Harper also watched the French. “What happens if they bring a mortar?” he asked.
“We’re buggered,” Sharpe said, “but a lot can happen before a mortar gets here.”
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Sharpe said irritably. He really did not know, any more than he knew what to do. Christopher had been very persuasive and it was only a streak of stubbornness in Sharpe that made him so certain the Colonel was lying. That and the look in Major Dulong’s eyes. “Maybe I’m wrong, Pat, maybe I’m wrong. Trouble is I like it here.”
Harper smiled. “You like it here?”
“I like being away from the army. Captain Hogan’s all right, but the rest? I can’t stand the rest.”
“Jack puddings,” Harper said flatly, meaning officers.
“I’m better on my own,” Sharpe said, “and out here I’m on my own. So we’re staying.”
“Aye,” Harper said, “and I think you’re right.”
“You do?” Sharpe sounded surprised.
“I do,” Harper said, “mind you, my mother never reckoned I was any good at thinking.”
Sharpe laughed. “Go and clean your rifle, Pat.”
Cooper had boiled a can of water and some of the riflemen used it to swill out their weapons’ barrels. Every shot left a little layer of caked powder that would eventually build up and make the rifle unusable, but hot water dissolved the residue. Some riflemen preferred to piss down the barrel. Hagman used the boiling water, then scraped at his barrel with his ramrod. “You want me to clean yours, sir?” he asked Sharpe.
“It’ll wait, Dan,” Sharpe said, then saw Sergeant Macedo and his men come back and he wondered where his own gravediggers were and so he went to the northernmost redoubt from where he could see Harris and Dodd stamping the earth down over Donnelly’s body while Williamson leaned on the spade. “Aren’t you finished?” Sharpe shouted at them. “Hurry!”
“Coming, sir!” Harris called, and he and Dodd picked up their jackets and started up the hill. Williamson hefted the spade, looked as if he was about to follow and then, quite suddenly, turned and ran down the hill.
“Jesus!” Harper appeared beside Sharpe and raised his rifle.
Sharpe pushed it down. He was not trying to save Williamson’s life, but there was a truce on the hill and even a single rifle shot could be construed as breaking the truce and the howitzer could answer the shot while Dodd and Harris were still on the open slope.
“The bastard!” Hagman watched Williamson run recklessly down the hill as though he was trying to outrun the expected bullet. Sharpe felt a terrible sense of failure. He had not liked Williamson, but even so it was the officer who had failed when a man ran. The officer would not get punished, of course, and the man, if he were ever caught, would be shot, but Sharpe knew that this was his failure. It was a reproof to his command.
Harper saw the stricken look on Sharpe’s face and did not understand it. “We’re best off without the bastard, sir,” he said.
Dodd and Harris looked dumbfounded and Harris even turned as if he wanted to chase Williamson until Sharpe called him back. “I should never have sent Williamson to do that job,” he said bitterly.
“Why not?” Harper said. “You weren’t to know he’d run.”
“I don’t like losing men,” Sharpe said bitterly.
“It’s not your fault!” Harper protested.
“Then whose is it?” Sharpe asked angrily. Williamson had vanished into the French ranks, presumably to join Christopher, and the only small consolation was that he had not been able to take his rifle with him. But it was still failure, and Sharpe knew it. “Best get under cover,” he told Harper. “Because they’ll start that damn gun again soon.”
The howitzer fired ten minutes before the hour was up, though as no one on the hilltop possessed a watch they did not realize it. The shell struck a boulder just below the lowest redoubt and ricocheted up into the sky where it exploded in a gout of gray smoke, flame and whistling shards of shattered casing. One scrap of hot iron buried itself in the stock of Dodd’s rifle, the rest rattled on rocks.
Sharpe, still reproaching himself for Williamson’s desertion, was watching the main road in the far valley. There was dust there and he could just make out horsemen riding from the northwest, from the Oporto road. Was it a mortar coming? If it was, he thought, then he would have to think about making an escape. Maybe, if they went fast, they could break through the dragoon cordon to the west and get into the high ground where the rocky terrain would make things hard for horsemen, but it would likely prove a bloody passage for the first half-mile. Unless he could try it at night? But if that was a mortar approaching then it would be in action long before nightfall. He stared at the distant road, cursing the shortcomings of Christopher’s telescope, and persuaded himself that he could see no kind of vehicle, whether gun carriage or mortar wagon, among the horsemen, but they were very far off and he could not be certain.
“Mister Sharpe, sir?” It was Dan Hagman. “Can I have a go at the bastards?”
