“He can’t fly,” Harper said stoically, “and he doesn’t have time to dig a bloody tunnel, so he has to come in through one of the streets, doesn’t he?”

The stolid good sense made Sharpe suppose he was seeing danger where there was none. Better, he thought, to rely on his first instincts. “He’ll send his cavalry on a feint there,” he pointed to the smooth western ground, “and when he thinks we’re all staring that way, he’ll send dismounted men in from the south. They’ll be ordered to break that barricade,” he pointed to the street which led from the city to the church, “and his cavalry will swerve in behind them.”

Harper turned to judge for himself, and seemed to find Sharpe’s words convincing. “And so long as we’re on the hill or in those houses,” he nodded towards the straggling buildings that lay outside the defences, “we’ll murder the bastard.” The big Irishman picked up a sprig of laurel and twisted the pliant wood in his fingers. “But what really worries me, sir, is not holding the bastard off, but what happens when we withdraw? They’ll be flooding into those streets like devils on a spree, so they will.”

Sharpe was also worried about that moment of retreat. Once Vivar’s business in the cathedral was done, the signal would be given and a great mass of people would flee eastwards. There would be volunteers, Riflemen, Cazadores, priests, and whatever townspeople no longer cared to stay under French occupation; all jostling and running into the darkness. Vivar had planned to have his cavalry protect the retreat, but Sharpe knew what savage chaos could overtake his men in the streets when the French Dragoons realized that barricades had been abandoned. He shrugged. “We’ll just have to run like hell.”

“And that’s the truth,” Harper said gloomily. He tossed away the crumpled twig.

Sharpe stared at the twisted scrap of laurel. “Good God!”

“What have I done now?”

“Jesus wept!” Sharpe clicked his fingers. “I want half the men in those houses,” he pointed at the line of buildings which led from the south-western barricade, and enfiladed the southern approach to the city, “and the rest on the hill.” He began running towards the city. Til be back, Sergeant!“

“What’s up with him?” Hagman asked when the Sergeant returned to the hilltop.

“The doxie turned him down,” Harper said with evident satisfaction, “so you owes me a shilling, Dan. She’s marrying the Major, so she is.”

“I thought she was soft as lights on Mr Sharpe!” Hagman said ruefully.

“She’s got more sense than to marry him. He ain’t ready for a chain and shackle, is he? She needs someone a bit steady, she does.”

“But he was sotted on her.”

“He would be, wouldn’t he? He’ll fall in love with anything in a petticoat. I’ve seen his type before. Got the sense of a half-witted sheep when it comes to women.” Harper spat. “It’s a good job he’s got me to look after him now.”

“You!”

“I can handle him, Dan. Just as I can handle you lot. Right, you Protestant scum! The French are coming for supper, so let’s be getting ready for the bastards!”

Newly cleaned rifles pointed south and west. The green-jackets were waiting for the dusk and for the coming of a chasseur.

The idea buzzed in Sharpe’s head as he ran uphill towards the city centre. Colonel de l’Eclin could be clever, but so could the defenders. He stopped in the main plaza and asked a Cazador where Major Vivar might be. The cavalryman pointed to the smaller northern plaza beyond the bridge which joined the bishop’s palace to the cathedral. That plaza was still crammed with people, though instead of yelling defiance at the trapped Frenchmen, the crowd was now eerily quiet. Even the bells had fallen silent.

Sharpe elbowed his way through the crush and saw Vivar standing on a flight of steps which led to the cathedral’s northern transept. Louisa was with him. Sharpe wished she was not there. The memory of his boorish behaviour with the Spaniard embarrassed him, and he knew he should apologize, but the girl’s presence inhibited any such public repentance. Instead he shouted his idea as he forced his way up the crowded steps. “Caltrops!”

“Caltrops?” Vivar asked. Louisa, unable to translate the unfamiliar word, shrugged.

Sharpe had picked up two wisps of straw as he ran through the city and now, just as Harper had unwittingly twisted the laurel twig, Sharpe twisted the straw. “Caltrops! But we haven’t got much time! Can we get the blacksmiths working?”

Vivar stared at the straw, then swore for not thinking of the idea himself. “They’ll work!” He ran down the steps.

Louisa, left with Sharpe, looked at the twisted straw which still meant nothing to her. “Caltrops?”

Sharpe scooped some damp mud from the instep of his left boot and rolled it into a ball. He snapped the straw into four lengths, each about three inches long, and he stuck three of them into the mud ball to form a three-pointed star. He laid the star on the flat of his hand and pushed the fourth spike into the mud ball so that it stood vertically. “A caltrop,” he said.

Louisa shook her head. “I still don’t understand.”

“A medieval weapon made of iron. The cleverness of it is that, whatever way it falls, there’s always a spike sticking upwards.” He demonstrated by turning the caltrop, and Louisa saw how one of the spikes, which had first formed part of the three-pointed star, now jutted upwards.

She understood then. “Oh, no!”

“Oh, yes!”

“Poor horses!”

“Poor us, if the horses catch us.” Sharpe crumpled the straw and mud into a ball that he tossed away. Proper caltrops, made from iron nails which would be fused and hammered in the fire, should be scattered thick on the roadways behind the retreating Riflemen. The spikes would easily pierce the soft frog tissue inside a horse’s hoof walls, and the beasts would rear, twist, plunge, and panic. “But the horses recover,” he assured Louisa, who seemed upset by the simple nastiness of the weapon.

“How did you know about them?” she asked.

“They were used against us in India…“ Sharpe’s voice faded away because, for the first time since he had climbed the cathedral steps, he saw why the crowd was packed so silently in the plaza.

A rough platform had been constructed at its centre; a platform of wooden planks laid across wine vats. On it was a high-backed chair which Sharpe at first took to be a throne.

The impression of royal ceremony was heightened by the strange procession which, flanked by red-uniformed Cazadores, approached the platform. The men in the procession were robed in sulphurous yellow and capped with red conical hats. Each carried a scrap of paper in his clasped hands. “The paper,” Louisa said quietly, “is a confession of faith. They’ve been forgiven, you see, but they must still die.”

Sharpe understood then. The tall chair, far from being a throne, was a garotte. On its high back was a metal implement, a collar and screw, that was Spain’s preferred method of execution. It was the first such machine he had seen in Spain.

Priests accompanied the doomed men. “They’re all anfran-cesadosj Louisa said. ”Some served as guides to French cavalry, others betrayed partisans.“

“You intend to watch?” Sharpe sounded shocked. If Louisa blanched at the thought of pricking a horse’s hoof, how was she to bear watching a man’s neck being broken?

“I’ve never seen an execution.”

Sharpe glanced down at her. “And you want to?”

“I suspect I shall be forced to see many unfamiliar things in the next years, don’t you?”

The first man was pushed up to the platform where he was forced into the chair. The iron collar was prised around his neck. The sacrist, Father Alzaga, stood beside the executioner. ”Pax et misericordia et tranquillitas! ” He shouted the words into the victim’s ear as the executioner went behind the chair, and shouted them again as the lever which turned the screw was snatched tight. The screw constricted the collar with impressive speed so that, almost before the second Latin injunction was over, the body in the chair jerked up and slumped back. The crowd seemed to sigh.