Sharpe's Fortress (12 page)

Sharpe crossed to the tall cavalryman.

“Shouldn't we talk to him, sir?”

“My dear fellow, have you ever tried to get the truth out of an Indian?”

the Captain asked.

“They swear by a thousand gaudy gods that they'll tell the truth, then lie like a rug! Be
quiet!” Naig had begun to protest and the cavalryman rammed the pistol into the
Indian's mouth, breaking a tooth and gashing Naig's gum.

“Another damned word, Naig, and I'll castrate you before I hang you.” The cavalryman
glanced at Sharpe, who was frowning.

“Are you squeamish, Ensign?”

“Don't seem right, sir. I mean I agree he deserves to be hung, but shouldn't we talk to him
first?”

“If you like conversation so much,” the cavalryman drawled, 'institute a
Philosophical Society. Then you can enjoy all the hot air you like.

Sergeant?“ This last was to Lockhart. Take the bastard off my hands, will you?”

“Pleasure, sir.” Lockhart seized Naig and shoved him towards the cart.

One of the cavalry troopers had cut a length of guy rope from the burnt remnants of the
tent and he now tied one end to the tip of the single shaft that protruded from the front of
the ox cart. He made a loop in the rope's end.

Naig screamed and tried to pull away. Some of his guards started forward, but then a hard
voice ordered them back and Sharpe turned to see that a tall, thin Indian in a black and
green striped robe had come from the larger tent. The newcomer, who looked to be in his
forties, walked with a limp. He crossed to the cavalry Captain and spoke quietly, and
Sharpe saw the cavalryman shake his head vehemently, then shrug as if to suggest that he
was powerless. Then the Captain gestured to Sharpe and the tall Indian gave the Ensign a
look of such malevolence that Sharpe instinctively put his hand on his sabre's hilt.

Lockhart had pulled the noose over Naig's head.

“Are you sure, sir?” he asked the cavalry Captain.

“Of course I'm sure, Sergeant,” the cavalryman said angrily.

“Just get on with it.”

“Sir?” Sharpe appealed to the Scots Captain, who frowned uncertainly, then turned and
walked away as though he wanted nothing more to do with the affair. The tall Indian in the
striped robe spat into the dust, then limped back to the tent.

Lockhart ordered his troopers to the back of the cart. Naig was attempting to pull the
noose free of his neck, but Lockhart slapped his hands down.

“Now, boys!” he shouted.

The troopers reached up and hauled down on the backboard so that the cart tipped like a
seesaw on its single axle and, as the troopers pulled down, so the shaft rose into the air.
The rope stretched and tightened.

Naig screamed, then the cavalryman jumped up to sit on the cart's back and the shaft
jerked higher still and the scream was abruptly choked off.

Naig was dangling now, his feet kicking wildly under the lavishly embroidered robe.
None of the crowd moved, none protested.

Naig's face was bulging and his hands were scrabbling uselessly at the noose which was
tight about his neck. The cavalry officer watched with a small smile.

“A pity,” he said in his elegant voice.

“The wretched man ran the best brothel I ever found.”

“We're not killing his girls, sir,” Sharpe said.

“That's true, Ensign, but will their next owner treat them as well?”

The cavalryman turned to the big tent's entrance and took off his plumed hat to salute a
group of said-clad girls who now watched wideeyed as their employer did the gallows
dance.

“I saw Nancy Merrick hang in Madras,” the cavalryman said, 'and she did the jig for
thirty seven minutes! Thirty-seven! I'd wagered on sixteen, so lost rather a lot of
tin. Don't think I can watch Naig dance for half an hour. It's too damned hot. Sergeant? Help
his soul to perdition, will you?"

Lockhart crouched beneath the dying man and caught hold of his heels. Then he tugged down
hard, swearing when Naig pissed on him.

He tugged again, and at last the body went still.

“Do you see what happens when you steal from us?” the cavalry Captain shouted at the
crowd, then repeated the words in an Indian language.

“If you steal from us, you will die!” Again he translated his words, then gave Sharpe a
crooked grin.

“But only, of course, if you're stupid enough to be caught, and I didn't think Naig was
stupid at all. Rather the reverse. Just how did you happen to discover the supplies,
Ensign?”

“Tent was on fire, sir,” Sharpe said woodenly.

