Sharpe's Triumph (13 page)

For Ahmednuggur had fallen, and from the first shot until the opening of the gate it
had taken just twenty minutes. And now the redcoats went for their reward and the
suffering inside the city could begin.

Major William Dodd had never reached his breakfast. Instead he had hurried back to the
walls the moment he heard the first muskets fire and, once on the fire step he had stared
appalled at the ladder parties for he had never once anticipated that the British would
attempt an escalade. Of all the methods of taking a city, an escalade was the riskiest,
but Dodd realized he should have foreseen it. Ahmednuggur had no ditch, nor any glacis,
indeed the city had no obstacle outside its ramparts and that made it a prime candidate
for escalade, though Dodd had never believed that Boy Wellesley would dare try such a
stratagem.

He thought Wellesley too cautious.

None of the assaults was aimed at the stretch of wall where Dodd's men were positioned,
so all they could do was fire their muskets obliquely at the advancing British, but the
distance was too great for their fire to be effective and the thick powder smoke of their
muskets soon obscured their aim and so Dodd ordered them to cease fire.

“I can only see four ladders,” his interpreter said.

“Must have more than four,” Dodd remarked.

“Can't do it with just four.”

For a time it seemed the Major must be right for the defence was making a mockery of the
attack, while Dodd's men were troubled by nothing more threatening than a scatter of
sepoy skirmishers who fired ineffectually at his stretch of the wall. He showed his
derision of the skirmishers' fire by standing openly in an embrasure from where he
could watch the enemy's cavalry ride about the city's flank to cut off any escape from the
northern gate. He could deal with a few cavalrymen, he decided. A scrap of stone was
driven from the coping beside him by a musket ball. The stone flake rapped against the
leather sword belt that was buckled round Dodd's new white coat. He did not like wearing
white.

It showed the dirt, but worse, it made any wound look much worse than it really was. Blood
on a red coat hardly showed, but even a small amount of blood on a white coat could make a
nervous man terrified.

He wondered if Pohlmann or Scindia would agree to the cost of new jackets. Brown, maybe,
or dark blue.

The interpreter came to where the Major stood in the embrasure.

“The kill adar requests that we form up behind the gate, sir.”

“Noted,” Dodd said curtly.

“He says the enemy are approaching the gate with a gun, sahib.”

“Sensible of them,” Dodd said, but otherwise ignored the request.

Instead he stared eastwards and saw a Scottish officer suddenly appear at the
summit of a bastion. Kill him, he silently urged the Arabs in the bastion, but the young
officer jumped down and began laying about him with his claymore, and suddenly there
were more kilted

Scotsmen crossing the wall.

“I do hate the bloody Scots,” he said.

“Sahib?” The interpreter asked.

“Priggish bastards, they are,” Dodd said, but the priggish bastards looked as if they
had just captured the city and Dodd knew it would be madness to get involved in a doomed
fight to save it. That way he would lose his regiment.

“Sahib'?” the interpreter interrupted Dodd nervously.

“The killadarwas insistent, sir.”

"Bugger the kill adar Dodd said, jumping down from the embrasure.

"I

want the men off the wall,“ he ordered, 'and formed in companies on the inner
esplanade.” He pointed down to the wide space just inside the wall.

“Now,” he added and, with one last glance at the attackers, he ran down the steps.

"Jemadar]? he shouted to Gopal, whom he had promoted as a reward for loyalty.

"Sahib?

“Form up! March by companies to the north gate! If any civilians block your path, open
fire!”

“Kill them?” the Jemadar asked.

“I don't want you to bloody tickle them, Gopal. Slaughter them!”

The interpreter had listened to this exchange and stared appalled at the tall
Englishman.

“But, sir.. .” he began to plead.

“The city's lost,” Dodd growled, 'and the second rule of war is not to reinforce
failure."

The interpreter wondered what the first rule was, but knew this was not the time to
ask.

“But the kill adar sir .. .”

“Is a lily-livered mouse and we are men. Our orders are to save the regiment so it can
fight again. Now, go!”

Dodd saw the first redcoats burst out of the inner door of the bastion, heard the Arab
volley that threw some of the attackers down into the bloodied dust, but then he turned
away from the fight and followed his men into the city's streets. It went against the grain
to abandon a fight, but Dodd knew his duty. The city might die, but the regiment must
live.

