Sharpe's Eagle (29 page)

"He's been annoying me, that one, so he has. Been jumping around like a regular little
Napoleon."

Sharpe stared at the hilltop. It was like the paintings of hell he had seen in Portuguese and
Spanish churches. Smoke rolled redly in weird patches across the hilltop, thickly where the
column was pushing deeper through the fires that marked the British lines, and thinly where small
groups fought the skirmishers who tried to clear the hilltop. Hundreds of small fires lit the
battle, muskets pumped smoke and flame into the night, the whole accompanied by the shouts of the
French and the cries of the wounded. The French skirmishers had suffered badly from the Riflemen.
Harper had lined them in the shadows on the hill's edge and they picked off the blue figures who
ran through the fires long before the French were close enough to use their muskets with any
accuracy. Sharpe pulled his own rifle forward and reached down for a cartridge.

"Any problems?"

Harper shook his head and grinned. "Target practice."

"The rest of the company?"

The Sergeant jerked his head backwards. "Most of them are down below with Mr. Knowles, sir. I
told him they weren't needed here."

For an instant Sharpe wondered whether anyone had seen him murder Berry but he dismissed the
thought. He trusted his instinct, an instinct that warned him of the enemy and on this night
every man had been his enemy until Berry had died. No-one had seen him. Harper grunted as he
rammed another bullet into his rifle.

"What happened, sir?"

Sharpe grinned wolfishly and said nothing. He was reliving the instant of Berry's death,
feeling the satisfac-tion, the relief of the pain of Josefina's ordeal. Who had said revenge was
stale and unprofitable? They were wrong. He primed the rifle, cocked it, and slid it forward but
no Voltigeurs were in sight. The battle had passed off to the left, where it flashed and
thundered in the darkness.

"Sir?"

He turned and looked at the Sergeant. He told him, flatly and simply, what had happened and
watched the broad Irish face turn bleak with anger.

"How is she?"

Sharpe shook his head. "She lost a lot of blood. They beat her."

The Sergeant searched the ground in front of him, sifting through the firelight and the humped
shadows, the far musket flashes that could be French or English. When he spoke his voice was
soft. "And the two of them? What will you do?"

"Lieutenant Berry died in tonight's battle."

Harper turned and looked at his Captain, at the blade which lay red beside him, and smiled
slowly. "The other one?"

"Tomorrow."

Harper nodded and turned back to the batde. The French had been held, judging by the position
of the musket flashes, as if in pushing ever deeper into the lines they had marched into a
thickening opposition they at last could not break. Sharpe searched the darkness to his right.
The French must have sent more troops, but there was no sign of them. The ground in front was
bare of movement. He turned round.

"Lieutenant Knowles!"

"Sir!" The voice came from the darkness but was fol-lowed by Knowles' anxious face coming up
the slope. "Sir? You're all right, sir?"

"Like a dog with a bone, Lieutenant." Knowles could not understand Sharpe's seeming content.
Rumours had run through the company since Harper and the Riflemen had returned without the
Captain. "Tell the men to fix bayonets and come up here. It's time we joined in."

Knowles grinned. "Yes, sir."

"How many men do we have?"

"Twenty, sir, not counting the Rifles."

"Good! To work then."

Sharpe stood up and walked onto the hilltop. He waved the Riflemen forward and waited for
Knowles and his group to climb into the light. Sharpe waved left and right with the
sword.

"Skirmish order! Then slowly forward. We're not trying to take on the column but let's flush
out their skirmishers."

