Sharpe's Fortress (36 page)

The Outer Fort had fallen and its garrison had been massacred.

And William Dodd, renegade, was Lord of Gawilghur.

Mister Hakeswill was not sure whether he was a lieutenant in William Dodd's eyes, but he
knew he was a Mister and he dimly apprehended that he could be much more. William Dodd was
going to win, and his victory would make him ruler of Gawilghur and tyrant of all the wide
land that could be seen from its soaring battlements. Mister Hakeswill was therefore well
placed, as Dodd's only white officer, to profit from the victory and, as he approached
the palace on Gawilghur's summit, Hakeswill was already imagining a future that was
limited only by the bounds of his fancy. He could be a rajah, he decided.

“I shall have an harem,” he said aloud, earning a worried look from his Havildar.

“An harem I'll have, all of me own. Bibbis in silk, but only when it's cold, eh? Rest of
the time they'll have to be naked as needles.” He laughed, scratched at the lice in his
crotch, then lunged with his sword at one of the peacocks that decorated the palace
gardens.

“Bad luck, them birds,” Hakeswill told the Havildar as the bird fled in a flurry of
bright severed feathers.

“Bad luck, they are. Got the evil eye, they do. Know what you should do with a peacock?
Roast the bugger. Roast it and serve it with 'taters. Very nice, that.”

“Yes, sahib,” the Havildar said nervously. He was not certain he liked this new white
officer whose face twitched so compulsively, but Colonel Dodd had appointed him and the
Colonel could do no wrong as far as the Havildar was concerned.

“Haven't tasted a 'tater in months,” Hakeswill said wistfully.

“Christian food, that, see? Makes us white.”

“Yes, sahib.”

"And I won't be sahib, will I? Your highness, that's what I'll be. Your bleeding highness
with a bedful of bare bibb is His face twitched as a bright idea occurred to him.

"I could have Sharpie as a servant.

Cut off his goo lies first, though. Snip snip." He bounded enthusiastically up a
stone staircase, oblivious of the sound of gunfire that had erupted in the ravine just
north of the Inner Fort. Two Arab guards moved to bar the way, but Hakeswill shouted at
them.

“Off to the walls, you scum! No more shirking! You ain't guarding the royal pisspot any
longer, but has to be soldiers. So piss off!”

The Havildar ordered the two men away and, though they were reluctant to abandon their
post, they were overawed by the number of bayonets that faced them. So, just like the guards
who had stood at the garden gate, they fled.

“So now we look for the little fat man,” Hakeswill said, 'and give him a
bloodletting."

“We must hurry, sahib,” the Havildar said, glancing back at the wall above the ravine
where the gunners were suddenly at work.

“God's work can't be hurried,” Hakeswill answered, pulling at one of the latticed doors
that led into the palace, 'and Colonel Dodd will die of old age on that wall, sonny. Ain't a
man alive who can get through that gate, and certainly not a pack of bleeding Scotchmen.
Bugger this door."

He raised his right foot and battered down the locked lattice with his boot.

Hakeswill had expected a palace dripping with gold, festooned with silk and paved with
polished marble, but Gawilghur had only ever been a summer refuge, and Berar had never
been as wealthy as other Indian states, and so the floors were common stone, the walls were
painted in lime wash and the curtains were of cotton. Some fine furniture of ebony inlaid
with ivory stood in the hallway, but Hakeswill had no eye for such chairs, only for jewels,
and he saw none. Two bronze jars and an iron cuspidor stood by the walls where lizards
waited motionless, while a brass poker, tongs and fire shovel, cast in Birmingham,
mounted on a stand and long bereft of any hearth, had pride of place in a niche. The hallway
had no guards, indeed no one was in sight and the palace seemed silent except for a faint
sound of choking and moaning that came from a curtained doorway at the far end of the hall.
The noise of the guns was muffled. Hakeswill hefted his sword and edged towards the
curtain.

His men followed slowly, bayonets ready, eyes peering into every shadow.

Hakeswill swept the curtain aside with the blade, and gasped.

The Killadar, with a tulwar slung at his side and a small round shield strapped to his
left arm, stared at Hakeswill above the bodies of his wives, concubines and daughters.
Eighteen women were on the floor.

Most were motionless, but some still writhed as the slow pain of the poison worked its
horrors. The Killadar was in tears.

