Sharpe's Fortress (21 page)

What the hell should he do? He knew no one in the British camp. He looked up at the high
summit where Gawilghur just showed. He supposed his old comrades in Manu Bappoo's Lions
of Allah were up there, but his uncle, with whom he had travelled from Arabia, was dead and
buried in Argaum's black earth. He knew other soldiers in the regiment, but he also feared
them. Those other soldiers wanted Ahmed to be their servant, and not just to cook for them
and clean their weapons. Sharpe alone had shown him friendliness, and Sharpe now needed
help, but Ahmed did not know how to provide it. He thought about the problem as he knotted
the stirrup leathers.

The plump, red-faced and white-haired man in the hills had been friendly, but how was
Ahmed to talk to him? He decided he ought to try and so he turned the horse, planning to
ride her all about the camp perimeter and then back up the road into the hills, but an
officer of the camp picquets saw him. The man was riding a horse and he spurred it close to
Ahmed and noted the British saddle cloth.

“What are you doing, boy?” he asked. The officer presumed Ahmed was exercising the
horse, but Ahmed took fright at the challenge and kicked back.

“Thief!” the officer shouted and gave chase.

“Stop! Thief!”

A sepoy turned with his musket and Ahmed nudged the horse so that she ran the man down.
There was a group of houses close by and Ahmed turned towards them, jumped a garden wall,
thumped through some beds of vegetables, jumped another wall, ducked under some fruit
trees, jumped a hedge and splashed through a muddy pond before kicking the horse up a bank
and into some trees. The officer had not dared follow him through the gardens, but Ahmed
could hear the hue and cry beyond the houses. He patted the mare's neck as she threaded
through the trees, then curbed her at the wood's edge. There was about a half-mile of open
country, then more thick woods that promised safety if only the tired mare could make the
distance without faltering.

“If Allah wills it,” Ahmed said, then kicked the horse into a gallop.

His pursuers were well behind, but they saw him break cover and now a dozen horsemen
were chasing him. Someone fired at him. He heard the musket shot, but the ball went nowhere
near him. He leaned over the mane and just let the horse run. He looked back once and saw the
pursuers bunching in his path, and then he was in the trees and he twisted northwards, cut
back west, then went north again, going ever deeper into the woods until at last he slowed
the blowing horse so that the sound of her thumping hooves would not betray him.

He listened. He could hear other horses blundering through the leaves, but they were
not coming any closer, and then he began to wonder if it would not be better to let
himself be caught after all, for surely someone among the British would speak his
language? Maybe if he went all the way to where the men were making the road in the hills he
would be too late to help Sharpe. He felt miserable, utterly unsure what he should do, and
then he decided he must go back and find help within the encampment and so he turned the
horse back towards his pursuers.

And saw a musket pointing straight at his throat.

The man holding the musket was an Indian and had one of the spiralling brass helmets
that the Mahrattas wore. He was a cavalryman, but he had picketed his horse a few yards
away and had crept up on Ahmed on foot. The man grinned.

Ahmed wondered if he should just kick the tired mare and risk his luck, but then another
Mahratta stepped from the leaves, and this one held a curved tulwar. A third man appeared,
and then more men came, all mounted, to surround him.

And Ahmed, who knew he had panicked and failed, wept.

It seemed to Dodd that Prince Manu Bappoo's policy of rewarding freebooters with cash
for weapons captured from the British was failing miserably. So far they had fetched in
three ancient matchlocks that must have belonged to shikarees, a broken musket of local
manufacture, and a fine pistol and sword that had been taken from an engineer officer.
No scabbard for the sword, of course, but the two trophies, so far as Dodd was concerned,
were the only evidence that the Mahrattas had tried to stop the British approach. He
pestered Manu Bappoo, pleading to be allowed to take his Cobras down to where the pioneers
were driving the road, but the Rajah's brother adamantly refused to let Dodd's men leave
the fortress.

