Sharpe's Battle

by Bernard Cornwell

  Regulations? No, of course I'm not. So don't tell anyone."

  "Not a word, sir. Never saw a thing, sir, and I'll make sure the lads say the same."

  "And one day," Sharpe said as he stared at the distant figure of Brigadier

  General Loup, "I'll put him against a wall and shoot him."

  "Amen," Harper said, "amen." He turned and looked at the French horse that was still picketed in the settlement. "What do we do with the beast?"

  "We can't take it with us," Sharpe said. The hills were too steep, and he planned to keep to the rocky heights where dragoon horses could not follow.

  "But I'll be damned before I give a serviceable cavalry horse back to the enemy." He cocked his rifle. "I hate to do it."

  "You want me to do it, sir?"

  "No," Sharpe said, though he meant yes for he really did not want to shoot the horse. He did it anyway. The shot echoed back from the hills, fading and crackling while the horse thrashed in its bloody death throes.

  The riflemen covered the Spanish dead with stones and thatch, but left the two

  French soldiers for their own comrades to bury. Then they climbed high into the misty heights to work their way westwards. By nightfall, when they came down into the valley of the River Turones, there was no sign of any pursuit.

  There was no stink of saddle-sore horses, no glint of grey light from grey steel, indeed there had been no sign nor smell of any pursuit all afternoon except just once, just as the light faded and as the first small candle flames flickered yellow in the cottages beside the river, when suddenly a wolf had howled its melancholy cry in the darkening hills.

  Its howl was long and desolate, and the echo lingered.

  And Sharpe shivered.

  CHAPTER 2

  The view from the castle in Ciudad Rodrigo looked across the River Agueda towards the hills where the British forces gathered, yet this night was so dark and wet that nothing was visible except the flicker of two torches burning deep inside an arched tunnel that burrowed through the city's enormous ramparts. The rain flickered silver-red past the flame light to make the cobbles slick. Every few moments a sentry would appear at the entrance of the tunnel and the fiery light would glint off the shining spike of his fixed bayonet, but otherwise there was no sign of life. The tricolour of France flew above the gate, but there was no light to show it flapping dispiritedly in the rain which was being gusted around the castle walls and sometimes even being driven into the deep embrasured window where a man leaned to watch the arch.

  The flickering torchlight was reflected in the thick pebbled lenses of his wire-bound spectacles.

  "Maybe he's not coming," the woman said from the fireplace.

  "If Loup says he will be here," the man answered without turning round, "then he will be here." The man had a remarkably deep voice that belied his appearance for he was slim, almost fragile-looking, with a thin scholarly face, myopic eyes and cheeks pocked with the scars of childhood smallpox. He wore a plain dark-blue uniform with no badges of rank, but Pierre Ducos needed no gaudy chains or stars, no tassels or epaulettes or aiguillettes to signify his authority. Major Ducos was Napoleon's man in Spain and everyone who mattered, from King Joseph downwards, knew it.

  "Loup," the woman said. "It means 'wolf', yes?"

  This time Ducos did turn round. "Your countrymen call him El Lobo," he said,

  "and he frightens them."

  "Superstitious people frighten easily," the woman said scornfully.

  She was tall and thin, and had a face that was memorable rather than beautiful. A hard, clever and singular face, once seen never forgotten, with a full mouth, deep-set eyes and a scornful expression. She was maybe thirty years old, but it was hard to tell for her skin had been so darkened by the sun that it looked like a peasant woman's. Other well-born women took care to keep their skins as pale as chalk and soft as curds, but this woman did not care for fashionable looks nor for fashionable clothes. Her passion was hunting and when she followed her hounds she rode astride like a man and so she dressed like a man: in breeches, boots and spurs. This night she was uniformed as a French hussar with skintight sky-blue breeches that had an intricate pattern of Hungarian lace down the front of the thighs, a plum- coloured dolman with blue cuffs and plaited white-silk cordings and a scarlet pelisse edged with black fur. It was rumoured that Dona Juanita de Elia possessed a uniform from the regiment of every man she had ever slept with and that her wardrobe needed to be as large as most people's parlours. To Major

