Sharpe 3-Book Collection 3: Sharpe's Trafalgar, Sharpe's Prey, Sharpe's Rifles (108 page)

Harper followed him over a ditch and an embankment. The two Riflemen were walking towards a slew of buildings that straggled like a limb from the city’s south-western corner and which could shelter de l’Eclin’s men as they approached. ‘We’ll have to put men in the houses,’ Harper said.

Sharpe seemed not to hear. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘A thousand Dragoons? Who would?’

‘De l’Eclin’s a clever bastard.’ Sharpe was half-talking to himself. ‘A clever, clever bloody bastard. And he’s especially clever when he’s attacking.’ He turned and stared at the city’s barricaded streets. The obstacles were manned by Cazadores and by the brown-coated volunteers who were piling brushwood into fires that could illuminate a night attack. They were doing, in fact, exactly what the French had done the night before, yet surely Colonel de l’Eclin would foresee all these preparations? So what would the Frenchman do? ‘He’s going to be bloody clever, Sergeant, and I don’t know how clever.’

‘He can’t fly,’ Harper said stoically, ‘and he doesn’t have time to dig a bloody tunnel, so he has to come in through one of the streets, doesn’t he?’

The stolid good sense made Sharpe suppose he was seeing danger where there was none. Better, he thought, to rely on his first instincts. ‘He’ll send his cavalry on a feint there,’ he pointed to the smooth western ground, ‘and when he thinks we’re all staring that way, he’ll send dismounted men in from the south. They’ll be ordered to break that barricade,’ he pointed to the street which led from the city to the church, ‘and his cavalry will swerve in behind them.’

Harper turned to judge for himself, and seemed to find Sharpe’s words convincing. ‘And so long as we’re on the hill or in those houses,’ he nodded towards the straggling buildings that lay outside the defences, ‘we’ll murder the bastard.’ The big Irishman picked up a sprig of laurel and twisted the pliant wood in his fingers. ‘But what really worries me, sir, is not holding the bastard off, but what happens when we withdraw? They’ll be flooding into those streets like devils on a spree, so they will.’

Sharpe was also worried about that moment of retreat. Once Vivar’s business in the cathedral was done, the signal would be given and a great mass of people would flee eastwards. There would be volunteers, Riflemen, Cazadores, priests, and whatever townspeople no longer cared to stay under French occupation; all jostling and running into the darkness. Vivar had planned to have his cavalry protect the retreat, but Sharpe knew what savage chaos could overtake his men in the streets when the French Dragoons realized that barricades had been abandoned. He shrugged. ‘We’ll just have to run like hell.’

‘And that’s the truth,’ Harper said gloomily. He tossed away the crumpled twig.

Sharpe stared at the twisted scrap of laurel. ‘Good God!’

‘What have I done now?’

‘Jesus wept!’ Sharpe clicked his fingers. ‘I want half the men in those houses,’ he pointed at the line of buildings which led from the south-western barricade, and enfiladed the southern approach to the city, ‘and the rest on the hill.’ He began running towards the city. ‘I’ll be back, Sergeant!’

‘What’s up with him?’ Hagman asked when the Sergeant returned to the hilltop.

‘The doxie turned him down,’ Harper said with evident satisfaction, ‘so you owes me a shilling, Dan. She’s marrying the Major, so she is.’

‘I thought she was soft as lights on Mr Sharpe!’ Hagman said ruefully.

‘She’s got more sense than to marry him. He ain’t ready for a chain and shackle, is he? She needs someone a bit steady, she does.’

‘But he was sotted on her.’

‘He would be, wouldn’t he? He’ll fall in love with anything in a petticoat. I’ve seen his type before. Got the sense of a half-witted sheep when it comes to women.’ Harper spat. ‘It’s a good job he’s got me to look after him now.’

‘You!’

‘I can handle him, Dan. Just as I can handle you lot. Right, you Protestant scum! The French are coming for supper, so let’s be getting ready for the bastards!’

Newly cleaned rifles pointed south and west. The greenjackets were waiting for the dusk and for the coming of a chasseur.

The idea buzzed in Sharpe’s head as he ran uphill towards the city centre. Colonel de l’Eclin could be clever, but so could the defenders. He stopped in the main plaza and asked a Cazador where Major Vivar might be. The cavalryman pointed to the smaller northern plaza beyond the bridge which joined the bishop’s palace to the cathedral. That plaza was still crammed with people, though instead of yelling defiance at the trapped Frenchmen, the crowd was now eerily quiet. Even the bells had fallen silent.

