Bernard Cornwell – 1812 10 Sharpe’s Enemy

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 Convent 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?’

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