Sharpe's Rifles (20 page)

“Vivar is his brother?” Sharpe’s confusion was absolute. Vivar, whose hatred of the French was
so overwhelming, had a brother who rode with the enemy? Who must have watched as the Dragoons
raped and killed Spanish women and children? His disbelief must have shown on his face for de
PEclin, clearly astonished that Sharpe had not known of the relationship, made a formal
introduction. “Allow me to name the Count of Mouromorto, Lieutenant. He is indeed Major Vivar’s
brother. You have to understand that, contrary to the lies told in the English newspapers, there
are many Spaniards who welcome the French presence. They believe it is time to sweep away the old
superstitions and practices that have crippled Spain for so long. The Count is such a man.” De
l’Eclin bowed to the Spaniard at the end of that description, but the Count merely glared at the
Englishman.

Sharpe returned the hostile stare. “You let these bastards kill your own people?”

For a second it seemed as if the Count would lash out at him. He was taller than Bias Vivar,
but now that he was close, Sharpe could see the familiarity. He had the same pugnacious jaw and
fervent eyes, which now regarded Sharpe with hostility. “What would you know of Spain,
Lieutenant?” the Count asked, “or of Spain’s desperate needs? Or of the sacrifices its people
must make if they are to know liberty?”

“What do you know of liberty? You’re nothing but a bloody murdering bastard.”

“Enough!” De l’Eclin raised his left hand to check Sharpe’s anger. “You say Major Vivar is not
with you?”

“He is not with me, nor is his damned strongbox. If it’s any business of yours, which it is
not, I parted from Major Vivar in anger and I don’t much care if I never see him again! But he’s
sent you on a wild goose chase, hasn’t he?”

De l’Eclin seemed amused at Sharpe’s anger. “Maybe, but you’re the goose, Lieutenant, and
you’re the one who’ll be plucked. You and your Rifles.” The Colonel was entranced by the word. He
knew Hussars, chasseurs, lancers, Dragoons, and gunners, he was familiar with sappers and
cuirassiers, grenadiers and fusiliers, but he had never before heard a man described as a
‘Rifle’. “On the other hand,” de l’Eclin continued, “if Major Vivar is with you, then you are
bound to deny his presence, are you not? Just as you are bound to defend him, which might explain
your persistence in this hopeless fight.”

“He isn’t here,” Sharpe said wearily. “Ask the Methodists.”

“I shall certainly ask the girl,” de l’Eclin said happily.

“Do that.” Sharpe spat the words. Bias Vivar, he thought, had been superbly clever, using a
rumour to persuade the French that he had fled south with the Riflemen, thereby sacrificing them.
But Sharpe could feel no anger against the Spaniard, only a reluctant admiration. He threw his
cigar onto the floor. “I’m going back.”

De l’Eclin nodded. “I shall give you ten minutes to make up your mind about surrender. Au
revoir, Lieutenant.”

“And go to hell yourself.”

Sharpe went back to the farmhouse. The wild goose was trapped, and would now be killed and
plucked. That, in a way, was Vivar’s revenge for Sharpe’s abandonment and Sharpe laughed at it,
for there was nothing else to do. Except fight.

“What did the bugger want, sir?” Harper asked.

“He wants us to surrender.”

“Bugger would.” Harper spat towards the fire.

“If we don’t surrender now, they won’t let us do it later.”

“So he’s got the wind up his backside, has he? He’s scared of the night?”

“He is, yes.”

“So what are you going to do, sir?”

“Tell him to go to hell. And make you a Sergeant.”

Harper grimaced. “No, sir.”

“Why the hell not?”

The big man shook his head. “I don’t mind telling the lads what to do in a fight, sir. Captain
Murray always let me do that, so he did, and I’ll do it whether you wanted me to or not. But I’ll
go no further. I won’t run your punishments for you or take a badge from you.”

“For Christ’s sake, why not?”

“Why the hell should I?”

“Why the hell did you save my life out there?” Sharpe gestured beyond the farmhouse to where,
in the panicked scramble to escape the Dragoons, he had been rescued by Harper’s
volleys.

The big Irishman looked embarrassed. “That would be Major Vivar’s fault, sir.”

“What the hell does that mean?”

“Well, sir, he told me that, with one exception, you were the best man in a fight he’d ever
seen. And that so long as the heathen English were fighting for a free Catholic Spain, sir, that
I was to keep you alive.”

“The best?”

“With the one exception.”

