Sharpe walked past the fires, swapping jokes, accepting tots of hoarded spirits, feeling the edges of bayonets, telling the men that the next day would not be bad. Nor should it be. The combined British and Spanish far outnumbered the French; the allies had the initiative, the battle should be short, swift, and victory almost a certainty. He listened to men boasting of the deeds they would perform next day and knew that the words covered their fear; it was right that they should. Other men, more quietly, asked him what it would be like. He smiled and told them they would see in the morning, but it would not be as bad as they feared, and shrugged away his knowledge of the chaos they would all have to surmount when the attacking infantry walked into the storm of canister and musket shot. He left the fires behind, skirted the bigger blaze where the officers’ servants prepared the thin stew of salt beef that was the last of the hoarded supplies, and out of the trees altogether. In the last light of dusk he could see a farmhouse five hundred yards away where earlier he had seen the sixteenth Light Dragoons go with their horses. He crossed the fields and went into the yard. A line of troopers in blue and scarlet uniforms waited by the armourer. Sharpe waited for them to finish and then unsheathed the huge sword and carried it to the wheel. This was part of his ritual, to have the sword sharpened by a cavalry armourer because they made a finer edge, and the armourer looked at his Rifleman’s uniform and grinned. He was an old soldier, too old to ride into battle, but he had seen it all, done it all himself. He took the blade from Sharpe, tested it with a broad thumb, and then pressed it onto the pedalled stone. The sparks flowed off the wheel, the blade sang; the man swept it lovingly up and down the edge and then sharpened the top six inches of the back blade. He wiped the sword with an oily piece of leather.
“Get yourself a German one, Captain.” It was an old argument, whether the Kligenthal blades were better than the British. Sharpe shook his head. “I’ve eaten German swords with this one.”
The armourer cackled a toothless laugh and peered down the edge. “There you are, Captain. Take care of it.”
Sharpe put some coins on the wheel frame and held the sword up to the last light of the western sky. There was a new sheen on the edge, he felt it with his thumb and smiled at the armourer. “You’ll never get a Kligenthal as sharp as that.”
The armourer said nothing but from behind him he took out a sabre and handed it to Sharpe. Sharpe sheathed his sword and took the curved blade. It felt as if it had been made for him; its balance was a miracle, as if the steel were not there even though it flashed in the red light. He touched the blade. It would have sliced through silk as cleanly as it must cut through the breastplate of the French cavalry. “German?” Sharpe asked.
“Yes, Captain. Belongs to our Colonel.” The armourer took the blade back. “And I haven’t begun to sharpen it yet!”
Sharpe laughed. The sabre must have cost two hundred guineas. One day, he promised himself, one day he would own such a sword, not taken from the dead, but a sword that was inscribed with his name, forged to his height, balanced for his grip. He went back to the trees and in the sky over the river he could see the glow of the enemy fires where twenty-two thousand Frenchmen were sharpening their own blades and wondering about the morning. Not many would sleep. Most would doze through the night, their wakefulness laced with apprehension, searching the eastern sky for a dawn that might be the last one they would ever see. Sharpe lay awake for part of the night and rehearsed the next day in his head. The plan was simple enough. The Alberche ran in a curve to join the River Tagus, and the French were on the inside of the bend. In the morning the Spanish trumpets would sound, their thirty guns be unleashed, and the infantry would splash across the shallow river to attack the outnumbered French. And as the French retreated, as assuredly they must, so Wellesley would throw the British onto their flank. And Marshal Victor would be destroyed, his army broken between the hammer of the Spanish and the anvil of the British, and as the blue infantry withdrew the cavalry would come through the water and turn retreat into carnage. And once that was done, all perhaps before the citizens of Talavera went to their Sunday morning mass, there would only be King Joseph Bonaparte’s twenty thousand men between the allies and Madrid. It was all so simple. Sharpe slept in his greatcoat, curled by the embers of a fire, a gilded eagle threading his sleep.
There were no bugles to wake them in the morning, nothing that might alert the French to the dawn attack instead of the more civilised hour of mid-morning, when most men could be expected to fight. Sergeants and corporals shook the men awake; soldiers cursed the dew and the cold air that rasped in their throats. Every man glanced towards the river, but the far bank was shrouded in mist and darkness; there was nothing to be seen, no sound to be heard. They had been forbidden to relight the fires in case the sudden lights should warn the French, but somehow they managed to heat water and threw in the loose tea-leaves, and Sharpe gratefully accepted a tin mug of the scalding liquid from his Sergeant. Harper was kicking dirt onto the fire; the men had risked a small blaze rather than go without tea, and he looked up at Sharpe and grinned. “Permission to go to church, sir?”
Sharpe grinned back. It was Sunday. He tried to work out the date. They had left Plasencia on the seventeenth and that had been a Monday, and he counted the days forward on his fingers. Sunday 23 July, 1809. There was still no light in the eastern sky, the stars shone brightly, the dawn still two hours away. Behind them, on a track that ran between the cork grove and the fields, there was a rumbling and clanking and cursing as a battery of artillery unlimbered. Sharpe turned, the tea cradled in his hands, and watched the dim shapes as the horses were led away and the field guns pointed across the river. They would herald the attack, hurling their round shot at the French lines, tearing holes in the French Battalions as Sharpe led his skirmishers into the river. It was cold, too cold to feel any excitement; that would come later. Now were the hours to feel apprehensive, to tighten belts and buckles, to feel hungry. Sharpe shivered slightly in his greatcoat, nodded his thanks to Harper, and made his way down the grove between the lines of his men who stamped their feet and swung their arms and resurrected the more successful jokes of the previous evening. Somehow they were not as funny in the small hours before dawn.
He left the trees and walked onto the patch of grass that lay beside the river. His boots swished through the dew and warned the sentries of his coming. He was challenged, gave the password, and greeted as he jumped down onto the shingle at the water’s edge.
“Anything happening?”
“No, sir.”
The water slid blackly beneath the tendrils of mist. There was an occasional slap and swirl from the river as a fish twisted and disturbed the surface. Sharpe peered over his cupped hands and blew on his fingers; there was the faintest dot of red light on the far bank that suddenly glowed brighter. The French sentry was smoking a cigar or a pipe. Sharpe looked to his left. The eastern sky at last had a suspicion of colour, a flat silver grey that silhouetted the hills, the first sign of dawn. He clapped one of the sentries on the shoulder. “Not long now.”