Sharpe's Devil

by Bernard Cornwell

“This can’t last!” Sharpe shouted at Harper. He needed to shout for the musketfire was almost continuous now, suggesting that the Spaniards had concentrated even more muskets at the top of the steps. For the defenders this was like shooting rats in a barrel. They would be grinning as they fired, knowing that this day they were defeating the dreaded Lord Cochrane and that all Spain would rejoice when that news reached home. Another volley banged, and the dead bodies which made a protective breastwork for Sharpe and Harper twitched under the flail of lead. “On, my good boys, on!” Miller called, but no one obeyed, for there could be no chance of surviving an uphill attack into that rending, flickering, crashing and unending fire. Any man who tried to climb the stairs would be cut down in seconds, then thrown back to the quay that was already piled with the blood-spattered dead who had rolled down the steps. “Stay down!” Cochrane countermanded Miller’s hopeless order. “Stay low! It’s all going to be well! I’ve a trick or two yet, boys!”

  “Jesus, but he needs a bloody trick now,” Harper said, then raised the musket blindly over the parapet of the dead bodies to pull its trigger. “God save Ireland, but we’re dead men unless he can get us out of here.”

  Miller shouted at his musicians to play louder, as though their feeble and ragged music could somehow turn back the surging tide of disaster. Some of Miller’s experienced marines, realizing how hopeless was their plight, began to edge backward. There had been a chance of capturing the fortress, even a good chance, but only if the surprise attack had reached the head of the staircase before the defenders had rallied. But the attackers had failed by yards, and now the Spaniards were grinding Cochrane’s men into blood and bones. More attackers began slipping down the steps. They were looking for possible escape routes around the harbor’s edge.

  “Stay there!” Cochrane shouted. “It’s all right, lads! Stay where you are! Wait for it! I promise everything will be well! Heads down now! Heads down! Keep your—” Cochrane’s voice was swamped as the whole world suddenly exploded in noise and stone fragments.

  “Christ!” Harper screeched as the citadel’s foundations seemed to shudder with the impact of gunfire.

  The O’Higgins, now that the citadel’s main thirty-six-pound battery had been silenced, had sailed out from the unwitting protection offered by the American ship and had anchored with her starboard broadside facing the fortress. She had just fired that full broadside at the defenders bunched at the top of the broad flight of stairs. The volley of cannonfire had been shockingly dangerous to the attackers, but magnificent shooting all the same. At a range of almost a half mile the flagship’s guns were firing just feet over the heads of Cochrane’s attackers. At least one cannonball fell short, for Sharpe saw a marine virtually disintegrate just five steps above him. At one moment the man was aiming his musket, the next there was just a butcher’s mess on the stairs and a crack of murderous intensity as the ball ricocheted on up toward the Spaniards.

  “Heads down!” Cochrane called again, and once again the broadside thundered from the Chilean warship. Stone shards, struck from the battlements, sang viciously over Sharpe’s head. This, he remembered from the tales of survivors, was precisely how Wellington had captured San Sebastian. That great fortress, the last French bastion in Spain, had resisted every British attack until, at the very last moment of the very last assault, when the helpless attackers were dying in the great breach as the French garrison poured a murderous fire into the redcoated ranks, Wellington had ordered his siege guns to fire just above the attackers’ heads. The unexpected cannonade, catching the French defenders out of their entrenchments and exposed behind the breach’s makeshift barricades, had turned a glorious French victory into a butcher’s nightmare. The huge roundshot had destroyed the French defenders, blowing them ragged, and a British defeat had turned into sudden triumph. Now Cochrane was trying the exact same trick.

  “Heads down!” Cochrane called again. He had clearly anticipated that the defenders might block the head of the stairs, and had thus arranged with the O’Higgins for this drastic solution that had caught the Spaniards bunched at the stairhead. “One more broadside, lads, then we’ll fillet the bastards!”

  The third broadside slammed into the citadel above Sharpe. The defenders’ musket fire, which a moment before had been so overwhelming, had now vanished, blown into whimpering carnage by the shocking violence of the naval gunnery.

  “Charge!” Cochrane was shouting even as the brutal echo of the third broadside reverberated around the harbor. “Now charge!”

