Sharpe's Battle

CHAPTER VII

The Real Companпa Irlandesa bivouacked on the plateau north and west of Fuentes de Onoro. The village lay astride the southernmost road leading from Ciudad Rodrigo to Almeida and in the night Wellington's army had closed about the village that now threatened to become a battlefield. The dawn mist hid the eastern countryside where the French army readied itself, while up on the plateau Wellington's forces were a smoke-obscured chaos of troops, horses and wagons. Guns were parked on the plateau's eastern crest, their barrels pointing across the Dos Casas stream that marked the army's forward line.

Donaju discovered Sharpe squinting sideways into a scrap of mirror in an attempt to cut his own hair. The sides and the front were easy enough to trim, the difficulty always lay in the rear. "Just like soldiering," Sharpe said.

"You've heard about Kiely?" Donaju, suddenly in command of the Real Companпa Irlandesa, ignored Sharpe's gnomic comment.

Sharpe snipped, frowned, then tried to repair the damage by snipping again, but it only made things worse. "Blew his head off, I heard."

Donaju flinched at Sharpe's callousness, but made no protest. "I can't believe he would do such a thing," he said instead.

"Too much pride, not enough sense. Sounds like most bloody aristocrats to me. These damn scissors are blunt."

Donaju frowned. "Why don't you have a servant?"

"Can't afford one. Besides, I've always looked after myself."

"And cut your own hair?"

"There's a pretty girl among the battalion wives who usually cuts it," Sharpe said. But Sally Clayton, like the rest of the South Essex, was far away. The South Essex was too shrunken by war to serve in the battle line and now was doing guard duty on the army's Portuguese depots and thus would be spared Marshal Massйna's battle to relieve Almeida and cut the British retreat across the Goa.

"Father Sarsfield is burying Kiely tomorrow," Donaju said.

"Father Sarsfield might be burying a lot of us tomorrow," Sharpe said. "If they bury us at all. Have you ever seen a battlefield a year after the fighting? It's like a boneyard. Skulls lying about like boulders, and fox-chewed bones everywhere. Bugger this," he said savagely as he gave his hair a last forlorn chop.

"Kiely can't even be buried in a churchyard" — Donaju did not want to think about battlefields on this ominous morning—"because it was suicide."

"There aren't many soldiers who get a proper grave," Sharpe said, "so I wouldn't grieve for Kiely. We'll be lucky if any of us get a proper hole, let alone a stone on top. Dan!" he shouted to Hagman.

"Sir?"

"Your bloody scissors are blunt."

"Sharpened them last night, sir," Hagman said stoically. "It's like my father always said, sir, only a bad workman blames his tools, sir."

Sharpe tossed the scissors across to Hagman, then brushed the cut strands of hair from his shirt. "You're better off without Kiely," he told Donaju.

"To guard the ammunition park?" Donaju said bitterly. "We would have done better to stay in Madrid."

"To be thought of as traitors?" Sharpe asked as he pulled on his jacket. "Listen, Donaju, you're alive and Kiely isn't. You've got yourself a good company to command. So what if you're guarding the ammunition? You think that isn't important? What happens if the Crapauds break through?"

Donaju did not seem cheered by Sharpe's opinions. "We're orphans," he said self-pityingly. "No one cares what happens to us."

"Why do you want someone to care?" Sharpe asked bluntly. "You're a soldier, Donaju, not a child. They issued you with a sword and a gun so you could take care of yourself, not have others take care of you. But as it happens, they do care. They care enough to send the whole lot of you to Cadiz, and I care enough to tell you that you've got two choices. You can go to Cadiz whipped and with your men knowing they've been whipped, or you can go back with your pride intact. It's up to you, but I know which one I'd choose."

This was the first Donaju had heard of the Real Companпa Irlandesa's proposed move to Cadiz and he frowned as he tried to work out whether Sharpe was being serious. "You're sure about Cadiz?"

"Of course I'm sure," Sharpe said. "General Valverde's been pulling strings. He doesn't think you should be here at all, so now you're off to join the rest of the Spanish army."

Donaju digested the news for a few seconds, then nodded approval. "Good," he said enthusiastically. "They should have sent us there in the first place." He sipped his mug of tea and made a wry face at the taste. "What happens to you now?"

"I'm ordered to stay with you till someone tells me to go somewhere else," Sharpe said. He did not want to admit that he was facing a court of inquiry, not because he was ashamed of his conduct, but because he did not want other men's sympathies. The court was a battle that he would have to face when the time came.

"You're guarding the ammunition?" Donaju seemed surprised.

"Someone has to," Sharpe said. "But don't worry, Donaju, they'll take me away from you before you go to Cadiz. Valverde doesn't want me there."

"So what do we do today?" Donaju asked nervously.

"Today," Sharpe said, "we do our duty. And there are fifty thousand Frogs doing theirs, and somewhere over that hill, Donaju, their duty and our duty will get bloody contradictory."

"It will be bad," Donaju said, not quite as a statement and not quite as a question either.

Sharpe heard the nervousness. Donaju had never been in a major battle and any man, however brave, was right to be nervous at the prospect. "It'll be bad," Sharpe said. "The noise is the worst, that and the powder fog, but always remember one thing: it's just as bad for the French. And I'll tell you another thing. I don't know why, and maybe it's just my imagination, but the Frogs always seem to break before we do. Just when you think you can't hold on for a minute longer, count to ten and by the time you reach six the bloody Frogs will have turned tail and buggered off. Now watch out, here's trouble."

The trouble was manifested by the approach of a thin, tall and bespectacled major in the blue coat of the Royal Artillery. He was carrying a sheaf of papers that kept coming loose as he tried to find one particular sheet among the rest. The errant sheets were being fielded by two nervous red-coated privates, one of whom had his arm in a dirty sling while the other was struggling along on a crutch. The Major waved at Sharpe and Donaju, thus releasing another flutter of paper. "The thing is," the Major said without any attempt to introduce himself, "that the divisions have their own ammunition parks. One or the other, I said, make up your mind! But no! Divisions will be independent! Which leaves us, you understand, with the central reserve. They call it that, though God knows it's rarely in the centre and, of course, in the very nature of things, we are never told what stocks the divisions themselves hold. They demand more, we yield, and suddenly there is none. It is a problem. Let us hope and pray the French do things worse. Is that tea?" The Major, who had a broad Scottish accent, peered hopefully at the mug in Donaju's hand.

"It is, sir," Donaju said, "but foul."

"Let me taste it, I beg you. Thank you. Pick up that paper, Magog, the day's battle may depend upon it. Gog and Magog," he introduced the two hapless privates. "Gog is bereft one arm, Magog one leg, and both the rogues are Welsh. Together they are a Welshman and a half, and the three of us, or two and a half if I am to be exact, comprise the entire staff complement of the central reserve." The Major smiled suddenly. "Alexander Tarrant," he introduced himself. "Major in the artillery but seconded to the Quartermaster General's staff. I think of myself as the Assistant-Assistant-Assistant Quartermaster General, and you, I suspect, are the new Assistant-Assistant-Assistant-Assistant Quartermaster Generals? Which means that Gog and Magog are now Assistant-Assistant-Assistant-Assistant-Assistant Quartermaster Generals. Demoted, by God! Will their careers ever recover? This tea is delicious, though tepid. You must be Captain Sharpe?"

"Yes, sir."

"An honour, Sharpe, 'pon my soul, an honour." Tarrant thrust out a hand, thus releasing a cascade of paper. "Heard about the dickie-bird, Sharpe, and confess I was moved mightily." It took Sharpe half a second to realize that Tarrant was talking about the eagle that Sharpe had captured at Talavera, but before he could respond the Major was already talking again. "And you must be Donaju of the royal guard? 'Pon my soul, Gog, but we're in elevated company! You'll have to mind your manners today!"

"Private Hughes, sir," Gog introduced himself to Sharpe, "and that's my brother." He gestured with his one arm at Magog.

"The Hughes brothers," Tarrant explained, "were wounded in their country's service and reduced to my servitude. Till now, Sharpe, they have been the sole guard for the ammunition. Gog would kick intruders and Magog shake his crutch at them. Once recovered, of course, they will return to duty and I shall be provided with yet more cripples to protect the powder and shot. Except today, Donaju, I have your fine fellows. Let us examine your duties!"

The duties were hardly onerous. The central reserve was just that, a place where hard-pressed divisions, brigades or even battalions could send for more ammunition. A motley collection of Royal Wagon Train drivers augmented by muleteers and carters recruited from the local population were available to deliver the infantry cartridges while the artillery usually provided their own transport. The difficulty of his own job, Tarrant said, was in working out which requests were frivolous and which desperate. "I like to keep the supplies intact," the Scotsman said, "until we near the end of an engagement. Anyone requesting ammunition in the first few hours is either already defeated or merely nervous. These papers purport to describe the divisional reserves, though the Lord alone knows how accurate they are." He thrust the papers at Sharpe, then pulled them back in case Sharpe muddled them. "Lastly, of course," Tarrant went on, "there is always the problem of making certain the ammunition gets through. Drivers can be" — he paused, looking for a word—"cowards!" he finally said, then frowned at the severity of the judgement. "Not all, of course, and some are wonderfully stout-hearted, but the quality isn't consistent. Perhaps, gentlemen, when the fighting gets bloody, I might rely on your men to fortify the drivers' bravery?" He made this inquiry nervously, as though half expecting that Sharpe or Donaju might refuse. When neither offered a demurral, he smiled. "Good! Well, Sharpe, maybe you'd like to survey the landscape? Can't despatch ammunition without knowing whither it's bound."

The offer gave Sharpe a temporary freedom. He knew that both he and Donaju had been shuffled aside as inconveniences and that Tarrant needed neither of them, yet still a battle was to be fought and the more Sharpe understood of the battlefield the better. "Because if things go bad, Pat," he told Harper as the two of them walked towards the gun line on the misted plateau's crest, "we'll be in the thick of it." The two carried their weapons, but had left their packs and greatcoats with the ammunition wagons.

"Still seems odd," Harper said, "having nothing proper to do."

"Bloody Frogs might find us work," Sharpe said dourly. The two men were standing at the British gun line that faced east into the rising sun that was making the mist glow above the Dos Casas stream. That stream flowed south along the foot of the high, flat-topped ridge where Sharpe and Harper were standing and which barred the French routes to Almeida. The French could have committed suicide by attacking directly over the stream and fighting up the ridge's steep escarpment into the face of the British guns, but barring that unlikely self-destruction there were only two other routes to the besieged garrison at Almeida. One led north around the ridge, but that road was barred by the still formidable ruins of Fort Conception and Wellington had decided that Massйna would try this southern road that led through Fuentes de Onoro.

The village lay where the ridge fell to a wide, marshy plain above which the morning mist now shredded and faded. The road from Ciudad Rodrigo ran white and straight across that flat land to where it forded the Dos Casas stream. Once over the stream the road climbed the hill between the village houses to reach the plateau where it forked into two roads. One road led to Almeida a dozen miles to the north-west and the other to Castello Bom and its murderously narrow bridge across the deep gorge of the Coa. If the French were to reach either road and so relieve the besieged town and force the redcoats back to the bottleneck of the narrow bridge, then they must first fight up the steep village streets of Fuentes de Onoro which was garrisoned with a mix of redcoats and greenjackets.

The ridge and the village both demanded that the enemy fight uphill, but there was a second and much more inviting option open to the French. A second road ran west across the plain south of the village. That second road ran through flat country and led to the passable fords that crossed the Coa further south. Those fords were the only place Wellington could hope to withdraw his guns, wagons and wounded if he was forced to retreat into Portugal, and if the French threatened to outflank Fuentes de Onoro by looping deep around the southern plain then Wellington would have to come down from the plateau to defend his escape route. If he chose not to come down from the heights then he would abandon the only routes that offered a safe crossing of the River Coa. Such a decision to let the French cut the southern roads would commit Wellington's army to victory or to utter annihilation. It was a choice Sharpe would not have wanted to make himself.

"God save Ireland," Harper suddenly said, "but would you look at that?"

Sharpe had been looking south towards the inviting flat meadows that offered such an easy route around Fuentes de Onoro's flank, but now he looked east to where Harper was staring.

And to where the mist had thinned to reveal a long, dark grove of cork oaks and holm oaks, and out of that grove, just where the white road left the dark trees, an army was appearing. Massйna's men must have bivouacked on the trees' far side and the smoke of their morning fires had melded with the mist to look like cloud, but now, in a grimly threatening silence, the French army debouched onto the plain that lapped wide about the village.

Some of the British gunners leaped to their guns' trails and began handspiking the cannons around so that the barrels were aimed at the place where the road came from the trees, but a gunner colonel trotted along the line and shouted at the crews to hold their fire. "Let them come closer! Hold your fire! Let's see where they place their batteries! Don't waste your powder. Morning, John! Nice one again!" the Colonel called to an acquaintance, then touched his hat in a polite greeting to the two strange riflemen. "You boys will have some trade today, I don't doubt."

"You too, Colonel," Sharpe said.

The Colonel spurred on and Sharpe turned back to the east. He drew out his telescope and leaned on a gunwheel to steady the spyglass's long barrel.

French infantry was forming at the tree line just behind the deploying batteries of French artillery. The guns' teams of oxen and horses were being led back into the shelter of the oaks while squads of gunners hoisted the hugely heavy cannon barrels out of their rear travelling trunnion holes and moved them into the forward fighting holes where other men used hammers to fasten the capsquares over the newly placed trunnions. Other gunners were piling ammunition close to the guns: squat cylinders of roundshot ready-strapped to their canvas bags of gunpowder. "Looks like solid shot," Sharpe told Harper. "They'll be aiming for the village."

The British gunners near Sharpe were making their own preparations. The guns' ready magazines held a mixture of roundshot and case shot. The roundshot were solid iron balls that would plunge wickedly through advancing infantry, while the case shot was Britain's secret weapon: the one artillery projectile that no other nation had learned to make. It was a hollow iron ball filled with musket bullets that were packed about a small powder charge that was ignited by a fuse. When the powder exploded it shattered the outer casing and spread the musket balls in a killing fan. If the case shot was properly employed it would explode just above and ahead of the advancing infantry and the secret to that horror lay in the missile's fusing. The fuses were wooden or reed tubes filled with powder and marked into lengths, each small division of the marked length representing half a second of burning time. The fuses were cut for the desired time, then pushed into the case shot and ignited by the firing of the gun itself, but a fuse that had been left too long would let the shot scream safely over the enemy's heads while one cut too short would explode prematurely. Gunner sergeants were cutting the fuses in different lengths, then laying the ammunition in piles that represented the different ranges. The first shells had fuses over half an inch long that would delay the explosion until the shot had carried eleven hundred yards while the shortest fuses were tiny stubs measuring hardly more than a fifth of an inch that would ignite the charge at six hundred and fifty yards. Once the enemy infantry was inside that distance the gunners would switch to roundshot alone and after that, when the French had closed to within three hundred and fifty yards, the guns would employ canister: tin cylinders crammed with musket balls that spread apart at the very muzzle of the cannon as the thin tin was shredded by the gun's powder charge.

These guns would be firing down the slope and over the stream so that the French infantry would be exposed to shell or shot for their whole approach. That infantry was now forming its columns. Sharpe tried to count the eagles, but there were so many standards and so much movement among the enemy that it was hard to make an accurate assessment. "At least a dozen battalions," he said.

"So where are the others?" Harper asked.

"God knows," Sharpe said. During his reconnaissance with Hogan the night before he had estimated that the French were marching to Almeida with at least eighty infantry battalions, but he could only see a fraction of that host forming their attack columns at the edge of the far woods. "Twelve thousand men?" he guessed.

The last mist evaporated from the village just as the French opened fire. The opening salvo was ragged as the gun captains fired in turn so that they could observe the fall of their shot and so make adjustments to their guns' aim. The first shot fell short, then bounced up over the few houses and walled gardens on the far bank to plough into a tiled roof halfway up the village slope. The sound of the gun arrived after the crash of falling tiles and splintering beams. The second shot cracked into an apple tree on the stream's eastern bank and scattered a small shower of white blossom before it ricocheted into the water, but the next few rounds were all aimed straight and hammered into the village houses. The British gunners muttered grudging approval of the enemy gunners' expertise.

"I wonder what poor sods are holding the village," Harper said.

"Let's go and find out."

"I'm honestly not that curious, sir," Harper protested, but followed Sharpe along the plateau's crest. The high ground ended just above the village where the plateau bent at a right angle to run due west back into the hills. In the angle of the bend, directly above the village, were two rocky knolls on one of which was built the village church with its stork's ragged nest perched precariously on the bell tower. The church's graveyard occupied the east-facing slope between the church and the village, and riflemen were crouched behind the mounded graves and canted stones, just as they were crouched among the outcrops of the second rocky knoll. Between the two stone peaks, on a saddle of short springy turf where yellow ragweed grew and where the Almeida road reached the high ground after zigzagging up beside the graveyard, a knot of staff officers sat their horses and watched the French cannonade which had begun to cloud the distant view with a dirty bank of smoke that twitched each time a roundshot blasted through. The cannon balls were crashing remorselessly into the village, smashing tile and thatch, splintering beams and toppling walls. The sound of the gunfire was a pounding that was palpable in the warm spring air, yet here, on the high ground above Fuentes de Onoro, it was almost as though the battle for the village was something happening far away.

Sharpe led Harper on a wide detour behind the group of staff officers. "Nosey's there," he explained to Harper, "and I don't need him glaring at me."

"In his bad books, are we?"

"More than that, Pat. I'm facing a bloody court of inquiry." Sharpe had not been willing to confess the truth to Donaju, but Harper was a friend and so he told him the story, and the bitterness of his plight could not help but spill over. "What was I supposed to do, Pat? Let those raping bastards live?"

"What will the court do to you?"

"Christ knows. At worst? Order a court martial and have me thrown out of the army. At best? Break me down to lieutenant. But that'll be the end of me. They'll make me a storekeeper again, then put me in charge of bloody lists at some bloody depot where I can drink myself to death."

"But they have to prove you shot those buggers! God save Ireland, but none of us will say a word. Jesus, I'd kill anyone who said different!"

"But there are others, Pat. Runciman and Sarsfield."

"They won't say a word, sir."

"May be too late anyway. General bloody Valverde knows, and that's all that matters. He's got his knife stuck into me and there's bugger all I can do about it."

"Could shoot the bastard," Harper said.

"You won't catch him alone," Sharpe said. He had dreamed of shooting Valverde, but doubted he would have the opportunity. "And Hogan says that bloody Loup might even send an official complaint!"

"It isn't fair, sir," Harper complained.

"No, Pat, it isn't, but it hasn't happened yet, and Loup might walk into a cannon ball today. But not a word to anyone, Pat. I don't want half the bloody army discussing it."

"I'll keep quiet, sir," Harper promised, though he could not imagine the news not getting round the army, nor could he imagine how anyone would think justice might be served by sacrificing an officer for shooting two French bastards. He followed Sharpe between two parked wagons and a brigade of seated infantry. Sharpe recognized the pale-green facings of the 24th, a Warwickshire regiment, while beyond them were the kilted and bonneted Highlanders of the 79th. The Highlanders' pipers were playing a wild tune to the tattoo of drums, trying to rival the deeper percussive blasts of the French cannonade. Sharpe guessed the two battalions formed the reserve poised to go down into Fuentes de Onoro's streets if the French looked like capturing the village. A third battalion was just joining the reserve brigade as Sharpe turned towards the sound of breaking tiles and cracking stone.

"Right, down here," Sharpe said. He had spotted a track that led beside the graveyard's southern wall. It was a precipitous track, probably made by goats, and the two men had to use their hands to steady themselves on the steep top portion of the slope, then they ran down the last few yards to the scanty cover of an alleyway where they were greeted by the sudden appearance of a nervous redcoat who came round the corner with levelled musket. "Hold your fire, lad!" Sharpe called. "Anyone who comes down here is probably on your side, and if they're not you're in trouble."

"Sorry, sir," the boy said, then ducked as a scrap of tile whistled overhead. "They're a bit lively, sir," he added.

"Time to worry, lad, is when they stop firing," Sharpe said, "because that means the infantry are on their way. Who's in charge here?"

"Don't know, sir. Unless it's Sergeant Patterson."

"I doubt it, lad, but thanks anyway." Sharpe ran from the alley's end, turned down a side street, dodged right into another street, jumped down a steep flight of stone stairs littered with broken tiles and so found himself in the main street which ran down the hill in a series of sharp twists. A roundshot hit the street's centre just as he ducked down beside a dungheap. The ball ploughed up a patch of stone and earth, then bounced to smash into a reed-thatched cattle byre as another roundshot splayed apart some roof beams across the street. Still more shots crashed home as the French gunners put in a sudden energetic spell. Sharpe and Harper took temporary cover in a doorway that bore the fading chalk marks from both armies' billeting officers; one mark read 5/4/60 meaning that five men of number four company of the 60th Rifles had been billeted in the tiny cottage, while just above it was a legend saying that seven Frenchmen, the mark carried the enemy's strange cross-bar on the shank of the 7, of the Sand of the Line had once been posted to the house that now lacked its roof. Dust drifted like mist in what had been the front room where a torn sacking curtain fluttered forlornly at a window. The village's inhabitants and their belongings had been carried in army wagons to the nearby town of Frenada, but inevitably some of the villagers' possessions had been left behind. One doorway was barricaded with a child's cot while another had a pair of benches as a firestep. A mixture of riflemen and redcoats garrisoned the town and they were sheltering from the cannonade by crouching behind the thickest walls of the deserted houses. The stone walls could not stop every French roundshot and Sharpe had already passed three dead men put out in the street and seen a half-dozen wounded men making their slow way back up towards the ridge. "What unit are you?" he called to a sergeant sheltering behind the cot across the street.

"Third Division Light Companies, sir!" the sergeant called back.

"And the First Division!" another voice chimed in. "Don't forget the First Division!"

It seemed the army had collected the cream of two divisions, their skirmishers, and put them into Fuentes de Onoro. Skirmishers were the brightest men, the ones trained to fight independently, and this village was no place for men who could only stand in the battle line and fire volleys. This was going to be a place of sharpshooting and street brawls, a place where men would be separated from their officers and forced to fight without orders. "Who's in charge of you all?" Sharpe asked the sergeant.

"Colonel Williams of the 60th, sir. Down there, in the inn."

"Thanks!" Sharpe and Harper edged down the side of the street. A roundshot rumbled overhead to drive into a roof. A scream sounded, then was cut off. The inn was the very same tavern where Sharpe had first met El Castrador and where now, in the same garden with the half-severed vine, he found Colonel Williams and his small staff.

"It's Sharpe, isn't it? Come to help us?" Williams was a genial Welshman from the 60th Rifles. "Don't know you," he said to Harper.

"Sergeant Harper, sir."

"You look handy to have in a scrap, Sergeant," Williams said. "Damned noisy today, eh?" he added in mild complaint of the cannonade. He was standing on a bench that gave him a view over the garden wall and the roofs of the lower houses. "So what brings you here, Sharpe?"

"I'm just making sure we know where to deliver ammunition, sir."

Williams offered Sharpe an owlish gaze of surprise. "Got you fetching and carrying, have they? Seems a waste of time for a man of your talents, Sharpe. And I don't think you'll find much custom here. My boys are all well supplied. Eighty rounds a man, two thousand men, and as many cartridges again stacked up in the church. Sweet Jesus!" This last imprecation was caused by a round-shot that must have gone within two feet of the Colonel's head, forcing him to duck hard down. It crashed into a house, there was a tumble of falling stone and then, quite suddenly, silence.

Sharpe tensed. The silence, after the crash of the guns and the splintering thunder of the roundshots' destructive impacts, was unnerving. Maybe, he thought, it was just a strange pause, like the sudden coincidental silence that could descend on a room of lively talkers during that moment when an angel was said to be passing over the room, and maybe an angel had flickered across the gunsmoke and all the French cannon had found themselves momentarily unloaded. Sharpe almost found himself praying for the guns to start again, but the silence stretched and stretched, threatening to be replaced by something much worse than a cannonade. Somewhere in the village a man coughed and a musket lock clicked. A horse whinnied up on the ridge where the pipes played. Rubble fell in a house where a wounded man whimpered. Out in the street a spent French cannon ball rolled gently downhill, then lodged against a fallen beam.

