Sharpe's Havoc (5 page)

“France must not win,” Luis said harshly.

“There are black and white pieces,” Christopher continued, ignoring his servant’s
protest, “and both obey rules. But who makes those rules, Luis? That is where the power lies.
Not with the players, certainly not with the pieces, but with the man who makes the
rules.”

“France must not win,” Luis said again. “I am a good Portuguese!”

Christopher sighed at his servant’s stupidity and decided to make things simpler for
Luis to understand. “You want to rid Portugal of the French?”

“You know I do!”

“Then serve dinner this afternoon. Be courteous, hide your thoughts and have faith in
me.”

Because Christopher had seen the light and now he would rewrite the rules.

Sharpe stared ahead to where the dragoons had lifted four skiffs from the river and used
them to make a barricade across the road. There was no way around the barricade which
stretched between two houses, for beyond the right-hand house was the river and beyond the
left was the steep hill where the French infantry approached, and there were more French
infantry behind Sharpe, which meant the only way out of the trap was to go straight through
the barricade.

“What do we do, sir?” Harper asked.

Sharpe swore.

“That bad, eh?” Harper unslung his rifle. “We could pick some of those boys off the
barricade there.”

“We could,” Sharpe agreed, but it would only annoy the French, not defeat them. He could
defeat them, he was sure, because his riflemen were good and the enemy’s barricade was
low, but Sharpe was also sure he would lose half his men in the fight and the other half would
still have to escape the pursuit of vengeful horsemen. He could fight, he could win, but he
could not survive the victory.

There really was only one thing to do, but Sharpe was reluctant to say it aloud. He had
never surrendered. The very thought was horrid.

“Fix swords,” he shouted.

His men looked surprised, but they obeyed. They took the long sword bayonets from their
scabbards and slotted them onto the rifle muzzles. Sharpe drew his own sword, a heavy
cavalry blade that was a yard of slaughtering steel. “All right, lads. Four files!”

“Sir?” Harper was puzzled.

“You heard me, Sergeant! Four files! Smartly, now.”

Harper shouted the men into line. The French infantry who had come from the city were
only a hundred paces behind now, too far for an accurate musket shot though one Frenchman
did try and his ball cracked into the whitewashed wall of a cottage beside the road. The
sound seemed to irritate Sharpe. “On the double now!” he snapped. “Advance!”

They trotted down the road toward the newly erected barricade which was two hundred
paces ahead. The river slid gray and swirling to their right while on their left was a field
dotted with the remnants of last year’s haystacks which were small and pointed so that they
looked like bedraggled witches’ hats. A hobbled cow with a broken horn watched them pass.
Some fugitives, despairing of passing the dragoons’ roadblock, had settled in the field to
await their fate.

“Sir?” Harper managed to catch up with Sharpe, who was a dozen paces ahead of his men.

“Sergeant?”

It was always “Sergeant,” Harper noted, when things were grim, never “Patrick” or “Pat.”
“What are we doing, sir?”

“We’re charging that barricade, Sergeant.”

“They’ll fillet our guts, if you’ll pardon me saying so, sir. The buggers will turn us
inside out.”

“I know that,” Sharpe said, “and you know that. But do they know that?”

Harper stared at the dragoons who were leveling their carbines across the keels of the
upturned skiffs. The carbine, like a musket and unlike a rifle, was smoothbore and thus
inaccurate, which meant the dragoons would wait until the last moment to unleash their
volley, and that volley promised to be heavy for still more of the green-coated enemy were
squeezing onto the road behind the barricade and aiming their weapons. “I think they do
know that, sir,” Harper observed.

Sharpe agreed, though he would not say so. He had ordered his men to fix swords because the
sight of fixed bayonets was more frightening than the threat of rifles alone, but the
dragoons did not seem to be worried by the menace of the steel blades. They were crowding
together so that every carbine could join the opening volley and Sharpe knew he would have
to surrender, but he was unwilling to do it without a single shot being fired. He
quickened his pace, reckoning that one of the dragoons would fire at him too soon and that
one shot would be Sharpe’s signal to halt, throw down his sword and so save his men’s lives. The
decision hurt, but it was the only option he had unless God sent a miracle.

“Sir?” Harper struggled to keep up with Sharpe. “They’ll kill you!”

