Sharpe's Fortress Read online

  “Maybe,” Bappoo said vaguely, though he had no intention of advancing all his infantry in front of the precious guns. He had no need to. The vision of eagles had persuaded him that he would see victory, and he believed the gunners would make that victory. He imagined dead red-coated bodies among the crops. He would avenge Assaye and prove that redcoats could die like any other enemy. “To your men, Colonel Dodd,” he said sternly.

  Dodd wheeled his horse and spurred toward the right of the line where his Cobras waited in four ranks. It was a fine regiment, splendidly trained, which Dodd had extricated from the siege of Ahmednuggur and then from the panicked chaos of the defeat at Assaye. Two disasters, yet Dodd’s men had never flinched. The regiment had been a part of Scindia’s army, but after Assaye the Cobras had retreated with the Rajah of Berar’s infantry, and Prince Manu Bappoo, summoned from the north country to take command of Berar’s shattered forces, had persuaded Dodd to change his allegiance from Scindia to the Rajah of Berar. Dodd would have changed allegiance anyway, for the dispirited Scindia was seeking to make peace with the British, but Bappoo had added the inducement of gold, silver and a promotion to colonel. Dodd’s men, mercenaries all, did not care which master they served so long as his purse was deep.

  Gopal, Dodd’s second-in-command, greeted the Colonel’s return with a rueful look. “He won’t advance?”

  “He wants the guns to do the work.”

  Gopal heard the doubt in Dodd’s voice. “And they won’t?”

  “They didn’t at Assaye,” Dodd said sourly. “Damn it! We shouldn’t be fighting them here at all! Never give redcoats open ground. We should be making the bastards climb walls or cross rivers.” Dodd was nervous of defeat, and he had cause to be for the British had put a price on his head. That price was now seven hundred guineas, nearly six thousand rupees, and all of it promised in gold to whoever delivered William Dodd’s body, dead or alive, to the East India Company. Dodd had been a lieutenant in the Company’s army, but he had encouraged his men to murder a goldsmith and, faced with prosecution, Dodd had deserted and taken over a hundred sepoys with him. That had been enough to put a price on his head, but the price rose after Dodd and his treacherous sepoys murdered the Company’s garrison at Chasalgaon. Now Dodd’s body was worth a fortune and William Dodd understood greed well enough to be fearful. If Bappoo’s army collapsed today as the Mahratta army had disintegrated at Assaye, then Dodd would be a fugitive on an open plain dominated by enemy cavalry. “We should fight them in the hills,” he said grimly.

  “Then we should fight them at Gawilghur,” Gopal said.

  “Gawilghur?” Dodd asked.

  “It is the greatest of all the Mahratta fortresses, sahib. Not all the armies of Europe could take Gawilghur.” Gopal saw that Dodd was skeptical of the claim. “Not all the armies of the world could take it, sahib,” he added earnesdy. “It stands on cliffs that touch the sky, and from its walls men are reduced to the size of lice.”

  “There’s a way in, though,” Dodd said, “there’s always a way in.”

  “There is, sahib, but the way into Gawilghur is across a neck of high rock that leads only to an outer fortress. A man might fight his way through those outer walls, but then he will come to a deep ravine and find the real stronghold lies on the ravine’s far side. There are more walls, more guns, a narrow path, and vast gates barring the way!” Gopal sighed. “I saw it once, years ago, and prayed I would never have to fight an enemy who had taken refuge there.”

  Dodd said nothing. He was staring down the gentle slope to where the red-coated infantry waited. Every few seconds a puff of dust showed where a round shot struck the ground.

  “If things go badly today,” Gopal said quietly, “then we shall go to Gawilghur and there we shall be safe. The British can follow us, but they cannot reach us. They will break themselves on Gawilghur’s rocks while we take our rest at the edge of the fortress’s lakes. We shall be in the sky, and they will die beneath us like dogs.”

  If Gopal was right then not all the king’s horses nor all the king’s men could touch William Dodd at Gawilghur. But first he had to reach the fortress, and maybe it would not even be necessary, for Prince Manu Bappoo might yet beat the redcoats here. Bappoo believed there was no infantry in India that could stand against his Arab mercenaries.