“Me and Sergeant Lockhart decided to rescue whatever was inside.”

“How very public-spirited of you.” The Captain gave Sharpe a long, speculative look,
then turned back to Lockhart.

“Is he dead, Sergeant?”

“Near as makes no difference, sir,” Lockhart called back.

“Use your pistol to make sure,” the Captain ordered, then sighed.

"A shame," he said.

“I rather liked Naig. He was a rogue, of course, but rogues are so much more amusing than
honest men.” He watched as Lockhart lowered the shaft, then stooped over the prostrate body
and put a bullet into its skull.

“I suppose I'll have to find some carts to fetch these supplies back where they belong,”
the Captain said.

“I'll do that, sir,” Sharpe said.

“You will?” The Captain seemed astonished to discover such willingness.

“Why on earth would you want to do that, Ensign?”

“It's my job, sir,” Sharpe said.

“I'm Captain Torrance's assistant.”

“You poor benighted bastard,” the Captain said pityingly.

“Poor, sir? Why?”

“Because I'm Captain Torrance. Good day to you, Ensign.” Torrance turned on his heel
and walked away through the crowd.

“Bastard,” Sharpe said, for he had suddenly understood why Torrance had been so keen
to hang Naig.

He spat after the departed Captain, then went to find some bullocks and carts. The army
had its supplies back, but Sharpe had made a new enemy. As if Hakeswill were not enough, he
now had Torrance as well.

The palace in Gawilghur was a sprawling one-storey building that stood on the highest
point within the Inner Fort. To its north was a garden that curled about the largest of the
fortress's lakes. The lake was a tank, a reservoir, but its banks had been planted with
flowering trees, and a flight of steps led from the palace to a small stone pavilion on the
lake's northern shore. The pavilion had an arched ceiling on which the reflections of the
lake's small waves should have rippled, but the season had been so dry that the lake had
shrunk and the water level was some eight or nine feet lower than usual. The water and the
exposed banks were rimed with a green, foul-smelling scum, but Beny

Singh, the Killadar of Gawilghur, had arranged for spices to be burned in low, flat
braziers so that the dozen men inside the pavilion were not too offended by the lake's
stench.

“If only the Rajah was here,” Beny Singh said, 'we should know what to do." Beny Singh
was a short, plump man with a curling moustache and nervous eyes. He was the fortress
commander, but he was a courtier by avocation, not a soldier, and he had always
regarded his command of the great fortress as a licence to make his fortune rather than to
fight the Rajah's enemies.

Prince Manu Bappoo was not surprised that his brother had chosen not to come to
Gawilghur, but had instead fled farther into the hills. The Rajah was like Beny Singh, he
had no belly for a fight, but Bappoo had watched the first British troops creep across the
plain beneath the fort's high walls and he welcomed their coming.

“We don't need my brother here to know what we must do,” he said.

“We fight.” The other men, all commanders of the various troops that had taken refuge
in Gawilghur, voiced their agreement.

“The British cannot be stopped by walls,” Beny Singh said. He was cradling a small white
lap dog which had eyes as wide and frightened as its master's.

“They can, and they will,” Bappoo insisted.

Singh shook his head.

"Were they stopped at Seringapatam? At Ahmednuggur? They crossed those city walls as
though they had wings!

They are what is the word your Arabs use? - djinnsl' He looked about the gathered council
and saw no one who would support him.

“They must have the djinns on their side,” he added weakly.

“So what would you do?” Bappoo asked.

“Treat with them,” Beny !Ungh said.

“Ask for cowle.”

"Cowled It was Colonel Dodd who intervened, speaking in his crude, newly learned
Marathi.

“I'll tell you what terms Wellesley will offer you. None! He'll march you away as a
prisoner, he'll slight these walls and take away the Rajah's treasures.”

“There are no treasures here,” Beny Singh said, but no one believed him. He was soothing
the little dog which had been frightened by the Englishman's harsh voice.

“And he'll give your women to his men as playthings,” Dodd added nastily.

Beny Singh shuddered. His wife, his concubines and his children were all in the palace,
and they were all dear to him. He pampered them, worshipped them and adored them.

“Perhaps I should remove my people from the fort?” he suggested hesitantly.

"I could take them to Multai?

The British will never reach Multai."

