The men responded to this hunting command by screaming like banshees. They began running through the marsh, stumbling on tussocks, and jumping small ditches. Ensign Keogh, lithe and young, ran ahead with his slender-bladed infantry officer"s sword held aloft. "Faugh a ballagh!" he shouted. "Faugh a ballagh!" Then he leaped a ditch, all sprawling legs and flapping scabbard, while his left hand clutched at his oversized hat to keep it from falling off. He stumbled, but Sergeant Masterson, who was almost as big as Harper, s.n.a.t.c.hed the frail-looking ensign back to his feet. "Kill them!" Keogh screamed. "Kill them!" Muskets sparked among the campfires, but Sharpe neither heard a ball pa.s.s nor saw anyone fall. The French, scattered and dozy, were scrambling out of their tents and shelters. An officer, his sword reflecting the firelight, tried to rally his troops, but the screams of the attacking Irish were enough to drive the newly woken men into the farther darkness. There was a smattering of musket fire from Gough"s Irishmen, but most of the work was done by the mere threat of their seventeen-inch bayonets. A woman, bare-legged, scooped up her bedding and sprinted after her man. Two dogs were running in circles, barking. Sharpe saw a pair of mounted men vanishing into the darkness behind him. He whirled, rifle raised, but the hors.e.m.e.n had galloped past the Irish flank into the dark toward the place where the lighters had grounded. Keogh had vanished ahead, followed by his men, but Sharpe held Harper back. "We"ve got green coats, Pat," he warned. "Someone will mistake us for c.r.a.pauds if we"re not careful."
He was right. A half dozen men with yellow facings on their red jackets suddenly appeared among the fires and Sharpe saw a musket swing toward him. "Ninety-fifth!" he shouted. "Ninety-fifth! Hold your fire! Who are you?"
"Sixty-seventh!" a voice shouted back. The 67th was a Hampshire regiment and they had advanced more slowly than the Irishmen, but kept closer order. A captain now took them east and south to guard the captured camp"s inland perimeter, while Major Gough was shouting at his Irishmen to move back through the tents and make a similar cordon on the bay side. Sharpe was thrusting his sword into the small tents as he and Harper walked toward Gough, and one such thrust elicited a yelp. Sharpe pulled the canvas flaps aside and saw two Frenchmen cowering inside. "Out!" he snarled. They crawled out and waited at his feet, shaking. "I don"t even know if we"re taking prisoners," Sharpe said.
"We can"t just kill them, sir," Harper said.
"I"m not going to kill them," Sharpe snarled. "Get up!" He prodded the men with his sword, then drove them toward another band of prisoners being escorted by the Hampshire redcoats. One of those Hampshires was stooping by a French boy who did not look more than fourteen or fifteen. He had taken a bullet in his chest and was choking to death, his heels beating a horrid tattoo on the ground. "Be easy, boy," the Hampshire man said as he stroked the dying boy"s cheek. "Be easy." The far bank sparked with a sudden flurry of musket shots that died away as quickly as they had risen, and it was evident that the redcoats there had been just as successful as the men on the southern sh.o.r.e.
"Is that you, Sharpe?" It was Major Gough"s voice.
"It is, sir."
"That was d.a.m.nably quick," Gough said, sounding disappointed. "The fellows just ran! Didn"t put up a fight at all. Will you do me the honor of reporting to General Graham that this bank is secure and that there"s no counterattack in sight? You should find the general by the rafts."
"A pleasure, sir," Sharpe said. He led Harper back through the captured encampment.
"I thought we"d get some fighting," Harper said, sounding as disappointed as Gough.
"b.u.g.g.e.rs were asleep, weren"t they?"
"I come all this way just to watch a bunch of Dubliners wake up some c.r.a.pauds?"
"Are Gough"s men from Dublin?"
"That"s where the regiment"s raised, sir." Harper spotted a discarded French pack, scooped it up, and filleted inside. "b.u.g.g.e.r all," he said and threw it away. "So how long do we stay here?"
"Long as it takes. An hour?"
"That long!"
"Engineers have a lot of work to do, Pat," Sharpe said, and suddenly thought of poor Sturridge who had trusted that Sharpe would keep him alive on the Guadiana.
They found General Graham on the bank where the fire rafts were moored. The fifth lighter, the one containing the engineers, had tied up on the nearest raft where two Frenchmen lay dead.
