Sharpe's Fortress Page 26

  Garrard looked skeptical. “If they let you.”

  “Aye, if they let me,” Sharpe agreed. He sat in silence for a while, watching the far gun emplacement. He could see men there, but was not sure what they were doing. “Where’s Hakeswill?” he asked. “I looked for him yesterday, and the bugger wasn’t on parade with the rest of you.”

  “Captured,” Garrard said.

  “Captured?”

  “That’s what Morris says. Me, I think the bugger ran. Either ways, he’s in the fort now.”

  “You think he ran?”

  “We had two fellows murdered the other night. Morris says it were the enemy, but I didn’t see any of the buggers, but there was some fellow creeping round saying he was a Company colonel, only he weren’t.” Garrard stared at Sharpe and a slow grin came to his face. “It were you, Dick.”

  “Me?” Sharpe asked straight-faced. “I was captured, Tom. Only escaped yesterday.”

  “And I’m the king of bloody Persia. Lowry and Kendrick were meant to arrest you, weren’t they?”

  “It was them who died?” Sharpe asked innocently.

  Garrard laughed. “Serve them bloody right. Bastards, both of them.” An enormous blossom of smoke showed at the distant wall on the top of the cliffs. Two seconds later the sound of the great gun bellowed all around Sharpe and Garrard, while the massive round shot struck the stalled limber just behind the enfilading battery. The wooden vehicle shattered into splinters and all five men were hurled to the ground where they jerked bloodily for a few seconds and then were still. Fragments of stone and wood hissed past Sharpe. “Bloody hell,” Garrard said admiringly, “five men with one shot!”

  “That’ll teach ‘em to keep their heads down,” Sharpe said. The sound of the enormous gun had drawn men from their tents toward the plateau’s edge. Sharpe looked around and saw that Captain Morris was among them. The Captain was in his shirtsleeves, staring at the great cloud of smoke through a telescope. “I’m going to stand up in a minute,” Sharpe said, “and you’re going to hit me.”

  “I’m going to do what?” Garrard asked.

  “You’re going to thump me. Then I’m going to run, and you’re going to chase me. But you’re not to catch me.”

  Garrard offered his friend a puzzled look. “What are you up to, Dick?”

  Sharpe grinned. “Don’t ask, Tom, just do it.”

  “You are a bloody officer, aren’t you?” Garrard said, grinning back. “Don’t ask, just do it.”

  “Are you ready?” Sharpe asked.

  “I’ve always wanted to clobber an officer.”

  “On your feet then.” They stood. “So hit me,” Sharpe said. “I’ve tried to pinch some cartridges off you, right? So give me a thump in the belly.”

  “Bloody hell,” Garrard said.

  “Go on, do it!”

  Garrard gave Sharpe a halfhearted punch, and Sharpe shoved him back, making him fall, then he turned and ran along the cliff’s edge. Garrard shouted, scrambled to his feet and began to pursue. Some of the men who had gone to fetch the five bodies moved to intercept Sharpe, but he dodged to his left and disappeared among some bushes. The rest of the 33rd’s Light Company was whooping and shouting in pursuit, but Sharpe had a long lead on them and he twisted in and out of the shrubs to where he had picketed one of Syud Sevajee’s horses. He pulled the peg loose, hauled himself into the saddle and kicked back his heels. Someone yelled an insult at him, but he was clear of the camp now and there were no mounted pickets to pursue him.

  A half-hour later Sharpe returned, trotting with a group of native horsemen coming back from a reconnaissance. He peeled away from them and dismounted by his tent where Ahmed waited for him. While Sharpe and Garrard had made the diversion the boy had been thieving and he grinned broadly as Sharpe ducked into the hot tent. “I have every things,” Ahmed said proudly.

  He had taken Captain Morris’s red coat, his sash and his sword-belt with its sabre. “You’re a good lad,” Sharpe said. He needed a red coat, for Colonel Stevenson had given orders that every man who went into Gawilghur with the attackers must be in uniform so that they were not mistaken for the enemy. Syud Sevajee’s men, who planned to hunt down Beny Singh, had been issued with some threadbare old sepoys’ jackets, some of them still stained with the blood of their previous owners, but none of the jackets had fit Sharpe. Even Morris’s coat would be a tight fit, but at least he had a uniform now. “No trouble?” Sharpe asked Ahmed.

