‘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 against 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.
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.