“This way!” Sharpe leaped the dead, carrying the fight toward the Revenant’s bows. The French defenders were numerous, but the way aft was blocked by just as many men. Muskets cracked from the quarterdeck and more fired from the forecastle and at least one defender was killed by his own side in that wild fire. The Revenant’s men far outnumbered the boarders, but the British numbers increased every second and the Pucelle’s crewmen wanted revenge for the raking the Revenant had given them. They slashed and lunged and screamed and hit and battered men down. A gunner was swinging a handspike, swatted aside a sword, crushed a Frenchman’s skull, then he was pushed on by the men behind. Chase was shouting at men to follow him aft toward the quarterdeck while Sharpe was leading a swarm of crazed men forward. “Kill them!” he shrieked. “Kill them!”
Afterward he would remember little of that fight, but he rarely remembered such brawls. They were too confused, too loud, too full of horror, so full of horror, indeed, that he was ashamed when he remembered the joy of it, but there was a joy there. It was the happiness of being released to the slaughter, of having every bond of civilization removed. It was also what Richard Sharpe was good at. It was why he wore an officer’s sash instead of a private’s belt, because in almost every battle the moment came when the disciplined ranks dissolved and a man simply had to claw and scratch and kill like a beast. You did not kill men at long range in this kind of fighting, but came as close as a lover before you slaughtered them.
To go into that kind of fighting needed a rage, or a madness or a desperation. Some men never found those qualities and they shrank from the danger, and Sharpe could not blame them, for there was little that was admirable in rage, insanity or despair. Yet they were the qualities that drove the fight, and they were fueled by a determination to win. Just that. To beat the bastards down, to prove that the enemy were lesser men. The good soldier was cock of a blood-soaked dunghill, and Richard Sharpe was good.
His rage went cold in a fight. The fear might harass him before the fighting began, and for two blunt pins he might have found an excuse not to cross the trembling mast bridge that would drop him into a crowd of the enemy, but once there he fought with a precision that was lethal. It seemed to him that the very passage of time slowed, so that he could see clearly what every enemy intended. A man to his right was drawing back a pike, so that threat could be ignored because it would take at least a heartbeat for the pike to come forward, and meanwhile a bearded man in front was already swinging down a cutlass and Sharpe twisted the point of his own blade into that man’s throat, then whipped the cutlass to his right, parrying the pike thrust, though Sharpe himself was looking to his left. He saw no imminent danger, looked back to the right, flicked the blade up into the pikeman’s face, looked front again, then shoulder charged the pikeman, driving him back so that he fell against a cannon and Sharpe could raise the cutlass and, with both hands, drive it down into the man’s belly. The point stuck in the gun’s timber carriage and Sharpe wasted a second wrenching it free. British seamen pounded past him, forcing the French another two or three paces back down their deck, and Sharpe climbed the cannon and jumped down its other side. A Frenchman tried to surrender to him there, but Sharpe dared not leave a man in his rear so he slashed at the Frenchman’s wrist so he could not use the axe he had dropped, then kicked him in the groin before climbing the next cannon. The spaces between the cannon served as refuges for the French and Sharpe wanted to break them out and drive them onto the pikes and blades of the boarders.
Captain Chase’s barge crew had followed him aft, fighting their own battle toward the quarterdeck steps, but Clouter had come late to the fight, for he had been the man who fired the Pucelle’s forward starboard carronade down into the mass of defenders just as Chase had led the charge across the mast. The big black man came across the fallen mainmast, leaped to the deck and headed aft, howling to be let through the crowded seamen. Once he was in the front rank he cleared the larboard side of the Revenant’s weather deck while Sharpe led the charge along the starboard side. Clouter was using an axe, swinging it one-handed, ignoring the men who tried to surrender, but just cutting them down in an orgy of killing. Men were surrendering now, throwing down axes or swords, holding up their hands or just throwing themselves to the deck where they pretended to be dead. Sharpe slashed a pike aside, cut his blade across a Frenchman’s eyes, then found no one to oppose him, but a musket ball plucked at the hem of his jacket as he turned to look for his marines. “Fire at those bastards!” he shouted, pointing up at the forecastle deck where some of Montmorin’s crew still fought back. One of the marines aimed a seven-barreled gun, but Sharpe snatched it from him. “Use a musket, lad.”