  They charged. They were men who wanted to revenge a near defeat, and the sound of their vengeance as they scrambled up the shot-mangled steps was bloodcurdling. Somewhere ahead of Sharpe, steel scraped on steel and a man screamed. The top of the stairs was a slaughteryard of broken stone, blood and mangled flesh. A Spanish drummer boy, scarcely ten years old, was curled at the side of the archway, his hands contracting into claws as he died. Sharpe, reaching the stair’s head, found himself shrouded in a fog of dust and smoke. Screams sounded ahead of him, then a Spanish soldier, his face a mask of blood, came charging from Sharpe’s right. The man lunged his bayonet at Sharpe who, with a practiced reflex, stepped back, tripped the man, then hacked down once with the sword. The borrowed blade seemed horribly light and seemed to do so little damage. Harper, a pace behind Sharpe, killed the man with a thrust of his bayonet. A volley of muskets sounded through the smoke, but no bullets came near Sharpe or Harper, suggesting that the volley was a rebel salvo fired at the retreating defenders. “This way!” Miller’s voice shouted. His remaining drummer was beating the charge while the flautists were playing an almost recognizable version of “Heart of Oak.”

  The marines ran to the left, charging down a stone tunnel that led to the parade ground. Sharpe and Harper went the other way. They pushed through a half-open door, stepped over the mangled body of a Spanish soldier, and found themselves in the great audience hall where Bautista had so effortlessly humiliated Sharpe just days before. Now, in the smoky dust that hung in slanting beams of morning sunlight, they found the hall deserted of all but the dead. Sharpe stepped over a fallen bench and edged past a headless Spanish officer. One of the O’Higgins’s cannonballs had struck the huge iron chandelier which, grotesquely bent and ripped from its chains, was now canted against the far wall. The defenders, who had been firing down from the great arched windows, had fled, leaving a litter of torn cartridge papers behind them. A dozen cannonballs lay on the stone floor. The places where they had struck the wall opposite the big arched windows were marked by plate-sized craters. One of the roundshot must have taken off the head of the Spanish officer, for the hall’s dusty floor was decorated with a monstrous fan of freshly sprayed blood.

  Sharpe pushed open a door at the hall’s far end to emerge onto the big parade ground. The Spaniards, in sheer terror, were abandoning the citadel’s defenses, running toward the gate at the far side of the citadel. A nearby battery of nine-pounder cannons was deserted, the gunner’s linstocks still smoking, the dirty sponge water in the buckets still rippling. Sharpe sheathed his sword and walked to the ramparts that had been smeared black with powder stains from the nine-pounders’ discharge and leaned over the citadel’s high edge to draw in a great breath of clean, cold air. Somewhere in the fortress a dog howled and a child screamed.

  “One of ours,” Harper said.

  “What’s one of ours?” Sharpe asked.

  “The gun!” Harper slapped the hot breech of the closest nine-pounder cannon and Sharpe saw there the cipher of King George III. The gun was presumably one of the thousands that the British government had given to the Spanish during the French wars. Sharpe touched the raised cipher and suddenly felt homesick—not for England and King George, but for Lucille and for her kitchen in Normandy and for the smell of dried herbs hanging from the beams, and for the rime of frost in the orchard and cat ice in the dairy yard, and for the sound of his children’s laughter. Then, like a warm rush, the knowledge flooded through Sharpe that h
is job in Chile was done, that there were no obstacles now to his taking Vivar’s body, except the minor one of finding a ship to carry the corpse home to Europe and Sharpe supposed Cochrane would help him over that difficulty.

  Beneath Sharpe, her job well done, the Espiritu Santo was hard aground beside the wharf and beginning to list as she took the ground on the falling tide. Skeins of cannon smoke thinned and drifted across the outer harbor where longboats, crammed with reinforcements from the O’Higgins, were being rowed ashore. The sailors on the American brigantine were cheering the passing boats because, so far as they were concerned, Cochrane’s rebels fought for liberty.

  Cochrane’s rebels thought they were fighting for Cochrane, for whores and for gold, while the Spaniards, their cause lost, were fleeing. Sharpe and Harper, walking unmolested around the citadel’s inner ramparts, watched scores of defeated soldiers running pell-mell down the hairpin bends of the approach road. A few, presumably officers, had horses and were galloping toward the high road which led north to Valdivia. Some townsfolk stared in astonishment as the citadel’s defeated garrison fled. “God, but they broke fast,” Harper said in wonderment.

