The first French shell, fired from an ugly little howitzer in a deep pit, burst on the Plaza, and flames shot through the smoke as the casing burst into unnumbered fragments that needled outwards. Before Sharpe could move, before the first explosion had ceased, the second howitzer’s shell landed, bounced, rolled to the powder trail just yards from the cathedral, hit a bollard, and the sentries dived for shelter as it flamed crashingly apart, and Sharpe knew that there was no time to reach the cellar. He plucked at Teresa and Harper.
‘The ovens!’
They ran, through the door and over the counter, and he picked up the girl and thrust her head-first into the great brick cave of the bread oven. Harper was clambering into the second and Sharpe waited till Teresa was at the back and then he heard an explosion. It was small enough, scarcely audible over the crash of French shells and the distant sound of the Portuguese batteries’ reply, and he knew, as he climbed in behind the girl, that the barrel had exploded, and he wondered if the cathedral door had held the blast, or if the cartridges had been moved, and then there was a second explosion, louder and more ominous, and Teresa gripped his thigh where it was wounded, and the second explosion seemed to go on, like a muffled volley from a battle in deep fog, and he knew that the cartridges, down in their stacks behind the door, were setting each other of in an unstoppable chain of explosions.
He wondered, crouched foetus-like in the oven, what was happening in the cathedral. He saw, in his mind’s eye, the lurid flames, gouting shafts of light, and then there was a bigger explosion and he knew that the chain had reached the powder stacked at the top of the steps, and it was all done now. Nothing could prevent it. The guards in the cathedral were dead; the great rood was looking down on its last seconds; the eternal presence would soon be swatted out.
Another French shell exploded, the fragments clashing on the bakery walls, and it was drowned by a seething roar, growing and terrifying, and in the first crypt, crate by crate, cartridge by cartridge, the ammunition of Almeida was exploding. The stabbing flames were reaching the weakened curtain; the men in the deep crypt would be on their knees, or in panic, the powder for the great guns all round them.
He had thought that the sound could only grow till it was the last sound on earth, but it seemed to die into silence that was merely the crackling of flames, and Sharpe, knowing it was foolish, uncurled his head and looked through the gap between the oven and its iron door, and he could not believe that the leather curtain had held, and then the hill moved. The sound came, not through the air but through the ground itself, like the groaning of rock, and the whole cathedral turned to dust, smoke, and flames that were the colour of blood that scorched through the utter blackness.
The French gunners, pausing with shells in their hands, jumped to the top of their pits and looked past the low grey ramparts and crossed themselves. The centre of the town had gone, turned into one giant flame that rolled up and up, and became a boiling cloud of darkness. Men could see things in the flame: great stones, timbers, carried upwards as if they were feathers, and then the shock hit the gunners like a giant, hot wind that came with the sound. It was like all the thunder of all the world poured into one town for one moment for one glimpse of the world’s end.
The cathedral disappeared, turned into flame, and the castle was scythed clean from the ground, the stones tumbling like toy things. Houses were scoured into flaming shards; the blast took the north of the town, unroofed half the southern slope, and the bakery collapsed on to the ovens, and Sharpe, deafened and gasping, choked on the thick dust and heated air, and the girl gripped him, prayed for her soul, and the blast went past like the breath of the Apocalypse.