Sharpe's Rifles s-6

by Бернард Корнуэлл

  Harper had disappeared. Sharpe turned and ran after his men. The bells were clanging overhead. A trumpet was shrieking its defiance at the sky. He did not know if the Sergeant was safe, or whether he had blocked the entrance to the plaza at the cathedral’s southern flank.

  “Form line! Two ranks!” Sharpe shouted at his desk. Beyond them, in a tumble of panic, men fled from the cathedral’s western transept.

  The first horse pierced itself on a spike. The iron went into the frog of its hoof, and then more horses came. They reared, screamed, and lunged in desperation from the pain. Men fell from saddles. A horse, made frantic with agony, bolted back across the plaza. Another reared so high that it toppled backwards and its rider shouted as he fell under the horse’s collapsing body.

  “Hold your fire!” The Riflemen had formed a line fifteen yards short of the caltrops. It was a race now. The French infantry would be climbing the western steps to flood into the cathedral. It would take at least a minute for them to reach the door from the transept and erupt behind Sharpe’s back. Some of them, seeing the agony of the horses, had come to kick the iron spikes away. They were led by a Sergeant. “Hagman?” Sharpe said. “Kill that bastard!”

  “Sir.” Hagman knelt, aimed, and fired. The Sergeant somersaulted backwards in a jet of blood from his chest. The infantry noticed the Riflemen for the first time. “Fire!” Sharpe shouted.

  The volley was small, but it drove more chaos and pain into the narrow space. “Reload!” There was no point in shouting at the greenjackets to hurry. They knew as well as Sharpe how fragile was the balance between survival and death in this darkening city, and to shout them to speed would merely fluster them.

  Sharpe turned. The last of Vivar’s congregation was running down the steps. A Spanish officer carried the gonfalon that had been hastily drawn into shining loops. Two priests gathered up their skirts and ran eastwards. Louisa appeared on the steps and Sharpe saw two Cazadores bring her a horse. Vivar pulled himself into his own saddle and drew his sword. “They’re in the cathedral!” he shouted at Sharpe.

  “Steady, lads. Fix swords!” As the bayonets were drawn, Sharpe looked around for Harper, but the Irishman was still nowhere to be seen. There were screams within the city. Trumpets were shrill in the evening air. It would be cold tonight. A frost would silver the flagstones where the French would take their revenge for the insults of this day.

  “Steady now, lads!” The caltrops had delayed the enemy and his men were reloaded, but a mass of mounted Frenchmen still waited beyond the spikes that were being frantically cleared by infantry. Carbine bullets cracked above the Riflemen, but the Dragoons fired from the saddle and aimed too hurriedly. Sharpe knew he only had seconds. He cupped his hands. “Sergeant! Sergeant Harper!”

  “Retire, Lieutenant!” Vivar shouted at Sharpe.

  “Sergeant Harper!”

  “Bastard!” The voice came from the top of the steps that led into the southern transept. Sharpe whipped round. After distributing his caltrops, Harper must have known he could not reach Sharpe by running across the cathedral’s western front. Instead he had taken the short cut through the cathedral and now appeared with a French officer in his left hand. “Bastard!” The Irishman was in a fury. “He tried to kill me, the bastard!” He kicked the Frenchman, hit him, then turned and flung the man back into the cathedral’s darkness. Vivar, seeing more shapes beyond the doors, fired a pistol into the transept.

  “Sir!” Hagman warned that the last caltrops were being cleared.

  “Present!” Sharpe shouted. “I thought I’d lost you!” he called out to Harper.

  “Bugger tried to stick a sword into me! In a church, God damn it! A cathedral. Can you credit it, sir?”

  “Jesus Christ! I thought I’d lost you!” Sharpe’s relief at Harper’s survival was heartfelt.

  “Sir!” Hagman warned again.

  Dragoons and infantry were mixed together in the charge that was funnelled into the narrow space beneath the bridge. Swords were lifted, men shouted their war cry, and the French spurred to vengeance. “Fire!” Sharpe called.

  The volley flayed into the narrow space, tumbling horses in blood and pain. A fallen sword clanged and scraped across the stone. The horsemen who followed hacked with their swords to clear a passage through the wounded and dying. Infantry appeared at the top of the cathedral’s southern steps.

