Sharpe's Havoc (28 page)

And then he smelt it. And immediately he thought of India and even imagined, for a wild
second, that he was back in that mysterious country for it was there that he had
experienced this smell so often. It was thick and rank and somehow honey-sweet. A smell
that almost made him want to vomit, then that urge passed, but he saw that Perkins, almost as
young as Pendleton, was looking sickly. “Take a deep breath,” Sharpe told him. “You’re going
to need it.”

Vicente, looking as nervous as Perkins, glanced at Sharpe. “Is it … “ he began.

“Yes,” Sharpe said.

It was death.

Vila Real de Zedes had never been a large or a famous village. No pilgrims came to
worship in its church. Saint Joseph might be revered locally, but his influence had never
extended beyond the vineyards, yet for all its insignificance it had not been a bad
village in which to raise children. There was always work in the Savage vineyards, the soil
was fertile and even the poorest house had a vegetable patch. Some of the villagers had
possessed cows, most kept hens and a few reared pigs, though there was no livestock left now.
There had been little authority to persecute the villagers. Father Josefa had been the
most important person in Vila Real de Zedes, other than the English in the Quinta, and
the priest had sometimes been irascible, but he had also taught the children their letters.
He had never been unkind.

And now he was dead. His body, unrecognizable, was in the ashes of the church where
other bodies, shrunken by heat, lay among the charred and fallen rafters. A dead dog was in
the street, a trickle of dried blood extending from its mouth and a cloud of flies buzzing
above the wound in its flank. More flies sounded inside the biggest of the two taverns and
Sharpe pushed open the door with the butt of his rifle and gave an involuntary shudder.
Maria, the girl Harper had liked, was spread naked on the only table left unbroken in the
taproom. She had been pinned to the table by knives thrust through her hands and now the flies
crawled across her bloody belly and breasts. Every wine barrel had been splintered, every
pot smashed and every piece of furniture other than the single table torn apart. Sharpe
slung his rifle and tugged the knives from Maria’s palms so that her white arms flapped as the
blades came free. Perkins stared aghast from the door. “Don’t just stand there,” Sharpe snapped,
“find a blanket, anything, and cover her.”

“Yes, sir.”

Sharpe went back to the street. Vicente had tears in his eyes. There were bodies in half a
dozen houses, blood in every house, but no living folk. Any survivors of Vila Real de Zedes
had fled the village, chased out by the casual brutality of their conquerors. “We should
have stayed here,” Vicente said angrily.

“And died with them?” Sharpe asked.

“They had no one to fight for them!” Vicente said.

“They had Lopes,” Sharpe said, “and he didn’t know how to fight, and if he had then he
wouldn’t have stayed. And if we’d fought for them we’d be dead now and these folk would be just
as dead.”

“We should have stayed,” Vicente insisted.

Sharpe ignored him. “Cooper? Sims?” The two men cocked their rifles. Cooper shot first,
Sharpe counted to ten and then Sims pulled his trigger, Sharpe counted to ten again and then
he fired into the air. It was a signal that Harper could lead the others down from the
hilltop. “Look for spades,” Sharpe said to Vicente.

“Spades?”

“We’re going to bury them.”

The graveyard was a walled enclosure just north of the village and there was a small hut
with sextons’ shovels that Sharpe gave to his men. “Deep enough so the animals don’t scratch
them up,” he ordered, “but not too deep.”

“Why not too deep?” Vicente bridled, thinking that a shallow grave was a callous insult
to the dead.

“Because when the villagers come back,” Sharpe said, “they’ll dig them up to find their
relatives.” He found a large piece of sacking in the shed and he used it to collect the
charred bodies from the church, dragging them one by one to the graveyard. The left arm came
off Father Josefa’s body when Sharpe tried to pull the priest free of the charred cross, but
Sims saw what was happening and came to help roll the shrunken, blackened corpse onto the
sacking.

“I’ll take it, sir,” Sims said, seizing hold of the sacking.

“You don’t have to.”

Sims looked embarrassed. “We’re not going to run, sir,” he blurted out, then looked
fearful as if he expected to get the rough edge of Sharpe’s tongue.

Sharpe looked at him and saw another thief, another drunk, another failure, another
rifleman. Then Sharpe smiled. “Thank you, Sims. Tell Pat Harper to give you some of his holy
water.”

