Sharpe's Battle

CHAPTER I

Sharpe swore. Then, in desperation, he turned the map upside down. "Might as well not have a bloody map," he said, "for all the bloody use it is."

"We could light a fire with it," Sergeant Harper suggested. "Good kindling's hard to come by in these hills."

"It's no bloody use for anything else," Sharpe said. The hand-drawn map showed a scatter of villages, a few spidery lines for roads, streams or rivers, and some vague hatchings denoting hills, whereas all Sharpe could see was mountains. No roads or villages, just grey, bleak, rock-littered mountains with peaks shrouded by mists, and valleys cut by streams turned white and full by the spring rains. Sharpe had led his company into the high ground on the border between Spain and Portugal and there become lost. His company, forty soldiers carrying packs, haversacks, cartridge cases and weapons, seemed not to care. They were just grateful for the rest and so sat or lay beside the grassy track. Some lit pipes, others slept, while Captain Richard Sharpe turned the map right side up and then, in anger, crumpled it into a ball. "We're bloody lost," he said and then, in fairness, corrected himself. "I'm bloody lost."

"My grand-da got lost once," Harper said helpfully. "He'd bought a bullock from a fellow in Cloghanelly Parish and decided to take a short cut home across the Derryveagh Mountains. Then the fog rolled in and grand-da couldn't tell his left from his right. Lost like a wee lamb he was, and then the bullock deserted the ranks and bolted into the fog and jumped clear over a cliff into the Barra Valley. Grand-da said you could hear the poor wee beast bellowing all the way down, then there was a thump just like you'd dropped a bagpipe off a church tower, only louder, he said, because he reckoned they must have heard that thump all the way to Ballybofey. We used to laugh about it later, but not at the time. God, no, it was a tragedy at the time. We couldn't afford to lose a good bullock."

"Jesus bloody wept!" Sharpe interrupted. "I can afford to lose a bloody sergeant who's got nothing better to do than blather on about a bloody bullock!"

"It was a valuable beast!" Harper protested. "Besides, we're lost. We've got nothing better to do than pass the time, sir."

Lieutenant Price had been at the rear of the column, but now joined his commanding officer at the front. "Are we lost, sir?"

"No, Harry, I came here for the hell of it. Wherever the hell this is." Sharpe stared glumly about the damp, bleak valley. He was proud of his sense of direction and his skills at crossing strange country, but now he was comprehensively, utterly lost and the clouds were thick enough to disguise the sun so that he could not even tell which direction was north. "We need a compass," he said.

"Or a map?" Lieutenant Price suggested happily.

"We've got a bloody map. Here." Sharpe thrust the balled-up map into the Lieutenant's hands. "Major Hogan drew it for me and I can't make head nor tail out of it."

"I was never any good with maps," Price confessed. "I once got lost marching some recruits from Chelmsford to the barracks, and that's a straight road. I had a map that time, too. I think I must have a talent for getting lost."

"My grand-da was like that," Harper said proudly. "He could get lost between one side of a gate and the other. I was telling the Captain here about the time he took a bullock up Slieve Snaght. It was dirty weather, see, and he was taking the short cut—

"Shut up," Sharpe said nastily.

"We went wrong at that ruined village," Price said, frowning over the creased map. "I think we should have stayed on the other side of the stream, sir." Price showed Sharpe the map. "If that is the village. Hard to tell really. But I'm sure we shouldn't have crossed the stream, sir."

Sharpe half suspected the Lieutenant was right, but he did not want to admit it. They had crossed the stream two hours before, so God only knew where they were now. Sharpe did not even know if they were in Portugal or Spain, though both the scenery and the weather looked more like Scotland. Sharpe was supposedly on his way to Vilar Formoso where his company, the Light Company of the South Essex Regiment, would be attached to the Town Major as a guard unit, a prospect that depressed Sharpe. Town garrison duty was little better than being a provost and provosts were the lowest form of army life, but the South Essex was short of men and so the regiment had been taken out of the battle line and set to administrative duties. Most of the regiment were escorting bullock carts loaded with supplies that had been barged up the Tagus from Lisbon, or else were guarding French prisoners on their way to the ships that would carry them to Britain, but the Light Company was lost, and all because Sharpe had heard a distant cannonade resembling far-away thunder and he had marched towards the sound, only to discover that his ears had played tricks. The noise of the skirmish, if indeed it was a skirmish and not genuine thunder, had faded away and now Sharpe was lost. "Are you sure that's the ruined village?" he asked Price, pointing to the crosshatched spot on the map that Price had indicated.

"I wouldn't like to swear to it, sir, not being able to read maps. It could be any of those scratchings, sir, or maybe none."

"Then why the hell are you showing it to me?"

"In a hope for inspiration, sir," Price said in a wounded voice. "I was trying to help, sir. Trying to raise our hopes." He looked down at the map again. "Maybe it isn't a very good map?" he suggested.

"It would make good kindling," Harper repeated.

"One thing's certain," Sharpe said as he took the map back from Price, "we haven't crossed the watershed which means these streams must be flowing west." He paused. "Or they're probably flowing west. Unless the world's bloody upside down which it probably bloody is, but on the chance that it bloody isn't we'll follow the bloody streams. Here" — he tossed the map to Harper—"kindling."

"That's what my grand-da did," Harper said, tucking the crumpled map inside his faded and torn green jacket. "He followed the water—"

"Shut up," Sharpe said, but not angrily this time. Rather he spoke quietly, and at the same time gestured with his left hand to make his companions crouch. "Bloody Crapaud," he said softly, "or something. Never seen a uniform like it."

"Bloody hell," Price said, and dropped down to the path.

Because a horseman had appeared just two hundred yards away. The man had not seen the British infantrymen, nor did he appear to be on the lookout for enemies. Instead his horse just ambled out of a side valley until the reins checked it, then the rider swung himself wearily out of the saddle and looped the reins over an arm while he unbuttoned his baggy trousers and urinated beside the path. Smoke from his pipe drifted in the damp air.

Harper's rifle clicked as he pulled the cock fully back. Sharpe's men, even those who had been asleep, were all alert now and lying motionless in the grass, keeping so low that even if the horseman had turned he would probably not have noticed the infantry. Sharpe's company was a veteran unit of skirmishers, hardened by two years of fighting in Portugal and Spain and as well trained as any soldiers in Europe. "Recognize the uniform?" Sharpe asked Price softly.

"Never seen it before, sir."

"Pat?" Sharpe asked Harper.

"Looks like a bloody Russian," Harper said. Harper had never seen a Russian soldier, but had a perverse idea that such creatures wore grey and this mysterious horseman was all in grey. He had a short grey dragoon jacket, grey trousers and a grey horsehair plume on his steel-grey helmet. Or maybe, Sharpe thought, it was merely a cloth cover designed to stop the helmet's metal from reflecting the light.

"Spaniard?" Sharpe wondered aloud.

"The dons are always gaudy, sir," Harper said. "The dons never did like dying in drab clothes."

"Maybe he's a partisan," Sharpe suggested.

"He's got Crapaud weapons," Price said, "and trousers." The pissing horseman was indeed armed just like a French dragoon. He wore a straight sword, had a short-barrelled carbine sheathed in his saddle holster and had a brace of pistols stuck in his belt. He also wore the distinctively baggy saroual trousers that the French dragoons liked, but Sharpe had never seen a French dragoon wearing grey ones, and certainly never a grey jacket. Enemy dragoons always wore green coats. Not dark hunting green like the coats of Britain's riflemen, but a lighter and brighter green.

"Maybe the buggers are running out of green dye?" Harper suggested, then fell silent as the horseman buttoned his floppy trousers and hauled himself up onto his saddle. The man looked carefully about the valley, saw nothing to alarm him and so spurred his horse back into the hidden side valley. "He was scouting," Harper said softly. "He was sent to see if anyone was here."

"He made a bloody bad job of it," Sharpe commented.

"Even so," Price said fervently, "it's a good thing we're going in the other direction."

"We're not, Harry," Sharpe said. "We're going to see who those bastards are and what they're doing." He pointed uphill. "You first, Harry. Take your fellows and go halfway up, then wait."

Lieutenant Price led the redcoats of Sharpe's company up the steep slope. Half of the company wore the red jackets of Britain's line infantry while the other half, like Sharpe himself, had the green jackets of the elite rifle regiments. It had been an accident of war that had stranded Sharpe and his riflemen in a redcoat battalion, but sheer bureaucratic inertia had held them there and now it was sometimes hard to tell the riflemen from the redcoats, so shabby and faded were their respective uniforms. From a distance they all looked like brown uniforms because of the cheap Portuguese cloth that the men were forced to use for repairs.

"You think we've crossed the lines?" Harper asked Sharpe.

"Like as not," Sharpe said sourly, still angry at himself. "Not that anyone knows where the damn lines are," he said defensively, and in part he was right. The French were retreating out of Portugal. Throughout the winter of 1810 the enemy had stayed in front of the Lines of Torres Vedras just a half-day's march from Lisbon, and there they had frozen and half starved to death rather than retreat to their supply depots in Spain. Marshal Massйna had known that retreat would yield all Portugal to the British while to attack the Lines of Torres Vedras would be pure suicide, and so he had just stayed, neither advancing nor retreating, just starving slowly through the winter and staring at the lines' enormous earthworks which had been hacked and scraped from a range of hills across the narrow peninsula just north of Lisbon. The valleys between the hills had been blocked by massive dams or with tangled barricades of thorn, while the hill tops and long slopes had been trenched, embrasured and armed with battery after battery of cannon. The lines, a winter's hunger and the relentless attacks of partisans had finally defeated the French attempt to capture Lisbon and in March they had begun to retreat. Now it was April and the retreat was slowing in the hills of the Spanish frontier, for it was here that Marshal Massйna had decided to make his stand. He would fight and defeat the British in the river-cut hills, and always, at Massйna's back, stood the twin fastnesses of Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo. Those two Spanish citadels made the frontier into a mighty barrier, though for now Sharpe's concern was not the grim border campaign that loomed ahead but rather the mysterious grey horseman.

Lieutenant Price had reached a patch of dead ground halfway up the hill where his redcoats concealed themselves as Sharpe waved his riflemen forward. The slope was steep, but the greenjackets climbed fast for, like all experienced infantrymen, they had a healthy fear of enemy cavalry and they knew that steep hillsides were an effective barrier to horsemen and thus the higher the riflemen climbed, the safer and happier they became.

Sharpe passed the resting redcoats and went on up towards the crest of a spur that divided the two valleys. When he was close to the ridge he waved his greenjackets down into the short grass, then crawled up to the skyline to peer down into the smaller valley where the grey horseman had disappeared.

And, two hundred feet beneath him, saw Frenchmen.

The men were all wearing the strange grey uniform, but Sharpe now knew they were French because one of the cavalrymen carried a guidon. This was a small, swallowtailed banner carried on a lance as a rally mark in the chaos of battle, and this particular shabby, frayed flag showed the red, white and blue of the enemy. The standard-bearer was sitting on his horse in the centre of a small abandoned settlement while his dismounted companions searched the half-dozen stone and thatch houses that looked as if they had been built to shelter families during the summer months when the lowland farmers would bring their flocks to graze the high pastures.

There were only a half-dozen horsemen in the settlement, but with them was a handful of French infantrymen, also wearing the drab and plain grey coats, rather than their usual blue. Sharpe counted eighteen infantrymen.

Harper wriggled uphill to join Sharpe. "Jesus, Mary and Joseph," he said when he saw the infantry. "Grey uniforms?"

"Maybe you're right," Sharpe said, "maybe the buggers have run out of dye."

"I wish they'd run out of musket balls," Harper said. "So what do we do?"

"Bugger off," Sharpe said. "No point in having a fight for the hell of it."

"Amen to that, sir." Harper began to slither down from the skyline. "Are we going now?"

"Give me a minute," Sharpe said and felt behind his back for his telescope which was stored in a pouch of his French oxhide pack. Then, with the telescope's hood extended to shade the outer lens and so stop even this day's damp light from being reflected downhill, he trained the glass on the tiny cottages. Sharpe was anything but a wealthy man, yet the telescope was a very fine and expensive glass made by Matthew Berge of London, with a brass eyepiece, shutters and a small engraved plate set into its walnut tube. "In Gratitude," the plate read, "AW. September 23rd, 1803." AW was Arthur Wellesley, now the Viscount Wellington, a lieutenant general and commander of the British and Portuguese armies which had pursued Marshal Massйna to Spain's frontier, but on September 23rd, 1803, Major General the Honourable Arthur Wellesley had been astride a horse that was piked in the chest and so pitched its rider down into the enemy's front rank. Sharpe could still remember the shrill Indian cries of triumph as the red-jacketed General had fallen among them, though he could remember precious little else about the seconds that followed. Yet it was those few seconds that had plucked him from the ranks and made him, a man born in the gutter, into an officer in Britain's army.

Now he focused Wellington's gift on the French beneath and watched as a dismounted cavalryman carried a canvas pail of water from the stream. For a second or two Sharpe thought that the man was carrying the water to his picketed horse, but instead the dragoon stopped between two of the houses and began to pour the water onto the ground. "They're foraging," Sharpe said, "using the water trick."

"Hungry bastards," Harper said.

The French had been driven from Portugal more by hunger than by force of arms. When Wellington had retreated to Torres Vedras he left behind him a devastated countryside with empty barns, poisoned wells and echoing granaries. The French had endured five months of famine partly by ransacking every deserted hamlet and abandoned village for hidden food, and one way to find buried jars of grain was to pour water on the ground, for where the soil had been dug and refilled the water would always drain away more quickly and so betray where the grain jars were hidden.

"No one would be hiding food in these hills," Harper said scornfully. "Who do they think would carry it all the way up here?"

Then a woman screamed.

For a few seconds both Sharpe and Harper assumed the sound came from an animal. The scream had been muffled and distorted by distance and there was no sign of any civilians in the tiny settlement, but as the terrible noise echoed back from the far hillside so the full horror of the sound registered on both men. "Bastards," Harper said softly.

Sharpe slid the telescope shut. "She's in one of the houses," he said. "Two men with her? Maybe three? Which means there can't be more than thirty of the bastards down there."

"Forty of us," Harper said dubiously. It was not that he was frightened by the odds, but the advantage was not so overwhelming as to guarantee a bloodless victory.

The woman screamed again.

"Fetch Lieutenant Price," Sharpe ordered Harper. "Tell everyone to be loaded and they're to stay just back from the crest." He turned round. "Dan! Thompson! Cooper! Harris! Up here." The four were his best marksmen. "Keep your heads down!" he warned the four men, then waited till they reached the crest. "In a minute I'm taking the rest of the rifles down there. I want you four to stay here and pick off any bastard who looks troublesome."

"Bastards are going already," Daniel Hagman said. Hagman was the oldest man in the company and the finest marksman. He was a Cheshire poacher who had been offered a chance to enlist in the army rather than face transportation for stealing a brace of pheasants from an absentee landlord.

Sharpe turned back. The French were leaving, or rather most of them were, for, judging from the way that the men at the rear of the infantry column kept turning and shouting towards the houses, they had left some of their comrades inside the cottage where the woman had screamed. With the half-dozen cavalrymen in the lead, the main group was trudging down the stream towards the larger valley.

"They're getting careless," Thompson said.

Sharpe nodded. Leaving men in the settlement was a risk and it was not like the French to run risks in wild country. Spain and Portugal were riddled with guerrilleros, the partisans who fought the guerrilla, the little war, and that war was far more bitter and cruel than the more formal battles between the French and the British. Sharpe knew just how cruel for only the previous year he had gone into the wild north country to find Spanish gold and his companions had been partisans whose savagery had been chilling. One of them, Teresa Moreno, was Sharpe's lover, only now she called herself La Aguja, the Needle, and every Frenchman she knifed with her long slim blade was one small part of the endless revenge she had promised to inflict on the soldiers who had raped her.

Teresa was now a long way off, fighting in the country around Badajoz, while in the settlement beneath Sharpe another woman was suffering from the attentions of the French and again Sharpe wondered why these grey-uniformed soldiers thought it safe to leave men to finish their crime in the isolated village. Were they certain that no partisans lurked in these high hills?

Harper came back, breathing hard after leading Price's redcoats up the hill. "God save Ireland," he said as hй dropped beside Sharpe, "but the bastards are going already."

"I think they've left some men behind. Are you ready?"

"Sure I am." Harper eased back his rifle's doghead.

"Packs off," Sharpe told his riflemen as he shrugged his own pack off his shoulders, then he twisted to look at Lieutenant Price. "Wait here, Harry, and listen for the whistle. Two blasts mean I want you to open fire from up here, and three mean I want you down at the village." He looked at Hagman. "Don't open fire, Dan, until they see us. If we can get down there without the bastards knowing it'll be easier." He raised his voice so the rest of his riflemen could hear. "We go down fast," Sharpe said. "Are you all ready? Are you all loaded? Then come on! Now!"

The riflemen scrambled over the crest and tumbled headlong down the steep hill behind Sharpe. Sharpe kept glancing to his left where the small French column retreated beside the stream, but no one in the column turned and the noise of the horses' hooves and the infantrymen's nailed boots must have smothered the sound of the greenjackets running downhill. It was not until Sharpe was just yards away from the nearest house that a Frenchman turned and shouted in alarm. Hagman fired at the same instant and the sound of his Baker rifle echoed first from the small valley's far slope, then from the distant flank of the larger valley. The echo crackled on, fainter and fainter, until it was drowned as the other riflemen on the hill top opened fire.

Sharpe jumped down the last few feet. He fell as he landed, picked himself up and ran past a dunghill heaped against a house wall. A single horse was tethered to a steel picket pin driven into the ground beside one of the small houses where a French soldier suddenly appeared in the doorway. The man was wearing a shirt and a grey coat, but nothing below the waist. He raised his musket as Sharpe ran into view, but then saw the riflemen behind Sharpe and so dropped the musket and raised his hands in surrender.

Sharpe had drawn his sword as he ran to the house door. Once there he shouldered the surrendering man aside and burst into the hovel that was a bare stone chamber, beamed with wood and roofed with stone and turf. It was dark inside the cottage, but not so dark that Sharpe could not see a naked girl scrambling over the earth floor into a corner. There was blood on her legs. A second Frenchman, this one with cavalry overalls round his ankles, tried to stand and reach for his scabbarded sword, but Sharpe kicked him in the balls. He kicked him so hard that the man screamed and then could not draw breath to scream again and so toppled onto the bloody floor where he whimpered and lay with his knees drawn tight up to his chest. There were two other men on the beaten earth floor, but when Sharpe turned on them with his drawn sword he saw they were both civilians and both dead. Their throats had been cut.

Musketry sounded ragged in the valley. Sharpe went back to the door where the bare-legged French infantryman was crouching with his hands held behind his head. "Pat!" Sharpe called.

Harper was organizing the riflemen. "We've got the buggers tamed, sir," the Sergeant said reassuringly, anticipating Sharpe's question. The riflemen were crouching beside the cottages where they fired, reloaded and fired again. Their Baker rifle muzzles gouted thick spurts of white smoke that smelt of rotted eggs. The French returned the fire, their musket balls smacking on the stone houses as Sharpe ducked back into the hovel. He picked up the two Frenchmen's weapons and tossed them out of the door. "Perkins!" he shouted.

Rifleman Perkins ran to the door. He was the youngest of Sharpe's men, or was presumed to be the youngest for though Perkins knew neither the day nor the year of his birth, he did not yet need to shave. "Sir?"

"If either of these bastards move, shoot them."

Perkins might be young, but the look on his thin face scared the unhurt Frenchman who reached out a placating hand as though begging the young rifleman not to shoot. "I'll look after the bastards, sir," Perkins said, then slotted his brass-handled sword bayonet onto his rifle's muzzle.

Sharpe saw the girl's clothing which had been tossed under a crudely sawn table. He picked up the greasy garments and handed them to her. She was pale, terrified and crying, a young thing, scarcely out of childhood. "Bastards," Sharpe said to the two prisoners, then ran out into the damp light. A musket ball hissed over his head as he ducked down into cover beside Harper.

"Bastards are good, sir," the Irishman said ruefully.

"I thought you had them tamed?"

"They've got different ideas on the matter," Harper said, then broke cover, aimed, fired and ducked back. "Bastards are good," he said again as he started to reload.

And the French were good. Sharpe had expected the small group of Frenchmen to hurry away from the rifle fire, but instead they had deployed into a skirmish line and so turned the easy target of a marching column into a scattered series of difficult targets. Meanwhile the half-dozen dragoons accompanying the infantry had dismounted and begun to fight on foot while one man galloped their horses out of rifle range, and now the assorted dragoon carbines and infantry muskets were threatening to overwhelm Sharpe's riflemen. The Baker rifles were far more accurate than the Frenchmen's muskets and carbines, and they could kill at four times the distance, but they were desperately slow to load. The bullets, each one wrapped in a leather patch that was designed to grip the barrel's rifling, had to be forced down the tight grooves and lands of the barrel, whereas a musket ball could be rammed fast down a smoothbore's unrifled gullet. Sharpe's men were already abandoning the leather patches in order to load faster, but without the leather the rifling could not impart spin to the ball and so the rifle was robbed of its one great advantage: its lethal accuracy. Hagman and his three companions were still firing down from the ridge, but their numbers were too few to make much difference and all that was saving Sharpe's riflemen from decimation was the protection of the village's stone walls.

Sharpe took the small whistle from its pouch on his crossbelt. He blew it twice, then unslung his own rifle, edged round the corner of the house and aimed at a puff of smoke down the valley. He fired. The rifle kicked back hard just as a French musket ball cracked into the wall beside his head. A fleck of stone slashed across his scarred cheek, drawing blood and missing his eyeball by half an inch. "Bastards are bloody good." Sharpe echoed Harper's tribute grudgingly, then a crashing musket volley announced that Harry Price had lined his redcoats on the hill top and was firing down at the French.

Price's first volley was enough to decide the fight. Sharpe heard a French voice shouting orders and a second later the enemy skirmish line began to shred and disappear. Harry Price only had time for one more volley before the grey-coated enemy had retreated out of range. "Green! Horrell! McDonald! Cresacre! Smith! Sergeant Latimer!" Sharpe called to his riflemen. "Fifty paces down the valley, make a picquet line there, but get the hell back here if the bastards come back for more. Move! Rest of you stay where you are."

"Jesus, sir, you should see in here." Harper had pushed open the nearest house door with the muzzle of his seven-barrel gun. The weapon, originally designed to be fired from the fighting tops of Britain's naval ships, was a cluster of seven half-inch barrels fired by a single flint. It was like a miniature cannon and only the biggest, strongest men could fire the gun without permanently damaging their shoulders. Harper was one of the strongest men Sharpe had ever known, but also one of the most sentimental and now the big Irishman looked close to tears. "Oh, sweet suffering Christ," Harper said as he crossed himself, "the living bastards."

Sharpe had already smelt the blood, now he looked past the Sergeant and felt the disgust make a lump in his throat. "Oh, my God," he said softly.

For the small house was drenched in blood, its walls spattered and its floor soaked with it, while on the floor were sprawled the limp bodies of children. Sharpe tried to count the little bodies, but could not always tell where one blood-boltered corpse began and another ended. The children had evidently been stripped naked and then had their throats cut. A small dog had been killed too, and its blood-matted, curly-haired corpse had been tossed onto the children whose skins appeared unnaturally white against the vivid streaks of black-looking blood.

"Oh, sweet Jesus," Sharpe said as he backed out of the reeking shadows to draw a breath of fresh air. He had seen more than his share of horror. He had been born to a poorhouse whore in a London gutter and he had followed Britain's drum from Flanders to Madras and through the Indian wars and now from the beaches of Portugal to the frontiers of Spain, but never, not even in the Sultan Tippoo's torture chambers in Seringapatam, had he seen children tossed into a dead pile like so many slaughtered animals.

"There's more here, sir," Corporal Jackson called. Jackson had just vomited in the doorway of a hovel in which the bodies of two old people lay in a bloody mess. They had been tortured in ways that were only too evident.

Sharpe thought of Teresa who was fighting these same scum who gutted and tormented their victims, then, unable to bear the unbidden images that seared his thoughts, he cupped his hands and shouted up the hill, "Harris! Down here!"

Rifleman Harris was the company's educated man. He had once been a schoolmaster, even a respectable schoolmaster, but boredom had driven him to drink and drink had been his ruin, or at least the cause of his joining the army where he still loved to demonstrate his erudition. "Sir?" Harris said as he arrived in the settlement.

"You speak French?"

"Yes, sir."

"There's two Frogs in that house. Find out what unit they're from, and what the bastards did here. And Harris!"

"Sir?" The lugubrious, red-haired Harris turned back.

"You don't have to be gentle with the bastards."

Even Harris, who was accustomed to Sharpe, seemed shocked by his Captain's tone. "No, sir."

Sharpe walked back across the settlement's tiny plaza. His men had searched the two cottages on the stream's far side, but found no bodies there. The massacre had evidently been confined to the three houses on the nearer bank where Sergeant Harper was standing with a bleak, hurt look on his face. Patrick Harper was an Ulsterman from Donegal and had been driven into the ranks of Britain's army by hunger and poverty. He was a huge man, four inches taller than Sharpe who was himself six feet tall. In battle Harper was an awesome figure, yet in truth he was a kind, humorous and easy-going man whose benevolence disguised his life's central contradiction which was that he had no love for the king for whom he fought and little for the country whose flag he defended, yet there were few better soldiers in all King George's army, and none who was more loyal to his friends. And it was for those friends that Harper fought, and the closest of his friends, despite their disparity in rank, was Sharpe himself. "They're just wee kiddies," Harper now said. "Who'd do such a thing?"

"Them." Sharpe jerked his head down the small valley to where the stream joined the wider waterway. The grey Frenchmen had stopped there; too far to be threatened by the rifles, but still close enough to watch what happened in the settlement where they had pillaged and murdered.

"Some of those wee ones had been raped," Harper said.

"I saw," Sharpe said bleakly.

"How could they do it?"

"There isn't an answer, Pat. God knows." Sharpe felt sick, just like Harper felt sick, but inquiring into the roots of sin would not gain revenge for the dead children, nor would it save the raped girl's sanity, nor bury the blood-soaked dead. Nor would it find a way back to the British lines for one small light company that Sharpe now realized was dangerously exposed on the edge of the French outpost line. "Ask a goddamn chaplain for an answer, if you can ever find one closer than the Lisbon brothels," Sharpe said savagely, then turned to look at the charnel houses. "How the hell are we going to bury this lot?"

"We can't, sir. We'll just tumble the house walls down on top of them," Harper said. He gazed down the valley. "I could murder those bastards. What are we going to do with the two we've got?"

"Kill them," Sharpe said curtly. "We'll get an answer or two now," he said as he saw Harris duck out of the cottage. Harris was carrying one of the steel-grey dragoon helmets which Sharpe now saw were not cloth-covered, but were indeed fashioned out of metal and plumed with a long hank of grey horsehair.

Harris ran his right hand through the plume as he walked towards Sharpe. "I found out who they are, sir," he said as he drew nearer. "They belong to the Brigade Loup, the Wolf Brigade. It's named after their commanding officer, sir. Fellow called Loup, Brigadier General Guy Loup. Loup means wolf in French, sir. They reckon they're an elite unit. Their job was to hold the road open through the mountains this past winter and they did it by beating the hell out of the natives. If any of Loup's men get killed then he kills fifty civilians as revenge. That's what they were doing here, sir. A couple of his men were ambushed and killed, and this is the price." Harris gestured at the houses of the dead. "And Loup's not far away, sir," he added in warning. "Unless these fellows are lying, which I doubt. He left a detachment here and took a squadron to hunt down some fugitives in the next valley."

Sharpe looked at the cavalryman's horse which was still tethered in the settlement's centre and thought of the infantryman he had captured. "This Brigade Loup," he asked, "is it cavalry or infantry?"

"The brigade has both, sir," Harris said. "It's a special brigade, sir, formed to fight the partisans, and Loup's got two battalions of infantry and one regiment of dragoons."

"And they all wear grey?"

"Like wolves, sir," Harris said helpfully.

"We all know what to do with wolves," Sharpe said, then turned as Sergeant Latimer shouted a warning. Latimer was commanding the tiny picquet line that stood between Sharpe and the French, but it was no new attack that had caused Latimer to shout his warning, but rather the approach of four French horsemen. One of them carried the tricolour guidon, though the swallowtailed flag was now half obscured by a dirty white shirt that had been impaled on the guidon's lance head. "Bastards want to talk to us," Sharpe said.

"I'll talk to them," Harper said viciously and pulled back the cock of his seven-barrelled gun.

"No!" Sharpe said. "And go round the company and tell everyone to hold their fire, and that's an order."

"Aye, sir." Harper lowered the flint, then, with a baleful glance towards the approaching Frenchmen, went to warn the greenjackets to hold their tempers and keep their fingers off their triggers.

Sharpe, his rifle slung on his shoulder and his sword at his side, strolled towards the four Frenchmen. Two of the horsemen were officers, while the flanking pair were standard-bearers, and the ratio of flags to men seemed impertinently high, almost as if the two approaching officers considered themselves greater than other mortals. The tricolour guidon would have been standard enough, but the second banner was extraordinary. It was a French eagle with gilded wings outspread perched atop a pole that had a cross-piece nailed just beneath the eagle's plinth. Most eagles carried a silk tricolour from the staff, but this eagle carried six wolf tails attached to the cross-piece. The standard was somehow barbaric, suggesting the far-off days when pagan armies of horse soldiers had thundered out of the Steppes to rape and ruin Christendom.

And if the wolf-tail standard made Sharpe's blood run chill, then it was nothing compared to the man who now spurred his horse ahead of his companions. Only the man's boots were not grey. His coat was grey, his horse was a grey, his helmet was lavishly plumed in grey and his grey pelisse was edged with grey wolf fur. Bands of wolf pelt encircled his boot tops, his saddlecloth was a grey skin, his sword's long straight scabbard and his carbine's saddle holster were both sheathed in wolfskin while his horse's nose band was a strip of grey fur. Even the man's beard was grey. It was a short beard, neatly trimmed, but the rest of the face was wild and merciless and scarred fit for nightmare. One bloodshot eye and one blind milky eye stared from that weather-beaten, battle-hardened face as the man curbed his horse beside Sharpe.

"My name is Loup," he said, "Brigadier General Guy Loup of His Imperial Majesty's army." His tone was strangely mild, his intonation courteous and his English touched with a light Scottish accent.

"Sharpe," the rifleman said. "Captain Sharpe. British army."

The three remaining Frenchmen had reined in a dozen yards away. They watched as their Brigadier swung his leg out of the stirrup and dropped lightly down to the path. He was not as tall as Sharpe, but he was still a big man and he was well muscled and agile. Sharpe guessed the French Brigadier was about forty years old, six years older than Sharpe himself. Loup now took two cigars from his fur-edged sabretache and offered one to Sharpe.

"I don't take gifts from murderers," Sharpe said.

Loup laughed at Sharpe's indignation. "More fool you, Captain. Is that what you say? More fool you? I was a prisoner, you see, in Scotland. In Edinburgh. A very cold city, but with beautiful women, very beautiful. Some of them taught me English and I taught them how to lie to their drab Calvinist husbands. We paroled officers lived just off Candlemaker Row. Do you know the place? No? You should visit Edinburgh, Captain. Despite the Calvinists and the cooking it is a fine city, very learned and hospitable. When the peace of Amiens was signed I almost stayed there." Loup paused to strike flint on steel, then to blow the charred linen tinder in his tinderbox into a flame with which he lit his cigar. "I almost stayed, but you know how it is. She was married to another man and I am a lover of France, so here I am and there she is and doubtless she dreams about me a lot more than I dream about her." He sighed. "But this weather reminded me of her. We would so often lie in bed and watch the rain and mist fly past the windows of Candlemaker Row. It is cold today, eh?"

"You're dressed for it, General," Sharpe said. "Got as much fur as a Christmas whore, you have."

Loup smiled. It was not a pleasant smile. He was missing two teeth, and those that remained were stained yellow. He had spoken pleasantly enough to Sharpe, even charmingly, but it was the smooth charm of a cat about to kill. He drew on his cigar, making the tip glow red, while his single bloodshot eye looked hard at Sharpe from beneath the helmet's grey visor.

Loup saw a tall man with a well-used rifle on one shoulder and a battered ugly-bladed sword at his hip. Sharpe's uniform was torn, stained and patched. The jacket's black cord hung in tatters between a few silver buttons that hung by threads, while beneath the jacket Sharpe wore a set of leather-reinforced French cavalry overalls. The remains of an officer's red sash encircled Sharpe's waist, while around his neck was a loosely knotted black choker. It was the uniform of a man who had long discarded the peacetime trappings of soldiering in exchange for the utilitarian comforts of a fighting man. A hard man, too, Loup guessed, not just from the evidence of the scar on Sharpe's cheek, but from the rifleman's demeanour which was awkward and raw-edged as though Sharpe would have preferred to be fighting than talking. Loup shrugged, abandoned his pleasantries and got down to business. "I came to fetch my two men," he said.

"Forget them, General," Sharpe replied. He was determined not to dignify this Frenchman by calling him 'sir' or 'monsieur'.

Loup raised his eyebrows. "They're dead?"

"They will be."

Loup waved a persistent fly away. The steel-plated straps of his helmet hung loose beside his face, resembling the cadenettes of braided hair that French hussars liked to wear hanging from their temples. He drew on his cigar again, then smiled. "Might I remind you, Captain, of the rules of war?"

Sharpe offered Loup a word that he doubted the Frenchman had heard much in Edinburgh's learned society. "I don't take lessons from murderers," Sharpe went on, "not in the rules of war. What your men did in that village wasn't war. It was a massacre."

"Of course it was war," Loup said equably, "and I don't need lectures from you, Captain."

"You might not need a lecture, General, but you damn well need a lesson."

Loup laughed. He turned and walked to the stream's edge where he stretched his arms, yawned hugely, then stooped to scoop some water to his mouth. He turned back to Sharpe. "Let me tell you what my job is, Captain, and you will put yourself in my boots. That way, perhaps, you will lose your tedious English moral certainties. My job, Captain, is to police the roads through these mountains and so make the passes safe for the supply wagons of ammunition and food with which we plan to beat you British back to the sea. My enemy is not a soldier dressed in uniform with a colour and a code of honour, but is instead a rabble of civilians who resent my presence. Good! Let them resent me, that is their privilege, but if they attack me, Captain, then I will defend myself and I do it so ferociously, so ruthlessly, so comprehensively, that they will think a thousand times before they attack my men again. You know what the major weapon of the guerrilla is? It is horror, Captain, sheer horror, so I make certain I am more horrible than my enemy, and my enemy in this area is horrible indeed. You have heard of El Castrador?"

"The Castrator?" Sharpe guessed the translation.

"Indeed. Because of what he does to French soldiers, only he does it while they are alive and then he lets them bleed to death. El Castrador, I am sorry to say, still lives, but I do assure you that none of my men has been castrated in three months, and do you know why? Because El Castrador's men fear me more than they fear him. I have defeated him, Captain, I have made the mountains secure. In all of Spain, Captain, these are the only hills where Frenchmen can ride safely, and why? Because I have used the guerrilleros' weapon against them. I castrate them, just as they would castrate me, only I use a blunter knife." Brigadier Loup offered Sharpe a grim smile. "Now tell me, Captain, if you were in my boots, and if your men were being castrated and blinded and disembowelled and skinned alive and left to die, would you not do as I do?"

"To children?" Sharpe jerked his thumb at the village.

Loup's one eye widened in surprise, as though he found Sharpe's objection odd in a soldier. "Would you spare a rat because it's young? Vermin are vermin, Captain, whatever their age."

"I thought you said the mountains were safe," Sharpe said, "so why kill?"

"Because last week two of my men were ambushed and killed in a village not far from here. The families of the murderers came here to take refuge, thinking I would not find them. I did find them, and now I assure you, Captain, that no more of my men will be ambushed in Fuentes de Onoro."

"They will if I find them there."

Loup shook his head sadly. "You are so quick with your threats, Captain. But fight me and I think you will learn caution. But for now? Give me my men and we shall ride away."

Sharpe paused, thinking, then finally shrugged and turned. "Sergeant Harper!"

"Sir?"

"Bring the two Frogs out!"

Harper hesitated as though he wanted to know what Sharpe intended before he obeyed the order, but then he turned reluctantly towards the houses. A moment later he appeared with the two French captives, both of whom were still naked below the waist and one of whom was still half doubled over in pain. "Is he wounded?" Loup asked.

"I kicked him in the balls," Sharpe said. "He was raping a girl."

Loup seemed amused by the answer. "You're squeamish about rape, Captain Sharpe?"

"Funny in a man, isn't it? Yes, I am."

"We have some officers like that," Loup said, "but a few months in Spain soon cures their delicacy. The women here fight like the men, and if a woman imagines that her skirts will protect her then she is wrong. And rape is part of the horror, but it also serves a secondary purpose. Release soldiers to rape and they don't care that they're hungry or that their pay is a year in arrears. Rape is a weapon like any other, Captain."

"I'll remember that, General, when I march into France," Sharpe said, then he turned back towards the houses. "Stop there, Sergeant!" The two prisoners had been escorted as far as the village entrance. "And Sergeant!"

"Sir?"

"Fetch their trousers. Get them dressed properly."

Loup, pleased with the way his mission was going, smiled at Sharpe. "You're being sensible, good. I would hate to have to fight you in the same way that I fight the Spanish."

Sharpe looked at Loup's pagan uniform. It was a costume, he thought, to scare a child, the costume of a wolfman walking out of nightmare, but the wolfman's sword was no longer than Sharpe's and his carbine a good deal less accurate than Sharpe's rifle. "I don't suppose you could fight us, General," Sharpe said, "we're a real army, you see, not a pack of unarmed women and children."

Loup stiffened. "You will find, Captain Sharpe, that the Brigade Loup can fight any man, anywhere, anyhow. I do not lose, Captain, not to anyone."

"So if you never lose, General, how were you taken prisoner?" Sharpe sneered. "Fast asleep, were you?"

"I was a passenger on my way to Egypt, Captain, when our ship was captured by the Royal Navy. That hardly counts as my defeat." Loup watched as his two men pulled on their trousers. "Where is Trooper Godin's horse?"

"Trooper Godin won't need a horse where he's going," Sharpe said.

"He can walk? I suppose he can. Very well, I yield you the horse," Loup said magniloquently.

"He's going to hell, General," Sharpe said. "I'm dressing them because they're still soldiers, and even your lousy soldiers deserve to die with their trousers on." He turned back to the settlement. "Sergeant! Put them against the wall! I want a firing squad, four men for each prisoner. Load up!"

"Captain!" Loup snapped and his hand went to his sword's hilt.

"You don't frighten me, Loup. Not you nor your fancy dress," Sharpe said. "You draw that sword and we'll be mopping up your blood with your flag of truce. I've got marksmen up on that ridge who can whip the good eye out of your face at two hundred yards, and one of those marksmen is looking at you right now."

Loup looked up the hill. He could see Price's redcoats there, and one greenjacket, but he plainly could not tell just how many men were in Sharpe's party. He looked back to Sharpe. "You're a captain, just a captain. Which means you have what? One company? Maybe two? The British won't entrust more than two companies to a mere captain, but within half a mile I have the rest of my brigade. If you kill my men you'll be hunted down like dogs, and you will die like dogs. I will exempt you from the rules of war, Captain, just as you propose exempting my men, and I will make sure you die in the manner of my Spanish enemies. With a very blunt knife, Captain."

Sharpe ignored the threat, turning towards the village instead. "Firing party ready, Sergeant?"

"They're ready, sir. And eager, sir!"

Sharpe looked back to the Frenchman. "Your brigade is miles away, General. If it was any closer you wouldn't be here talking to me, but leading the attack. Now, if you'll forgive me, I've got some justice to execute."

"No!" Loup said sharply enough to turn Sharpe back. "I have made a bargain with my men. You understand that, Captain? You are a leader, I am a leader, and I have promised my men never to abandon them. Don't make me break my promise."

"I don't give a bugger about your promise," Sharpe said.

Loup had expected that kind of answer and so shrugged. "Then maybe you will give a bugger about this, Captain Sharpe. I know who you are, and if you do not return my men I will place a price on your head. I will give every man in Portugal and Spain a reason to hunt you down. Kill those two and you sign your own death warrant."

Sharpe smiled. "You're a bad loser, General."

"And you're not?"

Sharpe walked away. "I've never lost," he called back across his shoulder, "so I wouldn't know."

"Your death warrant, Sharpe!" Loup called.

Sharpe lifted two fingers. He had heard that the English bowmen at Agincourt, threatened by the French with the loss of their bowstring fingers at the battle's end, had first won the battle and then invented the taunting gesture to show the overweening bastards just who were the better soldiers. Now Sharpe used it again.

Then went to kill the wolfman's men.

Major Michael Hogan discovered Wellington inspecting a bridge over the River Turones where a force of three French battalions had tried to hold off the advancing British. The resulting battle had been swift and brutal, and now a trail of French and British dead told the skirmish's tale. An initial tide line of bodies marked where the sides had clashed, a dreadful smear of bloodied turf showed where two British cannon had enfiladed the enemy, then a further scatter of corpses betrayed the French retreat across the bridge which their engineers had not had time to destroy. "Fletcher thinks the bridge is Roman work, Hogan," Wellington greeted the Irish Major.

"I sometimes wonder, my Lord, whether anyone has built a bridge in Portugal or Spain since the Romans." Hogan, swathed in a cloak because of the day's damp chill, nodded amicably to his Lordship's three aides, then handed the General a sealed letter. The seal, which showed the royal Spanish coat of arms, had been lifted. "I took the precaution of reading the letter, my Lord," Hogan explained.