  “Run!” Sharpe bellowed.

  Then was the chaos of flight. The Riflemen sprinted across the plaza to the dubious refuge of a narrow street. Louisa was gone ahead and Vivar, surrounded by a knot of his scarlet-coated elite, shouted at Sharpe to follow her. The Cazadores would stay to meet the French attack.

  The Riflemen ran. The retreat from the city had become a mad scramble in the dusk, a plunge downhill through the tight medieval streets. Sharpe led his men into a small plaza decorated with a well and a stone cross. The exits from the plaza were jammed with refugees and he halted his men, formed them into ranks, and allowed the rear rank to tap load their rifles. The men poured in powder, spat the bullet after, then hammered the rifle butt on the ground in the hope that the impact would jar the bullet down. “Present!”

  The rifles, their muzzles weighted with sword bayonets, came up. They could not fire yet, for their aim was blocked by the handful of Cazadores who tried to delay the French Dragoons. Swords clashed in the street with a sound like cracked bells. A Spaniard, blood streaming from his face, spurred away from the fight. A Dragoon screamed as his belly was ripped with a sword.

  “Major!” Sharpe shouted to Vivar that the rifles were ready.

  Vivar slashed at a Frenchman, then turned away from the riposte. “Go! Lieutenant! Go!”

  “Major!”

  A Cazador went down under a French blade. Vivar lunged to wound the Frenchman. It seemed to Sharpe that the Spaniard must be overwhelmed when suddenly a rush of volunteers in their brown tunics erupted behind the Dragoons and attacked them with knives, hammers, muskets, and swords. Vivar wrenched his horse around and shouted at his men to retreat.

  Sharpe had backed his own Riflemen to the eastern edge of the small plaza and now he split them to let the Spaniards through. The volunteers did not want to retreat but Vivar beat them back with the edge of his sabre. Sharpe waited till the plaza was clear and the first enemy appeared at its far side. “Rear rank! Fire!”

  The volley was feeble, but it checked the French rush. “Back!” Sharpe drew his sword, knowing he had cut it too fine.

  The Riflemen followed Vivar into the next street. It was darker now as the day slipped towards a winter’s night. Muskets fired from the windows above Sharpe, but the small volley could not prevent the French from flooding into the narrow street.

  “Behind you!” Harper called.

  Sharpe turned. He screamed his challenge and swung the heavy blade at a horse’s face. The beast swerved, the pig-tailed Dragoon chopped down, but Sharpe had parried quickly and the two swords clanged together. Harper lunged with his bayonet to the horse’s chest and the animal reared, blocking the street, and Sharpe slashed at one of its fetlocks. His sword must have broken bone for, as the horse came down, it collapsed. The Dragoon tried to chop at Sharpe as he fell, but the Rifleman’s sword was hissing up, driven with all his strength, and the steel sliced into the cavalryman’s neck. Blood spurted in a sudden spray that spattered from the gutter to ten feet high on the whitewashed wall of the alley. The broken-legged and screaming horse blocked the street. “Run!” Sharpe shouted.

  The Riflemen ran to the next corner where Vivar waited for them. “That way!” He pointed to the left, then spurred in the other direction with his handful of Cazadores.

  The Riflemen ran past a church, rounded a corner, and found themselves at the top of a steep flight of steps leading to a street that ran behind a stretch of medieval city wall. Vivar must have known the steps would offer safety from the Dragoons’ pursuit, and had sent them to find refuge while he stayed behind to check the French fury.

  Shar
pe ran down the steps, then led his men along the street. He had no idea if Vivar was safe, nor if Louisa had escaped, nor even if the gonfalon had survived the turmoil in the narrow streets. All he could do was take the salvation Vivar had offered. “That bastard was a clever bugger!” Sharpe said to Harper. “Inside the city all the time! Christ, he must have been laughing at us!” Doubtless, after Louisa had seen the Frenchmen parade in the plaza, de l’Eclin and most of his men had simply returned to the rear of the palace while a few hundred of the Dragoons had ridden south. It was clever, and it had led to this shambles. There was no honour in it, none, for the French had broken the truce, but Sharpe had seen what little honour there was in this bitter war between Spain and France.

