"Mannie who, sir?"

"Manu Bappoo, " Sharpe repeated the name, "and he was a good soldier.

Better than most of them, but we still beat the bugger somewhere or other, can't remember the name of the place, and Bappoo went running back to Gawilghur. It was a fortress, see? Great big place it was, not like this.

And high up, high in the bloody sky, and Manu Bappoo reckoned he was safe there. He couldn't be beaten up there, Pat, because no one had ever taken that fortress, and no one even reckoned it could be took." Sharpe paused, remembering Gawilghur's dark walls and the sheer cliffs that protected them. Hell in a high place. "He was over-confident, see? Just like us here."

"So what happened?" Harper asked.

"Some daft bugger in a red coat climbed a cliff, " Sharpe said, "and that was the end of Manu Bappoo."

"No cliffs here, sir."

"But keep your eyes peeled. I just don't like it."

"Goodnight, Mister Sharpe, " Harper said when Sharpe had disappeared a second time down the makeshift staircase. Then the Irishman turned back to the south where nothing moved, except a falling star that blazed briefly in the sky and then was gone.

He's got the shakes, Harper thought. He's seeing enemies where there are none. But the Irishman kept his eyes peeled anyway.

General Herault was just thirty years old. He was a cavalryman, an hussar, and he wore the cadenettes of the hussars; the twin pigtails that hung beside his face. His jacket was a dolman, a Hungarian fashion because the first hussars had all been from Hungary, and Herault's dolman was brown with pale blue cuffs and thick white loops of lace sewn across its breast.

His breeches were pale blue and had more lace twisting and looping down the thighs towards the tasselled tops of his black leather boots. The general had once been the captain of an elite company, and he still wore their mark; the thick fur colback hat with its tall red plume. The colback was hot in summer, but it stopped a sabre better than any metal helmet.