Sharpe's Battle Part 27

The screams began again. Loup drew on his cigar, brushed his hands and walked towards the barracks.

The Dona Juanita's hounds began to howl. The sound set more children crying, but one glance from Sharpe was enough to make the mothers quell their infants' misery. A horse whinnied. Through one of the loopholes Sharpe could see that the French were leading away the horses captured from the Portuguese officers.

He a.s.sumed the Irish company's horses had already been taken away. It had gone quiet in the barracks. Most of the French attackers had pursued the

Portuguese, leaving just enough infantrymen behind to keep the trapped men blocked inside the barracks. Every few seconds a musket ball cracked against the stone, a reminder to Sharpe and his men that the French were still watching every blocked-up door and window.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.ds will have captured poor old Runcibubble," Hagman said. "I can't see the General living on prisoners' rations."

"Runciman's an officer, Dan," Cooper said. Cooper was aiming his rifle through one of the loopholes, stalking a target. "He won't live on rations. He'll give his parole and be feeding on proper Frog victuals. He'll get even fatter. Got you, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d." He pulled his trigger, then slid the rifle inside to let another man take his place. Sharpe suspected that the erstwhile Wagon Master

General would be lucky to be a prisoner because if Loup was fighting true to his reputation then it was more likely that Runciman was lying slaughtered in his bed with his flannel nightdress and ta.s.selled woollen cap soaked in blood.

"Captain Sharpe, sir!" Harper called from the far end of the block. "Here, sir!"

Sharpe worked his way between the straw mattresses that lay on the beaten earth floor. The air inside the blocked-up barracks was fetid and the few wicks still alight were guttering. A woman spat as Sharpe went by and Sharpe turned on her. "You'd rather be out there being raped, you stupid b.i.t.c.h? I'll b.l.o.o.d.y well throw you out, if that's what you want."

"No, senor," she shrank away from his anger.

The woman's husband, crouching at a loophole, tried to apologize for his wife.

"It's just that the women are frightened, sir."

"So are we. Anyone but a fool would be frightened, but that doesn't mean you lose your manners." Sharpe hurried on to where Harper was kneeling beside the pile of straw-filled sacks that had served as mattresses and which now blocked the door.

"There's a man calling you, sir," Harper said. "I think it's Captain Donaju."

Sharpe crouched near the loophole next to the barricaded door. "Donaju! Is that you?"

"I'm in the men's barracks, Sharpe. Just to let you know that we're all well."

"How did you escape the gatehouse?"

"Through the door to the ramparts. There's half a dozen officers here."

"Is Kiely with you?"

"No. Don't know what's happened to him."

And Sharpe did not much care. "Is Sarsfield there?" he asked Donaju.

"Fraid not," Donaju answered.

"Keep the faith, Donaju!" Sharpe called. "These b.u.g.g.e.rs will be gone at first light!" He felt oddly relieved that Donaju had taken over the defence of the other barracks, for Donaju, for all his shy and retiring appearance, was proving to be a very good soldier. "Pity about Father Sarsfield," Sharpe said to Harper.

"He'll have gone straight to heaven, that one," Harper said. "Not many priests you can say that about. Most of them are proper devils for whiskey, women or boys, but Sarsfield, he was a good man, a real good man." The firing at the northern end of the fort died away and Harper crossed himself. "Pity about the poor Portuguese b.a.s.t.a.r.ds too," he said, realizing what the lull in the sound of fighting meant.

Poor Tom Garrard, Sharpe thought. Unless Garrard lived? Tom Garrard had always had a charmed life. He and Sharpe had crouched in the fiery red dust of

Gawilghur's breach as blood from their comrades' corpses trickled past like rivulets flowing down a rockfall. Sergeant Hakes will had been there, gibbering like a monkey as he tried to hide under a drummer boy's corpse. d.a.m.n

Obadiah Hakeswill, who had also claimed to bear a charmed life, though Sharpe could not believe the b.a.s.t.a.r.d still lived. Dead of the pox, like as not, or, if there was even a trace of justice in a bad world, gutted by the bullets of a firing squad. "Watch the roof," Sharpe said to Harper. The barracks roof was a continuous arch of masonry designed to resist the fall of an enemy mortar sh.e.l.l, but time and neglect had weakened the tough construction. "They'll find a weak spot," Sharpe said, "and try and break through to us." And it would be soon, he thought to himself, for the heavy silence in the fort betrayed that

Loup had finished off Oliveira and would now be coming for his real prize,

Sharpe. The next hour promised to be grim. Sharpe raised his voice as he walked back to the other end of the room. "When the attack comes just keep firing! Don't aim, don't wait, just fire and make room at your loophole for another man. They're going to reach the barracks walls, we can't stop that, and they're going to try to break open the roof, so keep a good ear above you.

