“I’ve enough, sir, thank you, sir.”
“Why do you need…” the general began asking, then stopped abruptly because a gun had fired from the Fort of San Luis. The garrison had at last woken up to what was happening in the marsh and, as the bellow of the gun faded, Sharpe heard musket balls whistle overhead. That meant the cannon had been loaded with canister or grapeshot. The sound of the cannon had scarcely gone silent when the smoke of its shot was lit by three violent explosions of red light as more guns slashed their shots from the embrasures. A round shot screamed just above the general’s head and a swarm of musket balls seethed across the marsh. “They won’t use shell,” Sharpe told Harper, “because they don’t want to set the rafts alight themselves.”
“That’s not much of a comfort, sir,” Harper said, “considering they’re aiming their guns straight at us.”
“They’re just firing at the camp,” Sharpe said.
“And we happen to be in the camp, sir.”
Then the guns of the San José Fort opened on the northern bank. They were much farther away and the grapeshot sighed in the dark rather than hissed or whistled. A round shot landed in the creek and splashed water over the nearest raft. The guns’ flashes were to the north and south now, lighting the night with sudden lurid flares that glowed on the writhing smoke, then faded, but leaving Sharpe dazzled. He knew he should not have come, nor indeed should Sir Thomas have come. A lieutenant general had no business joining a raiding party that should have been led by a major or, at most, a lieutenant colonel. But Sir Thomas was plainly a man who could not resist danger. The general was gazing south, trying to see in the intermittent light of the cannons’ muzzle flashes whether any French infantry had sallied from San Luis. “Sharpe!” he called.
“Sir?”
“Captain Vetch tells me the engineers are making fine time. Go back to the lighters, will you? You’ll find a marine captain there, name of Collins. Tell him we’ll be sounding the withdrawal in about twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour. Remember the password and countersign?”
“Balgowan and Perthshire, sir.”
“Good man. Off you go. And I haven’t forgotten you need a favor from me! We’ll talk about it over breakfast.”
Sharpe led Harper back along the creek. The marines challenged them with the password and Sharpe called the countersign. Captain Collins proved to be a stout man who looked askance at the score of prisoners who had been put under his charge. “What am I supposed to do with them?” he asked plaintively. “There’s no room in the lighters to take them back.”
“Then we’ll leave them here,” Sharpe said. He delivered the general’s message, then stood beside Collins and watched the cannon flashes. One French round shot struck the remains of a campfire so that embers, sparks, and flames exploded thirty or forty feet into the air. Some burning shards landed on the tents and started small fires that illuminated the cumbersome rafts.
“Don’t like fighting at night,” Collins admitted.
“It’s not easy,” Sharpe said. Every shadow seemed to move and the marshland was full of shadows cast by the fires. He remembered the night before Talavera, and how he had discovered the French coming up the hill. That had been a mad night of confusion, but tonight, at least, the enemy seemed to be supine. The fortress artillery still fired, but the grape and round shot were now going well to Sharpe’s left.
“Two of the buggers came here,” Collins said. “Both on horseback! I know we haven’t got any horses, but I still thought they might have been a pair of our lads who’d captured a couple. They rode up to me, calm as you like, and then galloped off. We never fired a shot. One of them even called good evening as he went, the insolent bastard.”
So the French, Sharpe thought, knew that the lighters were well downstream of the camp, and knew, moreover, that they were lightly guarded by a small picquet of marines. “If you don’t mind me suggesting it,” Sharpe said, “I’d move the lighters upstream.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s a big gap between you and the Irish boys.”
“We had to land here,” Collins said. “We couldn’t row right up to the camp, could we?”
“You could get up there now,” Sharpe said, nodding at the sailors who waited on the thwarts.
“My job is to guard the boats,” Collins said heavily. “I don’t command them.”
“So who does?”
A naval lieutenant commanded the lighters, but he had evidently gone upstream on board the fifth boat and was now with the engineers, and Collins, with no direct orders, would not risk moving the two lighters on his own initiative. He seemed insulted that Sharpe had even suggested it. “I shall wait for orders,” he said indignantly.
“In that case we’ll make a picquet for you,” Sharpe said. “We’ll be out there.” He nodded southward. “Warn your lads not to shoot us when we come back.”
