Sharpe's Triumph (10 page)

“Sergeant Sharpe!” Wellesley's familiar voice broke into his thoughts and Sharpe turned
to see his old commanding officer coming from the big tent.

“Sir!” Sharpe stiffened to attention.

“So Colonel McCandless has borrowed you from Major Stokes?”

Wellesley asked.

“Yes, sir,” Sharpe said. The General was bareheaded and Sharpe saw that his temples had
turned prematurely grey. He seemed to have forgotten Sharpe's handiwork with his horse,
for his long-nosed face was as unfriendly as ever.

“And you saw this man Dodd at Chasalgaon?”

“I did, sir.”

“Repugnant business,” Wellesley said, 'repugnant. Did he kill the wounded?"

“All of them, sir. All but me.”

“And why not you?” Wellesley asked coldly.

“I was covered in blood, sir. Fair drenched in it.”

“You seem to be in that condition much of the time, Sergeant,” Wellesley said with just a
hint of a smile, then he turned back to

McCandless.

“I wish you joy of the hunt, Colonel. I'll do my best to help you, but I'm short of men,
woefully short.”

“Thank you, sir,” the Scotsman said, then watched as the General went back into his big
tent which was crammed with red-coated officers.

“It seems,” McCandless said to Sharpe when the General was gone, 'that we're not
invited to supper.“ l ”Were you expecting to be, sir?"

“No,” McCandless said, 'and I've no business in that tent tonight either. They're
planning an assault for first light tomorrow."

Sharpe thought for a moment that he must have misheard. He looked northwards at the big
city wall.

“Tomorrow, sir? An assault? But they only got here today and there isn't a breach!”

“You don't need a breach for an escalade, Sergeant,” McCandless said.

“An escalade is nothing but ladders and murder.”

Sharpe frowned.

“Escalade?” He had heard the word, but was not really sure he knew what it meant.

“March straight up to the wall, Sharpe, throw your ladders against the ramparts and
climb.” McCandless shook his head.

“No artillery to help you, no breach, no trenches to get you close, so you must accept
the casualties and fight your way through the defenders. It isn't pretty, Sharpe, but it
can work.” The Scotsman still sounded disapproving. He was leading Sharpe away from the
General's tent, seeking a place to spread his blanket. Sevajee and his men were
following, and Sevajee was walking close enough to listen to McCandless's words.

“Escalades can work well against an unsteady enemy,” the Colonel went on, 'but I'm not at
all convinced the Mahrattas are shaky. I doubt they're shaky at all, Sharpe. They're
dangerous as snakes and they usually have Arab mercenaries in their ranks."

“Arabs, sir? From Arabia?”

“That's where they usually come from,” McCandless confirmed.

“Nasty fighters, Sharpe.”

“Good fighters,” Sevajee intervened.

“We hire hundreds of them every year. Hungry men, Sergeant, who come from their bare land
with sharp swords and long muskets.”

“Doesn't serve to underestimate an Arab,” McCandless agreed.

“They fight like demons, but Wellesley's an impatient man and he wants the business
over. He insists they won't be expecting an escalade and thus won't be ready for one, and I
pray to God he's right.”

“So what do we do, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“We go in behind the assault, Sharpe, and beseech Almighty God that our ladder parties
do get into the city. And once we're inside we hunt for Dodd. That's our job.”

“Yes, sir,” Sharpe said.

“And once we have the traitor we take him to Madras, put him on trial and have him hanged,”
McCandless said with satisfaction, as though the job was as good as done. His gloomy
forebodings of the previous night seemed to have vanished. He had stopped at a bare patch
of ground.

“This looks like a fair billet. No more rain in the offing, I think, so we should be
comfortable.”

Like hell, Sharpe thought. A bare bed, no rum, a fight in the morning, and God only knew
what kind of devils waiting across the wall, but he slept anyway.

And woke when it was still dark to see shadowy men straggling past with long ladders
across their shoulders. Dawn was near and it was time for an escalade. Time for ladders and
murder.

