‘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 the 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.