“Who is?”

“Me, sir.”

“The Major’s a lying bastard,” Sharpe said. He supposed he must accept what was offered, which
was Harper’s support on the battlefield. Even that would be better than no support at all. “So if
you are such a God-damned good fighter, tell me how we get out of this God-damned
hole?”

“We probably don’t, sir, and that’s the truth. But we’ll give the buggers a hell of a damned
fight, and they won’t be so cocksure the next time they meet the Rifles.”

A carbine bullet whiplashed through the kitchen window. De l’Eclin’s ten minutes were over,
and the fight had started again.

From one of the holes in the roof, Sharpe saw the wooded gully of which de l’Eclin had spoken.
Just to its north, in a walled paddock, most of the Dragoon’s horses were pastured.
“Hagman!”

The old poacher climbed the ladder. “Sir?”

“Make yourself a firing position and start killing horses. That’ll keep the buggers
busy.”

Downstairs the farm wife was busy with food. She produced a cask of salted mackerel and
whiting, evidence of how close the sea lay, which she distributed among the soldiers. Her
husband, his loophole completed, had charged a fowling piece with powder and shot that he
discharged deafeningly towards the east.

The French moved their horses further north. From the barn came the tantalizing smell of pork
being cooked. The rain seethed harder, then stopped. The carbine fire never stopped, but neither
did it do much damage. One Rifleman suffered a flesh wound in the arm and, when he yelped, was
scornfully jeered by his colleagues.

In the late afternoon a few Dragoons made a half-hearted charge through the orchard which lay
to the north, but they were easily discouraged. Sharpe, going from window to window, wondered
what devilry de l’Eclin plotted. He also wondered what Bias Vivar was doing with the time he had
gained by sending de l’Eclin on this wild goose chase. The strongbox was clearly of even more
importance than Sharpe had suspected; so important that the Emperor himself had sent the chasseur
to capture it. Sharpe supposed he would never know what it contained. Either he would be captured
or killed here, or else, when the French tired of this vigil, they would leave and Sharpe would
continue south. He would find a ship home, rejoin the mainstream of the army and he supposed,
with a sudden lurch of his heart, once again become a Quartermaster. He had not realized until
this second just how much he loathed that God-damn job. “Sir!” The voice was scared. “Sir!”
Sharpe ran to the front kitchen window. “Fire!” The French had made screens from the sheep
hurdles.

They had lashed them together to make heavy mats of birch-wattle that were large enough to
hide half a dozen men and resilient enough to stop rifle bullets. The cumbersome shields were
being inched across the yard, coming ever closer, and Sharpe knew that, once they reached the
house, the French would use axes and bars to break down the doors. He fired his own rifle,
knowing that the bullet was wasted against the supple wood. The carbine fire rose to a new
pitch.

Sharpe twisted about the table to the northern window. Powder smoke spurted from the orchard,
showing that Dragoons barred that escape, yet it was his only hope. He shouted up the ladder.
“Come down!”

He turned to Harper. “We’ll take the Spaniards with us. We’re breaking southwards.”

“They’ll catch us.”

“Better that than dying like rats in a pit. Fix swords!” He looked up the ladder to the
bedroom. “Hurry!”

“Sir!” It was Dodd who called back; quiet Dodd who stared out of the loophole in the roof and
who sounded most unnaturally excited. “Sir!”

Because a new trumpet challenged the sky.

Major Bias Vivar scraped his sword free of its scabbard. He raised it high, then, as the
trumpet reached its screaming high note, he lashed the blade down.

The horses spurred forward. There were a hundred of them; all that Lieutenant Davila had
brought from Orense. They scrambled up from the gully, found firm footing on the pasture, and
charged.

The crimson-uniformed Galician who held the guidon on its lance-like stave lowered the point.
The flag snapped in the wind. Dismounted French Dragoons turned in shock.

“Santiago! Santiago!” Vivar drew out the last syllable of his war cry as his Cazadores pounded
behind him. The remnants of his scarlet-clad elite company were here, reinforced by their
blue-coated comrades who had come north with Lieutenant Davila. Clods of earth were flung high
into the air from the horses’ hooves. “Santiago!” There was a ditch ahead, lined with Dragoons
who had been firing at the farmhouse and who now rose, twisted, and aimed at the Spanish cavalry.
A bullet hissed past Vivar’s face. “Santiago!” He came to the ditch, jumped it, and his blade
hissed down to slice blood from a Frenchman’s face.

