Sharpe's Revenge

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sharpe could feel his heart thumping. The two guards were still talking softly. He pulled up his right leg, found a foothold, and gingerly pushed himself up. In two minutes, he estimated, he would be inside the ruins. Add ten minutes to stalk the two men, then Calvet could be summoned with the agreed signal of a nightjar’s harsh call. He eased himself another foot up the slope, but then all his hopes of surprise, and all the pent-up fears of the night exploded in a lethal burst of noise.

  The two dogs had caught the strangers’ scent on the freshening breeze.

  One second there had been silence on the hilltop except for the muttering of the two guards, then, with a horrid abruptness, two dogs howled their cries at the moon as they came scrabbling and desperate over the ruined walls. Sharpe had time for one foul glimpse of their ragged silhouettes as they leaped against the sky.

  ‘Fire!’ He shouted the order in panic.

  Harper and Frederickson fired at the two sentries. The rifles’ noise was startlingly loud; so loud that thousands of roosting birds shattered up from the ruined masonry. A guard shouted with pain.

  The dogs were scenting their closest enemy: Sharpe.

  He had just had enough time after his first glimpse of the beasts to rise to one knee and draw the big sword. He could not see the beasts in the dark shadows, but he could hear and smell them. He screamed as he swung the heavy blade. He felt the steel thump into a pelt, jar on bone, then slide free. The animal he had struck howled like a soul in torment. Sharpe knew he must have hurt it badly for it slewed sideways, but then the second animal came straight for him with its teeth bared. Sharpe’s sword arm was unbalanced so he swung his left arm to ward off the attack. The dog’s teeth closed on the green cloth of his old jacket, then the animal swung all its weight on the fragile cloth that ripped, but not before the impact of the attack had sent Sharpe tumbling down the slope. He was nerveless with fear. He knew how to fight men, but this feral violence was something he could neither anticipate nor understand. He lost both sword and rifle as he fell. The second dog had also lost its balance and spilt sideways on the slope. The first dog, bleeding from its flank and with a broken foreleg, lunged at Sharpe. He scrambled away from it and, in his desperation, sprawled on to his back, but then the second dog, with shreds of green cloth hanging from its teeth, sprang on to his belly. Sharpe smelt its rancid breath and knew the dog was about to rip his windpipe open.

  Sharpe desperately lunged up with his right hand, caught the dog’s throat, and squeezed. A musket fired from the hilltop and the dog’s eyes reflected sudden and red in the muzzle’s flash. Calvet was shouting orders at the foot of the hill. Saliva dripped on to Sharpe’s face. The dog was a heavy mass of bone and muscle; nothing but a killing beast. It scrabbled for a foothold on Sharpe’s chest and belly, shook its head to loosen the terrible grip on its sinewy throat, and thrust its weight down so that its teeth could flense the skin from Sharpe’s face. Somewhere on the hilltop a man screamed. Another musket fired, but nowhere near Sharpe. He wanted to shout for help, but he needed all his strength to hold off the dog’s lunges.

  Sharpe twisted, heaved, and rolled the dog over on to its wounded companion. He still had his right hand hooked and clawed into the animal’s throat. He screamed at it in impotent rage, then wrenched his grip as if he would tear the windpipe clean out. The wounded dog snarled at him. Another musket fired and in its burst of flame Sharpe saw the sheen of dark-light on his fallen sword blade. He picked up the weapon in his left hand, holding it by the blade, and stabbed it down. The force of the blow rammed his hand down the edge, slicing his palm open, but he hurt one of the dogs badly for it whined and Sharpe felt the steel jerk as the beast tried to twist free of the blade. He let go of the dog’s throat with his right hand, seized the sword hilt, and stood up. Both dogs wrenched towards him, but he hacked down as if the sword was an axe, then went on hacking till there was nothing but bloodied pelts and butchered flesh.

  ‘Sir!’ Harper shouted from the ruins. ‘Where are you, sir?’

  ‘What’s happening, for Christ’s sake?’

  ‘Two dead ’uns here, sir.’