"Trouble?" Wellington asked.

"I wouldn't have bothered you otherwise, my Lord," Hogan answered gloomily.

Wellington frowned as he read the letter. The General was a handsome man, forty-two years old, but as fit as any in his army. And, Hogan thought, wiser than most. The British army, Hogan knew, had an uncanny knack of finding the least qualified man and promoting him to high command, but somehow the system had gone wrong and Sir Arthur Wellesley, now the Viscount Wellington, had been given command of His Majesty's army in Portugal, thus providing that army with the best possible leadership. At least Hogan thought so, but Michael Hogan allowed that he could be prejudiced in this matter. Wellington, after all, had promoted Hogan's career, making the shrewd Irishman the head of his intelligence department and the result had been a relationship as close as it was fruitful.

The General read the letter again, this time glancing at a translation Hogan had thoughtfully provided. Hogan meanwhile looked about the battlefield where fatigue parties were clearing up the remnants of the skirmish. To the east of the bridge, where the road came delicately down the mountainside in a series of sweeping curves, a dozen work parties were searching the bushes for bodies and abandoned supplies. The French dead were being stripped naked and stacked like cordwood next to a long, shallow grave that a group of diggers was trying to extend. Other men were piling French muskets or else hurling canteens, cartridge boxes, boots and blankets into a cart. Some of the plunder was even more exotic, for the retreating French had weighed themselves down with the loot of a thousand Portuguese villages and Wellington's men were now recovering church vestments, candlesticks and silver plate. "Astonishing what a soldier will carry on a retreat," the General remarked to Hogan. "We found one dead man with a milking stool. A common milking stool! What was he thinking of? Taking it back to France?" He held the letter out to Hogan. "Damn," he said mildly, then, more strongly, "God damn!" He waved his aides away, leaving him alone with Hogan. "The more I learn about His Most Catholic Majesty King Ferdinand VII, Hogan, the more I become convinced that he should have been drowned at birth."

Hogan smiled. "The recognized method, my Lord, is smothering."

"Is it indeed?"

"It is indeed, my Lord, and no one's ever the wiser. The mother simply explains how she rolled over in her sleep and trapped the blessed little creature beneath her body and thus, the holy church explains, another precious angel is born."

"In my family," the General said, "unwanted children get posted into the army."

"It has much the same effect, my Lord, except in the matter of angels."

Wellington gave a brief laugh, then gestured with the letter. "So how did this reach us?"

"The usual way, my Lord. Smuggled out of Valenзay by Ferdinand's servants and brought south to the Pyrenees where it was given to partisans for forwarding to us."

"With a copy to London, eh? Any chance of intercepting the London copy?"

"Alas, sir, gone these two weeks. Probably there already."

"Hell, damn and hell again. Damn!" Wellington stared gloomily at the bridge where a sling cart was salvaging the fallen barrel of a dismounted French cannon. "So what to do, eh, Hogan? What to do?"

The problem was simple enough. The letter, copied to the Prince Regent in London, had come from the exiled King Ferdinand of Spain who was now a prisoner of Napoleon in the French chвteau at Valenзay. The letter was pleased to announce that His Most Catholic Majesty, in a spirit of cooperation with his cousin of England and in his great desire to drive the French invader from the sacred soil of his kingdom, had directed the Real Companпa Irlandesa of His Most Catholic Majesty's household guard to attach itself to His Britannic Majesty's forces under the command of the Viscount Wellington. Which gesture, though it sounded generous, was not to the Viscount Wellington's taste. He did not need a stray company of royal palace guards. A battalion of trained infantry with full fighting equipment might have been of some service, but a company of ceremonial troops was about as much use to the Viscount Wellington as a choir of psalm-singing eunuchs.

"And they've already arrived," Hogan said mildly.

"They've what?" Wellington's question could be heard a hundred yards away where a dog, thinking it was being reproved, slunk away from some fly-blackened guts that trailed from the eviscerated body of a French artillery officer. "Where are they?" Wellington asked fiercely.

"Somewhere on the Tagus, my Lord, being barged towards us."

"How the hell did they get here?"

"According to my correspondent, my Lord, by ship. Our ships." Hogan put a pinch of snuff on his left hand, then sniffed the powder up each nostril. He paused for a second, his eyes suddenly streaming, then sneezed. His horse's ears flicked back at the noise. "The commander of the Real Companпa Irlandesa claims he marched his men to Spain's east coast, my Lord," Hogan went on, "then took ship to Menorca where our Royal Navy collected them."

Wellington snorted his derision. "And the French just let that happen? King Joseph just watched half the royal guard march away?" Joseph was Bonaparte's brother and had been elevated to the throne of Spain, though it was taking three hundred thousand French bayonets to keep him there.

"A fifth of the royal guard, my Lord," Hogan gently corrected the General. "And yes, that's exactly what Lord Kiely says. Kiely, of course, being their comandante."

"Kiely?"

"Irish peer, my Lord."

"Damn it, Hogan, I know the Irish peerage. Kiely. Earl of Kiely. An exile, right? And his mother, I remember, gave money to Tone back in the nineties." Wolfe Tone had been an Irish patriot who had tried to raise money and men in Europe and America to lead a rebellion against the British in his native Ireland. The rebellion had flared into open war in 1798 when Tone had invaded Donegal with a small French army that had been roundly defeated and Tone himself had committed suicide in his Dublin prison rather than hang from a British rope. "I don't suppose Kiely's any better than his mother," Wellington said grimly, "and she's a witch who should have been smothered at birth. Is his Lordship to be trusted, Hogan?"

"So far as I hear, my Lord, he's a drunk and a wastrel," Hogan said. "He was given command of the Real Companпa Irlandesa because he's the only Irish aristocrat in Madrid and because his mother had influence over the King. She's dead now, God rest her soul." He watched a soldier try to fork up the spilt French officer's intestines with his bayonet. The guts kept slipping off the blade and finally a sergeant yelled at the man to either pick the offal up with his bare hands or else leave it for the crows.

"What has this Irish guard been doing since Ferdinand left Madrid?" Wellington asked.

"Living on sufferance, my Lord. Guarding the Escorial, polishing their boots, staying out of trouble, breeding, whoring, drinking and saluting the French."

"But not fighting the French."

"Indeed not." Hogan paused. "It's all too convenient, my Lord," he went on. "The Real Companпa Irlandesa is permitted to leave Madrid, permitted to take ship, and permitted to come to us, and meanwhile a letter is smuggled out of France saying the company is a gift to you from His imprisoned Majesty. I smell Frog paws all over it, my Lord."

"So we tell these damn guards to go away?"

"I doubt we can. In London the Prince Regent will doubtless be flattered by the gesture and the Foreign Office, you may depend, will consider any slight offered to the Real Companпa Irlandesa to be an insult to our Spanish allies, which means, my Lord, that we are stuck with the bastards."

"Are they good for anything?"

"I'm sure they'll be decorative," Hogan allowed dubiously.

"And decoration costs money," Wellington said. "I suppose the King of Spain did not think to send his guard's pay chest?"

"No, my Lord."

"Which means I'm paying them?" Wellington inquired dangerously, and, when Hogan's only answer was a seraphic smile, the General swore. "God damn their eyes! I'm supposed to pay the bastards? While they stab me in the back? Is that what they're here for, Hogan?"

"I wouldn't know, my Lord. But I suspect as much."

A gust of laughter sounded from a fatigue party that had just discovered some intimate drawings concealed in a dead Frenchman's coat tails. Wellington winced at the noise and edged his horse further away from the raucous group. Some crows fought over a pile of offal that had once been a French skirmisher. The General stared at the unpleasant sight, then grimaced. "So what do you know about this Irish guard, Hogan?"

"They're mostly Spanish these days, my Lord, though even the Spanish-born guards have to be descended from Irish exiles. Most of the guardsmen are recruited from the three Irish regiments in Spanish service, but a handful, I imagine, will be deserters from our own army. I'd suspect that most of them are patriotic to Spain and are probably willing to fight against the French, but undoubtedly a handful of them will be afrancesados, though in that regard I'd suspect the officers before the men." An afrancesado was a Spaniard who supported the French and almost all such traitors came from the educated classes. Hogan slapped a horsefly that had settled on his horse's neck. "It's all right, Jeremiah, just a hungry fly," he explained to his startled horse, then turned back to Wellington. "I don't know why they've been sent here, my Lord, but I am sure of two things. First, it will be a diplomatic impossibility to get rid of them, and second we have to assume that it's the French who want them here. King Ferdinand, I've no doubt, was gulled into writing the letter. I hear he's not very clever, my Lord."

"But you are, Hogan. It's why I put up with you. So what do we do? Put them to latrine digging?"

Hogan shook his head. "If you employ the King of Spain's household guard on menial tasks, my Lord, it will be construed as an insult to our Spanish allies as well as to His Catholic Majesty."

"Damn His Catholic Majesty," Wellington growled, then stared balefully towards the trench-like grave where the French dead were now being unceremoniously laid in a long, white, naked row. "And the junta?" he asked. "What of the junta?"

The junta in Cadiz was the regency council that ruled unoccupied Spain in their King's absence. Of its patriotism there could be no doubt, but the same could not be said of its efficiency. The junta was notorious for its internal squabbles and touchy pride, and few matters had touched that pride more directly than the discreet request that Arthur Wellesley, Viscount Wellington, be made Generalisimo of all Spain's armies. Wellington was already the General Marshal of Portugal's army and commander of the British forces in Portugal, and no man of sense denied he was the best general on the allied side, not least because he was the only one who consistently won battles, and no one denied that it made sense for all the armies opposing the French in Spain and Portugal to be under a unified command, but nevertheless, despite the acknowledged sense of the proposal, the junta was reluctant to grant Wellington any such powers. Spain's armies, they protested, must be led by a Spaniard, and if no Spaniard had yet proved capable of winning a campaign against the French, then that was no matter; better a defeated Spaniard than a victorious foreigner.

"The junta, my Lord," Hogan answered carefully, "will think this is the thin end of a very broad wedge. They'll think this is a British plot to take over the Spanish armies piecemeal, and they'll watch like hawks, my Lord, to see how you treat the Real Companпa Irlandesa."

"The hawk," Wellington said with a sour twist, "being Don Luis."

"Precisely, my Lord," Hogan said. General Don Luis Valverde was the junta's official observer with the British and Portuguese armies and the man whose recommendation was needed if the Spanish were ever to appoint Wellington as their Generalisimo. It was an approval that was highly unlikely, for General Valverde was a man in whom all the junta's great pride and none of its small sense was concentrated.

"God damn it," Wellington said, thinking of Valverde. "Well, Hogan? You're paid to advise me, so earn your damned pay."

Hogan paused to collect his thoughts. "I fear we have to welcome Lord Kiely and his men," he said after a few seconds, "even while we distrust them, and so it seems to me, my Lord, that we must do our best to make them uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that they either go back to Madrid or else march down to Cadiz."

"We drive them out?" Wellington said. "How?"

"Partly, my Lord, by bivouacking them so close to the French that those guardsmen who wish to desert will find it easy. At the same time, my Lord, we say that we have put them in a place of danger as a compliment to their fighting reputation, despite which, my Lord, I think we must assume that the Real Companпa Irlandesa, while undoubtedly skilled at guarding palace gates, will prove less skilled at the more mundane task of fighting the French. We should therefore insist that they submit to a period of strict training under the supervision of someone who can be trusted to make their life a living misery."

Wellington gave a grim smile. "Make these ceremonial soldiers stoop, eh? Make them chew on humble pie till it chokes them?"

"Exactly, my Lord. I have no doubt that they expect to be treated with respect and even privilege, so we must disappoint them. We'll have to give them a liaison officer, someone senior enough to smooth Lord Kiely's feathers and allay General Valverde's suspicions, but why not give them a drillmaster too? A tyrant, but someone shrewd enough to smoke out their secrets."

Wellington smiled, then turned his horse back towards his aides. He knew exactly who Hogan had in mind. "I doubt our Lord Kiely will much like Mister Sharpe," the General said.

"I cannot think they'll take to each other, my Lord, no."

"Where is Sharpe?"

"He should be on his way to Vilar Formoso today, my Lord. He's an unhappy recruit to the Town Major's staff."

"So he'll be glad to be cumbered with Kiely instead then, won't he? And who do we appoint as liaison officer?"

"Any emollient fool will do for that post, my Lord."

"Very well, Hogan, I'll find the fool and you arrange the rest." The General touched his heels to his horse's flank. His aides, seeing the General ready to move, gathered their reins, then Wellington paused. "What does a man want with a common milking stool, Hogan?"

"It keeps his arse dry during wet nights of sentry duty, my Lord."

"Clever thought, Hogan. Can't think why I didn't come up with the idea myself. Well done." Wellington wheeled his horse and spurred west away from the battle's litter.

Hogan watched the General go, then grimaced. The French, he was sure, had wished trouble on him and now, with God's good help, he would wish some evil back on them. He would welcome the Real Companпa Irlandesa with honeyed words and extravagant promises, then give the bastards Richard Sharpe.

The girl clung to Rifleman Perkins. She was hurt inside, she was bleeding and limping, but she had insisted on coming out of the hovel to watch the two Frenchmen die. Indeed she taunted the two men, spitting and screaming at them, then laughed as one of the two captives dropped to his knees and lifted his bound hands towards Sharpe. "He says he wasn't raping the girl, sir," Harris translated.

"So why were the bastard's trousers round his ankles?" Sharpe asked, then looked at his eight-man firing squad. Usually it was hard to find men willing to serve on firing squads, but there had been no difficulty this time. "Present!" Sharpe called.

"Non, Monsieur, je vous prie! Monsieur!" the kneeling Frenchman called. Tears ran down his face.

Eight riflemen lined their sights on the two Frenchmen. The other captive spat his derision and kept his head high. He was a handsome man, though his face was bruised from Harris's ministrations. The first man, realizing that his begging was to go unanswered, dropped his head and sobbed uncontrollably. "Maman," he called pathetically, "Maman!" Brigadier General Loup, back in his fur-edged saddle, watched the executions from fifty yards away.

Sharpe knew he had no legal right to shoot prisoners. He knew he might even be endangering his career by this act, but then he thought of the small, blood-blackened bodies of the raped and murdered children. "Fire!" he called.

The eight rifles snapped. Smoke gusted to form an acrid, filthy-smelling cloud that obscured the skeins of blood splashing high on the hovel's stone wall as the two bodies were thrown hard back, then recoiled forward to flop onto the ground. One of the men twitched for a few seconds, then went still.

"You're a dead man, Sharpe!" Loup shouted.

Sharpe raised his two fingers to the Brigadier, but did not bother to turn round. "The bloody Frogs can bury those two," he said of the executed prisoners, "but we'll collapse the houses on the Spanish dead. They are Spanish, aren't they?" he asked Harris.

Harris nodded. "We're just inside Spain, sir. Maybe a mile or two. That's what the girl says."

Sharpe looked at the girl. She was no older than Perkins, maybe sixteen, and had dank, dirty, long black hair, but clean her up, he thought, and she would be a pretty enough thing, and immediately Sharpe felt guilty for the thought. The girl was in pain. She had watched her family slaughtered, then had been used by God knows how many men. Now, with her rag-like clothes held tight about her thin body, she was staring intently at the two dead soldiers. She spat at them, then buried her head in Perkins's shoulder. "She'll have to come with us, Perkins," Sharpe said. "If she stays here she'll be slaughtered by those bastards."

"Yes, sir."

"So look after her, lad. Do you know her name?"

"Miranda, sir."

"Look after Miranda then," Sharpe said, then he crossed to where Harper was organizing the men who would demolish the houses on top of the dead bodies. The smell of blood was as thick as the mass of flies buzzing inside the charnel houses. "The bastards will chase us," Sharpe said, nodding towards the lurking French.

"They will too, sir," the Sergeant agreed.

"So we'll keep to the hill tops," Sharpe said. Cavalry could not get to the tops of steep hills, at least not in good order, and certainly not before their leaders had been picked off by Sharpe's best marksmen.

Harper glanced at the two dead Frenchmen. "Were you supposed to do that, sir?"

"You mean, am I allowed to execute prisoners of war under the King's Regulations? No, of course I'm not. So don't tell anyone."

"Not a word, sir. Never saw a thing, sir, and I'll make sure the lads say the same."

"And one day," Sharpe said as he stared at the distant figure of Brigadier General Loup, "I'll put him against a wall and shoot him."

"Amen," Harper said, "amen." He turned and looked at the French horse that was still picketed in the settlement. "What do we do with the beast?"

"We can't take it with us," Sharpe said. The hills were too steep, and he planned to keep to the rocky heights where dragoon horses could not follow. "But I'll be damned before I give a serviceable cavalry horse back to the enemy." He cocked his rifle. "I hate to do it."

"You want me to do it, sir?"

"No," Sharpe said, though he meant yes for he really did not want to shoot the horse. He did it anyway. The shot echoed back from the hills, fading and crackling while the horse thrashed in its bloody death throes.

The riflemen covered the Spanish dead with stones and thatch, but left the two French soldiers for their own comrades to bury. Then they climbed high into the misty heights to work their way westwards. By nightfall, when they came down into the valley of the River Turones, there was no sign of any pursuit. There was no stink of saddle-sore horses, no glint of grey light from grey steel, indeed there had been no sign nor smell of any pursuit all afternoon except just once, just as the light faded and as the first small candle flames flickered yellow in the cottages beside the river, when suddenly a wolf had howled its melancholy cry in the darkening hills.

Its howl was long and desolate, and the echo lingered.

And Sharpe shivered.

CHAPTER II

The view from the castle in Ciudad Rodrigo looked across the River Agueda towards the hills where the British forces gathered, yet this night was so dark and wet that nothing was visible except the flicker of two torches burning deep inside an arched tunnel that burrowed through the city's enormous ramparts. The rain flickered silver-red past the flame light to make the cobbles slick. Every few moments a sentry would appear at the entrance of the tunnel and the fiery light would glint off the shining spike of his fixed bayonet, but otherwise there was no sign of life. The tricolour of France flew above the gate, but there was no light to show it flapping dispiritedly in the rain which was being gusted around the castle walls and sometimes even being driven into the deep embrasured window where a man leaned to watch the arch. The flickering torchlight was reflected in the thick pebbled lenses of his wire-bound spectacles.

"Maybe he's not coming," the woman said from the fireplace.

"If Loup says he will be here," the man answered without turning round, "then he will be here." The man had a remarkably deep voice that belied his appearance for he was slim, almost fragile-looking, with a thin scholarly face, myopic eyes and cheeks pocked with the scars of childhood smallpox. He wore a plain dark-blue uniform with no badges of rank, but Pierre Ducos needed no gaudy chains or stars, no tassels or epaulettes or aiguillettes to signify his authority. Major Ducos was Napoleon's man in Spain and everyone who mattered, from King Joseph downwards, knew it.

"Loup," the woman said. "It means 'wolf', yes?"

This time Ducos did turn round. "Your countrymen call him El Lobo," he said, "and he frightens them."

"Superstitious people frighten easily," the woman said scornfully.

She was tall and thin, and had a face that was memorable rather than beautiful. A hard, clever and singular face, once seen never forgotten, with a full mouth, deep-set eyes and a scornful expression. She was maybe thirty years old, but it was hard to tell for her skin had been so darkened by the sun that it looked like a peasant woman's. Other well-born women took care to keep their skins as pale as chalk and soft as curds, but this woman did not care for fashionable looks nor for fashionable clothes. Her passion was hunting and when she followed her hounds she rode astride like a man and so she dressed like a man: in breeches, boots and spurs. This night she was uniformed as a French hussar with skintight sky-blue breeches that had an intricate pattern of Hungarian lace down the front of the thighs, a plum-coloured dolman with blue cuffs and plaited white-silk cordings and a scarlet pelisse edged with black fur. It was rumoured that Dona Juanita de Elia possessed a uniform from the regiment of every man she had ever slept with and that her wardrobe needed to be as large as most people's parlours. To Major Ducos's eyes the Dona Juanita de Elia was nothing but a flamboyant whore and a soldier's plaything, and in Ducos's murky world flamboyance was a lethal liability, but in Juanita's own eyes she was an adventuress and an afrancesada, and any Spaniard willing to side with France in this war was useful to Pierre Ducos. And, he grudgingly allowed, this war-loving adventuress was willing to run great risks for France and so Ducos was willing to treat her with a respect he would not usually accord to women. "Tell me about El Lobo," the Dona Juanita demanded.

"He's a brigadier of dragoons," Ducos said, "who began his army career as a groom in the royal army. He's brave, he's demanding, he's successful and, above all, he is ruthless." On the whole Ducos had little time for soldiers whom he considered to be romantic fools much given to posturing and gestures, but he approved of Loup. Loup was single-minded, fierce and utterly without illusions, qualities that Ducos himself possessed, and Ducos liked to think that had he ever been a proper soldier, he would have been like Loup. It was true that Loup, like Juanita de Elia, affected a certain flamboyance, but Ducos forgave the Brigadier his wolf-fur pretensions because, quite simply, he was the best soldier Ducos had discovered in Spain and the Major was determined that Loup should be properly rewarded. "Loup will one day be a marshal of France," Ducos said, "and the sooner the better."

"But not if Marshal Massйna can help it?" Juanita asked.

Ducos grunted. He collected gossip more assiduously than any man, but he disliked confirming it, yet Marshal Massйna's dislike of Loup was so well known in the army that Ducos had no need to dissemble about it. "Soldiers are like stags, madame," Ducos said. "They fight to prove they are the best in their tribe and they dislike their fiercest rivals far more than the beasts that offer them no competition. So I would suggest to you, madame, that the Marshal's dislike of Brigadier Loup is confirmation of Loup's genuine abilities." It was also, Ducos thought, a typical piece of wasteful posturing. No wonder the war in Spain was taking so long and proving so troublesome when a marshal of France wasted petulance on the best brigadier in the army.

He turned back to the window as the sound of hooves echoed in the fortress's entrance tunnel. Ducos listened as the challenge was given, then he heard the squeal of the gate hinges opening and a second later he saw a group of grey horsemen appear in the flamelit archway.

The Dona Juanita de Elia had come to stand beside Ducos. She was so close that he could smell the perfume on her gaudy uniform. "Which one is he?" she asked.

"The one in front," Ducos replied.

"He rides well," Juanita de Elia said with grudging respect.

"A natural horseman," Ducos said. "Not fancy. He doesn't make his horse dance, he makes it fight." He moved away from the woman. He disliked perfume as much as he disliked opinionated whores.

The two waited in silent awkwardness. Juanita de Elia had long sensed that her weapons did not work on Ducos. She believed he disliked women, but the truth was that Pierre Ducos was oblivious of them. Once in a while he would use a soldier's brothel, but only after a surgeon had provided him with the name of a clean girl. Most of the time he went without such distractions, preferring a monkish dedication to the Emperor's cause. Now he sat at his table and leafed through papers as he tried to ignore the woman's presence. Somewhere in the town a church clock struck nine, then a sergeant's voice echoed from an inner courtyard as a squad of men was marched towards the ramparts. The rain fell relentlessly. Then, at last, boots and spurs sounded loud on the stairway leading to Ducos's big chamber and the Dona Juanita looked up expectantly.

Brigadier Loup did not bother to knock on Ducos's door. He burst in, already fuming with anger. "I lost two men! God damn it! Two good men! Lost to riflemen, Ducos, to British riflemen. Executed! They were put against a wall and shot like vermin!" He had crossed to Ducos's table and helped himself from the decanter of brandy. "I want a price put on the head of their captain, Ducos. I want the man's balls in my men's stewpot." He stopped suddenly, checked by the exotic sight of the uniformed woman standing beside the fire. For a second Loup had thought the figure in cavalry uniform was an especially effeminate young man, one of the dandified Parisians who spent more money on their tailor than on their horse and weapons, but then he realized that the dandy was a woman and that the cascading black plume was her hair and not a helmet's embellishment. "Is she yours, Ducos?" Loup asked nastily.

"Monsieur," Ducos said very formally, "allow me to name the Dona Juanita de Elia. Madame? This is Brigadier General Guy Loup."

Brigadier Loup stared at the woman by the fire and what he saw, he liked, and the Dona Juanita de Elia returned the Dragoon General's stare and what she saw, she also liked. She saw a compact, one-eyed man with a brutal, weather-beaten face who wore his grey hair and beard short, and his grey, fur-trimmed uniform like an executioner's costume. The fur glinted with rainwater that had brought out the smell of the pelts, a smell that mingled with the heady aromas of saddles, tobacco, sweat, gun oil, powder and horses. "Brigadier," she said politely.

"Madame," Loup acknowledged her, then shamelessly looked up and down her skin-tight uniform, "or should it be Colonel?"

"Brigadier at least," Juanita answered, "if not Marйchal."

"Two men?" Ducos interrupted the flirtation. "How did you lose two men?"

Loup told the story of his day. He paced up and down the room as he spoke, biting into an apple he took from Ducos's desk. He told how he had taken a small group of men into the hills to find the fugitives from the village of Fuentes de Onoro, and how, having taken his revenge on the Spaniards, he had been surprised by the arrival of the greenjackets. "They were led by a captain called Sharpe," he said.

"Sharpe," Ducos repeated, then leafed through an immense ledger in which he recorded every scrap of information about the Emperor's enemies. It was Ducos's job to know about those enemies and to recommend how they could be destroyed, and his intelligence was as copious as his power. "Sharpe," he said again as he found the entry he sought. "A rifleman, you say? I suspect he may be the same man who captured an eagle at Talavera. Was he with greenjackets only? Or did he have redcoats with him?"

"He had redcoats."

"Then it is the same man. For a reason we have never discovered he serves in a red-jacketed battalion." Ducos was adding to his notes in the book that contained similar entries on over five hundred enemy officers. Some of the entries were scored through with a single black line denoting that the men were dead and Ducos sometimes imagined a glorious day when all these enemy heroes, British, Portuguese and Spanish alike, would be black-lined by a rampaging French army. "Captain Sharpe," Ducos now said, "is reckoned a famous man in Wellington's forces. He came up from the ranks, Brigadier, a rare feat in Britain."

"I don't care if he came up from the jakes, Ducos, I want his scalp and I want his balls."

Ducos disapproved of such private rivalries, fearing that they interfered with more important duties. He closed the ledger. "Would it not be better," he suggested coldly, "if you allowed me to issue a formal complaint about the execution? Wellington will hardly approve."

"No," Loup said. "I don't need lawyers taking revenge for me." Loup's anger was not caused by the death of his two men, for death was a risk all soldiers learned to abide, but rather by the manner of their death. Soldiers should die in battle or in bed, not against a wall like common criminals. Loup was also piqued that another soldier had got the better of him. "But if I can't kill him in the next few weeks, Ducos, you can write your damned letter." The permission was grudging. "Soldiers are harder to kill than civilians," Loup went on, "and we've been fighting civilians too long. Now my brigade will have to learn how to destroy uniformed enemies as well."

"I thought most French soldiers would rather fight other regulars than fight guerrilleros," the Dona Juanita said.

Loup nodded. "Most do, but not me, madame. I have specialized in fighting the guerrilla."

"Tell me how," she asked.

Loup glanced at Ducos as if seeking permission, and Ducos nodded. Ducos was annoyed by the attraction he sensed between these two. It was an attraction as elemental as the lust of a tomcat, a lust so palpable that Ducos almost wrinkled his nose at the stench of it. Leave these two alone for half a minute, he thought, and their uniforms would make a single heap on the floor. It was not their lust that offended him, but rather the fact that it distracted them from their proper business. "Go on," he told Loup.

Loup shrugged as though there was no real secret involved. "I've got the best-trained troops in the army. Better than the Imperial Guard. They fight well, they kill well and they're rewarded well. I keep them separate. They're not billeted with other troops, they don't mix with other troops, and that way no one knows where they are or what they're doing. If you send six hundred men marching from here to Madrid then I guarantee you that every guerrillero between here and Seville will know about it before they leave. But not with my men. We don't tell anyone what we're doing or where we're going, we just go there and do it. And we have our own places to live. I emptied a village of its inhabitants and made it my depot, but we don't just stay there. We travel where we will, sleep where we will, and if guerrilleros attack us they die, and not just them, but their mothers, their children, their priests and their grandchildren die with them. We horrify them, madame, just as they try to horrify us, and by now my wolf pack is more horrifying than the partisans."

"Good," Juanita said simply.

"Brigadier Loup's patrol area is remarkably free of partisans," Ducos said in generous tribute.

"But not entirely free," Loup added grimly. "El Castrador survives, but I'll use his own knife on him yet. Maybe the arrival of the British will encourage him to show his face again."

"Which is why we are here," Ducos said, taking command of the room. "Our job is to make certain that the British do not stay here, but are sent packing." And then, in his deep and almost hypnotic voice, he described the military situation as he comprehended it. Brigadier General Loup, who had spent the last year fighting to keep the passes through the frontier hills free of partisans and who had thus been spared the disasters that had afflicted Marshal Massйna's army in Portugal, listened raptly as Ducos told the real story and not the patriotic lies that were peddled in the columns of the Moniteur. "Wellington is clever," Ducos admitted. "He's not brilliant, but he is clever and we under-estimated him." The existence of the Lines of Torres Vedras had been unknown to the French until they marched within cannon shot of the defences and there they had waited, ever hungrier, ever colder, through a long winter. Now the army was back on the Spanish frontier and waiting for Wellington's assault.

It was an assault that would be hard and bloody because of the two massive fortresses that barred the only passable roads through the frontier mountains. Ciudad Rodrigo was the northern fastness and Badajoz the southern. Badajoz had been in Spanish hands till a month before and Massйna's engineers had despaired of ever reducing its massive walls, but Ducos had arranged a huge bribe and the Spanish commander had yielded the keys to the fortress. Now both keys of Spain, Badajoz and Ciudad Rodrigo, were firmly in the Emperor's grip.

But there was a third border fortress which also lay in French hands. Almeida was inside Portugal and, though it was not so important as Ciudad Rodrigo or Badajoz, and though its massive castle had been destroyed with the neighbouring cathedral in an earth-shattering explosion of gunpowder just the previous year, the town's thick star-shaped walls and its strong French garrison still presented a formidable obstacle. Any British force laying siege to Ciudad Rodrigo would have to use thousands of men to guard against the threat of Almeida's garrison sallying out to raid the supply roads and Ducos reckoned that Wellington would never abide that menace in his army's rear. "Wellington's first priority will be to capture Almeida," Ducos said, "and Marshal Massйna will do his best to relieve the fortress from the British siege. In other words, Brigadier" — Ducos was speaking more to Loup than to the Dona Juanita — "there will be a battle fought close to Almeida. Not much is certain in war, but I think we can be certain of that."

Loup stared at the map, then nodded agreement. "Unless Marshal Massйna withdraws the garrison?" he said in a tone of contempt suggesting that Massйna, his enemy, was capable of any foolishness.

"He won't," Ducos said with the certainty of a man who had the power to dictate strategy to marshals of France. "And the reason he will not is here," Ducos said, and he tapped the map as he spoke. "Look," he said, and Loup bent obediently over the map. The fortress of Almeida was depicted like a star to imitate its jagged, star-shaped fortifications. Around it were the hatch marks of hills, but behind it, between Almeida and the rest of Portugal, ran a deep river. The Coa. "It runs in a gorge, Brigadier," Ducos said, "and is crossed by a single bridge at Gastello Bom."

"I know it well."

"So if we defeat General Wellington on this side of the river," Ducos said, "then the fugitives of his army will be forced to retreat across a single bridge scarce three metres wide. That is why we shall leave the garrison in Almeida, because its presence will force Lord Wellington to fight on this bank of the Coa and when he does fight we shall destroy him. And once the British are gone, Brigadier, we shall employ your tactics of horror to end all resistance in Portugal and Spain."

Loup straightened up. He was impressed by Ducos's analysis, but also dubious of it. He needed a few seconds to phrase his objection and made the time by lighting a long, dark cigar. He blew smoke out, then decided there was no politic way to voice his doubt, so he just stated it baldly. "I've not fought the British in battle, Major, but I hear they're stubborn bastards in defence." Loup tapped the map. "I know that country well. It's full of hill ranges and river valleys. Give Wellington a hill and you could die of old age before you could shift the bugger loose. That's what I hear, anyway." Loup finished with a shrug, as if to deprecate his own opinion.

Ducos smiled. "Supposing, Brigadier, that Wellington's army is rotted from the inside?"

Loup considered the question, then nodded. "He'll break," he confirmed simply.

"Good! Because that is precisely why I wanted you to meet the Dona Juanita," Ducos said, and the lady smiled at the dragoon. "The Dona Juanita will be crossing the lines," Ducos continued, "and living among our enemies. From time to time, Brigadier, she will come to you for certain supplies that I shall provide. I want you to make the provision of those supplies to Dona Juanita your most important duty."

"Supplies?" Loup asked. "You mean guns? Ammunition?"

Dona Juanita answered for Ducos. "Nothing, Brigadier, that cannot be carried in the panniers of a packhorse."

Loup looked at Ducos. "You think it's easy to ride from one army to another? Hell, Ducos, the British have a cavalry screen and there are partisans and our own picquets and God knows how many other British sentries. It isn't like riding in the Bois de Boulogne."

Ducos looked unconcerned. "The Dona Juanita will make her own arrangements and I have faith in those. What you must do, Brigadier, is acquaint the lady with your lair. She must know where to find you, and how. You can arrange that?"

Loup nodded, then looked at the woman. "You can ride with me tomorrow?"

"All day, Brigadier."

"Then we ride tomorrow," Loup said, "and maybe the next day too?"

"Maybe, General, maybe," the woman answered.

Ducos again interrupted their flirtation. It was late, his supper was waiting and he still had several hours of paperwork to be completed. "Your men," he said to Loup, "are now the army's picquet line. So I want you to be alert for the arrival of a new unit in the British army."

Loup, suspecting he was being taught how to suck eggs, frowned. "We're always alert to such things, Major. We're soldiers, remember?"

"Especially alert, Brigadier." Ducos was unruffled by Loup's scorn. "A Spanish unit, the Real Companпa Irlandesa, is expected to join the British soon and I want to know when they arrive and where they are positioned. It is important, Brigadier."

Loup glanced at Juanita, suspecting that the Real Companпa Irlandesa was somehow connected with her mission, but her face gave nothing away. Never mind, Loup thought, the woman would tell him everything before the next two nights were done. He looked back to Ducos. "If a dog farts in the British lines, Major, you'll know about it."

"Good!" Ducos said, ending the conversation. "I won't keep you, Brigadier. I'm sure you have plans for the evening."

Loup, thus dismissed, picked up his helmet with its plume of wet grey hair. "Dona," he said as he reached the staircase door, "isn't that the title of a married woman?"

"My husband, General, is buried in South America." Juanita shrugged. "The yellow fever, alas."

"And my wife, madame," Loup said, "is buried in her kitchen in Besanзon. Alas." He held a hand towards the door, offering to escort her down the winding stairs, but Ducos held the Spanish woman back.

"You're ready to go?" Ducos asked Juanita when Loup was gone out of earshot.

"So soon?" Juanita answered.

Ducos shrugged. "I suspect the Real Companпa Irlandesa will have reached the British lines by now. Certainly by the month's end."

Juanita nodded. "I'm ready." She paused. "And the British, Ducos, will surely suspect the Real Companпa Irlandesa's motives?"

"Of course they will. They would be fools not to. And I want them to be suspicious. Our task, madame, is to unsettle our enemy, so let them be wary of the Real Companпa Irlandesa and perhaps they will overlook the real threat?" Ducos took off his spectacles and polished their lenses on the skirts of his plain jacket. "And Lord Kiely? You're sure of his affections?"

"He is a drunken fool, Major," Juanita answered. "He will do whatever I tell him."

"Don't make him jealous," Ducos warned.

Juanita smiled. "You may lecture me on many things, Ducos, but when it comes to men and their moods, believe me, I know all there is to know. Do not worry about my Lord Kiely. He will be kept very sweet and very obedient. Is that all?"

Ducos looped his spectacles back into place. "That is all. May I wish you a good night's rest, madame?"

"I'm sure it will be a splendid night, Ducos." The Dona Juanita smiled and walked from the room. Ducos listened as her spurs jangled down the steps, then heard her laugh as she encountered Loup who had been waiting at the foot of the steps. Ducos closed the door on the sound of their laughter and walked slowly back to the window. In the night the rain beat on, but in Ducos's busy mind there was nothing but the vision of glory. This did not just depend on Juanita and Loup doing their duty, but rather on the clever scheme of a man whom even Ducos acknowledged as his equal, a man whose passion to defeat the British equalled Ducos's passion to see France triumphant, and a man who was already behind the British lines where he would sow the mischief that would first rot the British army, then lead it into a trap beside a narrow ravine. Ducos's thin body seemed to quiver as the vision unfolded in his imagination. He saw an insolent British army eroded from within, then trapped and beaten. He saw France triumphant. He saw a river gorge crammed to its rocky brim with bloody carcasses. He saw his Emperor ruling over all Europe and then, who could tell, over the whole known world. Alexander had done it, why not Bonaparte?

And it would begin, with a little cunning from Ducos and his most secret agent, on the banks of the Coa near the fortress of Almeida.

"This is a chance, Sharpe, upon my soul it is a chance. A veritable chance. Not many chances come in a man's life and a man must seize them. My father taught me that. He was a bishop, you see, and a fellow doesn't rise from being curate to bishop without seizing his chances. You comprehend me?"

"Yes, sir."

Colonel Claud Runciman's massive buttocks were well set on the inn bench while before him, on a plain wooden table, were the remnants of a huge meal. There were chicken bones, the straggling stalks of a bunch of grapes, orange peel, rabbit vertebrae, a piece of unidentifiable gristle and a collapsed wineskin. The copious food had forced Colonel Runciman to unbutton his coat, waistcoat and shirt in order to loosen the strings of his corset and the subsequent distending of his belly had stretched a watch chain hung thick with seals tight across a strip of pale, drum-taut flesh. The Colonel belched prodigiously. "There's a hunchbacked girl somewhere about who serves the food, Sharpe," Runciman said. "If you see the lass, tell her I'll take some pie. With some cheese, perhaps. But not if it's goat's cheese. Can't abide goat's cheese; it gives me spleen, d'you see?" Runciman's red coat had the yellow facings and silver lace of the 37th, a good line regiment from Hampshire that had not seen the Colonel's ample shadow in many a year. Recently Runciman had been the Wagon Master General in charge of the drivers and teams of the Royal Wagon Train and their auxiliary Portuguese muleteers, but now he had been appointed liaison officer to the Real Companпa Irlandesa.

"It's an honour, of course," he told Sharpe, "but neither unexpected nor undeserved. I told Wellington when he made me Wagon Master General that I'd do the job as a favour to him, but that I expected a reward for it. A fellow doesn't want to spend his life thumping sense into thick-witted wagon drivers, good God, no. There's the hunchback, Sharpe! There she is! Stop her, Sharpe, there's a kind fellow! Tell her I want pie and a proper cheese!"

The pie and cheese were arranged and another wineskin was fetched, along with a bowl of cherries, to satisfy the last possible vestiges of Runciman's appetite. A group of cavalry officers sitting at a table on the far side of the yard were making wagers on how much food Runciman could consume, but Runciman was oblivious of their mockery. "It's a chance," he said again when he was well tucked into his pie. "I can't tell what's in it for you, of course, because a chap like you probably doesn't expect too much out of life anyway, but I reckon I've got a chance at a Golden Fleece." He peered up at Sharpe. "You do know what real means, don't you?"

"Royal, sir."

"So you're not completely uneducated then, eh? Royal indeed, Sharpe. The royal guard! These Irish fellows are royal! Not a pack of common carriers and mule-drivers. They've got royal connections, Sharpe, and that means royal rewards! I've half an idea that the Spanish court might even give a pension with the Order of the Golden Fleece. The thing comes with a nice star and a golden collar, but a pension would be very acceptable. A reward for a job well done, don't you see? And that's just from the Spanish! The good Lord alone knows what London might cough up. A knighthood? The Prince Regent will want to know we've done a good job, Sharpe, he'll take an interest, don't you see? He'll be expecting us to treat these fellows proper, as befits a royal guard. Order of the Bath at the very least, I should think. Maybe even a viscountcy? And why not? There's only one problem." Colonel Runciman belched again, then raised a buttock for a few seconds. "My God, but that's better," he said. "Let the effusions out, that's what my doctor says. There's no future in keeping noxious effusions in the body, he tells me, in case the body rots from within. Now, Sharpe, the fly in our unguent is the fact these royal guards are all Irish. Have you ever commanded the Irish?"

"A few, sir."

"Well, I've commanded dozens of the rogues. Ever since they amalgamated the Train with the Irish Corps of Wagoners, and there ain't much about the Irish that I don't know. Ever served in Ireland, Sharpe?"

"No, sir."

"I was there once. Garrison duty at Dublin Castle. Six months of misery, Sharpe, without a single properly cooked meal. God knows, Sharpe, I strive to be a good Christian and to love my fellow man, but the Irish do sometimes make it difficult. Not that some of them ain't the nicest fellows you could ever meet, but they can be obtuse! Dear me, Sharpe, I sometimes wondered if they were gulling me. Pretending not to understand the simplest orders. Do you find that? And there's something else, Sharpe. We'll have to be politic, you and I. The Irish" — and here Runciman leaned awkwardly forward as though confiding something important to Sharpe—"are very largely Romish, Sharpe. Papists! We shall have to watch our theological discourse if we're not to unsettle their tempers! You and I might know that the Pope is the reincarnation of the Scarlet Whore of Babylon, but it won't help our cause if we say it out loud. Know what I mean?"

"You mean there'll be no Golden Fleece, sir?"

