The mare’s breath was roaring as she reached the crest. She wanted to check, but Sharpe pushed her through a gap in a straggling hedgerow and spurred her across an undulating pasture which, years before, had been under the plough and the old furrows still formed corrugations that faced Sharpe like waves of pale grass.
Sharpe was riding across the grassy waves and the mare took the hard, uneven ground heavily, jarring him with every step. Nosey raced ahead, circled back, barked happily, then ran alongside the labouring horse. Sharpe twisted to look behind and saw the first Dragoons reach the skyline. They had spread out and were racing to capture him. The ridged pasture was falling away in front of Sharpe, sloping down to a long dark oak wood from which a cart track ran north towards a big stone-walled farm that looked like a miniature fort. Sharpe looked behind again and saw the closest Dragoons were now just fifty yards away. Their long swords were drawn and their horses’ teeth bared. Sharpe tried to draw his own sword, but the moment he took his right hand off the reins he almost fell and the mare immediately tried to check. “Go’on!” he shouted at the mare and scraped his spurs hard down her flanks. “Go on!”
He glanced right and saw another half-dozen Dragoons racing to cut him off from the cart track. He swore viciously, turned the mare a touch westward again, but that merely gave the pursuers a better angle to close on him. The wood was only a hundred paces away, but the sweat-streaked mare was blown and slowing. Even if she reached the trees, the Dragoons would soon ride Sharpe down in the tangle of undergrowth. He swore silently. If he lived he would be doomed to spend the war as a prisoner.
Then a distant trumpet blared a challenge, making Sharpe turn with astonishment to see black-coated horsemen streaming pell-mell from the fortress-like farm buildings. There must have been at least twenty cavalrymen rowelling their horses down the cart track. Sharpe recognized the cavalry as Prussians. Dust spurted and drifted from their hooves and the bright sun flashed cruel and beautiful from their drawn sabres.
The Dragoons closest to the Prussians immediately turned and galloped back up the slope towards their comrades. Sharpe gave the mare a last despairing hack with his heels, then ducked his head as she crashed through a stand of ferns and thus into the wood’s cool margin. She would go no further, but just pulled up under the trees, shivering and sweating and blowing. Sharpe dragged the big sword free.
Two green-uniformed Dragoons followed Sharpe into the trees.
They came at full speed, the leading man aiming to Sharpe’s left, the other pulling to his right. Sharpe had his back to the attackers and the mare was too exhausted and too obstinate to turn. He slashed across his body to parry the attack of the man on the left. The Frenchman’s blade rang like a bell on Sharpe’s sword, then scraped down the steel to be stopped by the heavy disc hilt. Sharpe threw the Dragoon’s blade off then desperately backswung the long sword to meet the second man’s charge. The swing was so wild that it unbalanced Sharpe, but it also terrified the second Dragoon who swerved frantically away from the blade’s hissing reach. Sharpe grabbed a handful of his mare’s mane to haul himself back upright. Both Dragoons had galloped past Sharpe and were now trying to turn their horses for a second attack.
In the pasture behind Sharpe the Prussian horsemen were making a line to face the remaining Dragoons who, outnumbered, had cautiously pulled back towards the skyline. That confrontation was none of Sharpe’s business; his concern was with the two horsemen who now faced him in the wood. They glanced past Sharpe, judging how best to rejoin their comrades, though it was clear they wanted Sharpe’s life first.
One of them began to tug his carbine out of its holster. “Get him, Nosey!” Sharpe shouted, and at the same time he raked his spurs back so savagely that the exhausted and astonished mare jerked forward, almost spilling Sharpe out of his tall Hussar’s saddle. He was screaming at the two men, trying to frighten them. The dog leaped at the closest man who, encumbered with carbine and sword, could not cut down at the beast, then Sharpe’s mare slammed into the Frenchman’s horse and the big sword slashed down at the Dragoon. The blade hit the peak of the man’s cloth-covered helmet, ringing his ears like the knell of doom. The beleaguered Frenchman screamed desperately for help from his comrade who was trying to circle behind Sharpe to get a clear thrust at the Englishman’s back.