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, bloody 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. "God save Ireland," Harper said as he eased the wet sword out of Sharpe's hand, "but what have you done?"
"Won, Pat, bloody well won." And, despite the pain, he grinned. For he was a soldier, and he bloody well had won.
"Stay still, man, for God'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 goddamn bullet drove in scraps of your uniform," he said. "Why the hell 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.
"God knows if you'll live." The doctor plucked another scrap of bloody wool out of the wound and scraped it off the tweezer's jaws onto his stained apron. 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 damned child, for Christ's sake! I never could stand whining bloody 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 scraping against the bone as he searched for the carbine ball. "Got the little bastard. 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 Companпa 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 Companпa Irlandesa, General," he asked, "what happens to them?"
"Cadiz. But they go as heroes, Sharpe. A battle won! Almeida still invested and Massйna 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?"