style="font-size:15px;"> No one seemed to have noticed. The Engineer officer who had been examining the fuses had gone. The sentries on the walls stared outwards. Two infantrymen who carried a great, steaming pot over the yard were busy with their own thoughts.
Sharpe looked back at the piles of shells. Was it his imagination, or was there a small wisp of smoke coming from where the cigar had landed?
It was just his imagination, he decided.
He noticed that, despite the wound, he was gripping the bars of the window with his right hand. He uncurled his fingers.
Some men walked beneath his window. They laughed loudly.
It was not his imagination. The cigar stub was burning through to the powder core of the fuses. Smoke drifted up more thickly.
Sharpe froze. If he gave the warning he would stay a prisoner. If he did not there would be death and chaos, quite possibly his own death. But if he risked that, then the chaos would be on his side. He could use it to escape, he could forget the parole, he would be free and his honour would be intact.
The smoke was thickening now, rising up to drift eastward. An artilleryman crossed the yard from a magazine against the far wall. He passed within ten feet of the smoke, but noticed nothing. He was eating a hunk of bread and staring up at the sky which threatened rain. There were men on the walls, on the keep’s roof, yet none of them saw a thing.
Sharpe bit his lip. His left hand gripped the champagne.
The smoke turned to fire. One moment there was a grey haze, the next there was the hiss of fuses and the sparks were shooting up from the fire that snaked along the white line.
The gunner, the bread held to his mouth, stopped. He stared unbelieving at the fire-snakes. One disappeared into a pile of shells, would be eating at the first shell’s fuse, and then the gunner shouted, pointed with his loaf, and started to run.
The shell exploded.
It lifted the other shells into the air, fuses spinning, and then a second exploded, a third, and suddenly the courtyard was a maelstrom of fire and shell casing, and men were bellowing at each other to run, and Sharpe went back from the window. There were fuses leading into the keep and he had just seen, through the smoke, a streak of bright fire dart into the massive stones.
He backed slowly away. There was no safety in leaving the room. The stairway led only to the courtyard where the shells exploded. He had to stay in the room and survive whatever happened.
He tipped the cot bed over, sheltering himself behind the straw mattress, and, just as he had done so, the hill of Burgos Castle moved.
Deep beneath the keep, in the cellars and in the mine shafts that had been dug to oppose the British mines of the year before, the powder had been stacked. Barrel after barrel was down there, packed in the rock, and now the fire found it.
It blew.
It did not shatter outwards. There was more than enough powder to scythe the hilltop bare, to obliterate the walls, church, bastions, guns, and gates, but the rock-bound cellars acted as a giant mortar and hurled the blast upwards into the air until the flame spikes touched and pierced the low cloud, and still it went on, hurling stones and shells high into the air beyond the cloud and following with the rumbling, billowing, dark cloud that was fed by new blasts and pierced through by new flames as more stacks of powder were reached by the fire that destroyed the keep and thundered the sound miles out into the countryside.
Sharpe huddled against the wall.
The bed seemed to thump on him, the air was like a great, warm fist that pounded all about him and left only silence where there had been nothing but sound.
He was deafened.
He could feel shock after shock thudding the stone floor. He guessed that the shells were cracking open in the courtyard, and then there was a bigger blast, a thunder that pierced even his deafness, and he felt fragments spatter on the mattress that shielded him.
Silence again.
He was breathing dust. The thudding had stopped, but the room seemed to be shifting like the cabin of a ship under way.
He stood up, pushing the bed away, and saw the air was filled with white fog. It was not smoke, but powdered lime shaken from the walls and ceiling which now hung suspended in the room and stung his eyes.
He spat the dust out of his mouth.
The bottle of champagne was still in his hand. He swilled his mouth with it, spat again, then drank. The whole world seemed to be moving. The door was open, blown flat by the blast. The table had fallen and he saw, yet did not understand, that the ink bottle was rolling back and forth on the floorboards like the weight of a pendulum.
He went to the window. The room seemed to lurch as a ship lurched when caught by a sudden wind.
He had seen Almeida after the explosion and this reminded him of the Portuguese fortress. There was the same stench of roasted flesh, the same fire and dust in the silence.
The keep was a boiling cauldron of flame and smoke. He could not imagine how so much smoke could be roiled out of stone. There was a ringing in his ears, insistent and annoying. He hit the side of his head with his hand.
A man screamed beneath him. His clothes were gone, his body was blackened, and blood showed on his back. The sound made Sharpe aware that he could hear.
Time to go, he thought, and the realisation was so odd that he did not move. A magazine exploded somewhere and spewed a lance of flame into the boiling smoke. The floor shifted again.
He heard a rumble to his right, felt the sudden shock of the floor tilting, a movement that made him drop the champagne and grip the window bar for support. A crack had appeared in the wall, a crack that widened as he watched. Jesus! The old houses built against the courtyard wall were slumping down!
Go, he thought, go! He frowned, turned, and slapped his waist to check his sword was in its slings. It was.
Walking to the door was like walking the deck of a ship. He feared that even his footsteps might tip the precarious balance of the fragile house, that at any moment he would be felled by the falling masonry and collapsing floors.
The building shuddered again. A man shouted outside, then another, and Sharpe stepped over the threshold to see the young, cheerful guard lying dead. A shell had come through the landing window and blown him apart.
Masonry rumbled. A crack sounded like a whiplash. He jumped recklessly down the rubble-and dust-choked stairs. His uniform was thick with the white dust. Instinctively, as he reached the door to the courtyard, he began to beat it off, then stopped. It was as good a disguise as he could hope for.
Masonry fell somewhere, provoking shouts, and Sharpe knew that soon men would be in the castle who were not dazed, men who would begin the process of rescue and recovery. He hurried into the courtyard and turned left, towards the gate, and saw there a knot of men who stared aghast into the glimpse of hell that had been the keep.
He turned. He walked away from them, going towards the fire, but keeping the wall close to his right. He passed dead men, wounded men, men who cried, men who were past crying. The flesh smelt thick. He wished he had kept hold of the champagne to clear the taste of dust and smoke
