Over fifty Riflemen lined the northern ramparts, Riflemen who had been put there by Sharpe and then forbidden to fire at the ragged embrasures which had just blossomed flame and smoke into the morning darkness. The Fusiliers guarded into the dawn, facing the rising sun, but the Riflemen had been summoned by Sharpe. 'Wait!
The firing of the guns was a signal. It shook the sleep from men throughout the valley, warned them that death was striding again into the Gateway, but most of all it was a signal to one man. He stretched massive muscles, wondering if the cold had made him useless, and he prayed for one more deafening volley from the guns above him. His right hand curled about the lock of the seven-barrelled gun.
Sharpe and Harper had told no one of this plan, no one, for a single prisoner taken in the night could have blurted the truth. Harper had made a lair in the bones, a lair that was lined with blankets and supported by a table, the legs of which had been sawed short so there was just room for the huge Irishman to lie flat. When Price had bellowed the order to run Harper had echoed the shout, had pushed men on, and then stepped aside into a shadow to watch his comrades scramble out of the Convent. No one had missed him, they were all too intent on escaping the French whose shouts were audible beyond the wrecked wall, and Harper had turned back to the ossuary. He had wriggled backwards beneath the wooden shelter, drawn blankets about him, piled skulls in front of his face, and waited.
Waited through the cold, through the utter darkness, with the closeness of the dead about him, and he had clutched his crucifix and sometimes he had slept. Sometimes he listened to the voices just feet away from him and tried to reckon how many men he would have to kill.
His cave was at one side of the room, at the back of the bone-pile, and he had ensured that the weight of the skeletons above him was not too heavy. He fingered the flint of the seven-barrelled gun, wondering why the guns did not fire again, and then they did and sent their recoil shuddering through the stones of the Convent.
The four sentries heard the bones rattle as the guns fired. They looked across the valley to see where the shells would fall.
Harper groaned as his back took the weight of table and dead, the groan rising to a war bellow as he rose, and the young conscript was the first to see that the dead were moving! Skulls fell, grinning faces shifted in the pile, and the bones were lifting in the darkness. The other sentries turned as the bones cascaded outwards and a dark figure, teeth bared as the skulls' teeth were bared, came at them from the place of the dead.
Harper's bellow was drowned by the crash of the seven-barrelled gun, the muzzle flaming livid in the ossuary's gloom, the smoke white as the skulls' domes, and the sentries did not even have time to turn their muskets onto the sudden apparition. Two died instantly, both with bullets in their heads, a third was flung backwards, hit in the chest, and only the conscript was untouched.
Harper staggered with the recoil of the gun, almost tripped on a skull that crunched beneath his boot-heel, and the conscript gibbered in fear.
'No trouble, lad, the Irish voice growled. 'Stay still.
The heavy gun was reversed, the brass butt came forward once, and the conscript slumped into unconscious silence. Harper glanced once at the other three, but none would trouble him, and then he turned to the corridor leading into the Convent's interior.
Silence. No shouts of alarm, no footsteps, but he did not want to be disturbed so, with a muttered apology to the dead, he put his shoulder against one of the great piles of bones and heaved. They swayed, but were remarkably anchored together, and he wondered if the cold had sapped his strength and heaved again. He felt them shift, scraping and cracking, and he grunted as he put all his strength against the bones which suddenly collapsed into the corridor. He ploughed into the destruction, feet crunching on dry bones, and hauled at the still standing parts of the ossuary. He reached up and his fingers hooked into dead eye-sockets, grated on yellowed teeth, and more of the pile clattered down. He went on pulling until the blockage was higher than his own height and until the first voice at the far end shouted a nervous question into the darkness.
He ignored it. He went back to the sentries and found, by the wounded man, a fallen pipe, its tobacco still alight, and Harper picked it up, sucked on it until the bowl was glowing fierce, and then he turned back towards his lair.
He heaved the table from where it had fallen, raked bones aside with his foot, and on the wall, hanging like a bundle of white cords, were the fuses. They led to powder barrels stacked beneath the floors of the Convent's eastern end, powder barrels that Harper had himself put in place during three long cold hours of crawling in utter darkness. He had stacked rocks about the barrels and then led the fuses to the ossuary.
More voices shouted at him, voices that were stilled by an officer who then shouted himself. Harper did not understand what was being said, but he answered anyway. 'Oai'
There was a second's silence. 'Qui vive?
'Eh? He touched the glowing pipe bowl to the fuses and the fire seemed to leap up them, spitting sparks and smoking, and he stayed only a second or two until he was sure that the fire had taken and the Convent was doomed. One minute. Less.
He backed out over the bones, stooped for his seven-barrelled gun and slung it on his shoulder, and he could hear the French pulling at the bones at the far end of the blocked corridor. The wounded sentry looked mutely at him, but there was nothing Harper could do for the man. He would die anyway. 'I'm sorry, mate. He leaned down, picked up the man's fallen musket and aimed it at the ceiling halfway above the bones. 'Here's one from Ireland!
The ball ricocheted from the ceiling, slammed downwards to smash a skull at the French Lieutenant's feet.
'All right, son. Let's go. Harper scooped the conscript in his arms, glanced once at the blackened, burned fuse dangling from the dark space that led beneath the Convent floors, and jumped through the gap into the snow-covered pass.
'Number one section, fire! Sharpe shouted.
A dozen Rifles, warned to ignore the crude embrasure from which Harper stumbled and slipped, fired at the Convent's parapet.
Harper cursed, struggled on the snow, and threw the conscript aside when he judged that the boy would avoid the effects of the explosion. He put his head down and sprinted at the white slope, imagining the French infantry behind him, and the first musket ball sprayed snow at has feet.
'Fire! Sharpe shouted, and the remaining Rifles spat flame over the Castle ramparts and the bullets cracked on stone or whirred in the air about the heads of the French.
'Tirez!’ Cold Frenchmen fumbled with locks, picked at the rags that some had not taken from their guns, and the giant Rifleman was running further and the smoke of the first muskets was obscuring the target. 'Tirez!’ More smoke and flames decorated the Convent's cornice and the bullets jerked at the shallow snow at the lip of the pass.
'Run! Sharpe yelled. He thought for one awful moment that Harper was hit for the big man fell, rolled down the slope, but then the Irishman was up, legs pumping, and the Riflemen on the Castle wall were reloaded and they slid the barrels across the stone and gave him covering fire.
The rumble was hardly audible at first, like the first hints of far-away thunder on a summer's night.
The old builders would not have chosen the edge of the pass as a place to build the Convent, but the Virgin Mary had chosen it herself and so the builders had to negotiate the difficulties she had bequeathed them. The granite boulder had to be the centre-piece of the chapel, the Holy Footfall would have its proper, holy place, and so the old masons had built a platform of stone about the tip of the rock and supported the platform on solid arches which, to the west, made rooms for cells, a hall, and the Convent kitchens. To the east, though, there was not space for rooms and so the ground sloped up towards the stone platform and it was in that space, dark and cold, that the barrels of powder took the fire.