  “They did,” Sharpe agreed. He had seen soldiers run before, but never so easily as this. At Waterloo the French had run, but only after they had fought all day with snarling courage, yet these Spanish defenders, after firing a handful of volleys, had simply collapsed. Sharpe, given the citadel to defend, would have sheltered his men as soon as the frigate fired her first broadside, then counterattacked the moment the cannonade lifted, but the Spanish defenses and the morale of the garrison had proved as brittle as eggshells. The royal forces had been on the very edge of victory, but no one on the Spanish side had realized it or had known how to capitalize on it. “They’ve rotted away,” Sharpe said in the tone of a man suddenly understanding a truth. “Maybe all the Spaniards here are rotten.” He was suddenly assailed by a fantastic vision of Cochrane, with his diminishing band of heroes, capturing fortress after fortress, and more and more Spaniards running pell-mell for safety until, at the end, there was nowhere to run and Chile would be united under its rebel government.

  A cheer turned Sharpe around. From the top ramparts of the citadel’s main tower, above the great audience chamber, a marine tossed a roll of plundered cloth that cascaded and rippled to hang like a monstrous banner from the battlements. Another marine cut the halyard that held the Spanish flag.

  “So what now?” Harper asked.

  “We dig up Blas Vivar and take him home.” Sharpe was wiping the blade of Cochrane’s spare sword clean. It was a good sword, nicely balanced and with a wickedly sharp edge, but it lacked the ugly killing weight of his old Heavy Cavalry blade.

  “Do you think that bugger Bautista might still be here?” Harper was watching a small group of Spanish officers walk under guard from the large tower toward the barrack rooms.

  “Bautista will have buggered off days ago.” Sharpe scrubbed at the sticky blood with the corner of his coat, then grinned because he could almost hear Lucille’s exasperated complaint, for he suddenly realized that this coat was none other than his good dark green kerseymere that Lucille liked so much and which was such a trouble to clean. I’m going to be in the doghouse when I get home,” he told Harper, “for fighting in my best coat.”

  “Women don’t understand these things.”

  Somewhere in the citadel a child cried. Sharpe supposed that most of the men in the Spanish garrison would have taken themselves wives, and now those women would be finding new protectors. Major Miller, his tarred moustache looking more perky than ever, was protecting two such girls, one on each arm. “Did you enjoy yourself?” he called up to Sharpe.

  “I did, thank you.”

  “I can offer you a fruit of victory, perhaps?” Miller gestured at the girls.

  “Keep them, Major,” Sharpe smiled, then turned to stare from the rampart far across the hills to where the ragged Andean peaks tore at the sky. The smoke of volcanoes was a brown smear in the new morning’s sunlight. “Thank God,” he said quietly.

  “What for?” Harper asked.

  “Because it’s over, Patrick.” Sharpe was still overwhelmed by the sense of relief. “Honor is even. Cochrane rescued us from the Espiritu Santo, and we’ve helped him capture this place, and we don’t need to do anything more. We can go home. It’s a pity to have lost my sword, but I’ll not be needing it again, not in this life, and I don’t give a bugger about the next. As for Louisa’s money, well, she wanted it spent on finding her husband, and we’ve found him, so it’s over. We’ve fought our last fight.”

  Harper smiled. “Maybe we have at that.”

  Sharpe turned and looked down at the garrison church where Vivar lay buried. He saw rebels carrying gold out of the church, and he guessed that they had ripped apart the ornate altar screen. A cheer from the tower suggested that yet more treasure had been discovered. “Do you want to join in?” Sharpe invited Harper.

  “I’m all right. Just glad to be in one piece.” The Irishman yawned hugely. “But I’m tired, so I am.”

  “We can sleep today. All day.” Sharpe pushed himself away from the wall. “But first we’ve got to life a gravestone.”

  They had come to journey’s end, to the grave of a friend, and this time there was no one to stop them from retrieving Vivar’s body from its cold tomb. The citadel had fallen, Cochrane was victorious, and Sharpe could go home.

