He heard the firing then, the stuttering chatter of muskets and realized that the dragoons had been attacked from their rear. There was powder smoke hanging thick between the houses that edged the road, and more coming from an orchard halfway up the hill on which the great white flat-topped block of a building stood, and then Sharpe was at the barricade and he leaped up onto the first skiff, his foot half sticking in some new tar that had been smeared on its lower hull. The dragoons were facing away from him, shooting up at the windows, but then a green-coated man turned and saw Sharpe and shouted a warning. An officer came from the door of the house beside the river and Sharpe, jumping down from the boat, skewered the man’s shoulder with his big sword, then shoved him hard against the limewashed wall as the dragoon who had shouted the warning fired at him. The ball plucked at Sharpe’s heavy pack, then Sharpe kneed the officer in the groin and turned on the man who had fired at him. That man was going backward mouthing „non, non,” and Sharpe slammed the sword against his head, drawing blood but doing more damage with the blade’s sheer weight so that the dazed dragoon fell and was trampled by riflemen swarming over the low barricade. They were screaming slaughter, deaf to Harper’s shout to give the dragoons a volley.
Maybe three rifles fired, but the rest of the men kept charging to take their sword bayonets to an enemy that could not stand against an attack from front and back. The dragoons had been ambushed by troops coming from a building some fifty yards down the road, troops who had been hidden in the building and in the garden behind, and the French were now being attacked from both sides. The small space between the houses was veiled in powder smoke, loud with screams and the echo of shots, stinking of blood, and Sharpe’s men were fighting with a ferocity that both astonished and appalled the French. They were dragoons, schooled to fight with big swords from horseback, and they were not ready for this bloody brawl on foot with riflemen hardened by years of tavern fights and barrack-room conflicts. The men in rifle-green jackets were murderous in close combat and the surviving dragoons fled back to a grassy space on the river bank where their horses were picketed and Sharpe roared at his men to keep going eastward. „Let them go!” he shouted. „Drop ‘em! Drop ‘em!” The last four words were those used in the rat pit, the instruction shouted to a terrier trying to kill a rat that was already dead. „Drop ‘em! Keep going!” There was French infantry close behind, there were more cavalrymen in Oporto and Sharpe’s priority now was to get as far away from the city as he possibly could. „Sergeant!”
„I hear you, sir!” Harper shouted and he waded down the alley and hauled Rifleman Tongue away from a Frenchman. „Come on, Isaiah! Move your bloody bones!”
„I’m killing the bastard, Sergeant, I’m killing the bastard!”
„The bastard’s already dead! Now move!” A brace of carbine bullets rattled in the alleyway. A woman screamed incessantly in one of the nearby houses. A fleeing dragoon stumbled over a pile of woven wicker fish traps and sprawled in the house’s backyard where another Frenchman was lying among a pile of drying washing that he had pulled from a line as he died. The white sheets were red with his blood. Gataker aimed at a dragoon officer who had managed to mount his horse, but Harper pulled him away. „Keep running! Keep running!”
Then there was a swarm of blue uniforms to Sharpe’s left and he turned, sword raised, and saw they were Portuguese. „Friends!” he shouted for the benefit of his riflemen. „Watch out for the Portuguese!” The Portuguese soldiers were the ones who had saved him from an ignominious surrender, and now, having ambushed the French from behind, they joined Sharpe’s men in their headlong flight to the east.
„Keep going!” Harper bawled. Some of the riflemen were panting and they slowed to a walk until a flurry of carbine shots from the surviving dragoons made them hurry again. Most of the shots went high, one banged into the road beside Sharpe and ricocheted up into a poplar, and another struck Tarrant in the hip. The rifleman went down, screaming, and Sharpe grabbed his collar and kept running, dragging Tarrant with him. The road and river curved leftwards and there were trees and bushes on its bank. That woodland was not far away, too close to the city for comfort, but it would provide cover while Sharpe reorganized his men.