Sharpe's Battle Part 56

Someone had already cut open his pockets, seams and pouches and discarded a crude chess set with a board made of painted canvas, court pieces of carved wood and p.a.w.ns from musket b.a.l.l.s. Sharpe could smell the corpse as he crouched at the street corner and tried to divine the battle's course from the tangle of noise and smoke. He sensed he was behind the enemy now and that if he could just attack to his right then he would be threatening to cut off Loup's grey infantry and the bearskinned grenadiers who were now inextricably mixed together. If the enemy thought they were about to be surrounded they would probably retreat, and that retreat could lead to a wholesale French withdrawal. It could lead to victory.

Harper peered round the corner. "Thousands of the b.u.g.g.e.rs," he said. He was carrying a spontoon that he had picked up from a dead Connaught sergeant. He had snapped off four feet of the pike to make it a handier weapon for the grim business of killing in a confined s.p.a.ce. He looked at the plundered French officer in the street. "No money in that chess set," he said grimly. "Do you remember that sergeant at Busaco who found the silver chess men?" He hefted the spontoon. "Just send me a rich dead officer, please G.o.d."

"No one will get rich off me," Sharpe said grimly, then peered round the corner to see a barricade of dead grenadiers blocking the street with a ma.s.s of French infantry waiting behind them. "Who's loaded?" Sharpe asked the men crouching near him. "To the front," he ordered the half-dozen men who raised their hands. "Hurry now! We go round the corner," he told them, "you wait for my word, you kneel, you fire, then you charge like h.e.l.l. Pat? You bring the rest five paces behind." Sharpe was leading a mongrel mix of riflemen,

Connaught Rangers, Highlanders, guardsmen and cacadores."'Ready, boys?" He grinned at them from a face smeared with enemy blood. "Then come on!"

He screamed the last word as he led his men around the corner. The French behind the barricade obliged Sharpe by firing straightaway, panicked by the awful screams of the attackers into firing too soon and firing too high.

"Halt! Kneel!" Sharpe stood among the kneeling men. "Aim!" Harper was already leading the second charge out of the alley. "Fire!" Sharpe shouted and the volley whipped over the dead grenadiers as Sharpe's men charged out of the smoke and scrambled over the warm heap of b.l.o.o.d.y dead. The French ahead of

Sharpe were desperately reloading, but their fixed bayonets impeded their ramrods and they were still trying to load their muskets when Sharpe's charge smashed home and the killing began again. Sharpe's sword arm was weary, his throat was hoa.r.s.e from shouting and his eyes were stinging from powder smoke, sweat and blood, but there could be no rest. He rammed the sword home, twisted it, pulled it out, then rammed it forward again. A Frenchman aimed his musket at Sharpe, pulled the trigger and was rewarded with a hangfire as the powder in the pan caught fire, but did not set off the charge inside the barrel. The man screamed as the sword stabbed home. Sharpe was so weary from the killing that he was holding the big sword two-handed, his right hand on the hilt and his left gripping the lowest part of the blade so that he could shove it hard into the press of men. The crush of bodies was so great that there were times when he could hardly move and so he would claw at the faces nearest him, kick and bite and b.u.t.t with his head until the d.a.m.ned French moved or fell or died and he could climb over another body and snarl forward with the b.l.o.o.d.y sword dripping.

Harper caught up with him. The spontoon's foot-long sharpened steel spearhead had a small cross-bar at its base to prevent the weapon being driven too deep into an enemy horse or man and Harper was repeatedly burying the blade clear to the cross-piece, then kicking and twisting to loosen the weapon before thrusting forward again. Once, when a French sergeant tried to rally a group of men, Harper lifted a dying man on the end of the truncated spear and used his thrashing body as a bleeding and screaming battering ram that he slammed into the enemy ranks. A pair of b.l.o.o.d.y-faced Connaught Rangers had attached themselves to Harper and the three were chanting their war cries in Irish.

A rush of Highlanders came out of a lane on Sharpe's right. He sensed that the battle was turning. They were attacking downhill now, not defending uphill, and the grey infantry of Loup's brigade was going back with the rest. He unclenched his left hand from the lower blade of the sword and saw he had cut his palm open. A musket flamed from a window to his left and a guardsman went spinning down, gasping. Captain Donaju led a charge into the roofless house that echoed with shouts as French fugitives were hunted through the tiny rooms and back into the pig shed. A terrible roar of triumph sounded to Sharpe's right as a company of Connaught Rangers trapped two companies of Frenchmen in a blind alley. The Irish began working their b.l.o.o.d.y way to the alley's end and no officer dared try to stop their slaughter. Down on the gra.s.sland north of

Poco Velha this battle had seen the most delicate of drill manoeuvres save the

Light Division, now it was witnessing a primitive wild fighting out of the most gruesome nightmare that might yet save the whole army.

