'Where's El Catolico?' Knowles asked.

'Miles away.' Harper sounded gloomy.

The horse went forward again, Kearsey's heels raking back, but the lancers were desperately close. The Major turned the roan downslope towards the village, letting his speed build up before turning back, but his horse seemed winded or frightened. The roan's head tossed nervously, Kearsey urged it, and at the moment when Sharpe knew the lancers must catch him the Major realized it as well. He circled back, sword drawn, and Knowles groaned.

'He might do it yet.' Harper spoke gently, as if to a nervous recruit on the battlefield.

Four lancers were closest to the Major. He spurred towards them, singled one out, and Sharpe saw the sabre, point downwards, high in Kearsey's hand. Marlborough had calmed, and as the lancers thundered in, Kearsey touched the spurs, the horse leapt forward, and the Major had turned the right-hand lance to one side, swivelled his wrist with the speed of a trained swordsman, and one Pole lay beheaded on the ground.

'Beautiful!' Sharpe was grinning. Once a man got past the razor tip of a lance he was safe.

Kearsey was through, crouching on Marlborough's neck, urging the horse on towards the hills, but the first squadron of lancers were close behind their fellows, at full gallop, and the effort was useless. A dust cloud engulfed the Englishman, the silver points disappeared in the storm, and Kearsey was trapped with only his sword to save him. A man reeled out of the fight holding his stomach, and Sharpe knew the sabre had laid open the horseman's guts. The dust billowed like cannon smoke. The lance points were forced upwards in the press and once – Sharpe was not sure – he thought he saw the slashing light of the lifted sabre. It was magnificent, quite hopeless, one man against a regiment, and Sharpe watched the commotion subside, the dust drift towards the nightjar's treacherous nest, and the lance points sink to rest. It was over.

'Poor bastard.' Harper had not been looking forward to company prayers, but he had never wanted lancers to take away the unpleasant prospect.

'He's alive!' Knowles was pointing. 'Look!' It was true. Sharpe rested the glass on the rock rim of the gully and saw the Major riding between two of his captors. There was blood on his thigh, a lot, and Sharpe saw Kearsey trying to stem the flow with his two fists where a lance point had gouged into his right leg. It was a good capture for the Poles. An exploring officer whom they could keep for a few months before exchanging for a Frenchman of equal rank. They could well have recognized him. The exploring officers often rode in sight of their enemy, their uniforms distinct, relying on their fast horses to carry them from trouble, and it was possible that the French would decide not to exchange Kearsey for months; perhaps, Sharpe thought with a sinking feeling, till the British had been driven from Portugal.

The depressing thought made him stare at the hermitage, half hidden by trees, the unlikely place where Wellington's hopes were pinned. Without Kearsey it was even more important that the Company should try to find the gold that night, but then those hopes, too, were dashed. Half the lancers rode with their prisoner to the village, but the other half, in a curving column, trotted towards the graveyard and its hermitage. Sharpe cursed beneath his breath. There was no hope now of finding the gold that night. The only chance left was to wait until the French had gone, till they had stopped using the village and the hermitage as their base for the campaign against the Partisans in the hills. And when the French did go, El Catolico would come, and Sharpe had no doubt that the tall, grey-cloaked Spaniard would use every effort to stop the British from taking the gold. Only one man stood a chance of persuading the Partisan leader, and that man was a prisoner, wounded, in the hands of the lancers. He slid back from the skyline, turned and stared at the Company. Harper slid down beside him. 'What do we do, sir?'

'Do? We fight.' Sharpe gripped the hilt of the sword. 'We've been spectators long enough. We get the Major out, tonight.'

Knowles heard him, turned an astonished face on them. 'Get him out, sir? There's two regiments there!'

'So? That's only eight hundred men. There are fifty-three of us.'

'And a dozen Irish.' Harper grinned at the Lieutenant.

Knowles scrambled down the slope, looking at them with a disbelieving stare. 'With respect, sir. You're mad.' He began to laugh. 'Are you serious?'

Sharpe nodded. There was no other choice. Fifty-three men must take on eight hundred, or else the war was lost. He grinned at Knowles. 'Stop worrying! It'll be simple!'

And how the hell, he thought, do we do it?

CHAPTER 6

Sharpe mocked himself. So simple. Just release the Major when two of the finest regiments in the French army were expecting a night attack. The wise course, he thought, was to go home. The French probably had the gold by now, the war was lost, and a sensible man would shoulder his rifle and think about making a living at home. Instead, like a gambler who had lost all but a handful of coins, he was staking everything on one last throw, a throw against odds of sixteen to one.

Which was not, he told himself as the Company filed down a goat track in the darkness, quite true. He had lain on the gully's rim as the sun westered and watched the French preparations. They were thorough, but in their defence was their weakness, and Sharpe had felt the excitement well up inside, the incipient knowledge of success. The French expected an attack by Partisans, by small groups of silent men who would carry knives, or else who would fire muskets from the darkness, and they had prepared themselves for that ordeal. The village did not help them. The houses either side of the narrow street were jostled by low, ragged outbuildings; the whole making a maze of alleyways and dark corners where a silent assassin held the advantage. The French had no outlying sentries. To put a small group of men out in the fields was to write their death sentence, and the French, accustomed to this kind of fighting, had drawn themselves into makeshift fortresses. Most of the cavalry were in Cesar Moreno's house with its ample stabling and high, encircling wall. The other fortress, the only other building with a wall high and strong enough, was the hermitage with its cemetery. Both buildings would be crowded, but both safe from the silent knives, and to make them safer the French had embarked on a crusade of systematic destruction. The cottages nearest the Moreno house had been flattened, the ringing of the big hammers on their stone walls carrying up into the gully, and every tree, every door, every stick of furniture, had been cut and splintered and piled into heaps that could be lit so an attacking Partisan would be denied the gift of darkness. The French held the advantage, but only against Partisans. In their wildest dreams they would not imagine the sudden appearance of British infantry, crossbelts vivid in the defensive firelight, muskets flaming disciplined death. Or so Sharpe hoped.

He had one other advantage, slight but important. Kearsey had obviously given his parole, his gentleman's promise, to his captors that he would not attempt to escape, and Sharpe had seen the small. Major limping round the village. Each time, Kearsey had gone back to Moreno's house, and finally, as the light faded, Sharpe had seen the Major sitting on a balcony, on one of the few pieces of furniture left, so at least the rescuers knew where their goal lay. All that remained was to break into the house and for that speed was vital.

The march in the darkness seemed to take forever, but Sharpe dared not hurry the men, for fear of getting lost. They slipped and cursed on the stones; their musket stocks banged hollowly on rock; they squinted in the tiny light that came from the sickle moon hazed by the northern clouds. To the east the stars pricked at the outline of the hills, and as they neared the valley floor and midnight approached, the French lit fires that beckoned the Company like a beacon in the dark night.