"I suspect we'll have company soon, gentlemen," Williams said. He climbed down from the bench and brushed white dust from his faded green jacket. "Very soon. Can't see a thing from here. Gunsmoke, you see. Worse than fog." He was talking to fill the ominous silence. "Down to the stream, I think. Not that we can hold them there, not enough loopholes, but once they're in the village they'll find life a bit difficult. At least I hope so." He nodded agreeably to Sharpe, then ducked out of the door. His staff ran after him.

"We're not staying here, are we, sir?" Harper asked.

"Might as well see what's happening," Sharpe said. "Got nothing better to do. Are you loaded?"

"Just the rifle."

"I'd have the volley gun ready," Sharpe said. "Just in case." He began loading his own rifle just as the British guns on the ridge opened fire. Their smoke jetted sixty feet out from the crest and their noise punched at the wounded village as the shots screamed overhead towards the advancing French battalions.

Sharpe stood on the bench to see the dark columns of infantry emerging from the French gunsmoke. The first British case shot exploded above and ahead of the columns, each explosion staining the air with a smear of grey-white smoke riven with fire. Solid shots seared into the massed ranks, but none of the missiles seemed to make an ounce of difference. The columns kept coming: twelve thousand men under their eagles being drummed across the flat land towards the hammering artillery and the waiting muskets and the primed rifles beyond the stream. Sharpe looked left and right, but saw no other enemies apart from a handful of green-coated dragoons patrolling the southern fields. "They're coming straight in," he said, "no messing. One attack, Pat, hard at the village. No buggering round the edge yet. Looks like they think they can come straight through here. There'll be more brigades behind, and they'll throw them in one after the other till they get the church. After that it's downhill all the way to the Atlantic, so if we don't stop them here we'll not stop them anywhere."

"Well, as you say, sir, we've got nothing better to do." Harper finished loading his seven-barrelled gun, then picked up a small rag doll that had been discarded under the garden bench. The doll had a red torso on which a mother had stitched a white crossbelt to imitate a British infantryman's uniform. Harper propped the doll in a niche in the wall. "You keep guard now," he said to the rag bundle.

Sharpe half drew his sword and tested the edge. "Didn't get it sharpened," he said. Before a battle he liked to have the big blade professionally honed by a cavalry armourer, but there had been no time. He hoped it was not an omen.

"You'll just have to bludgeon the bastards to death then," Harper said, then crossed himself before reaching into his pocket to make sure his rabbit's foot was in its proper place. He looked back to the rag doll and was suddenly overwhelmed by a certainty that his own fate hung on the doll surviving in the wall's niche. "You take care now," he told the doll, then gave fate a nudge by jamming a scrap of stone across the niche's face to try and imprison the small rag toy.

A crackling sound like the tearing of calico announced that the British skirmishers had opened fire. The French voltigeurs had been advancing a hundred paces in front of their columns, but now were stopped by the fire of the riflemen concealed among the gardens and hovels on the stream's far bank. For a few minutes the skirmish fire stuttered loud, then the outnumbering voltigeurs threatened to surround the British skirmishers and the whistles of the officers and sergeants sounded shrilly to call the greenjackets back through the gardens. Two riflemen were limping, a third was being carried by two of his comrades, but most splashed unscathed through the stream and up into the labyrinthine maze of cottages and alleys.

The French voltigeurs crouched behind the garden walls on the stream's far bank and began trading fire with the village's defenders. The stream became fogged with a lacy veil of powder smoke that drifted south in the day's small wind. Sharpe and Harper, still waiting in the inn, could hear the French drummers sounding the pas de charge, the rhythm that had driven Napoleon's veterans over half Europe to fell their enemies like ninepins. The drums suddenly paused and both Sharpe and Harper instinctively mouthed the words along with twelve thousand Frenchmen, "Vive l'Empereur." Both men laughed as the drums started again.

The guns on the ridge had abandoned the case shot and were smashing roundshot down into the columns and now that the enemy's main formations were almost at the village's eastern gardens Sharpe could see the damage being done by the iron balls as they slashed through file and rank to fling men aside like bloody rags before bouncing in sprays of misted blood to smash into yet more ranks of men. Again and again the missiles lanced through the massed files, yet again and again, doggedly, unstoppably, the French closed up their ranks and kept on coming. The drummers beat on, the eagles flashed in the sun as brightly as the bayonets on the muskets of the leading ranks.

The drums paused again. "Vive l'Empereur!" the mass of Frenchmen called, but this time they drew out the last syllable into a long cheer that sustained them as they were released to the attack. The columns could not march in close order through the maze of walled gardens on the village's eastern bank and so the attacking infantry was let off the leash and ordered to charge pell-mell through the vegetable plots and small orchards, across the stream and up into the fire of Colonel Williams's defenders.

"God save us," Harper said in awe as the French attack engulfed the far bank like a dark wave. The enemy were cheering as they ran and as they overwhelmed the small walls and trampled down the spring crops and splashed into the shallow stream.

"Fire!" a voice shouted and the muskets and rifles cracked from the loopholed houses. A Frenchman went down, his blood thick in the water. Another fell on the clapper bridge and was unceremoniously pushed into the ford by the men crowding behind. Sharpe and Harper both fired from the inn garden, their bullets spinning over the lower roofs to plough into the mass of attackers who were now shielded from the artillery on the ridge by the village itself.

The first French attackers burst against the village's eastern walls. Bayonets clashed against bayonets. Sharpe saw a Frenchman appear on a top of a wall, then jump down into a hidden yard. More Frenchmen followed him across the wall. "Sword on, Pat," Sharpe said and drew his own sword as Harper clicked the sword bayonet onto his rifle. They ducked through the garden door and ran down the main street to find their progress blocked by a double rank of redcoats who were waiting with charged muskets and fixed bayonets. Twenty yards further down the street there were more redcoats who were firing over a makeshift barricade of window shutters, doors, tree branches and a pair of commandeered handcarts. The barricade was shaking from the assault of the French on the far side and every few seconds a musket would be thrust through the entanglement and blast fire, smoke and bullet at the defenders.

"Ready to open files!" the redcoat Lieutenant called. He looked to be about eighteen years old, but his West Country voice was firm. He nodded a greeting to Sharpe, then looked back to the barricade. "Steady now, boys, steady!"

Sharpe knew he would not need the sword yet, so sheathed it and reloaded his rifle instead. He bit the bullet off the cartridge, then held the round in his mouth as he pulled the rifle's hammer back one click to the half cock. He could taste the acrid, salty powder in his mouth as he poured a pinch of powder from the cartridge into the lock's open pan. He held tight to the rest of the cartridge as he pulled the frizzen full up to close the pan cover, then, with the rifle so primed, he let its brass stock fall to the ground. He poured the rest of the cartridge's powder into the muzzle, crammed the empty waxed cartridge paper on top of the powder to serve as wadding, then bent his head to spit the bullet into the gun. He yanked out the steel ramming rod with his left hand, spun the ramrod so that the splayed head faced downwards and thrust the rod hard down the barrel. He pulled it out, spun it again and let it fall into its holding rings, then tossed the rifle up with his left hand, caught it under the lock with his right and pulled the hammer back through a second click so that the weapon was at full cock and ready to fire. It had taken him twelve seconds and he had not thought once about what he was doing, nor even looked at the gun while he loaded it. The manoeuvre was the basic skill of his trade, the necessary skill that had to be taught to new recruits and then practised and practised until it was second nature. As a new recruit, just sixteen years old, Sharpe had dreamed about loading muskets. He had been forced to do it again and again until he had been bored rigid by the drill and was ready to spit at the sergeants for making him do it one more time and then, on a damp day in Flanders, he had found himself doing it for real and suddenly he had fumbled the cartridge and lost his ramrod and forgotten to prime the musket. He had somehow survived that fight, and afterwards he had practised again until at last he could do it without thinking. It was the same skill that he had laboured to drive into the Real Companпa Irlandesa during their unhappy stay in the San Isidro Fort.

Now, as he watched the defenders back away from the collapsing barricade, he found himself wondering how many times he had loaded a gun. Except there was no time to make a guess for the barricade's defenders were running back up the street and the victory roar of the French was swelling as they dismantled the last pieces of the obstacle.

"Open files!" the Lieutenant shouted and the two ranks of men obediently opened their files out from the centre to let the barricade's defenders stream through. At least three red-jacketed bodies were left on the street. A wounded man collapsed and pulled himself into a doorway, then a red-faced captain with grey side whiskers ran through the gap and shouted at the men to close ranks.

The files closed again. "Front rank, kneel!" the Lieutenant shouted when his two ranks were again arrayed across the street. "Wait for it!" he called, and this time his voice cracked with nervousness. "Wait for it!" he called again more firmly, then drew his sword and gave the slim blade a couple of tentative strokes. He swallowed as he watched the French finally burst through the wreckage and charge up the hill with their bayonets fixed.

"Fire!" the Lieutenant shouted, and the twenty-four muskets crashed in unison to choke the road with smoke. Somewhere a man was screaming. Sharpe fired his rifle and heard the distinctive sound of a bullet hitting a musket stock. "Front rank, stand!" the Lieutenant called. "At the double! Advance!"

The smoke cleared to show a half-dozen blue-coated bodies down on the stones and earth of the road. Burning scraps of wadding flickered like candle flames. The enemy retreated fast from the threat of the bayonets, but then another mass of blue uniforms appeared at the bottom edge of the village.

"I'm ready, Pollard!" a voice called behind Sharpe, and the Lieutenant, hearing it, halted his men.

"Back, boys!" he shouted and the two ranks, unable to advance against the new mass of the enemy, broke files and retreated uphill. The new attackers had loaded muskets and some stopped to aim. Harper gave them the seven barrels of his volley gun, then followed Sharpe up the hill as the smoke of the big gun spread between the houses.

The grey-whiskered Captain had formed a new defence line that opened to let the Lieutenant's men through. The Lieutenant formed his men into their two ranks a few paces behind the Captain's men and shouted at the redcoats to reload. Sharpe reloaded with them. Harper, knowing he would not have time to reload the volley gun, strapped it across his back and spat a bullet into his rifle.

The drums were still beating the pas de charge, while on the ridge behind Sharpe the pipes were rivalling the sound with their feral music. The cannon on the ridge were still firing, presumably aiming case shot at the distant French artillery. The small village reeked of powder smoke, reverberated with musket shots and echoed with the screams and shouts of frightened men.

"Fire!" the Captain ordered and his men poured a volley down the street. It was answered by a French volley. The enemy had decided to use their firepower rather than try to rush the defenders, and it was a battle the Captain knew he must lose. "Close on me, Pollard!" he shouted and the young Lieutenant took his men down to join the Captain's troops.

"Fire!" Pollard shouted, then made a mewing sound that was momentarily drowned by the crash of his men's muskets. The Lieutenant staggered back, blood showing on the white facings of his elegant coat. He staggered again and let go of his sword which clattered on a doorstep.

"Take him back, Pat," Sharpe said. "Meet me at the top of the cemetery."

Harper lifted the Lieutenant as though he was a child and ran back up the street. The redcoats were reloading, their ramrods rising and falling over their dark shakoes. Sharpe waited for the smoke to clear and looked for an enemy officer. He saw a moustached man carrying a sword, aimed, fired and thought he saw the man twist backwards, but the smoke obscured his view and then a great rush of Frenchmen pounded up the street.

"Bayonets!" the Captain called.

One redcoat backed away. Sharpe put his hand in the small of the man's back and shoved him hard back into his rank. He slung his rifle and drew his sword again. The French charge stalled in the face of the unbroken ranks with their grim steel blades, but the Captain knew he was outgunned and outnumbered. "Pace backwards!" he ordered. "Slow and steady! Slow and steady! If you're loaded, boys, give them a shot."

A dozen muskets fired, but at least twice as many Frenchmen returned the volley and the Captain's ranks seemed to shudder as the balls struck home. Sharpe was serving as a sergeant now, keeping the files in place from behind, but he was also looking back up the street to where a mixture of redcoats and greenjackets were retreating haphazardly from an alley. Their ragged retreat suggested the French were not far behind them and in a moment or two, Sharpe reckoned, the Captain's small company might be cut off. "Captain!" he shouted, then pointed with his sword when he had the man's attention.

"Back, lads, back!" The Captain grasped the danger immediately. His men turned and ran up the street. Some were helping their comrades, a few ran hard to find safety, but most stayed together to join the larger number of British troops who were forming in the small cobbled space at the village's centre. Williams had held three reserve companies in the safer houses at the upper end of the village and those men had now come down to stem the rising French tide.

The French burst out of the alley just as the company went past its mouth. A redcoat went down to a bayonet, then the Captain slashed his sword in a wild cut that sliced open the face of the Frenchman. A big French sergeant swung his musket stock at the Captain, but Sharpe lunged into the man's face with his sword and though the blow was off balance and feeble, it served to check the man while the Captain got away. The Frenchman rammed his bayonet at Sharpe, had it parried away, then Sharpe skewered the sword low and hard, twisting the blade to stop it being gripped by the man's flesh. He ripped it clear of the Frenchman's belly and went back up the hill, one pace, two, watching for more attacks, then a hand pulled him into the re-formed British ranks in the open space. "Fire!" someone shouted, and Sharpe's ears rang with the deafening bellow of serried muskets exploding all around his head.

"I want that alley cleared!" Colonel Williams's voice called. "Go on, Wentworth! Take your men down. Don't let them stand!"

A group of redcoats charged. There were French muskets firing from the windows of the houses and some of the men burst through the doors to drive the French out. More enemy came up the main street. They came in small groups, stopping to fire, then running up into the square where the battle was ragged and desperate. One small group of redcoats was overrun by a rush of Frenchmen who came out of a side alley and there were screams as the enemy's bayonets rose and fell. A boy somehow escaped the massacre and scrambled over the cobbles. "Where's your musket, Sanders?" a sergeant shouted.

The boy swore, turned to look for his fallen weapon and was shot in the open mouth. The French, exhilarated by their victory over the small group, charged over the boy's body to attack the larger mass of men who were trying to hold the mouth of the recaptured alley. They were met by bayonets. The clash of steel on steel and of steel on wood was louder than the muskets, for few men now had time to load a musket and so they used their blades or the stocks of their guns instead of bullets. The two sides stood poised just feet from each other and every now and then a brave group of men would summon the courage to make a charge into the enemy ranks. Then the voices would rise to hoarse shouts and the clash of steel would begin again. One such assault was led by a tall, bareheaded French officer who drove two redcoats aside with whip-quick slashes of his sword, then lunged at a British officer who was fumbling with his pistol. The red-coated officer stepped back and so exposed Sharpe. The tall Frenchman feinted left and managed to draw Sharpe's sword away in the parry, then reversed his stroke and was already gritting his teeth for the killing lunge, but Sharpe was not fighting by the rules of some Parisian fencing master and so he kicked the man in the crotch, then hammered the heavy iron hilt of the sword down onto his head. He kicked the man out of the ranks, and back-cut his heavy sword at a French soldier who was trying to drag a musket and bayonet out of a redcoat's hand. The blade's edge, unsharpened, served as a cudgel rather than a sword, but the Frenchman reeled away with his head in his hands.

"Forward!" a voice shouted and the makeshift British line advanced down the street. The enemy retreated from Williams's reserve who now threatened to take back the whole lower part of the village, but then a vagary of wind swirled away a patch of dust and gunsmoke and Sharpe saw a whole new wave of French attackers swarming over the gardens and walls on the stream's eastern bank.

"Sharpe!" Colonel Williams called. "Are you spoken for?"

Sharpe elbowed back through the tight ranks of redcoats. "Sir?"

"I'd be damned grateful if you were to find Spencer on the ridge and tell him we could use a few reinforcements."

"At once, sir."

"Lost a couple of my aides, you see," Williams began to explain, but Sharpe had already left on the errand. "Good man!" Williams called after him, then turned back to the fight that had degenerated into a series of bloody and desperate brawls in the murderous confines of the alleys and back gardens. It was a fight Williams feared losing for the French had committed their own reserves and a new mass of blue-coated infantry was now pouring into the village.

Sharpe ran past wounded men dragging themselves uphill. The village was clouded with dust and smoke and he took one wrong turning and found himself in a blind alley of stone walls. He backtracked, found the right street again," and emerged on the slope above the village where a crowd of wounded men waited for help.

They were too weak to climb the slope and some called out as Sharpe ran past.

He ignored them. Instead he climbed up the goat path beside the graveyard. A group of worried officers were standing beside the church and Sharpe shouted at them to see if any knew where General Spencer was. "I've got a message!" he called.

"What is it?" a man called back. "I'm his aide!"

"Williams wants reinforcements. Too many Frogs!"

The staff officer turned and ran towards the brigade that was waiting beyond the crest while Sharpe paused to catch his breath. His sword was in his hand and its blade was sticky with blood. He cleaned the steel on the edge of his jacket, then jumped in alarm as a bullet smacked hard into the stone wall beside him. He turned and saw a puff of musket smoke showing between some broken beams at the upper edge of the village and he realized the French had taken those houses and were now trying to cut off the defenders still inside Fuentes de Onoro. The greenjackets in the graveyard opened fire, their rifles cutting down any enemy foolish enough to show himself at a window or door for too long.

Sharpe sheathed his cleaned sword then went over the wall and crouched behind a slab of granite on which a rough cross had been chiselled. He loaded the rifle, then aimed it at the broken roof where he had seen the musket smoke. The flint had skewed in the doghead and he released the screw, adjusted the leather patch that gripped the flint, then tightened it down. He thumbed the cock back. He was bitterly thirsty, the usual fate of any man who had been biting into salty gunpowder cartridges. The air was foul with the stench of smoke.

A musket appeared between the beams and, a second later, a man's head showed. Sharpe fired first, but the rifle's smoke hid the bullet's mark. Harper slid down the graveyard's slope to land beside Sharpe. "Jesus," the Irishman said, "Jesus."

"Bad in there." Sharpe nodded down to the village. He primed the rifle, then upended the weapon to charge the muzzle. He had left his ramrod conveniently propped against the grave.

"More of the buggers coming over the stream," Harper said. He bit a bullet and was forced to silence until he could spit it into the rifle. "That poor lieutenant. Died."

"It was a chest wound," Sharpe said, ramming the ball and charge hard down the barrel. "Not many survive chest wounds."

"I stayed with the poor bugger," Harper said. "His mother's a widow, he told me. She sold the family plate to buy his uniform and sword, then said he'd be as great a soldier as any there was."

"He was good," Sharpe said. "He kept his nerve." He cocked the rifle.

"I told him that. Gave him a prayer. Poor wee bugger. First battle, too." Harper pulled the trigger. "Got you, you bastard," he said and immediately fished a new cartridge from his pouch while he pulled the hammer to half cock. More British defenders were emerging from between the houses, forced out of the village by the sheer weight of French numbers. "They should send some more men down there," Harper said.

"They're coming," Sharpe said. He laid the rifle's barrel on the gravestone and looked for a target.

"Taking their time, though," Harper said. On this occasion he did not spit the bullet into the rifle, but first wrapped it in the small patch of greased leather that would grip the barrel's rifling and so make the ball spin as it was fired. It took longer to load such a round, but it made the Baker rifle far more accurate. The Irishman grunted as he forced the patched bullet down the barrel that was caked with the deposits of gunpowder. "There's some boiling water behind the church," he said, telling Sharpe where to go if he needed to clean the fouled powder from his rifle's barrel.

"I'll piss down it if I have to."

"If you've got any piss. I'm dry as a dead rat. Jesus, you bastard." This was addressed at a bearded Frenchman who had appeared between two of the houses where he was beating down a greenjacket with a pioneer's axe. Sharpe, already loaded, took aim through the sudden spray of the dying rifleman's blood and pulled the trigger, but at least a dozen other greenjackets in the churchyard had seen the incident and the bearded Frenchman seemed to quiver as the bullets whipped home. "That'll teach him," Harper said, and laid his rifle on the stone. "Where the hell are those reinforcements?"

"Takes time to get them ready," Sharpe said.

"Lose a bloody battle just because they want straight ranks?" Harper asked scornfully. He looked for a target. "Come on, someone, show yourself…»

More of Williams's men retreated out of the village. They tried to form ranks on the rough ground at the foot of the graveyard, but by abandoning the houses they had yielded the stone walls to the French who could hide as they loaded, fire, then duck back into hiding again. Some British were still fighting inside the village, but the musket smoke betrayed that their fight had shrunk to a small group of houses at the very top of the main street. One more push by the French, Sharpe thought, and the village would be lost, and then there would a bitter fight up through the graveyard for mastery of the church and the rock outcrop. Lose those two summits, he thought, and the battle was done.

The French drumming rose to a new fervour. There were Frenchmen coming out of the houses to form small squads that tried to outflank the retreating British. The riflemen in the graveyard fired at the daring sallies, but there were too many French and not enough rifles. One of the wounded men tried to crawl away from the advancing enemy and was bayoneted in the back for his trouble. Two Frenchmen ransacked his uniform, searching for the small hoard of coins most soldiers hid away. Sharpe fired at the plunderers, then turned his rifle on the French who were threatening to find cover behind the graveyard's lower wall. He loaded and fired, loaded and fired until his right shoulder felt like one massive bruise hammered into the bone by the rifle's brutal recoil, then suddenly, blessedly, there was a skirl of pipes and a rush of kilted men spilt over the crest of the ridge between the church and the rocks to charge down the main road into the village.

"Look at the bastards!" Harper said with pride. "They'll give the Frogs a right beating."

The Warwicks appeared to Sharpe's right and, like the Scots, just poured over the edge and scrambled down the steeper slope towards Fuentes de Onoro. The leading French attackers paused for a second to judge the weight of the counterattack, then hurried back into the cover of the houses. The Highlanders were already in the village where their war cries echoed between the walls, then the Warwicks went into the western alleyways and drove hard and deep into the tangle of houses.

Sharpe felt the tension drain out of him. He was thirsty, he ached, he was tired and his shoulder was agony. "Jesus," he said, "and it wasn't even our fight." The thirst was galling and he had left his canteen with the ammunition wagons, but he felt too tired and dispirited to go and find water. He watched the broken village, noting how the gunsmoke marked the British advance right back down to the stream's edge, but he felt little elation. It seemed to Sharpe that all his hopes had stalled. He faced disgrace. Worse, he felt a sense of failure. He had dared to hope that he could turn the Real Companпa Irlandesa into soldiers, but he knew, staring down at the gunsmoke and the shattered houses, that the Irishmen needed another month of training and far more goodwill than Wellington had ever been prepared to give them. Sharpe had failed with them just as he had failed Hogan, and the twin failures raked at his spirits, then he realized he was feeling sorry for himself just as Donaju had felt self-pity in the morning mist. "Jesus," he said, disgusted at himself.

"Sir?" Harper asked, not having heard Sharpe.

"Never mind," Sharpe said. He felt the loom of disgrace and the bite of regret. He was a captain on sufferance and he supposed he would never now make major. "Bugger them all, Pat," he said and wearily stood. "Let's find something to drink."

Down in the village a dying redcoat had found Harper's rag doll jammed into the niche of the wall and had shoved it into his mouth to stop himself crying out in his pain. Now he died and his blood welled and spilt from his gullet so that the small, damaged doll fell in a welter of red. The French had pulled back beyond the stream where they took cover behind the garden walls to open fire on the Highlanders and the Warwicks who hunted down the last groups of trapped French survivors in the village. A disconsolate line of French prisoners straggled up the slope under a mixed guard of riflemen and Highlanders. Colonel Williams had been wounded in the counterattack and was now carried by his riflemen to the church which had been turned into a hospital. The stork's nest on the bell tower was still an untidy tangle of twigs, but the adult birds had been driven out by the noise and smoke of the battle to leave their nestlings to starve. The sound of musketry crackled across the stream for a while, then died away as both sides took stock of the first attack.

But not, both sides knew, the last.

