The Colours had gone, taken back to the Fusiliers who crouched behind a low barricade that guarded the entrance to the keep. They would fight with their own standards on this last fight and they wondered how long they must endure the blast of the explosions outside, the screaming of the horses behind, the noise of the guns that filled the valley more dreadfully than any file of French drummers.
Sharpe crouched beside Captain Gilliland high in the keep. He had to shout over the noise of the cannonade. ‘You know what to do?’
‘Yes, sir.’ Gilliland was unhappy. The rest of his rockets would be used in a manner he did not like. ‘How long, sir?’
‘I don’t know! An hour? Maybe two?’
Men wanted the French to come, wanted this storm of metal to end, wanted to have this fight done.
Frederickson yelled at the French to attack, called them yellow bastards, women to a man, afraid of a little hill with a few straggly thorns, and still the infantry did not come. One Rifleman screamed in pain because a canister ball was in his shoulder and Frederickson bawled at him to be silent.
The gunners slaved at their machines, served them, hauled at them, fed them with revenge for their dead Colonel.
High on the eastern side of the keep Sharpe watched the village. Once he flinched as a high canister shot struck shards of razor sharp stone from the hole he peered through. Somewhere a man screamed, the scream cut short, and the noise rolled about the valley and the smoke of the guns was drifted high over the pass and still the metal came at the walls and the shells cracked apart in the yard.
‘Sir?’ Harper pointed.
The French were coming.
Not in a column, not in one of France’s proud columns, but uncoiling like snakes from the village, four men in a file, and three Battalions were marching down the road, marching fast, and still the guns thundered, and still Sharpe’s men died in ones and twos, and still the shells battered at the defenders.
Fifteen hundred men, bayonets fixed, staying in the centre of the valley well away from the flight of the guns.
Sharpe watched them. He had held this place for a day now and he had desperately hoped for two. It would not be. He had one card left to play, just one, and when that was played it would all be over. He would retreat south through the hills, hoping the French cavalry had better targets to chase than his depleted force, and he would leave his wounded to the mercy of the French. He had made the garrison pile their coats and packs at the southern exit from the keep, the exit Pot-au-Feu’s men had used and which was now guarded by twenty Fusiliers to stop the faint-hearted leaving early. He grinned at Harper. ‘It was a good fight, Patrick.’
‘It’s not over yet, sir.’
Sharpe knew different. The curse was on him like a lead weight, and he supposed the curse would bring defeat, would let the French through the pass, and he wondered if he would have time to go to the dungeon before the panic of the scramble southwards and kill the yellow-faced misshapen man. That would lift the curse.
In the dungeon Hakeswill listened. He could read a battle by its sound and he knew the moment was not yet. He had hoped it would be in the night, but a Fusilier Lieutenant had sat with the sentries through much of the darkness, and Hakeswill had done nothing. Soon, he promised himself, soon.
Sharpe turned to the man who had replaced the bugler. ‘Ready?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘In a minute. Wait.’
The French were close, the Battalions turning towards the Castle, coming over the place where yesterday the rockets had shredded the ranks, but today there was no weapon that fired at them.
The guns stopped. It seemed like silence in the valley.
The left hand Battalion of the French broke into a run, curving further left, heading south-east, and they ran towards the watchtower hill because they would attack from the one direction where Dubreton had rightly guessed there were few defences.