They followed mountain paths that twisted over barren spurs and led through wild valleys. Once they passed a village sacked by the French. Not a building remained intact, not a person was in sight, not an animal still lived. Nor did one of Vivar’s men speak as they passed the charred beams from which the rain dripped slow.

They had started well before noon, for there were many miles to travel before dawn. Vivar’s Cazadores led. One squadron of the cavalry was mounted to patrol the land ahead of the march. Behind those picquets came the dis-mounted Cazadores, leading their horses. Behind them were the volunteers. The two priests rode just in front of Sharpe’s Riflemen who formed the rearguard. The strongbox travelled with the two priests. The precious cargo had been strapped to a macho, a mule whose vocal cords had been slit so it could not bray to warn the enemy.

Sergeant Patrick Harper was pleased to be marching to battle. The white silk stripes were bright on his ragged sleeve. “The lads are just fine, sir. My boys are delighted, so they are.”

“They’re all your boys,” Sharpe said, by which he meant that Harper’s especial responsibility extended beyond the group of Irish soldiers.

Harper nodded. “So they are, sir, and so they are.” He gave a quick glance at the marching greenjackets and was evidently satisfied that they needed no injunction to move faster. “They’ll be glad to be having a crack at the bastards, so they will.”

“Some of them must be worried?” Sharpe asked, hoping to draw Harper out about a rumoured incident earlier in the week, but the Sergeant blithely disregarded the hint.

“You don’t fight the bloody crapauds without being worried, sir, but think how worried the French would be if they knew the Rifles were coming. And Irish Rifles, too!”

Sharpe decided to question him directly. “What happened between you and Gataker?”

Harper shot him a look of perfect innocence. “Nothing at all, sir.”

Sharpe did not press the matter. He had heard that Gataker, a fly and shifty man, had opposed their involvement in Vivar’s scheme. The greenjackets had no business fighting private battles, he had claimed, especially ones likely to leave most of them dead or maimed. The pessimism could have spread swiftly, but Harper had put a ruthless stop to it and Gataker’s black eye had been explained as a tumble down the gatehouse stairs. “Terrible dark steps there,” was all Harper would say on the matter.

It was for just such swift resolutions of problems that

Sharpe had wanted the Irishman’s promotion, and it had proved an instant success. Harper had assumed the authority easily, and if that authority stemmed more from his strength and personality than from the silk stripes on his right sleeve, then so much the better. Captain Murray’s dying words had been proved right; with Harper on his side, Sharpe’s problems were halved.

The Riflemen marched into the night. It became dark as Hades and, though an occasional granite outcrop loomed blacker than the surrounding darkness, it seemed to Sharpe that they moved blind through a featureless landscape.

Yet this was the country of Bias Vivar’s volunteers. There were herdsmen among them who knew these hills as well as Sharpe had known his childhood alleys about St Giles in London. These men were now scattered throughout the column as guides, their services abetted by the cigars which Vivar had distributed amongst his small force. He was certain no Frenchmen would be this deep in the hills to smell the tobacco, and the small glowing lights acted as tiny beacons to keep the marching men closed up.

Yet, despite the guides and the cigars, their pace slowed in the night and became even slower as the rain made the paths slippery. The frequent streams were swollen, and Vivar insisted that each one was sprinkled with holy water before the vanguard splashed through. The men were tired and hungry, and in the darkness their fears became treacherous; the fears of men who go to an unequal battle and in whom apprehension festers until it becomes close to terror.

The rain stopped two hours before the dawn. There was no wind. Frost made the grass brittle. The cigars were finished, but their usefulness was ended anyway for a mist silted the last valleys before the city.

When the rain stopped, Vivar called a halt.

He stopped because there was a danger that the French might have put heavy picquets into the villages which lay in the hills about the city. Refugees from Santiago de Com-postela knew of no such precautions, but Vivar guarded against it by ordering that any piece of equipment which might rattle or clang must be tied down. Musket and rifle-slings, canteens and mess tins, all were muffled. It still seemed to Sharpe, as they moved off, that the troops made sufficient noise to wake the dead; horseshoes clicked on stone, iron boot-heels thumped frosted earth, but no French picquet startled the darkness with a volley of musketry to warn the distant city.

The Riflemen now led the march. Vivar followed with his cavalry, but the greenjackets led because they were the experienced infantry who would spearhead the attack. Cavalry could not assault a barricaded town; only infantry could achieve such a thing, and this time it had to be done without loaded firearms. Sharpe had reluctantly agreed that his Riflemen would make the assault with the bayonet alone.

A flintlock was a precarious thing. Even uncocked the weapon could fire if the flint’s doghead snagged on a twig, was dragged back, then released. Such a shot, however accidental, would alert French sentries.

It was one thing to order men not to fire; to tell them that their lives depended on a silent approach, but in the misted darkness just before dawn, when a man’s blood was at its coldest and his fears warmest, a cat’s squawl could be enough to scare a Rifleman and make him fire blind into the night. Just one such shot would bring Frenchmen tumbling from their guardhouses.

And so, though yielding the point had added to Sharpe’s dread, he had seen the force of Vivar’s pleading and so had agreed to advance with empty weapons. Now no shot could startle the night.

Yet still the French could be forewarned. Such fears were Sharpe’s tumultuous companions on the long and ever more halting march. Perhaps the French had their own spies in the mountains who, just as the refugees had betrayed information to Vivar, had betrayed Vivar to the city? Or perhaps de l’Eclin, a man whose ruthlessness was absolute, had whipped the truth from Louisa? Perhaps artillery had been fetched from Corunna and waited, charged with canister, to greet the fumbling attackers? Attackers, moreover, who would be tired, cold, and without loaded guns. The first moments of such a fight would be slaughter.

Sharpe’s fears burgeoned and, away from Vivar’s indomitable cheerfulness, he let the doubts gnaw at him. He could not express those doubts, for to do so would destroy whatever confidence his men might have in his leadership. He could only hope that he conveyed the same certainty as Patrick Harper who seemed to march eagerly over the last steep miles. Once, as they splashed through a soggy reach of grassland beneath the dark line of a pinewood, Harper spoke enthusiastically of just how grand it would be to see Miss Louisa again. “She’s a brave lass, sir.”

“And a foolish one,” Sharpe replied sourly, still angry that her life had been risked.

Yet Louisa was the reverse of Sharpe’s fear; the consolation which, like a tiny beacon in an immense darkness, kept him going. She was his hope, but arrayed against that hope were the demons of fear. Those demons became more sinister with every forced halt. Sharpe’s guide, a blacksmith from the city, was leading a circuitous route that would avoid the villages and the man stopped frequently to sniff the air as though he could find his way by scent alone.