"Good fellow, knew you'd comprehend. Exactly. We have to be diplomatic, Sharpe. We have to be understanding. We have to treat these fellows as if they were Englishmen." Runciman thought about that statement, then frowned. "Or almost English, anyway. You came up from the ranks, ain't that right? So these things might not be obvious to you, but if you just remember to keep silent about the Pope you can't go far wrong. And tell your chaps the same," he added hastily.

"A fair number of my fellows are Catholics themselves, sir," Sharpe said. "And Irish."

"They would be, they would be. A third of this army is Irish! If there was ever a mutiny, Sharpe… " Colonel Runciman shuddered at the prospect of the papist redcoats running wild. "Well, it doesn't bear thinking about, does it?" he went on. "So ignore their infamous heresies, Sharpe, just ignore them. Ignorance is the only possible cause for papism, my dear father always said, and a burning at the stake the only known cure. He was a bishop, so he understood these matters. Oh, and one other thing, Sharpe, I'd be obliged if you didn't call me Colonel Runciman. They haven't replaced me yet, so I'm still the Wagon Master General, so it ought to be General Runciman."

"Of course, General," Sharpe said, hiding a smile. After nineteen years in the army he knew Colonel Runciman's type. The man had purchased his promotions all the way to lieutenant colonel and there got stuck because promotion above that rank depended entirely on seniority and merit, but if Runciman wanted to be called General then Sharpe would play along for a while. He also sensed that Runciman was hardly likely to prove a difficult man so there was small point in antagonizing him.

"Good fellow! Ah! You see that scrawny chap who's just going?" Runciman pointed to a man leaving the inn through its arched entrance. "I swear he's left half a skin of wine on his table. See it? Go and snaffle it, Sharpe, there's a stout fellow, before that hunchbacked girl gets her paws on it. I'd go myself, but the damn gout is pinching me something hard today. Off you go, man, I'm thirsty!"

Sharpe was saved the indignity of scavenging the tables like a beggar by the arrival of Major Michael Hogan who waved Sharpe back towards the wreckage of Runciman's luncheon. "Good afternoon to you, Colonel," Hogan said, "and it's a grand day too, is it not?" Hogan, Sharpe noticed, was deliberately exaggerating his Irish accent.

"Hot," Runciman said, dabbing with his napkin at the perspiration that dripped down his plump cheeks and then, suddenly conscious of his naked belly, he vainly tried to tug the edges of his corset together. "Damnably hot," he said.

"It's the sun, Colonel," Hogan said very earnestly. "I've noticed that the sun seems to heat up the day. Have you noticed that?"

"Well, of course it's the sun!" Runciman said, confused.

"So I'm right! Isn't that amazing? But what about winter, Colonel?"

Runciman threw an anguished glance towards the abandoned wineskin. He was about to order Sharpe to fetch it when the serving girl whisked it away. "Damn," Runciman said sadly.

"You spoke, Colonel?" Hogan asked, helping himself to a handful of Runciman's cherries.

"Nothing, Hogan, nothing but a twinge of gout. I need some more Husson's Water, but the stuff is damned hard to find. Maybe you could put a request to the Horse Guards in London? They must realize we need medication here? And one other thing, Hogan?"

"Speak, Colonel. I am ever yours to command."

Runciman coloured. He knew he was being mocked but, though he outranked the Irishman, he was nervous of Hogan's intimacy with Wellington. "I am still, as you know, Wagon Master General," Runciman said heavily.

"So you are, Colonel, so you are. And a damned fine one too, I might say. The Peer was only saying to me the other day. Hogan, says he, have you ever seen wagons so finely mastered in all your born days?"

"Wellington said that?" Runciman asked in astonishment.

"He did, Colonel, he did."

"Well, I'm not really surprised," Runciman said. "My dear mother always said I had a talent for organization, Hogan. But the thing is, Major," Runciman went on, "that until a replacement is found then I am still the Wagon Master General" — he stressed the word 'General'—"and I would be vastly obliged if you addressed me as—"

"My dear Wagon Master," Hogan interrupted Runciman's laborious request, "why didn't you say so earlier? Of course I shall address you as Wagon Master, and I apologize for not thinking of that simple courtesy myself. But now, Wagon Master, if you'll excuse me, the Real Companпa Irlandesa have reached the edge of town and we need to review them. If you're ready?" Hogan gestured to the inn's gateway.

Runciman quailed at the prospect of exerting himself. "Right now, Hogan? This minute? But I can't. Doctor's orders. A man of my constitution needs to take a rest after… " He paused, seeking the right word. «After…» he went on and failed again.

"Rest after labour?" Hogan suggested sweetly. "Very well, Wagon Master, I'll tell Lord Kiely you'll meet him and his officers at General Valverde's reception this evening while Sharpe takes the men up to San Isidro."

"This evening at Valverde's, Hogan," Runciman agreed. "Very good. And Hogan. About my being Wagon Master General—"

"No need to thank me, Wagon Master. You'd just embarrass me with gratitude, so not another word! I shall respect your wishes and tell everyone else to do the same. Now come, Richard! Where are your green fellows?"

"In a taproom at the front of the inn, sir," Sharpe said. His riflemen were to join Sharpe in the San Isidro Fort, an abandoned stronghold on the Portuguese border, where they would help train the Real Companпa Irlandesa in musketry and skirmishing.

"My God, Richard, but Runciman's a fool!" Hogan said happily as the two men walked through the inn's gateway. "He's a genial fool, but he must have been the worst Wagon Master General in history. McGilligan's dog would have done a better job, and McGilligan's dog was famously blind, epileptic and frequently drunk. You never knew McGilligan, did you? A good engineer, but he fell off the Old Mole at Gibraltar and drowned himself after drinking two quarts of sherry, God rest his soul. The poor dog was inconsolable and had to be shot. The 73rd Highlanders did the deed with a full firing party and military honours to follow. But Runciman's just the fellow to flatter the Irish and make them think we're taking them seriously, but that's not your job. You understand me?"

"No, sir," Sharpe said, "don't understand you in the least, sir."

"You're being awkward, Richard," Hogan said, then stopped and took hold of one of Sharpe's silver coat buttons to emphasize his next words. "The object of all we now do is to upset Lord Kiely. Your job is to insert yourself into Lord Kiely's fundament and be an irritant. We don't want him here and we don't want his bloody Royal Company here, but we can't tell them to bugger off because it wouldn't be diplomatic, so your job is to make them go away voluntarily. Oh! Sorry now," he apologized because the button had come away in his fingers. "The buggers are up to no good, Richard, and we have to find a diplomatic way of getting rid of them, so whatever you can do to upset them, do it, and rely on Runciman the Rotund to smooth things over so they don't think we're being deliberately rude." Hogan smiled. "They'll just blame you for not being a gentleman."

"But I'm not, am I?"

"As it happens, you are, it's one of your faults, but let's not worry about that now. Just get rid of Kiely for me, Richard, with all his merry men. Make them cringe! Make them suffer! But above all, Richard, please, please make the bastards go away."

The Real Companпa Irlandesa might be called a company, but in fact it was a small battalion, one of the five that made up the household guard of Spain's royalty. Three hundred and four guardsmen had been on the company's books when it had last served in the Escorial Palace outside Madrid, but the imprisonment of Spain's king and benign neglect by the occupying French had reduced its ranks, and the journey by sea around Spain to join the British army had thinned the files even more, so that by the time the Real Companпa Irlandesa paraded on the outskirts of Vilar Formoso there were a mere one hundred and sixty-three men left. The one hundred and sixty-three men were accompanied by thirteen officers, a chaplain, eighty-nine wives, seventy-four children, sixteen servants, twenty-two horses, a dozen mules, "and one mistress," Hogan told Sharpe.

"One mistress?" Sharpe asked in disbelief.

"There's probably a score of mistresses," Hogan said, "two score! A walking brothel, in all likelihood, but his Lordship tells me we have to arrange accommodation suitable for himself and a lady friend. Not that she's here yet, you understand, but his Lordship tells me she's coming. The Dona Juanita de Elia is supposed to charm her way across the enemy lines in order to warm his Lordship's bed and if she's the same Juanita de Elia that I've heard about then she's well practised in bed warming. You know what they say of her? That she collects a uniform from the regiment of every man she sleeps with!" Hogan chuckled.

"If she crosses the lines here," Sharpe said, "she'll be damned lucky to escape the Loup Brigade."

"How the hell do you know about Loup?" Hogan asked instantly. For most of the time the Irishman was a genial and witty soul, but Sharpe knew the bonhomie disguised a very keen mind and the tone of the question was a sudden baring of that steel.

Yet Hogan was also a friend and for a split second Sharpe was tempted to confess how he had met the Brigadier and illegally executed two of his grey-uniformed soldiers, but then decided that was a deed best forgotten. "Everyone knows about Loup here," he answered instead. "You can't spend a day on this frontier without hearing about Loup."

"That's true enough," Hogan admitted, his suspicions allayed. "But don't be tempted to inquire further, Richard. He's a bad boy. Let me worry about Loup while you worry about that shambles." Hogan and Sharpe, followed by the riflemen, had turned a corner to see the Real Companпa Irlandesa slouching in parade order on a patch of waste land opposite a half-finished church. "Our new allies," Hogan said sourly, "believe it or not, in fatigue dress."

Fatigue dress was meant to be a soldier's duty uniform for everyday wear, but the fatigue uniform of the Real Companпa Irlandesa was much gaudier and smarter than the full dress finery of most British line battalions. The guardsmen wore short red jackets with black-edged, gilt-fringed swallowtails behind. The same gold-trimmed black cord edged their buttonholes and collars, while the facings, cuffs and turnbacks of their coats were of emerald green. Their breeches and waistcoats had once been white, their calf-length boots, belts and crossbelts were of black leather, while their sashes were green, the same green as the high plume that each man wore on the side of his black bicorne hat. The gilded hat badges showed a tower and a rearing lion, the same symbols that were displayed on the gorgeous green and gold shoulder sashes worn by the sergeants and drummer boys. As Sharpe walked closer he saw that the splendid uniforms were frayed, patched and discoloured, yet they still made a brave display in the bright spring sunshine. The men themselves looked anything but brave, instead appearing dispirited, weary and aggravated.

"Where are their officers?" Sharpe asked Hogan.

"Gone to a tavern for luncheon."

"They don't eat with their men?"

"Evidently not." Hogan's disapproval was acid, but not as bitter as Sharpe's. "Now don't be getting sympathetic, Richard," Hogan warned. "You're not supposed to like these boys, remember?"

"Do they speak English?" Sharpe asked.

"As well as you or I. About half of them are Irish born, the other half are descended from Irish emigrants, and a good few, I have to say, once wore red coats," Hogan said, meaning that they were deserters from the British army.

Sharpe turned and beckoned Harper towards him. "Let's have a look at this palace guard, Sergeant," he said. "Put 'em in open order."

"What do I call them?" Harper asked.

"Battalion?" Sharpe guessed.

Harper took a deep breath. "Talion! 'Shun!" His voice was loud enough to make the closest men wince and the further ones jump in surprise, but only a few men snapped to attention. "For inspection! Open order march!" Harper bellowed, and again very few guardsmen moved. Some just gaped at Harper while the majority looked towards their own sergeants for guidance. One of those gorgeously sashed sergeants came towards Sharpe, evidently to inquire what authority the riflemen possessed, but Harper did not wait for explanations. "Move, you bastards!" he bellowed in his Donegal accent. "You're in a war now, not guarding the royal pisspot. Behave like the good whores we all are and open up, now!"

"And I can remember when you didn't want to be a sergeant," Sharpe said to Harper under his breath as the startled guards at last obeyed the greenjacket Sergeant's command. "Are you coming, Major?" Sharpe asked Hogan.

"I'll wait here, Richard."

"Come on then, Pat," Sharpe said, and the two men began inspecting the company's front rank. An inevitable band of small mocking boys from the town fell into step behind the two greenjackets and pretended to be officers, but a thump on the ear from the Irishman's fist sent the boldest boy snivelling away and the others dispersed rather than face more punishment.

Sharpe inspected the muskets rather than the men, though he made sure that he looked into each soldier's eyes in an attempt to gauge what kind of confidence and willingness these men had. The soldiers returned his inspection resentfully, and no wonder, Sharpe thought, for many of these guards were Irishmen who must have been feeling all kinds of confusion at being attached to the British army. They had volunteered for the Real Companпa Irlandesa to protect a Most Catholic King, yet here they were being harried by the army of a Protestant monarch. Worse still, many of them would be avid Irish patriots, fierce for their country as only exiles can be, yet now they were being asked to fight alongside the ranks of that country's foreign oppressors. Yet, as Sharpe walked down the rank, he sensed more nervousness than anger and he wondered if these men were simply fearful of being asked to become proper soldiers for, if their muskets were any indication, the Real Companпa Irlandesa had long abandoned any pretensions to soldiering. Their muskets were a disgrace. The men carried the serviceable and sturdy Spanish-issue musket with its straight-backed hammer; however these guns were anything but serviceable, for there was rust on the locks and fouling caked inside the barrels. Some of them had no flints, others had no leather flint-seatings, while one gun did not even have the doghead screw to hold the flint in place. "Did you ever fire this musket, son?" Sharpe asked the soldier.

"No, sir."

"Have you ever fired a musket, son?"

The boy looked nervously towards his own sergeant. "Answer the officer, lad!" Harper growled.

"Once, sir. One day," the soldier said. "Just the once."

"If you wanted to kill someone with this gun, son, you'd have to beat them over the head with it. Mind you" — Sharpe pushed the musket back into the soldier's hands — "you look big enough for that."

"What's your name, soldier?" Harper asked him.

"Rourke, sir."

"Don't call me «sir». I'm a sergeant. Where are you from?"

"My da's from Galway, Sergeant."

"And I'm from Tangaveane in County Donegal and I'm ashamed, boy, ashamed, that a fellow Irishman can't keep a gun in half decent order. Jesus, boy, you couldn't shoot a Frenchman with that thing, let alone an Englishman." Harper unslung his own rifle and held it under Rourke's nose. "Look at that, boy! Clean enough to pick the dirt out of King George's nose. That's how a gun should look! 'ware right, sir." Harper added the last three words under his breath.

Sharpe turned to see two horsemen galloping across the waste ground towards him. The horses' hooves spurted dust. The leading horse was a fine black stallion being ridden by an officer who was wearing the gorgeous uniform of the Real Companпa Irlandesa and whose coat, saddlecloth, hat and trappings fairly dripped with gold tassels, fringes and loops. The second horseman was equally splendidly uniformed and mounted, while behind them a small group of other riders curbed their horses when Hogan intercepted them. The Irish Major, still on foot, hurried after the two leading horsemen, but was too late to stop them from reaching Sharpe. "What the hell are you doing?" the first man asked as he reined in above Sharpe. He had a thin, tanned face with a moustache trained and greased into fine points. Sharpe guessed the man was still in his twenties, but despite his youth he possessed a sour and ravaged face that had all the effortless superiority of a creature born to high office.

"I'm making an inspection," Sharpe answered coldly.

The second man reined in on Sharpe's other side. He was older than his companion and was wearing the bright-yellow coat and breeches of a Spanish dragoon, though the uniform was so crusted with looped chains and gold frogging that Sharpe assumed the man had to be at least a general. His thin, moustached face had the same imperious air as his companion's. "Haven't you learned to ask a commanding officer's permission before inspecting his men?" he asked with a distinct Spanish accent, then snapped an order in Spanish to his younger companion.

"Sergeant Major Noonan," the younger man shouted, evidently relaying the older man's command, "close order, now!"

The Real Companпa Irlandesa's Sergeant Major obediently marched the men back into close order just as Hogan reached Sharpe's side. "There you are, my Lords" — Hogan was addressing both horsemen — "and how was your Lordships' luncheon?"

"It was shit, Hogan. I wouldn't feed it to a hound," the younger man, whom Sharpe assumed was Lord Kiely, said in a brittle voice that dripped with aloofness but was also touched by the faint slur of alcohol. His Lordship, Sharpe decided, had drunk well at lunch, well enough to loosen whatever inhibitions he might have possessed. "You know this creature, Hogan?" His Lordship now waved towards Sharpe.

"Indeed I do, my Lord. Allow me to name Captain Richard Sharpe of the South Essex, the man Wellington himself chose to be your tactical adviser. And Richard? I have the honour to present the Earl of Kiely, Colonel of the Real Companпa Irlandesa."

Kiely looked grimly at the tattered rifleman. "So you're supposed to be our drillmaster?" He sounded dubious.

"I give lessons in killing too, my Lord," Sharpe said.

The older Spaniard in the yellow uniform scoffed at Sharpe's claim. "These men don't need lessons in killing," he said in his accented English. "They're soldiers of Spain and they know how to kill. They need lessons in dying."

Hogan interrupted. "Allow me to name His Excellency Don Luis Valverde," he said to Sharpe. "The General is Spain's most valued representative to our army." Hogan gave Sharpe a wink that neither horseman could see.

"Lessons in dying, my Lord?" Sharpe asked the General, puzzled by the man's statement and wondering whether it sprang from an incomplete mastery of English.

For answer the yellow-uniformed General touched his horse's flanks with the tips of his spurs to make the animal walk obediently along the line of the Real Companпa Irlandesa's front rank and, superbly oblivious of whether Sharpe was following him or not, lectured the rifleman from his saddle. "These men are going to war, Captain Sharpe," General Valverde said in a voice loud enough for a good portion of the guard to hear him. "They are going to fight for Spain, for King Ferdinand and Saint James, and fighting means standing tall and straight in front of your enemy. Fighting means staring your enemy in the eye while he shoots at you, and the side that wins, Captain Sharpe, is the side that stands tallest, straightest and longest. So you don't teach men how to kill or how to fight, but rather how to stand still while all hell comes at them. That's what you teach them, Captain Sharpe. Teach them drill. Teach them obedience. Teach them to stand longer than the French. Teach them" — the General at last twisted in his saddle to look down on the rifleman—"to die."

"I'd rather teach them to shoot," Sharpe said.

The General scoffed at the remark. "Of course they can shoot," he said. "They're soldiers!"

"They can shoot with those muskets?" Sharpe asked derisively.

Valverde stared down at Sharpe with a look of pity on his face. "For the last two years, Captain Sharpe, these men have stayed at their post of duty on the sufferance of the French." Valverde spoke in the tone he might have used to a small and unintelligent child. "Do you really think they would have been allowed to stay there if they had posed a threat to Bonaparte? The more their weapons decayed, the more the French trusted them, but now they are here and you can provide them with new weapons."

"To do what with?" Sharpe asked. "To stand and die like bullocks?"

"So how would you like them to fight?" Lord Kiely had followed the two men and asked the question from behind Sharpe.

"Like my men, my Lord," Sharpe said, "smartly. And you begin fighting smartly by killing the enemy officers." Sharpe raised his voice so that the whole of the Real Companпa Irlandesa could hear him. "You don't go into battle to stand and die like bullocks in a slaughteryard, you go to win, and you begin to win when you drop the enemy officers dead." Sharpe had walked away from Kiely and Valverde now and was using the voice he had developed as a sergeant, a voice pitched to cut across windy parade grounds and through the deadly clamour of battlefields. "You start by looking for the enemy officers. They're easy to recognize because they're the overpaid, overdressed bastards with swords and you aim for them first. Kill them any way you can. Shoot them, club them, bayonet them, strangle them if you must, but kill the bastards and after that you kill the sergeants and then you can begin murdering the rest of the poor leaderless bastards. Isn't that right, Sergeant Harper?"

"That's the way of it, sure enough," Harper called back.

"And how many officers have you killed in battle, Sergeant?" Sharpe asked, without looking at the rifle Sergeant.

"More than I can number, sir."

"And were they all Frog officers, Sergeant Harper?" Sharpe asked, and Harper, surprised by the question, did not answer, so Sharpe provided the answer himself. "Of course they were not. We've killed officers in blue coats, officers in white coats and even officers in red coats, because I don't care what army an officer fights for, or what colour coat he wears or what king he serves, a bad officer is better off dead and a good soldier had better learn how to kill him. Ain't that right, Sergeant Harper?"

"Right as rain, sir."

"My name is Captain Sharpe." Sharpe stood in the centre front of the Real Companпa Irlandesa. The faces watching him showed a mixture of astonishment and surprise, but he had their attention now and neither Kiely nor Valverde had dared to interfere. "My name is Captain Sharpe," he said again, "and I began where you are. In the ranks, and I'm going to end up where he is, in the saddle." He pointed at Lord Kiely. "But in the meantime my job is to teach you to be soldiers. I dare say there are some good killers among you and some fine fighters too, but soon you're going to be good soldiers as well. But for tonight we've all got a fair step to go before dark and once we're there you'll get food, shelter and we'll find out when you were last paid. Sergeant Harper! We'll finish the inspection later. Get them moving!"

"Sir!" Harper shouted. "Talion will turn to the right. Right turn! By the left! March!"

Sharpe did not even look at Lord Kiely, let alone seek his Lordship's permission to march the Real Companпa Irlandesa away. Instead he just watched as Harper led the guard off the waste ground towards the main road. He heard footsteps behind, but still he did not turn. "By God, Sharpe, but you push your luck." It was Major Hogan who spoke.

"It's all I've got to push, sir," Sharpe said bitterly. "I wasn't born to rank, sir, I don't have a purse to buy it and I don't have the privileges to attract it, so I need to push what bit of luck I've got."

"By giving lectures on assassinating officers?" Hogan's voice was frigid with disapproval. "The Peer won't like that, Richard. It smacks of republicanism."

"Bugger republicanism," Sharpe said savagely. "But you were the one who told me the Real Companпa Irlandesa can't be trusted. But I tell you, sir, that if there's any mischief there, it isn't coming from the ranks. Those soldiers weren't trusted with French mischief. They don't have enough power. Those men are what soldiers always are: victims of their officers, and if you want to find where the French have sown their mischief, sir, then you look among those damned, overpaid, overdressed, overfed bloody officers," and Sharpe threw a scornful glance towards the Real Companпa Irlandesa's officers who seemed unsure whether or not they were supposed to follow their men northwards. "That's where your rotten apples are, sir," Sharpe went on, "not in the ranks. I'd as happily fight alongside those guardsmen as alongside any other soldier in the world, but I wouldn't trust my life to that rabble of perfumed fools."

Hogan made a calming gesture with his hand, as if he feared Sharpe's voice might reach the worried officers. "You make your point, Richard."

"My point, sir, is that you told me to make them miserable. So that's what I'm doing."

"I just wasn't sure I wanted you to start a revolution in the process, Richard," Hogan said, "and certainly not in front of Valverde. You have to be nice to Valverde. One day, with any luck, you can kill him for me, but until that happy day arrives you have to butter the bastard up. If we're ever going to get proper command of the Spanish armies, Richard, then bastards like Don Luis Valverde have to be well buttered, so please don't preach revolution in front of him. He's just a simple-minded aristocrat who isn't capable of thinking much beyond his next meal or his last mistress, but if we're going to beat the French we need his support. And he expects us to treat the Real Companпa Irlandesa well, so when he's nearby, Richard, be diplomatic, will you?" Hogan turned as the group of Real Companпa Irlandesa's officers led by Lord Kiely and General Valverde came close. Riding between the two aristocrats was a tall, plump, white-haired priest mounted on a bony roan mare.

"This is Father Sarsfield" — Kiely introduced the priest to Hogan, conspicuously ignoring Sharpe — "who is our chaplain. Father Sarsfield and Captain Donaju will travel with the company tonight, the rest of the company's officers will attend General Valverde's reception."

"Where you'll meet Colonel Runciman," Hogan promised. "I think you'll find him much to your Lordship's taste."

"You mean he knows how to treat royal troops?" General Valverde asked, looking pointedly at Sharpe as he spoke.

"I know how to treat royal guards, sir," Sharpe intervened. "This isn't the first royal bodyguard I've met."

Kiely and Valverde both stared down at Sharpe with looks little short of loathing, but Kiely could not resist the bait of Sharpe's comment. "You refer, I suppose, to the Hanoverian's lackeys?" he said in his half-drunken voice.

"No, my Lord," Sharpe said. "This was in India. They were royal guards protecting a fat little royal bugger called the Sultan Tippoo."

"And you trained them too, no doubt?" Valverde inquired.

"I killed them," Sharpe said, "and the fat little bugger too." His words wiped the supercilious look off both men's thin faces, while Sharpe himself was suddenly overwhelmed with a memory of the Tippoo's water-tunnel filled with the shouting bodyguard armed with jewelled muskets and broad-bladed sabres. Sharpe had been thigh-deep in scummy water, fighting in the shadows, digging out the bodyguard one by one to reach that fat, glittering-eyed, buttery-skinned bastard who had tortured some of Sharpe's companions to death. He remembered the echoing shouts, the musket flashes reflecting from the broken water and the glint of the gems draped over the Tippoo's silk clothes. He remembered the Tippoo's death too, one of the few killings that had ever lodged in Sharpe's memory as a thing of comfort. "He was a right royal bastard," Sharpe said feelingly, "but he died like a man."

"Captain Sharpe," Hogan put in hastily, "has something of a reputation in our army. Indeed, you may have heard of him yourself, my Lord? It was Captain Sharpe who took the Talavera eagle."

"With Sergeant Harper," Sharpe put in, and Kiely's officers stared at Sharpe with a new curiosity. Any soldier who had taken an enemy standard was a man of renown and the faces of most of the guards' officers showed that respect, but it was the chaplain, Father Sarsfield, who reacted most fulsomely.

"My God and don't I remember it!" he said enthusiastically. "And didn't it just excite all the Spanish patriots in Madrid?" He climbed clumsily down from his horse and held a plump hand out to Sharpe. "It's an honour, Captain, an honour! Even though you are a heathen Protestant!" This last was said with a broad and friendly grin. "Are you a heathen, Sharpe?" the priest asked more earnestly.

"I'm nothing, Father."

"We're all something in God's eyes, my son, and loved for it. You and I shall talk, Sharpe. I shall tell you of God and you shall tell me how to strip the damned French of their eagles." The chaplain turned a smiling face on Hogan. "By God, Major, but you do us proud by giving us a man like Sharpe!" The priest's approval of the rifleman had made the other officers of the Real Companпa Irlandesa relax, though Kiely's face was still dark with distaste.

"Have you finished, Father?" Kiely asked sarcastically.

"I shall be on my way with Captain Sharpe, my Lord, and we shall see you in the morning?"

Kiely nodded, then turned his horse away. His other officers followed, leaving Sharpe, the priest and Captain Donaju to follow the straggling column formed by the Real Companпa Irlandesa's baggage, wives and servants.

By nightfall the Real Companпa Irlandesa was safe inside the remote San Isidro Fort that Wellington had chosen to be their new barracks. The fort was old, outdated and had long been abandoned by the Portuguese so that the tired, newly arrived men first had to clean out the filthy stone barracks rooms that were to be their new home. The fort's towering gatehouse was reserved for the officers, and Father Sarsfield and Donaju made themselves comfortable there while Sharpe and his riflemen took possession of one of the magazines for their own lodgings. Sarsfield had brought a royal banner of Spain in his baggage that was proudly hoisted on the old fort's ramparts next to the union flag of Britain. "I'm sixty years old," the chaplain told Sharpe as he stood beneath Britain's flag, "and I never thought the day would come when I'd serve under that banner."

Sharpe looked up at the British flag. "Does it worry you, Father?"

"Napoleon worries me more, my son. Defeat Napoleon, then we can start on the lesser enemies like yourself!" The comment was made in a friendly tone. "What also worries me, my son," Father Sarsfield went on, "is that I've eight bottles of decent red wine and a handful of good cigars and only Captain Donaju to share them with. Will you do me the honour of joining us for supper now? And tell me, do you play an instrument, perhaps? No? Sad. I used to have a violin, but it was lost somewhere, but Sergeant Connors is a rare man on the flute and the men in his section sing most beautifully. They sing of home, Captain."

"Of Madrid?" Sharpe asked mischievously.

Sarsfield smiled. "Of Ireland, Captain, of our home across the water where few of us have ever set foot and most of us never shall. Come, let's have supper." Father Sarsfield put a companionable arm across Sharpe's shoulder and steered him towards the gatehouse. A cold wind blew over the bare mountains as night fell and the first cooking fires curled their blue smoke into the sky. Wolves howled in the hills. There were wolves throughout Spain and Portugal and in winter they would sometimes come right up to the picquet line in the hope of snatching a meal from an unwary soldier, but this night the wolves reminded Sharpe of the grey-uniformed Frenchmen in Loup's brigade. Sharpe supped with the chaplain and afterwards, under a star-shining sky, he toured the ramparts with Harper. Beneath them the Real Companпa Irlandesa grumbled about their accommodations and about the fate that had stranded them on this inhospitable border between Spain and Portugal, but Sharpe, who had orders to make them miserable, wondered if instead he could make them into real soldiers who would follow him over the hills and far into Spain to where a wolf needed to be hunted, trapped and slaughtered.

Pierre Ducos waited nervously for news of the Real Companпa Irlandesa's arrival in Wellington's army. The Frenchman's greatest fear was that the unit would be positioned so far behind the fighting front that it would be useless for his purposes, but that was a risk Ducos was forced to run. Ever since French intelligence had intercepted Lord Kiely's letter requesting King Ferdinand's permission to take the Real Companпa Irlandesa to war on the allied side, Ducos had known that the success of his scheme depended as much on the allies' unwitting cooperation as on his own cleverness. Yet Ducos's cleverness would achieve nothing if the Irishmen failed to arrive, and so he waited with mounting impatience.

Little news came from behind the British lines. There had been a time when Loup's men could ride with impunity on either side of the frontier, but now the British and Portuguese armies were firmly clamped along the border and Loup had to depend for his intelligence on the unreliable and minuscule handful of civilians willing to sell information to the hated French, on interrogations of deserters and on educated guesses formed from the observations of his own men as they peered through spyglasses across the mountainous border.

And it was one of those scouts who first brought Loup news of the Real Companпa Irlandesa. A troop of grey dragoons had gone to one of the lonely hill tops which offered a long view into Portugal, and from where, with luck, a patrol might see some evidence of a British concentration of forces that could signal a new advance. The lookout post dominated a wide, barren valley where a stream glittered before the land rose to the rocky ridge on which the long-abandoned fort of San Isidro stood. The fort was of little military value for the road it guarded had long fallen into disuse and a century of neglect had eroded its ramparts and ditches into mockeries of their former strength so that now the San Isidro was home to ravens, foxes, bats, wandering shepherds, lawless men, and the occasional patrol of Loup's grey dragoons who might spend a night in one of the cavernous barracks rooms to stay out of the rain.

Yet now there were men in the fort, and the patrol leader brought Loup news of them. The new garrison was not a full battalion, he said, just a couple of hundred men. The fort itself, as Loup well knew, would need at least a thousand men to man its crumbling walls, so a mere two hundred hardly constituted a garrison, yet strangely the newcomers had brought their wives and children with them. The dragoons' troop leader, a Captain Braudel, thought the men were British. "They're wearing red coats," he said, "but not the usual stovepipe hats." He meant shakoes. "They've got bicornes."

"Infantry, you say?"

"Yes, sir."

"No cavalry? Any artillery?"

"Didn't see any."

Loup picked at his teeth with a sliver of wood. "So what were they doing?"

"Doing drill," Braudel said. Loup grunted. He was not much interested in a group of strange soldiers taking up residence in San Isidro. The fort did not threaten him and if the newcomers were content to sit tight and make themselves comfortable then Loup would not stir them into wakefulness. Then Captain Braudel stirred Loup himself into wakefulness. "But some of them were unblocking a well," the Captain said, "only they weren't redcoats. They were wearing green."

Loup stared at him. "Dark green?"

"Yes, sir."

Riflemen. Damned riflemen. And Loup remembered the insolent face of the man who had insulted him, the man who had once insulted all France by taking an eagle touched by the Emperor himself. Maybe Sharpe was in the San Isidro Fort? Ducos had denigrated Loup's thirst for vengeance, calling it unworthy of a great soldier, but Loup believed that a soldier made his reputation by picking his fights and winning them famously. Sharpe had defied Loup, the first man to openly defy him in many a long month, and Sharpe was a champion among France's enemies, so Loup's vengeance was not just personal, but would send ripples throughout the armies that waited to fight the battle that would decide whether Britain lunged into Spain or was sent reeling back into Portugal.

So that afternoon Loup himself visited the hill top, taking his finest spyglass which he trained on the old fort with its weed-grown walls and half-filled dry moat. Two flags hung limply in the windless air. One flag was British, but Loup could not tell what the second was. Beyond the flags the red-coated soldiers were doing musket drill, but Loup did not watch them long, instead he inched the telescope southwards until, at last, he saw two men in green coats strolling along the deserted ramparts. He could not see their faces at this distance, but he could tell that one of the men was wearing a long straight sword and Loup knew that British light infantry officers wore curved sabres. "Sharpe," he said aloud as he collapsed the telescope.

A scuffle behind made him turn round. Four of his wolf-grey men were guarding a pair of prisoners. One captive was in a gaudily trimmed red coat while the other was presumably the man's wife or lover. "Found them hiding in the rocks down there," said the Sergeant who was holding one of the soldier's arms.

"He says he's a deserter, sir," Captain Braudel added, "and that's his wife." Braudel spat a stream of tobacco juice onto a rock.

Loup scrambled down from the ridge. The soldier's uniform, he now saw, was not British. The waistcoat and sash, the half boots and the plumed bicorne were all too fancy for British taste, indeed they were so fancy that for a second Loup wondered if the captive was an officer, then he realized that Braudel would never have treated a captured officer with such disdain. Braudel clearly liked the woman who now raised shy eyes to stare at Loup. She was dark-haired, attractive and probably, Loup guessed, about fifteen or sixteen. Loup had heard that the Spanish and Portuguese peasants sold such daughters as wives to allied soldiers for a hundred francs apiece, the cost of a good meal in Paris. The French army, on the other hand, just took their girls for nothing. "What's your name?" Loup asked the deserter in Spanish.

"Grogan, sir. Sean Grogan."

"Your unit, Grogan?"

"Real Companпa Irlandesa, seсor." Guardsman Grogan was plainly willing to cooperate with his captors and so Loup signalled the Sergeant to release him.

Loup questioned Grogan for ten minutes, hearing how the Real Companпa Irlandesa had travelled by sea from Valencia, and how the men had been happy enough with the idea of joining the rest of the Spanish army at Cadiz, but how they resented being forced to serve with the British. Many of the men, the fugitive claimed, had fled from British servitude, and they had not enlisted with the King of Spain just to return to King George's tyranny.

Loup cut short the protests. "When did you run?" he asked.

"Last night, sir. Half a dozen of us did. And a good many ran the night before."

"There is an Englishman in the fort, a rifle officer. You know him?"

Grogan frowned, as though he found the question odd, but then he nodded. "Captain Sharpe, sir. He's supposed to be training us."

"To do what?"

"To fight, sir," Grogan said nervously. He found this one-eyed, calm-spoken Frenchman very disconcerting. "But we know how to fight already," he added defiantly.

"I'm sure you do," Loup said sympathetically. He poked at his teeth for a second, then spat the makeshift toothpick away. "So you ran away, soldier, because you didn't want to serve King George, is that it?"

"Yes, sir."

"But you'd certainly fight for His Majesty the Emperor?"

Grogan hesitated. "I would, sir," he finally said, but without any conviction.

"Is that why you deserted?" Loup asked. "To fight for the Emperor? Or were you hoping to get back to your comfortable barracks in the Escorial?"

Grogan shrugged. "We were going to her family's house in Madrid, sir." He jerked his head towards his wife. "Her father's a cobbler, and I'm not such a bad hand with a needle and thread myself. I thought I'd learn the trade."

"It's always good to have a trade, soldier," Loup said with a smile. He took a pistol from his belt and toyed with it for a moment before he pulled back the heavy cock. "My trade is killing," he added in the same pleasant voice and then, without showing a trace of emotion, he lifted the gun, aimed it at Grogan's forehead and pulled the trigger.

The woman screamed as her husband's blood splashed across her face. Grogan was thrown violently back, blood spraying and misting the air, then his body thumped and slid backwards down the hill. "He didn't really want to fight for us at all," Loup said. "He'd have been just another useless mouth to feed."

"And the woman, sir?" Braudel asked. She was bending over her dead husband and screaming at the French.

"She's yours, Paul," Loup said. "But only after you have delivered a message to Madame Juanita de Elia. Give madame my undying compliments, tell her that her toy Irish soldiers have arrived and are conveniently close to us, and that tomorrow morning we shall mount a little drama for their amusement. Tell her also that she would do well to spend the night with us."

Braudel smirked. "She'll be pleased, sir."

"Which is more than your woman will be," Loup said, glancing at the howling Spanish girl. "Tell this widow, Paul, that if she does not shut up I will tear her tongue out and feed it to the Dona Juanita's hounds. Now come on." He led his men down the hill to where the horses had been picketed. Tonight the Dona Juanita de Elia would come to the wolf's stronghold, and tomorrow she would ride to the enemy like a plague rat sent to destroy them from within.

And somewhere, some time before victory was final, Sharpe would feel France's vengeance for two dead men. For Loup was a soldier, and he did not forget, did not forgive and never lost.

CHAPTER III

Eleven men deserted during the Real Companпa Irlandesa's first night in the San Isidro Fort and eight men, including four picquets set to stop such desertions, ran on the second night. The guardsmen were providing their own sentries and Colonel Runciman suggested Sharpe's riflemen took over the duty. Sharpe argued against such a change. His riflemen were supposed to be training the Real Companпa Irlandesa and they could not work all day and stand guard all night. "I'm sure you're right, General," Sharpe said tactfully, "but unless headquarters sends us more men we can't work round the clock."

Colonel Runciman, Sharpe had discovered, was malleable so long as he was addressed as 'General'. He only wanted to be left alone to sleep, to eat and to grumble about the amount of work expected from him. "Even a general is only human," he liked to inform Sharpe, then he would inquire how he was supposed to discharge the onerous duties of liaising with the Real Companпa Irlandesa while he was also expected to be responsible for the Royal Wagon Train. In truth the Colonel's deputy still ran the wagon train with the same efficiency he had always displayed, but until a new Wagon Master General was formally appointed Colonel Runciman's signature and seal were necessary on a handful of administrative documents.

"You could surrender the seals of office to your deputy, General?" Sharpe suggested.

"Never! Never let it be said that a Runciman evaded his duty, Sharpe. Never!" The Colonel glanced anxiously out of his quarters to see how his cook was proceeding with a hare shot by Daniel Hagman. Runciman's lethargy meant that the Colonel was quite content to let Sharpe deal with the Real Companпa Irlandesa, but even for a man of Runciman's idle nonchalance, nineteen deserters in two nights was cause to worry. "Damn it, man" — he leaned back after inspecting the cook's progress—"it reflects on our efficiency, don't you see? We must do something, Sharpe! In another fortnight we won't have a soul left!"

Which, Sharpe reflected silently, was exactly what Hogan wanted. The Real Companпa Irlandesa was supposed to self-destruct, yet Richard Sharpe had been put in command of their training and there was a stubborn streak in Sharpe's soul that would not let him permit a unit for which he was responsible to slide into ruin. Damn it, he would make the guards into soldiers whether Hogan wanted him to or not.

Sharpe doubted he would get much help from Lord Kiely. Each morning his Lordship woke in a foul ill-temper that lasted until his steady intake of alcohol gave him a burst of high spirits that would usually stretch into the evening, but then be replaced by a morose sullenness aggravated by his losses at cards. Then he would sleep till late in the morning and so begin the cycle again. "How in hell," Sharpe asked Kiely's second-in-command, Captain Donaju, "did he get command of the guard?"

"Birth," Donaju said. He was a pale, thin man with a worried face who looked more like an impoverished student than a soldier, but of all the officers in the Real Companпa Irlandesa he seemed the most promising. "You can't have a royal guard commanded by a commoner, Sharpe," Donaju said with a touch of sarcasm, "but when Kiely's sober he can be quite impressive." The last sentence contained no sarcasm at all.

"Impressive?" Sharpe asked dubiously.

"He's a good swordsman," Donaju replied. "He detests the French, and in his heart he would like to be a good man."

"Kiely detests the French?" Sharpe asked without bothering to disguise his scepticism.

"The French, Sharpe, are destroying Kiely's privileged world," Donaju explained. "He's from the ancien rйgime, so of course he hates them. He has no money, but under the ancien rйgime that didn't matter because birth and title were enough to get a man a royal appointment and exemption from taxes. But the French preach equality and advancement on merit, and that threatens Kiely's world so he escapes the threat by drinking, whoring and gambling. The flesh is very weak, Sharpe, and it's especially feeble if you're bored, underemployed and also suspect that you're a relic of a bygone world." Donaju shrugged, as though ashamed of having offered Sharpe such a long and high-minded sermon. The Captain was a modest man, but efficient, and it was on Donaju's slender shoulders that the day-to-day running of the guard had devolved. He now told Sharpe how he would attempt to stem the desertions by doubling the sentries and using only men he believed were reliable as picquets, but at the same time he blamed the British for his men's predicament. "Why did they put us in this godforsaken place?" Donaju asked. "It's almost as if your General wants our men to run."

That was a shrewd thrust and Sharpe had no real answer. Instead he mumbled something about the fort being a strategic outpost and needing a garrison, but he was unconvincing and Donaju's only response was to politely ignore the fiction.

