The Real Compañía Irlandesa bivouacked on the plateau north and west of Fuentes de Oñoro. The village lay astride the southernmost road leading from Ciudad Rodrigo to Almeida and in the night Wellington’s army had closed about the village that now threatened to become a battlefield. The dawn mist hid the eastern countryside where the French army readied itself, while up on the plateau Wellington’s forces were a smoke-obscured chaos of troops, horses and wagons. Guns were parked on the plateau’s eastern crest, their barrels pointing across the Dos Casas stream that marked the army’s forward line.

Donaju discovered Sharpe squinting sideways into a scrap of mirror in an attempt to cut his own hair. The sides and the front were easy enough to trim, the difficulty always lay in the rear. “Just like soldiering,” Sharpe said.

“You’ve heard about Kiely?” Donaju, suddenly in command of the Real Compañía Irlandesa, ignored Sharpe’s gnomic comment.

Sharpe snipped, frowned, then tried to repair the damage by snipping again, but it only made things worse. “Blew his head off, I heard.”

Donaju flinched at Sharpe’s callousness, but made no protest. “I can’t believe he would do such a thing,” he said instead.

“Too much pride, not enough sense. Sounds like most bloody aristocrats to me. These damn scissors are blunt.”

Donaju frowned. “Why don’t you have a servant?”

“Can’t afford one. Besides, I’ve always looked after myself.”

“And cut your own hair?”

“There’s a pretty girl among the battalion wives who usually cuts it,” Sharpe said. But Sally Clayton, like the rest of the South Essex, was far away. The South Essex was too shrunken by war to serve in the battle line and now was doing guard duty on the army’s Portuguese depots and thus would be spared Marshal Masséna’s battle to relieve Almeida and cut the British retreat across the Coa.

“Father Sarsfield is burying Kiely tomorrow,” Donaju said.

“Father Sarsfield might be burying a lot of us tomorrow,” Sharpe said. “If they bury us at all. Have you ever seen a battlefield a year after the fighting? It’s like a boneyard. Skulls lying about like boulders, and fox-chewed bones everywhere. Bugger this,” he said savagely as he gave his hair a last forlorn chop.

“Kiely can’t even be buried in a churchyard”—Donaju did not want to think about battlefields on this ominous morning—“because it was suicide.”

“There aren’t many soldiers who get a proper grave,” Sharpe said, “so I wouldn’t grieve for Kiely. We’ll be lucky if any of us get a proper hole, let alone a stone on top. Dan!” he shouted to Hagman.

“Sir?”

“Your bloody scissors are blunt.”

“Sharpened them last night, sir,” Hagman said stoically. “It’s like my father always said, sir, only a bad workman blames his tools, sir.”

Sharpe tossed the scissors across to Hagman, then brushed the cut strands of hair from his shirt. “You’re better off without Kiely,” he told Donaju.

“To guard the ammunition park?” Donaju said bitterly. “We would have done better to stay in Madrid.”

“To be thought of as traitors?” Sharpe asked as he pulled on his jacket. “Listen, Donaju, you’re alive and Kiely isn’t. You’ve got yourself a good company to command. So what if you’re guarding the ammunition? You think that isn’t important? What happens if the Crapauds break through?”

Donaju did not seem cheered by Sharpe’s opinions. “We’re orphans,” he said self-pityingly. “No one cares what happens to us.”

“Why do you want someone to care?” Sharpe asked bluntly. “You’re a soldier, Donaju, not a child. They issued you with a sword and a gun so you could take care of yourself, not have others take care of you. But as it happens, they do care. They care enough to send the whole lot of you to Cadiz, and I care enough to tell you that you’ve got two choices. You can go to Cadiz whipped and with your men knowing they’ve been whipped, or you can go back with your pride intact. It’s up to you, but I know which one I’d choose.”

This was the first Donaju had heard of the Real Compañía Irlandesa’s proposed move to Cadiz and he frowned as he tried to work out whether Sharpe was being serious. “You’re sure about Cadiz?”

“Of course I’m sure,” Sharpe said. “General Valverde’s been pulling strings. He doesn’t think you should be here at all, so now you’re off to join the rest of the Spanish army.”

Donaju digested the news for a few seconds, then nodded approval. “Good,” he said enthusiastically. “They should have sent us there in the first place.” He sipped his mug of tea and made a wry face at the taste. “What happens to you now?”

“I’m ordered to stay with you till someone tells me to go somewhere else,” Sharpe said. He did not want to admit that he was facing a court of inquiry, not because he was ashamed of his conduct, but because he did not want other men’s sympathies. The court was a battle that he would have to face when the time came.

“You’re guarding the ammunition?” Donaju seemed surprised.

“Someone has to,” Sharpe said. “But don’t worry, Donaju, they’ll take me away from you before you go to Cadiz. Valverde doesn’t want me there.”

“So what do we do today?” Donaju asked nervously.

“Today,” Sharpe said, “we do our duty. And there are fifty thousand Frogs doing theirs, and somewhere over that hill, Donaju, their duty and our duty will get bloody contradictory.”

“It will be bad,” Donaju said, not quite as a statement and not quite as a question either.

Sharpe heard the nervousness. Donaju had never been in a major battle and any man, however brave, was right to be nervous at the prospect. “It’ll be bad,” Sharpe said. “The noise is the worst, that and the powder fog, but always remember one thing: it’s just as bad for the French. And I’ll tell you another thing. I don’t know why, and maybe it’s just my imagination, but the Frogs always seem to break before we do. Just when you think you can’t hold on for a minute longer, count to ten and by the time you reach six the bloody Frogs will have turned tail and buggered off. Now watch out, here’s trouble.”

The trouble was manifested by the approach of a thin, tall and bespectacled major in the blue coat of the Royal Artillery. He was carrying a sheaf of papers that kept coming loose as he tried to find one particular sheet among the rest. The errant sheets were being fielded by two nervous red-coated privates, one of whom had his arm in a dirty sling while the other was struggling along on a crutch. The major waved at Sharpe and Donaju, thus releasing another flutter of paper. “The thing is,” the major said without any attempt to introduce himself, “that the divisions have their own ammunition parks. One or the other, I said, make up your mind! But no! Divisions will be independent! Which leaves us, you understand, with the central reserve. They call it that, though God knows it’s rarely in the center and, of course, in the very nature of things, we are never told what stocks the divisions themselves hold. They demand more, we yield, and suddenly there is none. It is a problem. Let us hope and pray the French do things worse. Is that tea?” The major, who had a broad Scottish accent, peered hopefully at the mug in Donaju’s hand.