“Get back, Sergeant,” Sharpe said, “that’s an order.” He wanted the dragoons to fire at
him, not at his men.

“They’ll bloody kill you!” Harper said.

“Maybe they’ll turn and run,” Sharpe called back.

“God save Ireland,” Harper said, “and why would they do that?”

“Because God wears a green jacket,” Sharpe snarled, “of course.”

And just then the French turned and ran.

Sharpe had always been lucky. Maybe not in the greater things of life, certainly not in the
nature of his birth to a Cat Lane whore who had died without giving her only son a single
caress, nor in the manner of his upbringing in a London orphanage that cared not a jot for
the children within its grim walls, but in the smaller things, in those moments when success
and failure had been a bullet’s width apart, he had been lucky. It had been good fortune that
took him to the tunnel where the Tippoo Sultan was trapped, and even better fortune that had
decapitated an orderly at Assaye so that Richard Sharpe was riding behind Sir Arthur
Wellesley when that General’s horse was killed by a pike thrust and Sir Arthur was thrown down
among the enemy. All luck, outrageous luck sometimes, but even Sharpe doubted his good
fortune when he saw the dragoons twisting away from the barricade. Was he dead? Dreaming?
Concussed and imagining things? But then he heard the roar of triumph from his men and he
knew he was not dreaming. The enemy really had turned away and Sharpe was going to live and
his men would not have to march as prisoners to France.

He heard the firing then, the stuttering chatter of muskets and realized that the
dragoons had been attacked from their rear. There was powder smoke hanging thick between the
houses that edged the road, and more coming from an orchard halfway up the hill on which the
great white flat-topped block of a building stood, and then Sharpe was at the barricade and he
leaped up onto the first skiff, his foot half sticking in some new tar that had been smeared on
its lower hull. The dragoons were facing away from him, shooting up at the windows, but then
a green-coated man turned and saw Sharpe and shouted a warning. An officer came from the
door of the house beside the river and Sharpe, jumping down from the boat, skewered the man’s
shoulder with his big sword, then shoved him hard against the limewashed wall as the dragoon
who had shouted the warning fired at him. The ball plucked at Sharpe’s heavy pack, then Sharpe
kneed the officer in the groin and turned on the man who had fired at him. That man was going
backward mouthing “non, non,” and Sharpe slammed the sword against his head, drawing blood but
doing more damage with the blade’s sheer weight so that the dazed dragoon fell and was
trampled by riflemen swarming over the low barricade. They were screaming slaughter, deaf
to Harper’s shout to give the dragoons a volley.

Maybe three rifles fired, but the rest of the men kept charging to take their sword
bayonets to an enemy that could not stand against an attack from front and back. The dragoons
had been ambushed by troops coming from a building some fifty yards down the road, troops who
had been hidden in the building and in the garden behind, and the French were now being
attacked from both sides. The small space between the houses was veiled in powder smoke, loud
with screams and the echo of shots, stinking of blood, and Sharpe’s men were fighting with a
ferocity that both astonished and appalled the French. They were dragoons, schooled to
fight with big swords from horseback, and they were not ready for this bloody brawl on foot with
riflemen hardened by years of tavern fights and barrack-room conflicts. The men in
rifle-green jackets were murderous in close combat and the surviving dragoons fled back
to a grassy space on the river bank where their horses were picketed and Sharpe roared at his
men to keep going eastward. “Let them go!” he shouted. “Drop ‘em! Drop ‘em!” The last four
words were those used in the rat pit, the instruction shouted to a terrier trying to kill a
rat that was already dead. “Drop ‘em! Keep going!” There was French infantry close behind,
there were more cavalrymen in Oporto and Sharpe’s priority now was to get as far away from
the city as he possibly could. “Sergeant!”

“I hear you, sir!” Harper shouted and he waded down the alley and hauled Rifleman Tongue
away from a Frenchman. “Come on, Isaiah! Move your bloody bones!”

“I’m killing the bastard, Sergeant, I’m killing the bastard!”