The bayonets gleamed red in the firelight, the line walked steadily forward, but the enemy
skirmishers had disappeared. Sharpe took them to a hundred yards from the enemy column and waved
the men down. There was nothing they could do except watch a demonstration of British infantry at
its best. The French had ploughed their way almost to the end of the hill but had been checked by
a Battalion that Sharpe guessed must have marched from the foot of the hill and now stretched
itself ahead of the French like an impassable barrier. The Battalion was in line and firing in
controlled platoon volleys. It was superb. No infantry could stand against Britain's best, and
the Battalion was shredding the column with musketry that rolled up and down the Battalion's
line, the ramrods flashing in unison, the platoons firing in sequence, an irresistible hammering
of close range musket fire that poured into the tight French ranks. The enemy wavered. Each
volley decimated the column's leading ranks. Their commander tried to deploy into line but he was
too late. The men at the back of the column would not go forward into that hail of lead that
rippled methodically and murderously from the British muskets. Groups of blue-coated French began
to melt into the dark; a mounted British officer saw it and raised his sword, the red ranks
cheered and went forward with levelled bayonets and, as suddenly as it had begun, the battle was
done. The French went backwards, stepping over the dead, retreating ever faster from the reaching
blades. The enemy had done well. A single column had so nearly captured the hill, even without
another two columns that had never arrived, but now the French Colonel had to go back, had to
take his men from the musket fire that overwhelmed them. As they drew level with the skirmish
line some of Sharpe's Rifle-men lifted their weapons, but Sharpe shouted to let them go. There
would be killing enough tomorrow.

Sharpe crouched by a fire and wiped the blade free of the sticky blood with a dead Frenchman's
jacket. It was the time for collecting the dead and counting the living. He wanted Gibbons to
worry about Berry, to feel fear in the night, and he felt the elation again of the killing
stroke. From the town came the bells of midnight, and he thought briefly of the girl lying in the
candlelight and he wondered if she thought of him. Harper squatted beside him, his face black
with powder smoke, and held out a bottle of spirits.

"Get some sleep, sir. You need it." Harper grinned briefly. "We have a promise to keep
tomorrow."

Sharpe lifted the bottle towards the Sergeant as if in a toast. "A promise and a half,
Sergeant. A promise and a half."

It was a short, bad night. After the repulse of the French the army rescued the wounded and,
in the thin firelight, searched and piled the dead that could be found. Battal-ions that had
thought themselves safe in an imaginary second line now posted sentries, and the brief night was
broken by frequent rattles of musketry as the nervous picquets imagined fresh enemy columns in
the dark. The bugles sounded at two in the morning, the fires were restored to life, and hungry
men shivered round the flames and listened to the distant French bugles rousing the enemy. At
half past three, when a silvery grey light touched the flanks of the Medellin, Berry's body was
found and carried to the fire, where Simmerson and his officers sipped scalding tea. Gibbons,
appalled at the great wound disfiguring his friend's throat, looked at Sharpe with pale and
suspicious eyes. Sharpe looked back and smiled, saw the suspicion, and then Gibbons turned
abruptly away and shouted for his servant to clear up the blankets. Simmerson flicked a glance
round the officers. "He died a brave death, gentlemen, a brave death."

They all muttered the right words, more concerned with hunger and what was to come than with
the death of a fat Lieutenant, and watched bleakly as the body was stripped of its valuables
before being piled with the scores of dead that would be buried before the sun rose high and made
them offensive. No-one thought it odd that Berry's body had been found so far from the other
dead. The events of the night had been muddled; there were stories that the Germans below the
Medellin had fought a running skirmish with another column and groups of French fugitives had
become lost in the darkness and wandered in the British lines, and the shivering officers assumed
Berry had met such a group.

