Sharpe's Fortress (28 page)

“Who are you?” a low voice asked Private Kendrick just a few yards from Hakeswill's hiding
place.

“Kendrick, sir.”

“To me, Private. I need your help.”

Kendrick slipped back towards the voice. Bastard interfering officer, he thought, but
he had to obey.

“Where are you, sir?” he asked.

“Here, man! Hurry, now, hurry!”

Kendrick slipped on a slanting stone and sat down with a bump. A rocket slashed overhead,
spewing fire and sparks, and in its brief light he saw a shadow above him, then felt a blade
at his throat.

“One noise,” the voice hissed, 'and you're dead."

Kendrick went very still. He did not make any noise at all, but he still died.

A lucky shell struck a pair of oxen, disembowelling the beasts that lowed pitifully as
they collapsed onto the road.

“Get them out of the way!” a voice roared, and sepoys struggled with the massive
animals, cutting their harnesses and pulling the dying beasts into the rocks.

Other men ran the empty cart back to the encampment, making way for the next wagon to
drag more gab ions forward.

“Kill them!” the officer ordered.

“Use your bayonets! No musket fire!” The sepoys finished off the oxen, stabbing again
and again into their thick necks while the bloody hooves thrashed violently. Another shell
landed nearby, slicing its fragments among the rocks. The road was slippery with spilled
guts over which the next cart rolled impassively, its axle screeching like a demon.

“All well, soldier?” a voice asked Private Lowry.

“Yes, sir.”

“I'm Colonel Kenny,” the man said, dropping down beside Lowry.

“Yes, sir,” Lowry acknowledged nervously.

“See anything?”

“Nothing, sir,” Lowry said, then gasped as he felt a blade at his throat.

“Where's Hakeswill?” the voice hissed in his ear, and Lowry suddenly knew this was not
Colonel Kenny who had him in a tight grip.

“Dunno, sir,” Lowry said, then began to cry out, but the cry was cut off as the blade
sawed deep into his gullet.

A ball, fired low, struck plumb on the great boulder that sheltered Hakeswill and the
Sergeant whimpered as he tried to wriggle deeper into the cleft. A rocket landed thirty
paces behind him and began to chase its tail, whirling about on the turf, scattering
sparks, until it finally lodged against a rock and burned itself out in a display of small
blue flames. Another round shot hammered into the gab ions but now they were well stacked
and the ball's impact was soaked up by the tight packed soil.

A whistle blew from the battery site, then blew twice more. Morris, relieved by the
sound, called to the men to his right.

"Back to the road!

Pass it on! Back to the road!" Thank God the worst of the ordeal was over! Now he was
supposed to withdraw to the battery, ready to protect it through the remaining hours of
the dark night, but Morris knew he would feel a good deal safer once he was behind the gab
ions just as he knew that the cessation of the work would probably persuade the Mahrattas
to cease fire.

“Close on me!” he called to his company.

“Hurry!”

The message was passed along the picquet line and the men ran at a crouch back to where
Morris waited. They bumped into each other as they gathered, then squatted as Morris
called for Hakeswill.

“Not here, sir,” Sergeant Green finally decided.

“Count the men, Sergeant,” Morris ordered.

Sergeant Green numbered the men off.

“Three missing, sir,” he reported.

“Hakeswill, Lowry and Kendrick.”

“Damn them,” Morris said. A rocket hissed up from the gatehouse, twisted in the night to
leave a crazy trail of flame-edged smoke, then dived down to the left, far down, plunging
into the ravine that edged the isthmus. The light of the exhaust flashed down the steep
cliffs, finally vanishing a thousand feet below Morris. Two guns fired together, their
balls hammering towards the fake lanterns. The battery lanterns had vanished, evidence
that the sappers had finished their work.

“Take the men to the battery,” Morris ordered Green.

“Garrard? You stay with me.”

Morris did not want to do anything heroic, but he knew he could not report that he had
simply lost three men, so he took Private Tom Garrard west across the tumbled ground where
the picquet line had been stretched. They called out the names of the missing men, but no
reply came.

It was Garrard who stumbled over the first body.

“Don't know who it is, sir, but he's dead. Bloody mess, he is.”

Morris swore and crouched beside the body. A rocket's bright passage showed him a slit
throat and a spill of blood. It also revealed that the man had been stripped of his coat
which lay discarded beside the corpse. The sight of the gaping throat made Morris gag.

“There's another here, sir,” Garrard called from a few paces away.