Sharpe elbowed his way through the crush and saw Vivar standing on a flight of steps which led to the cathedral’s northern transept. Louisa was with him. Sharpe wished she was not there. The memory of his boorish behaviour with the Spaniard embarrassed him, and he knew he should apologize, but the girl’s presence inhibited any such public repentance. Instead he shouted his idea as he forced his way up the crowded steps. ‘Caltrops!’

‘Caltrops?’ Vivar asked. Louisa, unable to translate the unfamiliar word, shrugged.

Sharpe had picked up two wisps of straw as he ran through the city and now, just as Harper had unwittingly twisted the laurel twig, Sharpe twisted the straw. ‘Caltrops! But we haven’t got much time! Can we get the blacksmiths working?’

Vivar stared at the straw, then swore for not thinking of the idea himself. ‘They’ll work!’ He ran down the steps.

Louisa, left with Sharpe, looked at the twisted straw which still meant nothing to her. ‘Caltrops?’

Sharpe scooped some damp mud from the instep of his left boot and rolled it into a ball. He snapped the straw into four lengths, each about three inches long, and he stuck three of them into the mud ball to form a three-pointed star. He laid the star on the flat of his hand and pushed the fourth spike into the mud ball so that it stood vertically. ‘A caltrop,’ he said.

Louisa shook her head. ‘I still don’t understand.’

‘A medieval weapon made of iron. The cleverness of it is that, whatever way it falls, there’s always a spike sticking upwards.’ He demonstrated by turning the caltrop, and Louisa saw how one of the spikes, which had first formed part of the three-pointed star, now jutted upwards.

She understood then. ‘Oh, no!’

‘Oh, yes!’

‘Poor horses!’

‘Poor us, if the horses catch us.’ Sharpe crumpled the straw and mud into a ball that he tossed away. Proper caltrops, made from iron nails which would be fused and hammered in the fire, should be scattered thick on the roadways behind the retreating Riflemen. The spikes would easily pierce the soft frog tissue inside a horse’s hoof walls, and the beasts would rear, twist, plunge, and panic. ‘But the horses recover,’ he assured Louisa, who seemed upset by the simple nastiness of the weapon.

‘How did you know about them?’ she asked.

‘They were used against us in India…’ Sharpe’s voice faded away because, for the first time since he had climbed the cathedral steps, he saw why the crowd was packed so silently in the plaza.

A rough platform had been constructed at its centre; a platform of wooden planks laid across wine vats. On it was a high-backed chair which Sharpe at first took to be a throne.

The impression of royal ceremony was heightened by the strange procession which, flanked by red-uniformed Cazadores, approached the platform. The men in the procession were robed in sulphurous yellow and capped with red conical hats. Each carried a scrap of paper in his clasped hands. ‘The paper,’ Louisa said quietly, ‘is a confession of faith. They’ve been forgiven, you see, but they must still die.’

Sharpe understood then. The tall chair, far from being a throne, was a garotte. On its high back was a metal implement, a collar and screw, that was Spain’s preferred method of execution. It was the first such machine he had seen in Spain.

Priests accompanied the doomed men. ‘They’re all
anfrancesados
,’ Louisa said. ‘Some served as guides to French cavalry, others betrayed partisans.’

‘You intend to watch?’ Sharpe sounded shocked. If Louisa blanched at the thought of pricking a horse’s hoof, how was she to bear watching a man’s neck being broken?

‘I’ve never seen an execution.’

Sharpe glanced down at her. ‘And you want to?’

‘I suspect I shall be forced to see many unfamiliar things in the next years, don’t you?’

The first man was pushed up to the platform where he was forced into the chair. The iron collar was prised around his neck. The sacrist, Father Alzaga, stood beside the executioner. ‘
Pax et misericordia et tranquillitas
!’ He shouted the words into the victim’s ear as the executioner went behind the chair, and shouted them again as the lever which turned the screw was snatched tight. The screw constricted the collar with impressive speed so that, almost before the second Latin injunction was over, the body in the chair jerked up and slumped back. The crowd seemed to sigh.

Louisa turned away. ‘I wish…’ she began, but could not finish.

‘It was very quick,’ Sharpe said in wonderment.

