Then the twelve-pounders fired, hammering the loose plaster of the chapel, loosening flakes of gold paint that fluttered into the dust on the floor, and the solid shot smashed at the Castle wall, chipped great shards from it, and Sharpe, on the turret, shouted to the ramparts below. 'Don't fire till my order!'
Over fifty Riflemen lined the northern ramparts, Riflemen who had been put there by Sharpe and then forbidden to fire at the ragged embrasures which had just blossomed flame and smoke into the morning darkness. The Fusiliers guarded into the dawn, facing the rising sun, but the Riflemen had been summoned by Sharpe. 'Wait!'
The firing of the guns was a signal. It shook the sleep from men throughout the valley, warned them that death was striding again into the Gateway, but most of all it was a signal to one man. He stretched massive muscles, wondering if the cold had made him useless, and he prayed for one more deafening volley from the guns above him. His right hand curled about the lock of the seven-barrelled gun.
Sharpe and Harper had told no one of this plan, no one, for a single prisoner taken in the night could have blurted the truth. Harper had made a lair in the bones, a lair that was lined with blankets and supported by a table, the legs of which had been sawed short so there was just room for the huge Irishman to lie flat. When Price had bellowed the order to run Harper had echoed the shout, had pushed men on, and then stepped aside into a shadow to watch his comrades scramble out of the Convent. No one had missed him, they were all too intent on escaping the French whose shouts were audible beyond the wrecked wall, and Harper had turned back to the ossuary. He had wriggled backwards beneath the wooden shelter, drawn blankets about him, piled skulls in front of his face, and waited.
Waited through the cold, through the utter darkness, with the closeness of the dead about him, and he had clutched his crucifix and sometimes he had slept. Sometimes he listened to the voices just feet away from him and tried to reckon how many men he would have to kill.
His cave was at one side of the room, at the back of the bone-pile, and he had ensured that the weight of the skeletons above him was not too heavy. He fingered the flint of the seven-barrelled gun, wondering why the guns did not fire again, and then they did and sent their recoil shuddering through the stones of the Convent.
The four sentries heard the bones rattle as the guns fired. They looked across the valley to see where the shells would fall.
Harper groaned as his back took the weight of table and dead, the groan rising to a war bellow as he rose, and the young conscript was the first to see that the dead were moving! Skulls fell, grinning faces shifted in the pile, and the bones were lifting in the darkness. The other sentries turned as the bones cascaded outwards and a dark figure, teeth bared as the skulls' teeth were bared, came at them from the place of the dead.
Harper's bellow was drowned by the crash of the seven-barrelled gun, the muzzle flaming livid in the ossuary's gloom, the smoke white as the skulls' domes, and the sentries did not even have time to turn their muskets onto the sudden apparition. Two died instantly, both with bullets in their heads, a third was flung backwards, hit in the chest, and only the conscript was untouched.
Harper staggered with the recoil of the gun, almost tripped on a skull that crunched beneath his boot-heel, and the conscript gibbered in fear.
'No trouble, lad,' the Irish voice growled. 'Stay still.'
The heavy gun was reversed, the brass butt came forward once, and the conscript slumped into unconscious silence. Harper glanced once at the other three, but none would trouble him, and then he turned to the corridor leading into the Convent's interior.
Silence. No shouts of alarm, no footsteps, but he did not want to be disturbed so, with a muttered apology to the dead, he put his shoulder against one of the great piles of bones and heaved. They swayed, but were remarkably anchored together, and he wondered if the cold had sapped his strength and heaved again. He felt them shift, scraping and cracking, and he grunted as he put all his strength against the bones which suddenly collapsed into the corridor. He ploughed into the destruction, feet crunching on dry bones, and hauled at the still standing parts of the ossuary. He reached up and his fingers hooked into dead eye-sockets, grated on yellowed teeth, and more of the pile clattered down. He went on pulling until the blockage was higher than his own height and until the first voice at the far end shouted a nervous question into the darkness.