  Away on the plain Dodd could see that the two battalions that had fled into the tall crops were now being brought back into the line. In a moment, he knew, that line would start forward again. “Tell our guns to hold their fire,” he ordered Gopal. Dodd’s Cobras possessed five small cannon of their own, designed to give the regiment close support. Dodd’s guns were not in front of his white-coated men, but away on the right flank from where they could lash a murderous slanting fire across the face of the advancing enemy. “Load with canister,” he ordered, “and wait till they’re close.” The important thing was to win, but if fate decreed otherwise, then Dodd must live to fight again at a place where a man could not be beaten.

  At Gawilghur.

  The British line at last advanced. From east to west it stretched for three miles, snaking in and out of millet fields, through pastureland and across the wide, dry riverbed. The center of the line was an array of thirteen red-coated infantry battalions, three of them Scottish and the rest sepoys, while two regiments of cavalry advanced on the left flank and four on the right. Beyond the regular cavalry were two masses of mercenary horsemen who had allied themselves to the British in hope of loot. Drums beat and pipes played. The colors hung above the shakos. A great swath of crops was trodden flat as the cumbersome line marched north. The British guns opened fire, their small six-pound missiles aimed at the Mahratta guns.

  Those Mahratta guns fired constantly. Sharpe, walking behind the left flank of number six company, watched one particular gun which stood just beside a bright clump of flags on the enemy-held skyline. He slowly counted to sixty in his head, then counted it again, and worked out that the gun had managed five shots in two minutes. He could not be certain just how many guns were on the horizon, for the great cloud of powder smoke hid them, but he tried to count the muzzle flashes that appeared as momentary bright flames amid the gray-white vapor and, as best he could guess, he reckoned there were nearly forty cannon there. Forty times five was what? Two hundred. So a hundred shots a minute were being fired, and each shot, if properly aimed, might kill two men, one in the front rank and one behind. Once the attack was close, of course, the bastards would switch to canister and then every shot could pluck a dozen men out of the line, but for now, as the redcoats silently trudged forward, the enemy was sending round shot down the gentle slope. A good many of these missed. Some screamed overhead and a few bounced over the line, but the enemy gunners were good, and they were lowering their cannon barrels so that the round shot struck the ground well ahead of the redcoat line and, by the time the missile reached the target, it had bounced a dozen times and so struck at waist height or below. Grazing, the gunners called it, and it took skill. If the first graze was too close to the gun then the ball would lose its momentum and do nothing but raise jeers from the redcoats as it rolled to a harmless stop, while if the first graze was too close to the attacking line then the ball would bounce clean over the redcoats. The skill was to skim the ball low enough to be certain of a hit, and all along the line the round shots were taking their toll. Men were plucked back with shattered hips and legs. Sharpe passed one spent cannonball that was sticky with blood and thick with flies, lying twenty paces from the man it had eviscerated. “Close up!” the sergeants shouted, and the file-closers tugged men to fill the gaps. The British guns were firing into the enemy smoke cloud, but their shots seemed to have no effect, and so the guns were ordered farther forward. The ox teams were brought up, the guns were attached to the limbers, and the six-pounders trundled on up the slope.

  “Like ninepins.” Ensign Venables had appeared at Sharpe’s side. Roderick Venables was sixteen years old and attached to number seven company. He had been
the battalion’s most junior officer till Sharpe joined, and Venables had taken it on himself to be a tutor to Sharpe in how officers should behave. “They’re bowling us over like ninepins, eh, Richard?”

  Before Sharpe could reply a half-dozen men of number six company threw themselves aside as a cannonball bounced hard and low toward them. It whipped harmlessly through the gap they had made. The men laughed at having evaded it, then Sergeant Colquhoun ordered them back into their two ranks.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be on the left of your company?” Sharpe asked Venables.

  “You’re still thinking like a sergeant, Richard,” Venables said. “Pig-ears doesn’t mind where I am.” Pig-ears was Captain Lomax, who had earned his nickname not because of any peculiarity about his ears, but because he had a passion for crisply fried pig-ears. Lomax was easygoing, unlike Urquhart who liked everything done strictly according to regulations. “Besides,” Venables went on, “there’s damn all to do. The lads know their business.”