  ‘Get into the ruins!’ Sharpe clenched his slashed left hand to stem the blood that poured from his palm. His right leg and left shoulder were hurting like the devil. Beneath him he could see Calvet’s men desperately climbing towards the ruins. Sharpe could not see his rifle. He knelt again and felt around the slope, finally discovering the weapon’s stock beneath the still warm gobbets of dogflesh. He dragged the blood-sticky weapon free, then limped up to the hilltop.

  Frederickson found him there. ‘Harper shot one man, I killed the other. Are you all right?’

  ‘No, I’m not. Bloody dogs.’ Sharpe still shivered with the remembered fear of the dogs. He ripped a scrap of torn cloth from his left sleeve and wrapped it round his cut hand. A man shouted from the villa’s corner, telling Sharpe that other picquets had come to join the fight. He would ignore them. Calvet’s Imperial Guardsmen could suffer and deal with their threat because the important thing, the only thing, was to get deep inside the building. ‘Come on!’

  Harper had already found a way across the outer broken wall and now waited for Sharpe in the crumbling remains of an old courtyard. In some places the ancient masonry reached up two storeys, while in others it was just a few weed-grown feet high.

  ‘Quick! Move!’ Sharpe was hissing with pain, but it had to be suppressed. Surprise was gone, so now the attack must lunge like a blade as fast and deep as it could before the enemy rallied. He led the two Riflemen into a maze of broken walls and collapsed arches, dodging from shadow to shadow, always heading west towards the intact part of the house. At every step Sharpe expected a musket’s muzzle blast as greeting, but each corner turned and each wall jumped revealed nothing but silence and motionless ruin. Stone columns lay fallen over roofless corridors, and beams were half buried in fallen walls. It was a place for birds, lizards, snakes and silence.

  ‘This way!’ Harper called. He had found an undamaged cloister that seemed to offer a way through to the western end of the building. Sharpe followed the Irishman. One of Calvet’s men shouted from behind, but Sharpe ignored the call. Muskets suddenly crashed from the eastern face of the ruins. Sharpe stumbled on a broken piece of masonry, then fell into the deep shadow of the intact cloister. Frederickson followed and the three Riflemen, temporarily hidden, stopped to draw breath.

  ‘Is everyone loaded?’ Sharpe asked.

  All three rifles were charged. Sharpe sheathed his sword and cocked his own rifle. His left arm and hand were ripped with pain, but he had to forget that agony if the night was not to end in ignominious defeat. The cloister was pitch dark. It led west to where, surely, Ducos must be waiting. Sharpe expected Ducos’s men to appear at any moment and pointed his rifle towards the threatening dark shadows.

  ‘Major!’ Calvet roared from the eastern wall. ‘Where the hell are you, you bastard?’

  Sharpe was about to reply, but any sound he might have made was drowned by a new explosion of musketry. It seemed to come from the sky, and Sharpe sidled to the cloister’s edge and looked up to see a dark mass of men crowning the intact wall which marked the edge of the ruined part of the building and the beginning of the living quarters. They were firing down at Calvet’s men who now sought desperate shelter among the broken stones.

  Sharpe raised his rifle.

  ‘No!’ Frederickson hissed.

  ‘No?’

  ‘The bastards probably don’t know we’re this deep in the building! Come on!’ Frederickson felt his way down the black cloister. Calvet’s men were returning the fire now, but the musketry duel was dreadfully one sided. Ducos’s men were hidden by the roofs parapet and could plunge their fire down into the ruins, while Calvet’s men could only fire blindly upwards.

  ‘Major!’ Calvet bellowed again. ‘Where in Christ’s name are you?’

  Sharpe had reached the cloister’s end, and found it blocked by a heavy timber door. Frederickson,
crouching at the door’s foot, calmly produced his tinder box, struck flint to steel, and blew on the charred linen to make a tiny flame. The small light revealed ancient blackened timber. The door was constructed from five vertical baulks, studded with iron nails, but the long years and the desiccating heat had shrunk the wood to leave finger wide gaps between the heavy timbers. There was a rusted latch which, try as he might, Frederickson could not shift. ‘Bastard’s locked.’

  ‘Give me room.’ Harper pushed the two officers aside, then rammed his bayonet’s stout blade into one of the gaps. He levered the steel, grunting with the effort, and Sharpe was certain that the thick blade would snap before the ancient wood gave way. The noise of the muskets drowned any sounds Harper made.

