InsaneJournal

Sharpe's Moon
Spoiler: Sharpe's Eagle, Sharpe's Gold (book), Sharpe's Enemy
aos_challenge Prompt: Moon
Fanfic 100 Challenge: Moon
Rating: U
Pairing/Characters: Sharpe


Sharpe lay outside in an open field, wrapped in a greatcoat and wearing a forage cap against the night chill. The sounds of a sleeping army drifted in the night air; snoring soldiers, a horse whickering quietly somewhere to his left.

He usually watched the stars, on a night like this. Not this night, however. His eyes were on the yellow moon that hung low, near the horizon. A harvester’s moon, some of the South Essex called it and he could understand why.

He’d watched the same moon the night after taking the shilling. It had been larger then, and silver. A shilling coin in the night sky.

In Flanders, he’d seen it through a chink in the barn where the Light Company had been billeted. It had knifed a sliver of light into the darkness, a blade of silver that had caressed him until he’d fallen asleep.

It seemed to Sharpe that the stars were pretty enough to look at, but it was the moon that held the secrets of his soldier’s life. It turned night to spectral day, making the soldiers’ red coats appear midnight black and turning their pipe-clayed cross-belts a startling, ghostly white. It was in moon-cast shadows that it was easiest for a Rifleman to hide, although all shadows in the midnight day seemed to be alive, and it was then that he had to guard most against an unwary soldier firing at nothing.

A full moon had revealed to Sharpe the Eagle he must capture to remain in the army after the loss of the King’s Colour. The Eagle had seemed to fly across the moon’s silver disc, revealing to Sharpe the method of his escape from dishonour.

The moon’s silver path had led, too, to Teresa, in a high white village nestled in distant Spanish hills. A full moon had shone, too, at their parting, making her raven hair and the bullet wound in her throat black, black as despair, against the crisp, pure, new snow.

Sharpe lay and thought and wondered what more the moon would reveal to him. At last he slept and the moon shone down on him. A soldier’s moon. Sharpe’s moon.