“Have you ever heard of caltrops?” MacKeon asked.
“No.”
“Spiky things. Horses can’t abide them. Get up in their hooves, Mister Sharpe, into the soft tissue.”
“Harper! Harris! Cooper! Perkins!” Sharpe bellowed towards the olives where the riflemen had taken shelter. “Come here! Now! Fast!”
A trumpet sounded on the southern road and the lancers lowered their blades. General Herault walked his horse to the front of the squadron. The dragoons blasted a volley that ricocheted off the bridge parapet or flattened its bullets against the fort’s stonework. If that bugger of a wall collapses, Sharpe thought, it could crush his men, but there was no time to worry about that. Only time for Harper to finish his work.
The four riflemen had sprinted over the field and dropped beside Sharpe as the bullets whipped overhead. “Every damn bottle, Pat,” Sharpe said, “is to be broken.”
“Now, sir?” Harper asked, staring at Sharpe as though he were mad.
“Throw them up onto the bridge,” Sharpe said. “Do it now! Do it fast! Do it!”
Harris and Perkins crouched inside the shrine and pushed bottles out of the door, and Harper, Sharpe and Cooper hurled them up onto the bridge’s hump. MacKeon helped, and then two of the redcoats came to assist because there were so many bottles. Hundreds! Harper must have saved four hundred!
Doubtless he had hoped Sharpe would not see them, and then he would have distributed the wine among the Light Company, and Sharpe was now damned grateful for the Irishman’s disobedience. “Hurry!” He shouted, for the trumpet had sounded again and he could hear the thump of hooves.
They hurled the bottles until the bridge ran with wine. Wine that diluted the drying blood and trickled past the dead bodies left on the roadway.
But it was not the wine that would save Sharpe, but the thick layer of broken green glass that was beginning to build up in the bridge’s centre, and still he threw more bottles that smashed apart in fountains of red, and every broken bottle left a handful of razor sharp shards. The scraps were just like the tops of the high walls that rich folk put round their property in Britain, and on the wall tops they would cement a thief’s trap of broken glass, and Sharpe had crossed enough of those walls in his time.
Bloody sharp stuff, horrid stuff, and Harris and Perkins backed out of the shrine, their arms filled with the last bottles and they hurled them up onto the bridge and now the hooves were a thunder to fill the air and shake the ground, and the curb chains and scabbard chains clinked and Sharpe stood to see the lances coming straight at him, and even the dragoons had stopped to watch the Poles slaughter their way across the bridge.
“Stand up!” Sharpe shouted. “Present!” The muskets came up into mens’s shoulders. Their bayonets, many still red with blood, pointed towards the bridge crest that glittered with a bed of green glass.
And the lancers were in a line now, narrowing to cross the bridge at full gallop, and Sharpe drew his sword, tugging it hard because the blood drying on the blade had crusted to the inside of the scabbard. Some of the dragoons had opened fire. A redcoat staggered, his musket dropping.
Sergeant Huckfield pulled him back out of the front rank. “Close up! Close up!” The riflemen were firing at the dragoons and the leading lancers were just on the bridge.
“Fire! Sharpe shouted, and his thirty muskets flamed and smoked and he had an impression of a horse falling and screaming. “Reload! Fast!” He shouted, “reload!” The sound of hooves were still loud on the stone and Sharpe ran to one side to see past the musket’s smoke and an hussar was leading the charge, but this hussar had a lance and he reached the bridge’s crest and there his horse reared, and the horse was screaming, green light flashing off its flailing front hooves, and a second horse was sliding in the glass, shaking, its rider desperately trying to regain control, and then a third horse reached the broken glass and it too reared up. The lancers piled in behind, unable to get past the panicking horses.