For the San Isidro Fort was indeed a godforsaken place. It might have had strategic value once, but now the main road between Spain and Portugal ran leagues to the south and so the once huge fastness had been abandoned to decay. Weeds grew thick in the dry moat that had been eroded by rainfall so that the once formidable obstacle had become little more than a shallow ditch. Frost had crumbled the walls, toppling their stones into the ditch to make countless bridges to what was left of the glacis. A white owl roosted in the remains of the chapel's bell tower while the once-tended graves of the garrison's officers had become nothing but shallow declivities in a stony meadow. The only serviceable parts of San Isidro were the old barracks buildings that had been kept in a state of crude repair thanks to the infrequent visits of Portuguese regiments which had been stationed there in times of political crisis. During those crises the men would block the holes in the barracks walls to protect themselves from the cold winds, while the officers took up quarters in the twin-towered gatehouse that had somehow survived the years of neglect. There were even gates that Runciman solemnly ordered closed and barred each night, though employing such a precaution against desertion was like stopping up one earth of a mighty rabbit warren.

Yet, for all its decay, the fort still held a mouldering grandeur. The impressive twin-towered gateway was embellished with royal escutcheons and approached by a four-arched causeway that spanned the only section of the dry moat still capable of checking an assault. The chapel ruins were laced with delicate carved stonework while the gun platforms were still hugely massive. Most impressive of all was the fort's location for its ramparts offered sky-born views deep across shadowy peaks to horizons unimaginable distances away. The eastern walls looked deep into Spain and it was on those eastern battlements, beneath the flags of Spain and Britain, that Lord Kiely discovered Sharpe on the third morning of the guard's stay in the fort. It seemed that even Kiely had become worried about the rate of desertion. "We didn't come here to be destroyed by desertion," Kiely snapped at Sharpe. The wind quivered the waxed tips of his moustaches.

Sharpe fought back the comment that Kiely was responsible for his men, not Sharpe, and instead asked his Lordship just why he had come to join the British forces.

And, to Sharpe's surprise, the young Lord Kiely took the question seriously. "I want to fight, Sharpe. That's why I wrote to His Majesty."

"So you're in the right place, my Lord," Sharpe said sourly. "The Crapauds are just the other side of that valley." He gestured towards the deep, bare glen that separated the San Isidro from the nearest hills. Sharpe suspected that French scouts must be active on the valley's far side and would already have seen the movement in the old fort.

"We're not in the right place, Sharpe," Kiely said. "I asked King Ferdinand to order us to Cadiz, to be in our own army and among our own kind, but he sent us to Wellington instead. We don't want to be here, but we have royal orders and we obey those orders."

"Then give your men a royal order not to desert," Sharpe said glibly.

"They're bored! They're worried! They feel betrayed!" Kiely shuddered, not with emotion, but because he had just risen from his bed and was still trying to shake off his morning hangover. "They didn't come here to be trained, Sharpe," he snarled, "but to fight! They're proud men, a bodyguard, not a pack of raw recruits. Their job is to fight for the King, to show Europe that Ferdinand still has teeth."

Sharpe pointed east. "See that track, my Lord? The one that climbs to that saddle in the hills? March your men up there, keep them marching for half a day and I'll guarantee you a fight. The French will love it. It'll be easier for them than fighting choirboys. Half your men don't even have working muskets! And the other half can't use them. You tell me they're trained? I've seen militia companies better trained in Britain! And all those plump militia bastards do is parade in the market place once a week and then beat a retreat to the nearest bloody tavern. Your men aren't trained, my Lord, whatever you might think, but you give them to me for a month and I'll have them sharper than a bloody razor."

"They're merely out of practice," Kiely said loftily. His immense pride would not let him concede that Sharpe was right and that his vaunted palace guards were a shambles. He turned and gazed at his men who were being drilled on the weed-thick flagstones of the fort's plaza. Beyond the company, hard by the gatehouse towers, grooms were bringing saddled horses ready for the officers' midday exercises in horsemanship, while just inside the gate, on a stretch of smooth flagstones, Father Sarsfield was teaching the catechism to some of the company's children. The learning process evidently involved a deal of laughter; indeed, Sharpe had noticed, wherever the chaplain went, good humour followed. "If they were just given an opportunity," Kiely said of his men, "they'd fight."

"I'm sure they would," Sharpe said, "and they'd lose. What do you want of them? Suicide?"

"If necessary," Kiely said seriously. He had been staring east into enemy-held country, but now looked Sharpe in the eye. "If necessary," he said again, "yes."

Sharpe gazed at the dissolute, ravaged young face. "You're mad, my Lord."

Kiely did not take offence at the accusation. "Would you call Roland's defence of Roncesvalles the suicide of a madman? Did Leonidas's Spartans do nothing but throw away their lives in a fit of imbecility? What about your own Sir Richard Grenville? Was he just mad? Sometimes, Sharpe, a great name and undying fame can only come from a grand gesture." He pointed at the far hills.

"There are three hundred thousand Frenchmen over there, and how many British here? Thirty thousand? The war is lost, Sharpe, it is lost. A great Christian kingdom is going down to mediocrity, and all because of a Corsican upstart. All the glory and the valour and the splendour of a royal world are about to become commonplace and tawdry. All the nasty, mean things—republicanism, democracy, equality—are crawling into the light and claiming that they can replace a lineage of great kings. We are seeing the end of history, Sharpe, and the beginnings of chaos, but maybe, just maybe, King Ferdinand's household guard can bring the curtain down with one last act of shining glory." For a few seconds the drunken Kiely had betrayed his younger, nobler self. "That's why we're here, Sharpe, to make a story that will still be told when men have forgotten the very name of Bonaparte."

"Christ," Sharpe said, "no wonder your boys are deserting. Jesus! I would too. If I take a man into battle, my Lord, I like to offer him a better than evens chance that he'll march away with his skin intact. If I wanted to kill the buggers I'd just strangle them in their sleep. It's kinder." He turned and watched the Real Companпa Irlandesa. The men were taking it in turns to use the forty or so serviceable muskets and, with a handful of exceptions, they were virtually useless. A good soldier could shoot a smoothbore musket every twenty seconds, but these men were lucky to get a shot away every forty seconds. The guards had spent too long wearing powdered wigs and standing outside gilded doors, and not long enough learning the simple habits of priming, ramming, firing and loading. "But I'll train them," Sharpe said when the echo of another straggling volley had faded across the fort, "and I'll stop the buggers deserting." He knew he was undermining Hogan's stratagem, but Sharpe liked the rank and file of the Real Companпa Irlandesa. They were soldiers like any others, not so well trained maybe, and with more confused loyalties than most, but the majority of the men were willing enough. There was no mischief there, and it cut against Sharpe's grain to betray good men. He wanted to train them. He wanted to make the company into a unit of which any army could be proud.

"So how will you stop them deserting?" Kiely asked.

"By my own method," Sharpe said, "and you don't want to know what it is, my Lord, because it isn't a method Roland would have much liked."

Lord Kiely did not respond to Sharpe's taunt. Instead he was staring eastwards at something that had just claimed his attention. He took a small telescope from his uniform pocket, snapped it open and trained it across the wide bare valley to where Sharpe, staring into the morning sun, could just make out the figure of a lone horseman picking his way down the track which zigzagged from the saddle. Kiely turned. "Gentlemen!" he shouted at his officers. "To horse!" His Lordship, energized by a sudden excitement, ran down one of the ammunition ramps and shouted for a groom to bring his big black stallion.

Sharpe turned back east and took out his own telescope. It took him a moment or two to train the cumbersome instrument, then he managed to trap the distant rider in the lens. The horseman was in the uniform of the Real Companпa Irlandesa and he was also in trouble. Till now the man had been following the course of the steep track as it twisted down the valley's side, but now he abandoned the track and put his horse to the precipitous slope and slashed back with his whip to drive the beast down that dangerous descent. Half a dozen dogs raced ahead of the horseman, but Sharpe was more interested in what had prompted the man's sudden, dangerous plunge down the mountainside and so he raised the telescope to the skyline and there, silhouetted against the cloudless sky's hard brilliance, he saw dragoons. French dragoons. The lone horseman was a fugitive and the French were close behind.

"Are you coming, Sharpe?" Colonel Runciman, mounted on his carthorse-like mare, had thoughtfully provided his spare horse for Sharpe. Runciman was relying more and more on Sharpe as a companion to stave off the necessity of dealing with the sardonic Lord Kiely whose tart comments constantly dispirited Runciman. "D'you know what's happening, Sharpe?" Runciman asked as his nemesis led a ragged procession of mounted officers out of the fort's imposing entranceway. "Is it an attack?" The Colonel's uncommon display of energy was doubtless caused by fear rather than curiosity.

"There's a fellow in company uniform coming towards us, General, with a pack of Frogs on his tail."

"My word!" Runciman looked alarmed. As Wagon Master General he had been given few opportunities to see the enemy and he was not certain he wanted to remedy that lack now, but he could hardly display timidity in front of the guards and so he spurred his horse into a lumbering walk. "You'll stay close to me, Sharpe! As an aide, you understand?"

"Of course, General." Sharpe, uncomfortable as ever on horseback, followed Runciman across the entrance bridge. Sergeant Harper, curious about the excitement that had stirred the fort into sudden activity, led the Real Companпa Irlandesa onto the ramparts, ostensibly to stand guard, but in reality so they could watch whatever event had prompted this sudden exodus of officers from San Isidro.

By the time Sharpe had negotiated the causeway over the half-filled dry moat and had persuaded his horse to turn east off the road, the adventure seemed over. The fugitive had already crossed the stream and was now closer to Lord Kiely's rescue party than to his French pursuers, and as Kiely was attended by a dozen officers and there were only half a dozen dragoons, the horseman was clearly safe. Sharpe watched the fugitive's dogs lope excitedly round the rescue party, then he saw that the pursuing Frenchmen were dressed in the mysterious grey coats of Brigadier General Loup's brigade. "That fellow had a lucky escape, General," Sharpe said, "those are Loup's dragoons."

"Loup?" Runciman asked.

"Brigadier Loup, General. He's a nasty Frog who dresses his men in wolf fur and likes to cut off his enemies' balls before they die."

"Oh, my word." Runciman paled. "Are you sure?"

"I've met him, General. He threatened to geld me."

Runciman was driven to fortify himself by taking a handful of sugared almonds from a pocket and putting them one by one into his mouth. "I do sometimes wonder if my dear father was not right," he said between mouthfuls, "and that perhaps I should have chosen a churchman's career. I would have made a very serviceable bishop, I think, though perhaps a bishop's life might not have proved full enough for a man of my energies. There's little real work to do as a prelate, Sharpe. One preaches the odd sermon, of course, and makes oneself pleasant to the better sort of people in the county, and from time to time a fellow has to whip the lesser clergy into line, but there's not much else to the job. It's hardly a demanding life, Sharpe, and, quite frankly, most episcopal palaces are inhabited by very mediocre men. My dear father excepted, of course. Oh, my word, what's happening?"

Lord Kiely had ridden ahead to greet the fugitive, but, after stretching out a hand and offering a hasty word, his Lordship had spurred on towards the French pursuers who, recognizing that their quarry had escaped, had already reined in their horses. But now Kiely crossed the stream, drew his sword and shouted a challenge to the Frenchmen.

Every man in the valley knew what Kiely intended. He was challenging an enemy officer to a duel. Men of sense, like infantrymen or anyone given half a set of wits, disapproved of the practice, but cavalrymen could rarely resist the challenge. To take part in such a combat required pride and bravery, but to win such a fight was to forge a name as a warrior and every cavalry regiment in every army had officers whose fame went back to just such a fight: one man against one man, single sword against single sword, a duel between strangers that invited fame or death. "Kiely's trying to get himself killed, General," Sharpe told Runciman. Sharpe sounded sour, yet he could not deny a reluctant admiration for Kiely who, for this moment at least, had thrown off his hangover and his morose bitterness to become what he was in his own daydreams: the perfect knight and king's champion. "Kiely's got a fancy to die famous," Sharpe said. "He wants to be Roland or that Spartan fellow who thumped the Persians."

"Leonidas, Sharpe, King Leonidas," Runciman said. "Mind you, Sharpe, Kiely's a fine swordsman. I've watched him at practice, and the drink scarcely slows him a beat! Not that we'll see any evidence of that today," Runciman said as Kiely turned away from the unmoving Frenchmen. "None of them will fight!" Runciman sounded surprised, but also a little relieved that he would not have to witness any bloodshed.

"Kiely hardly gave them time to accept," Sharpe said. And Kiely had indeed stayed only a few seconds, almost as though he had wanted to make the defiant gesture, but was scared lest any of the enemy might accept his challenge.

Then one of the enemy did accept. Kiely had reached the stream's bank when a shout sounded behind him and a dragoon officer spurred out from among his companions. Kiely twisted in his saddle and Sharpe could have sworn that his Lordship blanched as the Frenchman rode towards him. "Oh, my word," Runciman said in alarm.

Kiely could not refuse to fight now, not without losing face, and so he returned to the grey dragoon who threw back his wolf-fur pelisse, tugged down on his helmet's brim, then drew his long-bladed straight sword. He twisted its strap about his wrist, then held the blade upright in salute of the man who would be either his killer or his victim. Lord Kiely returned the salute with his own straight blade. His Lordship might have made the challenge as a gesture that he never expected to be taken up, but now that he was committed to the fight he showed neither reluctance nor nervousness.

"They're both bloody fools," Sharpe said, "dying for bloody nothing." He and Runciman had joined the Real Companпa Irlandesa's officers as had Father Sarsfield who had abandoned his catechism class to follow Kiely into the valley. The priest heard Sharpe's scorn and offered the rifleman a surprised glance. The priest, like Runciman, seemed uncomfortable with the imminent duel and was running the beads of his rosary through plump fingers as he watched the two horsemen face each other across a fifty-yard gap. Lord Kiely dropped his blade from the salute and both men put spurs to their horses' flanks.

"Oh, my word," Runciman said. He fumbled another handful of almonds from his pocket.

The two horses closed slowly at first. Only at the very last moment did their riders release them to the full gallop. Both men were right-handed and looked to Sharpe to be well-matched in size, though Lord Kiely's black horse was the bigger by a clear hand.

The dragoon cut first. He seemed to have put his faith in a savage sweeping slash that would have disembowelled an ox, except that at the last moment he checked the swing to reverse the blade and cut back at his enemy's unprotected neck. It was done as fast as a man could blink and on the back of a horse at full gallop, and against any other rider it might have worked, but Lord Kiely simply turned his horse into his opponent's mount without even bothering to parry. The dragoon's smaller horse staggered as the weight of the stallion hit its hindquarters. The Frenchman's backslash cut thin air, then the horses parted and both men were sawing on their reins. Kiely turned faster and rammed his spurs back to add the horse's weight to the lunge of his straight sword. Masters-at-arms always taught that the point beats the edge, and Kiely now lanced his sword's point at the grey dragoon's belly and for a second Sharpe thought the lunge would surely pierce the Frenchman's defence, but somehow the dragoon parried and a second later the sound of the blades' ringing clash carried to Sharpe. By the time the harsh sound had echoed back from the far hills the two horses were already twenty yards apart and being turned into the attack again. Neither man had dared ride too far from his opponent in case he should be pursued and attacked from behind, so from now on the duel would be fought at close quarters and it would depend as much on the training of the two horses as on the riders' swordsmanship.

"Oh, dear," Runciman said. He feared to watch the horror of a man dying, yet dared not take his eyes from the spectacle. It was a sight as old as warfare: two champions clashing in full view of their comrades. "It's a wonder Kiely can fight at all," Runciman continued, "considering how much he drank last night. Five bottles of claret by my count."

"He's young," Sharpe said sourly, "and he was born with natural gifts for riding horses and fighting with swords. But as he gets older, General, those gifts will waste away and he knows it. He's living on borrowed time and that's why he wants to die young."

"I can't believe that," Runciman said, then winced as the two men hammered at each other with their swords.

"Kiely should go for the bastard's horse, not the man," Sharpe said. "You can always beat a horseman by crippling his bloody horse."

"It isn't the way a gentleman fights, Captain," Father Sarsfield said. The priest had edged his horse close to the two British officers.

"There's no future in being a gentleman in a fight, Father," Sharpe said. "If you think wars should only be fought by gentlemen then you should stop recruiting people like me out of the gutter."

"No need to mention your origins, Sharpe," Runciman hissed reprovingly. "You are an officer now, remember!"

"I pray for the day when no gentleman fights at all, nor other men either," Father Sarsfield said. "I do so dislike fighting."

"Yet you're a chaplain in the army?" Sharpe asked.

"I go where the need is greatest," the chaplain said, "and where will a man of God look to find the greatest concentration of sinners outside of a prison? In an army, I would suggest, begging your presence." Sarsfield smiled, then flinched as the duellists charged and their long swords clashed again. Lord Kiely's stallion instinctively ducked its head to avoid the blades that hissed above its ears. Lord Kiely lunged at his opponent and one of Kiely's officers cheered when he thought that his Lordship had skewered the Frenchman, but the sword had merely pierced the cloak that was rolled onto the cantle of the dragoon's saddle. Kiely dragged his sword free of the cloak just in time to parry a vicious backslash from the dragoon's heavier blade.

"Will Kiely win, do you think?" Runciman asked Sharpe anxiously.

"God knows, General," Sharpe said. The two horses were virtually motionless now, just standing still as the riders exchanged blows. The sound of the steel was continuous and Sharpe knew the men would be getting tired for swordfighting was damned hard work. Their arms would be weary from the weight and Sharpe could imagine the breath rasping in their throats, the grunts as they cut down with the steel and the pain as the sweat stung their eyes. And every now and then, Sharpe knew, each man would feel the strange sensation of catching the dispassionate gaze of the stranger he was trying to kill. The blades clashed and scraped for another few seconds, then the grey dragoon yielded that phase of the fight by touching spurs to his horse.

The Frenchman's horse started forward, then put a hoof into a rabbit's hole.

The horse stumbled. Kiely spurred forward as he saw his opportunity. He slashed down hard, rising out of the saddle to put all the weight of his body behind the killing blow, but somehow the dragoon parried the cut, even though the strength of it almost knocked him out of the saddle. His tired horse struggled to rise as the dragoon parried again and again, then suddenly the Frenchman abandoned his defence and lunged hard at Kiely. His sword tip caught in the hilt of Kiely's sword and drove it clear out of Kiely's grip. Kiely had looped the silk-tasselled sword strap around his wrist so the sword just hung loose, but it would take his Lordship a few seconds to retrieve the snakeskin-wrapped hilt and to give himself that time he wheeled his horse desperately away. The Frenchman scented victory and spurred his tired horse after his opponent.

Then the carbine cracked. The report was startling and it echoed back from the steep hill slope before anyone reacted.

The dragoon gave a gasp as the bullet struck him. The shot had taken him in the ribs and knocked him back in his saddle. The dying man recovered his balance then shook his head in disbelief that someone had interfered in the duel. His own sword fell to dangle from its strap as his companions shouted in protest that anyone should have dared break the convention that such duellists should be left alone on the battlefield, then the dragoon's mouth fell open and a wash of dark blood soaked the front of his grey jacket as he collapsed backwards off his tired horse.

An astonished Lord Kiely took one look at the vengeful dragoons spurring towards their fallen companion, then fled across the stream. "I don't understand," Colonel Runciman said.

"Someone broke the rules, General," Sharpe said, "and they saved Kiely's bacon by doing it. He was a dead man till that shot was fired." The French were still shouting protests, and one of them rode to the stream bank and dared any of the allied officers to face him in a second duel. No one accepted his offer so he began to call taunts and insults, all of which Sharpe reckoned were deserved because whoever had fired the carbine had killed the Frenchman unfairly. "So who did fire?" Sharpe asked aloud.

It had been the single officer who had been pursued by the dragoons and whose arrival in the valley had prompted the duel who had ended it so unsportingly. Sharpe could see the carbine in the fugitive's hands, but what surprised him was that no one was chiding the officer for his interference in the duel. Instead the other officers of the Real Companпa Irlandesa clustered about the newcomer in evident welcome. Sharpe urged his horse closer to see that the fugitive was a slim young officer with what Sharpe took to be a plume of shining black horsehair reaching down his back, but then Sharpe saw that it was not horsehair at all, but real hair, and that the officer was not an officer either, but a woman.

"He was going for his pistol," the woman offered in explanation, "so I shot him."

"Bravo!" one of the admiring officers called. The taunting Frenchman had turned away in disgust.

"Is that…? Is she…? Is it…?" Runciman asked incoherently.

"It's a woman, General," Sharpe said drily.

"Oh, my word, Sharpe! So he… she is."

She was a striking-looking woman too, Sharpe thought, whose fierce looks were made even more noticeable by the man's uniform that had been tailored to her trim figure. She swept off her plumed hat to salute Lord Kiely, then leaned over to kiss his Lordship. "It's the mistress, General," Sharpe said. "Major Hogan told me about her. She collects uniforms from all her lovers' regiments."

"Oh, my word. You mean they're not married and we're to be introduced?" Runciman asked in alarm, but it was too late to escape, for Lord Kiely was already beckoning the two English officers forward. He introduced Runciman first, then gestured towards Sharpe. "Captain Richard Sharpe, my dear, our tutor in modern fighting." Kiely did not try to disguise the sneer as he so described Sharpe.

"Ma'am," Sharpe said awkwardly. Juanita gave Runciman one withering glance, then appraised Sharpe for a long time while her pack of hunting dogs sniffed about his horse's legs. The woman's gaze was unfriendly and she finally turned away without even acknowledging the rifleman's presence. "So why did you shoot the dragoon, ma'am?" Sharpe asked, trying to provoke her.

She turned back to him. "Because he was going to shoot my Lord Kiely," she answered defiantly. "I saw him reach for his pistol."

She had not seen anything of the kind, Sharpe thought, but he would achieve nothing by challenging her bare-faced lie. She had shot to preserve her lover's life, nothing else, and Sharpe felt a pang of jealousy that the wastrel Kiely should have found himself such a brazen, defiant and remarkable woman. She was no beauty, but something in her clever, feral face stirred Sharpe, though he would be damned before he let her know she had that power. "You've come far, ma'am?" he asked.

"From Madrid, Captain," she said frostily.

"And the French didn't stop you?" Sharpe asked pointedly.

"I don't need French permission to travel in my own country, Captain, nor, in my own country, do I need explain myself to impertinent British officers." She spurred away, summoning her shaggy-haired, long-legged hounds to follow her.

"She doesn't like you, Sharpe," Runciman said.

"It's a mutual thing, General," Sharpe said. "I wouldn't trust the bitch an inch." It was mainly jealousy that made him say it and he knew it.

"She's a fine-looking woman, though, ain't she?" Runciman sounded wistful as though he understood he was not the man to donate a uniform of the 37th Line to Juanita's wardrobe. "I can't say as I've ever seen a woman in breeches before," Runciman said, "let alone astride a saddle. Doesn't happen much in Hampshire."

"And I've never seen a woman ride from Madrid to Portugal without a servant or a lick of luggage," Sharpe said. "I wouldn't trust her, General."

"You wouldn't trust who, Sharpe?" Lord Kiely asked. He was riding back towards the British officers.

"Brigadier Loup, sir," Sharpe lied smoothly. "I was explaining to General Runciman the significance of the grey uniforms." Sharpe pointed towards the dragoons who were now carrying the dead man's body back up the hillside.

"A grey uniform didn't help that dragoon today!" Kiely was still animated by the duel and apparently unashamed of the way it had ended. His face seemed younger and more attractive as though the arrival of his mistress had restored the lustre of youth to Kiely's drink-ravaged looks.

"Chivalry didn't help him either," Sharpe said sourly. Runciman, suspecting that Sharpe's words might provoke another duel, hissed in remonstrance.

Kiely just sneered at Sharpe. "He broke the rules of chivalry, Sharpe. Not me! The man was evidently going for his pistol. I reckon he knew he would be dead the moment I recovered my sword." His expression dared Sharpe to contradict him.

"Funny how chivalry becomes sordid, isn't it, my Lord?" Sharpe said instead. "But then war is sordid. It might start with chivalrous intentions, but it always ends with men screaming for their mothers and having their guts flensed out by cannon balls. You can dress a man in scarlet and gold, my Lord, and tell him it's a noble cause he graces, but he'll still end up bleeding to death and shitting himself in a panic. Chivalry stinks, my Lord, because it's the most sordid bloody thing on earth."

Kiely was still holding his sword, but now he slid the long blade home into its scabbard. "I don't need lectures on chivalry from you, Sharpe. Your job is to be a drillmaster. And to stop my rogues from deserting. If, indeed, you can stop them."

"I can do that, my Lord," Sharpe promised. "I can do that."

And that afternoon he went to keep his word.

Sharpe walked south from San Isidro following the spine of the hills as they dropped ever lower towards the main border road. Where the hills petered out into rolling meadowland there was a small village of narrow twisting streets, stone-walled gardens and low-roofed cottages that huddled on a slope climbing from a fast-flowing stream up to a rocky ridge where the village church was crowned by the ragged sticks of a stork's nest. The village was called Fuentes de Onoro, the village that had provoked Loup's fury, and it lay only two miles from Wellington's headquarters in the town of Vilar Formoso. That proximity worried Sharpe who feared his errand might be questioned by an inquisitive staff officer, but the only British troops in Fuentes de Onoro were a small picquet of the 60th Rifles who were positioned just north of the village and took no notice of Sharpe. On the stream's eastern bank were a few scattered houses, some walled gardens and orchards and a small chapel that were all reached from the main village by a footbridge constructed of stone slabs supported on boulders standing beside a ford where a patrol of King's German Legion cavalry was watering its horses. The Germans warned Sharpe that there were no allied troops on the further bank. "Nothing but French over there," the cavalry's Captain said and then, when he discovered Sharpe's identity, he insisted on sharing a flask of brandy with the rifleman. They exchanged news of Von Lossow, a KGL friend of Sharpe's, then the Captain led his men out of the stream and onto the long straight road that led towards Ciudad Rodrigo. "I'm looking for trouble," he called over his shoulder as he pulled himself up into the saddle, "and with God's help I'll find it!"

Sharpe turned the other way and climbed the village street to where a tiny inn served a robust red wine. It was not much of an inn, but then Fuentes de Onoro was not much of a village. The place lay just inside the Spanish border and had been plundered by the French as they had marched into Portugal then raked over again as they marched back out, and the villagers were justifiably suspicious of all soldiers. Sharpe took his wineskin out of the inn's smoky interior to a small vegetable garden where he sat beneath a grapevine with a half severed trunk. The damage seemed not to have affected the plant which was putting out vigorous new tendrils and bright fresh leaves. He dozed there, almost too weary to lift the wineskin.

"The French tried to cut the vine down." A voice spoke in sudden Spanish behind Sharpe. "They tried to destroy everything. Bastards." The man belched. It was a vast belch, loud enough to stir a cat sleeping on the garden's far wall. Sharpe turned to see a mountainous creature dressed in filthy brown leggings, a bloodstained cotton shirt, a green French dragoon coat that had split at all the seams in order to accommodate its new owner's bulk, and a leather apron that was caked black and stiff with dried blood. The man and his clothes stank of old food, bad breath, stale blood and decay. At his belt there hung an old-fashioned, unscabbarded sabre with a blade as dark, thick and filthy as a pole-axe, a horse pistol, a small bone-handled knife with a curiously hooked blade and a wooden whistle. "You're Captain Sharpe?" the enormous man asked as Sharpe rose to greet him.

"Yes."

"And my whistle tells you who I am, does it not?"

Sharpe shook his head. "No."

"You mean that castrators in England don't signal their coming with a blast on the whistle?"

"I've never heard of them doing it," Sharpe said.

El Castrador sat heavily on a bench opposite Sharpe. "No whistles? Where would I be without my little whistle? It tells a village I am coming. I blow it and the villagers bring out their hogs, beeves and foals, and I bring out my little knife." The man flicked the small, wickedly curved blade and laughed. He had brought his own wineskin which he now squirted into his mouth before shaking his head in rueful nostalgia. "And in the old days, my friend," El Castrador went on wistfully, "the mothers would bring out their little boys to be cut, and two years later the boys would travel to Lisbon or Madrid to sing so sweetly! My father, now, he cut many boys. One of his youngsters even sang for the Pope! Can you imagine? For the Pope in Rome! And all because of this little knife." He fingered the small bone-handled cutter.

"And sometimes the boys died?" Sharpe guessed.

El Castrador shrugged. "Boys are easily replaced, my friend. One cannot afford to be sentimental about small children." He jetted more red wine down his vast gullet. "I had eight boys, only three survived and that, believe me, is two too many."

"No girls?"

"Four." El Castrador fell silent for a second or two, then sighed. "That French bastard Loup took them. You know of Loup?"

"I know him."

"He took them and gave them to his men. El Lobo and his men like young girls." He touched the knife at his belt, then gave Sharpe a long speculative look. "So you are La Aguja's Englishman."

Sharpe nodded.

"Ah! Teresa!" The Spaniard sighed. "We were angry when we heard she had given herself to an Englishman, but now I see you, Captain, I can understand. How is she?"

"Fighting the French near Badajoz, but she sends her greetings." In fact Teresa had not written to Sharpe in weeks, but her name was a talisman among all the partisans and had been sufficient to arrange this meeting with the man who had been so roundly defeated by Brigadier Loup. Loup had tamed this part of the Spanish frontier and wherever Sharpe went he heard the Frenchman's name mentioned with an awed hatred. Every piece of mischief was the fault of Loup, every death, every house fire, every flood, every sick child, every robbed hive, every stillborn calf, every unseasonable frost; all were the wolf's work.

"She will be proud of you, Englishman," El Castrador said.

"She will?" Sharpe asked. "Why?"

"Because El Lobo has placed a price on your head," El Castrador said. "Did you not know?"

"I didn't know."

"One hundred dollars," El Castrador said slowly, with relish, as though he was tempted by the price himself.

"A pittance," Sharpe said disparagingly. Twenty-five pounds might be a small fortune to most people, a good year's pay indeed for most working folk, but still Sharpe reckoned his life was worth more than twenty-five pounds. "The reward on Teresa's head is two hundred dollars," he said resentfully.

"But we partisans kill more French than you English," El Castrador said, "so it is only right that we should be worth more." Sharpe tactfully refrained from asking whether there was any reward on El Castrador's own matted and lice-ridden head. Sharpe suspected the man had lost most of his power because of his defeats, but at least, Sharpe thought, El Castrador lived while most of his men were dead, killed by the wolf after being cut in the same way that El Castrador had cut his captives. There were times when Sharpe was very glad he did not fight the guerrilla.

El Castrador raised the wineskin again, spurted the wine into his mouth, swallowed, belched again, then breathed an effluent gust towards Sharpe. "So why do you want to see me, Englishman?"

Sharpe told him. The telling took a good while for though El Castrador was a brutal man, he was not especially clever and Sharpe had to explain his requirements several times before the big man understood. In the end, though, El Castrador nodded. "Tonight, you say?"

"I would be pleased. And grateful."

"But how grateful?" El Castrador shot a sly look at the Englishman. "Shall I tell you what I need? Muskets! Or even rifles like that!" He touched the barrel of Sharpe's Baker rifle which was propped against the vine's trunk.

"I can bring you muskets," Sharpe said, though he did not yet know how. The Real Companпa Irlandesa needed muskets much more desperately than this great butcher of a man did, and Sharpe did not even know how he was to supply those weapons. Hogan would never agree to give the Real Companпa Irlandesa new muskets, yet if Sharpe was to turn King Ferdinand's palace guard into a decent infantry unit then he would need to find them guns somehow. "Rifles I can't get," he said, "but muskets, yes. But I'll need a week."

"Muskets, then," El Castrador agreed, "and there is something else."

"Go on," Sharpe said warily.

"I want revenge for my daughters," El Castrador said with tears in his eyes. "I want Brigadier Loup and this knife to meet each other." He held up the small, bone-handled cutter. "I want your help, Englishman. Teresa says you can fight, so fight with me and help me catch El Lobo."

Sharpe suspected this second request would prove even more difficult than the first, but he nodded anyway. "You know where Loup can be found?"

El Castrador nodded. "Usually at a village called San Cristobal. He drove out the inhabitants, blocked the streets and fortified the houses. A stoat could not get near without being spotted. Sanchez says it would take a thousand men and a battery of artillery to take San Cristobal."

Sharpe grunted at the news. Sanchez was one of the best guerrilla leaders and if Sanchez reckoned San Cristobal was virtually impregnable, then Sharpe would believe him. "You said 'usually'. So he's not always at San Cristobal?"

"He goes where he likes, seсor," El Castrador said moodily. "Sometimes he takes over a village for a few nights, sometimes he would put his men in the fort where you now live, sometimes he would use Fort Concepciфn. Loup, seсor, is a law to himself." El Castrador paused. "But La Aguja says you are also a law unto yourself. If any man can defeat El Lobo, seсor, it must be you. And there is a place near San Cristobal, a defile, where he can be ambushed."

El Castrador offered this last detail as an enticement, but Sharpe ignored the lure. "I will do all a man can do," he promised.

"Then I shall help you tonight," El Castrador assured Sharpe in return. "Look for my gift in the morning, seсor," he said, then stood and shouted a command to the men he had evidently left outside the inn. Hooves clattered loud in the little street. "And next week," the partisan added, "I shall come for my reward. Don't let me down, Captain."

Sharpe watched the gross man go, then hefted the wineskin. He was tempted to drain it, but knew that a bellyful of sour wine would make his journey back to San Isidro doubly hard and so, instead, he poured the liquid over the roots of the ravaged vine. Maybe, he thought, it would help the vine repair itself. Wine to grapes, ashes to ashes and dust to dust. He picked up his hat, slung his rifle, and walked home.

That night, despite all Captain Donaju's precautions, three more guardsmen deserted. More men might have tried, but shortly after midnight a series of terrible screams sounded from the valley and any other men tempted to try their luck across the frontier decided to wait for another day. At dawn next morning, when Rifleman Harris was leading a convoy down the mountainside to fetch water from the stream to augment the trickle that the fort's well provided, he found the three men. He came back to Sharpe white-faced. "It's horrible, sir. Horrible."

"See that cart?" Sharpe pointed across the fort's courtyard to a handcart. "Get it down there, put them in and bring them back."

"Do we have to?" Rifleman Thompson asked, aghast.

"Yes, you bloody do. And Harris?"

"Sir?"

"Put this in with them," and Sharpe handed Harris a sack holding a heavy object. Harris began to untie the sack's mouth. "Not here, Harris," Sharpe said, "do it down there. And only you and our lads to see what you're doing."

By eight o'clock Sharpe had the one hundred and twenty-seven remaining guardsmen on parade, together with all their junior officers. Sharpe was the senior officer left inside the fort, for both Lord Kiely and Colonel Runciman had spent the night at army headquarters where they had gone to plead with the Assistant Commissary General for muskets and ammunition. Father Sarsfield was visiting a fellow priest in Guarda, while both Kiely's majors and three of his captains had gone hunting. Dona Juanita de Elia had also taken her hounds in search of hares, but had spurned the company of the Irish officers. "I hunt alone," she said, and then had scorned Sharpe's warning of patrolling Frenchmen. "In coming here, Captain," she told Sharpe, "I escaped every Frenchman in Spain. Worry about yourself, not me." Then she had spurred away with her hounds loping behind.

So now, bereft of their senior officers, the Real Companпa Irlandesa lined in four ranks beneath one of the empty gun platforms that served Sharpe as a podium. It had rained in the night and the flags on the crumbling battlements lifted reluctantly to the morning wind as Harris and Thompson manoeuvred the handcart up one of the ramps which led from the magazines to the gun platforms. They pushed the vehicle with its sordid cargo to Sharpe's side, then tipped the handles up so that the cart's bed faced the four ranks. There was an intake of breath, then a communal groan sounded from the ranks. At least one guardsman vomited while most just looked away or closed their eyes. "Look at them!" Sharpe snapped. "Look!"

He forced the guardsmen to look at the three mutilated naked bodies, and especially at the bloody, gut-churning mess dug out of the centre of each corpse and at the rictus of horror and pain on each dead face. Then Sharpe reached past one of the cold, white, stiff shoulders to drag free a steel-grey helmet plumed with coarse grey hair. He set it on one of the uptilted cart shafts. It was the same helmet that Harris had collected as a keepsake from the high settlement where Sharpe had discovered the massacred villagers and where Perkins had met Miranda who now followed the young rifleman with a touching and pathetic devotion. It was the same helmet that Sharpe had given back to Harris in the sack earlier that morning.

"Look at the bodies!" Sharpe ordered the Real Companпa Irlandesa. "And listen! The French believe there are two kinds of people in Spain: those who are for them and those who are against them, and there ain't a man among you who can escape that judgement. Either you fight for the French or you fight against them, and that isn't my decision, that's what the French have decided." He pointed to the three bodies. "That's what the French do. They know you're here now. They're watching you, they're wondering who and what you are, and until they know the answers they'll treat you like an enemy. And that's how the Frogs treat their enemies." He pointed to the bloody holes carved into the dead men's crotches.

"Which leaves you lot with three choices," Sharpe went on. "You can run east and have your manhood sliced off by the Frogs, or you can run west and risk being arrested by my army and shot as a deserter, or else you can stay here and learn to be soldiers. And don't tell me this isn't your war. You swore an oath to serve the King of Spain, and the King of Spain is a prisoner in France and you were supposed to be his guard. By God, this is your war far more than it's my war. I never swore an oath to protect Spain, I never had a woman raped by a Frenchman or a child murdered by a dragoon or a harvest stolen and a house burned by a Crapaud forage party. Your country has suffered all those things, and your country is Spain, and if you'd rather fight for Ireland than for Spain then why in the name of Almighty God did you take the Spanish oath?" He paused. He knew that not every man in the company was a would-be deserter. Many, like Lord Kiely himself, wanted to fight, but there were enough troublemakers to sap the company's usefulness and Sharpe had decided that this shock treatment was the only way to jar the troublemakers into obedience.

"Or does the oath mean nothing to you?" Sharpe demanded. "Because I'll tell you what the rest of this army thinks about you, and I mean the rest of this army, including the Connaught Rangers and the Inniskilling Dragoons and the Royal Irish Regiment and the Royal County Down Regiment and the Prince of Wales's Own Irish Regiment and the Tipperary Regiment and the County of Dublin Regiment and the Duke of York's Irish Regiment. They say you lot are soft. They say you're powder-puff soldiers, good for guarding a pisspot in a palace, but not good for a fight. They say you ran away from Ireland once and you'll run away again. They say you're about as much use to an army as a pack of singing nuns. They say you're overdressed and over-coddled. But that's going to change, because one day you and I will go into battle together and on that day you're going to have to be good! Bloody good!"

Sharpe hated making speeches, but he had seized these men's attention or at least the three castrated bodies had gripped their interest and Sharpe's words were making some kind of sense to them. He pointed east. "Over there," Sharpe said, and he plucked the helmet off the cart's shaft, "there's a man called Loup, a Frenchman, and he leads a regiment of dragoons called the wolf pack, and they wear these helmets and they leave that mark on the men they kill. So we're going to kill them. We're going to prove that there isn't a French regiment in the world that can stand up to an Irish regiment, and we're going to do that together. And we're going to do it because this is your war, and your only damned choice is whether you want to die like gelded dogs or fight like men. Now you make up your damned minds what you're going to do. Sergeant Harper?"

"Sir!"

"One half-hour for breakfast. I want a burial party for these three men, then we begin work."

"Yes, sir!"

Harris caught Sharpe's eye as the officer turned away. "Not one word, Harris," Sharpe said, thrusting the helmet into the rifleman's belly, "not one bloody word."

Captain Donaju stopped Sharpe as he walked away from the ramparts. "How do we fight without muskets?"

"I'll get you muskets, Donaju."

"How?"

"The same way a soldier gets everything that isn't issued to him," Sharpe said, "by theft."

That night not a single man deserted.

And next morning, though Sharpe did not recognize it at first, the trouble began.

"It's a bad business, Sharpe," Colonel Runciman said. "My God, man, but it's a bad business."

"What is, General?"

"You haven't heard?" Runciman asked.

"About the muskets, you mean?" Sharpe asked, assuming that Runciman must be referring to his visit to the army headquarters, a visit that had ended in predictable failure. Runciman and Kiely had returned with no muskets, no ammunition, no blankets, no pipe clay, no boots, no knapsacks and not even a promise of money for the unit's back pay. Wellington's parsimony was doubtless intended to draw the fangs of the Real Companпa Irlandesa, but it gave Sharpe horrid problems. He was struggling to raise the guardsmen's morale, but without weapons and equipment that morale was doomed. Worse still Sharpe knew he was close to enemy lines and if the French did attack then it would be no consolation to know that the Real Companпa Irlandesa's defeat had been a part of Hogan's plans, not if Sharpe was himself involved in the debacle. Hogan might want the Real Companпa Irlandesa destroyed, but Sharpe needed it armed and dangerous in case Brigadier Loup came calling.

"I wasn't talking about muskets, Sharpe," Runciman said, "but about the news from Ireland. You really haven't heard?"

"No, sir."

Runciman shook his head, making his jowls wobble. "It seems there are new problems in Ireland, Sharpe. Damned bad business. Bloody rebels making trouble, troops fighting back, women and children dead. River Erne blocked with bodies at Belleek. Talk of rape. Dear me. I really thought that 98 had settled the Irish business once and for all, but it seems not. The damned papists are making trouble again. Dear me, dear me. Why did God allow the papists to flourish? They try us Christians so sorely. Ah, well." Runciman sighed. "We'll have to break some skulls over there, just as we did when Tone rebelled in 98."

Sharpe reflected that if the remedy had failed in 1798 then it was just as likely to be ineffective in 1811, but he thought it tactful not to say as much. "It might mean trouble here, General," he said instead, "when the Irish troops hear about it?"

"That's why we have the lash, Sharpe."

"We might have the lash, General, but we don't have muskets. And I was just wondering, sir, exactly how a Wagon Master General orders his convoys about."

