Sharpe's Battle Part 57

"Won, Pat, b.l.o.o.d.y well won." And, despite the pain, he grinned. For he was a soldier, and he b.l.o.o.d.y well had won.

"Stay still, man, for G.o.d's sake." The surgeon's voice was slurred and his breath reeked of brandy. He grimaced as he manipulated the probe that was sunk deep in Sharpe's shoulder. The surgeon also held a small pair of tweezers that he constantly darted in and out of the open wound to give jabs of pure agony.

"The G.o.dd.a.m.n bullet drove in sc.r.a.ps of your uniform," he said. "Why the h.e.l.l don't you wear silk? That doesn't fall to pieces."

"Can't afford silk," Sharpe said. The church stank of blood, pus, faeces and urine. It was night time and Fuentes de Onoro's church was crammed with the wounded of two armies who lay in the smoking rushlight as they waited their turn with the surgeons who would be busy with their hooks and saws and blades all night long.

"G.o.d knows if you'll live." The doctor plucked another sc.r.a.p of b.l.o.o.d.y wool out of the wound and sc.r.a.ped it off the tweezer's jaws onto his stained ap.r.o.n.

He belched a fetid brandy-flavoured breath over Sharpe, then shook his head wearily. "The wound will probably turn septic. They usually do. You'll stink like a leper's latrine, your arm will drop off and in ten days' time you'll be dead. Lots of fever before then, you'll gibber like a lunatic and sweat like a horse, but you'll be a hero back home. Of course it hurts, man. Stop whining like a d.a.m.ned child, for Christ's sake! I never could stand whining b.l.o.o.d.y children. And sit still, man!"

Sharpe sat still. The pain of the probe was excruciating, like having a white- hot flesh-hook jammed and twisted into his shoulder joint. He closed his eyes and tried not to listen to the grating sound caused by the surgeon's probe sc.r.a.ping against the bone as he searched for the carbine ball. "Got the little b.a.s.t.a.r.d. Hold still." The surgeon found a narrow-nosed set of forceps and eased them into the wound after the probe. "You say a woman did it?"

"A woman did it," Sharpe said, keeping his eyes closed. A prisoner from Loup's brigade had confirmed that Juanita had indeed advanced with the dragoons. No one in Loup's brigade had thought the French would be dislodged from the village and thrown back over the stream and so no one had told Juanita the danger. Not that she would have listened. She had been an adventuress who loved the smell of fighting and now she was dead.

So was Loup, and with their death had died General Valverde's last chance of finding a witness to Sharpe's confession to having killed the French prisoners and so precipitating the fiasco at San Isidro. There was only one witness left alive and he had come at dusk to the church where Sharpe had been waiting for the surgeon. "They asked me," Runciman had told Sharpe excitedly. The Colonel had been in the village throughout the fight, and though no one was claiming that the erstwhile Wagon Master General had taken a leading role in the battle, nor was anyone denying that Colonel Runciman had been in the place of greatest danger where he had neither flinched nor shrunk from the fight.

"Who asked you what, General?" Sharpe had responded.

"Wellington and that wretched Spanish General." Runciman gabbled in his excitement. "Asked me directly, straight to my face. Had you admitted to shooting two Frenchies? That's what they asked me."

Sharpe flinched as a man screamed under the surgeon's knife. The amputated arms and feet made a grisly pile beside the altar that served as an operating table. "They asked you," Sharpe said, "and you don't tell lies."

"So I didn't!" Runciman said. "I said it was a preposterous question. That no gentleman would do such a thing and that you were an officer and therefore a gentleman and that with the greatest of respect to his Lordship I found the question offensive." Runciman bubbled with joy. "And Wellington backed me up!

Told Valverde he wanted to hear no more allegations against British officers.

And there's to be no court of inquiry either, Sharpe! Our conduct today, I am told, obviates any need to question the sad events of San Isidro. Quite right too!"

Sharpe had smiled. He had known he was exonerated from the moment that

Wellington, just before the Real Compania Irlandesa's counterattack on the village, had reprimanded him for shooting the French prisoners, but Runciman's excited news was a welcome confirmation of that release. "Congratulations,

General," Sharpe said. "So what now?"

"Home, I think. Home. Home." Runciman smiled at the thought. "Maybe I can be of some use in the Hampshire militia? I suggested as much to Wellington and he was kind enough to agree. The militia, he said, needed men with martial experience, men of vision and men with an experience of command, and he was kind enough to suggest I possessed all three qualities. He's a very kind man,

Wellington. Haven't you discovered that, Sharpe?"

"Very kind, sir," Sharpe said drily, watching the orderlies hold down a man whose leg was quivering as the surgeons cut at the thigh.