CHAPTER VIII

The French did not attack again. They stayed on the stream's eastern bank, while behind them, at the distant line of oaks that straddled the straight white road, the rest of their army slowly deployed so that by nightfall the whole of Massйna's force was encamped and the smoke of their fires mingled to make a grey wash that darkened to a hellish black as the sun sank behind the British ridge. The fighting in the village had stopped, but the artillery kept up a desultory battle till nightfall. The British had the best of it. Their guns were emplaced just back from the plateau's crest so that all the French could aim for was the skyline itself and most of their shots were fired too high and rumbled impotently over the British infantry concealed by the crest. Shots fired too low merely thumped into the ridge's slope which was too steep for the roundshot to bounce up to their targets. The British gunners, on the other hand, had a clear view of the enemy batteries and one by one their long-fused case shot either silenced the French artillery or persuaded the gunners to drag their cannon back into the cover of the trees.

The last gun fired as the sun set. The flat echo of the sound crashed and faded across the shadowed plain while the smoke from the gun's barrel curled and drifted in the wind. Small fires flickered in the village ruins, the flames glimmering luridly on broken walls and snapped beams. The streets were crammed with dead men and pitiful with the wounded who cried through the night for help. Behind the church, where the luckier casualties had been safely evacuated, wives searched for husbands, brothers for brothers and friends for friends. Burial parties looked for patches of soil on the rocky slopes while officers auctioned the possessions of their dead mess-fellows and wondered how long it would be before their own belongings were similarly knocked down for puny prices. Up on the plateau the soldiers stewed newly slaughtered beef in their Flanders cauldrons and sang sentimental songs of greenwoods and girls.

The armies slept with their weapons loaded and ready. Picquets watched the dark as the big guns cooled. Rats scampered through the fallen stones of Fuentes de Onoro and gnawed at dead men. Few of the living slept well. The British footguards had been infected with Methodism and some of the guardsmen gathered for a midnight prayer meeting until a Coldstreamer officer growled at them to give God and himself a bloody rest. Other men prowled in the dark to seek the dead and wounded for plunder. Now and then an injured man would call out in protest and a bayonet would glint quickly in the starlight and a wash of blood ebb into the soil as the newly dead man's uniform was searched for coins.

Major Tarrant had at last heard about Sharpe's impending ordeal by court of inquiry. He could hardly have avoided learning of it for a succession of officers came to the ammunition park to give Sharpe their condolences and to complain that an army which persecuted a man for killing the enemy must be an army led by idiots and administered by fools. Tarrant did not understand Wellington's decision either. "Surely the two men deserved to die? I agree they hardly endured the proper processes of the law, but even so, can anyone doubt their guilt?" Captain Donaju, who was sharing Tarrant's late supper with Sharpe, nodded agreement.

"It's not about two men dying, sir," Sharpe said, "but about bloody politics. I've given the Spanish reason to distrust us, sir."

"No Spaniards died!" Tarrant protested.

"Aye, sir, but too many good Portuguese did, so General Valverde's claiming that we can't be trusted with other nations' soldiers."

"This is too bad!" Tarrant said angrily. "So what happens to you now?"

Sharpe shrugged. "There's a court of inquiry, I'm blamed, which means a court martial. The worst they can do to me, sir, is take away my commission."

Captain Donaju frowned. "Suppose I speak to General Valverde?"

Sharpe shook his head. "And ruin your career, too? Thank you, but no. What this is really about," he explained, "is who should become Generalisimo of Spain. We reckon it should be Nosey, but Valverde doesn't agree."

"Doubtless because he wants the job himself!" Tarrant said scornfully. "It is too bad, Sharpe, too bad." The Scotsman frowned down at the dish of liver and kidney that Gog and Magog had cooked for his supper. Traditionally the officers received the offal of newly slaughtered cattle, a privilege Tarrant would happily have foregone. He tossed a peculiarly nauseating piece of kidney to one of the many dogs that had attached themselves to the army, then shook his head. "Is there any chance at all that you might avoid this ridiculous court of inquiry?" he asked Sharpe.

Sharpe thought of Hogan's sarcastic remark that Sharpe's only hope lay in a French victory that would obliterate all memories of what had happened at San Isidro. That seemed a dubious solution, yet there was another hope, a very slender hope, but one Sharpe had been thinking about all day.

"Go on," Tarrant said, sensing that the rifleman was hesitant about offering an answer.

Sharpe grimaced. "Nosey's been known to pardon men for good behaviour. There was a fellow in the 83rd who was caught red-handed stealing money from a poor-box in Guarda and he was condemned to be hanged for it, but his company fought so well at Talavera that Nosey let him go."

Donaju gestured with his knife towards the village that was beyond the eastern skyline. "Is that why you fought down there all day?" he asked.

Sharpe shook his head. "We just happened to find ourselves down there," he said dismissively.

"But you took an eagle, Sharpe!" Tarrant protested. "What more gallantry do you need to display?"

"A lot, sir." Sharpe winced as his sore shoulder gave a stab of pain. "I'm not rich, sir, so I can't buy a captaincy, let alone a majority, so I have to survive by merit. And a soldier's only as good as his last battle, sir, and my last battle was San Isidro. I have to wipe that out."

Donaju frowned. "It was my only battle," he said softly and to no one but himself.

Tarrant scorned Sharpe's pessimism. "Are you saying, Sharpe, that you have to perform some ridiculous act of heroism to survive?"

"Yes, sir. Exactly that, sir. So if you've got some horrid errand tomorrow then I want it."

"Good God, man." Tarrant was appalled. "Good God! Send you to your death? I can't do that!"

Sharpe smiled. "What were you doing seventeen years ago, sir?"

Tarrant thought for a second or two. "Ninety-four? Let's see now… " He counted off on his fingers for another few seconds. "I was still at school. Construing Horace in a gloomy schoolroom beneath the walls of Stirling Castle and being beaten every time I made an error."

"I was fighting the French, sir," Sharpe said. "And I've been fighting one bugger or another ever since, so don't you worry about me."

"Even so, Sharpe, even so." Tarrant frowned and shook his head. "Do you like kidney?"

"Love it, sir."

"It's all yours." Tarrant handed his plate to Sharpe. "Get your strength up, Sharpe, it seems you might need it." He twisted around to look at the red flame glow that lit the night above the fires of the French encampments. "Unless they don't attack," he said wistfully.

"The buggers aren't going away, sir, until we drive them away," Sharpe said. "Today was just a skirmish. The real battle hasn't started yet, so the Crapauds will be back, sir, they'll be back."

They slept close to the ammunition wagons. Sharpe woke once as a small shower hissed in the embers of the fire, then slept again until an hour before dawn. He awoke to see a small mist clinging to the plateau and blurring the grey shapes of soldiers tending their fires. Sharpe shared a pot of hot shaving water with Major Tarrant, then pulled on his jacket and weapons and walked westwards in search of a cavalry regiment. He found an encampment of hussars from the King's German Legion and exchanged a half-pint of issue rum for an edge on his sword. The German armourer bent over his wheel as the sparks flew and when he was done the edge of Sharpe's heavy cavalry sword was glinting in the dawn's small light. Sharpe slid the blade carefully into its scabbard and walked slowly back towards the gaunt silhouetted shapes of the wagon park.

The sun rose through a cloud of French cooking smoke. The enemy on the stream's eastern bank greeted the new day with a fusillade of musketry that rattled among Fuentes de Onoro's houses, but died away as no shots were returned. On the British ridge the gunners cut new fuses and piled their ready magazines with case shot, but no French infantry advanced from the distant trees to be the beneficiaries of their work. A large force of French cavalry rode southwards across the marshy plain where they were shadowed by horsemen from the King's German Legion, but as the sun rose higher and the last pockets of mist evaporated from the lowland fields it dawned on the waiting British that Massйna was not planning any immediate attack.

Two hours after dawn a French voltigeur picquet on the stream's eastern bank called out a tentative greeting to the British sentry he knew was hidden behind a broken wall on the west bank. He could not see the British soldier, but he could see the blue haze of his pipe smoke. "Goddam!" he called, using the French nickname for all British troops. "Goddam!"

"Crapaud?"

A pair of empty hands appeared above the French-held wall. No one fired and, a moment later, an anxious moustached face appeared. The Frenchman produced an unlit cigar and mimed that he would like a light.

The greenjacket picquet emerged from hiding just as warily, but when no enemy fired at him he walked out onto the clapper bridge that had lost one of its stone slabs in the previous day's fighting. He held his clay pipe out over the gap. "Come on, Frenchie."

The voltigeur walked onto the bridge and leaned over for the pipe that he used to light his cigar. Then he returned the pipe with a short length of garlic sausage. The two men smoked companionably, enjoying the spring sunshine. Other voltigeurs stretched and stood, just as the greenjackets relaxed in their positions. Some men took off their boots and dangled their feet in the stream.

In Fuentes de Onoro itself the British were struggling to remove the dead and the wounded from the crammed alleys. Men wrapped cloth strips about their mouths to drag the blood-black and heat-swollen bodies from the piles that marked where the fighting had been fiercest. Other men fetched water from the stream to relieve the thirst of the wounded. By mid-morning the truce across the stream was official and a company of unarmed French infantry arrived to carry their own casualties back across the bridge that had been patched with a plank taken from the watermill on the British bank. French ambulances waited at the ford to carry their men to the surgeons. The vehicles had been specially constructed for carrying wounded men and had springs as lavish as any city grandee's coach. The British army preferred to use farm carts that jolted the wounded foully.

A French major sat drinking wine and playing chess with a greenjacket captain in the inn's garden. Outside the inn a work party loaded an ox-drawn wagon with the dead who would be carried up to the ridge and buried in a common grave. The chessplayers frowned when a burst of raucous laughter sounded loud and the British Captain, annoyed that the laughter was not fading away, went to the gate and snapped at a sergeant for an explanation. "It was Mallory, sir," the Sergeant said, pointing to a shamefaced British rifleman who was the butt of French and British amusement. "Bugger fell asleep, sir, and the Frogs was loading him up with the dead 'uns."

The French Major took one of the Englishman's castles and remarked that he had once almost buried a living man. "We were already throwing earth in his grave when he sneezed. That was in Italy. He's a sergeant now."

The rifle Captain might have been losing the game of chess, but he was determined not to be outdone in stories. "I've met two men who survived hangings in England," he remarked. "They were pulled off the scaffold too soon and their bodies sold to the surgeons. The doctors pay five guineas a corpse, I'm told, so they can demonstrate their damned techniques to their apprentices. I'm told the corpses revive far more often than you'd think. There's always an unseemly scramble round the gallows as the man's family tries to cut the body down before the doctors get their wretched hands on it, and there doesn't seem anyone in authority to make sure the villain's properly dead before he's unstrung." He moved a bishop. "I suppose the authorities are being bribed."

"The guillotine makes no such mistakes," the Major said as he advanced a pawn. "Death by science. Very quick and certain. I do believe that is checkmate."

"Damn me," the Englishman said, "so it is."

The French Major stowed away his chess set. His pawns were musket balls, half limewashed and half left plain, the court pieces were carved from wood and the board was a square of painted canvas that he wrapped carefully about the chessmen. "It seems our lives have been spared this day," he said, glancing up at the sun that was already past the meridian. "Maybe we shall fight tomorrow instead?"

Up on the ridge the British watched as French troops marched south. It was clear that Massena would now be trying to turn the British right flank and so Wellington ordered the Seventh Division to deploy southwards and thus reinforce a strong force of Spanish partisans who were blocking the roads the French needed to advance artillery as part of their flanking manoeuvre. Wellington's army was now in two parts; the largest on the plateau behind Fuentes de Onoro was blocking the approach to Almeida while the smaller part was two and a half miles south astride the road along which the British would need to retreat if they were defeated. Massena put a telescope to his one eye to watch as the small British division moved south. He kept expecting the division to stop before it left the protective artillery range of the plateau, but the troops kept marching and marching. "He's made a bollocks of it," he told an aide as the Seventh Division finally marched way beyond the range of the strong British artillery. Massena collapsed the telescope. "Monsieur Wellington has made a bollocks of it," he said.

Andrй Massena had begun his military career as a private in the ranks of Louis XVI's army and now he was a marshal of France, the Duke of Rivoli and the Prince of Essling. Men called him "Your Majesty", yet once he had been a half-starved wharf rat in the small town of Nice. He had also once possessed two eyes, but the Emperor had shot one of the eyeballs away in a hunting accident. Napoleon would never acknowledge the responsibility, but nor would Marshal Massйna ever dream of blaming his beloved Emperor for the eye's loss, for he owed both his royal status and his high military rank to Napoleon who had recognized the wharf rat's skills as a soldier. Those skills had made Andrй Massйna famous inside the Empire and feared outside. He had trampled through Italy winning victory after victory, he had smashed the Russians on the borders of Switzerland and rammed bloody defeat down Austrian throats before Marengo. Marshal Andrй Massйna, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling, was not a pretty soldier, but by God he knew how to fight, which was why, at fifty-two years old, he had been sent to retrieve the disasters besetting the Emperor's armies in Spain and Portugal.

Now the wharf rat turned prince watched in disbelief as the gap between the two parts of the British army opened still wider. For a few seconds he even toyed with the idea that perhaps the four or five thousand red-coated infantrymen marching southwards were the Irish regiments that Major Ducos had promised would mutiny before the battle, but Massйna had never put much hope in Ducos's stratagem and the fact that these nine battalions were flying their flags as they marched suggested that they were hardly in revolt. Instead, miraculously, it seemed that the British were offering them up as a sacrifice by isolating them out in the southern plain where they would be far from any help. Massйna watched as the enemy regiments finally stopped just short of a village far to the south. According to his map the village was called Nave de Haver and it lay nearly five miles from Fuentes de Onoro. "Is Wellington tricking us?" Massйna asked an aide.

The aide was just as incredulous as his master. "Perhaps he believes he can beat us without keeping to the rules?" he suggested.

"Then in the morning we will teach him about the rules of war. I expected better of this Englishman! Tomorrow night, Jean, we shall have his whores as our own. Does Wellington have whores?"

"I don't know, Your Majesty."

"Then find out. And make sure I get the pick of the bunch before some filthy grenadier gives her the clap, you hear me?"

"Yes, Your Majesty," the aide said. His master's passion for women was as tiresome as his appetite for victory was inspiring, and tomorrow, it seemed, both hungers would be satisfied.

By mid-afternoon it was plain that the French were not coming that day. The picquets were doubled, and every battalion kept at least three companies under arms, but the other companies were released to more usual duties. Cattle were herded onto the plateau and slaughtered for the evening meal, bread was fetched from Vilar Formoso and the rum ration distributed.

Captain Donaju sought and received Tarrant's permission to take a score of men to attend Lord Kiely's burial which was taking place four miles behind Fuentes de Onoro. Hogan also insisted that Sharpe attend and Harper wanted to come as well. Sharpe felt awkward in Hogan's company, especially as the Irishman seemed blithely unaware of Sharpe's bitterness over the court of inquiry. "I invited Runciman," Hogan told Sharpe as they walked along the dusty road west from Vilar Formoso, "but he didn't really want to come. Poor fellow."

"In a bad way, is he?" Sharpe asked.

"Heartbroken," Hogan said callously. "Keeps claiming that nothing was his fault. He doesn't seem to grasp that isn't the point."

"It isn't, is it? The point is that you'd prefer to keep bloody Valverde happy."

Hogan shook his head. "I'd prefer to bury Valverde, and preferably alive, but what I really want is for Wellington to be Generalisimo."

"And you'll sacrifice me for that?"

"Of course! Every soldier knows you must lose some valuable men if you want to win a great prize. Besides, what does it matter if you do lose your commission? You'll just go off and join Teresa and become a famous partisan: El Fusilero!" Hogan smiled cheerfully, then turned to Harper. "Sergeant? Would you do me a great service and give me a moment's privacy with Captain Sharpe?"

Harper obligingly walked on ahead where he tried to overhear the conversation between the two officers, but Hogan kept his voice low and Sharpe's exclamations of surprise offered Harper no clue. Nor did he have any chance to question Sharpe before the three British officers turned a corner to see Lord Kiely's servants and Captain Donaju's twenty men standing awkwardly beside a grave that had been recently dug in an orchard next to a graveyard. Father Sarsfield had paid the village gravediggers to dig the hole just feet away from consecrated ground for, though the laws of the church insisted that Lord Kiely's sins must keep him from burial in holy ground, Sarsfield would nevertheless place the body as near as he could to consecrated soil so that on Judgment Day the exiled Irishman's soul would not be utterly bereft of Christian company. The body had been stitched into a dirty white canvas shroud. Four men of the Real Companпa Irlandesa lowered the corpse into the deep grave, then Hogan, Sharpe and Harper took off their hats as Father Sarsfield said the prayers in Latin and afterwards spoke in English to the twenty guardsmen. Lord Kiely, the priest said, had suffered from the sin of pride and that pride had not let him endure disappointment. Yet all Irishmen, Sarsfield said, must learn to live with disappointment for it was given to their heritage as surely as the sparks flew upwards. Yet, he went on, the proper response to disappointment was not to abandon hope and reject God's gift of life, but to keep the hope glowing bright. "We have no homes, you and I," he said to the sombre guardsmen, "but one day we shall all inherit our earthly home, and if it is not given to us then it will come to our children or to our children's children." The priest fell silent and stared down into the grave. "Nor must you worry that his Lordship committed suicide," he finally continued. "Suicide is a sin, but sometimes life is so unbearable that we must risk the sin rather than face the horror. Wolfe Tone made that choice thirteen years ago." The mention of the Irish patriot rebel made one or two of the guardsmen glance at Sharpe, then they looked back to the priest who went on in his gentle, persuasive voice to tell how Wolfe Tone had been held captive in a British dungeon and how, rather than face the enemy's gallows, he had slit his own throat with a penknife. "Lord Kiely's motives might not have been so pure as Tone's," Sarsfield said, "but we don't know what sadness drove him to his sin and in our ignorance we must therefore pray for his soul and forgive him." There were tears in the priest's eyes as he took a small phial of holy water from the haversack at his side and sprinkled its drops on the lonely grave. He offered the benediction in Latin, then stepped back as the guardsmen raised their muskets to fire a ragged volley over the open grave. Birds panicked up from the orchard's trees, then circled and flew back as the smoke dissipated among the branches.

Hogan took charge as soon as the volley had been fired. He insisted that there was still some danger of a French attack at dusk and that the soldiers should all return to the ridge. "I'll follow soon," he told Sharpe, then he ordered Kiely's servants back to his Lordship's quarters.

The soldiers and servants left, the sound of their boots fading in the late afternoon air. It was sultry in the orchard where the two gravediggers waited patiently for the signal to fill up the grave beside which Hogan now stood, hat in hand, staring down at the shrouded corpse. "For a long time," he said to Father Sarsfield, "I've carried a pillbox with some Irish earth inside so that if I should die I would rest with a little bit of Ireland all through eternity. I seem to have mislaid it, Father, which is a pity for I'd have liked to sprinkle a wee bit of Ireland's soil onto Lord Kiely's grave."

"A generous thought, Major," Sarsfield said.

Hogan stared down at Kiely's shroud. "The poor man. I hear he was hoping to marry the Lady Juanita?"

"They spoke of it," Sarsfield said drily, his tone implying his disapproval of the match.

"The lady's doubtless in mourning," Hogan said, then put his hat back on. "Or maybe she's not mourning at all? You've heard that she's gone back to the French? Captain Sharpe let her go. He's a fool for women, that man, but the Lady Juanita can easily make a fool of men. She did of poor Kiely here, did she not?" Hogan paused as a sneeze gathered and exploded. "Bless me," he said, wiping his nose and eyes with a vast red handkerchief. "And what a terrible woman she was," he went on. "Saying she was going to marry Kiely, and all the while she was committing adultery and fornication with Brigadier Guy Loup. Is fornication a mere venial sin these days?"

"Fornication, Major, is a mortal sin." Sarsfield smiled. "As I suspect you know only too well."

"Crying out to heaven for revenge, is it?" Hogan returned the smile, then looked back to the grave. Bees hummed in the orchard blossoms above Hogan's head. "But what about fornicating with the enemy, Father?" he asked. "Isn't that a worse sin?"

Sarsfield took the scapular from around his neck, kissed it, then carefully folded the strip of cloth. "Why are you so worried for the Dona Juanita's soul, Major?" he asked.

Hogan still looked down at the dead man's coarse shroud. "I'd rather worry about his poor soul. Do you think it was discovering that his lady was humping a Frog that killed him?"

Sarsfield flinched at Hogan's crudity. "If he did discover that, Major, then it could hardly have added to his happiness. But he was not a man who knew much happiness, and he rejected the hand of the church."

"And what could the church have done? Changed the whore's nature?" Hogan asked. "And don't tell me that Dona Juanita de Elia is not a spy, Father, for I know she is and you know the selfsame thing."

"I do?" Sarsfield frowned in puzzlement.

"You do, Father, you do, and God forgive you for it. Juanita is a whore and a spy, and a better whore, I think, than she is a spy. But she was the only person available for you, isn't that so? Doubtless you'd have preferred someone less flamboyant, but what choice did you have? Or was it Major Ducos who made the choice? But it was a bad choice, a very bad choice. Juanita failed you, Father. We found her when she was trying to bring you a whole lot of these." Hogan reached into his tail pocket and produced one of the counterfeit newspapers that Sharpe had discovered in San Cristobal. "They were wrapped in sheets of sacred music, Father, and I thought to myself, why would they do that? Why church music? Why not other newspapers? But, of course, if she was stopped and given a cursory search then who would think it odd that she was carrying a pile of psalms to a man of God?"

Sarsfield glanced at the newspaper, but did not take it. "I think, maybe," he said carefully, "that grief has deranged your mind."

Hogan laughed. "Grief for Kiely? Hardly, Father. What might have deranged me is all the work I've been having to do in these last few days. I've been reading my correspondence, Father, and it comes from all sorts of strange places. Some from Madrid, some from Paris, some even from London. Would you like to hear what I've learned?"

Father Sarsfield was fidgeting with the scapular, folding and refolding the embroidered strip of cloth. "If you insist," he said guardedly.

Hogan smiled. "Oh, I do, Father. For I've been thinking about this fellow, Ducos, and how clever everyone says he is, but what really worries me is that he's put another clever fellow behind our lines, and I've been hurting my mind wondering just who that new clever fellow might be. And I was also wondering, you see, just why it was that the first newspapers to arrive in the Irish regiments were supposed to be from Philadelphia. Very odd choice that. Am I losing you?"

"Go on," Sarsfield said. The scapular had come loose and he was meticulously folding it again.

"I've never been to Philadelphia," Hogan said, "though I hear it's a fine city. Would you like a pinch of snuff, Father?"

Sarsfield did not answer. He just watched Hogan and went on folding the cloth.

"Why Philadelphia?" Hogan asked. "Then I remembered! Actually I didn't remember at all; a man in London sent me a reminder. They remember these things in London. They have them all written down in a great big book, and one of the things written in that great big book is that it was in Philadelphia that Wolfe Tone got his letter of introduction to the French government. And it was there, too, that he met a passionate priest called Father Mallon. Mallon was more of a soldier than a priest and he was doing his best to raise a regiment of volunteers to fight the British, but he wasn't having a whole lot of success so he threw his lot in with Tone instead. Tone was a Protestant, wasn't he? And he never did have much fondness for priests, but he liked Mallon well enough because Mallon was an Irish patriot before he was a priest. And I think Mallon became Tone's friend as well, for he stayed with Tone every step of the way after that first meeting in Philadelphia. He went to Paris with Tone, raised the volunteers with Tone, then sailed to Ireland with Tone. Sailed all the way into Lough Swilly. That was in 1798, Father, in case you'd forgotten, and no one has seen Mallon from that day to this. Poor Tone was captured and the redcoats were all over Ireland looking for Father Mallon, but there's not been a sight nor smell of the man. Are you sure you won't have a pinch of snuff? It's Irish Blackguard and hard to come by."

"I would rather have a cigar, if you have one," Sarsfield said calmly.

"I don't, Father, but you should try the snuff one day. It's a grand specific against the fever, or so my mother always said. Now where was I? Oh yes, with poor Father Mallon on the run from the British. It's my belief he got back to France, and I think from there he was sent to Spain. The French couldn't use him against the English, at least not until the English had forgotten the events of 98, but Mallon must have been useful in Spain. I suspect he met the old Lady Kiely in Madrid. I hear she was a fierce old witch! Lived for the church and for Ireland, even though she saw too much of the one and had never seen the other. D'you think Mallon used her patronage as he spied on the Spanish for Bonaparte? I suspect so, but then the French took over the Spanish throne and someone must have been wondering where Father Mallon could be more usefully employed, and I suspect Father Mallon pleaded with his French masters to be employed against the real enemy. After all, who among the British would remember Father Mallon from 98? His hair will be white by now, he'll be a changed man. Maybe he's put on weight like me." Hogan patted his belly and smiled.

