“Bloody well ought to be frightening,” Sharpe responded. “A fight like that? In the rain and dark? Anything can happen. You just go in fast and dirty, Jorge, do the damage and keep on doing it.”
“You have done so much fighting,” Vicente said sadly, as though he pitied Sharpe.
“I’ve been a soldier for a long time,” Sharpe said, “and our army does a lot of fighting. India, Flanders, here, Denmark.”
“Denmark! Why were you fighting in Denmark?”
“God knows,” Sharpe said. “Something about their fleet. We wanted it, they didn’t want us to have it, so we went and took it.” He was gazing down the northern slope at a group of a dozen Frenchmen who had stripped to the waist and now began to shovel at a patch of ferns a hundred yards from the edge of the wood. He took out the replacement telescope Luis had brought him. It was little more than a toy and the outer lens was loose which meant it kept blurring, and it was only half as powerful as his own glass, but he supposed it was better than nothing. He focused the glass, steadied the outer lens with a fingertip and stared at the French work party. “Shit,” he said.
“What?”
“Bastards have got a cannon,” Sharpe said. “Just pray it isn’t a bloody mortar.”
Vicente, looking bewildered, was trying and failing to see a gun. “What happens if it’s a mortar?”
“We all die,” Sharpe said, imagining the pot-like gun lobbing its shells into the sky so that they would drop almost vertically onto his position. “We all die,” he said again, “or else we run away and get captured.”
Vicente made the sign of the cross again. He had not made that gesture at all in the first weeks Sharpe had known him, but the further Vicente traveled from his life as a lawyer the more the old imperatives returned to him. Life, he was beginning to learn, was not controlled by law or reason, but by luck and savagery and blind unfeeling fate. “I can’t see a cannon,” he finally admitted.
Sharpe pointed to the French working party. “Those buggers are making a nice flat patch so they can aim properly,” he explained. “You can’t fire a gun on a slope, not if you want to be accurate.” He took a few steps down the northern path. “Dan!”
“Sir?“
“See where the bastards are going to put a cannon? How far away is it?”
Hagman, ensconced in a crevice of stone, peered down. “Bit under seven hundred paces, sir. Too far.”
“We can try?”
Hagman shrugged. “I can try, but maybe save it for later?”
Sharpe nodded. Better to reveal the rifle’s range to the French when things were more desperate.
Vicente again looked bewildered so Sharpe explained. “A rifle bullet can carry that far, but it would take a genius to be accurate. Dan’s close to genius.” He thought about taking a small party of riflemen halfway down the slope and he knew that at three or four hundred yards they could do a lot of damage to a gun crew, but the gun crew, at that range, would answer them with canister and though the lower slope of the hill was littered with rocks few were of a size to shelter a man from canister. Sharpe would lose soldiers if he went down the hill. He would do it, he decided, if the gun turned out to be a mortar, for mortars never carried canister, but the French were bound to answer his foray with a strong skirmish line of infantry. Stroke and counter-stroke. It felt frustrating. All he could do was pray the gun was not a mortar.
It was not a mortar. An hour after the working party began making a level platform the cannon appeared and Sharpe saw it was a howitzer. That was bad enough, but it gave his men a chance, for a howitzer shell would come at an oblique angle and his men would be safe behind the bigger boulders on the hilltop. Vicente borrowed the small telescope and watched the French gunners unlimber the gun and prepare its ammunition. A caisson, its long coffin-like lid cushioned so that the gun crew could travel on it, was being opened and the powder bags and shells piled by the leveled ground. “It looks like a very small gun,” Vicente said.