There was a thump as the dead body was pushed off the chair, then a scraping sound as it was dragged off the platform. Louisa, no longer watching, did not speak till after the next shout from Father Alzaga signified that another traitor had met his end. ‘Do you think badly of me, Lieutenant?’

‘For watching an execution?’ Sharpe waited till the second body was released from the collar. ‘Why on earth should I? There are usually more women at a public hanging than men.’

‘I don’t mean that.’

He looked down at her and was instantly embarrassed. ‘I would not think badly of you.’

‘It was that night in the fortress.’ There was a plea in Louisa’s voice, as if she desperately needed Sharpe to understand what had happened. ‘You remember? When Don Blas showed us the gonfalon and told us the tale of the last battle? I think I was trapped then.’

‘Trapped?’

‘I like his nonsense. I was brought up to hate Catholics; to despise them for their ignorance and fear them for their malevolence, but no one ever told me of their glory!’

‘Glory?’

‘I’m bored with plain chapels.’ Louisa watched the executions as she spoke, though Sharpe doubted whether she was even aware that men died on the crude scaffold. ‘I’m bored with being told I’m a sinner and that my salvation depends only on my own dogged repentance. I want, just once, to see the hand of God come in all its glory to touch us. I want a miracle, Lieutenant. I want to feel so very small in front of that miracle, and that doesn’t make any sense to you at all, does it?’

Sharpe watched a man die. ‘You want the gonfalon.’

‘No!’ Louisa was almost scornful. ‘I do not believe for one small second, Lieutenant, that Santiago fetched that flag from heaven. I believe the gonfalon is merely an old banner that one of Don Blas’s ancestors carried into battle. The miracle lies in what the gonfalon does, not in what it is! If we survive today, Lieutenant, then we will have achieved a miracle. But we would not have done it, nor even tried to do it, without the gonfalon!’ She paused, wanting some confirmation from Sharpe, but he said nothing. She shrugged ruefully. ‘You still think it’s all a nonsense, don’t you?’

Still Sharpe said nothing. For him the gonfalon, whether nonsensical or not, was an irrelevance. He had not come to Santiago de Compostela for the gonfalon. He had thought it was for this girl, but that dream was dead. Yet there was something else that had fetched him to this city. He had come to prove that a whoreson Sergeant, patted on the head by a patronizing army and made into a Quartermaster, could be as good, as God-damned bloody good, as any born officer. And that could not be proved without the help of the men in green jackets who waited for the enemy, and Sharpe was suddenly swept with an affection for those Riflemen. It was an affection he had not felt since he had been a Sergeant and had held the power of life and death over a company of redcoats.

A scream jerked his attention back to the plaza where a recalcitrant prisoner fought against the hands which pushed him up to the platform. The man’s fight was useless. He was forced to the garotte and strapped into the chair. The iron was bent around his neck and the collar’s tongue inserted into the slot where the screw would draw it tight. Alzaga made the sign of the cross. ‘
Pax et misericordia et tranquillitas
!’

The prisoner’s yellow-frocked body jerked in a spasm as the collar gripped his neck to break his spine and choke the breath from him. His thin hands scrabbled at the arms of the chair, then the body slumped down. Sharpe supposed that swift death would have been the Count of Mouromorto’s fate if he had not stayed safe inside the French-held palace. ‘Why,’ he asked Louisa suddenly, ‘did the Count stay in the city?’

‘I don’t know. Does it matter?’

Sharpe shrugged. ‘I’ve never seen him apart from de l’Eclin before. And that Colonel is a very clever man.’

‘You’re clever, too,’ Louisa said warmly. ‘How many soldiers know about caltrops?’

Vivar pushed through the crowd and climbed the steps. ‘The forges are being heated. By six o’clock you’ll have a few hundred of the things. Where do you want them?’

‘Just send them to me,’ Sharpe said.

‘When you hear the bells next ring, you’ll know the gonfalon is unfurled. That’s when you can withdraw.’

‘Make it soon!’

‘Shortly after six,’ Vivar said. ‘It can’t be sooner. Have you seen what the French did to the cathedral?’

‘No.’ But nor did Sharpe care. He only cared about a clever French Colonel, a chasseur of the Imperial Guard, then a single rifle shot sounded from the south-west, and he ran.