Sharpe was still brooding over his failure and his first instinct was to tell the old poacher not to waste his time. Then he became aware of the odd atmosphere on the hill. His men were embarrassed because of Williamson. Many of them probably feared that Sharpe, in his anger, would punish them all for one man’s sin, and others, very few, might have wanted to follow Williamson, but most probably felt that the desertion was a reproach to them all. They were a unit, they were friends, they were proud of each other, and one of them had deliberately thrown that comradeship away. Yet now Hagman was offering to restore some of that pride and Sharpe nodded. “Go on, Dan,” he said, “but only you. Only Hagman!” he called to the other riflemen. He knew that they would all love to blaze away at the gun crew, but the distance was prodigious, right at the very end of a rifle’s range, and only Hagman had the skill to even come close.
Sharpe looked again at the distant dust cloud, but the horses had turned onto the smaller track that led to Vila Real de Zedes and, head on, he could not see whether they escorted any vehicle so he trained the glass on the howitzer’s crew and saw they were ramming a new shell down the stubby barrel. “Get under cover!”
Hagman alone stayed in the open. He was loading his rifle, first pouring powder from his horn into the barrel. Most of the time he would have used a cartridge which had powder and ball conveniently wrapped in waxed paper, but for this kind of shot, at seven hundred yards, he would use the high-quality powder carried in the horn. He used slightly more than was provided in a cartridge and, when the barrel was charged, he laid the weapon aside and took out the handful of loose bullets that nestled among the tea leaves at the bottom of his cartridge pouch. The enemy shell went just wide of the watchtower and exploded harmlessly over the steep western slope and, though the noise buffeted the eardrums and the broken casing rattled angrily against the stones, Hagman did not even look up. He was using the middle finger of his right hand to roll the bullets one by one in the palm of his left hand, and when he was sure he had found the most perfectly shaped ball, he put the others away and picked up his rifle again. At the back of the stock there was a small cavity covered with a brass lid. The cavity had two compartments; the larger held the rifle’s cleaning tools while the smaller was filled with patches made of thin and flexible leather that had been smeared with lard. He took one of the patches, closed the brass lid and saw Vicente was watching him closely. He grinned. “Slow old business, sir, isn’t it?”
Now he wrapped the bullet in the patch so that, when the rifle fired, the expanding bullet would force the leather into the barrel’s lands. The leather also stopped any of the gasses escaping past the bullet and so concentrated the powder’s force. He pushed the leather-wrapped ball into the barrel, then used the rammer to force it down. It was hard work and he grimaced with the effort, then nodded his thanks as Sharpe took over. Sharpe put the butt end of the steel ramrod against a rock and eased the rifle slowly forward until he felt t
he bullet crunch against the powder. He took out the ramrod, slid it into the hoops under the barrel and gave the gun back to Hagman who used powder from his horn to prime the pan. He smoothed the priming with a blackened index finger, lowered the frizzen and grinned again at Vicente. “She’s like a woman, sir,” Hagman said, patting the rifle, “take care of her and she’ll take care of you.”
“You’ll notice he let Mister Sharpe do the ramming, sir,” Harper said guilelessly.
Vicente laughed and Sharpe suddenly remembered the horsemen and he snatched up the small telescope and trained it on the road leading into the village, but all that was left of the newcomers was the dust thrown up by their horses’ hooves. They were hidden by the trees around the Quinta and so he could not tell whether the horsemen had brought a mortar. He swore. Well, he would learn soon enough.
Hagman lay on his back, his feet toward the enemy, then pillowed the back of his neck against a rock. His ankles were crossed and he was using the angle between his boots as a rest for the rifle’s muzzle and, because the weapon was just under four feet long, he had to curl his torso awkwardly to bring the stock into his shoulder. He settled at last, the rifle’s brass butt at his shoulder and its barrel running the length of his body and, though the pose looked clumsy, it was favored by marksmen because it held the rifle so rigidly. “Wind, sir?”
“Left to right, Dan,” Sharpe said, “very light.”
“Very light,” Hagman repeated softly, then he pulled back the flint. The swan-neck cock made a slight creaking noise as it compressed the mainspring, then there was a click as the pawl took the strain and Hagman hinged the backsight up as high as it would go, then lined its notch with the blade-sight dovetailed at the muzzle. He had to lower his head awkwardly to see down the barrel. He took a breath, let it half out and held it. The other men on the hilltop also held their breath.
