LITMIR.BIZ

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He could see the buckle holes in the girth straps on the dragoons’ horses which were picketed in a small field just to the west of the village. He counted the horses. Forty-six. Maybe forty-eight. It was hard to tell because some of the beasts were bunched together. Call it fifty men. He edged the telescope left and saw smoke rising from beyond the village, maybe from the river bank. A small stone bridge crossed the stream which flowed from the north. He could see no villagers. Had they fled? He looked to the west, back down the road which led to Oporto, and he could see no more Frenchmen, which suggested the dragoons were a patrol sent to harry fugitives. ‘Pat!’

      ‘Sir?’ Harper came and crouched beside him.

      ‘We can take these bastards.’

      Harper borrowed Sharpe’s telescope and stared south for a good minute. ‘Forty of them? Fifty?’

      ‘About that. Make sure our boys are loaded.’ Sharpe left the telescope with Harper and scrambled back from the crest to find Vicente. ‘Call your men here. I want to talk to them. You’ll translate.’ Sharpe waited till the thirty-seven Portuguese were assembled. Most looked uncomfortable, doubtless wondering why they were being commanded by a foreigner. ‘My name is Sharpe,’ he told the blue-coated troops, ‘Lieutenant Sharpe, and I’ve been a soldier for sixteen years.’ He waited for Vicente to interpret, then pointed at the youngest-looking Portuguese soldier, a lad who could not have been a day over seventeen and might well have been three years younger. ‘I was carrying a musket before you were born. And I mean carrying a musket. I was a soldier like you. I marched in the ranks.’ Vicente, as he translated, gave Sharpe a surprised look. The rifleman ignored it. ‘I’ve fought in Flanders,’ Sharpe went on, ‘I’ve fought in India, I’ve fought in Spain and I’ve fought in Portugal, and I’ve never lost a fight. Never.’ The Portuguese had just been run out of the great northern redoubt in front of Oporto and that defeat was still sore, yet here was a man telling them he was invincible and some of them looked at the scar on his face and the hardness in his eyes and they believed him. ‘Now you and I are going to fight together,’ Sharpe went on, ‘and that means we’re going to win. We’re going to run these damned Frenchmen out of Portugal!’ Some of them smiled at that. ‘Don’t take any notice of what happened today. That wasn’t your fault. You were led by a bishop! What bloody use is a bishop to anyone? You might as well go into battle with a lawyer.’ Vicente gave Sharpe a swift and reproving glance before translating the last sentence, but he must have done it correctly for the men grinned at Sharpe. ‘We’re going to run the bastards back to France,’ Sharpe continued, ‘and for every Portuguese and Briton they kill we’re going to slaughter a score.’ Some of the Portuguese thumped their musket butts on the ground in approbation. ‘But before we fight,’ Sharpe went on, ‘you’d better know I have three rules and you had all better get used to those rules now. Because if you break these three rules then, God help me, I’ll goddamn break you.’ Vicente sounded nervous as he interpreted the last few words.

      Sharpe waited, then held up one finger. ‘You don’t get drunk without my permission.’ A second finger. ‘You don’t thieve from anyone unless you’re starving. And I don’t count taking things off the enemy as thieving.’ That got a smile. He held up the third finger. ‘And you fight as if the devil himself was on your tail. That’s it! You don’t get drunk, you don’t thieve and you fight like demons. You understand?’ They nodded after the translation.

      ‘And right now,’ Sharpe went on, ‘you’re going to start fighting. You’re going to make three ranks and you’ll fire a volley at some French cavalry.’ He would have preferred two ranks, but only the British fought in two ranks. Every other army used three and so, for the moment, he would too, even though thirty-seven men in three ranks offered a very small frontage. ‘And you won’t pull your trigger until Lieutenant Vicente gives the order. You can trust him! He’s a good soldier, your Lieutenant!’ Vicente blushed and perhaps made some modest changes to his interpretation, but the grins on his men’s faces suggested the lawyer had conveyed the gist of Sharpe’s words. ‘Make sure your muskets are loaded,’ Sharpe said, ‘but not cocked. I don’t want the enemy knowing we’re here because some careless halfwit lets off a cocked musket. Now, enjoy killing the bastards.’ He left them on that bloodthirsty note and walked back to the crest where he knelt beside Harper. ‘Are they doing anything?’ he asked, nodding towards the dragoons.