Runciman goggled at Sharpe, amazed at the apparently inappropriate question. "Paper, of course, paper! Orders!"

Sharpe smiled. "And you're still Wagon Master General, sir, isn't that so? Because they haven't replaced you. I doubt they can find a man to fill your shoes, sir."

"Kind of you to say so, Sharpe, most kind." Runciman looked slightly surprised at receiving a compliment, but tried not to show too much unfamiliarity with the experience. "And it's probably true," he added.

"And I was wondering, General, how we might divert a wagon or two of weapons up to the fort here?"

Runciman gaped at Sharpe. "Steal them, you mean?"

"I wouldn't call it theft, General," Sharpe said reproachfully, "not when they're being employed against the enemy. We're just re-allocating the guns, sir, if you see what I mean. Eventually, sir, the army will have to equip us, so why don't we anticipate the order now? We can always catch up with the paperwork later."

Runciman shook his head wildly, dislodging the careful strands of long hair that he obsessively brushed over his balding pate. "It can't be done, Sharpe, it can't be done! It's against all precedence. Against all arrangements! Damn it, man, it's against regulations! I could be court-martialled! Think of the disgrace!" Runciman shuddered at the thought. "I'm astonished, Sharpe," he went on, "even disappointed, that you should make such a suggestion. I know you were denied a gentleman's breeding or even an education, but I had still expected better from you! A gentleman does not steal, he does not lie, he does not demean a woman, he honours God and the King. These attributes are not beyond you, Sharpe!"

Sharpe went to the door of Runciman's quarters. The Colonel's day parlour was the old guard room in one of the gatehouse towers and, with the fortress's ancient gates propped open, the doorway offered a stunning view south. Sharpe leaned on a doorpost. "What happened, General," he asked when Runciman's sermon had petered out, "when a wagon went missing? You must have lost some wagons to thieves?"

"A few, very few. Hardly one. Two, maybe. A handful, possibly."

"So then—" Sharpe began.

Colonel Runciman held up a hand to interrupt him. "Don't suggest it, Sharpe! I am an honest man, a God-fearing man, and I won't contrive to cheat His Majesty's exchequer of a wagonload of muskets. No, I won't. I have never dealt in untruths and I shall not start now. Indeed, I expressly forbid you to continue talking of the matter, and that is a direct order, Sharpe!"

"Two wagonloads of muskets," Sharpe offered the correction, "and three ammunition carts."

"No! I have already forbidden you to speak of the matter, and that is an end of it. You will say no more!"

Sharpe took out the penknife he used to clean the fouling off his rifle's lock. He unfolded the blade and ran his thumb along the edge. "Brigadier Loup knows we're here now, General, and he's going to be upset about that young fellow that Kiely's whore killed. It wouldn't surprise me if he tried to take revenge. Let's see now? A night assault? Probably. And he's got two full battalions of infantry and each and every one of those bastards will be trying to earn the reward Loup's put on my head. If I was Loup I'd attack from the north because the walls have virtually disappeared there, and I'd have the dragoons waiting down there to cut off the survivors." Sharpe nodded down the steep approach road, then chuckled. "Just imagine it, can't you? Being hunted down in the dawn by a pack of grey dragoons, each of them with a newly sharpened castrating knife in his sabretache. Loup doesn't give quarter, you see. He's not known for taking prisoners, General. He just pulls out the knife, yanks down your breeches and slices off your—"

"Sharpe! Please! Please!" A wan Runciman stared at Sharpe's penknife. "Do you have to be so graphic?"

"General! I'm raising a serious matter! I can't hold off a brigade of Frenchmen with my handful of riflemen. I might do some damage if the Irish boys had muskets, but without muskets, bayonets and ammunition?" Sharpe shook his head, then snapped the blade shut. "It's your choice, General, but if I was the senior British officer in this fort then I'd find a way to get some decent weapons up here as fast as possible. Unless, of course, I wanted to be singing the high notes in the church choir when I got back to Hampshire."

Runciman gaped at Sharpe. The Colonel was sweating now, overwhelmed by a vision of castrating Frenchmen running wild inside the crumbling fort. "But they won't give us muskets, Sharpe. We tried! Kiely and I tried together! And that awkward man General Valverde pleaded for us as well, but the Quartermaster General says there's a temporary shortage of spare weapons. He hoped General Valverde might persuade Cadiz to send us some Spanish muskets."

Sharpe shook his head at Runciman's despair. "So we have to borrow some muskets, General, till the Spanish ones arrive. We just need to divert a wagon or two with the help of those seals you've still got."

"But I can't issue orders to the wagon train, Sharpe! Not any longer! I have new duties, new responsibilities."

"You've got too many responsibilities, General," Sharpe said, "because you're too valuable a man, but really, sir, you shouldn't be worrying yourself over details. Your job is to look after the big decisions and let me look after the small." Sharpe tossed the penknife in the air and caught it. "And let me look after the Crapauds if they come, sir. You've got better things to do."

Runciman leaned back in his folding chair, making it creak dangerously. "You have a point, Sharpe, you do indeed have a point." Runciman shuddered as he contemplated the enormity of the crime. "But you think I am merely anticipating an order rather than breaking one?"

Sharpe stared at the Colonel with feigned admiration. "I wish I had your mind, General, I really do. That's a brilliant way of putting it. "Anticipating an order." I wish I'd thought of that."

Runciman preened at the compliment. "My dear mother always maintained I could have been a lawyer," he said proudly, "maybe even Lord Chancellor! But my father preferred me to take an honest career." He pulled some empty papers across his makeshift desk and began writing orders. From time to time the horror of his conduct made him pause, but each time Sharpe snapped the small blade open and shut and the noise prompted the Colonel to dip his quill's tip into the inkwell.

And next day four ox-drawn wagons with puzzled drivers and beds loaded with weapons, ammunition and supplies arrived at the San Isidro Fort.

And the Real Companпa Irlandesa was armed at last.

And thinking of mutiny.

CHAPTER IV

Next morning, just after dawn, a delegation discovered Sharpe at the deserted northern end of the fort. The sun was slicing across the valley to gild the small mist that sifted above the stream where Sharpe was watching a harrier float effortlessly in the light wind with its gaze trained down on the hillside. The eight men of the delegation halted awkwardly behind Sharpe who, after one sour glance at their serious faces, looked back to the valley. "There's some rabbits down there," Sharpe said to no one in particular, "and that daft bird keeps losing them in the mist."

"He won't go hungry for long though," Harper said, "I've never seen a hawk dafter than a rabbit." The greenjacket Sergeant was the only delegate from Sharpe's company: the other men were all from the Real Companпa Irlandesa. "It's a nice morning," Harper said, sounding uncharacteristically nervous. He plainly believed that either Father Sarsfield, Captain Donaju or Captain Lacy should broach the delicate subject that had caused this delegation to seek Sharpe out, but the chaplain and the two embarrassed officers were silent. "A grand morning," Harper said, breaking the silence again.

"Is it?" Sharpe responded. He had been standing on a merlon beside a gun embrasure, but now he jumped down to the firing platform and from there into the bed of the dry ditch. Years of rainfall had eroded the glacis and filled the ditch, just as frost had degraded and crumbled the stonework of the ramparts. "I've seen hovels built better than this," Sharpe said. He kicked at the wall's base and one of the larger stones shifted perceptibly. "There's no bloody mortar there!" he said.

"There wasn't enough water in the mix," Harper explained. He took a deep breath, then, realizing that his companions would not speak up, took the plunge himself. "We wanted to see you, sir. It's important, sir."

Sharpe clambered back up to the ramparts and brushed his hands together. "Is it about the new muskets?"

"No, sir. The muskets are just grand, sir."

"The training?"

"No, sir."

"Then the man you want to see is Colonel Runciman," Sharpe said curtly. "Call him «General» and he'll give you anything." Sharpe was deliberately dissembling. He knew exactly why the delegation was here, but he had small appetite for their worries. "Talk to Runciman after breakfast and he'll be in a good enough mood," he said.

"We've spoken to the Colonel," Captain Donaju spoke at last, "and the Colonel said we should speak with you."

Father Sarsfield smiled. "I think we knew he would say that, Captain, when we approached him. I don't think Colonel Runciman is particularly sympathetic to the problems of Ireland."

Sharpe looked from Sarsfield to Donaju, from Donaju to Lacy, then from Lacy to the sullen faces of the four rank and file guardsmen. "So it's about Ireland, is it?" Sharpe said. "Well, go on. I haven't got any other problems to solve today."

The chaplain ignored the sarcasm, offering Sharpe a folded newspaper instead. "It is about that, Captain Sharpe," Sarsfield said respectfully.

Sharpe took the paper which, to his surprise, came from Philadelphia. The front page was a dense mass of black type: lists of ships arriving or departing from the city wharves; news from Europe; reports of Congress and tales of Indian atrocities suffered by settlers in the western territories.

"It's at the bottom of the page," Donaju offered.

" 'The Melancholy Effects of Intemperance'?" Sharpe read a headline aloud.

"No, Sharpe. Just before that," Donaju said, and Sharpe sighed as he read the words "New Massacres in Ireland". What followed was a more lurid version of the tale Runciman had already told Sharpe: a catalogue of rape and slaughter, of innocent children cut down by English dragoons and of praying women dragged out of houses by drink-crazed grenadiers. The newspaper claimed that the ghosts of Cromwell's troopers had come back to life to turn Ireland into a blood-drenched misery again. Ireland, the English government had announced, would be pacified once and for all, and the newspaper commented that the English were choosing to make that pacification when so many Irishmen were fighting against France in the King's army in Portugal. Sharpe read the piece through twice. "What did Lord Kiely say?" he asked Father Sarsfield, not because he cared one fig what Kiely thought, but the question bought him a few seconds while he thought how to respond. He also wanted to encourage Sarsfield to do the delegation's talking, for the Real Companпa Irlandesa's chaplain had struck Sharpe as a friendly, sensible and cool-headed man and if he could get the priest on his side then he reckoned the rest of the company would follow.

"His Lordship hasn't seen the newspaper," Sarsfield said. "He has gone hunting with the Dona Juanita."

Sharpe handed the paper back to the priest. "Well, I've seen the newspaper," he said, "and I can tell you it's bloody rubbish." One of the guardsmen stirred indignantly, then stiffened when Sharpe gave him a threatening look. "It's a fairy tale for idiots," Sharpe said provocatively, "pure bloody make-believe."

"How do you know?" Donaju asked resentfully.

"Because if there was trouble in Ireland, Captain, we'd have heard about it before the Americans. And since when did the Americans have a good word to say about the British?"

"But we have heard about it," Captain Lacy intervened. Lacy was a stocky young man with a pugnacious demeanour and scarred knuckles. "There've been rumours," Lacy insisted.

"There have too," Harper added loyally.

Sharpe looked at his friend. "Oh, Christ," he said as he realized just how hurt Harper was, though he also realized that Harper must have come to him hoping that the stories were not true. If Harper had wanted a fight he would not have chosen Sharpe, but some other representative of the enemy race. "Oh, Christ," Sharpe swore again. He was plagued with more than enough problems already. The Real Companпa Irlandesa had been promised pay and given none; every time it rained the old barracks ran with damp; the food in the fort was dreadful and the only well provided nothing but a trickle of bitter water. Now, on top of those problems and the added threat of Loup's vengeance, there was this sudden menace of an Irish mutiny. "Give me back the newspaper, Father," Sharpe said to the chaplain, then stabbed a dirty fingernail at the date printed at the top of the sheet. "When was this published?" He showed the date to Sarsfield.

"A month ago," the priest said.

"So?" Lacy asked belligerently.

"So how many bloody drafts have arrived from Ireland in the last month?" Sharpe asked, his voice as scornful as it was forceful. "Ten? Fifteen? And not one of those men thought to tell us about his sister being raped or his mother being buggered witless by some dragoon? Yet suddenly some bloody American newspaper knows all about it?" Sharpe had addressed his words to Harper more than to the others, for Harper alone could be expected to know how frequently replacement drafts arrived from Ireland. "Come on, Pat! It doesn't make bloody sense, and if you don't believe me then I'll give you a pass and you can go down to the main camps and find some newly arrived Irishmen and ask them for news of home. Maybe you'll believe them if you don't believe me."

Harper looked at the date on the paper, thought about Sharpe's words, and nodded reluctantly. "It doesn't make sense, sir, you're right. But not everything in this world needs to make sense."

"Of course it bloody does," Sharpe snapped. "That's how you and I live. We're practical men, Pat, not bloody dreamers! We believe in the Baker rifle, the Tower musket and twenty-three inches of bayonet. You can leave superstitions to women and children, and these things" — he slapped the newspaper — "are worse than superstitions. They're downright lies!" He looked at Donaju. "Your job, Captain, is to go to your men and tell them that they're lies. And if you don't believe me then you ride down to the camps. Go to the Connaught Rangers and ask their new recruits. Go to the Inniskillings. Go wherever you like, but be back here by dusk. And in the meantime, Captain, tell your men they've got a full day of musket training. Loading and firing till their shoulders are raw meat. Is that clear?"

The men from the Real Companпa Irlandesa nodded reluctantly. Sharpe had won the argument, at least until the evening when Donaju returned from his reconnaissance. Father Sarsfield took the paper from Sharpe. "Are you saying this is a forgery?" the priest asked.

"How would I know, Father? I'm just saying it isn't true. Where did you get it?"

Sarsfield shrugged. "They're scattered throughout the army, Sharpe."

"And when did you and I ever see a newspaper from America, Pat?" Sharpe asked Harper. "And funny, isn't it, that the first one we ever see is all about Britain being bloody to Ireland? It smacks of mischief to me."

Father Sarsfield folded the paper. "I think you're probably right, Sharpe, and praise be to God for it. But you won't mind, will you, if I ride with Captain Donaju today?"

"It isn't up to me what you do, Father," Sharpe said. "But for the rest of you, let's get to work!"

Sharpe waited while the delegation left. He motioned Harper to stay behind, but Father Sarsfield also lingered for Sharpe's attention. "I'm sorry, Sharpe," the priest said.

"Why?"

Sarsfield flinched at Sharpe's harsh tone. "I imagine you do not need Irish problems intruding on your life."

"I don't need any damn problems, Father. I've got a job to do, and the job is to turn your boys into soldiers, good soldiers."

Sarsfield smiled. "I think you are a rare thing, Captain Sharpe: an honest man."

"Of course I'm not," Sharpe said, almost blushing as he remembered the horrors done to the three men caught by El Castrador at Sharpe's request. "I'm not a bloody saint, Father, but I do like to get things done. If I spent my damn life dreaming dreams I'd still be in the ranks. You can only afford dreams if you're rich and privileged." He added the last words viciously.

"You speak of Kiely," Sarsfield said and started walking slowly back along the ramparts beside Sharpe. The skirts of the priest's soutane were wet with the dew from the ragweed and grass that grew inside the fort. "Lord Kiely is a very weak man, Captain,"

Sarsfield went on. "He had a very strong mother" — the priest grimaced at the memory—"and you would not know, Captain, what a trial to the church strong women can be, but I think they can be even more of a trial to their sons. Lady Kiely wanted her son to be a great Catholic warrior, an Irish warrior! The Catholic warlord who would succeed where the Protestant lawyer Wolfe Tone failed, but instead she drove him into drink, pettiness and whoring. I buried her last year" — he made a quick sign of the cross — "and I fear her son did not mourn her as a son should mourn his mother nor, alas, will he ever be the Christian she wanted him to be. He told me last night that he intends to marry the Lady Juanita and his mother, I think, will be weeping in purgatory at the thought of such a match." The priest sighed. "Still, I didn't want to talk to you about Kiely. Instead, Captain, I beg you to be a little patient with us."

"I thought I was being patient with you," Sharpe said defensively.

"With us Irish," Father Sarsfield explained. "You are a man with a country, Captain, and you don't know what it's like to be an exile. You cannot know what it is like to be listening to the harps beside the waters of Babylon." Sarsfield smiled at the phrase, then shrugged. "It's like a wound, Captain Sharpe, that never heals, and I pray to God that you never have to feel that wound for yourself

Sharpe felt a stab of embarrassed pity as he looked into the priest's kindly face. "Were you never in Ireland, Father?"

"Once, my son, years ago. Long years ago, but if I live a thousand years that one brief stay will always seem like yesterday." He smiled ruefully, then hitched up his damp soutane. "I must join Donaju for our expedition! Think about my words, Captain!" The priest hurried away, his white hair lifting in the breeze.

Harper joined Sharpe. "A nice man, that," Harper said, nodding at the priest's receding back. "He was telling me how he was in Donegal once. Up in Lough Swilly. I had an aunt who lived that way, God rest her poor soul. She was in Rathmullen."

"I never was in Donegal," Sharpe said, "and I'll probably never get there, and frankly, Sergeant, right at this moment I don't care. I've got enough bloody troubles without the bloody Irish going moody on me. We need blankets, food and money which means I'm going to have to get Runciman to write another of his magic orders, but it won't be easy because the fat bugger's scared shitless of being court-martialled. Lord bloody Kiely's no bloody help. All he does is suck brandy, dream about bloody glory and trail around behind that black-haired whore like a mooncalf." Sharpe, despite Sarsfield's advice about patience, was losing his temper. "The priest is telling me to feel sorry for you all, Hogan wants me to kick these lads in the teeth and there's a fat Spaniard with a castrating knife who thinks I'm going to hold Loup down while he cuts off his bloody balls. Everyone expects me to solve all their bloody problems, so for God's sake give me some bloody help."

"I always do," Harper said resentfully.

"Yes, you do, Pat, and I'm sorry."

"And if the stories were true—" Harper began.

"They're not!" Sharpe shouted.

"All right! All right! God save Ireland." Harper blew out a long breath, then there was an awkward silence between the two men. Sharpe just glowered to the north while Harper clambered down into a nearby gun embrasure and kicked at a loosened stone. "God knows why they built a fort up here," he said at last.

"There used to be a main road down there." Sharpe nodded to the pass which lay to the north. "It was a way to avoid Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, but half the road got washed away and what's left of it can't take modern guns so it's no use these days. But the road eastwards is still all there, Pat, and Loup's bloody brigade can use it. Down there" — he pointed to the route as he spoke—"up this slope, over these walls and straight down on us and there's bugger all here to stop them."

"Why would Loup do that?" Harper asked.

"Because he's a mad, brave, ruthless bugger, that's why. And because he hates me and because kicking the lights out of us would be a cheap victory for the bastard." Sharpe had become preoccupied by the threat of a night raid by Loup's brigade. He had first thought of the raid merely as a means of frightening Colonel Runciman into signing his fraudulent wagon orders, but the more Sharpe had thought about it, the more likely such a raid seemed. And the San Isidro Fort was hopelessly ill prepared for such an attack. A thousand men might have been able to hold its degraded ramparts, but the Real Companпa Irlandesa was far too small a unit to offer any real resistance. They would be trapped within the vast, crumbling walls like rats in a terrier's fighting ring. "Which is just what Hogan and Wellington want," Sharpe said aloud.

"What's that, sir?"

"They don't bloody trust your Irishmen, see? They want them out of the way and I'm supposed to help get rid of the buggers, but the trouble is I like them. Damn it, Pat. If Loup comes we'll all be dead."

"You think he's coming?"

"I bloody well know he's coming," Sharpe said fervently, and suddenly the vague suspicions hardened into an utter certainty. He might have just made a vigorous proclamation of his practicality, but in truth he relied on instinct most of the time. Sometimes, Sharpe knew, the wise soldier listened to his superstitions and fears because they were a better guide than mere practicality. Good flat hard sense dictated that Loup would not waste valuable effort by raiding the San Isidro Fort, but Sharpe rejected that good sense because his every instinct told him there was trouble coming. "I don't know when or how he'll come," he told Harper, "but I'm not trusting a palace guard to serve picquet. I want our boys up here." He meant he wanted riflemen guarding the fort's northern extremity. "And I want a night picquet too, so make sure a couple of the lads get some sleep today."

Harper gazed down the long northern slope. "You think they'll come this way?"

"It's the easiest. West and east are too steep, the southern end is too strong, but a cripple could waltz across this wall. Jesus." This last imprecation was torn from Sharpe as he realized just how vulnerable the fort was. He stared eastwards. "I'll bet that bastard is watching us right now." From the far peaks a Frenchman armed with a good telescope could probably count the buttons on Sharpe's jacket.

"You really think he'll come?" Harper asked.

"I think we're damn lucky he hasn't come already. I think we're damn lucky to be alive." Sharpe jumped off the ramparts onto the grass inside the fort. There was nothing but grass and weed-strewn waste land for a hundred yards, then the red stone barracks buildings began. There were eight long buildings and the Real Companпa Irlandesa bivouacked in the two that had been kept in best repair while Sharpe's riflemen camped in one of the magazines close to the gate tower. That tower, Sharpe decided, was the key to the defence, for whoever held the tower would dominate the fight. "All we need is three or four minutes' warning," Sharpe said, "and we can make the bugger wish he'd stayed in bed."

"You can beat him?" Harper asked.

"He thinks he can surprise us. He thinks he can break into the barracks and slaughter us in our beds, Pat, but if we just have some warning we can turn that gate tower into a fortress and without artillery Loup can't do a damn thing about it." Sharpe was suddenly enthusiastic. "Don't you always say that a good fight is a tonic to an Irishman?" he asked.

"Only when I'm drunk," Harper said.

"Let's pray for a fight anyway," Sharpe said eagerly, "and a victory. My God, that'll put some confidence into these guards!"

But then, at dusk, just as the last red-gold rays were shrinking behind the western hills, everything changed.

The Portuguese battalion arrived unannounced. They were caзadores, skirmishers like the greenjackets, only these troops were outfitted in blood-brown jackets and grey British trousers. They carried Baker rifles and looked as if they knew how to use them. They marched into the fort with the easy, lazy step of veteran troops, while behind them came a convoy of three ox-drawn wagons loaded with rations, firewood and spare ammunition. The battalion was a little over half strength, mustering just four hundred rank and file, but the men still made a brave show as they paraded on the fort's old plaza.

Their Colonel was a thin-faced man called Oliveira. "For a few days every year," he explained off-handedly to Lord Kiely, "we occupy the San Isidro. Just as a way of reminding ourselves that the fort exists and to discourage anyone else from setting up house here. No, don't move your men out of the barracks. My men don't need roofs. And we won't be in your way, Colonel. I'll exercise my rogues across the frontier for the next few days."

Behind the last supply wagons the fort's great gates creaked shut. They crashed together, then one of Kiely's men lifted the locking bar into position. Colonel Runciman hurried out of the gatehouse to offer his greeting to Colonel Oliveira and to invite the Portuguese officer to supper, but Oliveira declined. "I share my men's supper, Colonel. No offence." Oliveira spoke good English and nearly half his officers were British, the result of a policy to integrate the Portuguese army into Wellington's forces. To Sharpe's delight one of the caзador officers was Thomas Garrard, a man who had served with Sharpe in the ranks of the 33rd and who had taken advantage of the promotion prospects offered to British sergeants willing to join the Portuguese army. The two men had last met at Almeida when the great fortress had exploded in a horror that had led to the garrison's surrender. Garrard had been among the men forced to lay down his arms.

"Bloody Crapaud bastards," he said feelingly. "Kept us in Burgos with hardly enough food to feed a rat, and what food there was was all rotted. Christ, Dick, you and I have eaten some bad meals in our time, but this was really bad. And all because that damned cathedral exploded. I'd like to meet the French gunner who did that and wring his bloody neck."

In truth it had been Sharpe who had caused the magazine in the cathedral's crypt to explode, but it did not seem a politic admission to make. "It was a bad business," Sharpe agreed mildly.

"You got out next morning, didn't you?" Garrard asked. "Cox wouldn't let us go. We wanted to fight our way out, but he said we had to do the decent thing and surrender." He shook his head in disgust. "Not that it matters now," he went on. "The Crapauds exchanged me and Oliveira asked me to join his regiment and now I'm a captain like you."

"Well done."

"They're good lads," Garrard said fondly of his company which was bivouacking in the open space inside the northern ramparts where the Portuguese campfires burned bright in the dusk. Oliveira's picquets were on every rampart save the gate tower. Such efficient sentries meant that Sharpe no longer needed to deploy his own riflemen on picquet duty, but he was still apprehensive and told Garrard his fears as the two men strolled round the darkening ramparts.

"I've heard of Loup," Garrard said. "He's a right bastard."

"Nasty as hell."

"And you think he's coming here?"

"Just an instinct, Tom."

"Hell, ignore those and you might as well dig your own grave, eh? Let's go and see the Colonel."

But Oliveira was not so easily convinced of Sharpe's fears, nor did Juanita de Elia help Sharpe's cause. Juanita and Lord Kiely had returned from a day's hunting and, with Father Sarsfield, Colonel Runciman and a half-dozen of the Real Companпa Irlandesa's officers, were guests at the Portuguese supper. Juanita scorned Sharpe's warning. "You think a French brigadier would bother himself with an English captain?" she asked mockingly.

Sharpe suppressed a stab of evil temper. He had been speaking to Oliveira, not to Kiely's whore, but this was not the time or the place to pick a quarrel. Besides, he recognized that in some obscure way his and Juanita's dislike of each other was bred into the bone and probably unavoidable. She would talk to any other officer in the fort, even to Runciman, but at Sharpe's very appearance she would turn and walk away rather than offer a polite greeting. "I think he'll bother with me, ma'am, yes," Sharpe said mildly.

"Why?" Oliveira demanded.

"Go on, man, answer!" Kiely said when Sharpe hesitated.

"Well, Captain?" Juanita mocked Sharpe. "Lost your tongue?"

"I think he'll bother with me, ma'am," Sharpe said, stung into an answer, "because I killed two of his men."

"Oh, my God!" Juanita pretended to be shocked. "Anyone would think there was a war happening!"

Kiely and some of the Portuguese officers smiled, but Colonel Oliveira just stared at Sharpe as though weighing the warning carefully. Finally he shrugged. "Why would he worry that you killed two of his men?" he asked.

Sharpe hesitated to confess to what he knew was a crime against military justice, but he could hardly withdraw now. The safety of the fort and all the men inside depended on him convincing Oliveira of the genuine danger and so, very reluctantly, he described the raped and massacred village and how he had captured two of Loup's men and stood them up against a wall.

"You had orders to shoot them?" Oliveira asked presciently.

"No, sir," Sharpe said, aware of the eyes staring at him. He knew it might prove a horrid mistake to have admitted the executions, but he desperately needed to persuade Oliveira of the danger and so he described how Loup had ridden to the small upland village to plead for his men's lives and how, despite that appeal, Sharpe had ordered them shot. Colonel Runciman, hearing the tale for the first time, shook his head in disbelief.

"You shot the men in front of Loup?" Oliveira asked, surprised.

"Yes, sir."

"So this rivalry between you and Loup is a personal vendetta, Captain Sharpe?" the Portuguese Colonel asked.

"In a way, sir."

"Either yes or no!" Oliveira snapped. He was a forceful, quicktempered man who reminded Sharpe of General Craufurd, the Light Division's commander. Oliveira had the same impatience with evasive answers.

"I believe Brigadier Loup will attack very soon, sir," Sharpe insisted.

"Proof?"

"Our vulnerability," Sharpe said, "and because he's put a price on my head, sir." He knew it sounded feeble and he blushed when Juanita laughed aloud. She was wearing her Real Companпa Irlandesa uniform, though she had unbuttoned the coat and shirt so that the flamelight glowed on her long neck. Every officer around the fire seemed fascinated by her, and no wonder, for she was a flamboyantly exotic creature in this place of guns and powder and stone. She sat close to Kiely, an arm resting on his knee and Sharpe wondered if perhaps they had announced their betrothal. Something seemed to have put the supper guests into a holiday mood. "How much is the price, Captain?" she asked mockingly.

Sharpe bit back a retort that the reward would prove more than enough to hire her services for a night. "I don't know," he lied instead.

"Can't be very much," Kiely said. "Over-age captain like you, Sharpe? Couple of dollars maybe? Bag of salt?"

Oliveira glanced at Kiely and the glance expressed disapproval of his Lordship's drunken gibes. The Colonel sucked on a cigar, then blew smoke across the fire. "I have doubled the sentries, Captain," he said to Sharpe, "and if this Loup does come to claim your head then we'll give him a fight."

"When he comes, sir," Sharpe insisted, "can I suggest, with respect, sir, that you get your men into the gatehouse?"

"You don't give up, do you, Sharpe?" Kiely interrupted. Before the Portuguese battalion's arrival Sharpe had asked Kiely to move the whole Real Companпa Irlandesa into the gatehouse, a request that Kiely had peremptorily turned down. "No one's going to attack us here," Kiely now said, reiterating his earlier argument, "and anyway, if they do, we should fight the bastards from the ramparts, not the gatehouse."

"We can't fight from the ramparts—" Sharpe began.

"Don't tell me where we can fight! God damn you!" Kiely shouted, startling Juanita. "You're a jumped-up corporal, Sharpe, not a bloody general. If the French come, damn it, I'll fight them how I like and beat them how I like and I won't need your help!"

The outburst embarrassed the assembled officers. Father Sarsfield frowned as though he was looking for some emollient words, but it was Oliveira who finally broke the awkward silence. "If they come, Captain Sharpe," he said gravely, "I shall seek the refuge you advise. And thank you for your advice." Oliveira nodded his dismissal.

"Good night, sir," Sharpe said, then walked away.

"Ten guineas to the price on your head says Loup won't come, Sharpe!" Kiely called after the rifleman. "What is it? Lost your damn nerve? Don't want to take a wager like a gentleman?" Kiely and Juanita laughed. Sharpe tried to ignore them.

Tom Garrard had followed Sharpe. "I'm sorry, Dick," Garrard said and then, after a pause, "Did you really shoot two Crapauds?"

"Aye."

"Good for you. But I wouldn't tell too many people about it."

"I know, I know," Sharpe said, then shook his head. "Bloody Kiely."

"His woman's a rare one though," Garrard said. "Reminds me of that girl you took up with at Gawilghur. You remember her?"

"This one's a bitch, that's the difference," Sharpe said. God, he thought, but his temper was being abraded to a raw bloody edge. "I'm sorry, Tom," he said, "it's like fighting with wet powder, trying to shake sense into this bloody place."

"Join the Portuguese, Dick," Garrard said. "Good as gold they are and no bloody over-born buggers like Kiely making life hard." He offered Sharpe a cigar. The two men bent their heads over Garrard's tinderbox and, when the charred linen caught the spark to flare bright, Sharpe saw a picture chased into the inner side of the lid.

"Hold it there, Tom," he said, stopping his friend from closing the lid. He stared at the picture for a few seconds. I'd forgotten those boxes," Sharpe said. The tinderboxes were made of a cheap metal that had to be protected from rust by gun oil, but Garrard had somehow kept this box safe for twelve years. There had once been scores like it, all made by a tinsmith in captured Seringapatam and all with explicit pictures etched crudely into the lids. Garrard's box showed a British soldier on top of a long-legged girl whose back was arched in apparent ecstasy. "Bugger might have taken his hat off first," Sharpe said.

Garrard laughed and snapped the box shut to preserve the linen. "Still got yours?"

Sharpe shook his head. "It was stolen off me years ago, Tom. I reckon it was that bastard Hakeswill that had it. Remember him? He was a thieving sod."

"Jesus God," Garrard said, "I'd half forgotten the bastard." He drew on the cigar, then shook his head in wonder. "Who'd ever believe it, Dick? You and me captains? And I can remember when you were broken down from corporal for farting on church parade."

"They were good days, Tom," Sharpe said.

"Only because they're a long way back. Nothing like distant memory for putting green leaves on a bare life, Dick."

Sharpe held the smoke in his mouth, then breathed out. "Let's hope it's a long life, Tom. Let's hope Loup isn't halfway here already. It would be a damned pity for you all to come up here for an exercise only to be slaughtered by Loup's brigade."

"We're not really here for an exercise," Garrard said. There was a long awkward silence. "Can you keep a secret?" Garrard asked eventually. The two men had reached a dark open space, out of earshot of any of the bivouacked caзadores. "We didn't come here by accident, Richard," Garrard admitted. "We were sent."

Sharpe heard footfalls on the nearest rampart where a Portuguese officer made his rounds. A challenge rang out and was answered. It was comforting to hear such military efficiency. "By Wellington?" Sharpe asked.

Garrard shrugged. "I suppose so. His Lordship doesn't talk to me, but not much happens in this army without Nosey's say-so."

"So why did he send you?"

"Because he doesn't trust your Spanish Irishmen, that's why. There have been some odd stories going round the army these last few days. Stories of English troops burning Irish priests and raping Irish women, and—"

"I've heard the tales," Sharpe interrupted, "and they're not true. Hell, I even sent a captain down to the camps today and he found out for himself." Captain Donaju, returning from the army's cantonments with Father Sarsfield, had possessed enough grace to apologize to Sharpe. Wherever Donaju and Sarsfield had visited and whoever they had asked, even men fresh out of Ireland, they could find no confirmation of the stories printed in the American newspaper. "No one can believe the stories!" Sharpe now protested to Garrard.

"But true or not," Garrard said, "the stories worry someone high up, and they think the stories are coming from your men. So we've been sent to keep an eye on you."

"Guard us, you mean?" Sharpe asked bitterly.

"Keep an eye on you," Garrard said again. "No one's really sure what we're supposed to do except stay here until their Lordships make up their mind what to do. Oliveira thinks your lads will probably be sent to Cadiz. Not you, Dick," Garrard hastened to add reassuringly, "you're not one of the Irish, are you? We'll just make sure these Irish lads can't make mischief and then your lads can go back to some proper soldiering."

"I like these Irish lads," Sharpe said flatly, "and they're not making mischief. I can warrant that."

"I'm not the one you have to convince, Dick."

It was Hogan or Wellington, Sharpe supposed. And how clever of Hogan or Wellington to send a Portuguese battalion to do the dirty work so that General Valverde could not say that a British regiment had persecuted the Royal Irish Company of the King of Spain's household guard. Sharpe blew out cigar smoke. "So those sentries on the wall, Tom," he said, "they're not looking outwards for Loup, are they, but looking in at us?"

"They're looking both ways, Dick."

"Well, make sure they're looking outwards. Because if Loup comes, Tom, there'll be hell to pay."

"They'll do their duty," Garrard said doggedly.

And they did. The diligent Portuguese picquets watched from the walls as the night chill spread down into the eastern valley where a ghostly mist worked its way upstream. They watched the long slopes, always alert to the smallest motion in the vaporous dark while in the fort some children of the Real Companпa Irlandesa cried in their sleep, a horse whinnied and a dog barked briefly. Two hours after midnight the sentries changed and the new men settled into their posts and gazed down the hillsides.

At three in the morning the owl flew back to its roost in the ruined chapel, its great white wings beating above the smouldering remnants of the Portuguese fires. Sharpe had been walking the sentries' beat and staring into the long shadowed night for the first sign of danger. Kiely and his whore were in bed, as was Runciman, but Sharpe stayed awake. He had taken what precautions he could, moving vast quantities of the Real Companпa Irlandesa's spare ammunition into Colonel Runciman's day parlour and issuing the rest to the men. He had talked a long while with Donaju, rehearsing what they should do if an attack did come and then, when he believed he had done all he could, he had walked with Tom Garrard. Now, following the owl, Sharpe went to his bed. It was less than three hours till dawn and Loup, he decided, would not come now. He lay down and fell fast asleep.

And ten minutes later woke to gunfire.

As the wolf, at last, attacked.

The first Sharpe knew of the attack was when Miranda, the girl rescued from the high border settlement, screamed like a banshee and for a second Sharpe thought he was dreaming, then he became aware of the gunshot that had preceded the scream by a split second and he opened his eyes to see that Rifleman Thompson was dying, shot in the head and bleeding like a stuck pig. Thompson had been hurled clear down the flight of ten steps that led from the magazine's crooked entrance and now lay twitching as a flood of gore spurted from his matted hair. He had been carrying his rifle when he was shot and now the weapon skidded over the floor to stop beside Sharpe.

Shadows loomed at the stairhead. The magazine's main entrance led into a short tunnel which would have been equipped with two doors when the fort had been properly garrisoned and its magazine filled with shot and powder. Where the second door should have hung the tunnel turned in an abrupt right angle, then reversed back to the stairhead. The pair of turns had been designed to baffle any enemy shell that might have breached the magazine's entrance and in the bleak darkness the double angle had succeeded in slowing down Thompson's killers who now erupted into the tiny rushlight that burned in the great underground chamber.

Grey uniforms. This was not a dream, but a nightmare for the grey killers had come.

Sharpe seized Thompson's rifle, pointed the muzzle and pulled the trigger.

An explosion crashed through the cellar as a cluster of flames speared through a smoke cloud towards the French at the top of the stair. Patrick Harper had fired his seven-barrelled gun and the volley of pistol balls slammed into the attackers to throw them back into the angle of the corridor's last turn where they went down in a welter of blood and pain. Two more riflemen fired. The magazine echoed with the shots and the air was stinking and thick with the choking smoke. A man was screaming, so was a girl. "Back way! Back way!" Sharpe shouted. "Shut that bloody girl up, Perkins!" He seized his own rifle and fired it up the stairs. He could see nothing now except for the small shining spots where the tiny rushlights glimmered in the smoke. The French seemed to have vanished, though in truth they were merely trying to negotiate the barricade of screaming, bleeding, twitching men who had been hurled back by Harper's volley and the fusillade of rifle bullets.

There was a second stair at the magazine's end, a stair that twisted up to the ramparts and was designed to let ammunition be delivered direct to the firestep rather than be carried through the fort's courtyard. "Sergeant Latimer!" Sharpe shouted. "Count them up! Thompson's out of it. Go, go!" If the French already held the ramparts, Sharpe reflected, then he and his riflemen were already trapped and doomed to die like rats in a hole, but he dared not abandon hope. "Go!" he shouted at his men. "Out! Out!" He had been sleeping with his boots on, so all he needed to do was snatch up his belt, pouches and sword. He slung the belt over his shoulder and began reloading the rifle. His eyes were smarting from the smoke. A French musket coughed more smoke at the top of the stairs and the bullet ricocheted harmlessly off the back wall.

"Just you and Harps, sir!" Latimer called from the back stair.

"Go, Pat!" Sharpe said.

Boots clattered on the stairs. Sharpe abandoned his attempt to load the rifle, reversed the weapon instead and hammered its butt at the shadow that appeared in the smoke. The man went down silently and hard, felled instantly by the brass-weighted blow. Harper, his rifle reloaded, fired blindly up the stairs, then grabbed Sharpe's elbow. "For the love of God, sir. Come on!"

Grey attackers were pouring down the stairs into the smoky darkness. A pistol fired, a man shouted in urgent French and another tripped over Thompson's corpse. The damp cave-like space stank of urine, rotted eggs and sweat. Harper pulled Sharpe through the cloying smoke to the foot of the back stairs where Latimer crouched. "Go on, sir!" Latimer had a loaded rifle that would serve as the parting shot.

Sharpe pounded up the stairs towards the cool and blessedly clean night air. Latimer fired into the chaos, then followed Harper up the crooked stair. Cresacre and Hagman were waiting at the stairhead with pointed rifles. "Don't shoot!" Sharpe called as he neared the stairhead, then pushed past the two riflemen and ran to the inner edge of the firestep to try and understand the night's full horror.

Harper ran to the door that led into the gate tower, only to find it was barred from the inside. He hammered on the wood with the butt of his volley gun. "Open up!" he shouted. "Open up!"

Hagman fired down the winding stair and a scream echoed up the steps.

"Behind us, sir!" Perkins called. He was sheltering a terrified Miranda in one of the machicolations, "and there's more on the road, sir!"

Sharpe swore. The gatehouse, that he had thought would be the night's salvation, was already captured. He could see that the gate was wide open and being guarded by grey-uniformed soldiers. Sharpe guessed two companies of Loup's voltigeurs, distinguished by the red epaulettes they wore, had led the attack and both were now inside the fort. One company had gone straight to the magazine where Sharpe and his men were bivouacking while most of the second company had spread into a skirmish line that was now advancing fast among the barracks blocks. Another squad of the grey-clad infantry was running up a ramp which led to the wall's wide firestep.

Harper kept trying to break the door down, but no one inside the gatehouse responded. Sharpe shouldered his half-loaded rifle and drew his sword. "Leave it, Pat!" he shouted. "Rifles! Line on me!" The real danger now was the section of men coming up to the wall. If those men got a lodging in the gun platforms then Sharpe's riflemen would be trapped while the rest of Loup's men swarmed into the San Isidro. That main enemy force was now hurrying up the approach road and, from the one quick southward glance that he could spare, Sharpe could see that Loup had sent his whole brigade into this attack which had been spearheaded by two companies of light infantry. God damn it, Sharpe thought, but he had got everything wrong. The French had not attacked from the north, but from the south, and in so doing they had already captured the fort's strongest point, the place Sharpe had planned to turn into an impregnable stronghold. He guessed that the two elite companies had crept up the approach road and rushed the causeway before any sentry called the alarm. And doubtless, too, the gates had been unbarred from inside by the same person who had betrayed where Sharpe, Loup's sworn enemy, was to be found and where Loup, seeking his revenge, had sent one of the two attacking companies.

Now, though, was not the time to analyse Loup's tactics, but to clear the ramparts of the Frenchmen who threatened to isolate Sharpe's riflemen. "Fix swords," he ordered, and waited while his men slotted the long, sword-handled bayonets onto their rifles' muzzles. "Be calm, lads," he said. He knew his men were frightened and excited after being woken to nightmare by a clever enemy, but this was no time for panic. It was a time for very cool heads and murderous fighting. "Let's get the bastards! Come on!" Sharpe called and he led his men in a ragged line down the moonlit battlements. The first Frenchmen to reach the firestep dropped to their knees and took aim, but they were outnumbered, in the dark and nervous and so they fired early and their bullets flew wide or high. Then, fearing to be overwhelmed by the dark mass of riflemen, the voltigeurs turned and ran down the ramp to join the skirmish line that was advancing between the barracks blocks towards Oliveira's caзadores.