  Ducos's eyes the Dona Juanita de Elia was nothing but a flamboyant whore and a soldier's plaything, and in Ducos's murky world flamboyance was a lethal liability, but in Juanita's own eyes she was an adventuress and an afrancesada, and any Spaniard willing to side with France in this war was useful to Pierre Ducos. And, he grudgingly allowed, this war-loving adventuress was willing to run great risks for France and so Ducos was willing to treat her with a respect he would not usually accord to women. "Tell me about El Lobo," the Dona Juanita demanded.

  "He's a brigadier of dragoons," Ducos said, "who began his army career as a groom in the royal army. He's brave, he's demanding, he's successful and, above all, he is ruthless." On the whole Ducos had little time for soldiers whom he considered to be romantic fools much given to posturing and gestures, but he approved of Loup. Loup was single-minded, fierce and utterly without illusions, qualities that Ducos himself possessed, and Ducos liked to think that had he ever been a proper soldier, he would have been like Loup. It was true that Loup, like Juanita de Elia, affected a certain flamboyance, but

  Ducos forgave the Brigadier his wolf-fur pretensions because, quite simply, he was the best soldier Ducos had discovered in Spain and the Major was determined that Loup should be properly rewarded. "Loup will one day be a marshal of France," Ducos said, "and the sooner the better."

  "But not if Marshal Masséna can help it?" Juanita asked.

  Ducos grunted. He collected gossip more assiduously than any man, but he disliked confirming it, yet Marshal Masséna's dislike of Loup was so well known in the army that Ducos had no need to dissemble about it. "Soldiers are like stags, madame," Ducos said. "They fight to prove they are the best in their tribe and they dislike their fiercest rivals far more than the beasts that offer them no competition. So I would suggest to you, madame, that the

  Marshal's dislike of Brigadier Loup is confirmation of Loup's genuine abilities." It was also, Ducos thought, a typical piece of wasteful posturing.

  No wonder the war in Spain was taking so long and proving so troublesome when a marshal of France wasted petulance on the best brigadier in the army.

  He turned back to the window as the sound of hooves echoed in the fortress's entrance tunnel. Ducos listened as the challenge was given, then he heard the squeal of the gate hinges opening and a second later he saw a group of grey horsemen appear in the flamelit archway.

  The Dona Juanita de Elia had come to stand beside Ducos. She was so close that he could smell the perfume on her gaudy uniform. "Which one is he?" she asked.

  "The one in front," Ducos replied.

  "He rides well," Juanita de Elia said with grudging respect.

  "A natural horseman," Ducos said. "Not fancy. He doesn't make his horse dance, he makes it fight." He moved away from the woman. He disliked perfume as much as he disliked opinionated whores.

  The two waited in silent awkwardness. Juanita de Elia had long sensed that her weapons did not work on Ducos. She believed he disliked women, but the truth was that Pierre Ducos was oblivious of them. Once in a while he would use a soldier's brothel, but only after a surgeon had provided him with the name of a clean girl. Most of the time he went without such distractions, preferring a monkish dedication to the Emperor's cause. Now he sat at his table and leafed through papers as he tried to ignore the woman's presence. Somewhere in the town a church clock struck nine, then a sergeant's voice echoed from an inner courtyard as a squad of men was marched towards the ramparts. The rain fell relentlessly. Then, a
t last, boots and spurs sounded loud on the stairway leading to Ducos's big chamber and the Dona Juanita looked up expectantly.

  Brigadier Loup did not bother to knock on Ducos's door. He burst in, already fuming with anger. "I lost two men! God damn it! Two good men! Lost to riflemen, Ducos, to British riflemen. Executed! They were put against a wall and shot like vermin!" He had crossed to Ducos's table and helped himself from the decanter of brandy. "I want a price put on the head of their captain,

  Ducos. I want the man's balls in my men's stewpot." He stopped suddenly, checked by the exotic sight of the uniformed woman standing beside the fire.

