Read Online Sharpe 3-Book Collection 2: Sharpe’s Havoc, Sharpe’s Eagle, Sharpe’s Gold by Bernard Cornwell - Free Book Online

west of the village. He counted the horses. Forty-six. Maybe forty-eight. It was hard to tell because some of the beasts were bunched together. Call it fifty men. He edged the telescope left and saw smoke rising from beyond the village, maybe from the river bank. A small stone bridge crossed the stream which flowed from the north. He could see no villagers. Had they fled? He looked to the west, back down the road which led to Oporto, and he could see no more Frenchmen, which suggested the dragoons were a patrol sent to harry fugitives. “Pat!”
    “Sir?” Harper came and crouched beside him.
    “We can take these bastards.”
    Harper borrowed Sharpe’s telescope and stared south for a good minute. “Forty of them? Fifty?”
    “About that. Make sure our boys are loaded.” Sharpe left the telescope with Harper and scrambled back from the crest to find Vicente. “Call your men here. I want to talk to them. You’ll translate.” Sharpe waited till the thirty-seven Portuguese were assembled. Most looked uncomfortable, doubtless wondering why they were being commanded by a foreigner. “My name is Sharpe,” he told the blue-coated troops, “Lieutenant Sharpe, and I’ve been a soldier for sixteen years.” He waited for Vicente to interpret, then pointed at the youngest-looking Portuguese soldier, a lad who could not have been a day over seventeen and might well have been three years younger. “I was carrying a musket before you were born. And I mean carrying a musket. I was a soldier like you. I marched in the ranks.” Vicente, as he translated, gave Sharpe a surprised look. The rifleman ignored it. “I’ve fought in Flanders,” Sharpe went on, “I’ve fought in India, I’ve fought in Spain and I’ve fought in Portugal, and I’ve never lost a fight. Never.” The Portuguese had just been run out of the great northern redoubt in front of Oporto and that defeat was still sore, yet here was a man telling them he was invincible and some of them looked at the scar on his face and the hardness in his eyes and they believed him. “Now you and I are going to fight together,” Sharpe went on, “and that means we’re going to win. We’re going to run these damned Frenchmen out of Portugal!” Some of them smiled at that. “Don’t take any notice of what happened today. That wasn’t your fault. You were led by a bishop! What bloody use is a bishop to anyone? You might as well go into battle with a lawyer.” Vicente gave Sharpe a swift and reproving glance before translating the last sentence, but he must have done it correctly for the men grinned at Sharpe. “We’re going to run the bastards back to France,” Sharpe continued, “and for every Portuguese and Briton they kill we’re going to slaughter a score.” Some of the Portuguese thumped their musket butts on theground in approbation. “But before we fight,” Sharpe went on, “you’d better know I have three rules and you had all better get used to those rules now. Because if you break these three rules then, God help me, I’ll goddamn break you.” Vicente sounded nervous as he interpreted the last few words.
    Sharpe waited, then held up one finger. “You don’t get drunk without my permission.” A second finger. “You don’t thieve from anyone unless you’re starving. And I don’t count taking things off the enemy as thieving.” That got a smile. He held up the third finger. “And you fight as if the devil himself was on your tail. That’s it! You don’t get drunk, you don’t thieve and you fight like demons. You understand?” They nodded after the translation.
    “And right now,” Sharpe went on, “you’re going to start fighting. You’re going to make three ranks and you’ll fire a volley at some French cavalry.” He would have preferred two ranks, but only the British fought in two ranks. Every other army used three and so, for the moment, he would too, even though thirty-seven men in three ranks offered a very small