Sharpe's Battle Read online

  "Ma'am," Sharpe said awkwardly. Juanita gave Runciman one withering glance, then appraised Sharpe for a long time while her pack of hunting dogs sniffed about his horse's legs. The woman's gaze was unfriendly and she finally turned away without even acknowledging the rifleman's presence. "So why did you shoot the dragoon, ma'am?" Sharpe asked, trying to provoke her.

  She turned back to him. "Because he was going to shoot my Lord Kiely," she answered defiantly. "I saw him reach for his pistol."

  She had not seen anything of the kind, Sharpe thought, but he would achieve nothing by challenging her bare-faced lie. She had shot to preserve her lover's life, nothing else, and Sharpe felt a pang of jealousy that the wastrel Kiely should have found himself such a brazen, defiant and remarkable woman. She was no beauty, but something in her clever, feral face stirred

  Sharpe, though he would be damned before he let her know she had that power.

  "You've come far, ma'am?" he asked.

  "From Madrid, Captain," she said frostily.

  "And the French didn't stop you?" Sharpe asked pointedly.

  "I don't need French permission to travel in my own country, Captain, nor, in my own country, do I need explain myself to impertinent British officers." She spurred away, summoning her shaggy-haired, long-legged hounds to follow her.

  "She doesn't like you, Sharpe," Runciman said.

  "It's a mutual thing, General," Sharpe said. "I wouldn't trust the bitch an inch." It was mainly jealousy that made him say it and he knew it.

  "She's a fine-looking woman, though, ain't she?" Runciman sounded wistful as though he understood he was not the man to donate a uniform of the 37th Line to Juanita's wardrobe. "I can't say as I've ever seen a woman in breeches before," Runciman said, "let alone astride a saddle. Doesn't happen much in

  Hampshire."

  "And I've never seen a woman ride from Madrid to Portugal without a servant or a lick of luggage," Sharpe said. "I wouldn't trust her, General."

  "You wouldn't trust who, Sharpe?" Lord Kiely asked. He was riding back towards the British officers.

  "Brigadier Loup, sir," Sharpe lied smoothly. "I was explaining to General

  Runciman the significance of the grey uniforms." Sharpe pointed towards the dragoons who were now carrying the dead man's body back up the hillside.

  "A grey uniform didn't help that dragoon today!" Kiely was still animated by the duel and apparently unashamed of the way it had ended. His face seemed younger and more attractive as though the arrival of his mistress had restored the lustre of youth to Kiely's drink-ravaged looks.

  "Chivalry didn't help him either," Sharpe said sourly. Runciman, suspecting that Sharpe's words might provoke another duel, hissed in remonstrance.

  Kiely just sneered at Sharpe. "He broke the rules of chivalry, Sharpe. Not me!

  The man was evidently going for his pistol. I reckon he knew he would be dead the moment I recovered my sword." His expression dared Sharpe to contradict him.

  "Funny how chivalry becomes sordid, isn't it, my Lord?" Sharpe said instead.

  "But then war is sordid. It might start with chivalrous intentions, but it always ends with men screaming for their mothers and having their guts flensed out by cannon balls. You can dress a man in scarlet and gold, my Lord, and tell him it's a noble cause he graces, but he'll still end up bleeding to death and shitting himself in a panic. Chivalry stinks, my Lord, because it's the most sordid bloody thing on earth."

  Kiely was still holding his sword, but now he slid the long blade home into its scabbard. "I don't need lectures on chivalry from you, Sharpe. Your job is to be a drillmaster. And to stop my rogues from deserting. If, indeed, you can stop them."

  "I can do that, my Lord," Sharpe promised. "I can do that."

  And that afternoon he went to keep his word.