  For a second Loup had thought the figure in cavalry uniform was an especially effeminate young man, one of the dandified Parisians who spent more money on their tailor than on their horse and weapons, but then he realized that the dandy was a woman and that the cascading black plume was her hair and not a helmet's embellishment. "Is she yours, Ducos?" Loup asked nastily.

  "Monsieur," Ducos said very formally, "allow me to name the Dona Juanita de

  Elia. Madame? This is Brigadier General Guy Loup."

  Brigadier Loup stared at the woman by the fire and what he saw, he liked, and the Dona Juanita de Elia returned the Dragoon General's stare and what she saw, she also liked. She saw a compact, one-eyed man with a brutal, weather- beaten face who wore his grey hair and beard short, and his grey, fur-trimmed uniform like an executioner's costume. The fur glinted with rainwater that had brought out the smell of the pelts, a smell that mingled with the heady aromas of saddles, tobacco, sweat, gun oil, powder and horses. "Brigadier," she said politely.

  "Madame," Loup acknowledged her, then shamelessly looked up and down her skin- tight uniform, "or should it be Colonel?"

  "Brigadier at least," Juanita answered, "if not Maréchal."

  "Two men?" Ducos interrupted the flirtation. "How did you lose two men?"

  Loup told the story of his day. He paced up and down the room as he spoke, biting into an apple he took from Ducos's desk. He told how he had taken a small group of men into the hills to find the fugitives from the village of

  Fuentes de Onoro, and how, having taken his revenge on the Spaniards, he had been surprised by the arrival of the greenjackets. "They were led by a captain called Sharpe," he said.

  "Sharpe," Ducos repeated, then leafed through an immense ledger in which he recorded every scrap of information about the Emperor's enemies. It was

  Ducos's job to know about those enemies and to recommend how they could be destroyed, and his intelligence was as copious as his power. "Sharpe," he said again as he found the entry he sought. "A rifleman, you say? I suspect he may be the same man who captured an eagle at Talavera. Was he with greenjackets only? Or did he have redcoats with him?"

  "He had redcoats."

  "Then it is the same man. For a reason we have never discovered he serves in a red-jacketed battalion." Ducos was adding to his notes in the book that contained similar entries on over five hundred enemy officers. Some of the entries were scored through with a single black line denoting that the men were dead and Ducos sometimes imagined a glorious day when all these enemy heroes, British, Portuguese and Spanish alike, would be black-lined by a rampaging French army. "Captain Sharpe," Ducos now said, "is reckoned a famous man in Wellington's forces. He came up from the ranks, Brigadier, a rare feat in Britain."

  "I don't care if he came up from the jakes, Ducos, I want his scalp and I want his balls."

  Ducos disapproved of such private rivalries, fearing that they interfered with more important duties. He closed the ledger. "Would it not be better," he suggested coldly, "if you allowed me to issue a formal complaint about the execution? Wellington will hardly approve."

  "No," Loup said. "I don't need lawyers taking revenge for me." Loup's anger was not caused by the death of his two men, for death was a risk all soldiers learned to abide, but rather by the manner of their death. Soldiers should die in battle or in bed, not against a wall like common criminals. Loup was also piqued that another soldier had got the better of him. "But if I can't kill him in the next few weeks, Ducos, you can write your damned letter." The permission was grudging. "Soldiers are harder to kill than civilians," Loup went on, "and we've been fighting civilians too long. Now my brigade will have to learn how to destroy uniformed enemies as well."

  "I thought most French soldiers would rather fight other regulars than fight guerrilleros," the Dona Juanita said.

  Loup nodded. "Most do, but not me, madame. I have specialized in fighting the guerrilla."