The Portuguese, Sharpe decided, must fend for themselves. His duty lay with the Real Companпa Irlandesa whose twin barracks had already been surrounded by the French skirmishers. The voltigeurs were firing at the barracks from the shelter of the other buildings, but they dared not attack, for the Irish guardsmen had opened a brisk return fire. Sharpe assumed the Real Companпa Irlandesa's officers were already either dead or prisoners, though it was possible that a few might have escaped out of the gatehouse's rampart doors as the French streamed into the lower rooms. "Listen, lads!" Sharpe raised his voice so that all his riflemen could hear. "We can't stay here. The buggers will be up from the magazine soon so we're going over to join the Irish boys. We'll barricade ourselves inside and keep firing." He would have liked to split his greenjackets into two groups, one for each of the besieged barracks, but he doubted any man could reach the further barracks alive. The nearer of the two was less infested by voltigeurs, but it was also the barracks where the wives and children were quartered and thus the more in need of extra firepower. "Are you ready?" Sharpe called. "Let's go!"

They ran down the ramp just as Oliveira's skirmishers attacked from the right. The appearance of the caзadores distracted the voltigeurs and gave Sharpe's riflemen the chance to cross to the barracks without fighting through a whole voltigeur company, but it was a narrow chance, for even as Harper began shouting in Gaelic to order the Real Companпa Irlandesa to open their door a huge cheer from the gatehouse on Sharpe's left announced the arrival of Loup's main force. Sharpe was among the barracks now where the voltigeurs were retreating from the attack of the Portuguese skirmishers. The Frenchmen's retreat drove them at right angles across Sharpe's path. Loup's men realized their danger too late. A sergeant screamed a warning, then was clubbed to the ground by Harper's volley gun. The Frenchman tried to stand, then the butt of the heavy gun slammed sickeningly into his skull. Another Frenchman tried to turn and run in the opposite direction, then realized in his panic that he was running towards the Portuguese and so turned back again only to find Rifleman Harris's sword bayonet at his throat. "Non, monsieur!" the Frenchman cried as he dropped his musket and raised his hands.

"Don't speak bloody Crapaud, do I?" Harris lied and pulled his trigger. Sharpe swerved past the falling body, parried a clumsy bayonet thrust and hammered his attacker down with his heavy sword. The man tried to stab his bayonet up at Sharpe who gave him two furious slashes with the big sword and left him screaming and bleeding and curled into a ball. He back-cut another French skirmisher, then ran on to the moon-cast shadow of the next empty barracks block where a huddle of riflemen were protecting Miranda. Harper still shouted in Gaelic, one of the precautions Sharpe had agreed with Donaju in case the French used an English speaker to confuse the defenders. The Sergeant's shouting had at last gained the attention of the guardsmen in the nearest barracks and the end door opened a crack. A rifle flared and crashed close beside Sharpe, a bullet hissed through the dark overhead while behind him a man screamed. Hagman was already at the barracks door where he crouched and counted the riflemen inside. "Come on, Perks!" he called, and Perkins and Miranda scuttled over the open space, followed by a rush of riflemen. "They're all safe, sir, all safe," the Cheshireman called to Sharpe, "just you and Harps."

"Go, Pat," Sharpe said, and just as the Irishman began to run a voltigeur came round the corner of the building, saw the big rifle Sergeant running away and dropped to one knee as he levelled his musket. He saw Sharpe a second later, but it was already too late. Sharpe came out of the dark shadow with the sword already swinging. The blade caught the voltigeur just above the eyes and such was the anger and strength in the blow that the top of the man's skull came away like a decapitated boiled egg.

"God save England," Hagman said, watching the blow from the barracks door. "Come in, Harps! Come on, sir! Hurry!" The panic started among the voltigeurs by the counterattacking Portuguese had helped the riflemen escape Loup's first assault, but that panic was subsiding as Loup's main force arrived through the captured gatehouse. That force would soon have Sharpe's men trapped in the barracks.

"Mattresses! Packs!" Sharpe shouted. "Pile 'em behind the doors! Pat! Look to the windows! Move, woman!" he snarled at a screaming wife who was trying to leave the barracks altogether. He unceremoniously pushed her back. Bullets cracked on the stone walls and splintered the door. There were two small windows on either side of the long room and Harper was stuffing them with blankets. Rifleman Cresacre pushed his rifle through one of the half-blocked windows and fired towards the gatehouse.

Sharpe and Donaju had discussed earlier what might happen if the French attacked and they had gloomily agreed that the Real Companпa Irlandesa might be trapped inside their barracks and so Donaju had ordered his men to make loopholes in the walls. The work had been done half-heartedly, but at least the loopholes existed and gave the defenders a chance to fire back. Even so, in the rushlit gloom of the tunnel-like barracks, this was a nightmarish place to be trapped. The women and children were crying, the guardsmen were nervous and the barricades behind the two end doors flimsy.

"You all know what to do," Sharpe called to the guardsmen. "The French can't get in here, and they can't blow the walls down and they can't shoot through stone. You keep up a good fire and you'll drive the bastards away." He was not sure that anything he had said was true, but he had to do his best to restore the men's spirits.

There were ten loopholes in the barracks, five on each long side, and each loophole was manned by at least eight men. Few of the men were as efficient as Sharpe would have liked at loading a musket, but with so many men using each loophole their fire would still be virtually continuous. He hoped the men in the second barracks were making similar preparations for he expected the French to assault both barracks at any moment. "Someone opened that damned gate for them," Sharpe told Harper. Harper had no time to answer, for instead a great howling noise announced the advance of Loup's main body of troops. Sharpe peered through a chink in one of the blocked windows and saw the flood of grey uniforms surge past the barracks. Behind them, pale in the moonlight, Loup's horsemen rode under their wolf-tail banner. "It's my own fault," Sharpe said ruefully.

"Yours, why?" Harper was ramming the last barrel of his volley gun.

"What does a good soldier do, Pat? He goes for surprise. It was so obvious that Loup had to attack from the north that I forgot about the south. Damn it." He pushed his rifle through the gap and looked for the one-eyed Loup. Kill Loup, he thought, and this attack would stall, but he could not see the Brigadier among the mass of grey uniforms into which he fired his rifle indiscriminately. The enemy's fire crackled harmlessly against the stone walls, while inside the barracks muskets crashed loud at loopholes and children wailed. "Keep those damn kids quiet!" Sharpe snapped. The dark, chill barracks room became foul with the acrid smell of powder smoke that scared the children almost as much as the deafening gunfire. "Quiet!" Sharpe roared, and there was a sudden gasping silence except for one baby that screamed incessantly. "Keep the damn thing quiet!" Sharpe shouted at the mother. "Hit it if you have to!" The mother plunged a breast into the baby's mouth instead, effectively stifling it. Some of the women and older children were usefully loading spare muskets and stacking them beside the windows. "Can't stand bloody children crying," Sharpe grumbled as he reloaded his rifle, "never have and never will."

"You were a baby once, sir," Daniel Hagman said reprovingly. The poacher turned rifleman was liable to such sententious moments.

"I was sick once, damn it, but that doesn't mean I have to like disease, does it? Has anyone seen that bastard Loup?"

No one had, and by now the mass of the Loup Brigade had swept past the two barracks in pursuit of the Portuguese who had called back their skirmish line and formed two ranks so that they could trade volleys with their attackers. The fight was lit by a half-moon and the guttering flicker of what remained of the camp-fires. The Frenchmen had ceased their wolf-like howling as the fight became grim, but it was still a one-sided affair. The newly woken Portuguese were outnumbered and facing men armed with a quick-loading musket, while they were equipped with the slow-loading Baker rifle. Even if they tap-loaded the rifle, abandoning the rammer and the leather patch that gripped the barrel's rifling, they still could not compete with the speed of the well-trained French force. Besides, Oliveira's caзadores were trained to fight in open country, to harass and to hide, to run and to shoot, and not to trade heavy volleys in the killing confrontation of the main battle line.

Yet even so the caзadores did not break easily. The French infantry found it hard to pinpoint the Portuguese infantry in the half-dark, and when they did establish where the line was formed it took time for the scattered French companies to come together and make their own line of three ranks. But once the two French battalions were in line they overlapped the small Portuguese battalion and so the flanks of the French pressed inwards. The Portuguese fought back hard. Rifle flames stabbed the night. The sergeants shouted at the files to close to the centre as men were hurled back by the heavy French musket balls. One man fell into the smouldering embers of a fire and screamed terribly as his cartridge pouch exploded to tear a haversack-sized hole in his back. His blood hissed and bubbled in the red-hot ashes as he died. Colonel Oliveira paced behind his men, weighing the fight's progress and judging it lost. That damned English rifleman had been right. He should have taken refuge in the barracks blocks, but now the French were between him and that salvation and Oliveira sensed the coming calamity and knew there was little he could do to prevent it. He had even fewer options when he heard the ominous and unmistakable sound of hooves. The French even had cavalry inside the fort.

The Colonel sent his colour party back to the northern ramparts. "Find somewhere to hide," he ordered them. There were old magazines in the bastions, and fallen walls that had made dark caves amidst the ruins, and it was possible that the regiment's colours might be preserved from capture if they were hidden in the tangle of damp cellars and tumbled stone. Oliveira waited as his hard-pressed men fired two more volleys then gave the order to retreat. "Steady now!" he called. "Steady! Back to the walls!" He was forced to abandon his wounded, though some bleeding and broken men still tried to crawl or limp back with the retreating line. The French uniforms pressed closer, then came the moment Oliveira feared most as a trumpet blared in the dark to the accompaniment of swords scraping out of scabbards. "Go!" Oliveira shouted to his men. "Go!"

His men broke ranks and ran to the walls just as the cavalry charged, and thus the caзadores became the dream target of all horsemen: a broken unit of scattered men. The grey dragoons slashed into the retreating ranks with their heavy swords. Loup himself led the charge and deliberately led it wide so that he could turn and herd the fugitives back towards his advancing infantry.

Some of Oliveira's left-hand companies reached the ramparts safely. Loup saw the dark uniforms streaming up an ammunition ramp and was content to let them go. If they crossed the wall and fled out into the valleys then the remainder of his dragoons would hunt them down like vermin, while if they stayed on the ramparts his men inside the San Isidro Fort would do the same. Loup's immediate concern was the men who were trying to surrender. Dozens of Portuguese soldiers, their rifles unloaded, stood with hands raised. Loup rode at one such man, smiled, then cut down with a backswing that half severed the man's head. "No prisoners!" Loup called to his men. "No prisoners!" His withdrawal from the fort could not be slowed by prisoners and, besides, the slaughter of a whole battalion would serve to warn Wellington's army that in reaching the Spanish frontier they had encountered a new and harder enemy than the troops they had chased away from Lisbon. "Kill them all!" Loup shouted. A caзador aimed at Loup, fired, and the bullet slapped inches past the Brigadier's short grey beard. Loup laughed, spurred his grey horse and threaded his way through the panicking infantry to hunt down the wretch who had dared try to kill him. The man ran desperately, but Loup cantered up behind and slashed his sword in an underhand swing that laid the man's spine open to the night. The man fell, writhing and screaming. "Leave him!" Loup called to a French infantryman tempted to give the wretch his coup de grвce. "Let him die hard," Loup said. "He deserves it."

Some of the survivors of Oliveira's battalion opened a galling rifle fire from the walls and Loup wheeled away from it. "Dragoons! Dismount!" He would let his dismounted cavalry hunt down the defiant survivors while his infantry dealt with the Real Companпa Irlandesa and the riflemen who seemed to have taken refuge in the barracks buildings. That was a pity. Loup had hoped that his advance guard would have trapped Sharpe and his damned greenjackets in the magazine, and that by now Loup would have had the pleasure of meting out an exquisitely painful revenge for the two men Sharpe had killed, but instead the rifleman had temporarily escaped and would need to be dug out of the barracks like a fox being unearthed at the end of a day's good run. Loup tilted his watch's face to the moon as he tried to work out just how much time he had left to break the barracks apart.

"Monsieur!" a voice shouted as the Brigadier closed his watch and slid out of his saddle. "Monsieur!"

Loup turned to see a thin-faced and angry Portuguese officer in the firm grip of a tall French corporal. "Monsieur?" Loup responded politely.

"My name is Colonel Oliveira, and I must protest, monsieur.My men are surrendering and your men are killing still! We are your prisoners!"

Loup fished a cigar from his sabretache and stooped to a dying fire to find an ember that would serve to light the tobacco. "Good soldiers don't surrender," he said to Oliveira, "they just die."

"But we are surrendering," Oliveira insisted bitterly. "Take my sword."

Loup straightened, sucked on the cigar and nodded to the Corporal. "Let him go, Jean."

Oliveira shook himself free of the Corporal's grip. "I must protest, monsieur," he said angrily. "Your soldiers are killing men who have their hands raised."

Loup shrugged. "Terrible things happen in war, Colonel. Now give me your sword."

Oliveira drew his sabre, reversed the blade and held the hilt towards the hard-faced dragoon. "I am your prisoner, monsieur," he said in a voice thickened by shame and anger.

"You hear that!" Loup shouted so that all his men could hear. "They have surrendered! They are our prisoners! See? I have their Colonel's sabre!" He took the sabre from Oliveira and flourished it in the smoky air. Gallantry insisted he should now give the weapon back to his defeated enemy on a promise of parole, but instead Loup hefted the blade as though judging its effectiveness. "A passable weapon," he said grudgingly, then looked into Oliveira's eyes. "Where are your colours, Colonel?"

"We destroyed them," Oliveira said defiantly. "We burned them."

The sabre slashed silver in the moonlight and blood seeped black from the slash on Oliveira's face where the steel had sliced across his left eye and his nose. "I don't believe you," Loup said, then waited until the shocked and bleeding Colonel had recovered his wits. "Where are your colours, Colonel?" Loup asked again.

"Go to hell," Oliveira said. "You and your filthy country." He had one hand pressed over his wounded eye.

Loup tossed the sabre to the Corporal. "Find out where the colours are, Jean, then kill the fool. Cut him if he won't tell you. A man usually loosens his tongue to keep his balls screwed on tight. And the rest of you," he shouted at his men who had paused to watch the confrontation between the two commanding officers, "this isn't a damned harvest festival, it's a battle. So start doing your job! Kill the bastards!"

The screams began again. Loup drew on his cigar, brushed his hands and walked towards the barracks.

The Dona Juanita's hounds began to howl. The sound set more children crying, but one glance from Sharpe was enough to make the mothers quell their infants' misery. A horse whinnied. Through one of the loopholes Sharpe could see that the French were leading away the horses captured from the Portuguese officers. He assumed the Irish company's horses had already been taken away. It had gone quiet in the barracks. Most of the French attackers had pursued the Portuguese, leaving just enough infantrymen behind to keep the trapped men blocked inside the barracks. Every few seconds a musket ball cracked against the stone, a reminder to Sharpe and his men that the French were still watching every blocked-up door and window.

"Bastards will have captured poor old Runcibubble," Hagman said. "I can't see the General living on prisoners' rations."

"Runciman's an officer, Dan," Cooper said. Cooper was aiming his rifle through one of the loopholes, stalking a target. "He won't live on rations. He'll give his parole and be feeding on proper Frog victuals. He'll get even fatter. Got you, you bastard." He pulled his trigger, then slid the rifle inside to let another man take his place. Sharpe suspected that the erstwhile Wagon Master General would be lucky to be a prisoner because if Loup was fighting true to his reputation then it was more likely that Runciman was lying slaughtered in his bed with his flannel nightdress and tasselled woollen cap soaked in blood.

"Captain Sharpe, sir!" Harper called from the far end of the block. "Here, sir!"

Sharpe worked his way between the straw mattresses that lay on the beaten earth floor. The air inside the blocked-up barracks was fetid and the few wicks still alight were guttering. A woman spat as Sharpe went by and Sharpe turned on her. "You'd rather be out there being raped, you stupid bitch? I'll bloody well throw you out, if that's what you want."

"No, seсor," she shrank away from his anger.

The woman's husband, crouching at a loophole, tried to apologize for his wife. "It's just that the women are frightened, sir."

"So are we. Anyone but a fool would be frightened, but that doesn't mean you lose your manners." Sharpe hurried on to where Harper was kneeling beside the pile of straw-filled sacks that had served as mattresses and which now blocked the door.

"There's a man calling you, sir," Harper said. "I think it's Captain Donaju."

Sharpe crouched near the loophole next to the barricaded door. "Donaju! Is that you?"

"I'm in the men's barracks, Sharpe. Just to let you know that we're all well."

"How did you escape the gatehouse?"

"Through the door to the ramparts. There's half a dozen officers here."

"Is Kiely with you?"

"No. Don't know what's happened to him."

And Sharpe did not much care. "Is Sarsfield there?" he asked Donaju.

"Fraid not," Donaju answered.

"Keep the faith, Donaju!" Sharpe called. "These buggers will be gone at first light!" He felt oddly relieved that Donaju had taken over the defence of the other barracks, for Donaju, for all his shy and retiring appearance, was proving to be a very good soldier. "Pity about Father Sarsfield," Sharpe said to Harper.

"He'll have gone straight to heaven, that one," Harper said. "Not many priests you can say that about. Most of them are proper devils for whiskey, women or boys, but Sarsfield, he was a good man, a real good man." The firing at the northern end of the fort died away and Harper crossed himself. "Pity about the poor Portuguese bastards too," he said, realizing what the lull in the sound of fighting meant.

Poor Tom Garrard, Sharpe thought. Unless Garrard lived? Tom Garrard had always had a charmed life. He and Sharpe had crouched in the fiery red dust of Gawilghur's breach as blood from their comrades' corpses trickled past like rivulets flowing down a rockfall. Sergeant Hakes will had been there, gibbering like a monkey as he tried to hide under a drummer boy's corpse. Damn Obadiah Hakeswill, who had also claimed to bear a charmed life, though Sharpe could not believe the bastard still lived. Dead of the pox, like as not, or, if there was even a trace of justice in a bad world, gutted by the bullets of a firing squad. "Watch the roof," Sharpe said to Harper. The barracks roof was a continuous arch of masonry designed to resist the fall of an enemy mortar shell, but time and neglect had weakened the tough construction. "They'll find a weak spot," Sharpe said, "and try and break through to us." And it would be soon, he thought to himself, for the heavy silence in the fort betrayed that Loup had finished off Oliveira and would now be coming for his real prize, Sharpe. The next hour promised to be grim. Sharpe raised his voice as he walked back to the other end of the room. "When the attack comes just keep firing! Don't aim, don't wait, just fire and make room at your loophole for another man. They're going to reach the barracks walls, we can't stop that, and they're going to try to break open the roof, so keep a good ear above you. Soon as you see starlight, fire. And remember, it'll be light soon and they won't stay after sunrise. They'll be feared that our cavalry will cut off their retreat. Now, good luck, boys."

"And God bless you all," Harper added from the gloom at the far end of the room.

The attack came with a roar like a rush of water released by lifting a sluice gate. Loup had massed his men in the cover of some nearby barracks, then released them in a desperate charge against the two barracks' north-facing walls. The rush was designed to carry the French infantry fast across the dangerous patch of ground covered by Sharpe's muskets and rifles. Those guns cracked to fill the barracks with yet more filthy smoke, but the third or fourth shot from each loophole sounded perversely loud and suddenly a man reeled back cursing from his musket's wrist-shattering recoil. "They're blocking the holes!" another man called.

Sharpe ran to the nearest loophole on the north wall and rammed his rifle into the hole. The muzzle cracked on stone. The French were holding masonry blocks against the loophole's outer opening, effectively ending Sharpe's fire. More Frenchmen were climbing onto the roof where their boots made a muffled, scraping sound like rats in an attic. "Jesus Christ!" A man stared wanly upwards. "Mary, Mother of God," he began to pray in a wailing voice.

"Shut up!" Sharpe snapped. He could hear the ringing noise of metal working on stone. How long before the roof collapsed and let in a flood of vengeful Frenchmen? Inside the barracks a hundred pale faces stared at Sharpe, willing an answer he did not possess.

Harper came up with the solution instead. He clambered up on the monstrous pile of straw-filled sacks by the door so that he could reach the topmost point of the end wall where a small hole served as a chimney and ventilator. The hole was too high for the French to block, and high enough to give Harper a clear shot along the roofline of Donaju's barracks. The bullets would be rising and so would be more of a threat to those Frenchmen nearest Harper, but if he could fire enough bullets he could at least slow down the assault on Donaju and pray that Donaju would return the compliment.

Harper opened with his seven-barrelled gun. The crash echoed through the barracks with the sound of a thirty-two-pounder cannon. A scream answered the blast that had whipped like canister shot across the other roof. Now, one by one, muskets and rifles were handed up to the big Sergeant who fired again and again, not bothering to aim, but just cracking the bullets into the grey mass that swarmed on the neighbouring roof. After a half-dozen shots the mass began to shred as men sought shelter on the ground. The answering fire smacked all around Harper's loophole, creating more dust than danger. Perkins had reloaded the volley gun and Harper now fired it again just as a musket flashed from the equivalent venthole in Donaju's barracks. Sharpe heard a scraping sound above him as a Frenchman's boots slid down the outer curve to the wall's base.

A man screamed in the barracks as he was hurled backwards by a musket ball. The French were randomly unmasking the loopholes and firing into the room where the wives and children crouched and whimpered. The besieged huddled away from the loopholes' lines of fire, the only defence they had. Harper kept firing while a group of men and women loaded for him, but most of the barracks' occupants could only wait in the smoky gloom and pray. The noise was hellish: a banging, ringing, scraping cacophony, and always, like an eerie promise of the horrid death that defeat promised, the feral wolf howl of Loup's men all around the barracks.

Dust sifted down from a patch of the ceiling. Sharpe moved everyone away from the threatened area, then ringed it with men armed with loaded muskets. "If a stone falls," he told them, "shoot like hell and keep shooting." The air was difficult to breathe. It was filled with dust, smoke and the stench of urine. The cheap rushlight candles were guttering. Children were crying throughout the length of the barracks now and Sharpe could not stop them. Women were crying too, while muffled French voices mocked their victims, doubtless promising that they would give the women something better than mere smoke to cry about.

Hagman coughed, then spat onto the floor. "Like a coal mine, it is," he said.

"You ever been in a coal mine, Dan?" Sharpe asked.

"I was a year down a mine in Derbyshire," Hagman said, then flinched as a musket flash speared through a nearby loophole. The ball spread itself harmlessly on the opposite wall. "I was just a littl'un," Hagman went on. "If my dad hadn't gone and died and my mam moved back to her sister's in Handbridge I'd be there still. Or more likely dead. Only the luckiest see their thirtieth birthday down the mines." He shuddered as a huge, rhythmic crashing began to reverberate through the tunnel-like barracks. Either the French had brought a sledgehammer, or else they were using a boulder like a battering ram. "Like the little pigs in the house, aren't we," Hagman said in the echoing dark, "with the big bad wolf huffing and puffing outside?"

Sharpe gripped his rifle. He was sweating, and his rifle's stock felt greasy. "When I was a child," he said, "I never believed the pigs could really see off the wolf."

"Pigs don't, as a rule," Hagman said grimly. "If the bastards go on banging like that they'll give me a headache."

"Dawn can't be far off," Sharpe said, though whether Loup would truly withdraw in the first light, Sharpe did not know. He had told his men that the French would go at dawn to give them hope, but maybe there was no hope. Maybe they were all condemned to die in a wretched fight in the scrabbling ruins of an abandoned barracks where they would be bayoneted and shot by an elite French brigade who had come to destroy this scratch force of unhappy Irishmen.

"Mind out!" a man called. More dust streamed down from the ceiling. So far the old barracks had stood the assault astonishingly well, but the first breach in the masonry was imminent.

"Hold your fire!" Sharpe ordered. "Wait till they break through!"

A huddle of kneeling women were telling their beads, rocking back and forth on their knees as they said the Hail Mary. Nearby a circle of men waited with expectant faces, muskets aimed up at the threatened patch of ceiling. Behind them an outer ring of men waited with more loaded guns.

"I hated the coal mine," Hagman said. "I was always frightened from the moment I went down the shaft. Men used to die there for no reason. None at all! We'd just find them dead, peaceful as you like, sleeping like babes. I used to think the devils came from the earth's centre to take their souls."

A woman screamed as a masonry block in the ceiling jarred and threatened to fall. "At least you didn't have screaming women in the mines," Sharpe said to Hagman.

"But we did, sir. Some worked with us and some were ladies working for themselves, if you follow my meaning. There was one called Dwarf Babs, I remember. A penny a time, she charged. She'd sing to us every Sunday. Maybe a psalm or perhaps one of Mr Wesley's hymns. "Hide me, O my Saviour, hide, till the storm of life be past"." Hagman grinned in the sultry dark. "Maybe Mr Wesley had some trouble with the Frenchies, sir? Sounds like it. Do you know Mr Wesley's hymns, sir?" he asked Sharpe.

"I was never one for church, Dan."

"Dwarf Babs wasn't exactly church, sir."

"But she was your first woman?" Sharpe guessed. In the dark Hagman blushed. "And she didn't even charge me."

"Good for Dwarf Babs," Sharpe said, then raised his rifle as, at last, a section of the roof gave way and crashed to the floor in a welter of dust, screams and noise. The ragged hole was two or three feet across and obscured by dust beyond which the wraith-like shapes of French soldiers loomed like giants. "Fire!" Sharpe yelled. The ring of muskets blazed, followed, a second later, by the second ring of guns as more men fired into the void. The French reply was oddly muted, almost as if the attackers had been surprised by the amount of musket fire that now poured up from the newly opened vent. Men and women reloaded frantically and passed the newly charged guns forward, and the French, driven from the hole's edge by the sheer volume of fire, began hurling rocks into the barracks. The stones crashed harmlessly onto the floor. "Block the loopholes!" Sharpe ordered, and men rammed the French-delivered stones into the loopholes to stop the intermittent bullets. Better still the air began to feel fresh. Even the candle flames took on new life and glowed into the darker recesses of the packed, fearful barracks.

"Sharpe!" a voice called outside the barracks. "Sharpe!"

The French had momentarily stopped firing and Sharpe ordered his men to hold their own fire. "Reload, lads!" He sounded cheerful.

"It's always a good sign when the bastards want to talk instead of fight." He walked closer to the hole in the roof. "Loup?" he called.

"Come out, Sharpe," the Brigadier said, "and we will spare your men." It was a shrewd enough offer even though Loup must have known that Sharpe would not accept, but he did not expect Sharpe to accept, instead he wanted the rifleman's companions to surrender him as Jonah had been surrendered to the ocean by his shipmates.

"Loup?" Sharpe called. "Go to hell. Pat? Open fire!"

Harper crashed a volley of half-inch balls at the other barracks. Donaju's men were still alive and still fighting, and now Loup's men came back to life as the fighting renewed itself. A frustrated volley of musketry cracked against the wall around Harper's loophole. One of the bullets ricocheted inside and slapped against the stock of Harper's rifle. He swore because the blow stung, then fired the rifle at the opposite roof.

Another rush of feet on the roof announced a new attack. The men beneath the broken masonry fired upwards, but suddenly a blast of gunfire swamped down through the hole. Loup had sent every man possible onto the roof and the attackers were able to match the fury of the defenders' fusillades. The Real Companпa Irlandesa's guardsmen shrank back from the musketry. "Bastards are everywhere!" Harper said, then ducked as a crash sounded on the stone roof just above his head. The French were now trying to break through the roof right over Harper's eyrie. Women screamed and covered their eyes. A child was bleeding from a ricochet.

The fight, Sharpe knew, was ending. He could sense the defeat. He supposed it had been inevitable, right from the moment that Loup had outguessed and outmanoeuvred the San Isidro's defenders. Any second now, Sharpe knew, and a wave of Frenchmen would swarm through the hole in the roof and though the first few enemy to enter the barracks would surely die, the second wave would live to fight over their comrades' bodies and so win the battle. And what then? Sharpe flinched from the thought of Loup's revenge, the knife at his groin, the slicing cut and the pain beyond all pain. He watched the hole in the roof with his rifle ready for one last shot and he wondered whether it would not be better to put the muzzle beneath his chin and blow the top of his skull away.

And then the world shook. Dust started from every masonry joint as a flash of light seared across the hole in the barracks' roof. A second later the boom and thunderous bellow of a great explosion rolled over the barracks, drowning even the furious crack of the French muskets outside and the desperate sobbing of the children inside. The vast noise reverberated against the gate tower to roll back again over the fort's interior while scraps of wood dropped from the sky to clatter on the roof.

A kind of ragged silence followed. The French fire had stopped. Somewhere close to the barracks a man was sighing as he breathed in and whimpering as he breathed out. The sky looked lighter, but the light was vivid and red. A piece of stone or wood scraped and rattled its way down the curving side of the barracks. Men were moaning and crying, while further off there was the crackle of flame. Daniel Hagman cleared away some of the straw mattresses that blocked the end door and peered through a ragged bullet hole driven through the timber. "It's the Portuguese ammunition," Hagman said. "Two wagons of the stuff were parked over there, sir, and some silly bastard of a Frog must have been playing with fire."

Sharpe unblocked a loophole and found it open at the far side. A Frenchman, his grey uniform burning, staggered past Sharpe's view. Now, in the silence after the great explosion, he could hear more men crying and gasping. "That blast scraped the buggers clean off the roofs, sir!" Harper called.

Sharpe ran to the hole in the roof and ordered a man to crouch on the ground. Then, using the man's back as a step, he leaped up and caught the broken edge of the masonry. "Heave me up!" he ordered.

Someone pushed his legs and he scrambled awkwardly over the broken lip. The fort's interior seemed to be scorched and smoking. The two carts of ammunition had blown themselves to smithereens and blasted the victorious French into chaos. Blood was smeared on the roof and a tangle of dead lay on the ground near the barracks where the explosion's survivors wandered in a daze. A naked man, blackened and bleeding, reeled among those shocked Frenchmen. One of the confused infantrymen saw Sharpe on the roof but did not have the strength or maybe lacked the sense to raise his musket. There appeared to be some thirty or forty dead, and maybe as many again badly injured; not many casualties out of the thousand men that Loup had brought to the San Isidro Fort, but the disaster had whipped the confidence clean out of the wolf's brigade.

And, Sharpe saw, there was better news still. For through the swirling smoke and dust, through the grey-dark of night and the sullen glow of fire, a silver line showed in the east. The dawn light was shining and with the rising sun would come an allied cavalry picquet to discover why so much smoke plumed up from the San Isidro Fort.

"We've won, boys," Sharpe said as he jumped back down to the barracks floor. That was not quite true. They had not won, they had merely survived, but survival felt uncommonly like victory and never more so than when, a half-hour later, Loup's men left the fort. They had made two more attacks on the barracks, but the assaults were feeble, mere gestures, for the explosion had ripped the enthusiasm out of Loup's brigade. So, in the first light, the Frenchmen went and they carried their wounded with them. Sharpe helped dismantle the barrier inside the nearest barracks door, then stepped cautiously into a chill and smoky morning that stank of blood and fire. He carried his loaded rifle in case Loup had left some marksmen behind, but no one shot at him in the pearly light. Behind Sharpe, like men released from nightmare, the guardsmen stepped cautiously into the dawn. Donaju emerged from the second barracks and insisted on shaking Sharpe's hand, almost as though the rifleman had won some kind of victory. He had not. Indeed Sharpe had come within a hand's breadth of ignominious defeat.

But now, instead, he was alive and the enemy was gone.

Which meant, Sharpe knew, that the real trouble was about to begin.

CHAPTER V

Caзadores trailed into the fort all morning. A few had escaped by hiding in ruined parts of the northern ramparts, but most of the survivors had fled across the ramparts and found a refuge among the thorns or in the dead, stony ground at the foot of the ridge dominated by the San Isidro Fort. Those lucky ones had watched aghast from their hiding places as other fugitives were hunted and slaughtered by the grey dragoons.

Oliveira had brought over four hundred riflemen to the fort. Now more than a hundred and fifty were dead, seventy were wounded and as many others missing. Just over a quarter of the Portuguese regiment paraded at midday. They had suffered a terrible defeat after being overwhelmed in a confined space by an enemy four times their number, yet they were not wholly destroyed and their colours still flew. Those flags had stayed hidden all night despite Loup's efforts to find the banners. Colonel Oliveira was dead and his body carried horrific evidence of the manner of his dying. Most of the other officers were also dead.

The Real Companпa Irlandesa had lost no officers, not one. The French, it appeared, had not bothered to assault the gate tower. Loup's men had streamed through the gates and ransacked the fort, but not one man had tried to enter the imposing tower. The enemy had not even taken the officers' horses from their stables next to the gatehouse. "We had the doors barred," Lord Kiely lamely explained the survival of the gatehouse's occupants.

"And the Crapauds didn't try to break them down?" Sharpe asked, not bothering to hide his scepticism.

"Be careful of what you suggest, Captain," Kiely said in a supercilious tone.

Sharpe reacted like a dog smelling blood. "Listen, you bastard," he said, astonished to hear himself saying it, "I fought my way up from the gutter and I don't care if I have to fight you to get another bloody step up. I'll slaughter you, you drunken bugger, and then I'll feed your damned guts to your whore's dogs." He took a step towards Kiely who, scared of the rifleman's sudden vehemence, stepped back. "What I'm suggesting," Sharpe went on, "is that one of your bloody friends in the bloody gatehouse opened the bloody gates to the bloody French and that they didn't attack you, my Lord" — he spoke the honorific title as rudely as he could — "because they didn't want to kill their friends as well as their enemies. And don't tell me I'm wrong!" By now Sharpe was walking after Kiely who was trying to escape Sharpe's diatribe that had attracted the attention of a large number of riflemen and guardsmen. "Last night you said you'd beat the enemy without my help." Sharpe caught Kiely by the shoulder and turned him round so violently that Kiely was forced to stagger to keep his balance. "But you didn't even fight, you bastard," Sharpe went on. "You skulked inside while your men did the fighting for you."

Kiely's hand went to his sword hilt. "Do you want a duel, Sharpe?" he asked, his face flushed with embarrassment. His dignity was being flayed in front of his men and what made it worse was that he knew he had deserved their scorn, yet pride would never permit Lord Kiely to admit as much. For a second it looked as if he would flick his hand to strike Sharpe's cheek, but instead he settled for words. "I'll send you my second."

"No!" Sharpe said. "A pox on your bloody second, my Lord. If you want to fight me, then fight me now. Here. Right here! And I don't care what bloody weapons we use. Swords, pistols, muskets, rifles, bayonets, fist, feet." He was walking towards Kiely who backed away. "I'll fight you into the ground, my Lord, and I'll beat the offal out of your yellow hide, but I'll only do it here and now. Right here. Right now!" Sharpe had not meant to lose his temper, but he was glad that he had. Kiely seemed dumbstruck, helpless in the face of a fury he had never suspected existed.

"I won't fight like an animal," Kiely said weakly.

"You won't fight at all," Sharpe said, then laughed at the aristocrat. "Run away, my Lord. Go on. I'm done with you."

Kiely, utterly defeated, tried to walk away with some dignity, but reddened as some of the watching men cheered his departure. Sharpe shouted at them to shut the hell up, then turned to Harper. "The bloody French didn't try to get into the gatehouse," he told Harper, "because they knew their bloody friends were inside, just as they didn't steal their friends' horses."

"Stands to reason, sir," Harper agreed. He was watching Kiely walk away. "He's yellow, isn't he?"

"Front to back," Sharpe agreed.

"But what Captain Lacy says, sir," Harper went on, "is that it wasn't his Lordship who gave the order not to fight last night, but his woman. She said the French didn't know there was anyone in the gatehouse and so they should all keep quiet."

"A woman giving orders?" Sharpe asked in disgust.

Harper shrugged. "A rare hard woman, that one, sir. Captain Lacy says she was watching the fighting and loving every second of it."

"I'd have the witch on a bonfire fast enough, I can tell you," Sharpe said. "Bloody damn hellbitch."

"Damn what, Sharpe?" It was Colonel Runciman who asked the question, but who did not wait to hear an answer. Instead Runciman, who at last had a genuine war story to tell, hastened to describe how he had survived the attack. The Colonel, it seemed, had locked his door and hidden behind the great pile of spare ammunition that Sharpe had stacked in his day parlour, though now, in the daylight, the Colonel ascribed his salvation to divine intervention rather than to the fortuitous hiding place. "Maybe I am intended for higher things, Sharpe? My mother always believed as much. How else do you explain my survival?" Sharpe was more inclined to believe that the Colonel had lived because the French had been under orders to leave the whole gatehouse complex untouched, but he did not think it kind to say as much.

"I'm just glad you're alive, General," Sharpe said instead.

"I would have died hard, Sharpe! I had both my pistols double-shotted! I would have taken some of them with me, believe you me. No one can say a Runciman goes into eternity alone!" The Colonel shuddered as the night's horrors came back to him. "Have you seen any evidence of breakfast, Sharpe?" he asked in an attempt to restore his spirits.

"Try Lord Kiely's cook, General. He was frying bacon not ten minutes ago and I don't suppose his Lordship's got much of an appetite. I just challenged the yellow bastard to a fight."

Runciman looked shocked. "You did what, Sharpe? A duel? Don't you know duelling is illegal in the army?"

"I never said anything about a duel, General. I just offered to beat the hell out of him right here and now, but he seemed to have other things on his mind."

Runciman shook his head. "Dear me, Sharpe, dear me. I can't think you'll come to a good end, but I shall be sad when it happens. What a scamp you are! Bacon? Lord Kiely's cook, you said?"

Runciman waddled away and Sharpe watched him go. "In ten years' time, Pat," Sharpe said, "he'll have turned last night's mess into a rare old story. How General Runciman saved the fort, armed to the jowls and fighting off the whole Loup Brigade."

"Runcibubble 's harmless," Harper said.

"He's harmless, Pat," Sharpe agreed, "so long as you keep the fool out of harm's way. And I almost failed to do that, didn't I?"

"You, sir? You didn't fail last night."

"Oh, but I did, Pat. I failed. I failed badly. I didn't see that Loup would out-clever me, and I didn't hammer the truth into Oliveira's skull, and I never saw how dangerously trapped we were in those barracks." He flinched, remembering the fetid, humid, dust-laden darkness of the night and the awful, scrabbling sound as the French tried to break through the thin masonry shell. "We survived because some poor fool set light to an ammunition wagon," Sharpe admitted, "not because we outfought Loup. We didn't. He won and we got beat."

"But we're alive, sir."

"So's Loup, Pat, so's Loup, God damn him."

But Tom Garrard was not alive. Tom Garrard had died, though at first Sharpe did not recognize his friend, for the body was so scorched and mutilated by fire. Garrard was lying face down in the very centre of the blackened spot where one of the ammunition wagons had stood and at first the only clue to his identity was the bent, blackened scrap of metal in an outstretched hand that had been fire-shrunken into a charred claw. Sharpe spotted the glint of metal and stepped through the still hot ashes to prise the box clear of the shrivelled grip. Two fingers snapped off the hand as Sharpe freed the tinder box. He brushed the black fingers aside, then levered open the lid to see that though all the linen kindling had long been consumed the picture of the redcoat was undamaged. Sharpe cleaned the engraving with a hand, then wiped a tear from his eye. "Tom Garrard saved our lives last night, Pat."

"He did?"

"He blew up the ammunition on purpose and killed himself doing it." The presence of the tinderbox could mean nothing else. Tom Garrard, in the wake of his battalion's defeat, had somehow managed to reach the ammunition wagons and light a fire he had known would blow his own soul clear into eternity. "Oh, dear God," Sharpe said, then fell silent as he remembered the years of friendship. "He was at Assaye with me," he went on after a while, "and at Gawilghur too. He was from Ripon, a farmer's boy, only his father was a tenant and the landlord threw him out when he was three days late with the rent after a bad harvest so Tom saved his folks the need to feed another mouth by joining the 33rd. He used to send money home, God knows how on a soldier's pay. In another two years, Pat, he'd have made colonel in the Portuguese, and then he planned to go home to Ripon and beat ten kinds of hell out of the landlord who drove him into the army in the first place. That's what he told me last night."

"Now you'll have to do it for him," Harper said.

"Aye. That bugger'll get a thumping he never dreamed of," Sharpe said. He tried to close the tinderbox, but the heat had distorted the metal. He took a last glance at the picture, then tossed the box back into the ashes. Then he and Harper climbed the ramparts where they had charged the small group of voltigeurs the night before and from where the full horror of the night could be seen. The San Isidro was a smoking, blackened wreck, littered with bodies and reeking of blood. Rifleman Thompson, the only greenjacket to die in the night, was being carried in a blanket towards a hastily dug grave beside the fort's ruined church.

"Poor Thompson," Harper said. "I gave him hell for waking me last night. Poor bugger was only going outside for a piss and tripped over me."

"Lucky he did," Sharpe said.

Harper walked to the tower door that still had the dents driven into it by the butt of his volley gun. The big Irishman fingered the marks ruefully. "Those bastards must have known we were trying to get refuge, sir," he said.

"At least one of those bastards wanted us dead, Pat. And if I ever find out who, then God help him," Sharpe said. He noticed that no one had thought to raise any flags on the battlements.

"Rifleman Cooper!" Sharpe called.

"Sir?"

"Flags!"

The first outsiders to arrive at San Isidro were a strong troop of King's German Legion cavalry who scouted the valley before climbing to the fort. Their captain reported a score of dead at the foot of the slope, then saw the far greater number of bodies lying in the fort's open area. "Mein Gott! What happened?"

