"Sorry, sir," the boy said, then ducked as a scrap of tile whistled overhead. "They're a bit lively, sir," he added.

"Time to worry, lad, is when they stop firing," Sharpe said, "because that means the infantry are on their way. Who's in charge here?"

"Don't know, sir. Unless it's Sergeant Patterson."

"I doubt it, lad, but thanks anyway." Sharpe ran from the alley's end, turned down a side street, dodged right into another street, jumped down a steep flight of stone stairs littered with broken tiles and so found himself in the main street which ran down the hill in a series of sharp twists. A roundshot hit the street's centre just as he ducked down beside a dungheap. The ball ploughed up a patch of stone and earth, then bounced to smash into a reed-thatched cattle byre as another roundshot splayed apart some roof beams across the street. Still more shots crashed home as the French gunners put in a sudden energetic spell. Sharpe and Harper took temporary cover in a doorway that bore the fading chalk marks from both armies' billeting officers; one mark read 5/4/60 meaning that five men of number four company of the 60th Rifles had been billeted in the tiny cottage, while just above it was a legend saying that seven Frenchmen, the mark carried the enemy's strange cross-bar on the shank of the 7, of the Sand of the Line had once been posted to the house that now lacked its roof. Dust drifted like mist in what had been the front room where a torn sacking curtain fluttered forlornly at a window. The village's inhabitants and their belongings had been carried in army wagons to the nearby town of Frenada, but inevitably some of the villagers' possessions had been left behind. One doorway was barricaded with a child's cot while another had a pair of benches as a firestep. A mixture of riflemen and redcoats garrisoned the town and they were sheltering from the cannonade by crouching behind the thickest walls of the deserted houses. The stone walls could not stop every French roundshot and Sharpe had already passed three dead men put out in the street and seen a half-dozen wounded men making their slow way back up towards the ridge. "What unit are you?" he called to a sergeant sheltering behind the cot across the street.

"Third Division Light Companies, sir!" the sergeant called back.

"And the First Division!" another voice chimed in. "Don't forget the First Division!"

It seemed the army had collected the cream of two divisions, their skirmishers, and put them into Fuentes de Onoro. Skirmishers were the brightest men, the ones trained to fight independently, and this village was no place for men who could only stand in the battle line and fire volleys. This was going to be a place of sharpshooting and street brawls, a place where men would be separated from their officers and forced to fight without orders. "Who's in charge of you all?" Sharpe asked the sergeant.

"Colonel Williams of the 60th, sir. Down there, in the inn."

"Thanks!" Sharpe and Harper edged down the side of the street. A roundshot rumbled overhead to drive into a roof. A scream sounded, then was cut off. The inn was the very same tavern where Sharpe had first met El Castrador and where now, in the same garden with the half-severed vine, he found Colonel Williams and his small staff.

"It's Sharpe, isn't it? Come to help us?" Williams was a genial Welshman from the 60th Rifles. "Don't know you," he said to Harper.

"Sergeant Harper, sir."

"You look handy to have in a scrap, Sergeant," Williams said. "Damned noisy today, eh?" he added in mild complaint of the cannonade. He was standing on a bench that gave him a view over the garden wall and the roofs of the lower houses. "So what brings you here, Sharpe?"

"I'm just making sure we know where to deliver ammunition, sir."

Williams offered Sharpe an owlish gaze of surprise. "Got you fetching and carrying, have they? Seems a waste of time for a man of your talents, Sharpe. And I don't think you'll find much custom here. My boys are all well supplied. Eighty rounds a man, two thousand men, and as many cartridges again stacked up in the church. Sweet Jesus!" This last imprecation was caused by a round-shot that must have gone within two feet of the Colonel's head, forcing him to duck hard down. It crashed into a house, there was a tumble of falling stone and then, quite suddenly, silence.

Sharpe tensed. The silence, after the crash of the guns and the splintering thunder of the roundshots' destructive impacts, was unnerving. Maybe, he thought, it was just a strange pause, like the sudden coincidental silence that could descend on a room of lively talkers during that moment when an angel was said to be passing over the room, and maybe an angel had flickered across the gunsmoke and all the French cannon had found themselves momentarily unloaded. Sharpe almost found himself praying for the guns to start again, but the silence stretched and stretched, threatening to be replaced by something much worse than a cannonade. Somewhere in the village a man coughed and a musket lock clicked. A horse whinnied up on the ridge where the pipes played. Rubble fell in a house where a wounded man whimpered. Out in the street a spent French cannon ball rolled gently downhill, then lodged against a fallen beam.

"I suspect we'll have company soon, gentlemen," Williams said. He climbed down from the bench and brushed white dust from his faded green jacket. "Very soon. Can't see a thing from here. Gunsmoke, you see. Worse than fog." He was talking to fill the ominous silence. "Down to the stream, I think. Not that we can hold them there, not enough loopholes, but once they're in the village they'll find life a bit difficult. At least I hope so." He nodded agreeably to Sharpe, then ducked out of the door. His staff ran after him.

"We're not staying here, are we, sir?" Harper asked.

"Might as well see what's happening," Sharpe said. "Got nothing better to do. Are you loaded?"

"Just the rifle."

"I'd have the volley gun ready," Sharpe said. "Just in case." He began loading his own rifle just as the British guns on the ridge opened fire. Their smoke jetted sixty feet out from the crest and their noise punched at the wounded village as the shots screamed overhead towards the advancing French battalions.

Sharpe stood on the bench to see the dark columns of infantry emerging from the French gunsmoke. The first British case shot exploded above and ahead of the columns, each explosion staining the air with a smear of grey-white smoke riven with fire. Solid shots seared into the massed ranks, but none of the missiles seemed to make an ounce of difference. The columns kept coming: twelve thousand men under their eagles being drummed across the flat land towards the hammering artillery and the waiting muskets and the primed rifles beyond the stream. Sharpe looked left and right, but saw no other enemies apart from a handful of green-coated dragoons patrolling the southern fields. "They're coming straight in," he said, "no messing. One attack, Pat, hard at the village. No buggering round the edge yet. Looks like they think they can come straight through here. There'll be more brigades behind, and they'll throw them in one after the other till they get the church. After that it's downhill all the way to the Atlantic, so if we don't stop them here we'll not stop them anywhere."

"Well, as you say, sir, we've got nothing better to do." Harper finished loading his seven-barrelled gun, then picked up a small rag doll that had been discarded under the garden bench. The doll had a red torso on which a mother had stitched a white crossbelt to imitate a British infantryman's uniform. Harper propped the doll in a niche in the wall. "You keep guard now," he said to the rag bundle.

Sharpe half drew his sword and tested the edge. "Didn't get it sharpened," he said. Before a battle he liked to have the big blade professionally honed by a cavalry armourer, but there had been no time. He hoped it was not an omen.