Sharpe's Fortress (4 page)

“Load with canister,” he ordered, 'and wait till they're close." The important thing
was to win, but if fate decreed otherwise, then Dodd must live to fight again at a place
where a man could not be beaten.

At Gawilghur.

The British line at last advanced. From east to west it stretched for three miles, snaking
in and out of millet fields, through pastureland and across the wide, dry riverbed. The
centre of the line was an array of thirteen red-coated infantry battalions, three of
them Scottish and the rest sepoys, while two regiments of cavalry advanced on the left
flank and four on the right. Beyond the regular cavalry were two masses of mercenary
horsemen who had allied themselves to the British in hope of loot. Drums beat and pipes
played. The colours hung above the shakos. A great swathe of crops was trodden flat as the
cumbersome line marched north.

The British guns opened fire, their small six-pound missiles aimed at the Mahratta
guns.

Those Mahratta guns fired constantly. Sharpe, walking behind the left flank of number
six company, watched one particular gun which stood just beside a bright clump of flags on
the enemy-held skyline. He slowly counted to sixty in his head, then counted it again,
and worked out that the gun had managed five shots in two minutes. He could not be certain
just how many guns were on the horizon, for the great cloud of powder smoke hid them, but he
tried to count the muzzle flashes that appeared as momentary bright flames amidst the
grey-white vapour and, as best he could guess, he reckoned there were nearly forty cannon
there. Forty times five was what? Two hundred. So a hundred shots a minute were being fired,
and each shot, if properly aimed, might kill two men, one in the front rank and one behind.
Once the attack was close, of course, the bastards would switch to canister and then every
shot could pluck a dozen men out of the line, but for now, as the redcoats silently trudged
forward, the enemy was sending round shot down the gentle slope. A good many of these
missed. Some screamed overhead and a few bounced over the line, but the enemy gunners were
good, and they were lowering their cannon barrels so that the round shot struck the ground
well ahead of the redcoat line and, by the time the missile reached the target, it had
bounced a dozen times and so struck at waist height or below. Grazing, the gunners called
it, and it took skill. If the first graze was too close to the gun then the ball would lose its
momentum and do nothing but raise jeers from the redcoats as it rolled to a harmless stop,
while if the first graze was too close to the attacking line then the ball would bounce clean
over the redcoats. The skill was to skim the ball low enough to be certain of a hit, and all
along the line the round shots were taking their toll. Men were plucked back with shattered
hips and legs. Sharpe passed one spent cannonball that was sticky with blood and thick with
flies, lying twenty paces from the man it had eviscerated.

“Close up!” the sergeants shouted, and the file-closers tugged men to fill the gaps. The
British guns were firing into the enemy smoke cloud, but their shots seemed to have no
effect, and so the guns were ordered farther forward. The ox teams were brought up, the
guns were attached to the limbers, and the six-pounders trundled on up the slope.

“Like ninepins.” Ensign Venables had appeared at Sharpe's side.

Roderick Venables was sixteen years old and attached to number seven company. He
had been the battalion's most junior officer till Sharpe joined, and Venables had taken
it on himself to be a tutor to Sharpe in how officers should behave.

“They're bowling us over like ninepins, eh, Richard?”

Before Sharpe could reply a half-dozen men of number six company threw themselves
aside as a cannonball bounced hard and low towards them. It whipped harmlessly through the
gap they had made. The men laughed at having evaded it, then Sergeant Colquhoun ordered them
back into their two ranks.

“Aren't you supposed to be on the left of your company?” Sharpe asked Venables.

“You're still thinking like a sergeant, Richard,” Venables said.

“Pigears doesn't mind where I am.” Pig-ears was Captain Lomax, who had earned his
nickname not because of any peculiarity about his ears, but because he had a passion for
crisply fried pig-ears. Lomax was easygoing, unlike Urquhart who liked everything done
strictly according to regulations.

“Besides,” Venables went on, 'there's damn all to do. The lads know their business."

“Waste of time being an ensign,” Sharpe said.

“Nonsense! An ensign is merely a colonel in the making,” Venables said.

