There was a hammering from downstairs, the blast of a musket, and El Catolico smiled. 'Time to die, Sharpe. Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine.' He came forward like quicksilver, past Sharpe's clumsy parry, and the blade drew blood at Sharpe's waist. 'Et lux perpetua luceat eis.' The voice was like silk, beautiful and hypnotic, and the blade went to the other side of Sharpe's waist, razored his skin, and was gone. Sharpe knew he was being toyed with, a plaything, while the prayer lasted, and he could do nothing. He remembered Helmut's techniques and went for El Catolico's eyes, stabbing the empty air, and the Spaniard laughed. 'Go slow, Sharpe! Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion.'

Sharpe lunged desperately for the eyes; Helmut had made it look easy, but El Catolico just swayed to one side and the rapier came low at the Rifleman, aiming at the thigh for another flesh wound, and Sharpe had only one, desperate, insane idea left. He let the rapier come, kicked his right thigh forward, and pushed the blade painfully into his flesh so that El Catolico could not use it. The Spaniard tried to drag it free; Sharpe felt the tearing in his leg, but he had the initiative, was still driving forward, and he hit the Spaniard with the heavy guard of the sword, scraping it up the face, and El Catolico abandoned the rapier and went backwards. Sharpe followed, the rapier stuck clean through his thigh, and El Catolico grabbed at it, missed, and Sharpe swept his blade down, caught El Catolico's forearm; the Spaniard cried out and Sharpe back-swung him with the flat of his blade, a scything crack across the skull, and the Partisan fell.

Sharpe stopped. There were shouts below. 'Captain!'

'Up here! On the church roof!'

He could hear footsteps below, pounding in the alleyway, and he suspected the Partisans were abandoning the unequal conflict. He stopped and took hold of El Catolico's rapier. The wound hurt, but Sharpe knew he had been lucky; the blade had gone through the outer muscles and the blood and pain were worse than the damage. He pulled at the sword, clenching his teeth, and it slid free. He held the rapier in his hands, felt its fine balance, and knew he could never have defeated it except for the madness of driving his body on to the inlaid blade and denying El Catolico his skill.

The Spaniard moaned, still unconscious, and Sharpe crossed to him, bleeding and limping, and looked down at his enemy. His eyes were closed, the lids flickering slightly, and Sharpe took his own sword, put it at El Catolico's throat. 'A butcher's blade, eh?' He stabbed down till the point hit the roof, twisted it, then kicked the neck free of the blade. 'That was for Claud Hardy.' There would be no fiefdom in the mountains, no private kingdom, for El Catolico.

There was a thumping on the trapdoor. 'Who's that?'

'Sergeant Harper!'

'Wait!'

He pushed the ladder to one side and the trapdoor was pushed up and Harper appeared, a smoking torch in one hand. The Irishman looked first at Sharpe, then at the body. 'God save Ireland. What were you doing, sir? A competition to see who could bleed the most?'

'He wanted to kill me.'

The eyebrows went up. 'Really?' Harper looked at the dead man. 'He was a fine swordsman, sir. How did you do it?'

Sharpe told him. How he had gone for the eyes, failed, so had impaled himself on the sword. Harper listened, shook his head.

'You're a bloody fool, sir. Let's see the leg.'

Teresa came up, followed by Lossow and Knowles, and the story had to be told again, and Sharpe felt the tension flow out of him. He watched Teresa kneel by the body.

'Does it upset you?'

She shook her head, busy at something, and Sharpe watched as she searched beneath the blood-stained clothes and found, round the dead man's waist, a money-belt thick with coins. She opened one of the pockets.

'Gold.'

'Keep it.'

Sharpe was feeling his leg, tracing the wound, and he knew he had been lucky and that the blade had torn a smaller wound than his stupidity deserved. He looked up at Harper. 'I'll need the maggots.'

Harper grinned. In a tin box he kept fat white maggots that lived only on dead flesh, spurning healthy tissue, and nothing cleaned a simple wound better than a handful dropped into the cut and bound in with a bandage. The Irishman took Sharpe's sash as a temporary dressing, bound it tight. 'It'll mend, sir.'

Lossow looked at the body. 'What now?'

'Now?' Sharpe wanted a glass of wine, another plate of that stew. 'Nothing. They have another leader. We still have to hand the gold over.'

Teresa spoke in Spanish, angry and vehement, and Sharpe smiled.

'What was that, sir?' Knowles was stunned by the blood on the roof.

'I don't think she likes the new leaders.' Sharpe flexed his left arm. 'If El Catolico's Lieutenants don't produce the gold, then they may not be leaders much longer. Is that right?'

She nodded.

'Then who will be?' Knowles sat down on the parapet.

'La Aguja.' Sharpe had trouble pronouncing the Spanish

'J -'

Teresa laughed, pleased, and Harper looked up from his own excursion into El Catolico's pockets.

'La what?'

'La Aguja. The Needle. Teresa. We have a bargain.'

Knowles looked astonished. Teresa? Miss Moreno?'

'Why not? She fights better than most of them.' He had made up the name, saw that it pleased her. 'But to make that happen we must keep the gold from the Spanish, get it out of the city, and finish this job.'

Lossow sighed, scraped his unused sabre back into its curved scabbard. 'Which brings us back to the old question, my friend. How?'

Sharpe had dreaded this moment, wanted to lead them gently towards it, but it had come. 'Who's stopping us?'

Lossow shrugged. 'Cox.'

Sharpe nodded. He spoke patiently. 'And Cox has his authority as Commander of the garrison. If there were no garrison, there would be no authority, no way to stop us.'

'So?' Knowles was frowning.

'So, at dawn tomorrow we destroy the garrison.'

There was a moment's utter silence, broken by Knowles. 'We can't!'

Teresa laughed at the sheer joy of it. 'We can!'

'God in his heaven!' Lossow's face was appalled, fascinated.

Harper did not seem surprised. 'How?'

So Sharpe told them.

CHAPTER 23

Almeida stirred early, that Monday morning; it was well before first light as men stamped their boots on cobbled streets and made the small talk that is the talisman against great events. The war, after all, had come to the border town, and between the defenders' outer glacis and the masked guns of the French, the hopes and fears of Europe were concentrated. In far-off cities men looked at maps. If Almeida could hold, then perhaps Portugal could be saved, but they knew better. Eight weeks at the most, they said, and probably just six, and then Massena's troops would have Lisbon at their mercy. The British had had their run and now it was over, the last hurdles to be cleared, but in St Petersburg and Vienna, Stockholm and Berlin, they let the maps curl up and wondered where the victorious blue-jacketed troops would be next sent. A pity about the British, but what did anyone expect?

Cox was on the southern ramparts, standing by a brazier, waiting for the first light to show him the new French batteries. Yesterday the French had fired a few shots, destroying the telegraph, but today, Cox knew, things would begin in earnest. He hoped for a great defence, a struggle that would make the history books, that would block the French till the rains of late autumn could save Portugal; but he also imagined the siege guns, the paths blasted through the great walls, and then the screaming, steel-tipped battalions that would come forward in the night to drown his hopes in chaos and defeat. Cox and the French both knew the town was the last obstacle to French victory, and, hope as Cox did, in his heart he did not believe that the town could hold out till the roads were swamped and the rivers made impassable by rain.