“I could not leave them for the English,” he said.

“What did he say?” Hakeswill demanded.

“He preferred they should die than be dishonoured,” the Havildar translated.

“Bleeding hell,” Hakeswill commented. He stepped down into the sunken floor where the
women lay. The dead had greenish dribbles coming from their mouths and their glassy eyes
stared up at the lotuses painted on the ceiling, while the living jerked spasmodically.
The cups from which they had drunk the poison lay on the tiled floor.

“Some nice bibb is here,” Hakeswill said ruefully.

“A waste!” He stared at a child, no more than six or seven. There was a jewel about her
neck and Hakeswill stooped, grasped the pendant and snapped the chain.

“Bleeding waste,” he said in disgust, then used his sword blade to lift the said of a
dying woman. He raised the silk to her waist, then shook his head.

“Look at that!” he said.

“Just look at that! What a bleeding waste!”

The Killadar roared in anger, drew his tulwar and ran down the steps to drive Hakeswill
from his women. Hakeswill, alarmed, backed away, then remembered he was to be a rajah and
could not show timidity in front of the Havildar and his men, so he stepped forward again
and thrust the sword forward in a clumsy lunge. It might have been clumsy, but it was also
lucky, for the Killadar had stumbled on a body and was lurching forward, his tulwar
flailing as he sought his balance, and the tip of Hakeswill's blade ripped into his throat
so that a spray of blood pulsed onto the dead and the dying. The Killadar gasped as he fell.
His legs twitched as he tried to bring the tulwar round to strike at Hakeswill, but his
strength was going and the Englishman was above him now.

“You're a djinnl” the Killadar said hoarsely.

The sword stabbed into Beny Singh's neck.

“I ain't drunk, you bastard,” Hakeswill said indignantly.

“Ain't seen a drop of mother's milk in three years!” He twisted the sword blade,
fascinated by the way the blood pulsed past the steel. He watched until the blood finally
died to a trickle, then jerked the blade free.

“That's him gone,” Hakeswill said.

“Another bloody heathen gone down to hell, eh?”

The Havildar stared in horror at Beny Singh and at the corpses drenched with his
blood.

“Don't just stand there, you great pudding!” Hakeswill snapped.

“Get back to the walls!”

“The walls, sahib?”

“Hurry! There's a battle being fought, or ain't you noticed? Go on! Off with you! Take
the company and report to Colonel Dodd as how the fat little bugger's dead. Tell him I'll
be back in a minute or two. Now off with you! Quick!”

The Havildar obeyed, taking his men back through the hallway and out into the sunlight
that was being hazed by the smoke rising from the ravine. Hakeswill, left alone in the
palace, stooped to his work. All the dead wore jewellery. They were not great jewels, not
like the massive ruby that the Tippoo Sultan had worn on his hat, but there were pearls and
emeralds, sapphires and small diamonds, all mounted in gold, and Hakeswill busied himself
delving through the bloodied silks to retrieve the scraps of wealth. He crammed the stones
into his pockets where they joined the gems he had taken from Sharpe, and then, when the
corpses were stripped and searched, he roamed the palace, snarling at servants and
threatening scullions, as he ransacked the smaller rooms. The rest of the defenders
could fight; Mister Hakeswill was getting rich.

The fight in the ravine was now a merciless massacre. The garrison of the Outer Fort
was trapped between the soldiers who had captured their stronghold and the kilted
Highlanders advancing up the narrow road, and there was no escape except over the
precipice, and those who jumped, or were pushed by the panicking mass, fell onto the
shadowed rocks far below. Colonel Chalmers's men advanced with bayonets, herding the
fugitives towards Kenny's men who greeted them with more bayonets. A thousand men had
garrisoned the Outer Fort, and those men were now dead or doomed, but seven thousand more
defenders waited within the Inner Fort and Colonel Kenny was eager to attack them. He
tried to order men into ranks, tugging them away from the slaughter and shouting for
gunners to find an enemy cannon that could be fetched from the captured ramparts and
dragged to face the massive gate of the Inner Fort, but the redcoats had an easier target
in the huddled fugitives and they enthusiastically killed the helpless enemy, and all
the while the guns of the Inner Fort fired down at the redcoats while rockets slammed into
the ravine to add to the choking fog of powder smoke.