“It is, sir,” Donaju said, “but foul.”

“Let me taste it, I beg you. Thank you. Pick up that paper, Magog, the day’s battle may depend upon it. Gog and Magog,” he introduced the two hapless privates. “Gog is bereft one arm, Magog one leg, and both the rogues are Welsh. Together they are a Welshman and a half, and the three of us, or two and a half if I am to be exact, comprise the entire staff complement of the central reserve.” The major smiled suddenly. “Alexander Tarrant,” he introduced himself. “Major in the artillery but seconded to the quartermaster general’s staff. I think of myself as the assistant-assistant-assistant quartermaster general, and you, I suspect, are the new assistant-assistant-assistant-assistant quartermaster general? Which means that Gog and Magog are now assistant-assistant-assistant-assistant-assistant quartermaster generals. Demoted, by God! Will their careers ever recover? This tea is delicious, though tepid. You must be Captain Sharpe?”

“Yes, sir.”

“An honor, Sharpe, ’pon my soul, an honor.” Tarrant thrust out a hand, thus releasing a cascade of paper. “Heard about the dickie-bird, Sharpe, and confess I was moved mightily.” It took Sharpe half a second to realize that Tarrant was talking about the eagle that Sharpe had captured at Talavera, but before he could respond the major was already talking again. “And you must be Donaju of the royal guard? ’Pon my soul, Gog, but we’re in elevated company! You’ll have to mind your manners today!”

“Private Hughes, sir,” Gog introduced himself to Sharpe, “and that’s my brother.” He gestured with his one arm at Magog.

“The Hughes brothers,” Tarrant explained, “were wounded in their country’s service and reduced to my servitude. Till now, Sharpe, they have been the sole guard for the ammunition. Gog would kick intruders and Magog shake his crutch at them. Once recovered, of course, they will return to duty and I shall be provided with yet more cripples to protect the powder and shot. Except today, Donaju, I have your fine fellows. Let us examine your duties!”

The duties were hardly onerous. The central reserve was just that, a place where hard-pressed divisions, brigades or even battalions could send for more ammunition. A motley collection of Royal Wagon Train drivers augmented by muleteers and carters recruited from the local population were available to deliver the infantry cartridges while the artillery usually provided their own transport. The difficulty of his own job, Tarrant said, was in working out which requests were frivolous and which desperate. “I like to keep the supplies intact,” the Scotsman said, “until we near the end of an engagement. Anyone requesting ammunition in the first few hours is either already defeated or merely nervous. These papers purport to describe the divisional reserves, though the Lord alone knows how accurate they are.” He thrust the papers at Sharpe, then pulled them back in case Sharpe muddled them. “Lastly, of course,” Tarrant went on, “there is always the problem of making certain the ammunition gets through. Drivers can be”—he paused, looking for a word—“cowards!” he finally said, then frowned at the severity of the judgment. “Not all, of course, and some are wonderfully stout-hearted, but the quality isn’t consistent. Perhaps, gentlemen, when the fighting gets bloody, I might rely on your men to fortify the drivers’ bravery?” He made this inquiry nervously, as though half expecting that Sharpe or Donaju might refuse. When neither offered a demurral, he smiled. “Good! Well, Sharpe, maybe you’d like to survey the landscape? Can’t despatch ammunition without knowing whither it’s bound.”

The offer gave Sharpe a temporary freedom. He knew that both he and Donaju had been shuffled aside as inconveniences and that Tarrant needed neither of them, yet still a battle was to be fought and the more Sharpe understood of the battlefield the better. “Because if things go bad, Pat,” he told Harper as the two of them walked toward the gun line on the misted plateau’s crest, “we’ll be in the thick of it.” The two carried their weapons, but had left their packs and greatcoats with the ammunition wagons.

“Still seems odd,” Harper said, “having nothing proper to do.”

“Bloody Frogs might find us work,” Sharpe said dourly. The two men were standing at the British gun line that faced east into the rising sun that was making the mist glow above the Dos Casas stream. That stream flowed south along the foot of the high, flat-topped ridge where Sharpe and Harper were standing and which barred the French routes to Almeida. The French could have committed suicide by attacking directly over the stream and fighting up the ridge’s steep escarpment into the face of the British guns, but barring that unlikely self-destruction there were only two other routes to the besieged garrison at Almeida. One led north around the ridge, but that road was barred by the still formidable ruins of Fort Concepción and Wellington had decided that Masséna would try this southern road that led through Fuentes de Oñoro.

The village lay where the ridge fell to a wide, marshy plain above which the morning mist now shredded and faded. The road from Ciudad Rodrigo ran white and straight across that flatland to where it forded the Dos Casas stream. Once over the stream, the road climbed the hill between the village houses to reach the plateau, where it forked into two roads. One road led to Almeida a dozen miles to the northwest and the other to Castello Bom and its murderously narrow bridge across the deep gorge of the Coa. If the French were to reach either road and so relieve the besieged town and force the redcoats back to the bottleneck of the narrow bridge, then they must first fight up the steep village streets of Fuentes de Oñoro, which was garrisoned with a mix of redcoats and greenjackets.

The ridge and the village both demanded that the enemy fight uphill, but there was a second and much more inviting option open to the French. A second road ran west across the plain south of the village. That second road ran through flat country and led to the passable fords that crossed the Coa further south. Those fords were the only place Wellington could hope to withdraw his guns, wagons and wounded if he was forced to retreat into Portugal, and if the French threatened to outflank Fuentes de Oñoro by looping deep around the southern plain, then Wellington would have to come down from the plateau to defend his escape route. If he chose not to come down from the heights, then he would abandon the only routes that offered a safe crossing of the River Coa. Such a decision to let the French cut the southern roads would commit Wellington’s army to victory or to utter annihilation. It was a choice Sharpe would not have wanted to make himself.

“God save Ireland,” Harper suddenly said, “but would you look at that?”

Sharpe had been looking south toward the inviting flat meadows that offered such an easy route around Fuentes de Oñoro’s flank, but now he looked east to where Harper was staring.