“Jesus!” Morris twisted aside, willing himself not to throw up, but the bile was sour
in his throat. He shuddered, then managed to take a deep breath.

“We're going.”

“You want me to look for the other fellow, sir?” Garrard asked.

“Come on!” Morris fled, not wanting to stay in this dark charnel house.

Garrard followed.

The gunfire died. A last rocket stitched sparks across the stars, then Gawilghur was
silent again.

Hakeswill cowered in his hiding place, shuddering as the occasional flare of an
exploding shell or passing rocket cast lurid shadows into the narrow cleft. He thought
he heard Lowry call aloud, but the sound was so unexpected, and so quickly over, he
decided it was his nerves. Then, blessedly, he heard the whistle that signalled that the
sappers were done with their work, and a moment later he heard the message being called
along the line.

“Back to the road! Back to the road!”

The rockets and guns were still battering the night, so Hakeswill stayed where he was
until he sensed that the fury of the fire was diminishing, then he crept out of his cleft
and, still keeping low, scuttled eastwards.

“Hakeswill!” a voice called nearby.

He froze.

“Hakeswill?” The voice was insistent.

Some instinct told the Sergeant that there was mischief in the dark, and so Hakeswill
crouched lower still. He heard something moving in the night, the scrape of leather on
stone, the sound of breathing, but the man did not come close to Hakeswill who, petrified,
edged on another pace. His hand, feeling the ground ahead of him, suddenly found
something wet and sticky. He flinched, brought his fingers to his nose and smelt blood.

“Jesus,” he swore under his breath. He groped again, and this time found a corpse. His
hands explored the face, the open mouth, then found the gaping wound in the neck. He jerked
his hand back.

It had to be Lowry or Kendrick, for this was about where he had left the two privates, and
if they were dead, or even if only one of them was dead, then it meant that Captain
Torrance's death had been no lovers' tiff. Not that Hakeswill had ever believed it was. He
knew who it was. Bloody Sharpe was alive. Bloody Sharpe was hunting his enemies, and three,
maybe four, were already dead. And Hakeswill knew he would be next.

“Hakeswill!” the voice hissed, but farther away now.

A gun fired from the fort and in its flash Hakeswill saw a cloaked shape to his north. The
man was crossing the skyline, not far from Hakeswill, but at least he was going away.
Sharpe! It had to be Sharpe!

And a terror grew in Hakeswill so that his face twitched and his hands shook.

“Think, you bugger,” he told himself, 'think!"

And the answer came, a sweet answer, so obvious that he wondered why he had taken so
long to find it.

Sharpe was alive, he was not a prisoner in Gawilghur, but haunting the British camp,
which meant that there was one place that would be utterly safe for Hakeswill to go. He could
go to the fortress, and Sharpe would never reach him there for the rumour in the camp was
that the assault on Gawilghur was likely to be a desperate and bloody business.

Likely to fail, some men said, and even if it did not, Hakeswill could always pretend he
had been taken prisoner. All he wanted at this moment was to be away from Sharpe and so he
sidled southwards, down the hill, and once he reached the flatter ground, he ran towards
the now dark walls of the fort through the drifting skeins of foul-smelling powder
smoke.

He ran past the tank, along the approach road, and round to the left where the great
gatehouse loomed above him in the dark. And once there he pounded on the massive,
iron-studded doors.

No one responded.

He pounded again, using the butt of his musket, scared witless that the sound would
bring an avenging horror from the dark behind, and suddenly a small wicket gate in the
larger door was pulled open to flood flame light into the night.

“I'm a deserter!” Hakeswill hissed.

“I'm on your side!”

Hands seized him and pulled him through the small doorway. A smoking torch burned high on
the wall to show Hakeswill the long, narrow entranceway, the dark ramparts, and the dark
faces of the men who had him prisoner.

“I'm on your side!” he shouted as the gate was closed behind him and his musket was
snatched away.

“I'm on your side!”

A tall, hawk-faced man strode down the stone road.

“Who are you?”

he asked in English.

“I'm someone willing to fight for you, sir. Willing and able, sir. Old soldier,
sir.”

“My name is Manu Bappoo,” the man said in a sibilant voice, 'and I command here."

“Very good, sir. Sahib, I mean, very good.” Hakeswill bobbed his head.

“Hakeswill, sir, is my name. Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill.”