He ignored it. He went back to the sentries and found, by the wounded man, a fallen pipe, its tobacco still alight, and Harper picked it up, sucked on it until the bowl was glowing fierce, and then he turned back towards his lair.
He heaved the table from where it had fallen, raked bones aside with his foot, and on the wall, hanging like a bundle of white cords, were the fuses. They led to powder barrels stacked beneath the floors of the Convent's eastern end, powder barrels that Harper had himself put in place during three long cold hours of crawling in utter darkness. He had stacked rocks about the barrels and then led the fuses to the ossuary.
More voices shouted at him, voices that were stilled by an officer who then shouted himself. Harper did not understand what was being said, but he answered anyway. 'Oai'
There was a second's silence. 'Qui vive?'
'Eh?' He touched the glowing pipe bowl to the fuses and the fire seemed to leap up them, spitting sparks and smoking, and he stayed only a second or two until he was sure that the fire had taken and the Convent was doomed. One minute. Less.
He backed out over the bones, stooped for his seven-barrelled gun and slung it on his shoulder, and he could hear the French pulling at the bones at the far end of the blocked corridor. The wounded sentry looked mutely at him, but there was nothing Harper could do for the man. He would die anyway. 'I'm sorry, mate.' He leaned down, picked up the man's fallen musket and aimed it at the ceiling halfway above the bones. 'Here's one from Ireland!'
The ball ricocheted from the ceiling, slammed downwards to smash a skull at the French Lieutenant's feet.
'All right, son. Let's go.' Harper scooped the conscript in his arms, glanced once at the blackened, burned fuse dangling from the dark space that led beneath the Convent floors, and jumped through the gap into the snow-covered pass.
'Number one section, fire!' Sharpe shouted.
A dozen Rifles, warned to ignore the crude embrasure from which Harper stumbled and slipped, fired at the Convent's parapet.
Harper cursed, struggled on the snow, and threw the conscript aside when he judged that the boy would avoid the effects of the explosion. He put his head down and sprinted at the white slope, imagining the French infantry behind him, and the first musket ball sprayed snow at has feet.
'Fire!' Sharpe shouted, and the remaining Rifles spat flame over the Castle ramparts and the bullets cracked on stone or whirred in the air about the heads of the French.
'Tirez!’ Cold Frenchmen fumbled with locks, picked at the rags that some had not taken from their guns, and the giant Rifleman was running further and the smoke of the first muskets was obscuring the target. 'Tirez!’ More smoke and flames decorated the Convent's cornice and the bullets jerked at the shallow snow at the lip of the pass.
'Run!' Sharpe yelled. He thought for one awful moment that Harper was hit for the big man fell, rolled down the slope, but then the Irishman was up, legs pumping, and the Riflemen on the Castle wall were reloaded and they slid the barrels across the stone and gave him covering fire.
The rumble was hardly audible at first, like the first hints of far-away thunder on a summer's night.
The old builders would not have chosen the edge of the pass as a place to build the Convent, but the Virgin Mary had chosen it herself and so the builders had to negotiate the difficulties she had bequeathed them. The granite boulder had to be the centre-piece of the chapel, the Holy Footfall would have its proper, holy place, and so the old masons had built a platform of stone about the tip of the rock and supported the platform on solid arches which, to the west, made rooms for cells, a hall, and the Co
nvent kitchens. To the east, though, there was not space for rooms and so the ground sloped up towards the stone platform and it was in that space, dark and cold, that the barrels of powder took the fire.
Eight caches of barrels, barrels taken from the stack which the Spanish had delivered to Adrados instead of Ciudad Rodrigo, waited in the darkness. Much of their force went sideways, but enough lifted the bed of stone so that, to an astonished gunner, it seemed as if the howitzers were being lifted up from the surface of the cloister, and then the tiles ripped apart, smoke and flame surged upwards, and the noise rose to drown the valley in sound. Flame lanced upwards, flame that for a second seemed like a spike of the sun itself, and then the powder for the howitzers caught the fire and a flame sheet spread sideways as the chapel floor heaved up. The serge bags for the twelve pounder guns added their power and to the watchers in the valley it seemed as if the whole south east corner of the ancient building was melting in fire and smoke.