By four o'clock the army was in position. Hill's Brigades were on the Medellin and the Brigade
Majors lined the Battalions back from the hill crest so that they would be invisible to the
French gunners. The South Essex were on the flank of the hill overlooking the Germans and the
Guards who would defend the flat plain between the Medellin and the Pajar. Sharpe stared at the
town, half hidden in mist, and wondered what was happening to Josefina. He was impatient for the
battle to start, to take his Light Company away from Simmerson and up to the skirmish line that
would form in the mist-shrouded Portina valley. He was surprised that Simmerson had said nothing
to the Battalion. Instead the Colonel sat on his grey horse and stared moodily at the myriad
smoke trails from the French camp that rose and mingled in front of the rising sun. He ignored
Sharpe; he always did, as though the Rifleman was a small nuisance that would be brushed from his
life when his letter was received in London. Gibbons sat beside Simmerson and it suddenly
occurred to Sharpe that the two men were frightened. In front of them the solitary colour drooped
from its staff, beaded with morning moisture, a lonely reminder of the Battalion's disgrace.
Simmerson did not know war, and he was staring at the mist along the Portina, wondering what
would emerge from the whiteness to challenge his Battal-ion. It was not just Sharpe's future that
depended on this battle. If the Battalion did badly then it would stay a Battalion of Detachments
and dwindle away under the onslaught of disease and death until it would simply disappear from
the army list; the Battalion that never was. Simmerson would survive. He would sail home to his I
country estate, take his seat in Parliament, become an armchair expert on the war, but wherever
soldiers met, the names of Simmerson and the South Essex would be scorned. Sharpe grinned to
himself; ironically, on this day, Simmerson needed the Riflemen far more than Sharpe needed the
Colonel. At last the signal came and the Light Companies went forward, spreading themselves into
a thin screen of skirmishers to become the first men to meet the attack. As he walked down the
slope towards the mist Sharpe stared at the Cascajal Hill that was topped with French guns,
almost wheel to wheel, the barrels pointing at the Medellin. Somewhere behind the guns the French
Battalions would be parading into the huge columns that would be thrown at the British line;
behind them there would be cavalry waiting to pour through the opening: more than fifty thousand
Frenchmen preparing to punish the British for their temerity in sending Wellesley's small army
into their Empire. The Light Company walked into the mist, into the private world where
skirmisher would fight Voltigeur, and Sharpe thrust away the thoughts of defeat. It was
unthinkable that Wellesley could lose, that the army might be shattered and sent reeling back to
the sea, that Sharpe's problems, Simmerson's problems, the fate of the South Essex, all. would
become drowned in the disastrous flood of defeat. Harper ran up to him and nodded cheerfully as
he pulled the muzzle stopper from his rifle.

"The weather's hot for us, sir."

Sharpe grimaced. "It will clear in an hour or so." The mist hid everything beyond a hundred
paces and took away the advantage of the long range rifles. Sharpe saw the stream
ahead.

"Far enough. See if Mr Denny is all right."

Harper went off to the right to where Denny should be joining up with the German skirmishers.
Sharpe walked upstream where he suspected the attack would be and found Knowles at the end of the
line. Beyond in the mist he could see the redcoats of the 66th and some Riflemen from the Royal
Americans.

"Lieutenant?"

"Sir?" Knowles was nervously alert, half dreading, half enjoying his first day of real battle.
Sharpe grinned cheerfully at him.

"Any problems?"

"No, sir. Will it be long?" Knowles glanced constantly at the empty far bank of the Portina as
though he expected to see the whole French army suddenly materialise.

"You'll hear the guns first." Sharpe stamped his feet against the cold. "What's the
time?"

Knowles took out his watch, inscribed from his father, and opened the case. "Nearly five,
sir." He went on looking at the ornate watch face with its filigree hand. "Sir?" He sounded
embarrassed.

"Yes?"

"If I die, sir, would you have this?" He held the watch out.

Sharpe pushed the watch back. He wanted to laugh but he shook his head gravely. "You're not
going to die. Who'd take over if I went?"

Knowles looked at him fearfully and Sharpe nodded. "Think about it, Lieutenant. Promotion can
be rapid in battle." He grinned, attempting to dispel Knowles' gloom. "Who knows? If it's a good
enough day we may all end up Generals."

A gun banged on the Cascajal. Knowles' eyes widened as he heard, for the first time, the
rumbling thunder of iron shot in the air. Unseen by the skirmishers the eight-pound ball struck
the crest of the Medellin, bounced over the troops in a spray of dirt and stones, and rolled
harmlessly to rest four hundred yards down the plateau. The sound of the shot echoed flady from
the hills, was muffled by the mist, and died into silence. A hundred thousand men heard it, some
crossed themselves, some prayed, and some just thought fitfully of the storm that was about to
break across the Portina. Knowles waited for another gun but there was silence.

"What was that, sir?"

"A signal to the other French batteries. They'll be reloading the gun." Sharpe imagined the
sponge hissing as it was thrust into the gun, the steam rising from the vent, and then the new
charge and shot being rammed home. "About now, I'd think."