Sharpe's Siege s-18

by Бернард Корнуэлл

  Then Sharpe turned and jumped.

  The landing knocked all the breath from him. He pitched forward, rifle falling from his shoulder, and his face hit the wet sand.

  A hand grabbed his collar and hauled him up. Harper’s voice shouted, “Run!”

  Sharpe’s mouth was filled with gritty sand. He spat. He stumbled on the body of one of the Frenchmen dumped on this strip of sand the day before, sprawled, then ran again. His shako was gone. Frenchmen were standing on the ramparts above while to his right, from the north, the cavalry appeared.

  The two longboats, oars rising and falling with painful slowness, inched towards the small breaking waves of the channel’s beach. The first Riflemen were in the water, wading towards the boats, reaching for them.

  Cornelius Killick, in the leading boat, bellowed an order and Sharpe saw the oars back, saw the clumsy boats swing, and he knew that Killick was turning the craft so that the wider sterns would face the shore.

  “Form line!” Frederickson was shouting.

  Sharpe swerved towards the shout, pawing sand from his eyes. Thirty Riflemen were bumping into a crude line at the very edge of the sea. Sharpe and Harper joined it.

  “Front rank kneel! Present!” Frederickson, as if on a battlefield, faced the cavalry with two ranks that bristled with blades. The leading horseman, an officer, leaned from his saddle to swing his sabre, but the light blade clanged along the sword bayonets like a child’s stick dragged on iron palings.

  “Back! Back!” Sharpe shouted it.

  The small line marched backwards, step by step, into the sea. Waves drove at their calves, their thighs, and the shock of the cold water reached for their groins.

  Horsemen spurred into the sea. The horses, frightened by the blades and waves, reared.

  “Come on, you bastards!” Killick shouted. “Swim!”

  “Break ranks!” Sharpe shouted it. “Go!” He stayed as rearguard. His rifle encumbered him and he let it drop into the water.

  A horseman swung a sabre at Sharpe and the Rifleman’s long sword, used with both Sharpe’s hands, broke the man’s forearm. The Frenchman hissed with pain, dropped his sabre, then his horse jerked back towards dry land. Another horseman was twisting his sabre’s point in a Rifleman’s neck. There was blood, splashes, and more yellow-teethed horses plunging into the foam. Harper, still holding the axe, swung it at the horseman who sheered clumsily away while the body of a Rifleman was tugged by the tide. Harper dragged the body towards the boats, not knowing that the man was already dead.

  The infantry had jumped from the ramparts and shouted at the cavalry to make way. Sharpe, teeth snarling, dared them to come. He taunted them. He stepped towards them, wanting one of them to try, just one.

  “Sir!” a voice shouted from behind. “Sir!”

  Sharpe stepped backwards and, seeing it, the French attacked.

  A sergeant led them. He was old in war, toughened by years of campaigning, and he knew the Englishman would lunge.

  Sharpe lunged. The Frenchman jerked his musket aside, parrying, and bellowed his victory as he thrust forward.

  He was still shouting as Sharpe’s sword, which had been twisted over the bayonet’s stab, punctured his belly. Sharpe turned the blade, pushing, and the blood spewed into the breaking foam as the blade seemed to be swallowed by the big belly. Sharpe stepped back, jerked the sword, and the blade came free in a welter of new blood.

  “Sir!”

  He went backwards. Another horseman drove into the water and Sharpe swung his blade at the horse’s head, it reared, then a man came from his other side, an officer in a darker uniform, and Sharpe turned, parried a clumsy thrust, and drew his sword back for the killing thrust.

  “Not him! Not him!” Killick shouted it.

  Sharpe checked his thrust.

  Lassan, knowing that he would not die on this day of rain and savagery, lowered his sword into the water. “Go.”

  Sharpe went. He turned and plunged further into the sea. The longboats were already pulling away. Men clung to the transom of the nearest boat while other men, safely in the craft, reached hands and rifles towards him.

  A pistol bullet spat in a plurne beside Sharpe’s face. He was up to his chest now, half wading and half swimming, and he reached with his left hand, lunged, and caught an outstretched rifle barrel.

  “Pull!” Killick shouted. “Pull!”