  "Tell me how," she asked.

  Loup glanced at Ducos as if seeking permission, and Ducos nodded. Ducos was annoyed by the attraction he sensed between these two. It was an attraction as elemental as the lust of a tomcat, a lust so palpable that Ducos almost wrinkled his nose at the stench of it. Leave these two alone for half a minute, he thought, and their uniforms would make a single heap on the floor.

  It was not their lust that offended him, but rather the fact that it distracted them from their proper business. "Go on," he told Loup.

  Loup shrugged as though there was no real secret involved. "I've got the best- trained troops in the army. Better than the Imperial Guard. They fight well, they kill well and they're rewarded well. I keep them separate. They're not billeted with other troops, they don't mix with other troops, and that way no one knows where they are or what they're doing. If you send six hundred men marching from here to Madrid then I guarantee you that every guerrillero between here and Seville will know about it before they leave. But not with my men. We don't tell anyone what we're doing or where we're going, we just go there and do it. And we have our own places to live. I emptied a village of its inhabitants and made it my depot, but we don't just stay there. We travel where we will, sleep where we will, and if guerrilleros attack us they die, and not just them, but their mothers, their children, their priests and their grandchildren die with them. We horrify them, madame, just as they try to horrify us, and by now my wolf pack is more horrifying than the partisans."

  "Good," Juanita said simply.

  "Brigadier Loup's patrol area is remarkably free of partisans," Ducos said in generous tribute.

  "But not entirely free," Loup added grimly. "El Castrador survives, but I'll use his own knife on him yet. Maybe the arrival of the British will encourage him to show his face again."

  "Which is why we are here," Ducos said, taking command of the room. "Our job is to make certain that the British do not stay here, but are sent packing."

  And then, in his deep and almost hypnotic voice, he described the military situation as he comprehended it. Brigadier General Loup, who had spent the last year fighting to keep the passes through the frontier hills free of partisans and who had thus been spared the disasters that had afflicted

  Marshal Masséna's army in Portugal, listened raptly as Ducos told the real story and not the patriotic lies that were peddled in the columns of the

  Moniteur. "Wellington is clever," Ducos admitted. "He's not brilliant, but he is clever and we under-estimated him." The existence of the Lines of Torres

  Vedras had been unknown to the French until they marched within cannon shot of the defences and there they had waited, ever hungrier, ever colder, through a long winter. Now the army was back on the Spanish frontier and waiting for

  Wellington's assault.

  It was an assault that would be hard and bloody because of the two massive fortresses that barred the only passable roads through the frontier mountains.

  Ciudad Rodrigo was the northern fastness and Badajoz the southern. Badajoz had been in Spanish hands till a month before and Masséna's engineers had despaired of ever reducing its massive walls, but Ducos had arranged a huge bribe and the Spanish commander had yielded the keys to the fortress. Now both keys of Spain, Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, were firmly in the Emperor's grip.

  But there was a third border fortress which also lay in French hands. Almeida was inside Portugal and, though it
was not so important as Ciudad Rodrigo or

  Badajoz, and though its massive castle had been destroyed with the neighbouring cathedral in an earth-shattering explosion of gunpowder just the previous year, the town's thick star-shaped walls and its strong French garrison still presented a formidable obstacle. Any British force laying siege to Ciudad Rodrigo would have to use thousands of men to guard against the threat of Almeida's garrison sallying out to raid the supply roads and Ducos reckoned that Wellington would never abide that menace in his army's rear.

  "Wellington's first priority will be to capture Almeida," Ducos said, "and

  Marshal Masséna will do his best to relieve the fortress from the British siege. In other words, Brigadier"-Ducos was speaking more to Loup than to the

  Dona Juanita - "there will be a battle fought close to Almeida. Not much is certain in war, but I think we can be certain of that."

  Loup stared at the map, then nodded agreement. "Unless Marshal Masséna withdraws the garrison?" he said in a tone of contempt suggesting that