Collins did not reply. Sharpe told Harper to drop the haversack of smoke balls in the general’s lighter, then took him southward. “Keep a lookout, Pat.”
“You think the French will come?”
“They can’t just sit there and let us burn the rafts, can they?”
“They’ve been dozy so far, sir.”
They crouched in the reeds. The small wind was coming from the far ocean and it brought the smell of salt from the pans across the bay. Sharpe could see the reflection of the city’s lights winking and shaking on the water. The gunfire from the forts punctured the night, but from this distance it was hard to tell if the shots were doing any damage in the captured camps. It was hard to see anything. The men from Dublin and Hampshire were lying flat and the engineers were busy in the shadows on the rafts. “If I were the Crapauds,” Sharpe said, “I wouldn’t worry about the rafts. I’d come and take these lighters. That would strand us all here, wouldn’t it? They’ll pick up a couple of hundred prisoners including a lieutenant general. Not a bad night’s work for a dozy pack of bastards, eh?”
“You’re not the Crapauds, are you, sir? They’re probably getting drunk. Letting their gunners do the work.”
“They can afford to lose the fire rafts,” Sharpe went on, “if they capture five lighters. They can use the lighters instead of the rafts.”
“We’ll be gone soon, sir,” Harper said consolingly. “No need to worry.”
“Let’s hope so.”
They fell silent. Marsh birds, woken by the firing, cried forlorn in the dark. “So what are we doing in the city?” Harper asked after a while.
“There’s some bastards that have got some letters and we have to buy them back,” Sharpe said. “Or at least we have to make sure no one does anything nasty while they are bought back, and if it all goes wrong, which it will, we’re going to have to steal the bloody things.”
“Letters? Not gold?”
“Not gold, Pat.”
“And it will go wrong?”
“Of course it will. We’re dealing with blackmailers. They never settle for the first payment, do they? They always come back for more, so we’re probably going to have to kill the bastards before it’s all over.”
“Whose letters are they?”
“Some whore wrote them,” Sharpe said vaguely. He supposed that Harper would learn the truth soon enough, but Sharpe liked Henry Wellesley enough not to spread the man’s shame even wider. “It should be easy enough,” he went on, “except that the Spaniards won’t like what we’re doing. If we get caught they’ll arrest us. Either that or shoot us.”
“Arrest us?”
“We’ll just have to be clever, Pat.”
“That’s all right then,” Harper said. “We don’t have a problem, do we?”
Sharpe smiled. The wind stirred the reeds. The tide was still. The guns were firing steadily, their shots thumping in the marsh or churning the creek. “I wish the bloody 8th was here,” Sharpe said softly.
“The Leather-hats?” Harper asked, thinking Sharpe meant a regiment from Cheshire.
“No. The French
8th, Pat. The bastards we met up the river. The ones that took poor Lieutenant Bullen prisoner. They’ve got to be coming back here, don’t they? They can’t reach Badajoz now, not without a bridge. I want to meet them again. That bloody Colonel Vandal. I’m going to shoot him in the skull, the bastard.”
“You’ll find him, sir.”
“Maybe. But not here. We’ll be gone in a week. But one day, Pat, I’ll find that bastard and murder him for what he did to Lieutenant Bullen.”
Harper did not respond. Instead he laid a hand on Sharpe’s sleeve and Sharpe, at the same instant, heard the rustle of reeds. It was not the sound of the small wind stirring the plants, but more regular. Like footsteps. And it was close. “See anything?” he whispered.
“No. Yes.”
Sharpe saw them then. Or he saw shadows running at a crouch. Then there was the glint of reflected light from a piece of metal, perhaps a musket muzzle. The shadows stopped so that they melded into the darkness, but Sharpe saw more men moving beyond. How many? Twenty? No, double that. He leaned close to Harper. “Volley gun,” he breathed into the sergeant’s ear. “Then we go to the right. We run like hell for thirty paces, then drop.”
