Sharpe had no difficulty in firing the three shots. He had been doing this for half his life, and the Portuguese musket was British made and familiar to Sharpe. He bit open the cartridge, tasted the salt in the powder, charged the barrel, rammed down wadding and ball, primed the pan, cocked, pulled the trigger and felt the kick of the gun into his shoulder and then he dropped the butt and bit into the next cartridge and most of his riflemen were grinning because they knew he was good.

Sergeant Macedo was the only man other than Sharpe who fired his three shots within forty-five seconds. Fifteen of the riflemen and twelve of the Portuguese managed a shot every twenty seconds, but the rest were slow and so Sharpe and Vicente set about training them. Williamson, one of the riflemen who had failed, grumbled that it was stupid to make him learn how to fire a smoothbore musket when he was a rifleman. He made the complaint just loud enough for Sharpe to hear and in the expectation that Sharpe would choose to ignore it, then looked aggrieved when Sharpe dragged him back out of the formation. „You’ve got a complaint?” Sharpe challenged him.

„No, sir.” Williamson, his big face surly, looked past Sharpe.

„Look at me,” Sharpe said. Williamson sullenly obeyed. „The reason you are learning to fire a musket like a proper soldier,” Sharpe told him, „is because I don’t want the Portuguese to think we’re picking on them.” Williamson still looked sullen. „And besides,” Sharpe went on, „we’re stranded miles behind enemy lines, so what happens if your rifle breaks? And there’s another reason besides.”

„What’s that, sir?” Williamson asked.

„If you don’t bloody do it,” Sharpe said, „I’ll have you on another charge, then another charge and another after that until you’re so damn fed up with punishment duty that you’ll have to shoot me to be rid of it.”

Williamson stared at Sharpe with an expression which suggested he would like nothing more than to shoot him, but Sharpe just stared into his eyes and Williamson looked away. „We’ll run out of ammunition,” he said churlishly, and in that he was probably right, but Kate Savage unlocked her father’s gun room and found a barrel of powder and a bullet mold so Sharpe was able to have his men make up new cartridges, using pages from the sermon books in the Quinta’s library to wrap the powder and shot. The balls were too small, but they were fine for practice, and for three days his men blasted their muskets and rifles across the driveway. The French must have heard the musketry echoing dully from the hills and they must have seen the powder smoke above Vila Real de Zedes, but they did not come. Nor did Colonel Christopher.

„But the French are going to come,” Sharpe told Harper one afternoon as they climbed the hill behind the Quinta.

„Like as not,” the big man said. „I mean it’s not as if they don’t know we’re here.”

„And they’ll slice us into pieces when they do arrive,” Sharpe said.

Harper shrugged at that pessimistic opinion, then frowned. „How far are we going?”

„The top,” Sharpe said. He had led Harper through the trees and now they were on the rocky slope that led to the old watchtower on the hill’s summit. „Have you never been up here?” Sharpe asked.

„I grew up in Donegal,” Harper said, „and there was one thing we learned there, which was never go to the top of the hills.”

„Why ever not?”

„Because anything valuable will have long rolled down, sir, and all you’ll be doing is getting yourself out of breath by climbing up to find it gone. Jesus Christ, but you can see halfway to heaven from up here.”

The track followed a rocky spine that led to the summit and on either side the slope steepened until only a goat could have found footing on the treacherous scree, yet the path itself was safe enough, winding up toward the watchtower’s ancient stump. „We’re going to make a fort up here,” Sharpe said enthusiastically.

„God save us,” Harper said.

„We’re getting lazy, Pat, soft. Idle. It ain’t good.”

„But why make a fort?” Harper asked. „It’s a fortress already! The devil himself couldn’t take this hill, not if it was defended.”

„There are two ways up here,” Sharpe said, ignoring the question, „this path and another on the south side. I want walls across each path. Stone walls, Pat, high enough so a man can stand behind them and fire over their tops. There’s plenty of stone up here.” Sharpe led Harper through the tower’s broken archway and showed him how the old building had been raised about a natural pit in the hill’s summit and how the crumbling tower had filled the pit with stones.

Harper peered down into the pit. „You want us to move all that masonry and build new walls?” He sounded appalled.

„I was talking to Kate Savage about this place,” Sharpe said. „This old tower was built hundreds of years ago, Pat, when the Moors were here. They were killing Christians then, and the King built the watchtower so they could see when a Moorish raiding party was coming.”

„It’s a sensible thing to do,” Harper said.

„And Kate was saying how the folk in the valleys would send their valuables up here. Coins, jewels, gold. All of it up here, Pat, so that the heathen bastards wouldn’t snatch it. And then there was an earthquake nd the tower fell in and the locals reckon there’s treasure under those tones.”

Harper looked skeptical. „And why wouldn’t they dig it up, sir? The folk in the village don’t strike me as halfwits. I mean, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, if I knew there was a pit of bloody gold up on a hill I wouldn’t be vasting my time with a plough or a harrow.”

„That’s just it,” Sharpe said. He was making up the story as he went ilong and thought desperately for an answer to Harper’s entirely reasonable objection. „There was a child, you see, buried with the gold and the egend says the child will haunt the house of whoever digs up its bones. But only a local house,” he added hastily.

Harper sniffed at that embellishment, then looked back down the path. „So you want a fort here?”

„And we need to bring barrels of water here,” Sharpe said. That was the summit’s weakness, no water. If the French came and he had to retreat to the hilltop then he did not want to surrender just because of thirst. „Miss Savage”-he still did not think of her as Mrs. Christopher-’will find us barrels.”

„Up here? In the sun? Water will go rancid,” Harper warned him.

„A splash of brandy in each one,” Sharpe said, remembering his voyages to and from India and how the water had always tasted faintly of rum. „I’ll find the brandy.”

„And you really expect me to believe there’s gold under those stones, sir?”

„No,” Sharpe admitted, „but I want the men to half believe it. It’s going to be hard work building walls up here, Pat, and dreams of treasure never hurt.”

So they built the fort and never found gold, but in the spring sunlight they made the hilltop into a redoubt where a handful of infantry could grow old under siege. The ancient builders had chosen well, not just selecting the highest peak for miles around to build their watchtower, but also a place that was easily defended. Attackers could only come from the north or the south, and in both cases they would have to pick their way along narrow paths. Sharpe, exploring the southern path one day, found a rusted arrowhead under a boulder and he took it back to the summit and showed it to Kate. She held it beneath the brim of her wide straw hat and turned it this way and that. „It probably isn’t very old,” she said.

„I was thinking it might have wounded a Moor.”

„They were still hunting with bows and arrows in my grandfather’s time,” she said.

„Your family was here then?”

„Savages started in Portugal in 1711,” she said proudly. She had been gazing southwest, in the direction of Oporto, and Sharpe knew she was watching the road in hope of seeing a horseman come, but the passing days brought no sign of her husband, nor even a letter. The French did not come either, though Sharpe knew they must have seen his men toiling on the summit as they piled rocks to make ramparts across the two paths and struggled up those tracks with barrels of water that were put into the great cleared pit on the peak. The men grumbled about being made to work like mules, but Sharpe knew they were happier tired than idle. Some, encouraged by Williamson, complained that they wasted their time, that they should have abandoned this godforsaken hill with its broken tower and found a way south to the army, and Sharpe reckoned they were probably right, but he had his orders and so he stayed.