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.
Louisa turned away. “I wish…“ she began, but could not finish.
“It was very quick,” Sharpe said in wonderment.
There was a thump as the dead body was pushed off the chair, then a scraping sound as it was dragged off the platform. Louisa, no longer watching, did not speak till after the next shout from Father Alzaga signified that another traitor had met his end. “Do you think badly of me, Lieutenant?”
“For watching an execution?” Sharpe waited till the second body was released from the collar. “Why on earth should I? There are usually more women at a public hanging than men.”
“I don’t mean that.”
He looked down at her and was instantly embarrassed. “I would not think badly of you.”
“It was that night in the fortress.” There was a plea in Louisa’s voice, as if she desperately needed Sharpe to understand what had happened. “You remember? When Don Bias showed us the gonfalon and told us the tale of the last battle? I think I was trapped then.”
“Trapped?”
“I like his nonsense. I was brought up to hate Catholics; to despise them for their ignorance and fear them for their malevolence, but no one ever told me of their glory!”
“Glory?”
“I’m bored with plain chapels.” Louisa watched the executions as she spoke, though Sharpe doubted whether she was even aware that men died on the crude scaffold. “I’m bored with being told I’m a sinner and that my salvation depends only on my own dogged repentance. I want, just once, to see the hand of God come in all its glory to touch us. I want a miracle, Lieutenant. I want to feel so very small in front of that miracle, and that doesn’t make any sense to you at all, does it?”
Sharpe watched a man die. “You want the gonfalon.”
“No!” Louisa was almost scornful. “I do not believe for one small second, Lieutenant, that Santiago fetched that flag from heaven. I believe the gonfalon is merely an old banner that one of Don Bias’s ancestors carried into battle. The miracle lies in what the gonfalon does, not in what it is! If we survive today, Lieutenant, then we will have achieved a miracle. But we would not have done it, nor even tried to do it, without the gonfalon!” She paused, wanting some confirmation from Sharpe, but he said nothing. She shrugged ruefully. “You still think it’s all a nonsense, don’t you?”
Still Sharpe said nothing. For him the gonfalon, whether nonsensical or not, was an irrelevance. He had not come to Santiago de Compostela for the gonfalon. He had thought it was for this girl, but that dream was dead. Yet there was something else that had fetched him to this city. He had come to prove that a whoreson Sergeant, patted on the head by a patronizing army and made into a Quartermaster, could be as good, as God-damned bloody good, as any born officer. And that could not be proved without the help of the men in green jackets who waited for the enemy, and Sharpe was suddenly swept with an affection for those Riflemen. It was an affection he had not felt since he had been a Sergeant and had held the power of life and death over a company of redcoats.
A scream jerked his attention back to the plaza where a recalcitrant prisoner fought against the hands which pushed him up to the platform. The man’s fight was useless. He was forced to the garotte and strapped into the chair. The iron was bent around his neck and the collar’s tongue inserted into the slot where the screw would draw it tight. Alzaga made the sign of the cross. ‘Pax et misericordia et tranquillitasr
The prisoner’s yellow-frocked body jerked in a spasm as the collar gripped his neck to break his spine and choke the breath from him. His thin hands scrabbled at the arms of the chair, then the body slumped down. Sharpe supposed that swift death would have been the Count of Mouromorto’s fate if he had not stayed safe inside the French-held palace. “Why,” he asked Louisa suddenly, “did the Count stay in the city?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
Sharpe shrugged. “I’ve never seen him apart from de l’Eclin before. And that Colonel is a very clever man.”
“You’re clever, too,” Louisa said warmly. “How many soldiers know about caltrops?”
Vivar pushed through the crowd and climbed the steps. “The forges are being heated. By six o’clock you’ll have a few hundred of the things. Where do you want them?”
“Just send them to me,” Sharpe said.
“When you hear the bells next ring, you’ll know the gonfalon is unfurled. That’s when you can withdraw.”