"So I'm off to England!" Runciman said with delight. "Dear England, all that good food and sensible religion! And you, Sharpe? What of your future?"

"I'll go on killing Frogs, General. It's all I'm good for." He glanced at the doctor and saw the man was nearly finished with his previous patient and he braced himself for the pain to come. "And the Real Compania Irlandesa,

General," he asked, "what happens to them?"

"Cadiz. But they go as heroes, Sharpe. A battle won! Almeida still invested and Ma.s.sena scuttling back to Ciudad Rodrigo. "Pon my word, Sharpe, but we're all heroes now!"

"I'm sure your father and mother always said you'd be a hero one day,

General."

Runciman had shaken his head. "No, Sharpe, they never did. They were hopeful for me, I don't deny it, and no wonder for they were blessed with only the one child and I was that fortunate blessing, and they gave me great gifts, Sharpe, great gifts, but not, I think, heroism."

"Well, you are a hero, sir," Sharpe said, "and you can tell anyone who asks that I said as much." Sharpe held out his right arm and, despite the pain, shook Runciman's hand. Harper had just appeared at the church doorway and was holding up a bottle to show that there was some consolation waiting when

Sharpe's bullet was extracted. "I'll see you outside, sir," Sharpe told

Runciman, "unless you want to watch the surgeon pull out the bullet?"

"Oh, good Lord, no, Sharpe! My dear parents never thought I'd have the stomach to study medicine and I fear they were right." Runciman had gone pale. "I shall let you suffer alone," he said and backed hastily away with a handkerchief held over his mouth in case the noxious effusions of the hospital gave him a sickness.

Now the doctor pulled the bullet free of the wound before ramming a dirty rag against Sharpe's shoulder to staunch the flow of blood. "No bones broken," he said, sounding disappointed, "but there are some bone chips off the rib that'll hurt you for a few days. Maybe for ever, if you live. You want to keep the bullet?" he asked Sharpe.

"No, sir."

"Not as a keepsake for the ladies?" the doctor asked, then took a flask of brandy from a pocket of his blood-stiffened ap.r.o.n. He took a deep swallow, then used a corner of his b.l.o.o.d.y ap.r.o.n to wipe the tips of the forceps clean.

"I know a man in the artillery who has dozens of spent bullets mounted in gold and hung on chains," the surgeon said. "He claims each one lodged near his heart. He's got the scar, you see, to prove it, and he presents a bullet to every woman he wants to roger and tells each silly b.i.t.c.h that he dreamed of a woman who looked just like her when he thought he was dying. It works, he says. He's a pig-ugly scoundrel but he reckons the women can't wait to claw his breeches down." He offered Sharpe the bullet again. "Sure you don't want the d.a.m.n thing?"

"Quite sure."

The doctor tossed the bullet aside. "I'll get you wrapped up," he said. "Keep the bandage damp if you want to live and don't blame me if you die." He walked unsteadily away, calling for an orderly to bandage Sharpe's shoulder.

"I do hate b.l.o.o.d.y doctors," Sharpe said as he joined Harper outside the church.

"My grand-da said the same thing," the Irishman said as he offered Sharpe the bottle of captured brandy. "He only saw a doctor once in all his life and a week later he was dead. Mind you, he was eighty-six at the time."

Sharpe smiled. "Is he the same one whose bullock dropped off the cliff?"

"Aye, and bellowed all the way down. Just like when Grogan's pig fell down a well. I think we laughed for a week, but the d.a.m.ned pig wasn't even scratched!

Just wet."

Sharpe smiled. "You must tell me about it some time, Pat."

"So you're staying with us then?"

"No court of inquiry," Sharpe said. "Runciman told me."

"They should never have wanted one in the first place," Harper said scornfully, then took the bottle from Sharpe and tipped it to his mouth.

They wandered through an encampment smeared with the smoke of cooking fires and haunted with the cries of wounded men left on the battlefield. Those cries faded as Sharpe and Harper walked further from the village. Around the fires men sang of their homes far away. The singing was sentimental enough to give

Sharpe a pang of homesickness even though he knew his home was not in England, but here, in the army, and he could not imagine leaving this home. He was a soldier and he marched where he was ordered to march and he killed the King's enemies when he arrived. That was his job and the army was his home and he loved both even though he knew he would have to fight like a gutter-born b.a.s.t.a.r.d for every step of advancement that other men took for granted. And he knew too that he would never be prized for his birth or his wit or his wealth, but would only be reckoned as good as his last fight, but that thought made him smile. For Sharpe's last battle had been against the best soldier France had and Sharpe had drowned the b.a.s.t.a.r.d like a rat. Sharpe had won, Loup was dead, and it was over at last: Sharpe's battle.

Historical Note