Sharpe's Siege Read online

  He pushed upwards. He could smell Harper’s breath and feel the rank fear from the man. He sympathized with it. Sharpe had once had a tooth pulled in India and he remembered the pain as vividly as any wound taken in battle. He pushed harder. The tooth did not move, though Harper quivered as he loyally tried to push against Sharpe’s pressure.

  ‘Harder,’ Frederickson muttered.

  Sharpe pushed harder, the metal jaws slipped up into the swollen gums, and the pincers were wrenched away as Harper bellowed and flailed to one side. ‘Jesus and his bloody saints! Christ!’ The sergeant had his hands to his mouth that was trickling blood. ‘God in heaven!’ He was keening with the sudden agony.

  ‘It slipped,’ Sharpe said in apologetic explanation.

  ‘Bloody near killed me!’ Harper swallowed more brandy, then spat a potent mixture of blood and alcohol on to the ground. ‘Jesus!’

  ‘Perhaps I should try,’ Frederickson offered. Lieutenant Minver, like his men, grinned.

  ‘God damn all officers! All!’ Harper was in a blaze of anger now. ‘Bloody murdering bastards!’ He picked up the pincers, opened his mouth, and probed with a finger.

  He flinched.

  Sharpe drew back. The Riflemen, no longer laughing, watched as the huge, bare-chested man put the pincers over his own tooth. The big hand closed and Harper’s blue eyes seemed to grow wider. He pushed and Sharpe heard a distinct crack, like gristle snapping, then the pincers were being twisted right and left, Harper was moaning, and again there were the tiny sounds of tissue parting or bone grating.

  Sharpe held his breath. No one moved. A French child of ten could have taken these prize troops captive at this moment as the bare-chested Harper, shaking with the pain and cold, began to pull.

  The Irishman’s hand trembled. A bead of blood pulsed at his lower lip, another, then in a great groan and a gush of pus and blood, the huge tooth tore free. Scraps of flesh were attached to its branching roots, but blood, bright red blood was pouring on to Harper’s chest in great rivulets that steamed in the cold air.

  ‘Get him on to the wagon!’ Sharpe ordered.

  ‘Christ in his heaven!’ The pain had brought tears to Harper’s eyes. He stood, coughing blood, a fearful sight. He was weeping now, not out of weakness, but in anger and pain. He was blood smothered; steaming with warm blood, coughing blood, his face and chest soaked in blood.

  ‘You shouldn’t go,’ Frederickson said to Sharpe, meaning that it was foolish for the two senior officers to risk themselves at the same time.

  Sharpe ignored the well-meant advice. ‘Lieutenant Minver. As soon as we have the gate open, you charge! Swords fitted!’

  ‘Sir.’ The lieutenant, a thin dark man, smiled nervously. Harper lay on the cart, shivering.

  ‘Take your men to the edge of the sand,’ Sharpe said as he took off his pack, his officer’s sash, snake-buckled belt, his Rifleman’s jacket, and his shako. Frederickson was doing the same. ‘Sergeant Rossner? You bring this equipment.’

  ‘Sir!’

  Harper’s seven-barrelled gun, loaded and primed, was put beside the Irishman’s bloodstained right hand. His rifle was on the left side of the cart where Sharpe’s sword, drawn from the scabbard, lay easily to hand. Sharpe wanted to give the impression of three men bringing the victim of an accident from the ambush party. Yet success depended on the French guards seeing only the dreadful blood on Patrick Harper.

  Harper, lying belly up on the cart, was in danger of choking on his own blood. He spat a thick gob, turned his head, and spat again. ‘Spit onto your chest! Don’t waste it!’ Sharpe said. Harper growled in mutiny, then spat a satisfying lump of blood down to his navel. Sharpe took one handle of the cart, Frederickson the other, and Sharpe nodded. ‘Move.’

  The firing from the fort had stopped which meant, Sharpe knew, that either the frigate was out of range or else was sinking. There was no sound from the ambush site.

  The cart screeched foully on the rough track that led past scrawny alders towards the Teste de Buch. Far away, over the houses and beyond the dunes, Sharpe saw a shiver of white which he knew must be the frigate’s topsails, then heard a bellow of thunder and saw a blossom of smoke which told him Grant had opened fire again. Captain Grant, at least, was doing his duty. Even at the cost of his ship and men he was drawing the fort’s fire, and his success was measured by the sudden clap of thunder as the huge fortress guns opened their own fire again.