The shot warned, not of de l’Eclin’s arrival, but of the approach of a Cazador patrol. Their horses were whipped to blood and lather. Vivar, who had returned with Sharpe to discover what had prompted the shot, translated the picquet’s message. ‘They saw French Dragoons.’

‘Where?’

‘About two leagues to the south-west.’

‘How many?’

‘Hundreds.’ Vivar interpreted his patrol’s anxious report. ‘The Frenchmen chased them and they were lucky to escape.’ He listened to more excited words. ‘And they saw the chasseur.’ Vivar smiled. ‘So! We know where they are now. All we must do is hold them out of the city.’

‘Yes.’ Somehow the news that the enemy was at last approaching served to calm Sharpe’s apprehension. Most of that nervousness had been concentrated on Colonel de l’Eclin’s cleverness, but the prosaic knowledge of which road the enemy was on, and how faraway his forces were, made him seem a less fearsome opponent.

Vivar followed the tired horsemen through the gap in the barricade. ‘You hear the hammers?’ he called back.

‘Hammers?’ Sharpe frowned, then did indeed hear the echoing ring of hammers on anvils. ‘Caltrops?’

‘I’ll send them to you, Lieutenant.’ Vivar started up the hill. ‘Enjoy yourselves!’

Sharpe watched the Major walk away, then, on an impulse, he threaded the barricade and followed him up the cobbled street. ‘Sir?’

‘Lieutenant.’

Sharpe made certain he was out of his men’s earshot. ‘I want to apologize for what happened in the tavern, sir, I…’

‘What tavern? I haven’t been in a tavern all day. Tomorrow, maybe, when we’re safely away from these bastards, we’ll find a tavern. But today?’ Vivar’s face was entirely serious. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lieutenant.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

‘I don’t like it when you call me “sir”,’ Vivar smiled. ‘It means you’re not being belligerent. I need you belligerent, Lieutenant. I need to know Frenchmen are going to die.’

‘They’ll die, sir.’

‘You’ve put men in the houses?’ Vivar meant the houses which lay along the road outside the city’s perimeter.

‘Yes, sir.’

‘They can’t defend against an attack from the west there, can they?’

‘It won’t be from the west, sir. We’ll see them to the west first, but they’ll attack from the south.’

It was plain as a pikestaff that Vivar was unhappy with Sharpe’s deployment, but he also had faith in the Rifleman’s skills and that faith made him swallow his protest. ‘You’re a typical British soldier,’ he said instead, ‘talking of taverns when there’s work to do.’ He laughed and turned away.

Feeling shriven, Sharpe went back to the fortified hilltop where, behind a brushwood breastwork strung between tree stumps, two dozen Riflemen waited. They had a fine view from the hill-crest, but Sharpe had no doubt that, once the enemy committed himself to the attack, this strong picquet would go down to the houses where the rest of his men waited. The attack would be from the south, not the west. ‘You heard the Major!’ he warned his Riflemen. ‘The bastards are coming! They’ll be here in another hour.’

In fact it took nearer three hours. Three hours of increasing worry that the Dragoons were hatching wickedness, and three hours during which the first clinking sacks of caltrops were delivered to the hilltop. Only then did the two-man picquet of Cazadores which had been posted at the brink of the dead ground rowel their horses back to the city. ‘
Dragons! Dragons
!’ They made gestures over their heads to imitate the shape of the French helmets, and pointed west to the dead ground.

‘
Si
!’ Sharpe shouted, ‘
Gracias
!’

The Riflemen, some of whom had been laughing over the wicked small spikes of the caltrops, went back to their barricades. The landscape stayed empty. Sharpe looked south, expecting to see the other close picquet withdrawing, but there was no sign of the Cazadores who had been posted to guard the southern approach to the city.

‘Bloody hell!’ Hagman spat in horror at the sudden smell which came across the grassland. It was the rancid stench of saddle and crupper sores that came on the chill west wind from the dead ground. The Riflemen wrinkled their noses against the foul odour.

Sharpe watched the innocent and empty scene which hid the attackers. Doubtless the French officers, concealed by the ragged bushes at the valley’s edge, were watching the city. Behind those officers the Dragoons would be preparing for battle. He imagined helmets being crammed onto pigtailed heads, and long swords scraping out of metal scabbards. The horses, knowing what was to come, would be pawing the ground. Men would be nervously shortening stirrup leathers or wiping sweat from their reins. Sharpe wondered if he had been wrong; if, instead of feinting from the west and attacking from the south, the French would simply charge to the barricades and then just claw at the defences.

