Sharpe's Fortress Page 20

  Then a musket fired, its sound unnaturally loud in the confines of the courtyard’s carved walls. One of the guards flinched as the musket ball whipped past his head to chip a flake of stone from one of the decorated arches. Then a voice shouted from the cloister by the temple entrance. The man spoke in an Indian language, and he spoke to Jama who was staring appalled as a group of armed men pushed their way to the very front of the crowd.

  It was Syud Sevajee who had fired, and who had spoken to Jama, and who now grinned down at Sharpe. “I’ve told him it must be a fair fight, Ensign.”

  “Me against him?” Sharpe jerked his chin at Prithviraj.

  “We came for entertainment,” Syud Sevajee said, “the least you can do is provide us with some.”

  “Why don’t you just shoot the bugger and have done with it?”

  Sevajee smiled. “This crowd will accept the result of a fair fight, Ensign. They might not like it if I simply rescue you. Besides, you don’t want to be in my debt, do you?”

  “I’m in your debt already,” Sharpe said, “up to my bloody eyeballs.” He turned and looked at Prithviraj who was waiting for a sign from Jama. “Hey! Goliath!” Sharpe shouted. “Here!” He threw the tulwar at the man, keeping the spear. “You want a fair fight? So you’ve got a weapon now.”

  The pain seemed to have vanished and even the thirst had gone away. It was like that moment at Assaye when he had been surrounded by enemies, and suddenly the world had seemed a calm, clear-cut place full of delicious opportunity. He had a chance now. He had more than a chance, he was going to put the big bastard down. It was a fair fight, and Sharpe had grown up fighting. He had been bred to it from the gutter, driven to it by poverty and inured to it by desperation. He was nothing if he was not a fighter, and now the crowd would get the bloody sport they wanted. He hefted the spear. “So come on, you bastard!”

  Prithviraj stooped and picked up the tulwar. He swung it in a clumsy arc, then looked again at Jama.

  “Don’t look at him, you great ox! Look at me!” Sharpe went forward, the spear low, then he raised the blade and lunged toward the big man’s belly and Prithviraj made a clumsy parry that rang against the spear blade. “You’ll have to put more strength into it than that,” Sharpe said, pulling back the spear and standing still to tempt thejetti forward. Prithviraj stepped toward him, swung the blade and Sharpe stepped back so that the tulwar’s tip slashed inches from his chest.

  “You have to be quick,” Sharpe said, and he feinted right, spun away and walked back to the left leaving Prithviraj off balance. Sharpe turned and lunged with the spear, pricking the big man’s back and leaving a trickle of blood. “Ain’t the same, is it, when the other fellow’s got a weapon?” He smiled at the jetti. “So come on, you daft pudding. Come on!”

  The crowd was silent now. Prithviraj seemed puzzled. He had not expected to fight, not with a weapon, and it was plain he was not accustomed to a tulwar. “You can give up,” Sharpe said. “You can kneel down and give up. I won’t kill you if you do that, but if you stay on your feet I’ll pick you apart like a joint of bloody meat.”

  Prithviraj did not understand a word, but he knew Sharpe was dangerous and he was trying to work out how best to kill him. He glanced at the spear, wishing he had that weapon instead of the tulwar, but Sharpe knew the point should always beat the edge, which was why he had kept the spear. “You want it quick or slow, Sevajee?” Sharpe called.

  “Whichever you prefer, Ensign,” Sevajee said, smiling. “It is not for the audience to tell the actors how the play should go.”

  “Then I’ll make it quick,” Sharpe said, and he pointed at Prithviraj with his free hand and motioned that thejetti could kneel down. “Just kneel,” he said, “and I’ll spare you. Tell him that, Sevajee!”

  Sevajee called out in an Indian language and Prithviraj must have decided the offer was an insult, for he suddenly ran forward, tulwar swinging, and Sharpe had to step quickly aside and parry one of the cuts with the spear’s staff. The blade cut a sliver of wood from the shaft, but went nowhere near Sharpe.

  “No good doing that,” Sharpe said. “You’re not making hay, you great pudding, you’re trying to stay alive.”

  Prithviraj attacked again, but all he could think to do was make great swings with the blade, any one of which might have slit Sharpe into two, but the attacks were clumsy and Sharpe backed away, always circling around to the middle of the courtyard so that he was not trapped against its edges. The crowd, sensing that Prithviraj might win, began to urge him on, but some noticed that the Englishman was not even trying to fight yet. He was taunting the jetti, he was evading him and he was keeping his spear low.