  “Waste of time being an ensign,” Sharpe said.

  “Nonsense! An ensign is merely a colonel in the making,” Venables said. “Our duty, Richard, is to be decorative and stay alive long enough to be promoted. But no one expects us to be useful! Good God! A junior officer being useful? That’ll be the day.” Venables gave a hoot of laughter. He was a bumptious, vain youth, but one of the few officers in the 74th who offered Sharpe companionship. “Did you hear a new draft has come to Madras?” he asked.

  “Urquhart told me.”

  “Fresh men. New officers. You won’t be junior anymore.”

  Sharpe shook his head. “Depends on the date the new men were commissioned, doesn’t it?”

  “Suppose it does. Quite right. And they must have sailed from Britain long before you got the jump up, eh? So you’ll still be the mess baby. Bad luck, old fellow.”

  Old fellow? Quite right, Sharpe thought. He was old. Probably ten years older than Venables, though Sharpe was not exactly sure for no one had ever bothered to note down his birth date. Ensigns were youths and Sharpe was a man.

  “Whoah!” Venables shouted in delight and Sharpe looked up to see that a round shot had struck the edge of an irrigation canal and bounced vertically upward in a shower of soil. “Pig-ears says he once saw two cannonballs collide in mid-air,” Venables said. “Well, he didn’t actually see it, of course, but he heard it. He says they suddenly appeared in the sky. Bang! Then flopped down.”

  “They’d have shattered and broken up,” Sharpe said.

  “Not according to Pig-ears,” Venables insisted. “He says they flattened each other.” A shell exploded ahead of the company, whistling scraps of iron casing overhead. No one was hurt and the files stepped around the smoking fragments. Venables stooped and plucked up a scrap, juggling it because of the heat. “Like to have keepsakes,” he explained, slipping the piece of iron into a pouch. “I’ll send it home for my sisters. Why don’t our guns stop and fire?”

  “Still too far away,” Sharpe said. The advancing line still had half a mile to go and, while the six-pounders could fire at that distance, the gunners must have decided to get really close so that their shots could not miss. Get close, that was what Colonel McCandless had always told Sharpe. It was the secret of battle. Get close before you start slaughtering.

  A round shot struck a file in seven company. It was on its first graze, still traveling at blistering speed, and the two men of the file were whipped backward in a spray of mingling blood. “Jesus,” Venables said in awe. “Jesus!” The corpses were mixed together, a jumble of splintered bones, tangled entrails and broken weapons. A corporal, one of the file-closers, stooped to extricate the men’s pouches and haversacks from the scattered offal. “Two more names in the church porch,” Venables remarked. “Who were they, Corporal?”

  “The McFadden brothers, sir.” The Corporal had to shout to be heard over the roar of the Mahratta guns.

  “Poor bastards,” Venables said. “Still, there are six more. A fecund lady, Rosie McFadden.”

  Sharpe wondered what fecund meant, then decided he could guess. Venables, for all his air of carelessness, was looking slightly pale as though the sight of the churned corpses had sickened him. This was his first battle, for he had been sick with the Malabar Itch during Assaye, but the Ensign was forever explaining that he could not be upset by the sight of blood because, from his earliest days, he had assisted his father who was an Edinburgh surgeon, but now he suddenly turned aside, bent over and vomited. Sharpe kept stolidly walking. Some of the men turned at the sound of Venables’s retching.

  “Eyes front!” Sharpe snarled.

  Sergeant Colquhoun gave Sharpe a resentful look. The Sergeant believed that any order that did not come from himself or from Captain Urquhart was an unnecessary order.

  Venables caught up with Sharpe. “Something I ate.”

  “India does that,” Sharpe said sympathetically.

  “Not to you.”

  “Not yet,” Sharpe said and wished he was carrying a musket so he could touch the wooden stock for luck.

  Captain Urquhart sheered his horse leftward. “To your company, Mr. Venables.”

  Venables scuttled away and Urquhart rode back to the company’s right flank without acknowledging Sharpe’s presence. Major Swinton, who commanded the battalion while Colonel Wallace had responsibility for the brigade, galloped his horse behind the ranks. The hooves thudded heavily on the dry earth. “All well?” Swinton called to Urquhart.

  “All well.”

