The nuns had gone, taken in leather-curtained carts to the mother house at Leon, and the soldiers whose surcoats had decorated the walls of the castle had gone too. The road still led through the hills, a road that wound up from the deep-ravined rivers of the Portuguese border, but there were newer and better roads to the south. The Gateway of God guarded only Adrados now, a valley of sheep, thorns, and Pot-au-Feu's desperate band of deserters.
'They'll have seen us by now, sir.
'Yes.
Sharpe pulled out the watch that Sir Augustus Farthingdale had lent him. They were early so he stopped the three horses. The third horse carried the gold and, it was hoped, would provide a mount for Lady Farthingdale if Pot-au-Feu kept his word and released her on payment of the ransom. Harper climbed off his horse, stretched his huge muscles, and stared at the buildings on the skyline. 'They'd be bastards to attack, sir.
'True.
An attack on the Gateway from the west would be an uphill assault, steeply uphill, with no chance of approaching the pass unseen. Sharpe turned. It had taken him and Harper three hours to climb from the river, and for much of that time they would have been visible to a man with a glass on the castle ramparts. The rocks to left and right of the pass were jumbled and steep, impassable to artillery, barely climbable by infantry. Whoever held the Gateway of God barred the one road through the Sierra, and it was fortunate for the British that the French had never needed these hills and so no battle had ever been fought up this impossible slope. The hills had no value because the roads to the south by-passed the Sierra, making a defence of Spain impossible in these hills, but to Pot-au-Feu the old buildings were a perfect refuge.
High above them were birds, circling slowly, and Sharpe saw Patrick Harper staring lovingly at them. Harper loved birds. They were his private retreat from the army.
‘What are they?
'Red kite, sir. They'll be up from the valley looking for carrion.
Sharpe grunted. He feared that they might provide lunch for the birds. The closer they rode to the high valley the more he believed it was a trap. He did not believe that Farthingdale's bride would be released. He believed the money would be taken and he wondered whether he or Harper would leave alive. He had told the Sergeant that he need not come, but the big Irishman had jeered at such pusillanimity. If Sharpe was going, he would go. 'Come on. Let's go on.
Sharpe had not liked Sir Augustus Farthingdale. The Colonel had been condescending to the Rifleman, amused when he discovered that Sharpe did not possess a watch and could not, therefore, time his arrival at the Convent to the exact moment stipulated by Pot-au-Feu's letter. Ten minutes past eleven, exactly. Yet beneath the Colonel's bored voice Sharpe had detected a panic about his wife. The Colonel was in love. At sixty he had found his bride, and now she was being snatched from him, and though the Colonel tried to hide every emotion beneath a mask of elegant politeness, he could not hide the passion which his bride engendered. Sharpe had not liked him, but Sharpe had felt sorry for him, and he would try to restore the lost bride.
The red kites slid their spread wings and forked tails over the castle ramparts and Sharpe could now see men on the walls. They were on the ramparts of the keep, on the turret of a great gatetower that faced into the pass, and behind the castellations of the wall around the courtyard. Their muskets were tiny lines against the pale blue of the December sky.
The road was zig-zagging now as the pass narrowed. It crossed the saddle of the pass close to the Castle wall, too close, and Sharpe pulled his horse off the road and set it at the steep grass bank of the pass's last few yards. The Convent was to their left now and Sharpe could see how it had been built on the very edge of the pass so that its eastern wall, facing the village, was just a single storey high while the western wall, looking towards Portugal, was two floors high. In the southern wall, facing across the pass, a big hole had been crudely smashed into the lower floor. The hole was covered by a blanket. Sharpe nodded at it. 'You'd think they'd put a gun in there.
'Good place for one. Harper said. The gun would fire straight across the neck of the pass.
