Sharpe looked through the window. A score of smoke trails rose vertically from the chimneys of Frenada, smoke fading into a flawless cold sky. Of course he would go. Nairn had not let Sir Augustus go because the Colonel might become a hostage himself, but Nairn had not expressed any such fear about Sharpe. He smiled at the Major General. ‘I assume I’m expendable, sir.’
‘You’re a soldier, aren’t you? Of course you’re expendable!’
Sharpe was still smiling. He was a soldier, and a lady needed rescuing, and was that not what soldiers throughout history had done? The smile became wider. ‘Of course I’ll go, sir. With pleasure.’
In the churches of Spain they were praying for revenge on the perpetrators of Adrados’s misery. The prayers were being answered.
CHAPTER 4
La Entrada de Dios.
The Gateway of God.
It looked it, too, from two hundred feet below on a bright winter morning as Sharpe and Harper walked their patient horses up the track which wound between rocks whose shadows still harboured the night’s frost. Adrados lay just beyond the saddle of the pass, but the pass was the Gateway of God.
To left and right were rocky peaks, a nightmare landscape, savage and sharp. In front of them was the smooth grass of the road through the Sierra. Guarding that road was the Gateway.
To the right of the pass was the castle. The Castillo de la Virgen. El Cid himself had known that castle, had stood on its ramparts before riding out against the curved scimitars of Islam. Legend said that three Muslim Kings had died in the dungeons beneath the Castle of the Virgin, died refusing to profess Christianity, and their ghosts were said to wander wraith-like in the Gateway of God. The castle had stood years beyond number, built before the Wars of God were won, but when the Muslims had been thrown back across the sea, the castle had begun to decay. The Spanish had moved from the high places of refuge, back down the passes into the softer plains. Yet the castle still stood, a refuge for foxes and ravens, its keep and gatehouse still holding the southern edge of the Gateway of God.
And on the northern side, two hundred yards from the castle, was the Convent. It was a huge building, low and square, and its windowless walls seemed to spring from the granite of the Sierra’s rocks. Here was the place where the Virgin had stood, here was where they had built a shrine about her Footfall and a castle to protect it, and the Convent had no windows because the nuns who had once lived in its rich cloisters were supposed not to look upon the world, only at the mystery of the smooth patch of granite in their gold painted chapel.
The nuns had gone, taken in leather-curtained carts to the mother house at Leon, and the soldiers whose surcoats had decorated the walls of the castle had gone too. The road still led through the hills, a road that wound up from the deep-ravined rivers of the Portuguese border, but there were newer and better roads to the south. The Gateway of God guarded only Adrados now, a valley of sheep, thorns, and Pot-au-Feu’s desperate band of deserters.
‘They’ll have seen us by now, sir.’
‘Yes.’
Sharpe pulled out the watch that Sir Augustus Farthingdale had lent him. They were early so he stopped the three horses. The third horse carried the gold and, it was hoped, would provide a mount for Lady Farthingdale if Pot-au-Feu kept his word and released her on payment of the ransom. Harper climbed off his horse, stretched his huge muscles, and stared at the buildings on the skyline. ‘They’d be bastards to attack, sir.’
‘True.’
An attack on the Gateway from the west would be an uphill assault, steeply uphill, with no chance of approaching the pass unseen. Sharpe turned. It had taken him and Harper three hours to climb from the river, and for much of that time they would have been visible to a man with a glass on the castle ramparts. The rocks to left and right of the pass were jumbled and steep, impassable to artillery, barely climbable by infantry. Whoever held the Gateway of God barred the one road through the Sierra, and it was fortunate for the British that the French had never needed these hills and so no battle had ever been fought up this impossible slope. The hills had no value because the roads to the south by-passed the Sierra, making a defence of Spain impossible in these hills, but to Pot-au-Feu the old buildings were a perfect refuge.
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