Then Harper came out of the smoke.
To the defenders in the courtyard it must have seemed as if a creature from myth had come out of the explosion's darkness, a huge man, drunk with battle, an axe head swinging from his hands, and he ran at the wall, jumped, and the steel blade clove the smoke and bit wet into the defenders.
'Fusiliers! Fusiliers! Sharpe shouted. He slipped, his right heel greased by a smear of blood, and the fall saved him from a Frenchman's bayonet that came from his left. Sharpe rolled on the ground, swung the huge sword and saw a sliver of wood slice from the musket above him. He lashed out with his left foot, caught the man on his kneecap, and then the man was staggering and Sharpe was on his feet, and the sword finished the Frenchman off. 'Fusiliers! To me!
He tugged at the sword blade, kicked the body, and the weapon came reluctantly free. 'Fusiliers!
God, this was a bad place! It was only the presence of some of the enemy around the survivors that stopped Pot-au-Feu's muskets sweeping the courtyard clean. Four men lay at Harper's feet, others had gone back from the fury in the huge man, from the great blade that swung from his powerful arms, and Sharpe saw a man take careful aim with his musket. 'Patrick!
The halberd was thrown, the fluke of its axe head burying itself in the man's forehead, and Harper came back over the wall unslinging his seven-barrelled gun.
'Save it, Patrick! To me! To me!
The Sergeant was hustling his men towards Sharpe. Three wounded were being helped, another man had both Colours of the Fusiliers bundled carelessly under his arm. The shafts were broken and splintered.
'This way! Sharpe turned and kept the movement going in a backswing of his sword that drove back a man in Portuguese uniform who was charging from the rubble. The man seemed crazed, mad with fighting, and Sharpe saw other figures on the broken wall where the smoke clung and was thick with the smell of roasted flesh. Sharpe concentrated on the one man, letting all his anger flow into the lunge of the twisting sword, and he saw the brown uniform fold over the great blade and he was twisting it free even as he knew that they were surrounded.
A musket ball slammed into the stones by his left foot, another plucked at the tail of his jacket, and a third spun a Fusilier clear round, dying before he hit the ground, and Sharpe could see men thick on the stones, scrambling towards them, and he knew that he could never get the wounded across the barrier. He twisted round again. He would not die here! Not at the hands of these scum on this day!
They expected him to stand and fight or else to run over the stones, so he must do something else, and he must decide in an instant or else they would all be dead or worse. Pot-au-Feu did believe he could win! He was proving it to his men, and they were rewarding him by fighting with a fanaticism that was partly born of the knowledge that they were doomed if defeated.
To his right was the gate-tower, huge and massively turreted. There had to be a doorway into it and Sharpe was moving, yelling, and the Fusiliers changed direction and Sharpe led them with his sword and the deserters backed off because they had not expected this and the sword swept at them. He stepped over a red-jacketed body, its mouth open and red, and then the sword took a man in the back and Harper seized the fallen musket, squeezed the trigger, and Sharpe was on the low wall, across it, yelling as if the fiend was inside him, beginning to enjoy this crazy charge into the heart of the enemy's defence, and there was the doorway, small and black, off to his right. 'There! Go! Go! Go!
The Sergeant led them, dragging a wounded man despite his screams of pain, and Sharpe seized Harper's elbow, turned him, so the two of them would be the rearguard as the Fusiliers scrambled into the desperately small doorway. A backswing to knock a musket and bayonet into the air, withdraw, lunge, and shout in triumph because another bastard was down, and then the shout across the courtyard.
'Get them!
Hakeswill’s voice. The musket balls flattened on the gate-tower, pecked at the cobbles, and Sharpe went backwards. 'Get inside! Thank God for the smoke in the courtyard, the hiding smoke, but then there was a crude line visible that came towards them, mouths open, bayonets ahead of them and Harper went onto one knee and the great gun was in his shoulder. 'Get back, sir!
The kick of the seven-barrelled gun almost threw Harper into the doorway. The centre of the attacking line was snatched away, the shot echoed huge in the Castle, and Sharpe grabbed Harper's collar and hauled him backwards. The Sergeant rolled clear inside the doorway and shook his head. 'God save Ireland.
'Stairs, sir! The Fusilier Sergeant pointed at a winding stairway.
'Door!
Harper slammed it. It looked rotten and frail, nail heads half falling from the once stout planks. There was a bar for it and Sharpe dropped it into place as a musket ball splintered a hole by his right wrist.
The Fusilier Sergeant was hesitating at the bottom of the curving stairs. 'Buggers are up there, sir.
Sharpe told him what he thought of the defenders upstairs, then led the way with his sword outstretched. Going up the tight, spiral staircase Sharpe understood the cleverness of the old Castle builders for the steps, in this direction, turned in a clockwise direction. Sharpe's sword arm, like most mens', was his right arm, and it was blocked and hampered by the central stone shaft that supported the inner side of each step. A defender, going backwards up the stairs, would have far more freedom for his right arm. So far no one challenged his ascent.
He was going slowly, carefully, scared of each step. Below him he could hear the thumping as musket butts hammered at the door. It could not hold. Then one of his wounded screamed horribly and Sharpe remembered a glimpse of a shattered thigh-bone sticking clean from the torn flesh and he knew the man was being dragged up the steps. Poor bastard, Christmas Day 1812, and the thought gave him such anger that he abandoned his caution and ran up the steps, shouting, and he burst into a spacious room where men, far more frightened than he, waited to see what came out of the doorway. They did not know if it would be friend or foe and they hesitated long enough for the sword to take one and the other two ran back to an open door that looked onto the northern ramparts. Sharpe slammed the door shut, barred it, then turned to look at their refuge.
It was a large, rectangular chamber lit by two arrow slits that looked out at the valley. Two huge and broken windlasses were in the room, long decayed, and a rusted pulley on the ceiling showed where once a portcullis had been raised and lowered by guards in this room. Another circular staircase led upwards from a doorway and Sharpe knew it must lead to the turret's top from which Pot-au-Feu's men had fired on the attack.
Harper was loading his seven-barrelled gun, a long process, while the Fusiliers dragged the wounded into the chamber. Sharpe grabbed the Sergeant's tunic. 'Two men for each doorway, muskets loaded. He looked at the windlasses. The great drums were still there, the wood rotten and dusty. 'Try and block the stairway with one of them.
A shot echoed up the stairway, then another, then a splintering crash as the door was pounded down. Sharpe grinned at the Sergeant. 'Don't worry. They'll be cautious coming up here.
Two Fusiliers tugged at the nearest windlass, snapping bits of wood from its decrepit frame, but achieving nothing. Harper gave one his seven-barrelled gun and a handful of the pistol cartridges he fed it with. 'Load that, son. Just like a bloody musket. Now stand back.’
He wrapped the huge arms about the vast wooden drum, tested his strength tentatively against the force of the anchors that held the axle to the huge beam beneath, and then the arms tightened, the legs pushed, his face was distorted with the effort, and still the drum would not move. One of the men guarding the staircase primed his musket, hastily levelled it, and fired down into the winding stair. A shout from below. That would slow them.