And to where the mist had thinned to reveal a long, dark grove of cork oaks and holm oaks, and out of that grove, just where the white road left the dark trees, an army was appearing. Masséna’s men must have bivouacked on the trees’ far side and the smoke of their morning fires had melded with the mist to look like cloud, but now, in a grimly threatening silence, the French army debouched onto the plain that lapped wide about the village.

Some of the British gunners leaped to their guns’ trails and began handspiking the cannons around so that the barrels were aimed at the place where the road came from the trees, but a gunner colonel trotted along the line and shouted at the crews to hold their fire. “Let them come closer! Hold your fire! Let’s see where they place their batteries! Don’t waste your powder. Morning, John! Nice one again!” the colonel called to an acquaintance, then touched his hat in a polite greeting to the two strange riflemen. “You boys will have some trade today, I don’t doubt.”

“You too, Colonel,” Sharpe said.

The colonel spurred on and Sharpe turned back to the east. He drew out his telescope and leaned on a gunwheel to steady the spyglass’s long barrel.

French infantry was forming at the tree line just behind the deploying batteries of French artillery. The guns’ teams of oxen and horses were being led back into the shelter of the oaks while squads of gunners hoisted the hugely heavy cannon barrels out of their rear traveling trunnion holes and moved them into the forward fighting holes where other men used hammers to fasten the capsquares over the newly placed trunnions. Other gunners were piling ammunition close to the guns: squat cylinders of roundshot ready-strapped to their canvas bags of gunpowder. “Looks like solid shot,” Sharpe told Harper. “They’ll be aiming for the village.”

The British gunners near Sharpe were making their own preparations. The guns’ ready magazines held a mixture of roundshot and case shot. The roundshot were solid iron balls that would plunge wickedly through advancing infantry, while the case shot was Britain’s secret weapon: the one artillery projectile that no other nation had learned to make. It was a hollow iron ball filled with musket bullets that were packed about a small powder charge that was ignited by a fuse. When the powder exploded it shattered the outer casing and spread the musket balls in a killing fan. If the case shot was properly employed it would explode just above and ahead of the advancing infantry and the secret to that horror lay in the missile’s fusing. The fuses were wooden or reed tubes filled with powder and marked into lengths, each small division of the marked length representing half a second of burning time. The fuses were cut for the desired time, then pushed into the case shot and ignited by the firing of the gun itself, but a fuse that had been left too long would let the shot scream safely over the enemy’s heads while one cut too short would explode prematurely. Gunner sergeants were cutting the fuses in different lengths, then laying the ammunition in piles that represented the different ranges. The first shells had fuses over half an inch long that would delay the explosion until the shot had carried eleven hundred yards while the shortest fuses were tiny stubs measuring hardly more than a fifth of an inch that would ignite the charge at six hundred and fifty yards. Once the enemy infantry was inside that distance the gunners would switch to roundshot alone and after that, when the French had closed to within three hundred and fifty yards, the guns would employ canister: tin cylinders crammed with musket balls that spread apart at the very muzzle of the cannon as the thin tin was shredded by the gun’s powder charge.

These guns would be firing down the slope and over the stream so that the French infantry would be exposed to shell or shot for their whole approach. That infantry was now forming its columns. Sharpe tried to count the eagles, but there were so many standards and so much movement among the enemy that it was hard to make an accurate assessment. “At least a dozen battalions,” he said.

“So where are the others?” Harper asked.

“God knows,” Sharpe said. During his reconnaissance with Hogan the night before he had estimated that the French were marching to Almeida with at least eighty infantry battalions, but he could only see a fraction of that host forming their attack columns at the edge of the far woods. “Twelve thousand men?” he guessed.

The last mist evaporated from the village just as the French opened fire. The opening salvo was ragged as the gun captains fired in turn so that they could observe the fall of their shot and so make adjustments to their guns’ aim. The first shot fell short, then bounced up over the few houses and walled gardens on the far bank to plough into a tiled roof halfway up the village slope. The sound of the gun arrived after the crash of falling tiles and splintering beams. The second shot cracked into an apple tree on the stream’s eastern bank and scattered a small shower of white blossom before it ricocheted into the water, but the next few rounds were all aimed straight and hammered into the village houses. The British gunners muttered grudging approval of the enemy gunners’ expertise.

“I wonder what poor sods are holding the village,” Harper said.

“Let’s go and find out.”

“I’m honestly not that curious, sir,” Harper protested, but followed Sharpe along the plateau’s crest. The high ground ended just above the village where the plateau bent at a right angle to run due west back into the hills. In the angle of the bend, directly above the village, were two rocky knolls, on one of which was built the village church with its stork’s ragged nest perched precariously on the bell tower. The church’s graveyard occupied the east-facing slope between the church and the village, and riflemen were crouched behind the mounded graves and canted stones, just as they were crouched among the outcrops of the second rocky knoll. Between the two stone peaks, on a saddle of short springy turf where yellow ragweed grew and where the Almeida road reached the high ground after zigzagging up beside the graveyard, a knot of staff officers sat their horses and watched the French cannonade which had begun to cloud the distant view with a dirty bank of smoke that twitched each time a roundshot blasted through. The cannon balls were crashing remorselessly into the village, smashing tile and thatch, splintering beams and toppling walls. The sound of the gunfire was a pounding that was palpable in the warm spring air, yet here, on the high ground above Fuentes de Oñoro, it was almost as though the battle for the village was something happening far away.

Sharpe led Harper on a wide detour behind the group of staff officers. “Nosey’s there,” he explained to Harper, “and I don’t need him glaring at me.”

“In his bad books, are we?”

“More than that, Pat. I’m facing a bloody court of inquiry.” Sharpe had not been willing to confess the truth to Donaju, but Harper was a friend and so he told him the story, and the bitterness of his plight could not help but spill over. “What was I supposed to do, Pat? Let those raping bastards live?”

“What will the court do to you?”

“Christ knows. At worst? Order a court-martial and have me thrown out of the army. At best? Break me down to lieutenant. But that’ll be the end of me. They’ll make me a storekeeper again, then put me in charge of bloody lists at some bloody depot where I can drink myself to death.”

