“He doesn’t seem to be on our side today,” Hagman said.
The only good news was that Harper had brought his men safely back across the Tormes. He had led them a mile westwards and used a fisherman’s skiff to ferry them over the river, and it was reassuring for Sharpe to have the big Irishman and the twenty rifleman back at his side, but he did not know what he could do with them. Have them killed in a forlorn attack on the fort’s gate?
The Scotsman, MacKeon, came and squatted beside Sharpe. He was smoking a short foul pipe that he now pointed towards the fort. “It reminds me, Captain,” he said, “of that terrible place in India.”
Sharpe wondered if MacKeon was drunk. The fort at San Miguel was nothing like Gawilghur. The Indian fort had been built on a clifftop, dizzyingly high above the Deccan plain, while San Miguel was a decaying ruin built beside a river. “It don’t look much like Gawilghur to me,” Sharpe said.
“Mebbe not,” MacKeon said, tapping the pipe out against a stone, “but the pigtailed fellows reckon there’s only one way in. And they’re guarding that entrance, like as not, but there’s always a back way, Captain, always a back way. And you were the laddie that found it at Gawilghur.” He pointed the stem of his pipe at the fort. “See that great crack?”
MacKeon was pointing to a jagged fissure that began low on the shadowed western wall then zig-zagged up the stones almost to the parapet. For a moment Sharpe was wondering whether the Scotsman really expected the light company to climb the wall, then saw that, maybe a third of the way up, a whole section of stone had fallen away. The space looked like a small cave and was half hidden by ivy, but MacKeon was right. It was a back way in, and an agile man could squeeze through the gap, but to what? Sharpe could not remember seeing a hole inside the fort, so where did it lead?
“Sergeant Harper?”
“Sir?”
“If a frog shows his head above that parapet, shoot him.” The riflemen could keep the French out of sight, and if they were out of sight they could not see what mischief Sharpe planned. He unbuckled his sword belt, let the clumsy weapon drop, and then, with the rifle slung on his shoulder, ran across the waste ground to the fort’s wall. No Frenchman saw him, for they were keeping their heads below the parapet. They might have captured the fort, but they had a healthy respect for the rifles.
It was a hard climb. Much worse than the cliff at Gawilghur, Sharpe reckoned. That had been steep, but not vertical, and there had been bushes to provide handholds. The crack in the fort wall gave plenty of handholds, but it sloped from left to right and Sharpe had to scrabble to find footholds in the old wall, but he hauled himself up, half expecting a pistol to bang above him, and then at last he could grab the ivy’s thick trunk and that helped. One good lodgement for his foot and he could thrust himself up into the hole.
The hole was smaller than it had looked, but Sharpe turned sideways and squeezed between the stones. His rifle caught on the ivy, and his uniform snagged on the edge of the stones, but he untangled himself and pushed on until his head was inside the fort. A foul stench assailed him, and at first he could see nothing but darkness, then he saw chinks of light above him and heard footsteps on timber and realised that he had entered the space above the store-room’s barrel-vaulted stone ceiling and the lowermost timber floor. He wriggled on until he was inside the wall and wondered what he had achieved. There was no way to mount an attack from here. It would take men far too long to climb the wall, and they could only enter one at a time and even when they were inside, what could they do? They would be trapped in a narrowing space between two floors, and as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom he saw that the floor beams were oddly ragged, and then he realised he was staring at thousand of bats hanging from the timbers. “Bloody hell,” he muttered, and he tried to forget the bats and looked about him and saw that the space was thick with supporting timbers, some quite small, but all placed to support the floors on the curved stone roof that was thick with bat dung. It was the dung that stank so high.