licked his lips, crossed himself, then pushed the door fully open.
Harper froze. He could see the enemy and Sharpe could not. Frederickson tried to push on, but he could not get past Sharpe.
“God save Ireland,” Harper whispered, and Sharpe knew that the big man, like himself, was scared. There was a hard knot in Sharpe’s belly, put there by the certainty that death waited beyond the open door.
“How many?” he whispered to Harper.
“At least a dozen of the bastards.”
“For Christ’s sake!” Frederickson sounded angry. “Calvet’s being crucified!”
“Vive I’Empereur!” Sharpe said fatuously, and the erstwhile enemy’s battle cry seemed to propel Harper through the open door.
“Bastards!” The Irishman screamed the word as his own battle cry. Men turned to stare at him, astonishment on their faces, then Harper pulled the trigger and the flint sparked fire into the chamber behind the seven barrels. The gun hammered like a small cannon and two of Ducos’s men were snatched clean off their feet to tumble, screaming, to the broken stones below.
Sharpe had followed Harper on to the smoke-wreathed roof. He carried the rifle in his clumsily bandaged left hand, fired it, did not wait to see if his bullet hit, but just ran forward with the sword in his right hand. The blade was matted thick with dog blood and hair. Frederickson flanked Harper’s right. A musket hammered at them, but the three Riflemen were moving too quickly and the ball whined harmlessly between Sharpe and Harper.
The surprise of their small attack was absolute. One second Sergeant Challon’s men had been firing down in comparative safety, and the next they were being violently assaulted from their left flank. Those men nearest to the Riflemen had no time to escape. One man tried to twist out of Sharpe’s way, but the big sword caught him on the backswing to flay his throat back to the spine. Sharpe’s scream of triumph would have curdled a devil’s blood. Harper was using the butt of the big gun like a club. Frederickson shot a man, discarded his rifle, then elegantly skewered another with his sword. Sharpe was past his first victim, hunting another. The fear had gone now, washed away by the old exaltation of battle. The enemy was running. They were desperately jostling towards a doorway on the roofs far side. These men had no belly for this fight, all except one man who had the tough face of an old soldier.
The moustached face was framed with the pigtails of the elite Napoleonic Dragoons. The man wore the remnants of his green uniform on which was the single stripe of a Sergeant. He lifted his straight sword towards Sharpe, feinted, then lunged at Harper. He did not finish the lunge, but stepped back and swung the blade towards Frederickson. The man was cornered, his companions had abandoned him, but he was making a professional cold fight out of his desperate position.
“Give up,” Sharpe said in English, then corrected himself by giving the command in French.
The only response was a sudden and savage attack. Sharpe parried so that the two swords ran like a bell. The other enemy had disappeared down the far stairway, and now the French Sergeant retreated after them, but never turned his back on his three opponents. Frederickson edged round to threaten his right flank and the Dragoon Sergeant’s sword slithered towards the new threat, but Harper was even faster. He moved to the Sergeant’s left, reached out, and seized his belt to pull him off balance. The Sergeant tried to reverse his blade, but Harper contemptuously ripped it from his hand and sent it spinning over the parapet. He then hit the French Sergeant on the head so that the man slumped down in dazed agony. “You were told to give up,” Harper said patiently, then hit the man again. “You stubborn bloody bastard.”
“Major!” General Calvet was standing in the ruins below.
“Go right!” Sharpe pointed to where they had broken through into the passage. “Hurry!”
“Englishman! Well done!”
Sharpe laughed at the compliment, then essayed an elaborate bow to the Frenchman. As he bowed, so’Harper screamed a sudden warning, and Sharpe abandoned his courtesy to fall ignominiously on his face as a small cannon split the dawn apart with its sudden noise. The ball thumped over Sharpe’s head.
“Ducos!” Frederickson had spotted the enemy.
