Sharpe had a pistol that he fired at one of the arched windows that lay high to his right. He saw a chip of stone fly off the window ledge. Harper dropped beside Sharpe. “Christ save Ireland,” Harper panted, “but this is desperate!” He leveled his borrowed musket and fired up into the smoke. “I told the wife I’d be doing nothing dangerous. Not a thing, I told her, except the sea voyage, and that never worries her because she’s a great believer in Saint Brendan’s protection, so she is.” All this was spoken while Harper was reloading the musket with a skill that betrayed his years of soldiering. ‘Jesus, but the money that woman wastes on candles! Christ, I could have lit my way to the shithole of hell and back with all the bloody candles she’s given to the holy saints, but I wished she’d lit a bloody candle to keep me safe in a fight.” He aimed up the steps in the general direction of the smoke cloud and pulled the trigger. “God help us.” He began reloading. “I mean there’s no way out of here, is there? The bloody boat will be hard aground in a minute or two.”
Sharpe saw a man leaning out of a window to fire at the attackers cowering on the steps. He aimed the reloaded pistol and fired, and saw a spurt of blood vivid in the gray morning as the man toppled down the crag’s face. “Got one,” he said happily.
“Good for you.” Harper raised himself and fired over the prone bodies of the marines higher up the steps. A volley smacked down, blasting a chip of stone from the stair beside Sharpe.
“This can’t last!” Sharpe shouted at Harper. He needed to shout for the musketfire was almost continuous now, suggesting that the Spaniards had concentrated even more muskets at the top of the steps. For the defenders this was like shooting rats in a barrel. They would be grinning as they fired, knowing that this day they were defeating the dreaded Lord Cochrane and that all Spain would rejoice when that news reached home. Another volley banged, and the dead bodies which made a protective breastwork for Sharpe and Harper twitched under the flail of lead. “On, my good boys, on!” Miller called, but no one obeyed, for there could be no chance of surviving an uphill attack into that rending, flickering, crashing and unending fire. Any man who tried to climb the stairs would be cut down in seconds, then thrown back to the quay that was already piled with the blood-spattered dead who had rolled down the steps. “Stay down!” Cochrane countermanded Miller’s hopeless order. “Stay low! It’s all going to be well! I’ve a trick or two yet, boys!”
“Jesus, but he needs a bloody trick now,” Harper said, then raised the musket blindly over the parapet of the dead bodies to pull its trigger. “God save Ireland, but we’re dead men unless he can get us out of here.”
Miller shouted at his musicians to play louder, as though their feeble and ragged music could somehow turn back the surging tide of disaster. Some of Miller’s experienced marines, realizing how hopeless was their plight, began to edge backward. There had been a chance of capturing the fortress, even a good chance, but only if the surprise attack had reached the head of the staircase before the defenders had rallied. But the attackers had failed by yards, and now the Spaniards were grinding Cochrane’s men into blood and bones. More attackers began slipping down the steps. They were looking for possible escape routes around the harbor’s edge.
“Stay there!” Cochrane shouted. “It’s all right, lads! Stay where you are! Wait for it! I promise everything will be well! Heads down now! Heads down! Keep your—” Cochrane’s voice was swamped as the whole world suddenly exploded in noise and stone fragments.
“Christ!” Harper screeched as the citadel’s foundations seemed to shudder with the impact of gunfire.
The O’Higgins, now that the citadel’s main thirty-six-pound battery had been silenced, had sailed out from the unwitting protection offered by the American ship and had anchored with her starboard broadside facing the fortress. She had just fired that full broadside at the defenders bunched at the top of the broad flight of stairs. The volley of cannonfire had been shockingly dangerous to the attackers, but magnificent shooting all the same. At a range of almost a half mile the flagship’s guns were firing just feet over the heads of Cochrane’s attackers. At least one cannon-ball fell short, for Sharpe saw a marine virtually disintegrate just five steps above him. At one moment the man was aiming his musket, the next there was just a butcher’s mess on the stairs and a crack of murderous intensity as the ball ricocheted on up toward the Spaniards.