Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 14

‘What you really wanted,’ Lieutenant Pelletieu said, ‘was a mortar.’

‘A mortar?’ Brigadier General Vuillard was astonished at the Lieutenant’s self-confidence. ‘You are telling me what I want?’

‘What you want,’ Pelletieu said confidently, ‘is a mortar. It’s a question of elevation, sir.’

‘It is a question, Lieutenant’ – Vuillard put a deal of stress on Pelletieu’s lowly rank – ‘of pouring death, shit, horror and damnation on those impudent bastards on that goddamned hilltop.’ He pointed to the watchtower. He was standing at the edge of the wood where he had invited Lieutenant Pelletieu to unlimber his howitzer and start slaughtering. ‘Don’t talk to me of elevation! Talk to me of killing.’

‘Killing is our business, sir,’ the Lieutenant said, quite unmoved by the Brigadier’s anger, ‘but I do have to get closer to the impudent bastards.’ He was a very young man, so young that Vuillard wondered whether Pelletieu had even begun to shave. He was also thin as a whip, so thin that his white breeches, white waistcoat and dark-blue cutaway coat hung on him like discarded garments draped on a scarecrow. A long skinny neck jutted from the stiff blue collar, and his long nose supported a pair of thick-lensed spectacles that gave him the unfortunate appearance of a half-starved fish, but he was a remarkably self-possessed fish who now turned to his Sergeant. ‘Two pounds at twelve degrees, don’t you think? But only if we can get to within three hundred and fifty toise?’

‘Toise?’ The Brigadier knew gunners used the old unit of measurement, but it meant nothing to him. ‘Why the hell don’t you speak French, man?’

‘Three hundred and fifty toise? Call that …’ Pelletieu paused and frowned as he did the mathematics.

‘Six hundred and eighty metres,’ his Sergeant, as thin, pale and young as Pelletieu, broke in.

‘Six hundred and eighty-two,’ Pelletieu said cheerfully.

‘Three fifty toise?’ the Sergeant mused aloud. ‘Two-pound charge? Twelve degrees? I think that will serve, sir.’

‘Only just though,’ Pelletieu said, then turned back to the Brigadier. ‘The target’s high, sir,’ he explained.

‘I know it’s high,’ Vuillard said in a dangerous tone, ‘it is what we call a hill.’

‘And everyone believes howitzers can work miracles on elevated targets,’ Pelletieu went on, disregarding Vuillard’s sarcasm, ‘but they’re not really designed to be angled at much more than twelve degrees from the horizontal. Now a mortar, of course, can achieve a much higher angle, but I suspect the nearest mortar is at Oporto.’

‘I just want the bastards dead!’ Vuillard growled, then turned back as a memory occurred to him. ‘And why not a three-pound charge? The gunners were using three-pound charges at Austerlitz.’ He was tempted to add ‘before you were born’, but restrained himself.

‘Three pounds!’ Pelletieu audibly sucked in his breath while his Sergeant rolled his eyes at the Brigadier’s display of ignorance. ‘She’s a Nantes barrel, sir,’ Pelletieu added in gnomic explanation as he patted the howitzer. ‘She was made in the dark ages, sir, before the revolution, and she was horribly cast. Her partner blew up three weeks ago, sir, and killed two of the crew. There was an air bubble in the metal, just horrible casting. She’s not safe beyond two pounds, sir, just not safe.’

Howitzers were usually deployed in pairs, but the explosion three weeks before had left Pelletieu’s the sole howitzer in his battery. It was a strange-looking weapon that resembled a toy gun incongruously perched on a full-scale carriage. The barrel, just twenty-eight inches long, was mounted between wheels that were the height of a man, but the small weapon was capable of doing what other field guns could not achieve: it could fire in a high arc. Field guns were rarely elevated more than a degree or two and their round shot flew in a flat trajectory, but the howitzer tossed its shells up high so that they plunged down onto the enemy. The guns were designed to fire over defensive walls, or above the heads of friendly infantry, and because a lobbed missile came to a swift stop when it landed, the howitzers did not fire solid round shot. An ordinary field gun, firing solid shot, could depend on the missile to bounce and keep on bouncing, and even after the fourth or fifth graze, as the gunners called each bounce, the round shot could still maim or kill, but a round shot tossed into the air was likely to bury itself in the turf and do no subsequent damage. So the howitzers fired shells that were fused to explode when the missile landed.

‘Forty-nine times two, sir, seeing as how we have the caisson for the other howitzer as well,’ Pelletieu said when Vuillard asked him how many shells his gun possessed. ‘Ninety-eight shells, sir, and twenty-two canister. Twice the usual rations!’

‘Forget the canister,’ Vuillard ordered. Canister, which spread from a gun’s barrel like duck shot, was for use against troops in the open, not for infantry concealed amongst rocks. ‘Drop the shells on the bastards and we’ll send for more ammunition if you need it. Which you won’t,’ he added malevolently, ‘because you’re going to kill the bastards, aren’t you?’

‘That’s what we’re here for,’ Pelletieu said happily, ‘and with respect, sir, we won’t make widows by standing here talking. I’d best find a place to deploy her, sir. Sergeant! Shovels!’

‘Shovels?’ Vuillard asked.

‘We have to level the ground, sir,’ Pelletieu said, ‘because God didn’t think of gunners when He made the world. He made too many lumps and not enough smooth spots. But we’re very good at improving His handiwork, sir.’ He led his men towards the hill in search of a place that could be levelled.

Colonel Christopher had been inspecting the howitzer, but now nodded at Pelletieu’s receding back. ‘Sending schoolboys to fight our wars?’

‘He seems to know his business,’ Vuillard admitted grudgingly. ‘Did your servant turn up?’

‘Bloody man’s gone missing. Had to shave myself!’

‘Shave yourself, eh?’ Vuillard observed with amusement. ‘Life is hard, Colonel, life is sometimes so very hard.’