“But they have to prove you shot those buggers! God save Ireland, but none of us will say a word. Jesus, I’d kill anyone who said different!”

“But there are others, Pat. Runciman and Sarsfield.”

“They won’t say a word, sir.”

“May be too late anyway. General bloody Valverde knows, and that’s all that matters. He’s got his knife stuck into me and there’s bugger all I can do about it.”

“Could shoot the bastard,” Harper said.

“You won’t catch him alone,” Sharpe said. He had dreamed of shooting Valverde, but doubted he would have the opportunity. “And Hogan says that bloody Loup might even send an official complaint!”

“It isn’t fair, sir,” Harper complained.

“No, Pat, it isn’t, but it hasn’t happened yet, and Loup might walk into a cannon ball today. But not a word to anyone, Pat. I don’t want half the bloody army discussing it.”

“I’ll keep quiet, sir,” Harper promised, though he could not imagine the news not getting round the army, nor could he imagine how anyone would think justice might be served by sacrificing an officer for shooting two French bastards. He followed Sharpe between two parked wagons and a brigade of seated infantry. Sharpe recognized the pale-green facings of the 24th, a Warwickshire regiment, while beyond them were the kilted and bonneted Highlanders of the 79th. The Highlanders’ pipers were playing a wild tune to the tattoo of drums, trying to rival the deeper percussive blasts of the French cannonade. Sharpe guessed the two battalions formed the reserve poised to go down into Fuentes de Oñoro’s streets if the French looked like capturing the village. A third battalion was just joining the reserve brigade as Sharpe turned toward the sound of breaking tiles and cracking stone.

“Right, down here,” Sharpe said. He had spotted a track that led beside the graveyard’s southern wall. It was a precipitous track, probably made by goats, and the two men had to use their hands to steady themselves on the steep top portion of the slope, then they ran down the last few yards to the scanty cover of an alleyway where they were greeted by the sudden appearance of a nervous redcoat who came round the corner with leveled musket. “Hold your fire, lad!” Sharpe called. “Anyone who comes down here is probably on your side, and if they’re not you’re in trouble.”

“Sorry, sir,” the boy said, then ducked as a scrap of tile whistled overhead. “They’re a bit lively, sir,” he added.

“Time to worry, lad, is when they stop firing,” Sharpe said, “because that means the infantry are on their way. Who’s in charge here?”

“Don’t know, sir. Unless it’s Sergeant Patterson.”

“I doubt it, lad, but thanks anyway.” Sharpe ran from the alley’s end, turned down a side street, dodged right into another street, jumped down a steep flight of stone stairs littered with broken tiles and so found himself in the main street which ran down the hill in a series of sharp twists. A roundshot hit the street’s center just as he ducked down beside a dungheap. The ball ploughed up a patch of stone and earth, then bounced to smash into a reed-thatched cattle byre as another roundshot splayed apart some roof beams across the street. Still more shots crashed home as the French gunners put in a sudden energetic spell. Sharpe and Harper took temporary cover in a doorway that bore the fading chalk marks from both armies’ billeting officers; one mark read 5/4/60 meaning that five men of number four company of the 60th Rifles had been billeted in the tiny cottage, while just above it was a legend saying that seven Frenchmen, the mark carried the enemy’s strange crossbar on the shank of the 7, of the 82nd of the Line had once been posted to the house that now lacked its roof. Dust drifted like mist in what had been the front room where a torn sacking curtain fluttered forlornly at a window. The village’s inhabitants and their belongings had been carried in army wagons to the nearby town of Frenada, but inevitably some of the villagers’ possessions had been left behind. One doorway was barricaded with a child’s cot while another had a pair of benches as a firestep. A mixture of riflemen and redcoats garrisoned the town and they were sheltering from the cannonade by crouching behind the thickest walls of the deserted houses. The stone walls could not stop every French roundshot and Sharpe had already passed three dead men put out in the street and seen a half-dozen wounded men making their slow way back up toward the ridge. “What unit are you?” he called to a sergeant sheltering behind the cot across the street.

“Third Division Light Companies, sir!” the sergeant called back.

“And the First Division!” another voice chimed in. “Don’t forget the First Division!”

It seemed the army had collected the cream of two divisions, their skirmishers, and put them into Fuentes de Oñoro. Skirmishers were the brightest men, the ones trained to fight independently, and this village was no place for men who could only stand in the battle line and fire volleys. This was going to be a place of sharpshooting and street brawls, a place where men would be separated from their officers and forced to fight without orders. “Who’s in charge of you all?” Sharpe asked the sergeant.

“Colonel Williams of the 60th, sir. Down there, in the inn.”

“Thanks!” Sharpe and Harper edged down the side of the street. A roundshot rumbled overhead to drive into a roof. A scream sounded, then was cut off. The inn was the very same tavern where Sharpe had first met El Castrador and where now, in the same garden with the half-severed vine, he found Colonel Williams and his small staff.

“It’s Sharpe, isn’t it? Come to help us?” Williams was a genial Welshman from the 60th Rifles. “Don’t know you,” he said to Harper.

“Sergeant Harper, sir.”

“You look handy to have in a scrap, Sergeant,” Williams said. “Damned noisy today, eh?” he added in mild complaint of the cannonade. He was standing on a bench that gave him a view over the garden wall and the roofs of the lower houses. “So what brings you here, Sharpe?”

“I’m just making sure we know where to deliver ammunition, sir.”

Williams offered Sharpe an owlish gaze of surprise. “Got you fetching and carrying, have they? Seems a waste of time for a man of your talents, Sharpe. And I don’t think you’ll find much custom here. My boys are all well supplied. Eighty rounds a man, two thousand men, and as many cartridges again stacked up in the church. Sweet Jesus!” This last imprecation was caused by a roundshot that must have gone within two feet of the colonel’s head, forcing him to duck hard down. It crashed into a house, there was a tumble of falling stone and then, quite suddenly, silence.

Sharpe tensed. The silence, after the crash of the guns and the splintering thunder of the roundshots’ destructive impacts, was unnerving. Maybe, he thought, it was just a strange pause, like the sudden coincidental silence that could descend on a room of lively talkers during that moment when an angel was said to be passing over the room, and maybe an angel had flickered across the gunsmoke and all the French cannon had found themselves momentarily unloaded. Sharpe almost found himself praying for the guns to start again, but the silence stretched and stretched, threatening to be replaced by something much worse than a cannonade. Somewhere in the village a man coughed and a musket lock clicked. A horse whinnied up on the ridge where the pipes played. Rubble fell in a house where a wounded man whimpered. Out in the street a spent French cannon ball rolled gently downhill, then lodged against a fallen beam.

