A priming tube was in the gun’s vent, suggesting that the cannon was loaded, but Sharpe ignored it, went to the opening from which the blanket had been torn aside, and listened. Boots scrambling on the turf and rocks outside, the gasping and crying of women and children, the shouts of men. Those who had escaped from the Convent were going for the Castle. Torches flared on the battlement.
‘Can we fire it?’ Frederickson was fingering the priming, tube, a quill filled with fine powder that flashed the fire down to the charge in its canvas bag. ‘No, there are children out there.’
‘God save Ireland!’ Harper had picked up one of the whitish rounded stones that had fallen behind the gun. He held it as if it would kill him, his face screwed in distaste. ‘Would you look at this? Good God!’
It was a skull. All the ‘stones’ were skulls. The man with the torch pressed closer until Frederickson barked him back because of the powder barrels, but in the smoky light Sharpe could see that the piled skulls walled in a great pile of other human bones. Thigh bones, ribs, pelvises, arms, small curled hands and long feet bones, all piled in this cellar. Frederickson, his face more ghastly than any skull, shook his head in wonderment. ‘An ossuary.’
‘A what?’
‘Ossuary, sir, a bone house. The nuns. They bury them here.’
‘Jesus!’
‘They strip the flesh off first, sir. God knows how. I’ve seen it before.’
There were hundreds of the bones, perhaps thousands. To make a space for the trail of the gun Pot-au-Feu’s men had broken into the neat pile and the skeletons had tumbled down onto the floor, the bones had been shovelled to one side, and Sharpe could see a fine white powder littered with shards where men had stepped on the human remains. ‘Why do they do it?’
Frederickson shrugged. ‘So they’re all together at the resurrection, I think.’
Sharpe had a sudden image of the mass graves at Talavera and Salamanca heaving on the last day, the dead soldiers coming to life, their eye sockets rotten like Frederickson’s, the earth shedding off the dead ranks coming from the grave. ‘Good God!’ There was a pail of dirty water under the gun, ready for the sponge, and a rag beside it. He stooped and cleaned off his sword before pushing it home in the scabbard. ‘We’ll need six men here. No one’s to fire the gun without my order.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Frederickson was cleaning the sabre, pulling the curved blade slowly through the wet rag.
Sharpe went back through the pathway of skulls, following Harper’s broad back. He remembered walking across Salamanca’s battlefield in the autumn, before the retreat to Portugal, and there had been so many dead that not all had been buried. He could remember the hollow sound as a horse’s hooves had clipped a skull which had rolled like a misshapen football. That had been in November, not even four months after the battle, yet already the enemy dead had been flensed white.
He walked into the cloister, a place of the living, and the fire showed disconsolate prisoners hedged by sword-bayonets. A child cried for its mother, a Rifleman carried a tiny baby deserted by its parents, and the women screamed at Sharpe as he appeared. They wanted to leave, it was not their doing, they were not soldiers, but he bellowed at them to be quiet. He looked at Frederickson. ‘How’s your Spanish?’
‘Good enough.’
‘Find whatever women were captured up here. Give them decent quarters.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The hostages can stay where they are. They’re comfortable enough, but make sure you’ve half a dozen reliable men to protect them.’
‘Yes, sir.’ They were walking across the courtyard, stepping over the small canals. ‘What about this scum, sir?’
Frederickson stopped beside the deserters who had been captured. No Hakeswill there, just three dozen sullen frightened men. Sharpe looked at them. Two-thirds were in British uniform. He raised his voice so that all the Riflemen in the courtyard and on the upper gallery could hear him. ‘These bastards are a disgrace to their uniforms. All of them. Strip them!’