Sanjit Pandee was kill adar of the city, which meant that he commanded Ahmednuggur's
garrison in the name of his master, Dowlut Rao Scindia, Maharajah of Gwalior, and in
principle every soldier in the city, though not in the adjacent fortress, was under
Pandee's command.

So why had Major Dodd ejected Pandee's troops from the northern gatehouse and
substituted his own men? Pandee had sent no orders, but the deed had been done anyway and
no one could explain why, and when Sanjit Pandee sent a message to Major Dodd and
demanded an answer, the messenger was told to wait and, so far as the kill adar knew, was
still waiting.

Sanjit Pandee finally summoned the courage to confront the Major himself. It was
dawn, a time when the kill adar was not usually stirring, and he discovered Dodd and a
group of his white-coated officers on the southern wall from where the Major was
watching the British camp through a heavy telescope mounted on a tripod. Sanjit Pandee did
not like to disturb the tall Dodd who was being forced to stoop awkwardly because the
tripod was incapable of raising the glass to the level of his eye. The kill adar cleared
his throat, but that had no effect, and then he scraped a foot on the fire step and still Dodd
did not even glance at him, so finally the kill adar demanded his explanation, though in
very flowery terms just in case he gave the Englishman offence. Sanjit Pandee had already
lost the battle over the city treasury which Dodd had simply commandeered without so much
as a by-your-leave, and the kill adar was nervous of the scowling foreigner.

“Tell the bloody man,” Dodd told his interpreter without taking his eye from the
telescope, 'that he's wasting my bloody time. Tell him to go and boil his backside."

Dodd's interpreter, who was one of his younger Indian officers, courteously
suggested to the kill adar that Major Dodd's attention was wholly consumed by the
approaching enemy, but that as soon as he had a moment of leisure, the Major would be
delighted to hold a conversation with the honoured kill adar

The kill adar gazed southwards. Horsemen, British and Indian, were ranging far ahead of
the approaching enemy column. Not that Sanjit Pandee could see the column properly,
only a dark smudge among the distant green that he supposed was the enemy. Their feet
kicked up no dust, but that was because of the rain that had fallen the day before.

“Are the enemy truly coming?” he enquired politely.

“Of course they're not bloody coming,” Dodd said, standing upright and massaging the
small of his back.

“They're running away in terror.”

“The enemy are indeed approaching, sahib,” the interpreter said deferentially.

The kill adar glanced along his de fences and was reassured to see the bulk of Dodd's
regiment on the fire step and alongside them the robed figures of his Arab
mercenaries.

“Your regiment's guns,” he said to the interpreter, 'they are not here?"

“Tell the interfering little bugger that I've sold all the bloody cannon to the
enemy,” Dodd growled.

"The guns are placed where they will prove most useful, sahib' the interpreter assured
the kill adar with a dazzling smile, and the kill adar who knew that the five small guns were
at the north gate where they were pointing in towards the city rather than out towards the
plain, sighed in frustration. Europeans could be so very difficult.

“And the three hundred men the Major has placed at the north gate?”

Sanjit Pandee said.

“Is it because he expects an attack there?”

“Ask the idiot why else they would be there,” Dodd instructed the interpreter, but
there was no time to tell the kill adar anything further because shouts from the ramparts
announced the approach of three enemy horsemen. The emissaries rode beneath a white flag,
but some of the Arabs were aiming their long-barrelled matchlocks at the approaching
horsemen and the kill adar quickly sent some aides to tell

the mercenaries to hold their fire.

“They've come to offer us cowle,” the kill adar said as he hurried towards the south
gate. Cowle was an offer of terms, a chance for the defenders to surrender rather than
face the horrors of assault, and the kill adar hoped he could prolong the negotiations
long enough to persuade Major Dodd to bring the three hundred men back from the north
gate.

The kill adar could see that the three horsemen were riding towards the south gate which
was topped by a squat tower from which flew Scindia's gaudy green and scarlet flag. To reach
the tower the kill adar had to run down some stone steps because the stretch of wall just
west of the gate possessed no fire step but was simply a high, blank wall of red stone. He
hurried along the foot of the wall, then climbed more steps to reach the gate tower just as
the three horsemen reined in beneath.