  “I thought you said it would be quick,” Sevajee said.

  “You want it over?” Sharpe asked. He crouched, raising the spear blade, and the motion checked Prithviraj who stared at him warily. “What I’m going to do,” Sharpe said, “is cut your belly open, then slit your throat. Are you ready?” He went forward, jabbing the spear, still low, and Prithviraj backed away, trying to parry the small lunges, but Sharpe dragged the spear back each time before the parry could connect, and Prithviraj frowned. He seemed hypnotized by the shining blade that flickered like a snake’s tongue, and behind it Sharpe was grinning at him and taunting him, and Prithviraj tried to counterattack once, but the spear slashed up to within an inch of his face and he went on stepping backward. Then he backed into the blinded jetti who still crouched on the flagstones and Prithviraj staggered as he lost his balance.

  Sharpe came up from the crouch, the spear lancing forward, and the wild parry came far too late and suddenly the blade was punching and tearing through the skin and muscle of the jettis stomach. Sharpe twisted the leaf-shaped steel so that it did not get trapped in the flesh and then he ripped it out, and blood washed across the temple floor and Prithviraj was bending forward as if he could seal the pain in his belly by folding over, and then the spear sliced from the side to slash across his throat.

  The crowd sighed.

  Prithviraj was on the stones now, curled up with blood bubbling from his sliced belly and pulsing from his neck.

  Sharpe kicked the tulwar from the jetti’s unresisting hand, then turned and looked at Jama. “You and your brother did business with Captain Torrance?”

  Jama said nothing.

  Sharpe walked toward the shrine. The guards moved to stop him, but Sevajee’s men raised their muskets and some, grinning, jumped down into the courtyard. Ahmed also jumped down and snatched the tulwar from the flagstones. Prithviraj was on his side now, dying.

  Jama stood as Sharpe reached the steps, but he could not move fast with his limp and suddenly the spear was at his belly. “I asked you a question,” Sharpe said.

  Jama still said nothing.

  “You want to live?” Sharpe asked. Jama looked down at the spear blade that was thick with blood. “Was it Torrance who gave me to you?” Sharpe asked.

  “Yes,” Jama said.

  “If I see you again,” Sharpe said, “I’ll kill you. If you go back to the British camp I’ll hang you like your brother, and if you so much as send a message to Torrance, I’ll follow you to the last corner on God’s earth and I’ll castrate you with my bare hands.” He jabbed the spear just enough to prick Jama’s belly, then turned away. The crowd was silent, cowed by Sevajee’s men and by the ferocity they had witnessed in the temple courtyard. Sharpe tossed away the spear, pulled Ahmed toward him and patted the boy’s head. “You’re a good lad, Ahmed. A bloody good lad. And I need a drink. By Christ, I’m thirsty.”

  But he was also alive.

  Which meant some other men would soon be dead.

  Because Sharpe was more than alive. He was angry. Angry as hell. And wanting revenge.

  Sharpe borrowed a cloak from one of Sevajee’s men, then pulled himself up behind Ahmed onto Major Stokes’s horse. They rode slowly away from the village where the torches guttered in the temple toward the smear of red light that betrayed where the British encampmen
t lay some miles to the west. Sevajee talked as they rode, telling Sharpe how Ahmed had fled straight into the arms of his men. “Luckily for you, Ensign,” the Indian said, “I recognized him.”

  “Which is why you sent for help, isn’t it?” Sharpe asked sarcastically. “It’s why you fetched some redcoats to get me out of that bloody tent.”

  “Your gratitude touches me deeply,” Sevajee said with a smile. “It took us a long time to make sense of what your boy was saying, and I confess we didn’t wholly believe him even then, and by the time we thought to take him seriously, you were already being carried away. So we followed. I thought we might fetch some entertainment from the evening, and so we did.”

  “Glad to be of service, sahib,” Sharpe said.

  “I knew you could beat a jetti in a fair fight.”

  “I beat three at once in Seringapatam,” Sharpe said, “but I don’t know as it was a fair fight. I’m not much in favor of fair fights. I like them to be unfair. Fair fights are for gentlemen who don’t know any better.”

  “Which is why you gave the sword to the jetti,” Sevajee observed dryly.

