Sharpe's Battle

Oliveira had brought over four hundred riflemen to the fort. Now more than a hundred and fifty were dead, seventy were wounded and as many others missing. Just over a quarter of the Portuguese regiment paraded at midday. They had suffered a terrible defeat after being overwhelmed in a confined space by an enemy four times their number, yet they were not wholly destroyed and their colours still flew. Those flags had stayed hidden all night despite Loup's efforts to find the banners. Colonel Oliveira was dead and his body carried horrific evidence of the manner of his dying. Most of the other officers were also dead.

The Real Companпa Irlandesa had lost no officers, not one. The French, it appeared, had not bothered to assault the gate tower. Loup's men had streamed through the gates and ransacked the fort, but not one man had tried to enter the imposing tower. The enemy had not even taken the officers' horses from their stables next to the gatehouse. 'We had the doors barred,' Lord Kiely lamely explained the survival of the gatehouse's occupants.

'And the Crapauds didn't try to break them down?' Sharpe asked, not bothering to hide his scepticism.

'Be careful of what you suggest, Captain,' Kiely said in a supercilious tone.

Sharpe reacted like a dog smelling blood. 'Listen, you bastard,' he said, astonished to hear himself saying it, 'I fought my way up from the gutter and I don't care if I have to fight you to get another bloody step up. I'll slaughter you, you drunken bugger, and then I'll feed your damned guts to your whore's dogs.' He took a step towards Kiely who, scared of the rifleman's sudden vehemence, stepped back. 'What I'm suggesting,' Sharpe went on, 'is that one of your bloody friends in the bloody gatehouse opened the bloody gates to the bloody French and that they didn't attack you, my Lord' — he spoke the honorific title as rudely as he could — 'because they didn't want to kill their friends as well as their enemies. And don't tell me I'm wrong!' By now Sharpe was walking after Kiely who was trying to escape Sharpe's diatribe that had attracted the attention of a large number of riflemen and guardsmen. 'Last night you said you'd beat the enemy without my help.' Sharpe caught Kiely by the shoulder and turned him round so violently that Kiely was forced to stagger to keep his balance. 'But you didn't even fight, you bastard,' Sharpe went on. 'You skulked inside while your men did the fighting for you.'

Kiely's hand went to his sword hilt. 'Do you want a duel, Sharpe?' he asked, his face flushed with embarrassment. His dignity was being flayed in front of his men and what made it worse was that he knew he had deserved their scorn, yet pride would never permit Lord Kiely to admit as much. For a second it looked as if he would flick his hand to strike Sharpe's cheek, but instead he settled for words. 'I'll send you my second.'

'No!' Sharpe said. 'A pox on your bloody second, my Lord. If you want to fight me, then fight me now. Here. Right here! And I don't care what bloody weapons we use. Swords, pistols, muskets, rifles, bayonets, fist, feet.' He was walking towards Kiely who backed away. 'I'll fight you into the ground, my Lord, and I'll beat the offal out of your yellow hide, but I'll only do it here and now. Right here. Right now!' Sharpe had not meant to lose his temper, but he was glad that he had. Kiely seemed dumbstruck, helpless in the face of a fury he had never suspected existed.

'I won't fight like an animal,' Kiely said weakly.

'You won't fight at all,' Sharpe said, then laughed at the aristocrat. 'Run away, my Lord. Go on. I'm done with you.'

Kiely, utterly defeated, tried to walk away with some dignity, but reddened as some of the watching men cheered his departure. Sharpe shouted at them to shut the hell up, then turned to Harper. 'The bloody French didn't try to get into the gatehouse,' he told Harper, 'because they knew their bloody friends were inside, just as they didn't steal their friends' horses.'

'Stands to reason, sir,' Harper agreed. He was watching Kiely walk away. 'He's yellow, isn't he?'

'Front to back,' Sharpe agreed.

'But what Captain Lacy says, sir,' Harper went on, 'is that it wasn't his Lordship who gave the order not to fight last night, but his woman. She said the French didn't know there was anyone in the gatehouse and so they should all keep quiet.'

'A woman giving orders?' Sharpe asked in disgust.

