It had been Brigadier Vuillard’s idea to attack at dusk. Most soldiers would expect an assault at dawn, but it was Vuillard’s notion that men’s guard was lower late in the day. “They’re looking forward to a skin of wine, a wench and a hot meal,” he had told Christopher, then he had fixed the time for the assault at a quarter to eight in the evening. The sun would actually set a few moments before, but the twilight would stretch until half past eight, though the clouds had proved so thick that Vuillard doubted there would be any twilight to speak of. Not that it mattered. Dulong had been lent a good Breguet watch and he had promised that his men would be on the watchtower’s peak at a quarter to eight just as the dragoons converged on the village and the Quinta. The remaining companies of the 31st Leger would first climb up to the wood and then sweep down onto the Quinta from the south. “I doubt Dulong will see any action,” Vuillard told Christopher, “and he’ll be unhappy about that. He’s a bloodthirsty rascal.”
“You’ve given him the most dangerous task, surely?”
“But only if the enemy are on the hilltop,” the Brigadier explained. “I hope to catch them off guard, Colonel.”
And it seemed to Christopher as though Vuillard’s hopes were justified for, at a quarter to eight, the dragoons charged into Vila Real de Zedes and met almost no opposition. A clap of thunder was the accompaniment to the attack and a stab of lightning split the sky and reflected silver white from the dragoons’ long swords. A handful of men resisted, some muskets were fired from a tavern beside the church and Vuillard later discovered, through questioning the survivors, that a band of partisans had been recuperating in the village. A handful of them escaped, but eight others were killed and a score more, including their leader, who called himself the Schoolteacher, were captured. Two of Vuillard’s dragoons were wounded.
A hundred more dragoons rode to the Quinta. They were commanded by a captain who would rendezvous with the infantry coming down through the woods and the Captain had promised to make certain the property was not looted. “You don’t want to go with them?” Vuillard asked.
“No.” Christopher was watching the village girls being pushed toward the largest tavern.
“I don’t blame you,” Vuillard said, noticing the girls, “the sport will be here.”
And Vuillard’s sport began. The villagers hated the French and the French hated the villagers and the dragoons had discovered partisans in the houses and they all knew how to treat such vermin. Manuel Lopes and his captured partisans were taken to the church where they were forced to break up the altars, rails and images, then ordered to heap all the shattered timber in the center of the nave. Father Josefa came to protest at the vandalism and the dragoons stripped him naked, tore his cassock into strips and used the strips to lash the priest to the big crucifix that hung above the main altar. “The priests are the worst,” Vuillard explained to Christopher, “they encourage their people to fight us. I swear we’ll have to kill every last priest in Portugal before we’re through.”
Other captives were being brought to the church. Any villager whose house contained a firearm or who had defied the dragoons was taken there. A man who had tried to protect his thirteen-year-old daughter was dragged to the church and, once inside, a dragoon sergeant broke the mens’ arms and legs with a great sledgehammer taken from the blacksmith’s forge. “It’s a lot easier than tying them up,” Vuillard explained. Christopher flinched as the big hammer snapped the bones. Some men whimpered, a few screamed, but most stayed obstinately silent. Father Josefa said the prayer for the dying until a dragoon quieted him by breaking his jaw with a sword.
It was dark by now. The rain still beat on the church roof, but not so violently. Lightning lit the windows from the outside as Vuillard crossed to the remnants of a side altar and picked up a candle that had been burning on the floor. He took it to the pile of splintered furniture that had been laced with powder from the dragoons’ carbine ammunition. He placed the candle deep in the pile and backed away. For a moment the flame flickered small and insignificant, then there was a hiss and a bright fire streaked up the pile’s center. The wounded men cried aloud as smoke began to curl toward the beams and as Vuillard and the dragoons retreated toward the door. “They flap like fish.” The Brigadier spoke of the men who tried to drag themselves toward the fire in the vain hope of extinguishing it. Vuillard laughed. “The rain will slow things,” he told Christopher, “but not by much.” The fire was crackling now, spewing thick smoke. “It’s when the roof catches fire that they die,“ Vuillard said, “and it takes quite a time. Best not to stay though.”