Harper panted, stopped, and turned to watch his handiwork. He brushed snow from his uniform.
Lieutenant Harry Price was on the gatehouse turret. 'You knew!' He was accusing. 'Then why didn't you say?'
Sharpe grinned. 'Suppose one of you had been captured and held in the Convent overnight. Could you have kept silent?'
Price shrugged. 'But you might have told us when we got back.'
'I thought the surprise might cheer you up.'
'Jesus.' Price sounded disgusted. 'I was worried!'
'I'm sorry, Harry.'
The Convent was boiling smoke now, flames licking where they found fuel, and men stumbled, blackened and burned, from the wreckage. Most of the building still stood, but the wheels of all but two of the guns were broken, the ammunition was gone, and the Convent was no longer a threat to the Castle.
Patrick Harper was in the courtyard, grinning, demanding breakfast for a big man, while the Fusiliers and Riflemen cheered because their day had begun with another victory.
In the Convent daylight filtered through the smoke and dust, past broken stone and burning beams, and the light touched a polished piece of granite that had not seen daylight in eight hundred years.
Sunday, the 27th of December, 1812, had begun.
Chapter 27
The French still had guns and now the gunners were fired by anger and the south of the village was wreathed in ragged smoke while the canister rattled like metal rain on the Castle walls. There were howitzers firing too, and even though they could no longer fire from the flank and thus keep firing until the infantry were at the very brink of the courtyard, they could lob their shells from the protection of the village and make the Castle a place of seething iron.
One hour, two, and the guns still fired, and the canister killed sentries and the cobbles were scorched by the exploding shells where the snow had turned to black slush.
There was no truce this time. The gunner Colonel was dead, crushed by a falling howitzer barrel, and it was still dangerous to go into the Convent's upper part because of the howitzer shells that still exploded and added fresh smoke to the funeral pyre of more than a hundred men. The French General swore his revenge, and ordered the guns to start it. The gunners fought for their dead Colonel.
Two guns doused the watchtower hill in canister, the musket balls flaying through the thorns, jerking snow from the branches, snapping twigs and spines down onto the Riflemen who crouched in their pits. Rabbits know where to dig, and a rabbit hole was a rifle pit that was well started, and Frederickson urged the gunners on. 'Fire, you bastards! We're ready for you!' He was too. He expected them to come from the east or the north and his strength was ready for them, strength that would push the attack towards the cleared space on the northern slope of the hill down which he planned to roll his barrels of powder, fuses protected from the snow with sewn leather sheaths, and with the barrels would go the four inch round shells left for the Spanish gun. 'Come on, you bastards!' His men grinned, listening to Sweet William's battle cry. He had kept most of the Fusiliers on the reverse slope of the hill, away from the artillery fire, and he would only use them if the French turned his line of hidden Riflemen.
Most of the guns worked on the Castle. They broke open the stable roof, started fire in its rafters and in Gilliland's empty carts that blazed high and melted the slush for yards around. The French dislodged the single gun on the Castle's eastern wall, lifting it in an explosion and sliding it in a tumble of stone, snow, brass and timber down to the rubble. One shell penetrated the inner courtyard, bouncing off the walls of the keep, and its blast killed six horses outright and the Fusiliers forced their way through the screaming, panicked beasts, sliding on a mixture of blood and slush and horse urine to finish off the wounded beasts. And still the guns fired.
The Castle filled with the smoke of the explosions, shook with the crash of shot, and the twelve-pounders mixed roundshot with the canister and some of the balls hit ancient, loosened stone and a Rifleman screamed because a slab fell on his legs.
