Sharpe’s Enemy: The Defence of Portugal, Christmas 1812. Bernard Cornwell

      La Entrada de Dios.

      The Gateway of God.

      It looked it, too, from two hundred feet below on a bright winter morning as Sharpe and Harper walked their patient horses up the track which wound between rocks whose shadows still harboured the night’s frost. Adrados lay just beyond the saddle of the pass, but the pass was the Gateway of God.

      To left and right were rocky peaks, a nightmare landscape, savage and sharp. In front of them was the smooth grass of the road through the Sierra. Guarding that road was the Gateway.

      To the right of the pass was the castle. The Castillo de la Virgen. El Cid himself had known that castle, had stood on its ramparts before riding out against the curved scimitars of Islam. Legend said that three Muslim Kings had died in the dungeons beneath the Castle of the Virgin, died refusing to profess Christianity, and their ghosts were said to wander wraith-like in the Gateway of God. The castle had stood years beyond number, built before the Wars of God were won, but when the Muslims had been thrown back across the sea, the castle had begun to decay. The Spanish had moved from the high places of refuge, back down the passes into the softer plains. Yet the castle still stood, a refuge for foxes and ravens, its keep and gatehouse still holding the southern edge of the Gateway of God.

      And on the northern side, two hundred yards from the castle, was the Convent. It was a huge building, low and square, and its windowless walls seemed to spring from the granite of the Sierra’s rocks. Here was the place where the Virgin had stood, here was where they had built a shrine about her Footfall and a castle to protect it, and the Convent had no windows because the nuns who had once lived in its rich cloisters were supposed not to look upon the world, only at the mystery of the smooth patch of granite in their gold painted chapel.

      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 ravines 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