‘With respect, sir, the gun’s handier.’ Harper hefted the seven barrels. It was true, but Sharpe could not let someone else lead.
‘You follow.’
The staircase was like the first, bending inconveniently to the right, and Sharpe pushed away the inconsequential thought that Captains of the past must have sent their left-handed swordsmen first into stairways like this. He was frightened. Each step added to the fear, each step revealing another stretch of dark, blank wall. A single man with a musket would have no difficulty in killing him. He stopped, listening, wishing he had thought to remove his boots so that their ascent would be quieter.
Beneath him he heard muskets, a shout, and then the calm voice of the Fusilier Sergeant. The man could easily defend the chamber for a few minutes, but Sharpe half expected his small party to be marooned in this Castle for hours. He had to have the turret top and he thought of the defenders waiting up these stairs and he wished devoutly that he did not have to climb them. He could hear Harper fidgeting and grunting behind him and he shushed him irritably.
The Irishman pushed something at him. ‘Here, sir.’
It was his green jacket. Sharpe understood. Hang the jacket on the sword tip because the defenders, nervous themselves, were just waiting for something to appear in the gloom of the stairway. Harper grinned and motioned with his gun, telling Sharpe to stay close to the shaft of the staircase so the Sergeant could fire past him and trust to the ricocheting of the seven bullets. Sharpe pushed the bloody, tip of the sword into the collar of the jacket and, in the half-light, he could see the laurel wreath badge that was sewn onto the sleeve. Sharpe wore one himself, the coveted badge that said a Rifleman had gone first into a defended breach, yet Badajoz seemed so long ago now, the utter fear of it just a dulled memory, while the fear of this moment was so huge and paralysing. Death was so channelled and directed by this staircase, yet Sharpe had learned that the steps a man feared most were the ones that had to be taken. He climbed. The jacket was ahead of him, a dark shape in the gloom, and he tried to remember how tall the gatehouse was, and how many steps it would take to reach the top, but he was confused. The turning of the stair had taken away his sense of direction, the fear turned each scrape of his boots’ soles on the cold stone into a jab of alarm as he imagined the bullet striking from above.
The sword blade jarred on the central pillar. The jacket jerked with each step. It was a pathetic ruse, looking nothing like a man, but he told himself that the defenders would be nervous too. They were rehearsing in their minds what kind of attack would burst up these stairs, they were imagining death too on this Christmas Day.
The volley, when it came, was sickeningly close, and the bullets snatched at the jacket, billowed it, tore it, and Sharpe involuntarily ducked for the staircase seemed full of shrieking metal striking stone, and then the seven-barrelled gun exploded next to his ear, deafening him, and Sharpe screamed a challenge that he could not hear, twitched the jacket free of the sword point and charged up the stairs.
The jacket saved his life. He had thought only to discard it, to free the blade, but his right foot stepped on it, threw him painfully forward and tumbled Harper behind him. The Irishman crushed the breath from Sharpe, drove his ribs against the corners of the steps, and as they fell so the second volley, saved for this moment, flamed over their heads. Harper felt the hot breath of the guns, knew that the shots had missed, and he clawed his way forward over Sharpe’s body and used the massive gun as a club in the doorway of the small turret that carried the staircase onto the tower’s top.
Sharpe followed, his head ringing with the explosion of the seven-barrelled gun, and on the confined roof space his sword was the better weapon. The fear would have its outlet now, like a clawed animal released from a stinking cage, and he killed with the blade. He could hear nothing, only see the enemy who went back before him and he knew these men had drawn his nerves steel tight, had forced fear on him in a small place, and he killed with the efficient skill of his sword arm.