Captain Joubert should be holding the north gate safe where Dodd's guns waited, and
where his own saddle horses and pack mule were ready, and so he called for his other French
officer, the young Lieutenant Silliere, and told him to take a dozen men to rescue Simone
Joubert from the panic that he knew was about to engulf the city. Dodd had rather hoped he
could fetch Simone himself, posing as her protector, but he knew that the fall of the city
was imminent and there 8?

would be no time for such gallantries.

“Bring her safe, Lieutenant.”

“Of course, sir,” Silliere said and, glad to be given such a duty, he ordered a dozen
men to follow him into the alleys.

Dodd gave one backward glance towards the south, then marched away from the fight. There
was nothing for him here but failure. It was time to go north, for it was there, Dodd knew,
beyond the wide rivers and among the far hills and a long way from their supplies, that the
British would be lured to their deaths.

But Ahmednuggur, and everything inside it, was doomed.

Sharpe followed McCandless into the gatehouse's high archway, using the weight of his
mare to push through the sepoys and Highlanders who jostled in the narrow roadway that was
still half blocked by the six pounder cannon. The mare shied from the thick powder smoke that
hung in the air between the scorched and smoking remnants of the two gates and Sharpe,
gripping the mane to keep in the saddle, kicked his heels back so that the horse shot
forward and trampled through the fly-blown intestines of the sepoy who had been struck in
the belly by the six-pound shot. He hauled on the reins, checking the mare's fright among
the sprawled bodies of the Arabs who had died trying to defend the gate.

The fight here had been short and brutal, but there was no resistance left in the city by
the time Sharpe caught up with McCandless who was staring in disapproval at the
victorious redcoats who hurried into Ahmednuggur's alleyways. The first screams were
sounding.

“Women and drink,” McCandless said disapprovingly.

“That's all they'll be thinking of, women and drink.”

“Loot too, sir,” Sharpe corrected the Scotsman.

“It's a wicked world, sir,” he added hastily, wishing he could be let off the leash
himself to join the plunderers. Sevajee and his men were through the gate now, wheeling
their horses behind Sharpe, who glanced up at the walls to see, with some surprise, that
many of the city's defenders were still on the fire step though they were making no effort
to fire at the red-coated enemy who flooded through the broken gate.

“So what do we do, sir?” he asked.

McCandless, usually so sure of himself, seemed at a momentary loss, but then he saw a
wounded Mahratta crawling across the cleared space inside the wall and, throwing his reins
to Sharpe, he dismounted and crossed to the casualty. He helped the wounded man into the
shelter of a doorway and there propped him against a wall and gave him a drink from his
canteen. He spoke to the wounded man for a few seconds. Sevajee, his tulwar still drawn,
came alongside Sharpe.

“First we kill them, then we give them water,” the Indian said.

“Funny business, war, sir,” Sharpe said.

“Do you enjoy it?” Sevajee asked.

“Don't rightly know, sir. Haven't seen much.” A short skirmish in Flanders, the swift
victory of Malavelly, the chaos at the fall of Seringapatam, the horror of Chasalgaon and
today's fierce escalade; that was Sharpe's full experience of war and he harboured all
the memories and tried to work out from them some pattern that would tell him how he would
react when the next violence erupted in his life. He thought he enjoyed it, but he was
dimly aware that perhaps he ought not to enjoy it.

“You, sir?” he asked Sevajee.

“I love it, Sergeant,” the Indian said simply.

“You've never been wounded?” Sharpe guessed.

“Twice. But a gambler does not stop throwing dice because he loses.”

McCandless came running back from the wounded man.

“Dodd's heading for the north gate!”

“This way,” Sevajee said, sawing his reins and leading his cut-throats off to the right
where he reckoned they would avoid the press of panicked people crowding the centre of the
city.

“That wounded man was the kill adar,”I McCandless said as he fiddled his left boot into
the stirrup, then hauled himself into the saddle.

“Dying, poor fellow. Took a bullet in the stomach.”

“Their chief man, eh?” Sharpe said, looking up at the gatehouse where a Highlander was
ripping down Scindia's flags.

“And he was bitterly unhappy with our Lieutenant Dodd,” McCandless said as he spurred
his horse after Sevajee.

"It seems he deserted the de fences

“He's in a hurry to get away, sir,” Sharpe suggested.

“Then let us hurry to stop him,” McCandless said, quickening his horse so that he could
push through Sevajee's men to reach the front ranks of the pursuers. Sevajee was using
the alleyways beneath the eastern walls and for a time the narrow streets were
comparatively empty, but then the crowds increased and their troubles began. A dog
yapped at the heels of McCandless's horse, making it rear, then a holy cow with blue
painted horns wandered into their path and Sevajee insisted they wait for the beast, but
McCandless angrily banged the cow's bony rump with the flat of his claymore to drive it
aside, then his horse shied again as a blast of musketry sounded just around the corner. A
group of sepoys were shooting open a locked door, but McCandless could not spare the time
to stop their depredations.

