The water hissed, but it did nothing, for the whole floor was now under siege, and in a few seconds the flames broke through in a half dozen places and the draught now whipped the fire up into the tangle of dry timbers that filled the western half of the fort. The flames climbed the ladders, snaked up beams, burned at the thin partitions, and the ever thickening smoke forced the hussars back. The horses were whinnying in panic. “Gobel!” Pailleterie shouted, “get the horses onto the northern bank! Go! Go!”
The horses were led out of the gate and, seeing freedom, they bolted across the bridge towards the olive groves. The flames were crackling and leaping, filling the space inside the fort with an unbearable heat and churning smoke. “Onto the bridge!” Pailleterie shouted, “pistols! Sergeant Coignet! On the bridge! Face north! Lieutenant! Where are the prisoners?
Fetch them!”
Smoke-blackened hussars stumbled out of the arch. The square tower was now one vast chimney and the dry timbers were being consumed in a constant roar that billowed smoke high into the sky. Flames leaped twenty, thirty feet above the parapet. Coignet was thrusting men into ranks, but they were nervous, for the furnace roar was right beside them and smouldering embers were dropping among them, and somewhere inside the fort a man was screaming terribly because he had been trapped. The wounded redcoats were carried out ans placed on the grass beyond the shrine.
And then the rifle fire began. Shot after shot, coming from the north, from a ditch there, and hussars were thrown back or bent over.
“We’ll charge them!” Pailleterie pushed into the front rank and drew his sabre. The rifles were not so far away, maybe sixty yards, and he would sabre the bastards into the dry ground. “Draw sabres!”
There were some sixty men on the bridge and they drew their sabres.
It was Pailleterie’s last chance to hold the bridge.
And Sharpe shouted “Fire!”
“Fire!” Sharpe shouted, and Lieutenant Price’s redcoats who had run from the village to form two ranks across the road, fired a volley southwards into the hussars and there was suddenly blood on the road, and men crumpling and staggering.
“Charge!” Sharpe shouted. “Come on!” And he was running ahead of them, sword drawn, and the tower was belching smoky flames to his right and the hussars were edging backwards, those that still stood, and Sharpe was simply filled with an utter fury. How dare these bastards have defeated him? And all he wanted to do was kill them, to take his revenge, but they were running now, fleeing from the glitter of bayonets. Not one man stood.
The wounded hussars crawled on the road, the dead lay still, but the living fled back to the southern bank to escape the vengeful infantry.
And Captain Pailleterie was also filled with a single-minded rage. How dare these bastards deny him his victory? All night he had ridden, and he had evaded the picquets in the sierra’s foothills and defeated the infantry garrison of a fort with cavalrymen. With cavalrymen! Men had received the Legion d’honneur for less, and now the bastards had come back from the dead to cheat him of his glory. “Coignet! Coignet! Come back!
Hussars! Turn! Turn! For the Emperor.”
Bugger the Emperor. It was pride that checked them, not the Emperor. They were an elite company, and when they saw the Captain turning back onto the bridge, at least half of them followed. Two bands of angry men, pride at stake, were clashing above the Tormes.
“Now kill the bastards!” Sharpe said, filled with a ridiculous elation that the crapauds were going to fight after all, and he scythed the heavy-cavalry sword down onto the neck of a Frenchman, twisted the blade free as he kicked the falling man in the face, then stabbed the bloody blade forward. It was sabres against bayonets, and wild as a tavern brawl.
Gutter fighting with government issue weapons. Stab and slash and snarl and kick, and in truth the two sides were too close together for either to have an advantage. The redcoats were crammed against hussars and did not have room to bring their bayonets back, and when the hussars cut down with sabres they risked having their sword arms seized. Some men fired pistols, and that would create a small gap, but it would immediately be filled.