Harper swore, looked at Sharpe.
‘Not so funny here, eh?’ Sharpe found himself feeling relieved that the rockets had gone. Even at thirty yards the noise and fire was alarming.
Harper grinned. ‘Wouldn’t you say our duty was done, sir?’
‘Just the big ones, then it’s done.’
‘For what we are about to receive.’
The next volley was not to be ground fired, but to be aimed upwards in firing tubes supported by a tripod. Gilliland, Sharpe knew, would be working at the mathematics of the trajectory. Sharpe had always supposed mathematics to be the most exact of all the sciences and he did not clearly see how it could be applied to the inexact nature of rocketry, but Gilliland would be busy with angles and equations. The wind had to be ascertained, for if a breeze was blowing across the rockets’ path then they had a perverse habit of turning into the wind. That, Gilliland had explained, was because the wind put more pressure on the long stick than on the cylinder head, and so the tubes had to be aimed down-wind for an upwind target. Another calculation was the stick length, a longer stick giving more height and a longer flight, and at six hundred yards Sharpe knew the artillerymen would be sawing off a length of each rocket’s tail. A third imponderable was the angle of launch. A rocket travelled relatively slowly as it left the firing tube and so the head fell towards the ground in the first few feet of flight and the angle of launch had to be increased to compensate. Modern science at war.
‘Hold your hat, sir.’
The smoke and flames were easily visible beneath the firing tubes, even at six hundred yards, and then, with appalling suddenness, the missiles leaped into the air. These were eighteen-pounder rockets, a dozen of them, and they sliced the air above the lingering smoke trails of the first volley, climbing, climbing, and Sharpe saw one slam off to the left, hopelessly off course, while the others seemed to have coalesced into a living flame-shot cloud that grew silently over the valley.
‘Oh, God.’ Harper was holding the crucifix. The rockets, strangely, seemed not to be moving. The cloud grew, the flame surrounded dots were still and hovering, and Sharpe knew it’was an illusion caused by the trajectory bringing the missiles in a curve pointing straight at the two of them. Then a single dot dropped from the cloud, fire at its edges, smoke dark against the clear sky behind. The noise burst on them; a screaming roar, flame-born, and the dot grew larger. ‘Down!’
‘Christ!’ Harper dived right, Sharpe left, and Sharpe clung to the soil by the wall and the noise hammered at him, growing, seeming to make the stones of the wall shake, and the air was throbbing with the noise that came closer and closer and filled their whole world with terror as the rocket slammed into the wall.
‘Jesus.’ Sharpe rolled over and sat up. The rocket, the most accurate of the week, had demolished the stone wall where he and Harper had been standing. The broken stick toppled slowly off the wreckage. The cylinder smoked innocently in the next field. Smoke drifted over the burned grass.
They started laughing, beating the dirt off their uniforms, and suddenly it seemed hilarious to Sharpe so that he rolled onto his side, helpless with laughter. ‘Holy Jesus!’
‘You’d better thank Him. If that had been a shell instead of roundshot.’ Harper left the thought unfinished. He was standing and staring at the ruins of the wall.
Sharpe sat up again. ‘Is that frightening?’
Harper grinned. ‘You’d regret having a full belly, that’s for sure, sir.’ He bent down and picked up his shako.
‘So maybe there is something to the mad Colonel’s invention.’
‘Aye, sir.’
‘And think if you could fire a whole volley at fifty paces.’
Harper nodded. ‘True, but there’s a lot of maybes and ifs there, sir.’ He grinned. ‘You’re fond of them, aren’t you? You fancy trying them out, yes?’ He laughed. ‘Toys for Christmas.’
A figure in blue uniform, leading a second horse, was riding towards them from the firing point. Harper pulled his battered shako low over his eyes and nodded towards the galloping man. ‘I think he’s worried he’s murdered us, sir.’