Sharpe's Fortress (24 page)

“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 towards the smear of red light that betrayed where the British
encampment 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 ajetti 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 favour 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 drily.

“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 grey 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 towards 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 defence of the
broken wall Wellesley proposed sending two columns of his own men up the steep tracks that
led directly 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 travelling 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."

“It's lice, sir.”

“Then for Christ's sake stop wriggling. You're distracting me.”

“Scratch on,” Torrance had said, laying down a winning hand. He had yawned, scooped up
the coins, and bid his partners a good night.

“It's devilish early,” the Major had grumbled, wanting a chance to win his money
back.

“Duty,” Torrance had said vaguely, then he had strolled to the merchant encampment and
inspected the women who fanned themselves in the torrid night heat. An hour later, well
pleased with himself, he had returned to his quarters. His servant squatted on the porch,
but he waved the man away.

Sajit was still at his candle-lit desk, unclogging his pen of the soggy paper scraps
that collected on the nib. He stood, touched his inky hands together and bowed as Torrance
entered.

“Sahib.”

“All well?”

"All is well, sahib. Tomorrow's chitties He pushed a pile of papers across the desk.

“I'm sure they're in order,” Torrance said, quite confident that he spoke true. Sajit
was proving to be an excellent clerk. He went to the door of his quarters, then turned with
a frown.

“Your uncle hasn't come back?”

“Tomorrow, sahib, I'm sure.”

“Tell him I'd like a word. But not if he comes tonight. I don't want to be disturbed
tonight.”

“Of course not, sahib.” Sajit offered another bow as Torrance negotiated the door
and the muslin screen.

The Captain shot the iron bolt, then chased down the few moths that had managed to get
past the muslin. He lit a second lamp, piled the night's winnings on the table, then called
for Clare. She came sleepy eyed from the kitchen.

“Arrack, Brick,” Torrance ordered, then peeled off his coat while Clare un stoppered a
fresh jar of the fierce spirit. She kept her eyes averted as Torrance stripped himself
naked and lay back in his hammock.

“You could light me a hookah, Brick,” he suggested, 'then sponge me down. Is there a clean
shirt for the morning?"

“Of course, sir.”

“Not the darned one?”

“No, sir.”

He turned his head to stare at the coins which glittered so prettily in the smoky
lamplight. In funds again! Winning! Perhaps his luck had turned. It seemed so. He had lost
so much money at cards in the last month that he had thought nothing but ruin awaited him,
but now the goddess of fortune had turned her other cheek. Rule of halves, he told himself
as he sucked on the hookah. Save half, gamble the other half.