The halberd was thrown, the fluke of its axe head burying itself in the man’s forehead, and Harper came back over the wall unslinging his seven-barrelled gun.
‘Save it, Patrick! To me! To me!’
The Sergeant was hustling his men towards Sharpe. Three wounded were being helped, another man had both Colours of the Fusiliers bundled carelessly under his arm. The shafts were broken and splintered.
‘This way!’ Sharpe turned and kept the movement going in a backswing of his sword that drove back a man in Portuguese uniform who was charging from the rubble. The man seemed crazed, mad with fighting, and Sharpe saw other figures on the broken wall where the smoke clung and was thick with the smell of roasted flesh. Sharpe concentrated on the one man, letting all his anger flow into the lunge of the twisting sword, and he saw the brown uniform fold over the great blade and he was twisting it free even as he knew that they were surrounded.
A musket ball slammed into the stones by his left foot, another plucked at the tail of his jacket, and a third spun a Fusilier clear round, dying before he hit the ground, and Sharpe could see men thick on the stones, scrambling towards them, and he knew that he could never get the wounded across the barrier. He twisted round again. He would not die here! Not at the hands of these scum on this day!
They expected him to stand and fight or else to run over the stones, so he must do something else, and he must decide in an instant or else they would all be dead or worse. Pot-au-Feu did believe he could win! He was proving it to his men, and they were rewarding him by fighting with a fanaticism that was partly born of the knowledge that they were doomed if defeated.
To his right was the gate-tower, huge and massively turreted. There had to be a doorway into it and Sharpe was moving, yelling, and the Fusiliers changed direction and Sharpe led them with his sword and the deserters backed off because they had not expected this and the sword swept at them. He stepped over a red-jacketed body, its mouth open and red, and then the sword took a man in the back and Harper seized the fallen musket, squeezed the trigger, and Sharpe was on the low wall, across it, yelling as if the fiend was inside him, beginning to enjoy this crazy charge into the heart of the enemy’s defence, and there was the doorway, small and black, off to his right. ‘There! Go! Go! Go!’
The Sergeant led them, dragging a wounded man despite his screams of pain, and Sharpe seized Harper’s elbow, turned him, so the two of them would be the rearguard as the Fusiliers scrambled into the desperately small doorway. A backswing to knock a musket and bayonet into the air, withdraw, lunge, and shout in triumph because another bastard was down, and then the shout across the courtyard.
‘Get them!’
Hakeswill’s voice. The musket balls flattened on the gate-tower, pecked at the cobbles, and Sharpe went backwards. ‘Get inside!’ Thank God for the smoke in the courtyard, the hiding smoke, but then there was a crude line visible that came towards them, mouths open, bayonets ahead of them and Harper went onto one knee and the great gun was in his shoulder. ‘Get back, sir!’
The kick of the seven-barrelled gun almost threw Harper into the doorway. The centre of the attacking line was snatched away, the shot echoed huge in the Castle, and Sharpe grabbed Harper’s collar and hauled him backwards. The Sergeant rolled clear inside the doorway and shook his head. ‘God save Ireland.’
‘Stairs, sir!’ The Fusilier Sergeant pointed at a winding stairway.
‘Door!’
Harper slammed it. It looked rotten and frail, nail heads half falling from the once stout planks. There was a bar for it and Sharpe dropped it into place as a musket ball splintered a hole by his right wrist.
The Fusilier Sergeant was hesitating at the bottom of the curving stairs. ‘Buggers are up there, sir.’
Sharpe told him what he thought of the defenders upstairs, then led the way with his sword outstretched. Going up the tight, spiral staircase Sharpe understood the cleverness of the old Castle builders for the steps, in this direction, turned in a clockwise direction. Sharpe’s sword arm, like most mens’, was his right arm, and it was blocked and hampered by the central stone shaft that supported the inner side of each step. A defender, going backwards up the stairs, would have far more freedom for his right arm. So far no one challenged his ascent.