Bernard Cornwell – 1809 01 Sharpe’S Rifles

And so, though yielding the point had added to Sharpe’s dread, he had seen the force of Vivar’s pleading and so had agreed to advance with empty weapons. Now no shot could startle the night.

Yet still the French could be forewarned. Such fears were Sharpe’s tumultuous companions on the long and ever more halting march. Perhaps the French had their own spies in the mountains who, just as the refugees had betrayed information to Vivar, had betrayed Vivar to the city? Or perhaps de l’Eclin, a man whose ruthlessness was absolute, had whipped the truth from Louisa? Perhaps artillery had been fetched from Corunna and waited, charged with canister, to greet the fumbling attackers? Attackers, moreover, who would be tired, cold, and without loaded guns. The first moments of such a fight would be slaughter.

Sharpe’s fears burgeoned and, away from Vivar’s indomitable cheerfulness, he let the doubts gnaw at him. He could not express those doubts, for to do so would destroy whatever confidence his men might have in his leadership. He could only hope that he conveyed the same certainty as Patrick Harper who seemed to march eagerly over the last steep miles. Once, as they splashed through a soggy reach of grassland beneath the dark line of a pinewood, Harper spoke enthusiastically of just how grand it would be to see Miss Louisa again. “She’s a brave lass, sir.”

“And a foolish one,” Sharpe replied sourly, still angry that her life had been risked.

Yet Louisa was the reverse of Sharpe’s fear; the consolation which, like a tiny beacon in an immense darkness, kept him going. She was his hope, but arrayed against that hope were the demons of fear. Those demons became more sinister with every forced halt. Sharpe’s guide, a blacksmith from the city, was leading a circuitous route that would avoid the villages and the man stopped frequently to sniff the air as though he could find his way by scent alone.

At last satisfied, he increased his pace. The Riflemen slithered down a steep hill, reaching a stream that had flooded the meadows and turned the valley’s bottom into a morass of frost and shallow water. Sharpe’s guide stopped at the margin of the marsh. ‘Agua, senor.“

“What does he want?” Sharpe hissed.

“Saying something about water,” Harper replied.

“I know it’s God-damned water.” Sharpe started forward, but the guide dared to pluck at the Rifleman’s sleeve.

“Agua bendita! Senor!“

“Ah!” It was Harper who understood. “He wants the holy water, sir, so he does.”

Sharpe swore at the idiocy of the request. The Riflemen were late and this fool demanded that he sprinkle a morass with holy water? “Come on!”

“Are you sure…“ Harper began.

“Come on!” Sharpe’s voice was made harsher by the fears which seethed inside him. This whole expedition was misbegotten and mad! Yet pride would not let him turn back, nor would it let him make an obeisance towards Vivar’s water-sprites. “I haven’t got any bloody holy water!” he growled. “Anyway, it’s superstitious bloody nonsense, Sergeant, and you know it.”

“I don’t know that at all, sir.”

“Come on!” Sharpe led the way through the stream and cursed because his tattered boots let in cold water. The Riflemen, oblivious to the cause of the small delay at the water’s edge, followed. This mist seemed thicker in the valley’s bottom and the guide, who had splashed through the stream with Sharpe, hesitated on the far bank.

“Hurry!” Sharpe growled, though it was a pointless admonition for the blacksmith spoke no English. “Hurry! Hurry!”

The guide, clearly flustered, indicated a narrow sheep track that angled up the further slope. As he climbed, Sharpe realized they must have come very close to the city, which was betrayed by the mephitic stink of its streets that seemed to him to be a foretaste of the horror that awaited his men.

Sharpe suddenly realized that the thump and chink of moving cavalry had been left behind, and he knew Vivar must have sent the Cazadores on their northward detour which was designed to take them far from the ears of French sentries. The ill-trained volunteer infantry should be some two or three hundred yards behind Sharpe by now. The Riflemen were isolated, ahead of the attack, and now very close to the holy city of St James.

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