At the western end of the valley, where the crest showed the magnificent view of the land beyond the mountains, were two great buildings. Both were ruins.
On the north side, low and squat, was an old convent. Its two cloisters still stood, though the upper cloister had been grievously torn by a great explosion that had destroyed the old chapel. The convent had long been deserted. Weeds grew on its patterned tiles, leaves choked the channels that had once carried water in its lower garden.
To the south, barring the pass, was a castle. A man could still climb to the top of the keep, or stand on the gatehouse, but it had been centuries since a lord lived in the castle.
Now it was a home for the ravens, and bats hung in its high dark rooms.
Further east, and higher still, dominating the land for miles around, was an old watchtower. That, too, could be climbed, though the winding stair led only to a broken battlement.
The high valley was called the Gateway of God. By the castle, on the grass that was littered with rabbit droppings like miniature musketballs, was a long, low mound. It was a grave, and in the grave were the bodies of the men who had died defending this pass in the winter. They had been few, and their enemies many, yet they had held the pass until relief came. They had been led by a soldier, by a Rifleman, by Richard Sharpe.
The French who had died, and there had been many, had been buried more hurriedly in a mass grave by the village. In the winter the scavenging beasts had scraped the earth from the grave and eaten what flesh they could find. Now, as the spring days turned to summer and the small stream in the Gateway of God shrank, the bones of the dead Frenchmen were littered about the village. Skulls lay like a monstrous crop of mushrooms.
In the south there was a war, armies marching to this year’s campaign, but in the Gateway of God, where Sharpe had fought his war against an army, there was nothing but death and the wind moving the thorns and the skulls grinning from the cropped grass. It was a place of no use to either army, a place of ghosts and death and loneliness, a place forgotten.
The city of Burgos was where the Great Road split. The road came from the French frontier to San Sebastian, then plunged south through the mountains where the Partisans made every journey hell for the French. There was relief from ambush at Vitoria, then the road went into the hills again, going ever south, until it came to the wide plains where Burgos lay.
It was the road down which the French had invaded Spain. It was the road back up which they would retreat. At Burgos the road divided. One branch went south to Madrid, the other south and west towards Portugal and the Atlantic. Burgos was the crossroads of invasion, the guardian of retreat, the fortress on the plains.
It was not a large fortress, yet in the last days of the summer of 1812 it had withstood a British siege. The castle was still scarred by the marks of cannon-balls and shells. In 1812 the castle had kept the British from chasing the French over the Pyrenees, and this summer, men feared, it might be called on to do the same work again against a reinforced British army.
Pierre Ducos did not care. If the soldiers lost Spain, then his secret Treaty would save France. The Inquisitor, back in Burgos, had promised that he would deliver, within the month, the letters that were even now being collected by the threatened Spanish Inquisition. The letters would convince Ferdinand VII of Spain’s support of a French treaty.
The two men met, not in the castle, but in one of the town’s tall, gloomy houses. Ducos winced as his spectacles rubbed his sore skin. On the advice of an army surgeon he had put axle grease behind his ears to protect against the chafing wire, but still the earpieces irritated him. At least he had the consolation of knowing that the man who had broken his other, comfortable spectacles was dead.