Each of the five rafts was a great square platform of timber with a short mast to which a sc.r.a.p of sail could be attached. The French had been waiting for a dark night, a north wind, and an incoming tide to drive the rafts down onto the fleet waiting to take the army south. Volunteer crews would have manned the ponderous rafts, guiding them to within a quarter mile or so of the anchorage. Then they would have lit the slow matches and taken to their rowing boats to escape the inferno. If the rafts had ever succeeded in getting among the British and Spanish shipping they would have caused panic. Ships would have cut their anchor cables rather than be set afire and the wind would have driven the anchorless ships crashing into one another or onto the marshy sh.o.r.e of the Isla de Leon, and meanwhile the monster fire rafts would drift on, causing more chaos. Each was crammed with barrels of incendiaries and with baulks of firewood, and they were armed with ancient cannons at their perimeters. The cannons" touchholes were connected to the incendiary-filled barrels with slow matches. The cannons, some of which looked two hundred years old, were all small, but Sharpe supposed they were loaded with grapeshot, round shot, and anything else the French could cram into their muzzles so that the blazing rafts would spit b.a.l.l.s and sh.e.l.ls and death as they lumbered into the tightly packed anchorage.
The engineers were setting their charges and running quick fuse to the southern bank where General Graham stood with his aides. Sharpe gave him Gough"s message and Sir Thomas nodded an acknowledgment. "Evil b.l.o.o.d.y things, aren"t they?" he said, nodding at the nearest raft.
"Balgowan!" a voice hailed from the northern bank. "Balgowan!"
"Perthshire!" Sir Thomas bellowed back.
"All secure on this side, sir!" the voice shouted back.
"Good man!"
"Balgowan, sir?" Sharpe asked.
"Pa.s.sword," Sir Thomas said. "Should have told you that. Balgowan is where I grew up, Sharpe. Finest place on G.o.d"s earth." He was frowning as he spoke, staring south toward the San Luis fort. "It"s all been too easy," he said, worried. Sharpe said nothing because Lieutenant General Sir Thomas Graham did not need his comments. "Bad troops." Sir Thomas spoke of the French who had supposedly been guarding the rafts. "That"s what it is. Battalion level, that"s where the rot starts. I"ll wager your year"s wages against mine, Sharpe, that the senior battalion officers are sleeping in the forts. They"ve got warm beds, fires in the hearth, and dairymaids between the sheets while their men suffer out here."
"I"ll not take your wager, sir."
"You"d be a fool if you did," Sir Thomas said. In the light of the dying French campfires the general could see ranks of redcoats facing the fort. Those men would be silhouetted against the fires and thus be prime targets for the fort"s artillery. "Willie," he said, "tell Hugh and Johnny to lay their men down."
"Aye aye, sir," Lord William said, dropping into naval jargon. He ran southward and Sir Thomas slopped through the mud and clambered on board the nearest raft.
"Come and have a look, Sharpe!" he invited.
Sharpe and Harper followed the general who used his heavy-bladed claymore to prize open the nearest barrel. The top came off to reveal a half dozen pale b.a.l.l.s, each about the size of a nine-pounder round shot. "What the devil are those?" Sir Thomas asked. "They look like haggis."
"Smoke b.a.l.l.s, sir," an engineer lieutenant said after taking a quick look at the b.a.l.l.s. He and an engineer sergeant were replacing the slow matches in the cannons with quick match.
Sir Thomas lifted one smoke ball and prodded the mixture beneath it. "What"s in the rest of the barrel?" he asked.
"Mostly saltpeter, sir," the lieutenant said, "probably mixed with sulfur, antimony, and pitch. It"ll burn like h.e.l.l."
Sir Thomas hefted the smoke ball. The case was pierced by a dozen holes and, when Sir Thomas tapped it, sounded hollow. "Papier-mache?" the general guessed.
"That"s it, sir. Papier-mache filled with powder, antimony, and coal dust. Don"t see many of those these days. Naval equipment. You"re supposed to light them and hurl them through the enemy gunports, sir, where they choke the gunners. Of course you"ll probably die doing it, but they can be nasty little chaps in confined s.p.a.ces."
"So why are they here?" Sir Thomas asked.
"I suppose the frogs hoped they"d churn out a cloud of smoke that would drift ahead of the rafts to hide them, sir. Now, if you"ll excuse me, sir."
"Of course, man." The general stepped out of the lieutenant"s way. He put the smoke ball back in the barrel and was about to replace the lid when Sharpe reached for the b.a.l.l.s.
"Can I have those, sir?"
"You want them?" Sir Thomas asked, surprised.
"With your permission, sir."
Sir Thomas looked as though he thought Sharpe very strange, then shrugged. "Whatever you want, Sharpe."
Sharpe sent Harper to find a French haversack. He was thinking of the cathedral"s crypt, and about the caverns and pa.s.sages around the low chamber, and about men lurking in the dark with muskets and blades. He filled the haversack with the smoke b.a.l.l.s and gave it to Harper. "Look after it, Pat. It could save our lives."