  Sharpe walked south from San Isidro following the spine of the hills as they dropped ever lower towards the main border road. Where the hills petered out into rolling meadowland there was a small village of narrow twisting streets, stone-walled gardens and low-roofed cottages that huddled on a slope climbing from a fast-flowing stream up to a rocky ridge where the village church was crowned by the ragged sticks of a stork's nest. The village was called Fuentes de Onoro, the village that had provoked Loup's fury, and it lay only two miles from Wellington's headquarters in the town of Vilar Formoso. That proximity worried Sharpe who feared his errand might be questioned by an inquisitive staff officer, but the only British troops in Fuentes de Onoro were a small picquet of the 60th Rifles who were positioned just north of the village and took no notice of Sharpe. On the stream's eastern bank were a few scattered houses, some walled gardens and orchards and a small chapel that were all reached from the main village by a footbridge constructed of stone slabs supported on boulders standing beside a ford where a patrol of King's German

  Legion cavalry was watering its horses. The Germans warned Sharpe that there were no allied troops on the further bank. "Nothing but French over there," the cavalry's Captain said and then, when he discovered Sharpe's identity, he insisted on sharing a flask of brandy with the rifleman. They exchanged news of Von Lossow, a KGL friend of Sharpe's, then the Captain led his men out of the stream and onto the long straight road that led towards Ciudad Rodrigo.

  "I'm looking for trouble," he called over his shoulder as he pulled himself up into the saddle, "and with God's help I'll find it!"

  Sharpe turned the other way and climbed the village street to where a tiny inn served a robust red wine. It was not much of an inn, but then Fuentes de Onoro was not much of a village. The place lay just inside the Spanish border and had been plundered by the French as they had marched into Portugal then raked over again as they marched back out, and the villagers were justifiably suspicious of all soldiers. Sharpe took his wineskin out of the inn's smoky interior to a small vegetable garden where he sat beneath a grapevine with a half severed trunk. The damage seemed not to have affected the plant which was putting out vigorous new tendrils and bright fresh leaves. He dozed there, almost too weary to lift the wineskin.

  "The French tried to cut the vine down." A voice spoke in sudden Spanish behind Sharpe. "They tried to destroy everything. Bastards." The man belched.

  It was a vast belch, loud enough to stir a cat sleeping on the garden's far wall. Sharpe turned to see a mountainous creature dressed in filthy brown leggings, a bloodstained cotton shirt, a green French dragoon coat that had split at all the seams in order to accommodate its new owner's bulk, and a leather apron that was caked black and stiff with dried blood. The man and his clothes stank of old food, bad breath, stale blood and decay. At his belt there hung an old-fashioned, unscabbarded sabre with a blade as dark, thick and filthy as a pole-axe, a horse pistol, a small bone-handled knife with a curiously hooked blade and a wooden whistle. "You're Captain Sharpe?" the enormous man asked as Sharpe rose to greet him.

  "Yes."

  "And my whistle tells you who I am, does it not?"

  Sharpe shook his head. "No."

  "You mean that castrators in England don't signal their coming with a blast on the whistle?"

  "I've never heard of them doing it," Sharpe said.

  El Castrador sat heavily on a bench opposite Sharpe. "No whistles? Where would

  I be without my little whistle? It tells a village I am coming. I blow it and the villagers bring out their hogs, beeves and foals, and I bring out my little knife." The man flicked the small, wickedly curved blade and laughed.

  He had brought his own wineskin which he now squirted into his mouth before shaking his head in rueful nostalgia. "And in the old days, my friend," El

  Castrador went on wistfully, "the mothers would bring out their little boys to be cut, and two years later the boys would travel to Lisbon or Madrid to sing so sweetly! My father, now, he cut many boys. One of his youngsters even sang for the Pope! Can you imagine? For the Pope in Rome! And all because of this little knife." He fingered the small bone-handled cutter.

  "A
nd sometimes the boys died?" Sharpe guessed.

  El Castrador shrugged. "Boys are easily replaced, my friend. One cannot afford to be sentimental about small children." He jetted more red wine down his vast gullet. "I had eight boys, only three survived and that, believe me, is two too many."

