Sharpe's Havoc (21 page)

“I’ll take the small girl,” Christopher said wolfishly, “the redhead.”

She screamed, but there was much screaming that night in Vila Real de Zedes.

As there was on the hill to the south.

Sharpe ran. He shouted at his men to get to the top of the hill as fast as they could and
then he scrambled up the slope and he had gone a hundred yards before he calmed down and
realized that he was doing this all wrong. “Rifles!” he shouted. “Packs off!”

He let his men unburden themselves until they carried only their weapons, haversacks
and cartridge boxes. Lieutenant Vicente’s men did the same. Six Portuguese and the same
number of riflemen would stay to guard the discarded packs and bags and greatcoats and cuts
of smoked meat, while the rest followed Sharpe and Vicente up the slope. They went much faster
now. “Did you see the bastards up there?” Harper panted.

“No,” Sharpe said, but he knew the French would want to take the fort because it was the
highest ground for miles, and that meant they had probably sent a company or more to loop
about the south and sneak up the hill. So it was a race. Sharpe had no proof that the French were
in the race, but he did not underestimate them. They would be coming and all he could pray
was that they were not there already.

The rain fell harder. No gun would fire in this weather. This was going to be a fight of
wet steel, fists and rifle butts. Sharpe’s boots slipped on sodden turf and skidded on rock.
He was getting short of breath, but at least he had climbed the flanking slope and was now on
the path that led up the northern spine of the hill, and his men had widened and strengthened
the path, cutting steps in the steepest places and pegging the risers with wedges of birch.
It had been invented work to keep them busy, but it was all worth it now because it quickened
the pace. Sharpe was still leading with a dozen riflemen close behind. He decided he would
not close ranks before they reached the top. This was a scramble where the devil really
would take the hindmost so the important thing was to reach the summit, and he looked up
into the whirl of rain and cloud and he saw nothing up there but wet rock and the sudden
reflected sheen of a lightning bolt slithering down a sheer stone face. He thought of the
village and knew it was doomed. He wished he could do something about that, but he did not have
enough men to defend the village and he had tried to warn them.

The rain was driving into his face, blinding him. He slithered as he ran. There was a
stitch in his side, his legs were like fire and the breath rasped in his throat. The rifle was
slung on his shoulder, bouncing there, the stock thumping into his left thigh as he tried to
draw the sword, but then he had to let go of the hilt to steady himself against a rock as his
boots slid wildly out from under him. Harper was twenty paces back, panting. Vicente was
gaining on Sharpe who dragged his sword free of its scabbard, pushed himself away from the
boulder and forced himself on again. Lightning flickered to the east, outlining black hills
and a sky slanting with water. The thunder crackled across the heavens, filling them with
angry noise, and Sharpe felt as though he were climbing into the heart of the storm, climbing
to join the gods of war. The gale tore at him. His shako was long gone. The wind shrieked,
moaned, was drowned by thunder and burdened by rain and Sharpe thought he would never reach
the top and suddenly he was beside the first wall, the place where the path zigzagged between
two of the small redoubts his men had built, and a dagger of lightning stabbed down into the
void that opened wet and dark to his right. For a wild second he thought the hilltop was empty
and then he saw the flash of a blade reflecting the storm’s white fire and knew the French were
already there.

Dulong’s voltigeurs had arrived just seconds before and had taken the watchtower, but
they had not had time to occupy the northernmost redoubts where Sharpe’s men now appeared.
“Throw them out!” Dulong roared at his men.

“Kill the bastards!” Sharpe shouted and his blade scraped along a bayonet, jarred against
the muzzle of the musket and he threw himself forward, driving the man back, and hammered
his forehead against the man’s nose and the first riflemen were past him and the blades were
ringing in the near dark. Sharpe banged the hilt of his sword into the face of the man he had
put down, plucked the musket from him and threw it out into the void then pushed on to where a
group of Frenchmen were readying to defend the summit. They aimed their muskets and Sharpe
hoped to God he was right and that no flintlock would ever fire in this wet fury. Two men
struggled to his left and Sharpe slid the sword into a blue jacket, twisting it in the ribs,
and the Frenchman threw himself sideways to escape the blade and Sharpe saw it was Harper
hammering at the man with a rifle butt.