And soon, he thought, it would be murderous for the fugitives on the hill.

At dawn, a wet dawn with clouds scudding away southeast and a wind still gusting about the ragged summit, Dodd had spotted the fugitives halfway down the hill’s northern slope. They were crouching in the rocks, evidently hiding from the French picquets who lined the edge of the wood. There were seven, all men. Six had been survivors from Manuel Lopes’s band and the seventh was Luis, Christopher’s servant.

‘It is the Colonel,’ he had told Sharpe.

‘What is?’

‘Colonel Christopher. He is down there. He brought them here, he told them you were here!’

Sharpe stared down towards the village where a black smear showed where the church had stood. ‘He’s a bastard,’ he said quietly, but he was not surprised. Not now. He only blamed himself for being so slow to see that Christopher was a traitor. He questioned Luis further and the servant told him about the journey south to meet General Cradock, about the dinner party in Oporto where a French general had been the guest of honour, and how Christopher sometimes wore an enemy uniform, but Luis honestly admitted he did not know what webs the Colonel spun. He did know that Christopher possessed Sharpe’s good telescope and Luis had managed to steal the Colonel’s old telescope, which he presented to Sharpe with a triumphant flourish. ‘I am sorry it is not your own, senhor, but the Colonel keeps that one in his tail pocket. I fight for you now,’ Luis said proudly.

‘Have you ever fought?’ Sharpe asked.

‘A man can learn,’ Luis said, ‘and there is no one better than a barber for slitting throats. I used to think about that when I shaved my customers. How easy it would be to cut. I never did, of course,’ he added hastily in case Sharpe thought he was a murderer.

‘I think I’ll go on shaving myself,’ Sharpe said with a smile.

So Vicente gave Luis one of the captured French muskets and a cartridge box of ammunition and the barber joined the other soldiers among the redoubts that barricaded the hilltop. Lopes’s men were sworn in as loyal Portuguese soldiers and when one said he would rather take his chances on escape and join the partisan groups to the north Sergeant Macedo used his fists to force the oath on him. ‘He’s a good lad, that Sergeant,’ Harper said approvingly.

The damp lifted. The sodden flanks of the hill steamed in the morning sun, but that haze vanished as the morning became hotter. There were dragoons all about the hog-backed hill now. They patrolled the valleys on either side, had another strong picquet to the south and dismounted men watching from the wood’s edge. Sharpe, seeing the dragoons tighten their noose, knew that if he and his men tried to escape they would become meat for the horsemen. Harper, his broad face glistening with sweat, gazed down at the cavalry. ‘There’s something I’ve noticed, sir,’ he said, ‘ever since we joined up with you in Spain.’

‘What’s that?’

‘That we’re always outnumbered and surrounded.’

Sharpe had been listening, not to Harper, but to the day itself. ‘Notice anything?’ he asked.

‘That we’re surrounded and outnumbered, sir?’

‘No.’ Sharpe paused to listen again, then frowned. ‘Wind’s in the east, isn’t it?’

‘More or less.’

‘No sound of gunfire, Pat.’

Harper listened. ‘Good God and you’re right, sir.’

Vicente had noticed the same thing and came to the watchtower where Sharpe had set up his command post. ‘There’s no noise from Amarante,’ the Portuguese Lieutenant said unhappily.

‘So they’ve finished fighting there,’ Harper commented.

Vicente made the sign of the cross which was admission enough that he suspected the Portuguese army that had been holding the bridge over the Tamega had been defeated.

‘We don’t know what’s happening,’ Sharpe said, trying to cheer Vicente up, but in truth that admission was almost as depressing as the thought that Amarante had fallen. So long as the distant thunder of the guns had sounded from the east then so long had they known there were still forces fighting the French, had known that the war itself was continuing and that there was hope that one day they could rejoin some friendly forces, but the morning’s silence was ominous. And if the Portuguese were gone from Amarante, then what of the British in Coimbra and Lisbon? Were they boarding ships in the broad mouth of the Tagus, ready to be convoyed home? Sir John Moore’s army had been chased out of Spain, so was the smaller British force in Lisbon now scuttling away? Sharpe felt a sudden and horrid fear that he was the last British officer in northern Portugal and the last morsel to be devoured by an insatiable enemy. ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ he lied, seeing the same fear of being stranded on his companions’ faces. ‘Sir Arthur Wellesley’s coming.’

‘We hope,’ Harper said.

‘Is he good?’ Vicente asked.

‘The very bloody best,’ Sharpe said fervently and then, seeing that his words had not really encouraged hope, he made Harper busy. All the food that had been brought up to the watchtower had been stored in one corner of the ruin where Sharpe could keep an eye on it, but the men had taken no breakfast so he had Harper supervise the distribution. ‘Give them hunger rations, Sergeant,’ he ordered, ‘for God alone knows how long we’ll be up here.’

Vicente followed Sharpe onto the small terrace outside the watchtower entrance from where he stared at the distant dragoons. He looked distracted and began fiddling with a scrap of the white piping that decorated his dark-blue uniform and the more he fidgeted, the more piping was stripped away from his jacket. ‘Yesterday,’ he suddenly blurted out. ‘Yesterday was the first time that I killed a man with a sword.’ He frowned as he pulled another inch or two of the piping from his jacket’s hem. ‘A hard thing to do.’

‘Especially with a sword like that,’ Sharpe said, nodding at Vicente’s scabbard. The Portuguese officer’s sword was slim, straight and not particularly robust. It was a sword for parades, for show, not for gutter fights in the rain. ‘Now a sword like this’ – Sharpe patted the heavy cavalry sword that hung from his belt – ‘batters the bastards down. It don’t cut them to death so much as it bludgeons them. You could batter an ox to death with this blade. Get yourself a cavalry sword, Jorge. They’re made for killing. Infantry officers’ swords are for dance floors.’