  A last cavalryman charged into the sea, but an oarblade, slapped down on to the water, frightened the horse. The French, their muskets made useless by rain, could only watch.

  Sharpe clung to the rifle with his left hand. The weapon’s foresight dug into his palm. The sword in his right hand was dragging him down, as was the heavy scabbard. He kicked with his feet, water slopped into his mouth and he gagged.

  “Pull! Pull! Pull!” Killick’s voice roared over the clanking of the Thuella’s windlass that dragged the anchor clear of the channel’s silt. The sails were dropping into the small wind and the Thuella was stirring in the water.

  The boats bumped on the ship’s side and men pushed the Riflemen towards the deck. Someone took Sharpe’s collar and hauled him dripping and heavy into the longboat. “Up!”

  A ladder was built into the ship’s side. Sharpe, unsteady in the rocking longboat, thrust his sword into his scabbard that squirted water as the blade went home. He reached for the ladder, climbed, then American hands hauled him on to the Thuella‘s deck. He had swallowed sea-water and, with a sudden spasm, he vomited it on to the scrubbed deck. He gasped for breath, vomited more, then lay, chest heaving, in the scuppers.

  He heard cheers, German and Spanish and British cheers, even American cheers, and Sharpe twisted, looked through a gunport, and saw the coastline already sliding past. French gunners were wrestling the twelve-pounders through wet sand, but too late and to no avail. The longboats were being towed at ropes’ ends, the Thuella’s wet sails were filling with a new, easterly breeze, and the French were left behind, impotent.

  They had escaped.

  EPILOGUE

  Cavalry was nervous on wet fields. French horsemen would summon courage, ride a few yards forward, then swerve away from a threatened British volley. Unseen artillery, firing at unseen targets, punched the drizzling air, while infantry, shivering in the February cold, waited for orders.

  Sharpe’s force, pushing four handcarts loaded with wounded, came to the skirmish from the north. A squadron of French cavalry saw them, wheeled right, then drew curved sabres for the charge.

  “Two ranks! Fix swords!” Sharpe sensed the enemy would not press the charge home, but he went through the dutiful motions and the enemy officer, seeing the waiting bayonets, and not knowing that there was not a single loaded musket or rifle in the twin ranks, dutifully withdrew. The battle, if battle it was, seemed too scattered and tentative for a cavalry charge that might leave the horsemen exposed to a sudden counter-attack. Besides, Sharpe could see that the French were dreadfully outnumbered, outnumbered as heavily as he had been at the Teste de Buch. The enemy, scarce more than a heavy picquet line, was everywhere being pushed back before a burgeoning number of British and Portuguese troops.

  A mile ahead there was a sudden, rushing sound like a huge wave breaking on a beach and Sharpe saw a rocket rise into the air and plummet towards the east. It had been over a year since he had seen the Rocket Artillery and he supposed it was as inaccurate as ever. Yet somehow the odd sight made him feel at home. “Remember those?” he asked Frederickson.

  Sweet William, who had been with Sharpe when the rockets were first used against the astonished French, nodded. “Indeed I do.”

  A mounted infantry captain, red coat bright, galloped up the track towards Sharpe. His voice, as he curbed his spirited horse, was peremptory with a staff officer’s vicarious authority. “Who the devil are you? What are you doing here?”

  “My name is Sharpe, my rank is Major, and you call me ”sir“.”

  The captain stared with incredulity, first at Sharpe, then at
the dirty, draggled mixture of Riflemen and Marines who stared dully towards the rocket’s smoking trail. “Sharpe?” The captain seemed to have lost his voice. “But you’re…” he checked. ”You’ve come from the north, sir?“

  “Yes.” It seemed too difficult to explain it all; to explain how an American privateer captain had agreed to rescue a garrison and to land that garrison as close as he dared to the British lines. To explain how the Thuella had flogged her way south through a wet night, and how Riflemen and Marines had thumped the schooner’s pump-handles till their muscles burned in the cold, or how Sharpe, his turn at the pumps over, had drunk brandy with an American enemy in a small cabin and promised, that when this damn fool war was done, to drink even more in a place called Marblehead. Or to explain how, in the rain-misted dawn, Cornelius Killick had landed Sharpe’s men north of the Adour estuary.

  “I wish I could take you further,” the American had said.