‘Jesus Christ!’ The blasphemy was torn from Hagman as the hidden valley suddenly sprouted a line of cavalry; a great line of Dragoons who trotted forward with billowing cloaks and drawn swords. They had taken the cloth covers from their helmets so that the gold-coloured metal shone in the afternoon light. ‘There’s thousands of the buggers!’ Hagman pushed his rifle forward.

‘Don’t fire!’ Sharpe called. He did not want the Riflemen to fire for fear that they would trigger the fingers of the Cazadores behind the barricades. The Spanish muskets and carbines, being smooth-bored, were far less accurate than the rifles, and a volley fired at this distance was a volley wasted.

Sharpe could have saved his breath for, within seconds of the cavalry’s appearance, the first muskets fired. He swore, turned, and saw that the city’s roofs were crammed with civilians who wanted to kill the French. Immediately the first shots sounded, so all the men behind the barricades began to fire. A huge volley crackled and spat flames, smoke belched to hide the city’s flank, and scarce a single Frenchman fell. The range, over three hundred yards, was hopelessly long. Even if a bullet struck it was likely to be spent, and would bounce harmlessly off a thick uniform coat or a horse’s winter pelt.

The horsemen checked their slow advance. Sharpe looked for de l’Eclin’s red pelisse and could not see it. He mentally divided the line into quarters and made a swift count of one quarter, then multiplied the result by four to reach a total of three hundred. This was not the attack. This was a display of strength, spread into an impressive line, but only meant to draw eyes westward. ‘Watch the south!’ Sharpe called to his men. ‘Watch the south!’

The firing from the city had drawn Sergeant Harper up from the buildings that guarded the southern approach. He stared at the line of Dragoons and whistled. ‘That’s a rare lot of mischief, sir.’

‘Only three hundred men,’ Sharpe said calmly.

‘Is that all, now?’

A French officer drew his sword and cantered forward. After a few strides he spurred his horse into a gallop and curved its path so that he would swoop within a hundred yards of the city’s defence. Muskets crackled from the barricades, but he galloped safe through the wild shots. Another officer started forward, and Sharpe guessed the Frenchmen would keep tantalizing the defenders until the real attack erupted.

Hagman pulled back his rifle cock as the second French officer spurred to full speed. ‘Can I teach the bugger a lesson, sir?’

‘No. Let them be. This is just a fake. They think it’s working, so let them play.’

Minutes passed. A whole squadron of Dragoons trotted down the front of the line, then reversed their path to gallop derisively back. Their defiance prompted another huge volley to ripple down the city’s western buildings, and Sharpe saw the ground flecked by the strike of the balls and knew that the Spaniards’ shots were falling short. A second squadron, holding a guidon high, trotted northwards. Some of the stationary Frenchmen sheathed their swords and fired carbines from the saddle, and every French shot provoked an answering and wasteful volley from the city.

Another officer displayed his bravery by galloping as close as he dared to the city’s defences. This one had less luck. His horse went down in a flurry of blood and mud. A great cheer went up from the barricades, but the Frenchman slashed his saddle free and ran safely back towards his comrades. Sharpe admired the man, but schooled himself to keep watching the south.

South! That was where the attack would come, not here! De l’Eclin’s absence from the west meant that the chasseur must be with the men who crept about the city’s southern flank. Sharpe was sure of it now. The French were waiting for the sun to sink even lower so that the shadows would be long in the broken southern ground. In the meantime this western diversion was calculated to stretch the defenders’ nerves and waste the city’s powder, but the attack would come from the south; Sharpe knew it, and he stared obsessively south where nothing moved among the falling ground. Somewhere beyond that ground was the southern picquet of mounted Cazadores, and he became obsessed that the Spaniards had been overwhelmed by a French attack. There could be seven hundred Dragoons hidden to the south. He wondered whether to send a patrol of Riflemen to explore the shadows.

‘Sir?’ Harper had stayed on the hilltop and now called urgently. ‘Sir?’

Sharpe turned back to the west, and swore.

Another squadron of Dragoons had come from the dead ground, and this one was led by a horseman wearing a red pelisse and a black fur colback. A horseman on a big black horse. De l’Eclin. Not to the south, where the bulk of Sharpe’s Riflemen were deployed, but to the west where the Frenchman could wait until the sinking sun was a dazzling and blinding ball of fire in the defenders’ eyes.