The dragoons left, locking the church behind them. A dozen men stayed out in the rain to make certain that the fire did not go out or, more unlikely, that no one escaped from the flames, while Vuillard led Christopher and a half-dozen other officers to the village’s largest tavern which was cheerfully lit by scores of candles and lamps. “The infantry will report to us here,” Vuillard explained, “so we must find something to pass the time, eh?”
“Indeed.” Christopher plucked off his cocked hat as he stooped through the tavern door.
“We’ll have a meal,” Brigadier Vuillard said, “and what passes in this country for wine.” He stopped in the main room where the village’s girls had been lined against a wall. “What do you think?” he asked Christopher.
“Tempting,” Christopher said.
“Indeed.” Vuillard still did not entirely trust Christopher. The Englishman was too aloof, but now, Vuillard thought, he would put him to the test. “Take your choice,” he said, pointing to the girls. The men guarding the girls grinned. The girls were crying softly.
Christopher took a pace toward the captives. If the Englishman was squeamish, Vuillard thought, then that would betray scruples or, worse, a sympathy for the Portuguese. There were even some in the French army who expressed such sympathies, officers who argued that by maltreating the Portuguese the army only made their own problems worse, but Vuillard, like most Frenchmen, believed that the Portuguese needed to be punished with such severity that none would ever dare lift a finger against the French again. Rape, theft and wanton destruction were, to Vuillard, defensive tactics and now he wanted to see Christopher join him in an act of war. He wanted to see the aloof Englishman behave like the French in their moment of triumph. “Be quick,” Vuillard said, “I promised my men they could have the ones we don’t want.”
“I’ll take the small girl,” Christopher said wolfishly, “the redhead.”
She screamed, but there was much screaming that night in Vila Real de Zedes.
As there was on the hill to the south.
Sharpe ran. He shouted at his men to get to the top of the hill as fast as they could and then he scrambled up the slope and he had gone a hundred yards before he calmed down and realized that he was doing this all wrong. “Rifles!” he shouted. “Packs off!”
He let his men unburden themselves until they carried only their weapons, haversacks and cartridge boxes. Lieutenant Vicente’s men did the same. Six Portuguese and the same number of riflemen would stay to guard the discarded packs and bags and greatcoats and cuts of smoked meat, while the rest followed Sharpe and Vicente up the slope. They went much faster now. “Did you see the bastards up there?” Harper panted.
“No,” Sharpe said, but he knew the French would want to take the fort because it was the highest ground for miles, and that meant they had probably sent a company or more to loop about the south and sneak up the hill. So it was a race. Sharpe had no proof that the French were in the race, but he did not underestimate them. They would be coming and all he could pray was that they were not there already.
The rain fell harder. No gun would fire in this weather. This was going to be a fight of wet steel, fists and rifle butts. Sharpe’s boots slipped on sodden turf and skidded on rock. He was getting short of breath, but at least he had climbed the flanking slope and was now on the path that led up the northern spine of the hill, and his men had widened and strength
ened the path, cutting steps in the steepest places and pegging the risers with wedges of birch. It had been invented work to keep them busy, but it was all worth it now because it quickened the pace. Sharpe was still leading with a dozen riflemen close behind. He decided he would not close ranks before they reached the top. This was a scramble where the devil really would take the hindmost so the important thing was to reach the summit, and he looked up into the whirl of rain and cloud and he saw nothing up there but wet rock and the sudden reflected sheen of a lightning bolt slithering down a sheer stone face. He thought of the village and knew it was doomed. He wished he could do something about that, but he did not have enough men to defend the village and he had tried to warn them.
