A flintlock was a precarious thing. Even uncocked the weapon could fire if the flint’s doghead snagged on a twig, was dragged back, then released. Such a shot, however accidental, would alert French sentries.
It was one thing to order men not to fire; to tell them that their lives depended on a silent approach, but in the misted darkness just before dawn, when a man’s blood was at its coldest and his fears warmest, a cat’s squawl could be enough to scare a Rifleman and make him fire blind into the night. Just one such shot would bring Frenchmen tumbling from their guardhouses.
And so, though yielding the point had added to Sharpe’s dread, he had seen the force of Vivar’s pleading and so had agreed to advance with empty weapons. Now no shot could startle the night.
Yet still the French could be forewarned. Such fears were Sharpe’s tumultuous companions on the long and ever more halting march. Perhaps the French had their own spies in the mountains who, just as the refugees had betrayed information to Vivar, had betrayed Vivar to the city? Or perhaps de l’Eclin, a man whose ruthlessness was absolute, had whipped the truth from Louisa? Perhaps artillery had been fetched from Corunna and waited, charged with canister, to greet the fumbling attackers? Attackers, moreover, who would be tired, cold, and without loaded guns. The first moments of such a fight would be slaughter.
Sharpe’s fears burgeoned and, away from Vivar’s indomitable cheerfulness, he let the doubts gnaw at him. He could not express those doubts, for to do so would destroy whatever confidence his men might have in his leadership. He could only hope that he conveyed the same certainty as Patrick Harper who seemed to march eagerly over the last steep miles. Once, as they splashed through a soggy reach of grassland beneath the dark line of a pinewood, Harper spoke enthusiastically of just how grand it would be to see Miss Louisa again. “She’s a brave lass, sir.”
“And a foolish one,” Sharpe replied sourly, still angry that her life had been risked.
Yet Louisa was the reverse of Sharpe’s fear; the consolation which, like a tiny beacon in an immense darkness, kept him going. She was his hope, but arrayed against that hope were the demons of fear. Those demons became more sinister with every forced halt. Sharpe’s guide, a blacksmith from the city, was leading a circuitous route that would avoid the villages and the man stopped frequently to sniff the air as though he could find his way by scent alone.
At last satisfied, he increased his pace. The Riflemen slithered down a steep hill, reaching a stream that had flooded the meadows and turned the valley’s bottom into a morass of frost and shallow water. Sharpe’s guide stopped at the margin of the marsh. ‘Agua, senor.“
“What does he want?” Sharpe hissed.
“Saying something about water,” Harper replied.
“I know it’s God-damned water.” Sharpe started forward, but the guide dared to pluck at the Rifleman’s sleeve.
“Agua bendita! Senor!“
“Ah!” It was Harper who understood. “He wants the holy water, sir, so he does.”
Sharpe swore at the idiocy of the request. The Riflemen were late and this fool demanded that he sprinkle a morass with holy water? “Come on!”
“Are you sure…“ Harper began.
“Come on!” Sharpe’s voice was made harsher by the fears which seethed inside him. This whole expedition was misbegotten and mad! Yet pride would not let him turn back, nor would it let him make an obeisance towards Vivar’s water-sprites. “I haven’t got any bloody holy water!” he growled. “Anyway, it’s superstitious bloody nonsense, Sergeant, and you know it.”
“I don’t know that at all, sir.”
“Come on!” Sharpe led the way through the stream and cursed because his tattered boots let in cold water. The Riflemen, oblivious to the cause of the small delay at the water’s edge, followed. This mist seemed thicker in the valley’s bottom and the guide, who had splashed through the stream with Sharpe, hesitated on the far bank.
“Hurry!” Sharpe growled, though it was a pointless admonition for the blacksmith spoke no English. “Hurry! Hurry!”
The guide, clearly flustered, indicated a narrow sheep track that angled up the further slope. As he climbed, Sharpe realized they must have come very close to the city, which was betrayed by the mephitic stink of its streets that seemed to him to be a foretaste of the horror that awaited his men.
Sharpe suddenly realized that the thump and chink of moving cavalry had been left behind, and he knew Vivar must have sent the Cazadores on their northward detour which was designed to take them far from the ears of French sentries. The ill-trained volunteer infantry should be some two or three hundred yards behind Sharpe by now. The Riflemen were isolated, ahead of the attack, and now very close to the holy city of St James.
And they were late, for the mist was being silvered by the first hint of the false dawn. Sharpe could see Harper beside him, he could even see the beads of moisture on the peak of Harper’s shako. He had lost his own shako in the battle at the farm, and now wore a Cazador’s forage cap instead. The cap was a pale grey and Sharpe was seized with the sudden irrational knowledge that the light-coloured cloth would make his head a target for some French marksman on the hill above. He snatched it off and threw it into some brambles. He could feel the thump of his heart. His belly was tender and his mouth dry.
The blacksmith, going very cautiously now, led the Riflemen across a rough pasture and into a grove of elm trees that grew at the hill’s summit. The bare branches dripped and the mist wavered in the darkness. Sharpe could smell a fire, though he could not see it. He wondered if it belonged to one of the French guardposts and the thought of the waiting sentries made him feel horribly alone and vulnerable. The dawn was coming. This was the moment when he should be attacking, but the mist masked the landmarks which Vivar had coached him to expect. To his right there should be a church, to his left the loom of the city, and he should not be on a hilltop, but in a deep ravine which would hide the Riflemen’s approach.
Sharpe, lacking those landmarks, supposed there was still further to go, that they yet had to drop down into the ravine, but the blacksmith checked under the trees and, in dumbshow, indicated that the city lay to their left. Sharpe did not respond, and the guide plucked again at the Rifleman’s green sleeve and pointed to the left. “Santiago! Santiago!”
“Jesus bloody wept.” Sharpe dropped to one knee.
“Sir?” Harper knelt beside him.
“We’re in the wrong bloody place!”
“God save Ireland.” The Sergeant’s voice was scarce above a whisper. The guide, unable to gain an understandable response from the greenjackets, disappeared into the darkness.
Sharpe swore again. He was in the wrong place. That mistake worried and irritated him, but what angered him more was the knowledge that Vivar would say it was because the spirits of the stream, the xanes, had been slighted. God damn it, but that was nonsense! All the same Sharpe had gone astray, he was late, and he did not know where Vivar’s other troops were. The fears took hold of him. This was not how an attack should start! There should be bugles and banners in the mist! Instead he was alone, lost, far ahead of the Cazadores and volunteers. He told himself he had known this would happen! He had seen it happen before, in India, where good troops, forced to a night attack, had become lost, frightened, and beaten.
“What do we do, sir?” Harper asked.
Sharpe did not answer, because he did not know. He was tempted to say they would pull back in an abandonment of the whole attack, but then a shape moved to his left, boots rustled the frosted grass, and the blacksmith re-appeared in the mist with Bias Vivar at his side. “You’ve come too far,” Vivar whispered.