‘Do I pull the lads out of the buildings?’ Harper asked nervously.

‘Wait.’ Sharpe was tempted by the thought that de l’Eclin was clever enough to make himself a part of the deception.

The French waited. Why, Sharpe wondered, if this was their main attack, would they signal it so obviously? He looked south again, seeing how the shadows darkened and lengthened. He stared at the rutted road and scanned the hedgerows. Something moved in a shadow; moved again, and Sharpe clapped his hands in triumph. ‘There!’

The Riflemen twisted to look.

‘Cazadores, sir.’ Harper, knowing that he disappointed Sharpe’s expectations, sounded subdued.

Sharpe pulled open his telescope. The approaching men were in Spanish uniform, suggesting that they were either the southern picquet bringing news or else one of the parties that had gone south-east to break down the bridges over the river. Or perhaps they were disguised Frenchmen? Sharpe looked back at the chasseur, but de l’Eclin was not moving. There was something very threatening in his utter stillness; something that spoke of a rampant and chilling confidence.

Sharpe obstinately clung to his certainty. He knew that his men no longer believed him, that they prepared themselves to fight the enemy who paraded so confidently in the west, but he could not surrender his obsession with the south. Nor could he rid himself of the conviction that de l’Eclin was too subtle a soldier to put all his hopes in a straightforward and unsubtle attack.

Sharpe opened his telescope to inspect the horsemen who came slowly from the south. He swore softly. They were Spaniards. He recognized one of Vivar’s Sergeants who had white side-whiskers. The mud on the horses’ legs and the picks strapped to the Cazadores’ saddles showed that they were a returning bridge-breaking party.

‘Damn. Bloody hell and bloody damnation!’ He had been wrong, utterly wrong! The Spaniards who approached from the south had just ridden clean through an area which should have been rife with de l’Eclin’s seven hundred missing men. Sharpe had been too clever by half! ‘Fetch the men out of the houses, Sergeant.’

Harper, relieved at the order, ran down the slope and Sharpe turned his glass back to the west. Just as he settled the long tube and adjusted the barrels to focus the image, Colonel de l’Eclin drew his sabre and Sharpe was momentarily dazzled by the reflection of sunlight from the curved steel.

He blinked the brightness away, remembering the moment when de l’Eclin had so nearly cut him down by the bridge. It seemed so long ago now; before he had met Vivar and Louisa. Sharpe remembered the black horse charging and his astonishment as the superbly trained beast had swerved right to allow the Colonel to hack down with a left-handed stroke. A man did not expect to face a cack-handed swordsman, and perhaps that explained why so many soldiers were superstitious of fighting against a left-handed opponent.

Sharpe peered through the telescope again. Colonel de l’Eclin was resting his curved blade on his saddle pommel, waiting. The horses behind him moved restlessly. The sun was sinking and reddening. Soon a flag would be unfurled in Santiago’s cathedral, and the faithful would plead with a dead saint to come to their country’s aid. Meanwhile, a soldier of the Emperor’s favourite elite waited for the charge that would break the city’s defences. The feint and the attack, Sharpe realized, would both come from the west. These three hundred horsemen would draw the defenders’ fire while the rest of the Dragoons, hidden in the dead ground, prepared a sudden lunge that would burst from the fog of powder smoke like a thunderbolt.

Harper was urging the Riflemen uphill. ‘Where do you want them, sir?’

But Sharpe did not answer. He was watching Colonel de l’Eclin who cut the sabre in flashing practice strokes, as though he was bored. The sun’s reflection from the gleaming blade provoked a ragged and inaccurate volley from the city’s defenders. De l’Eclin ignored it. He was waiting for the sun to become a weapon of awesome power, dazzling the defenders, and that moment was very close.

‘Sir?’ Harper insisted.

But still Sharpe did not answer for, at that very instant, he had a new certainty. He knew at last what the French planned. He had been wrong about the southern attack, but if he was wrong now then the city, the gonfalon, and all his own men would be lost. All would be lost. He felt the temptation to ignore the new knowledge, but to hesitate was fatal and the decision must be taken. He slammed the telescope shut and pushed it into his pocket. He kicked the sacks of caltrops. ‘Bring them, and follow me. All of you!’