The rain was driving into his face, blinding him. He slithered as he ran. There was a stitch in his side, his legs were like fire and the breath rasped in his throat. The rifle was slung on his shoulder, bouncing there, the stock thumping into his left thigh as he tried to draw the sword, but then he had to let go of the hilt to steady himself against a rock as his boots slid wildly out from under him. Harper was twenty paces back, panting. Vicente was gaining on Sharpe who dragged his sword free of its scabbard, pushed himself away from the boulder and forced himself on again. Lightning flickered to the east, outlining black hills and a sky slanting with water. The thunder crackled across the heavens, filling them with angry noise, and Sharpe felt as though he were climbing into the heart of the storm, climbing to join the gods of war. The gale tore at him. His shako was long gone. The wind shrieked, moaned, was drowned by thunder and burdened by rain and Sharpe thought he would never reach the top and suddenly he was beside the first wall, the place where the path zigzagged between two of the small redoubts his men had built, and a dagger of lightning stabbed down into the void that opened wet and dark to his right. For a wild second he thought the hilltop was empty and then he saw the flash of a blade reflecting the storm’s white fire and knew the French were already there.
Dulong’s voltigeurs had arrived just seconds before and had taken the watchtower, but they had not had time to occupy the northernmost redoubts where Sharpe’s men now appeared. “Throw them out!” Dulong roared at his men.
“Kill the bastards!” Sharpe shouted and his blade scraped along a bayonet, jarred against the muzzle of the musket and he threw himself forward, driving the man back, and hammered his forehead against the man’s nose and the first riflemen were past him and the blades were ringing in the near dark. Sharpe banged the hilt of his sword into the face of the man he had put down, plucked the musket from him and threw it out into the void then pushed on to where a group of Frenchmen were readying to defend the summit. They aimed their muskets and Sharpe hoped to God he was right and that no flintlock would ever fire in this wet fury. Two men struggled to his left and Sharpe slid the sword into a blue jacket, twisting it in the ribs, and the Frenchman threw himself sideways to escape the blade and Sharpe saw it was Harper hammering at the man with a rifle butt.
“God save Ireland.” Harper, wild-eyed, stared up at the French guarding the watchtower.
“We’re going to charge those bastards!” Sharpe shouted at the riflemen coming up behind.
“God save Ireland.”
“Tirezl” a French officer shouted and a dozen flints fell on steel and the sparks flashed and died in the rain.
“Now kill them!” Sharpe roared. “Just bloody kill them!” Because the French were on his hilltop, on his land, and he felt a rage fit to match the anger of the storm-filled sky. He ran uphill and the French muskets reached down with their long bayonets and Sharpe remembered fighting on the steep breach at Gawilghur and he did now what he had done then, reached under the bayonet and grabbed a man’s ankle and tugged. The Frenchman screamed as he was pulled down the hill to where three sword bayonets chopped at him, and then Vicente’s Portuguese, realizing they could not shoot the French, began hurling rocks at them and the big stones drew blood, made men flinch, and Sharpe bellowed at his riflemen to close with the enemy. He back-swung the sword, driving a bayonet aside, pulled another musket with his left hand so that the man was tugged down onto Harper’s sword bayonet. Harris was flailing with an axe they had used to clear the path through the birch, laurel and oak wood, and the French shrank from the terrible weapon and still the rocks were hurled and Sharpe’s riflemen, snarling and panting, were clawing their way upward. A man kicked Sharpe in the face, Cooper caught the boot and raked his sword bayonet up the man’s leg. Harper was using his rifle as a club, beating men down with his huge strength. A rifleman fell backward, blood pulsing from his throat to be instantly diluted by the rain. A Portuguese soldier took his place, stabbing up with his bayonet and screaming insults. Sharpe rammed his sword two-handed up into the press of bodies, stabbed, twisted, pulled and stabbed again. Another Portuguese was beside him, thrusting his bayonet up into a French groin, while Sergeant Macedo, lips drawn back in a snarl, was fighting with a knife. The blade flickered in the rain, turned red, was washed clean, turned red again. The French were going back, retreating to the patch of bare stone terrace in front of the watchtower ruins and an officer was shouting angrily at them, and then the officer came forward, saber out, and Sharpe met him, the blades clashed and Sharpe just head-butted again and, in the flash of lightning, saw the astonishment on the officer’s face, but the Frenchman evidently came from the same school as Sharpe for he tried to kick Sharpe’s groin as he rammed his fingers at Sharpe’s eyes. Sharpe twisted aside, came back to hit the man on the jaw with the hilt of his sword, then the officer just seemed to vanish as two of his men dragged him backward.