Soon as you see starlight, fire. And remember, it'll be light soon and they won't stay after sunrise. They'll be feared that our cavalry will cut off their retreat. Now, good luck, boys."

"And G.o.d bless you all," Harper added from the gloom at the far end of the room.

The attack came with a roar like a rush of water released by lifting a sluice gate. Loup had ma.s.sed his men in the cover of some nearby barracks, then released them in a desperate charge against the two barracks' north-facing walls. The rush was designed to carry the French infantry fast across the dangerous patch of ground covered by Sharpe's muskets and rifles. Those guns cracked to fill the barracks with yet more filthy smoke, but the third or fourth shot from each loophole sounded perversely loud and suddenly a man reeled back cursing from his musket's wrist-shattering recoil. "They're blocking the holes!" another man called.

Sharpe ran to the nearest loophole on the north wall and rammed his rifle into the hole. The muzzle cracked on stone. The French were holding masonry blocks against the loophole's outer opening, effectively ending Sharpe's fire. More

Frenchmen were climbing onto the roof where their boots made a m.u.f.fled, sc.r.a.ping sound like rats in an attic. "Jesus Christ!" A man stared wanly upwards. "Mary, Mother of G.o.d," he began to pray in a wailing voice.

"Shut up!" Sharpe snapped. He could hear the ringing noise of metal working on stone. How long before the roof collapsed and let in a flood of vengeful

Frenchmen? Inside the barracks a hundred pale faces stared at Sharpe, willing an answer he did not possess.

Harper came up with the solution instead. He clambered up on the monstrous pile of straw-filled sacks by the door so that he could reach the topmost point of the end wall where a small hole served as a chimney and ventilator.

The hole was too high for the French to block, and high enough to give Harper a clear shot along the roofline of Donaju's barracks. The bullets would be rising and so would be more of a threat to those Frenchmen nearest Harper, but if he could fire enough bullets he could at least slow down the a.s.sault on

Donaju and pray that Donaju would return the compliment.

Harper opened with his seven-barrelled gun. The crash echoed through the barracks with the sound of a thirty-two-pounder cannon. A scream answered the blast that had whipped like canister shot across the other roof. Now, one by one, muskets and rifles were handed up to the big Sergeant who fired again and again, not bothering to aim, but just cracking the bullets into the grey ma.s.s that swarmed on the neighbouring roof. After a half-dozen shots the ma.s.s began to shred as men sought shelter on the ground. The answering fire smacked all around Harper's loophole, creating more dust than danger. Perkins had reloaded the volley gun and Harper now fired it again just as a musket flashed from the equivalent venthole in Donaju's barracks. Sharpe heard a sc.r.a.ping sound above him as a Frenchman's boots slid down the outer curve to the wall's base.

A man screamed in the barracks as he was hurled backwards by a musket ball.

The French were randomly unmasking the loopholes and firing into the room where the wives and children crouched and whimpered. The besieged huddled away from the loopholes' lines of fire, the only defence they had. Harper kept firing while a group of men and women loaded for him, but most of the barracks' occupants could only wait in the smoky gloom and pray. The noise was h.e.l.lish: a banging, ringing, sc.r.a.ping cacophony, and always, like an eerie promise of the horrid death that defeat promised, the feral wolf howl of

Loup's men all around the barracks.

Dust sifted down from a patch of the ceiling. Sharpe moved everyone away from the threatened area, then ringed it with men armed with loaded muskets. "If a stone falls," he told them, "shoot like h.e.l.l and keep shooting." The air was difficult to breathe. It was filled with dust, smoke and the stench of urine.

The cheap rushlight candles were guttering. Children were crying throughout the length of the barracks now and Sharpe could not stop them. Women were crying too, while m.u.f.fled French voices mocked their victims, doubtless promising that they would give the women something better than mere smoke to cry about.

Hagman coughed, then spat onto the floor. "Like a coal mine, it is," he said.

"You ever been in a coal mine, Dan?" Sharpe asked.

"I was a year down a mine in Derbyshire," Hagman said, then flinched as a musket flash speared through a nearby loophole. The ball spread itself harmlessly on the opposite wall. "I was just a littl'un," Hagman went on. "If my dad hadn't gone and died and my mam moved back to her sister's in

Handbridge I'd be there still. Or more likely dead. Only the luckiest see their thirtieth birthday down the mines." He shuddered as a huge, rhythmic crashing began to reverberate through the tunnel-like barracks. Either the

French had brought a sledgehammer, or else they were using a boulder like a battering ram. "Like the little pigs in the house, aren't we," Hagman said in the echoing dark, "with the big bad wolf huffing and puffing outside?"