‘I mean it was difficult to look in his eyes,’ Vicente explained, ‘and still use the blade.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Sharpe said, ‘but it’s still the best thing to do. What you want to do is to watch the sword or bayonet, isn’t it? But if you keep watching their eyes you can tell what they’re going to do next by where they look. Never look at the place you’re going to hit them, though. Keep looking at their eyes and just hit.’

Vicente realized he was stripping the piping from his jacket and tucked the errant length into a buttonhole. ‘When I shot my own Sergeant,’ he said, ‘it seemed unreal. Like theatre even. But he was not trying to kill me. That man last night? It was frightening.’

‘Bloody well ought to be frightening,’ Sharpe responded. ‘A fight like that? In the rain and dark? Anything can happen. You just go in fast and dirty, Jorge, do the damage and keep on doing it.’

‘You have done so much fighting,’ Vicente said sadly, as though he pitied Sharpe.

‘I’ve been a soldier for a long time,’ Sharpe said, ‘and our army does a lot of fighting. India, Flanders, here, Denmark.’

‘Denmark! Why were you fighting in Denmark?’

‘God knows,’ Sharpe said. ‘Something about their fleet. We wanted it, they didn’t want us to have it, so we went and took it.’ He was gazing down the northern slope at a group of a dozen Frenchmen who had stripped to the waist and now began to shovel at a patch of ferns a hundred yards from the edge of the wood. He took out the replacement telescope Luis had brought him. It was little more than a toy and the outer lens was loose which meant it kept blurring, and it was only half as powerful as his own glass, but he supposed it was better than nothing. He focused the glass, steadied the outer lens with a fingertip and stared at the French work party. ‘Shit,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘Bastards have got a cannon,’ Sharpe said. ‘Just pray it isn’t a bloody mortar.’

Vicente, looking bewildered, was trying and failing to see a gun. ‘What happens if it’s a mortar?’

‘We all die,’ Sharpe said, imagining the pot-like gun lobbing its shells into the sky so that they would drop almost vertically onto his position. ‘We all die,’ he said again, ‘or else we run away and get captured.’

Vicente made the sign of the cross again. He had not made that gesture at all in the first weeks Sharpe had known him, but the further Vicente travelled from his life as a lawyer the more the old imperatives returned to him. Life, he was beginning to learn, was not controlled by law or reason, but by luck and savagery and blind unfeeling fate. ‘I can’t see a cannon,’ he finally admitted.

Sharpe pointed to the French working party. ‘Those buggers are making a nice flat patch so they can aim properly,’ he explained. ‘You can’t fire a gun on a slope, not if you want to be accurate.’ He took a few steps down the northern path. ‘Dan!’

‘Sir?’

‘See where the bastards are going to put a cannon? How far away is it?’

Hagman, ensconced in a crevice of stone, peered down. ‘Bit under seven hundred paces, sir. Too far.’

‘We can try?’

Hagman shrugged. ‘I can try, but maybe save it for later?’

Sharpe nodded. Better to reveal the rifle’s range to the French when things were more desperate.

Vicente again looked bewildered so Sharpe explained. ‘A rifle bullet can carry that far, but it would take a genius to be accurate. Dan’s close to genius.’ He thought about taking a small party of riflemen halfway down the slope and he knew that at three or four hundred yards they could do a lot of damage to a gun crew, but the gun crew, at that range, would answer them with canister and though the lower slope of the hill was littered with rocks few were of a size to shelter a man from canister. Sharpe would lose soldiers if he went down the hill. He would do it, he decided, if the gun turned out to be a mortar, for mortars never carried canister, but the French were bound to answer his foray with a strong skirmish line of infantry. Stroke and counter-stroke. It felt frustrating. All he could do was pray the gun was not a mortar.

It was not a mortar. An hour after the working party began making a level platform the cannon appeared and Sharpe saw it was a howitzer. That was bad enough, but it gave his men a chance, for a howitzer shell would come at an oblique angle and his men would be safe behind the bigger boulders on the hilltop. Vicente borrowed the small telescope and watched the French gunners unlimber the gun and prepare its ammunition. A caisson, its long coffin-like lid cushioned so that the gun crew could travel on it, was being opened and the powder bags and shells piled by the levelled ground. ‘It looks like a very small gun,’ Vicente said.

‘Doesn’t have to be long-barrelled,’ Sharpe explained, ‘because it isn’t a precision gun. It just lobs shells on us. It’ll be noisy, but we’ll survive.’ He said that to cheer Vicente up, but he was not as confident as he sounded. Two or three lucky shells could decimate his command, but at least the howitzer’s arrival had taken his men’s minds off their larger predicament and they watched as the gunners made ready. A small flag had been placed fifty paces in front of the howitzer, presumably so the gun captain could judge the wind which would tend to drift the shells westwards. Sure enough Sharpe saw them edge the howitzer’s trail to compensate, and then watched through the telescope as the quoins were hammered under the stubby barrel. Field guns were usually elevated with a screw, but howitzers used the old-fashioned wooden wedges. Sharpe reckoned the skinny officer who supervised the gun must be using his largest wedges, straining to get maximum elevation so that his shells would drop into the rocks on the hill’s summit. The first powder bags were being brought to the weapon and Sharpe saw the flash of reflected sunlight glance off steel and he knew the officer must be trimming the shell’s fuse. ‘Under cover, Sergeant!’ Sharpe shouted.

Every man had a place to go to, a place that was well protected by the great boulders. Most of the riflemen were in the redoubts, walled with stone, but half a dozen, including Sharpe and Harper, were inside the old watchtower where a stairway had once led to the ramparts. Only four of the steps were left and they merely climbed to a gaping cavity in the stonework of the northern wall and Sharpe positioned himself there so he could see what the French were doing.

