Sharpes Sword   ::   Корнуэлл Бернард

Another gun from the fortress, a different note to this firing, and the hillside seemed to leap with small explosions of soil where the canister bullets, sprayed fromthe bursting tin can at the gun’s muzzle, pecked at the soil. “Spread out! Spread out!” Sharpe was running recklessly, leaping rough ground, and he threw away his fired rifle, knowing one of his men would retrieve it, and clumsily drew his huge, straight sword.

Windham was angry. Honour had been trampled by the breaking of Delmas’s parole, and the Colonel was in no mood to offer the Frenchman mercy. Windham heard the canister strike the ground, heard an agonised yelp as one of his hounds was hit, and then he forgot everything because Delmas was close, facing him, and the British Colonel stretched out with his curved sabre so that its point would spear savagely into the fugitive’s chest.

It seemed to Windham that Delmas struck with his sword too soon. He saw the blade coming, was just bracing his arm for the shock of his own blade meeting the enemy, and then Delmas’s beautiful sword, as it had been intended to do, slammed viciously into the mouth of Windham’s horse.

The animal screamed, swerved, reared up, and Windham fought for control. He let his sabre hang by its wrist-strap as he sawed at the reins, as he saw blood spray from his injured horse’s mouth, and as he struggled he never saw the Frenchman move behind, swing, and never knew what killed him.

Sharpe saw. He shouted helplessly, uselessly, and he saw the great sword slam blade-edge into the Colonel’s back.

Windham seemed to arch away from the stroke. Even in death his knees gripped the horse, even as his head dropped, as his arms went limp and the sabre dangled uselessly. The horse screamed again, tried to shake the dead man from the saddle. It fled away from the man who had hurt it, still bucking and hurting, and then, almost mercifully, a barrel-load of canister threw man and horse into a bloodied mess on the turf.

The hounds sniffed at the dead man and dying horse. Its hooves drummed the dry earth for an instant, the hounds whimpered, and then the horse’s head was down. Blood drained quickly into the parched soil.

Delmas was limping. The fall must have hurt him, but still he hurried, gritting his teeth against the pain, but now Sharpe was gaining. There were houses at the bridge’s southern end, a small outpost of the university city across the river, and Sharpe saw the Frenchman disappear behind a wall. Delmas was almost onto the bridge.

Another canister load of musket balls flayed into the turf, filling the summer air with their whip-crack of death, and then Sharpe saw Patrick Harper, the giant Sergeant, racing up on his right with his seven-barrelled gun held in his hand.