Calvet glanced at the Neapolitan battalion. Their colours had been unfurled, though the wind was not strong enough to lift the heavy fringed silk. Beneath the two flags the men appeared dispirited and flaccid. “You have the stomach for a fight, Colonel?” Calvet challenged Pannizi.
“I have the orders for a fight, General, and I am a soldier.”
“A good answer.” Calvet scowled down the hill. He knew better than anyone how hopeless this fight was, yet he was a soldier too, and he also had his orders. “And if we surrender to you now?” he asked with evident distaste for the question.
Pannizi looked shocked. “My dear General, there is no question of your surrendering! You are invited to be the guests of the Cardinal, the most honoured guests. Consider my regiment to be nothing more than an escort sent to conduct you with due honour into the city.”
Calvet had the grace to smile at the outrageous description. “And if we choose not to be the Cardinal’s guests?”
“You are free to leave the kingdom, all of you.”
“Free?” Calvet probed.
Pannizi nodded. “Entirely free. And you may take with you your uniforms and personal weapons,” he paused, “but nothing more.”
The threat was in those last three words. Pannizi knew what treasure lay in the villa, and he did not care what became of Calvet, Sharpe, or their men, so long as the treasure became his.
Calvet turned abruptly to stare north. The Neapolitan horsemen had cut off that escape route. He turned back. “You will give us fifteen minutes to consider our position, Colonel?”
“Ten,” Pannizi said, then drew his sword again. He saluted Calvet with the shining blade. “And you will do the honour of breakfasting with my officers, General?”
“Only if you have bacon,” Calvet said. “I have a great liking for fat bacon.”
Pannizi smiled. “Bacon will be found for you, General. You have ten minutes to anticipate its taste.” The Neapolitan Colonel sheathed his sword, nodded a summons to his two companions, then galloped back down the hill.
!Merde, merde, merde,“ Calvet said.
“Lime!” Calvet snarled at Sharpe. “I had you trapped in a fort and you escaped with powdered lime. So tell me what foul trick you have this time?”
Sharpe did not reply immediately. He was staring downhill at the dispirited Neapolitan infantrymen who, in anticipation of the ten minutes’ expiry, were being ordered to their feet. “Will they fight?”
“Of course they’ll bloody fight,” Calvet said. “That bastard Pannizi is telling them that there’s a battalion of whores and a king’s ransom in this place! Any minute now and they’ll be raring to fight! They smell plunder.”
“So give it to them,” Sharpe said abruptly.
“What?”
“Give them the damned gold! It weighs too much anyway. Take the stones and give them the bags of gold.”
Calvet stared at the Rifleman. “You’re mad.”
“On the contrary, General. We haven’t got lime, but we can blind them with gold. Showers of gold! Gold dropping from the heavens!” Sharpe was suddenly enthusiastic. “For God’s sake, General, how much is this treasure worth to you? Would you rather crawl back to your Emperor with nothing? Or would you rather buy your way out of this trap with a little gold?”
Calvet turned to look at the somnolent battalion. “So what do I do, Englishman? Go down there and haggle like a shoemaker? Don’t be a fool. If we offer a little gold they’ll want it all, and once they have it all, they’ll want the stones, and once they have the stones, we have nothing.”
“We don’t offer it to them,” Sharpe said, “but we give it. How good do you think their discipline is?”
Calvet snorted. “They’re a shambles! I’ve seen men reeking with drink who made a better show than that.”
“So we test their discipline by appealing to their greed.” Sharpe grinned at Harper. “I want the grasshopper. And some powder.”
Harper carried the brass gun, a powder keg and a bag of quick-fuse on to the terrace. Sharpe placed the weapon butt down, balanced by its bent rear legs, so that it could fire high into the air like a mortar. Sharpe did not want to blow a swathe of death through the Neapolitan battalion which waited a quarter mile away, he only wanted to swamp it with greed, and so he would literally make the gold of heaven rain from the sky.
Two of Calvet’s men fetched the bags of gold coins while Sharpe ladled a minuscule amount of powder into the gun. He tamped it down. He dared not charge the gun fully, or else the coins would be blasted across empty miles of countryside. He poured a small fortune of gold into the brass barrel, then pushed a length of quick-fuse into the touch-hole. “General?”
Calvet had been sulking at the prospect of losing even a small amount of his master’s treasure, but now he brightened at the prospect of firing the first golden volley. The gun was aimed so that the golden shower would fall to the east, away from the sea. Before he fired, Calvet glanced to make certain that his men were ready to make their bid for escape.
Harper was supporting the still dazed Frederickson, and had Ducos tied to a length of rope. He had cut the Frenchman’s ankles free so Ducos could run. Calvet’s men, all but for the two wounded Grenadiers, were laden with their bags and packs of gems. The prisoners, all but Ducos, would be abandoned. “We’re ready,” Calvet said, then gleefully touched the glowing end of a cheroot to the stub of quick-fuse.
There was a brief hiss, a coughing dull explosion, and a spew of dark smoke. The gun jarred backwards, then toppled, as Sharpe had an impression, nothing more, of a gouting of bright gold that glittered almost straight into the air through the acrid billow of smoke. Then, a second later, it seemed that a patch of the sky twinkled as though fragments of the sun itself were shattering in the upper air. Sharpe knew he watched the coins at the top of their arcing flight, but then they disappeared. He waited, and suddenly Harper whooped as the shards of light bounced and scattered and winked on the ground just beyond the Neapolitan battalion’s right flank.
Sharpe righted the fallen gun, ladled in another scoop of powder, then rammed yet more coins on to the charge. He glanced downhill and saw the movement as men turned in the infantry’s ranks. He rammed another length of quick-fuse home, then touched Calvet’s cheroot to its tip.
Another shower of gold sparkled high, then fell to earth in a glitter of greed.
“They’re trying to hold the buggers!” Harper reported gleefully.
A third charge, then a fourth, and now Sharpe was adding a half ounce to the charge so that the gold was spreading itself in a bright swathe that led away from the sea. He touched the cheroot on the fifth charge and this time, as the gold shattered the dawn sky into a thousand bright sparks, the battalion below broke their ranks, cheered, and stormed the empty fields to make their fortunes. The three Neapolitan ranks had dissolved like men hit by canister. Their sergeants and officers could not hold them and the men scattered like a chaotic mob to the countryside. They threw away their packs, muskets and shakoes as they fought and scrambled for the coins. They plucked the golden harvest and constantly watched the sky for yet more of the wonderful goldfall.
Sharpe gave them a last heavy blast of gold, this one from a barrel almost fully charged so that the thick coins glittered a full half mile inland as they fell. For the last time he watched the brightness tumble, then he turned and hobbled after Calvet’s men.
It was a race now. The infantry had been taken from the equation, but there were still the cavalry and Pannizi’s mounted officers. Calvet’s men, weighed with their prize of precious gems and their two wounded comrades, stumbled down the steep hill. Harper forced Ducos on, while Sharpe helped Frederickson. “I’m all right,” Frederickson protested, but as soon as Sharpe let him go, he stumbled as if drunk.