To a bakery. The soldiers, British and German, were mystified as Sharpe traced a gutter away from the cathedral to a building not far from the north gate. He tried the door, but it was well locked, and Harper gestured him to one side.
‘Helmet? Door.’
The German Sergeant nodded, moved ponderously at the barrier, grunted as he hit it, and then turned with what passed as a smile as the wood splintered away in front of him.
‘Told you, sir,’ Harper said. ‘Any provosts about?’
‘If there are any, kill them,’ Sharpe said.
‘Sir! You hear that, Helmet? Kill the provosts!’
It was pitch black inside but Sharpe felt his way over the floor, past a table that must once have been the counter for the shop, and found huge brick ovens, cold now, hunched at the back of the bakery. He went back to the street, empty of Portuguese provosts or patrols.
They climbed the shallow ramp to the first wall and stopped by the battlements. Sentries lined the rampart, bunched near the gleaming batteries that had been dug into the wall’s heart and, in front of them, crouched like grey fingers, were the outer defences, gently sloping, deceptive, filled with Portuguese troops whose fires cast strange glows on the deep ditches that were unseen by the enemy. Further out, beyond the dark strip of earth that was cleared of cover so that the defenders could tear the heart out of an assault, Sharpe could see French fires, some half hidden, and from the far darkness came the occasional ring of a pickaxe, the thump of earth being pried loose.
He jumped, startled by a sudden report, and realized that the Portuguese were sending the occasional missile in the hope of disturbing the French engineers. Night was when the batteries were dug, trenches extended, but the time was not yet right for the Portuguese troops to sally out of the defences and raid the French works in the night-time assault of bayonets in enemy trenches. The French were not close enough yet. A siege worked to a timetable, understood by both sides, and this was just the beginning when the besiegers’ ring was not yet complete and the fortress town was at the height of its strength and pride.
He led the way on the rampart’s top to the north gate, and Harper watched his Captain stare moodily down at the sentries, the vast gate, the companies of infantry who lived between the granite traps to guard the entrance of the town.
Harper guessed what was in Sharpe’s mind. ‘No way out, sir.’
‘No.’ The last small chance gone. ‘No. Back to the house.’
They went down steps and found a street that went towards the lower town and Sharpe stayed away from the dark houses with their blind windows and shut-up doors. Their boots rang cold on the cobbles, as they peered into alleyways, up the cross streets, and once or twice Harper thought he saw a shadow that was too irregular to be part of a building, but he could not be sure. Almeida was quiet, eerie. Sharpe drew his sword.
‘Sir?’ Harper’s voice was worried. ‘You wouldn’t be planning, would you, to…’
They had forgotten the rooftops, but Helmut, alerted by a sound, had turned, looked up, and the man who dropped on him screamed terribly as the sabre pierced him. Sharpe went right, Harper left, and the street was suddenly full of men with swords, dark clothes, and the dying man’s pathetic whimpers. Hagman was using his bayonet, backed against a wall and letting El Catolico’s men come to him, and Sharpe, by the same wall, twisted desperately to one side as a rapier blade came at him and missed his waist by inches. He parried a second man with the sword, remembered El Catolico calling it a butcher’s weapon, and, forsaking technique for anger he hacked with it once and felt the edge hit something, bite, and slide free. He turned back to the first attacker, but Roach was there, massive and ponderous, pounding the life from the man with his rifle-butt, and Sharpe twisted back, flickered his sword out in a blind lunge and felt it parried, pushed aside, and he leaped back, knowing the attack was coming, tripped on the dead man and fell backwards.