"Left!" Harper called and Sharpe turned to see a rush of grey-uniformed

Frenchmen coming through an alley. The guardsmen no longer needed orders to counterattack, they just swarmed into the alley and screamed a wild, keening noise as they laid into the enemy. The Real Compania Irlandesa had been caught up by the sublime joy of a victorious and killing fight. One man took a bullet in the chest and noticed nothing, but just went on stabbing and swinging his musket. Donaju had long ceased trying to exercise control. Instead he was fighting like his men, grinning horribly from a face made awful by blood, smoke, sweat and strain. "Seen Runciman?" Sharpe asked him.

"No."

"He'll live," Sharpe said. "He ain't the kind to die in battle."

"And we are?" Donaju asked.

"G.o.d knows." Sharpe was resting for a moment in an angle of wall. His breath came in great gasps. "Have you seen Loup?" he asked Harper.

"Not a sign of the b.u.g.g.e.r, sir," Harper answered. "But I'm saving this for him." He touched the cl.u.s.tered barrels of his volley gun that was slung on his back.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d's mine," Sharpe said.

A cheer announced another rush forward somewhere in the village. The French were going back everywhere and Sharpe knew this was the time to keep the enemy from holding or regrouping. He led a squad of men through a house, stepping over two French corpses and one dead Highlander to emerge into the small backyard. He kicked open the yard's gate and saw Frenchmen just yards away.

"Come on!" He screamed the last word as he ran into the street and led his men against the remnants of a barricade. Muskets flared and flamed, something slapped against the stock of Sharpe's slung rifle, then he was hacking the sword over the barricade and guardsmen were hauling the carts and benches and burning straw bales aside. A house was on fire nearby and the smoke made

Sharpe cough as he kicked his way through the last obstacles and parried a bayonet lunged by a small wiry French sergeant. Harper skewered the man with his spontoon. The stream was just feet away. A French gun fired, blasting canister up the main road and twitching a dozen Highlanders aside, then the

French gunners were masked as a rush of Frenchmen tried to escape the vengeful allied counterattack by fleeing back over the Dos Casas stream.

A bellowing voice sounded to Sharpe's right and he saw it was Loup himself trying to rally the French. The Brigadier was standing on the remnants of the old stone clapper bridge where he swore at the running Frenchmen and tried to turn them back with his sword. Harper unslung his seven-barrelled gun, but

Sharpe pushed it down. "b.u.g.g.e.r's mine, Pat."

Some redcoats were pursuing the French over the stream as Sharpe ran towards the bridge. "Loup! You b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Loup!" he shouted. "Loup!"

The Brigadier turned and saw the blood-soaked rifleman running towards him.

Loup jumped off the bridge as Sharpe splashed into the stream and the two men met halfway, thigh-deep in a pool made by a dam of bodies and discoloured by their blood. The swords clashed, Loup lunged, but Sharpe parried and swung, only to have his own blow parried. He kicked at Loup's knee, but the deep water impeded him and he almost fell and opened himself to a scything swing of

Loup's straight sword, but Sharpe recovered at the last moment and deflected the blow with the hilt of his sword which he rammed forward at Loup's wall- eye. The Brigadier stepped hurriedly back, tripped, but gained his balance with another vicious swing of the sword. The wider battle was still being fought, but both the British and the French left the two swordsmen alone. The

French were going to earth in the walls and gardens of the stream's eastern bank where their first attacks of the day had started, while the British and

Portuguese were hunting the last enemy out of the village proper. While in the stream the two battle-crazed men swung their clumsy swords like clubs.

They were evenly matched. Loup was the better swordsman, but he lacked

Sharpe's height and reach and he was more accustomed to fighting on horseback than on foot. The two swung, stabbed and parried in a grotesque mockery of the fine art of fencing. Their movements were slowed by the stream and by their tiredness, while the finesse of swordfighting was wasted on blades as long and c.u.mbersome as heavy cavalry swords. The sound of the two swords was reminiscent of a blacksmith's shop.

"b.a.s.t.a.r.d," Sharpe said, and cut. "b.a.s.t.a.r.d," he said again and rammed the point forward.

Loup parried the lunge. "This is for my two murdered men," he said and cut the sword upward, forcing Sharpe to an awkward parry. Loup spat an insult then lunged his sword at Sharpe's face, making the rifleman stagger sideways.

