“Get yourself a German one, Captain.” It was an old argument, whether the Kligenthal blades were better than the British. Sharpe shook his head. “I’ve eaten German swords with this one.”
The armourer cackled a toothless laugh and peered down the edge. “There you are, Captain. Take care of it.”
Sharpe put some coins on the wheel frame and held the sword up to the last light of the western sky. There was a new sheen on the edge, he felt it with his thumb and smiled at the armourer. “You’ll never get a Kligenthal as sharp as that.”
The armourer said nothing but from behind him he took out a sabre and handed it to Sharpe. Sharpe sheathed his sword and took the curved blade. It felt as if it had been made for him; its balance was a miracle, as if the steel were not there even though it flashed in the red light. He touched the blade. It would have sliced through silk as cleanly as it must cut through the breastplate of the French cavalry. “German?” Sharpe asked.
“Yes, Captain. Belongs to our Colonel.” The armourer took the blade back. “And I haven’t begun to sharpen it yet!”
Sharpe laughed. The sabre must have cost two hundred guineas. One day, he promised himself, one day he would own such a sword, not taken from the dead, but a sword that was inscribed with his name, forged to his height, balanced for his grip. He went back to the trees and in the sky over the river he could see the glow of the enemy fires where twenty-two thousand Frenchmen were sharpening their own blades and wondering about the morning. Not many would sleep. Most would doze through the night, their wakefulness laced with apprehension, searching the eastern sky for a dawn that might be the last one they would ever see. Sharpe lay awake for part of the night and rehearsed the next day in his head. The plan was simple enough. The Alberche ran in a curve to join the River Tagus, and the French were on the inside of the bend. In the morning the Spanish trumpets would sound, their thirty guns be unleashed, and the infantry would splash across the shallow river to attack the outnumbered French. And as the French retreated, as assuredly they must, so Wellesley would throw the British onto their flank. And Marshal Victor would be destroyed, his army broken between the hammer of the Spanish and the anvil of the British, and as the blue infantry withdrew the cavalry would come through the water and turn retreat into carnage. And once that was done, all perhaps before the citizens of Talavera went to their Sunday morning mass, there would only be King Joseph Bonaparte’s twenty thousand men between the allies and Madrid. It was all so simple. Sharpe slept in his greatcoat, curled by the embers of a fire, a gilded eagle threading his sleep.
There were no bugles to wake them in the morning, nothing that might alert the French to the dawn attack instead of the more civilised hour of mid-morning, when most men could be expected to fight. Sergeants and corporals shook the men awake; soldiers cursed the dew and the cold air that rasped in their throats. Every man glanced towards the river, but the far bank was shrouded in mist and darkness; there was nothing to be seen, no sound to be heard. They had been forbidden to relight the fires in case the sudden lights should warn the French, but somehow they managed to heat water and threw in the loose tea-leaves, and Sharpe gratefully accepted a tin mug of the scalding liquid from his Sergeant. Harper was kicking dirt onto the fire; the men had risked a small blaze rather than go without tea, and he looked up at Sharpe and grinned. “Permission to go to church, sir?”
Sharpe grinned back. It was Sunday. He tried to work out the date. They had left Plasencia on the seventeenth and that had been a Monday, and he counted the days forward on his fingers. Sunday 23 July, 1809. There was still no light in the eastern sky, the stars shone brightly, the dawn still two hours away. Behind them, on a track that ran between the cork grove and the fields, there was a rumbling and clanking and cursing as a battery of artillery unlimbered. Sharpe turned, the tea cradled in his hands, and watched the dim shapes as the horses were led away and the field guns pointed across the river. They would herald the attack, hurling their round shot at the French lines, tearing holes in the French Battalions as Sharpe led his skirmishers into the river. It was cold, too cold to feel any excitement; that would come later. Now were the hours to feel apprehensive, to tighten belts and buckles, to feel hungry. Sharpe shivered slightly in his greatcoat, nodded his thanks to Harper, and made his way down the grove between the lines of his men who stamped their feet and swung their arms and resurrected the more successful jokes of the previous evening. Somehow they were not as funny in the small hours before dawn.