She rode back toward the city, looking for wounded who could manage this awkward but speedy form of transportation.
Within the city walls Julian St. Simon, miraculously unscathed but blackened from head to toe from gunfire, stood in the central square and took stock. He'd been at the storming of Ciudad Rodrigo three months before and, horrendous though that had been, it had been nothing compared to this April night.
“Julian! Thank God, man.” Frank Frobisher came running across the square. “I saw you go down at the San Jose bastion, but I couldn't get back to you in the crush.” The captain had lost his hat, his tunic was ripped, and an oozing gash ran from one scorched eye brow down to the corner of his mouth.
“I lost my footing, nothing more dramatic than that,” Julian said, clapping his friend's arm in a wordless gesture. “Tim's gone to the rear. Piece of shrapnel in his eye.”
“And Deerbourne's fallen,” Frank said, his expression bleak. “And George Castleton and… oh, so many others.” He looked around the deserted square.
The inhabitants of Badajos were behind locked doors, not showing their faces to the victors. Sporadic gunfire still sounded from the ramparts.
“The men are in a savage mood,” he said sombrely.
“If the Peer allows them to fall out, there'll be a sack worse than Ciudad Rodrigo.”
“He will,” Julian asserted, clasping the back of his neck, arching it against his hand in a weary gesture. “They fought like tigers, they saw their comrades slaughtered, he'll give them their revenge.”
Both men looked up at the sky where the evening star was fading fast. “If Wellington had hanged the garrison of Ciudad Rodrigo, he'd have saved thousands of lives today,” Julian said in a deadened voice. “Philippon would never have held out here if he faced death at defeat.”
Frank shrugged. “A trifle medieval, though, Julian, putting a defeated garrison to the sword.”
“And you think what's going to happen here will be civilized?” Julian demanded. “The men are going to go to the devil, and we'll have the devil's own work to whip them into shape again at the end of such an orgy.”
Frank made no response to this truth.
It was midmorning when the French garrison was sent under escort to Elvas and the English troops were fallen out. They poured into the city, forcing their way through the clogged breaches, exploding into the city streets, a night of bleeding informing a savage bloodlust that had been given license for unbridled satisfaction.
Two hours after dawn Tamsyn had stabled Cesar, exhausted but docile after his hours of labor, and had fallen into her bed at Senhora Braganza's cottage just as she was, muddy and bloodstained, refusing the widow's pressing offers of food and hot water.
She slept for five hours and awoke refreshed and alert, but with the unmistakable sense that something evil was afoot. She swung out of bed and went to the window. The street below was almost deserted, except for a couple of peasants standing in the shade of a wall. They weren't talking, merely leaning against the wall puffing on their pipes.
Tamsyn went downstairs. There was no sign of Senhora Braganza, and she went out into the street, still in her filthy clothes. The sounds from Badajos carried over the still morning air. It was a raucous cacophony. Shouts, crashes, screams, intermingling with odd bursts of music from pipe and drum.
She crossed her arms and shivered. She'd heard such sounds before.
Senhora Braganza came hurrying down the streets carrying a milk churn. In a voluble flood of Portuguese, she swept her lodger into the kitchen, sat her down, and prepared an omelette fragrant with crushed thyme and rosemary and a pot of strong, bitter coffee.
Tamsyn ate mechanically; then she rose to her feet, thanked her hostess with an almost absent smile, and walked back out into the street, heedless of the renewed offers of hot water and clean raiment coming from the cottage kitchen.
Her feet took her without any signals from her brain across the pontoon bridge toward Badajos.
The encampment was almost deserted except for the hospital tents where the frantic activity continued unabated, but there were fewer drays and limbers bringing in the wounded now. Once the order to fall out had been given, the men had abandoned their injured comrades for the orgiastic pleasures to be found in the sack of Badajos.
Tamsyn entered the city through one of the breaches.
Someone in the ditch below was calling for water, a low, continuous supplication. She stopped, looking for the sufferer, but couldn't tell among the tangle of bodies who might be alive. Part of her knew it was madness, but something impelled her onward into the city.
A group of soldiers raced past her, their arms loaded with goods plundered from a store whose smashed door bore mute witness to the looting. The sounds of drunken singing came from an alley, where another group sat around a split casket of wine, scooping the wine into their mouths with hands or their shakos, their muskets lying disregarded at their feet. They looked up as Tamsyn came toward them, their mouths stained red, their eyes unfocused, but they were in a benign mood and only called out a few jocular gibes as she went past.
She'd left her rifle and bandolier in Elvas and carried only a knife at her belt, but it occurred to her that if her male attire didn't fool the men, her filthy, bloodstained appearance was probably sufficient protection. Her only jewelry was the locket at her neck, and that was hidden beneath her shirt.
She walked on through the cobbled streets, hearing the crack of muskets above a confused babble of screams, and shouts of laughter and rage. Somewhere a drum was beating and a pipe trilled in accompaniment. A nun in a torn black habit ran out of a church, pursued by a laughing, shouting troop of soldiers, tunics and shirts unbuttoned. One of them flourished a gold embroidered altar cloth like a flag of triumph; another carried two massive silver candlesticks.
The nun dodged sideways into a doorway, and Tamsyn glimpsed her terrified face beneath her cowl before the barred door behind her opened and she was dragged inside to relative safety. The men came charging after her, stopped when they couldn't find her, and milled around in befuddlement, shaking their heads as if they could solve the mystery in that way. Then someone tossed a wineskin to his companion, and they turned in a body as if obeying some collective instinct, surging back toward the church.
Tamsyn shuddered, anger and hideous memory intermingling now to burn with a fierce, consuming flame. Her hand was on her knife, and she wished she had her rifle, not because she felt threatened herself, but because her rage was murderous as she saw what soldiers were doing to the inhabitants of Badajos. There were officers here and there, trying to stop the worst of the excesses, but the men, in the grip of wine and victory, were beyond their control.
Tamsyn saw two officers remonstrating with a ragtag group of infantrymen who were conducting an auction in the street. One of the items on the block was a young girl. A soldier fired his musket over the head of one of the officers, another levelled his weapon at the heart of the other. They were two against twenty drunken savages and were forced to retreat while Tamsyn watched from a doorway.
They turned and left, and she couldn't blame them, but she stayed herself, waiting until the girl was sold for a ruby the size of a hen's egg and, amid gales of laughter, tossed into the audience, into the arms of a burly rifle- man with an eye patch.
The man carried off his prize, pushing through the crowd, making for a square at the end of the alley. Tamsyn followed, her deadly rage now focused on this one episode. She couldn't stop the wholesale savagery, but she would stop this.
The square was an aimless tumult as soldiers wandered in and out of the stores, where doors had been smashed, the iron bars ripped from ground-floor windows, goods spilling out onto the street. The girl was keening like a lost child, and Tamsyn increased her speed, dogging the soldier's footsteps, her eyes sweeping the ground for a weapon more substantial than her knife. Two men were playing dice, sitting on a doorstep amid the ruins of a draper's store. Their muskets were on the ground beside them. Tamsyn darted sideways, grabbed up one of the firearms, and was off and running down the street, ignoring the outraged yells behind her.