Manu Bappoo stared at the redcoat. He disliked deserters. A man who deserted his flag
could not be trusted under any other flag, but the news that a white soldier had run from
the enemy ranks could only hearten his garrison. Better, he decided, to leave this man
alive as a witness to the enemy's crumbling morale than shoot him out of hand.

“Take him to Colonel Dodd,” he ordered one of his men.

“Give him back his firelock. He's on our side.”

So Hakeswill was inside Gawilghur and among the enemy. But he was safe from the terror
that had turned his life to sudden nightmare.

He was safe from Sharpe.

The sappers who had em placed the gab ions were too excited to go to sleep and instead
were milling about a pair of smoky fires. Their laughter rose and fell on the night wind.
Major Stokes, pleased with their work, had produced three jars of arrack as a reward, and
the jugs were being passed from hand to hand.

Sharpe watched the small celebration and then, keeping to the shadows among Syud
Sevajee's encampment, he went to a small tent where he stripped off his borrowed Indian
robes before crawling under the flap. In the dark he blundered into Clare who, kept awake
by the sound of the bombardment and then by the voices of the sappers, put up a hand and
felt bare flesh.

“You're undressed!” She sounded alarmed.

“Not quite,” Sharpe said, then understood her fear.

“My clothes were soaking,” he explained, 'so I took them off. Didn't want to wet the bed,
eh? And I've still got my shirt on."

“Is it raining? I didn't hear it.”

“It was blood,” he said, then rummaged under the blanket he had borrowed from Syud
Sevajee and found Torrance's pouch.

Clare heard the rattle of stones.

“What is it?”

“Just stones,” he said, 'pebbles." He put the twenty jewels he had retrieved from
Kendrick and Lowry into the pouch, stowed it safe under the blanket, then lay down. He
doubted he had found every stone, but he reckoned he had retrieved most of them. They had
been loose in the two privates' pockets, not even hidden away in their coat seams. God, he
felt tired and his body had still not recovered from Hakeswill's kicking. It hurt to
breathe, the bruises were tender and a tooth was still loose.

“What happened out there?” Clare asked.

“The engineers put the gab ions in place. When it's light they'll scrape the gun platform
and make the magazines, and tomorrow night they'll bring up the guns.”

“What happened to you?” Clare amended her question.

Sharpe was silent for a while.

“I looked up some old friends,” he said.

But he had missed Hakeswill, damn it, and Hakeswill would be doubly alert now. Still, a
chance would come. He grinned as he remembered Morris's scared voice. The Captain was a
bully to his men and a to adie to his superiors.

“Did you kill someone?” Clare asked.

“Two men,” he admitted, 'but it should have been three."

“Why?”

He sighed.

“Because they were bad men,” he said simply, then reflected it was a true answer.

“And because they tried to kill me,” he added, 'and they robbed me. You knew them," he went
on.

“Kendrick and Lowry.”

“They were horrid,” Clare said softly.

“They used to stare at me.”

“Can't blame them for that, love.”

She was silent for a while. The laughter of the sappers was subsiding as men drifted
towards their tents. The wind gusted at the tent's entrance and brought the smell of burnt
powder from the rocky isthmus where patches of grass still flamed around the exhausted
rocket tubes.

“Everything's gone wrong, hasn't it?” Clare said.

“It's being put right,” Sharpe replied.

“For you,” she said.

Again she was silent, and Sharpe suspected she was crying.

“I'll get you home to Madras,” he said.

“And what'll happen to me there?”

“You'll be all right, lass. I'll give you a pair of my magic pebbles.”

“What I want,” she said softly, 'is to go home. But I can't afford it."

“Marry a soldier,” Sharpe said, 'and be carried home with him." He thought of Eli
Lockhart who had been admiring Clare from a distance.

They would suit each other, Sharpe thought.

She was crying very softly.

“Torrance said he'd pay my way home when I'd paid off the debt,” she said.

“Why would he make you work for one passage, then give you another?” Sharpe asked.

“He was a lying bastard.”

“He seemed so kind at first.”

“We're all like that,” Sharpe said.

"Soft as lights when you first meet a woman, then you get what you want and it changes. I
don't know.

Maybe not every time."

“Charlie wasn't like that,” Clare said.

“Charlie? Your husband?”

“He was always good to me.”

Sharpe lay back. The light of the dying fires nickered in the tent's loose weave. If it
rained, he thought, the cloth would leak like a pepper pot.

“There are good men and bad,” he said.

“What are you?” Clare asked.