“Doesn’t have to be long-barrelled,” Sharpe explained, “because it isn’t a precision gun. It just lobs shells on us. It’ll be noisy, but we’ll survive.” He said that to cheer Vicente up, but he was not as confident as he sounded. Two or three lucky shells could decimate his command, but at least the howitzer’s arrival had taken his men’s minds off their larger predicament and they watched as the gunners made ready. A small flag had been placed fifty paces in front of the howitzer, presumably so the gun captain could judge the wind which would tend to drift the shells westward. Sure enough Sharpe saw them edge the howitzer’s trail to compensate, and then watched through the telescope as the quoins were hammered under the stubby barrel. Field guns were usually elevated with a screw, but howitzers used the old-fashioned wooden wedges. Sharpe reckoned the skinny officer who supervised the gun must be using his largest wedges, straining to get maximum elevation so that his shells would drop into the rocks on the hill’s summit. The first powder bags were being brought to the weapon and Sharpe saw the flash of reflected sunlight glance off steel and he knew the officer must be trimming the shell’s fuse. “Under cover, Sergeant!” Sharpe shouted.
Every man had a place to go to, a place that was well protected by the great boulders. Most of the riflemen were in the redoubts, walled with stone, but half a dozen, including Sharpe and Harper, were inside the old watchtower where a stairway had once led to the ramparts. Only four of the steps were left and they merely climbed to a gaping cavity in the stonework of the northern wall and Sharpe positioned himself there so he could see what the French were doing.
The gun vanished in a cloud of smoke, followed a heartbeat later by the massive boom of the exploding powder. Sharpe tried to find the missile in the sky, then saw the tiny, wavering trail of smoke left by the burning fuse. Then came the sound of the shell, a thunder rolling overhead, and the smoke trail whipped only a couple of feet above the ruined watchtower. Everyone had been holding their breath, but now let it out as the shell exploded somewhere above the southern slope.
“Cut his fuse too long,” Harper said.
“He won’t next time,” Tongue said.
Daniel Hagman, white-faced, sat against the wall with his eyes closed. Vicente and most of his men were a little way down the slope where they were protected by a boulder the size of a house. Nothing could reach them directly, but if a shell bounced off the face of the watchtower it would probably fall among them. Sharpe tried not to think of that. He had done his best and he knew he could not provide absolute safety for every man.
They waited.
“Get on with it,” Harris said. Harper crossed himself. Sharpe looked through the hole in the wall and saw the gunner carrying the portfire to the barrel. He said nothing to the men, for the noise of the gun would be warning enough and he was not looking down the hill to see when the howitzer was fired, but the moment when the French put in an infantry attack. That seemed the obvious thing for them to do. Fire the howitzer to keep the British and Portuguese heads down and then send their infantry to make an assault, but Sharpe saw no sign of any such attack. The dragoons were keeping their distance, the infantry was out of sight and the gunners just kept working.
Shell after shell arced to the hilltop. After the first shot the fuses were cut to the precise length and the shells cracked on rocks, fell and exploded. Monotonously, steadily, shot after shot, and each explosion sent shards of hot iron crackling and whistling through the jumble of boulders on the hilltop, yet the French seemed unaware of how much shelter the boulders provided. The summit stank of powder, the smoke drifted like mist through the rocks and clung to the lichen-covered stones of the watchtower, but miraculously no one was badly hurt. One of Vicente’s men was struck by a sliver of iron that cut his upper arm, but that was the only casualty. Yet even so the men hated the ordeal. They sat hunched, counting down the shots that came at a regular pace, one a minute, and the seconds stretched between each one and no one spoke and each shot was a boom from the base of the hill, a crash or th
ump as the shell struck, the ragged explosion of the powder charge and the shriek of its fragmented casing. One shell failed to explode and they all waited breathless as the seconds passed and then realized that its fuse must have been faulty.
“How many bloody shells do they have?” Harper asked after a quarter-hour.
No one could answer. Sharpe had a vague recollection that a British six-pounder carried more than a hundred rounds of ammunition in its limber, caisson and axle boxes, but he was not sure of that and French practice was probably different, so he said nothing. Instead he prowled round the hilltop, going from the tower to the men in the redoubts and then watching anxiously down the other flanks of the hill, and still there was no sign that the French contemplated an assault.
He went back to the tower. Hagman had produced a small wooden flute, something he had whittled himself during his convalescence, and now he played trills and snatches of old familiar melodies. The scraps of music sounded like birdsong, then the hilltop would reverberate to the next explosion, the shell fragments would batter against the tower and as the brutal sound faded so the flute’s breathy sound would re-emerge. “I always wanted to play the flute,” Sharpe said to no one in particular.