Dodd himself was allowed to leave, but only to exercise his horse, which he did each
day by riding west along the brink of the plateau. He did not go far. There was a tempting
price on his head, and though no enemy cavalry had been seen on the plateau since the
engineer had made his reconnaissance, Dodd still feared that he might be captured, and so
he only rode until he could see the British works far beneath him. Then, protected by a
handful of Bappoo's horsemen, he would stare through a telescope at the ant-like figures
labouring so far below.

He watched the road widen, and lengthen, and one morning he saw that two battalions of
infantry had camped in one of the high valleys, and next day he saw the beginnings of an
artillery park: three guns, a forage cart, a spare wheel wagon and four ammunition
limbers.

He cursed Bappoo, knowing that his Cobras could destroy that small park and hurl the
British into dazed confusion, yet the Prince was content to let the enemy climb the
escarpment unopposed. The road was being remade, yet even so it was still steep enough in
places to need a hundred men to haul one gun. Yet day by day Dodd saw the number of guns
increase in the artillery park, then inch up the hill and he knew it would not be long
before the British reached the plateau and their besieging forces would seal off the narrow
isthmus of rock that led from the cliffs to the great fortress.

And still Manu Bappoo made no proper effort to harry the redcoats.

“We shall stop them here,” the Prince told Dodd, 'here," and he would gesture at
Gawilghur's walls, but William Dodd was not so sure that the redcoats would be stopped so
easily. Bappoo might be convinced of the fortress's strength, but Bappoo knew nothing of
modern siege craft.

Each morning, as he returned from his excursion along the cliff top, Dodd would
dismount as he reached the isthmus and give his horse to one of his escort so that he could
walk the attackers' route. He tried to see the fortress as the redcoats would see it, tried
to anticipate where their attack would come and how it would be made.

It was, he had to admit, a brutal place to attack. Two great walls protected the Outer
Fort, and though the British could undoubtedly breach those walls with cannon fire, the two
ramparts stood on a steep slope so that the attackers would need to fight their way uphill
to where the defenders would be waiting among the ruins of the breaches. And those
breaches would be flanked by the massive round bastions that were too big to be collapsed
by the twelve- or eighteen-pounder guns Dodd expected the British to deploy. The bastions
would spit round shot, musket balls and rockets down into the British who would be
struggling towards the nearer breach, their approach route getting ever narrower until
it was finally constricted by the vast tank of water that blocked most of the approach.
Dodd walked the route obsessively and could almost feel sorry for the men who would have
to do it under fire.

A hundred paces from the fort, where the defenders' fire would be most lethal, the
attackers would be squeezed between the reservoir and the cliff edge, compressed into a
space just twenty paces wide. Dodd stood in that space each day and stared up at the double
walls and counted the artillery pieces. Twenty-two cannon were pointing at him and when
the redcoats came those barrels would be loaded with canister, and besides those heavy
guns there was a mass of smaller weapons, the murderers and spitfires that could be held by
one man and which could blast out a fistful of stone scraps or pistol balls. True, the
British would have destroyed some of the larger guns, but the barrels could be mounted on
new carriages and re sited behind the vast bastions so that the attackers, if they even
succeeded in climbing up to the breach, would be enfiladed by cannon fire. And to reach
that far they would need to fight uphill against Bappoo's Arabs, and against the massed
musketry of the garrison.

It was a prospect so daunting that Prince Manu Bappoo expected most of the attackers
would sheer away from the breaches and run to the Delhi Gate, the Outer Fort's northern
entrance. That gate would undoubtedly have been shattered by British cannon fire, but
once inside its arch the attackers would find themselves in a trap. The road inside the
gate curled up beside the wall, with another great wall outside it, so that anyone on the
cobbles was dwarfed by the stone ramparts on either side, and those would be lined with men
firing down or else throwing the great rocks that Bappoo had ordered piled onto the fire
steps Inch by bloody inch the redcoats would fight their way up the narrow road between the
walls, only to turn the corner to see an even greater gate standing in front of them, and
one, moreover, that could not be reached by the besiegers' cannon fire. Thus, Bappoo
reckoned, the British assault would be thwarted.