Harper shrugged. 'A rare hard woman, that one, sir. Captain Lacy says she was watching the fighting and loving every second of it.'

'I'd have the witch on a bonfire fast enough, I can tell you,' Sharpe said. 'Bloody damn hellbitch.'

'Damn what, Sharpe?' It was Colonel Runciman who asked the question, but who did not wait to hear an answer. Instead Runciman, who at last had a genuine war story to tell, hastened to describe how he had survived the attack. The Colonel, it seemed, had locked his door and hidden behind the great pile of spare ammunition that Sharpe had stacked in his day parlour, though now, in the daylight, the Colonel ascribed his salvation to divine intervention rather than to the fortuitous hiding place. 'Maybe I am intended for higher things, Sharpe? My mother always believed as much. How else do you explain my survival?' Sharpe was more inclined to believe that the Colonel had lived because the French had been under orders to leave the whole gatehouse complex untouched, but he did not think it kind to say as much.

'I'm just glad you're alive, General,' Sharpe said instead.

'I would have died hard, Sharpe! I had both my pistols double-shotted! I would have taken some of them with me, believe you me. No one can say a Runciman goes into eternity alone!' The Colonel shuddered as the night's horrors came back to him. 'Have you seen any evidence of breakfast, Sharpe?' he asked in an attempt to restore his spirits.

'Try Lord Kiely's cook, General. He was frying bacon not ten minutes ago and I don't suppose his Lordship's got much of an appetite. I just challenged the yellow bastard to a fight.'

Runciman looked shocked. 'You did what, Sharpe? A duel? Don't you know duelling is illegal in the army?'

'I never said anything about a duel, General. I just offered to beat the hell out of him right here and now, but he seemed to have other things on his mind.'

Runciman shook his head. 'Dear me, Sharpe, dear me. I can't think you'll come to a good end, but I shall be sad when it happens. What a scamp you are! Bacon? Lord Kiely's cook, you said?'

Runciman waddled away and Sharpe watched him go. 'In ten years' time, Pat,' Sharpe said, 'he'll have turned last night's mess into a rare old story. How General Runciman saved the fort, armed to the jowls and fighting off the whole Loup Brigade.'

'Runcibubble 's harmless,' Harper said.

'He's harmless, Pat,' Sharpe agreed, 'so long as you keep the fool out of harm's way. And I almost failed to do that, didn't I?'

'You, sir? You didn't fail last night.'

'Oh, but I did, Pat. I failed. I failed badly. I didn't see that Loup would out-clever me, and I didn't hammer the truth into Oliveira's skull, and I never saw how dangerously trapped we were in those barracks.' He flinched, remembering the fetid, humid, dust-laden darkness of the night and the awful, scrabbling sound as the French tried to break through the thin masonry shell. 'We survived because some poor fool set light to an ammunition wagon,' Sharpe admitted, 'not because we outfought Loup. We didn't. He won and we got beat.'

'But we're alive, sir.'

'So's Loup, Pat, so's Loup, God damn him.'

But Tom Garrard was not alive. Tom Garrard had died, though at first Sharpe did not recognize his friend, for the body was so scorched and mutilated by fire. Garrard was lying face down in the very centre of the blackened spot where one of the ammunition wagons had stood and at first the only clue to his identity was the bent, blackened scrap of metal in an outstretched hand that had been fire-shrunken into a charred claw. Sharpe spotted the glint of metal and stepped through the still hot ashes to prise the box clear of the shrivelled grip. Two fingers snapped off the hand as Sharpe freed the tinder box. He brushed the black fingers aside, then levered open the lid to see that though all the linen kindling had long been consumed the picture of the redcoat was undamaged. Sharpe cleaned the engraving with a hand, then wiped a tear from his eye. 'Tom Garrard saved our lives last night, Pat.'

'He did?'

'He blew up the ammunition on purpose and killed himself doing it.' The presence of the tinderbox could mean nothing else. Tom Garrard, in the wake of his battalion's defeat, had somehow managed to reach the ammunition wagons and light a fire he had known would blow his own soul clear into eternity. 'Oh, dear God,'