The gun vanished in a cloud of smoke, followed a heartbeat later by the massive boom of the exploding powder. Sharpe tried to find the missile in the sky, then saw the tiny, wavering trail of smoke left by the burning fuse. Then came the sound of the shell, a thunder rolling overhead, and the smoke trail whipped only a couple of feet above the ruined watchtower. Everyone had been holding their breath, but now let it out as the shell exploded somewhere above the southern slope.

‘Cut his fuse too long,’ Harper said.

‘He won’t next time,’ Tongue said.

Daniel Hagman, white-faced, sat against the wall with his eyes closed. Vicente and most of his men were a little way down the slope where they were protected by a boulder the size of a house. Nothing could reach them directly, but if a shell bounced off the face of the watchtower it would probably fall among them. Sharpe tried not to think of that. He had done his best and he knew he could not provide absolute safety for every man.

They waited.

‘Get on with it,’ Harris said. Harper crossed himself. Sharpe looked through the hole in the wall and saw the gunner carrying the portfire to the barrel. He said nothing to the men, for the noise of the gun would be warning enough and he was not looking down the hill to see when the howitzer was fired, but the moment when the French put in an infantry attack. That seemed the obvious thing for them to do. Fire the howitzer to keep the British and Portuguese heads down and then send their infantry to make an assault, but Sharpe saw no sign of any such attack. The dragoons were keeping their distance, the infantry was out of sight and the gunners just kept working.

Shell after shell arced to the hilltop. After the first shot the fuses were cut to the precise length and the shells cracked on rocks, fell and exploded. Monotonously, steadily, shot after shot, and each explosion sent shards of hot iron crackling and whistling through the jumble of boulders on the hilltop, yet the French seemed unaware of how much shelter the boulders provided. The summit stank of powder, the smoke drifted like mist through the rocks and clung to the lichen-covered stones of the watchtower, but miraculously no one was badly hurt. One of Vicente’s men was struck by a sliver of iron that cut his upper arm, but that was the only casualty. Yet even so the men hated the ordeal. They sat hunched, counting down the shots that came at a regular pace, one a minute, and the seconds stretched between each one and no one spoke and each shot was a boom from the base of the hill, a crash or thump as the shell struck, the ragged explosion of the powder charge and the shriek of its fragmented casing. One shell failed to explode and they all waited breathless as the seconds passed and then realized that its fuse must have been faulty.

‘How many bloody shells do they have?’ Harper asked after a quarter-hour.

No one could answer. Sharpe had a vague recollection that a British six-pounder carried more than a hundred rounds of ammunition in its limber, caisson and axle boxes, but he was not sure of that and French practice was probably different, so he said nothing. Instead he prowled round the hilltop, going from the tower to the men in the redoubts and then watching anxiously down the other flanks of the hill, and still there was no sign that the French contemplated an assault.

He went back to the tower. Hagman had produced a small wooden flute, something he had whittled himself during his convalescence, and now he played trills and snatches of old familiar melodies. The scraps of music sounded like birdsong, then the hilltop would reverberate to the next explosion, the shell fragments would batter against the tower and as the brutal sound faded so the flute’s breathy sound would re-emerge. ‘I always wanted to play the flute,’ Sharpe said to no one in particular.

‘The fiddle,’ Harris said, ‘I’ve always wanted to play the fiddle.’

‘Hard that,’ Harper said, ‘because it’s fiddly.’

They groaned and Harper grinned proudly. Sharpe was mentally counting the seconds, imagining the gun being pushed back into place and then being sponged out, the gunner’s thumb over the touchhole to stop the rush of air forced by the incoming sponge from setting fire to any unexploded powder in the breech. When every lingering scrap of fire had been extinguished inside the barrel they would thrust home the powder bags, then the six-inch shell with its carefully cut fuse protruding from the wooden bung, and the gunner would ram a spike down the touchhole to pierce a canvas powder bag and afterwards push a reed filled with more powder down into the punctured bag. They would stand back, cover their ears and the gunner would touch the linstock to the reed and just then Sharpe heard the boom and almost instantly there was an almighty crash inside the tower itself and he realized the shell had come right through the hole at the top of the truncated staircase and now it fell down, fuse smoking in a wild spiral, to lodge between two of the packs that held their food and Sharpe stared at it, saw the wisp of smoke shivering upwards, knew they must all die or be terribly maimed when it exploded and he did not think, just dived. He scrabbled at the fuse, knew he was too late to extract it and so he dropped onto the shell, his belly smothering it, and his mind was screaming because he did not want to die. It will be quick, he thought, it will be quick, and at least he would not have to take decisions any more and no one else would be hurt and he cursed the shell because it was taking so long to explode and he was staring at Daniel Hagman who was staring back at him, eyes wide and the forgotten flute held just an inch from his mouth.

‘Stay there much longer,’ Harper said in a voice that could not quite hide the strain he was feeling, ‘and you’ll hatch the bloody thing.’

Hagman started to laugh, then Harris and Cooper and Harper joined in, and Sharpe climbed off the shell and saw that the wooden plug that held the fuse was blackened by fire, but somehow the fuse had gone out and he picked up the damned missile and hurled it out of the hole and listened to it clatter down the hill.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Sharpe said. He was sweating, shaking. He collapsed back against the wall and looked at his men who were weak with laughter. ‘Oh, God,’ he said.

‘You’d have had a bellyache if that had popped, sir,’ Hagman said and that started them all laughing again.

Sharpe felt drained. ‘If you bastards have nothing better to do,’ he said, ‘then take out the canteens. Give everyone a drink.’ He was rationing the water like the food, but the day was hot and he knew everyone would be dry. He followed the riflemen outside. Vicente, who had no idea what had just happened, but only knew that a second shell had failed to explode, looked anxious. ‘What happened?’

‘Fuse went out,’ Sharpe said, ‘just went out.’

