He pushed upwards. He could smell Harper’s breath and feel the rank fear from the man. He sympathized with it. Sharpe had once had a tooth pulled in India and he remembered the pain as vividly as any wound taken in battle. He pushed harder. The tooth did not move, though

Harper quivered as he loyally tried to push against Sharpe’s pressure.

“Harder,” Frederickson muttered.

Sharpe pushed harder, the metal jaws slipped up into the swollen gums, and the pincers were wrenched away as Harper bellowed and flailed to one side. “Jesus and his bloody saints! Christ!” The sergeant had his hands to his mouth that was trickling blood. “God in heaven!” He was keening with the sudden agony.

“It slipped,” Sharpe said in apologetic explanation.

“Bloody near killed me!” Harper swallowed more brandy, then spat a potent mixture of blood and alcohol on to the ground. “Jesus!”

“Perhaps I should try,” Frederickson offered. Lieutenant Minver, like his men, grinned.

“God damn all officers! All!” Harper was in a blaze of anger now. “Bloody murdering bastards!” He picked up the pincers, opened his mouth, and probed with a finger.

He flinched.

Sharpe drew back. The Riflemen, no longer laughing, watched as the huge, bare-chested man put the pincers over his own tooth. The big hand closed and Harper’s blue eyes seemed to grow wider. He pushed and Sharpe heard a distinct crack, like gristle snapping, then the pincers were being twisted right and left, Harper was moaning, and again there were the tiny sounds of tissue parting or bone grating.

Sharpe held his breath. No one moved. A French child of ten could have taken these prize troops captive at this moment as the bare-chested Harper, shaking with the pain and cold, began to pull.

The Irishman’s hand trembled. A bead of blood pulsed at his lower lip, another, then in a great groan and a gush of pus and blood, the huge tooth tore free. Scraps of flesh were attached to its branching roots, but blood, bright red blood was pouring on to Harper’s chest in great rivulets that steamed in the cold air.

“Get him on to the wagon!” Sharpe ordered.

“Christ in his heaven!” The pain had brought tears to Harper’s eyes. He stood, coughing blood, a fearful sight. He was weeping now, not out of weakness, but in anger and pain. He was blood smothered; steaming with warm blood, coughing blood, his face and chest soaked in blood.

“You shouldn’t go,” Frederickson said to Sharpe, meaning that it was foolish for the two senior officers to risk themselves at the same time.

Sharpe ignored the well-meant advice. “Lieutenant Minver. As soon as we have the gate open, you charge! Swords fitted!”

“Sir.” The lieutenant, a thin dark man, smiled nervously. Harper lay on the cart, shivering.

“Take your men to the edge of the sand,” Sharpe said as he took off his pack, his officer’s sash, snake-buckled belt, his Rifleman’s jacket, and his shako. Frederickson was doing the same. “Sergeant Rossner? You bring this equipment.”

“Sir!”

Harper’s seven-barrelled gun, loaded and primed, was put beside the Irishman’s bloodstained right hand. His rifle was on the left side of the cart where Sharpe’s sword, drawn from the scabbard, lay easily to hand. Sharpe wanted to give the impression of three men bringing the victim of an accident from the ambush party. Yet success depended on the French guards seeing only the dreadful blood on Patrick Harper.

Harper, lying belly up on the cart, was in danger of choking on his own blood. He spat a thick gob, turned his head, and spat again. “Spit onto your chest! Don’t waste it!” Sharpe said. Harper growled in mutiny, then spat a satisfying lump of blood down to his navel. Sharpe took one handle of the cart, Frederickson the other, and Sharpe- nodded. “Move.”

The firing from the fort had stopped which meant, Sharpe knew, that either the frigate was out of range or else was sinking. There was no sound from the ambush site.

The cart screeched foully on the rough track that led past scrawny alders towards the Teste de Buch. Far away, over the houses and beyond the dunes, Sharpe saw a shiver of white which he knew must be the frigate’s topsails, then heard a bellow of thunder and saw a blossom of smoke which told him Grant had opened fire again. Captain Grant, at least, was doing his duty. Even at the cost of his ship and men he was drawing the fort’s fire, and his success was measured by the sudden clap of thunder as the huge fortress guns opened their own fire again.

The cart axle screeched fit to wake the dead, bounced on the uneven road, and Harper groaned. His right hand, streaked with bloody rivulets, groped for his seven-barrelled gun and Sharpe, seeing the movement, knew the huge Irishman was recovering. “Well done, Sergeant.”

“Didn’t mean to be rude to you, sir.” Harper choked on blood as he said the words.

“Yes, you did,” Frederickson cheerfully answered for Sharpe. “So would any man. Now shut up. You’re supposed to be dying.”

Patrick Harper said nothing more as the cart slewed round a corner, over a muddy rut, and up on to the harder track that led straight to the bridge over the fort’s inner ditch. The wind gusted, bringing the stench of powder smoke in its cold touch. No sound came from the south and Sharpe knew the Marines were still far from Arcachon. If the Scylla was to be saved from further punishment, then the Rifles would have to do the job.

They were already within cannon-range of the fort, but no gunners stared from the deep embrasures. “Run,” Sharpe said. “Run as if he’s dying.”

“He is,” Harper groaned.

Sharpe had to push hard to keep up with Frederickson’s pace and he saw a head appear on the fortress wall, he saw the tricolour lift to the smoke-fouled wind, then Sweet William, beside him, was shouting in breathless French and Sharpe knew that it was madness for three men to take on one of the coastal forts of mainland France, but he was committed now, inside musket range, and all they could do was push on, pray, then fight like the soldiers that they were; the best.

CHAPTER 7

They stopped ignominiously on the sand-gritted planks of the drawbridge.

The gates did not open, they could go no further, and Sharpe and Frederickson, chests heaving and breath misting into great plumes from the effort of pushing the obstinate cart with Harper’s weight, could only stare up at a puzzled face which appeared on the ramparts.

Frederickson shouted to the sentry in French, an answer was made, and Harper, fearing a sudden musket blast from above, groaned horribly on the cart. The blood on his huge chest was drying to a cracked crust.

“He wants to know,” Frederickson spoke to Sharpe with astonishment in his voice, “whether we’re the Americans.”

“Yes!” Sharpe shouted. “Yes, yes!”

„Attendee!“ The guard’s head disappeared.

Sharpe turned to look through the notch made where the approach road cut through the glacis. He stared at the place where the villagers stood by the trees and where he had dimly discerned the shape of a gun’s limber among the pines. “The Americans are manning those guns?” He too sounded astonished.

Frederickson shrugged. “Must be.”

Sharpe turned back, his boots making a hollow sound on the thick planks of the drawbridge. To right and left the flooded inner ditch stretched. The ditch water, fed by a rivulet from the millstream, seemed shallow enough, but it would still be a cloying obstacle to men trying to assault the gaunt, rough-faced wall of the fort’s enceinte.

The fortress guns bellowed to Sharpe’s left, jetting smoke and flame towards the frigate that was now beyond Cap Ferrat. The battle had become a long-range duel as Grant teased the fort and, doubtless, cursed the land force for their late arrival.