Bernard Cornwell – 1812 10 Sharpe’s Enemy

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.

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