“I think I'm good,” he said, 'but I don't know. All the time I get into trouble, and I
only know one way out. I can fight. I can do that all right."

“Is that what you want? To fight?”

“God knows what I want.” He laughed softly.

“I wanted to be an officer more than I'd wanted anything in my life! I dreamed of it, I
did. I wanted it so bad that it hurt, and then the dream came true and it woke me up and I
wondered why I'd wanted it so much.” He paused.

Syud Sevajee's horses stamped their feet softly behind the tent.

“Some buggers are trying to persuade me to leave the army. Sell the commission, see?
They don't want me.”

“Why not?”

“Because I piss in their soup, lass.”

“So will you leave?”

He shrugged.

“Don't want to.” He thought about it.

“It's like a club, a society. They don't really want me, so they chuck me out, and then
I have to fight my way back in. But why do I do it if they don't want me? I don't know. Maybe
it'll be different in the Rifles. I'll try 'em, anyway, and see if they're
different.”

“You want to go on fighting?” Clare asked.

“It's what I'm good at,” Sharpe said.

“And I do enjoy it. I mean I know you shouldn't, but there ain't any other excitement
like it.”

“None?”

“Well, one.” He grinned in the dark.

There was a long silence, and he thought Clare had fallen asleep, but then she spoke
again.

“How about your French widow?”

“She's gone,” Sharpe said flatly.

“Gone?”

“She buggered off, love. Took some money of mine and went. Gone to America, I'm
told.”

Clare lay in silence again.

“Don't you worry about being alone?” she asked after a while.

“No.”

“I do.”

He turned towards her, propped himself on an elbow and stroked her hair. She stiffened
as he touched her, then relaxed to the gentle pressure of his hand.

“You ain't alone, lass,” Sharpe said.

“Or only if you want to be. You got trapped, that's all. It happens to everyone. But
you're out now. You're free.” He stroked her hair down to her neck and felt warm bare skin
under his hand. She did not move and he softly stroked farther down.

“You're undressed,” he said.

“I was warm,” she said in a small voice.

“What's worse?” Sharpe asked.

“Being warm or being lonely?”

He thought she smiled. He could not tell in the dark, but he thought she smiled.

“Being lonely,” she said very softly.

“We can look after that,” he said, lifting the thin blanket and moving to her side.

She had stopped crying. Somewhere outside a cock crowed and the eastern cliffs were
touched with the first gold of the day. The fires on the rocky neck of land flickered and
died, their smoke drifting like patches of thin mist. Bugles called from the main
encampment, summoning the redcoats to the morning parade. The night picquets were
relieved as the sun rose to flood the world with light.

Where Sharpe and Clare slept.

“You abandoned the dead men?” Wellesley growled.

Captain Morris blinked as a gust of wind blew dust into one of his eyes.

“I tried to bring the bodies in,” he lied, 'but it was dark, sir. Very dark. Colonel Kenny
can vouch for that, sir. He visited us."

“I visited you?” Kenny, lean, tall and irascible, was standing beside the
General.

“I visited you?” he asked again, his inflection rising to outrage.

“Last night, sir,” Morris answered in plaintive indignation.

“On the picquet line.”

“I did no such thing. Sun's gone to your head.” Kenny glowered at Morris, then took a
snuff box from a pocket and placed a pinch on his hand.

“Who the devil are you, anyway?” he added.

“Morris, sir. 33rd.”

“I thought we had nothing but Scots and sepoys here,” Kenny said to Wellesley.

“Captain Morris's company escorted a convoy here,” Wellesley answered.

“A light company, eh?” Kenny said, glancing at Morris's epaulettes.

“You might even be useful. I could do with another company in the assault party.” He
snorted the snuff, stopping one nostril at a time.

“It cheers my boys up,” he added, 'seeing white men killed." Kenny commanded the first
battalion of the tenth Madrassi Regiment.

“What's in your assault unit now?” Wellesley asked.

“Nine companies,” Kenny said.

"The grenadiers and two others from the Scotch Brigade, the flankers from my regiment and
four others.

Good boys, all of them, but I daresay they won't mind sharing the honours with an
English light company."

“And I've no doubt you'll welcome a chance to assault a breach, Morris?” Wellesley asked
drily.

“Of course, sir,” Morris said, cursing Kenny inwardly.

“But in the meantime,” Wellesley went on coldly, 'bring your men's bodies in."

“Yes, sir.”

“Do it now.”