Father Sarsfield frowned at the scapular. He seemed surprised that he was still holding the vestment and so he carefully stowed it in the haversack slung from his shoulder, then just as carefully brought out a small pistol. "Father Mallon might be a changed man," he said as he opened the frizzen to check that the gun was primed, "but I would like to think that if he was still alive he would be a patriot."

"I imagine he is," Hogan said, apparently unworried by the pistol. "A man like Mallon? His loyalty won't change as much as his hair and belly."

Sarsfield frowned at Hogan. "And you're not a patriot, Major?"

"I like to think so."

"Yet you fight for Britain."

Hogan shrugged. The priest's pistol was loaded and primed, but for the moment it hung loose in Sarsfield's hand. Hogan had played a game with the priest, a game he had expected to win, but this proof of his victory was not giving the Major any pleasure. Indeed, as the realization of his triumph sank in, Hogan's mood became ever bleaker. "I worry about allegiance," Hogan said, "I surely do. I lie awake sometimes and wonder whether I'm right in thinking that what's best for Ireland is to be a part of Britain, but I do know one thing, Father, which is that I don't want to be ruled by Bonaparte. I think maybe I'm not so brave a man as Wolfe Tone, but nor did I ever agree with his ideas. You do, Father, and I salute you for it, but that isn't why you're going to have to die. " The reason you're going to have to die, Father, is not because you fight for Ireland, but because you fight for Napoleon. The distinction is fatal."

Sarsfield smiled. "I shall have to die?" he asked in wry amusement. He cocked the pistol, then raised it towards Hogan's head.

The sound of the shot pounded across the orchard. The two gravediggers jumped in terror as smoke drifted out from the hedge where the killer had been concealed just twenty paces from where Hogan and Sarsfield had been standing. The priest was now lying on the mound of excavated soil where his body jerked twice and then, with a sigh, lay still.

Sharpe stood up from behind the hedge and crossed to the grave to see that his bullet had gone plumb where he had aimed it, straight through the dead man's heart. He stared down at the, priest, noting how dark the blood looked on the soutane's cloth. A fly had already settled there. "I liked him," he told Hogan.

"It's allowed, Richard," Hogan said. The Major was upset and pale, so pale that for a moment he looked as if he might be sick. "One of mankind's higher authorities enjoins us to love our enemies and He said nothing about them ceasing to be enemies just because we love them. Nor can I recall any specific injunction in Holy Scripture against shooting our enemies through the heart." Hogan paused and suddenly all his usual flippancy seemed to drain out of him. "I liked him too," he said simply.

"But he was going to shoot you," Sharpe said. Hogan, talking privately with Sharpe on their way to the burial, had warned the rifleman what might happen and Sharpe, disbelieving the prediction, had nevertheless watched it happen and then done his part.

"He deserved a better death," Hogan said, then he pushed the corpse with his foot and thus toppled it into the grave. The priest's body landed awkwardly so that it seemed as if he was sitting on the shrouded head of Kiely's corpse. Hogan tossed the counterfeit newspaper after the body, then took a small round box from his pocket. "Shooting Sarsfield doesn't fetch you any favours, Richard," Hogan said sternly as he prised the lid off the box. "Let's just say I now forgive you for letting Juanita go. That damage has been contained. But you still might need to be sacrificed for the happiness of Spain."

"Yes, sir," Sharpe said resentfully.

Hogan caught the resentment in the rifleman's voice. "Of course life isn't fair, Richard. Ask him." He nodded down at the dead, white-haired priest then sprinkled the contents of his small box onto the corpse's faded and bloodied soutane.

"What's that?" Sharpe asked.

"Just soil, Richard, just soil. Nothing important." Hogan tossed the empty pillbox onto the two bodies, then summoned the grave-diggers. "He was a Frenchman," he told them in Portuguese, certain that such an explanation would make them sympathize with the murder they had just witnessed. He gave each man a coin, then watched as the double grave was filled with earth.

Hogan walked back with Sharpe towards Fuentes de Onoro. "Where's Patrick?" the Major asked.

"I told him to wait in Vilar Formoso."

"At an inn?"

"Aye. The one where I first met Runciman."

"Good. I need to get drunk, Richard." Hogan looked bleak, almost as if he might weep. "One less witness of your confession in San Isidro, Richard," he said.

"That's not why I did it, Major," Sharpe protested.

"You did nothing, Richard, absolutely nothing." Hogan spoke fiercely. "What happened in that orchard never happened. You saw nothing, heard nothing, did nothing. Father Sarsfield is alive, God knows where, and his disappearance will become a mystery that will never be explained. Or perhaps the truth is that Father Sarsfield never even existed, Richard, in which case you can't possibly have killed him, can you? So say no more about it, not a word." He sniffed, then looked ahead at the blue evening sky which was unbruised by any gunsmoke. "The French have given us a day of peace, Richard, so we shall celebrate by getting bloody drunk. And tomorrow, God help us sinners both, we'll bloody fight."

The sun sank behind layers of western cloud so that the sky seemed shot with glory. For a time the shadows of the British guns reached monstrously across the plain as they stretched towards the oaks and the French army and it was then, in the dying minutes of the full light, that Sharpe rested his telescope on the chill barrel of a nine-pounder gun and trained the glass across the low-lying land until he could see the enemy soldiers around their cooking fires. It was not the first time that day he had searched the enemy lines through the glass. All morning he had wandered restlessly between the ammunition park and the gun line where he had stared fixedly at the enemy and now, back from Vilar Formoso with a sour belly and a head thick with too much wine, he looked once again into Massйna's lines.

"They won't come now," a gunner lieutenant said, thinking that the rifle Captain feared a dusk assault. "Froggies don't like fighting at night."

"No," Sharpe agreed, "they won't come now," but he kept his eye to the telescope as he inched it along the shadowed line of trees and fires and men. And then, suddenly, he checked the glass.

For he had seen the grey uniforms. Loup was here after all and his brigade was a part of Massйna's army which had spent the whole day preparing for the attack that would surely come with the returning sun.

Sharpe watched his enemy, then straightened from the gun barrel and closed the glass. His head spun with the effects of the wine, but he was not so drunk that he did not feel a shudder of fear as he thought of what would come across those cannon-scarred fields when the sun next shone on Spain.

Tomorrow.

CHAPTER IX

The horsemen came out of the mist like creatures from nightmare. The Frenchmen rode big horses that galloped through the marshland to explode water with every stride, then the leading squadrons reached the higher ground about the village of Nave de Haver where the Spanish partisans had bivouacked and the sound of the French cavalry's hooves turned into a thunder that shook the earth itself. A trumpet urged the horsemen on. It was dawn and the sun was a silver disc low in the fogbank that veiled the eastern fields from which death was erupting.

The Spanish sentinels fired one hasty volley, then retreated before the overwhelming enemy numbers. Some of the partisans were asleep after standing guard through the night, and they woke only to stumble out from their requisitioned houses and be cut down with slashing blades and dipping lance heads. The partisan brigade had been placed in Nave de Haver to watch the allies' southern flank and no one had expected them to face a full French attack, but now the heavy cavalry was streaming in through the alleys and crashing their big horses through the gardens and orchards beside the huddle of houses that lay so far to the south of Fuentes de Onoro. The partisan commander shouted at his men to withdraw, but the French were slashing at defenders as they frantically tried to reach their frightened horses. Some men refused to retreat, but ran at the enemy with all the passionate hatred of the guerrillero. Blood spilt on the streets and splashed on the house walls. One street was blocked when a Spaniard shot a dragoon's horse and the beast fell thrashing to the cobbles. The Spaniard bayoneted the rider, then was hurled backwards as a second horse, unable to stop its charge, tripped and stumbled over the bleeding corpses. A knot of Spaniards fell on the second horse and its rider. Knives and swords hacked down, then more partisans scrambled over the dying, bloody beasts to fire a volley at the milling riders trapped by the carnage. More Frenchmen fell from their saddles, then a troop of lancers entered the street behind the Spanish defenders and the lance heads dropped to the level of a man's waist as the horses were spurred forward. The Spaniards, trapped between dragoons and lancers, tried to fight back, but now it was the turn of the French to be the killers. A few partisans escaped through the houses, but only to find the streets beyond the back doors were also filled with blood-crazed horsemen in glittering uniforms being urged to the slaughter by the frantic, joyous notes of the trumpeters.

Most of Nave de Haver's Spanish defenders fled into the mists west of the village where they were pursued by cuirassiers in high black-plumed helmets and shining steel breastplates. The big swords hacked down like meat axes; one such blow could cripple a horse or crush a man's skull. To the north and south of the cuirassiers, troops of lightly mounted chasseurs а cheval raced like steeplechasers to cut off the Spaniards. They whooped hunting calls. The chasseurs carried light, curved sabres that slashed wicked wounds across their enemies' heads and shoulders. Unhorsed Spaniards reeled in agony across the meadows and were ridden down by horsemen practising their sword cuts or lance thrusts. Dismounted dragoons hunted through the houses and cattle sheds of Nave de Haver, finding the survivors one by one and shooting them with carbines or pistols. One group of Spaniards took refuge in the church, but the copper-helmeted dragoons forced their way in through the priest's door at the back of the sacristy and fell on the defenders with swords. It was Sunday morning and the priest had hoped to say a Mass for the Spanish troops, but now he died with his congregation as the French ransacked the small, blood-soaked church for its plate and candlesticks.

A French work party dragged the corpses out of the village's main street so that the advancing artillery could pass through. It took half an hour's work before the guns could crash and rattle between the blood-splashed houses. The first guns were the light and mobile cannon of the horse artillery; six-pounder guns dragged by horses ridden by gunners resplendent in gold and blue uniforms. Larger cannons were coming behind, but the horse artillery would lead the attack on the next village upstream where the British Seventh Division had taken its position. Infantry columns followed the horse artillery, battalion after battalion marching beneath their gilded eagles. The mist was burning off to show a village smoking with abandoned cooking fires and reeking of blood where the victorious dragoons were remounting their horses to join the pursuit. Some of the infantry tried to march through the village, but staff officers forced them to go around Nave de Haver's southern flank so that none of the battalions would be slowed by plundering. The first aides galloped back to Massйna's headquarters to say that Nave de Haver had fallen and that the village of Poco Velha, less than two miles upstream, was already under artillery fire. A second division of infantry marched to support the men who were already turning the allies' southern flank and were now marching due north towards the road that led from Fuentes de Onoro to the fords across the River Coa.

Opposite Fuentes de Onoro itself the French main gun batteries opened fire. The cannon had been dragged to the tree line and roughly embrasured with felled trunks to give their crews some protection from the British guns on the ridge. The French fired common shell, iron balls filled with a fused powder charge that cracked apart in a burst of smoke to shatter the casing on the plateau's skyline, while short-barrelled howitzers lobbed shells into the broken streets of Fuentes de Onoro to fill the village with the stench of burned powder and the rattle of exploded iron. During the night a battery of mixed four- and six-pounder guns had been moved into the gardens and houses on the stream's eastern bank and those guns opened up with roundshot that cracked fiercely on the defenders' walls. The voltigeurs in the gardens fired at British loopholes and cheered whenever a roundshot brought down a length of wall or collapsed a broken roof onto a room of crouching redcoats. A shell set light to some collapsed thatch and the flames crackled up to spread thick smoke across the upper village where riflemen sheltered behind the cemetery's gravestones. French shells drove into the burial ground, overturning headstones and grubbing up the earth around the graves so that it looked as though a herd of monstrous pigs had been truffling the soil to reach the buried dead.

The British guns returned a sporadic fire. They were holding the bulk of their ammunition for the moment when the French columns were launched across the plain towards the village, though every now and then a case shot exploded at the tree line to make the French gunners duck and curse. One by one the aim of the French guns was shifted from the ridge onto the burning village where the spreading smoke gave evidence of the damage being done. Behind the ridge the redcoat battalions listened to the cannonade and prayed they would not be asked to go down into the maelstrom of fire and smoke. Some chaplains raised their voice over the sound of the cannon as they read Morning Prayer to the waiting battalions. There was a comfort in the old words, though some sergeants barked at the men to mind their damned manners when they tittered at the line in the day's epistle which enjoined the congregation to abstain from fleshly lusts. Then they prayed for the King's Majesty, for the royal family, for the clergy, and only then did some chaplains add a prayer that God would preserve the lives of His soldiers on this Sabbath day on the border of Spain.

Where, three miles south of Fuentes de Onoro, the cuirassiers and chasseurs and lancers and dragoons were met by a force of British dragoons and German hussars. The horsemen clashed in a sudden and bloody mкlйe. The allied horse were outnumbered, but they were properly formed and fighting against an enemy force strung out by the excitement of the pursuit. The French faltered, then retreated, but on either flank of the allied squadrons other French horsemen raced ahead to where two battalions of infantry, one British and one Portuguese, waited behind the walls and hedges of Poco Velha. The British and German cavalry, fearing that they would be surrounded, hurried out of danger's way as the excited French horse ignored them and charged at the village's defenders instead.

"Fire!" a caзador colonel shouted and ragged smoke whiplashed from the garden walls. Horses screamed and fell, while men were plucked backwards from saddles as the musket and rifle balls cracked straight through the cuirassiers' steel breastplates. There was a frantic trumpet call and the charging French horse checked, turned and rode back to re-form, leaving behind a tideline of struggling horses and bleeding men. More French horsemen were arriving to join the attack; imperial guardsmen mounted on big horses and carrying carbines and swords, while beyond the cavalry the leading foot artillery unlimbered in the meadows and opened fire to add their heavier missiles to the six-pounder guns of the horse artillery. The first twelve-pounder cannon balls fell short, but the next rounds crashed into Poco Velha's defenders and tore great gaps in their protective walls. The French cavalry had drawn to one side to re-form its ranks and to open a path for the infantry who now appeared behind the guns. The infantry battalions formed themselves into two attack columns that would move like human avalanches at the thin line of Poco Velha's defenders. The French drummer boys tightened their drumskins, while beyond Poco Velha the remaining seven battalions of the British Seventh Division waited for the attack that the drums would inspire. Horse artillery guarded the infantry's flanks, but the French were bringing still more horses and still more guns against the isolated defenders. The British and German cavalry, which had been driven away westwards, now trotted in a wide circle to rejoin the beleaguered Seventh Division.

French skirmishers ran ahead of the attacking column. They splashed through a streamlet, passed the artillery gun line and ran out to where the dead horses and dying men marked the limit of the cavalry's first attack. There the skirmishers split into their pairs to open fire. British and Portuguese skirmishers met them and the crackle of muskets and rifles carried across the marshy fields to where Wellington stared anxiously southwards. Beneath him the village of Fuentes de Onoro was a smoking shambles being pounded by a continuous cannonade, but his gaze was always to the south where he had sent his Seventh Division beyond the protective range of the British cannon on the plateau.

Wellington had made a mistake, and he knew it. His army was split in two and the enemy was threatening to overwhelm the smaller of the two parts. Gallopers brought him news of a broken Spanish force, then of ever mounting numbers of French infantry crossing the stream at Nave de Haver to join the attack on the Seventh Division's nine battalions. At least two French divisions had gone south for that attack, and each of those divisions was stronger than the newly formed and still under-strength Seventh Division which was not only under attack by infantry, but also seemed assailed by every French horseman in Spain.

French infantry officers urged the columns forward and the drummers responded by beating the pas de charge with a frantic energy. The French attack had rolled over Nave de Haver, had brushed aside the allied cavalry and now it had to keep up the momentum if it was to annihilate Wellington's right wing. Then the victorious attack could lance at the rear of Wellington's main force while the rest of the French army hammered through his battered defences at Fuentes de Onoro.

The voltigeurs pushed back the outnumbered allied skirmishers who ran back to join a main defence line being shredded and torn by French canister. Wounded men crawled back into Poco Velha's small streets where they tried to find a patch of shelter from the terrible storm of canister. French cavalrymen were waiting on the village's flanks, waiting with blade and lance to pounce on the broken fugitives who must soon stream back from the columns' attack.

"Vive l'Empereur!" the attackers shouted. The mist had gone now, replaced by a clear sunlight that flickered off thousands of French bayonets. The sun was shining into the defenders' eyes, a great blinding blaze out of which loomed the huge dark shapes of the French columns trampling the fields to the sounds of drums and cheering and the thunder of marching feet. The voltigeurs began firing at the main British and Portuguese line. The sergeants shouted at the files to close up, then looked nervously at the enemy cavalry waiting to charge from the flanks.

The British and Portuguese battalions shrank towards their centres as the dead and wounded left the files. "Fire!" the British Colonel ordered and his men began the rolling volleys that rippled smoke up and down the line as the companies fired in turn. The Portuguese battalion took up the volleys so that the whole eastern face of the village flashed flame. Men in the leading ranks of the French columns went down and the columns divided so that the files could walk round the wounded and dead, then the ranks closed up again as the cheering Frenchmen came stolidly on. The Portuguese and British volleys became ragged as the officers let men fire as soon as they were loaded. Smoke rolled thick to hide the village. A French galloper gun unlimbered on the village's northern flank and slashed a roundshot into the caзadores' ranks. The drummers paused in the pas de charge and the columns let out their great war cry, "Vive l'Empereur!" and then the drums began again, beating even faster as the columns crashed through the fragile vegetable gardens on the outskirts of the village. Another roundshot seared in from the north, slathering a gable end with blood.

"Withdraw! Withdraw!" The two battalions had no hope of holding the village and so, almost overrun by the enemy, the redcoats and Portuguese ran back through the village. It was a poor place with a tiny church no bigger than a dissenting chapel. The grenadier companies of both battalions formed ranks beside the church. Ramrods scraped in barrels. The French were in the village now, their columns breaking apart as the infantry found their own paths through the alleyways and gardens. The cavalry was closing on the village's flanks, looking for broken ranks to charge and decimate. The leading French attackers came into sight of the church and a Portuguese officer gave the order to fire and the two companies hurled a volley that choked the narrow street with dead and wounded Frenchmen. "Back! Back!" the Portuguese officer shouted. "Watch your flanks!"

A roundshot splintered part of the church roof, showering the retreating grenadiers with shards of broken tile. French infantry appeared in an alleyway and spilt out to make a crude firing line that brought down two caзadores and a redcoat. Most of the two battalions were clear of the village now and retreating towards the other seven battalions that were formed in square to deter the circling French cavalry. That cavalry feared it would be cheated of its prey and some of the horsemen charged Poco Velha's withdrawing garrison. "Rally, rally!" a redcoat officer called as he saw a squadron of cuirassiers wheel around to charge at his men. His company shrank into the rally square, a huddle of men forming an obstacle large enough to deter a horse from charging home. "Hold your fire! Let the buggers get close!"

"Leave him be!" a sergeant shouted when a man ran out of the rally square to help a wounded comrade.

"Hive! Hive!" another captain shouted and his men rallied into a hasty square. "Fire!" Maybe a third of his men were loaded and they loosed a ragged volley that made one horse scream and rear. The rider fell, crashing heavily to earth with all the weight of his breastplate and back armour dragging him down. Another horseman rode clear through the musket balls and galloped wildly along the face of the crude square. A redcoat darted out to lunge at the Frenchman with his bayonet, but the rider leaned far from his saddle and screamed in triumph as he whipped his sword across the infantryman's face.

"You bloody fool, Smithers! You bloody fool!" his captain shouted at the blinded redcoat who was screaming and clutching a face that was a mask of blood.

"Back! Back!" the Portuguese Colonel urged his men. The French infantry had advanced through the village and was forming an attack column at its northern edge. A British galloper gun fired at them and the roundshot skipped on the ground and bounced up to crack into the village houses.

"Vive l'Empereur!" a French colonel bellowed and the drummer boys began to sound the dreaded pas de charge that would drive the Emperor's infantry onwards. The two allied battalions were streaming in clumps across the fields pursued by the advancing infantry and harried by horsemen. One small group was ridden down by lancers, another panicked and ran towards the waiting squares only to be hunted down by dragoons who held their swords like lances to spear into the redcoats' backs. The two largest masses of horsemen were those that stalked the colour parties, waiting for the first sign of panic that would open the clustered infantrymen to a thunderous charge. The flags of the two battalions were lures to glory, trophies that would make their captors famous throughout France. Both sets of flags were surrounded by bayonets and defended by sergeants carrying spontoons, the long, heavy, lance-headed pikes designed to kill any horse or man daring to thrust in to capture the fringed silk trophies.

"Rally! Rally!" the English Colonel shouted at his men. "Steady, boys, steady!" And his men doggedly worked their way westwards while the cavalry feinted charges that might provoke a volley. Once the volley was fired the real charge would be led by lancers who could reach across the infantry's bayonets and unloaded muskets to kill the outer ranks of defenders. "Hold your fire, boys, hold your fire," the Colonel called. His men passed close to one of the outcrops of rock that studded the plain and for a few seconds the redcoats seemed to cling to the tiny scrap of high ground as though the lichen-covered stone would offer them a safe refuge, then the officers and sergeants moved them on to the next stretch of open grassland. Such open land was heaven-sent for horsemen, a cavalryman's perfect killing ground.

Dragoons had unholstered their carbines to snipe at the colour parties. Other horsemen fired pistols. Bloody trails followed the redcoats and caзadores as they marched. The hurrying French infantry were shouting at their own horsemen to clear a line of fire so that a musket volley could tear the defiant colour parties apart, but the horsemen would not yield the glory of capturing an enemy standard to any foot soldier and so they circled the flags and blocked the infantry fire that might have overwhelmed the retreating allied infantrymen. Marksmen among the British and Portuguese picked their targets, fired, then reloaded as they walked. The two battalions had lost all order; there were no more ranks or files, just clusters of desperate men who knew that salvation lay in staying close together as they edged their way back towards the dubious safety of the Seventh Division's remaining battalions who still waited in square and watched aghast as the boiling maelstrom of cavalry and cannon smoke inched ever nearer.

"Fire!" a voice shouted from one of these battalions and the face of a square erupted with smoke to shatter an excited troop of sabre-wielding chasseurs. The retreating infantry had come close to the other battalions now and the horsemen saw their first chance of fame slipping away. Some cuirassiers wound their swords' wrist straps tight, called encouragement to one another and then spurred their big horses into the gallop as a trumpeter sounded the charge. They rode booted knee to booted knee, a phalanx of steel and horse flesh designed to batter the nearest colours' defenders into broken shreds that could be slaughtered like cattle. This was a lottery: fifty horsemen against two hundred frightened men and if the horsemen broke the rally square then one of the surviving cuirassiers would ride back to Marshal Massйna with a king's flag and another would carry the bullet-scarred remnants of the 85th's yellow colour and both would be famous.

"Front rank, kneel!" the 85th's Colonel shouted.

"Take aim! Wait for it!" a captain called. "Damn your eagerness! Wait!"

The redcoats were from Buckinghamshire. Some had been recruited from the farms of the Chilterns and from the villages of Aylesbury's vale, while most had come from the noisome slums and pestilent prisons of London which sprawled on the county's southern edge. Now their mouths were dry from the salt gunpowder of the cartridges they had bitten all morning and their battle had shrunk to a terrifying patch of foreign land that was surrounded by a victorious, rampaging, screaming enemy. For all the men of the 85th knew they might have been the last British troops alive and now they faced the Emperor's horse as it charged at them with plumed men holding heavy swords and behind the cuirassiers a tangled mass of lancers, dragoons and chasseurs followed to snap up the broken remnants of the colour party's rally square. A Frenchman screamed a war cry as he rammed his spurs hard back along his horse's flanks and, just as it seemed that the redcoats had left their one volley too late, their Colonel called the word.

"Fire!"

Horses tumbled in bloody agony. A horse and cavalryman struck by a volley kept moving forward, turned in an instant from war's gaudiest killers into so much overdressed meat, but the meat could still smash a square's face apart by its sheer dead weight. The leading rank of the cavalry charge fell to smear its dying blood along the grass. Horsemen screamed as they were crushed by their own rolling horses. The riders coming behind could not avoid the carnage in front and the second rank rode hard into the flailing remnants of the first and the horses shrieked as their legs broke and as they tumbled down to slide to a halt just yards from the redcoats' lingering gunsmoke.