On the snow in front of the eastern wall the howitzer shells that fell short made star-shaped patterns in the snow, stars black and violent, craters of heat in the whiteness, and one shell landed on the gatehouse turret where a Rifleman, old in war, tan to it with the butt of his rifle raised. The fuse smoked crazily as the shell span, the Rifleman paused a second, then struck one glancing blow on the iron ball. The fuse was jerked out clean as a blade, and the shell was harmless. The man grinned at his frightened companions. 'Always come out if you hit 'em right.'
The Colours had gone, taken back to the Fusiliers who crouched behind a low barricade that guarded the entrance to the keep. They would fight with their own standards on this last fight and they wondered how long they must endure the blast of the explosions outside, the screaming of the horses behind, the noise of the guns that filled the valley more dreadfully than any file of French drummers.
Sharpe crouched beside Captain Gilliland high in the keep. He had to shout over the noise of the cannonade. 'You know what to do?'
'Yes, sir.' Gilliland was unhappy. The rest of his rockets would be used in a manner he did not like. 'How long, sir?'
'I don't know! An hour? Maybe two?'
Men wanted the French to come, wanted this storm of metal to end, wanted to have this fight done.
Frederickson yelled at the French to attack, called them yellow bastards, women to a man, afraid of a little hill with a few straggly thorns, and still the infantry did not come. One Rifleman screamed in pain because a canister ball was in his shoulder and Frederickson bawled at him to be silent.
The gunners slaved at their machines, served them, hauled at them, fed them with revenge for their dead Colonel.
High on the eastern side of the keep Sharpe watched the village. Once he flinched as a high canister shot struck shards of razor sharp stone from the hole he peered through. Somewhere a man screamed, the scream cut short, and the noise rolled about the valley and the smoke of the guns was drifted high over the pass and still the metal came at the walls and the shells cracked apart in the yard.
'Sir?' Harper pointed.
The French were coming.
Not in a column, not in one of France's proud columns, but uncoiling like snakes from the village, four men in a file, and three Battalions were marching down the road, marching fast, and still the guns thundered, and still Sharpe's men died in ones and twos, and still the shells battered at the defenders.
Fifteen hundred men, bayonets fixed, staying in the centre of the valley well away from the flight of the guns.
Sharpe watched them. He had held this place for a day now and he had desperately hoped for two. It would not be. He had one card left to play, just one, and when that was played it would all be over. He would retreat south through the hills, hoping the French cavalry had better targets to chase than his depleted force, and he would leave his wounded to the mercy of the French. He had made the garrison pile their coats and packs at the southern exit from the keep, the exit Pot-au-Feu's men
had used and which was now guarded by twenty Fusiliers to stop the faint-hearted leaving early. He grinned at Harper. 'It was a good fight, Patrick.'
'It's not over yet, sir.'
Sharpe knew different. The curse was on him like a lead weight, and he supposed the curse would bring defeat, would let the French through the pass, and he wondered if he would have time to go to the dungeon before the panic of the scramble southwards and kill the yellow-faced misshapen man. That would lift the curse.
In the dungeon Hakeswill listened. He could read a battle by its sound and he knew the moment was not yet. He had hoped it would be in the night, but a Fusilier Lieutenant had sat with the sentries through much of the darkness, and Hakeswill had done nothing. Soon, he promised himself, soon.
Sharpe turned to the man who had replaced the bugler. 'Ready?'
'Yes, sir.'
'In a minute. Wait.'
The French were close, the Battalions turning towards the Castle, coming over the place where yesterday the rockets had shredded the ranks, but today there was no weapon that fired at them.
The guns stopped. It seemed like silence in the valley.
The left hand Battalion of the French broke into a run, curving further left, heading south-east, and they ran towards the watchtower hill because they would attack from the one direction where Dubreton had rightly guessed there were few defences.
The other two Battalions raised a cheer, lowered their bayonets, and ran at the rubble of the eastern wall. No muskets fired from the defenders, no rifles, and the gun that would have flanked them lay on its side, shattered, useless on the stones. The two men who would have fired it sprawled lifeless on the cobbles.
A Rifleman on the keep's ramparts shouted for Sharpe, shouted loud, but the message never reached him. The French were in the courtyard.