“God save Ireland.” Harper, wild-eyed, stared up at the French guarding the
watchtower.

“We’re going to charge those bastards!” Sharpe shouted at the riflemen coming up
behind.

“God save Ireland.”

“Tirezl” a French officer shouted and a dozen flints fell on steel and the sparks flashed
and died in the rain.

“Now kill them!” Sharpe roared. “Just bloody kill them!” Because the French were on his
hilltop, on his land, and he felt a rage fit to match the anger of the storm-filled sky. He ran
uphill and the French muskets reached down with their long bayonets and Sharpe remembered
fighting on the steep breach at Gawilghur and he did now what he had done then, reached under
the bayonet and grabbed a man’s ankle and tugged. The Frenchman screamed as he was pulled down
the hill to where three sword bayonets chopped at him, and then Vicente’s Portuguese,
realizing they could not shoot the French, began hurling rocks at them and the big stones
drew blood, made men flinch, and Sharpe bellowed at his riflemen to close with the enemy. He
back-swung the sword, driving a bayonet aside, pulled another musket with his left hand so
that the man was tugged down onto Harper’s sword bayonet. Harris was flailing with an axe
they had used to clear the path through the birch, laurel and oak wood, and the French shrank
from the terrible weapon and still the rocks were hurled and Sharpe’s riflemen, snarling and
panting, were clawing their way upward. A man kicked Sharpe in the face, Cooper caught the
boot and raked his sword bayonet up the man’s leg. Harper was using his rifle as a club,
beating men down with his huge strength. A rifleman fell backward, blood pulsing from his
throat to be instantly diluted by the rain. A Portuguese soldier took his place, stabbing
up with his bayonet and screaming insults. Sharpe rammed his sword two-handed up into the
press of bodies, stabbed, twisted, pulled and stabbed again. Another Portuguese was beside
him, thrusting his bayonet up into a French groin, while Sergeant Macedo, lips drawn back in
a snarl, was fighting with a knife. The blade flickered in the rain, turned red, was washed
clean, turned red again. The French were going back, retreating to the patch of bare stone
terrace in front of the watchtower ruins and an officer was shouting angrily at them,
and then the officer came forward, saber out, and Sharpe met him, the blades clashed and
Sharpe just head-butted again and, in the flash of lightning, saw the astonishment on the
officer’s face, but the Frenchman evidently came from the same school as Sharpe for he tried
to kick Sharpe’s groin as he rammed his fingers at Sharpe’s eyes. Sharpe twisted aside, came
back to hit the man on the jaw with the hilt of his sword, then the officer just seemed to
vanish as two of his men dragged him backward.

A tall French sergeant came at Sharpe, musket flailing, and Sharpe stepped back, the man
tripped, and Vicente reached out with his straight-bladed sword and its tip ripped the
Sergeant’s windpipe so he roared like a punctured bellows and collapsed in a spray of pink
rain. Vicente stepped back, appalled, but his men went streaming past to spread down into the
southern redoubts where they enthusiastically bayoneted the French out of their holes.
Sergeant Macedo had left his knife trapped in a Frenchman’s chest and instead was using a
French musket as a club and a voltigeur tried to pull the weapon out of his grasp and looked
stunned when the Sergeant just let him have it, then kicked him in the belly so that the
Frenchman fell back over the edge of the bluff. He screamed as he fell. The scream seemed to
last a long time, then there was a wet thump on the rocks far below, the musket clattered, and
the sound was swamped as thunder rolled over the sky. The clouds were split by lightning and
Sharpe, his sword blade dripping with rain-diluted blood, shouted at his men to check every
redoubt. “And search the tower!”

Another bolt of lightning revealed a large group of Frenchmen halfway up the southern
path. Sharpe reckoned that a small group of fitter men had come on ahead and it was those men
that he had encountered. The largest group, who could easily have held the summit against
Sharpe and Vicente’s desperate counterattack, had been too late, and Vicente was now
putting men into the lower redoubts. A rifleman lay dead by the watchtower. “It’s Sean
Donnelly,” Harper said.

“Pity,” Sharpe said, “a good man.”

“He was an evil little bastard from Deny,” Harper said, “who owed me four shillings.”

“He could shoot straight.”