  “You can’t.” A strange sail had been spotted to the south, merely a scrap of ghostly white above a blurred horizon, but the sail meant danger to the Thuella and so Killick had turned for the shore.

  Now Sharpe, marching south, had met British troops north of the river which could only mean that Elphinstone had built his bridge. “Who are you?” Sharpe asked the staff captain.

  “First Division, sir.”

  Sharpe nodded towards another racing plume of rocket smoke. “The Adour?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They were safe. There would be surgeons for the wounded and a precious bridge across the river; a bridge leading south to St Jean de Luz and to Jane.

  The bridge was there. The miraculous bridge, the bridge that only a clever man could build, a bridge to outflank the French Army, a bridge of boats.

  The bridge was made from chasse-marees. A whole fleet of the luggers was moored side-by-side in the wide river mouth and, stretching from deck to deck and supported by vast cables, was a wide roadway of planks. Over the bridge marched red-coated Companies, Company after Company, an Army outflanking an enemy and going further into France. The Divisional headquarters, the staff officer said, was still south of the river.

  Sharpe took his men to the northern bank where a surgeon had erected a tent and waited for customers. “Best if you wait here,” Sharpe said to Frederickson.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Sharpe looked at his Marines and Riflemen, at Harper and Minver and Rossner and Palmer and all the men who had fought as no men should be asked to fight. “I’ll come back for you,” he said lamely.

  Sharpe left them. He walked against the tide of the invading Division, edging his way across the plank bridge that rose and fell with the small waves of the estuary. It was for this bridge that his men had taken the Teste de Buch. They had drawn the enemy to the wrong place so that the bridge could be built undisturbed.

  The bridge was nearly a quarter-mile in length and had to resist the massive rise and fall of ocean tides. Seamen, under naval officers, manned windlasses that governed the anchors of the moored boats. The windlasses balanced the long bridge against the currents of river and ocean and against the vast, surging tide that swept into the Adour.

  The bridge, guarded by a fleet of brigs, was a miracle of engineering.

  And the man who had built it waited on the southern sea-wall where a vast capstan, built into a cage of wooden beams, could compensate the roadway’s cables against the estuary’s tidefall. Colonel Elphinstone, standing on the capstan’s platform, watched the dirty, blood- and powder-stained Rifleman approach. The expression on Elphinstone’s face was one of sheer disbelief that slowly turned to pleasure. “He said you were captured!”

  The small rain stung Sharpe’s face as he looked up to the colonel. “Who, sir?”

  “Bampfylde.” Elphinstone’s eyes took in the blood on Sharpe’s thigh and head. “You escaped!”

  “We all did, sir. Every last goddamn man that Bampfylde abandoned. Except for the dead, of course. There were twenty-seven dead, sir.” Sharpe paused, remembering that more had died since his last count. Two of the wounded had died on the Thuella and had been slid into a grey sea. And Sharpe supposed that the American Rifleman, Taylor, must be numbered with the dead, even though he lived and was even now sailing westwards.

  “Maybe thirty, sir. But the French sent a brigade against us, and we fought the bastards to a standstill, sir.” Sharpe heard the anger in his own voice and knew that this honest man did not deserve it. “I’m sorry, sir. I need a horse.”

  “You need a rest.” Elphinstone, with surprising agility for a heavy, middle-aged man, swung himself down the cage of beams. “A brigade, you say?”

  “A demi-brigade,” Sharpe said. “But with artillery.”

  “Good God Almighty.”

  Sharpe turned to watch a Battalion of Portuguese infantry scramble down the sea-wall towards the rope-held planks. “I see Bampfylde brought you the chasse-marees. The bastard did something right.”

  “He says he took the fort!” Elphinstone said. “He said you went inland and were defeated.”

  “Then he’s a poxed, lying bastard. We took the fort. Then we went inland, beat the Frogs by the river, and came back to find the fort abandoned. We beat them there, too.”

  “Not too loud, Sharpe,” Elphinstone said, “ware right flank.”

  Sharpe twisted round. Yards down the river bank was a party of some two dozen officers, both Army and Navy, who had come to see this prodigy; a floating bridge that crossed an estuary. With them were ladies who had been invited to witness the far smoke of battle. Gleaming carriages were parked on a marshy road two hundred yards to the rear. “Is that Bampfylde?”

