“Well?” Vivar sensed from Sharpe’s silence and immobility that the Rifleman already believed the battle lost.

“Where’s your cavalry?” Sharpe asked, not out of interest, but to delay the horrid decision.

“Davila’s leading them. They’ll be in place. The volunteers are in the pasture behind.” Receiving no response, Vivar touched Sharpe’s arm. “With or without you, I’ll do it. I have to do it, Lieutenant. I would not care if the Emperor himself and all the forces of hell guarded the city, I would have to do it. There is no other way of expunging my family’s shame. I have a brother who is a traitor, so the treason must be washed away with enemy blood. And God will look mercifully upon such a wish, Lieutenant. You say you do not believe, but I think on the verge of battle every man feels the breath of God.”

It was a fine speech, but Sharpe did not relent. “Will God keep the guardhouse quiet?”

“If he wills it, yes.” The mist was lightening. Sharpe could see the bare pale branches of the elm above him. Every second’s delay was puting the assault in more jeopardy, and Vivar knew it. “Well?” he asked again. Still Sharpe said nothing and the Spaniard, with a gesture of disgust, stood. “We Spanish will do it alone, Lieutenant.”

“Bugger you, no! Rifles!” Sharpe stood. He thought of Louisa; she had said something about seizing the moment and, despite his demons, Sharpe thought he might lose her if he did not act now. “Coats and packs off!” The Riflemen, so they could fight unencumbered, obeyed. “And load!”

Vivar hissed a caution against loading the rifles, but Sharpe would not go into the attack with neither surprise nor loaded weapons. The risk of a misfire must be endured. He waited till the last ramrod had been thrust home and the last lock primed. “Fix swords!”

Blades scraped, then clicked as the bayonets’ spring-loaded catches slotted onto the rifle muzzles. Sharpe slung his own rifle and drew his big clumsy sword. Tn file, Sergeant. Tell the men not to make a bloody sound!“ He looked at Vivar. Til not have you thinking we didn’t have the courage.”

Vivar smiled. “I would never have thought that. Here.” He reached up and took the tiny sprig of dead rosemary from his hat and tucked it into a loose loop on Sharpe’s jacket.

“Does that make me one of your elite?” Sharpe asked.

Vivar shook his head. “It’s a herb that averts evil, Lieutenant.”

For a second Sharpe was tempted to reject the super-stition, then, remembering his defiance of the xanes, he let the shred of rosemary stay where it was. The morning’s task had become so desperate that he was even prepared to believe that a dead herb could give him protection. “Forward!”

In for a penny, Sharpe thought and, God damn it, but he had put his approval on Vivar’s madness back in the fort’s chapel when he had let the mystery of the gonfalon overwhelm him like the heady fumes of some dark and heated wine. Now was not the time to let the fears stop the insanity.

So forward. Forward through the trees, past a stone wall, and suddenly Sharpe’s boots grated on flint and he saw they had come to the road. A building loomed dark to his right, while ahead of him he could at last see the guardhouse fire. Its flames were dim, smeared vague by the mist, but it had been lit outside the church and thus illumined the roadway. Any second now the challenge might sound. “Close up!” Sharpe whispered to Harper. “And fingers off triggers!”

“Close up!” Harper hissed. “And don’t bloody fire!”

Sharpe proposed to go past the guardhouse at a run. The noise would begin then, but that could not be helped. It would begin with the smatter of musket and rifle fire, and end in the full cacophony of death. For now, though, there was only the scrape of boots on flint, the thump of muffled equipment, and the hoarse breathing of men already tired by hours and hours of marching.

Harper crossed himself. The other Irishman in the company did the same. They grinned, not with pleasure, but fear. The Riflemen were shaking, and their bellies wanted to empty. Mary, Mother of God, Harper repeated to himself time and time again. He supposed he should say a prayer to St James, but he knew none, and so he nervously repeated the more familiar invocation. Be with us now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

Sharpe led the advance. He walked slowly; ever staring at the smeared light of the watch-fire. The flamelight glinted up his sword blade which he held low. Far beyond the first blaze, he could now see the blur of other fires which must be burning at the margin of the main French defence. The mist was silvering, lightening, and he even thought he could see the faint tangle of pinnacles and domes that was the city’s roofline. It was a small city, Vivar had said; a mere handful of houses about the abbey, hostels, cathedral, and plaza, but a city held by the French that must be taken by a motley little army.

A motley, brown-dressed, ill-trained little force that was inspired by one man’s faith. Vivar, Sharpe thought, must be drunk on God if he believed the moth-eaten shred of silk could work its miracle. It was madness. If the British army knew that an ex-Sergeant was leading Riflemen on such a mission, they would court-martial him. Sharpe supposed he was as mad as Vivar; the only difference was that Vivar was goaded by God, and Sharpe by the stubborn, stupid pride of a soldier who would not admit defeat.

Yet, Sharpe reminded himself, other men had achieved glory on dreams just as impractical. Those few knights, forced a thousand years before to their fastnesses in the mountains by the overwhelming armies of Mahomet, must have felt just this same despair. When those knights had tightened their girths and lifted their lances from the stirrup-couches and stared at the great crescent of the enemy beneath the rippling banners that had brought blood from the desert, they must have known that this was the hour of their death. Yet still they had slammed down the visors of their helmets, raked back their spurs, and charged.

A stone grated beneath Sharpe’s foot and brought his thoughts back to the present. They were in a street now, the countryside left behind. The windows of the silent houses had iron grilles. The road was climbing, not steeply, but enough of a slope to make the charge more difficult. A shape moved by the fire, then Sharpe saw there was a crude barrier placed across the road that would stop his mad dash to the city’s main defences. The barriers was nothing but two handcarts and some chairs, but still a barrier.

The moving shape by the watch-fire resolved itself into a human silhouette; a Frenchman who stooped to light a pipe with a burning spill taken from the flames. The man suspected nothing, nor did he look northwards to where he might have seen the reflection of firelight on fixed bayonets.

Then a dog barked in a house to Sharpe’s right. He was so tense that he jumped sideways. The dog became frantic. Another dog took up the alarm, and a cockerel challenged the morning. The Riflemen instinctively quickened their pace.

The Frenchman by the fire straightened and turned. Sharpe could see the distinctive shape of the man’s shako; an infantryman. Not a dismounted cavalryman, but a Goddamned French infantryman who unslung his musket and pointed it towards the Riflemen. ‘Qui vive?

The challenge began the day’s fight. Sharpe took a breath, and ran.