JК
Sharpes Sword :: Корнуэлл Бернард
Страница: 1 из 213Аннотация: The bitter rivalry between Sharpe and the ruthless Frenchman Colonel Leroux is brought to life against the vivid canvas of the Peninsular War.
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BERNARD CORNWELL
Sharpe’s Sword
For Peggy Blackburn, with love
“A knight errant — to cut a long story short — is beaten up one day and made Emperor the next.”
Don Quixote
by Miguel Cervantes (1547–1615)
Translated by J. M. Cohen
PART ONE
Sunday, June 14 to Tuesday, June 23rd, 1812
PROLOGUE
The tall man on horseback was a killer.
He was strong, healthy, and ruthless. Some men thought he was young to be a full Colonel in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, but no-one took advantage of his youth. A single glimpse of his curiously pale eyes, pale-lashed eyes, eyes that gave his strong, handsome face a chill of death, was enough to make men offer respect to Colonel Leroux.
Leroux was the Emperor’s man. He went where Napoleon sent him and he performed his master’s tasks with skill and pitiless efficiency. Now he was in Spain, sent there by the Emperor himself, and Colonel Leroux had just made a mistake. He knew it, he cursed himself for it, but he was also planning how to escape his self-imposed predicament.
He was trapped.
He had ridden with a cavalry escort to a miserable village huddled at the edge of the great plains of Leon and there had found his man, a priest. He had tortured the priest, stripping the skin inch by inch from the living body, and in the end, of course, the priest talked. They all talked to Colonel Leroux in the end. Yet this time he had taken too long. At the moment of victory, at that very moment when the priest could take the pain no longer and screamed out the name which Leroux had come so far to learn, the German cavalry erupted into the village. Men of the King’s German Legion who fought for Britain in this war savaged the French Dragoons, their sabres rising and falling, their hoofbeats drumming a rhythm behind the screams of pain, and Colonel Leroux had run.
He had grabbed one companion, a Captain of the cavalry escort, and together they had ridden desperately north, cutting their way through one group of Germans, and now, an hour later, they had stopped at the edge of a wood that grew about a sudden, quick stream that tumbled towards the River Tormes.
The Dragoon Captain looked behind. “We’ve lost them.”
“We haven’t.
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BERNARD CORNWELL
Sharpe’s Sword
For Peggy Blackburn, with love
“A knight errant — to cut a long story short — is beaten up one day and made Emperor the next.”
Don Quixote
by Miguel Cervantes (1547–1615)
Translated by J. M. Cohen
PART ONE
Sunday, June 14 to Tuesday, June 23rd, 1812
PROLOGUE
The tall man on horseback was a killer.
He was strong, healthy, and ruthless. Some men thought he was young to be a full Colonel in Napoleon’s Imperial Guard, but no-one took advantage of his youth. A single glimpse of his curiously pale eyes, pale-lashed eyes, eyes that gave his strong, handsome face a chill of death, was enough to make men offer respect to Colonel Leroux.
Leroux was the Emperor’s man. He went where Napoleon sent him and he performed his master’s tasks with skill and pitiless efficiency. Now he was in Spain, sent there by the Emperor himself, and Colonel Leroux had just made a mistake. He knew it, he cursed himself for it, but he was also planning how to escape his self-imposed predicament.
He was trapped.
He had ridden with a cavalry escort to a miserable village huddled at the edge of the great plains of Leon and there had found his man, a priest. He had tortured the priest, stripping the skin inch by inch from the living body, and in the end, of course, the priest talked. They all talked to Colonel Leroux in the end. Yet this time he had taken too long. At the moment of victory, at that very moment when the priest could take the pain no longer and screamed out the name which Leroux had come so far to learn, the German cavalry erupted into the village. Men of the King’s German Legion who fought for Britain in this war savaged the French Dragoons, their sabres rising and falling, their hoofbeats drumming a rhythm behind the screams of pain, and Colonel Leroux had run.
He had grabbed one companion, a Captain of the cavalry escort, and together they had ridden desperately north, cutting their way through one group of Germans, and now, an hour later, they had stopped at the edge of a wood that grew about a sudden, quick stream that tumbled towards the River Tormes.
The Dragoon Captain looked behind. “We’ve lost them.”
“We haven’t.