‘Bloody well ought to be frightening,’ Sharpe responded. ‘A fight like that? In the rain and dark? Anything can happen. You just go in fast and dirty, Jorge, do the damage and keep on doing it.’
‘You have done so much fighting,’ Vicente said sadly, as though he pitied Sharpe.
‘I’ve been a soldier for a long time,’ Sharpe said, ‘and our army does a lot of fighting. India, Flanders, here, Denmark.’
‘Denmark! Why were you fighting in Denmark?’
‘God knows,’ Sharpe said. ‘Something about their fleet. We wanted it, they didn’t want us to have it, so we went and took it.’ He was gazing down the northern slope at a group of a dozen Frenchmen who had stripped to the waist and now began to shovel at a patch of ferns a hundred yards from the edge of the wood. He took out the replacement telescope Luis had brought him. It was little more than a toy and the outer lens was loose which meant it kept blurring, and it was only half as powerful as his own glass, but he supposed it was better than nothing. He focused the glass, steadied the outer lens with a fingertip and stared at the French work party. ‘Shit,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Bastards have got a cannon,’ Sharpe said. ‘Just pray it isn’t a bloody mortar.’
Vicente, looking bewildered, was trying and failing to see a gun. ‘What happens if it’s a mortar?’
‘We all die,’ Sharpe said, imagining the pot-like gun lobbing its shells into the sky so that they would drop almost vertically onto his position. ‘We all die,’ he said again, ‘or else we run away and get captured.’
Vicente made the sign of the cross again. He had not made that gesture at all in the first weeks Sharpe had known him, but the further Vicente travelled from his life as a lawyer the more the old imperatives returned to him. Life, he was beginning to learn, was not controlled by law or reason, but by luck and savagery and blind unfeeling fate. ‘I can’t see a cannon,’ he finally admitted.
Sharpe pointed to the French working party. ‘Those buggers are making a nice flat patch so they can aim properly,’ he explained. ‘You can’t fire a gun on a slope, not if you want to be accurate.’ He took a few steps down the northern path. ‘Dan!’
‘Sir?’
‘See where the bastards are going to put a cannon? How far away is it?’
Hagman, ensconced in a crevice of stone, peered down. ‘Bit under seven hundred paces, sir. Too far.’
‘We can try?’
Hagman shrugged. ‘I can try, but maybe save it for later?’
Sharpe nodded. Better to reveal the rifle’s range to the French when things were more desperate.
Vicente again looked bewildered so Sharpe explained. ‘A rifle bullet can carry that far, but it would take a genius to be accurate. Dan’s close to genius.’ He thought about taking a small party of riflemen halfway down the slope and he knew that at three or four hundred yards they could do a lot of damage to a gun crew, but the gun crew, at that range, would answer them with canister and though the lower slope of the hill was littered with rocks few were of a size to shelter a man from canister. Sharpe would lose soldiers if he went down the hill. He would do it, he decided, if the gun turned out to be a mortar, for mortars never carried canister, but the French were bound to answer his foray with a strong skirmish line of infantry. Stroke and counter-stroke. It felt frustrating. All he could do was pray the gun was not a mortar.
It was not a mortar. An hour after the working party began making a level platform the cannon appeared and Sharpe saw it was a howitzer. That was bad enough, but it gave his men a chance, for a howitzer shell would come at an oblique angle and his men would be safe behind the bigger boulders on the hilltop. Vicente borrowed the small telescope and watched the French gunners unlimber the gun and prepare its ammunition. A caisson, its long coffin-like lid cushioned so that the gun crew could travel on it, was being opened and the powder bags and shells piled by the levelled ground. ‘It looks like a very small gun,’ Vicente said.
‘Doesn’t have to be long-barrelled,’ Sharpe explained, ‘because it isn’t a precision gun. It just lobs shells on us. It’ll be noisy, but we’ll survive.’ He said that to cheer Vicente up, but he was not as confident as he sounded. Two or three lucky shells could decimate his command, but at least the howitzer’s arrival had taken his men’s minds off their larger predicament and they watched as the gunners made ready. A small flag had been placed fifty paces in front of the howitzer, presumably so the gun captain could judge the wind which would tend to drift the shells westwards. Sure enough Sharpe saw them edge the howitzer’s trail to compensate, and then watched through the telescope as the quoins were hammered under the stubby barrel. Field guns were usually elevated with a screw, but howitzers used the old-fashioned wooden wedges. Sharpe reckoned the skinny officer who supervised the gun must be using his largest wedges, straining to get maximum elevation so that his shells would drop into the rocks on the hill’s summit. The first powder bags were being brought to the weapon and Sharpe saw the flash of reflected sunlight glance off steel and he knew the officer must be trimming the shell’s fuse. ‘Under cover, Sergeant!’ Sharpe shouted.
Every man had a place to go to, a place that was well protected by the great boulders. Most of the riflemen were in the redoubts, walled with stone, but half a dozen, including Sharpe and Harper, were inside the old watchtower where a stairway had once led to the ramparts. Only four of the steps were left and they merely climbed to a gaping cavity in the stonework of the northern wall and Sharpe positioned himself there so he could see what the French were doing.
The gun vanished in a cloud of smoke, followed a heartbeat later by the massive boom of the exploding powder. Sharpe tried to find the missile in the sky, then saw the tiny, wavering trail of smoke left by the burning fuse. Then came the sound of the shell, a thunder rolling overhead, and the smoke trail whipped only a couple of feet above the ruined watchtower. Everyone had been holding their breath, but now let it out as the shell exploded somewhere above the southern slope.
‘Cut his fuse too long,’ Harper said.
‘He won’t next time,’ Tongue said.
Daniel Hagman, white-faced, sat against the wall with his eyes closed. Vicente and most of his men were a little way down the slope where they were protected by a boulder the size of a house. Nothing could reach them directly, but if a shell bounced off the face of the watchtower it would probably fall among them. Sharpe tried not to think of that. He had done his best and he knew he could not provide absolute safety for every man.
They waited.
‘Get on with it,’ Harris said. Harper crossed himself. Sharpe looked through the hole in the wall and saw the gunner carrying the portfire to the barrel. He said nothing to the men, for the noise of the gun would be warning enough and he was not looking down the hill to see when the howitzer was fired, but the moment when the French put in an infantry attack. That seemed the obvious thing for them to do. Fire the howitzer to keep the British and Portuguese heads down and then send their infantry to make an assault, but Sharpe saw no sign of any such attack. The dragoons were keeping their distance, the infantry was out of sight and the gunners just kept working.
Shell after shell arced to the hilltop. After the first shot the fuses were cut to the precise length and the shells cracked on rocks, fell and exploded. Monotonously, steadily, shot after shot, and each explosion sent shards of hot iron crackling and whistling through the jumble of boulders on the hilltop, yet the French seemed unaware of how much shelter the boulders provided. The summit stank of powder, the smoke drifted like mist through the rocks and clung to the lichen-covered stones of the watchtower, but miraculously no one was badly hurt. One of Vicente’s men was struck by a sliver of iron that cut his upper arm, but that was the only casualty. Yet even so the men hated the ordeal. They sat hunched, counting down the