A vagary of the storm-threatening clouds caused a rent somewhere in the churning sky and a leprous shaft of sunlight, yellow and misted, slanted down to shine on the highway beside Gemioncourt farm.
“Dear God!” Doggett was staring at the curiously bright patch of land beneath the sky’s unnatural blackness.
In which sunlit patch were Lancers.
There were suddenly thousands of Lancers. Lancers in green coats and Lancers in scarlet coats. The farmland had sprouted a thicket of flag-hung spear points that were touched gold by the errant shaft of sunlight.
“Let’s get the hell out of here!” Sharpe settled himself into his saddle.
“No, sir! Look! Look!” An excited Doggett was standing in his stirrups, pointing south. Sharpe turned back, saw nothing, so pulled his telescope from his saddlebag.
The lens slid past the foreshortened Lancers, back through the dust which their hooves were kicking up from the rye fields, and back up the white highway to where, outlined against the sun brightened crops and illuminated by the wash of errant light, was a single horseman. The man was darkly dressed, mounted on a grey horse, and wearing a cocked hat sideways across his scalp. He was slumped in his saddle, as though he rode unwillingly.
“It’s him!” Doggett spoke almost reverently.
“My God.” Sharpe’s voice was awed. There, in his glass, was the small plump man who had dominated Europe for the past ten years, a man Sharpe had never seen, but whose form and face and posture were familiar from a thousand engravings and a thousand statues. Sharpe handed the glass to Harper who stared at the far Emperor.
“It’s Bonaparte!” Doggett sounded as excited as though he saw his own monarch riding towards him.
“It is bloody time to get out of here,” Harper said.
The Lancers climbed the shallow slope from the ford and, in greeting, every waiting British gun was fired.
The cannons crashed back violently. The gun wheels jarred up while the ground quivered with dust. Smoke jetted twenty yards in front of each cannon muzzle while, above the trampled crops, the shell fuses left small white smoke trails that arced towards the line of advancing cavalry. There was a pause, then it seemed as though the Lancers plunged into a maelstrom of exploding shells. Smoke and flame billowed as horses screamed. Sharpe saw a lance cartwheeling above a boiling mass of smoke.
Then, as if to show that man was puny, a sudden wind howled from the north-west. The wind erupted so abruptly that Sharpe half twisted in the saddle, fearing an exploding shell behind him, and as he turned there was a booming discharge of thunder that sounded like the end of time itself. The rift in the clouds closed as though a vast door had slammed in heaven, and the reverberation of the door was the horrendous thunder that hammered down at the earth in a deafening cascade. A spear of lightning sliced blue-white into the far woods, and then the rain came.
In an instant the whole battlefield was blotted from sight. It was a cloudburst, a torrent, a seething pelting storm that slashed down to soak the fields and flood the ditches and hiss where it hit the hot barrels of the cannons. Sharpe had to shout to make himself heard over the downpour. “Let’s go! Come on!”
Within seconds the field had been churned into a morass. The rain was even heavier than the great sky-shaking storms Sharpe had seen in India. As he led his companions out from the trees’ shelter he had to duck his head against the maniacal force of the wind-whipped torrents that soaked his uniform in seconds. The horses struggled against the gale of rain, their hooves sticking in the glutinous mess of mud and straw. The rainwater sluiced off the fields with its load of precious soil, uncovering the white swollen bodies of the barely buried dead.
Thunder cracked in the sky; a battle of Gods that drowned the man-made sounds of war. The vast explosions rumbled from west to east, rebounded, split the clouds with multiple forks of lightning, and deluged the crouching earth. Sharpe led Harper and Doggett onto the Nivelles road that was now a writhing river of water-carried mud. He could see a troop of cloaked cavalry to his left, and a gun team hitching their weapon to its limber on his right, but any object more than thirty yards away was utterly obscured by the silver shafts of rain that crashed down like shrapnel. Behind Sharpe a gun fired, its sound drowned by the greater violence of the storm.