“Wellesley will have to hang some of them,” he said, spurring on.

Refugees were fleeing into the alleys, hammering on locked doors or scaling mud walls
to find safety. A woman, carrying a vast bundle on her head, was knocked to the ground by
a sepoy who began slashing at the bundle's ropes with his bayonet. Two Arabs, both armed
with massive matchlock guns with pearl-studded stocks, appeared ahead of them and Sharpe
unslung his musket, but the two men were not disposed to continue a lost fight and so
vanished into a gateway. The street was littered with discarded uniform jackets, some
green, some blue, some brown, all thrown off by panicking defenders who now tried to pass
themselves off as civilians. The crowds thickened as they neared the city's northern edge
and the air of panic here was palpable. Muskets sounded constantly in the city and
every shot, like every scream, sent a shudder through the crowds that eddied in hopeless
search of an escape.

McCandless was shouting at the crowds, and using the threat of his sword to make a
passage. There were plenty of men in the streets who might have opposed the Colonel's
party, and some of those men still had weapons, but none made any threatening move.
Ahmednuggur's surviving defenders only wanted to live, while the civilians had been
plunged into terror. A crowd had invaded a Hindu temple where the women swayed and
wailed in front of their garlanded idols. A child carrying a birdcage scurried across the
road and McCandless wrenched his horse aside to avoid trampling the toddler, and then a
loud volley of musketry sounded close ahead. There was a pause, and Sharpe imagined the men
tearing open new cartridges and ramming the bullets into their muzzles, and then,
exactly at the moment he expected it, the second volley sounded. This was not the
ragged noise of plundering men blasting open locked doors, but a disciplined infantry
fight.

“I warrant that fight's at the north gate!” McCandless called back excitedly.

“Sounds heavy, sir,” Sharpe said.

“It'll be panic, man, panic! We'll just ride in and snatch the fellow!”

McCandless, so close to his quarry, was elated. A third volley sounded, and this time
Sharpe heard the musket balls smacking against mud walls or ripping through the thatched
roofs. The crowds were suddenly thinner and McCandless drove back his spurs to urge his
big gelding closer to the firefight. Sevajee was alongside him, tulwar shining, and his
men just behind. The city walls were close to their right-hand side, and ahead, over a
jumble of thatched and slate roofs, Sharpe could see a blue and-green-striped flag flying
over the ramparts of a square tower like the bastion that crowned the south gate. The tower
had to be above the north gate, and he kicked his horse on and hauled back the cock of his
musket.

The horsemen cleared the last buildings and the gate was now only thirty yards ahead on
the far side of an open, paved space, but the moment McCandless saw the gate he wrenched his
reins to swerve his horse aside. Sevajee did the same, but the men behind, Sharpe
included, were too late. Sharpe had thought that the disciplined volleys must be being
fired by redcoats or sepoys, but instead two companies of white jacketed soldiers were
barring the way to the gate and it was those men who were firing to keep the space around the
gate clear for other white coated companies who were marching in double-quick time to
escape the city. The volleys were being fired indiscriminately at civilians, redcoats
and fugitive defenders alike, their aim solely to keep the gate free for the white-coated
companies that were under the command of an unnaturally tall man mounted on a gaunt
black horse. And just as Sharpe saw the man, and recognized him, so the left-hand company
aimed at the horsemen and fired.

A horse screamed. Blood spurted fast and warm over the cobbles as the beast fell,
trapping its rider and breaking his leg. Another of Sevajee's men was down, his tulwar
ringing as it skittered across the stones. Sharpe heard the whistle of musket balls all
about him and he tugged on the reins, wrenching the mare back towards the alley, but she
protested his violence and turned back towards the enemy. He kicked her.

“Move, you bitch!” he shouted.

“Move!” He could hear ramrods rattling in barrels and he knew it would only be seconds,
before another volley came his way, but then McCandless was beside him and the Scotsman
leaned over, seized Sharpe's bridle and hauled! him safely into the shelter of an
alley.

“Thank you, sir,” Sharpe said. He had lost control of his horse and felt ashamed. The mare
was quivering and he patted her neck just as Dodd's next volley hammered its huge noise
through the city. The balls thumped into the mud-brick walls, shattered tiles and tore
handfuls out of the palm thatch. McCandless had dismounted, so Sharpe now kicked his feet
from the stirrups, dropped from the saddle and ran to join the Colonel at the mouth of the
alley. Once there, he looked for Dodd through the clearing smoke, found him and aimed the
musket.

