Sharpe's Fortress (37 page)

“If we put up enough fire,” Kenny said, 'the enemy'll take shelter. It won't take long."
He looked at his axe men all of them huge sappers, all carrying vast-bladed axes that had
been sharpened to wicked edges.

Kenny turned and watched the effect of the five-pounder shots. The gate's locking bar
had been struck plumb, but the gate still held. A badly aimed shot cracked into the stone
beside the gate, starting up dust, then a correction to the gun sent a ball hammering
into the bar again and the thick timber broke and the remnants of the gates fell
inwards.

“Forward!”

Kenny shouted.

“Forward!”

Four hundred redcoats followed the Colonel up the narrow track that led to the Inner
Fort. They could not run to the assault, for the hill was too steep; they could only trudge
into the fury of Dodd's fusillade.

Cannon, rockets and muskets blasted down the hill to tear gaps in Kenny's ranks.

“Give them fire!” an officer on the ravine's northern side shouted at the watching
redcoats, and the men loaded their muskets and fired at the smoke-masked gatehouse. If
nothing else, the wild fire might keep the defenders' heads down. Another cannon had been
fetched from the Outer Fort, and now added its small round shots to the fury that beat
audibly on the gatehouse ramparts. Those ramparts were thick with the powder smoke
gouted by the defenders' cannon and muskets and it was that smoke which protected
Kenny's men as they hurried up the last few yards to the broken gate.

“Protect the sappers!” Kenny shouted and then, his sword in his hand, he clambered over
the broken timbers and led his attackers into the entrance passage.

Facing Kenny was a stone wall. He had expected it, but even so he was astonished by
the narrowness of the passage that turned sharply to his left and then climbed steeply to
the second unbroken gate.

“There it is!”

he shouted, and led a surge of men up the cobbled road towards the iron-studded
timbers.

And hell was loosed.

The fire steps above the gateway passage were protected by the outer wall's high
rampart, and Dodd's men, though they could hear the musket balls beating against the stones,
were safe from the wild fire that lashed across the deep ravine. But the redcoats beneath
them, the men following Colonel Kenny into the passage, had no protection. Musket fire,
stones and rockets slashed into a narrow space just twenty-five paces long and eight wide.
The leading axe men were among the first to die, beaten down by bullets. Their blood
splashed high on the walls. Colonel Kenny somehow survived the opening salvo, then he was
struck on the shoulder by a lump of stone and driven to the ground. A rocket slashed past
his face, scorching his cheek, but he picked himself up and, sword in numbed hand, shouted
at his men to keep going. No one could hear him. The narrow space was filled with noise,
choking with smoke in which men died and rockets flared. A musket ball struck Kenny in the
hip and he twisted, half fell, but forced himself to stand and, with blood pouring down his
white breeches, limped on. Then another musket ball scored down his back and threw him
forward. He crawled on bloodslicked stones, sword still in his hand, and shuddered as a
third ball hit him in the back. He still managed to reach the second gate and reared up to
strike it with his sword, and then a last musket ball split his skull and left him dead at the
head of his men. More bullets plucked at his corpse.

Kenny's surviving men tried to brave the fire. They tried to climb the slope to the
second gate, but the murderous fire did not cease, and the dead made a barrier to the
living. Some men attempted to fire up at their tormentors on the fire step but the sun was
high now and they aimed into a blinding glare, and soon the redcoats began to back down the
passage. The weltering fire from above did not let up. It flayed the Scotsmen, ricocheted
between the walls, struck dead and dying and living, while the rockets, lit and tossed
down, seared like great comets between the stone walls and filled the space with a sickening
smoke.

The dead were burned by rocket flames which exploded their cartridge boxes to pulse
gouts of blood against the black walls, but the smoke hid the survivors who, under its
cover, stumbled back to the hill outside the fortress. They left a stone-walled passage
filled with the dying and the dead, trickling with blood, foul with smoke and echoing with
the moans of the wounded.

“Cease fire!” Colonel Dodd shouted.

“Cease fire!”

The smoke cleared slowly and Dodd stared down at a pit of carnage in which a few bodies
twitched.

“They'll come again soon,” Dodd warned his Cobras.