“When he wasn’t drunk,” Harper allowed.

Pendleton, the youngest of the riflemen, brought Sharpe his shako. “Found it on the slope,
sir.”

“What were you doing on the slope when you should have been fighting?” Harper
demanded.

Pendleton looked worried. “I just found it, sir.”

“Did you kill anyone?” Harper wanted to know.

“No, Sergeant.”

“Not earned your bloody shilling today then, have you? Right! Pendleton! Williamson! Dodd!
Sims!” Harper organized a group to go back down the hill and bring up the discarded packs
and food. Sharpe had another two men strip the dead and wounded of their weapons and
ammunition.

Vicente had garrisoned the southern side of the fort and the sight of his men was enough to
deter the French from trying a second assault. The Portuguese lieutenant now came back to
join Sharpe beside the watchtower where the wind shrieked on the broken stone. The rain was
slackening, but the stronger wind gusts still drove drops hard against the ruined walls. “What
do we do about the village?” Vicente wanted to know.

“There’s nothing we can do.”

“There are women down there! Children!”

“I know.”

“We can’t just leave them.”

“What do you want us to do?” Sharpe asked. “Go down there? Rescue them? And while we’re
there, what happens up here? Those bastards take the hill.” He pointed at the French
voltigeurs who were still halfway up the hill, uncertain whether to keep climbing or to give
up the attempt. “And when you get down there,” Sharpe went on, “what are you going to find?
Dragoons. Hundreds of bloody dragoons. And when the last of your men are dead you’ll have the
satisfaction of knowing you tried to save the village.” He saw the stubbornness on
Vicente’s face. “There’s nothing you can do.”

“We have to try,” Vicente insisted.

“You want to take some men on patrol? Then do it, but the rest of us stay up here. This place
is our one chance of staying alive.”

Vicente shivered. “You will not keep going south?”

“We get off this hill,” Sharpe said, “and we’re going to have dragoons giving us haircuts
with their bloody swords. We’re trapped, Lieutenant, we’re trapped.”

“You will let me take a patrol down to the village?”

“Three men,” Sharpe said. He was reluctant to let even three men go with Vicente, but he
could see that the Portuguese lieutenant was desperate to know what was happening to his
countrymen. “Stay in cover, Lieutenant,” Sharpe advised. “Stay in the trees. Go very
carefully!”

Vicente was back three hours later. There were simply too many dragoons and
blue-jacketed infantry around Vila Real de Zedes and he had got nowhere near the village.
“But I heard screams,” he said.

“Aye,” Sharpe said, “you would have done.”

Beneath him, beyond the Quinta, the remnants of the village church burned out in the dark
damp night. It was the only light he could see. There were no stars, no candles, no lamps, just
the sullen red glow of the burning church.

And tomorrow, Sharpe knew, the French would come for him again.

In the morning the French officers had breakfast on the terrace of the tavern beneath a
vine trellis. The village had proved to be full of food and there was newly baked bread, ham,
eggs and coffee for breakfast. The rain had gone to leave a damp feel in the wind, but there
were shadows in the fields and the promise of warm sunlight in the air. The smoke of the
burned-out church drifted northwards, taking with it the stench of roasted flesh.

Maria, the red-headed girl, served Colonel Christopher his coffee. The Colonel was picking
his teeth with a sliver of ivory, but he took it from his mouth to thank her. “Obrigado,
Maria,” he said in a pleasant tone. Maria shuddered, but nodded a hasty acknowledgment as
she backed away.

“She’s replaced your servant?” Brigadier Vuillard asked.

“The wretched fellow’s missing,” Christopher said. “Runaway. Gone.”

“A fair exchange,” Vuillard said, watching Maria. “That one’s much prettier.”

“She was pretty,” Christopher allowed. Maria’s face was badly bruised now and the bruises
had swollen to spoil her beauty. “And she’ll be pretty again,” he went on.

“You hit her hard,” Vuillard said with a hint of reproach.

Christopher sipped his coffee. “The English have a saying, Brigadier. A spaniel, a woman
and a walnut tree, the more they’re beaten the better they be.”

“A walnut tree?”

“They say if the trunk is well thrashed it increases the yield of nuts; I have no idea if
it’s true, but I do know that a woman has to be broken like a dog or a horse.”