  The cart axle screeched fit to wake the dead, bounced on the uneven road, and Harper groaned. His right hand, streaked with bloody rivulets, groped for his seven-barrelled gun and Sharpe, seeing the movement, knew the huge Irishman was recovering. ‘Well done, Sergeant.’

  ‘Didn’t mean to be rude to you, sir.’ Harper choked on blood as he said the words.

  ‘Yes, you did,’ Frederickson cheerfully answered for Sharpe. ‘So would any man. Now shut up. You’re supposed to be dying.’

  Patrick Harper said nothing more as the cart slewed round a corner, over a muddy rut, and up on to the harder track that led straight to the bridge over the fort’s inner ditch. The wind gusted, bringing the stench of powder smoke in its cold touch. No sound came from the south and Sharpe knew the Marines were still far from Arcachon. If the Scylla was to be saved from further punishment, then the Rifles would have to do the job.

  They were already within cannon-range of the fort, but no gunners stared from the deep embrasures. ‘Run,’ Sharpe said. ‘Run as if he’s dying.’

  ‘He is,’ Harper groaned.

  Sharpe had to push hard to keep up with Frederickson’s pace and he saw a head appear on the fortress wall, he saw the tricolour lift to the smoke-fouled wind, then Sweet William, beside him, was shouting in breathless French and Sharpe knew that it was madness for three men to take on one of the coastal forts of mainland France, but he was committed now, inside musket range, and all they could do was push on, pray, then fight like the soldiers that they were; the best.

  CHAPTER 7

  They stopped ignominiously on the sand-gritted planks of the drawbridge.

  The gates did not open, they could go no further, and Sharpe and Frederickson, chests heaving and breath misting into great plumes from the effort of pushing the obstinate cart with Harper’s weight, could only stare up at a puzzled face which appeared on the ramparts.

  Frederickson shouted to the sentry in French, an answer was made, and Harper, fearing a sudden musket blast from above, groaned horribly on the cart. The blood on his huge chest was drying to a cracked crust.

  ‘He wants to know,’ Frederickson spoke to Sharpe with astonishment in his voice, ‘whether we’re the Americans.’

  ‘Yes!’ Sharpe shouted. ‘Yes, yes!’

  ‘Attendez!‘ The guard’s head disappeared.

  Sharpe turned to look through the notch made where the approach road cut through the glacis. He stared at the place where the villagers stood by the trees and where he had dimly discerned the shape of a gun’s limber among the pines. ‘The Americans are manning those guns?’ He too sounded astonished.

  Frederickson shrugged. ‘Must be.’

  Sharpe turned back, his boots making a hollow sound on the thick planks of the drawbridge. To right and left the flooded inner ditch stretched. The ditch water, fed by a rivulet from the millstream, seemed shallow enough, but it would still be a cloying obstacle to men trying to assault the gaunt, rough-faced wall of the fort’s enceinte.

  The fortress guns bellowed to Sharpe’s left, jetting smoke and flame towards the frigate that was now beyond Cap Ferrat. The battle had become a long-range duel as Grant teased the fort and, doubtless, cursed the land force for their late arrival.

  ‘What’s the crapaud bastard doing?’ Harper growled softly.

  ‘Gone to fetch the officer of the guard?’ Sharpe guessed. Harper shivered. The light was dying in the west, a cold evening promised frost in the night, and the huge Irishman was stripped to the waist. ‘Not long now,’ Sharpe said, the words spoken more in nervou
sness than for comfort.

  Suddenly a bolt clanged, scraped, then a bar thudded to the ground from its brackets.

  ‘Christ!’ Frederickson’s voice betrayed relief that their ruse, so quickly devised and then made possible by Harper’s pain, was working.

  ‘Wait for my word.’ Sharpe said it softly as he saw Harper’s muscles, beneath their crazed and shivering quilt of dried blood, suddenly tense.

  The hinges of the gate squealed like a tormented soul. Lieutenant Minver, two hundred yards away, would see the huge door leafing open and should already be moving. ‘Now,’ Sharpe said.

  The French guard was eager to help the wounded man. The guard himself was injured, his leg setting in plaster, and he gestured at the cast as if to explain the slowness with which he tugged the huge, iron-studded gate open.

