“Yes!” This time there was defiance in her voice.
“It isn’t gentle, Miss Louisa! They’ll hack about like bloody butchers! They may not even notice you’re a girl till they’ve sliced half your face away. Now bugger off! You’re too pretty to be killed by these bastards!”
“I’m staying!”
Colonel de l’Eclin raised his sabre again. Sharpe could hear the creak of saddles now. “Hagman? That cheating bastard is yours.”
“Sir!”
Sharpe forgot Louisa. He crammed himself between two of his front-rank men and held his sword high. “Wait for my word! I’m not going to fire till the bastards are breathing down our necks! But when they come we’re going to make these sons of whores wish they hadn’t been bloody born!” The approaching horses tossed their heads nervously. They knew what was coming, and Sharpe allowed himself a moment’s pity for the butchery that he must inflict. “Aim at the horses!” he reminded his men. “Forget the riders, kill the horses!”
“For what we are about to receive,” Harper said.
Riflemen licked powder-gritted lips. They nervously checked that the rifle pans were primed and the flints well seated in the leather-lined dogheads. Their mouths were dry and their stomachs tender. The vibration of the trotting horses was palpable in the soil, like the passing of great guns on a nearby road. Or, Sharpe thought, like the tremor of thunder on a sultry day that presaged the stab of lightning.
Colondel de l’Eclin lowered his curved blade in the signal for his men to go into the canter. In a few seconds, Sharpe knew, the trumpet would call for the gallop and the big horses would surge forward. He took a breath, knowing he must judge the moment for this one volley to exquisite perfection.
Then the lightning struck.
There were only just over fifty men, but they were Vivar’s elite company, the crimson-coated Cazadores, who burst from the city to charge downhill. It was a tired squadron, wearied by a night and day of fighting, but above them, like a ripple of glory in the dark sky, flew the gonfalon of Santiago Matamoros. The scarlet cross was bright as blood.
“Santiago!” Vivar led them. Vivar spurred them on. Vivar screamed the war cry that could snatch a miracle from defeat. “Santiago!”
The slope gave the Cazadores’s charge speed, while the banner gave them the courage of martyrs. They struck the edge of the first French line like a thunderbolt and the swords carved bloody ruin into the Dragoons. De l’Eclin was shouting, turning, trying to realign his men, but the banner of the saint was driving deep into the French squadron. The gonfalon’s long tail was already flecked with an enemy’s blood.
“Charge!” Sharpe was running. “Charge!”
The second French squadron spurred forward, but Vivar had foreseen it and swerved right to take his men into their centre. Behind him was a chaos of milling horses. Cavalry hacked at cavalry.
“Halt!” Sharpe held both arms out to bar his men’s mad rush. “Steady, lads! One volley. Aim left! Aim at the horses! Fire!”
The Riflemen fired at the untouched horsemen on the right of the French charge. Horses fell screaming to the mud. Dragoons kicked boots from stirrups and rolled away from their dying beasts. “Now kill the bastards!” Sharpe screamed the incantation as he ran. “Kill! Kill!”
A rabble of men ran to the broken French line. There were Riflemen, Cazadores, and country men who had left — their homes to carry war against an invader. Dragoons hacked down with long swords, but the rabble surrounded them and slashed at horses and clawed men from their saddles. This was not how an army fought, but how an untutored people took terror to an enemy.
Colonel de l’Eclin swivelled his horse to keep the rabble at bay. His sabre hissed to kill a Cazador, lunged to drive a Spaniard back, and sliced to parry a Rifleman’s sword-bayonet. The Dragoons were being driven to the boggy ground where the horses slithered and slipped. A trumpeter was dragged from his grey horse and savaged with knives. Knots of Frenchmen tried to hack through the mob. Sharpe used both hands to hack down at a horse’s neck, then swung back to send its rider clean from the saddle. A woman from the city sawed with a knife at the fallen Frenchman’s neck. Fugitives were running back from the stream’s eastern bank, coming to join a slaughter.
A trumpet drove the third French squadron into the chaos. The field was bloody, but still the white gonfalon floated high where Bias Vivar drove his crimson elite like a blade into the enemy. A Spanish Sergeant held the great banner that had been hung from a cross-staff on a pole. He waved it so that the silk made a serpentine challenge in the dusk.
The Count of Mouromorto saw the challenge and despised it. That streamer of silk was everything he hated in Spain; it stood for the old ways, for the domination of church over ideas, for the tyranny of a God he had rejected, and so the Count raked back his spurs and drove his horse into the men who guarded the gonfalon.
“He’s mine!” Vivar yelled again and again. “Mine! Mine!”
The brothers’ swords met, scraped, disengaged. Vivar’s horse turned into the enemy as it was trained to, and Vivar lunged. The Count parried. A Cazador rode to take him in the rear, but Vivar shouted at the man to stay clear. “He’s mine!”
The Count gave two quick hard blows that would have driven a weaker man from the saddle. Vivar parried both, back-cut, and turned the cut into a lunge that drew blood from his brother’s thigh. The blood dripped onto the white boots.
The Count touched his horse with a spur; it went sideways, then, to another touch, lunged back. Mouromorto snarled, knowing that this battle was won as his long sword lunged at his brother.
But Vivar leaned back in the saddle, right back, so that his brother’s blade hissed past him and could not be brought back fast enough as he straightened and speared his own sword forward. The steel juddered into Mouromorto’s belly. Their eyes met, and Vivar twisted the blade. He felt pity, and knew he could not afford pity. “Traitor!” He twisted the blade again, then raised his boot to push the horse away and disengage his long sword. The steel shuddered free, blood gushed onto the Count’s pommel, and his scream was an agony that died as he fell onto the blood-soaked mud.
“Santiago!” Vivar shouted in triumph, and the shout was carried across the small valley as the Cazadores rallied to the banner of the dead saint and raised their swords against the third French squadron.
The Riflemen were hunting among the remnants of the first two squadrons. Dragoons were turning their horses to flee, knowing they had been beaten by the savagery of the attack. A Cazador’s sword opened the throat of the French standard bearer, and the Spaniard seized the enemy guidon and raised it high in celebration of victory. Colonel de l’Eclin saw the capture of the small flag and knew that he was beaten; beaten by the great white gonfalon of Matamoros.
“Back!” The chasseur knew when a fight was hopeless, and knew when it was better to save a handful of men who could fight again.
“No!” Sharpe saw the Colonel order the retreat, and he ran towards the Frenchman. “No!” His ankle still hurt from his jump from the cathedral platform, the pain made his run ungainly and the soggy ground half tripped him, but he forced himself on. He outstripped his Riflemen and still shouted in frustrated anger. “You bastard! No!”
De l’Eclin heard the insult. He turned, saw Sharpe was isolated from the greenjacketed men and, as any cavalry officer would, he accepted the challenge. He rode at Sharpe, remembering when he had fought the Rifleman before that he had used the simple ruse of switching his sabre from right to left hand. That stratagem could not be repeated, instead the Colonel would rowel his horse at the last moment so that the black stallion surged into a killing speed that would put all its momentum behind his sabre stroke. Sharpe waited with his sword ready to swing at the horse’s mouth. Someone shouted at him to jump aside, but the Rifleman held his ground as the big black horse bore down on him. De l’Eclin was holding his sabre so that its point would spear into Sharpe’s ribs, but in the very last second, just as the spurred horse surged for the kill, the Frenchman changed his stroke. He did it with the quickness of a snake striking, raising and turning the blade so that it would slash down onto Sharpe’s bare head. De l’Eclin shouted in triumph as his sabre came down and as the Rifleman, whose sword had missed his horse, crumpled beneath that stroke.