Sharpe's Skirmish by Bernard Cornwell

Author:Bernard Cornwell [Cornwell, Bernard]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-01-30T10:07:33+00:00

PART THREE

Sharpe went back to the northern parapet and gazed up the road. Nothing moved there. Quiet as the damn grave. A few last bats still flew around the tower, and earlier he had seen an owl come flapping in to a hole in the fort's decaying stonework. Otherwise it was still. The river slid silent beneath a smokelike layer of mist. The bridge's three arches were dark. Sergeant Harper reckoned he had seen some large trout under those arches, but Sharpe had given him no time to try and catch them. It was nerves, he thought again. Jumpy as hell, and he had made everyone else nervous.

Teresa came up the ladder stairs from the living quarters. She yawned, then put her arm into Sharpe's elbow. "All quiet?"

"All quiet." There were four riflemen up on the parapet. Sharpe had thought to put some redcoats up here, but their smoothbore muskets were so inaccurate that they could do little good from this height and so he had merely kept his remaining riflemen here. He moved away from them so they would not overhear him. "I'm thinking I panicked yesterday," he said to Teresa.

"I didn't see you panic."

"Seeing enemies where there aren't any," he admitted.

She squeezed his arm. "At least you are ready for them if they come."

He grimaced. "But they're not out there, are they? They're bloody miles away, tucked up in their beds and I've had a sleepless night because of it."

"You can sleep today," Teresa said. The eastern sky was ablaze now, banded with clouds that reflected the first sunlight. The olive groves, still in night's shadows, were dark, but in another few minutes the sun would rise over the hills and Sharpe would stand the company down. Give them an easy day, he thought, for they deserved it. A make and mend day in which they could sew up their uniforms, or just sleep, or perhaps fish in the river.

"Perhaps I will go back to Salamanca today," Teresa said.

"Leaving me?"

"Just for the day. To visit Antonia."

Antonia was their daughter, a baby, but she might as well have been an orphan, Sharpe reckoned, her parents were both so busy killing frogs. "If the weather stays nice," he said, "and the frogs don't come, you can bring her out here?"

"Why not?" Teresa asked.

The sun slipped above the hills and Sharpe flinched from its dazzling light. The shadows of trees and hedgerows stretched long across the road where no Frenchmen stirred. Mister MacKeon strolled out from the fort and went to the riverbank where he unbuttoned his trousers and pissed into the Tormes. "All that good wine," Teresa said softly.

Then there was a shout from the bridge, and Sharpe turned, and he heard the hooves and he was unslinging his rifle, but he could not see a damn thing because the sun was so low and it was filling the eastern sky with dazzling light, but coming from the heart of the blinding light were horsemen.

Not from the road, but from

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