The rest of the charge was blocked by the horror before them and so it split into two streams of horsemen that galloped ineffectually down the sides of the rally square. Redcoats fired as the cavalry passed and then the charge was gone and the Colonel was telling his men to move on westwards. "Steady, boys, steady!" he called.

A man ran out and cut a horsehair-plumed helmet from the corpse of a Frenchman, then ran back into the rally square. Another volley came from the battalions waiting in square and suddenly the battered, harried fugitives of Poco Velha's defenders were back amidst the rest of the Seventh Division. They formed in the division's centre, just where a wide road led south and west between deep ditches. It was the road that went to the safe fords across the Coa, the road which went home, the road to security, but all that was left to guard it were the nine squares of infantry, a battery of light guns and the cavalry who had survived the fight south of Poco Velha.

The two battalions from Poco Velha formed small squares. They had suffered in the village's streets and on the spring grass of the meadows outside the village, yet their colours still flew: four bright flags amidst a division flying eighteen such flags, while around them circled the Empire's cavalry and to their north there marched two whole divisions of the Empire's foot soldiers. The two beleaguered battalions had reached safety, but it looked as though it would be short-lived for they had survived only to join a division that was surely doomed. Sixteen thousand Frenchmen now threatened four and a half thousand Portuguese and Britons.

The French horsemen wheeled away from the musket fire to re-form ranks made ragged by the morning's charge. The French infantry stopped to form for their new attack, while from the east, from across the stream, there came new French artillery fire that aimed to batter the nine waiting squares into carnage.

It was two hours after dawn. And in the meadows south of Fuentes de Onoro and far from any help an army seemed to be dying. While the French marched on.

"He has a choice," Marshal Massйna remarked to Major Ducos. The Marshal did not really want to be talking to a mere major on this morning of his triumph, but Ducos was a prickly fellow who had an inexplicable sway with the Emperor and so Andrй Massйna, Marshal of France, Duke of Rivoli and Prince of Essling, found time after breakfast to make certain Ducos understood the day's opportunities and, more important, to whom this day's laurels would belong.

Ducos had ridden out of Ciudad Rodrigo to witness the battle.

Officially Massйna's attack was merely an effort to move supplies into Almeida, but every Frenchman knew the stakes were much higher than the relief of one small garrison stranded behind the British lines. The real prize was the opportunity to cut Wellington off from his base and then destroy his army in one glorious day of bloodletting. Such a victory would end British defiance in Spain and Portugal for ever and would bring in its wake a roll call of new titles for the wharf rat who had joined the French royal army as a private. Maybe Massйna would earn a throne? The Emperor had redistributed half the chairs in Europe by making his brothers into kings, so why should not Marshal Massйna, Prince of Essling, become the king of somewhere or other? The throne in Lisbon needed a pair of buttocks to keep it warm, and Massйna reckoned his bum was as good for the task as any of Napoleon's brothers. And all that was needed for that glorious vision to come true was victory here at Fuentes de Onoro and that victory was now very close. The battle had opened as Massйna had intended and now it would close as he intended.

"You were saying, Your Majesty, that Wellington has a choice?" Ducos prompted the Marshal who had drifted into a momentary daydream.

"He has a choice," Massйna confirmed. "He can abandon his right wing which means he also abandons any chance of retreat, in which case we shall break his centre in Fuentes de Onoro and hunt his army down in the hills for the next week. Or he can abandon Fuentes de Onoro and try to rescue his right wing, in which case we shall fight him to the death on the plain. I'd rather he offered me a fight on the plain, but he won't. This Englishman only feels safe when he has a hill to defend, so he'll stay in Fuentes de Onoro and let his right wing go to a hell of our making."

Ducos was impressed. It had been a long time since he had heard a French officer sound so optimistic in Spain, and a long time too since the eagles had marched into battle with such confidence and alacrity. Massйna deserved applause and Ducos happily offered the Marshal the compliments he desired, but he also added a caution. "This Englishman, Your Majesty," he pointed out, "is also skilled at defending hills. He defended Fuentes de Onoro on Friday, did he not?"

Massйna sneered at the caution. Ducos had elaborated such devious schemes to undermine British morale, but they only sprang from his lack of faith in soldiers, just as Ducos's presence in Spain sprang from the Emperor's lack of faith in his marshals. Ducos had to learn that when a marshal of France put his mind to victory then victory was certain. "On Friday, Ducos," Massйna explained, "I tickled Fuentes de Onoro with a pair of brigades, but today we shall send three whole divisions into that little village. Three big divisions, Ducos, full of hungry men. What chance do you think that little village has?"

Ducos considered the question in his usual pedantic way. He could see Fuentes de Onoro clearly enough; the village was a meagre sprawl of peasants' hovels being pounded to dust by the French artillery. Beyond the dust and smoke Ducos could see the graveyard and battered church where the road angled uphill to the plateau. The hill was steep, to be sure, but not very high, and on Friday the attackers had cleared the village of its defenders and gained a lodgement among the lower stones of the graveyard and one more attack would surely have driven the eagles clear across the ridge's crest and into the soft belly of the enemy beyond. And now, out of sight of that enemy, three whole divisions of French infantry were waiting to attack, and in the van of that attack Massйna planned to put the elite of his attacking regiments, the massed companies of grenadiers with their plumed bearskins and fearful reputation. The cream of France would march against a raddled army of half-broken men.

"Well, Ducos?" Massйna challenged the Major for his verdict.

"I must congratulate Your Majesty," Ducos said.

"Which means, I suppose, that you approve of my humble plan?" Massйna asked sarcastically.

"All France will approve, Your Majesty, when it brings victory."

"Bugger the victory," Massйna said, "so long as it brings me Wellington's whores. I'm tired of my present bunch. Half of them are poxed, the other half are pregnant and the fat one bawls her eyes out every time you strip the bitch for duty."

"Wellington has no whores," Ducos said icily. "He controls his passions."

The one-eyed Massйna burst into laughter. "Controls his passions! God on his cross, Ducos, but you'd make smiling a crime. Controls his passions, does he? Then he's a fool, and a defeated fool at that." The Marshal wheeled his horse away from the Major and snapped his fingers at a nearby aide. "Let the eagles go, Jean, let them go!"

The drums called for the muster and three divisions stirred themselves for action. Men drained coffee dregs, stowed knives and tin plates in haversacks, checked their cartridge pouches and plucked their muskets from the pyramid stacks. It was two hours after a Sunday dawn and time to close the battle's jaws as all along the Marshal's line, from south in the plain to north where the village smoked under its numbing cannonade, the French smelt victory.

"Pon my soul, Sharpe, but it's unfair. Unfair! You and me both to stand trial?" Colonel Runciman had been unable to resist the lure of witnessing the day's high drama and so he had come to the plateau, though he had taken care not to step too close to the ridge's crest which was occasionally churned by a high French roundshot. A pyre of smoke marked where the village endured its bombardment while further south, way down on the plain, a second smudge of musket smoke betrayed where the French flank attack was driving across the low ground.

"Waste of time complaining about unfairness, General," Sharpe said. "Only the wealthy can afford to preach about fairness. The rest of us take what we can and try hard not to miss what we can't take."

"Even so, Sharpe, it's unfair!" Runciman said reprovingly. The Colonel looked pale and unhappy. "It's the disgrace, you see. A man goes home to England and expects to be decently treated, but instead I'll be vilified." He ducked as a French roundshot rumbled far overhead. "I had hopes, Sharpe! I had hopes!"

"The Golden Fleece, General? Order of the Bath?"

"Not just those, Sharpe, but of marriage. There are, you understand, ladies of fortune in Hampshire. I've no ambition to bи a bachelor all my life, Sharpe. My dear mother, God rest her, always claimed I'd make a good husband so long as the lady was possessed of a middling fortune. Not a great fortune, one must not be unrealistic, but a sufficiency to keep our good selves in modest comfort. A pair of coaches, decent stables, cooks that know their business, smallish game park, a dairy, you know the sort of place."

"Makes me homesick, General," Sharpe said.

The sarcasm sailed airily over Runciman's head. "But now, Sharpe, can you imagine any woman of decent family allying herself with a vilified name?" He thought about it for a moment, then gave a slow despairing shake of the head. "Good God! I might have to marry a Methodist!"

"It hasn't happened yet, General," Sharpe said, "and a lot could change today."

Runciman looked alarmed. "You mean I could be killed?"

"Or you could make a name for bravery, sir," Sharpe said. "Nosey always forgives a man for good conduct."

"Oh, good Lord, no! Dear me, no. Pon my soul, Sharpe, no. I ain't the type. Never was. I went into soldiering because my dear father couldn't find a place for me anywhere else! He purchased me into the army, you understand, because he said it was as good a billet as I could ever expect from society, but I'm not the fighting sort. Never was, Sharpe." Runciman listened to the terrible noise of the cannonade pounding Fuentes de Onoro, a noise made worse by the splintering sound of voltigeur muskets firing over the stream. "I'm not proud of it, Sharpe, but I don't think I could endure that kind of thing. Don't think I could at all."

"Can't blame you, sir," Sharpe said, then turned as Sergeant Harper shouted for his attention. "You'll forgive me, General?"

"Off you go, Sharpe, off you go."

"Trade, sir," Harper said, jerking his head towards Major Tarrant who was gesticulating at a wagon driver.

Tarrant turned as Sharpe came near. "The Light Division is ordered south, Sharpe, but its ammunition reserve is stuck to the north. We're to replace it. Would you mind if your rifles accompanied it?"

Sharpe did mind. He instinctively wanted to stay where the battle would be fiercest and that was in Fuentes de Onoro, but he could not say as much to Tarrant. "No, sir."

"In case they get bogged down, d'you see, and have to spend the rest of the day fighting off Frenchmen, so the General wants them to have a plenitude of ammunition. Rifle and musket cartridges, mixed. Artillery are looking after themselves. One wagon should do it, but it needs an escort, Sharpe. French cavalry are lively down there."

"Can we help?" Captain Donaju had overheard Tarrant's hurried explanation of Sharpe's errand.

"Might need you later, Captain," Tarrant said. "I have a feeling today's likely to be lively all round. Never seen the Frogs so uppity. Have you, Sharpe?"

"They've got their tails up today, Major," Sharpe agreed. He looked up at the wagon driver. "Are you ready?"

The driver nodded. His wagon was an English four-wheeled farm vehicle with high splayed sides to which were harnessed three Cleveland Bays in single file. "Had four beasts once," the driver remarked as Sharpe climbed up beside him, "but a Frenchie shell got Bess, so now I'm down to three." The driver had woven red and blue woollen braiding into the horses' manes and had decorated his wagon's flanks with discarded cap-plates and thrown horseshoes that he had nailed to the planking. "You know where we're going?" he asked Sharpe as Harper ordered the riflemen to climb onto the boxes of ammunition stacked on the wagon's bed.

"After them." Sharpe pointed to his right where the plateau offered a gentler slope down to the southern lowlands and where the Light Division was marching south beneath its banners. It was Sharpe's old division, made up of riflemen and light infantry, and it regarded itself as the army's elite division. Now it was marching to save the Seventh Division from annihilation.

A mile away, across the Dos Casas stream and close to the ruined barn that served as his headquarters, Marshal Andrй Massйna saw the fresh British troops leaving the plateau's protection to march south towards the beleaguered redcoats and Portuguese. "The fool," he said to himself, then louder in a gleeful voice, "the fool!"

"Your Majesty?" an aide inquired.

"The first rule of war, Jean," the Marshal said, "is never to reinforce failure. And what is our whore-free Englishman doing? He's sending more troops to be massacred by our cavalry!" The Marshal put the telescope back to his eye. He could see guns and cavalry going south with the new troops. "Or maybe he's withdrawing?" he mused aloud. "Maybe he's making sure he can get back to Portugal. Where's Loup's brigade?"

"Just north of here, Your Majesty," the aide answered.

"With his whore, no doubt?" Massena asked sourly. Juanita de Elia's flamboyant presence with the Loup Brigade had drawn the attention and jealousy of every Frenchman in the army.

"Indeed, Your Majesty."

Massena snapped the telescope shut. He disliked Loup. He recognized his ambitions and knew that Loup would trample over any man to gain those ambitions. Loup wanted to be a marshal like Massena, he had even lost an eye like Massena, and now he wanted those grand titles with which the Emperor rewarded the brave and the lucky. But Massena would not help Loup secure those ambitions. A man remained a marshal by suppressing his rivals, not encouraging them, so this day Brigadier Loup would be given a menial task. "Warn Brigadier Loup," Massena told the aide, "that he's to untangle himself from his Spanish whore and be ready to escort the wagons through Fuentes de Onoro when our soldiers have opened the road. Tell him Wellington's shifting his position to the south and the road to Almeida should be open by midday, and that his brigade's job will be to escort the supplies into Almeida while the rest of us finish off the enemy." Massena smiled. Today was a day for Frenchmen to win glory, a day to capture a haul of enemy colours and to soak a river bank with the blood of Englishmen, but Loup, Massena had decided, would share no part of it. Loup would be a common baggage guard while Massena and the eagles made all Europe shudder with fear.

The Seventh Division retreated towards a slight ridge of ground above the Dos Casas stream. They were retreating north, but facing south as they tried to block the advance of the massive French force that had been sent around the army's flank. In the distance they could see the two enemy infantry divisions re-forming their ranks in front of Poco Velha, but the immediate danger came from the enormous number of French cavalry that waited just outside the effective range of the Seventh Division's muskets. The equation facing the nine allied battalions was simple enough. They could form squares and know that even the bravest cavalry would be slaughtered if they tried to charge the mass of compacted muskets and bayonets, but infantry in square was cruelly vulnerable to artillery and musket fire; the moment the Seventh Division contracted into squares the French would batter the allied ranks with gunfire until the Portuguese and redcoats were shredded bloody and the cavalry could ride unchallenged over the crazed survivors.

British and German cavalry came to the rescue first. The allied horse was outnumbered and could never hope to defeat the swirling mass of plumed and breastplated Frenchmen, but the hussars and dragoons made charge after charge that kept the enemy cavalry from harrying the infantry. "Keep them in hand!" a British cavalry major kept shouting at his squadron. "Keep them in hand!" He feared that his men would lose their sense and make a mad charge to glory instead of retiring after each short attack to re-form and charge again, and so he kept encouraging them to show caution and keep their discipline. The squadrons took turns to hold off the French cavalry, one fighting as the others retreated after the infantry. The horses were bleeding, sweating and trembling, but time after time they trotted into their ranks and waited for the spurs to throw them back into the fight. The men tightened their grips on sword and sabre and watched the enemy who shouted insults in an attempt to entice the British and Germans to a mad galloping assault that would open their tightly ordered ranks and turn the controlled charges into a frantic mкlйe of swords, lances and sabres. In such a mкlйe the French numbers were bound to win, but the allied officers kept their men in hand. "Damn your eagerness! Hold her in, hold her in!" a captain called to a trooper whose horse broke into a trot too early.

The dragoons were the allied heavy cavalry. They were big men mounted on big horses and carried long heavy straight-bladed swords. They did not charge at the gallop, but rather waited until an enemy regiment threatened to charge and then they made their counter-charge at walking pace. Sergeants shouted at the men to hold the line, to keep close and curb their horses, and only at the very last moment, when the enemy was within pistol shot, did a trumpeter sound the charge and the horses would be spurred to a gallop and the men would scream their war cries as they hacked at the enemy horsemen. The big swords could do horrid work.

They battered the lighter sabres of the French chasseursaside and forced the riders to duck low over their horses' necks as they tried to avoid the butchers' blades. Steel clashed on steel, wounded horses screamed and reared, then the trumpet would call for the withdrawal and the allied horse would disengage and wheel away. A few French were bound to pursue, but the British and Germans were working close to their own infantry and any Frenchman tempted to pursue too close to the Portuguese and British battalions became easy meat for a company of muskets. It was hard, disciplined, inglorious work, and each counter-charge paid a price in men and horses, but the threat of the enemy cavalry was checked by it and the nine infantry battalions marched steadily north because of it.

The retreating Seventh Division's flanks were covered by the fire of the horse artillery. The gunners fired canister that could turn a horse and man into a mangled horror of flesh, cloth, leather, steel and blood. The guns would fire four or five rounds while the infantry retreated, then the horse teams were hurried forward, the gun's trail lifted into the limber's pintle, and the gunners would scramble onto the horses' backs and whip the animals into a frantic dash before the vengeful French cavalrymen could catch them. As soon as the team reached the protection of the infantry's muskets it would slew around to make the gun's skidding wheels throw up a fountain of mud or dust, and the gunners would slide off the horses' backs even before they had stopped running. The gun was unhitched, the horses and limber led away and in seconds the next round of canister would shriek down the field to drive another French squadron bloodily away.

The French artillery concentrated their fire on the infantry. Their roundshot and shells whipped through the ranks, spraying blood ten feet high as the missiles plunged home. "Close up! Close up!" the sergeants shouted and prayed that the excitable enemy cavalry would mask their own guns and thus stop the bombardment, but the cavalry was learning to let the gunners and the French infantry do some of the work before the horsemen garnered all the glory. The French cavalry pulled aside to let the muskets and cannons fight the battle and to rest their horses while the Portuguese and British infantry died.

And die they did. The roundshot whipped through the columns and musket fire raked the files to slow the already agonizingly slow retreat. The nine shrinking battalions left trails of crushed and bloodied grass as they crawled northwards and the crawl was threatening to come to a full halt when all that would be left of the division would be nine bands of survivors clustered round their precious colours. The French cavalry saw their enemy dying and were content to wait for the perfect moment to pounce and deliver the coup de grвce. One group of chasseurs and cuirassiers rode towards a slight rise in the ground where a long wood was planted. The cavalry's commander reckoned the wood would hide his men as they worked their way to the rear of the dying battalions and so give him a chance to launch a surprise attack that might capture a half-dozen flags in one glorious charge. He led the two troops up the slope, his men trailing behind, when suddenly the tree line exploded with gunsmoke. There were not supposed to be enemy troops among the trees, but the volley ripped the advancing cavalry into chaos. The cuirassier commander went backwards off his horse's rump with his breastplate holed three times. One of his boots was trapped in a stirrup and he screamed as his terrified and wounded horse dragged him bouncing across the grass to leave great splashes of blood. Then his foot came free and he twitched on the grass as he died. Eight other horsemen fell, some had merely been unhorsed and those men ran to find an unwounded mount while their comrades turned and spurred to safety.

Green-jacketed riflemen ran out of the woods to pillage the dead and wounded cavalrymen. The deeply bellied breastplates worn by the cuirassiers were valued as shaving bowls or skillets and even a bullet-holed breastplate could be patched up by a friendly blacksmith. More greenjackets showed at the woods' southern end, then a battalion of redcoats appeared behind them and with the redcoats came a squadron of fresh cavalry and another battery of horse artillery. A regimental band was playing "Over the Hills and Far Away" as yet more redcoats and greenjackets marched into view.

The Light Division had arrived.

The ammunition wagon lumbered across the fields in the wake of the fast-marching Light Division. One of the wagon's axles squealed like a soul in torment, an annoyance for which the driver apologized, "but I've greased her," he told Sharpe, "and greased her again. I've greased her with the best pig's fat rendered down, but that squeak still don't want to go away. It started the day our Bess got killed and I reckons that squeak is our Bess letting us know she's still kicking somewhere." For a time the driver followed a cart track, then Sharpe and his riflemen had to dismount and put their shoulders to the wagon's rear to help the vehicle over a bank and into a meadow. Once back on top of the ammunition boxes the greenjackets decided the wagon was a stage coach and began imitating the calls of the post horns and singing out the stops. "Red Lion! Fine ales, good food, we change the horses and leave in a quarter-hour! Ladies will find their convenience catered for in the passage behind the lounge." The wagon driver had heard it all before and showed no reaction, but Sharpe, after Harris had hollered for ten minutes about pissing in the passage, turned and told them all to shut the hell up whereupon they pretended to be cowed by him and Sharpe had a sudden pang of regret at the things he would miss if he were to lose his commission. Ahead of the wagon the rifles and muskets cracked. An occasional French round-shot that had been fired too high came bounding across the nearby fields, but the three horses plodded on as patiently as though they were harnessed to a plough instead of lumbering into battle. Only once did an enemy threaten and so force Sharpe's score of riflemen off the wagon to form a rank beside the road. A troop of fifty green-coated dragoons appeared way off to the west where their commander spotted the wagon and turned his men in for the attack. The wagon driver stopped the vehicle and was waiting with a knife poised in case he needed to cut the traces. "We takes the horses," he advised Sharpe, "and leaves the Frenchies to ransack the wagon. That'll keep the buggers busy while we makes off." His horses munched the grass contentedly while Sharpe measured the range to the French dragoons whose copper helmets glinted gold in the sunlight.

Then, just when he had decided that he might be forced to take the wagon driver's advice and retreat, a squadron of blue-coated cavalrymen intervened. The newcomers were British light dragoons who tempted the French into a running fight of sword against sabre.

The driver put away his knife and clicked his tongue, provoking the horses forward. The riflemen scrambled back aboard as the wagon swayed on towards a tree line that obscured the source of the growing powder smoke whitening the southern sky.

Then a crash of heavy guns sounded to the north and Sharpe twisted on the wagon's box to see that the rim of the British-held plateau was thick with smoke as the main batteries fired thunderous volleys towards the east. "Frogs are attacking the village again," Sharpe said.

"Nasty place to fight," Harper said. "Be glad we're out here instead, boys."

"And pray the buggers don't cut us off out here," Sergeant Latimer added gloomily.

"You've got to die somewhere, ain't that right, Mister Sharpe?" Perkins called out.

"Make it your own bed, Perkins, with Miranda beside you," Sharpe answered. "Are you looking after that girl?"

"She's not complaining, Mister Sharpe," Perkins said, thereby provoking a chorus of teasing jeers. Perkins still lacked his green jacket and was touchy about the loss of the coat with its distinguishing black armband denoting that he was a Chosen Man, a compliment that was paid only to the best and most reliable riflemen.

The wagon lurched onto a deep-rutted farm track that led south through the trees towards the distant villages overrun by the French. The Seventh Division was marching north from the woods, going back to the plateau, while the newly arrived Light Division deployed across the broader road that led back into Portugal. The retiring battalions marched slowly, forced to the snail's pace by the number of wounded in their ranks, but at least they marched undefeated beneath flying colours.

The wagon driver hauled on the reins to stop the horses among the trees where the Light Division had established a temporary depot. Two surgeons had spread their knives and saws on tarpaulins laid under holm oaks, while a regimental band played a few yards away. Sharpe told his riflemen to stay with the wagon while he sought orders.

The Light Division was arrayed in squares on the plain between the trees and the smoking villages. The French cavalry trotted across the faces of the squares trying to provoke wasteful volleys at too long a range. The British cavalry was being held in reserve, waiting until the French horse came too close. Six guns of the horse artillery were firing at the French cannon while groups of riflemen were occupying the rocky outcrops that studded the fields. General Craufurd, the Light Division's irascible commander, had brought three and a half thousand men to the rescue of the Seventh Division and now those three and half thousand were faced by four thousand French cavalry and twelve thousand French infantrymen. That infantry was advancing in its attack columns from Poco Velha.

"Sharpe? What the hell are you doing here? Thought you'd deserted us, gone to join the bumboys in Picton's division." Brigadier General Robert Craufurd, fierce-faced and scowling, had spotted Sharpe.

Sharpe explained he had brought a wagonload of ammunition that was now waiting among the trees.

"Waste of time bringing us ammunition," Craufurd snapped. "We've got plenty. And what the hell are you doing delivering ammunition? Been demoted, have you? I heard you were in disgrace."

"I'm on administrative duties, sir," Sharpe said. He had known Craufurd ever since India and, like every other skirmisher in Britain's army, Sharpe had a mixed regard for 'Black Bob', sometimes resenting the man's hard, unforgiving discipline, but also recognizing that in Craufurd the army had a soldier almost as talented as Wellington himself.

"They're going to sacrifice you, Sharpe," Craufurd said with unholy relish. He was not looking at Sharpe, but instead watched the great horde of French cavalry that was preparing for a concerted charge against his newly arrived battalions. "You shot a pair of Frogs, ain't that right?"