McCandless hurriedly pushed the musket down.

“What are you doing, man?”

“Killing the bugger, sir,” Sharpe snarled, remembering the stench of blood at
Chasalgaon.

“You'll do no such thing, Sergeant,” McCandless growled.

“I want him alive!”

Sharpe cursed, but did not shoot. Dodd, he saw, was very calm. He had caused another
massacre here, but this time he had been killing Ahmednuggur's civilians to prevent them
from crowding the gateway, and his killers, the two white-coated companies, still stood
guard on the gate even though the remaining companies had all vanished into the sunlit
country beyond the archway's long dark tunnel. So why were those two companies
lingering? Why did Dodd not extricate them before the rampaging sepoys and Highlanders
caught up with him? The ground ahead of the two rear guard companies was littered with dead
and dying fugitives and a horrid number of those corpses and casualties were women and
children, while more weeping and shrieking people, terrified by the volley fire and
equally frightened of the invaders spreading into the city behind them, were crammed
into every street or alley that opened onto the cleared space by the gate.

“Why doesn't he leave?” McCandless wondered aloud.

“He's waiting for something, sir,” Sharpe said.

“We need men,” McCandless said.

“Go and fetch some. I'll keep an eye on Dodd.”

“Me, sir? Fetch men?”

“You're a sergeant, aren't you?” McCandless snapped.

“So behave like one. Get me an infantry company. Highlanders, preferably. Now go!”

Sharpe cursed under his breath, then sprinted back into the city. How the hell was he
expected to find men? There were plenty of redcoats in sight, but none was under
discipline, and demanding that looters abandon their plunder to go into another fight
would like as not prove a waste of time if not downright suicidal. Sharpe needed to find an
officer, and so he bullied his way through the terrified crowd in hope of discovering a
company of Highlanders that was still obeying orders.

A splintering crash directly above his head made him duck into a doorway just seconds
before a flimsy balcony collapsed under the weight of three sepoys and a dark wooden
trunk they had dragged from a bedroom. The trunk split apart when it hit the street, spilling
out a trickle of coins, and the three injured sepoys screamed as they were trampled by a
rush of soldiers and civilians who plunged in to collect the loot. A tall Scottish sergeant
used his musket butt to clear a space about the broken trunk, then knelt and began scooping
the coins into his upturned bearskin. He snarled at Sharpe, thinking him a rival for the
plunder, but Sharpe stepped over the Sergeant, tripped on the broken leg of one of the
sepoys, and shoved on. Bloody chaos!

A half-naked girl ran out of a potter's shop, then suddenly stopped as her unwinding
said jerked her to a halt. Two redcoats hauled her back towards the shop. The girl's father,
blood on his temple, was slumped just outside the doorway amidst the litter of his wares.
The girl stared into Sharpe's eyes and he saw her mute appeal, then the door of the shop was
slammed shut and he heard the bar dropping into place. Whooping Highlanders had
discovered a tavern and were setting up shop, while another Highlander was calmly
reading his Bible while sitting on a brassbound trunk he had pulled from a goldsmith's
shop.

“It's a fine day, Sergeant,” he said equably, though he took care to keep his hand on his
musket until Sharpe had safely gone past.

Another woman screamed in an alley, and Sharpe instinctively headed towards the
terrible sound. He discovered a riotous mob of sepoys fighting with a small squad of
white-jacketed soldiers who had to be among the very last of the city's defenders still
in recognizable uniforms.

They were led by a very young European officer who flailed a slender sword from his
saddle, but just as Sharpe caught sight of him, the officer was caught from behind by a
bayonet. He arched his back, and his mouth opened in a silent scream as his sword faltered,
then a mass of dark hands reached up and hauled him down from his white-eyed horse. Bayonets
plunged down, then the officer's blood-soaked uniform was being rifled for money.

Beyond the dead officer, and also on horseback, was a woman. She was wearing
European clothes and had a white net veil hanging from the brim of her straw hat, and it was
her scream that Sharpe had heard. Her horse had been trapped against a wall and she was
clinging to a roof beam that jutted just above her head. She was sitting sidesaddle,
facing the street and screaming as excited sepoys clawed at her. Other sepoys were
looting a pack mule that had been following her horse, and she turned and shouted at them
to stop, then gasped as two men caught her legs.