“But not where we’ll attack, nor when.”
“I wish de l’Eclin wasn’t there.”
Vivar scorned his fears. “You think Imperial Guards don’t sleep?”
Sharpe ignored the question. “He isn’t there to collect forage. His job is to take the gonfalon, and he knows we’ll bring it to him. Whatever we plan, Major, he’s already thought of. He’s waiting for us! He’s ready for us!”
“You’re frightened of him.” Vivar leaned against the wall of the tower room where the map was kept. Firelight flickered in the courtyard below where a Spaniard sang a slow, sad song.
“I’m frightened of him,” Sharpe confirmed, “because he’s good. Too good.”
“He’s only good in attack. He can’t defend! When you attacked his ambush, and I attacked him in the farmyard, he wasn’t so clever, was he?”
“No,” Sharpe allowed.
“And now he’s trying to defend a city! He’s a chasseur, a hunter like a Cazador, and he’s no good at defence.” Vivar would brook no defeatism. “Of course we’ll win! Thanks to your ideas, we’ll win.”
The praise was calculated to elicit enthusiasm from Sharpe who had suggested an inside-out stratagem for the assault. The attack would not try to take the city house by house, or street by street, but instead it would strike fast and hard for the city’s centre. Then, split into ten parties, one party for each of the roads that broke the circuit of the ancient defences, the attackers would drive the French outwards towards the open country.“‘Let them get away!” Sharpe had argued. “So long as you take the city.”
If they took the city, which Sharpe doubted, they could hope to hold it for no more than thirty-six hours. Soult’s infantry, marching from Corunna and reinforced with the superb French artillery, would soon make mincemeat of the Major’s men. “I only need a day,” Vivar hesitated. “We capture it at dawn, we find the traitors by noon, we destroy the supplies, and that night we unfurl the gonfalon. The next day we leave in glory.”
Sharpe went to the narrow window. Bats, woken from their winter’s sleep by the arrival of soldiers in the fortress, flickered in the red light. The hills were dark. Somewhere on those black slopes Sergeant Harper led a patrol of Riflemen on a long, looping march. The patrol was not just to search for a bivouacking French cavalry patrol, but also to keep the men hard and accustom them to the vagaries of marching at night. All of Vivar’s small force, including the half-trained volunteers, would have to make such a journey and, having seen what chaos a night march could inflict on troops, Sharpe flinched inwardly. He thought, too, of the dreadful odds. There were two thousand French cavalrymen in Santiago de Compostela. Not all would be there when Vivar attacked; some would be bivouacking in the farmlands which they pillaged, but there would still be a mighty preponderance of enemy.
Against whom would march fifty Riflemen, one hundred and fifty Cazadores of whom only a hundred had horses, and close to three hundred half-trained volunteers.
Madness. Sharpe turned on the Spaniard. “Why don’t you wait till the French have marched south?”
“Because to wait wouldn’t make a story which will be told in every Spanish tavern. Because I have a brother who must die. Because, if I wait, I will be thought as spineless as the other officers who’ve fled south. Because I’ve sworn to do it. Because I cannot believe in defeat. No. We go soon, we go very soon.” Vivar was almost speaking to himself, staring down at the charcoal marks which showed the French defences. “Just as soon as our volunteers are ready, we go-‘
Sharpe said nothing. The truth was that he now believed that the attack was madness, but it was a madness he had helped to plan and sworn to support.
Just as the innocent scrabbling of an unfledged owlet in an attic could be turned by a child’s dread into the night-steps of a fearful monster, so Sharpe let his fears feed and grow as the days passed.
He could tell no one of his certainty that the assault would end in disaster. He did not want to earn Vivar’s scorn by such an admission, and there was no one else in whom he could confide. Harper, like the Spanish Major, seemed imbued by a blithe confidence that the attack would work. “Mind you, sir, the Major will have to wait another week.”
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