Sharpe's Fortress (3 page)

“Jesus!” Sharpe said aloud, earning himself a reproving look from Sergeant
Colquhoun.

Two battalions of the sepoys were fleeing. Sharpe saw the General riding among the
fugitives, and he imagined Wellesley shouting at the frightened men to stop and re-form,
but instead they kept running towards the millet. They had been panicked by the oxen and
by the weight of enemy shot that beat the dry grassland with dust and smoke.

The men vanished in the high stalks, leaving nothing behind but a scatter of
embarrassed officers and, astonishingly, the two panicked gun teams which had
inexplicably stopped short of the millet and now waited patiently for the gunners to
catch them.

“Sit yourselves down!” Urquhart called to his men, and the company squatted in the dry
riverbed. One man took a stump of clay pipe from his pouch and lit it with a tinderbox. The
tobacco smoke drifted slowly in the small wind. A few men drank from their canteens, but
most were hoarding their water against the dryness that would come when they bit into their
cartridges. Sharpe glanced behind, hoping to see the pucka lees who brought the battalion
water, but there was no sign of them. When he turned back to the north he saw that some enemy
cavalry had appeared on the crest, their tall lances making a spiky thicket against the
sky. Doubtless the enemy horsemen were tempted to attack the broken British line and so
stampede more of the nervous sepoys, but a squadron of British cavalry emerged from a wood
with their sabres drawn to threaten the flank of the enemy horsemen. Neither side charged,
but instead they just watched each other. The 74th's pipers had ceased their playing. The
remaining British galloper guns were deploying now, facing up the long gentle slope to
where the enemy cannon lined the horizon.

“Are all the muskets loaded?” Urquhart asked Colquhoun.

“They'd better be, sir, or I'll want to know why.”

Urquhart dismounted. He had a dozen full canteens of water tied to his saddle and he
unstrung six of them and gave them to the company.

“Share it out,” he ordered, and Sharpe wished he had thought to bring some extra water
himself. One man cupped some water in his hands and let his dog lap it up. The dog then sat
and scratched its fleas while its master lay back and tipped his shako over his eyes.

What the enemy should do, Sharpe thought, is throw their infantry forward. All of it.
Send a massive attack across the skyline and down towards the millet. Flood the riverbed
with a horde of screaming warriors who could add to the panic and so snatch victory.

But the skyline stayed empty except for the guns and the stalled enemy lancers.

And so the redcoats waited.

Colonel William Dodd, commanding officer of Dodd's Cobras, spurred his horse to the
skyline from where he stared down the slope to see the British force in disarray. It looked
to him as though two or more battalions had fled in panic, leaving a gaping hole on the
right of the redcoat line. He turned his horse and kicked it to where the Mahratta warlord
waited under his banners. Dodd forced his horse through the aides until he reached Prince
Manu Bappoo.

“Throw everything forward, sahib,” he advised Bappoo, 'now!"

Manu Bappoo showed no sign of having heard Dodd. The Mahratta commander was a tall and
lean man with a long, scarred face and a short black beard. He wore yellow robes, had a
silver helmet with a long horse-tail plume, and carried a drawn sword that he claimed to
have taken in single combat from a British cavalry officer. Dodd doubted the claim, for
the sword was of no pattern that he recognized, but he was not willing to challenge
Bappoo directly on the matter.

Bappoo was not like most of the Mahratta leaders that Dodd knew.

Bappoo might be a prince and the younger brother of the cowardly Rajah of Berar, but
he was also a fighter.

“Attack now!” Dodd insisted. Much earlier in the day he had advised against fighting
the British at all, but now it seemed that his advice had been wrong, for the British assault
had dissolved in panic long before it reached musket range.

“Attack with everything we've got, sahib,” Dodd urged Bappoo.

“If I throw everything forward, Colonel Dodd,” Bappoo said in his oddly sibilant
voice, 'then my guns will have to cease fire. Let the ;

British walk into the cannon fire, then we shall release the infantry." i Bappoo had
lost his front teeth to a lance thrust, and hissed his words so that, to Dodd, he sounded like
a snake. He even looked reptilian.