General Graham had jumped onto the next raft where a squad of engineers was putting new fuses to the loaded cannon and planting powder charges in the raft"s center. "More smoke b.a.l.l.s here, Sharpe," he called back.
"I"ve enough, sir, thank you, sir."
"Why do you need..." the general began asking, then stopped abruptly because a gun had fired from the Fort of San Luis. The garrison had at last woken up to what was happening in the marsh and, as the bellow of the gun faded, Sharpe heard musket b.a.l.l.s whistle overhead. That meant the cannon had been loaded with canister or grapeshot. The sound of the cannon had scarcely gone silent when the smoke of its shot was lit by three violent explosions of red light as more guns slashed their shots from the embrasures. A round shot screamed just above the general"s head and a swarm of musket b.a.l.l.s seethed across the marsh. "They won"t use sh.e.l.l," Sharpe told Harper, "because they don"t want to set the rafts alight themselves."
"That"s not much of a comfort, sir," Harper said, "considering they"re aiming their guns straight at us."
"They"re just firing at the camp," Sharpe said.
"And we happen to be in the camp, sir."
Then the guns of the San Jose Fort opened on the northern bank. They were much farther away and the grapeshot sighed in the dark rather than hissed or whistled. A round shot landed in the creek and splashed water over the nearest raft. The guns" flashes were to the north and south now, lighting the night with sudden lurid flares that glowed on the writhing smoke, then faded, but leaving Sharpe dazzled. He knew he should not have come, nor indeed should Sir Thomas have come. A lieutenant general had no business joining a raiding party that should have been led by a major or, at most, a lieutenant colonel. But Sir Thomas was plainly a man who could not resist danger. The general was gazing south, trying to see in the intermittent light of the cannons" muzzle flashes whether any French infantry had sallied from San Luis. "Sharpe!" he called.
"Sir?"
"Captain Vetch tells me the engineers are making fine time. Go back to the lighters, will you? You"ll find a marine captain there, name of Collins. Tell him we"ll be sounding the withdrawal in about twenty minutes. Maybe half an hour. Remember the pa.s.sword and countersign?"
"Balgowan and Perthshire, sir."
"Good man. Off you go. And I haven"t forgotten you need a favor from me! We"ll talk about it over breakfast."
Sharpe led Harper back along the creek. The marines challenged them with the pa.s.sword and Sharpe called the countersign. Captain Collins proved to be a stout man who looked askance at the score of prisoners who had been put under his charge. "What am I supposed to do with them?" he asked plaintively. "There"s no room in the lighters to take them back."
"Then we"ll leave them here," Sharpe said. He delivered the general"s message, then stood beside Collins and watched the cannon flashes. One French round shot struck the remains of a campfire so that embers, sparks, and flames exploded thirty or forty feet into the air. Some burning shards landed on the tents and started small fires that illuminated the c.u.mbersome rafts.
"Don"t like fighting at night," Collins admitted.
"It"s not easy," Sharpe said. Every shadow seemed to move and the marshland was full of shadows cast by the fires. He remembered the night before Talavera, and how he had discovered the French coming up the hill. That had been a mad night of confusion, but tonight, at least, the enemy seemed to be supine. The fortress artillery still fired, but the grape and round shot were now going well to Sharpe"s left.
"Two of the b.u.g.g.e.rs came here," Collins said. "Both on horseback! I know we haven"t got any horses, but I still thought they might have been a pair of our lads who"d captured a couple. They rode up to me, calm as you like, and then galloped off. We never fired a shot. One of them even called good evening as he went, the insolent b.a.s.t.a.r.d."
So the French, Sharpe thought, knew that the lighters were well downstream of the camp, and knew, moreover, that they were lightly guarded by a small picquet of marines. "If you don"t mind me suggesting it," Sharpe said, "I"d move the lighters upstream."
"Why?"
"Because there"s a big gap between you and the Irish boys."
"We had to land here," Collins said. "We couldn"t row right up to the camp, could we?"
"You could get up there now," Sharpe said, nodding at the sailors who waited on the thwarts.
"My job is to guard the boats," Collins said heavily. "I don"t command them."
"So who does?"
A naval lieutenant commanded the lighters, but he had evidently gone upstream on board the fifth boat and was now with the engineers, and Collins, with no direct orders, would not risk moving the two lighters on his own initiative. He seemed insulted that Sharpe had even suggested it. "I shall wait for orders," he said indignantly.
"In that case we"ll make a picquet for you," Sharpe said. "We"ll be out there." He nodded southward. "Warn your lads not to shoot us when we come back."
Collins did not reply. Sharpe told Harper to drop the haversack of smoke b.a.l.l.s in the general"s lighter, then took him southward. "Keep a lookout, Pat."
"You think the French will come?"
"They can"t just sit there and let us burn the rafts, can they?"
