The volley, stinging from the flank, flayed into the first infantry ranks, and Frederickson was bellowing commands as though he held more men under orders. The French were glancing nervously towards the beechwood as Captain Palmer's fifty Marines now loosed their third volley down the road straight at the slowly forming enemy companies. Minver's men, slower to deploy, fired next from the right, through the hedgerow. The mist remnants were thick with smoke now. The stench of blood mingled with powder-stink.
"Stop loading!" Sharpe shouted at the Marines. All the noise caused the pain in his skull to throb terribly, yet his instincts were still able to tell him the battle was won. The French, though outnumbering Sharpe by three or four to one, were dazed, disorganized, and shaken. One more push and the enemy would break. "Front rank up! Fix swords!"
"Bayonets, sir," Harper muttered. Only Green Jackets, who carried the sword bayonet, used the order to fix swords.
"Bayonets! Bayonets!" he quickly bellowed. "Captain Palmer! I'll trouble you to go forward!" Deadly steel was quickly added to the heavy sea borne style muskets of the Marines. Satisfied, Palmer looked over at Sharpe and nodded. "Advance. At the double! Advance!"
The two ranks stepped lively, pushing through the cold, powder filled January air of Gascony. Sharpe and Harper fell in beside the Marine Captain at their rear. If the enemy held, then the Marines would be slaughtered. He shivered inside his grey coat hoping that as they stepped out of the smoke that any surviving French officer wouldn't see how feeble the assault truly was.
"Fire!" Frederickson yelled. Nearly seventy rifles rippled in unison out of the beechwood to Sharpe's left. Good, Frederickson had understood all and was supporting him, adding to the chaos. He hoped Minver would quickly follow with his own volley.
Suddenly the Marines in front of him were stumbling and slowing, though not a shot had been fired at them. "Charge!" Sharpe roared, encouraging the men to face down the unseen enemy line. He marched out of the grey haze. "Ch …." He didn't finish his repeat of the command. Now he understood why the Marines had stalled. The enemy was gone, as were their wagons, horses, packs, and dead. The road no longer even existed. Instead, only a grassy sward a hundred feet long stretched out in front of him until it ran into the edge of a forest. A forest that had not been there during the morning as they waited in ambush. Sharpe shivered, despite noting the temperature to no longer be below freezing. "Cease fire! All Rifles! Cease fire!"
"Bloody hell," Palmer swore.
"God save Ireland," Patrick choked out.
Few of the Rifles, nor the Marines, slept much that night. The afternoon had been spent fruitlessly looking for anything familiar from their previous day's march: no farm on the other side of the hedgerow, no toll house and river, no villages, no roads. The search had revealed only a few trails. So after a warm meal of boiled beef from their gunny sacks and a few snared hares, they had laid down on boughs stripped from nearby trees or simply in their great coats which thankfully were no longer desperately needed for warmth. With heads propped up on packs as the first stars began to flicker out, later than they should for January, the first moans of terror had started. Harper's taunt of "Don't bloody unman yerselfs!" had calmed them just enough as the illegible heavens wheeled into better view. Eventually, as men will to tame the unknown, they began drawing patterns in the new constellation and naming them: the Lancer, the Tower, the Squid, etc.
The naming went on through the night as new stars rose to replace their setting fellows. Finally the east at last grew pale. Or at least what they guessed must be east, for the sun rose and was simply the sun. And with it the forest around them ceased to be a single, frightening, dark shape; becoming trees, brush, and shrubs. The returning light revealed them to still be oddly familiar; perhaps similar to that which they'd marched through at times in Spain and Portugal, but nothing like what they'd seen so far in southern France.
Despite the madness, Sharpe had not lost all his senses, and picquets had been set to keep watch on the edges of the ad hoc camp set up by the two veteran companies of the 60th Rifles and the fifty Marines under the competent enough command of Captain Palmer. Hagman came out of the gloom cast by the trees into the growing pink light. "Visitors comin', major," the old poacher called out softly. "Maybe a dozen on horse.
"Bring the other picquets closer in Hagman, but keep out of sight," Sharpe commanded as he got to his feet. "Rifles. Marines."
Sweet William got his near seventy men formed up quickly on one side of Sharpe and Lieutenant Minver did the same with his company of fifty odd on the other side. And behind, the muskets of the Marines formed the third leg of their protective triad. Patrick strode up beside his friend and unslung his heavy seven shot piece. The big Irishman had a grin on his face, but Sharpe could see the unease beneath which it covered up.
Several men flinched as an arrow flashed high up into the dawn sky and then came thudding down near the remnants of one of the night's campfires. Luckily no one got an itchy finger and pulled a trigger. The Rifles were a veteran lot and the Marines blooded enough even if they'd found no bodies after the previous day's phantom battle.
Sharpe and Harper exchanged surprised glances. "They bloody red injuns, Sir?" Harper snickered.
A challenge soon followed in some unknown tongue.
"Hail the woods!" Sharpe cried out. "Come out and be recognized!"
Less than a minute later a figure pushed aside some bushes and strode purposefully towards them. From the man's clothes, Sharpe instantly knew he wasn't a French officer, private, or even a local militia type. Parts of him were dressed more like a bandit or a Spanish guerilla, though his bearing loudly proclaimed him a leader of men; an aristocrat perhaps.
"He's got balls if he thinks we're going to pay for those rabbits we took from his estate," Harper groused, clearly coming to a similar conclusion as Sharpe as to the newcomer's nature. The stew had been tasty last night despite, though six rabbits hadn't added much overall to the bellies of a hundred and seventy five men.
The mysterious lord stopped well short of Sharpe and well within range of any archer or archers who were protecting his back. He folded his arms across his solid looking chest and waited, all the while eyes passing back and forth over the near hundred men of the Rifles gathered in the glen. He was lean, of middle height, and appeared in his mid-thirties beneath sun-darkened olive skin and just starting to salt dark hair.
"Bloody hell, he thinks he's a god damned knight," Sharpe muttered.
Harper whistled in appreciation, for it wasn't the two vicious scars on his face that made the man stand out. No it didn't. The man wore a shirt of linked mail that reached halfway down his thighs. And atop his head sat an iron pot, that connected to the shirt with more linked iron over his neck.
"Well, we might as well go speak with him then. You coming, Captain Frederickson? My parlez-vous ain't as sweet as yours."
"Yesh, Major," his friend answered with the lisp that always came when he was prepared to fight. Off had come his eyepatch and out the set of false teeth he wore. "But whatever they cried before didn't sound like any language I ever heard before. Maybe it was Basque," the highly literate captain suggested.
Harper, as Sharpe's Sergeant Major and personal shadow, came along too. The trio stopped a good ten feet from the medieval warrior. "Major Sharpe," he announced, jerking a thumb at himself. "Captain Frederickson. Sergeant Major Harper."
The man pointed at himself. "Neilos Tzimiskes." And then blathered a couple sentences.
From growing up as an orphan in mostly the river parishes of Southwark, as well as shipping out of England more than once, Sharpe knew the country of origins for many languages, if not in fact knowing how to speak them. "How's your Greek, Captain?"
"Poor," Frederickson responded. "But it isn't Greek exactly, as Portuguese isn't quite Spainish. Here goes, hope I don't accidentally insult his mother. ποια χώρα είναι αυτό?"
"Videssos."