  “Gently now, Sharpe!” Elphinstone said.

  “Bugger Bampfylde.” Sharpe was streaked with mud, spattered with dried blood, salt-stained, and scorched with powder burns. He walked along the sea-wall’s narrow path towards the spectators who clustered about two tripod-mounted telescopes. A spatter of applause and admiration sounded as another rocket arched towards the grey clouds.

  Two naval lieutenants blocked Sharpe’s progress. One of them, seeing the soldier’s tattered, dirty state, suggested that Sharpe make a detour. “Go down there.” The naval officer pointed to the swampy mud inland of the wall.

  “Get out of my way. Move!” The sudden command startled all of the spectators. A woman dropped her umbrella and gave a small scream at Sharpe’s bloody, dirty appearance, but Captain Horace Bampfylde, explaining at length how he had captured a fortress and brought these cfiasse-marees south to help out the Army, fell into a terrified silence.

  “You poxed bastard,” Sharpe said. “You coward!”

  “Sir!” An Army officer touched Sharpe’s arm in remonstrance, but Sharpe rounded on the man, who stepped back in sudden fear from the savage face.

  Sharpe looked back to Bampfylde. “You ran away.”

  “That is not…”

  “Just as you did not take the fortress, you bastard, I did. And then I held it, you bastard, I held it against a goddamned brigade of crapaud troops. We beat them, Bampfylde. We fought them and beat them. I lost some of your Marines, Bampfylde, because you don’t fight a demi-brigade without losing men, but we won!“ There was an embarrassed silence among the elegantly dressed party. A cold wind stirred the water to Sharpe’s right, then a dull cough of artillery thumped its noise across the, river. ”Do you hear me, Bampfylde?“

  The naval officer said nothing, and there was nothing but terror on his fleshy young face. The other officers, appalled by Sharpe’s face and by the anger in his voice, stood as if frozen.

  “Over two thousand men, you bastard, and less than two hundred of us. We fought them till we had no bullets left, then we fought with steel, Bampfylde. And we won!” Sharpe took another step towards the naval captain who, terrified, stepped backwards.

  “He told me…” Bampfylde began, but could not go on.

  “Who told you what?”

  Bampfylde’s eyes went past Sharpe and the Riflem
an turned to see the Comte de Maquerre, a girl on his arm, standing with Colonel Wigram. The Comte looked at Sharpe as though he saw a revenant come from the tomb. Sharpe, who had not expected to find the Comte, stared with equal disbelief.

  Then, to both minds, came the shared knowledge of treachery and the Comte de Maquerre panicked. He ran.

  The Comte ran towards the bridge that led to the north bank of the Adour-where a handful of French troops retreated from the First Division. There should have been more French troops there, Calvet’s troops, enough troops to turn the river into blood, but de Maquerre had been fooled by the story of a landing and so Calvet’s troops had been frittered away at Arcachon. The Comte de Maquerre had unwittingly served Wellington well, but he was a traitor and so he ran.

  Sharpe ran after him.

  Colonel Wigram raised a hand as if to call for prudent decorum in front of ladies, but Sharpe pushed the man down the sea-wall and into the mud.

  De Maquerre leaped down the sloping wall, miraculously kept his footing on the slippery river’s edge, and climbed on to the bridge.

  “Stop him!” Sharpe bellowed it.

  Portuguese infantrymen crossing the bridge saw a tall, distinguished officer in British uniform being chased by a dirty, tattered wretch. They made way for the Comte.

  Sharpe banged his wounded thigh as he clambered on to the roadway. Blood ran warm on his thigh as he snarled at men to make way. “Stop him!”

  A jittery horse, made nervous by the strange road across which it was being led blindfolded, checked de Maquerre’s panicked flight. It swerved its rump into the Frenchman’s path and the Comte was forced to leap for the safety of one of the moored chasse-marees. He turned as he landed on the deck, saw he could run no further, and drew his sword.

  Sharpe jumped forward from the planks on to the boat’s deck and drew his own sword.

  The Comte de Maquerre, seeing the filth and blood of battle on Sharpe, sensed that the fight was lost before it began. He lowered his slim blade. “I surrender, Major.”