Sharpe's Battle Part 33

"What do we do if we meet them?" Donaju asked.

"Hide," Sharpe said. "Seventy of us can't beat a thousand of them, not in the open." An ambush might work this night, but not a firefight on open, level moonlit ground against an overwhelming enemy. "And I hate night fighting,"

Sharpe went on. "I was captured in a b.l.o.o.d.y night fight in India. We were blundering around in the sodding dark with no one knowing what they were doing or why except for the Indians, and they knew well enough. They were firing rockets at us. The things were no b.l.o.o.d.y use as weapons, but at night their fire blinded us and the next thing I knew there were twenty big b.u.g.g.e.rs with fixed bayonets all around me."

"Where was that?" Donaju asked.

"Seringapatam."

"What business did you have in India?" Donaju asked in evident disapproval.

"Same business I've got here," Sharpe said curtly. "Killing the King's enemies."

El Castrador wanted to know what they were talking about, so Donaju translated. The partisan was suffering because Sharpe had refused to let anyone ride a horse so El Castrador's horse, like the horses of the Spanish-

Irish officers, was being led at the column's rear. Sharpe had insisted on the precaution because men on horses were liable to ride away from the line of march and the sight of a mounted man on a crest could easily serve to alert a

French patrol. Sharpe had similarly insisted that no man carry a loaded musket in case a stumble snapped a lock and fired a shot that would carry far in the still, almost windless night.

The march was not hard. The first hour was the worst, for they had to climb the steep hill opposite the San Isidro, but once over the crest the road kept to fairly level ground. It was a drover's road, gra.s.sy, wide and easy marching in the cool night air. The route wound lazily between rocky outcrops where enemy picquets could have been hidden. Normally Sharpe would have reconnoitred such dangerous places, but this night he pushed his scouts urgently ahead. He was in a dangerous and fatalistic mood. Maybe, he thought, this reckless march was the aftermath of defeat, a kind of shocked reaction in which a man lashed out blindly, and this daft expedition under the half-moon was undoubtedly blind, for Sharpe knew in his inmost soul that the unfinished business between himself and Brigadier Loup would almost certainly stay unfinished. No man could expect to march by night towards a fortified village that he had not reconnoitred and then spring an ambush. The odds were that the small expedition would watch the village from afar, Sharpe would conclude that nothing could be achieved against its walls or in the nearby defile, and in the dawn the guards and riflemen would march back to San Isidro with nothing but sore feet and a wasted night.

It was just after midnight when the column reached the low ridge that overlooked the valley of San Cristobal. Sharpe rested the men behind the crest while he climbed to the top with El Castrador, Donaju and Harper. The four men lay in the rocks and watched.

The grey stone of the village was blanched near white by the moonlight which cast stark shadows from the intricate web of stone walls that marked the fields around the small settlement. The lime-washed bell tower of the church seemed to glow, so clear was the night and so bright the half-moon that hung above the glimmering hills. Sharpe trained his telescope on the tower and, though he could plainly see the untidy stork's nest on top and the sheen of the moon glancing from a bell suspended in the tower's arched opening, he could see no sentries there. But nor would he necessarily expect to see a picquet, for any man keeping watch through a cold long night in a high vulnerable place would be likely to huddle for shelter in a corner of the tower.

San Cristobal looked as though it had been a pleasant village before Loup's brigade came to evict the inhabitants and destroy their livelihood. The st.u.r.dy field walls had been built to keep fighting bulls safely penned, and those bulls had paid for the church and houses that all showed a touch of affluence in the lens of Sharpe's telescope. At Fuentes de Onoro, the tiny village where he had first met El Castrador, the cottages had been mostly low and virtually windowless, but some of San Cristobal's houses had two storeys and nearly all the outward-facing walls possessed windows and even, in one case, a small balcony. Sharpe a.s.sumed there would be picquets in half those windows.

He traced the line of the drover's road with his telescope to see that where a track left the road to become the village's main street a stone wall had been built between two houses. There was a gap in the wall, but Sharpe could just make out the shadowy hint of a second wall beyond the first. He made a zigzag motion with his hand as he looked at El Castrador. "The gate, senor?"

"Si. Three walls!" El Castrador exaggerated the zigzag gesture to show how complicated the maze-like entrance was. Such a maze would slow down any attacker while Loup's men poured musket fire down from the upper windows.

"How do they get their horses inside?" Donaju asked in Spanish.

"Around the far side," El Castrador answered. "There is a gate. Very strong.

And the defile, senor, is on the far side of the village. Where the road goes into the hills, see? We should go there?"

"Christ, no," Sharpe said. His hope in El Castrador's defile had vanished the moment he saw where it was. The gorge might be a perfect place for a surprise attack, but it was too far away and Sharpe knew he would have no chance of reaching it before daylight. So much for his hopes of ambush.

He turned the spygla.s.s back to the village just in time to see a flicker of motion. He tensed, then saw it was merely a puff of smoke coming from a chimney deep in the village. The smoke had been there all the time, but someone must have dumped wood on the fire or else tried to revive a hearth of smouldering embers with a pair of bellows and so provoked the sudden gust of smoke.