  “I knew he’d make a bollocks of it,” Sharpe said. He was tired suddenly, and all the aches and throbs and agony had come back. Above him the sky was brilliant with stars, while a thin sickle moon hung just above the faraway fortress. Dodd was up there, Sharpe thought, another life to take. Dodd and Torrance, Hakeswill and his two men. A debt to be paid by sending all the bastards to hell.

  “Where shall I take you?” Sevajee asked.

  “Take me?”

  “You want to go to the General?”

  “Christ, no.” Sharpe could not imagine complaining to Wellesley. The cold bugger would probably blame Sharpe for getting into trouble. Stokes, maybe? Or the cavalry? Sergeant Lockhart would doubtless welcome him, but then he had a better idea. “Take me to wherever you’re camped,” he told Sevajee.

  “And in the morning?”

  “You’ve got a new recruit,” Sharpe said. “I’m one of your men for now.”

  Sevajee looked amused. “Why?”

  “Why do you think? I want to hide.”

  “But why?”

  Sharpe sighed. “D’you think Wellesley will believe me? If I go to Wellesley he’ll think I’ve got sunstroke, or he’ll reckon I’m drunk. And Torrance will stand there with a plum in his bloody mouth and deny everything, or else he’ll blame Hakeswill.”

  “Hakeswill?” Sevajee asked.

  “A bastard I’m going to kill,” Sharpe said. “And it’ll be easier if he doesn’t know I’m still alive.” And this time, Sharpe vowed, he would make sure of the bastard. “My only worry,” he told Sevajee, “is Major Stokes’s horse. He’s a good man, Stokes.”

  “That horse?” Sevajee asked, nodding at the gray mare.

  “You reckon a couple of your fellows could return it to him in the morning?”

  “Of course.”

  “Tell him I got thrown from the saddle and snatched up by the enemy,” Sharpe said. “Let him think I’m a prisoner in Gawilghur.”

  “And meanwhile you’ll be one of us?” Sevajee asked.

  “I’ve just become a Mahratta,” Sharpe said.

  “Welcome,” said Sevajee. “And what you need now, Sharpe, is some rest.”

  “I’ve had plenty of rest,” Sharpe said. “What I need now are some clothes, and some darkness.”

  “You need food too,” Sevajee insisted. He glanced up at the sliver of moon above the fort. It was waning. “Tomorrow night will be darker,” he promised, and Sharpe nodded. He wanted a deep darkness, a shadowed blackness, in which a living ghost could hunt.

  Major Stokes was grateful for the return of his horse, but saddened over Sharpe’s fate. “Captured!” he told Sir Arthur Wellesley. “And my own fault too.”

  “Can’t see how that can be, Stokes.”

  “I should never have let him ride off on his own. Should have made him wait till a group went back.”

  “Won’t be the first prison cell he’s seen,” Wellesley said, “and I daresay it won’t be the last.”

  “I shall miss him,” Stokes said, “miss him deeply. A good man.”

  Wellesley grunted. He had ridden up the improved road to judge its progress for himself and he was impressed, though he took care not to show his approval. The road now snaked up into the hills and one more day’s work would see it reach the edge of the escarpment. Half the necessary siege guns were already high on the road, parked in an upland meadow, while bullocks were trudging up the lower slopes with their heavy burdens of round shot that would be needed to break open Gawilghur’s walls. The Mahrattas had virtually ceased their raids on the road-makers ever since Wellesley had sent two battalions of sepoys up into the hills to hunt the enemy down. Every once in a while a musket shot would be fired from a long distance, but the balls were usually spent before they reached a target. “Your work won’t end with the road,” Wellesley told Stokes, as the General and his staff followed the engineer on foot toward some higher ground from where they could inspect the fortress.

  “I doubted it would, sir.”

  “You know Stevenson?”

  “I’ve dined with the Colonel.”

  “I’m sending him up here. His troops will make the assault. My men will stay below and climb the two roads.” Wellesley spoke curtly, almost offhandedly. He was proposing to divide his army into two again, just as it had been split for most of the war against the Mahrattas. Stevenson’s part of the army would climb to the plateau and make the main assault on the fortress. That attack would swarm across the narrow neck of land to climb the breaches, but to stop the enemy from throwing all their strength into the defense of the broken wall Wellesley proposed sending two columns of his own men up the steep tracks that led direcdy to the fortress. Those men would have to approach unbroken walls up slopes too steep to permit artillery to be deployed, and Wellesley knew those columns could never hope to break into Gawilghur. Their job was to spread the defenders thin, and to block off the garrison’s escape routes while Colonel Stevenson’s men did the bloody work. “You’ll have to establish Stevenson’s batteries,” Wellesley told Stokes. “Major Blackiston’s seen the ground”—he indicated his aide—”and he reckons two eighteens and three iron twelves should suffice. Major Blackiston, of course, will give you whatever advice he can.”

