Harper pushed past Sharpe, saw the girls, and aimed his rifle on which his bayonet was now locked. The girls shook their heads, as if to show that they would not make any noise. Frederickson appeared in the room. He had prepared for battle in his usual way by stowing his eyepatch and false teeth in his ammunition pouch, and he thus presented a fearsome sight which made one of the girls draw breath to scream. Harper rapped the side of her head with the edge of his blade. She froze. The blanket dropped away to show that she was naked.
“Kill the bitches.” Frederickson came into the room last.
“Tell them that if they make a noise we’ll kill them both,” Sharpe ordered. Frederickson seemed disgusted at this display of weakness, but obeyed. One of the two girls nodded to show that she understood, and Sharpe plucked a blanket from the floor and tossed it over their heads. “Come on!”
A second winding stairway led from the room. Sharpe again climbed it first. The sound of musketry was much louder now, betraying that the Riflemen were close to Ducos’s men. At the top of the stairway was a half-open door which Sharpe knew would lead on to the flat roof from which Ducos’s men poured their fire down on to Calvet’s soldiers. Sharpe remembered a moment like this on the Portuguese border when he and Harper had climbed just such a stair in the certain knowledge that the enemy waited at its top. He felt like a rat in a barrel, and the fear slowed his step. Through the half open door he could see the sky. There was a high wisp of cloud, lit silver grey against the dark.
“Move yourself, sir.” Harper unceremoniously pushed Sharpe aside to take the lead. He had slung his rifle and bayonet on his left shoulder so he could use his favourite weapon; the big seven-barrelled gun. The Irishman licked his lips, crossed himself, then pushed the door fully open.
Harper froze. He could see the enemy and Sharpe could not. Frederickson tried to push on, but he could not get past Sharpe.
“God save Ireland,” Harper whispered, and Sharpe knew that the big man, like himself, was scared. There was a hard knot in Sharpe’s belly, put there by the certainty that death waited beyond the open door.
“How many?” he whispered to Harper.
“At least a dozen of the bastards.”
“For Christ’s sake!” Frederickson sounded angry. “Calvet’s being crucified!”
“Vive I’Empereur!” Sharpe said fatuously, and the erstwhile enemy’s battle cry seemed to propel Harper through the open door.
“Bastards!” The Irishman screamed the word as his own battle cry. Men turned to stare at him, astonishment on their faces, then Harper pulled the trigger and the flint sparked fire into the chamber behind the seven barrels. The gun hammered like a small cannon and two of Ducos’s men were snatched clean off their feet to tumble, screaming, to the broken stones below.
Sharpe had followed Harper on to the smoke-wreathed roof. He carried the rifle in his clumsily bandaged left hand, fired it, did not wait to see if his bullet hit, but just ran forward with the sword in his right hand. The blade was matted thick with dog blood and hair. Frederickson flanked Harper’s right. A musket hammered at them, but the three Riflemen were moving too quickly and the ball whined harmlessly between Sharpe and Harper.
The surprise of their small attack was absolute. One second Sergeant Challon’s men had been firing down in comparative safety, and the next they were being violently assaulted from their left flank. Those men nearest to the Riflemen had no time to escape. One man tried to twist out of Sharpe’s way, but the big sword caught him on the backswing to flay his throat back to the spine. Sharpe’s scream of triumph would have curdled a devil’s blood. Harper was using the butt of the big gun like a club. Frederickson shot a man, discarded his rifle, then elegantly skewered another with his sword. Sharpe was past his first victim, hunting another. The fear had gone now, washed away by the old exaltation of battle. The enemy was running. They were desperately jostling towards a doorway on the roofs far side. These men had no belly for this fight, all except one man who had the tough face of an old soldier.
The moustached face was framed with the pigtails of the elite Napoleonic Dragoons. The man wore the remnants of his green uniform on which was the single stripe of a Sergeant. He lifted his straight sword towards Sharpe, feinted, then lunged at Harper. He did not finish the lunge, but stepped back and swung the blade towards Frederickson. The man was cornered, his companions had abandoned him, but he was making a professional cold fight out of his desperate position.
“Give up,” Sharpe said in English, then corrected himself by giving the command in French.
The only response was a sudden and savage attack. Sharpe parried so that the two swords ran like a bell. The other enemy had disappeared down the far stairway, and now the French Sergeant retreated after them, but never turned his back on his three opponents. Frederickson edged round to threaten his right flank and the Dragoon Sergeant’s sword slithered towards the new threat, but Harper was even faster. He moved to the Sergeant’s left, reached out, and seized his belt to pull him off balance. The Sergeant tried to reverse his blade, but Harper contemptuously ripped it from his hand and sent it spinning over the parapet. He then hit the French Sergeant on the head so that the man slumped down in dazed agony. “You were told to give up,” Harper said patiently, then hit the man again. “You stubborn bloody bastard.”
“Major!” General Calvet was standing in the ruins below.
“Go right!” Sharpe pointed to where they had broken through into the passage. “Hurry!”
“Englishman! Well done!”
Sharpe laughed at the compliment, then essayed an elaborate bow to the Frenchman. As he bowed, so’Harper screamed a sudden warning, and Sharpe abandoned his courtesy to fall ignominiously on his face as a small cannon split the dawn apart with its sudden noise. The ball thumped over Sharpe’s head.
“Ducos!” Frederickson had spotted the enemy.
Sharpe looked where Frederickson was pointing. Beyond this roof was another courtyard, this one intact, and on its far side Sharpe saw an open full-length window on an upper floor. The room had a balcony that billowed with smoke. Men moved in the lantern light behind the balcony, then the small wind shifted the obscuring smoke and Sharpe at last saw his enemy. He recognized the round lenses of the spectacles first, then he saw the thin face and he saw, too, with astonishment, that Ducqs was in the uniform of a French Marshal. For a second Ducos looked straight into Sharpe’s eyes, then he twisted away. Two other men took his place. Between them they carried a strange brass object which they stood in the window. For a second Sharpe thought it was a small misshapen table, but then Frederickson recognized the four-legged gun. “A bloody grasshopper!” he said scornfully, but he still dropped flat as the linstock touched fire to the charge. This time the small gun had been loaded with multiple shot that whistled harmlessly overhead.
A scream sounded below, and Sharpe knew Calvet’s men must have entered the second courtyard. The sound of musketry began again, rising in a snapping crescendo, but this time the deadly sound came from deep inside Ducos’s fastness. The dawn was already lightening the eastern sky with a pale silver wash and Sharpe knew this battle was half won, but still not complete. An enemy had to be trapped and taken alive. He loaded his rifle, wiped blood off his blade, and went back to the fight.