Smoke dribbled back from the man’s cigar. He stepped over one of the fuses, then tapped ash onto a pile of shells. Sharpe watched, disbelieving. The cavalryman walked on, disdaining his surroundings. Another cloud of smoke drifted up from his cigar and then, with superb unconcern, the man tossed the cigar stub behind him onto the tangle of fuses. He disappeared into the keep. No one seemed to have noticed. The Engineer officer who had been examining the fuses had gone. The sentries on the walls stared outwards. Two infantrymen who carried a great, steaming pot over the yard were busy with their own thoughts. Sharpe looked back at the piles of shells. Was it his imagination, or was there a small wisp of smoke coming from where the cigar had landed?
It was just his imagination, he decided.
He noticed that, despite the wound, he was gripping the bars of the window with his right hand. He uncurled his fingers.
Some men walked beneath his window. They laughed loudly.
It was not his imagination. The cigar stub was burning through to the powder core of the fuses. Smoke drifted up more thickly.
Sharpe froze. If he gave the warning he would stay a prisoner. If he did not there would be death and chaos, quite possibly his own death. But if he risked that, then the chaos would be on his side. He could use it to escape, he could forget the parole, he would be free and his honour would be intact.
The smoke was thickening now, rising up to drift eastward. An artilleryman crossed the yard from a magazine against the far wall. He passed within ten feet of the smoke, but noticed nothing. He was eating a hunk of bread and staring up at the sky which threatened rain. There were men on the walls, on the keep’s roof, yet none of them saw a thing.
Sharpe bit his lip. His left hand gripped the champagne.
The smoke turned to fire. One moment there was a grey haze, the next there was the hiss of fuses and the sparks were shooting up from the fire that snaked along the white line.
The gunner, the bread held to his mouth, stopped. He stared unbelieving at the fire-snakes. One disappeared into a pile of shells, would be eating at the first shell’s fuse, and then the gunner shouted, pointed with his loaf, and started to run.
The shell exploded.
It lifted the other shells into the air, fuses spinning, and then a second exploded, a third, and suddenly the courtyard was a maelstrom of fire and shell casing, and men were bellowing at each other to run, and Sharpe went back from the window. There were fuses leading into the keep and he had just seen, through the smoke, a streak of bright fire dart into the massive stones.
He backed slowly away. There was no safety in leaving the room. The stairway led only to the courtyard where the shells exploded. He had to stay in the room and survive whatever happened.
He tipped the cot bed over, sheltering himself behind the straw mattress, and, just as he had done so, the hill of Burgos Castle moved.
Deep beneath the keep, in the cellars and in the mine shafts that had been dug to oppose the British mines of the year before, the powder had been stacked. Barrel after barrel was down there, packed in the rock, and now the fire found it.
It blew.
It did not shatter outwards. There was more than enough powder to scythe the hilltop bare, to obliterate the walls, church, bastions, guns, and gates, but the rock-bound cellars acted as a giant mortar and hurled the blast upwards into the air until the flame spikes touched and pierced the low cloud, and still it went on, hurling stones and shells high into the air beyond the cloud and following with the rumbling, billowing, dark cloud that was fed by new blasts and pierced through by new flames as more stacks of powder were reached by the fire that destroyed the keep and thundered the sound miles out into the countryside.
Sharpe huddled against the wall.