"Yes, sir."

"No wonder you're in disgrace," Craufurd said, then gave a bark of laughter. His aides sat their horses in a tight group behind the General. "Come alone, Sharpe, did you?" Craufurd asked.

"I've got my greenjackets here, sir."

"And the buggers can remember how to fight?"

"I think they can, sir."

"Then skirmish for me. Those are your new administrative duties, Mister Sharpe. I have to keep the division a safe distance in front of the Frog infantry which means we'll all have to endure the attentions of their gunners and horse, but I'm expecting my rifles to plague the horses and kill the damn guns, and you can help them." Craufurd twisted in his saddle. "Barratt? Distribute the ammunition and send the wagon back with the wounded. Go to it, Sharpe! And keep a good lookout, we don't want to abandon you out here on your own."

Sharpe hesitated. It was a risky business asking questions of Black Bob, a man who expected instant obedience, but the General's words had intrigued him. "So we're not staying here, sir?" he asked. "We're going back to the ridge?"

"Of course we're bloody going back! Why the hell do you think we marched out here? Just to commit suicide? You think I came back from leave just to give the bloody Frogs some target practice? Get the hell on with it, Sharpe!"

"Yes, sir." Sharpe ran back to fetch his men and felt a sudden mingled surge of fear and hope.

For Wellington had abandoned the roads back to Portugal. There could be no safe withdrawal now, no steady retreat across the Coa's fords, for Wellington had yielded those roads to the enemy. The British and Portuguese must stand and fight now, and if they lost they would die and with them would die all hopes of victory in Spain. Defeat now did not just mean that Almeida would be relieved, but that the British and Portuguese army would be annihilated. Fuentes de Onoro had become a battle to the death.

CHAPTER X

Sunday's first attack on Fuentes de Onoro was made by the same French infantrymen who had attacked two days before and who had since been occupying the gardens and houses on the stream's eastern bank. They assembled silently, using the stone walls of the orchards and gardens to disguise their intentions and then, without an opening volley or even bothering to throw out a skirmish line, the blue-coated infantry swarmed across the tumbled walls and plunged down to the stream. The Scottish defenders had time for one volley, then the French were in the village, clawing at the barricades or clambering over the walls thrown down by the howitzer shells that had fallen among the houses in the two hours since dawn. The French drove the Scots deep into the village where one surge trapped two companies of Highlanders in a cul de sac. The attackers turned on the cornered men in a frenzy, filling the alley's narrow confines with a storm of musketry. Some of the Scots tried to escape by pushing down a house wall, but the French were waiting on the far side and met the wall's collapse with more volleys of musket fire. The surviving Highlanders barricaded themselves in houses bordering the stream, but the French poured fire at windows, loopholes and doors, then brought up galloper guns to fire across the stream until at last, with all their officers killed or wounded, the dazed Highlanders surrendered.

The attack on the cornered Highlanders had drained men from the main uphill assault which stalled in the village's centre. The Warwicks, again in reserve, came down from the plateau to help the remaining Scots and together they first stopped the French, then drove them back towards the stream. The fight was fought at murderously close range. Muskets flamed just feet from their targets, and when these were empty men used their guns as clubs or else stabbed forward with bayonets. They were hoarse from shouting and from breathing the smoky dust that filled the air in the narrow, twisting streets where gutters ran with blood and bodies piled to block each door and entryway. The Scots and Warwicks fought their way downhill, but each time they tried to push the French out of the last few houses the newly emplaced guns in the orchards would open fire with canister to fill the village's lower streets and alleys with a rattling sleet of death. Blood trickled to the stream. The village's defenders were deafened by the echo of muskets and the crash of artillery in the streets, but they were not so deaf that they did not hear the ominous tattoo of approaching drummers. New French columns were crossing the plain. The British guns on the ridge were slashing roundshot into the advancing ranks and blasting case shot that exploded above their heads, but the columns were vast and the defenders' cannons few, and so the great mass of men marched on into the eastern gardens from where, with a vast shout, a horde of men in shaggy black bearskin hats swept over the stream and up into the village.

These new attackers were the massed grenadiers: the biggest men and bravest fighters that the attacking divisions could muster. They wore moustaches, epaulettes and plumed bearskins as marks of their special status and they stormed into the village with a roar of triumph that lasted as they swept up the streets with bayonets and musket fire. The tired Warwicks went back and the Scots went with them. More Frenchmen crossed the stream, a seemingly never-ending flood of blue coats that followed the elite grenadiers into the alleys and up through the houses. The fight in the lower half of the village was the hardest for the attackers, for although sheer impetus carried the assault far into the village heart they were constantly obstructed by dead or wounded. Grenadiers slipped on stones made treacherous by blood, yet sheer numbers forced the attackers on and the defenders were now too few to stop them. Some redcoats tried to clear streets with volley fire, but the grenadiers swarmed through back alleys or over garden walls to outflank the redcoat companies which could only go back uphill through the dust and tiles and burning thatch of the upper village. Wounded men called out pathetically, beseeching their comrades to carry them to safety, but the attack was coming too fast now and the Scots and Englishmen were retreating too quickly. They abandoned the village altogether, fleeing from the upper houses to find a refuge in the graveyard.

The leading French grenadiers charged from the village towards the church above and were met by a volley of muskets fired by men waiting behind the graveyard wall.

The front men fell, but those behind leaped over their dying comrades to assault the graveyard wall. Bayonets and musket stocks slashed over the stone, then the big French soldiers surged over the wall, even pushing it down in some places to begin hunting the survivors up through the heaped graves and fallen stones and shattered wooden crosses. More Frenchmen came from the village to bolster the attack, then a splintering deluge of rifle and musket fire flashed from the stony outcrops just above the blood-greased slope. Grenadiers fell and rolled downhill. A second British volley whipped over the gun-churned graves as still more redcoats arrived to line the ridge's crest and fire their rolling volleys from beside the church and from the saddle of grassland where Wellington had watched aghast as this spring French tide had risen almost to his horse's hooves.

And there, for a while, the attack stalled. The French had first filled the village with dead and wounded, then they had captured it, and now they held the graveyard too. Their soldiers crouched behind graves or behind their enemy's piled dead. They were just feet from the ridge's summit, just feet from victory while behind them, on a plain gouged by roundshot and scorched by shell and littered with the bodies of dead and dying men, still more French infantry came to help the attackers on.

The day needed just one more push, then the eagles of France would fly free.

The Light Division had formed its battalions into close columns of companies. Each company formed a rectangle four ranks deep and anything from twelve to twenty files wide, then the ten companies of each battalion paraded in column so that from the sky each battalion now resembled a stack of thin red bricks. Then, one by one, the battalion columns turned their backs on the enemy and began marching north towards the plateau. The French cavalry gave immediate pursuit and the air rang with a brassy cacophony as trumpet after trumpet sounded the advance.

"Form square on the front division!" the Colonel of the redcoat battalion nearest Sharpe shouted.

The Major commanding the battalion's leading division of companies called for the first brick to halt and for the second to form alongside it so that two of the bricks now made one long wall of men four ranks deep and forty men wide. "Dress ranks!" the sergeants shouted as the men shuffled close together and looked right to make sure their rank was ruler straight. While the leading two companies straightened their ranks the Major was calling orders to the succeeding companies. "Sections outward wheel! Rear sections close to the front!" The French trumpets were pealing and the earth was vibrating from the mass of hooves, but the sergeants' and officers' voices sounded coolly over the threat. "Outward wheel! Steady now! Rear sections close to the front!" The six centre companies of the battalion now split into four sections each. Two sections swung like hinged doors to the right and two to the left, the innermost men of each section reducing their marching pace from thirty to twenty inches, while the men swinging widest lengthened their stride to thirty-three inches and so the sections pivoted outward to begin forming the twin faces of the square whose anchoring wall was the first two companies. Mounted officers hurried to get their horses inside the rapidly forming square that was, in reality, an oblong. The northward face had been made by the two leading companies, now the two longer sides were formed by the next six companies wheeling outward and closing hard up, while the last companies merely filled in the vacant fourth side. "Halt! Right about face!" the Major in command of the rear division shouted to the last two companies.

"Prepare to receive cavalry!" the Colonel shouted dutifully, as if the sight of the massed French horse was not warning enough. The Colonel drew his sword, then swatted with his free hand at a horsefly. The colour party stood beside him, two teenage ensigns holding the precious flags that were guarded by a squad of chosen men commanded by hard-bitten sergeants armed with spontoons. "Rear rank! Port arms!" the Major called. The innermost rank of the square would hold its fire and so act as the battalion's reserve. The cavalry was a hundred paces away and closing fast, a churning mass of excited horses, raised blades, trumpets, flags and thunder.

"Front rank, kneel!" a captain called. The front rank dropped and jammed their bayonet-tipped muskets into the earth to make a continuous hedge of steel about the formation.

"Make ready!" The two inside ranks cocked their loaded guns, and took aim. The whole manoeuvre had been done at a steady pace, without fuss, and the sudden sight of the levelled muskets and braced bayonets persuaded the leading cavalrymen to sheer away from the steady, stolid and silent square. Infantry in square were just about as safe from cavalry as if they were tucked up at home in bed, and the redcoat battalion, by forming square so quickly and quietly, had made the French charge impotent.

"Very nice," Sergeant Latimer said in tribute to the battalion's professionalism. "Very nicely done. Just like the parade ground at Shorncliffe."

"Gun to the right, sir," Harper called. Sharpe's men were occupying one of the rocky outcrops that studded the plain and which gave the riflemen protection from the marauding cavalry. Their job was to snipe at the cavalry and especially at the French horse artillery which was trying to take advantage of the British squares. Men in square were safe from cavalry yet horribly vulnerable to shell and roundshot, but gunners were equally vulnerable to the accuracy of the British Baker rifles. A galloper gun had taken position two hundred paces away from Sharpe and the gun's crew was lining the barrel on the newly formed square. Two men lifted the ammunition chest off the gun's trail while a third double-shotted the gun's blackened barrel by ramming a round of canister on top of a roundshot.

Dan Hagman fired first and the man ramming the shot slewed round, then held onto the protruding rammer's handle as though it was his grip on life itself. A second bullet cracked off the cannon's barrel to leave a bright scratch in the jaded brass. Another gunner fell, then one of the gun's horses was hit and it reared up and kicked at the horse harnessed next to it. "Steady does it," Sharpe said, "take aim, boys, take aim. Don't waste the shots." Three more greenjackets fired and their bullets persuaded the beleaguered gunners to crouch behind the cannon and its limber. The gunners shouted at some green-coated dragoons to go and dig the damned riflemen out from their rocky eyrie. "Someone take care of that dragoon captain," Sharpe said.

"Square's going, sir!" Cooper warned Sharpe as Horrell and Cresacre fired at the distant horseman.

Sharpe turned and saw the redcoat square was shaking itself into a column again to resume its retreat. He dared not get too far away from the protection of the redcoats' muskets. His danger, like that facing every small group of riflemen who covered the retreat, was that his men might be cut off by the cavalry and Sharpe doubted that the long-suffering French horsemen would be willing to take prisoners this day. Any greenjacket caught in the open would most likely be used for sword or lance practice. "Go!" he shouted, and his men scrambled away from the rocks and ran for the cover of the redcoat battalion. The dragoons turned to pursue, then the leading ranks of horsemen were thrown sideways and turned bloody as a blast of canister fired from a British galloper gun smashed into them. Sharpe saw a clump of trees just to the left of the redcoat battalion's line of march and shouted at Harper to lead the men to the small wood's cover.

Once safe among the oaks the greenjackets reloaded and looked for new targets. To Sharpe, who had served on a dozen battlefields, the plain offered an extraordinary sight: a mass of cavalry was churning and spilling between the steadily withdrawing battalions, yet for all their noise and excitement the horsemen were achieving nothing. The infantry were steady and silent, performing the intricate drill that they had practised for hours and hours and which now was saving their lives, and doing it in the knowledge that just one mistake by a battalion commander would be fatal. If a column was just a few seconds too slow to form square then the rampaging cuirassiers would be through the gap on their heavy horses and gutting the imperfect square from the inside. A disciplined battalion would be turned in an instant into a rabble of panicking fugitives to be ridden down by dragoons or slaughtered by lancers, yet no battalion made any mistake and so the French were being frustrated by a superb display of steady soldiering.

The French kept searching for an opportunity. Whenever a battalion was marching in a column of companies and so looked ripe for attack a sudden surge of horses would flow across the field and the trumpets would rally yet more horse to join the thunderous charge, but then the redcoats' column would break, wheel and march into square with the same precision as if they were drilling on the parade ground of their home barracks. The troops would mark time for an instant as the square was achieved, then the outer rank would kneel, the whole formation would bristle with bayonets and the horsemen would sheer away in impotent rage. A few impetuous Frenchmen would always try to draw blood and gallop too close to the square only to be blasted from their saddles, or maybe a British galloper gun would bloody a whole troop of dragoons or cuirassiers with a blast of canister, but then the cavalry would gallop out of range and the horses would be rested while the square trudged back into column and marched stoically on. The horsemen would watch them go until another flurry of trumpets summoned the whole flux of mounted men to chase yet another opportunity far across the field and once again a battalion would contract into square and once again the horsemen would wheel away with unblooded blades.

And always, everywhere, ahead and behind and in between the slowly withdrawing battalions, groups of greenjackets sniped and harried and killed. French gunners became reluctant to advance while the more sober horsemen took care to avoid the small nests of riflemen that stung so viciously. The French had no rifles because the Emperor despised the weapon as being too slow for battle use, but today the rifles were making the Emperor's soldiers curse.

The Emperor's soldiers were also dying. The calm redcoat battalions were leaving scarcely any bodies behind, but the cavalry was being flayed by rifle and cannon fire. Unhorsed cavalrymen limped southwards carrying saddles, bridles and weapons. Some riderless horses stayed with their regiments, forming in the ranks whenever a squadron regrouped and charging along with the other horses when the trumpets threw the squadron into the attack. Far behind the milling cavalry the French infantry divisions hurried to join the battle, but the Light Division was outmarching the advancing French infantry. When a battalion did form column to continue the retreat it would go at the rifle speed of a hundred and eight paces to the minute—faster than any other infantry in the world. The French marching pace was shorter than the British and the speed of their march much slower than that of the specially trained troops of Craufurd's Light Division and so, despite the need to stop and form square and see off the cavalry, Craufurd's men were still outpacing the pursuing infantry while far to the north of the Light Division the main British line was being remade so that Wellington's defence now followed the edge of the plateau to make a right angle with Fuentes de Onoro at its corner. All that was needed now was for the Light Division to come safely home and the army would be complete again, ensconced behind slopes and daring the French to attack.

Sharpe took his men back another quarter-mile to a patch of rocks where his riflemen could find cover. A pair of British guns was working close to the rocks, blasting roundshot and shell at a newly placed French battery beside the wood Sharpe had just abandoned. The flow of horse began to thicken in this part of the field as the cavalry sought out a vulnerable battalion. Two regiments, one of redcoats and the other Portuguese, were retreating past the battery and the sweating horsemen stalked the two columns. Eventually the press of horse became so thick that the columns marched into squares. "Buggers are everywhere," Harper said, firing his rifle at a chasseur officer. The two British guns had switched their aim to fire canister at the cavalry in an attempt to drive them away from the two infantry squares. The guns crashed back on their trails to jar the wheels up in the air. The gunners swabbed out the barrel, rammed down a new charge and canister, pricked the powder bag through the touch-hole, then ducked aside after putting the smoking linstock to the powder fuse. The guns cracked deafeningly, smoke punched sixty feet out from the muzzles and the grass lay momentarily flat as the blast whipped overhead. A horse screamed as the musket balls spread out and thumped home.

A surge and eddy in the mass of horse presaged another move, but instead of riding back across the fields to harry a marching column the cavalry suddenly turned on the two guns. Blood dripped from horses' flanks as riders spurred frantically towards the desperate gunners who now picked up their guns' trails, turned the weapons and dropped the trail-hooks over the limbers' pintles. The team horses were run into place, the harnesses attached and the gunners scrambled up onto the guns or horses, but the French cavalry had timed their charge well and the gunners were still whipping their tired animals into motion as the leading cuirassiers swept down on the battery.

A charge of British light dragoons saved the guns. The blue-coated horsemen slashed in from the north, sabres cutting down at plumed helmets and parrying swords. More British cavalry arrived to flank the guns that were now galloping frantically northwards. The heavy cannons bounced over the rough ground, the gunners clung to the limbers' handles, the whips cracked, and all about the galloping horses and blurring wheels the cavalry hacked at each other in a running fight. A British dragoon reeled out of the fight with a face turned into a mask of blood while a cuirassier fell from his saddle to be mangled by the hooves of the gun teams then crushed by the iron-rimmed wheels of limber and cannon. Then a rippling crash of musketry announced that the rolling chaos of guns, horses, swordsmen and lancers had come into range of the Portuguese square's face and the cheated French cavalry swerved away as the two guns galloped on to safety. A cheer for the gunners' escape went up from the two allied squares, then the guns slewed about in an eruption of grass and dust to open fire again on their erstwhile pursuers.

Sharpe's men had slipped away from the rocks to join another battalion of redcoats. They marched among the companies for a few minutes, then broke off to take position in a tangle of thorns and boulders. A small group of chasseurs in green coats, black silver-looped shakoes and with carbines slung on hooks on their white crossbelts trotted close by. The French had not noticed the small group of riflemen crouched among the thorns. They were continually taking off their shakoes and wiping sweat from their faces with their frayed red cuffs. Their horses were white with sweat. One had a leg matted with blood, but it was somehow keeping up with its companions. The officer stopped his troop and one of the men unclipped his carbine, cocked the weapon and aimed at a British gun that was unlimbering to the east. Hagman put a rifle bullet into the man's head before he could pull the trigger and suddenly the chasseurs were cursing and trying to spur their horses out of rifle range. Sharpe fired, his rifle's report lost in the crackle of sound as his men sent a volley after the enemy troop. A half-dozen of the chasseurs galloped out of range, but they left as many bodies behind. "Permission to rake the bastards over, sir?" Cooper asked.

"Go on, but equal shares," Sharpe said, meaning that whatever plunder was found had to be shared among the whole squad.

Cooper and Harris ran out to filch the bodies while Harper and Finn carried bundles of empty water bottles to a nearby stream. They filled the bottles while Cooper and Harris slit the seams of the dead men's green coats, cut open the pockets of their white waistcoats, searched inside the shako linings and tugged off the short, white-tasselled boots. The two riflemen came back with a French shako half filled with a motley collection of French, Portuguese and Spanish coins. "Poor as church mice," Harris complained while he split the coins into piles. "You having a share, sir?"

"Course he is," Harper said, distributing the precious water. Every man was parched. Their mouths had been dried and soured by the acrid, salty gunpowder in the cartridges and now they swilled the water round their mouths and spat it out black before drinking the rest.

A distant crackling sound made Sharpe turn. The village of Fuentes de Onoro was a mile away now and the sound seemed to be coming from its narrow, death-choked streets where a plume of smoke climbed into the sky. More gunsmoke showed at the plateau's edge, evidence that the French were still attacking the village. Sharpe turned back to look at the tired, hot cavalrymen who spread across the plain. He was looking for grey uniforms and seeing none.

"Time to go, sir?" Hagman called, hinting that the riflemen would be cut off if Sharpe did not withdraw soon.

"Back we go," Sharpe said. "Run to that column." He pointed to some Portuguese infantry.

They ran, easily reaching the Portuguese before a half-hearted pursuit of vengeful chasseurs could get close to the riflemen, but the chasseurs' small charge attracted a flow of other cavalrymen, enough to make the Portuguese column shake itself into square. Sharpe and his men stayed in the square and watched as the cavalry streamed around the battalion. Brigadier General Craufurd had also taken shelter in the square and now observed the surrounding French from under the battalion's colours. He looked a proud man, and no wonder. His division, which he had disciplined into becoming the best in all the army, was performing magnificently. They were outnumbered, they were surrounded, yet no one had panicked, not one battalion had been caught deployed in column, and not one square had been rattled by the horsemen's proximity. The Light had saved the Seventh Division and now it was saving itself with a dazzling display of professional soldiering. Pure drill was defeating French verve, and Massйna's attack, which had swept around the British right flank with overwhelming force, had been rendered utterly impotent. "You like it, Sharpe?" Craufurd called from his horse.

"Wonderful, sir, just wonderful." Sharpe's compliment was heartfelt.

"They're scoundrels," Craufurd said of his men, "but the devils can fight, can't they?" His pride was understandable, and it had even persuaded the irascible Craufurd to unbend and indulge in conversation. It was even a friendly conversation. "I'll put a word in for you, Sharpe," Craufurd said, "because a man shouldn't be disciplined for killing the enemy, but I don't suppose my help will do you any good."

"It won't, sir?"

"Valverde's an awkward bugger," Craufurd said. "He don't like the British, and he won't want Wellington given a Spanish Generalisimo's hat. Valverde reckons he'd make a better Generalisimo himself, but the only time the bugger fought the French he pissed his yellow pants yellower and lost three good battalions doing it. But it ain't about soldiering, Sharpe, it's about politics, all about damned politics, and the one thing every soldier should know is not to get tangled up in politics. Slimy bastards, politicians, should all be killed. Every last damned one of them. I'd tie the whole bloody pack of lying bastards to cannon muzzles and blow them away, blow them away! Fertilize a field with the bastards, dung the world with the breed. Them and lawyers." The thought of the twin professions had put Craufurd into a bad mood. He scowled at Sharpe, then twitched his reins to take his horse back towards the battalion's colours. "I'll speak for you, Sharpe."

"Thank you, sir," Sharpe said.

"Won't help you," Craufurd said curtly, "but I'll try." He watched the nearest French cavalry move away. "I think the buggers are looking for other meat," he called to the Portuguese battalion's Colonel. "Let's march on. Should be back in the lines for luncheon. Day to you, Sharpe."

The Seventh Division had long reached the safety of the plateau and now the leading battalions of the Light Division climbed the slope under the protection of British artillery. The British and German cavalry, that had charged again and again to hold off the hordes of French horsemen, now walked their weary and wounded horses up the hill where riflemen with dried mouths and bruised shoulders and fouled rifle barrels trudged towards safety. The French horsemen could only watch their enemy march away and wonder why in over three miles of pursuit across country made by God for cavalrymen they had not managed to break one single battalion. They had succeeded in catching and killing a handful of redcoat skirmishers in the open land at the bottom of the ridge, but the overall price of the morning's fight had been dozens of dead troopers and scores of butchered horses.

The last of the Light Division columns climbed the hill beneath its colours where bands played to greet the battalion's return. The British army that had been so dangerously divided was now whole again, but it was still cut off from home and it still faced the larger of the two French attacks.

For in Fuentes de Onoro, whose streets were already choked with blood, a whole new French attack was following the drums.

Marshal Massйna felt annoyance as he watched the two parts of the enemy's army recombine. Good God, he had sent two divisions of infantry and all his cavalry and still they had let the enemy slip away! But at least all the British and Portuguese forces were now cut off from their retreat across the Coa so that now, when they were defeated, the whole of Wellington's army must try to find safety in the wild hills and deep gorges of the high borderland. It would be a massacre. The cavalry which had frittered away the morning so uselessly would hunt the survivors through the hills, and all that was needed to begin that wild and slaughterous chase was for Massйna's infantry to break through the last defences above Fuentes de Onoro.

The French now held the village and the graveyard. Their leading soldiers were just feet beneath the ridge's summit that was crowned with redcoats and Portuguese blasting volleys that foun-tained soil among the graves and rattled sharply against the village walls. The surviving Highlanders had retreated to the ridge with the Warwickshire men who had lived through the mauling fight in the streets and now they had been joined by Portuguese caзadores, redcoats from the English shires, skirmishers from the valleys of Wales and by Hanoverians loyal to King George III; all mingled as they stood shoulder to shoulder to hold the heights and drown Fuentes de Onoro in smoke and lead. And in the village the streets were crowded with French infantry who were waiting for the order to make the last victorious assault up and out of the smoking houses, across the broken graveyard wall, over the humped graves and broken stones of the cemetery and then across the ridge's crest and into the enemy's vulnerable rear. To the left of their charge would be the white-walled, bullet-scarred church on its ledge of rock, while to the right would be the tumbled grey boulders of the stony summit where the British riflemen lurked, and in between those two landmarks the road climbed the grassy, blood-slicked chute up which the blue-coated infantry needed to attack to bring France a victory.