"Ask Colonel the Lord Kiely," Sharpe said, and jerked a thumb at Kiely who was visible on the gatehouse turret. Other Real Companпa Irlandesa officers were supervising the squads collecting the Portuguese dead, while Father Sarsfield had taken charge of a dozen men and their wives who were caring for the Portuguese wounded, though without a surgeon there was little they could do except bandage, pray and fetch water. One by one the wounded died, some crying out in delirium, but most staying calm as the priest held their hands, asked their names and gave them the viaticum.

The next outsiders to arrive were a group of staff officers, mostly British, some Portuguese and one Spaniard, General Valverde. Hogan led the party, and for a solemn half-hour the Irish Major walked about the horror with an appalled expression, but when he left the other staff officers to join Sharpe he was grinning with an inappropriate cheerfulness. "A tragedy, Richard!" Hogan said happily.

Sharpe was offended by his friend's cheerfulness. "It was a bloody hard night, sir."

"I'm sure, I'm sure," Hogan said, trying and failing to sound sympathetic. The Major could not contain his happiness. "Though it's a pity about Oliveira's cacadores. He was a good man and it was a fine battalion."

"I warned him."

"I'm sure you did, Richard, I'm sure you did. But it's always the same in war, isn't it? The wrong people get the hind teat. If only the Real Companпa Irlandesa could have been decimated, Richard, that would have been a great convenience right now, a real convenience. Still and all, still and all, this will do. This will do very well."

"Do for what?" Sharpe asked fiercely. "Do you know what happened here last night, sir? We were betrayed. Some bastard opened the gates to Loup."

"Of course he did, Richard!" Hogan said soothingly. "Haven't I been saying all along that they couldn't be trusted? The Real Companпa Irlandesa aren't here to help us, Richard, but to help the French." He pointed to the dead. "You need further proof? But of course this is good news. Until this morning it was impossible to send the bastards packing because that would have offended London and the Spanish court. But now, don't you see, we can thank the Spanish King for the valued assistance of his personal guard, we can claim that the Real Companпa Irlandesa was instrumental in seeing off a strong French raid over the frontier, and then, honours even, we can send the treacherous buggers to Cadiz and let them rot." Hogan was positively exultant. "We are off the hook, Richard, the French malevolence is defeated, and all because of last night. The French made a mistake. They should have left you alone, but plainly Monsieur Loup couldn't resist the bait. It's all so clever, Richard, that I wish I'd thought of it myself, but I didn't. But no matter; this'll mean goodbye to our gallant allies and an end to all those rumours about Ireland."

"My men didn't spread those rumours," Sharpe insisted.

"Your men?" Hogan mocked. "These aren't your men, Richard. They're Kiely's, or more likely Bonaparte's, but they're not your men."

"They're good men, sir, and they fought well."

Hogan shook his head at the anger in Sharpe's voice, then steered his friend along the eastern battlements with a touch on the rifle-man's elbow. "Let me try and explain something to you, Richard," Hogan said. "One third of this army is Irish. There's not a battalion that doesn't have its ranks full of my countrymen and most of those Irishmen are not lovers of King George. Why should they be? But they're here because there's no work at home and because there's no food at home and because the army, God bless it, has the sense to treat the Irish well. But just suppose, Richard, just suppose, that we can upset all those good men from County Cork and County Offaly, and all those brave souls from Inniskilling and Ballybofey, and suppose we can upset them so badly that they mutiny. How long will this army hold together? A week? Two days? One hour? The French, Richard, very nearly ripped this army into two parts and don't think they won't try again, because they will. Only the next rumour will be more subtle, and the only way I can stop that next rumour is by ridding the army of the Real Companпa Irlandesa, because even if you're right and they didn't spread the tales of rape and massacre, then someone close to them did. So tomorrow morning, Richard, you're going to march these bastards down to headquarters where they will surrender those nice new muskets you somehow filched for them and draw rations for a long march. In effect, Richard, they are under arrest until we can find the transport to carry them to Cadiz and there's nothing you can do about it. It's all been ordered." Hogan took a piece of paper from his pouch and gave it to the rifleman. "And it isn't an order from me, Richard, but from the Peer."

Sharpe unfolded the paper. He felt aggrieved at what he perceived to be an injustice. Men like Captain Donaju only wanted to fight the French, but instead they were to be shuffled aside. They were to be marched down to headquarters and disarmed like a battalion of turncoats. Sharpe felt a temptation to crumple Wellington's written order into a ball, but sensibly resisted the impulse. "If you want to get rid of the troublemakers," he said instead, "then start with Kiely and his bloody whore, start with the—"

"Don't teach me my job," Hogan interrupted tartly. "I can't act against Kiely and his whore because they're not in the British army. Valverde could get rid of them, but he won't, so the easy thing to do, the politic thing, is to get rid of the whole damned pack of them. And tomorrow morning, Richard, you do just that."

Sharpe took a deep breath to curb his anger. "Why tomorrow?" he asked when he trusted himself to speak again. "Why not now?"

"Because it will take you the rest of today to bury the dead."

"And why order me to do it?" Sharpe asked sullenly. "Why not Runciman, or Kiely?"

"Because those two gentlemen," Hogan answered, "will be going back with me to make their reports. There's going to be a court of inquiry and I need to make damn sure that the court discovers exactly what I want it to discover."

"Why the hell do we want a court of inquiry?" Sharpe asked sourly. "We know what happened. We got beat."

Hogan sighed. "We need a court of inquiry, Richard, because a decent Portuguese battalion got torn to scraps, and the Portuguese government is not going to like that. Worse still, our enemies in the Spanish junta will love it. They'll say the events of last night prove that foreign troops can't be trusted under British command, and right now, Richard, what we want more than anything else is to have the Peer made the Generalisimo of Spain. We won't win otherwise. So what we need to do now, just to make sure that bloody Valverde doesn't have too much sunshine in which to make his hay, is hold a solemn court of inquiry and find a British officer on whom all the blame can be laid. We need, God bless the poor bastard, a scapegoat."

Sharpe felt the long, slow dawning of disaster. The Portuguese and Spanish wanted a scapegoat, and Richard Sharpe would make a fine victim, a victim who would be trussed and basted by the reports Hogan would concoct this afternoon at headquarters. "I tried to tell Oliveira that Loup was going to attack," Sharpe said, "but he wouldn't believe me—"

"Richard! Richard!" Hogan interrupted in a long-suffering tone. "You're not the scapegoat! Good God, man, you're nothing but a captain, and only a captain on sufferance. Aren't you a lieutenant on the list? You think we can go to the Portuguese government and say we allowed a greenjacket lieutenant to destroy a prime regiment of caзadores? Good Lord alive, man, if we're going to make a sacrifice then the very least we can do is find a big, plump beast with enough fat on its carcass to make the fire sizzle when we throw it on the flames."

"Runciman," Sharpe said.

Hogan smiled wolfishly. "Exactly. Our Wagon Master will be sacrificed to make the Portuguese happy and to persuade the Spanish that Wellington can be trusted not to massacre their precious soldiers. I can't sacrifice Kiely, though I'd love to, because that will upset the Spaniards and I can't sacrifice you because you're too junior and, besides, I need you for the next time I've got a fool's errand, but Colonel Claud Runciman was born for this moment, Richard. This is Claud's proud and sole purpose in life: to sacrifice his honour, his rank and his reputation to keep Lisbon and Cadiz happy." Hogan paused, thinking. "Maybe we'll even shoot him. Only pour encourager les autres."

Sharpe guessed he was supposed to recognize the French phrase, but it meant nothing to him and he was too depressed to ask for a translation. He also felt desperately sorry for Runciman. "Whatever you do, sir," Sharpe said, "don't shoot him. It wasn't his fault. It was mine."

"If anyone's," Hogan said brusquely, "it was Oliveira's responsibility. He was a good man, but he should have listened to you, but I dare not blame Oliveira. The Portuguese need him as a hero, just as the Spanish need Kiely. So we'll pick on Runciman instead. It ain't justice, Richard, but politics, and like all politics it ain't pretty, but well done it can work wonders. I'll leave you to bury the dead and tomorrow morning you report to headquarters with all your Irishmen disarmed. We're looking for a place to billet them where they can't get into trouble, and you, of course, can then go back to some proper soldiering."

Sharpe again felt a pang at the injustice of the solution. "Suppose Runciman wants to call me as a witness?" he asked. "I won't lie. I like the man."

"You have perverse tastes. Runciman won't call you, no one will call you. I'll make sure of that. This court of inquiry isn't supposed to establish the truth, Richard, but to ease Wellington and me off a painful hook that is presently inserted deep into our joint fundament." Hogan grinned, then turned and walked away. "I'll send you some picks and shovels to bury the dead," he called in callous farewell.

"You couldn't send us what we needed, could you?" Sharpe shouted after the Major in bitterness. "But you can find bloody shovels fast enough."

"I'm a miracle worker, that's why! Come and have lunch with me tomorrow!"

The smell of the dead was already rank in the fort. Carrion birds wheeled overhead or perched on the crumbling ramparts. There were a few entrenching tools in the fort already and Sharpe ordered the Real Companпa Irlandesa to start digging a long trench for a grave. He made his own riflemen join the diggers. The greenjackets grumbled that such labouring was beneath their dignity as elite troops, but Sharpe insisted. "We do it because they're doing it," he told his unhappy men, jerking his thumb towards the Irish guardsmen. Sharpe even took a hand himself, stripping to the waist and wielding a pickaxe as though it was an instrument of vengeance. He slammed the point repeatedly into the hard, rocky soil, wrenched it loose and swung again until the sweat poured off him.

"Sharpe?" A sad Colonel Runciman, mounted on his big horse, peered down at the sweating, bare-backed rifleman. "Is that really you, Sharpe?"

Sharpe straightened and pushed the hair out of his eyes. "Yes, General. It's me."

"You were flogged?" Runciman was staring aghast at the thick scars on Sharpe's back.

"In India, General, for something I didn't do."

"You shouldn't be digging now! It's beneath an officer's dignity to dig, Sharpe. You must learn to behave as an officer."

Sharpe wiped the sweat off his face. "I like digging, General. It's honest work. I always fancied that one day I might have a farm. Just a small one, but with nothing but honest work to do from sun-up to lights-out. Are you here to say goodbye?"

Runciman nodded. "You know there's going to be a court of inquiry?"

"I heard, sir."

"They need someone to blame, I suppose," Runciman said. "General Valverde says someone should hang for this." Runciman fidgeted with his reins, then turned in his saddle to stare at the Spanish General who was a hundred paces away and deep in conversation with Lord Kiely. Kiely seemed to be doing most of the talking, gesticulating wildly, but also pointing towards Sharpe every few seconds. "You don't think they'll hang me, do you, Sharpe?" Runciman asked. He seemed very close to tears.

"They won't hang you, General," Sharpe said.

"But it'll mean disgrace all the same," Runciman said, sounding broken-hearted.

"So fight back," Sharpe said.

"How?"

"Tell them you ordered me to warn Oliveira. Which I did."

Runciman frowned. "But I didn't order you to do that, Sharpe."

"So? They won't know that, sir."

"I can't tell a lie!" Runciman said, shocked at the thought.

"It's your honour that's at stake, sir, and there'll be enough bastards telling lies about you."

"I won't tell lies," Runciman insisted.

"Then bend the truth, for God's sake, sir. Tell them how you had to play tricks to get some decent muskets, and if it hadn't been for those muskets then no one would have lived last night! Play the hero, sir, make the bastards wriggle!"

Runciman shook his head slowly. "I'm not a hero, Sharpe. I'd like to think there's a valued contribution I can make to the army, as my dear father made to the church, but I'm not sure I've found my real calling yet. But I can't pretend to be what I'm not." He took off his cocked hat to wipe his brow. "I just came to say goodbye."

"Good luck, sir."

Runciman smiled ruefully. "I never had that, Sharpe, never. Except in my parents. I was lucky in my dear parents and in being blessed with a healthy appetite. But otherwise…?" He shrugged as though the question was unanswerable, put his hat on again and then, with a forlorn wave, turned and rode to join Hogan. Two ox-drawn wagons had come to the fort with spades and picks and as soon as the tools were unloaded Father Sarsfield commandeered the two vehicles so that the wounded could be carried to doctors and hospitals.

Hogan waved goodbye to Sharpe and led the wagons out of the fort. The surviving caзadores followed, marching beneath their flags. Lord Kiely said nothing to his men, but just rode southwards. Juanita, who had not shown her face outside the gatehouse all morning, rode beside him with her dogs running behind. General Valverde touched his hat to greet Juanita, then pulled his reins sharply around and spurred his horse across the fire-blackened grass of the fort's yard until he came to where Sharpe was digging. "Captain Sharpe?" he said.

"General?" Sharpe had to shade his eyes to look up at the tall, thin, yellow-uniformed man in his high saddle.

"What reason did General Loup have for his attack last night?"

"You must ask him, General," Sharpe said.

Valverde smiled. "Maybe I shall. Now back to your digging, Captain. Or should it be Lieutenant?" Valverde waited for an answer, but when none came he turned his horse and rammed his spurs hard back.

"What was all that about?" Harper asked.

"God knows," Sharpe said, watching the elegant Spaniard gallop to catch up with the wagons and the other horsemen. Except he did know, and he knew it meant trouble. He swore, then plucked the pick out of the soil and rammed it hard down again. A spark flew from a scrap of flint as the pick's spike slashed deep. Sharpe let go of the handle. "But I'll tell you what I do know, Pat. Everyone loses out of last night's business except goddamned Loup, and Loup's still out there and that gives me the gripe."

"So what can you do about it, sir?"

"At this moment, Pat, nothing. I don't even know where to find the bastard."

Then El Castrador arrived.

"El Lobo is in San Cristobal, seсor," El Castrador said. The partisan had come with five of his men to collect the muskets Sharpe had promised him. The Spaniard claimed he needed a hundred weapons, though Sharpe doubted whether the man had even a dozen followers any more, yet doubtless any extra guns would be sold for a healthy profit. Sharpe gave El Castrador thirty of the muskets he had stored overnight in Runciman's quarters.

"I cannot spare more," he had told El Castrador, who had shrugged acceptance in the manner of a man accustomed to disappointments.

Now El Castrador was poking among the Portuguese dead, searching for plunder. He picked up a rifle horn, turned it over and saw it had been holed by a bullet. He nevertheless wrenched off the horn's metal spout and shoved it into a capacious pocket of his bloodstained apron. "El Lobo is in San Cristobal," he said again.

"How do you know?" Sharpe asked.

"I am El Castrador!" the gross man said boastfully, then squatted beside a blackening corpse. He prised open the dead man's jaws with his big fingers. "Is it true, seсor, that you can sell the teeth of the dead?"

"In London, yes."

"For gold?"

"They pay gold, yes. Or silver," Sharpe said. The plundered teeth were made into sets of dentures for rich clients who wanted something better than replacement teeth made from bone or ivory.

El Castrador peeled the corpse's lips back to reveal a handsome set of incisors. "If I take the teeth out, seсor, will you buy them from me? Then you can send them to London for a profit. You and me, eh? We can do business."

"I'm too busy to do business," Sharpe said, hiding his distaste. "Besides, we only take French teeth."

"And the French take British teeth to sell in Paris, yes? So the French bite with your teeth and you bite with theirs, and neither of you will bite with your own." El Castrador laughed as he straightened from the corpse. "Maybe they will buy teeth in Madrid," he said speculatively.

"Where's San Cristobal?" Sharpe changed the subject.

"Over the hills," El Castrador said vaguely.

"Show me." Sharpe pulled the big man towards the eastern ramparts. "Show me," he said again as they reached the firestep.

El Castrador indicated the track that twisted up into the hills on the valley's far side, the same track down which Juanita de Elia had fled from the pursuing dragoons. "You follow that path for five miles," El Castrador said, "and you will come to San Cristobal. It is not a big place, but it is the only place you can reach by that road."

"And how do you know Loup is there?" Sharpe asked.

"Because my cousin saw him arrive there this morning. My cousin said he was carrying wounded men with him."

Sharpe gazed eastwards. Five miles. Say two hours if the moon was unclouded or six hours if it was jet dark. "What was your cousin doing there?" he asked.

"He once lived in the village, seсor. He goes to watch it from time to time."

A pity, Sharpe thought, that no one had been watching Loup the previous evening. "Tell me about San Cristobal," he said.

It was a village, the Spaniard said, high in the hills. Not a large village, but prosperous with a fine church, a plaza, and a number of substantial stone houses. The place had once been famous for rearing bulls destined for the fighting rings of the small frontier towns. "But no more," El Castrador said. "The French stewed the last bulls."

"Is it a hill-top village?" Sharpe asked.

El Castrador shook his head. "It sits in a valley like that one" — he waved at the eastern valley—"but not so deep. No trees grow there, seсor, and a man cannot get close to San Cristobal without being seen. And El Lobo has built walls across all the gaps between the houses and he keeps watchmen in the church's bell tower. You cannot get close." El Castrador issued the warning in a worried voice. "You are thinking of going there?"

Sharpe did not answer for a long time. Of course he was thinking of going there, but to what purpose? Loup had a brigade of men while Sharpe had half a company. "How close can I get without being seen?" he asked.

El Castrador shrugged. "A half-mile? But there is also a defile there, a valley where the road runs. I've often thought we could trap Loup there. He used to scout the valley before he rode through it, but not now. Now he is too confident."

So go to the defile, Sharpe thought, and watch. Just watch. Nothing else. No attack, no ambush, no disobedience, no heroics, just a reconnaissance. And after all, he told himself, Wellington's order to take the Real Companпa Irlandesa to the army headquarters at Vilar Formoso did not detail the route he must take. Nothing specifically forbade Sharpe taking a long, circuitous journey via San Cristobal, but he knew, even as he thought of that evasion, that it was specious. The sensible thing was to forget Loup, but it cut against all his instincts to be beaten and just lie down and accept the beating. "Does Loup have artillery at San Cristobal?" he asked the partisan.

"No, seсor."

Sharpe wondered if Loup had arranged for this intelligence to reach him. Was Loup enticing Sharpe into a trap? "Would you come with us, seсor?" he asked El Castrador, suspecting that the partisan would never come if Loup was the inspiration behind this news of the brigade's whereabouts.

"To watch Loup," the Spaniard asked guardedly, "or to fight him?"

"To watch him," Sharpe said, knowing it was not the honest answer.

The Spaniard nodded. "You haven't enough men to fight him," he added to explain his cautious question.

Privately Sharpe agreed. He did not have enough men, not unless he could surprise Loup or maybe ambush him in the defile. One rifle bullet, well aimed, would kill a man as surely as a full battalion attack, and when Sharpe thought of Oliveira's mangled and tortured body he reckoned that Loup deserved that bullet. So maybe tonight, Sharpe thought, he could take his riflemen to San Cristobal and pray for a private revenge in the defile at dawn. "I would welcome your help," Sharpe told El Castrador, flattering the man.

"In a week's time, seсor," El Castrador said, "I can assemble a respectable troop."

"We go tonight," Sharpe said.

"Tonight?" The Spaniard was appalled.

"I saw a bullfight once," Sharpe said, "and the matador gave the bull the killing stroke, the one over the neck and down through the shoulders, and the bull staggered, then sank to its knees. The man pulled the sword out and turned away with his arms raised in triumph. You can guess what happened."

El Castrador nodded. "The bull rose?"

"A horn in the small of the man's back," Sharpe confirmed. "Well, I am the bull, seсor, and I confess to being wounded, but Loup's back is turned. So tonight, when he thinks we're too weak to move, we march."

"But only to watch him," the partisan said cautiously. He had been scorched by Loup too often to risk a fight.

"To watch," Sharpe lied, "just to watch."

He was truthful with Harper. He took his friend to the top of the gatehouse tower from where the two riflemen stared across the eastern valley towards the hazed country where the village of San Cristobal was hidden. "I don't honestly know why I'm going," Sharpe confessed, "and we've got no orders to go and I'm not even sure we can do a damned thing when we get there. But there's a reason for going." He paused, suddenly feeling awkward. Sharpe found it hard to articulate his more private thoughts, perhaps because to do so exposed a vulnerability and few soldiers were good at doing that, and what he wanted to say was that a soldier was only as good as his last battle and Sharpe's last battle had been this disaster that had left San Isidro smoking and bloody. And there were plenty of carping fools in the army who would be glad that the upstart from the ranks had at last got his comeuppance, all of which meant that Sharpe must strike back at Loup or else lose his reputation as a lucky and victorious soldier.

"You have to beat the blood out of Loup?" Harper broke the silence with his suggestion.

"I don't have enough men to do that," Sharpe said. "The riflemen will come with me, but I can't order Donaju's men to San Cristobal. The whole idea's probably a waste of time, Pat, but there's a chance, a half-chance, that I can get that one-eyed bastard in my rifle sight."

"You'd be surprised," Harper said. "There's more than a few of the Real Companпa Irlandesa who'd love to come with us. I don't know about the officers, but Sergeant Major Noonan will come, and that fellow Rourke, and there's a wild bugger called Leon O'Reilly who wants nothing more than to kill Crapauds and there's plenty more like him. They've got something to prove, you see. That they're not all as yellow as Kiely."

Sharpe smiled, then shrugged. "It probably is all a waste of time, Pat," he repeated.

"So what else were you planning on doing tonight?"

"Nothing," Sharpe said, "nothing at all." Yet he knew that if he marched to another defeat he would risk everything he had ever earned, but he also knew that not to go, however hopeless the prospect of revenge, was to accept the beating Loup had administered and Sharpe was too proud to accept that licking. He would most likely achieve nothing by marching to San Cristobal, yet march he must.

They marched after dark. Donaju insisted on coming, and fifty of his men came too. More would have marched, but Sharpe wanted most of the Real Companпa Irlandesa to stay behind and guard the families and baggage. Everyone and everything left in the San Isidro Fort had been moved into the gatehouse just in case Loup did come back to finish off his previous night's work. "Which would just be my bloody luck," Sharpe said. "Me marching to shoot him and him marching to geld me." He had his riflemen ranging ahead as scouts just in case the French were returning to the San Isidro.

"What do we do if we meet them?" Donaju asked.

"Hide," Sharpe said. "Seventy of us can't beat a thousand of them, not in the open." An ambush might work this night, but not a firefight on open, level moonlit ground against an overwhelming enemy. "And I hate night fighting," Sharpe went on. "I was captured in a bloody night fight in India. We were blundering around in the sodding dark with no one knowing what they were doing or why except for the Indians, and they knew well enough. They were firing rockets at us. The things were no bloody use as weapons, but at night their fire blinded us and the next thing I knew there were twenty big buggers with fixed bayonets all around me."

"Where was that?" Donaju asked.

"Seringapatam."

"What business did you have in India?" Donaju asked in evident disapproval.

"Same business I've got here," Sharpe said curtly. "Killing the King's enemies."

El Castrador wanted to know what they were talking about, so Donaju translated. The partisan was suffering because Sharpe had refused to let anyone ride a horse so El Castrador's horse, like the horses of the Spanish-Irish officers, was being led at the column's rear. Sharpe had insisted on the precaution because men on horses were liable to ride away from the line of march and the sight of a mounted man on a crest could easily serve to alert a French patrol. Sharpe had similarly insisted that no man carry a loaded musket in case a stumble snapped a lock and fired a shot that would carry far in the still, almost windless night.

The march was not hard. The first hour was the worst, for they had to climb the steep hill opposite the San Isidro, but once over the crest the road kept to fairly level ground. It was a drover's road, grassy, wide and easy marching in the cool night air. The route wound lazily between rocky outcrops where enemy picquets could have been hidden. Normally Sharpe would have reconnoitred such dangerous places, but this night he pushed his scouts urgently ahead. He was in a dangerous and fatalistic mood. Maybe, he thought, this reckless march was the aftermath of defeat, a kind of shocked reaction in which a man lashed out blindly, and this daft expedition under the half-moon was undoubtedly blind, for Sharpe knew in his inmost soul that the unfinished business between himself and Brigadier Loup would almost certainly stay unfinished. No man could expect to march by night towards a fortified village that he had not reconnoitred and then spring an ambush. The odds were that the small expedition would watch the village from afar, Sharpe would conclude that nothing could be achieved against its walls or in the nearby defile, and in the dawn the guards and riflemen would march back to San Isidro with nothing but sore feet and a wasted night.

It was just after midnight when the column reached the low ridge that overlooked the valley of San Cristobal. Sharpe rested the men behind the crest while he climbed to the top with El Castrador, Donaju and Harper. The four men lay in the rocks and watched.

The grey stone of the village was blanched near white by the moonlight which cast stark shadows from the intricate web of stone walls that marked the fields around the small settlement. The lime-washed bell tower of the church seemed to glow, so clear was the night and so bright the half-moon that hung above the glimmering hills. Sharpe trained his telescope on the tower and, though he could plainly see the untidy stork's nest on top and the sheen of the moon glancing from a bell suspended in the tower's arched opening, he could see no sentries there. But nor would he necessarily expect to see a picquet, for any man keeping watch through a cold long night in a high vulnerable place would be likely to huddle for shelter in a corner of the tower.

San Cristobal looked as though it had been a pleasant village before Loup's brigade came to evict the inhabitants and destroy their livelihood. The sturdy field walls had been built to keep fighting bulls safely penned, and those bulls had paid for the church and houses that all showed a touch of affluence in the lens of Sharpe's telescope. At Fuentes de Onoro, the tiny village where he had first met El Castrador, the cottages had been mostly low and virtually windowless, but some of San Cristobal's houses had two storeys and nearly all the outward-facing walls possessed windows and even, in one case, a small balcony. Sharpe assumed there would be picquets in half those windows.

He traced the line of the drover's road with his telescope to see that where a track left the road to become the village's main street a stone wall had been built between two houses. There was a gap in the wall, but Sharpe could just make out the shadowy hint of a second wall beyond the first. He made a zigzag motion with his hand as he looked at El Castrador. "The gate, seсor?"

"Si. Three walls!" El Castrador exaggerated the zigzag gesture to show how complicated the maze-like entrance was. Such a maze would slow down any attacker while Loup's men poured musket fire down from the upper windows.

"How do they get their horses inside?" Donaju asked in Spanish.

"Around the far side," El Castrador answered. "There is a gate. Very strong. And the defile, seсor, is on the far side of the village. Where the road goes into the hills, see? We should go there?"

"Christ, no," Sharpe said. His hope in El Castrador's defile had vanished the moment he saw where it was. The gorge might be a perfect place for a surprise attack, but it was too far away and Sharpe knew he would have no chance of reaching it before daylight. So much for his hopes of ambush.

He turned the spyglass back to the village just in time to see a flicker of motion. He tensed, then saw it was merely a puff of smoke coming from a chimney deep in the village. The smoke had been there all the time, but someone must have dumped wood on the fire or else tried to revive a hearth of smouldering embers with a pair of bellows and so provoked the sudden gust of smoke.

"They're all tucked up in bed," Donaju said. "Safe and sound."

Sharpe edged the telescope across the village roofs. "No flag," he said at last. "Does he usually fly a flag?" he asked El Castrador.

The big man shrugged. "Sometimes yes, sometimes no." He plainly did not know the answer.

Sharpe collapsed the telescope. "Put a dozen men on guard, Donaju," he ordered, "and tell the rest to sleep a while. Pat? Send Latimer and a couple of the lads to that knoll." He indicated a rocky height that would offer the best view of the surrounding country. "And you and the rest of the rifles will come with me."

Harper paused as though he wanted to ask for details of what they planned to do, then decided mute obedience was the best course and slid back off the crest. Donaju frowned. "I can't come with you?"

"Someone has to take charge if I die," Sharpe said. "So keep watch, stay here till three in the morning, and if you haven't heard from me by then, go home."

"And what do you plan to do there?" Donaju asked, gesturing towards the village.

"It doesn't smell right," Sharpe said. "I can't explain it, but it doesn't smell right. So I'm just going to take a look. Nothing more, Donaju, just a look."

Captain Donaju was still unhappy at being excluded from Sharpe's patrol, yet he did not like to contradict Sharpe's plans. Sharpe, after all, was a fighting soldier and Donaju had only one night's experience of battle. "What do I tell the British if you die?" he asked Sharpe chidingly.

"To take my boots off before they bury me," Sharpe said. "I don't want blisters through eternity." He turned to see Harper leading a file of riflemen up the slope. "Ready, Pat?"

"Aye, sir."

"You'll stay here," Sharpe said to El Castrador, not quite as a question, but not quite a direct order either.

"I shall wait here, seсor." The partisan's tone betrayed that he had no wish to get any closer to the wolf's lair.

Sharpe led his men southwards behind the crest until a broken stretch of rocks offered a patch of shadow that took them safe down to the nearest stone wall. They moved fast, despite having to go at a crouch, for the shadows of the stone walls offered black lanes of invisibility that angled towards the village. Halfway across the valley floor Sharpe stopped and made a cautious reconnaissance with his telescope. He could see now that all the lower windows in the village had been blocked with stone, leaving only the inaccessible upper windows free for lookouts. He could also see the foundations of houses that had been demolished outside the village's defensive perimeter so that no attacker would have shelter close to San Cristobal. Loup had taken the additional precaution of knocking down the drystone walls that lay within close musket range of the village. Sharpe could get as near as sixty or seventy paces, but after that he would be as visible as a blowfly on a limewashed wall.

"Bugger's taking no chances," Harper said.

"Can you blame him?" Sharpe answered. "I'd knock down a few walls to stop El Castrador practising his technique on me."

"So what do we do?" Harper asked.

"Don't know yet."

Nor did Sharpe know. He had come to within rifle range of his enemy's stronghold and he could feel no prickle of fear. Indeed, he could feel no apprehension at all. Maybe, he thought, Loup was not here. Or maybe, more worryingly, Sharpe's instincts were out of kilter. Maybe Loup was the puppetmaster here and he was enticing Sharpe ever closer, lulling his victim into a fatal sense of security.

"Someone's there," Harper said, anticipating Sharpe's thoughts, "else there'd be no smoke."

"Sensible thing to do," Sharpe said, "is for us to bugger off out of here and go to bed."

"Sensible thing to do," Harper said, "is get out the bloody army and die in bed."

"But that's not why we joined, is it?"

"Speak for yourself, sir. I just joined to get a square meal," Harper said. He primed his rifle, then similarly armed the seven-barrel gun. "Getting killed wasn't really part of the idea at all."

"I joined so as not to be strung from a gallows," Sharpe said. He primed his own rifle, then gazed again at the village's moonwashed walls. "Damn it," he said, "I'm going closer." It was like the game children played when they tried to see how close they could creep to a victim without their movements being observed, and suddenly, in Sharpe's mind, the village assumed a childlike menace, almost as though it were a malevolent but sleeping castle that must be approached with enormous stealth in case it stirred and destroyed him. Yet why bother to risk destruction, he asked himself? And he could give himself no answer to the question, except that he had not come this close to the stronghold of the man who had made himself into Sharpe's bitterest enemy just to turn and walk ignom-iniously away. "Watch the windows," he told his men, then he sneaked along the base of the shadowed wall until at last the stones ran out and there was only a spill of fallen rocks to show where once the wall had stood.

But at least that spill of stones offered a patchy tangle of concealing shadows. Sharpe stared at that tangle, wondering if the shadows were sufficient to hide a man and then he looked up at the village. Nothing stirred except the haze of woodsmoke tugged by the night's small wind.

"Come back, sir!" Harper called softly.

But instead Sharpe took a breath, lay flat and edged out into the moonlight. He was slithering like a snake between the rocks, so slowly that he trusted no watcher would detect his moving shape amidst the patchwork of shadows. His belt and looped uniform kept snagging on stones, but each time he eased himself free and crept a few feet onwards before freezing to listen again. He was anticipating the telltale sound of a musket being cocked, the heavy double click that would presage a crashing shot. He heard nothing except the soft sound of the wind. Not even a dog barked.

He went closer and closer until at last the jumbled stones ended and there was only moonlit open ground between himself and the high wall of the nearest house. He stared up at the window and saw nothing. He could smell nothing but the rank odour of the dungheaps in the town. No smell of tobacco, no saddle-sores, no stink of unwashed uniforms. There was the faint hint of woodsmoke sweetening the stench of dung, but otherwise no suggestion of human presence in the village. Two bats wheeled close to the wall, their ragged wings flickering black against the limewash. Sharpe, now that he was close to the village, could see the signs of neglect. The limewash was wearing thin, slates had slipped from the roofs and the window frames had been torn apart for firewood. The French had displaced San Cristobal's inhabitants and made it a village of ghosts. Sharpe's heart thumped hard, echoing in his ears as he lay straining for any clue as to what lay behind the blank, silent walls. He cocked his rifle and the clicks sounded unnaturally loud in the night, but no one called a challenge from the village.

"Bugger it." He had not meant to speak aloud, but had, and as he spoke so he stood up.

He could almost sense Harper taking a nervous breath a hundred paces behind him. Sharpe stood and waited, and no one spoke, no one called, no one challenged and no one shot. He felt suspended between life and death, almost as if the whole spinning earth had become as fragile as a blown-glass ball that could be shattered by a single loud noise.

He walked towards the village that lay just twenty paces away. The loudest noises in the night were the sounds of his boots on the grass and of the breath in his throat. He reached out and touched the cold stone wall, and no one fired and no one challenged, and so Sharpe walked on around the village's edge, past the stone-blocked windows and the wall-barricaded streets until he came at last to the maze-like entrance.

He stopped five paces short of the gate's outer wall. He licked his lips and stared at the dark gap. Was he being watched? Was Loup, like a sorcerer in a tower, drawing him on? Were the French holding their breath and scarcely believing their luck as their victim came to them, step by slow step? Was the night about to explode in stark horror? In gunfire and slaughter, defeat and pain? The thought almost made Sharpe walk away from the village, but his pride stopped him from retreating and the pride was monstrous enough to make him step one pace closer to the labyrinthine gate.

Then another pace, and another, and suddenly he was there, in the gate's opening itself, and nothing moved. Not a breath stirred. In front of him was the blank second wall with its enticing opening off to Sharpe's left. He sidled into the gap, closed off now from the moonlight and from the sight of his riflemen. He was in the maze, in Loup's trap now, and he edged down the narrow gap between the walls with his rifle pointed and his finger on the trigger.

He came to the gap and saw a third blank wall ahead, and so he stepped through into the last narrow passage that led to his right and thus to the final gap in the last wall. His feet scraped on stone, his breath boomed. There was moonlight beyond the third wall, but inside the labyrinth it was dark and cold. He had his back pressed hard against the middle wall and he took an odd comfort from the solid feel of the stone. He edged sideways again, tried to ignore the pumping of his heart, then took a deep breath, dropped to one knee and threw himself sideways in one motion so that he was kneeling in the last entrance to Loup's village with his rifle aimed straight down the stone-paved street towards the whitewashed church.

And in front of him was nothing.

No one called in triumph, no one sneered, no one ordered his capture.

Sharpe let out a long breath. It was a cold night, but sweat was trickling down his face and stinging his eyes. He shivered, then lowered the rifle's muzzle.

And the howling began.

CHAPTER VI

"He's mad, Hogan," Wellington said. "Stark mad. Gibbering. Should be locked up in Bedlam where we could pay sixpence to go and mock him. Ever been to Bedlam?"

"Once, my Lord, just the once." Hogan's horse was tired and fretful, for the Irishman had ridden long and hard to find the General and he was somewhat confused by the abrupt greeting. Hogan was also in the disobliging mood of a man woken too early, yet he somehow managed to respond to Wellington's jocular greeting in a similar vein. "My sister wanted to see the lunatics, my Lord, but as I recall we only paid tuppence each."

"They should lock Erskine up," Wellington said grimly, "and charge the populace tuppence apiece to view him. Still, even Erskine should manage this job, eh? All he has to do is stop the place up, not actually capture it." Wellington was inspecting the grim defences surrounding the French-held town of Almeida. Every now and then a gun would fire from the fortress town and the flat, hard sound of the shot would echo across the rolling country a few seconds after the shot itself had bounced in a flurry of early morning dew and bounded harmlessly off towards fields or woods. Wellington, attended by a dozen aides and gallopers and starkly lit by the long slanting rays of the just risen sun, made a ripe target for the French gunners, but his Lordship ignored their efforts. Instead, almost in mockery of the enemy's marksmanship, he would stop wherever the terrain offered a view and stare at the town which had possessed a peculiar flat-topped appearance ever since the cathedral and castle on Almeida's hill top had exploded in a massive eruption of stored powder. That explosion had forced the British and Portuguese defenders to surrender the fortress town to the French, who in turn were now ringed by British troops under the command of Sir William Erskine. Erskine's men were under orders to contain the garrison, not capture it, and indeed none of Erskine's guns was large enough to make any impression on the massive star-shaped fortifications. "How many of the scoundrels are in there, Hogan?" Wellington asked, ignoring the fact that Hogan would not have ridden hard across country so early in the day without bringing some important news.

"We think fifteen hundred men, my Lord."

"Ammunition?"

"Plenty."

"And how much food do they have?"

"My sources say two weeks on half rations which probably means they can last a month. The French do seem able to subsist on nothing, my Lord. Might I suggest we move before a gunner lays an accurate sight? And might I claim your Lordship's further attention?"

Wellington did not move. "I am claiming the gunners' whole attention," the General said with heavy humour, "as a means of encouraging them to improve their aim. That way, Hogan, they might relieve me of Erskine." General Erskine was usually drunk, perpetually half blind and reputed to be mad. "Or so the Horse Guards confessed to me," Wellington said, expecting Hogan to follow his erratic train of thought. "I wrote to them, Hogan, and complained at being provided with Erskine and do you know what they wrote back?" Wellington had told Hogan this story at least half a dozen times in the last three months, but the Irishman knew how much the General enjoyed the telling of it and so he indulged his master.

"I fear their reply has momentarily slipped my mind, my Lord."

"They wrote, Hogan, and I quote, that "no doubt he is sometimes a little mad, but in his lucid intervals he is an uncommonly clever fellow, but he did look a little wild as he embarked!" Wellington gave his great horse-neigh of a laugh. "So will Massйna try to relieve the garrison?"

Hogan understood from the General's tone that Wellington knew the answer as well as he did himself, and so he sensibly said nothing. The answer, anyway, was obvious, for both Hogan and Wellington understood that Marshal Massйna would not have left fifteen hundred men in Almeida just so they could be starved into surrender and thus forced to spend the rest of the war in some inhospitable prison camp on Dartmoor. Almeida had been garrisoned for a purpose and Hogan, like his master, suspected the purpose was close to its fulfilment.

A blossom of white smoke marked where a cannon had fired from the ramparts. The ball showed itself to Hogan as a dark vertical line that flickered in the sky, a sure sign that the shot was coming straight towards the observer. Now all depended on whether the gun-layer had judged the elevation right. One half-turn too many on the gun's elevating screw and the ball would fall short, one turn too few and it would scream overhead.

It fell a hundred yards short, then bounced up over Wellington's head to tear through a grove of oaks. Leaves scattered as the shot whipped the branches to and fro. "Their guns are too cold, Hogan," the General said. "They're under-firing."

"Not by a great deal, my Lord," Hogan said fervently, "and the barrels will warm quickly."

Wellington chuckled. "Value you life, do you? Well, ride on." His Lordship clicked his tongue and his horse obediently walked on down the slope past a British gun battery that was screened from the enemy by an earthwork topped by soil-filled baskets. Many of the gunners were stripped to the waist, some were sleeping, and none seemed to notice the commander passing. Another general might have been annoyed by the battery's casual air, but Wellington's quick eye noted the good condition of the guns and so he merely nodded to the battery commander before waving his aides out of earshot. "So what's your news, Hogan?"

"Too much news, my Lord, and none of it good," Hogan said. He took off his hat and fanned his face. "Marshal Bessiиres has joined Massйna, my Lord. Brought a deal of cavalry and artillery with him, but no infantry as far as we can gather."

"Your partisans?" Wellington was inquiring about the source of Hogan's information.

"Indeed, my Lord. They shadowed Bessiиres's march." Hogan took out his snuff box and helped himself to a restorative pinch while Wellington digested the news. Bessiиres commanded the French army in Northern Spain, an army devoted wholly to fighting partisans, and the news that Bessiиres had brought troops to reinforce Marshal Massйna hinted that the French were readying themselves for their attempt to relieve the seige of Almeida.

Wellington rode in silence for a few yards. His route took him up a gentle slope to a grassy crest that offered another view of the enemy fortress. He took out a spyglass and gave the spreading, low walls and the artillery-shattered rooftops a long inspection. Hogan imagined the gunners handspiking their guns around to lay on their new target. Wellington grunted, then snapped the spyglass shut. "So Massйna's coming to resupply these rascals, is he? And if he succeeds, Hogan, they'll have enough supplies to last out till hell goes cold unless we storm the place first, and storming it will take until midsummer at least, and I can't storm Almeida and Ciudad Rodrigo at the same time, so Massйna will just have to be stopped. It'll go low, I warrant." This last remark referred to a cannon that had just fired from the walls. The smoke jetted out across the ditch as Hogan tried to catch sight of the missile. The roundshot arrived a second before the sound of the gun. The ball bounced on the slope below the General's party and ricocheted high over his head to crack against an olive tree. Wellington turned his horse away. "But you know what it will mean, Hogan, if I try to stop Massйna in front of Almeida?"

"The Coa, my Lord."

