"Poor bastards, " Harper said, for the smoke was clearing and he could see the bodies scattered on the road. Some were still, some crawled blindly, some just twitched. Then the rifles opened fire. Sharpe's riflemen did not miss their mark at that close range. They fired from behind the rocks high on either side of the small valley. First, they picked off the surviving officers, then the sergeants. By the time each greenjacket had fired two rounds, the French had vanished from the small valley. They had fled back over its lip, leaving behind a dozen dead and a score of wounded men. The battle for Irati had begun.

IN ONE way, Colonel Jean Gudin had been untypically lucky, for not one partisan had troubled his column on its dark road north, but in every other way his usual ill fortune had prevailed.

First, one of the dragoon horses had stumbled on a frozen rut in the road and broken its leg. By itself, it was no great accident, and the poor beast was put out of its misery swiftly enough, but in the dark the commotion caused a long delay. The carcass was finally hauled from the road and the column had trudged on, only to have the dragoon vanguard take a wrong turning a few kilometres further on.

That, at least, was not Gudin's fault, any more than an injured horse was his fault, but it was typical of his luck. It was almost dawn by the time the column had turned itself about and found the right track winding up towards the high pass. By then, Gudin had surrendered his horse to one of his lieutenants who had a fever and could hardly walk.

Colonel Caillou was fuming at the delay. He had never, he claimed, in all his service as a soldier, seen such ineptitude. A halfwit could do better than Colonel Gudin. "We are supposed to be at the pass by midday, " he insisted. "We shall be lucky to be there by nightfall."

Gudin ignored the colonel's ranting. There was nothing to be done, except press on and be thankful that the guerilleros were all asleep in their beds.

In three days' time, Gudin reflected, he could be back at a depot in France.

He would be safe. And so long as no British troops waited at the frontier he should save Caillou's Eagle and so spare himself the firing squad.

It was just after dawn that the next accident occurred. The column was dragging two wagons, one carrying the heavily pregnant Maria and the second loaded with what small baggage the garrison had managed to rescue from the fort. The axle of that second wagon broke and suddenly the horses were dragging stumps of splintering wood across the rutted road. Gudin sighed.

There was nothing for it but to abandon the wagon with all its precious possessions; small things, but the property of men who owned little.

He did let his men rifle through the baggage to retrieve what they could carry, and all the while Caillou cursed him and said it was time-wasting.

Gudin knew that was true and so, before all the packs could be hauled off, he ordered the wagon to be shoved off the road. With it went his books, not many, but all of them dear to Gudin. They included his diaries from India, the careful record of those long, hot years when he had thought he could drive the British out of Mysore. But the redcoats had won and nothing had been the same since.

Gudin often thought of India. He missed it; the smells, the heat, the colour, the mystery. He missed the gaudy panoply of Indian armies marching, he missed the sun and the savagery of the monsoon. In India, he thought, I had a future, but after it, none.

And sometimes, when he was feeling sorry for himself, he blamed it all on one young man whom he had liked, an Englishman called Sharpe. It had been Sharpe who had caused that first great defeat, though Gudin had never blamed him, for he had recognised that Private Richard Sharpe had been a natural soldier. How the Emperor would love Sharpe. So much luck.

Now there was another Sharpe, an officer in Spain whose named haunted the French, and Gudin sometimes wondered if it was the same man, though that seemed unlikely for few British officers came from the ranks and, besides, this Spanish Sharpe was a Rifleman and Gudin's Sharpe had been a redcoat. Yet still Gudin hoped it was the same man for he had liked young Richard Sharpe, though in truth he suspected that he was long dead. Not many Europeans had survived India. The fever got them if the enemy did not.

Gudin walked on, his diaries left behind, musing on India and trying to ignore Colonel Caillou's insults. The pregnant girl was crying and the garrison surgeon, a fastidious Parisian who had hated serving in the Pyrenees, claimed she would die if he did not cut her open.

"The baby is sideways, " he told Gudin. "It should be headfirst."

"If you cut her, she'll die, " said Gudin.

"So?" The surgeon despised soldiers' women. "She'll die if I don't cut her."

"Just keep her alive as far as Irati, " Gudin said, "and there you can operate."

"If she lives that long, " the surgeon muttered, and just then a dull rumble sounded from the mountains ahead. It sounded like distant thunder, but there were no storm clouds over the peaks and a second after the rumble had faded the small wind brought the crackle of musketry.

"You see, " Caillou spurred back down the column with a look of spiteful triumph. "There's enemy ahead."

"We don't know that, " Gudin said. "That sound could have come from anywhere."

"They're waiting for us, " Caillou said, pointing dramatically towards the hills. "And if we'd abandoned the women, we'd be there already. It's your doing, Gudin. I promise if my Eagle is lost, the Emperor will know it's your doing."

"You must tell the Emperor whatever you wish, " Gudin said in resignation.

"So leave the women here now. Leave them, " Caillou insisted. "March to the guns, Colonel. Get there before dark."

"I will not leave the women, " Gudin said. "I will not leave them. And we shall be at Irati long before nightfall. It is not so far now."

Colonel Gudin sighed and walked on. His heels were blistering but he would not retrieve his horse, for he knew the lieutenant's need was greater than his.

Nor would he abandon his men's women, and so he kept going and tried to blot out Caillou's nagging voice and the awful, haunting screams of the pregnant girl.

He was not a prayerful man, but as he climbed towards the distant sounds of the guns, Gudin did pray. He prayed that God would send him a victory, just one small victory so that his career would not end in failure or a firing squad. A Christmas miracle, that was all he asked, just one small miracle to set against a lifetime of defeat.

GENERAL Maximillien Picard bulled his way through the panicked troops to stand at the mouth of the small valley. He could see the dead grenadiers, the smashed barrels and, beyond them, the other barrels waiting in the road. A rifle bullet snapped past his head, but Picard ignored the threat. He was charmed. There was no one alive who could spoil that luck.

«Santon!» he snapped.

"Sir?" Major Santon resisted the urge to crouch.

"One company up here. They are to destroy the barrels, with volley fire, you understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"And while they're doing that, send the voltigeurs up the slopes."

The general waved to where puffs of white smoke betrayed the position of the riflemen. He did not know they were riflemen, and if he had he might have shown more caution, but he believed the ambush had been set by partisans. But whoever it was, they would soon be chased out of their lairs by the French light infantry.

"Do it now! " Picard snapped. "We don't have all day."

He turned away and a bullet plucked at his cloak, flicking it out like a banner caught by the wind. Picard turned back, looked to find the newest patch of musket smoke, and lined a finger to it. «Bastards,» he said as he walked away, "bastards."