Sharpe's Battle Part 28

Sharpe gripped his rifle. He was sweating, and his rifle's stock felt greasy.

"When I was a child," he said, "I never believed the pigs could really see off the wolf."

"Pigs don't, as a rule," Hagman said grimly. "If the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds go on banging like that they'll give me a headache."

"Dawn can't be far off," Sharpe said, though whether Loup would truly withdraw in the first light, Sharpe did not know. He had told his men that the French would go at dawn to give them hope, but maybe there was no hope. Maybe they were all condemned to die in a wretched fight in the scrabbling ruins of an abandoned barracks where they would be bayoneted and shot by an elite French brigade who had come to destroy this scratch force of unhappy Irishmen.

"Mind out!" a man called. More dust streamed down from the ceiling. So far the old barracks had stood the a.s.sault astonishingly well, but the first breach in the masonry was imminent.

"Hold your fire!" Sharpe ordered. "Wait till they break through!"

A huddle of kneeling women were telling their beads, rocking back and forth on their knees as they said the Hail Mary. Nearby a circle of men waited with expectant faces, muskets aimed up at the threatened patch of ceiling. Behind them an outer ring of men waited with more loaded guns.

"I hated the coal mine," Hagman said. "I was always frightened from the moment

I went down the shaft. Men used to die there for no reason. None at all! We'd just find them dead, peaceful as you like, sleeping like babes. I used to think the devils came from the earth's centre to take their souls."

A woman screamed as a masonry block in the ceiling jarred and threatened to fall. "At least you didn't have screaming women in the mines," Sharpe said to

Hagman.

"But we did, sir. Some worked with us and some were ladies working for themselves, if you follow my meaning. There was one called Dwarf Babs, I remember. A penny a time, she charged. She'd sing to us every Sunday. Maybe a psalm or perhaps one of Mr Wesley's hymns. "Hide me, O my Saviour, hide, till the storm of life be past"." Hagman grinned in the sultry dark. "Maybe Mr

Wesley had some trouble with the Frenchies, sir? Sounds like it. Do you know

Mr Wesley's hymns, sir?" he asked Sharpe.

"I was never one for church, Dan."

"Dwarf Babs wasn't exactly church, sir."

"But she was your first woman?" Sharpe guessed. In the dark Hagman blushed.

"And she didn't even charge me."

"Good for Dwarf Babs," Sharpe said, then raised his rifle as, at last, a section of the roof gave way and crashed to the floor in a welter of dust, screams and noise. The ragged hole was two or three feet across and obscured by dust beyond which the wraith-like shapes of French soldiers loomed like giants. "Fire!" Sharpe yelled. The ring of muskets blazed, followed, a second later, by the second ring of guns as more men fired into the void. The French reply was oddly muted, almost as if the attackers had been surprised by the amount of musket fire that now poured up from the newly opened vent. Men and women reloaded frantically and pa.s.sed the newly charged guns forward, and the

French, driven from the hole's edge by the sheer volume of fire, began hurling rocks into the barracks. The stones crashed harmlessly onto the floor. "Block the loopholes!" Sharpe ordered, and men rammed the French-delivered stones into the loopholes to stop the intermittent bullets. Better still the air began to feel fresh. Even the candle flames took on new life and glowed into the darker recesses of the packed, fearful barracks.

"Sharpe!" a voice called outside the barracks. "Sharpe!"

The French had momentarily stopped firing and Sharpe ordered his men to hold their own fire. "Reload, lads!" He sounded cheerful.

"It's always a good sign when the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds want to talk instead of fight." He walked closer to the hole in the roof. "Loup?" he called.

"Come out, Sharpe," the Brigadier said, "and we will spare your men." It was a shrewd enough offer even though Loup must have known that Sharpe would not accept, but he did not expect Sharpe to accept, instead he wanted the rifleman's companions to surrender him as Jonah had been surrendered to the ocean by his shipmates.

"Loup?" Sharpe called. "Go to h.e.l.l. Pat? Open fire!"

Harper crashed a volley of half-inch b.a.l.l.s at the other barracks. Donaju's men were still alive and still fighting, and now Loup's men came back to life as the fighting renewed itself. A frustrated volley of musketry cracked against the wall around Harper's loophole. One of the bullets ricocheted inside and slapped against the stock of Harper's rifle. He swore because the blow stung, then fired the rifle at the opposite roof.

Another rush of feet on the roof announced a new attack. The men beneath the broken masonry fired upwards, but suddenly a blast of gunfire swamped down through the hole. Loup had sent every man possible onto the roof and the attackers were able to match the fury of the defenders' fusillades. The Real

Compania Irlandesa's guardsmen shrank back from the musketry. "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are everywhere!" Harper said, then ducked as a crash sounded on the stone roof just above his head. The French were now trying to break through the roof right over Harper's eyrie. Women screamed and covered their eyes. A child was bleeding from a ricochet.

The fight, Sharpe knew, was ending. He could sense the defeat. He supposed it had been inevitable, right from the moment that Loup had outguessed and outmanoeuvred the San Isidro's defenders. Any second now, Sharpe knew, and a wave of Frenchmen would swarm through the hole in the roof and though the first few enemy to enter the barracks would surely die, the second wave would live to fight over their comrades' bodies and so win the battle. And what then? Sharpe flinched from the thought of Loup's revenge, the knife at his groin, the slicing cut and the pain beyond all pain. He watched the hole in the roof with his rifle ready for one last shot and he wondered whether it would not be better to put the muzzle beneath his chin and blow the top of his skull away.