  “Good man!” Swinton spurred on.

  The sound of the enemy guns was constant now, like thunder that did not end. A thunder that pummeled the ears and almost drowned out the skirl of the pipers. Earth fountained where round shot struck. Sharpe, glancing to his left, could see a scatter of bodies lying in the wake of the long line. There was a village there. How the hell had he walked straight past a village without even seeing it? It was not much of a place, just a huddle of reed-thatched hovels with a few patchwork gardens protected by cactus-thorn hedges, but he had still walked clean past without noticing its existence. He could see no one there. The villagers had too much sense. They would have packed their few pots and pans and buggered off as soon as the first soldier appeared near their fields. A Mahratta round shot smacked into one of the hovels, scattering reed and dry timber, and leaving the sad roof sagging.

  Sharpe looked the other way and saw enemy cavalry advancing in the distance, then he glimpsed the blue and yellow uniforms of the British 19th Dragoons trotting to meet them. The late-afternoon sunlight glittered on drawn sabres. He thought he heard a trumpet call, but maybe he imagined it over the hammering of the guns. The horsemen vanished behind a stand of trees. A cannonball screamed overhead, a shell exploded to his left, then the 74th’s Light Company edged inward to give an ox team room to pass back southward. The British cannon had been dragged well ahead of the attacking line where they had now been turned and deployed. Gunners rammed home shot, pushed priming quills into touch-holes, stood back. The sound of the guns crashed across the field, blotting the immediate view with gray-white smoke and filling the air with the nauseous stench of rotted eggs.

  The drummers beat on, timing the long march north. For the moment it was a battle of artillerymen, the puny British six-pounders firing into the smoke cloud where the bigger Mahratta guns pounded at the advancing redcoats. Sweat trickled down Sharpe’s belly, it stung his eyes and it dripped from his nose. Flies buzzed by his face. He pulled the sabre free and found that its handle was slippery with perspiration, so he wiped it and his right hand on the hem of his red coat. He suddenly wanted to piss badly, but this was not the time to stop and unbutton breeches. Hold it, he told himself, till the bastards are beaten. Or piss in your pants, he told himself, because in this heat no one would know it from sweat and it would dry quickly enough. Might smell, though. Better to wait. And if any of the men knew he had pissed his pants he would never live it down. Pisspants Sharpe. A ball thumped overhead
, so close that its passage rocked Sharpe’s shako. A fragment of something whirred to his left. A man was on the ground, vomiting blood. A dog barked as another tugged blue guts from an opened belly. The beast had both paws on the corpse to give its tug purchase. A file-closer kicked the dog away, but as soon as the man was gone the dog ran back to the body. Sharpe wished he could have a good wash. He knew he was lousy, but then everyone was lousy.

  Even General Wellesley was probably lousy. Sharpe looked eastward and saw the General spurring up behind the kilted 48th. Sharpe had been Wellesley’s orderly at Assaye and as a result he knew all the staff officers who rode behind the General. They had been much friendlier than the 74th’s officers, but then they had not been expected to treat Sharpe as an equal.

  Bugger it, he thought. Maybe he should take Urquhart’s advice. Go home, take the cash, buy an inn and hang the sabre over the serving hatch. Would Simone Joubert go to England with him? She might like running an inn. The Buggered Dream, he could call it, and he would charge army officers twice the real price for any drink.

  The Mahratta guns suddenly went silent, at least those that were directly ahead of the 74th, and the change in the battle’s noise made Sharpe peer ahead into the smoke cloud that hung over the crest just a quarter-mile away. More smoke wreathed the 74th, but that was from the British guns. The enemy gun smoke was clearing, carried northward on the small wind, but there was nothing there to show why the guns at the center of the Mahratta line had ceased fire. Perhaps the buggers had run out of ammunition. Some hope, he thought, some bloody hope. Or perhaps they were all reloading with canister to give the approaching redcoats a rajah’s welcome.

  God, but he needed a piss and so he stopped, tucked the sabre into his armpit, then fumbled with his buttons. One came loose. He swore, stooped to pick it up, then stood and emptied his bladder onto the dry ground. Then Urquhart was wheeling his horse. “Must you do that now, Mr. Sharpe?” he asked irritably.