“I suspect we’ll have company soon, gentlemen,” Williams said. He climbed down from the bench and brushed white dust from his faded green jacket. “Very soon. Can’t see a thing from here. Gunsmoke, you see. Worse than fog.” He was talking to fill the ominous silence. “Down to the stream, I think. Not that we can hold them there, not enough loopholes, but once they’re in the village they’ll find life a bit difficult. At least I hope so.” He nodded agreeably to Sharpe, then ducked out of the door. His staff ran after him.

“We’re not staying here, are we, sir?” Harper asked.

“Might as well see what’s happening,” Sharpe said. “Got nothing better to do. Are you loaded?”

“Just the rifle.”

“I’d have the volley gun ready,” Sharpe said. “Just in case.” He began loading his own rifle just as the British guns on the ridge opened fire. Their smoke jetted sixty feet out from the crest and their noise punched at the wounded village as the shots screamed overhead toward the advancing French battalions.

Sharpe stood on the bench to see the dark columns of infantry emerging from the French gunsmoke. The first British case shot exploded above and ahead of the columns, each explosion staining the air with a smear of gray-white smoke riven with fire. Solid shots seared into the massed ranks, but none of the missiles seemed to make an ounce of difference. The columns kept coming: twelve thousand men under their eagles being drummed across the flatland toward the hammering artillery and the waiting muskets and the primed rifles beyond the stream. Sharpe looked left and right, but saw no other enemies apart from a handful of green-coated dragoons patrolling the southern fields. “They’re coming straight in,” he said, “no messing. One attack, Pat, hard at the village. No buggering round the edge yet. Looks like they think they can come straight through here. There’ll be more brigades behind, and they’ll throw them in one after the other till they get the church. After that it’s downhill all the way to the Atlantic, so if we don’t stop them here we’ll not stop them anywhere.”

“Well, as you say, sir, we’ve got nothing better to do.” Harper finished loading his seven-barreled gun, then picked up a small rag doll that had been discarded under the garden bench. The doll had a red torso on which a mother had stitched a white crossbelt to imitate a British infantryman’s uniform. Harper propped the doll in a niche in the wall. “You keep guard now,” he said to the rag bundle.

Sharpe half drew his sword and tested the edge. “Didn’t get it sharpened,” he said. Before a battle he liked to have the big blade professionally honed by a cavalry armorer, but there had been no time. He hoped it was not an omen.

“You’ll just have to bludgeon the bastards to death, then,” Harper said, then crossed himself before reaching into his pocket to make sure his rabbit’s foot was in its proper place. He looked back to the rag doll and was suddenly overwhelmed by a certainty that his own fate hung on the doll surviving in the wall’s niche. “You take care now,” he told the doll, then gave fate a nudge by jamming a scrap of stone across the niche’s face to try and imprison the small rag toy.

A crackling sound like the tearing of calico announced that the British skirmishers had opened fire. The French voltigeurs had been advancing a hundred paces in front of their columns, but now were stopped by the fire of the riflemen concealed among the gardens and hovels on the stream’s far bank. For a few minutes the skirmish fire stuttered loud, then the outnumbering voltigeurs threatened to surround the British skirmishers and the whistles of the officers and sergeants sounded shrilly to call the greenjackets back through the gardens. Two riflemen were limping, a third was being carried by two of his comrades, but most splashed unscathed through the stream and up into the labyrinthine maze of cottages and alleys.

The French voltigeurs crouched behind the garden walls on the stream’s far bank and began trading fire with the village’s defenders. The stream became fogged with a lacy veil of powder smoke that drifted south in the day’s small wind. Sharpe and Harper, still waiting in the inn, could hear the French drummers sounding the pas de charge, the rhythm that had driven Napoleon’s veterans over half Europe to fell their enemies like ninepins. The drums suddenly paused and both Sharpe and Harper instinctively mouthed the words along with twelve thousand Frenchmen, “Vive l’Empereur.” Both men laughed as the drums started again.

The guns on the ridge had abandoned the case shot and were smashing roundshot down into the columns and now that the enemy’s main formations were almost at the village’s eastern gardens Sharpe could see the damage being done by the iron balls as they slashed through file and rank to fling men aside like bloody rags before bouncing in sprays of misted blood to smash into yet more ranks of men. Again and again the missiles lanced through the massed files, yet again and again, doggedly, unstoppably, the French closed up their ranks and kept on coming. The drummers beat on, the eagles flashed in the sun as brightly as the bayonets on the muskets of the leading ranks.

The drums paused again. “Vive l’Empereur!” the mass of Frenchmen called, but this time they drew out the last syllable into a long cheer that sustained them as they were released to the attack. The columns could not march in close order through the maze of walled gardens on the village’s eastern bank and so the attacking infantry was let off the leash and ordered to charge pell-mell through the vegetable plots and small orchards, across the stream and up into the fire of Colonel Williams’s defenders.

“God save us,” Harper said in awe as the French attack engulfed the far bank like a dark wave. The enemy were cheering as they ran and as they overwhelmed the small walls and trampled down the spring crops and splashed into the shallow stream.

“Fire!” a voice shouted and the muskets and rifles cracked from the loopholed houses. A Frenchman went down, his blood thick in the water. Another fell on the clapper bridge and was unceremoniously pushed into the ford by the men crowding behind. Sharpe and Harper both fired from the inn garden, their bullets spinning over the lower roofs to plough into the mass of attackers who were now shielded from the artillery on the ridge by the village itself.

The first French attackers burst against the village’s eastern walls. Bayonets clashed against bayonets. Sharpe saw a Frenchman appear on a top of a wall, then jump down into a hidden yard. More Frenchmen followed him across the wall. “Sword on, Pat,” Sharpe said and drew his own sword as Harper clicked the sword bayonet onto his rifle. They ducked through the garden door and ran down the main street to find their progress blocked by a double rank of redcoats who were waiting with charged muskets and fixed bayonets. Twenty yards further down the street there were more redcoats who were firing over a makeshift barricade of window shutters, doors, tree branches and a pair of commandeered handcarts. The barricade was shaking from the assault of the French on the far side and every few seconds a musket would be thrust through the entanglement and blast fire, smoke and bullet at the defenders.

