LITMIR.BIZ

      Obadiah Hakeswill, the Sergeant who had recruited Sharpe into the army, the man who had caused Sharpe to be flogged in a dusty Indian square. Hakeswill.

      The man who had Harper flogged earlier this same year, who had tried to rape Teresa, Sharpe’s wife, who had held a saw-backed bayonet at the throat of Sharpe’s baby daughter, Antonia. Obadiah Hakeswill.

      The head twitched on its long neck. The spittle dropped in a glittering cartwheel from his mouth. He hawked, spat, and shuffled sideways. This was the man who could not be killed.

      He had been hanged when he was twelve. It was a trumped-up charge of stealing sheep, trumped-up because the vicar whose daughter young Hakeswill had tried to molest did not want to drag his child’s reputation in the mud. The magistrates had been happy to oblige.

      He was the youngest of all the prisoners being hanged that day. The executioner, wanting to please the massed spectators, had not given any of his victims a neck-breaking drop. He had suspended them slowly, letting them hang and throttle themselves to death, letting the crowd enjoy each choking sound, each futile kick, and the executioner had tantalized the crowd by offering to tug on the ankles and responding to their shouts of yes or no. No one cared about the small boy at the end of the gibbet. Hakeswill had hung, feigning death, cunning even as he slipped into nightmare-ridden darkness, and then, before the end, the heavens had opened.

      The street outside the gaol was hammered and sluiced by the cloudburst, lightning slammed and bent the weathercock on the high church steeple, and the wide market street cleared as men, women and children ran for shelter. No one cared as Hakeswill’s unclc cut the small body down. They thought the boy was dead, that the body was being sold to a doctor eager for a fresh corpse to explore, but the uncle took Obadiah into an alleyway, slapped him into consciousness, and told the child to go away, never to return. Hakeswill had obeyed.

      He had started twitching that day and the twitching had not stopped in thirty years. He had found the army, a refuge for men like himself, and in its ranks he had discovered a simple code for survival. To those who were superior, the officers, Hakeswill was the perfect soldier. He was punctilious in his duty, in his respect, and he was made into a Sergeant. No officer with Hakeswill as his Sergeant needed worry about discipline. Sergeant Hakeswill terrorized his Companies into obedience and the price of freedom from that tyranny was paid to the ugly Sergeant in money, liquor or women. It never ceased to amaze Hakeswill what a married woman would do to keep her soldier husband from a flogging. His life was dedicated to revenge upon a fate that had made him ugly, unloved, a creature loathed by its fellows, useful only to its superiors.

      Yet fate could give blessings too. It had cheated death for Obadiah Hakeswill. He was not the only man or woman to escape a hanging. So many survived that some hospitals charged the cost of caring for the living-hanged on the ghouls who fought to snatch fresh corpses from the gallows to sell to doctors, yet Hakeswill saw himself as unique. He was the man who had survived death, and now no man could kill him. He feared no man. He could be hurt, but he could not be killed, and he had proven that on battlefields and in back alleys. He was the favoured child of death.

      And he was here, in the Gateway of God, Pot-au-Feu’s Lieutenant. He had deserted from Sharpe’s Company in April, his careful rules for survival in the army shattered by his lust for Teresa, his court-martial and execution guaranteed by his murder of Sharpe’s friend, Captain Robert Knowles, and so he had slipped into the black-red darkness of the horror that was Badajoz at the siege’s end. Now he was in Adrados where he had found other desperate men who would play to his evil, pander to his madness, follow him into the murk of his lusts.

      ‘A pleasure, yes?’ Hakeswill laughed at Sharpe. ‘Got to call me “sir” now! I’m a Colonel!’ Pot-au-Feu watched Hakeswill fondly, smiling at the performance. The face jerked. ‘Going to salute me, are you? Eh?’ He took off the bicorne hat so that his hair, grey now, hung lank over the yellow skin. The eyes were china-blue in the ravaged

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