Sharpe's Skirmish s-14 Page 6

  He pushed his right hand through the wrist loop that was fastened at the lance's midpoint.

  It was time to swat the enemy aside.

  Time to win.

  Bloody hell, Sharpe thought, but what to do? If his men stood up they exposed themselves to the galling fire of the three hundred dragoons, and if they stayed crouching they could not see over the bridge's hump. They could fire one volley when the French came, but by then the big horses would be within forty feet and, though the volley might kill the leading cavalrymen, the dead and dying horses would slide forward on the roadway to smash their weight into the redcoats. Sharpe had seen the first French square break at Garcia Hernandez because the French held their fire an instant too long and the dead weight of the slaughtered horses had broken through the square's face like a battering ram. He stood, attracting a whistling volley of dragoon fire, but he endured it long enough to see a squadron of lancers trotting towards the road. "Bloody lancers, " he said.

  He hated lancers.

  He needed to barricade the bridge, but the wagon was in the river and any timbers that might have been useful from the fort were now inside an inferno. The smoke and embers whirled around Sharpe. The upper floors had collapsed, spewing sparks high into the cloudless sky. The heat of the burning fort was like a furnace to Sharpe's right.

  Mister MacKeon had equipped himself with a musket and cartridge pouch. He was crouching beside the wayside shrine and now beckoned Sharpe. Sharpe crossed to him and the Scotsman jerked a thumb through the iron-grille gate that protected the Virgin. "Your answer's there, Mister Sharpe, " he said.

  Prayer? Sharpe wondered, then he looked past the chipped plaster saint and saw that the back of the chapel was piled with the bottles of wine that Harper had been ordered to smash. "Wine?"

  "Have you ever heard of caltrops?" MacKeon asked.

  "No."

  "Spiky things. Horses can't abide them. Get up in their hooves, Mister Sharpe, into the soft tissue."

  "Harper! Harris! Cooper! Perkins! " Sharpe bellowed towards the olives where the riflemen had taken shelter. "Come here! Now! Fast!»

  A trumpet sounded on the southern road and the lancers lowered their blades. General Herault walked his horse to the front of the squadron. The dragoons blasted a volley that ricocheted off the bridge parapet or flattened its bullets against the fort's stonework. If that bugger of a wall collapses, Sharpe thought, it could crush his men, but there was no time to worry about that. Only time for Harper to finish his work.

  The four riflemen had sprinted over the field and dropped beside Sharpe as the bullets whipped overhead. "Every damn bottle, Pat, " Sharpe said, "is to be broken."

  "Now, sir?" Harper asked, staring at Sharpe as though he were mad.

  "Throw them up onto the bridge, " Sharpe said. "Do it now! Do it fast! Do it!»

  Harris and Perkins crouched inside the shrine and pushed bottles out of the door, and Harper, Sharpe and Cooper hurled them up onto the bridge's hump. MacKeon helped, and then two of the redcoats came to assist because there were so many bottles. Hundreds! Harper must have saved four hundred!

  Doubtless he had hoped Sharpe would not see them, and then he would have distributed the wine among the Light Company, and Sharpe was now damned grateful for the Irishman's disobedience. «Hurry!» He shouted, for the trumpet had sounded again and he could hear the thump of hooves.

  They hurled the bottles until the bridge ran with wine. Wine that diluted the drying blood and trickled past the dead bodies left on the roadway.

  But it was not the wine that would save Sharpe, but the thick layer of broken green glass that was beginning to build up in the bridge's centre, and still he threw more bottles that smashed apart in fountains of red, and every broken bottle left a handful of razor sharp shards. The scraps were just like the tops of the high walls that rich folk put round their property in Britain, and on the wall tops they would cement a thief's trap of broken glass, and Sharpe had crossed enough of those walls in his time.

  Bloody sharp stuff, horrid stuff, and Harris and Perkins backed out of the shrine, their arms filled with the last bottles and they hurled them up onto the bridge and now the hooves were a thunder to fill the air and shake the ground, and the curb chains and scabbard chains clinked and Sharpe stood to see the lances coming straight at him, and even the dragoons had stopped to watch the Poles slaughter their way across the bridge.

  "Stand up! " Sharpe shouted. «Present!» The muskets came up into mens's shoulders. Their bayonets, many still red with blood, pointed towards the bridge crest that glittered with a bed of green glass.

  And the lancers were in a line now, narrowing to cross the bridge at full gallop, and Sharpe drew his sword, tugging it hard because the blood drying on the blade had crusted to the inside of the scabbard. Some of the dragoons had opened fire. A redcoat staggered, his musket dropping.

  Sergeant Huckfield pulled him back out of the front rank. "Close up! Close up! " The riflemen were firing at the dragoons and the leading lancers were just on the bridge.

  "Fire! Sharpe shouted, and his thirty muskets flamed and smoked and he had an impression of a horse falling and screaming. "Reload! Fast! " He shouted, «reload!» The sound of hooves were still loud on the stone and Sharpe ran to one side to see past the musket's smoke and an hussar was leading the charge, but this hussar had a lance and he reached the bridge's crest and there his horse reared, and the horse was screaming, green light flashing off its flailing front hooves, and a second horse was sliding in the glass, shaking, its rider desperately trying to regain control, and then a third horse reached the broken glass and it too reared up. The lancers piled in behind, unable to get past the panicking horses.