“Holy water?” Sims asked.

“The brandy he keeps in his second canteen. The one he thinks I don’t know about.”

Afterward, when the men who had come down from the hilltop were helping to bury the dead,
Sharpe went back to the church where Harper found him. “Picquets are set, sir.”

“Good.”

“And Sims says I was to give him some brandy.”

“I hope you did.”

“I did, sir, I did. And Mister Vicente, sir, he’s wanting to say a prayer or two.”

“I hope God’s listening.”

“You want to be there?”

“No, Pat.”

“Didn’t think you would.” The big Irishman picked his way through the ashes. Some of the
wreckage still smoked where the altar had stood, but he pushed a hand into the blackened
tangle and pulled out a twisted, black crucifix. It was only four inches high and he laid
it on his left palm and made the sign of the cross. “Mister Vicente’s not happy, sir.”

“I know.”

“He thinks we should have defended the village, but I told him, sir, I told him you don’t
catch the rabbit by killing the dog.”

Sharpe stared into the smoke. “Maybe we should have stayed here.”

“Now you’re talking like an Irishman, sir,” Harper said, “because there’s nothing we
don’t know about lost causes. Sure and we’d all have died. And if you see that the trigger
guard on Gataker’s rifle is hanging loose then don’t give him hell about it. The screws are
worn to buggery.”

Sharpe smiled at Harper’s effort to divert him. “I know we did the right thing, Pat. I just
wish Lieutenant Vicente could see it.”

“He’s a lawyer, sir, can’t see a bloody thing straight. And he’s young. He’d sell his cow for
a drink of milk.”

“We did the right thing,” Sharpe insisted, “but what do we do now?”

Harper tried to straighten the crucifix. “When I was a wee child,” he said, “I got lost. I
was no more then seven, eight maybe. No bigger then Perkins, anyway. There were soldiers near
the village, your lot in red, and to this day I don’t know what the bastards were doing there,
but I ran away from them. They didn’t chase me, but I ran all the same because that’s what you
did when the red bastards showed themselves. I ran and I ran, I did, and I ran until I didn’t
know where the hell I was.”

“So what did you do?”

“I followed a stream,” Harper said, “and came to these two wee houses and my aunty lived
in one and she took me home.”

Sharpe started to laugh and, though it was not really funny, could not stop.

“Maire,” Harper said, “Aunty Maire, rest her soul.” He put the crucifix into a
pocket.

“I wish your Aunty Maire was here, Pat. But we’re not lost.”

“No?”

“We go south. Find a boat. Cross the river. Keep going south.”

“And if the army’s gone from Lisbon?”

“Walk to Gibraltar,” Sharpe said, knowing it would never come to that. If there was peace
then he would be found by someone in authority and sent to the nearest port, and if there was
war then he would find someone to fight. Simple, really, he thought. “But we march at night,
Pat.”

“So we’re still at war, you think?”

“Oh, we’re at war, Pat,” Sharpe said, looking at the wreckage and thinking of Christopher,
“we’re bloody well at war.”

Vicente was staring at the new graves. He nodded when Sharpe said he proposed marching
south during the night, but he did not speak until they were outside the cemetery gates. “I
am going to Porto,” he said.

“You believe there’s been a peace treaty?”

“No,” Vicente said, then shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t know. But I do know Colonel Christopher
and Brigadier Vuillard are probably there. I didn’t fight them here, so I must pursue them
there.”

“So you’ll go to Oporto,” Sharpe said, “and die?”

“Maybe,” Vicente said grandly, “but a man cannot hide from evil.”

“No,” Sharpe said, “but if you fight it, fight it clever.”

“I’m learning how to fight,“ Vicente said, “but I already know how to kill.”

That was a recipe for suicide, Sharpe thought, but he did not argue. “What I’m planning,”
he said instead, “is to go back the way we came. I can find the way easy enough. And once I’m at
Barca d’Avintas I’ll look for a boat. There has to be something that will float.”

“I’m sure there is.”

“So come with me that far,” Sharpe suggested, “because it’s close to Oporto.”