  Harper, rolling from the cart, did not see the thick plaster on the man’s leg, nor did he see the welcoming, reassuring smile; he only saw a man in an enemy jacket, a man who barred a door that must be opened, and Harper came up from the roadway with a sword-bayonet in his right hand and the Frenchman gave a horrid, pathetic sigh as the twenty-three inch blade, held like a long dagger, ripped into his belly. Sharpe saw the blood spilling like water on the cobbles of the archway as he pushed his full weight on to the half-opened gate.

  Harper twisted the bayonet free and left the guard bleeding and twitching on the drawbridge. He kicked the man’s musket into the ditch, then fetched his rifle and seven-barrelled gun from the cart. Frederickson, sword in hand, dragged the empty handcart into the tunnel that pierced the ramparts. No one had seen them, no one raised the alarm; they had taken the garrison utterly by surprise.

  Sharpe bolted both doors open. His rifle was slung, his sword naked, and at any second he expected a shout of alarm or a musket shot, but the three Riflemen were undetected. They smiled at each other, made nervous by success, then their ears were punched by the shattering pulse of air as the fortress guns fired towards the Scylla. Harper hefted his seven-barrelled gun. ‘I’ll teach those bastards how to fire guns.’

  ‘Sergeant!’ Sharpe called, but Harper was already running, gun cocked, towards the courtyard.

  A shout sounded from the sand-dunes and, at the same instant, two muskets coughed above Sharpe. He realized there must be other guards on the gate’s roof, men who could see Minver’s assault approaching, and Sharpe looked for a route that would take him to the ramparts. A low, arched doorway lay to his right and he ducked through it.

  He found himself in a guardroom. A wooden musket rack, varnished and polished, held eight muskets upright. A table was littered with playing cards before a black-leaded pot-bellied stove that silted smoke from an ill-fitting chimney pipe. Stairs climbed through an arch on the far side of the room and, exchanging his sword for the rifle, Sharpe took the steps at a rush.

  He could hear, above him, the rattle of ramrods in barrels. The stairs turned a right angle, the sky was grey overhead, then a moustached face, just ten feet away, turned towards the sound of feet on the stairs and Sharpe pulled the rifle’s trigger and saw the man twitch backwards. More blood.

  A movement to his left as he cleared the stairs made Sharpe twist round. A second man was desperately pulling a ramrod free of his musket’s long barrel, then, seeing that he could not free his weapon of the encumbrance, the Frenchman just raised the gun to his shoulder.

  Sharpe fell and rolled to his right.

  The musket banged and flamed and the ramrod, which could have impaled Sharpe like a skewer, cartwheeled across the inner courtyard to clang against the stone ramp.

  ‘Non! Non!’ The man was backing away now as Sharpe, unscathed, rose from the stones with his sword in his right hand.

  ‘Non!’ The guard dropped his musket, raised his hands, and Sharpe accepted the man’s surrender by the simple expedient of tipping him over the ramparts into the flooded ditch twenty feet below. Minver’s Riflemen, pouches, scabbards, canteens and horns flapping as they ran, were on the road now; the fastest men already close to the glacis.

  Sharpe turned towards the sound of the fortress guns. He could see an empty wall on which vast, cold guns stood mute. At the wall’s end was a small stone citadel, little more than a covered shelter for sentries, and beyond that was the semi-circular bastion that jutted into the waters of the Arcachon channel and from which the heavy guns fired. The French artillerymen, stunned, deafened and half blinded by their own firing, had still not seen the small slaughter at the gate. They swabbed and charged their vast weapons, intent only on the frigate that dared to defy them.

  Then a voice screamed defiance at them. Some turned. The others, losing the rhythm of their tasks, twisted to see what had interrupted the work.

  Patrick Harper had shouted at them in a voice that would have silenced hell itself, a voice that had called Battalions to order across the vast spaces of windy parade grounds, and the gunners stared with astonishment into the courtyard below where a blood-boltered giant seemed to hold a small cannon in his hands.

  ‘Bastards!’ Harper screamed the word, then pulled the seven-barrelled gun’s trigger. The half-inch balls flayed up and out, fanning to strike the left hand gun crew. Two men fell, then Harper dropped the massive gun and unslung his rifle.

  ‘Patrick!’ Sharpe had seen a Frenchman on the barrack roof who knelt, carbine in hand, to aim downwards. ‘Cover!’

  Harper rolled right, looked up, and ran.

