Sharpe chuckled. ‘You think I should marry Teresa?’
‘Why not? She’s a skinny thing, so she is, but you could put some meat on her bones.’ Harper profoundly disapproved of Sharpe’s taste for slim women.
They sat silent again, listening to the rain pelt on the canvas, and sharing a friendship that rarely had a chance to be expressed or defined. Sharpe had a reputation, with those who did not know him well, of being a man short on words and it was true, he thought, except with a handful of friends. Harper and Hogan; Lossow, the German cavalryman, and that was about all. Exiles to a man, cut off from their own countries and fighting with a strange army. Sharpe was an exile, too, a stranger in the Officers’ Mess. ‘You know what the General says?’
Harper shook his head. ‘Tell me what the General says.’
‘He says that no one ever promoted from the ranks turns out well.’
‘Does he now?’
‘He says they turn to drink.’
‘In this army, who wouldn’t?’ Harper pushed a canteen at Sharpe. ‘Here, get yourself drunk.’
Some fool opened the door of a lantern in the parallel and the French gunners, ever alert, saw the light and suddenly the ramparts of Badajoz blossomed flame and shot. There were shouts from the workings, the light disappeared, but then there was the sick thud of the shots striking home and the screams from the trench. Harper spat. ‘We’ll never take this bloody town.’
‘We can’t stay here for ever.’
‘That’s what you said when you first went to Ireland.’
Sharpe grinned. ‘It’s the welcome you give us. We don’t want to leave. Anyway, we like the weather.’
‘You can keep it.’ Harper squinted up into the darkness. ‘Christ! I wish the rain would stop!’
‘I thought the Irish liked rain.’
‘We love rain, so we do, but this isn’t rain.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s the flood, the deluge, the end of the whole sodden world.’
Sharpe leaned back on a wicker gabion, abandoned by a working party, and stared up. ‘I haven’t seen the stars in a week. Longer.’
‘That’s true.’
‘I like stars.’
‘That’s nice for them.’ Harper was amused; he did not often hear Sharpe’s tongue loosened by drink.
‘No, really. You like birds, I like stars.’
‘Birds do things. They fly, make nests. You can watch them.’
Sharpe said nothing. He remembered the nights lying in fields, head on haversack, body inside the sewn blanket, and legs thrust into the arms of the jacket which was buttoned upside down on his stomach. It was the soldier’s way of sleeping, but on some nights he would simply lie there and watch the great smear in the sky that was like the camp fires of an unimaginably huge army. Legion upon incomprehensible legion, up there in the sky, and he knew that they were coming nearer, night by night, and the picture was confused in his head by the strange, drunken preachers who had come to the foundling home when he was a child. The stars were mixed up with the four horsemen of the apocalypse, the last trump, the second coming, the raising of the dead, and the lights in the night were the army of the world’s end. “The world won’t end in a flood. It’ll be bayonets and battalions. A bloody great battle.’
‘As long as we’re in the skirmish line, sir, I don’t mind.’ Harper drank more rum. ‘I must save some for the morning.’
Sharpe sat up. ‘Hagman’s bribing the drummer boys.’
‘Never works.’ Harper was right. The drummer boys did the flogging and were usually bribed by the victim’s friends, but under the gaze of the officers they were forced to lay on with their full strength.
Sharpe stared at the dark bulk of Badajoz, relieved by a few hazed lights. There was a fire burning in one of the castle’s many courtyards. The dull, brief bell of the Cathedral rang the half-hour. ‘If only she wasn’t there…’ He stopped.
‘What?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘If she wasn’t there.’ Harper’s Ulster accent was slow, as if he was treading very carefully. ‘You’d be tempted to bugger off. Is that right? Up to the hills? To fight with the Partisans?’