“Fire!” Vivar’s sword flashed down.
The Spanish carbines flamed. Horses tumbled. Blood, men and snow made a whirling chaos. Something screamed, but whether man or horse, Sharpe could not tell. Then, over the scream, came Vivar’s war shout. ”Santiago! Santiago!“
The Galicians cheered, then charged. Not at the barricade, but towards the broken horsemen.
“Jesus Christ!” a Rifleman close to Sharpe muttered, then lowered his weapon. “They’re bleeding mad!”
But it was a magnificent madness. Sharpe’s men watched and he barked at them to keep firing at the enemy behind the barricade. He permitted himself to watch as the tough Galician soldiers discarded their firearms and drew their own long swords. They climbed over the dead horses and stabbed down at dazed Dragoons. Others seized bridles or dragged at riders.
The Frenchmen behind the barricade stood to make their own charge and Sharpe shouted a warning at Vivar, but one which he knew the Spaniard would never hear. He turned. “Sergeant Williams! Keep your men here! The rest of you! Follow!”
The Riflemen ran in a frenzied scramble down the hill. They made a ragged charge that would take the last Dragoons in the flank, and the French saw them coming, hesitated, then fled. Vivar’s men were taking prisoners or rounding up riderless horses, while the surviving Frenchmen scrambled away to safety. The battle was over. The ambushed, outnumbered, had snatched an impossible victory, and the snow stank of blood and smoke.
Then gunfire sounded from the canyon behind Sharpe.
Vivar turned, his face ashen.
A rifle fired, its sound amplified by the echo of rock walls.
“Lieutenant!” Vivar gestured desperately towards the canyon. “Lieutenant!” There was a genuine despair in his voice.
Sharpe turned and ran towards the chasm. The gunfire was sudden and brusque. He could see Sergeant Williams firing downwards, and he knew there must have been more Frenchmen hidden at the canyon’s far end; men who would have blocked the panicked retreat they had expected to provoke. Instead those men must be advancing up the canyon to take Vivar and Sharpe in the rear.
Except they had been stopped by one man. Rifleman Harper had found the rifle of a fallen man and, using the corpse of the mule as a bastion, was holding off the handful of Dragoons. He had cut the bonds from his wrists, using a bayonet that had slashed deep wounds into his hands, but, despite the bleeding cuts, he still loaded and fired his rifle with a fearful precision. A dead French horse and a wounded Dragoon witnessed to the Irishman’s skill. He screamed his Gaelic challenge at the others, daring them to come closer. He turned, wild-eyed, as Sharpe appeared, then turned scornfully back to face the French.
Sharpe lined his Rifles across the road. “Take aim!” The chasseur in his red pelisse and black fur hat was in the gorge. Next to him rode the tall man in a black riding coat and white boots.
“Fire!” Sharpe shouted.
A dozen rifles flamed. Bullets whined in ricochet, and two more horsemen fell. The man in red and the man in black were safe. They seemed to stare directly into Sharpe’s eyes for an instant, then a fusillade from above made them turn their horses and spur away to safety. The Riflemen jeered, and Sharpe snapped them into silence. “And reload!”
The French had gone. Water dripped from thawing icicles that hung from rocks. A wounded horse whinnied. The filthy smoke of gunfire drifted in the gorge. A Rifleman vomited blood, then sighed. Another man wept. The wounded horse was silenced by a rifle shot, and the sound slammed in brutal echoes from the rock walls.
Footsteps sounded behind Sharpe. It was Bias Vivar who walked past him, past the greenjackets, and knelt by the mule. He carefully unstrapped the strongbox from the dead beast’s harness. Then, standing, he looked up at Harper. “You saved it, my friend.”
“I did, sir?” It was clear the Irishman had no idea what value Vivar placed on the chest.
The Spaniard reached up to the huge man and kissed both his cheeks. One of Sharpe’s Riflemen sniggered, then was shamed to silence by the moment’s solemnity.
“You saved it,” Vivar said again, and there were tears in his eyes. Then he lifted the strongbox and carried it back up the canyon.
Sharpe followed. His men, silent and cold, came down to the roadway. There was no exultation in victory for, unnoticed until this moment, and far beyond the abandoned French barricade, a smear of grey smoke rose into the winter air. It rose from the village, and the smoke was grey as a pauper’s shroud and carried the stench of death and fire.
And from it, like dark snow, ashes fell on a bloodied land.
CHAPTER 5
The villagers could have sent no warning of the French presence for there was no village any more, nor villagers.
The fires must have been set just as the ambush was sprung, for the houses still burned fiercely. The corpses, though, had frozen hard. The French had killed the people, then sheltered in their houses as they waited for Vivar’s small column to reach the high canyon.
It had never been much of a village; a poor place of goats and sheep, and of people who made a living from high pastures. The houses lay in a hollow sheltered by dwarf oaks and chestnut trees. Potatoes had grown in a few small fields that were edged with wild mulberries and furze. The houses had been mere thatched huts with dungheaps at their doors. They had been shared by men and animals alike, just as the houses Sharpe’s own Riflemen had known in England had been, and that nostalgic resemblance added to the poignancy of the day.
If anything could add to the poignancy of children and babies killed, of women raped, or of men crucified. Sergeant Williams, who had known his share of horror in a bad world, vomited. One of the Spanish infantrymen turned in silence on a French captive and, before Vivar could utter a word, disembowelled the man. Only then did the Cazador utter a howl of hatred.
Vivar ignored the killing and the howl. Instead, with an odd formality, he marched to Sharpe. “Would you…“ he began, but found it hard to continue. The stench of those bodies which burned inside the houses was thick. He swallowed. ”Would you place picquets, Lieutenant?“
“Yes, sir.”
That, at least, took the Riflemen away from the bodies of slaughtered infants and the burning hovels. All that was left of the village’s buildings were the church walls; walls of stone which could not be burned, though the church’s timber roof still flamed high to spew smoke above the valley’s rim where, among the trees, Sharpe placed his sentries. The French, if they still lingered, were invisible.
“Why did they do it, sir?” Dodd, a quiet man, appealed to Sharpe.
Sharpe could offer no answer.
Gataker, as fly a rogue as any in the army, stared empty-eyed at the landscape. Isaiah Tongue, whose education had been wasted by gin, winced as a terrible scream sounded from the village; then, realizing that the scream must have come from a captured Frenchman, spat to show that it had not troubled him.
Sharpe moved on, placing more sentries, finally reaching a spot from which, between two great granite boulders, he could see far to the south. He sat there alone, staring into the immense sky that promised yet more bad weather. His drawn sword was still in his hand and, almost in a daze, he tried to push it home into its metal scabbard. The blade, still sticky with blood, stopped halfway, and he saw to his astonishment that a bullet had pierced the scabbard and driven the lips of metal inwards.
“Sir?”
Sharpe looked round to see a nervous Sergeant Williams. “Sergeant?”
“We lost four men, sir.”
Sharpe had forgotten to ask, and he cursed himself for the omission. “Who?”