Sharpe returned the lunge and shouted in triumph as his sword sliced into

Loup's midriff, but he had only succeeded in piercing the Frenchman's sabretache that now trapped the point of his sword as Loup waded forward to give the killing blow. Sharpe stepped forward as well, closing the gap to stop the lunge and b.u.t.ting with his head as he got close. The Frenchman avoided the b.u.t.t and brought up his knee. Sharpe hit him with his left hand, then wrenched his sword free and hit Loup with the hilt just as the Brigadier's sword guard clouted him stingingly on the left side of his head.

The two men reeled apart. They stared at each other, but they no longer traded insults for they needed all their strength for the fight. Muskets snapped across the stream, but still no one interfered with the duellists, recognizing that they were fighting the battle of honour that belonged to them alone. A group of grey-uniformed men watched from the eastern bank while a mix of riflemen, guardsmen, Rangers and Highlanders cheered Sharpe from the west.

Sharpe scooped water up with his left hand and splashed it on his mouth. He licked his lips. "Time to finish you," he said thickly and waded forward. Loup raised his sword as Sharpe swung, parried the blow, then parried again. Sharpe had found a new, desperate energy and he gave the Frenchman stroke after stroke, huge strokes, great slashing cuts of the heavy sword that beat down

Loup's guard and followed each other so fast that the Frenchman had no time to disengage and turn his own blade into the attack. He went back, beaten by

Sharpe's strength, and blow by blow his defence weakened as Sharpe, teeth gritted, went on swinging. One last blow rang on Loup's upheld sword to drive the grey Frenchman down onto his knees in the water and Sharpe screamed his victory as he raised the sword for one last terrible strike.

"Watch out, sir!" Harper called desperately.

Sharpe glanced to his left to see a grey-uniformed dragoon mounted on a grey horse and with a plume of black, shining hair hanging from his helmet to his waist. He was holding a short-barrelled carbine aimed dead at Sharpe. Sharpe stepped back, checking the killing stroke, and saw that the black hair was not a helmet's plume at all. "Juanita!" he shouted. She would save Loup just as she had once kept Lord Kiely alive, only she had saved Kiely to preserve her excuse for staying behind British lines while she would keep Loup alive for love. "Juanita!" Sharpe called, appealing to that one memory of a grey dawn in a grey wolf's bed in the high hills.

She smiled. She fired. She turned to flee, but Harper was in the shallows with the seven-barrelled gun at his shoulder and his volley s.n.a.t.c.hed Juanita off her horse in an eruption of blood. Her death screech ended before her falling body struck the ground.

Sharpe was also falling. He had taken a terrible blow under his right shoulder and the pain was already flickering like fire down his suddenly nerveless hand. He staggered and went to one knee and Loup was suddenly over him, sword aloft. Smoke from a burning house wafted over the stream as Loup shouted his victory and brought the sword slamming down.

Sharpe hooked the Frenchman's right ankle with his left hand and tugged. Loup shouted as he fell. Sharpe snarled and dived forward, going beneath the falling sword, and he grabbed his own sword blade with his blood-encrusted left hand so that he was holding the three-foot blade like a quarterstaff that he rammed hard across his enemy's neck. Blood from his shoulder was running down to the stream as he drove the Brigadier beneath the water, drove him down to the stream's gravel bed and held him there with the sword. He locked his right arm straight and held the sword tip with his left and clenched his teeth against the pain in his arm as he used all his weight to hold the smaller man down under the hurrying stream. Bubbles showed in the b.l.o.o.d.y water and were whirled away. Loup kicked and thrashed, but Sharpe held him there, kneeling in the stream so that only his head and b.l.o.o.d.y shoulder were above water and he kept the sword hard over the dying man's throat to drown the Frenchman like a man would drown a rabid dog.

Rifles and muskets splintered from the western bank as Sharpe's men drove away

Loup's infantry from the eastern bank. Those grey infantry had come forward to rescue their Brigadier, but Loup was dying, choking on water and steel, blacking out under the stream. A bullet slapped the water close to Sharpe, but he stayed there, ignoring the pain, just holding the sword hard across his enemy's throat. And slowly, slowly, the last bubbles faded, and slowly, slowly, the struggles beneath Sharpe ceased, and slowly, slowly, Sharpe understood that he had scotched the beast and that Loup, his enemy, was dead and slowly, slowly, Sharpe eased away from the body that floated up to the surface as he staggered, b.l.o.o.d.y and hurting, back to the western bank where

Harper caught up with him and hurried him back into the shelter of a bullet- chipped wall. "G.o.d save Ireland," Harper said as he eased the wet sword out of

Sharpe's hand, "but what have you done?"