The lance slammed into a Dragoon, burying the guidon flag in his chest. The standard-bearer
rode the staff free, screaming his own challenge, then was hit in the neck by a carbine bullet. A
horseman coming behind seized the toppling staff and raised the blood-soaked flag high
again.

“Santiago!”

Dismounted Dragoons were fleeing in the farmyard. The Spanish cavalry crashed into them.
Blades chopped down. Frightened horses twisted, snapped with yellow teeth and lashed with their
hooves. Swords clashed, ringing like blacksmith’s hammers. A Spaniard fell from the saddle, a
Frenchman screamed as a sword pinned him against the barn. The hurdle screens were abandoned in
the mud.

The charge had scoured the French clean out of the farmyard, and had made carnage of the
eastern ditch. The trumpeter was sounding the call to reform as Vivar reined in, turned his
horse, and started back. A French Dragoon, reeling from the first attack, made a feeble thrust at
the Major and was rewarded with a cut throat. “Rifles! Rifles!” Vivar shouted.

Some French officers ran from the barn and Vivar slewed his horse towards them, his men close
behind him. The Frenchmen turned and fled. The Cazadores rode right into the barn, ducking under
the lintel, and screams sounded inside. Mounted Dragoons appeared and Vivar shouted at his men to
form a line, to charge home, to fight for Santiago.

It was then that the Riflemen appeared from the house, splintering down the bullet-riddled
door and running into the yard with sword-bayonets fixed. They cheered the Spaniard. “East!”
Vivar shouted above their cheers, pointing with his sword. “East!”

The Riflemen ran eastwards, away from the sea, into the wooded gully where there would be
temporary safety from the French Dragoons. Those Dragoons, recovering from the shock of Vivar’s
attack, and realizing how they outnumbered the Spanish horsemen, were reforming their ranks on
the road beneath the farmhouse. The French trumpet sounded the advance.

Vivar let the counterattack come. He was yielding ground, content that the French should
regain the farm buildings while he withdrew to the gulley. His men fired from the saddle. When
they reloaded they rammed the bullets down their carbine barrels with ramrods that were attached
by a hinged sleeve at the weapons’ muzzles and so could not be dropped. The farmer, his wife, and
the Parkers’ coachman fled with the greenjackets.

The last of the Spanish Cazadores crashed down the gully’s slope. Sharpe’s Riflemen lined the
brink, firing at the Frenchmen whose pursuit, though enthusiastic, was doomed. The gully’s brush
and thorn would force the Dragoons to funnel into the narrow paths that were covered by the
Rifles and, realizing the danger, de l’Eclin called his men back. A few Frenchmen, stung to
anger, spurred onwards and Sharpe watched as the rifle bullets destroyed their scattered charge.
“Cease fire!”

“Follow us!” Vivar called from the gully’s far crest.

“Sir!” Harper shouted the warning, making Sharpe turn back.

Sprinting over the pasture, her skirt held up in her right hand and her bonnet grasped in her
left, came Louisa Parker. A bellow of rage sounded from the farm, evidently her aunt’s despairing
protest, but the girl ignored it. She skirted a fallen, bleeding horse. A Frenchman began running
in pursuit, but Hagman dropped the man with a single shot.

“Lieutenant! Lieutenant!” Louisa shouted.

“God Almighty!” Harper laughed as the girl, gasping for breath and eyes wide with the
excitement of the moment, crashed into the gully and threw herself at Sharpe as though he could
protect her against all the world.

Sharpe, exhilarated by her arrival, opened his arms to check her headlong flight. For a second
she clung to him, laughing and breathless, then she drew away. Sharpe’s men cheered the girl’s
defiance.

“Lieutenant!” Vivar had spurred back to hasten the Riflemen’s retreat, and now stared with
amazement at the girl at Sharpe’s side. “Lieutenant?”

But there was no time for explanations, no time for anything but the panicked flight
eastwards, away from the sea’s safety, and back to the mysteries enshrined in Bias Vivar’s
strongbox. The wild goose was safe.

  
T
hey journeyed throughout that night, climbing ever
higher and always into the teeth of a wind that brought the chill from the snow which lay in the
gullies of the upper slopes. Past midnight, from a wooded spur, Sharpe saw the far off gleam of
the western sea. Much closer, and beneath him in the dark tangle of the lowlands, a smear of camp
fires betrayed where men bivouacked. “The French,” Vivar said softly.