Sharpe's Devil

'White horse, six or seven back.'

'So it is,' Sharpe said grimly. The merchant and British Consul was among the horsemen who, like himself, were mostly middle-aged and prosperous-looking men. Their leader, the man wearing the scarlet sash, slowed as he neared Sharpe.

'Are you Cochrane?' he called in Spanish.

'Admiral Cochrane is following. He'll be here soon,' Sharpe replied.

'We've come to surrender the town to you.' The man reined in his horse, took off his hat, and offered Sharpe a bow. 'My name is Manuel Ferrara, I have the honor to be the alcalde of Valdivia, and these gentlemen are senior and respected citizens of our town. We want no trouble, senor. We are merely merchants who struggle to make a poor living. As you know, our sympathies have always been with the Republic, and we beg that you will treat us with the respect due to civilians who have taken no part in the fighting.'

'Shut up,' Sharpe said. He pushed past the offended and astonished Mayor to reach Blair. 'You bastard.'

'Mister Sharpe?' Blair touched a nervous hand to his hat.

'You're supposed to look after British interests, you bugger, not suck Bautista's tits because you're frightened of him!'

'Now, Mister Sharpe, be careful what you say!'

'You shit-faced son of a whore.' Sharpe took hold of Blair's right boot and heaved up, chucking the Consul bodily out of his saddle. Blair gave a yelp of astonishment, then collapsed into the mud on the far side of the horse. Sharpe steadied the beast, then mounted it himself. 'You!' he said to the Mayor, who was still protesting his undying loyalty to the ideals of liberty and republicanism.

'Me, senor?'

'I told you to shut up. I don't give a fart for your republics. I'm a monarchist. And get off your damned horse. My friend needs it.'

'My horse? But this is a valuable beast, senor, and—'

'Get off,' Sharpe said, 'or I'll blow you off it.' He drew one of his two pistols and cocked it.

The Mayor hastily slid off his horse. Harper, grinning, heaved himself into the vacated saddle. 'Where's Bautista?' Sharpe asked the Mayor.

'The Captain-General is in the Citadel. But his men don't want to fight.'

'But Bautista wants to fight?'

'Yes, senor. But the men think you are devils. They say you can't be killed!' The Mayor crossed himself, then turned fearfully as a shout from the river announced the arrival of Lord Cochrane and his boats.

'All of you!' Sharpe shouted at the Mayor's nervous deputation. 'Off your horses! All of you! Now!' He kicked his heels to urge Blair's white horse forward. 'What's this flag?' He gestured at the ornate coat of arms.

'The flag of the town of Valdivia, senor,' the Mayor answered.

'Hold on to it, Patrick!'

Cochrane jumped ashore, roaring with questions. What was happening? Who were these men? Why had Sharpe tried to race ahead?

'Bautista's holed up in the Citadel,' Sharpe explained. 'Everyone else in Valdivia wants to surrender, but Bautista doesn't. That means he's waiting for your boats and he'll fire on you. But if a small group of us go ahead on horseback we might just fool them into opening the gates.'

Cochrane seized a horse and shouted for others of his men to find themselves mounts. The remainder of his piratical force was to row upriver as fast as it could. The Mayor tried to make another speech about liberty and the Republic, but Cochrane pushed him aside and dragged himself up into his saddle. He grinned at Sharpe. 'Christ, but this is joy! What would we do for happiness if peace came?' He turned his horse clumsily, rammed his heels back, and whooped as the horse took off. 'Let's go get the whores!'

His men cheered. Hooves thumped mud into the faces of the Mayor's delegation as Sharpe and Harper raced after Cochrane. The rebellion was down to a spearhead of just twenty men, but with a whole country as their prize.

They rode hard, following the river road east toward the town. On the horsemen's left the river flowed placidly toward the sea, while to their right was a succession of terraced vineyards, tobacco fields and orchards. There were no military posts, no soldiers and nothing untoward in the landscape. Bautista had put no pickets on the harbor road, and had set no ambushes in the trees. Cochrane and his men rode untroubled through two villages and past white-painted churches and plump farmhouses. Cochrane waved at villagers who, terrified of strangers, crouched inside their cottages till the armed horsemen had passed. Cochrane was in understandably high spirits. 'It was impossible, you see! Impossible!'

'What was?' Sharpe asked.

'To capture the harbor with just three hundred men! That's why it worked. They couldn't believe there were so few of us. My God!' Cochrane pounded the pommel of his saddle in his exuberant enthusiasm, 'I'm going to capture the Spanish treasury and those prickless legal bastards in Santiago will have to grovel at my feet to get the money!'

'You have to capture the Citadel first.' Sharpe reminded him.

'Simplicity itself.' In his present mood Cochrane would have attacked the Rock of Gibraltar with just a boat's crew. He whooped with delirious joy, making his horse prick its ears back. The horses were tired, breathing hard on the slopes and sweating beneath their saddlecloths, but Cochrane ruthlessly pressed them on. What did it matter if he lost horses, so long as he gained a country?

Then, two hours after they had encountered the Mayor's delegation on the riverbank, the road breasted a low ridge and there, hazed with the smoke of its fires and dominated by the great Citadel within the river's bend, lay Valdivia.

Sharpe was about to ask just how Cochrane wanted to approach the Citadel, but His Lordship, seeing the prize so close, had already scraped back his heels and was shouting at Harper to hold the flag high. 'We'll go straight for them! Straight for them! The devil take us if we fail! Go! Go! Go!'

'God save Ireland!' Harper shouted the words like a war cry, then he too raked back his heels.

“Jesus wept,' Sharpe said, and followed. This was not war, it was madness, a race, an idiocy. An Admiral, a Dublin publican, an English farmer and sixteen rebels were attacking the biggest fort in Chile, and doing it as though it were a child's game. Harper, his horse pounding alongside Cochrane, held the flag high so that its fringed symbol streamed in the wind. Cochrane had drawn his sword and Sharpe now struggled to do the same, but pulling a long blade free when trying to stay aboard a galloping horse was not the easiest task. He managed it just as the horsemen funneled into the town itself, clattering onto a narrow street which led to the main square. A woman carrying a tray of bread tripped in her frantic effort to get out of their way. Fresh loaves spilled across the roadway. Sparks chipped off the cobbles from the horses' hooves. A priest shrank into a doorway, a child screamed, then the horsemen were in the main square and Cochrane was shouting at the fortress to open its gates.

'Open! Open!' he shouted in Spanish, and maybe it was the sight of the flag, or perhaps the urgency of the horsemen that suggested they were fugitives from the disasters that were known to have occurred in the harbor, but magically, just as every other Spanish fortress had opened its gates, so this one threw open its entrance.

The horses crashed across the bridge. Cochrane and Harper were in the lead. Cochrane had a drawn sword, and the sight of the bare blade made the officer in the gateway shout in alarm, but it was too late. Harper dropped the tip of the flag and, at full gallop and with all his huge weight behind the flag's staff, he drove the tip of the pole into the officer's chest. There was an explosion of blood, a crunch of bone, then the officer went down with a shattered chest and a blood-soaked flag impaled in his ribs, while Harper, letting the staff go, was through the archway and into the outer courtyard.

'Surrender! Surrender!' Cochrane was screaming the word in a demented voice, flailing at panicked soldiers with the flat of his drawn sword. 'Drop your muskets! Surrender!'

A musket fired from an upper window and the bullet flattened itself on the cobbles, but no other resistance was offered. The gate to the inner courtyard, hard by the Angel Tower, was closed. All around Sharpe the Spanish soldiers were throwing down their muskets. Cochrane was already out of his saddle, hurling men aside to reach a