“Fetch more stones, make sure your muskets are loaded. More rockets!” He patted his men
on the shoulders, congratulating them. They grinned at him, pleased with their work. It was
like killing rats in a barrel. Not one Cobra had been hit, the first enemy assault had
failed and the others, Dodd was certain, would end in just the same way. The Lord of
Gawilghur was winning his first victory.

Major Stokes had found Sharpe shortly before Kenny made his assault, and the two men
had been joined first by Syud Sevajee and his followers, then by the dozen cavalrymen
who accompanied Eli Lockhart.

All of them, Stokes, Sevajee and Lockhart, had entered the Outer Fort after the fight
for the breaches was finished, and now they stood watching the failure of Kenny's
assault. The survivors of the attack were crouching just yards from the broken entrance
that boiled with smoke, and Sharpe knew they were summoning the courage to charge again.

“Poor bastards,” he said.

“No choice in the matter,” Stokes said bleakly.

“No other way in.”

“That ain't a way in, sir,” Sharpe said dourly, 'that's a fast road to a shallow
grave."

“Overwhelm them,” Stokes said, 'that's the way to do it. Overwhelm them."

“Send more men to be killed?” Sharpe asked angrily.

“Get a gun over that side,” Stokes suggested, 'and blast the gates down one after the
other. Only way to prise the place open, Sharpe."

The covering fire that had blazed across the ravine died when it was obvious the first
attack had failed, and the lull encouraged the defenders to come to the outer
embrasures and fire down at the stalled attackers.

“Give them fire!” an officer shouted from the bed of the ravine, and again the muskets
flared across the gorge and the balls spattered against the walls.

Major Stokes had levelled his telescope at the gate where the thick smoke had at last
dissipated.

“It ain't good,” he admitted.

“It opens onto a blank wall.”

“It does what, sir?” Eli Lockhart asked. The cavalry Sergeant was looking aghast at the
horror across the ravine, grateful perhaps that the cavalry was never asked to break
into such deathtraps.

“The passage turns,” Stokes said.

“We can't fire straight up the entranceway. They'll have to drag a gun right into the
archway.”

“They'll never make it,” Sharpe said. Any gun positioned in the outer arch would get the
full fury of the defensive fire, and those defenders were protected by the big outer
wall. The only way Sharpe could see of getting into the fortress was by battering the
whole gatehouse flat, and that would take days of heavy cannon fire.

“The gates of hell,” Stokes said softly, staring through his glass at the bodies left
inside the arch.

“Can I borrow the telescope, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“Of course.” Stokes cleaned the eyepiece on the hem of his jacket.

“It ain't a pretty sight though.”

Sharpe took the glass and aimed it across the ravine. He gave the gatehouse a cursory
glance, then edged the lens along the wall which led westwards from the besieged gate. The
wall was not very high, perhaps only twelve or fifteen feet, much lower than the great
ramparts about the gatehouse, and its embrasures did not appear to be heavily manned. But
that was hardly a surprise, for the wall stood atop a precipice. The de fences straight ahead
were not the wall and its handful of defenders, but the stony cliff which fell down into
the ravine.

Stokes saw where Sharpe was aiming the glass.

“No way in there, Richard.”

Sharpe said nothing. He was staring at a place where weeds and small shrubs twisted up
the cliff. He tracked the telescope from the bed of the ravine to the base of the wall,
searching every inch, and he reckoned it could be climbed. It would be hard, for it was
perilously steep, but if there was space for bushes to find lodgement, then a man could
follow, and at the top of the cliff there was a brief area of grass between the precipice and
the wall. He took the telescope from his eye.

“Has anyone seen a ladder?”

“Back up there.” It was Ahmed who answered.

“Where, lad?”

“Up there.” The Arab boy pointed to the Outer Fort.

“On the ground,” he said.

Sharpe twisted and looked at Lockhart.

“Can you boys fetch me a ladder?”

“What are you thinking of?” Lockhart asked.

“A way in,” Sharpe said, 'a bloody way in." He gave the telescope to Stokes.

“Get me a ladder, Sergeant,” he said, 'and I'll fix those buggers properly. Ahrned? Show
Sergeant Lockhart where you saw the ladder."

“I stay with you,” the boy said stubbornly.