Vicente agreed and his men fell in behind Sharpe’s when they left the village, and Sharpe
was glad of it for the night was pitch black again and despite his confidence that he could
find the way he would have become hopelessly lost if Vicente had not been there. As it was
they made painfully slow progress and eventually rested in the darkest heart of the night
and made better time when the wolf light edged the eastern horizon.

Sharpe was in two minds about going back to Barca d’Avintas. There was a risk, for the
village was perilously close to Oporto, but on the other hand he knew it was a place where
the river was safe to cross, and he reckoned he should be able to find some wreckage from the
huts and houses that his men could fashion into a raft. Vicente agreed, saying that much of
the rest of the Douro valley was a rocky ravine and that Sharpe would face difficulty in
either approaching the river or finding a crossing place. A larger risk was that the
French would be guarding Barca d’Avintas, but Sharpe suspected they would be content with
having destroyed all the boats in the village.

Dawn found them in some wooded hills. They stopped by a stream and made a breakfast of stale
bread and smoked meat so tough that the men joked about re-soling their boots, then grumbled
because Sharpe would not let them light a fire and so make tea. Sharpe carried a crust to the
summit of a nearby hill and searched the landscape with the small telescope. He saw no
enemy, indeed he saw no one at all. A deserted cottage lay further up the valley where the
stream ran and there was a church bell tower a mile or so to the south, but there were no
people. Vicente joined him. “You think there might be French here?”

“I always think that,” Sharpe said.

“And do you think the British have gone home?” Vicente asked.

“No.”

“Why not?”

Sharpe shrugged. “If we wanted to go home,” he said, “we’d have gone after Sir John Moore’s
retreat.”

Vicente stared south. “I know we could not have defended the village,” he said.

“I wish we could have done.”

“It is just that they are my people.” Vicente shrugged.

“I know,” Sharpe said, and he tried to imagine the French army in the dales of Yorkshire or
in the streets of London. He tried to imagine the cottages burning, the alehouses sacked
and the women screaming, but he could not envisage that horror. It seemed oddly
impossible. Harper could doubtless imagine his home being violated, could probably
recall it, but Sharpe could not.

“Why do they do it?” Vicente asked with a genuine note of anguish.

Sharpe collapsed the telescope then scuffed the earth with the toe of his right boot. On the
day after they had climbed to the watchtower he had dried the rain-soaked boots in front of
the fire, but he had left them too close and the leather had cracked. “There are no rules in
war,” he said uncomfortably.

“There are rules,” Vicente insisted.

Sharpe ignored the protest. “Most soldiers aren’t saints. They’re drunks, thieves, rogues.
They’ve failed at everything, so they join the army or else they’re forced to join by some
bastard of a magistrate. Then they’re given a weapon and told to kill. Back home they’d be
hanged for it, but in the army they’re praised for it, and if you don’t hold them hard then they
think any killing is permitted. Those lads,”-he nodded down the hill to the men grouped under
the cork oaks-”know damn well they’ll be punished if they step out of line. But if I let them
off the leash? They’d run this country ragged, then make a mess of Spain and they’d never stop
till someone killed them.” He paused, knowing he had been unfair to his men. “Mind you, I like
them,” he went on. “They’re not the worst, not really, just unlucky, and they’re damn fine
soldiers. I don’t know.” He frowned, embarrassed. “But the Frogs? They don’t have any choice.
It’s called conscription. Some poor bastard is working as a baker or a wheelwright one day
and the next he’s in uniform and being marched half a continent away. They resent it, and
the French don’t flog their soldiers so there’s no way of holding them.”

“Do you flog?”

“Not me.” He thought about telling Vicente that he had been flogged once, long ago, on a hot
parade ground in India, then decided it would sound like boasting. “I just take them behind
a wall and beat them up,” he said instead. “It’s quicker.”

Vicente smiled. “I could not do that.”

“You could always give them a writ instead,” Sharpe said. “I’d rather be beaten up than get
tangled by a lawyer.” Maybe, he thought, if he had beaten Williamson the man might have
settled to authority. Maybe not. “So how far is the river?” he asked.

“Three hours? Not much longer.”

“Bugger all happening here, we might as well keep going.”

“But the French?” Vicente suggested nervously.

“None here, none there.” Sharpe nodded to the south. “No smoke, no birds coming out of trees
like a cat was after them. And you can smell French dragoons a mile off. Their horses all have
saddle sores, they stink like a cesspit.”