Harper raised the volley gun slowly, very slowly. Then, with the stock against his right shoulder, he cocked it. The lock’s pawl made a click as it engaged and the sound carried to the Frenchmen and Sharpe saw the pale faces turn toward him and just then Harper pulled the trigger and the gun flooded the marsh with noise and lit it with the burst of muzzle flashes. Smoke hid Sharpe as he took off running. He counted the paces and, at thirty, dropped flat. He could hear a man moaning. Two muskets fired, then a voice shouted a command, and no more guns sounded. Harper dropped beside him. “Rifles next,” Sharpe said. “Then we go to the boats.”
He could hear the Frenchmen hissing to one another. They had been hit hard by the seven bullets and they were doubtless talking about their casualties, but then they fell silent and Sharpe could see them more clearly now for they were suddenly outlined against the muzzle flames of the cannons firing from the fort. He got to one knee and aimed his rifle. “Ready?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fire.”
The two rifles spat toward the shadows. Sharpe had no idea if either bullet struck. All he knew was that the French were trying to take the lighters, they were perilously close to the creek, and the shots would have raised the alarm. He hoped the marine captain would have had the initiative to order the boats upstream. “Come on,” he said, and they ran clumsily, half-tripping on tussocks, and he sensed that the French had cast caution away and were running to his right. “Move the boats!” Sharpe shouted at the marine picquet. “Move the boats!” His head was all pain, but he had to ignore it. French muskets crashed in the night. A bullet thumped into mud close to Harper’s feet just as the marines fired a ragged volley into the dark.
The sudden outburst of musketry had alerted the sailors and they had cut the lines to the boarding grapnels they were using as anchors and then shoved the lighters away from the bank, but the ponderous boats moved painfully slowly. The one farthest from Sharpe made better progress, but the nearer one seemed to be half-grounded. More French muskets banged, coughing out smoke in which Sharpe saw the glint of bayonets. The outnumbered marines scrambled aboard the nearest lighter as the French reached the bank. A marine fired and a blue-coated Frenchman was hurled back and two others closed on the lighter and rammed their bayonets at sailors who were trying to pole the lighter off the bank with their oars. The attackers grabbed the oars. The French prisoners who had been under the guard were free now and, though unarmed, were also trying to board the lighter. A pistol fired, its report crisper than a musket. Then a dozen heavier crashes sounded and Sharpe guessed the sailors had been issued with the heavy pistols used by boarding parties. They had been issued with cutlasses too, though doubtless none had expected to use them, but now the sailors were hacking at men scrambling over the lighter’s gunwale.
Sharpe was twenty yards away, crouching at the creek’s edge. He told himself that this was not his fight, that his responsibility was back in the city whose lights shimmered across the wide bay. But he had six smoke balls aboard that threatened lighter and he wanted them, and besides, if the French took even one lighter then it would make Sir Thomas’s withdrawal almost impossible. “We’re going to have to drive the buggers away from the boat,” Sharpe said.
“There must be fifty of the bastards, sir. More.”
“Plenty of our lads still fighting,” Sharpe said. “We’ll just scare the buggers. Maybe they’ll run.” He stood, slung the unloaded rifle on his back, and drew his sword.
“God save Ireland,” Harper said.
Army regulations decreed that Sharpe, as a skirmishing officer, should be armed with a cavalry saber, but he had never liked the weapon. The saber’s curve made it good for slashing, but in truth most officers wore the blades as mere decoration. He much preferred the heavy cavalry trooper’s sword that was one of the longest manufactured. The blade was straight, almost a yard of Birmingham steel. The cavalry complained constantly of the weapon. It did not keep an edge, it was too heavy in the blade, and the asymmetrical point made it ineffective. Sharpe had ground down the back blade to make the point symmetrical and he liked the weapon’s weight that made the sword into an effective club. He and Harper splashed into the creek’s shallows and came at the French from their left. The blue-coated men were not expecting an attack and may even have thought the two dark-uniformed men were French, for none turned to oppose them. These men were the French laggards, those unwilling to plunge into the creek and fight against the marines and sailors, and none wanted a fight. Some were reloading their muskets, but most just watched the struggle for the lighter as Sharpe and Harper hit them. Sharpe lunged the sword at a throat and the man fell away, his ramrod clattering in his musket’s barrel. Sharpe struck again. Harper was thrusting the sword bayonet and bellowing in Gaelic. A French bayonet glinted to Sharpe’s right and he swung the sword hard, thumping its blunt edge against a man’s skull, and suddenly there was no immediate enemy in front, just a stretch of water and a knot of Frenchmen trying to board the lighter’s bows that was being defended by marines with cutlasses and bayonets. Sharpe waded into the creek and thrust the sword at a man’s spine, and knew he had taken too big a chance because the men assailing the lighter turned on him ferociously. A bayonet slashed into his jacket and became entangled there. He cut sideways just as Harper arrived beside him.