  "No girls?"

  "Four." El Castrador fell silent for a second or two, then sighed. "That

  French bastard Loup took them. You know of Loup?"

  "I know him."

  "He took them and gave them to his men. El Lobo and his men like young girls."

  He touched the knife at his belt, then gave Sharpe a long speculative look.

  "So you are La Aguja's Englishman."

  Sharpe nodded.

  "Ah! Teresa!" The Spaniard sighed. "We were angry when we heard she had given herself to an Englishman, but now I see you, Captain, I can understand. How is she?"

  "Fighting the French near Badajoz, but she sends her greetings." In fact

  Teresa had not written to Sharpe in weeks, but her name was a talisman among all the partisans and had been sufficient to arrange this meeting with the man who had been so roundly defeated by Brigadier Loup. Loup had tamed this part of the Spanish frontier and wherever Sharpe went he heard the Frenchman's name mentioned with an awed hatred. Every piece of mischief was the fault of Loup, every death, every house fire, every flood, every sick child, every robbed hive, every stillborn calf, every unseasonable frost; all were the wolf's work.

  "She will be proud of you, Englishman," El Castrador said.

  "She will?" Sharpe asked. "Why?"

  "Because El Lobo has placed a price on your head," El Castrador said. "Did you not know?"

  "I didn't know."

  "One hundred dollars," El Castrador said slowly, with relish, as though he was tempted by the price himself.

  "A pittance," Sharpe said disparagingly. Twenty-five pounds might be a small fortune to most people, a good year's pay indeed for most working folk, but still Sharpe reckoned his life was worth more than twenty-five pounds. "The reward on Teresa's head is two hundred dollars," he said resentfully.

  "But we partisans kill more French than you English," El Castrador said, "so it is only right that we should be worth more." Sharpe tactfully refrained from asking whether there was any reward on El Castrador's own matted and lice-ridden head. Sharpe suspected the man had lost most of his power because of his defeats, but at least, Sharpe thought, El Castrador lived while most of his men were dead, killed by the wolf after being cut in the same way that El

  Castrador had cut his captives. There were times when Sharpe was very glad he did not fight the guerrilla.

  El Castrador raised the wineskin again, spurted the wine into his mouth, swallowed, belched again, then breathed an effluent gust towards Sharpe. "So why do you want to see me, Englishman?"

  Sharpe told him. The telling took a good while for though El Castrador was a brutal man, he was not especially clever and Sharpe had to explain his requirements several times before the big man understood. In the end, though,

  El Castrador nodded. "Tonight, you say?"

  "I would be pleased. And grateful."

  "But how grateful?" El Castrador shot a sly look at the Englishman. "Shall I tell you what I need? Muskets! Or even rifles like that!" He touched the barrel of Sharpe's Baker rifle which was propped against the vine's trunk.

  "I can bring you muskets," Sharpe said, though he did not yet know how. The

  Real Companïa Irlandesa needed muskets much more desperately than this great butcher of a man did, and Sharpe did not even know how he was to supply those weapons. Hogan would never agree to give the Real Companïa Irlandesa new muskets, yet if Sharpe was to turn King Ferdinand's palace guard into a decent infantry unit then he would need to find them guns somehow. "Rifles I can't get," he said, "but muskets, yes. But I'll need a week."

  "Muskets, then," El Castrador agreed, "and there is something else."

  "Go on," Sharpe said warily.

  "I want revenge for my daughters," El Castrador said with tears in his eyes.

  "I want Brigadier Loup and this knife to meet each other." He held up the small, bone-handled cutter. "I want your help, Englishman. Teresa says you can fight, so fight with me and help me catch El Lobo."

  Sharpe suspected this second request would prove even more difficult than the first, but he nodded anyway. "You know where Loup can be found?"