"Exactly." If the British and Portuguese army fought the French close to Almeida then they would have the deep, fast-flowing River Coa at their backs, and if Massйna succeeded in turning Wellington's right flank, which he would assuredly try to do, then the army would be left with one road, just one road, on which it could retreat if it suffered defeat. And that one road led across a high, narrow bridge over the Coa's otherwise uncrossable gorge, and if the defeated army with all its guns and baggage and women and pack-horses and wounded were to try and cross that one narrow bridge then there would be chaos. And into that chaos would plunge the Emperor's heavy horses with their sword-wielding troopers and thus a fine British army that had thrown the French out of Portugal would die on the frontier of Spain and there would be a new bridge over the Seine in Paris and it would bear the odd name of Pont Castello Bom in commemoration of the place where Andrй Massйna, Marshal of France, would have destroyed Lord Wellington's army. "So we shall have to beat Marshal Massйna, won't we?" Wellington said to himself, then turned to Hogan. "When will he come, Hogan?"

"Soon, my Lord, very soon. The stores in Ciudad Rodrigo won't allow them otherwise," Hogan answered. With the arrival of Bessiиres's men the French now had too many mouths to feed from Ciudad Rodrigo's supply depots, which meant they would have to march soon or starve.

"So how many does Massйna have now?" Wellington asked.

"He can put fifty thousand men into the field, my Lord."

"And I can't put forty thousand against them," Wellington said bitterly. "One day, Hogan, London will come to believe that we can win this war and will actually send us some troops who are not mad, blind or drunk, but till then…?" He left the question unanswered. "Any more of those damned counterfeit newspapers?"

Hogan was not surprised by the sudden change of subject. The newspapers describing the fictional atrocities in Ireland had been intended to disaffect the Irish soldiers in the British army. The ploy had failed, but only just, and both Hogan and Wellington feared that the next attempt might be more successful. And if that attempt came on the eve of Massйna's crossing of the frontier to relieve Almeida it could be disastrous. "None, sir," Hogan said, "yet."

"But you've moved the Real Companпa Irlandesa away from the frontier?"

"They should be arriving at Vilar Formoso this morning, my Lord," Hogan said.

Wellington grimaced. "At which juncture you will apprise Captain Sharpe of his troubles?" The General did not wait for Hogan's answer. "Did he shoot the two prisoners, Hogan?"

"I suspect so, my Lord, yes," Hogan answered heavily. General Valverde had reported the execution of Loup's men to the British headquarters, not in protest at the actual deed, but rather as proof that Loup's raid on the San Isidro Fort had been provoked by Captain Sharpe's irresponsibility. Valverde was riding a high moral horse and loudly proclaiming that Spanish and Portuguese lives could not be trusted to British command. The Portuguese were unlikely to worry overmuch about Valverde's allegations, but the juntain Cadiz would be only too eager for any ammunition they could use against their British allies. Valverde was already passing on a litany of other complaints, how British soldiers failed to salute when the Holy Sacraments were being carried through the streets, and how the freemasons among the British officers offended Catholic sensibilities by openly parading in their regalia, but now he had a more bitter and wounding allegation: that the British would fight to the last drop of their allies' blood and the massacre at San Isidro was his proof.

"Damn Sharpe," Wellington said.

Damn Valverde, Hogan thought, but Britain needed Spanish goodwill more than it needed one rogue rifleman. "I haven't talked to Sharpe, my Lord," Hogan said, "but I suspect he did kill the two men. I hear it was the usual thing: Loup's men had raped village women." Hogan shrugged as if to imply that such horror was now commonplace.

"It may be the usual thing," Wellington said acidly, "but that hardly condones the execution of prisoners. It's my experience, Hogan, that when you promote a man from the ranks he usually takes to drink, but not in Mister Sharpe's case. No, I promote Sergeant Sharpe and he takes to conducting private wars behind my back! Loup didn't attack the San Isidro to destroy Oliveira or Kiely, Hogan, he did it to find Sharpe, which makes the loss of the caзadores all Sharpe's fault!"

"We don't know that, my Lord."

"But the Spanish will deduce it, Hogan, and proclaim it far and wide, which makes it hard, Hogan, damned hard for us to blame Runciman. They'll say we're hiding the real culprit and that we're cavalier with allied lives."

"We can say the allegations against Captain Sharpe are malicious and false, my Lord?"

"I thought he admitted them?" Wellington retorted sharply. "Didn't he boast to Oliveira about executing the two rogues?"

"So I understand, my Lord," Hogan said, "but none of Oliveira's officers survived to testify to that admission."

"So who can testify?"

Hogan shrugged. "Kiely and his whore, Runciman and the priest." Hogan tried to make the list sound trivial, then shook his head. "Too many witnesses, I'm afraid, my Lord. Not to mention Loup himself. Valverde could well attempt to get a formal complaint from the French and we'd be hard put to ignore such a document."

"So Sharpe has to be sacrificed?" Wellington asked.

"I fear so, my Lord."

"God damn it, Hogan!" Wellington snapped. "Just what the devil was going on between Sharpe and Loup?"

"I wish I knew, my Lord."

"Aren't you supposed to know?" the General asked angrily.

Hogan soothed his tired horse. "I've not been idle, my Lord," he said with a touch of tetchiness. "I don't know all that happened between Sharpe and Loup, but what does seem to be happening is a concerted effort to sow discord in this army. There's a new man come south from Paris, a man called Ducos, who seems to be cleverer than the usual rogues. He's the fellow behind this scheme of counterfeit newspapers. And I'll guess, my Lord, that there are more of those newspapers on the way, designed to arrive here just before the French themselves."

"Then stop them!" Wellington demanded.

"I can and shall stop them," Hogan said confidently. "We know it's Kiely's whore who brings them over the frontier, but our problem is finding the man who distributes them in our army, and that man is the real danger, my Lord. One of our correspondents in Paris warns us that the French have a new agent in Portugal, a man of whom they expect great things. I would dearly like to find him before he fulfils those expectations. I'm rather hoping the whore will lead us to him."

"You're sure about the woman?"

"Quite sure," Hogan said firmly. His sources in Madrid were explicit, but he knew better than to mention their names aloud. "Sadly we don't know who this new man in Portugal is, but given time, my Lord, and a touch of carelessness on the part of Kiely's whore, we'll find him."

Wellington grunted. A rumble in the sky announced the passage of a French roundshot, but the General did not even look up to see where the shot might fall. "Damn all this fuss, Hogan, and damn Kiely and his damned men, and damn Sharpe too. Is Runciman trussed for the sacrifice?"

"He's in Vilar Formoso, my Lord."

The General nodded. "Then truss Sharpe too. Put him to administrative duties, Hogan, and warn him that his conduct will be the subject of a court of inquiry. Then inform General Valverde that we're pursuing the matter. You know what to say." Wellington pulled out a pocket watch and clicked its lid open. An expression of distaste showed on his thin face. "I suppose, if I'm here, that I'll have to visit Erskine. Or do you think the madman is still in bed?"

"I'm sure his aides will have apprised Sir William of your presence, my Lord, and I can't think he'd be flattered if you were to ignore him."

"Touchier than a virgin in a barracks room. And mad as well. Just the man, Hogan, to conduct Sharpe and Runciman's court of inquiry. Let us see, Hogan, whether Sir William is experiencing a lucid interval and can thus understand what verdict is required of him. We must sacrifice one good officer and one bad officer to draw Valverde's fangs. God damn it, Hogan, God damn it, but needs must when the devil drives. Poor Sharpe." His Lordship gave one backward glance at the town of Almeida, then led his entourage towards the besieging force's headquarters.

While Hogan worried about the narrow bridge at Castello Bom, about Sharpe and, even more, about a mysterious enemy come into Portugal to sow discord.

The house with the smoking chimney lay where the street opened into the small plaza before the church, and it was in there that the howling had begun. Sharpe, who had been rising to his feet, had crouched instantly back into the shadows as a gate beside the house creaked open.

Then the hounds had poured out. They had been pent up too long and so ran joyously up and down the deserted street. A figure wearing uniform led a horse and a mule out and then turned away from Sharpe, evidently planning to leave San Cristobal by the gated entrance on the village's far side. One of the hounds leaped playfully at the mule and received a curse and a kick for its trouble.

The curse sounded plainly in the street. It was a woman's voice, the voice of the Dona Juanita de Elia who now put her foot in the stirrup of the saddled horse, but the hound came back to plague the mule again just as she tried to haul herself up into the saddle. The mule, which was loaded with a pair of heavy panniers, brayed and shied away from the hound and pulled its leading rein out of Juanita's grip then, frightened by the excited dogs, it trotted towards Sharpe.

Juanita de Elia cursed again. Her plumed bicorne hat had fallen off in the commotion so that her long black hair began to come out of its pins. She pushed it roughly into place as she hurried after the frightened mule which had come to a stop just a few paces from Sharpe's hiding place. The hounds ran in the other direction, baptizing the church steps in their joy at being released from confinement in the yard.

"Come on, you bastard," Juanita told the mule in Spanish. She was wearing the elegant uniform of the Real Companпa Irlandesa.

She leaned to pick up the mule's leading rein and Sharpe stepped out into the moonlight. "I never know," he said, "whether Dona is a title or not. Do I say "good morning, milady"? Or just good morning?" He stopped three paces from her.

It took Juanita a few seconds to recover her poise. She straightened up, glanced at the rifle in Sharpe's hands, then at her horse thirty paces away. She had left a carbine in the saddle holster, but knew she had no chance of reaching the weapon. She had a short sword at her side and her hand went to the hilt, then stopped as Sharpe raised the rifle's muzzle. "You wouldn't kill a woman, Captain Sharpe," she said coldly.

"In the dark, milady? With you in uniform? I don't think anyone would blame me."

Juanita watched Sharpe carefully, trying to judge the veracity of his threat. Then a means of salvation occurred to her and she smiled before giving a brief tuneless whistle. Her hounds stopped and pricked their ears. "I'll set the dogs on you, Captain," she said.

"Because that's all you've got left here, isn't it?" Sharpe said. "Loup has gone. Where?"

Juanita still smiled. "I've seen my bitches pull down a prime stag, Captain, and turn it into offal in two minutes. The first to reach you will go for your throat and she'll hold you down while the others feed on you."

Sharpe returned the smile, then raised his voice. "Pat! Bring 'em in!"

"Damn you," Juanita said, then she whistled again and the hounds began loping down the street. At the same time she turned and began running towards her horse, but she was slowed by the spurs on her heavy riding boots and Sharpe caught her from behind. He put his left arm round her waist and held her body in front of his like a shield as he backed against the nearest wall.

"Whose throat will they go for now, my lady?" he asked. Her tousled hair was in his face. It smelt of rosewater.

She kicked at him, tried to elbow him, but he was much too strong. The fastest hound came running towards them and Sharpe lowered the rifle with his right hand and pulled the trigger. The sound of the shot was brutally loud in the confined street. Sharpe's aim had been confused by Juanita's struggles, but his bullet caught the attacking animal in the haunch and sent it spinning and yelping to the ground just as Harper led the riflemen through the entrance maze. The Irishman's sudden appearance confused the other hounds. They slowed down, then whined as they clustered about the wounded bitch.

"Put the bugger out of its misery, Pat," Sharpe said. "Harris? Go back to Captain Donaju, give him my compliments and tell him to bring his men into the village. Cooper? Get her ladyship's horse. And Perkins? Take her ladyship's sword."

Harper waded into the hounds, drew his sword bayonet and stooped to the bleeding, snapping bitch. "Be still, you bugger," he said gently, then sliced once. "You poor beast," he said as he straightened up with his bayonet dripping blood. "God save Ireland, sir, but look what you found. Lord Kiely's fancy lady."

"Traitor!" Juanita said to Harper, then spat at him. "Traitor! You should be fighting the English."

"Oh, my lady," Harper said as he wiped the blade on the skirt of his green jacket, "some time you and me must enjoy a long talk about who should be fighting on whose side, but right now I'm busy with the war I've already got."

Perkins gingerly extracted the short sword from Juanita's slings, then Sharpe released his grip on her. "My apologies for manhandling you, ma'am," he said very formally.

Juanita ignored the apology. She stood straight and stiff, keeping her dignity in front of the foreign riflemen. Dan Hagman was coaxing the mule out of the street corner where it had taken refuge. "Bring it with you, Dan," Sharpe said, then led the way up the street towards the house Juanita had vacated. Harper escorted her, making her follow Sharpe into the yard.

The house must have been one of the largest in the village for the gate led into a spacious courtyard that possessed stabling on two sides and an elaborately crowned well in its centre. The kitchen door was open and Sharpe ducked inside to find the fire still smouldering and the remains of a meal on the table. He found some candle stubs, lit them from the fire, and placed them back on the table amidst the litter of plates and cups. At least six people had eaten at the table, suggesting that Loup and his men had left very recently. "Look round the rest of the village, Pat," Sharpe told Harper. "Take half a dozen men and go carefully. I reckon everyone's gone, but you never know."

"I'll take care, sir, so I will." Harper took the riflemen out of the kitchen leaving Sharpe alone with Juanita.

Sharpe gestured at a chair. "Let's talk, my lady."

She walked with a slow dignity to the far side of the table, put a hand on the chair back, then suddenly broke away and ran for a door across the room. "Go to hell," was her parting injunction. Sharpe was encumbered by the furniture so that by the time he reached the door she was already halfway up a dark flight of stairs. He scrambled after her. She turned right at the stairhead and ran through a door that she slammed behind her. Sharpe kicked it a split second before it would have latched and hurled himself through the opening to see, in the moonlight, that Juanita was sprawled across a bed. She was struggling to free an object from a discarded valise then, as Sharpe crossed the room, she turned with a pistol in her hand. He threw himself at her, slamming his left hand at the pistol just as she pulled the trigger. The bullet cracked into the ceiling as he landed full on her. She gasped from the impact, then tried to claw at his eyes with her free hand.

Sharpe rolled off her, stood and backed to the window. He was panting. His left wrist hurt from the impact of striking the pistol aside. The moonlight came past him to silver the haze of pistol smoke and to shine on the bed that was nothing but a raft of straw-filled mattresses on which a jumble of pelts provided the covers. Juanita half sat up, glared at him, then seemed to realize that her defiance had run its course. She let out a disgruntled sigh and collapsed back onto the furs.

Dan Hagman had heard the pistol shot from the courtyard and now came pounding up the stairs and into the bedroom with his rifle levelled. He looked from the woman prone on the bed to Sharpe. "Are you all right, sir?"

"Just a disagreement, Dan. No one hurt."

Hagman looked back at Juanita. "A right little spitfire, sir," he said admiringly. "She probably needs a spanking."

"I'll look after her, Dan. You get those panniers off the mule. Let's see what the spitfire was taking away, eh?"

Hagman went back downstairs. Sharpe massaged his wrist and looked about the room. It was a large high-ceilinged chamber with dark wood panelling, thick ceiling beams, a fireplace and a heavy linen press in one corner. It was obviously the bedroom of a substantial man and the room that a commanding officer, quartering his men in a small village, would naturally take as his own billet. "It's a big bed, my lady, too big for just one person," Sharpe said. "Are those wolf skins?"

Juanita said nothing.

Sharpe sighed. "You and Loup, eh? Am I right?"

She stared at him with dark resentful eyes, but still refused to speak.

"And all those days you went hunting alone," Sharpe said, "you were coming here to see Loup."

Again she refused to speak. The moonlight put half her face in shadow.

"And you opened the San Isidro's gate for Loup, didn't you?" Sharpe went on. "That's why he didn't attack the gatehouse. He wanted to make sure no harm came to you in the fighting. That's nice in a man, isn't it? Looking after his woman. Mind you, he can't have liked the thought of you and Lord Kiely. Or isn't Loup the jealous kind?"

"Kiely was usually too drunk," she said in a low voice.

"Found your tongue, have you? So now you can tell me what you were doing here."

"Go to hell, Captain."

The sound of boots in the street made Sharpe turn to the window to see that the men of the Real Companпa Irlandesa had arrived in the street below. "Donaju!" he shouted. "Into the kitchen here!" He turned back to the bed. "We've got company, my lady, so let's go and be sociable." He waited for her to stand up, then shook his head when she obstinately refused to move. "I'm not leaving you on your own, my lady, so you can either go downstairs on your own two feet or have me carry you."

She stood, straightened her uniform and tried to rearrange her hair. Then, followed by Sharpe, she went down into the candlelit kitchen where El Castrador, Donaju and Sergeant Major Noonan were standing by the table. They gaped at Juanita, then looked at Sharpe who did not feel inclined to offer an immediate explanation of the lady's presence. "Loup's gone," Sharpe told Donaju. "I've got Sergeant Harper making sure the place is empty, so why don't you have your lads man the defences? Just in case Brigadier Loup decides to come back."

Donaju glanced at Juanita, then turned on Noonan. "Sergeant Major? You heard the order. Do it."

Noonan went. El Castrador was watching Hagman unpack the dismounted mule panniers. Juanita had gone to the remnants of the fire where she was warming herself. Donaju looked at her, then gave Sharpe an inquiring look. "The Dona Juanita," Sharpe explained, "is a woman of many parts. She's Lord Kiely's betrothed, General Loup's lover and an agent of the French."

Juanita's head jerked up at the last phrase, but she made no effort to contradict Sharpe. Donaju stared at her as though he was unwilling to believe what he had just heard. Then he turned back to Sharpe with a frown. "She and Loup?" he asked.

"Their love nest's upstairs, for Christ's sake," Sharpe said. "Go and look if you don't believe me. Her ladyship here let Loup into the fort last night. Her ladyship, Donaju, is a goddamned traitor."

"Hymn sheets, sir," Hagman interrupted in a puzzled tone. "But bloody odd ones. I've seen things like it at church at home, you know, for the musicians, but not like this." The old poacher had unpacked the panniers to reveal a great pile of manuscripts that were lined with staves and inscribed with words and music.

"They're very old." Donaju was still dazed by the revelations about Juanita, but now moved across to examine the papers unearthed by Hagman. "See, Sharpe? Just four staves instead of five. They could be two or three hundred years old. Latin words. Let's see now." He frowned as he made a mental translation. " 'Clap your hands, everyone, call unto God with a voice of victory. The psalms, I think."

"She wasn't carrying the psalms back to our lines," Sharpe said, and he seized the top manuscripts off the pile and began sorting through them. It took only seconds to find that there were newspapers hidden beneath the disguising manuscripts. "These, Donaju" — Sharpe held up the newspapers — "these are what she was carrying."

Juanita's only reaction to the discovery was to start biting one of her nails. She glanced at the kitchen door, but Harper had come back to the house and the courtyard was now filled with his riflemen. "Place is empty, sir. Bugger's gone," Harper reported, "and he left in a rare hurry, sir, for the place is still stuffed with plunder. Something drove him out in a hurry." He nodded respectfully to Captain Donaju. "Your fellows are manning the defences, sir."

"They're not American newspapers this time," Sharpe said, "but English ones. Learned their lesson last time, didn't they? Make a newspaper too old and no one believes the stories, but these dates are just last week." He threw the papers on the table one by one. "The Morning Chronicle, the Weekly Dispatch, the Salisbury Journal, the Staffordshire Advertiser, someone's been busy, my lady. Who? Someone in Paris? Is that where these papers are printed?"

Juanita said nothing.

Sharpe plucked another newspaper from the pile. "Probably printed three weeks ago in Paris and brought here just in time. After all, no one would be astonished to see a two-week-old Shrewsbury Chronicle in Portugal, would they? A fast-sailing ship could easily have brought it, and there'll be no drafts of troops to contradict these stories. So what are they saying about us this time?" He leafed through the newspaper, tilting it towards the candles as he turned the pages. "Apprentice imprisoned for playing football on the Sabbath? Serve the little bugger right for trying to enjoy himself, but I don't suppose his story will drive the troops to mutiny, though something in here will."

"I've found something," Donaju said quietly. He had been searching the Morning Chronicle and now he folded the paper and held it towards Sharpe. "A piece about the Irish Division."

"There isn't an Irish Division," Sharpe said, taking the newspaper. He found the item that had attracted Donaju's attention and read it aloud. " 'Recent disturbances among the Hibernian troops of the army serving in Portugal, " Sharpe read, embarrassed because he was a slow and not very certain reader, " 'have persuaded the government to adopt a new and palliative' " — he had a lot of trouble with that word—" 'policy. When the present campaigning season is over the Irish regiments of the army will be brigaded as a division that shall be posted to the garrisons of the Caribbean islands. The exchequer has forbidden the expense of carrying wives, doubting that many so described have benefited from the Almighty's blessing on their union. And in the tropics, doubtless, the hot Irish heads will find a climate more to their liking. »

"The same report is here." Donaju displayed another paper, then hastily offered El Castrador an explanation of all that was happening inside the smoky kitchen.

The partisan glared at Juanita when her treachery was revealed. "Traitor!" he spat at her. "Your mother was a whore," he said, so far as Sharpe was able to follow the quick, angry Spanish, "your father a goat. You were given everything, yet you fight for Spain's enemies, while we, who have nothing, fight to save our country." He spat again and fingered his small bone-handled knife. Juanita stiffened under the onslaught, but said nothing. Her dark eyes went back to Sharpe who had just found another version of the announcement that all the Irish regiments were to be posted to the West Indies.

"It's a clever lie," Sharpe said, looking at Juanita, "very clever."

Donaju frowned. "Why is it clever?" He had asked the question of Patrick Harper. "Wouldn't the Irish like to be brigaded together?"

"I'm sure they would, sir, but not in the Caribbean and not without their women, God help us."

"Half of the men would be dead of the yellow fever within three months of arriving in the islands," Sharpe explained, "and the other half dead within six months. Being posted to the Caribbean, Donaju, is a death sentence." He looked at Juanita. "So whose idea was it, my lady?"

She said nothing, just chewed on the fingernail. El Castrador shouted at her for her obstinacy and untied the small knife from his belt. Donaju blanched at the stream of obscenities and tried to restrain the big man's anger.

"Well, the story isn't true," Sharpe interrupted the commotion. "For a start we wouldn't be so daft as to take the Irish soldiers away from the army. Who'd win the battles else?"

Harper and Donaju smiled. Sharpe felt a quiet exultation, for if this discovery did not justify his breaking orders and marching on San Cristobal, nothing would. He made a pile of the newspapers, then looked at Donaju. "Why don't you send someone back to headquarters. Find Major Hogan, tell him what's here and ask him what we should be doing."

"I'll go myself," Donaju said, "but what will you do?"

"I have a few things to do here first," Sharpe said, looking at Juanita as he spoke. "Like discovering where Loup is, and why he left in such a hurry."

Juanita bridled. "I have nothing to say to you, Captain."

"Then maybe you'll say it to him." He jerked his head towards El Castrador.

Juanita gave a fearful glance at the partisan, then looked back at Sharpe. "When did British officers cease to be gentlemen, Captain?"

"When we began to win battles, ma'am," Sharpe said. "So who's it to be? Me or him?"

Donaju looked as though he might make a protest at Sharpe's behaviour, then he saw the rifleman's grim face and thought better of it. "I'll take a newspaper to Hogan," he said quietly, then folded the counterfeit Morning Chronicle into his pouch and backed from the room. Harper went with him and closed the kitchen door firmly behind him.

"Don't you worry, sir," Harper said to Donaju once they were in the yard. "I'll look after the lady now."

"You will?"

"I'll dig her a nice deep grave, sir, and bury the witch upside down so that the harder she struggles the deeper she'll go. Have a safe ride back to the lines, sir."

Donaju blanched, then went to find his horse while Harper shouted at Perkins to find some water, make a fire and brew a good strong morning cup of tea.

"You're in trouble, Richard," Hogan said when he finally reached Sharpe. It was early evening of the day which had begun with Sharpe's stealthy approach to Loup's abandoned stronghold. "You're in trouble. You've been shooting prisoners. God, man, I don't care if you shoot every damned prisoner between here and Paris, but why the hell did you have to tell anyone?"

Sharpe's only response was to turn from his vantage point among the rocks and wave a hand to indicate that Hogan should keep low.

"Don't you know the first rule of life, Richard?" Hogan grumbled as he tethered his horse to a boulder.

"Never get found out, sir."

"So why the hell didn't you keep your damned mouth shut?" Hogan clambered up to Sharpe's eyrie and lay down beside the rifleman. "So what have you found?"

"The enemy, sir." Sharpe was five miles beyond San Cristobal, five miles deeper inside Spain, guided there by El Castrador who had ridden back to San Cristobal with the news that had brought Hogan out to this ridge overlooking the main road that led west out of Ciudad Rodrigo. Sharpe had reached the ridge on Dona Juanita's horse which was now picketed safely out of sight of anyone looking up from the road and there were plenty who might have looked, for Sharpe was staring down at an army. "The French are out, sir," he said. "They're marching, and there are thousands of the buggers."

Hogan drew out his own telescope. He stared at the road for a long time, then allowed a hiss of breath to escape. "Dear God," he said, "dear sweet merciful God." For a whole army was on the march. Infantry and dragoons, gunners and hussars, lancers and grenadiers, voltigeurs and engineers; a trail of men that looked black in the fading light, though here and there in the long column the dying sun reflected dark scarlet from the flank of a cannon being dragged by a team of oxen or horses. Thick dust clouded up from the wheels of the cannons, wagons and coaches that were keeping to the road itself, while the infantry marched in columns in the fields either side. The cavalry rode on the outermost flanks, long lines of men with steel-tipped lances and shining helmets and tossing plumes, their horses' hooves leaving long bruised marks on the spring grass of the valley. "Dear God," Hogan said again.

"Loup's down there," Sharpe said. "I saw him. That's why he left San Cristobal. He was summoned to join the army, you see?"

"Damn it!" Hogan exploded. "Why couldn't you forget Loup? It's Loup's fault you're in trouble! Why in the name of God couldn't you keep your mouth shut about those two damned fools you shot to death? Now bloody Valverde's saying that the Portuguese lost a prime regiment of men because you stirred up the hornet's nest, and that no sane Spaniard can ever trust a soldier to British officers. What it means, you damned fool, is that we have to parade you in front of the court of inquiry. We have to sacrifice you with Runciman."

Sharpe stared at the Irish Major. "Me?"

"Of course! For Christ's sake, Richard! Don't you have the first inkling of politics? The Spanish don't want Wellington as Generalissimo! They see that appointment as an insult to their country and they're looking for ammunition to support their cause. Ammunition like some damned fool of a rifleman fighting a private war at the expense of a fine regiment of Portuguese caзadores whose fate will serve as an example of what might happen to any Spanish regiments put under the Peer's command." He paused to stare through his telescope, then pencilled a note on the cuff of his shirt. "God damn it, Richard, we were going to have a nice quiet court of inquiry, put all the blame on Runciman and then forget what happened at San Isidro. Now you've confused everything. Did you happen to keep notes of what you've seen here?"

"I did, sir," Sharpe said. He was still trying to come to terms with the idea that his whole career was suddenly in jeopardy. It all seemed so monstrously unfair, but he kept the resentment to himself as he handed Hogan a stiff, folded sheet of the ancient music that had concealed the counterfeit newspapers. On the back of the sheet Sharpe had pencilled a tally of the units he had watched march beneath him. It was an awesome list of battalions and squadrons and batteries, all going towards Almeida and all expecting to meet and trounce the small British army that had to try to stop them from relieving the fortress.

"So tomorrow," Hogan said, "they'll reach our positions. Tomorrow, Richard, we fight. And that's why." Hogan had spotted something new in the column and now pointed far to the west. It took Sharpe a moment to train his telescope, then he saw the vast column of ox-hauled wagons that was following the French troops west. "The relief supplies for Almeida," Hogan said, "all the food and ammunition the garrison wants, enough to keep them there through the summer while we lay siege, and if they can keep us in front of Almeida all summer then we'll never get across the frontier and the Lord alone knows how many Frogs will attack us next spring." He collapsed his telescope again. "And talking of spring, Richard, would you like to tell me exactly what you did with the Dona Juanita? Captain Donaju said he left her with you and our knife-happy friend."

Sharpe coloured. "I sent her home, sir."

There was a moment's silence. "You did what?" Hogan asked.

"I sent her back to the Crapauds, sir."

Hogan shook his head in disbelief. "You let an enemy agent go back to the French? Are you entirely mad, Richard?"

"She was upset, sir. She said that if I took her back to the army she'd be arrested by the Spanish authorities and tried by the junta in Cadiz, sir, and like as not put in front of a firing squad. I've never been one for fighting against women, sir. And we know who she is, don't we? So she can't do any harm now."

Hogan closed his eyes and rested his head on his forearm. "Dear God, in Your infinite mercy please save this poor bugger's soul because Wellington sure as hell will not. Did it not occur to you, Richard, that I would have liked to talk to the lady?"

"It did, sir. But she was frightened. And she didn't want me to leave her alone with El Castrador. I was just being a gentleman, sir."

"I thought you didn't approve of the gentry fighting wars. So what did you do? Pat her little bum, dry her maidenly tears, then give her a soulful kiss and send her down to Loup so she could tell him how you're stranded in San Cristobal?"

"I let her go a couple of miles back" — Sharpe jerked his head north and west—"and made her travel on foot, sir, without any boots. I reckoned that would slow her down. And she did talk to me before she left, sir. It's all written down there if you can make out my handwriting. She says she distributed the newspapers, sir. She took them down to Irish encampments, sir."

"The only thing that Dona Juanita could distribute, Richard, is the pox. Jesus wept! You let that bitch twist you round her little fingers. For Christ's sake, Richard, I already knew she was the one fetching the newspapers. She was an errand girl. The real villain is someone else and I was hoping to follow her to him. Now you've buggered that up. Jesus!" Hogan paused to contain his anger, then shook his head wearily. "But at least she left you your bloody jacket."

Sharpe frowned in puzzlement. "My jacket, sir?"

"Remember what I told you, Richard? How the Lady Juanita collects the uniforms of every man she sleeps with. Her wardrobes must be vast, but I'm glad to see she won't be hanging a jacket of rifle green along with all the other coats."

"No, sir," Sharpe said, and blushed an even deeper red. "Sorry, sir."

"It can't be helped," Hogan said as he wriggled back from the crest. "You're an idiot for women and always were. If we thrash Massйna then the lady can't do us much harm, and if we don't, then the war's probably lost anyway. Let's get you the hell out of here. You're on administrative duties till your crucifixion." He backed away from the crest and put his telescope back into a belt pouch. "I'll do my best for you, God knows why, but your best prayer, Richard, and I hate to tell you this, is that we lose this battle. Because if we do it'll be such a disaster that no one will have the time or energy to remember your idiocy."

It was dark by the time they reached San Cristobal. Donaju had returned to the village with Hogan and now he led his fifty men of the Real Companпa Irlandesa back towards the British lines. "I saw Lord Kiely at headquarters," he told Sharpe.

"What did you tell him?"

"I told him his lover was an afrancesada and that she was sleeping with Loup." Donaju's tone was stark. "And I told him he was a fool."

"What did he say?"

Donaju shrugged. "What do you think? He's an aristocrat, he has pride. He told me to go to hell."

"And tomorrow," Sharpe said, "we all might do just that." Because tomorrow the French would attack and he would once again see those vast blue columns drummed forward beneath their eagles and listen to the skull-splitting sound of massed French batteries pounding away. He shuddered at the thought, then turned to watch his greenjackets march past. "Perkins," he suddenly shouted, "come here!"

Perkins had been trying to hide on the far side of the column, but now, sheepishly, he came to stand in front of Sharpe. Harper came with him. "It isn't his fault, sir," Harper said hurriedly.

"Shut up," Sharpe said, and looked down at Perkins. "Where, Perkins, is your green jacket?"

"Stolen, sir." Perkins was in shirt, boots and trousers over which his equipment was belted. "It got wet, sir, when I was carrying water round to the lads so I hung it out to dry and it was stolen, sir."

"That lady was not so far away, sir, from where he hung it," Harper said meaningfully.

"Why would she steal a rifleman's jacket?" Sharpe asked, but sensed a blush beginning. He was glad it was dark.

"Why would anyone want Perkins's jacket, sir?" Harper asked, "It was a threadbare thing at best, so it was, and too small to fit most men. But I reckon it was stolen, sir, and I don't reckon Perkins should pay for it. "Twasn't his fault."

"Go away, Perkins," Sharpe said.

"Yes, sir, thank you, sir."

Harper watched the boy run back to his file. "And why would the Lady Juanita steal a jacket? That puzzles me, sir, truly does, for I can't think it was anyone else who took it."

"She didn't steal it," Sharpe said, "the lying bitch earned it. Now keep on going. We've a way to go yet, Pat." Though whether the road led anywhere good, he no longer knew, for he was a scapegoat and he faced the foregone conclusions of a court of inquiry and in the dark, following his men west, he shivered.

There were only two sentries at the door to the house which served as Wellington's headquarters. Other generals might conclude that their dignity demanded a whole company of soldiers, or even a whole battalion, but Wellington never wanted more than two men and they were only there to keep away the town's children and to control the more importunate petitioners who believed the General could solve their problems with a stroke of his quill pen. Merchants came seeking contracts to supply the army with fouled beef or with bolts of linen stored too long in moth-infested warehouses, officers came seeking redress against imagined slights, and priests arrived to complain that Protestant British soldiers mocked the holy church, and in the midst of these distractions the General tried to solve his own problems: the lack of entrenching tools, the paucity of heavy guns that could grind down a fortress's defences and the ever-pressing duty of convincing a nervous ministry in London that his campaign was not doomed.

So Lord Kiely was not a welcome visitor following the General's customary early dinner of roast saddle of mutton with vinegar sauce. Nor did it help that Kiely had plainly fortified himself with brandy for this confrontation with Wellington who, early in his career, had decided that an over-indulgence in alcohol hurt a man's abilities as a soldier. "One man in this army had better stay sober," he liked to say of himself, and now, seated behind a table in the room that served as his office, parlour and bedroom, he looked dourly at the flushed, excited Kiely who had arrived with an urgent request. Urgent to Kiely, if not to anyone else.

Candles flickered on the table that was spread with maps. A galloper had come from Hogan reporting that the French were out and marching on the southern road that led through Fuentes de Onoro. That news was not unexpected, but it meant that the General's plans were now to be subjected to the test of cannon fire and musket volleys. "I am busy, Kiely," Wellington said icily.

"I ask only that my unit be allowed to take the forefront of the battle line," Kiely said with the careful dignity of a man who knows that liquor might otherwise slur his words.

"No," Wellington said. The General's aide, standing in the window, gestured towards the door, but Kiely ignored the invitation to leave.

"We have been ill used, my Lord," he said unwisely. "We came here at the request of my sovereign in good faith, expecting to be properly employed, and instead you have ignored us, denied us our supplies—"

"No!" The loudness of the word was such that the sentries at the house's front step were visibly startled. Then they looked at each other and grinned. The General had a temper, though it was rarely seen, but when Wellington did choose to unleash the full fury of his personality it was an awesome thing.

The General stared up at his visitor. His voice dropped to a conversational level, but it still reeked of scorn. "You came here, sir, ill prepared, unwanted, unfunded, and expected me, sir, to provide both your men's livelihoods and their accoutrements, and in return, sir, you have offered me insolence and, worse, betrayal. You did not come at His Majesty's bidding, but because the enemy desired you to come, and it is now my desire that you should go. And you shall go, sir, with honour because it is unthinkable that we should send away King Ferdinand's household troops in any other condition, but that honour, sir, has been earned at the expense of other men. Your troops, sir, shall serve in the battle, for there will be no opportunity to remove them before the French arrive, but they shall serve as guards on my ammunition park. You may choose to command them or to sulk in your tent. Good day to you, my Lord."

"My Lord?" The aide addressed Kiely tactfully, stepping towards the door.

But Lord Kiely was blind to tact. "Insolence?" He pounced on the word. "My God, but I command King Ferdinand's guard and—"

"And King Ferdinand, sir, is a prisoner!" Wellington snapped. "Which does not speak, sir, for the efficacy of his guard. You came here, sir, with your adulterous whore, flaunting her like a prinked bitch, and the whore, sir, is a traitor! The whore, sir, has been doing her best to destroy this army and the only providence that has saved this army from her ministrations is that her best, thank God, is no better than your own! Your request is denied, good day."

Wellington looked down to his papers. Kiely had other complaints to make, chief of them the way in which he had been manhandled and insulted by Captain Sharpe, but now he stood insulted by Wellington too. Lord Kiely was just summoning his last reserves of courage to protest this treatment when the aide took firm hold of his elbow and pulled him towards the door and Kiely found himself powerless to resist. "Perhaps your Lordship requires some refreshment?" the aide inquired emolliently as he steered the furious Kiely out into the hallway where a group of curious officers looked with pity at the disgraced man. Kiely shook the aide's hand away, seized his hat and sword from the hall table, and stalked out of the front door without another word. He ignored the two sentries as they presented arms.

"Nosey saw him off fast enough," one of the sentries said, then snapped to attention again as Edward Pakenham, the Adjutant General, climbed the steps.

Kiely seemed oblivious of Pakenham's cheerful greeting. Instead he walked down the street in a blind rage, passing long lines of guns that were slowly negotiating the town's narrow lanes, but he saw nothing and understood nothing except that he had failed. Just as he had failed at everything, he told himself, but none of the failure was his fault. The cards had run against him, and that was how he had lost what small fortune his mother had left to him after she had squandered her wealth on the damned church and on the damned Irish rebels who always managed to end up on British gallows, and the same bad luck explained why he had failed to win the hand of at least two Madrid heiresses who had preferred to marry Spaniards of the blood rather than a peer without a country. Kiely's self-pity welled up at the memories of their rejections. In Madrid he was a second-class citizen because he could not trace his lineage back to some medieval brute who had fought against the Moors, while in this army, he decided, he was an outcast because he was Irish.

Yet the worst insult of all was Juanita's betrayal. Juanita the wild, unconventional, clever and seductive woman whom Kiely had imagined himself marrying. She had money, she had noble blood and other men had looked enviously at Kiely when Juanita was at his side. Yet all along, he supposed, she had been deceiving him. She had given herself to Loup. She had lain in Loup's arms and Kiely presumed she had told all his secrets to Loup, and he imagined their laughter as they lay entangled in their bed and once again the anger and the pity swelled inside him. There were tears in his eyes as he realized he would be the laughing stock of all Madrid and all this army.

He entered a church. Not because he wanted to pray, but because he could think of nowhere else to go. He could not face going back to his quarters in General Valverde's lodgings where everyone would look at him and whisper that he was a cuckold.

The church was crowded with dark-shawled women waiting to make their confessions. Phalanxes of candles glimmered in front of statues, altars and paintings. The small lights glittered off the gilded pillars and from the massive silver cross on the high altar that still had its white Easter frontal.

Kiely went to the altar steps. His sword clattered on the marble as he knelt and stared at the rood. He was being crucified too, he told himself, and by smaller men who did not understand his noble aims. He took a flask from his pocket and tipped it to his lips, sucking at the fierce Spanish brandy as though it would save his life.

"Are you well, my son?" A priest had come soft-footed to Kiely's side.

"Go away," Kiely said.

"The hat, my son," the priest said nervously. "This is God's house."

Kiely snatched the plumed hat from his head. "Go away," he said again.

"God preserve you," the priest said and walked back into the shadows. The women waiting to make their confessions glanced nervously at the finely uniformed officer and wondered if he was praying for victory over the approaching French. Everyone knew the blue-coated enemy was coming again and householders were burying their valuables in their gardens in case Massйna's dreaded veterans beat the British aside and came back to sack the town.

Kiely finished the flask. His head spun with liquor, shame and anger. Behind the silver rood in a niche above the high altar was a statue of Our Lady. She wore a diadem of stars, a blue robe, and carried lilies in her hands. It had been a long time since Kiely had stared at such an image. His mother had loved such things. She had forced him to confession and to the sacrament, and had chided him for failing her. She had used to pray to the Virgin, claiming a special kinship with Our Lady as another disappointed woman who had known a mother's sadness. "Bitch," Kiely said aloud, staring at the blue-robed statue, "bitch!" He had hated his mother, just as he hated the church. Juanita had shared Kiely's contempt for the church, but Juanita was another man's lover. Maybe she had always been another man's lover. She had lain with Loup and God knows how many other men and all the while Kiely had been planning to make her a countess and to show off her beauty in all the great capitals of Europe. Tears trickled down his cheeks as he thought of her betrayal and as he remembered his humiliation at the hands of Captain Sharpe. That last memory filled him with a sudden fury. "Bitch!" he shouted at the Virgin Mary. He stood up and hurled the empty flask at her statue behind the altar. "Whore bitch!" he cried as the flask bounced harmlessly off the Virgin's blue robe.

The women screamed. The priest ran towards his Lordship, then stopped in terror because Kiely had drawn the pistol from his holster. The click of the gun's lock echoed loud in the cavernous church as Kiely thumbed back the heavy hammer.

"Bitch!" Kiely spat the word at the statue. "Lying, whoring, thieving, two-faced, leprous bitch!" Tears poured down his cheeks as he aimed the pistol.

"No!" the priest implored as the women's shrieks filled the church. "Please! No! Think of the blessed Virgin, please!"

Kiely turned on the man. "Call her a virgin, do you? You think she'd be a virgin after the Legions had hammered through Galilee?" He laughed wildly, then turned back to the statue. "You whore bitch!" he shouted as he trained the pistol again. "You filthy whore bitch!"

"No!" the priest cried despairingly.

Kiely pulled the trigger.

The heavy bullet smashed through his palate and punched out a palm-sized patch of his skull as it exited. Blood and brain splashed as high as the Virgin's diadem of stars, but none landed on Our Lady. Instead the gore spattered across the sanctuary steps, doused a handful of candles, then trickled down to the nave. Kiely's dead body fell back, his head a mangled horror of blood, brain and bone.

The screams in the church slowly died to be replaced by the rumble of wheels in the street as more guns were dragged towards the east.

And towards the French. Who were coming to reclaim Portugal and break the insolent British at a narrow bridge across the Coa.