  A French officer, commanding the big gun battery, stared at the blood-streaked giant, then to Sharpe, and the Rifleman saw the look of sheer surprise on the thin, pale face. Frederickson, sword in hand, was crossing the yard, careless of the carbine above him, and shouting to the gunners to surrender.

  The French officer suddenly jerked, as though waking to find a nightmare real, and shouted at his men to forsake their cannons and snatch their carbines from racks beside the embrasures. Sharpe had forgotten how French gunners carried long-arms and he bellowed at Frederickson to take cover, then saw the flicker of movement as the Frenchman on the roof changed aim.

  Sharpe twisted away, knowing the shot was aimed at himself. He had a glimpse of the foreshortened stab of flame with its aureole of smoke, then the carbine ball slashed across his forehead. One half inch closer and he would have been dead, killed by fragments of skull driven into his brain, but instead he staggered, stunned, and his vision was suddenly sheeted with scarlet as he twisted, fell, and heard the sword clang as it bounced on the rampart’s stones. His head felt as if a red-hot poker had been slashed across his face. He was blind.

  A pitiless stab of pain lanced in his head, making him moan. The blindness was making him panic, and his dizziness would not let him stand. He slumped against the wall and tasted thick, salty blood on his tongue. He scrabbled vainly for his fallen sword.

  A French shout of command made him turn his face left, but he could see nothing. Carbines fired. A ball fluttered overhead, another slapped the wall beside him, then a Baker rifle’s quick crack, that Sharpe had heard a million times before, sounded to his right and he could hear the scrape of boots on stone as the riflemen came into the courtyard. Another crack, a scream, and another Baker rifle had found a victim, then Frederickson was shouting orders.

  A volley splintered the dusk, sparking pricks of flame from rifle’ muzzles, then half the Green Jackets went forward, their comrades covering them, and the long sword-bayonets were carried up the stone ramp and Sharpe heard them cheer and knew that the fort was taken. He was blind.

  Slowly, fearfully, Sharpe raised a hand to his throbbing head and gouged at his right eye. He scraped blood away and saw a shimmer of light. His eyes were thick with blood, sealed by it, and he spat on a filthy hand and scraped at the gore to clear his right eye and dimly saw Frederickson’s men scouring the water-bastion with their bayonets. He felt a pang of relief, clear as spring water, that he could see. He could see the enemy leaping from the embrasures, abandoning fort and guns, and he saw a shot from the Scylla, that had
been firing vainly for ninety minutes, take the head from a Rifleman on the western ramparts. The body, streaming blood like a squirting wine-bag, tumbled down on to the courtyard’s cobbles.

  ‘Get the flag down!’ Sharpe bellowed it. He was on his hands and knees, blood soaking his shirt and threatening to close his right eye again. ‘The flag!’

  Lieutenant Minver, understanding, cut the halyard with his sword so that the tricolour fluttered down. That would stop the Scylla’s guns.

  ‘Close the gate!’ Sharpe shouted again, and the effort lanced such quick agony through his skull that he sobbed. He shook his head, trying to clear the pain, but it pulsed like a needle of fire behind his eyes.

  A massive volley sounded to the south and Sharpe, his head hurting with every move, twisted round to see the blossom of smoke from the grove of trees. ‘Captain Frederickson! Captain Frederickson!’

  Frederickson took the stairs to the upper rampart three at a time. ‘Jesus!’ He stooped beside Sharpe and tried to wipe the blood away from his face, but Sharpe, still on his hands and knees, twisted away. ‘Minver’s Company to the ramparts. Take yours and clear those damned American guns.’ He saw Frederickson hesitate. ‘Go!’

  Frederickson went and Sharpe, the pain suddenly dreadful, realized that the Scylla had ceased fire and that the field guns had ended their fusillade. He leaned against the wall, closed his good eye, and let the pain come. He had captured a fort.

  Cornelius Killick could have happily taken Nicolas Leblanc and wrung his damned French neck.

  It was Leblanc’s factory, at St Denis near Paris, that manufactured the potassium nitrate that was mixed with charcoal and sulphur to make gunpowder.

  It was not that Cornelius Killick had ever heard of Nicolas Leblanc, but the American knew powder, and he knew, the instant that his guns fired, that French powder was fit only for July the Fourth fire-crackers. The potassium nitrate, saltpetre, was at fault, but that again Kilhck could not know, but he did know when a gun coughed instead of banged. He had charged the guns as he would his own guns, and as if he was using American powder, but he should have elevated the guns to compensate for the poor quality of the charges.