„What the hell can we do?” Harper asked.
„Nothing,” Sharpe said harshly, „except get out of here.” He turned his back on the dying crowd and led his men eastward down the river wharf. Scores of other people were doing the same thing, gambling that the French would not yet have captured the city’s inland suburbs. The sound of musketry was constant in the streets and the Portuguese guns across the river were now firing at the French in the lower streets so that the hammering of the big guns was punctuated by the noise of breaking masonry and splintering rafters.
Sharpe paused where the wharf ended to make sure all his men were there and he looked back at the bridge to see that so many folk had been forced off its end that the bodies were now jammed in the gap and the water was piling up behind them and foaming white across their heads. He saw a blue-coated Portuguese soldier step on those heads to reach the barge on which the drawbridge had been mounted. Others followed him, skipping over the drowning and the dead. Sharpe was far enough away that he could no longer hear the screams.
„What happened?” Dodd, usually the quietest of Sharpe’s men, asked.
„God was looking the other way,” Sharpe said and looked at Harper. „All here?”
„All present, sir,” Harper said. The big Ulsterman looked as if he had been weeping. „Those poor wee children,” he said resentfully.
„There was nothing we could do,” Sharpe said curtly, and that was true, though the truth of it did not make him feel any better. „Williamson and Tarrant are on a charge,” he told Harper.
„Again?”
„Again,” Sharpe said, and wondered at the idiocy of the two men who would rather have snatched a drink than escape from the city, even if that drink had meant imprisonment in France. „Now come on!” He followed the civilian fugitives who, arriving at the place where the river’s wharf was blocked by the ancient city wall, had turned up an alleyway. The old wall had been built when men fought in armor and shot at each other with crossbows, and the lichen-covered stones would not have stood two minutes against a modern cannon and as if to mark that redundancy the city had knocked great holes in the old ramparts. Sharpe led his men through one such gap, crossed the remnants of a ditch and then hurried into the wider streets of the new town beyond the walls.
„Crapauds!” Hagman warned Sharpe. „Sir! Up the hill!” Sharpe looked to his left and saw a troop of French cavalry riding to cut off the fugitives. They were dragoons, fifty or more of them in their green coats and all carrying straight swords and short carbines. They wore brass helmets that, in wartime, were covered by cloth so the polished metal would not reflect the sunlight. „Keep running!” Sharpe shouted. The dragoons had not spotted the riflemen or, if they had, were not seeking a confrontation, but instead spurred on to where the road skirted a great hill that was topped with a huge white flat-roofed building. A school, perhaps, or a hospital. The main road ran north of the hill, but another went to the south, between the hill and the river, and the dragoons were on the bigger road so Sharpe kept to his right, hoping to escape by the smaller track on the Douro’s bank, but the dragoons at last saw him and drove their horses across the shoulder of the hill to block the lesser road where it bordered the river. Sharpe looked back and saw French infantry following the cavalry. Damn them. Then he saw that still more French troops were pursuing him from the broken city wall. He could probably outrun the infantry, but the dragoons were already ahead of him and the first of them were dismounting and making a barricade across the road. The folk fleeing the city were being headed off and some were climbing to the big white building while others, in despair, were going back to their houses. The cannon were fighting their own battle above the river, the French guns trying to match the bombardment from the big Portuguese battery which had started dozens of fires in the fallen city as the round shot smashed ovens, hearths and forges. The dark smoke of the burning buildings mingled with the gray-white smoke of the guns and beneath that smoke, in the valley of drowning children, Richard Sharpe was trapped.