"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 boomed. There was moonlight beyond the third wall, but inside the labyrinth it was dark and cold. He had his back pressed hard against the middle wall and he took an odd comfort from the solid feel of the stone. He edged sideways again, tried to ignore the pumping of his heart, then took a deep breath, dropped to one knee and threw himself sideways in one motion so that he was kneeling in the last entrance to Loup's village with his rifle aimed straight down the stone-paved street towards the whitewashed church.

And in front of him was nothing.

No one called in triumph, no one sneered, no one ordered his capture.

Sharpe let out a long breath. It was a cold night, but sweat was trickling down his face and stinging his eyes. He shivered, then lowered the rifle's muzzle.

And the howling began.

CHAPTER VI

"He's mad, Hogan," Wellington said. "Stark mad. Gibbering. Should be locked up in Bedlam where we could pay sixpence to go and mock him. Ever been to Bedlam?"

"Once, my Lord, just the once." Hogan's horse was tired and fretful, for the Irishman had ridden long and hard to find the General and he was somewhat confused by the abrupt greeting. Hogan was also in the disobliging mood of a man woken too early, yet he somehow managed to respond to Wellington's jocular greeting in a similar vein. "My sister wanted to see the lunatics, my Lord, but as I recall we only paid tuppence each."

"They should lock Erskine up," Wellington said grimly, "and charge the populace tuppence apiece to view him. Still, even Erskine should manage this job, eh? All he has to do is stop the place up, not actually capture it." Wellington was inspecting the grim defences surrounding the French-held town of Almeida. Every now and then a gun would fire from the fortress town and the flat, hard sound of the shot would echo across the rolling country a few seconds after the shot itself had bounced in a flurry of early morning dew and bounded harmlessly off towards fields or woods. Wellington, attended by a dozen aides and gallopers and starkly lit by the long slanting rays of the just risen sun, made a ripe target for the French gunners, but his Lordship ignored their efforts. Instead, almost in mockery of the enemy's marksmanship, he would stop wherever the terrain offered a view and stare at the town which had possessed a peculiar flat-topped appearance ever since the cathedral and castle on Almeida's hill top had exploded in a massive eruption of stored powder. That explosion had forced the British and Portuguese defenders to surrender the fortress town to the French, who in turn were now ringed by British troops under the command of Sir William Erskine. Erskine's men were under orders to contain the garrison, not capture it, and indeed none of Erskine's guns was large enough to make any impression on the massive star-shaped fortifications. "How many of the scoundrels are in there, Hogan?" Wellington asked, ignoring the fact that Hogan would not have ridden hard across country so early in the day without bringing some important news.