The bed seemed to thump on him, the air was like a great, warm fist that pounded all about him and left only silence where there had been nothing but sound.
He was deafened.
He could feel shock after shock thudding the stone floor. He guessed that the shells were cracking open in the courtyard, and then there was a bigger blast, a thunder that pierced even his deafness, and he felt fragments spatter on the mattress that shielded him.
Silence again.
He was breathing dust. The thudding had stopped, but the room seemed to be shifting like the cabin of a ship under way.
He stood up, pushing the bed away, and saw the air was filled with white fog. It was not smoke, but powdered lime shaken from the walls and ceiling which now hung suspended in the room and stung his eyes.
He spat the dust out of his mouth.
The bottle of champagne was still in his hand. He swilled his mouth with it, spat again, then drank. The whole world seemed to be moving. The door was open, blown flat by the blast. The table had fallen and he saw, yet did not understand, that the ink bottle was rolling back and forth on the floorboards like the weight of a pendulum.
He went to the window. The room seemed to lurch as a ship lurched when caught by a sudden wind.
He had seen Almeida after the explosion and this reminded him of the Portuguese fortress. There was the same stench of roasted flesh, the same fire and dust in the silence.
The keep was a boiling cauldron of flame and smoke. He could not imagine how so much smoke could be roiled out of stone. There was a ringing in his ears, insistent and annoying. He hit the side of his head with his hand.
A man screamed beneath him. His clothes were gone, his body was blackened, and blood showed on his back. The sound made Sharpe aware that he could hear.
Time to go, he thought, and the realisation was so odd that he did not move. A magazine exploded somewhere and spewed a lance of flame into the boiling smoke. The floor shifted again.
He heard a rumble to his right, felt the sudden shock of the floor tilting, a movement that made him drop the champagne and grip the window bar for support. A crack had appeared in the wall, a crack that widened as he watched. Jesus! The old houses built against the courtyard wall were slumping down!
Go, he thought, go! He frowned, turned, and slapped his waist to check his sword was in its slings. It was.
Walking to the door was like walking the deck of a ship. He feared that even his footsteps might tip the precarious balance of the fragile house, that at any moment he would be felled by the falling masonry and collapsing floors.
The building shuddered again. A man shouted outside, then another, and Sharpe stepped over the threshold to see the young, cheerful guard lying dead. A shell had come through the landing window and blowft him apart.
Masonry rumbled. A crack sounded like a whiplash. He jumped recklessly down the rubble and dust-choked stairs. His uniform was thick with the white dust. Instinctively, as he reached the door to the courtyard, he began to beat it off, then stopped. It was as good a disguise as he could hope for.
Masonry fell somewhere, provoking shouts, and Sharpe knew that soon men would be in the castle who were not dazed, men who would begin the process of rescue and recovery. He hurried into the courtyard and turned left, towards the gate, and saw there a knot of men who stared aghast into the glimpse of hell that had been the keep.
He turned. He walked away from them, going towards the fire, but keeping the wall close to his right. He passed dead men, wounded men, men who cried, men who were past crying. The flesh smelt thick. He wished he had kept hold of the champagne to clear the taste of dust and smoke from his mouth.
Then a crash, a splintering, growing, hellish noise erupted to his right in the building where he had been prisoner, and he had a glimpse of the walls falling, of roof beams coming like lances through the breaking stones, and then it was blotted by dust and he was running, the stones falling, and he felt a massive blow on his leg that twisted him to his side, threw him down, and his mouth, nose, ears and eyes were thick with the dust and the noise and he was crawling blindly towards the light.