Massйna now tried to make the victory certain by sending forward ten fresh battalions of infantry. Wellington, he knew, could defend the slope above the village only by bringing in men who were guarding other parts of the ridge. If Massйna could weaken another section of the ridge it would open an alternative path to the plateau, but to do that he must first turn the saddle of grassland above the village into a place of death. The French reinforcements crossed the plain in two great columns and their appearance provoked the fire of every British cannon on the ridge. Case shot slashed across the stream to burst in livid smoke, roundshot crashed through the ranks while shells lobbed from the short-barrelled howitzers fizzed to leave smoky trails arcing in the sky before cracking open in the columns' hearts.

Yet still the columns came. Drummer boys beat them on and the eagles showed bright above as they marched past the dead of the previous attacks. It seemed to some of the French that they walked towards the very gate of hell, towards a smoke-wreathed maw spitting flame and stinking from three days of death. To north and south the meadows lay in spring freshness, but on the banks of Fuentes de Onoro's stream there was nothing but blasted trees, burned houses, fallen walls, dead, dying and screaming men, and on the plateau's crest above the village there was just smoke and more smoke as the cannons and rifles and muskets hammered at the men waiting to make their huge assault.

The battle had been shrunken to this one place, to these last few feet of the slope above Fuentes de Onoro. It was midday and the sun was fierce and the shadows short as the ten new battalions broke their ranks to run through the gardens and down the eastern bank of the stream. They splashed through the water and ran up into streets choked with bloody bodies and groaning, slow-moving wounded men. The fresh attackers cheered as they ran, encouraging themselves and the waiting French infantry to one last, supreme effort. They filled the streets, then they burst in huge streams from the alley and laneway entrances at the top of the village, and there were so many attackers that the last of the newly arrived columns were still crossing the stream as the leading companies swarmed over the graveyard wall and up into the volley fire. Men fell to the allied volleys, but more men came behind to clamber over the dead and the dying and to struggle across the graves. Other men ran up the road alongside the cemetery. One whole battalion swerved to the right to fire up at the riflemen on the rocky knoll and their musket fire overwhelmed and drove the greenjackets back from the boulders. A Frenchman climbed to the knoll's summit where he waved his hat before pitching down with a rifle bullet in his lungs. More Frenchmen clambered up the slabs from where they could look down on the great victorious surge of their comrades who were fighting up the last few bloody inches of the slope. The attackers passed the Frenchmen left dead from the previous attacks, they climbed at last onto grass untouched by blood, and then they reached the ragged place where the wadding of the allied muskets had scorched and burned the turf, and still they climbed, and still their officers and sergeants shouted them on, and still the drummer boys beat their attack rhythm to drive this vast wave up and across the plateau's lip. Massйna's infantrymen were doing all that the Marshal had wanted them to do. They were climbing into the horror of the rolling volleys and climbing over their own dead, so many dead that the survivors seemed dipped in blood, and the British and Portuguese and Germans were being forced back step by step as still more men came from the village to press up behind and replace the men who fell to the awful volley fire.

A cheer arose as the leading Frenchmen gained the ridge's summit. A whole company of voltigeurs had run to the church to use its wall and rock foundations as a shelter from the musketry and now those men clambered up the last few feet and bayoneted some redcoats defending the church door, then burst inside to find the flagged floor filled with wounded men. Doctors sawed at shattered arms and bleeding legs as the French voltigeurs ran to the windows and opened fire. One of the voltigeurs was hit by a rifle bullet and left a sliding trail of blood on the whitewashed wall as he sagged to the floor. The other voltigeurs ducked as they reloaded, but when they took aim across the window ledges they could see deep across the plateau into the heart of Wellington's position. Close by they could see the wagons of the ammunition park and one of the voltigeurs laughed as he made an English officer scamper for safety with a shot that drove a long splinter out of a wagon's side. The doctors shouted a protest as the noise and smoke of the musketry filled the church, but the voltigeur commander told them to shut the hell up and keep on working. On the road outside the church a surge of French attackers reinforced the heroes who had captured the ridge's crest and who now threatened to break the enemy army in two before they scattered it to the merciless blades of the frustrated cavalry.

Massйna saw his blue coats gain the far skyline and he felt a great burden drop from his soul. Sometimes, he thought, the hardest part of being a general lay in the necessity of disguising worry. All day he had pretended a confidence he had not altogether felt, for the wretched Major Ducos had been right when he said that Wellington loved nothing better than defending a hill, and Massйna had watched Fuentes de Onoro's hill and worried that his brave men would never spill over its lip to the rich harvest of victory beyond. Now they were over, the battle was won, and Massйna had no further need to hide his anxiety. He laughed aloud, smiled on his entourage and accepted a flask of brandy with which to toast his victory. And victory was sweet, so sweet. "Send Loup forward," Massйna now commanded. "Tell him to clear the road through the village. We can't deliver supplies through streets choked with dead. Tell him the battle's won so he can take his whore with him if he can't bear to untie her apron strings from round his neck." He laughed again for life was suddenly so very very good.

There were two battalions standing ready near the church; one famous and the other infamous. The famous battalion was the 74th, Highlanders all, and known for their hard steadiness in battle. The Scotsmen were eager to take revenge for the losses suffered by their sister regiment in Fuentes de Onoro's bloody streets and to help them was the 88th, the infamous battalion, reckoned to be as near ungovernable as any regiment in the army, though no one had ever complained about their ability in battle. The 88th was a hard brawling regiment, its men as proud of their fighting record as of their homeland, and that homeland was the wild, bleak and beautiful west of Ireland. The 88th were the Connaught Rangers and now, with the 74th from the Scottish mountains, they would be sent to save Wellington's army.

The French hold on the ridge's crest was tightening as more men reached the road's summit. There was no time to deploy the Scots or Irish into line, only to throw them forward in column of sections at the very centre of the enemy's line. "Bayonets, boys!" an officer shouted, then the two battalions were running forward. Pipes played the Scotsmen on and wild cheers marked the Connaught advance. Both regiments went fast, eager to get the moment over. The thin mingled line of allied infantry split to let the columns through, then fell in behind as the front ranks of the Irish and Scots slammed into the advancing French. There was no time for musketry and no chance for men to hold back from hand-to-hand fighting. The French knew that victory was theirs if they could just defeat this last enemy effort, while the Scots and Irish knew that their only chance of victory depended on them throwing the French off-the ridge's crest.

And so they struck home. Most infantry would have checked their charge a few paces short of an enemy line to pour in a volley of musketry in the hope that the enemy would retreat rather than accept the challenge and horror of hand-to-hand fighting, but the Highlanders and the men of Connaught offered the French no such chance. The front ranks charged bodily into the French attackers and used their bayonets. They screamed war cries in Gaelic and Erse, they clawed and spat and clubbed and kicked and stabbed and all the time more men piled in behind as the rear ranks of the columns collapsed onto the fight. Highland officers slashed with their heavy claymores, while the Irish officers stabbed with the lighter infantry sword. Sergeants drove spontoons hard into the mass of Frenchmen, skewering them with the pikehead, twisting it free and driving it forward again. Inch by inch the counterattack advanced. This was fighting as the Highlanders had always known it, hand to hand and smelling your enemy's blood as you killed him, and it was the kind of fighting for which the Irish were as feared in their own army as among the enemy. They thrust forward, at times so close packed with the enemy that it was the sheer weight of men rather than the edge of their weapons that forced progress. Men slipped and sprawled on the bodies that lay on the saddle's lip, but the press of men behind thrust the men in front onwards and suddenly the French were going back down the steep hill and their grudging retreat became a spilling flight for the safety of the houses.

Riflemen retook the knoll of rocks as Portuguese soldiers hunted down and killed the voltigeurs inside the church. Irishmen and Scotsmen led the wild, screaming, bloody countercharge down through the graveyard and for a moment it seemed as though the ridge, the battle and the army were saved.

Then the French struck again.

Brigadier Loup understood that Massйna would not offer him a chance to make a name in the battle, but that did not mean he would accept the Marshal's animosity. Loup understood Massйna's distrust and did not particularly object, for he believed that a soldier made his own chances. The art of advancement was to wait patiently until an opportunity offered itself and then to move as fast as a striking snake, and now that his brigade had been ordered to its menial task of clearing the main road through and beyond the village of Fuentes de Onoro the Brigadier would watch for any opportunity that would allow him to release his superbly trained and hard-fighting men to a task more suited to their skills.

His journey across the plain was placid. The fighting boiled at the top of the pass above the village, but the British guns seemed not to notice the advance of a single small brigade. A couple of roundshot struck his infantrymen, and one case shot exploded wide of his grey dragoons, but otherwise the Loup Brigade's advance was untroubled by the enemy. The brigade's two infantry battalions marched in column either side of the road, the dragoons flanked them in two large squadrons while Loup himself, beneath his savage wolf-tailed banner, rode in the centre of the formation. Juanita de Elia rode with him. She had insisted on witnessing the battle's closing stages and Marshal Massйna's confident assurance that the battle was won had persuaded Loup it was safe enough for Juanita to ride at least as far as the Dos Casas's eastern bank. The paucity of British artillery fire seemed to vindicate Massйna's confidence.

Loup dismounted his dragoons outside the village gardens. The horses were picketed in a battered orchard where they would remain while the dragoons cleared the road east of the stream. There were not many obstructions here to slow the progress of the heavy baggage wagons carrying Almeida's relief supplies, merely one collapsed wall and a few blackening corpses left from the British gunfire, so once the dragoons had cleared the passage they were ordered to cross the ford and start on the larger job inside the village proper. Loup ordered Juanita to stay with the horses while he marched his two battalions of infantry around the village's northern flank so that they could begin clearing the main street from the top of the hill, working their way down to meet the dragoons coming up from the stream. "You don't have to be careful with the wounded," he told his men, "we're not a damned rescue mission. Our job is to clear the street, not nurse injured men, so just throw the casualties aside until the doctors arrive. Just clear the way, that's all, because the sooner the road's clear the sooner we can put some guns on the ridge to finish off the Goddams. To work!"

He led his men up around the village. A few scattered skirmishers' bullets came from the heights above to remind the grey-clad infantry that this was still not a battle won and Loup, striding eagerly ahead of his men, noted that the fighting was still very close to the plateau's lip, and then a great cheer from the ridge announced that the battle could yet be lost.

For the cheer marked the moment when a phalanx of red-coated infantry drove in the French attack and thrust it back across the crest. Now, beneath their bright flags, the British counterattack was storming down the slope towards the village. French voltigeurs were abandoning the high rocks and fleeing down the slope to find safety behind the village's stone walls. A sudden panic had gripped the leading French grenadiers who were giving ground to the vengeful redcoats, but Loup felt nothing but elation. God, it seemed, was working to a different plan than Marshal Andrй Massйna. The street clearance could wait, for suddenly Loup's opportunity had come.

Providence had placed his brigade on the left flank of the Irish counterattack. The redcoats were screaming down the hill, bayoneting and clubbing their enemies, oblivious of the two waiting battalions of fresh infantry. Behind the Irish came a disorganized mass of allied infantry, all sucked pell-mell into this new battle for mastery of Fuentes de Onoro's blood-glutted streets.

"Fix bayonets!" Loup called and drew his own straight-bladed dragoon sword. So Massйna had thought to keep his brigade from glory? Loup turned to see that his pagan banner of wolf tails hanging from an eagle's cross-bar was held high, and then, as the counterattacking British troops poured into the village streets, he ordered the advance.

Like a whirlpool that sucked every scrap of flotsam into its destructive vortex, the village had again become a place of close-quarter killing. "Vive l'Empereur!" Loup shouted, and plunged into the fight.

Sharpe eased the green jacket off the dead rifleman. The man had been one of the sharpshooters on the rocky knoll, but he had been shot by a voltigeur at the high point of the French attack and now Sharpe pulled the bloody jacket off the stiff, awkward arms. "Perkins! Here!" He threw the green jacket to the rifleman. "Get your girl to shorten the sleeves."

"Yes, sir."

"Or do it yourself, Perkins," Harper added.

"I'm no good with a needle, Sarge."

"That's what Miranda says too," Harper said, and the riflemen laughed.

Sharpe walked to the rocks above the village. He had brought his riflemen back unscathed from their errand to the Light Division, only to find that Major Tarrant had no new orders for him. The battle had become a vicious fight over mastery of the village, its graveyard and the church above, and men were not using ammunition so much as sword, bayonet and musket stock. Captain Donaju had wanted permission to join the men firing at the French from the crest's ridge, but Tarrant had been so worried by the proximity of the attackers that he had ordered the Real Companпa Irlandesa to stay close to the ammunition wagons that he was busily having harnessed to their horses or oxen. "If we must retreat," he had told Sharpe, "it'll be chaos! But a man must be ready." The Real Companпa Irlandesa made a thin line between the wagons and the fighting, but then the attack of the 74th Highlanders and the Connaught Rangers had eased Tarrant's urgency.

"Pon my soul, Sharpe, but it's hot work." Colonel Runciman had been hovering around the ammunition wagons, fidgeting and worrying, but now he came forward to catch a glimpse of the turmoil in the village beneath. He gave his horse's reins to one of the riflemen and peered nervously over the crest at the fighting beneath. It was hot work indeed. The village, left reeking and smoking from the earlier battles fought through its streets, was once again a maelstrom of musket smoke, screams and blood. The 74th and 88th had driven deep into the labyrinth of houses, but now their progress was slowing as the French defences thickened. The French howitzers on the other stream bank had begun lobbing shells into the graveyard and upper houses, adding to the smoke and noise. Runciman shuddered at the horrid sight, then stepped back two paces only to stumble on a dead voltigeur whose body marked the deepest point of penetration reached by the French. Runciman frowned at the body. "Why do they call them vaulters?" he asked.

"Vaulters?" Sharpe asked, not understanding the question.

"Voltigeur, Sharpe," Runciman explained. "French for vaulter."

Sharpe shook his head. "God knows, sir."

"Because they jump like fleas, sir, when you shoot at them," Harper offered. "But don't worry yourself about that one, sir." Harper had seen the look of worry on Runciman's face. "He's a good voltigeur, that one. He's dead."

Wellington was not far away from Sharpe and Runciman. The General was sitting on his horse on the bloody dip of land where the road crossed the ridge between the church and the rocks, and behind him was nothing except the army's baggage and ammunition park. To the north and west his divisions guarded the plateau against the French threat, but here, in the centre, where the enemy had so nearly broken through, there was nothing left. There were no more reserves and he would not thin the ridge's other defenders and so open a back door to French victory. The battle would have to be won by his Highlanders and Irishmen, and so far they were rewarding his faith by retaking the village house by bloody house and cattle shed by burning cattle shed.

Then the grey infantry struck from the flank.

Sharpe saw the wolf-tail banner in the smoke. For a second he froze. He wanted to pretend he had not seen it. He wanted an excuse, any excuse, not to go down that awful slope to a village so reeking with death that the air alone was enough to make a man vomit. He had fought once already inside Fuentes de Onoro, and once was surely enough, but his hesitation was only for a heartbeat. He knew there was no excuse. His enemy had come to Fuentes de Onoro to claim victory and Sharpe must stop him. He turned. "Sergeant Harper! My compliments to Captain Donaju and ask him to form column. Go on! Hurry!" Sharpe looked at his men, his handful of good men from the bloody, fighting 95th. "Load up, lads. Time to go to work."

"What are you doing, Sharpe?" Runciman asked.

"You want to beat our court of inquiry, General?" Sharpe asked.

Runciman gaped at Sharpe, not understanding why the question had been asked. "Why, yes, of course," he managed to say.

"Then go over to Wellington, General," Sharpe said, "and ask his Lordship's permission to lead the Real Companпa Irlandesa into battle."

Runciman blanched. "You mean…?" he began, but could not articulate the horror. He glanced down at the village that had been turned into a slaughterhouse. "You mean…?" he began again and then his mouth fell slackly open at the very thought of going down into that smoking hell.

"I'll ask if you don't," Sharpe said. "For Christ's sake, sir! Gallantry forgives everything! Gallantry means you're a hero. Gallantry gets you a wife. Now for Christ's sake! Do it!" he shouted at Runciman as though the Colonel was a raw recruit.

Runciman looked startled. "You'll come with me, Sharpe?" He was as frightened of approaching Wellington as he was of going towards the enemy.

"Come on!" Sharpe snapped, and led a flustered Runciman towards the sombre knot of staff officers who surrounded Wellington. Hogan was there, watching anxiously as the tide of struggle in the village turned against the allies once again. The French were inching uphill, forcing the redcoats and the Portuguese and the German infantry back out of the village, only this time there were no ranks of muskets waiting at the crest of the ridge to blast the enemy as they climbed the road and overran the churned-up graveyard.

Runciman hung back as the two men reached the staff officers, but Sharpe pushed his way through the horses and dragged the reluctant Colonel with him. "Ask him," Sharpe said.

Wellington heard the words and frowned at the two men. Colonel Runciman hesitated, snatched off his hat, tried to speak and only managed an incoherent stutter.

"General Runciman wants permission, my Lord— Sharpe began coldly.

"— To take the Irish into battle." Runciman managed to complete the sentence in a barely coherent rush. "Please, my Lord!"

Some of the staff officers smiled at the thought of the Wagon Master General leading troops, but Wellington twisted in his saddle to see that the red-jacketed Real Companпa Irlandesa had formed column. It looked a pathetically small unit, but it was there, formed, armed and evidently eager. There was no one else. The General looked at Sharpe and raised an eyebrow. Sharpe nodded.

"Carry on, Runciman," Wellington said.

"Come on, sir." Sharpe plucked the fat man's sleeve to pull him away from the General.

"One moment!" The General's voice was frigid. "Captain Sharpe?"

Sharpe turned back. "My Lord?"

"The reason, Captain Sharpe, why we do not execute enemy prisoners, no matter how vile their behaviour, is that the enemy will reciprocate the favour on our men, no matter how small their provocation." The General looked at Sharpe with an eye as cold as a winter stream. "Do I make myself clear, Captain Sharpe."

"Yes, sir. My Lord."

Wellington gave a very small nod. "Go."

Sharpe dragged Runciman away. "Come on, sir!"

"What do I do, Sharpe?" Runciman asked. "For God's sake, what do I do? I'm not a fighter!"

"Stay at the back, sir," Sharpe said, "and leave everything else to me." Sharpe scraped his long sword free. "Captain Donaju!"

"Captain Sharpe?" Donaju was pale.

"General Wellington requests," Sharpe shouted loudly enough for every man in the Real Companпa Irlandesa to hear him, "that the King of Spain's bodyguard goes down to the village and kills every goddamn Frenchman it finds. And the Connaught Rangers are down there, Captain, and they need a morsel of Irish help. Are you ready?"

Donaju drew his own sword. "Perhaps you would do the honour of taking us down, Captain?"

Sharpe beckoned his riflemen into the ranks. There would be no skirmishers here, no delicate long-range killing, only a blood-soaked brawl in a godforsaken village on the edge of Spain where Sharpe's sworn enemy had come to turn defeat into victory. "Fix bayonets!" Sharpe called. For a second or two he was assailed with the strange thought that this was just how Lord Kiely had wanted his men to fight. His Lordship had simply wanted to throw his men into a suicidal battle, and this place was as good as any for that kind of gesture. No training could prepare a man for this battle. This was gutter fighting and it was either born into a man's bones or it was absent for ever. "And forward!" Sharpe shouted. "At the double!" And he led the small unit up the road to the ridge's crest where the soil was torn by enemy roundshot, then over the skyline and down. Down into the smoke, the blood and the slaughter.

CHAPTER XI

Bodies lay sprawled on the upper slope. Some were motionless, others still stirred slowly with the remnants of life. A Highlander vomited blood, then collapsed across a grave that had been so churned by shell and roundshot that the pelvic and wrist bones of a corpse lay among the soil. A French drummer boy sat beside the road with his hands clasped over his spilt guts. His drumsticks were still stuck in his crossbelt. He looked up mutely as Sharpe ran past, then began to cry. A greenjacket lay dead from one of the very first attacks. A bent French bayonet was stuck in his ribs just above a distended, blackened belly that was thick with flies. A shell cracked apart beside the body and scraps of its casing whistled past Sharpe's head. One of the guardsmen was hit and fell, tripping two men behind him. Harper shouted at them to leave the man alone. "Keep running!" he called harshly. "Keep running! Let the bugger look after himself! Come on!"

Halfway to the village the road curved sharply to the right. Sharpe left the road there, jumping down a small embankment into a patch of scrubland. He could see the Loup Brigade not far ahead. The grey infantry had plunged into the village from the north and were now threatening to cut the 88th into two parts. Loup's attack had first arrested the momentum of the British counterattack then reversed it, and to Sharpe's right he could see redcoats retreating out of the village to find shelter behind the remnants of the graveyard wall. A swarm of Frenchmen was pushing up from the village's lower houses, roused to one last brave effort by the example of Loup's brigade.

But Loup's brigade now had an enemy of its own, a small enemy, but one with something to prove. Sharpe led the Real Companпa Irlandesa through the scrubland, over a tiny plot of parched beans, then he was leaping down another low embankment and running hard towards the flank of the nearest grey infantry battalion. "Kill them!" Sharpe shouted, "kill them!" It was a horrid, savage and appropriate battle cry for the Real Companпa Irlandesa was outnumbered and unless they fell on the enemy with a hungry ferocity they would be repelled and broken. This fight would depend on savagery. "Kill the bastards!" Sharpe screamed. Fear was huge inside him, making his voice harsh and desperate. His belly was sour with terror, but he had long learned that the enemy suffered just the same fear and that to yield to it was to invite disaster. The key to this fight's survival lay in closing on the enemy fast, in crossing the open space where their muskets could kill and so getting his men hard into the enemy's ranks where the fight would degenerate into a street brawl.

And so he screamed his awful encouragement even as he wondered if his courage would fail and drive him to seek shelter behind one of the broken walls, but at the same time he was judging the enemy ahead. There was an alley crammed with enemy immediately in front of Sharpe, and to its left a low wall enclosing a garden. Some of Loup's men had crossed a fallen wall into the garden, but most were pushing through the alley towards the bigger fight raging in the village's centre. Sharpe headed for the alley. Frenchmen turned and called in warning. One man fired his musket to shroud the alley's entrance with white smoke, then Sharpe crashed into the rearmost grey ranks and slammed his sword forward. The relief of contact was enormous, releasing a terrible energy that he poured into the wickedly sharp sword blade. Men arrived either side of him with bayonets. They were screaming and stabbing, men in whom terror was similarly being turned into a barbaric frenzy. Other guardsmen had gone to clear the garden, while Donaju was fighting his way into another alley lower down the slope.

It was a gutter fight, and if for the first few moments Sharpe's men found it easier than they had expected that was because they had assaulted the rearmost of Loup's ranks, the place where the men least enthusiastic about fighting like animals in narrow streets had taken refuge. Yet the longer Sharpe's men fought, the closer they came to Loup's best fighters and the harder the fight proved.

Sharpe saw a big moustached sergeant working his way back through the ranks and rallying the men as he came. The Sergeant was shouting, hitting men, forcing the cowardly to turn and use their bayonets on the new attackers, but then his head snapped back and was surrounded with a momentary red mist of blood droplets as a rifle bullet killed him. Hagman and Cooper had found a rooftop from which to serve as sharpshooters.

Sharpe stepped over bodies, hammered muskets aside, then stabbed with his sword. There was no room for slashing strokes, only a tight space in which to jab and ram and twist the blade. The only leadership required of him now was to be seen fighting and the Real Companпa Irlandesa followed him willingly. It was as if they had been let off a leash and they fought like fiends as they cleared first one alley and then the next. The French retreated from the bitter attack, looking for an easier place to defend. Donaju, his face and uniform spattered with blood, rejoined Sharpe in a small triangular plaza where the two alleys met. A dead Frenchman lay on a dungheap, another blocked a door. There were bodies shoved into the gutters, bodies piled inside houses and bodies heaped against walls. The piles of dead showed the battle's progression, with skirmishers from the first day covered with Frenchmen, then Highlanders, then French grenadiers in their massive bearskin hats beneath more redcoats and now Loup's grey uniforms made a new top layer. The stench of death was thick as fog. The ruts in the earthen road, where they showed between the corpses, were flooded with blood. The streets were glutted by death and choked with men seeking to glut them more.