“Our duty, Richard, is to be decorative and stay alive long enough to be promoted. But
no one expects us to be useful! Good God! A junior officer being useful? That'll be the
day.” Venables gave a hoot of laughter. He was a bumptious, vain youth, but one of the few
officers in the 74th who offered Sharpe companionship.

“Did you hear a new draft has come to Madras?” he asked.

“Urquhart told me.”

“Fresh men. New officers. You won't be junior any more.”

Sharpe shook his head.

“Depends on the date the new men were commissioned, doesn't it?”

"Suppose it does. Quite right. And they must have sailed from Britain long before you got
the jump up, eh? So you'll still be the mess baby.

Bad luck, old fellow."

Old fellow? Quite right, Sharpe thought. He was old. Probably ten years older than
Venables, though Sharpe was not exactly sure for no one had ever bothered to note down his
birth date. Ensigns were youths and Sharpe was a man.

“Whoah!” Venables shouted in delight and Sharpe looked up to see that a round shot had
struck the edge of an irrigation canal and bounced vertically upwards in a shower of
soil. Tig-ears says he once saw two cannonballs collide in mid-air," Venables said.

“Well, he didn't actually see it, of course, but he heard it. He says they suddenly
appeared in the sky. Bang! Then flopped down.”

“They'd have shattered and broken up,” Sharpe said.

“Not according to Pig-ears,” Venables insisted.

“He says they flattened each other.” A shell exploded ahead of the company, whistling
scraps of iron casing overhead. No one was hurt and the files stepped round the smoking
fragments. Venables stooped and plucked up a scrap, juggling it because of the heat.

“Like to have keepsakes,” he explained, slipping the piece of iron into a pouch.

“I'll send it home for my sisters. Why don't our guns stop and fire?”

“Still too far away,” Sharpe said. The advancing line still had half a mile to go and,
while the six-pounders could fire at that distance, the gunners must have decided to get
really close so that their shots could not miss. Get close, that was what Colonel
McCandless had always told Sharpe. It was the secret of battle. Get close before you
start slaughtering.

A round shot struck a file in seven company. It was on its first graze, still
travelling at blistering speed, and the two men of the file were whipped backwards in a
spray of mingling blood.

“Jesus,” Venables said in awe.

“Jesus!” The corpses were mixed together, a jumble of splintered bones, tangled
entrails and broken weapons. A corporal, one of the file closers stooped to extricate the
men's pouches and haversacks from the scattered offal.

“Two more names in the church porch,” Venables remarked.

“Who were they, Corporal?”

“The McFadden brothers, sir.” The Corporal had to shout to be heard over the roar of
the Mahratta guns.

“Poor bastards,” Venables said.

“Still, there are six more. A fecund lady, Rosie McFadden.”

Sharpe wondered what fecund meant, then decided he could guess.

Venables, for all his air of carelessness, was looking slightly pale as though the
sight of the churned corpses had sickened him. This was his first battle, for he had been
sick with the Malabar Itch during Assaye, but the Ensign was forever explaining that he
could not be upset by the sight of blood because, from his earliest days, he had assisted
his father who was an Edinburgh surgeon, but now he suddenly turned aside, bent over and
vomited. Sharpe kept stolidly walking.

Some of the men turned at the sound of Venables's retching.

“Eyes front!” Sharpe snarled.

Sergeant Colquhoun gave Sharpe a resentful look. The Sergeant believed that any order
that did not come from himself or from Captain Urquhart was an unnecessary order.

Venables caught up with Sharpe.

“Something I ate.”

“India does that,” Sharpe said sympathetically.

“Not to you.”

“Not yet,” Sharpe said and wished he was carrying a musket so he could touch the wooden
stock for luck.

Captain Urquhart sheered his horse left wards

“To your company, Mister Venables.”

Venables scuttled away and Urquhart rode back to the company's right flank without
acknowledging Sharpe's presence. Major Swinton, who commanded the battalion while
Colonel Wallace had responsibility for the brigade, galloped his horse behind the ranks.
The hooves thudded heavily on the dry earth.

“All well?” Swinton called to Urquhart.

“All well.”

“Good man!” Swinton spurred on.

The sound of the enemy guns was constant now, like thunder that did not end. A thunder
that pummelled the ears and almost drowned out the skirl of the pipers. Earth fountained
where round shot struck.