  El Castrador nodded. "Usually at a village called San Cristobal. He drove out the inhabitants, blocked the streets and fortified the houses. A stoat could not get near without being spotted. Sanchez says it would take a thousand men and a battery of artillery to take San Cristobal."

  Sharpe grunted at the news. Sanchez was one of the best guerrilla leaders and if Sanchez reckoned San Cristobal was virtually impregnable, then Sharpe would believe him. "You said 'usually'. So he's not always at San Cristobal?"

  "He goes where he likes, señor," El Castrador said moodily. "Sometimes he takes over a village for a few nights, sometimes he would put his men in the fort where you now live, sometimes he would use Fort Concepciôn. Loup, señor, is a law to himself." El Castrador paused. "But La Aguja says you are also a law unto yourself. If any man can defeat El Lobo, señor, it must be you. And there is a place near San Cristobal, a defile, where he can be ambushed."

  El Castrador offered this last detail as an enticement, but Sharpe ignored the lure. "I will do all a man can do," he promised.

  "Then I shall help you tonight," El Castrador assured Sharpe in return. "Look for my gift in the morning, señor," he said, then stood and shouted a command to the men he had evidently left outside the inn. Hooves clattered loud in the little street. "And next week," the partisan added, "I shall come for my reward. Don't let me down, Captain."

  Sharpe watched the gross man go, then hefted the wineskin. He was tempted to drain it, but knew that a bellyful of sour wine would make his journey back to

  San Isidro doubly hard and so, instead, he poured the liquid over the roots of the ravaged vine. Maybe, he thought, it would help the vine repair itself.

  Wine to grapes, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. He picked up his hat, slung his rifle, and walked home.

  That night, despite all Captain Donaju's precautions, three more guardsmen deserted. More men might have tried, but shortly after midnight a series of terrible screams sounded from the valley and any other men tempted to try their luck across the frontier decided to wait for another day. At dawn next morning, when Rifleman Harris was leading a convoy down the mountainside to fetch water from the stream to augment the trickle that the fort's well provided, he found the three men. He came back to Sharpe white-faced. "It's horrible, sir. Horrible."

  "See that cart?" Sharpe pointed across the fort's courtyard to a handcart.

  "Get it down there, put them in and bring them back."

  "Do we have to?" Rifleman Thompson asked, aghast.

  "Yes, you bloody do. And Harris?"

  "Sir?"

  "Put this in with them," and Sharpe handed Harris a sack holding a heavy object. Harris began to untie the sack's mouth. "Not here, Harris," Sharpe said, "do it down there. And only you and our lads to see what you're doing."

  By eight o'clock Sharpe had the one hundred and twenty-seven remaining guardsmen on parade, together with all their junior officers. Sharpe was the senior officer left inside the fort, for both Lord Kiely and Colonel Runciman had spent the night at army headquarters where they had gone to plead with the

  Assistant Commissary General for muskets and ammunition. Father Sarsfield was visiting a fellow priest in Guarda, while both Kiely's majors and three of his captains had gone hunting. Dona Juanita de Elia had also taken her hounds in search of hares, but had spurned the company of the Irish officers. "I hunt alone," she said, and then had scorned Sharpe's warning of patrolling

  Frenchmen. "In coming here, Captain," she told Sharpe, "I escaped every

  Frenchman in Spain. Worry about yourself, not me." Th
en she had spurred away with her hounds loping behind.

  So now, bereft of their senior officers, the Real Companïa Irlandesa lined in four ranks beneath one of the empty gun platforms that served Sharpe as a podium. It had rained in the night and the flags on the crumbling battlements lifted reluctantly to the morning wind as Harris and Thompson manoeuvred the handcart up one of the ramps which led from the magazines to the gun platforms. They pushed the vehicle with its sordid cargo to Sharpe's side, then tipped the handles up so that the cart's bed faced the four ranks. There was an intake of breath, then a communal groan sounded from the ranks. At least one guardsman vomited while most just looked away or closed their eyes.