“The fiddle,” Harris said, “I’ve always wanted to play the fiddle.”
“Hard that,” Harper said, “because it’s fiddly.”
They groaned and Harper grinned proudly. Sharpe was mentally counting the seconds, imagining the gun being pushed back into place and then being sponged out, the gunner’s thumb over the touchhole to stop the rush of air forced by the incoming sponge from setting fire to any unexploded powder in the breech. When every lingering scrap of fire had been extinguished inside the barrel they would thrust home the powder bags, then the six-inch shell with its carefully cut fuse protruding from the wooden bung, and the gunner would ram a spike down the touchhole to pierce a canvas powder bag and afterward push a reed filled with more powder down into the punctured bag. They would stand back, cover their ears and the gunner would touch the linstock to the reed and just then Sharpe heard the boom and almost instantly there was an almighty crash inside the tower itself and he realized the shell had come right through the hole at the top of the truncated staircase and now it fell down, fuse smoking in a wild spiral, to lodge between two of the packs that held their food and Sharpe stared at it, saw the wisp of smoke shivering upward, knew they must all die or be terribly maimed when it exploded and he did not think, just dived. He scrabbled at the fuse, knew he was too late to extract it and so he dropped onto the shell, his belly smothering it, and his mind was screaming because he did not want to die. It will be quick, he thought, it will be quick, and at least he would not have to make decisions any more and no one else would be hurt and he cursed the shell because it was taking so long to explode and he was staring at Daniel Hagman who was staring back at him, eyes wide and the forgotten flute held just an inch from his mouth.
“Stay there much longer,” Harper said in a voice that could not quite hide the strain he was feeling, “and you’ll hatch the bloody thing.”
Hagman started to laugh, then Harris and Cooper and Harper joined in, and Sharpe climbed off the shell and saw that the wooden plug that held the fuse was blackened by fire, but somehow the fuse had gone out and he picked up the damned missile and hurled it out of the hole and listened to it clatter down the hill.
“Sweet Jesus,” Sharpe said. He was sweating, shaking. He collapsed back against the wall and looked at his men who were weak with laughter. “Oh, God,” he said.
“You’d have had a bellyache if that had popped, sir,” Hagman said and that started them all laughing again.
Sharpe felt drained. “If you bastards have nothing better to do,” he said, “then take out the canteens. Give everyone a drink.” He was rationing the water like the food, but the day was hot and he knew everyone would be dry. He followed the riflemen outside. Vicente, who had no idea what had just happened, but only knew that a second shell had failed to explode, looked anxious. “What happened?”
“Fuse went out,” Sharpe said, “just went out.”
He went down to the northernmost redoubts and stared at the gun. How much bloody ammunition did the bastards have? The rate of fire had slowed a little, but that seemed more to do with the gunners’ weariness than a shortage of shells. He watched them load another round, did not bother to take cover and the shell exploded up behind the watch-tower. The howitzer had recoiled eight or nine feet, much less than a field gun, and he watched as the gunners put their shoulders to the wheel and shoved it back into place. The air between Sharpe and the gun wavered because of the day’s heat, which was made more intense by a small grass fire ignited by the cannon’s blast. That had been happening all day and the howitzer’s muzzle flame had left a fan-shaped patch of scorched grass and ferns in front of the barrel. And then Sharpe saw something else, something that puzzled him, and he opened Christopher’s small telescope, cursing the loss of his own, and he steadied the barrel on a rock and stared intently and saw that an officer was crouching beside the gun wheel with an upraised hand. That odd pose had been what puzzled him. Why would a man crouch by the front of a gun’s wheels? And Sharpe could just see something else. Shadows. The ground there had been cleared, but the sun was now low in the sky and it was throwing long shadows and Sharpe could see that the cleared ground had been marked with two half-buried stones, each maybe the size of a twelve-pounder’s round shot, and that the officer was bringing the wheels right up to the two stones. When the wheels touched the stones he dropped his hand and the men went about the business of reloading.
