The cellar was spattered with blood, with bodies that showed death in a dozen horrid ways. Wine-racks stood by the walls, looted empty, but the floor was black with Spanish blood, strewn with mutilations obscene as nightmare. Young, old, men and women, all killed horribly. It struck Sharpe that these people must have died the day before, as he watched from the hilltop, killed as the French pretended the village was empty. He had lain in the gully, the sun warm on his back, and in the cellar the Spanish had died, slowly and with exquisite pain. The bodies lay in the crumpled way of the dead, their number impossible to count, or to tell the ways in which they had died. Some were too young even to have known what had happened, killed no doubt before their mothers’ eyes, and Sharpe felt an impotent rage as the girl stepped past him, searching the shambles, and from far away, as if across a whole town, Sharpe heard a volley of shots. They must get out! He grabbed the girl’s arm.
‘Come on!’
‘No!’
She was searching for one person, pulling at the bodies, oblivious of the horror. Why would there be a guard on dead men? Sharpe pushed past her, took the lantern, and then heard the moaning from the far, dark end of the old wine cellar. The girl heard, too.
‘Ramon!’
Sharpe stepped on dead flesh, flinched from a spider’s web, and then, dimly at first, he saw a man manacled to the far wall. He did not ask himself why a wine cellar should be equipped with manacles; there was no time. He took the lantern closer and saw that what he had thought were chains were blood trails. The man was not manacled but nailed to the stone wall, alive.
‘Ramon!’ The girl was past Sharpe, pulling ineffectively at the nails, and Sharpe put down the lantern and hammered at the nail-heads with his sword’s brass hilt. He knocked them left and right, hearing the thunder of hooves outside, shouts and a volley, and then the nail was loose, blood trickling afresh, and he pulled it out and started on the second hand. Another volley, more hooves, and he hammered desperately until the prisoner was free. He gave the girl his sword and heaved Ramon, if that were his name, on to his shoulder.
‘Go on!’
The girl led him past the doorway they had come through, past the welter of blood and bodies, to the far corner of the cellar. A trapdoor was revealed by the lantern she was holding and she gestured at it. Sharpe dropped his moaning burden, reached up, heaved, and a sudden breeze of welcome night air dispelled the foul stench of the blood and dead. He pulled himself up, surprised to find that the trapdoor emerged outside the house walls, and then realized it was so supplies could reach the house without being trampled through the courtyard and kitchens. He looked round and there was the Company, marching steadily in three ranks.
‘Sergeant!’
Harper turned, relief visible on his face in the light from the burning house. Sharpe dropped back into the cellar, heaved the wounded man on to the ground, leaped up himself, and reached down for the girl. She ignored him, pulled herself up, rolled into the grass, and Sharpe had a glimpse of long legs. There were cheers from the men and Sharpe realized they were for him. Harper was there, thumping his back, saying something unintelligible about thinking Sharpe was lost, and then the Sergeant had the wounded man and they were running towards the Company and Sharpe, for the first time, saw horsemen in the darkness. Harper gave the wounded man into the ranks. Knowles was grinning at Sharpe, Kearsey gesturing to the girl.
‘Are they loaded?’ Sharpe gestured at the muskets, screamed at Knowles over the sound of the burning house.
‘Most, sir.’
‘Keep going!’
Sharpe pushed Knowles on, driving the Company towards the barley field and the comforting darkness, and turned to face the house and see what the cavalry were doing. Harper was already there, running backwards, the seven-barrelled gun threatening any horsemen. Sharpe wondered how long it had been since they had burst through the gate. No more than seven or eight minutes, he decided. Enough time for his men to have fired seven or eight hundred shots into the astonished French, set fire to the house, rescued Kearsey, the girl and the prisoner, and he grinned in the darkness.