  The paving slab that bore Blas Vivar’s initials had been replaced, but the stoneworkers’ tools were still in the side chapel and, with Harper’s help, Sharpe inserted the crowbar beside the big sandstone slab. “Ready?” Sharpe asked. “Heave.”

  Nothing happened. “Bloody hell!” Harper said. Behind them, in the nave of the church, a man screamed. The O’Higgins’s surgeon, a maudlin Irishman named MacAuley, had ordered the wounded of both sides to be brought into the church where, on a trestle table, he sliced at mangled flesh and sawed at shattered bones. A Dominican monk, who had been a surgeon in the citadel’s sick bay, was helping the Irish doctor, as were two orderlies from the Chilean flagship.

  “I hate listening to surgeons working,” Harper said, then gave Vivar’s gravestone a kick. “It doesn’t want to move.” The big Irishman spat on both hands, gripped the crowbar firmly and, with his feet solidly planted on either side of the slab, heaved back until the veins stood out on his forehead and sweat dripped down his cheeks. Yet all he succeeded in doing was bending the crowbar’s shaft. “Jesus Christ!” he swore as he let go of the crowbar, “They’ve cemented the bugger in place, haven’t they?” He went to the side chapel and came back with a sledgehammer. “Stand back.”

  Sharpe sensibly stepped back as the Irishman swung, then drove the head of the sledgehammer hard down onto the gravestone. The noise of the impact was like the strike of a cannonball, cracking the gravestone clean across. Harper swung the hammer again and again, grunting as he crazed the obstinate stone into a score of jagged-edged chunks. He finally dropped the hammer when the stone was reduced to rubble. “That’s taught the bugger a lesson.”

  Lord Cochrane, who had come into the church while Harper was fevershly annihilating the stone, now took out his watch, snapped open its lid, and showed the face to Sharpe. “Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds.”

  “My Lord?” Sharpe enquired politely.

  “Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds! See?”

  “Has everyone gone mad around here?” Sharpe asked.

  “Thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds is precisely how long it took us to capture the citadel! This watch measures elapsed time, do you see? You press this trigger to start it and this to stop it. I pressed the trigger as our bows touched the wharf, and stopped it when the last defender abandoned the ramparts. In fact I was a bit late, so we probably took less time, but even thirteen minutes and forty-three seconds is rather good for the capture of a citadel this size, don’t you think?” His Lordship, who was in an excitedly triumphant mood, sn
apped the watch lid shut. “I must thank you. Both of you.” He graciously bowed to both Sharpe and Harper.

  “We didn’t do anything,” Sharpe said modestly.

  “Not a great deal,” Harper amended Sharpe’s modesty.

  “Numbers count for so much,” His Lordship said happily. “If I’d attacked with just thirty men then there would have been no hope of victory, but I’ve discovered that in this kind of war success is gained by small increments. Besides, your presence was worth more than you think. Half of my men fought in the French wars, and they know full well who you are, both of you! And they feel more confident when they know that famous soldiers such as yourselves are fighting beside them.”

  Sharpe tried to brush the compliment aside, but Cochrane would have none of his coyness. “They feel precisely the same about my presence in a scrap. They fight better when I’m in command because they believe in me. And because they believe in my luck!”

  “And Mister Sharpe’s always been lucky in a fight,” Harper added.

  “There you are!” Cochrane beamed. “Napoleon always claimed he’d rather have lucky soldiers than clever ones, though I pride myself on being both.”

  Sharpe laughed at His Lordship’s immodesty. “Why didn’t you tell us you’d arranged to have the O’Higgins fire just over our heads if the attack faltered?”

  “Because if men know you’ve got an ace hidden up your sleeve they expect you to play it whether it’s needed or not. I didn’t want to run the risk of using the broadside unless I really had to, but if the men had known the broadside might be used they would have held back in the knowledge that the gunners would do some of the hard work for them.”

  “It was a brilliant stroke,” Sharpe said.

  “How truly you speak, my dear Sharpe.” Cochrane at last seemed to notice the destruction wrought by Harper’s sledgehammer. “What are you doing, Mister Harper?”

  “Blas Vivar,” Harper explained. “He’s under here. We’re digging him up, only since we were last here the buggers have cemented him in place.”