Two of the horsemen were Indians while the third was a British officer, and the three
men had indeed come to offer the city cowle. If the kill adar surrendered, one of the
Indians shouted, the city's defenders would be permitted to march from Ahmednuggur
with all their hand weapons and whatever personal belongings they could carry. General
Wellesley would guarantee the garrison safe passage as far as the River Godavery,
beyond which Pohlmann's compoo had withdrawn. The officer finished by demanding an
immediate answer.

Sanjit Pandee hesitated. The cowle was generous, surprisingly generous, and he was
tempted to accept because no man would die if he took the terms. He could see the
approaching column clearly now, and it looked to him like a red stain smothering the
plain. There would be guns there, and the gods alone knew how many muskets. Then he glanced to
his left and right and he saw the reassuring height of his walls, and he saw the white robes
of his fearsome Arabs, and he contemplated what Dowlut Rao Scindia would say if he meekly
surrendered Ahmednuggur. Scindia would be angry, and an angry Scindia was liable to put
whoever had angered him beneath the elephant's foot. The kill adar task was to delay the
British in front of Ahmednuggur while Scindia gathered his allies and so prepared the vast
army that would crush the invader. Sanjit Pandee sighed.

“There can be no cowle,” he called down to Wellesley's three messengers, and the
horsemen did not try to change his mind. They just tugged on their reins, spurred their
horses and rode away.

“They want battle,” the kill adar said sadly, 'they want loot."

“That's why they come here,” an aide replied.

“Their own land is barren.”

“I hear it is green,” Sanjit Pandee said.

“No, sahib, barren and dry. Why else would they be here?”

News spread along the walls that cowle had been refused. No one had expected otherwise,
but the kill adar reluctant defiance cheered the defenders whose ranks thickened as
townsfolk climbed to the fire step to see the approaching enemy.

Dodd scowled when he saw that women and children were thronging the ramparts to view the
enemy.

“Clear them away!” he ordered his interpreter.

“I want only the duty companies up here.” He watched as his orders were obeyed.

“Nothing's going to happen for three days now,” he assured his officers.

“They'll send skirmishers to harass us, but skirmishers can't hurt us if we don't show
our heads above the wall. So tell the men to keep their heads down. And no one's to fire at the
skirmishers, you understand? No point in wasting good balls on skirmishers. We'll open
fire after three days.”

“In three days, sahib?” a young Indian officer asked.

“It will take the bastards one day to establish batteries and two to make a breach,”
Dodd forecast confidently.

“And on the fourth day the buggers will come, so there's nothing to get excited about
now.”

The Major decided to set an example of insouciance in the face of the enemy.

“I'm going for breakfast,” he told his officers.

“I'll be back when the bastards start digging their breaching batteries.”

The tall Major ran down the steps and disappeared into the city's alleys. The
interpreter looked back at the approaching column, then put his eye to the telescope. He
was looking for guns, but at first he could see only a mass of men in red coats with the odd
horseman among their ranks, and then he saw something odd. Something he did not
comprehend.

Some of the men in the front ranks were carrying ladders. He frowned, then saw something
more familiar beyond the red ranks and tilted the glass so that he could see the enemy's
cannon. There were only five guns, one being hauled by men and the four larger by
elephants, and behind the artillery were more redcoats. Those redcoats wore patterned
skirts and had high black hats, and the interpreter was glad that he was behind the wall for
somehow the men in skirts looked fearsome.

He looked back at the ladders and did not really understand what

he saw. There were only four ladders, so plainly they did not mean to lean them against
the wall. Maybe, he thought, the British planned to make an observation tower so that they
could see over the de fences and that explanation made sense and so he did not comprehend
that there was to be no siege at all, but an escalade. The enemy was not planning to knock a
hole in the wall, but to swarm straight over it. There would be no waiting, no digging, no
saps, no batteries and no breach. There would just be a charge, a scream, a torrent of fire,
and then death in the morning sun.

“The thing is, Sharpe,” McCandless said, 'not to get yourself killed."

“Wasn't planning on it, sir.”

“No heroics, Sharpe. It's not your job. We just follow the heroes into the city, look for
Mister Dodd, then go back home.”