  “Fighting in a bloody cathedral!” Harper was still indignant.

  “You did for him, anyway.”

  “For him! I did for three of the bastards. Three bastards who won’t fight in a cathedral again.”

  Sharpe could not help but laugh. He had reached a break in the city wall which opened into empty countryside. The ground fell steeply there, leading to a stream that was a slash of silver in the gathering dusk. Refugees were fleeing across the stream, then climbing towards the hills and safety. There were no Frenchmen in sight. Sharpe presumed that the enemy were still embroiled in the streets where Vivar fought his hopeless delaying action. “Load,” he ordered.

  The men stopped and began to load their rifles. Harper, evidently recovered from his indignation at French impiety, checked with his ramrod halfway down the barrel. He began to laugh.

  “Share the joke, Sergeant?” Sharpe said.

  “Have you seen yourself, sir?”

  The men also began to laugh. Sharpe looked down and realized that his trousers, torn already, had ripped clean off his right thigh. He tore at the rotten scraps of cloth until his right leg was virtually naked. “So? You think we can’t beat the bastards half-dressed?”

  “They’ll run away in fright if they see you, sir,” Gataker said.

  “All right, lads.” Sharpe sensed from their laughter that the men knew they were safe. They had escaped the French, the battle was over, and all they needed to do was cross the small valley and climb into the hills. He looked back once, hoping to see Vivar, but the street was empty. Screams, shouts, shots, and the clangour of steel told of the battles which still filled the inner city, but the Riflemen had slipped through the chaos to this safety. Nor was there any merit in returning to the fight. The duty of every man now was to escape. “Straight across the valley, lads! We’ll stop on the far ridge!”

  The greenjackets left the cover of the wall, walking down through the rough, steep pasture which led to the boggy stream where, only this morning, Sharpe had neglected to placate the water spirits. In front of them, and scattered thick throughout the valley, was a mass of refugees. Some were civilians, some wore the ragged brown tunic of Vivar’s volunteers, and a few were Cazadores who had become separated from their squadrons. There was still no sign of Vivar, nor of Louisa, nor of the gonfalon. Two monks, their robes clutched high, waded the stream.

  “Shall we wait, sir?” Harper, anxious for Major Vivar’s safety, wanted to stay by the stream.

  “On the far bank,” Sharpe said. “We can give covering fire from there.”

  Then a trumpet called from the south, and Sharpe turned to find that it was all over. The adventure, the hopes, all the impossible dreams that had come so very close to triumph, were done.

  Because, like gold heated to incandescence, the helmets of the enemy flared in the dying sun. Because three hundred Frenchmen had ridden around the city, Sharpe was trapped, and the day of miracles was done.

  CHAPTER 18

  The Dragoons, who had menaced the west of the city, had ridden around its southern margins to block the eastern escape route. Now they filled the valley to the south where their helmets glowed bright in the day’s last light. They were led by the horseman who wore de l’Eclin’s red pelisse, but who carried a sabre in his right hand.

  The refugees began to run, but the boggy ground made their panicked flight clumsy and slow. Most tried to cross the stream, some went north, while a few ran towards the dubious safety of Sharpe’s Riflemen.

  “Sir?” Harper asked.

  But there was nothing helpful that Sharpe could say in answer. It was over. No safety lay in the tumult which still echoed within the city, nor was there time to cross the stream or retreat northwards. The Rifles were in open ground, trapped by cavalry, and Sharpe must form a rally square and fight the bastards to the end. A soldier might be beaten, but he never grovelled. He would take as many of the triumphant bastards as he could and, in years to come, when French soldiers crouched by camp fires in some remote land, a few would shudder to remember a fight in a northern Spanish valley. “Form up! Three ranks!” Sharpe would fire one volley, then contract into the square. The hooves would thunder past, the blades slash and glitter, and slowly his men would be cut down.

  Sharpe cut at a weed patch with his sword. “I’m not going to surrender, Sergeant.”

  “Never thought you would, sir.”

  “But once we’re broken, the men can give up.”

  “Not if I’m watching them, sir.”