A tall French sergeant came at Sharpe, musket flailing, and Sharpe stepped back, the man tripped, and Vicente reached out with his straight-bladed sword and its tip ripped the Sergeant’s windpipe so he roared like a punctured bellows and collapsed in a spray of pink rain. Vicente stepped back, appalled, but his men went streaming past to spread down into the southern redoubts where they enthusiastically bayoneted the French out of their holes. Sergeant Macedo had left his knife trapped in a Frenchman’s chest and instead was using a French musket as a club and a voltigeur tried to pull the weapon out of his grasp and looked stunned when the Sergeant just let him have it, then kicked him in the belly so that the Frenchman fell back over the edge of the bluff. He screamed as he fell. The scream seemed to last a long time, then there was a wet thump on the rocks far below, the musket clattered, and the sound was swamped as thunder rolled over the sky. The clouds were split by lightning and Sharpe, his sword blade dripping with rain-diluted blood, shouted at his men to check every redoubt. “And search the tower!”
Another bolt of lightning revealed a large group of Frenchmen halfway up the southern path. Sharpe reckoned that a small group of fitter men had come on ahead and it was those men that he had encountered. The largest group, who could easily have held the summit against Sharpe and Vicente’s desperate counterattack, had been too late, and Vicente was now putting men into the lower redoubts. A rifleman lay dead by the watchtower. “It’s Sean Donnelly,” Harper said.
“Pity,” Sharpe said, “a good man.”
“He was an evil little bastard from Deny,” Harper said, “who owed me four shillings.”
“He could shoot straight.”
“When he wasn’t drunk,” Harper allowed.
Pendleton, the youngest of the riflemen, brought Sharpe his shako. “Found it on the slope, sir.”
“What were you doing on the slope when you should have been fighting?” Harper demanded.
Pendleton looked worried. “I just found it, sir.”
“Did you kill anyone?” Harper wanted to know.
“No, Sergeant.”
“Not earned your bloody shilling today then, have you? Right! Pendleton! Williamson! Dodd! Sims!” Harper organized a group to go back down the hill and bring up the discarded packs and food. Sharpe had another two men strip the dead and wounded of their weapons and ammunition.
Vicente had garrisoned
the southern side of the fort and the sight of his men was enough to deter the French from trying a second assault. The Portuguese lieutenant now came back to join Sharpe beside the watchtower where the wind shrieked on the broken stone. The rain was slackening, but the stronger wind gusts still drove drops hard against the ruined walls. “What do we do about the village?” Vicente wanted to know.
“There’s nothing we can do.”
“There are women down there! Children!”
“I know.”
“We can’t just leave them.”
“What do you want us to do?” Sharpe asked. “Go down there? Rescue them? And while we’re there, what happens up here? Those bastards take the hill.” He pointed at the French voltigeurs who were still halfway up the hill, uncertain whether to keep climbing or to give up the attempt. “And when you get down there,” Sharpe went on, “what are you going to find? Dragoons. Hundreds of bloody dragoons. And when the last of your men are dead you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you tried to save the village.” He saw the stubbornness on Vicente’s face. “There’s nothing you can do.”
“We have to try,” Vicente insisted.
“You want to take some men on patrol? Then do it, but the rest of us stay up here. This place is our one chance of staying alive.”
Vicente shivered. “You will not keep going south?”
“We get off this hill,” Sharpe said, “and we’re going to have dragoons giving us haircuts with their bloody swords. We’re trapped, Lieutenant, we’re trapped.”
“You will let me take a patrol down to the village?”
“Three men,” Sharpe said. He was reluctant to let even three men go with Vicente, but he could see that the Portuguese lieutenant was desperate to know what was happening to his countrymen. “Stay in cover, Lieutenant,” Sharpe advised. “Stay in the trees. Go very carefully!”
Vicente was back three hours later. There were simply too many dragoons and blue-jacketed infantry around Vila Real de Zedes and he had got nowhere near the village. “But I heard screams,” he said.