Authors: Bernard Cornwell
The cavalry off to Sharpe's right spurred into a trot again and disappeared beyond the red-blossomed trees, leaving only a drifting cloud of dust behind. Two galloper guns, light six-pounder cannons, followed them, bouncing dangerously on the uneven ground behind their teams of horses. Every other cannon in the army was drawn by oxen, but the galloper guns had horse teams that were three times as fast as the plodding draught cattle. The lone enemy cannon fired again, its brutal sound punching the warm air with an almost palpable impact. Sharpe could see more enemy guns on the ridge, but they were smaller than the gun that had just fired and Sharpe presumed they did not have the long range of the bigger cannon. Then he saw a trace of gray in the air, a flicker like a vertical pencil stroke drawn against the pale blue sky and he knew that the big gun's shot must be coming straight toward him, and he knew too that there was no wind to carry the heavy ball gently aside, and all that he realized in the second or so that the ball was in the air, too short a time to react, only to recognize death's approach, but then the ball slammed into the ground a dozen paces short of him and bounced on up over his head to run harmlessly into a field of sugar cane. “I reckon the bastards have got your mother laying the gun now, Dick,” Garrard said.
“No talking now!” Sergeant Hakeswill's voice screeched suddenly. “Save your godless breath. Was that you talking, Garrard?”
“Not me, Sarge. Ain't got the breath.”
“You ain't got the breath?” Sergeant Hakeswill came hurrying
down the company's ranks and thrust his face up toward Garrard. “You ain't got the breath? That means you're dead, Private Garrard! Dead! No use to King or country if you's dead, but you never was any bleeding use any-wav.” The Sergeant's malevolent eyes flicked to Sharpe. “Was it you talking, Sharpie?”
“Not me, Sarge.”
“You ain't got orders to talk. If the King wanted you to have a conversation I'd have told you so. Says so in the scriptures. Give me your firelock, Sharpie. Quick now!”
Sharpe handed his musket to the Sergeant. It was Hakeswill's arrival in the company that had persuaded Sharpe that it was time to run from the army. He had been bored anyway, but Hakeswill had added injustice to boredom. Not that Sharpe cared about injustice, for only the rich had justice in this world, but Hakeswill's injustice was touched with such malevolence that there was hardly a man in the Light Company not ready to rebel, and all that kept them from mutiny was the knowledge that Hakeswill understood their desire, wanted it, and wanted to punish them for it. He was a great man for provoking insolence and then punishing it. He was always two steps ahead of you, waiting around a corner with a bludgeon. He was a devil, was Hakeswill, a devil in a smart red coat decorated with a sergeant's badges.
Yet to look at Hakeswill was to see the perfect soldier. It was true that his oddly lumpy face twitched every few seconds as though an evil spirit was twisting and jerking just beneath his sun-reddened skin, but his eyes were blue, his hair was powdered as white as the snow that never fell on this land, and his uniform was as smart as though he stood guard at Windsor Castle. He performed drill like a Prussian, each movement so crisp and clean that it was a pleasure to watch, but then the face would twitch and his oddly childlike eyes would flicker a sideways glance and you could see the
devil peering out. Back when he had been a recruiting sergeant Hakeswill had taken care not to let the devil show, and that was when Sharpe had first met him, but now, when the Sergeant no longer needed to gull and trick young fools into the ranks, Hakeswill did not care who saw his malignancy.
Sharpe stood motionless as the Sergeant untied the scrap of rag that Sharpe used to protect his musket's lock from the insidious red dust. Hakeswill peered at the lock, found nothing wrong, then turned away from Sharpe so that the sun could fall full on the weapon. He peered again, cocked the gun, dry-fired it, then seemed to lose interest in the musket as a group of officers spurred their horses towards the head of the stalled column. “Company!” Hakeswill shouted. “Company! âShun!”
The men shuffled their feet together and straightened as the three officers galloped past. Hakeswill had stiffened into a grotesque pose; his right boot tucked behind his left, his legs straight, his head and shoulders thrown back, his belly thrust forward and his bent elbows straining to meet in the concavity at the small of his back. None of the other companies of the King's 33rd Regiment had been stood to attention in honor of the passing officers, but Hakeswill's gesture of respect was nevertheless ignored. The neglect had no effect on the Sergeant who, when the trio of officers had gone past, shouted at the company to stand easy and then peered again at Sharpe's musket.