“The bastard’s already dead! Now move!” A brace of carbine bullets rattled in the
alleyway. A woman screamed incessantly in one of the nearby houses. A fleeing dragoon
stumbled over a pile of woven wicker fish traps and sprawled in the house’s backyard where
another Frenchman was lying among a pile of drying washing that he had pulled from a line
as he died. The white sheets were red with his blood. Gataker aimed at a dragoon officer who
had managed to mount his horse, but Harper pulled him away. “Keep running! Keep running!”

Then there was a swarm of blue uniforms to Sharpe’s left and he turned, sword raised, and saw
they were Portuguese. “Friends!” he shouted for the benefit of his riflemen. “Watch out for
the Portuguese!” The Portuguese soldiers were the ones who had saved him from an
ignominious surrender, and now, having ambushed the French from behind, they joined
Sharpe’s men in their headlong flight to the east.

“Keep going!” Harper bawled. Some of the riflemen were panting and they slowed to a walk
until a flurry of carbine shots from the surviving dragoons made them hurry again. Most of
the shots went high, one banged into the road beside Sharpe and ricocheted up into a poplar,
and another struck Tarrant in the hip. The rifleman went down, screaming, and Sharpe
grabbed his collar and kept running, dragging Tarrant with him. The road and river curved
leftwards and there were trees and bushes on its bank. That woodland was not far away, too
close to the city for comfort, but it would provide cover while Sharpe reorganized his
men.

“Get to the trees!” Sharpe yelled. “Get to the trees!”

Tarrant was in pain, shouting protests and leaving a trail of blood on the road. Sharpe
pulled him into the trees and let him drop, then stood beside the road and shouted at his men
to form a line at the wood’s edge. “Count them, Sergeant,” he called to Harper, “count them!”
The Portuguese infantry mingled with the riflemen and began reloading their muskets.
Sharpe unslung his rifle and fired at a cavalryman who was wheeling his horse on the river
bank, ready to pursue. The horse reared, throwing its rider. Other dragoons had drawn their
long straight swords, evidently intent on a vengeful pursuit, but then a French officer
shouted at the cavalrymen to stay where they were. He at least understood that a charge
into thick trees where infantry was loaded and ready was tantamount to suicide. He would
wait for his own infantry to catch up.

Daniel Hagman took out the scissors that had cut Sharpe’s hair and sliced Tarrant’s
breeches away from the wounded hip. Blood spilled down as Hagman cut, then the old man
grimaced. “Reckon he’s lost the joint, sir.”

“He can’t walk?”

“He won’t walk never again,” Hagman said. Tarrant swore viciously. He was one of Sharpe’s
troublemakers, a sullen man from Hertfordshire who never lost a chance to become drunk and
vicious, but when he was sober he was a good marksman who did not lose his head in battle.
“You’ll be all right, Ned,” Hagman told him, “you’ll live.”

“Carry me,” Tarrant appealed to his friend, Williamson.

“Leave him!” Sharpe snapped. “Take his rifle, ammunition and sword.”

“You can’t just leave him here,” Williamson said, and obstructed Hagman so that he could
not unbuckle his friend’s cartridge box.

Sharpe seized Williamson by the shoulder and hauled him away. “I said leave him!” He did not
like it, but he could not be slowed down by the weight of a wounded man, and the French would
tend for Tarrant better than any of Sharpe’s men could. The rifleman would go to a French
army hospital, be treated by French doctors and, if he did not die from gangrene, would
probably be exchanged for a wounded French prisoner. Tarrant would go home, a cripple, and
most likely end in the parish workhouse. Sharpe pushed through the trees to find Harper.
Carbine bullets pattered through the branches, leaving shreds of leaf sifting down the
shafts of sunlight behind them. “Anyone missing?” Sharpe asked Harper.

“No, sir. What happened to Tarrant?”

“Bullet in the hip,” Sharpe said, “he’ll have to stay here.”

“Won’t miss him,” Harper said, though before Sharpe had made the Irishman into a sergeant,
Harper had been a crony of the troublemakers among whom Tarrant had been a ringleader. Now
Harper was the troublemaker’s scourge. It was strange, Sharpe reflected, what three stripes
could do.

Sharpe reloaded his rifle, knelt by a laurel tree, cocked the weapon and stared at the
French. Most of the dragoons were mounted, though a handful were on foot and trying their
luck with their carbines, but at too long a range. But in a minute or two, Sharpe thought, they
would have a hundred infantrymen ready to charge. It was time to go.