Sharpe, glancing to his left, could see a scatter of bodies lying in the wake of the
long line. There was a village there. How the hell had he walked straight past a village
without even seeing it? It was not much of a place, just a huddle of reed-thatched hovels
with a few patchwork gardens protected by cactus-thorn hedges, but he had still walked
clean past without noticing its existence. He could see no one there. The villagers had
too much sense. They would have packed their few pots and pans and buggered off as soon as the
first soldier appeared near their fields. A Mahratta round shot smacked into one of the
hovels, scattering reed and dry timber, and leaving the sad roof sagging.

Sharpe looked the other way and saw enemy cavalry advancing in the distance, then he
glimpsed the blue and yellow uniforms of the British igth Dragoons trotting to meet them.
The late-afternoon sunlight glittered on drawn sabres. He thought he heard a trumpet
call, but maybe he imagined it over the hammering of the guns. The horsemen vanished
behind a stand of trees. A cannonball screamed overhead, a shell exploded to his left,
then the 74th's Light Company edged inwards to give an ox team room to pass back
southwards. The British cannon had been dragged well ahead of the attacking line where they
had now been turned and deployed. Gunners rammed home shot, pushed priming quills into
touch-holes, stood back. The sound of the guns crashed across the field, blotting the
immediate view with grey-white smoke and filling the air with the nauseous stench of
rotted eggs.

The drummers beat on, timing the long march north. For the moment it was a battle of
artillerymen, the puny British six-pounders firing into the smoke cloud where the bigger
Mahratta guns pounded at the advancing redcoats. Sweat trickled down Sharpe's belly, it
stung his eyes and it dripped from his nose. Flies buzzed by his face. He pulled the sabre free
and found that its handle was slippery with perspiration, so he wiped it and his right
hand on the hem of his red coat. He suddenly wanted to piss badly, but this was not the
time to stop and unbutton breeches. Hold it, he told himself, till the bastards are
beaten. Or piss in your pants, he told himself, because in this heat no one would know it
from sweat and it would dry quickly enough. Might smell, though.

Better to wait. And if any of the men knew he had pissed his pants he would never live it
down. Pisspants Sharpe. A ball thumped overhead, so close that its passage rocked Sharpe's
shako. A fragment of something whirred to his left. A man was on the ground, vomiting
blood. A dog barked as another tugged blue guts from an opened belly. The beast had both
paws on the corpse to give its tug purchase. A file-closer kicked the dog away, but as soon
as the man was gone the dog ran back to the body. Sharpe wished he could have a good wash. He
knew he was lousy, but then everyone was lousy.

Even General Wellesley was probably lousy. Sharpe looked eastwards and saw the
General spurring up behind the kilted 78th. Sharpe had been Wellesley's orderly at
Assaye and as a result he knew all the staff officers who rode behind the General. They
had been much friendlier than the 74th's officers, but then they had not been expected to
treat Sharpe as an equal.

Bugger it, he thought. Maybe he should take Urquhart's advice. Go home, take the cash, buy
an inn and hang the sabre over the serving hatch. Would Simone Joubert go to England with
him? She might like running an inn. The Buggered Dream, he could call it, and he would charge
army officers twice the real price for any drink.

The Mahratta guns suddenly went silent, at least those that were directly ahead of the
74th, and the change in the battle's noise made Sharpe peer ahead into the smoke cloud that
hung over the crest just a quarter-mile away. More smoke wreathed the 74th, but that was from
the British guns. The enemy gun smoke was clearing, carried northwards on the small wind,
but there was nothing there to show why the guns at the centre of the Mahratta line had
ceased fire. Perhaps the buggers had run out of ammunition. Some hope, he thought, some
bloody hope. Or perhaps they were all reloading with canister to give the approaching
redcoats a rajah's welcome.

God, but he needed a piss and so he stopped, tucked the sabre into his armpit, then
fumbled with his buttons. One came away. He swore, stooped to pick it up, then stood and
emptied his bladder onto the dry ground. Then Urquhart was wheeling his horse.

“Must you do that now, Mister Sharpe?” he asked irritably.