He went down to the northernmost redoubts and stared at the gun. How much bloody ammunition did the bastards have? The rate of fire had slowed a little, but that seemed more to do with the gunners’ weariness than a shortage of shells. He watched them load another round, did not bother to take cover and the shell exploded up behind the watchtower. The howitzer had recoiled eight or nine feet, much less than a field gun, and he watched as the gunners put their shoulders to the wheel and shoved it back into place. The air between Sharpe and the gun wavered because of the day’s heat, which was made more intense by a small grass fire ignited by the cannon’s blast. That had been happening all day and the howitzer’s muzzle flame had left a fan-shaped patch of scorched grass and ferns in front of the barrel. And then Sharpe saw something else, something that puzzled him, and he opened Christopher’s small telescope, cursing the loss of his own, and he steadied the barrel on a rock and stared intently and saw that an officer was crouching beside the gun wheel with an upraised hand. That odd pose had been what puzzled him. Why would a man crouch by the front of a gun’s wheels? And Sharpe could just see something else. Shadows. The ground there had been cleared, but the sun was now low in the sky and it was throwing long shadows and Sharpe could see that the cleared ground had been marked with two half-buried stones, each maybe the size of a twelve-pounder’s round shot, and that the officer was bringing the wheels right up to the two stones. When the wheels touched the stones he dropped his hand and the men went about the business of reloading.

Sharpe frowned, thinking. Now why, on a fine sunny day, would the French artillery officer need to mark a place for his gun’s wheels? The wheels themselves, iron-rimmed, would leave gouges in the soil that would serve as markers for when the gun was repositioned after each shot, yet they had taken the trouble to put the stones there as well. He ducked down behind the wall as another blossom of smoke heralded a shell. This one fell fractionally short and the jagged-edged iron scraps rattled against the low stone walls that Sharpe’s men had built. Pendleton poked his head above the redoubt. ‘Why don’t they use round shot, sir?’ he asked.

‘Howitzers don’t have round shot,’ Sharpe said, ‘and it’s hard to fire a proper gun uphill.’ He was brusque for he was wondering about those stones. Why put them there? Had he imagined them? But when he looked through the glass he could still see them.

Then he saw the gunners walk away from the howitzer. A score of infantrymen had appeared, but they were merely a guard for the gun which was otherwise abandoned. ‘They’re having their supper,’ Harper suggested. He had brought water for the men in the forward positions and now sat beside Sharpe. For a moment he looked embarrassed, then grinned. ‘That was a brave thing you did, sir.’

‘You’d have done the bloody same.’

‘I bloody wouldn’t,’ Harper said vehemently. ‘I’d have been out of that bloody door like a scalded cat if my legs had bloody worked.’ He saw the deserted gun. ‘So it’s over for the day?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Sharpe said, because he suddenly understood why the stones were there.

And knew what he could do about it.

Brigadier Vuillard, ensconced in the Quinta, poured himself a glass of Savages’ finest white port. His blue uniform jacket was unhooked and he had eased a button of his breeches to make space for the fine shoulder of mutton that he had shared with Christopher, a dozen officers and three women. The women were French, though certainly not wives, and one of them, whose golden hair glinted in the candlelight, had been seated next to Lieutenant Pelletieu who seemed unable to take his bespectacled eyes from a cleavage that was deep, soft, shadowed and streaked where sweat had made rivulets through the white powder on her skin. Her very presence had struck Pelletieu almost dumb, so that all the confidence he had shown on first meeting Vuillard had fled.

The Brigadier, amused by the woman’s effect on the artillery officer, leaned forward to accept a candle from Major Dulong that he used to light a cigar. It was a warm night, the windows were open and a big pale moth fluttered about the candelabra at the table’s centre. ‘Is it true,’ Vuillard asked Christopher between the puffs that were needed to get the cigar properly alight, ‘that in England the women are expected to leave the supper table before the cigars are lit?’

‘Respectable women, yes.’ Christopher took the toothpick from his mouth to answer.

‘Even respectable women, I would have thought, make attractive companions to a good smoke and a glass of port.’ Vuillard, content that the cigar was drawing properly, leaned back and glanced down the table. ‘I have an idea,’ he said genially, ‘that I know precisely who is going to answer the next question. What time is first light tomorrow?’

There was a pause as the officers glanced at each other, then Pelletieu blushed. ‘Sunrise, sir,’ he said, ‘will be at twenty minutes past four, but it will be light enough to see at ten minutes to four.’

‘So clever,’ the blonde, who was called Annette, whispered to him.

‘And the moon state?’ Vuillard asked.

Pelletieu blushed an even deeper red. ‘No moon to speak of, sir. The last full moon was on the thirtieth of April and the next will be …’ His voice faded away as he became aware that the others about the table were amused by his erudition.

‘Do go on, Lieutenant,’ Vuillard said.

‘On the twenty-ninth of this month, sir, so it’s a waxing moon in its first quarter, sir, and very slight. No illumination in it. Not now.’

‘I like a dark night,’ Annette whispered to him.

‘You’re a veritable walking encyclopaedist, Lieutenant,’ Vuillard said, ‘so tell me what damage your shells did today?’

‘Very little, sir, I’m afraid.’ Pelletieu, almost overwhelmed by Annette’s perfume, looked as though he was about to faint. ‘That summit is prodigiously protected by boulders, sir. If they kept their heads down, sir, then they should have survived mostly intact, though I’m sure we killed one or two.’

‘Only one or two?’

Pelletieu looked abashed. ‘We needed a mortar, sir.’

Vuillard smiled. ‘When a man lacks instruments, Lieutenant, he uses what he has to hand. Isn’t that right, Annette?’ He smiled, then took a fat watch from his waistcoat pocket and snapped open the lid. ‘How many rounds of shell do you have left?’

‘Thirty-eight, sir.’