Sharpe frowned, thinking. Now why, on a fine sunny day, would the French artillery officer need to mark a place for his gun’s wheels? The wheels themselves, iron-rimmed, would leave gouges in the soil that would serve as markers for when the gun was repositioned after each shot, yet they had taken the trouble to put the stones there as well. He ducked down behind the wall as another blossom of smoke heralded a shell. This one fell fractionally short and the jagged-edged iron scraps rattled against the low stone walls that Sharpe’s men had built. Pendleton poked his head above the redoubt. “Why don’t they use round shot, sir?” he asked.
“Howitzers don’t have round shot,” Sharpe said, “and it’s hard to fire a proper gun uphill.” He was brusque for he was wondering about those stones. Why put them there? Had he imagined them? But when he looked through the glass he could still see them.
Then he saw the gunners walk away from the howitzer. A score of infantrymen had appeared, but they were merely a guard for the gun which was otherwise abandoned. “They’re having their supper,” Harper suggested. He had brought water for the men in the forward positions and now sat beside Sharpe. For a moment he looked embarrassed, then grinned. “That was a brave thing you did, sir.”
“You’d have done the bloody same.”
“I bloody wouldn’t,” Harper said vehemently. “I’d have been out of that bloody door like a scalded cat if my legs had bloody worked.” He saw the deserted gun. “So it’s over for the day?” he asked.
“No,” Sharpe said, because he suddenly understood why the stones were there.
And knew what he could do about it.
Brigadier Vuillard, ensconced in the Quinta, poured himself a glass of Savages’ finest white port. His blue uniform jacket was unhooked and he had eased a button of his breeches to make space for the fine shoulder of mutton that he had shared with Christopher, a dozen officers and three women. The women were French, though certainly not wives, and one of them, whose golden hair glinted in the candlelight, had been seated next to Lieutenant Pelletieu who seemed unable to take his bespectacled eyes from a cleavage that was deep, soft, shadowed and streaked where sweat had made rivulets through the white powder on her skin. Her very presence had struck Pelletieu almost dumb, so that all the confidence he had shown on first meeting Vuillard had fled.
The Brigadier, amused by the woman’s effect on the artille
ry officer, leaned forward to accept a candle from Major Dulong that he used to light a cigar. It was a warm night, the windows were open and a big pale moth fluttered about the candelabra at the table’s center. “Is it true,” Vuillard asked Christopher between the puffs that were needed to get the cigar properly alight, “that in England the women are expected to leave the supper table before the cigars are lit?”
“Respectable women, yes.” Christopher took the toothpick from his mouth to answer.
“Even respectable women, I would have thought, make attractive companions to a good smoke and a glass of port.” Vuillard, content that the cigar was drawing properly, leaned back and glanced down the table. “I have an idea,” he said genially, “that I know precisely who is going to answer the next question. What time is first light tomorrow?”
There was a pause as the officers glanced at each other, then Pelletieu blushed. “Sunrise, sir,” he said, “will be at twenty minutes past four, but it will be light enough to see at ten minutes to four.”
“So clever,” the blond, who was called Annette, whispered to him.
“And the moon state?” Vuillard asked.
Pelletieu blushed an even deeper red. “No moon to speak of, sir. The last full moon was on the thirtieth of April and the next will be ... “ His voice faded away as he became aware that the others about the table were amused by his erudition.
“Do go on, Lieutenant,” Vuillard said.
“On the twenty-ninth of this month, sir, so it’s a waxing moon in its first quarter, sir, and very slight. No illumination in it. Not now.”
“I like a dark night,” Annette whispered to him.
“You’re a veritable walking encyclopaedist, Lieutenant,” Vuillard said, “so tell me what damage your shells did today?”
“Very little, sir, I’m afraid.” Pelletieu, almost overwhelmed by Annette’s perfume, looked as though he was about to faint. “That summit is prodigiously protected by boulders, sir. If they kept their heads down, sir, then they should have survived mostly intact, though I’m sure we killed one or two.”