“Mind yourself, sir,” Harper warned. He was guessing that the grasshopper gun was reloaded. The two Riflemen went very still. If the men below had any wit they would not fire at the same place, but would blast the shot into an unbroken part of the ceiling. Sharpe felt the fear of utter helplessness, knowing that at any second a cannonball could drive up beneath his feet.
“Fire, you bastards!” he muttered.
The gun fired. The men below had guessed wrong and the shot smashed through the attic’s far end. Dust and noise billowed about the confined space while broken tiles clattered down the roof and smashed themselves in the courtyard.
As the cannon’s noise still echoed in the attic, Harper moved with the speed of a scalded cat to the first hole. He peered down, rammed the seven barrels through the ragged gap, then pulled the trigger. He had only had time to charge five of the barrels, so much of the gun’s force was wasted through the two empty muzzles, but the grasshopper’s crew was only fifteen feet below him and the five bullets had enough force to kill both men. Sharpe fired his own reloaded rifle through the newer hole, then went to help Harper who was levering at the tensioned floorboard. Frederickson moaned, rolled on to his side, then lay still. The floorboard, weakened by the cannonball’s strike, snapped, and Sharpe and Harper could at last peer down at their enemy.
Two men lay dead beside the fallen grasshopper gun which, because it had been placed on its butt to fire upwards, now had two bent back legs. A third wounded man lay in a puddle of blood by the far door. The other Dragoons had taken shelter in the corners of the room. One of them raised a carbine and both Sharpe and Harper ducked back.
Sharpe reloaded his rifle. Frederickson was breathing hoarsely now. There was silence from below. Ducos and the remaining Dragoons feared the awesome destructive power of the seven-barrelled gun and none of them dared step into the room’s centre to retrieve their small cannon, and so they shrank back into corners and stared in fear at the broken ceiling. They were still staring as Calvet’s men came to the loopholed doors and thrust their muskets through.
„Non! Non!“ one of the Dragoons shouted.
Sharpe took one of the rifles and worked at the board beside the broken one. It had been loosened by the two cannon blows and came up with surprising ease. He saw the Dragoons with their hands up, and he saw the muskets protruding from the doors, but he could not see Ducos. “General!” he shouted.
“Major?” Calvet’s voice was muffled.
“Wait there! I’ll open up!”
Harper tried to stop Sharpe. “You’ll break your bloody legs, sir!”
But Sharpe wanted Ducos alive. Sharpe wanted to capture the small cunning enemy who had dogged his footsteps from the Portuguese border to this broken house in Italy, and Sharpe, this close to his old enemy, would not be denied. He lowered himself through the gaping hole, hung for a second by his hands, then dropped.
The height from ceiling to floor was fifteen feet. Sharpe had shrunk that distance by hanging from the broken boards, but he still dropped the best part of nine feet. The fall jarred him. He spilt sideways on the stone floor and a pain shrieked up from his right ankle to his newly mended thigh. He screamed with the pain, rolled to the right, and snarled at the Dragoons to stay still. He expected a bullet at any second. Harper was above him, threatening the room with his rifle. None of the Dragoons fired. They just stared at the blood-streaked, savagely scarred man who had dropped from the roof and who now struggled to stand upright. There was no sign of Ducos. The room was lit by the pale grey wash of the lightening sky. Sharpe drew his sword and the sound of the scraping blade made one of the Dragoons whimper and shake his head.
“Where’s Ducos?” Sharpe asked in French.
One of the Dragoons gestured towards a heavy green curtain.
Sharpe knew he should have unlocked the doors to let Calvet’s men into the room, but he was too close to his enemy now, and he had travelled too far and suffered too much to let this man escape him. He limped towards the curtain, flinching each time the weight went on to his right leg. He stopped a half dozen paces from the heavy green cloth. “Ducos! You bastard? It’s Major Sharpe!”
A pistol exploded beyond the curtain and a bullet plucked at the green cloth. The pistol ball tore a ragged hole, went a foot to Sharpe’s right, then buried itself in the ebony and silver inlaid table.
Sharpe stepped two paces closer to the curtain. “Ducos! You missed!”
Another bullet twitched the heavy curtain. This one went to Sharpe’s left. The curtain quivered from the bullet’s passing. The new ragged hole had scorched edges. The Dragoons stared at the limping madman who was playing this insane game with death.
Sharpe stepped so close that he could have reached out a hand and touched the green curtain. “You missed again!” He could hear the Frenchman breathing hoarsely beyond the curtain, then he heard the click as another weapon was cocked. Sharpe sensed from the sound that Ducos.was standing well back from the green material and must be firing in blind panic at its heavy folds. “Ducos? Try again!” he called.
The third bullet jerked the cloth. It went to Sharpe’s right, but so close that it could not have missed by more than a sword blade’s thickness. Dust sprang from the curtain’s thick weave to drift in the silvery dawn light. Sharpe laughed. “You missed!”
“Open the door!” Calvet roared angrily through one of the loopholes.
“Ducos?” Sharpe called again, and once again the hidden Frenchman fired one of his stock of pistols, but this time the shot was not greeted by Sharpe’s mockery. Instead the Rifleman screamed foully, gasped in awful pain, then moaned like a soul in sobbing torment.
Ducos shouted his triumph aloud. He ran to the curtain and snatched the heavy cloth aside. And there, at the moment of his personal victory, he stopped short.
He stopped because a sword blade flashed up to dig its point into the skin of his throat.
An unwounded Sharpe, with dog-blood lining the scars on his powder-stained face, stared into Ducos’s eyes.
The Frenchman held a last unfired pistol, but the huge sword was sharp in his throat and the eyes that stared into his were like dark ice. ‘Non, non, non.“ Ducos moaned the words, then his gun dropped on to the floor as his bladder gave way and a stain spread on the white silk of his French Marshal’s breeches.
„Oui, oui, oui,“ Sharpe said, then brought up his left knee in a single, savage kick. The force of it jarred Ducos’s spectacles free, they fell and smashed, and then the Frenchman, clutching the warm stain on his breeches, fell after them and screamed a terrible moaning scream.
And the long chase was done.
Sharpe limped to the door to let in an irate General Calvet. The dawn was full now, flooding the limpid sea with a glitter of silver and gold. The villa was thick with smoke, but oddly silent now that the muskets had stopped firing. It was the silence after battle; the unexpected and oddly disappointing silence when the body still craved excitement and there was nothing now to do but clear up the wounded and dead, and find the plunder. Calvet’s men tramped into the room and disarmed the broken Dragoons. Harper carried Frederickson downstairs and tenderly laid the officer on to a chaise-longue taken from the dismantled barricade. Two of Calvet’s men had been wounded, one of them badly, but none had been killed. The wounded Grenadiers were laid beside Frederickson whose wits were slowly coming back. His face was already blackening and swelling in a vast bruise, but he managed a wry smile when he saw the ludicrously uniformed Pierre Ducos. The Frenchman still gasped from the pain of Sharpe’s kick as Harper tied his wrists and ankles, then pushed him scornfully into a corner of the room to join the captured Dragoons.