‘Don’t use them all at once,’ Vuillard said, then raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. ‘Don’t you have work to do, Lieutenant?’ he asked. The work was to fire the howitzer through the night so that the ragged forces on the hilltop would get no sleep, then an hour before first light the gunfire would stop and Vuillard reckoned the enemy would all be asleep when his infantry attacked.

Pelletieu scraped his chair back. ‘Of course, sir, and thank you, sir.’

‘Thank you?’

‘For the supper, sir.’

Vuillard made a gracious gesture of acceptance. ‘I’m just sorry, Lieutenant, that you can’t stay for the entertainment. I’m sure Mademoiselle Annette would have liked to hear about your charges, your rammer and your sponge.’

‘She would, sir?’ Pelletieu asked, surprised.

‘Go, Lieutenant,’ Vuillard said, ‘just go.’ The Lieutenant fled, pursued by the sound of laughter, and the Brigadier shook his head. ‘God knows where we find them,’ he said. ‘We must pluck them from their cradles, wipe the mother’s milk from their lips and send them to war. Still, young Pelletieu knows his business.’ He dangled the watch on its chain for a second, then thrust it into a pocket. ‘First light at ten minutes to four, Major,’ he spoke to Dulong.

‘We’ll be ready,’ Dulong said. He looked sour, the failure of the previous night’s attack still galling him. The bruise on his face was dark.

‘Ready and rested, I hope?’ Vuillard said.

‘We’ll be ready,’ Dulong said again.

Vuillard nodded, but kept his watchful eyes on the infantry Major. ‘Amarante is taken,’ he said, ‘which means some of Loison’s men can return to Oporto. With luck, Major, that means we shall have enough force to march south on Lisbon.’

‘I hope so, sir,’ Dulong answered, uncertain where the conversation was going.

‘But General Heudelet’s division is still clearing the road to Vigo,’ Vuillard went on, ‘Foy’s infantry is scouring the mountains of partisans, so our forces will still be stretched, Major, stretched. Even if we get Delaborde’s brigades back from General Loison and even with Lorges’s dragoons, we shall be stretched if we want to march on Lisbon.’

‘I’m sure we’ll succeed all the same,’ Dulong said loyally.

‘But we need every man we can muster, Major, every man. And I do not want to detach valuable infantry to guard prisoners.’

There was silence round the table. Dulong gave a small smile as he understood the implications of the Brigadier’s words, but he said nothing.

‘Do I make myself clear, Major?’ Vuillard asked in a harder tone.

‘You do, sir,’ Dulong said.

‘Bayonets fixed then,’ Vuillard said, tapping ash from his cigar, ‘and use them, Major, use them well.’

Dulong looked up, his grim face unreadable. ‘No prisoners, sir.’ He did not inflect the words as a question.

‘That sounds like a very good idea,’ Vuillard said, smiling. ‘Now go and get some sleep.’

Major Dulong left and Vuillard poured more port. ‘War is cruel,’ he said sententiously, ‘but cruelty is sometimes necessary. The rest of you’ – he looked at the officers on both sides of the table – ‘can ready yourselves for the march back to Oporto. We should have this business finished by eight tomorrow morning, so shall we set a march time of ten o’clock?’

For by then the watchtower on the hill would have fallen. The howitzer would keep Sharpe’s men awake by firing through the night and in the dawn, as the tired men fought off sleep and a wolf-grey light seeped across the world’s rim, Dulong’s well-trained infantry would go in for the kill.

At dawn.

Sharpe had watched till the very last seep of twilight had gone from the hill, until there was nothing but bleak darkness, and only then, with Pendleton, Tongue and Harris as his companions, he edged past the outer stone wall and felt his way down the path. Harper had wanted to come, had even been upset at not being allowed to accompany Sharpe, but Harper would need to command the riflemen if Sharpe did not come back. Sharpe would have liked to take Hagman, but the old man was still not fully mended and so he had gone with Pendleton who was young, agile and cunning, and with Tongue and Harris who were both good shots and both intelligent. Each of them carried two rifles, but Sharpe had left his big cavalry sword with Harper for he knew that the heavy metal scabbard was likely to knock on stones and so betray his position.

It was hard, slow work going down the hill. There was a thin suggestion of a moon, but stray clouds continually covered it and even when it showed clearly it had no power to light their path and so they felt their way down, saying nothing, groping ahead for each step and thereby making more noise than Sharpe liked, but the night was full of noises: insects, the sigh of the wind across the hill’s flank and the distant cry of a vixen. Hagman would have coped better, Sharpe thought, for he moved through the dark with the grace of a poacher, while all four of the riflemen going down the hill’s long slope were from towns. Pendleton, Sharpe knew, was from Bristol where he had joined the army rather than face transportation for being a pickpocket. Tongue, like Sharpe, came from London, but Sharpe could not remember where Harris had grown up and, when they stopped to catch their breath and search the darkness for any hint of light, Sharpe asked him.

‘Lichfield, sir,’ Harris whispered, ‘where Samuel Johnson came from.’

‘Johnson?’ Sharpe could not quite place the name. ‘Is he in the first battalion?’

‘Very much so, sir,’ Harris whispered, and then they went on and, as the slope became less steep and they accustomed themselves to this blind journey, they became quieter. Sharpe was proud of them. They might not have been born to such a task, as Hagman had, but they had become stalkers and killers. They wore the green jacket.

And then, after what seemed like an hour since they had left the watchtower, Sharpe saw what he expected to see. A glimmer of light. Just a glimmer that swiftly vanished, but it was yellow, and he knew it came from a screened lantern and that someone, a gunner probably, had drawn back the screen to throw a small wash of light, and then there was another light, this one red and tiny, and Sharpe knew it was the howitzer’s portfire. ‘Down,’ he whispered. He watched the tiny red glow. It was further away than he would have liked, but there was plenty of time. ‘Close your eyes,’ he hissed.