They breasted the last few feet, their horses scrambling up the steep turf, and there was the high valley of Adrados. A quarter mile ahead of them was the village itself, a huddle of small, low houses built around one larger house that Sharpe supposed to be the village Inn. The road turned right once it was through the village, sharp right, turning to the south, and Sharpe almost groaned aloud. There was a hill that made the pivot of the turning valley, a hill that was steep, thorn covered, and crowned by an old watchtower. The Castillo de la Virgen guarded the pass, but the watchtower was the sentry post for the whole Sierra. The tower looked old, its summit crowned by castellations like the Castle walls, but at its foot he could see the scars of earthworks and he guessed the Spanish garrison had made new defences there. Whoever controlled the watchtower controlled the whole valley. Guns put at the summit of the watchtower hill could fire down into the courtyard of the Castle.
'Let's keep going. They were five minutes early and Sharpe did not turn towards the Convent, instead he led Harper on the track which ran, past a spring, towards the village. He wanted to see the eastern face of the Castle, the face that looked onto the village, but as he rode there was a sudden shout from the gatehouse and then a rattle of musket shots.
'Friendly. Harper grinned. The shots had gone hopelessly wide, intended only as a warning. Sharpe reined in and stared at the Castle. The gatehouse faced him, massively turreted, topped with men whojeered towards the Riflemen. The archway, its gates long gone, was barricaded with two peasant carts, presumably stolen from the village, while the gatehouse turrets above seemed solid and untouched by the passage of time. The keep had not been so fortunate. Sharpe could see daylight through some of the holes in its upper floors, yet the stairways must still wind to the very top for men stood on the ramparts staring at the two horsemen in the valley.
They had ridden far enough to see along the length of the eastern wall, and their excursion had been worthwhile. Most of the wall was gone, nothing now but a heap of rubble marking the line of the old wall. The rubble line would be simple to cross, a ready made breach into Pot-au-Feu's fastness.
They turned toward the Convent. No one stared from its apparently flat roof, no smoke drifted from its cloisters. It seemed to be abandoned. One doorway faced east, a doorway that was flanked by two small barred windows that Sharpe guessed had been the only normal channels of communication with the outside world. The door itself was huge, decorated with strange heads carved into the stone archway, and Sharpe dismounted beneath their eroded gaze and tied the horses' reins to the rusting bars of the left hand window. Harper heaved the saddlebags off the third horse, the gold heavy, and Sharpe pushed at one of the doors. It creaked open.
The watch said ten past eleven, the scroll-worked minute hand precisely pointing to the Roman II.
The door, hinges rusted, swung fully open.
It showed a cloister beyond the entrance tunnel. A century of neglect had made the cloister ragged, but it kept its beauty. The stone pillars that supported the cloister arches were carved, their heads a riot of stone leaves and small birds, while the cloister floor was paved in coloured tiles, green and yellow, now edged with weeds and dead grass. In the centre was a raised pool, empty of water but filled with weeds, and in one corner of the courtyard a young hornbeam had pushed its way through the tiles, cracking them around its bole. The cloister seemed empty. The roof line of the southern and eastern walls was etched in shadow on the tiles.
Sharpe took the rifle from his shoulder. He was a Major now, the ranks long in his past, yet he still carried the rifle. He had always carried a long-arm into battle; a musket when he was a private, a rifle now he was an officer. He saw no reason not to carry a gun. A soldier's job was to kill. A rifle killed.
He cocked it, the click suddenly loud in the dark entrance-way, and he walked on soft feet into the sunlight of the cloister. His eyes searched the shadows of the arches. Nothing moved.
He gestured to Harper.
The huge Sergeant carried the saddlebag into the courtyard. The coins chinked dully inside the leather. His eyes, like Sharpe's, searched the roofline, the shadows, and saw nothing, nobody.
Beneath the arches doors opened from the cloister and Sharpe pushed them open one by one. They seemed to be storerooms. One was full of sacks and he drew his huge, clumsy sword and slit at the rough cloth. Grain spilled onto the floor. He sheathed the sword.
Harper dropped the saddlebag beside the raised pool and took from his shoulder the seven-barrelled gun and pulled back the flint. The gun was a gift from Sharpe and it fired seven half-inch bullets from its seven barrels. Only a hugely strong man could wield the gun, and they were few in number, so much so that the Royal Navy, for whom the guns had been made, had abandoned the weapon when they found its recoil wounding more of their
