'They won't, sir.'
'But your gunners will be in range of those damned Riflemen on the hill.' The General spoke slowly, thinking aloud. 'I think we must keep them busy. Do you believe this report they have rockets?' He had turned to Dubreton.
'No, sir. I can't see how they could fire them through the thorns.'
'Nor me. So. We'll send a Battalion up the hill, eh? They can keep the Riflemen busy.'
'Just one, sir?'
The fire crackled in the hearth, sparks spitting onto the boots that dried before the flames, and the plans were meticulously made. A battalion, reinforced by Voltigeurs, would assault the watchtower while two twelve-pounders, instead of going into the Convent, would soak the thorns with canister to kill the hidden Greenjackets. The howitzers in the Convent would make the Castle courtyard into a place of shell-born death, while guns south of the village would rake the rubble and earthworks so no rockets could be carried to their launchers. And the infantry would attack again in mid-raorning, an infantry that would be protected by the guns, that would take their bayonets to a shattered, demoralized garrison. Then the French could march on to the bridge at Barca de Alva, to victory. The General raised a glass of brandy. 'To victory in the Emperor's name.'
They murmured the toast, drank it, and only Dubreton muttered a doubt. 'They gave the Convent up pretty easily.'
'They had few men there, Alexandre.'
'True.'
'And my guns had softened them.' The Colonel of Artillery smiled.
'True.'
The General raised his glass again. 'And tomorrow we win.'
'True.'
The breeze drifted the snow into piles inside the Castle courtyard. The flakes hissed in the fire, melted on the backs of the Rocket Troop horses who were huddled inside the keep's courtyard, settled wet and cold on the greatcoats of the men who stared into the night and feared a screaming attack from the darkness. Rags were wrapped round the locks of muskets and rifles, rags to stop the wetness reaching the powder in the pans. Fires had been lit in the Convent and the flames showed where French soldiers struggled at the old gateway, heaving and hammering stones into a crude ramp up which the guns could be pushed. Occasionally a rifle shot cracked in the valley and its bullet would chip stone by the French or throw a man down, cursing and wounded, but then the French protected the place with an empty ammunition caisson, and the Riflemen saved their ammunition. Other Riflemen, from Frederickson's Company, patrolled into the valley. Their orders were to keep the French awake, to fire at lights, shadows, to wear on the night-time nerves of the enemy, while on the hill the Fusiliers cursed and swore and wondered what kind of maniac would order to them to search by night for rabbit holes. Rabbit holes!
Men slept uneasily, their uniforms half dried by the fires, their muskets always within reach. Some woke in the darkness, wondering for an instant where they were, and when they remembered the chill fear would come back. They were in a bad place.
Major Richard Sharpe seemed distracted. He was polite, attentive to every detail, secretive about tomorrow's plans. He stayed on the gatehouse turret till midnight, till the snow stopped falling, and then he had joined his Company for a thin meal of boiled dried beef. Daniel Hagman had assured Sharpe that Harper would survive, but there had been little conviction in the old poacher's voice and Sharpe had just smiled at him. 'I know, Dan. I know.' There had been little conviction in Sharpe's voice as well.
Sharpe walked every rampart, spoke to every sentry, and the tiredness was like a pain in every part of his body. He wanted to be warm, he wanted to sleep, he wished that Harper's huge and genial presence was in the Castle, but he knew, too, that he would have little sleep this night. An hour or two, perhaps, huddled in some cold corner. The room that Farthingdale had made his own, the room with the fireplace, had been given to the wounded, and no man in the valley had a worse night than them.
The wind was cold. The snow seemed almost luminous on the valley floor, a white sheet that would-betray an enemy movement. The sentries fought to stay awake on the ramparts, listened for their Sergeants' footsteps, wondered what the dawn would bring from the east.
To the south there was a glow in the sky, a red suffusion that marked where Partisans were spending the dark hours. Somewhere, just once, a wolf gave a sobbing howl that was ghostlike in the high, dark night.