“You'll not find âOwt wrong with it, Sarge,” Sharpe said.
Hakeswill, still standing at attention, did an elaborate about turn, his right boot thumping down to the ground. “Did you hear me give you permission to speak, Sharpie?”
“No, Sarge.”
“No, Sarge. No, you did not. Flogging offence that, Sharpie.” Hakeswill's right cheek twitched with the involuntary spasm that disfigured his face every few seconds and the
vehement evil of the face was suddenly so intense that the whole Light Company momentarily held its breath in expectation of Sharpe's arrest, but then the thumping discharge of the enemy cannon rolled across the countryside and the heavy ball splashed and bounced and tore its way through a bright-green patch of growing rice, and the violence of the harmless missile served to distract Hakeswill who turned to watch as the ball rolled to a stop. “Poor bloody shooting,” Hakeswill said scathingly. “Heathens can't lay guns, I dare say. Or maybe they're toying with us. Toying!” The thought made him laugh. It was not, Sharpe suspected, the anticipation of excitement that had brought Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill to this state of near joviality, but rather the thought that a battle would cause casualties and misery, and misery was the Sergeant's delight. He liked to see men cowed and frightened, for that made them biddable, and Sergeant Hakeswill was always at his happiest when he was in control of unhappy men.
The three officers had stopped their horses at the head of the column and now used telescopes to inspect the distant ridge which was clouded by a ragged fringe of smoke left from the last discharge of the enemy cannon. “That's our Colonel, boys,” Hakeswill announced to the 33rd's Light Company, “Colonel Arthur Wellesley himself, God bless him for a gentleman, which he is and you ain't. He's come to see you fight, so make sure you do. Fight like the Englishmen you are.”
“I'm a Scot,” a sour voice spoke from the rear rank.
“I heard that! Who said that?” Hakeswill glared at the company, his face twitching uncontrollably. In a less blithe mood the Sergeant would have ferreted out the sneaker and punished him, but the excitement of pending battle persuaded him to let the offence pass. “A Scot!” he said derisively instead. “What is the finest thing a Scotsman ever saw?
Answer me that!” No one did. “The high road to England, that's what. Says so in the scriptures, so it must be true.” He hefted Sharpe's musket as he looked down the waiting ranks. “I shall be watching you,” he snarled. “You ain't none of you been in a proper fight before, not a proper fight, but on the other side of that bleeding hill there's a horde of black-faced heathens what can't wait to lay their filthy hands on your womenfolk, so if so much as one of you turns his back I'll have the skin off the lot of you! Bare bones and blood, that's what you'll be. But you does your duty and obeys your orders and you can't go wrong. And who gives the orders?”
The Sergeant waited for an answer and eventually Private Mallinson offered one. “The officers, Sergeant.”
“The officers! The officers!” Hakeswill spat his disgust at the answer. “Officers are here to show us what we are fighting for. Gentlemen, they are. Proper gentlemen! Men of property and breeding, not broken potboys and scarlet-coated pickpockets like what you are. Sergeants give the orders. Sergeants is what the army is. Remember that, lads! You're about to go into battle against heathens and if you ignore me then you'll be dead men!” The face twitched grotesquely, its jaw wrenched suddenly sideways, and Sharpe, watching the Sergeant's face, wondered if it was nervousness that had made Hakeswill so voluble. “But keeps your eyes on me, lads,” Hakeswill went on, “and you'll be right as trivets. And you know why?” He cried the last word out in a high dramatic tone as he stalked down the Light Company's front rank. “You know why?” he asked again, now sounding like some dissenting preacher ranting in a hedgerow. “Because I cannot die, boys, I cannot die!” He was suddenly intense, his voice hoarse and full of fervor as he spoke. It was a speech that all the Light Company had heard many times before, but it was remarkable for all that, though Sergeant Green, who was outranked by Hakeswill, turned away in disgust.
Hakeswill jeered at Green, then tugged at the tight constriction of the leather stock that circled his neck, pulling it down so that an old dark scar was visible at his throat. “The hangman's noose, boys!” he cried. “That's what marked me there, the hangman's noose! See it? See it? But I am alive, boys, alive and on two feet instead of being buried under the sod, proof as never was that you needs not die!” His face twitched again as he released the stock. “Marked by God,” he finished, his voice gruff with emotion, “that's what I am, marked by God!”