  Sharpe grinned at the big Irishman. “Thank you for everything.”

  “I still say you punch harder than any man I’ve ever known.”

  “I’d forgotten that.” Sharpe laughed. He saw that some of the dismounted Cazadores and volunteers had run to form crude extensions of his three ranks. He wished they had not come, for their clumsiness would only make his final stand more vulnerable, but he would not turn them away. He slashed his sword left and right as though practising for the last moments. The French Dragoons had checked their slow, menacing advance. Their front rank stood motionless a quarter-mile away. It looked a long distance, but Sharpe knew with what cruel speed cavalry could cover the ground when their trumpeter hurled them forward.

  He turned his back on the enemy and looked at his men. “What we should have done, lads, is gone north.”

  There was a moment’s silence, then the greenjackets remembered the argument that had driven Harper to try and kill Sharpe. They laughed.

  “But tonight,” Sharpe said, “you have my permission to get drunk. And in case I don’t have another chance to tell you, you’re the best damned troops I’ve ever fought with.”

  The men recognized the apology for what it was, and cheered. Sharpe thought what a long time it had taken him to earn that cheer, then turned away from the Riflemen so they would not see his pleasure and embarrassment.

  He turned in time to see a knot of horsemen ride from the city. One of them was the Count of Mouromorto, distinctive in his long black coat and tall white boots. Another, in a red dolman jacket and with hair as gold as the Dragoons’ helmets, rode a big black horse. The waiting French Dragoons cheered as Colonel de l’Eclin took his pelisse and colback from the man who had worn them. The Count rode to the rear squadron, the French reserve, while the chasseur took his proper place at the very front of the charge. Sharpe watched as he adjusted the scarlet pelisse on his shoulder, as he crammed the big fur colback on his head, and as he drew the sabre with his left hand. Sharpe prayed that he would see de l’Eclin dead before he himself went down under the hooves and blades of the enemy.

  “Lieutenant!”

  Sharpe turned to see Louisa ride up to the rear of his men. “Go!” He pointed eastwards to where there might be safety. Her horse would give her a speed that was denied to the refugees on foot. “Ride!”

  “Where’s Don Bias?”

  “I don’t know! Now go!”

  “I’m staying!”

  “Sir!” Harper shouted the warning.

  Sharpe turned back. Colonel de l’Eclin’s sabre was raised to start the French advance. There was sodden ground to the right of the Dragoons, and a steep slope to their left, so the charge would be constricted into a channel of firm ground that was about a hundred paces across. A f
ew muskets flickered flame beyond the stream, but the range was too long and the flank Dragoons ignored it.

  Colonel de l’Eclin’s sabre dropped, and the trumpeter sounded the advance. The leading squadron walked forward. When they had gone fifty yards, Sharpe knew, the second French line would start their slow advance. The third line would stay another fifty yards behind. This was the classic cavalry attack, leaving enough space between the lines so that a fallen horse in the front rank did not trip and bring down the horses behind. It was slow at first, but very menacing.

  “Front rank, kneel!” Sharpe said calmly.

  The Dragoons walked their horses, for they wanted to keep their dressing tight. They would accelerate soon, but Sharpe knew they would not spur into a gallop until just seconds before the charge crashed home. Musket shots and screams sounded from the city, evidence that Spaniard still fought Frenchmen in the darkening streets, but that battle was no longer Sharpe’s concern.

  Colonel de l’Eclin raised the sabre in his left hand and the first squadron went into the trot. The trumpet confirmed the order. Sharpe could hear the cavalry now. He could hear the jingle of curb chains, the slap of saddle flaps, and the thump of hooves. A guidon reared above the front rank.

  “Steady, lads, steady.” There was nothing else Sharpe could say. He commanded a ragged line of men who would resist for an instant, then be ridden over by the big horses. “Are you still there, Miss Louisa?”

  “Yes!” Louisa’s nervous voice came from behind the ranks of Riflemen.

  “Then, if you’ll forgive me, bugger ofF!”

  His men laughed. Sharpe could see the Dragoon’s pigtails bouncing beneath the darkening helmets. “Are you still there, Miss Louisa?”

  “Yes!” This time there was defiance in her voice.