“Ready to open files!” the redcoat Lieutenant called. He looked to be about eighteen years old, but his West Country voice was firm. He nodded a greeting to Sharpe, then looked back to the barricade. “Steady now, boys, steady!”

Sharpe knew he would not need the sword yet, so sheathed it and reloaded his rifle instead. He bit the bullet off the cartridge, then held the round in his mouth as he pulled the rifle’s hammer back one click to the half cock. He could taste the acrid, salty powder in his mouth as he poured a pinch of powder from the cartridge into the lock’s open pan. He held tight to the rest of the cartridge as he pulled the frizzen full up to close the pan cover, then, with the rifle so primed, he let its brass stock fall to the ground. He poured the rest of the cartridge’s powder into the muzzle, crammed the empty waxed cartridge paper on top of the powder to serve as wadding, then bent his head to spit the bullet into the gun. He yanked out the steel ramming rod with his left hand, spun the ramrod so that the splayed head faced downward and thrust the rod hard down the barrel. He pulled it out, spun it again and let it fall into its holding rings, then tossed the rifle up with his left hand, caught it under the lock with his right and pulled the hammer back through a second click so that the weapon was at full cock and ready to fire. It had taken him twelve seconds and he had not thought once about what he was doing, nor even looked at the gun while he loaded it. The maneuver was the basic skill of his trade, the necessary skill that had to be taught to new recruits and then practiced and practiced until it was second nature. As a new recruit, just sixteen years old, Sharpe had dreamed about loading muskets. He had been forced to do it again and again until he had been bored rigid by the drill and was ready to spit at the sergeants for making him do it one more time and then, on a damp day in Flanders, he had found himself doing it for real and suddenly he had fumbled the cartridge and lost his ramrod and forgotten to prime the musket. He had somehow survived that fight, and afterward he had practiced again until at last he could do it without thinking. It was the same skill that he had labored to drive into the Real Compañía Irlandesa during their unhappy stay in the San Isidro Fort.

Now, as he watched the defenders back away from the collapsing barricade, he found himself wondering how many times he had loaded a gun. Except there was no time to make a guess, for the barricade’s defenders were running back up the street and the victory roar of the French was swelling as they dismantled the last pieces of the obstacle.

“Open files!” the lieutenant shouted and the two ranks of men obediently opened their files out from the center to let the barricade’s defenders stream through. At least three red-jacketed bodies were left on the street. A wounded man collapsed and pulled himself into a doorway, then a red-faced captain with gray side whiskers ran through the gap and shouted at the men to close ranks.

The files closed again. “Front rank, kneel!” the lieutenant shouted when his two ranks were again arrayed across the street. “Wait for it!” he called, and this time his voice cracked with nervousness. “Wait for it!” he called again more firmly, then drew his sword and gave the slim blade a couple of tentative strokes. He swallowed as he watched the French finally burst through the wreckage and charge up the hill with their bayonets fixed.

“Fire!” the lieutenant shouted, and the twenty-four muskets crashed in unison to choke the road with smoke. Somewhere a man was screaming. Sharpe fired his rifle and heard the distinctive sound of a bullet hitting a musket stock. “Front rank, stand!” the lieutenant called. “At the double! Advance!”

The smoke cleared to show a half-dozen bluecoated bodies down on the stones and earth of the road. Burning scraps of wadding flickered like candle flames. The enemy retreated fast from the threat of the bayonets, but then another mass of blue uniforms appeared at the bottom edge of the village.

“I’m ready, Pollard!” a voice called behind Sharpe, and the lieutenant, hearing it, halted his men.

“Back, boys!” he shouted and the two ranks, unable to advance against the new mass of the enemy, broke files and retreated uphill. The new attackers had loaded muskets and some stopped to aim. Harper gave them the seven barrels of his volley gun, then followed Sharpe up the hill as the smoke of the big gun spread between the houses.

The gray-whiskered captain had formed a new defence line that opened to let the lieutenant’s men through. The lieutenant formed his men into their two ranks a few paces behind the captain’s men and shouted at the redcoats to reload. Sharpe reloaded with them. Harper, knowing he would not have time to reload the volley gun, strapped it across his back and spat a bullet into his rifle.

The drums were still beating the pas de charge, while on the ridge behind Sharpe the pipes were rivaling the sound with their feral music. The cannon on the ridge were still firing, presumably aiming case shot at the distant French artillery. The small village reeked of powder smoke, reverberated with musket shots and echoed with the screams and shouts of frightened men.

“Fire!” the captain ordered and his men poured a volley down the street. It was answered by a French volley. The enemy had decided to use their firepower rather than try to rush the defenders, and it was a battle the captain knew he must lose. “Close on me, Pollard!” he shouted and the young lieutenant took his men down to join the captain’s troops.

“Fire!” Pollard shouted, then made a mewing sound that was momentarily drowned by the crash of his men’s muskets. The lieutenant staggered back, blood showing on the white facings of his elegant coat. He staggered again and let go of his sword which clattered on a doorstep.

“Take him back, Pat,” Sharpe said. “Meet me at the top of the cemetery.”

Harper lifted the lieutenant as though he was a child and ran back up the street. The redcoats were reloading, their ramrods rising and falling over their dark shakoes. Sharpe waited for the smoke to clear and looked for an enemy officer. He saw a moustached man carrying a sword, aimed, fired and thought he saw the man twist backwards, but the smoke obscured his view and then a great rush of Frenchmen pounded up the street.

“Bayonets!” the captain called.

One redcoat backed away. Sharpe put his hand in the small of the man’s back and shoved him hard back into his rank. He slung his rifle and drew his sword again. The French charge stalled in the face of the unbroken ranks with their grim steel blades, but the captain knew he was outgunned and outnumbered. “Pace backward!” he ordered. “Slow and steady! Slow and steady! If you’re loaded, boys, give them a shot.”