  “No glacis?” Stokes directed the question to Blackiston.

  “Not when I was there,” Blackiston said, “though of course they could have made one since. I just saw curtain walls with a few bastions. Ancient work, by the look of it.”

  “Fifteenth-century work,” Wellesley put in and, when he saw that the two engineers were impressed by his knowledge, he shrugged. “Syud Sevajee claims as much, anyway.”

  “Old walls break fastest,” Stokes said cheerfully. The two big guns, with the three smaller cannon, would batter the wall head on to crumble the ancient stone that was probably unprotected by a glacis of embanked earth to soak up the force of the bombardment, and the Major had yet to find a fortress wall in India that could resist the strike of an eighteen-pounder shot traveling half a mile every two seconds. “But you’ll want some enfilading fire,” he warned Wellesley.

  “I’ll send you some more twelves,” Wellesley promised.

  “A battery of twelves and an howitzer,” Stokes suggested. “I’d like to drop some nasties over the wall. There’s nothing like an howitzer for spreading gloom.”

  “I’ll send an howitzer,” Wellesley promised. The enfilading batteries would fire at an angle through the growing breaches to keep the enemy from making repairs, and the howitzer, which fired high in the air so that its shells dropped steeply down, could bombard the repair parties behind the fortress ramparts. “And I want the batteries established quickly,” Wellesley said. “No dallying, Major.”

  “I’m not a man to dally, Sir Arthur,” Stokes said cheerfully. The Major was leading the General and his staff up a particularly steep patch of road
where an elephant, supplemented by over sixty sweating sepoys, forced an eighteen-pounder gun up the twisting road. The officers dodged the sepoys, then climbed a knoll from where they could stare across at Gawilghur.

  By now they were nearly as high as the stronghold itself and the profile of the twin forts stood clear against the bright sky beyond. It formed a double hump. The narrow neck of land led from the plateau to the first, lower hump on which the Outer Fortress stood. It was that fortress which would receive Stokes’s breaching fire, and that fortress which would be assailed by Stevenson’s men, but beyond it the ground dropped into a deep ravine, then climbed steeply to the much larger second hump on which the Inner Fortress with its palace and its lakes and its houses stood. Sir Arthur spent a long time staring through his glass, but said nothing.

  “I’ll warrant I can get you into the smaller fortress,” Stokes said, “but how do you cross the central ravine into the main stronghold?”

  It was that question that Wellesley had yet to answer in his own mind, and he suspected there was no simple solution. He hoped that the attackers would simply surge across the ravine and flood up the second slope like an irresistible wave that had broken through one barrier and would now overcome everything in its path, but he dared not admit to such impractical optimism. He dared not confess that he was condemning his men to an attack on an Inner Fortress that would ‘ have unbreached walls and well-prepared defenders. “If we can’t take it by escalade,” he said curtly, collapsing his glass, “we’ll have to dig breaching batteries in the Outer Fortress and do it the hard way.”

  In other words, Stokes thought, Sir Arthur had no idea how it was to be done. Only that it must be done. By escalade or by breach, and by God’s mercy, if they were lucky, for once they were into the central ravine the attackers would be in the devil’s hands.

  It was a hot December day, but Stokes shivered, for he feared for the men who must go up against Gawilghur.

  Captain Torrance had enjoyed a remarkably lucky evening. Jama had still not returned to the camp, and his big green tents with their varied delights stood empty, but there were plenty of other diversions in the British camp. A group of Scottish officers, augmented by a sergeant who played the flute, gave a concert, and though Torrance had no great taste for chamber music he found the melodies were in tune with his jaunty mood. Sharpe was gone, Torrance’s debts were paid, he had survived, and he had strolled on from the concert to the cavalry lines where he knew he would find a game of whist. Torrance had succeeded in taking fifty-three guineas from an irascible major and another twelve from a whey-cheeked ensign who kept scratching his groin. “If you’ve got the pox,” the Major had finally said, “then get the hell to a surgeon.”