  “No bugger saw me,” the boy said proudly. His English was improving every day, though Sharpe worried that it was not quite the King’s English. Ahmed grinned again as Sharpe gave him a coin that he stuffed into his robes.

  Sharpe folded the jacket over his arm and stooped out of the tent. He was looking for Clare and saw her a hundred paces away, walking with a tall soldier who was dressed in a shirt, black trousers and spurred boots. She was deep in conversation, and Sharpe felt a curious pang of jealousy as he approached, but then the soldier turned around, frowned at Sharpe’s ragged appearance, then recognized the man under the head cloth. He grinned. “Mr. Sharpe,” he said.

  “Eli Lockhart,” Sharpe said. “What the hell are the cavalry doing here?” He jerked his thumb toward the fort that was edged with white smoke as the defenders tried to hammer the British batteries. “This is a job for real soldiers.”

  “Our Colonel persuaded the General that Mr. Dodd might make a run for it. He reckoned a dozen cavalrymen could head him off.”

  “Dodd won’t run,” Sharpe said. “He won’t have space to get a horse out.”

  “So we’ll go in with you,” Lockhart said. “We’ve got a quarrel with Mr. Dodd, remember?”

  Clare was looking shy and alarmed, and Sharpe reckoned she did not want Sergeant Lockhart to know that she had spent time with Ensign Sharpe. “I was looking for Mrs. Wall,” he explained to Lockhart. “If you can spare me a few minutes, ma’am?”

  Clare shot Sharpe a look of gratitude. “Of course, Mr. Sharpe.”

  “It’s this jacket, see?” He held out Morris’s coat. “It’s got red facings and turnbacks, and I need white ones.” He took off his head cloth. “I wondered if you could use this. I know it’s a bit filthy, and I hate to trouble you, ma’am, but I don’t reckon my sewing’s up to making turnbacks, cuffs and collars.”

  “You could take that captain’s badge off while you’re about it, love,” Lockhart suggested to Clare, “and the skirmisher’s wings. Don’t reckon Mr. Sharpe wants that coat’s real owner to recognize it.”

  “I’d rather he didn’t,” Sharpe admitted.

  Clare took the coat, gave Sharpe another grateful look, then hurried toward Sevajee’s tents. Lockhart watched her go. “Been wanting a chance to talk to her for three years,” he said wonderingly.

  “So you found it, eh?”

  Lockhart still watched her. “A rare-looking woman, that.”

  “Is she? I hadn’t really noticed,” Sharpe lied.

  “She said you’d been kind to her,” Lockhart said.

  “Well, I tried to help, you know how it is,” Sharpe said awkwardly.

  “That bloody man Torrance killed himself and she had nowhere to go. And you found her, eh? Most officers would try to take advantage of a woman like that,” Lockhart said.

  “I’m not a proper officer, am I?” Sharpe replied. He had seen the way that Clare looked at the tall cavalryman, and how Lockhart had stared at her, and Sharpe reckoned that it was best to stand aside.

  “I had a wife,” Lockhart said, “only she died on the voyage out. Good little woman, she was.”

  “I’m sorry,” Sharpe said.

  “And Mrs. Wall,” Lockhart went on, “lost her husband.” Widow meets widower. Any minute now, Sharpe thought, and the word fate would be used. “It’s destiny,” Lockhart said in a tone of wonderment.

  “So what are you going to do about her?” Sharpe asked.

  “She says she ain’t got a proper home now,” Lockhart said, “except the tent you lent
her, and my Colonel won’t mind me taking a wife.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “More or less,” Lockhart said, blushing.

  “And she said yes?”

  “More or less,” Lockhart said again, blushing more deeply.

  “Bloody hell,” Sharpe said admiringly, “that’s quick!”

  “Real soldiers don’t wait,” Lockhart said, then frowned. “I heard a rumor you’d been snamed by the enemy?”

  “Got away,” Sharpe said vaguely. “Buggers were careless.” He turned and watched as an errant rocket from the fort soared up into the cloudless sky to leave a thickening pile of smoke through which, eventually, it tumbled harmlessly to earth. “Are you really joining the attack?” he asked Lockhart.

  “Not in the front rank,” Lockhart said. “I ain’t a fool. But Colonel Huddlestone says we can go in and look for Dodd. So we’ll wait for you boys to do the hard work, then follow.”

