Giles Hardy, and just like his brother. Mad as a
coot.'

'And Josefina?'

Hogan smiled, sniffed his snuff, and Sharpe waited for the sneeze. Hogan wiped away the
tears. 'She's here. You want to see her?'

'Yes.'

Hogan laughed. 'She's rather celebrated now." He did not explain.

They rode in the lengthening shadows down the paved highway into Lisbon. It was
crowded with carts, carrying building stone, and with the labourers who were making one
of the great wonders of the military world, a fortress covering five hundred square miles
that would stop the French in the year of 1810 and would never be used again. Sharpe admired
Wellington for a clever man, because no one, utterly no one outside Lisbon, seemed to
know the lines existed, and the French, their tails up, would come hallooing down the
southern road. And stop.