The slaughter could not endure. The beaten defenders threw down their guns and fell to
their knees, and gradually the British officers called off the massacre. Chalmers's
Highlanders advanced up the road that was now slippery with blood, driving the few
prisoners in front of them. Wounded Arabs crawled or limped. The survivors were stripped of
their remaining weapons and sent under sepoy guard back up to the Outer Fort, and for
every step of their way they suffered from the fire that flamed and crackled from the Inner
Fort. Finally, exhausted, they were taken out through the Delhi Gate and told to wait
beside the tank.

The parched prisoners threw themselves at the green-scummed water and some, seeing
that the sepoy guards were few in number, slipped away northwards. They went without
weapons, master less fugitives who posed no threat to the British camp, which was guarded by
a half battalion of Madrassi sepoys.

The northern face of the ravine, which looked towards the unconquered Inner Fort, was
now crowded with some three thousand redcoats, most of whom did nothing but sit in
whatever small shade they could find and grumble that the pucka lees had not fetched
water.

Once in a while a man would fire a musket across the ravine, but the balls were wild at
that long range, and the enemy fire, which had been heavy during the massacre on the
western road, gradually eased off as both sides waited for the real struggle to
begin.

Sharpe was halfway down the ravine, seated beneath a stunted tree on which the remnants
of some red blossom hung dry and faded. A tribe of black-faced, silver-furred monkeys had
fled the irruption of men into the rocky gorge, and those beasts now gathered behind
Sharpe where they gibbered and screamed. Tom Garrard and a dozen men of the 33rd's Light
Company had gathered around Sharpe, while the rest of the company was lower down the
ravine among some rocks.

“What happens now?” Garrard asked.

“Some poor bastards have to get through that gate,” Sharpe said.

“Not you?”

“Kenny will call us when he needs us,” Sharpe said, nodding towards the lean Colonel who
had at last organized an assault party at the bottom of the track which slanted up
towards the gate.

“And he bloody will, Tom. It ain't going to be easy getting through that gate.” He touched
the scorch mark on his cheek.

“That bloody hurts!”

Tut some butter on it," Garrard said.

“And where do I get bleeding butter here?” Sharpe asked. He shaded his eyes and peered at
the complex ramparts above the big gate, trying to spot either Dodd or Hakeswill, but
although he could see the white jackets of the Cobras, he could not see a white man on the
ramparts.

“It's going to be a long fight, Tom,” he said.

The British gunners had succeeded in bringing an enemy five pounder cannon to the edge
of the ravine. The sight of the gun provoked a flurry of fire from the Inner Fort,
wreathing its gatehouse in smoke as the round shot screamed across the ravine to plunge all
around the threatening gun. Somehow it survived. The gunners rammed it, aimed it, then
fired a shot that bounced just beneath the gate, ricocheted up into the woodwork, but fell
back.

The defenders kept firing, but their smoke obscured their aim and the small captured
cannon had been positioned behind a large low rock that served as a makeshift breastwork.
The gunners elevated the barrel a trifle and their next shot struck plumb on the gates,
breaking a timber.

Each successive shot splintered more wood and was greeted by an ironic cheer from the
redcoats who watched from across the ravine. The gate was being demolished board by board,
and at last a round shot cracked into its locking bar and the half-shattered timbers
sagged on their hinges.

Colonel Kenny was gathering his assault troops at the foot of the ravine. They were the
same men who had gone first into the breaches of the Outer Fort, and their faces were
stained with powder burns, with dust and sweat. They watched the destruction of the outer
gate of the Inner Fort and they knew they must climb the path into the enemy's fire as soon
as the gun had done its work. Kenny summoned an aide.

“You know Plummer?” he asked the man.

“Gunner Major, sir?”

“Find him,” Kenny said, 'or any gunner officer. Tell them we might need a light piece up
in the gateway." He pointed with a reddened sword at the Inner Fort's gatehouse.

“The passage ain't straight,” he explained to the aide.

“Get through the gate and we turn hard left. If our axe men can't deal with the other gates
we'll need a gun to blow them in.”

The aide climbed back up to the Outer Fort, looking for a gunner.

Kenny talked to his men, explaining that once they were through the shattered gate they
would find themselves faced by another and that the infantry were to fire up at the
flanking fire steps to protect the axe men who would try to hack their way through the
successive obstacles.