“Mad as a hare,” Tom Garrard muttered.
“Did you speak, Sharpie?” Hakeswill whipped around to stare at Sharpe, but Sharpe was so palpably still and staring mutely ahead that his innocence was indisputable. Hakeswill paced back down the Light Company. “I have watched men die, better men than any of you pieces of scum, proper men, but God has spared me! So you do what I says, boys, or else you'll be carrion.” He abruptly thrust the musket back into Sharpe's hands. “Clean weapon, Sharpie. Well done, lad.” He paced smartly away and Sharpe, to his surprise, saw that the scrap of rag had been neatly retied about the lock.
The compliment to Sharpe had astonished all the Light Company. “He's in a rare good mood,” Garrard said.
“I heard that, Private Garrard!” Hakeswill shouted over his shoulder. “Got ears in the back of me head, I have. Silence now. Don't want no heathen horde thinking you're frit! You're white men, remember, bleached in the cleansing blood of the bleeding lamb, so no bleeding talking in the ranks! Nice and quiet, like them bleeding nuns what never utters a sound on account of having had their papist tongues cut out.” He suddenly crashed to attention once again and saluted by bringing his spear-tipped halberd across his body. “Company all present, sir!” he shouted in a voice that must
have been audible on the enemy-held ridge. “All present and quiet, sir! Have their backs whipped bloody else, sir.”
Lieutenant William Lawford curbed his horse and nodded at Sergeant Hakeswill. Lawford was the Light Company's second officer, junior to Captain Morris and senior to the brace of young ensigns, but he was newly arrived in the battalion and was as frightened of Hakeswill as were the men in the ranks. “The men can talk, Sergeant,” Lawford observed mildly. “The other companies aren't silent.”
“No, sir. Must save their breath, sir. Too bleeding hot to talk, sir, and besides, they got heathens to kill, sir, mustn't waste breath on chit-chat, not when there are black-faced heathens to kill, sir. Says so in the scriptures, sir.”
“If you say so, Sergeant,” Lawford said, unwilling to provoke a confrontation, then he found he had nothing else to say and so, awkwardly aware of the scrutiny of the Light Company's seventy-six men, he stared at the enemy-held ridge. But he was also conscious of having ignominiously surrendered to the will of Sergeant Hakeswill and so he slowly colored as he gazed toward the west. Lawford was popular, but thought to be weak, though Sharpe was not so sure of that judgement. He thought the Lieutenant was still finding his way among the strange and sometimes frightening human currents that made up the 33rd, and that in time Lawford would prove a tough and resilient officer. For now, though, William Lawford was twenty-four years old and had only recently purchased his lieutenancy, and that made him unsure of his authority.
Ensign Fitzgerald, who was only eighteen, strolled back from the column's head. He was whistling as he walked and slashing with a drawn sabre at tall weeds. “Off in a moment, sir,” he called up cheerfully to Lawford, then seemed to become aware of the Light Company's ominous silence. “Not frightened, are you?” he asked.
“Saving their breath, Mister Fitzgerald, sir,” Hakeswill snapped.
“They've got breath enough to sing a dozen songs and still beat the enemy,” Fitzgerald said scornfully. “Ain't that so, lads?”
“We'll beat the bastards, sir,” Tom Garrard said.
“Then let me hear you sing,” Fitzgerald demanded. “Can't bear silence. We'll have a quiet time in our tombs, lads, so we might as well make a noise now.” Fitzgerald had a fine tenor voice that he used to start the song about the milkmaid and the rector, and by the time the Light Company had reached the verse that told how the naked rector, blindfolded by the milkmaid and thinking he was about to have his heart's desire, was being steered toward Bessie the cow, the whole company was bawling the song enthusiastically.
They never did reach the end. Captain Morris, the Light Company's commanding officer, rode back from the head of the battalion and interrupted the singing. “Half-companies!” he shouted at Hakeswill.
“Half-companies it is, sir! At once, sir. Light Company! Stop your bleeding noise! You heard the officer!” Hakeswill bellowed. “Sergeant Green! Take charge of the after ranks. Mister Fitzgerald! I'll trouble you to take your proper place on the left, sir. Forward ranks! Shoulder firelocks! Twenty paces, forward, march! Smartly now! Smartly!”