  Frederickson blew on the tinder’s flame to keep it alight as Sharpe drew his sword and rammed the blade alongside Harper’s. He twisted the sword so that the strain would be taken from edge to edge, then added his weight to the Irishman’s. The feeble flame went out, then, with a crash and a gout of dust, the timber cracked and split. Harper ripped the board away, then used Sharpe’s sword to attack the next heavy timber. The fire from the rooftop was persistent while that from the eastern ruins was sporadic, suggesting that Calvet’s men were trapped among the fallen stones.

  ‘We’re through!’ Harper had made the hole large enough, and now pushed the sword back to Sharpe. The Irishman went first through the gap, Frederickson followed, and Sharpe went last. They went into an utter darkness, bereft of stars, and it seemed to Sharpe as though they had stumbled into some capacious dungeon with a smooth stone floor, sheer stone walls, and a high echoing ceiling. Sharpe groped his way forward. The sound of the musketry was muffled now. The villa’s defenders doubtless believed they were winning the battle, but were still unaware that one tiny group of attackers had managed to reach deep into the huge building.

  ‘Door!’ Frederickson had found the way out of the dark room and, miraculously, the new door was unlocked. It grated and squealed as Frederickson thrust it ajar. It led into a passage that was suffused with the faintest pre-dawn light from north-facing windows. No enemy waited in the passage, only a black cat which hissed at them, then fled.

  A winding stairway climbed from a jet black arch in the passage’s left wall. Sharpe knew this was no moment to be cautious, speed was all, and so he hefted his bloodied sword and climbed. He did not try. to be silent, but just blundered up the winding stair two steps at a time. The stairway opened into a stone-walled room where a flickering tallow candle revealed two terrified girls clutching each other in the remnants of their beds. Men’s clothes were on the floor, though doubtless the men themselves were among the defenders on the roof. One of the girls opened her mouth to scream and Sharpe instinctively threatened her with the sword. She went very still.

  Harper pushed past Sharpe, saw the girls, and aimed his rifle on which his bayonet was now locked. The girls shook their heads, as if to show that they would not make any noise. Frederickson appeared in the room. He had prepared for battle in his usual way by stowing his eyepatch and false teeth in his ammunition pouch, and he thus presented a fearsome sight which made one of the girls draw breath to scream. Harper rapped the side of her head with the edge of his blade. She froze. The blanket dropped away to show that she was naked.

  ‘Kill the bitches.’ Frederickson came into the room last.

  ‘Tell them that if they make a noise we’ll kill them both,’ Sharpe ordered. Frederickson seemed disgusted at this display of weakness, but obeyed. One of the two girls nodded to show that she understood, and Sharpe plucked a blanket from the floor and tossed it over their heads. ‘Come on!’

  A second winding stairway led from the room. Sharpe again climbed it first. The sound of musketry was much louder now, betraying that the Riflemen were close to Ducos’s men. At the top of the stairway was a half-open door which Sharpe knew would lead on to the flat roof from which Ducos’s men poured their fire down on to Calvet’s soldiers. Sharpe remembered a moment like this on the Portuguese border when he and Harper had climbed just such a stair in the certain knowledge that the enemy waited at its top. He felt like a rat in a barrel, and the fear slowed his step. Through the half open door he could see the sky. There was a high wisp of cloud, lit silver grey against the dark.

  ‘Move yourself, sir.’ Harper unceremoniously pushed Sharpe aside to take the lead. He had slung his rifle and bayonet on his left shoulder so he could use his favourite weapon; the big seven-barrelled gun. The Irishman licked his lips, crossed himself, then pushed the door fully open.

  Harper froze. He could see the enemy and Sharpe could not. Frederickson tried to push on, but he could not get past Sharpe.

  ‘God save Ireland,’ Harper whispered, and Sharpe knew that the big man, like himself, was scared. There was a hard knot in Sharpe’s belly, put there by the certainty that death waited beyond the open door.

  ‘How many?’ he whispered to Harper.

  ‘At least a dozen of the bastards.’

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Frederickson sounded angry. ‘Calvet’s being crucified!’

  ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ Sharpe said fatuously, and the erstwhile enemy’s battle cry seemed to propel Harper through the open door.

  ‘Bastards!’ The Irishman screamed the word as his own battle cry. Men turned to stare at him, astonishment on their faces, then Harper pulled the trigger and the flint sparked fire into the chamber behind the seven barrels. The gun hammered like a small cannon and two of Ducos’s men were snatched clean off their feet to tumble, screaming, to the broken stones below.

  Sharpe had followed Harper on to the smoke-wreathed roof. He carried the rifle in his clumsily bandaged left hand, fired it, did not wait to see if his bullet hit, but just ran forward with the sword in his right hand. The blade was matted thick with dog blood and hair. Frederickson flanked Harper’s right. A musket hammered at them, but the three Riflemen were moving too quickly and the ball whined harmlessly between Sharpe and Harper.

  The surprise of their small attack was absolute. One second Sergeant Challon’s men had been firing down in comparative safety, and the next they were being violently assaulted from their left flank. Those men nearest to the Riflemen had no time to escape. One man tried to twist out of Sharpe’s way, but the big sword caught him on the backswing to flay his throat back to the spine. Sharpe’s scream of triumph would have curdled a devil’s blood. Harper was using the butt of the big gun like a club. Frederickson shot a man, discarded his rifle, then elegantly skewered another with his sword. Sharpe was past his first victim, hunting another. The fear had gone now, washed away by the old exaltation of battle. The enemy was running. They were desperately jostling towards a doorway on the roofs far side. These men had no belly for this fight, all except one man who had the tough face of an old soldier.

  The moustached face was framed with the pigtails of the elite Napoleonic Dragoons. The man wore the remnants of his green uniform on which was the single stripe of a Sergeant. He lifted his straight sword towards Sharpe, feinted, then lunged at Harper. He did not finish the lunge, but stepped back and swung the blade towards Frederickson. The man was cornered, his companions had abandoned him, but he was making a professional cold fight out of his desperate position.

  ‘Give up,’ Sharpe said in English, then corrected himself by giving the command in French.

  The only response was a sudden and savage attack. Sharpe parried so that the two swords ran like a bell. The other enemy had disappeared down the far stairway, and now the French Sergeant retreated after them, but never turned his back on his three opponents. Frederickson edged round to threaten his right flank and the Dragoon Sergeant’s sword slithered towards the new threat, but Harper was even faster. He moved to the Sergeant’s left, reached out, and seized his belt to pull him off balance. The Sergeant tried to reverse his blade, but Harper contemptuously ripped it from his hand and sent it spinning over the parapet. He then hit the French Sergeant on the head so that the man slump
ed down in dazed agony. ‘You were told to give up,’ Harper said patiently, then hit the man again. ‘You stubborn bloody bastard.’

  ‘Major!’ General Calvet was standing in the ruins below.

  ‘Go right!’ Sharpe pointed to where they had broken through into the passage. ‘Hurry!’

  ‘Englishman! Well done!’

  Sharpe laughed at the compliment, then essayed an elaborate bow to the Frenchman. As he bowed, so Harper screamed a sudden warning, and Sharpe abandoned his courtesy to fall ignominiously on his face as a small cannon split the dawn apart with its sudden noise. The ball thumped over Sharpe’s head.

  ‘Ducos!’ Frederickson had spotted the enemy.

  Sharpe looked where Frederickson was pointing. Beyond this roof was another courtyard, this one intact, and on its far side Sharpe saw an open full-length window on an upper floor. The room had a balcony that billowed with smoke. Men moved in the lantern light behind the balcony, then the small wind shifted the obscuring smoke and Sharpe at last saw his enemy. He recognized the round lenses of the spectacles first, then he saw the thin face and he saw, too, with astonishment, that Ducos was in the uniform of a French Marshal. For a second Ducos looked straight into Sharpe’s eyes, then he twisted away. Two other men took his place. Between them they carried a strange brass object which they stood in the window. For a second Sharpe thought it was a small misshapen table, but then Frederickson recognized the four-legged gun. ‘A bloody grasshopper!’ he said scornfully, but he still dropped flat as the linstock touched fire to the charge. This time the small gun had been loaded with multiple shot that whistled harmlessly overhead.