"They"ve been dozy so far, sir."
They crouched in the reeds. The small wind was coming from the far ocean and it brought the smell of salt from the pans across the bay. Sharpe could see the reflection of the city"s lights winking and shaking on the water. The gunfire from the forts punctured the night, but from this distance it was hard to tell if the shots were doing any damage in the captured camps. It was hard to see anything. The men from Dublin and Hampshire were lying flat and the engineers were busy in the shadows on the rafts. "If I were the c.r.a.pauds," Sharpe said, "I wouldn"t worry about the rafts. I"d come and take these lighters. That would strand us all here, wouldn"t it? They"ll pick up a couple of hundred prisoners including a lieutenant general. Not a bad night"s work for a dozy pack of b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, eh?"
"You"re not the c.r.a.pauds, are you, sir? They"re probably getting drunk. Letting their gunners do the work."
"They can afford to lose the fire rafts," Sharpe went on, "if they capture five lighters. They can use the lighters instead of the rafts."
"We"ll be gone soon, sir," Harper said consolingly. "No need to worry."
"Let"s hope so."
They fell silent. Marsh birds, woken by the firing, cried forlorn in the dark. "So what are we doing in the city?" Harper asked after a while.
"There"s some b.a.s.t.a.r.ds that have got some letters and we have to buy them back," Sharpe said. "Or at least we have to make sure no one does anything nasty while they are bought back, and if it all goes wrong, which it will, we"re going to have to steal the b.l.o.o.d.y things."
"Letters? Not gold?"
"Not gold, Pat."
"And it will go wrong?"
"Of course it will. We"re dealing with blackmailers. They never settle for the first payment, do they? They always come back for more, so we"re probably going to have to kill the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds before it"s all over."
"Whose letters are they?"
"Some wh.o.r.e wrote them," Sharpe said vaguely. He supposed that Harper would learn the truth soon enough, but Sharpe liked Henry Wellesley enough not to spread the man"s shame even wider. "It should be easy enough," he went on, "except that the Spaniards won"t like what we"re doing. If we get caught they"ll arrest us. Either that or shoot us."
"Arrest us?"
"We"ll just have to be clever, Pat."
"That"s all right then," Harper said. "We don"t have a problem, do we?"
Sharpe smiled. The wind stirred the reeds. The tide was still. The guns were firing steadily, their shots thumping in the marsh or churning the creek. "I wish the b.l.o.o.d.y 8th was here," Sharpe said softly.
"The Leather-hats?" Harper asked, thinking Sharpe meant a regiment from Cheshire.
"No. The French 8th, Pat. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds we met up the river. The ones that took poor Lieutenant Bullen prisoner. They"ve got to be coming back here, don"t they? They can"t reach Badajoz now, not without a bridge. I want to meet them again. That b.l.o.o.d.y Colonel Vandal. I"m going to shoot him in the skull, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d."
"You"ll find him, sir."
"Maybe. But not here. We"ll be gone in a week. But one day, Pat, I"ll find that b.a.s.t.a.r.d and murder him for what he did to Lieutenant Bullen."
Harper did not respond. Instead he laid a hand on Sharpe"s sleeve and Sharpe, at the same instant, heard the rustle of reeds. It was not the sound of the small wind stirring the plants, but more regular. Like footsteps. And it was close. "See anything?" he whispered.
"No. Yes."
Sharpe saw them then. Or he saw shadows running at a crouch. Then there was the glint of reflected light from a piece of metal, perhaps a musket muzzle. The shadows stopped so that they melded into the darkness, but Sharpe saw more men moving beyond. How many? Twenty? No, double that. He leaned close to Harper. "Volley gun," he breathed into the sergeant"s ear. "Then we go to the right. We run like h.e.l.l for thirty paces, then drop."
Harper raised the volley gun slowly, very slowly. Then, with the stock against his right shoulder, he c.o.c.ked it. The lock"s pawl made a click as it engaged and the sound carried to the Frenchmen and Sharpe saw the pale faces turn toward him and just then Harper pulled the trigger and the gun flooded the marsh with noise and lit it with the burst of muzzle flashes. Smoke hid Sharpe as he took off running. He counted the paces and, at thirty, dropped flat. He could hear a man moaning. Two muskets fired, then a voice shouted a command, and no more guns sounded. Harper dropped beside him. "Rifles next," Sharpe said. "Then we go to the boats."
He could hear the Frenchmen hissing to one another. They had been hit hard by the seven bullets and they were doubtless talking about their casualties, but then they fell silent and Sharpe could see them more clearly now for they were suddenly outlined against the muzzle flames of the cannons firing from the fort. He got to one knee and aimed his rifle. "Ready?"
"Yes, sir."