They closed their eyes and, a moment later, the gun crashed its smoke, flame and shell into the night and Sharpe heard the missile trundle overhead and he saw a dull light on his closed eyelids, then he opened his eyes and could see nothing for a few seconds. He could smell the gunsmoke, though, and he saw the red portfire move as the gunner put it aside. ‘On!’ he said, and they crept on down the hill, and the screened lantern blinked again as the gun crew pushed the howitzer’s wheels back to the two stones which marked the place where they could be sure that, despite the darkness, the gun would be accurate. That was the realization that had come to Sharpe at sunset, the reason why they had marked the ground, because in the night the French gunners needed an easy method for realigning the howitzer and the two big stones made better markers than gouges in the soil. So he had known this night firing was going to happen and knew exactly what he could do about it.

It was a long time before the howitzer fired again, and by then Sharpe and his men were two hundred paces away and not much higher than the gun. Sharpe had expected the second shot much sooner, then he realized that the gunners would probably space their shells through the short night to keep his men awake and that would mean a long time between shots. ‘Harris? Tongue?’ he whispered. ‘Off to the right. If you get into trouble, get the hell back up to Harper. Pendleton? Come on.’ He led the youngster away to the left, crouching as he moved, feeling his way through the rocks until he reckoned he had gone about fifty paces from the path and then he settled Pendleton behind a boulder and positioned himself behind a low gorse bush. ‘You know what to do.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So enjoy it.’

Sharpe was enjoying himself. It surprised him to realize it, but he was. There was a joy in thus foxing the enemy, though perhaps the enemy had expected what was about to happen and was ready for it. But this was no time to worry, just time to spread some confusion, and he waited and waited until he was certain he was wrong and that the gunners would not fire again, and then the whole night was split apart by a tongue of white flame, bright and long, that was immediately swallowed by the cloud of smoke and Sharpe had a sudden glimpse of the gun bucking back on its trail, its big wheels spinning a foot high in the air, and then his night vision was gone, seared from his eyes by the bright stab of fire, and he waited again, only this time it was just a few seconds before he saw the yellow glow of the unshielded lantern and he knew the gunners were manhandling the howitzer’s wheels towards the stones.

He aimed at the lantern. His vision was smeared by the after-effects of the fire, but he could see the square of lamplight clearly enough. He was just about to squeeze the trigger when one of his men on the right of the path fired and the lantern was dropped, its shielding fell away and Sharpe could see two dark figures half lit by the new and brighter light. He edged the rifle left and pulled the trigger, heard Pendleton fire, then he snatched up the second rifle and aimed again into the pool of light. A Frenchman jumped forward to extinguish the lantern and three rifles, one of them Sharpe’s, sounded at the same time and the man was snatched backwards and Sharpe heard a loud clang like a cracked bell ringing and knew one of the bullets had hit the howitzer’s barrel.

Then the light went out. ‘Come on!’ Sharpe called to Pendleton and the two of them ran further to their left. They could hear the French shouting, one man gasping and moaning, then a louder voice calling for silence. ‘Down!’ Sharpe whispered and the two went to ground and Sharpe began the laborious business of loading his two rifles in the dark. He saw a small flame burning back where he and Pendleton had been and he knew that the wadding from one of their rifles had started a small grass fire. It flickered for a few seconds, then he saw dark shapes nearby and guessed that the French infantry who had been guarding the gun were out looking for whoever had just fired the shots, but the searchers found nothing, trampled the small fire dead and went back to the trees.

There was another pause. Sharpe could hear the murmur of voices and reckoned the French were discussing what to do next. The answer came soon enough when he heard the trampling of feet and he deduced that the infantry had been sent to scour the nearer hillside, but in the dark they merely blundered through the ferns and cursed whenever they tripped on rocks or became entangled by gorse. Officers and sergeants snarled and snapped at the men who were too sensible to spread out and get lost or maybe ambushed in the darkness. After a while they trailed back to the trees and there was another long wait, though Sharpe could hear the clatter of the howitzer’s rammer as it shoved and scraped the next shell home.

The French probably thought their attackers were gone, he decided. No shots had come for a long time and their own infantry had made a perfunctory search, and the French were probably feeling safer, for the gunner foolishly tried to revive the portfire by whipping it back and forth a couple of times until its tip glowed a brighter red. He did not need the extra heat to light the reed in the touchhole, but rather to see the touchhole, and it was his death sentence for he then blew on the tip of the slow match held in the portfire’s jaws, and either Harris or Tongue shot him, and even Sharpe jumped with surprise when the rifle shot blistered the night and he had a glimpse of flame far off to his right, and then the French infantry were forming ranks, the fallen portfire was snatched up and, just as the howitzer fired, so the muskets hammered a crude volley in the direction of Tongue and Harris.

And the grass fires started again. One sprang up just in front of the howitzer and two smaller fires were ignited by the wadding of the French muskets. Sharpe, his eyes still dazzled by the gun’s big flame, nevertheless could see the crew heaving at the wheels and he slid the rifle forward. He fired, changed weapons and fired again, aiming at the dark knot of men straining at the nearest gun wheel. He saw one fall away. Pendleton fired. Two more shots came from the right and the grass fires were spreading and then the infantry realized that the flames were illuminating the gunners, making them targets, and they frantically stamped out the small fires, but not before Pendleton had fired his second rifle and Sharpe saw another gunner spin away from the howitzer, then a last shot came from Tongue or Harris before the flames were at last extinguished.

Sharpe and Pendleton went back fifty paces before reloading. ‘We hurt them that time,’ Sharpe said. Small groups of Frenchmen, emboldening themselves with loud shouts, darted forward to search the slope again, but again found nothing.