Hagman and Cooper jumped from one broken roof to another. "Bastards to your left, sir!" Cooper called from his eyrie, indicating an alley that ran crookedly downhill from the small triangular plaza. The French had withdrawn far enough to give Sharpe's men a pause in which they could reload or else wrap dirty strips of cloth round slashed hands and arms. Some men drank from their hoarded rum issue. A few were wholly drunk, but they would fight all the better for it and Sharpe did not mind. "Bastards are coming, sir!" Cooper called in warning.

"Bayonets!" Sharpe called. "Now come on!" He drew out the last word as he led his men into the alley. It was scarcely six feet wide, no room to swing a sword. The first bend was just ten feet away and Sharpe reached it at the same time as a rush of Frenchmen. Sharpe felt a bayonet catch in his jacket, heard the cloth rip, then he was punching the iron hilt of his sword into a moustached face. He was fighting a grenadier who snarled through bleeding lips with yellow rotted teeth as he tried to kick Sharpe in the crotch. Sharpe hammered the sword down, but the blow was cushioned by the black greasy fur of the thick bearskin. The man's breath was fetid. The grenadier had let go of his musket and was trying to throttle Sharpe, but Sharpe seized the upper blade of his sword with his left hand, kept tight hold of the hilt with his right and rammed the blade hard into the Frenchman's throat. He pushed the grenadier's head back so far that he could see the whites of his eyes and still the man would not let go of his throat so Sharpe just slid the blade to his right, slid once and his world turned red as the sword sliced into the Frenchman's jugular.

He clambered over the twitching body of the dying grenadier. Rum-crazed guardsmen were slashing with bayonets, hitting with musket stocks, kicking and screaming at an enemy who could not match this ferocity. Guardsman Rourke had broken his musket and had picked up a blackened roof beam instead and was now ramming the heavy timber forward at the Frenchmen's faces. The enemy began to edge backwards. An officer from Loup's brigade tried to rally them, but Hagman picked him off from a rooftop and the enemy's grudging retreat turned into a sudden rout. One Frenchman took refuge in a house where he lost his head by firing from a window on the advancing guardsmen. A rush of Irishmen stormed the house and killed every French fugitive inside.

"God save Ireland." Harper dropped down beside Sharpe. "Jesus, but it's hard work." He was breathing hoarsely. "Christ, sir, have you seen yourself? Drenched in blood, so you are."

"Not mine, Pat." Sharpe cuffed blood out of his eyes. He had reached the corner of a street which led into the village's heart. A dead French officer lay in the centre of the street, his mouth open and crawling with flies. Someone had already cut open his pockets, seams and pouches and discarded a crude chess set with a board made of painted canvas, court pieces of carved wood and pawns from musket balls. Sharpe could smell the corpse as he crouched at the street corner and tried to divine the battle's course from the tangle of noise and smoke. He sensed he was behind the enemy now and that if he could just attack to his right then he would be threatening to cut off Loup's grey infantry and the bearskinned grenadiers who were now inextricably mixed together. If the enemy thought they were about to be surrounded they would probably retreat, and that retreat could lead to a wholesale French withdrawal. It could lead to victory.

Harper peered round the corner. "Thousands of the buggers," he said. He was carrying a spontoon that he had picked up from a dead Connaught sergeant. He had snapped off four feet of the pike to make it a handier weapon for the grim business of killing in a confined space. He looked at the plundered French officer in the street. "No money in that chess set," he said grimly. "Do you remember that sergeant at Busaco who found the silver chess men?" He hefted the spontoon. "Just send me a rich dead officer, please God."

"No one will get rich off me," Sharpe said grimly, then peered round the corner to see a barricade of dead grenadiers blocking the street with a mass of French infantry waiting behind them. "Who's loaded?" Sharpe asked the men crouching near him. "To the front," he ordered the half-dozen men who raised their hands. "Hurry now! We go round the corner," he told them, "you wait for my word, you kneel, you fire, then you charge like hell. Pat? You bring the rest five paces behind." Sharpe was leading a mongrel mix of riflemen, Connaught Rangers, Highlanders, guardsmen and caзadores."'Ready, boys?" He grinned at them from a face smeared with enemy blood. "Then come on!"

He screamed the last word as he led his men around the corner. The French behind the barricade obliged Sharpe by firing straightaway, panicked by the awful screams of the attackers into firing too soon and firing too high. "Halt! Kneel!" Sharpe stood among the kneeling men. "Aim!" Harper was already leading the second charge out of the alley. "Fire!" Sharpe shouted and the volley whipped over the dead grenadiers as Sharpe's men charged out of the smoke and scrambled over the warm heap of bloody dead. The French ahead of Sharpe were desperately reloading, but their fixed bayonets impeded their ramrods and they were still trying to load their muskets when Sharpe's charge smashed home and the killing began again. Sharpe's sword arm was weary, his throat was hoarse from shouting and his eyes were stinging from powder smoke, sweat and blood, but there could be no rest. He rammed the sword home, twisted it, pulled it out, then rammed it forward again. A Frenchman aimed his musket at Sharpe, pulled the trigger and was rewarded with a hangfire as the powder in the pan caught fire, but did not set off the charge inside the barrel. The man screamed as the sword stabbed home. Sharpe was so weary from the killing that he was holding the big sword two-handed, his right hand on the hilt and his left gripping the lowest part of the blade so that he could shove it hard into the press of men. The crush of bodies was so great that there were times when he could hardly move and so he would claw at the faces nearest him, kick and bite and butt with his head until the damned French moved or fell or died and he could climb over another body and snarl forward with the bloody sword dripping.

Harper caught up with him. The spontoon's foot-long sharpened steel spearhead had a small cross-bar at its base to prevent the weapon being driven too deep into an enemy horse or man and Harper was repeatedly burying the blade clear to the cross-piece, then kicking and twisting to loosen the weapon before thrusting forward again. Once, when a French sergeant tried to rally a group of men, Harper lifted a dying man on the end of the truncated spear and used his thrashing body as a bleeding and screaming battering ram that he slammed into the enemy ranks. A pair of bloody-faced Connaught Rangers had attached themselves to Harper and the three were chanting their war cries in Irish.

A rush of Highlanders came out of a lane on Sharpe's right. He sensed that the battle was turning. They were attacking downhill now, not defending uphill, and the grey infantry of Loup's brigade was going back with the rest. He unclenched his left hand from the lower blade of the sword and saw he had cut his palm open. A musket flamed from a window to his left and a guardsman went spinning down, gasping. Captain Donaju led a charge into the roofless house that echoed with shouts as French fugitives were hunted through the tiny rooms and back into the pig shed. A terrible roar of triumph sounded to Sharpe's right as a company of Connaught Rangers trapped two companies of Frenchmen in a blind alley. The Irish began working their bloody way to the alley's end and no officer dared try to stop their slaughter. Down on the grassland north of Poco Velha this battle had seen the most delicate of drill manoeuvres save the Light Division, now it was witnessing a primitive wild fighting out of the most gruesome nightmare that might yet save the whole army.

"Left!" Harper called and Sharpe turned to see a rush of grey-uniformed Frenchmen coming through an alley. The guardsmen no longer needed orders to counterattack, they just swarmed into the alley and screamed a wild, keening noise as they laid into the enemy. The Real Companпa Irlandesa had been caught up by the sublime joy of a victorious and killing fight. One man took a bullet in the chest and noticed nothing, but just went on stabbing and swinging his musket. Donaju had long ceased trying to exercise control. Instead he was fighting like his men, grinning horribly from a face made awful by blood, smoke, sweat and strain. "Seen Runciman?" Sharpe asked him.

"No."

"He'll live," Sharpe said. "He ain't the kind to die in battle."

"And we are?" Donaju asked.

"God knows." Sharpe was resting for a moment in an angle of wall. His breath came in great gasps. "Have you seen Loup?" he asked Harper.

"Not a sign of the bugger, sir," Harper answered. "But I'm saving this for him." He touched the clustered barrels of his volley gun that was slung on his back.

"Bastard's mine," Sharpe said.

A cheer announced another rush forward somewhere in the village. The French were going back everywhere and Sharpe knew this was the time to keep the enemy from holding or regrouping. He led a squad of men through a house, stepping over two French corpses and one dead Highlander to emerge into the small backyard. He kicked open the yard's gate and saw Frenchmen just yards away. "Come on!" He screamed the last word as he ran into the street and led his men against the remnants of a barricade. Muskets flared and flamed, something slapped against the stock of Sharpe's slung rifle, then he was hacking the sword over the barricade and guardsmen were hauling the carts and benches and burning straw bales aside. A house was on fire nearby and the smoke made Sharpe cough as he kicked his way through the last obstacles and parried a bayonet lunged by a small wiry French sergeant. Harper skewered the man with his spontoon. The stream was just feet away. A French gun fired, blasting canister up the main road and twitching a dozen Highlanders aside, then the French gunners were masked as a rush of Frenchmen tried to escape the vengeful allied counterattack by fleeing back over the Dos Casas stream.

A bellowing voice sounded to Sharpe's right and he saw it was Loup himself trying to rally the French. The Brigadier was standing on the remnants of the old stone clapper bridge where he swore at the running Frenchmen and tried to turn them back with his sword. Harper unslung his seven-barrelled gun, but Sharpe pushed it down. "Bugger's mine, Pat."

Some redcoats were pursuing the French over the stream as Sharpe ran towards the bridge. "Loup! You bastard! Loup!" he shouted. "Loup!"

The Brigadier turned and saw the blood-soaked rifleman running towards him. Loup jumped off the bridge as Sharpe splashed into the stream and the two men met halfway, thigh-deep in a pool made by a dam of bodies and discoloured by their blood. The swords clashed, Loup lunged, but Sharpe parried and swung, only to have his own blow parried. He kicked at Loup's knee, but the deep water impeded him and he almost fell and opened himself to a scything swing of Loup's straight sword, but Sharpe recovered at the last moment and deflected the blow with the hilt of his sword which he rammed forward at Loup's wall-eye. The Brigadier stepped hurriedly back, tripped, but gained his balance with another vicious swing of the sword. The wider battle was still being fought, but both the British and the French left the two swordsmen alone. The French were going to earth in the walls and gardens of the stream's eastern bank where their first attacks of the day had started, while the British and Portuguese were hunting the last enemy out of the village proper. While in the stream the two battle-crazed men swung their clumsy swords like clubs.

They were evenly matched. Loup was the better swordsman, but he lacked Sharpe's height and reach and he was more accustomed to fighting on horseback than on foot. The two swung, stabbed and parried in a grotesque mockery of the fine art of fencing. Their movements were slowed by the stream and by their tiredness, while the finesse of swordfighting was wasted on blades as long and cumbersome as heavy cavalry swords. The sound of the two swords was reminiscent of a blacksmith's shop.

"Bastard," Sharpe said, and cut. "Bastard," he said again and rammed the point forward.

Loup parried the lunge. "This is for my two murdered men," he said and cut the sword upward, forcing Sharpe to an awkward parry. Loup spat an insult then lunged his sword at Sharpe's face, making the rifleman stagger sideways. Sharpe returned the lunge and shouted in triumph as his sword sliced into Loup's midriff, but he had only succeeded in piercing the Frenchman's sabretache that now trapped the point of his sword as Loup waded forward to give the killing blow. Sharpe stepped forward as well, closing the gap to stop the lunge and butting with his head as he got close. The Frenchman avoided the butt and brought up his knee. Sharpe hit him with his left hand, then wrenched his sword free and hit Loup with the hilt just as the Brigadier's sword guard clouted him stingingly on the left side of his head.

The two men reeled apart. They stared at each other, but they no longer traded insults for they needed all their strength for the fight. Muskets snapped across the stream, but still no one interfered with the duellists, recognizing that they were fighting the battle of honour that belonged to them alone. A group of grey-uniformed men watched from the eastern bank while a mix of riflemen, guardsmen, Rangers and Highlanders cheered Sharpe from the west.

Sharpe scooped water up with his left hand and splashed it on his mouth. He licked his lips. "Time to finish you," he said thickly and waded forward. Loup raised his sword as Sharpe swung, parried the blow, then parried again. Sharpe had found a new, desperate energy and he gave the Frenchman stroke after stroke, huge strokes, great slashing cuts of the heavy sword that beat down Loup's guard and followed each other so fast that the Frenchman had no time to disengage and turn his own blade into the attack. He went back, beaten by Sharpe's strength, and blow by blow his defence weakened as Sharpe, teeth gritted, went on swinging. One last blow rang on Loup's upheld sword to drive the grey Frenchman down onto his knees in the water and Sharpe screamed his victory as he raised the sword for one last terrible strike.

"Watch out, sir!" Harper called desperately.

Sharpe glanced to his left to see a grey-uniformed dragoon mounted on a grey horse and with a plume of black, shining hair hanging from his helmet to his waist. He was holding a short-barrelled carbine aimed dead at Sharpe. Sharpe stepped back, checking the killing stroke, and saw that the black hair was not a helmet's plume at all. "Juanita!" he shouted. She would save Loup just as she had once kept Lord Kiely alive, only she had saved Kiely to preserve her excuse for staying behind British lines while she would keep Loup alive for love. "Juanita!" Sharpe called, appealing to that one memory of a grey dawn in a grey wolf's bed in the high hills.

She smiled. She fired. She turned to flee, but Harper was in the shallows with the seven-barrelled gun at his shoulder and his volley snatched Juanita off her horse in an eruption of blood. Her death screech ended before her falling body struck the ground.

Sharpe was also falling. He had taken a terrible blow under his right shoulder and the pain was already flickering like fire down his suddenly nerveless hand. He staggered and went to one knee and Loup was suddenly over him, sword aloft. Smoke from a burning house wafted over the stream as Loup shouted his victory and brought the sword slamming down.

Sharpe hooked the Frenchman's right ankle with his left hand and tugged. Loup shouted as he fell. Sharpe snarled and dived forward, going beneath the falling sword, and he grabbed his own sword blade with his blood-encrusted left hand so that he was holding the three-foot blade like a quarterstaff that he rammed hard across his enemy's neck. Blood from his shoulder was running down to the stream as he drove the Brigadier beneath the water, drove him down to the stream's gravel bed and held him there with the sword. He locked his right arm straight and held the sword tip with his left and clenched his teeth against the pain in his arm as he used all his weight to hold the smaller man down under the hurrying stream. Bubbles showed in the bloody water and were whirled away. Loup kicked and thrashed, but Sharpe held him there, kneeling in the stream so that only his head and bloody shoulder were above water and he kept the sword hard over the dying man's throat to drown the Frenchman like a man would drown a rabid dog.

Rifles and muskets splintered from the western bank as Sharpe's men drove away Loup's infantry from the eastern bank. Those grey infantry had come forward to rescue their Brigadier, but Loup was dying, choking on water and steel, blacking out under the stream. A bullet slapped the water close to Sharpe, but he stayed there, ignoring the pain, just holding the sword hard across his enemy's throat. And slowly, slowly, the last bubbles faded, and slowly, slowly, the struggles beneath Sharpe ceased, and slowly, slowly, Sharpe understood that he had scotched the beast and that Loup, his enemy, was dead and slowly, slowly, Sharpe eased away from the body that floated up to the surface as he staggered, bloody and hurting, back to the western bank where Harper caught up with him and hurried him back into the shelter of a bullet-chipped wall. "God save Ireland," Harper said as he eased the wet sword out of Sharpe's hand, "but what have you done?"

"Won, Pat, bloody well won." And, despite the pain, he grinned. For he was a soldier, and he bloody well had won.

"Stay still, man, for God's sake." The surgeon's voice was slurred and his breath reeked of brandy. He grimaced as he manipulated the probe that was sunk deep in Sharpe's shoulder. The surgeon also held a small pair of tweezers that he constantly darted in and out of the open wound to give jabs of pure agony. "The goddamn bullet drove in scraps of your uniform," he said. "Why the hell don't you wear silk? That doesn't fall to pieces."

"Can't afford silk," Sharpe said. The church stank of blood, pus, faeces and urine. It was night time and Fuentes de Onoro's church was crammed with the wounded of two armies who lay in the smoking rushlight as they waited their turn with the surgeons who would be busy with their hooks and saws and blades all night long.

"God knows if you'll live." The doctor plucked another scrap of bloody wool out of the wound and scraped it off the tweezer's jaws onto his stained apron. He belched a fetid brandy-flavoured breath over Sharpe, then shook his head wearily. "The wound will probably turn septic. They usually do. You'll stink like a leper's latrine, your arm will drop off and in ten days' time you'll be dead. Lots of fever before then, you'll gibber like a lunatic and sweat like a horse, but you'll be a hero back home. Of course it hurts, man. Stop whining like a damned child, for Christ's sake! I never could stand whining bloody children. And sit still, man!"

Sharpe sat still. The pain of the probe was excruciating, like having a white-hot flesh-hook jammed and twisted into his shoulder joint. He closed his eyes and tried not to listen to the grating sound caused by the surgeon's probe scraping against the bone as he searched for the carbine ball. "Got the little bastard. Hold still." The surgeon found a narrow-nosed set of forceps and eased them into the wound after the probe. "You say a woman did it?"

"A woman did it," Sharpe said, keeping his eyes closed. A prisoner from Loup's brigade had confirmed that Juanita had indeed advanced with the dragoons. No one in Loup's brigade had thought the French would be dislodged from the village and thrown back over the stream and so no one had told Juanita the danger. Not that she would have listened. She had been an adventuress who loved the smell of fighting and now she was dead.

So was Loup, and with their death had died General Valverde's last chance of finding a witness to Sharpe's confession to having killed the French prisoners and so precipitating the fiasco at San Isidro. There was only one witness left alive and he had come at dusk to the church where Sharpe had been waiting for the surgeon. "They asked me," Runciman had told Sharpe excitedly. The Colonel had been in the village throughout the fight, and though no one was claiming that the erstwhile Wagon Master General had taken a leading role in the battle, nor was anyone denying that Colonel Runciman had been in the place of greatest danger where he had neither flinched nor shrunk from the fight.

"Who asked you what, General?" Sharpe had responded.

"Wellington and that wretched Spanish General." Runciman gabbled in his excitement. "Asked me directly, straight to my face. Had you admitted to shooting two Frenchies? That's what they asked me."

Sharpe flinched as a man screamed under the surgeon's knife. The amputated arms and feet made a grisly pile beside the altar that served as an operating table. "They asked you," Sharpe said, "and you don't tell lies."

"So I didn't!" Runciman said. "I said it was a preposterous question. That no gentleman would do such a thing and that you were an officer and therefore a gentleman and that with the greatest of respect to his Lordship I found the question offensive." Runciman bubbled with joy. "And Wellington backed me up! Told Valverde he wanted to hear no more allegations against British officers. And there's to be no court of inquiry either, Sharpe! Our conduct today, I am told, obviates any need to question the sad events of San Isidro. Quite right too!"

Sharpe had smiled. He had known he was exonerated from the moment that Wellington, just before the Real Companпa Irlandesa's counterattack on the village, had reprimanded him for shooting the French prisoners, but Runciman's excited news was a welcome confirmation of that release. "Congratulations, General," Sharpe said. "So what now?"

"Home, I think. Home. Home." Runciman smiled at the thought. "Maybe I can be of some use in the Hampshire militia? I suggested as much to Wellington and he was kind enough to agree. The militia, he said, needed men with martial experience, men of vision and men with an experience of command, and he was kind enough to suggest I possessed all three qualities. He's a very kind man, Wellington. Haven't you discovered that, Sharpe?"

"Very kind, sir," Sharpe said drily, watching the orderlies hold down a man whose leg was quivering as the surgeons cut at the thigh.

"So I'm off to England!" Runciman said with delight. "Dear England, all that good food and sensible religion! And you, Sharpe? What of your future?"

"I'll go on killing Frogs, General. It's all I'm good for." He glanced at the doctor and saw the man was nearly finished with his previous patient and he braced himself for the pain to come. "And the Real Companпa Irlandesa, General," he asked, "what happens to them?"

"Cadiz. But they go as heroes, Sharpe. A battle won! Almeida still invested and Massйna scuttling back to Ciudad Rodrigo. "Pon my word, Sharpe, but we're all heroes now!"

"I'm sure your father and mother always said you'd be a hero one day, General."

Runciman had shaken his head. "No, Sharpe, they never did. They were hopeful for me, I don't deny it, and no wonder for they were blessed with only the one child and I was that fortunate blessing, and they gave me great gifts, Sharpe, great gifts, but not, I think, heroism."

"Well, you are a hero, sir," Sharpe said, "and you can tell anyone who asks that I said as much." Sharpe held out his right arm and, despite the pain, shook Runciman's hand. Harper had just appeared at the church doorway and was holding up a bottle to show that there was some consolation waiting when Sharpe's bullet was extracted. "I'll see you outside, sir," Sharpe told Runciman, "unless you want to watch the surgeon pull out the bullet?"

"Oh, good Lord, no, Sharpe! My dear parents never thought I'd have the stomach to study medicine and I fear they were right." Runciman had gone pale. "I shall let you suffer alone," he said and backed hastily away with a handkerchief held over his mouth in case the noxious effusions of the hospital gave him a sickness.

Now the doctor pulled the bullet free of the wound before ramming a dirty rag against Sharpe's shoulder to staunch the flow of blood. "No bones broken," he said, sounding disappointed, "but there are some bone chips off the rib that'll hurt you for a few days. Maybe for ever, if you live. You want to keep the bullet?" he asked Sharpe.

"No, sir."

"Not as a keepsake for the ladies?" the doctor asked, then took a flask of brandy from a pocket of his blood-stiffened apron. He took a deep swallow, then used a corner of his bloody apron to wipe the tips of the forceps clean. "I know a man in the artillery who has dozens of spent bullets mounted in gold and hung on chains," the surgeon said. "He claims each one lodged near his heart. He's got the scar, you see, to prove it, and he presents a bullet to every woman he wants to roger and tells each silly bitch that he dreamed of a woman who looked just like her when he thought he was dying. It works, he says. He's a pig-ugly scoundrel but he reckons the women can't wait to claw his breeches down." He offered Sharpe the bullet again. "Sure you don't want the damn thing?"

"Quite sure."

The doctor tossed the bullet aside. "I'll get you wrapped up," he said. "Keep the bandage damp if you want to live and don't blame me if you die." He walked unsteadily away, calling for an orderly to bandage Sharpe's shoulder.

"I do hate bloody doctors," Sharpe said as he joined Harper outside the church.

"My grand-da said the same thing," the Irishman said as he offered Sharpe the bottle of captured brandy. "He only saw a doctor once in all his life and a week later he was dead. Mind you, he was eighty-six at the time."

Sharpe smiled. "Is he the same one whose bullock dropped off the cliff?"

"Aye, and bellowed all the way down. Just like when Grogan's pig fell down a well. I think we laughed for a week, but the damned pig wasn't even scratched! Just wet."

Sharpe smiled. "You must tell me about it some time, Pat."

"So you're staying with us then?"

"No court of inquiry," Sharpe said. "Runciman told me."

"They should never have wanted one in the first place," Harper said scornfully, then took the bottle from Sharpe and tipped it to his mouth.

They wandered through an encampment smeared with the smoke of cooking fires and haunted with the cries of wounded men left on the battlefield. Those cries faded as Sharpe and Harper walked further from the village. Around the fires men sang of their homes far away. The singing was sentimental enough to give Sharpe a pang of homesickness even though he knew his home was not in England, but here, in the army, and he could not imagine leaving this home. He was a soldier and he marched where he was ordered to march and he killed the King's enemies when he arrived. That was his job and the army was his home and he loved both even though he knew he would have to fight like a gutter-born bastard for every step of advancement that other men took for granted. And he knew too that he would never be prized for his birth or his wit or his wealth, but would only be reckoned as good as his last fight, but that thought made him smile. For Sharpe's last battle had been against the best soldier France had and Sharpe had drowned the bastard like a rat. Sharpe had won, Loup was dead, and it was over at last: Sharpe's battle.