Sharpe's final visit to the sentries was to the men who guarded the hole hacked in the southern side of the keep. He looked at the snow-covered thorns of the hill and knew that, should tomorrow they be overwhelmed, that was the escape route. Many would never take it, but would lie dying in the Castle, and he remembered the winter four years before when he had led the single Company of Riflemen, in weather worse than this, on a retreat that had been as desperate as tomorrow's might be. Most of those men were dead now, killed by disease or by the enemy, and Harper had been one of the men who had struggled south in the Galician snows. Harper.
He went to the steps which led straight and broad down to the dungeons. Lightly wounded Fusiliers guarded the prisoners and they did so in a stench that was vile, a stench that rose from the crammed, foul bodies in the dark. The guards were nervous. There was no door to the dungeons, just the stairway, and they had made a barricade, chest high, at the bottom of the steps and lit it with flaming straw torches that showed the slick wetness of the nearest patch of floor. Each guard had three muskets, loaded and cocked, and the thought was that no prisoner would have time to clamber the barricade before a bullet would throw him back. The guards were pleased to see Sharpe. He sat with them on the steps. 'How are they?'
'Bleeding cold, sir.'
'That'll keep them quiet.'
'Gives me the creeps, sir. You know that big bastard?'
'Hakeswill?'
'He got free.'
Sharpe looked into the darkness beyond the torches. He could see the half-naked bodies piled together for warmth, he could see some eyes glittering at him from the heap, but he could not see Hakeswill. 'Where is he?'
'He stays at the back, sir.'
'Given you no trouble?'
'No.' The man spat a stream of tobacco juice over the unbalustraded edge of the stairs. 'We told them if they came within ten feet of the barricade, we'd fire.' He patted the butt of his musket, one captured from Pot-au-Feu's men.
'Good.' He looked at the half-dozen men. 'When are you relieved?'
'Morning, sir.' Their self-elected spokesman said.
'What do you have to drink?'
They grinned, held up canteens. 'Rum, sir.'
He walked down the steps and pushed at the barricade. It seemed firm enough, a mixture of stones and old timber, and he stared into the darkness and understood why this damp place would scare a man. It was called a dungeon, though in truth it was more like a huge, branching cellar, arched low with massive stones, but doubtless it had been a place where men had died through the ages. Like the men Hakeswill had killed here, like the Muslim prisoners who would have defended their faith by refusing to convert despite the Christian knives, racks, burning irons, and chains. He wondered if anyone had ever been happy in this place, had ever laughed.
This was a tomb for happiness, a place where no sunlight had reached for centuries, and he turned back to the stairs, glad to be leaving this place.
'Sharpy! Little Dick Sharpy!' The voice was behind him now, a voice Sharpe knew too well. He ignored Hakeswill, began climbing the steps, but the cackle came, mocking and knowing. 'Running away, are we, Sharpy?'
Despite himself, Sharpe turned. The figure shuffled into the torchlight, face twitching, body wrapped with a shirt taken off another prisoner. Hakeswill stopped, pointed at Sharpe, and gave his cackling laugh. 'You think you've won, don't you, Sharpy?' The blue eyes were unnaturally bright in the flames of the torch, while the grey hair and yellow skin looked sallow, as if HakeswilPs whole body, except his eyes, were a leprous growth.
Sharpe turned again, spoke loud to the sentries. 'If he comes within fifteen feet of th
e barricade, shoot him.'
'Shoot him!' The scream was from Hakeswill. 'Shoot him! You poxed son of a poxed whore, Sharpe! You bastard! Get others to do your dirty work for you?' Sharpe turned, halfway up the stairs, and saw Hakeswill smile at the guards. 'You think you can shoot me, lads? Try, go on! Try now! Here I am!' He spread his naked arms wide, grinning, the head on its long neck twitching at them. 'You can't kill me! You can shoot me, but you can't kill me! I'll come for you, lads, I'll come and squeeze your hearts out in the dark.' The hands came together. 'You can't kill me, lads. Plenty's tried, including that poxed bastard who calls himself a Major, but no one's killed me. Never will. Never!'
The guards were awed by the force of Hakeswill, by the passionate conviction in the harsh voice, by the hatred.
Sharpe looked at him, hating him. 'Obadiah? I'll send your soul to hell within a fortnight.'
