he asked El Castrador.
The big man shrugged. 'Sometimes yes, sometimes no.' He plainly did not know the answer.
Sharpe collapsed the telescope. 'Put a dozen men on guard, Donaju,' he ordered, 'and tell the rest to sleep a while. Pat? Send Latimer and a couple of the lads to that knoll.' He indicated a rocky height that would offer the best view of the surrounding country. 'And you and the rest of the rifles will come with me.'
Harper paused as though he wanted to ask for details of what they planned to do, then decided mute obedience was the best course and slid back off the crest. Donaju frowned. 'I can't come with you?'
'Someone has to take charge if I die,' Sharpe said. 'So keep watch, stay here till three in the morning, and if you haven't heard from me by then, go home.'
'And what do you plan to do there?' Donaju asked, gesturing towards the village.
'It doesn't smell right,' Sharpe said. 'I can't explain it, but it doesn't smell right. So I'm just going to take a look. Nothing more, Donaju, just a look.'
Captain Donaju was still unhappy at being excluded from Sharpe's patrol, yet he did not like to contradict Sharpe's plans. Sharpe, after all, was a fighting soldier and Donaju had only one night's experience of battle. 'What do I tell the British if you die?' he asked Sharpe chidingly.
'To take my boots off before they bury me,' Sharpe said. 'I don't want blisters through eternity.' He turned to see Harper leading a file of riflemen up the slope. 'Ready, Pat?'
'Aye, sir.'
'You'll stay here,' Sharpe said to El Castrador, not quite as a question, but not quite a direct order either.
'I shall wait here, seсor
Sharpe led his men southwards behind the crest until a broken stretch of rocks offered a patch of shadow that took them safe down to the nearest stone wall. They moved fast, despite having to go at a crouch, for the shadows of the stone walls offered black lanes of invisibility that angled towards the village. Halfway across the valley floor Sharpe stopped and made a cautious reconnaissance with his telescope. He could see now that all the lower windows in the village had been blocked with stone, leaving only the inaccessible upper windows free for lookouts. He could also see the foundations of houses that had been demolished outside the village's defensive perimeter so that no attacker would have shelter close to San Cristobal. Loup had taken the additional precaution of knocking down the drystone walls that lay within close musket range of the village. Sharpe could get as near as sixty or seventy paces, but after that he would be as visible as a blowfly on a limewashed wall.
'Bugger's taking no chances,' Harper said.
'Can you blame him?' Sharpe answered. 'I'd knock down a few walls to stop El Castrador practising his technique on me.'
'So what do we do?' Harper asked.
'Don't know yet.'
Nor did Sharpe know. He had come to within rifle range of his enemy's stronghold and he could feel no prickle of fear. Indeed, he could feel no apprehension at all. Maybe, he thought, Loup was not here. Or maybe, more worryingly, Sharpe's instincts were out of kilter. Maybe Loup was the puppetmaster here and he was enticing Sharpe ever closer, lulling his victim into a fatal sense of security.
'Someone's there,' Harper said, anticipating Sharpe's thoughts, 'else there'd be no smoke.'
'Sensible thing to do,' Sharpe said, 'is for us to bugger off out of here and go to bed.'
'Sensible thing to do,' Harper said, 'is get out the bloody army and die in bed.'
'But that's not why we joined, is it?'
'Speak for yourself, sir. I just joined to get a square meal,' Harper said. He primed his rifle, then similarly armed the seven-barrel gun. 'Getting killed wasn't really part of the idea at all.'
'I joined so as not to be strung from a gallows,' Sharpe said. He primed his own rifle, then gazed again at the village's moonwashed walls. 'Damn it,' he said, 'I'm going closer.' It was like the game children played when they tried to see how close they could creep to a victim without their movements being observed, and suddenly, in Sharpe's mind, the village assumed a childlike menace, almost as though it were a malevolent but sleeping castle that must be approached with enormous stealth in case it stirred and destroyed him. Yet why bother to risk destruction, he asked himself? And he could give himself no answer to the question, except that he had not come this close to the stronghold of the man who had made himself into Sharpe's bitterest enemy just to turn and walk ignom-iniously away. 'Watch the windows,' he told his men, then he sneaked along the base of the shadowed wall until at last the stones ran out and there was only a spill of fallen rocks to show where once the wall had stood.
But at least that spill of stones offered a patchy tangle of concealing shadows. Sharpe stared at that tangle, wondering if the shadows were sufficient to hide a man and then he looked up at the village. Nothing stirred except the haze of woodsmoke tugged by the night's small wind.
'Come back, sir!' Harper called softly.
But instead Sharpe took a breath, lay flat and edged out into the moonlight. He was slithering like a snake between the rocks, so slowly that he trusted no watcher would detect his moving shape amidst the patchwork of shadows. His belt and looped uniform kept snagging on stones, but each time he eased himself free and crept a few feet onwards before freezing to listen again. He was anticipating the telltale sound of a musket being cocked, the heavy double click that would presage a crashing shot. He heard nothing except the soft sound of the wind. Not even a dog barked.
He went closer and closer until at last the jumbled stones ended and there was only moonlit open ground between himself and the high wall of the nearest house. He stared up at the window and saw nothing. He could smell nothing but the rank odour of the dungheaps in the town. No smell of tobacco, no saddle-sores, no stink of unwashed uniforms. There was the faint hint of woodsmoke sweetening the stench of dung, but otherwise no suggestion of human presence in the village. Two bats wheeled close to the wall, their ragged wings flickering black against the limewash. Sharpe, now that he was close to the village, could see the signs of neglect. The limewash was wearing thin, slates had slipped from the roofs and the window frames had been torn apart for firewood. The French had displaced San Cristobal's inhabitants and made it a village of ghosts. Sharpe's heart thumped hard, echoing in his ears as he lay straining for any clue as to what lay behind the blank, silent walls. He cocked his rifle and the clicks sounded unnaturally loud in the night, but no one called a challenge from the village.
'Bugger it.' He had not meant to speak aloud, but had, and as he spoke so he stood up.
He could almost sense Harper taking a nervous breath a hundred paces behind him. Sharpe stood and waited, and no one spoke, no one called, no one challenged and no one shot. He felt suspended between life and death, almost as if the whole spinning earth had become as fragile as a blown-glass ball that could be shattered by a single loud noise.
He walked towards the village that lay just twenty paces away. The loudest noises in the night were the sounds of his boots on the grass and of the breath in his throat. He reached out and touched the cold stone wall, and no one fired and no one challenged, and so Sharpe walked on around the village's edge, past the stone- blocked windows and the wall-barricaded streets until he came at last to the maze-like entrance.
He stopped five paces short of the gate's outer wall. He licked his lips and stared at the dark gap. Was he being watched? Was Loup, like a sorcerer in a tower, drawing him on? Were the French holding their breath and scarcely believing their luck as their victim came to them, step by slow step? Was the night about to explode in stark horror? In gunfire and slaughter, defeat and pain? The thought almost made Sharpe walk away from the village, but his pride stopped him from retreating and the pride was monstrous enough to make him step one pace closer to the labyrinthine gate.
Then another pace, and another, and suddenly he was there, in the gate's opening itself, and nothing moved. Not a breath stirred. In front of him was the blank second wall with its enticing opening off to Sharpe's left. He sidled into the gap, closed off now from the moonlight and from the sight of his riflemen. He was in the maze, in Loup's trap now, and he edged down the narrow gap between the walls with his rifle pointed and his finger on the trigger.
He came to the gap and saw a third blank wall ahead, and so he stepped through into the last narrow passage that led to his right and thus to the final gap in the last wall. His feet scraped on stone, his breath