And then the world shook. Dust started from every masonry joint as a flash of light seared across the hole in the barracks' roof. A second later the boom and thunderous bellow of a great explosion rolled over the barracks, drowning even the furious crack of the French muskets outside and the desperate sobbing of the children inside. The vast noise reverberated against the gate tower to roll back again over the fort's interior while sc.r.a.ps of wood dropped from the sky to clatter on the roof.

A kind of ragged silence followed. The French fire had stopped. Somewhere close to the barracks a man was sighing as he breathed in and whimpering as he breathed out. The sky looked lighter, but the light was vivid and red. A piece of stone or wood sc.r.a.ped and rattled its way down the curving side of the barracks. Men were moaning and crying, while further off there was the crackle of flame. Daniel Hagman cleared away some of the straw mattresses that blocked the end door and peered through a ragged bullet hole driven through the timber. "It's the Portuguese ammunition," Hagman said. "Two wagons of the stuff were parked over there, sir, and some silly b.a.s.t.a.r.d of a Frog must have been playing with fire."

Sharpe unblocked a loophole and found it open at the far side. A Frenchman, his grey uniform burning, staggered past Sharpe's view. Now, in the silence after the great explosion, he could hear more men crying and gasping. "That blast sc.r.a.ped the b.u.g.g.e.rs clean off the roofs, sir!" Harper called.

Sharpe ran to the hole in the roof and ordered a man to crouch on the ground.

Then, using the man's back as a step, he leaped up and caught the broken edge of the masonry. "Heave me up!" he ordered.

Someone pushed his legs and he scrambled awkwardly over the broken lip. The fort's interior seemed to be scorched and smoking. The two carts of ammunition had blown themselves to smithereens and blasted the victorious French into chaos. Blood was smeared on the roof and a tangle of dead lay on the ground near the barracks where the explosion's survivors wandered in a daze. A naked man, blackened and bleeding, reeled among those shocked Frenchmen. One of the confused infantrymen saw Sharpe on the roof but did not have the strength or maybe lacked the sense to raise his musket. There appeared to be some thirty or forty dead, and maybe as many again badly injured; not many casualties out of the thousand men that Loup had brought to the San Isidro Fort, but the disaster had whipped the confidence clean out of the wolf's brigade.

And, Sharpe saw, there was better news still. For through the swirling smoke and dust, through the grey-dark of night and the sullen glow of fire, a silver line showed in the east. The dawn light was shining and with the rising sun would come an allied cavalry picquet to discover why so much smoke plumed up from the San Isidro Fort.

"We've won, boys," Sharpe said as he jumped back down to the barracks floor.

That was not quite true. They had not won, they had merely survived, but survival felt uncommonly like victory and never more so than when, a half-hour later, Loup's men left the fort. They had made two more attacks on the barracks, but the a.s.saults were feeble, mere gestures, for the explosion had ripped the enthusiasm out of Loup's brigade. So, in the first light, the

Frenchmen went and they carried their wounded with them. Sharpe helped dismantle the barrier inside the nearest barracks door, then stepped cautiously into a chill and smoky morning that stank of blood and fire. He carried his loaded rifle in case Loup had left some marksmen behind, but no one shot at him in the pearly light. Behind Sharpe, like men released from nightmare, the guardsmen stepped cautiously into the dawn. Donaju emerged from the second barracks and insisted on shaking Sharpe's hand, almost as though the rifleman had won some kind of victory. He had not. Indeed Sharpe had come within a hand's breadth of ignominious defeat.

But now, instead, he was alive and the enemy was gone.

Which meant, Sharpe knew, that the real trouble was about to begin.

CHAPTER 5.

Cacadores trailed into the fort all morning. A few had escaped by hiding in ruined parts of the northern ramparts, but most of the survivors had fled across the ramparts and found a refuge among the thorns or in the dead, stony ground at the foot of the ridge dominated by the San Isidro Fort. Those lucky ones had watched aghast from their hiding places as other fugitives were hunted and slaughtered by the grey dragoons.

Oliveira had brought over four hundred riflemen to the fort. Now more than a hundred and fifty were dead, seventy were wounded and as many others missing.

Just over a quarter of the Portuguese regiment paraded at midday. They had suffered a terrible defeat after being overwhelmed in a confined s.p.a.ce by an enemy four times their number, yet they were not wholly destroyed and their colours still flew. Those flags had stayed hidden all night despite Loup's efforts to find the banners. Colonel Oliveira was dead and his body carried horrific evidence of the manner of his dying. Most of the other officers were also dead.

The Real Compania Irlandesa had lost no officers, not one. The French, it appeared, had not bothered to a.s.sault the gate tower. Loup's men had streamed through the gates and ransacked the fort, but not one man had tried to enter the imposing tower. The enemy had not even taken the officers' horses from their stables next to the gatehouse. "We had the doors barred," Lord Kiely lamely explained the survival of the gatehouse's occupants.

"And the c.r.a.pauds didn't try to break them down?" Sharpe asked, not bothering to hide his scepticism.

"Be careful of what you suggest, Captain," Kiely said in a supercilious tone.

Sharpe reacted like a dog smelling blood. "Listen, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said, astonished to hear himself saying it, "I fought my way up from the gutter and