“Yes, sir.”
“When we do attack,” the general’s rumbling voice checked the exodus of uniformed officers, “we do it quickly, efficiently, and right. Any man who lets me down will have to explain himself, alone, to me.” He raised one clenched fist the size of a small cannon-ball. “Now bugger off and keep the bastards hopping.”
The waves broke and sucked on the beach at the channel entrance, the wind rattled pine branches and sighed over the ramparts, and the picked men of the best French Battalion went to their night-time task while the others slept. And General Calvet, head on a haversack and boots ready by his bed, snored.
“Hold your fire!” Sharpe bellowed the order, heard it echoed by a sergeant, then ran down the southern rampart.
Six or seven musket shots had cracked from the glacis, the balls hissing uselessly overhead, and, two Marines and a Rifleman had instinctively returned fire. “You don’t fire,” Sharpe said, “unless you’re ordered to fire or unless the bastards are climbing the wall! You hear?”
None of the three men replied. Instead, crouching beneath the battlements, they reloaded their weapons.
Sharpe sent Fytch around the ramparts with a new warning that no man was to fire. The French, Sharpe guessed, were trying to provoke just such defensive fire to see which parts of the rampart responded most heavily. Let the bastards guess.
Sixty men were in the old garrison offices, fully armed, but told to catch what sleep they could. When the attack came, and Sharpe did not expect it till the deadest hours of the night, those men could be on the ramparts in minutes.
He crouched in an embrasure. The wind fingered cold on the scabbed blood on his forehead, and the sigh of it in his ears made listening difficult. He thought he heard the scrape of a boot or musket butt on the glacis, but was not sure. Whatever the sound was, it was too small to presage a full attack. Sharpe had crouched beyond a fortress’s defences, throat dry and fear rampant, and he knew what sudden commotion was made by a mass of men moving to the escalade. There would be ladders bumping forward, the chink of equipment, the scrape of hundreds of boots, but he could hear nothing but the wind and see nothing but the blackness.
He went to the eastern wall and crouched beside Sergeant Rossner. “Anything?”
“Nothing, sir.” The German sergeant had his shako upended on the firestep and half-filled with cartridges. Beside him was a roped mass of hay. If an attack came the hay would be lit then slung far over the walls to illuminate targets. No lights were allowed in the courtyard or on the walls of the Teste de Buch, for such lights could only silhouette the defenders for the convenience of French marksmen.
Sharpe moved on, crouching to talk with men, offering them wine from his canteen, always giving the same message. There was nothing to fear from random shots, or from the shouts that sometimes sounded in the darkness. The French were trying to fray the defenders’ nerves, and Sharpe would have done the same. Once there was the sound of massed feet, shouts, and a fusillade of musketry that flattened on the walls, but no dark shapes appeared beyond the glacis lip. Jeers and insults came from the darkness, more shots, but Sharpe’s men, once the first fear had subsided, learned to ignore the sounds.
In Commandmant Lassan’s old quarters two Marines, one who had been a surgeon’s mate and another who had trained in the butcher’s trade, laid out carpenter’s tools, shaving razors, and sewing kits on a table. They had no clamps, instead there was a cauldron of boiling pitch with which to cauterize a stump. They had no camphorated wine, nor any solution of lead acetate, so instead they had a barrel of salt-water to wash wounds, and a pot filled with spider-webs that could be stuffed into deep, cuts. Patrick Harper, the big Irishman, had recommended maggots for cleaning wounds, but the dignity of their new-fetched professional pride would not allow the two Marines to accept the nostrum. They listened to the shots in the night, sipped the brandy that was supposed to dull wounded men’s pain, and wondered when the first wounded would be brought for their attention.
Captain Palmer, trying to sleep where the sixty men were held in reserve, knew that there would be small rest tonight. Musket shots and sudden shouts came faint to the old offices, but not so faint that they did not cause men to stir and reach for their muskets or rifles. “I wish the bastards would come,” one Marine muttered, and Palmer held the same belief. Better to get it over, he thought, than this damned waiting.
A Spanish Rifleman on the southern wall sent for Sharpe. “Can you hear it, senor?” The man spoke in Spanish.
Sharpe listened. Faint, but unmistakable, came the sound of picks and spades thudding into earth, then the ring of a crowbar on stone. “They’re making a battery,” he replied in Spanish.,
“In the village?” The Rifleman made it half a guess and half a question.
Sharpe listened again. “I’d say so.”
“They’ll be in range, then.” The Spaniard slapped the woodwork of his rifle.
“Long range,” Sharpe said dubiously.
“Not for Taylor,” the Spaniard said. The American’s marksmanship was a legend to Frederickson’s men.
But Taylor, this night, was in the darkness; gone with Harper and Frederickson, gone to spread terror among the men who tried to keep a garrison awake with clamour, gone to the kill.
Not a man made a sound. They lay flat to let their eyes adjust to the darkness.
The sky was not so dark as the land. There was no moon, but a spread of stars showed between patches of cloud and that lighter sky might betray a silhouette from ground-level and so the Riflemen lay, bellies on the sand, unmoving.
They were the best. Each man was a veteran, each had fought in more battles than could be casually recalled, and each had killed and gone past that point where a man found astonishment in the act of giving death to another human being.
William Frederickson, whose passion was for the architecture of the past and who was as well educated as any man in Wellington’s Army, saw death as a regrettable but inevitable necessity of his trade. If wars could be won without death Frederickson would have been content, but so far mankind had devised no such process. And war, he believed, was necessary. To Frederickson the enemy was the embodiment of Napoleon’s Imperial ambitions, the foe of all that he held most dear, and while he was not so foolish, nor so blind, as to be unaware of their humanity, it was nevertheless a humanity that had been pointed in his direction with orders to kill. It was therefore necessary to kill more swiftly and more efficiently than the enemy.
Thomas Taylor, Frederickson’s American, reckoned death as commonplace as a meal or a woman. It was part of being alive. From his youngest days he had only known cruelty, pain, sickness, poverty, and death, and he saw nothing strange in any of those things. If it had made him heartless, it had also given him a pride in surviving in the valley of the shadow. He could kill with a rifle, a knife, a sword bayonet, or his bare hands, and he was good with all of them. He was a man of great resentment, and small remorse. He resented a fate that had driven him from his own land, that had doomed him to an Army he did not love, but his pride would not let him be a bad soldier.
For Patrick Harper killing was a soldier’s trade and an act that provoked equal measures of regret and pride. By nature the Irishman was a gentle, pacific man, but there was a rage in him that could be touched by battle and turn him into a warrior as fearsome as any celebrated in Celtic song. Only battle seemed to touch that rage.
Sometimes, thinking of the men he had killed and whose faces he had seen show the last emotion of life, Harper might wish the blow withdrawn, the bayonet unthrust, or the trigger unpulled, but it was always too late. Other times, when he looked about the men he led, he was proud that he was of the best, that his deeds were celebrated, and that his name was never spoken with disdain. He loved the men he fought alongside, and their deaths hurt him, so he fought for them like a demon. He was a soldier, and he was a good one, and now he lay in the sand and was aware of the Green Jackets lying to his left and right and of the small sounds that came from the dunes ahead.
For an hour or more the French had been sniping at the fort, teasing the defenders, but always from a safe distance. They had done it to the southern and eastern ramparts, and now dark figures showed in the dead ground to the north where Frederickson’s men lay.
Sweet William clicked his tongue softly, held a hand up so that it was silhouetted on the dark sky, and slowly gestured further north.
Thirteen shadows moved in the sand. They had blackened faces, blackened hands, and darkened weapons.