      ‘Getting drunk,’ Harper said. ‘Gave them the talk, did you?’

      ‘Is that what it is?’

      ‘Don’t get drunk, don’t thieve and fight like the devil. Mister Sharpe’s sermon.’

      Sharpe smiled, then took the telescope from the Sergeant and trained it at the village where a score of dragoons, their green coats unbuttoned, were squirting wineskins into their mouths. Others were searching the small houses. A woman with a torn black dress ran from one house, was seized by a cavalryman and dragged back indoors. ‘I thought the villagers were gone,’ Sharpe said.

      ‘I’ve seen a couple of women,’ Harper said, ‘and doubtless there are plenty more we can’t see.’ He ran a huge hand over the lock of his rifle. ‘So what are we going to do with them?’

      ‘We’re going to piss up their noses,’ Sharpe said, ‘till they decide to swat us away and then we’re going to kill them.’ He collapsed the glass and told Harper exactly how he planned to defeat the dragoons.

      The vineyards gave Sharpe the opportunity. The vines grew in close thick rows that stretched from the stream on their left to some woodland off to the west, and the rows were broken only by a footpath that gave labourers access to the plants which offered dense cover for Sharpe’s men as they crawled closer to Barca d’Avintas. Two careless French sentries watched from the village’s edge, but neither saw anything threatening in the spring countryside and one of them even laid his carbine down so he could pack a small pipe with tobacco. Sharpe put Vicente’s men close to the footpath and sent his riflemen off to the west so that they were closer to the paddock in which the dragoons’ horses were picketed. Then he cocked his own rifle, lay down so that the barrel protruded between two gnarled vine roots and aimed at the nearest sentry.

      He fired, and the butt slammed back into his shoulder and the sound was still echoing from the village’s walls when his riflemen began shooting at the horses. Their first volley brought down six or seven of the beasts, wounded as many again and started a panic among the other tethered animals. Two managed to pull their picketing pins out of the turf and jumped the fence in an attempt to escape, but then circled back towards their companions just as the rifles were reloaded and fired again. More horses screamed and fell. A half-dozen of the riflemen were watching the village and began shooting at the first dragoons to run towards the paddock. Vicente’s infantry remained hidden, crouching among the vines. Sharpe saw that the sentry he had shot was crawling up the street, leaving a bloody trail, and, as the smoke from that shot faded, he fired again, this time at an officer running towards the paddock. More dragoons, fearing they were losing their precious horses, ran to unpicket the beasts and the rifle bullets began to kill men as well as horses. An injured mare whinnied pitifully and then the dragoons’ commanding officer realized he could not rescue the horses until he had driven away the men who were slaughtering them and so he shouted at his cavalrymen to advance into the vines and drive the attackers off.

      ‘Keep shooting the horses!’ Sharpe shouted. It was not a pleasant job. The screams of the wounded beasts tore at men’s souls and the sight of an injured gelding trying to drag itself along by its front legs was heartbreaking, but Sharpe kept his men firing. The dragoons, spared the rifle fire now, ran towards the vineyard in the confident belief that they were dealing with a mere handful of partisans. Dragoons were supposed to be mounted infantry and so they were issued with carbines, short-barrelled muskets, with which they could fight on foot, and some carried the carbines while others preferred to attack with their long straight swords, but all of them instinctively ran towards the track which climbed among the vines. Sharpe had guessed they would follow the track rather than clamber over the entangling vines and that was why he had put Vicente and his men close by the path. The dragoons were bunching together as they entered the vines and Sharpe had an urge to run across to the Portuguese and take command of them,

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