"Go, Pat," Sharpe said, and just as the Irishman began to run a voltigeur came round the corner of the building, saw the big rifle Sergeant running away and dropped to one knee as he levelled his musket. He saw Sharpe a second later, but it was already too late. Sharpe came out of the dark shadow with the sword already swinging. The blade caught the voltigeur just above the eyes and such was the anger and strength in the blow that the top of the man's skull came away like a decapitated boiled egg.

"God save England," Hagman said, watching the blow from the barracks door. "Come in, Harps! Come on, sir! Hurry!" The panic started among the voltigeurs by the counterattacking Portuguese had helped the riflemen escape Loup's first assault, but that panic was subsiding as Loup's main force arrived through the captured gatehouse. That force would soon have Sharpe's men trapped in the barracks.

"Mattresses! Packs!" Sharpe shouted. "Pile 'em behind the doors! Pat! Look to the windows! Move, woman!" he snarled at a screaming wife who was trying to leave the barracks altogether. He unceremoniously pushed her back. Bullets cracked on the stone walls and splintered the door. There were two small windows on either side of the long room and Harper was stuffing them with blankets. Rifleman Cresacre pushed his rifle through one of the half-blocked windows and fired towards the gatehouse.

Sharpe and Donaju had discussed earlier what might happen if the French attacked and they had gloomily agreed that the Real Companпa Irlandesa might be trapped inside their barracks and so Donaju had ordered his men to make loopholes in the walls. The work had been done half-heartedly, but at least the loopholes existed and gave the defenders a chance to fire back. Even so, in the rushlit gloom of the tunnel-like barracks, this was a nightmarish place to be trapped. The women and children were crying, the guardsmen were nervous and the barricades behind the two end doors flimsy.

"You all know what to do," Sharpe called to the guardsmen. "The French can't get in here, and they can't blow the walls down and they can't shoot through stone. You keep up a good fire and you'll drive the bastards away." He was not sure that anything he had said was true, but he had to do his best to restore the men's spirits.

There were ten loopholes in the barracks, five on each long side, and each loophole was manned by at least eight men. Few of the men were as efficient as Sharpe would have liked at loading a musket, but with so many men using each loophole their fire would still be virtually continuous. He hoped the men in the second barracks were making similar preparations for he expected the French to assault both barracks at any moment. "Someone opened that damned gate for them," Sharpe told Harper. Harper had no time to answer, for instead a great howling noise announced the advance of Loup's main body of troops. Sharpe peered through a chink in one of the blocked windows and saw the flood of grey uniforms surge past the barracks. Behind them, pale in the moonlight, Loup's horsemen rode under their wolf-tail banner. "It's my own fault," Sharpe said ruefully.

"Yours, why?" Harper was ramming the last barrel of his volley gun.

"What does a good soldier do, Pat? He goes for surprise. It was so obvious that Loup had to attack from the north that I forgot about the south. Damn it." He pushed his rifle through the gap and looked for the one-eyed Loup. Kill Loup, he thought, and this attack would stall, but he could not see the Brigadier among the mass of grey uniforms into which he fired his rifle indiscriminately. The enemy's fire crackled harmlessly against the stone walls, while inside the barracks muskets crashed loud at loopholes and children wailed. "Keep those damn kids quiet!" Sharpe snapped. The dark, chill barracks room became foul with the acrid smell of powder smoke that scared the children almost as much as the deafening gunfire. "Quiet!" Sharpe roared, and there was a sudden gasping silence except for one baby that screamed incessantly. "Keep the damn thing quiet!" Sharpe shouted at the mother. "Hit it if you have to!" The mother plunged a breast into the baby's mouth instead, effectively stifling it. Some of the women and older children were usefully loading spare muskets and stacking them beside the windows. "Can't stand bloody children crying," Sharpe grumbled as he reloaded his rifle, "never have and never will."

"You were a baby once, sir," Daniel Hagman said reprovingly. The poacher turned rifleman was liable to such sententious moments.

"I was sick once, damn it, but that doesn't mean I have to like disease, does it? Has anyone seen that bastard Loup?"

No one had, and by now the mass of the Loup Brigade had swept past the two barracks in pursuit of the Portuguese who had called back their skirmish line and formed two ranks so that they could trade volleys with their attackers. The fight was lit by a half-moon and the guttering flicker of what remained of the camp-fires. The Frenchmen had ceased their wolf-like howling as the fight became grim, but it was still a one-sided affair. The newly woken Portuguese were outnumbered and facing men armed with a quick-loading musket, while they were equipped with the slow-loading Baker rifle. Even if they tap-loaded the rifle, abandoning the rammer and the leather patch that gripped the barrel's rifling, they still could not compete with the speed of the well-trained French force. Besides, Oliveira's caзadores were trained to fight in open country, to harass and to hide, to run and to shoot, and not to trade heavy volleys in the killing confrontation of the main battle line.

Yet even so the caзadores did not break easily. The French infantry found it hard to pinpoint the Portuguese infantry in the half-dark, and when they did establish where the line was formed it took time for the scattered French companies to come together and make their own line of three ranks. But once the two French battalions were in line they overlapped the small Portuguese battalion and so the flanks of the French pressed inwards. The Portuguese fought back hard. Rifle flames stabbed the night. The sergeants shouted at the files to close to the centre as men were hurled back by the heavy French musket balls. One man fell into the smouldering embers of a fire and screamed terribly as his cartridge pouch exploded to tear a haversack-sized hole in his back. His blood hissed and bubbled in the red-hot ashes as he died. Colonel Oliveira paced behind his men, weighing the fight's progress and judging it lost. That damned English rifleman had been right. He should have taken refuge in the barracks blocks, but now the French were between him and that salvation and Oliveira sensed the coming calamity and knew there was little he could do to prevent it. He had even fewer options when he heard the ominous and unmistakable sound of hooves. The French even had cavalry inside the fort.

The Colonel sent his colour party back to the northern ramparts. "Find somewhere to hide," he ordered them. There were old magazines in the bastions, and fallen walls that had made dark caves amidst the ruins, and it was possible that the regiment's colours might be preserved from capture if they were hidden in the tangle of damp cellars and tumbled stone. Oliveira waited as his hard-pressed men fired two more volleys then gave the order to retreat. "Steady now!" he called. "Steady! Back to the walls!" He was forced to abandon his wounded, though some bleeding and broken men still tried to crawl or limp back with the retreating line. The French uniforms pressed closer, then came the moment Oliveira feared most as a trumpet blared in the dark to the accompaniment of swords scraping out of scabbards. "Go!" Oliveira shouted to his men. "Go!"

His men broke ranks and ran to the walls just as the cavalry charged, and thus the caзadores became the dream target of all horsemen: a broken unit of scattered men. The grey dragoons slashed into the retreating ranks with their heavy swords. Loup himself led the charge and deliberately led it wide so that he could turn and herd the fugitives back towards his advancing infantry.