“You'd run away?” Dodd asked in his harsh voice.

“You bloody won't!”

He spoke those three words in English, but everyone understood what they meant. He
leaned forward.

“If you run away,” he said, 'the garrison loses heart. The rest of the soldiers can't
take their women away, so why should you? We fight them here, and we stop them here. Stop them
dead!"

He stood and walked to the pavilion's edge where he spat onto the green-scummed bank
before turning back to Beny Singh.

“Your women are safe here, Killadar. I could hold this fortress from now till the world's
end with just a hundred men.”

“The British are djinns,” Beny Singh whispered. The dog in his arms was shivering.

“They are not djinns,” Dodd snapped.

“There are no demons! They don't exist!”

“Winged djinns,” Beny Singh said in almost a whimper, 'invisible djinnsl In the
air!"

Dodd spat again.

“Bloody hell,” he said in English, then turned fast towards Beny Singh.

“I'm an English demon. Me! Understand? I'm a djinn, and if you take your women away
I'll follow you and I'll come to them at night and fill them with black bile.” He bared his
yellowed teeth and the Killadar shuddered. The white dog barked shrilly.

Manu Bappoo waved Dodd back to his seat. Dodd was the only European officer left in
his forces and, though Bappoo was glad to have the Englishman's services, there were times
when Colonel Dodd could be tiresome.

“If there are djinns,” Bappoo told Singh, 'they will be on our side." He waited while the
Killadar soothed the frightened dog, then he leaned forward.

“Tell me,” he demanded of Beny Singh, 'can the British take the fortress by using the
roads up the hill?"

Beny Singh thought about those two steep winding roads that twisted up the hill beneath
Gawilghur's walls. No man could survive those climbs, not if the defenders were raining
round shot and rocks down the precipitous slopes.

“No,” he admitted.

“So they can only come one way. Only one way! Across the land bridge. And my men will
guard the Outer Fort, and Colonel Dodd's men will defend the Inner Fort.”

“And no one,” Dodd said harshly, 'no one will get past my Cobras."

He still resented that his well-trained, white-coated soldiers were not defending
the Outer Fort, but he had accepted Manu Bappoo's argument that the important thing was
to hold the Inner Fort. If, by some chance, the British did capture the Outer Fort, they
would never fight past Dodd's men.

“My men,” Dodd growled, 'have never been defeated. They never will be."

Manu Bappoo smiled at the nervous Beny Singh.

“You see, Killadar, you will die here of old age.”

“Or of too many women,” another man put in, provoking laughter.

A cannon sounded from the Outer Fort's northern ramparts, followed a few seconds
later by another. No one knew what might have caused the firing and so the dozen men
followed Manu Bappoo as he left the pavilion and walked towards the Inner Fort's northern
ramparts. Silverfurred monkeys chattered at the soldiers from the high branches.

Arab guards stood at the gate of the Rajah's garden. They were posted to stop any common
soldiers of the garrison going to the paths beside the tank where the Killadar's women
liked to stroll in the cool of the evening. A hundred paces beyond the garden gate was a
steep sided rock pit, about twice as deep as a man stood high, and Dodd paused to look down
into its shadowed depths. The sides had been chiselled smooth by stone-workers so that
nothing could climb up from the floor that was littered with white bones.

“The Traitor's Hole,” Bappoo said, as he paused beside Dodd, 'but the bones are from baby
monkeys."

“But they do eat men?” Dodd asked, intrigued by the shadowed blackness at the foot of
the'^hole.

“They kill men,” Bappoo said, 'but don't eat them. They're not big enough."

“I can't see any,” Dodd said, disappointed, then suddenly a sinuous shadow writhed
swiftly between two crevices.

“There!” he said happily.

“Don't they grow big enough to eat men?”

“Most years they escape,” Bappoo said.

“The monsoon floods the pit and the snakes swim to the top and wriggle out. Then we must
find new ones. This year we've been saved the trouble. These snakes will grow bigger than
usual.”

Beny Singh waited a few paces away, clutching his small dog as though he feared Dodd
would throw it down to the snakes.

“There's a bastard who ought to be fed to the snakes,” Dodd said to Bappoo, nodding
towards the Killadar.

“My brother likes him,” Bappoo said mildly, touching Dodd's arm to indicate that they
should walk on.