  “I’ll look out for you.”

  “And we’ll keep an eye on you,” Lockhart promised. “But in the meantime I’ll go and see if someone needs a needle threaded.”

  “You do that,” Sharpe said. He watched the cavalryman walk away, and saw, at the same time, that Ahmed had been evicted from Clare’s tent with Sharpe’s few belongings. The boy looked indignant, but Sharpe guessed their exile from the tent would not last long, for Clare would surely move to the cavalryman’s quarters before nightfall. Ding dong, he thought, wedding bells. He took the pouch with its jewels from Ahmed, then, while his uniform was being tailored, he went to watch the guns gnaw and batter at the fort.

  The young horseman who presented himself at the gate of Gawilghur’s Inner Fort was tall, arrogant and self-assured. He was dressed in a white silk robe that was tied at the waist with a red leather belt from which a golden-hilted tulwar hung in a gem-encrusted scabbard, and he did not request that the gates be opened, but rather demanded it. There was, in truth, no good reason to deny his orders, for men were constantly traversing the ravine between the two forts and Dodd’s Cobras were accustomed to opening and closing the gates a score of times each day, but there was something in the young man’s demeanor that annoyed Gopal. So he sent for Colonel Dodd.

  Dodd arrived a few moments later with the twitching English Sergeant at his side. The horseman rounded on Dodd, shouting at him to punish Gopal, but Dodd just spat, then turned to Hakeswill. “Why would a man be riding a horse out of this gate?”

  “Wouldn’t know, sir,” Hakeswill said. The Sergeant was now dressed in a white coat that was crossed with a black sash as a sign of rank, though quite what rank the sash denoted was uncertain.

  “There’s nowhere to exercise a horse,” Dodd said, “not unless he plans to ride through the Outer Fort into the English camp. Ask him his business, Gopal.”

  The young man refused to answer. Dodd shrugged, drew his pistol and aimed it at the horseman’s head. He cocked the gun and the sound of the hammer engaging echoed loudly from the ramparts. The young man blanched and shouted at Gopal.

  “He says, sahib, that he is on an errand for the Killadar,” Gopal explained to Dodd.

  “What errand?” Dodd demanded. The young man plainly did not want to answer, but Dodd’s grim face and the leveled pistol persuaded him to take a sealed packet from the pouch that hung from his belt. He showed Dodd the Killadar’s seal, but Dodd was not impressed by the red wax with its impression of a snake curled about a knife blade. “Who is it addressed to?” he demanded, gesturing that the young man turn the package over.

  The horseman obeyed and Dodd saw that the packet was addressed to the commanding officer of the British camp. It must have been written by a clerk who was unfamiliar with the English language, for it was atrociously spelled, but the words were unmistakable and Dodd stepped forward and seized the horse’s bridle. “Haul him out of the saddle, Gopal,” Dodd ordered, “hold him in the guardroom and send a man to fetch Manu Bappoo.”

  The young man attempted a momentary resistance, even half drawing his tulwar from its precious scabbard, but a dozen of Dodd’s men easily overpowered him. Dodd himself turned away and climbed the steps to the rampart, motioning Hakeswill to follow him. “It’s obvious what the Killadar is doing,” Dodd growled. “He’s trying to make peace.”

  “I thought we couldn’t be defeated here, sir,” Hakeswill said in some alarm.

  “We can’t,” Dodd said, “but Beny Singh is a coward. He thinks life should be nothing but women, music and games.”

  Which sounded just splendid to Obadiah Hakeswill, but he said nothing. He had presented himself to Dodd as an aggrieved British soldier who believed the war against the Mahrattas was unfair. “We ain’t got no business here, sir,” he had said, “not in heathen land. It belongs to the blackamoors, don’t it? And there ain’t nothing here for a redcoat.”

  Dodd had not believed a word of it. He suspected Hakeswill had fled the British army to avoid trouble, but he could hardly blame the Sergeant for that. Dodd himself had done the same, and Dodd did not care about Hakeswill’s motives, only that the Sergeant was willing to fight. And Dodd believed his men fought better when white men gave them orders. “There’s a steadiness about the English, Sergeant,” he had told Hakeswill, “and it gives the natives bottom.”

  “It gives them what, sir?” Hakeswill had asked.

