Бернард Корнуэлл - Sharpe's Havoc

To Sharpe it seemed there was no chance at all. More than twenty thousand French fugitives darkened the valley beneath him and Christopher was lost somewhere in that mass and how Sharpe was ever to find the renegade he did not know. But he pulled on his threadbare coat and picked up his rifle and followed Hogan who, Sharpe saw, was similarly pessimistic while Harper, perversely, was oddly cheerful, even when they had to wade through a tributary of the Cavado which ran waist deep through a steep defile which fell toward the larger river. Hogan’s mule baulked at the cold, fast water and the Captain proposed abandoning the animal, but then Javali smacked the beast hard across the face and, while it was still blinking, picked it up and carried it bodily through the wide stream. The riflemen cheered the display of strength while the mule, safe on the opposite bank, snapped its yellow teeth at the goatherd who simply smacked it again. „Useful lad, that,” Harper said approvingly. The big Irish Sergeant was soaked to the skin and as cold and tired as any of the other men, but he seemed to relish the hardship. „It’s no worse than herding back home,” he maintained as they trudged on. „I remember once my uncle was taking a flock of mutton, prime meat the lot of them, walking them on the hoof to Belfast and half the buggers ran like shite when we’d not even got to Letterkenny! Jesus, all that money gone to waste.”

„Did you get them back?” Perkins asked.

„You’re joking, lad. I searched half the bloody night and all I got was a clip round the ear from my uncle. Mind you, it was his fault, he’d never herded so much as a rabbit before and didn’t know one end of a sheep from the other, but he was told there was good cash for mutton in Belfast so he stole the flock off a skinflint in Colcarney and set off to make his fortune.”

„Do you have wolves in Ireland?” Vicente wanted to know.

„In red coats,” Harper said, and saw Sharpe scowl. „My grandfather now,” he went on hurriedly, „claimed to see a pack of them at Derrynagrial. Big, they were, he said, and with red eyes and teeth like graveyard stones and he told my grandmother that they chased him all the way to the Glenleheel bridge, but he was a drunk. Jesus, he could soak the stuff up.”

Javali wanted to know what they were talking about and immediately had his own tales of wolves attacking his goats and how he had fought one with nothing but a stick and a sharp-edged stone, and then he claimed to have raised a wolf cub and told how the village priest had insisted on killing it because the devil lived in wolves, and Sergeant Macedo said that was true and described how a sentry at Almeida had been eaten by wolves one cold winter’s night.

„Do you have wolves in England?” Vicente asked Sharpe.

„Only lawyers.”

„Richard!” Hogan chided him.

They were going north now. The road that the French would use from Ponte Nova to the Spanish frontier twisted into the hills until it met another tributary of the Cavado, the Misarella, and the Saltador bridge crossed the upper reaches of that river. Sharpe would rather have gone down to the road and marched ahead of the French, but Hogan would not hear of it. The enemy, he said, would put dragoons across the Cavado as soon as the bridge was repaired and the road was no place to be caught by horsemen, and so they stayed in the high ground that became ever more rugged, stony and difficult. Their progress was painfully slow because they were forced to make long detours when precipices or slopes of scree barred their way, and for every mile they went forward they had to walk three, and Sharpe knew the French were now advancing up the valley and gaining fast, for their progress was signaled by scattered musket shots from the hills about the Misarella’s defile. Those shots, fired at too long a range by men activated by hatred, sounded closer and closer until, at mid-morning, the French came into view.

A hundred dragoons led, but not far behind them was infantry, and these men were not a panicked rabble, but marching in good order. Javali, the moment he saw them, growled incoherently, grabbed a handful of powder from his bag, half of which he spilled as he tried to push it into his musket’s barrel. He rammed down a bullet, primed his musket and shot into the valley. It was not apparent that he hit an enemy, but he gave a small joyful shuffle and then loaded the musket again. „You were right, Richard,” Hogan said ruefully, „we should have used the road.” The French were overtaking them now.

„You were right, sir,” Sharpe said. „People like him”-he jerked his head toward the wild-bearded Javali-”would have been taking shots at us all morning.”

„Maybe,” Hogan said. He swayed on the mule’s back, then glanced down again at the French. „Pray the Saltador has been broken,” he said, but he did not sound hopeful.

They had to clamber down into a saddle of the hills, then climb again to another hog-backed ridge littered with the massive rounded boulders. They lost sight of the fast-flowing Misarella and of the French on the road beside it, but they could hear the occasional flurry of musket shots which told of partisans sniping into the valley.

„God grant the Portuguese have got to the bridge,” Hogan said for the tenth or twentieth time since dawn. If all had gone well then the Portuguese forces advancing northward in parallel to Sir Arthur Wellesley’s army should have blocked the French at Ruivaens, so cutting the last eastward road to Spain, and then sent a brigade into the hills to plug the final escape route at the Saltador. If all had gone well the Portuguese should now be barring the mountain road with cannon and infantry, but the weather had slowed their march as it had slowed Wellesley’s pursuit and the only men waiting for Marshal Soult at the Saltador were more ordenanqa.

There were over a thousand of them, half trained and ill armed, but an English major from the Portuguese staff had ridden ahead to give them advice. His strongest recommendation was to destroy the bridge, but many of the ordenanga came from the hard frontier hills and the soaring arch across the Misarella was the lifeline of their commerce and so they refused to heed Major Warre’s advice. Instead they compromised by knocking off the bridge’s parapets and narrowing its roadway by breaking the roadway’s stones with great sledgehammers, but they insisted on leaving a slim strip of stone to leap the deep ravine, and to defend the ribbon-like arch they barricaded the northern side of the bridge with an abattis made from thorn bushes, and behind that formidable obstacle, and on either side of it, they scraped earthworks behind which they could shelter as they fired at the French with ancient muskets and fowling guns. There was no artillery.

The strip of bridge that remained was just wide enough to let a farm cart cross the river’s ravine. It meant that once the French were gone the valley’s commerce could resume while the roadway and parapets were rebuilt. But to the French that narrow strip would mean only one thing: safety.

Hogan was the first to see that the bridge was not fully destroyed. He climbed off the mule and swore viciously, then handed Sharpe his telescope and Sharpe stared down at the bridge’s remnants. Musket smoke already shrouded both banks as the dragoons of the French vanguard fired across the ravine and the ordenanga in their makeshift redoubts shot back. The sound of the muskets was faint.

„They’ll get across,” Hogan said sadly, „they’ll lose a lot of men, but they’ll clear that bridge.”

Sharpe did not answer. Hogan was right, he thought. The French were making no effort to take the bridge now, but doubtless they were assembling an assault party and that meant he would have to find a place from where his riflemen could shoot at Christopher as he crossed the narrow stone arch. There was nowhere on this side of the river, but on the Misarella’s opposite bank there was a high stone bluff where a hundred or more ordenanqa were stationed. The bluff had to be less than two hundred paces from the bridge, too far for the Portuguese muskets, but it would provide a perfect vantage for his rifles, and if Christopher reached the center of the bridge he would be greeted by a dozen rifle bullets.