The blue eyes were unblinking, the twitching gone, and Hakeswill's right hand came slowly up to point at Sharpe. 'Richard bloody Sharpe. I curse you. I curse you by wind and by water, by fog and by fire, and I bury your name on the stone.' It seemed as if his head would twitch, but Hakeswill exerted all his will, and the twitch was nothing more than a mouth-clenched judder, a judder followed by a great scream of rage. 'I bury your name on the stone!' He turned back to the shadows.
Sharpe watched him go, then turned himself and, after a word with the guards, climbed to the very top of the Castle's keep. He climbed the turning stairs until he was in the cold, clean air that blew from the hills, and he breathed deep as though he could cleanse his soul of all the bad deeds. He feared a curse. He wished he had carried his rifle, for on the butt of the gun he had carved away a small sliver so that a patch of bare wood was not covered with varnish, and he could have pressed a finger on the wood to fight the curse. He feared a curse. It was a weapon of evil, and a weapon that always brought evil upon the person who made the curse, but Hakeswill had no future but evil and so could deliver the words.
A man could fight bullets and bayonets, even rockets if he understood the weapon, but no man understood the invisible enemies. Sharpe wished he knew how to propitiate Fate, the soldiers' Goddess, but She was a capricious deity, without loyalty.
It came to him that if he could see just one star, just one, then the curse would be lifted, and he turned on the ramparts and he searched the dark sky, but there was nothing in the heavens but cloud and heaviness. He searched desperately, looking for a star, but there was no star. Then a voice called to him from the courtyard, wanting him, and he went down the twisting stair to wait for morning.
Chapter 26
There were ghosts in the Gateway of God, so said the people of Adrados, and so the soldiers believed even though they had not been told. The buildings were too old, the place too remote, the imaginations too receptive. The wind sounded on shattered stone, rustled long-spiked thorn, sighed on the edge of the pass.
Four French soldiers were sentries by the gun in the cellars of the Convent. They stared at the Castle and their view was obscured by the gusts of wind that picked up bellying sails of snow and snatched them over the edge of the pass so that, for moments at a time, the air between Convent and Castle was beautiful with glittering white folds in the darkness.
And behind them, behind the spiked gun, were the piled skulls, the stuff of ghosts, and the soldiers shivered and watched the British sentries on the ramparts who were outlined by the fires in the Castle courtyard, and then another gust of wind would snatch the white ghost-like snow into waving plumes that went westward to settle again in the pass.
Sledge-hammers sounded above them, the crashes muffled by the intervening stones. The gunners would have their embrasures in the southern wall.
One of the Frenchmen smoked a short pipe, his back comfortable against the skulls, though the others had seen him lean there and had sketched the sign of the cross on their greatcoats.
'Steam.' One of them said.
‘What?'
'I've been thinking about it. Steam, that's what they were. Steam.'
They had been talking of the strange weapon that had torn into the column. One of the men spat into the darkness. 'Steam.' He was scornful.
'Have you ever seen a steam engine?' Asked the first man.
'No.'
'I saw one in Rouen. Bloody great noise! Just like this morning! Fire, smoke, noise. Has to be steam!'
A new conscript who had hardly spoken all night plucked up courage to say something. 'My father says the future is with steam.'
The first man looked at him, dubious of this unmoustached support. He decided it was welcome. 'There you are then! I tell you! I saw one in a mill. A bloody great room with bloody great beams going up and down, and smoke everywhere! Like hell it was, like hell!' He shook his head, intimating that he had seen things that they had not seen, horrors of which they could have no comprehension, though in truth his glimpse had been brief at best, and incomprehensible as well. 'Your father's right, son. Steam! It'll be everywhere.'
Another man laughed. 'You'll have a steam musket, Jean.'
'And why not?' The first man had been carried away by his vision of the future. 'Steam infantry. I tell you! It'll happen! You saw what happened this morning.'
'I could do with a steam whore right now.'
There was a crash outside, a cheer, and a section of the wall fell into the snow. The man with the pipe blew smoke that was snatched into the pass. 'They should block this hole up.'
'They should march us back to bloody Salamanca.'
There were footsteps in the cellar behind and Jean peered between the skulls. 'Officer.'
