Even as that realization struck him, Sharpe also realized that he was acting like a Rifleman, not like an officer. He had taken shelter, he was looking for a target, and he did not know what his men were doing back in the gorge. Not that he had any desire to go back into that trap of rock and bullets, but such was an officer’s duty and so he picked himself up and ran.

He shouldered through the assembling Spaniards, saw that the mule lay kicking and bleeding, then was aware of a buzzing and cracking about his ears. The carbine bullets were spitting down into the gorge, ricocheting wildly, filling the air with a tangle of death. He saw a greenjacket lying on his belly. Blood had spewed from the man’s mouth to stain a square yard of melting snow. A rifle cracked to Sharpe’s left, then one to his right. The greenjackets had taken what cover they could and were trying to kill the Frenchmen above. It occurred to him that the French should have put more men on the heights, that the volume of their fire was too small to overwhelm the road. The thought was so surprising that he stood quite still and gaped at the high skyline.

He was right. The French had just enough men on the heights to pin the ambush down, yet the killing would not be done by those men, but by others: That knowledge gave Sharpe hope, and told him what he must do. He began by striding down the road’s centre and shouting for his men. “Rifles! To me! To me!”

The Riflemen did not move. A bullet slapped into the snow beside Sharpe. The French cavalrymen, more used to the sword than the carbine, were aiming high, but that common fault was small consolation amidst their bullets. Sharpe again shouted for the Riflemen to come to him but, naturally enough, they preferred the small shelter offered at the base of the cliffs. He dragged one man out of a rock cleft. “That way! Run! Wait for me at the end of the gorge.” He rousted others. “On your feet! Move!” He kicked more men to their feet. “Sergeant Williams?”

“Sir?” The reply came from further down the chasm, somewhere beyond the skeins of rifle smoke that were trapped by the rock walls.

Tf we stay here we’re dead ‘uns. Rifles! Follow me!“

They followed. Sharpe had no time to reflect on the irony that men who had so recently tried to kill him now obeyed his orders. They obeyed because Sharpe knew what needed to be done, and the certainty of his knowledge was strong in him, and it was that certainty which fetched the green-jackets out of their scanty shelter. They also followed because the only other man they might have trusted, Harper, was not with them, but still tied to the wounded mule’s tail.

“Follow! Follow!” Sharpe jumped a wounded Spaniard, twisted as a bullet slashed past his face, then turned to his right. He had led his men almost to the mouth of the canyon, just behind the place where Vivar still formed his own dismounted cavalrymen into line. Once, years before, a fall of rock had slid down to make a shoulder of scree and turf and, though the slope was perilously steep, and made even more perilous by the melting snow, it offered a short cut to the hillside which, in turn, led to the heights above. Sharpe scrambled up the rockfall, using his rifle as a staff, and behind him, in ones and twos, the Riflemen followed.

“Skirmish order!” Sharpe paused at the top of the first steep slope to shrug off his encumbering pack. “Spread out!”

Some of the Riflemen suddenly realized what was expected of them. They were supposed to assault a steep and slippery slope at the top of which the French would be protected by the natural bastions of jumbled rock. Some of them hesitated and looked for cover. “Move!” Sharpe’s voice was louder than the gunfire. “Move! Skirmish order! Move!”

They moved, not because of any confidence in Sharpe, but because the habit of obedience under fire ran deep.

Sharpe knew that to stay in the gorge was to die.

The French wanted them in there, pinned by the carbines above to be slaughtered by the Dragoons who would charge from the roadblock. The only way to prise this ambush apart was to attack one of its jaws. Men would die in the attempt, but not so many as would die in the blood-reeking sludge and horror on the roadway.

Sharpe heard Vivar shout a word of command in Spanish, but he ignored it. The Major must do what he thought fit, and Sharpe would do as he thought best, and the strange exaltation of battle suddenly gripped him. Here, in the filthy stench of powder smoke, he felt at home. This had been his life for sixteen years. Other men learned to plough fields or to shape wood, but Sharpe had learned how to use a musket or rifle, sword or bayonet, and how to turn an enemy’s flank or assault a fortress. He knew fear, which was every soldier’s familiar companion, but Sharpe also knew how to turn the enemy’s own fear to his advantage.

High above Sharpe, silhouetted against the grey clouds, a French officer redeployed his men to face the new threat. The dismounted Dragoons who had lined the canyon’s edge, must now scramble to their right to face this unexpected attack on their flank. They moved urgently, and the first French bullets hissed whip-quick in the freezing air.

“I want fire! I want fire!” Sharpe shouted as he climbed, and was rewarded by the cracks of the Baker rifles. The Riflemen were doing what they were trained to do. One man fired as his partner moved. The Dragoons, still searching for new positions in the high rocks, would hear the bullets spin past their ears. The French did not use rifles, preferring the faster musket, but a musket was a clumsy weapon compared to the slow-loading Baker.

A bullet hissed by Sharpe. He thought it must have been a rifle bullet fired from behind him and he wondered if one of his men, hating him, had aimed at his back. There was no time for that fear now though it was a real fear, for in India he had known more than one unpopular officer shot in the back. “Faster! Faster! Left! Left!”

Sharpe was gambling on his instinct that the men who had been positioned on the heights were only enough to hold the ambush down, and he hoped he was stretching those men too thin. He went further left, forcing the French to move again. He saw a face in the rocks ahead, a moustached face framed by the odd pigtails of the French Dragoons. Dragons was the French and Spanish name for them, and that thought wisped by Sharpe as the face disappeared behind a puff of smoke and again he heard the distinctive smack of a rifle bullet. A rifle! A Baker! He suddenly knew these must be the same men who had split apart Dunnett’s four companies of Riflemen at the bridge; they were using captured British rifles, and the memory of that defeat gave him a new anger which drove him onwards.

Sharpe turned abruptly towards the centre of the enemy’s weakened line. Somewhere on the hillside behind he had abandoned his unfired rifle and drawn his new sword. The weapon would make him a mark to the Dragoons, an officer to be shot, but it also made him visible to his men.

His legs were hurting with the effort of climbing. The slope was steep and ice-slick, and every footfall slid back before it took purchase. Anger had driven him up the hill, but now fear made him frail. Sharpe was panting, too out of breath to shout any more, conscious only of the need to close the gap on the French. He had a sudden certainty that he would die. He would die here, because even a Dragon could not fail to kill him at this short range. But still he climbed. What mattered was to prise open this jaw of the trap so that Vivar’s men could escape up the hill. Sharpe’s heart pounded in his chest, his muscles burned, his bruises ached, and he wondered whether he would feel the bullet that killed him. Would it strike clean, throwing him back to slide in blood and thawing snow down the slope? At least his men would know he was no coward. He would show the bastards how a real soldier died.