"Cornwell, Bernard - Sharpe 08 - Sharpe's Christmas" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cornwell Bernard)

None of the grenadiers noticed the small holes that had been drilled into the barrel to feed oxygen to the fuse, they just smelt wine and so kicked over the barrel.

For a second Sharpe thought the trap had failed, then suddenly the narrow valley vanished in a cloud of grey-white powder smoke pierced with livid flame.

The smoke churned in the small combe, hiding the carnage made by the explosion. Then, as the damp wind began to carry the powder smoke northwards, the sound rolled up the slope. It was like a clap of thunder magnified by the echo that beat back from the valley's far side. Once the echo had gone there was just a strange silence in the hills.

"Poor bastards," Harper said, for the smoke was clearing and he could see the bodies scattered on the road. Some were still, some crawled blindly, some just twitched. Then the rifles opened fire. Sharpe's riflemen did not miss their mark at that close range. They fired from behind the rocks high on either side of the small valley. First, they picked off the surviving officers, then the sergeants. By the time each greenjacket had fired two rounds, the French had vanished from the small valley. They had fled back over its lip, leaving behind a dozen dead and a score of wounded men. The battle for Irati had begun.

IN ONE way, Colonel Jean Gudin had been untypically lucky, for not one partisan had troubled his column on its dark road north, but in every other way his usual ill fortune had prevailed.

First, one of the dragoon horses had stumbled on a frozen rut in the road and broken its leg. By itself, it was no great accident, and the poor beast was put out of its misery swiftly enough, but in the dark the commotion caused a long delay. The carcass was finally hauled from the road and the column had trudged on, only to have the dragoon vanguard take a wrong turning a few kilometres further on.

That, at least, was not Gudin's fault, any more than an injured horse was his fault, but it was typical of his luck. It was almost dawn by the time the column had turned itself about and found the right track winding up towards the high pass. By then, Gudin had surrendered his horse to one of his lieutenants who had a fever and could hardly walk.

Colonel Caillou was fuming at the delay. He had never, he claimed, in all his service as a soldier, seen such ineptitude. A halfwit could do better than Colonel Gudin. "We are supposed to be at the pass by midday," he insisted. "We shall be lucky to be there by nightfall."

Gudin ignored the colonel's ranting. There was nothing to be done, except press on and be thankful that the guerilleros were all asleep in their beds.

In three days' time, Gudin reflected, he could be back at a depot in France.

He would be safe. And so long as no British troops waited at the frontier he should save Caillou's Eagle and so spare himself the firing squad.

It was just after dawn that the next accident occurred. The column was dragging two wagons, one carrying the heavily pregnant Maria and the second loaded with what small baggage the garrison had managed to rescue from the fort. The axle of that second wagon broke and suddenly the horses were dragging stumps of splintering wood across the rutted road. Gudin sighed.

There was nothing for it but to abandon the wagon with all its precious possessions; small things, but the property of men who owned little.

He did let his men rifle through the baggage to retrieve what they could carry, and all the while Caillou cursed him and said it was time-wasting.

Gudin knew that was true and so, before all the packs could be hauled off, he ordered the wagon to be shoved off the road. With it went his books, not many, but all of them dear to Gudin. They included his diaries from India, the careful record of those long, hot years when he had thought he could drive the British out of Mysore. But the redcoats had won and nothing had been the same since.

Gudin often thought of India. He missed it; the smells, the heat, the colour, the mystery. He missed the gaudy panoply of Indian armies marching, he missed the sun and the savagery of the monsoon. In India, he thought, I had a future, but after it, none.

And sometimes, when he was feeling sorry for himself, he blamed it all on one young man whom he had liked, an Englishman called Sharpe. It had been Sharpe who had caused that first great defeat, though Gudin had never blamed him, for he had recognised that Private Richard Sharpe had been a natural soldier. How the Emperor would love Sharpe. So much luck.

Now there was another Sharpe, an officer in Spain whose named haunted the French, and Gudin sometimes wondered if it was the same man, though that seemed unlikely for few British officers came from the ranks and, besides, this Spanish Sharpe was a Rifleman and Gudin's Sharpe had been a redcoat. Yet still Gudin hoped it was the same man for he had liked young Richard Sharpe, though in truth he suspected that he was long dead. Not many Europeans had survived India. The fever got them if the enemy did not.

Gudin walked on, his diaries left behind, musing on India and trying to ignore Colonel Caillou's insults. The pregnant girl was crying and the garrison surgeon, a fastidious Parisian who had hated serving in the Pyrenees, claimed she would die if he did not cut her open.

"The baby is sideways," he told Gudin. "It should be headfirst."

"If you cut her, she'll die," said Gudin.

"So?" The surgeon despised soldiers' women. "She'll die if I don't cut her."

"Just keep her alive as far as Irati," Gudin said, "and there you can operate."

"If she lives that long," the surgeon muttered, and just then a dull rumble sounded from the mountains ahead. It sounded like distant thunder, but there were no storm clouds over the peaks and a second after the rumble had faded the small wind brought the crackle of musketry.

"You see," Caillou spurred back down the column with a look of spiteful triumph. "There's enemy ahead."