They swore quietly, pulled their uniforms straight, and adopted poses that suggested an unceasing watch on the snow outside. The Lieutenant stopped at the gun. 'Anything?'
'No, sir. All quiet. Reckon they're tucked up in bed.'
The officer fingered the filed nail in the touch-hole. 'It'll soon be over, lads.'
'That's what they told them, sir.' The man with the pipe jerked its stem at the skulls of the nuns.
The Lieutenant looked at the skulls. 'Bit eerie, aren't they?'
'We don't mind, sir.
'Well, it'll soon be over. We've got four howitzers upstairs. There'll be four other guns as well. They're just putting them into place. Another hour and we'll open fire.'
'Then what, sir?'Jean asked.
'Then nothing!' He grinned at them. 'We guard the guns and watch the attack.’
'Really!'
'Truly.'
The soldiers grinned. Someone else would be doing the fighting and the dying. The Lieutenant peered through the great hole and watched the snow smoke off the crest of the pass. 'It'll soon be over.'
The hour passed slowly. Overhead the gunners prepared, the tools of their trade, their rippers and wormheads, rammers and swabbers, buckets and portfires, spikes and fuses. The howitzers, obscenely squat guns, pointed into the air and the gunners fussed about them. The range was short and the officers were debating how much powder to put into each barrel and the gunners waited with their long-handled scoops to feed the skyward muzzles that would lob the six inch shells over the valley. The hornbeam had long been taken away as fuel for the fires that burned in the lower courtyard.
To the east there was the faintest lightening of a strip of sky over the horizon, a false dawn that was seen by few except the Riflemen on the watchtower hill, and for the four sentries alone again in the room of skulls and bones the night was as dark as ever. It seemed to them that the dawn would never come, that they were trapped eternally in this cold place, this dark place, where the skulls of the dead reached to the ceiling, and they shivered, watched the night above the snow, and hoped for dawn. One of them looked suddenly alarmed. 'What was that?'
'What?'
'A noise! In here. Listen!'
They listened. The conscript shook his head. 'A rat?'
'Shut your bloody face!'
Jean, his enthusiasm of an hour before gone, leaned back again
st the gunwheel. 'Rats. Must be thousands of bloody rats. Anyway, I don't know how you can hear a bloody thing with all that thumping upstairs. What are they doing up there? Mardi Gras?'
The gunners were spiking the trails of the twelve-pounders to face the same spot on the Castle wall.
The gunner Colonel had ridden to the Convent and now he strode into the other cloister, his hands rubbing together, and grinned at his men. 'All ready?'
'Yes, sir.'
'How much powder in the howitzers?'
'Half pound, sir.'
'Too much. Still! It'll warm the barrels. Christ! It's cold.' He walked into the chapel, open now to the south, and saw two of his twelve pounders that had been dragged through the widened door and now pointed through gaping holes at the Castle. 'Those Riflemen worrying you?'
'No, sir.'
'Let's hope the bastards are low on bullets.' He walked across the wreckage of the chapel and found a curious lump of granite that stuck through the floor. The top of it was polished smooth and he wondered why it was there. Typical of the bloody Spanish not to clear the site properly before they built the Convent, though why anyone would want to build a Convent in this benighted spot was beyond him. No wonder the nuns had left. He went back to the door. 'Well done, lads! You did a good job moving them in here!' They had too.
In the cloister he looked east and saw the first faint flush of the real dawn to the east. Snow was two inches deep on the shattered remains of the Convent's wall. 'All right! Let's try the howitzers! You'll fire over, you'll see!'
A Captain shouted at a Lieutenant on the roof to watch the fall of shot, and then he yelled the order to fire and four linstocks touched four fuses, and the howitzers seemed to try and bury themselves into the snow-trampled tiles, and the noise shook snow from the tiles and the smoke was thick and choking and the Lieutenant on the roof shouted into the courtyard. 'Two hundred over!’
’Told you so!'
Morning in the Gateway of God. The cough of howitzers, the sudden almost imperceptible streak of burning fuses hurtling into the air, falling, and the shells bounced on the hillside to the south of the keep, rolled, then exploded in dirty smoke. The snow was streaked black, thorns cracked as the fragments hurtled outwards.