“You bloody don't.” Sharpe patted the boy on the head, wondering what Ahmed made of the
slaughter that had been inflicted on his countrymen in the ravine, but the boy seemed
blessedly unaffected.

“Go and help the Sergeant,” he told Ahmed.

Ahmed led the cavalrymen uphill.

“What are you doing, Richard?”

Stokes asked.

“We can climb up to the wall,” Sharpe said, pointing to where the trail of weeds and
bushes snaked up the other side of the ravine.

“Not you, sir, but a light company can do it. Go up the ravine, send a ladder up and
cross the wall.”

Stokes trained the telescope and stared at the opposing cliff for a long while.

“You might get up,” he said dubiously, 'but then what?"

Sharpe grinned.

“We attack the gatehouse from the back, sir.”

“One company?”

“Where one company can go, sir, another can follow. Once they see we're up there,
other men will come.” He still held the great claymore which was too big to fit into the
scabbard of his borrowed sword, but now he discarded that scabbard and shoved the
claymore into his belt.

He liked the sword. It was heavy, straight-bladed and brutal, not a weapon for delicate
work, but a killer. Something to give a man confidence.

“You stay here, sir,” he told Stokes, 'and look after Ahmed for me. The little bugger
would love to get in a fight, but he ain't got the sense of a louse when it comes to a scrap
and he's bound to get killed. Tom!" he called to Garrard, then beckoned that he and the rest
of the 33rd's Light Company should follow him down to where Morris sheltered among the
rocks.

“When Eli gets here with the ladder, sir,” he added to Stokes, 'send him down."

Sharpe ran down the ravine's steep side into the smoke-reeking shadows where Morris was
seated under a tree making a meal out of bread, salt beef and whatever liquor was left in
his canteen.

“Don't have enough food for you, Sharpe,” he said.

“Not hungry,” Sharpe lied.

“You're sweating, man,” Morris complained.

“Why don't you find yourself some shade? There's nothing we can do until the gunners
knock that bloody gatehouse flat.”

“There is,” Sharpe said.

Morris cocked a sceptical eye up at Sharpe.

“I've had no orders, Ensign,” he said.

“I want you and the Light Company, sir,” Sharpe said respectfully.

“There's a way up the side of the ravine, sir, and if we can get a ladder to the top then
we can cross the wall and go at the bastards from the back.”

Morris tipped the canteen to his mouth, drank, then wiped his lips.

“If you, twenty like you and the Archangel Gabriel and all the bloody saints asked me to
climb the ravine, Sharpe, I would still say no. Now for Christ's sake, man, stop trying to be
a bloody hero. Leave it to the poor bastards who are under orders, and go away.” He waved a
hand.

“Sir,” Sharpe pleaded, 'we can do it! I've sent for a ladder."

“No!” Morris interrupted loudly, attracting the attention of the rest of the
company.

“I am not giving you my company, Sharpe. For God's sake, you're not even a proper
officer! You're just a bumped-up sergeant! A bloody ensign too big for your boots and,
allow me to remind you, Mister Sharpe, forbidden by army regulations to serve in this
regiment. Now go away and leave me in peace.”

“I thought you'd say that, Charles,” Sharpe said ruefully.

“And stop calling me Charles!” Morris exploded.

“We are not friends, you and I. And kindly obey my order to leave me in peace, or had you
not noticed that I outrank you?”

“I had noticed. Sorry, sir,” Sharpe said humbly and he started to turn away, but
suddenly whipped back and seized Morris's coat. He dragged the Captain back into the
rocks, going so fast that Morris was momentarily incapable of resistance. Once among
the rocks, Sharpe let go of the patched coat and thumped Morris in the belly.

“That's for the flogging you gave me, you bastard,” he said.

“What the hell do you think you're doing, Sharpe?” Morris asked, scrambling away on his
bottom.

Sharpe kicked him in the chest, leaned down, hauled him up and thumped him on the jaw.
Morris squealed with pain, then gasped as Sharpe backhanded him across the cheek, then
struck him again. A group of men had followed and were watching wide-eyed. Morris turned to
appeal to them, but Sharpe hit him yet again and the Cap-268

tain's eyes turned glassy as he swayed and collapsed. Sharpe bent over him.

“You might outrank me,” he said, 'but you're a piece of shit, Charlie, and you always
were. Now can I take the company?"