Dodd was not so sure. The Prince was right in thinking that there was no way in through the
Delhi Gate, but Dodd suspected the breaches would be less formidable. He had begun to see
weaknesses in the ancient walls, old cracks that were half hidden by weeds and lichen, and
he knew the skill of the British gunners. The wall would break easily, and that meant the
breaches would be big and wide, and Dodd reckoned the British would fight their way through.
It might be a hard fight, but they would win it. And that meant the British would capture the
Outer Fort.

But Dodd did not express that opinion to Bappoo, nor did he urge the Prince to build an
earthen glacis outside the wall to soak up the fire of the breaching batteries. Such a
glacis would delay the British for days, even weeks, but Dodd encouraged the Prince to
believe that the Outer Fort was impregnable, for in that misapprehension lay Dodd's
opportunity.

Manu Bappoo had once told Dodd that the Outer Fort was a trap.

An enemy, if they captured the Outer Fort, would think their battle won, but then they
would come to Gawilghur's central ravine and find a second, even greater fort, waiting on
its far side. But for Dodd the Outer Fort was Manu Bappoo's trap. If Manu Bappoo lost the
Outer Fort then he, like the enemy, would have to cross the ravine and climb to the Inner
Fort, and it was there that Dodd commanded and, try as Dodd might, he could see no
weaknesses in the Inner Fort's de fences

Neither Manu Bappoo nor the British could ever cross the ravine, not if Dodd opposed
them.

The Inner Fort was quite separate from the Outer. No wall joined them, only a track that
dropped steeply to the bed of the ravine and then climbed, even more steeply, to the
intricate gateway of the Inner Fort. Dodd used that track each day, and he tried to
imagine himself as an attacker. Twenty more guns faced him from the Inner Fort's single
wall as he descended the ravine, and none of those guns would have been dismounted by
cannon fire. Muskets would be pouring their shot down into the rocky ravine and rockets
would be slashing bloodily through the British ranks. The redcoats would die here like rats
being pounded in a bucket, and even if some did survive to climb the track towards the
gate, they would only reach Gawilghur's last horror.

That horror was the entrance, where four vast gates barred the Inner Fort, four gates set
one after another in a steep passage that was flanked by towering walls. There was no
other way in. Even if the British breached the Inner Fort's wall it would not help, for the
wall was built on top of the precipice which formed the southern side of the ravine, and no
man could climb that slope and hope to survive.

The only way in was through the gate, and Wellesley, Dodd had learned, did not like
lengthy sieges. He had escaladed Ahmednuggur, surprising its defenders by sending men
with ladders against the unbreached walls, and Dodd was certain that Wellesley would
similarly try to rush the Inner Fort. He could not approach the wall, perched on its cliff,
so he would be forced to send his men into the ghastly entrance that twisted as it climbed,
and for every steep step of the way, between each of the four great gates, they would be
pounded by muskets, crushed by stones, blasted by cannon and savaged by rockets dropped
from the parapets. It could not be done. Dodd's Cobras would be on the fire steps and the
redcoats would be beneath them, and the redcoats would die like cat de

Dodd had no great opinion of Indian rockets, but he had stockpiled more than a
thousand above the Inner Fort's murderous entrance, for within the close confines of the
walled road the weapons would prove lethal. The rockets were made of hammered tin, each one
about sixteen inches long and four or five inches in diameter, with a bamboo stick the
height of a man attached to each tin cylinder that was crammed with powder. Dodd had
experimented with the weapon and found that a lit rocket tossed down into the gate
passage would sear and bounce from wall to wall, and even when it finally stopped
careering madly about the roadway, it went on belching out a torch of flame that would
scorch trapped men terribly. A dozen rockets dropped between two of the gates might kill a
score of men and burn another score half to death. Just let them come, Dodd prayed as he
climbed each morning towards the Inner Fort. Let them come! Let them come and let them take
the Outer Fort, for then Manu Bappoo must die and the British would then come to Dodd and die
like the Prince.

And afterwards the fugitives of their beaten army would be pursued south across the
Deccan Plain. Their bodies would rot in the heat and their bones whiten in the sun, and the
British power in India would be broken and Dodd would be Lord of Gawilghur.