Sharpe looked where Frederickson was pointing. Beyond this roof was another courtyard, this one intact, and on its far side Sharpe saw an open full-length window on an upper floor. The room had a balcony that billowed with smoke. Men moved in the lantern light behind the balcony, then the small wind shifted the obscuring smoke and Sharpe at last saw his enemy. He recognized the round lenses of the spectacles first, then he saw the thin face and he saw, too, with astonishment, that Ducqs was in the uniform of a French Marshal. For a second Ducos looked straight into Sharpe’s eyes, then he twisted away. Two other men took his place. Between them they carried a strange brass object which they stood in the window. For a second Sharpe thought it was a small misshapen table, but then Frederickson recognized the four-legged gun. “A bloody grasshopper!” he said scornfully, but he still dropped flat as the linstock touched fire to the charge. This time the small gun had been loaded with multiple shot that whistled harmlessly overhead.
A scream sounded below, and Sharpe knew Calvet’s men must have entered the second courtyard. The sound of musketry began again, rising in a snapping crescendo, but this time the deadly sound came from deep inside Ducos’s fastness. The dawn was already lightening the eastern sky with a pale silver wash and Sharpe knew this battle was half won, but still not complete. An enemy had to be trapped and taken alive. He loaded his rifle, wiped blood off his blade, and went back to the fight.
CHAPTER 14
Sergeant Challon lay disarmed and unconscious on the roof, but Pierre Ducos could not know of his loyal Sergeant’s predicament. Instead he cursed the Sergeant for abandoning him, just as he cursed the hired men who now scrambled desperately from the villa to run away into the night’s remnant. Only a handful of Dragoons had stayed with Ducos, not out of loyalty, but with the demand that Ducos now open the great strongbox and let them flee with their plunder.
Their greed was interrupted by Calvet’s men who began storming the lower corridors. Women and children screamed as they tried to escape the vengeful Guardsmen, and the screams served to remind Ducos’s Dragoons of their predicament. They slammed doors shut to cut the strongbox off from the attackers, then axed loopholes in the doors so they could keep Calvet’s men at bay. The grasshopper gun fired once more at the far roof, but the three green uniformed men seemed to have gone and the gun was brought down into the curtained archway that faced towards the sea. From that position it could slaughter any enemy who tried to outflank the loopholed doors by crossing the paved and balustraded terrace. “If we just hold long enough,” Ducos urged his six remaining men, “I promise we’ll get help.”
Ducos loaded two gilt-chased pistols that had been gifts from the Czar of Russia to the Emperor of France before the two nations fell into enmity. He carried the pistols to the window facing the courtyard and fired them both at the place where he believed he had seen, Sharpe. No one could be seen on that far roof now, so Ducos merely shot at phantoms. He was trying to persuade himself that Sharpe’s appearance had been just that; a phantom sprung on him by his over-heated fears and made more palpable by the dawn’s bad light. Yet he could hear that the men in the corridors outside the locked doors were no phantoms; they were fellow Frenchmen, come for a treasure that Ducos would not surrender.
Some of the products of that treasure were now used to barricade the archway where the grasshopper gun stood. A celestial globe was heaped on top of a japanned chest of drawers. A green silk covered chaise-longue made a breastwork, while beneath it an ebony table with a surface of inlaid silver and ivory was stacked as a shield for enemy bullets. Cushions, curtains, rugs and bedclothes were crammed between chairs to make the barricade yet more formidable. Only the heavy green curtain which shielded the deep alcove where the strongbox was hidden was left in its place. Two men crewed the grasshopper gun in its cushioned embrasure, while the other four Dragoons took it in turns to fire through the two loopholed doors. Ducos, his gaudy uniform hanging from him like finery draped on a scarecrow, paced between the three positions and spun a fantasy of imminent Neapolitan rescue.
The two loopholed doors were old and tough. A musket bullet could not penetrate the wood. At first the fire from the corridors was frightening in its intensity, but the Dragoons soon learned they were safe, and soon