Hagman made some tiny adjustments, edging the barrel to the left and drawing the stock down to give the weapon more elevation. It was not only an impossibly long shot, but he was firing downhill which was notoriously difficult. No one moved. Sharpe was watching the howitzer crew through the telescope. The gunner was just bringing the portfire to the breech and Sharpe knew he should interrupt Hagman’s concentration and order his men to take cover, but just then Hagman pulled his trigger, the crack of the rifle startled birds up from the hillside, smoke wreathed about the rocks and Sharpe saw the gunner spin round and the portfire drop as the man clutched his right thigh. He staggered for a few seconds, then fell.
“Right thigh, Dan,” Sharpe said, knowing that Hagman could not see through the smoke of his rifle, “and you put him down. Under cover! All of you! Quick!” Another gunner had snatched up the portfire.
They scrambled behind rocks and flinched as the shell exploded on the face of a big boulder. Sharpe slapped Hagman’s back. “Unbelievable, Dan!”
“I was aiming for his chest, sir.”
“You spoiled his day, Dan,” Harper said. “You spoiled his bloody day.” The other riflemen were congratulating Hagman. They were proud of him, delighted that the old man was back on his feet and as good as ever. And the shot had somehow compensated for Williamson’s treachery. They were an elite again, they were riflemen.
“Do it again, sir?” Hagman asked Sharpe.
“Why not?” Sharpe said. If a mortar did come then its crew would be frightened if they discovered they were within range of the deadly rifles.
Hagman began the laborious process all over again, but no sooner had he wrapped the next bullet in its leather patch than, to Sharpe’s astonishment, the howitzer’s trail was lifted onto the limber and the gun was dragged away into the trees. For a moment Sharpe was exultant, then he feared that the French were simply taking away the howitzer so that the mortar could use the cleared patch of land. He waited with a heavy sense of dread, but no mortar appeared. No one appeared. Even the infantry who had been posted close to the howitzer had gone back into the trees and, for the first time since Sharpe had retreated to the watchtower, the northern slope was deserted. Dragoons still patrolled to the east and west, but after a half-hour they too rode north toward the village.
“What’s happening?” Vicente asked.
“God knows.”
Then, suddenly, Sharpe saw the whole French force, the gun, the cavalry and the infantry, and they were all marching away down the road from Vila Real de Zedes. They must be going back to Oporto and he gazed, dumbfounded, not daring to believe what he saw. “It’s a trick,” Sharpe said, “has to be.” He gave the telescope to Vicente.
“Maybe it is peace?” Vicente suggested after he had stared at the retreating French. “Maybe the fighting really is over. Why else would they go?”
“They’re going, sir,” Harper said, “that’s all that matters.” He had taken the glass from Vicente and could see a farm wagon loaded with the French wounded. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” he exulted, “but they’re going!”
But why? Was it peace? Had the horsemen, whom Sharpe had feared were escorting a mortar, brought a message instead? An order to retreat? Or was it a trick? Were the French hoping he would go down to the village and so give the dragoons a chance to attack his men on level ground? He was as confused as ever.
“I’m going down,” he said. “Me, Cooper, Harris, Perkins, Cresacre and Sims.” He deliberately named the last two because they had been friends of Williamson and if any men were likely to follow the deserter it was those two and he wanted to show them he still trusted them. “The rest of you stay here.”
“I would like to come,” Vicente said and, when he saw Sharpe was about to refuse, he explained. “The village, senhor. I want to see the village. I want to see what happened to our people.”
Vicente, like Sharpe, took five men; Sergeant Harper and Sergeant Macedo were left in charge on the hilltop, and Sharpe’s patrol set off down the hill. They went past the great fanshaped scorch mark which showed where the howitzer had been fired and Sharpe half expected a volley to blast from the wood, but no gun sounded and then he was under the shade of the trees. He and Cooper led, going stealthily, watching for an ambush among the laurels, birch and oak, but they were undisturbed. They followed the path to the Quinta which had its blue shutters closed against the sun and looked quite undamaged. A tabby cat washed itself on the sun-warmed cobbles beneath the stable arch and paused to stare indignantly at the soldiers, then went back to its ablutions. Sharpe tried the kitchen door, but it was locked. He thought of breaking it down, then decided to leave it and led the men round to the front of the house instead. The front door was locked, the driveway deserted. He backed slowly away from the Quinta, watching the shutters, almost expecting them to be thrown open to loose a blast of musketry, but the big house slept on in the early-afternoon warmth.
“I think it’s empty, sir,” Harris said, though he sounded nervous.
“I reckon you’re right,” Sharpe agreed and he turned and walked on down the drive. The gravel crunched under his boots so he moved to the verge and signaled that his men should do the same. The day was hot and still, even the birds were silent.
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 th
e 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.