  Those horses were in screaming agony, blood dripping from hooves, and Sharpe looked at his redcoats, watching the ramrods go back into the musket hoops. «Present!» He shouted. The muskets came up again as a dragoon's bullet whiplashed past Sharpe's shako. «Fire!» He called, and this time the three leading horses went down, struck by the volley, and the bridge was blocked. Two of the horses died within seconds, but the third lay on its side and screamed as it beat its hooves against the glass that had defeated the charge.

  Sharpe bulled through the ranks and ran up onto the bridge that was slippery with wine. The hussar was trapped beneath his horse, and grimacing because he had fallen among the broken glass, but he tried to lift the lance as Sharpe approached, but Sharpe knocked the lance blade aside, then grabbed the hussar by the collar of his brown coat and just dragged him clear of his horse. Glass crunched under Sharpe's boots. The hussar screamed as his hip was pulled through the shattered bottles, then Sharpe tugged him clear and pulled the man's pistol from its holster. He cocked it, aimed it, fired and the screaming horse gave a shudder and died. Then Sharpe pushed his prisoner back down the bridge. «Harry!» He shouted at Lieutenant Price. "Take the redcoats up to the dead horses.

  That's your barricade! Ensign?" He called for Hickey, because he knew the ensign spoke some French. "Ensign!»

  "Dead, sir, " Harper said. "Hit by a dragoon."

  "God damn, another ensign gone." Sharpe said. He tugged the lance off his prisoner, breaking the wrist-strap, then pulled out the Frenchman's sabre.

  "Harris? You speak frog. Find out what the hell these bastards are doing here. Give him a kicking if he won't talk."

  Then there were more hooves, another trumpet, and Sharpe whipped round, but there were no French approaching the bridge and he turned back to see more horsemen in blue and yellow, only these were coming from the north. A whole regiment of horsemen galloping on the road from Salamanca, their horses white with sweat because they had ridden so hard, and Teresa was alongside the leading officer who raised a hand and grinned at Sharpe as he curbed his horse.

  "Captain Lossow, " Sharpe said, reaching up to shake the German's hand.

  Captain Lossow of the King's German Legion looked at the blood and wine on the bridge, and at the dragoons who were trudging back towards their hors
es, and then at the great mass of French cavalry who were stalled in the fields beyond. "There must be a thousand men over there, Richard."

  "You want to go and play with them? You'll have to let me clear the bridge of glass first."

  "We shall wait here, " Lossow said, swinging down from his saddle. "We have a battalion of infantry coming and a battery of guns. But it looks as if you managed without us, Richard."

  "We coped, " Sharpe said, smiling up at Teresa. "We coped."

  Tubbs had been trapped in the burning fort and he was dead, and the captured French muskets were nothing but a twisted mass of melted metal.

  Good for nothing, MacKeon said, but Sharpe knew he would never have won this scrap if it had not been for MacKeon. "I owe you, " he said.

  "To hell and away, " the Scotsman said. "I just remembered how you managed at Gawilghur, Mister Sharpe, and reckoned you could manage again."

  Pierre Ducos appeared that evening, but Herault's brave idea was defeated, and now a battery of British field guns and a line of redcoats defended the bridge beside the smoking fort. Herault himself was a prisoner, captured, Captain Pailleterie said, by a rifleman called Sharpe. Ducos spat. The fools! They had held the bridge! And lost it! The incompetent fools. "You will be punished for this, Pailleterie, " he promised, «punished!» And then he ordered General Michaud to turn his infantrymen about and march them away south, and he took out his small notebook and crossed out the recommendation for General Herault's promotion, and added Pailleterie's name with a cross beside it, and then the name of the British rifle officer who had cheated him of victory. Sharp, he wrote, not knowing there should be an 'e', then added a question mark. A name to remember, but then, Ducos forgot nothing.

  Sharpe watched the enemy leave. He stood with Teresa on the crest of the bridge at San Miguel de Tormes, and watched the French retreat. And it was his company that had turned them back. "I was lucky, " he said softly.

  "Didn't deserve to win."

  "Of course you deserved to win, " Teresa said.

  "It was MacKeon." Sharpe said. "He reminded me of what we did at Gawilghur. And then it was Pat Harper, disobeying orders as usual."

  "There was a battle, " Teresa said, "in Spain. We won."

  «No,» Sharpe said, putting an arm about her shoulders. "It weren't a battle, love. Just a skirmish." Just a skirmish, but the French had lost and their general was Sharpe's prisoner. And too many men had died, and that was Sharpe's fault, but the army would only remember that Captain Sharpe had stopped the frogs and so, for the moment, his career was safe and the French would abandon Madrid and Wellington could keep marching north. And all because Sharpe had fought a skirmish and he had won. It was Sharpe's skirmish.

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