Sergeant Green took a half-dozen men down the neck of land, but they only found two
bodies. They were expecting three, but Sergeant Hakeswill was missing. The enemy, seeing
the redcoats among the rocks above the reservoir, opened fire and the musket balls smacked
into stones and ricocheted up into the air. Green took a bullet in the heel of his boot. It
did not break the skin of his foot, but the blow hurt and he hopped on the short, dry
grass.

“Just grab the buggers and drag them away,” he said. He wondered why the enemy did not
fire their cannon, and just then a gun discharged a barrel of canister at his squad.

The balls hissed all about the men, but miraculously none was hit as the soldiers seized
Kendrick and Lowry by their feet and ran back towards the half-completed battery where
Captain Morris waited. Both the dead men had slit throats.

Once safe behind the gab ions the corpses were treated more decorously by being placed
on makeshift stretchers. Colonel Kenny intercepted the stretcher-bearers to examine
the corpses which were already smelling foul.

“They must have sent a dozen cut-throats out of the fort,” he reckoned.

“You say there's a sergeant missing?”

“Yes, sir,” Morris answered.

“Poor fellow must be a prisoner. Be careful tonight, Captain! They'll probably try
again. And I assure you, Captain, if I decide to take a stroll this evening, it won't be to
your picquet line.”

That night the 33rd's Light Company again formed a screen in front of the new batteries,
this time to protect the men dragging up the guns. It was a nervous night, for the company
was expecting throat-slitting Mahrattas to come silently through the darkness, but
nothing stirred.

The fortress stayed silent and dark. Not a gun fired and not a rocket flew as the British
cannon were hauled to their new emplacements and as powder charges and round shot were
stacked in the newly made ready magazines.

Then the gunners waited.

The first sign of dawn was a grey lightening of the east, followed by the flare of
reflected sun as the first rays lanced over the world's rim to touch the summit of the
eastern cliffs. The fortress walls showed grey black Still the gunners waited. A solitary
cloud glowed livid pink on the horizon. Smoke rose from the cooking fires inside the
fortress where the flags hung limp in the windless air. Bugles roused the British camp which
lay a half-mile behind the batteries where officers trained telescopes on Gawilghur's
northern wall.

Major Stokes's job was almost finished. He had made the batteries, and now the gunners
must unmake the walls, but first Stokes wanted to be certain that the outermost breach
would be made in the right place.

He had fixed a telescope to a tripod and now he edged it from side to side, searching the
lichen-covered stones just to the right of a bastion in the centre of the wall. The wall
sloped back slightly, but he was sure he could see a place where the old stones bulged out of
alignment, and he watched that spot as the sun rose and cast a hint of shadow where the
stones were not quite true. Finally he screwed the telescope's mount tight shut, so that the
tube could not move, then summoned the gun captain of the battery's eighteen-pounder. A
major actually commanded this battery, but he insisted that his sergeant go to the
spyglass.

“That's your target,” Stokes told the Sergeant.

The Sergeant stooped to the telescope, then straightened to see over the glass, then
stooped again. He was chewing a wad of tobacco and had no lower front teeth so that the
yellow spittle ran down his chin in a continuous dribble. He straightened, then stooped a
third time. The telescope was powerful, and all he could see in the glass circle was a
vertical joint between two great stones. The joint was some four feet above the wall's base,
and when it gave way the wall would spill forward down the slope to make the ramp up which the
attackers could swarm.

“Smack on the joint, sir?” the Sergeant asked in a Northumbrian accent so pronounced
that Stokes did not at first understand him.

“Low on the joint,” Stokes said.

“Low it is, sir,” the Sergeant said, and stooped to squint through the glass once more.

“The joint gapes a bit, don't it?”

“It does,” Stokes said.

The Sergeant grunted. For a while, he reckoned, the battering would drive the stones in,
sealing the gap, but there was pressure there and the wall must eventually give way as the
battered stones weakened.

“That bugger'll burst like an abscess,” the Sergeant said happily, straightening from
the telescope. He returned to his gun and barked at his men to make some minute adjustments
to its trail. He himself heaved on the elevating screw, though as yet the gun was still
masked by some half filled gab ions that blocked the embrasure. Every few seconds the
Sergeant climbed onto the trail to see over the gab ions then he would demand that the gun
was shifted a half-inch left or a finger's breadth to the right as he made another finicky
adjustment to the screw. He tossed grass in the air to gauge the wind, then twisted the
elevation again to raise the barrel a tiny amount.