Then, with a suddenness that bespoke their desperate and fragile morale, the defenders of Fort San Carlos shattered just as the garrison of Fort Ingles had broken. The gunners, who were in their embrasures overlooking the moon-washed waters of the harbor, turned to see a churning mass of fighting men silhouetted on their western ramparts. They saw more men scramble onto the walls and they feared that the flood of men would wash down to swamp the courtyard and bring bayonets to the gunpits, and so the gunners fled. They leaped from their embrasures, scrambled up the ditch's far side and ran south toward the third fort, Amargos, that lay a half mile away and, like San Carlos, faced east onto the harbor.
The Spanish infantry, seeing the gunners go and realizing that there was nothing left to defend, broke as well. Sharpe, still on the western ramparts, cupped his hands and screamed toward Cochrane's men. "They're running! Go south! South!" he shouted in English. "Do you hear me, Cochrane?"
"I hear you!" the voice came back.
"They're running for the next fort!"
"Tally-ho! Tally-ho!" And Cochrane, throwing all caution to the wind, turned his men off the track to charge south toward Fort Amargos. The headland echoed with the yelps and cheers of the hunting rebels. Miller's drummers were trying to beat a quick tattoo, but the pace of the advance was too swift for such formal encouragement. The defenders of Fort San Carlos, denied the use of their gate, spilled over their earthen walls to flee toward safety. Now two sets of men were running for Fort Amargos whose defenders, thinking they were all loyal Spanish forces, opened its wooden gates to receive them.
Sharpe, his men disorganized and exhausted by their attacks on the first two forts, did not join the assault on Fort Amargos. Instead he jumped down to the courtyard and crossed to the flagpole that was nothing but a thin tree trunk skinned of its bark. He sawed with his sword till the flag fluttered free. Lieutenant Cabral, foraging through the fort's buildings, found a thin horse shivering in a stable. He offered to ride after Cochrane and bring back news of the night, an offer Sharpe gratefully accepted. Then, when picquets had been set on the captured ramparts and search parties sent to find the wounded, Sharpe sheathed his sword and walked to the gun embrasures.
Harper joined him. Most of the Kitty's sailors were ransacking the fort, hurling bedding out of the log huts and hunting for coins in abandoned valises and rucksacks. A Midshipman, deputed by Sharpe to bring a butcher's bill, reported that he had found just three dead Spaniards and one dead rebel.
"God save Ireland," Harper said in amazement, "but that wasn't a battle, it was more like herding cattle!"
"They think we're devils," the Midshipman said. "I spoke to a wounded man and he said their bullets can't kill us. We're charmed, you see. We're protected by magic."
"No wonder the poor sods ran," Harper made the sign of the cross, then gave a huge yawn.
Sharpe sent the Midshipman to find Cochrane's surgeon, MacAuley. There were six men badly wounded, all Spaniards. Some of the Kitty's men had sword cuts, and one had a bullet in his thigh, but otherwise the injuries were paltry. Sharpe had never known a victory to come so cheap. "Cochrane was right," he said to Harper. Or perhaps it had been the Spaniards who had defeated themselves, for men who believe in demons can be defeated easily.
Sharpe leaned on a gun embrasure and stared at the moon-glossed water of Valdivia Harbor. A score of ships, their cabin lights like cottage windows bright in the night, lay in the great bay, while across the water, perhaps a thousand yards away, a blaze of torches shone in Fort Niebla. Beside the fort was the entrance to the River Valdivia, leading to the town where supposedly Bias Vivar was a prisoner.
"We could give those bastards a shot or two?" Harper nodded toward the lights of Fort Niebla.
"They're out of musket range," Sharpe said idly.
"Not with muskets. With these buggers!" Harper slapped the nearest cannon. It was a massive thirty-six pounder, a ship-killing lump of artillery that had a depressed barrel in expectation of enemy ships coming through the harbor's entrance channel. The gun's roundshot would be held in place by a rope ring rammed against the ball to stop it rolling down the inclined barrel. A quill filled with a finely mealed powder stuck from the cannon's touch-hole, and a portfire smoked and fizzed inside a protective barrel at the back of the gunpit. All the gun needed was to be re-aimed, then fired.
"Why not?" Sharpe said, then turned the cannon's elevating screw until it pointed to a spot just above the far Fort Niebla. Harper had already levered the trail around. Sharpe plucked the portfire from its barrel and blew on its burning tip till the fuse glowed a brilliant red. "Would you like to do the honors?"
"You do this one," Harper said, "and I'll do the next."
Sharpe stood to one side, reached over, and touched the glowing match to the quill in the touchhole. The fire flashed down to the charge, the gun crashed back on its carriage and a cloud of smoke billowed to hide the harbor. Men cheered as the ball screamed away across the water. Burning scraps of wad floated down the hillside and started small fires in the grass.
Harper fired the next gun, and so they went down the embrasures, sending the heavy shots toward the distant fort. Sharpe doubted that the cannonfire would do any damage, for he had no training in aiming such big guns, yet the shots were an expression of relief, even of joy. The defenders at Fort Niebla, doubtless confused by the noises and alarms of the night, did not fire back.
As the sound of the last shot echoed around the confining hills of the harbor, Sharpe looked south and saw that Cochrane's men were swarming across the ramparts of Fort Amargos. The fort's Spanish defenders were a fleeing rabble, the gate gaped open, and its flag was captured. Others of Cochrane's men, diverted from the newly captured Fort Amargos, were scrambling up the headland's central ridge to attack the gun emplacements of Fort Chorocomayo. Musket fire splintered the night as the attackers climbed. Cheers sounded from the ridge, a bugle called, and out in the harbor the nervous crews of neutral ships displayed bright lanterns in their rigging, advertizing to any attackers that they had no part in this night's fighting.
The fighting was ending. High on the ridge, under the bright sparks of the stars, musket flashes and cannon flames showed where Fort Chorocomayo briefly resisted Cochrane's assault. Chorocomayo had been constructed to stop an attack from the south, not the north, and the firing flared for only a few minutes before there was a sudden silence and, through the moonlit mist of powder smoke, Sharpe saw the silhouetted flag drop. Chorocomayo, like Amargos and San Carlos and Fort Ingles, had fallen. Three hundred wet and frightened men, coming from the sea, had ripped Valdivia's outer defenses into tatters. "Bloody amazing, is what it is!" Harper said.
"It surely is," Sharpe agreed, though he knew the worst was yet to come, for the most formidable of the Spanish defense works, Corral Castle, Fort Niebla, Manzanera Island and Valdivia's Citadel, were still in enemy hands, and all those strongholds, save only the gun batteries on Manzanera Island, were stone-walled and properly supplied with glacis, ditches and revetments. Yet those more taxing defenses would have to wait for daylight. Lieutenant Cabral, coming back on his horse, confirmed that Cochrane had called a halt for the night. The attack would continue in the morning, and till then the rebel forces were to stay where they were—to eat, sleep and rejoice.
Sharpe washed his sword blade clean in a trough of water, then joined Harper by a brazier where they ate Spanish sausages and a great loaf of bread, all washed down by a skin of harsh red wine. Harper had also found a basket of apples, and their smell reminded Sharpe of Normandy, for an instant, the homesickness was acute as a bullet's strike. He shook it away. The smell of the battle, of powder smoke and blood, was already gone, blown southward by the salty sea wind.