"They're all tucked up in bed," Donaju said. "Safe and sound."

Sharpe edged the telescope across the village roofs. "No flag," he said at last. "Does he usually fly a flag?" he asked El Castrador.

The big man shrugged. "Sometimes yes, sometimes no." He plainly did not know the answer.

Sharpe collapsed the telescope. "Put a dozen men on guard, Donaju," he ordered, "and tell the rest to sleep a while. Pat? Send Latimer and a couple of the lads to that knoll." He indicated a rocky height that would offer the best view of the surrounding country. "And you and the rest of the rifles will come with me."

Harper paused as though he wanted to ask for details of what they planned to do, then decided mute obedience was the best course and slid back off the crest. Donaju frowned. "I can't come with you?"

"Someone has to take charge if I die," Sharpe said. "So keep watch, stay here till three in the morning, and if you haven't heard from me by then, go home."

"And what do you plan to do there?" Donaju asked, gesturing towards the village.

"It doesn't smell right," Sharpe said. "I can't explain it, but it doesn't smell right. So I'm just going to take a look. Nothing more, Donaju, just a look."

Captain Donaju was still unhappy at being excluded from Sharpe's patrol, yet he did not like to contradict Sharpe's plans. Sharpe, after all, was a fighting soldier and Donaju had only one night's experience of battle. "What do I tell the British if you die?" he asked Sharpe chidingly.

"To take my boots off before they bury me," Sharpe said. "I don't want blisters through eternity." He turned to see Harper leading a file of riflemen up the slope. "Ready, Pat?"

"Aye, sir."

"You'll stay here," Sharpe said to El Castrador, not quite as a question, but not quite a direct order either.

"I shall wait here, senor." The partisan's tone betrayed that he had no wish to get any closer to the wolf's lair.

Sharpe led his men southwards behind the crest until a broken stretch of rocks offered a patch of shadow that took them safe down to the nearest stone wall.

They moved fast, despite having to go at a crouch, for the shadows of the stone walls offered black lanes of invisibility that angled towards the village. Halfway across the valley floor Sharpe stopped and made a cautious reconnaissance with his telescope. He could see now that all the lower windows in the village had been blocked with stone, leaving only the inaccessible upper windows free for lookouts. He could also see the foundations of houses that had been demolished outside the village's defensive perimeter so that no attacker would have shelter close to San Cristobal. Loup had taken the additional precaution of knocking down the drystone walls that lay within close musket range of the village. Sharpe could get as near as sixty or seventy paces, but after that he would be as visible as a blowfly on a limewashed wall.

"b.u.g.g.e.r's taking no chances," Harper said.

"Can you blame him?" Sharpe answered. "I'd knock down a few walls to stop El

Castrador practising his technique on me."

"So what do we do?" Harper asked.

"Don't know yet."

Nor did Sharpe know. He had come to within rifle range of his enemy's stronghold and he could feel no p.r.i.c.kle of fear. Indeed, he could feel no apprehension at all. Maybe, he thought, Loup was not here. Or maybe, more worryingly, Sharpe's instincts were out of kilter. Maybe Loup was the puppetmaster here and he was enticing Sharpe ever closer, lulling his victim into a fatal sense of security.

"Someone's there," Harper said, antic.i.p.ating Sharpe's thoughts, "else there'd be no smoke."

"Sensible thing to do," Sharpe said, "is for us to b.u.g.g.e.r off out of here and go to bed."

"Sensible thing to do," Harper said, "is get out the b.l.o.o.d.y army and die in bed."

"But that's not why we joined, is it?"

"Speak for yourself, sir. I just joined to get a square meal," Harper said. He primed his rifle, then similarly armed the seven-barrel gun. "Getting killed wasn't really part of the idea at all."

"I joined so as not to be strung from a gallows," Sharpe said. He primed his own rifle, then gazed again at the village's moonwashed walls. "d.a.m.n it," he said, "I'm going closer." It was like the game children played when they tried to see how close they could creep to a victim without their movements being observed, and suddenly, in Sharpe's mind, the village a.s.sumed a childlike menace, almost as though it were a malevolent but sleeping castle that must be approached with enormous stealth in case it stirred and destroyed him. Yet why bother to risk destruction, he asked himself? And he could give himself no answer to the question, except that he had not come this close to the stronghold of the man who had made himself into Sharpe's bitterest enemy just to turn and walk ignom-iniously away. "Watch the windows," he told his men, then he sneaked along the base of the shadowed wall until at last the stones ran out and there was only a spill of fallen rocks to show where once the wall had stood.

But at least that spill of stones offered a patchy tangle of concealing shadows. Sharpe stared at that tangle, wondering if the shadows were sufficient to hide a man and then he looked up at the village. Nothing stirred except the haze of woodsmoke tugged by the night's small wind.

"Come back, sir!" Harper called softly.