A dozen muskets fired, but at least twice as many Frenchmen returned the volley and the captain’s ranks seemed to shudder as the balls struck home. Sharpe was serving as a sergeant now, keeping the files in place from behind, but he was also looking back up the street to where a mixture of redcoats and greenjackets were retreating haphazardly from an alley. Their ragged retreat suggested the French were not far behind them and in a moment or two, Sharpe reckoned, the captain’s small company might be cut off. “Captain!” he shouted, then pointed with his sword when he had the man’s attention.

“Back, lads, back!” The captain grasped the danger immediately. His men turned and ran up the street. Some were helping their comrades, a few ran hard to find safety, but most stayed together to join the larger number of British troops who were forming in the small cobbled space at the village’s center. Williams had held three reserve companies in the safer houses at the upper end of the village and those men had now come down to stem the rising French tide.

The French burst out of the alley just as the company went past its mouth. A redcoat went down to a bayonet, then the captain slashed his sword in a wild cut that sliced open the face of the Frenchman. A big French sergeant swung his musket stock at the captain, but Sharpe lunged into the man’s face with his sword and though the blow was off balance and feeble, it served to check the man while the captain got away. The Frenchman rammed his bayonet at Sharpe, had it parried away, then Sharpe skewered the sword low and hard, twisting the blade to stop it being gripped by the man’s flesh. He ripped it clear of the Frenchman’s belly and went back up the hill, one pace, two, watching for more attacks, then a hand pulled him into the re-formed British ranks in the open space. “Fire!” someone shouted, and Sharpe’s ears rang with the deafening bellow of serried muskets exploding all around his head.

“I want that alley cleared!” Colonel Williams’s voice called. “Go on, Wentworth! Take your men down. Don’t let them stand!”

A group of redcoats charged. There were French muskets firing from the windows of the houses and some of the men burst through the doors to drive the French out. More enemy came up the main street. They came in small groups, stopping to fire, then running up into the square where the battle was ragged and desperate. One small group of redcoats was overrun by a rush of Frenchmen who came out of a side alley and there were screams as the enemy’s bayonets rose and fell. A boy somehow escaped the massacre and scrambled over the cobbles. “Where’s your musket, Sanders?” a sergeant shouted.

The boy swore, turned to look for his fallen weapon and was shot in the open mouth. The French, exhilarated by their victory over the small group, charged over the boy’s body to attack the larger mass of men who were trying to hold the mouth of the recaptured alley. They were met by bayonets. The clash of steel on steel and of steel on wood was louder than the muskets, for few men now had time to load a musket and so they used their blades or the stocks of their guns instead of bullets. The two sides stood poised just feet from each other and every now and then a brave group of men would summon the courage to make a charge into the enemy ranks. Then the voices would rise to hoarse shouts and the clash of steel would begin again. One such assault was led by a tall, bareheaded French officer who drove two redcoats aside with whip-quick slashes of his sword, then lunged at a British officer who was fumbling with his pistol. The red-coated officer stepped back and so exposed Sharpe. The tall Frenchman feinted left and managed to draw Sharpe’s sword away in the parry, then reversed his stroke and was already gritting his teeth for the killing lunge, but Sharpe was not fighting by the rules of some Parisian fencing master and so he kicked the man in the crotch, then hammered the heavy iron hilt of the sword down onto his head. He kicked the man out of the ranks, and back-cut his heavy sword at a French soldier who was trying to drag a musket and bayonet out of a redcoat’s hand. The blade’s edge, unsharpened, served as a cudgel rather than a sword, but the Frenchman reeled away with his head in his hands.

“Forward!” a voice shouted and the makeshift British line advanced down the street. The enemy retreated from Williams’s reserve who now threatened to take back the whole lower part of the village, but then a vagary of wind swirled away a patch of dust and gunsmoke and Sharpe saw a whole new wave of French attackers swarming over the gardens and walls on the stream’s eastern bank.

“Sharpe!” Colonel Williams called. “Are you spoken for?”

Sharpe elbowed back through the tight ranks of redcoats. “Sir?”

“I’d be damned grateful if you were to find Spencer on the ridge and tell him we could use a few reinforcements.”

“At once, sir.”

“Lost a couple of my aides, you see,” Williams began to explain, but Sharpe had already left on the errand. “Good man!” Williams called after him, then turned back to the fight that had degenerated into a series of bloody and desperate brawls in the murderous confines of the alleys and back gardens. It was a fight Williams feared losing, for the French had committed their own reserves and a new mass of blue-coated infantry was now pouring into the village.

Sharpe ran past wounded men dragging themselves uphill. The village was clouded with dust and smoke and he took one wrong turning and found himself in a blind alley of stone walls. He backtracked, found the right street again, and emerged on the slope above the village where a crowd of wounded men waited for help. They were too weak to climb the slope and some called out as Sharpe ran past.

He ignored them. Instead he climbed up the goat path beside the graveyard. A group of worried officers were standing beside the church and Sharpe shouted at them to see if any knew where General Spencer was. “I’ve got a message!” he called.

“What is it?” a man called back. “I’m his aide!”

“Williams wants reinforcements. Too many Frogs!”

The staff officer turned and ran toward the brigade that was waiting beyond the crest while Sharpe paused to catch his breath. His sword was in his hand and its blade was sticky with blood. He cleaned the steel on the edge of his jacket, then jumped in alarm as a bullet smacked hard into the stone wall beside him. He turned and saw a puff of musket smoke showing between some broken beams at the upper edge of the village and he realized the French had taken those houses and were now trying to cut off the defenders still inside Fuentes de Oñoro. The greenjackets in the graveyard opened fire, their rifles cutting down any enemy foolish enough to show himself at a window or door for too long.

Sharpe sheathed his cleaned sword, then went over the wall and crouched behind a slab of granite on which a rough cross had been chiseled. He loaded the rifle, then aimed it at the broken roof where he had seen the musket smoke. The flint had skewed in the doghead and he released the screw, adjusted the leather patch that gripped the flint, then tightened it down. He thumbed the cock back. He was bitterly thirsty, the usual fate of any man who had been biting into salty gunpowder cartridges. The air was foul with the stench of smoke.

A musket appeared between the beams and, a second later, a man’s head showed. Sharpe fired first, but the rifle’s smoke hid the bullet’s mark. Harper slid down the graveyard’s slope to land beside Sharpe. “Jesus,” the Irishman said, “Jesus.”