He stayed another half-hour, fired four more times and then went back to the hilltop, a journey which, in the dark, took almost two hours, though it was easier than going down for there was just enough light in the sky to show the outline of the hill and the broken stub of the watchtower. Tongue and Harris followed an hour later, hissing the password up at the sentry before coming excitedly into the fort where they told the tale of their exploit.

The howitzer fired twice more during the night. The first shot rattled the lower slope with canister and the second, a shell, cracked the night with flame and smoke just to the east of the watchtower. No one got much sleep, but Sharpe would have been surprised if anyone had slept well after the day’s ordeal. And just before dawn, when the eastern edge of the world was a grey glow, he went round to make sure everyone was awake. Harper was laying a fire beside the watchtower wall. Sharpe had forbidden any fires during the night, for the flames would have given the French gunners an excellent aiming mark, but now that the daylight was coming it would be safe to brew up some tea. ‘We can stay here for ever,’ Harper had said, ‘so long as we can stew some tea, sir. But run out of tea and we’ll have to surrender.’

The grey streak in the east spread, lightening at its base. Vicente shivered beside Sharpe for the night had turned surprisingly cold. ‘You think they’re coming?’ Vicente asked.

‘They’re coming,’ Sharpe said. He knew that the howitzer’s ammunition supply was not endless, and there could only have been one reason to keep the gun working through the night and that was to fray his men’s nerves so that they would be easy meat for a morning attack.

And that meant the French would come at dawn.

And the light grew, wan and grey and pale as death, and the tops of the highest clouds were already golden red as the light changed from grey to white and white to gold and gold to red.

And then the killing began.

‘Sir! Mister Sharpe!’

‘I see them!’ Dark shapes melding into the dark shadows of the northern slope. It was French infantry or, perhaps, dismounted dragoons, coming to attack. ‘Rifles! Make ready!’ There were clicks as Baker rifles were cocked. ‘Your men don’t fire, understand?’ Sharpe said to Vicente.

‘Of course,’ Vicente said. The muskets would be hopelessly inaccurate at anything more than sixty paces so Sharpe would keep the Portuguese volley as a final defence and let his riflemen teach the French the advantages of the seven lands and seven grooves twisting the quarter turn in the rifle barrels. Vicente was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet, betraying the nervousness he felt. He fingered one end of his small moustache and licked his lips. ‘We wait till they reach that white rock, yes?’

‘Yes,’ Sharpe said, ‘and why don’t you shave that moustache off?’

Vicente stared at him. ‘Why don’t I shave my moustache?’ He could scarcely believe his ears.

‘Shave it off,’ Sharpe said. ‘You’d look older. Less like a lawyer. Luis would do it for you.’ He had successfully taken Vicente’s mind off his worries, and now he looked east where a mist hung over the low ground. No threat from there, he reckoned, and he had four of his riflemen watching the southern path, but only four because he was fairly certain that the French would concentrate their troops on one side of the hill and, once he was absolutely certain of that, he would bring those four back across to the northern side and let a couple of Vicente’s men guard the southern path. ‘When you’re ready, lads!’ Sharpe called. ‘But don’t fire high!’

Sharpe did not know it, but the French were late. Dulong had wanted his men closed up on the summit approach before the horizon turned grey, but it had taken longer than he anticipated to climb the dark slope and, besides, his men were befuddled and tired after a night of chasing phantoms. Except the phantoms were real and had killed one gunner, wounded three more and put the fear of God into the rest of the artillery crew. Dulong, ordered to take no prisoners, felt some respect for the men he faced.

And then the massacre began.

It was a massacre. The French had muskets, the British had rifles, and the French had to converge on the narrow ridge that climbed to the small summit plateau and once on the ridge they were easy meat for the rifles. Six men went down in the first few seconds and Dulong’s response was to lead the others on, to overwhelm the fort with manpower, but more rifles cracked, more smoke drifted from the hilltop, more bullets thumped home and Dulong understood what he had only appreciated before through lectures: the menace of a rifled barrel. At a range where a full battalion musket volley was unlikely to kill a single man, the British rifles were deadly. The bullets, he noticed, made a different sound. There was a barely detectable shriek in their whiplike menace. The guns themselves did not cough like a musket, but had a snap to their report, and a man struck by a rifle bullet was thrown back further than he would have been by a musket ball. Dulong could see the riflemen now, for they stood up in their rock pits to reload their damned guns, ignoring the threat of the howitzer’s shells that sporadically arced over the French infantry’s heads to explode on the crest. Dulong shouted at his men to fire at the green-jacketed enemy, but the musket shots sounded feeble and the balls went wide and still the rifle shots slashed home and his men were reluctant to climb onto the narrow part of the ridge so Dulong, knowing that example was all, and reckoning that a lucky man might possibly survive the rifle fire and reach the redoubts, decided to set an example. He shouted at his men to follow, drew his sabre and charged. ‘For France,’ he cried, ‘for the Emperor!’

‘Cease fire!’ Sharpe shouted.

Not one man had followed Dulong, not one. He came alone and Sharpe recognized the Frenchman’s bravery and, to show it, he stepped forward and raised his sword in a formal salute.

Dulong saw the salute, checked and turned and saw he was alone. He looked back to Sharpe, raised his own sabre, then sheathed it with a violent thrust that betrayed the disgust he felt at his men’s reluctance to die for the Emperor. He nodded at Sharpe, then walked away, and twenty minutes later the rest of the French were gone from the hill. Vicente’s men had been formed in two ranks on the tower’s open terrace, ready to fire a volley that had not been needed, and two of them had been killed by a howitzer shell, and another shell had slammed a piece of its casing into Gataker’s leg, gouging a bloody path down his right thigh, but leaving the bone unbroken. Sharpe had not even registered that the howitzer had been firing during the attack, but it had stopped now, the sun was fully risen and the valleys were flooded by light and Sergeant Harper, his rifle barrel fouled by powder deposits and hot from firing, had made the day’s first pot of tea.