  Dodd had frowned at the Sergeant’s obtuseness. “You ain’t Scotch, . are you?”

  “Christ no, sir! I ain’t a bleeding Scotchman, nor a Welshman. English, sir, I am, through and through, sir.” His face twitched. “English, sir, and proud of it.”

  So Dodd had given Hakeswill a white jacket and a black sash, then put him in charge of a company of his Cobras. “Fight well for me here, Sergeant,” he told Hakeswill when the two men reached the top of the rampart, “and I’ll make you an officer.”

  “I shall fight, sir, never you mind, sir. Fight like a demon, I will.”

  And Dodd believed him, for if Hakeswill did not fight then he risked being captured by the British, and God alone knew what trouble he would then face. Though in truth Dodd did not see how the British could penetrate the Inner Fort. He expected them to take the Outer Fort, for there they had a flat approach and their guns were already blasting down the breaches, but they would have a far greater problem in capturing the Inner Fort. He showed that problem now to Hakeswill. “There’s only one way in, Sergeant, and that’s through this gate. They can’t assault the walls, because the slope of the ravine is too steep. See?”

  Hakeswill looked to his left and saw that the wall of the Inner Fort was built on an almost sheer slope. No man could climb that and hope to assail a wall, even a breached wall, which meant that Dodd was right and the attackers would have to try and batter down the four gates that barred the entranceway, and those gates were defended by Dodd’s Cobras. “And my men have never known defeat, Sergeant,” Dodd said. “They’ve watched other men beaten, but they’ve not been outfought themselves. And here the enemy will have to beat us. Have to! But they can’t. They can’t.” He fell silent, his clenched fists resting on the fire step. The sound of the guns was constant, but the only sign of the bombardment was the misting smoke that hung,over the far side of the Outer Fort. Manu Bappoo, who commanded there, was now hurrying back toward the Inner Fort and Dodd watched the Prince climb the steep path to the gates. The hinges squealed as, one after the other, the gates were opened to let Bappoo and his aides in. Dodd smiled as the last gate was unbarred. “Let’s go and make some mischief,” he said, turning back to the steps.

  Manu Bappoo had already opened the letter that Gopal had given to him. He looked up as Dodd approached. “Read it,” he said simply, thrusting the folded paper toward the Colonel.

  “He wants to surrender?” Dodd asked, taking the letter.

  “Just read it,” Bappoo said grimly.

  The letter was clumsily written, but intelligible. Beny Singh, as Killadar of the Rajah of Berar’s fortress of Gawilghur, was offering to yield the f
ort to the British on the sole condition that the lives of all the garrison and their dependents were spared. None was to be hurt, none was to be imprisoned. The British were welcome to confiscate all the weaponry in the fort, but they were to allow Gawilghur’s inhabitants to leave with such personal property as could be carried away on foot or horseback.

  “Of course the British will accept!” Manu Bappoo said. “They don’t want to die in the breaches!”

  “Has Beny Singh the authority to send this?” Dodd asked.

  Bappoo shrugged. “He’s Killadar.”

  “You’re the general of the army. And the Rajah’s brother.”

  Bappoo stared up at the sky between the high walls of the entrance-way. “One can never tell with my brother,” he said. “Maybe he wants to surrender? But he hasn’t told me. Maybe, if we lose, he can blame me, saying he always wanted to yield.”

  “But you won’t yield?”

  “We can win here!” Bappoo said fiercely, then turned toward the palace as Gopal announced that the Killadar himself was approaching.

  Beny Singh must have been watching his messenger’s progress from the palace, for now he hurried down the path and behind him came his wives, concubines and daughters. Bappoo walked toward him, followed by Dodd and a score of his white-coated soldiers. The Killadar must have reckoned that the sight of the women would soften Bappoo’s heart, but the Prince’s face just became harder. “If you want to surrender,” he shouted at Beny Singh, “then talk to me first!”

  “I have authority here,” Beny Singh squeaked. His little lapdog was in his arms, its small tongue hanging out as it panted in the heat.

  “You have nothing!” Bappoo retorted. The women, pretty in their silk and cotton, huddled together as the two men met beside the snake pit.

  “The British are making their breaches,” Beny Singh protested, “and tomorrow or the day after they’ll come through! We shall all be killed!” He wailed the prophecy. “My daughters will be their playthings and my wives their servants.” The women shuddered.