villagers celebrate a Mass to remember the event.”
“There’s a village here?”
“A mile beyond the gorge. We can rest there.”
Sharpe saw what a magnificent site the canyon made for an ambush. The Christian forces, hidden in the high rocks, would have had an eagle’s view of the road and the Moors, climbing to the gorge, would have been watched every step of the way to the killing arrows. “And how do you know the French aren’t waiting for us?” Emboldened by Vivar’s renewed affability, he raised the question which had worried him earlier. “We’ve got no picquets.”
“Because the French won’t have reached this far into Spain,” Vivar said confidently, “and if they had, then the villagers would have sent warning down all the roads, and even if the warnings missed us, we’d smell the French horses.” The French, always careless of their cavalry horses, drove them until their saddle and crupper sores could be smelt half a mile away. “One day,” Vivar added cheerfully, “the French will flog their last horse to death and we’ll ride over that loathsome country.” The thought gave him a renewed energy and he turned towards the marching men. “Not far before you can rest!”
At which point, from above the gorge where the Moors had been ambushed, and in front of Sharpe where the road led down towards the pilgrim way, the French opened fire.
CHAPTER 4
Sharpe saw Vivar dive to the right side of the road, and threw himself to the left. The big, unfamiliar sword at Sharpe’s hip clanged on a rock, then the rifle was at his shoulder and he tore away the scrap of rag that kept rain from the gunpowder in the rifle’s pan. A French bullet gouged wet snow two inches to his right, another slapped with a vicious crack into the stone face above him. A man screamed behind him.
Dragoons. God-damned bloody Dragoons. Green coats and pink facings. No horses. Dismounted Dragoons with short carbines. Sharpe, recovering from his astonishment at the ambush, tried to make sense of the chaos of fear and noise that had erupted in the winter’s cold. He saw puffs of grey smoke, dirty as the thawing snow, in an arc about his front. The French had thrown a low barricade of stones across the road about sixty paces from the canyon’s mouth. It was long range for the French carbines, but that did not matter. The dismounted Dragoons who lined the peaks of the immense and sheer cliffs either side of the gorge were the men doing the damage.
Sharpe rolled onto his back. A bullet cracked into the snow where his head had been a second before. He could see the Dragoons standing on the lips of the chasm, firing down into the deathtrap of the road where, nine hundred years before, the Moors had been slaughtered.
Vivar’s men had scattered. They crouched at the base of the rocks and fired upwards. Vivar was shouting at them, calling for them to form a line, to advance. He was planning to charge the men who barred the road. Instinctively Sharpe knew that the French had foreseen that move, which was why they had not made their barricade in the gorge, but beyond it. They wanted to lure the ambushed out into the plateau, and there could only be one reason for that. The French had cavalry waiting, cavalry with long straight swords that would butcher unprotected infantry.
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