Maybe it was his hooded eyes, or perhaps it was just his air of silent menace. But at
least he could fight. Bappoo's brother, the Rajah of Berar, had fled before the battle at
Assaye, but Bappoo, who had not been present at Assaye, was no coward. Indeed, he could
bite like a serpent.

“The British walked into the cannon fire at Assaye,” Dodd growled, 'and there were fewer
of them and we had more guns, but still they won."

Bappoo patted his horse which had shied away from the sound of a nearby cannon. It was a
big, black Arab stallion, and its saddle was encrusted with silver. Both horse and saddle
had been gifts from an Arabian sheik whose tribesmen sailed to India to serve in Bappoo's
own regiment. They were mercenaries from the pitiless desert who called themselves the
Lions of Allah and they were reckoned to be the most savage regiment in all India. The
Lions of Allah were arrayed behind Bappoo: a phalanx of dark-faced, white-robed
warriors armed with muskets and long, curved scimitars.

“You truly think we should fight them in front of our guns?” Bappoo asked Dodd.

“Muskets will kill more of them than cannon will,” Dodd said. One of the things he liked
about Bappoo was that the man was willing to listen to advice.

"Meet them halfway, sahib, thin the bastards out with musket fire, then pull back to let
the guns finish them with canister.

Better still, sahib, put the guns on the flank to rake them."

“Too late to do that,” Bappoo said.

“Aye, well. Mebbe.” Dodd sniffed. Why the Indians stubbornly insisted on putting guns
in front of infantry, he did not know. Daft idea, it was, but they would do it. He kept
telling them to put their cannon between the regiments, so that the gunners could slant
their fire across the face of the infantry, but Indian commanders reckoned that the sight
of guns directly in front heartened their men.

“But put some infantry out front, sahib,” he urged.

Bappoo thought about Dodd's proposal. He did not much like the Englishman who was a
tall, ungainly and sullen man with long yellow teeth and a sarcastic manner, but Bappoo
suspected his advice was good. The Prince had never fought the British before, but he was
aware that they were somehow different from the other enemies he had slaughtered on a
score of battlefields across western India. There was, he understood, a stolid
indifference to death in those red ranks that let them march calmly into the fiercest
cannonade. He had not seen it happen, but he had heard about it from enough men to credit
the reports. Even so he found it hard to abandon the tried and tested methods of battle.
It would seem unnatural to advance his infantry in front of the guns, and so render the
artillery useless. He had thirty-eight cannon, all of them heavier than anything the
British had yet deployed, and his gunners were as well trained as any in the world.
Thirty-eight heavy cannon could make a fine slaughter of advancing infantry, yet if what
Dodd said was true, then the red-coated ranks would stoically endure the punishment and
keep coming. Except some had already run, which suggested they were nervous, so perhaps
this was the day when the gods would finally turn against the British.

“I saw two eagles this morning,” Bappoo told Dodd, 'outlined against the sun."

So bloody what? Dodd thought. The Indians were great ones for auguries, forever
staring into pots of oil or consulting holy men or worrying about the errant fall of a
trembling leaf, but there was no better augury for victory than the sight of an enemy
running away before they even reached the fight.

“I assume the eagles mean victory?” Dodd asked politely.

“They do,” Bappoo agreed. And the augury suggested the victory would be his whatever
tactics he used, which inclined him against trying anything new. Besides, though Prince
Manu Bappoo had never fought the British, nor had the British ever faced the Lions of
Allah in battle.

And the numbers were in Bappoo's favour. He was barring the British advance with forty
thousand men, while the redcoats were not even a third of that number.

“We shall wait,” Bappoo decided, 'and let the enemy get closer." He would crush them
with cannon fire first, then with musketry.

“Perhaps I shall release the Lions of Allah when the British are closer, Colonel,” he
said to pacify Dodd.

“One regiment won't do it,” Dodd said, 'not even your Arabs, sahib.

Throw every man forward. The whole line."

“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 towards 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 Chasal-gaon. 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 sceptical of the claim.

“Not all the armies of the world could take it, sahib,” he added earnestly.

“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.