Harper was screaming incoherently now. He drove his rifle butt into a man’s face, but more Frenchmen were coming and Sharpe dragged Harper back from their blades. Four men were attacking them and these were not the laggards. These were men who wanted to kill and he could see their bared teeth and their long blades. He swept the sword in a massive haymaking blow that deflected two bayonet thrusts, then stepped back again. Harper was beside him, and the Frenchmen pressed hard, thinking they had easy victims. At least, Sharpe thought, the enemy had no loaded muskets. Just then a gun went off and the muzzle flash blinded him and thick smoke engulfed him. But the bullet went God knows where, and Sharpe instinctively twitched from it and fell sideways into the creek. The French must have thought he was dead because they ignored him and lunged at Harper who thrust his sword bayonet hard into a man’s eyes just as the Irish struck.
Major Gough had brought his company back to the creek and the first Sharpe knew of their coming was a volley that drowned the marsh in noise. After that came the screams of the attacking redcoats. They came with bayonets and fury. “Faugh a ballagh!” they shouted, and the French obeyed. The attack on the lighter shredded under the assault of the 87th. A Frenchman stooped to Sharpe, thinking him dead and presumably wanting his sword, and Sharpe punched the man in the face, then came out of the water, sword swinging, and he slashed it across the man’s face. The Frenchman ran. Sharpe could see Ensign Keogh cutting his straight sword at a much bigger enemy who flailed at the thin officer with his musket.
Then the big Sergeant Masterson drove his bayonet into the man’s ribs. The Frenchman went down under Masterson’s weight. Keogh sliced his sword at the fallen man and wanted more. He was screaming a high-pitched scream and he saw the two dark figures in the creek’s shallows and turned to attack, shouting at his men to follow.
“Faugh a ballagh!” Harper roared.
“It’s you!” Keogh stopped at the water’s edge. He grinned suddenly. “That was a proper fight.”
“It was bloody desperate,” Harper muttered.
Major Gough was shouting at his men to form line and face south. Sergeants pulled redcoats away from the enemy corpses they were plundering. The surviving marines were clubbing the few remaining Frenchmen off the lighter, but Captain Collins, a cutlass in his hand, was dead. “He should have moved the bloody boats, sir,” a marine sergeant said as he greeted Sharpe. The sergeant spat a dark stream of tobacco juice onto a French corpse. “You’re soaked through, sir,” he added. “Did you fall in?”
“I fell in,” Sharpe said, and the first explosion split the darkness.
The explosion came from one of the five fire rafts. A spire of flame, brilliantly white, shot into the sky, then red light followed, flashing outward in a ring that flattened the marsh grass. The night was flooded with fire. Later it was decided that an errant spark from a fire in one of the captured French camps had somehow ignited a quickfuse. The charges had already been laid and the engineers were stringing the last of the fuses when one saw the bright fizz of a burning quick match. He shouted a warning, then jumped off the raft just as the first powder keg exploded. All across the rafts now the fuses sparked and smoked like wriggling snakes of fire.
The white spire twisted and dimmed. The rumble of the explosion faded across the marshland as a bugle sounded, ordering the British troops back to the lighters. The bugle was still calling when the next charges exploded, one after the other, their fire pounding toward the clouds and their noise punching across the marshes where the reeds and grasses bent again to the warm and unexpected winds. Smoke began to boil from the rafts where the French-laid incendiaries caught the fire and their flames illuminated the French troops who had retreated from the lighters. “Fire!” Major Gough roared, and his company of the 87th loosed a volley, and still the charges exploded and the rafts burned. The cannons at the rafts’ perimeters began to fire, the balls and grapeshot whistling across the creek and marsh.