“Bad in there.” Sharpe nodded down to the village. He primed the rifle, then upended the weapon to charge the muzzle. He had left his ramrod conveniently propped against the grave.

“More of the buggers coming over the stream,” Harper said. He bit a bullet and was forced to silence until he could spit it into the rifle. “That poor lieutenant. Died.”

“It was a chest wound,” Sharpe said, ramming the ball and charge hard down the barrel. “Not many survive chest wounds.”

“I stayed with the poor bugger,” Harper said. “His mother’s a widow, he told me. She sold the family plate to buy his uniform and sword, then said he’d be as great a soldier as any there was.”

“He was good,” Sharpe said. “He kept his nerve.” He cocked the rifle.

“I told him that. Gave him a prayer. Poor wee bugger. First battle, too.” Harper pulled the trigger. “Got you, you bastard,” he said and immediately fished a new cartridge from his pouch while he pulled the hammer to half cock. More British defenders were emerging from between the houses, forced out of the village by the sheer weight of French numbers. “They should send some more men down there,” Harper said.

“They’re coming,” Sharpe said. He laid the rifle’s barrel on the gravestone and looked for a target.

“Taking their time, though,” Harper said. On this occasion he did not spit the bullet into the rifle, but first wrapped it in the small patch of greased leather that would grip the barrel’s rifling and so make the ball spin as it was fired. It took longer to load such a round, but it made the Baker rifle far more accurate. The Irishman grunted as he forced the patched bullet down the barrel that was caked with the deposits of gunpowder. “There’s some boiling water behind the church,” he said, telling Sharpe where to go if he needed to clean the fouled powder from his rifle’s barrel.

“I’ll piss down it if I have to.”

“If you’ve got any piss. I’m dry as a dead rat. Jesus, you bastard.” This was addressed at a bearded Frenchman who had appeared between two of the houses where he was beating down a greenjacket with a pioneer’s ax. Sharpe, already loaded, took aim through the sudden spray of the dying rifleman’s blood and pulled the trigger, but at least a dozen other greenjackets in the churchyard had seen the incident and the bearded Frenchman seemed to quiver as the bullets whipped home. “That’ll teach him,” Harper said, and laid his rifle on the stone. “Where the hell are those reinforcements?”

“Takes time to get them ready,” Sharpe said.

“Lose a bloody battle just because they want straight ranks?” Harper asked scornfully. He looked for a target. “Come on, someone, show yourself.”

More of Williams’s men retreated out of the village. They tried to form ranks on the rough ground at the foot of the graveyard, but by abandoning the houses they had yielded the stone walls to the French who could hide as they loaded, fire, then duck back into hiding again. Some British were still fighting inside the village, but the musket smoke betrayed that their fight had shrunk to a small group of houses at the very top of the main street. One more push by the French, Sharpe thought, and the village would be lost, and then there would a bitter fight up through the graveyard for mastery of the church and the rock outcrop. Lose those two summits, he thought, and the battle was done.

The French drumming rose to a new fervor. There were Frenchmen coming out of the houses to form small squads that tried to outflank the retreating British. The riflemen in the graveyard fired at the daring sallies, but there were too many French and not enough rifles. One of the wounded men tried to crawl away from the advancing enemy and was bayoneted in the back for his trouble. Two Frenchmen ransacked his uniform, searching for the small hoard of coins most soldiers hid away. Sharpe fired at the plunderers, then turned his rifle on the French who were threatening to find cover behind the graveyard’s lower wall. He loaded and fired, loaded and fired until his right shoulder felt like one massive bruise hammered into the bone by the rifle’s brutal recoil, then suddenly, blessedly, there was a skirl of pipes and a rush of kilted men spilled over the crest of the ridge between the church and the rocks to charge down the main road into the village.

“Look at the bastards!” Harper said with pride. “They’ll give the Frogs a right beating.”

The Warwicks appeared to Sharpe’s right and, like the Scots, just poured over the edge and scrambled down the steeper slope toward Fuentes de Oñoro. The leading French attackers paused for a second to judge the weight of the counterattack, then hurried back into the cover of the houses. The Highlanders were already in the village where their war cries echoed between the walls, then the Warwicks went into the western alleyways and drove hard and deep into the tangle of houses.

Sharpe felt the tension drain out of him. He was thirsty, he ached, he was tired and his shoulder was agony. “Jesus,” he said, “and it wasn’t even our fight.” The thirst was galling and he had left his canteen with the ammunition wagons, but he felt too tired and dispirited to go and find water. He watched the broken village, noting how the gunsmoke marked the British advance right back down to the stream’s edge, but he felt little elation. It seemed to Sharpe that all his hopes had stalled. He faced disgrace. Worse, he felt a sense of failure. He had dared to hope that he could turn the Real Compañía Irlandesa into soldiers, but he knew, staring down at the gunsmoke and the shattered houses, that the Irishmen needed another month of training and far more goodwill than Wellington had ever been prepared to give them. Sharpe had failed with them just as he had failed Hogan, and the twin failures raked at his spirits; then he realized he was feeling sorry for himself just as Donaju had felt self-pity in the morning mist. “Jesus,” he said, disgusted at himself.

“Sir?” Harper asked, not having heard Sharpe.

“Never mind,” Sharpe said. He felt the loom of disgrace and the bite of regret. He was a captain on sufferance and he supposed he would never now make major. “Bugger them all, Pat,” he said and wearily stood. “Let’s find something to drink.”

Down in the village a dying redcoat had found Harper’s rag doll jammed into the niche of the wall and had shoved it into his mouth to stop himself crying out in his pain. Now he died and his blood welled and spilled from his gullet so that the small, damaged doll fell in a welter of red. The French had pulled back beyond the stream where they took cover behind the garden walls to open fire on the Highlanders and the Warwicks who hunted down the last groups of trapped French survivors in the village. A disconsolate line of French prisoners straggled up the slope under a mixed guard of riflemen and Highlanders. Colonel Williams had been wounded in the counterattack and was now carried by his riflemen to the church which had been turned into a hospital. The stork’s nest on the bell tower was still an untidy tangle of twigs, but the adult birds had been driven out by the noise and smoke of the battle to leave their nestlings to starve. The sound of musketry crackled across the stream for a while, then died away as both sides took stock of the first attack.

But not, both sides knew, the last.