once that was gone it was hopeless to think of reloading in this rain.
Riflemen stood and hurled missiles and the attack faltered. There were dead at the breach’s foot, put there by Frederickson’s volley, but then the living, roared on by Calvet, surged over the bodies. A lead sheet sliced into a man’s skull and a howitzer shell bounced on the stones.
“On! On!” Calvet was alive. He did not know how many had died, but he felt the old joy of battle and his huge voice plucked men up the ramp of stones. He swung his sword at the cheval-de-frise and staggered sideways as a cobblestone hit his skull. “The Emperor! The Emperor!”
A tide of men scrambled on the breach. An officer, armed with an expensive percussion cap pistol that was proof against the rain, fired upwards and a Rifleman toppled from the ramparts and was torn apart by bayonets.
“Push!” Calvet was shoving the cheval-de-frise forward, forcing a gap. A howitzer shell, thrown from the ramparts, hit his left arm, stunning it, but he could see a space at the end of the spiked beam and he jumped for it. His sword-arm was still good and he pointed the way as he breasted the breach’s summit. “Charge!”
,The flood of men, pushed from behind and desperate to escape the rain of missiles from above, flowed over the breach.
Harper watched them. He saw the general, saw the gaudy golden braid and plucked the rag away from the seven-barrelled gun’s lock. He pulled the trigger and three Frenchmen were hurled backwards on the inner face of the breach. Calvet, who had been leading the dead men, survived.
“Fire!” Frederickson, given the blunderbusses, bellowed the order and three of the six guns belched their stone scraps at the enemy.
A Frenchman was impaled on one of the bayonets jammed between stones and, despite his desperate screams, was trampled further on to the blade by his comrades. Other men, sobbing and struggling, had been forced on to the cheval-de-frise that now lay canted on the breach’s inner face. Yet most men survived to leap down on to the courtyard’s cobbles.
“Back! Back!” Frederickson’s men were not there to contest the breach, but to guard the ramp. They went backwards, appalled by the scrabbling tide of men who surged into the fortress.
Sharpe, seeing that the breach was lost, blew a two-fingered whistle. “Back! Back!” His men ran down the ramparts.
At the foot of the stone ramp, facing the collapsed gateway, was the single cannon. Its capsquare was broken, but the barrel was charged with the last of the garrison’s dry powder and rammed with metal scraps, stone fragments, and rusty nails. A trail of powder had been trickled into its vent, then covered with a patch of oilcloth.
Harper stood by the cannon. Beside it, sheltered in a hole beneath the stone ramp, was a torch made of twisted straw, rags and pitch. He plucked it out and whirled it through the air so that the flames were fanned into a sudden, rain-sizzling blaze.
“Now!” Frederickson, halfway up the ramp with his men, shouted the order.
Harper plucked the oilcloth free and jammed the burning concoction of dripping pitch and straw on to the venthole. He saw the powder spark and threw himself sideways.
The cannon fired.
It recoiled viciously and the barrel, ramming with all the force of the dirty powder inside it, tore itself off the carriage, but not before the charge, spreading like duckshot, emptied itself into the courtyard.
The stones and metal scraps flayed into the French. A shower of blood momentarily rivalled the rain, then the barrel clanged down on to the carriage’s right wheel, snapping spokes as if they were matchwood, and Harper was scrambling up the ramp and shouting for his axe.
Men screamed in the yard. Men had been blinded, eviscerated, torn ragged. Calvet had instinctively thrown himself flat and now listened to the horror about him. “Charge!” He scrambled up. “Charge!”
He could see how few defenders were left to face him, but at least they were. Riflemen, the British elite, and he would capture these last few as a token of his victory. “Charge!”
Men, made courageous by the paucity of the defenders and roused to gallantry by the general’s voice, obeyed. From among the wounded and the dead, from the clinging smoke of the cannon, a pelting, yelling mass of men emerged. Calvet led them.
“Now!” Frederickson had the last seven lime-barrels at the head of the ramp. Sergeant Rossner threw one, it bounced, split open, then, spewing powder that was turned to instant whitewash by the rain, slammed into the first rank of Frenchmen. A man screamed as the barrel pinned him against the broken gun-carriage and as limewash flayed at his eyes.
Frederickson looked behind him. Sharpe’s men, using the dry cover of the citadel where captured French ammunition had been stored, were holding the southern wall. Minver’s men, with agonizing slowness, were being rowed towards the Thuella.
A second lime barrel thumped down the slope, then a third. More Frenchmen were scrambling on to the walls to attack the citadels, but the men in those small fortresses had the last dry charges and they forced the attackers into the cover of the embrasures.
“Now!” A fourth barrel bounced and struck a man full in the chest.
A pistol fired from the courtyard and Rossner grunted as the bullet hit his arm.
“Go!” Frederickson pushed him towards the sea. “Go!”
More Frenchmen were coming, clawing at the ramp, fighting past the smashed gun carriage, over the broken barrel strakes, and across the bodies of their own wounded. The foot of the ramp was a grotesque mixture of whitewash and blood like a painter’s accident.
“Now!” The fifth barrel went, then the sixth.
Sharpe had come to the head of the ramp. He could see Minver’s men scrambling up the Tkuella’s side, but the French could not be held for long. Some were trying to climb the inner wall to the ramparts, using debris from the burned offices as scaling ladders, and Sharpe ran back to stop them. He drove his sword down once, twice, and a man screamed as the blade raked his face.
“Now!” The last barrel was thrown by Harper. It did not bounce, but flew full tilt to smash into a fresh charge of men. The Thuella’s boats had still not started their return journey.
“Swords!” Frederickson shouted the order.
The French, exhilarated by their victory in the breach and seeing that no more barrels could plunge into their ranks, charged. A single rank of Riflemen, sword-bayonets in place, awaited them.
Then Harper broke the line.
With a shout that filled the whole courtyard with its echo, Patrick Harper charged down the stone slope. He carried the great, bright-bladed axe, and in his veins there was the keening of a thousand Irish warriors. He was shouting in his Gaelic now, daring the French to have at him, and the leading Frenchmen dared not.
Harper was six feet four, a giant, and had muscles like a mainmast’s cables. He did not attack cautiously, feeling for his enemy’s weakness, but screamed his challenge at the full run. The axe took two men with its first blow then Harper turned the blade as though it weighed less than a sword, brought it back, blade dripping blood, while his voice, chanting its ancient language, drove the Frenchmen backwards.
A French captain, eager for glory and knowing that the ramp must be taken, lunged, and the axe-blade slit his belly open to the rain. Harper screamed triumph, defying the French, daring them to come to challenge his blade. He stopped a few feet from the bottom of the ramp, victorious, and the rain dripped pink from the broad- bladed axe that he held in his right hand. He laughed at the French.
“Sergeant!” Sharpe bellowed. “Patrick!”
The longboats, at last, were pushing back to the shore.
“Patrick!” Sharpe cupped his hands. “Come back!”
Harper shouldered the axe. He turned, disdaining to run, and walked slowly up the stone ramp to where Frederickson waited. He turned there and stared down into the courtyard. The officer with the percussion pistol, its barrel charged with powder from a dry horn, slipped a percussion cap over the gun’s nipple, but Calvet, who recognized bravery when he saw it, shook his head. That Rifleman, Calvet thought, should be in the Imperial Guard.
“Citadels!” Sharpe’s shout was sudden in the odd silence that followed Harper’s lone attack. “Retreat! Retreat!”
