Sharpe's Triumph (6 page)

“You can ride a horse?”

Sharpe frowned.

“I can sit on one, sir.”

“Good enough,” the Scotsman said. He pulled on his oilcloth cape, then untied the two
reins and gave one set to Sharpe.

“She's a docile thing, Sharpe, so don't saw on her bit.”

“We're going right now, sir?” Sharpe asked, surprised by the suddenness of it all.

“Right now,” McCandless said.

“Time waits for no man, Sharpe, and we have a traitor and a murderer to catch.” He pulled
himself into his saddle and watched as Sharpe clumsily mounted the second horse.

“So where are you going?” Stokes asked McCandless.

“Ahmednuggur first, and after that God will decide.” The Colonel touched his horse's
flanks with his spurs and Sharpe, his pack hanging from one shoulder and his musket slung on
the other, followed.

He would redeem himself for the failure at Chasalgaon. Not with 1 punishment, but with
something better: with vengeance.

Major William Dodd ran a white-gloved finger down the spoke of a gun wheel He inspected
his fingertip and nearly nine hundred men, or at least as many of the nine hundred on
parade who could see the , Major, inspected him in return.

No mud or dust on the glove. Dodd straightened his back and glowered at the gun crews,
daring any man to show pleasure in having achieved a near perfect turn-out. It had been
hard work, too, for it had rained earlier in the day and the regiment's five guns had been
dragged through the muddy streets to the parade ground just inside

Ahmednuggur's southern gate, but the gunners had still managed to clean their weapons
meticulously. They had removed every scrap of mud, washed the mahogany trails, then
polished the barrels until their alloy of copper and tin gleamed like brass.

Impressive, Dodd thought, as he peeled off the glove. Pohlmann had left Ahmednuggur,
retreating north to join his compoo to Scindia's gathering army, and Dodd had ordered
this surprise inspection of his new command. He had given the regiment just one hour's
notice, but so far he had found nothing amiss. They were impressive indeed; standing in
four long white-coated ranks with their four cannon and single howitzer paraded at the
right flank. The guns themselves, despite their gleam, were pitiful things. The four field
guns were mere four pounders while the fifth was a five-inch howitzer, and not one of the
pieces fired a ball of real weight. Not a killing ball.

“Peashooters!” Dodd said disparagingly.

“Monsieur?” Captain Joubert, the Frenchman who had desperately hoped to be given
command of the regiment himself, asked.

“You heard me, Monsewer. Peashooters!” Dodd said as he lifted a limber's lid and
hoisted out one of the four-pounder shots. It was half the size of a cricket ball.

“You might as well spit at them, Monsewer!”

Joubert, a small man, shrugged.

“At close range, Monsieur .. .” he began to defend the guns.

“At close range, Monsewer, close range!” Dodd tossed the shot to Joubert who fumbled the
catch.

“That's no use at close range! No more use than a musket ball, and the gun's ten times more
cumbersome than a musket.” He rummaged through the limber.

“No canister? No grape?”

“Canister isn't issued for four-pounder guns,” Joubert said.

“It isn't even made for them.”

“Then we make our own,” Dodd said.

"Bags of scrap metal, Monsewer, strapped to a sabot and a charge. One and a half pounds
of powder per round. Find a dozen women in the town and have them sew up the bags.

Maybe your wife can help, Monsewer?" He leered at Joubert who showed no reaction. Dodd
could smell a man's weakness, and the oddly attractive Simone Joubert was undoubtedly
her husband's weakness, for she clearly despised him and he, just as clearly, feared
losing her.

“I want thirty bags of grape for each gun by this time tomorrow,” Dodd ordered.

“But the barrels, Major!”Joubert protested.

“You mean they'll be scratched?” Dodd jeered.

"What do you want, Monsewer? A scratched bore and a live regiment? Or a clean gun and a
row of dead men? By tomorrow, thirty rounds of canister per gun, and if there ain't room
in the limbers then throw out that bloody round shot.

Might as well spit cherrystones as fire those pebbles."

Dodd slammed down the limber's lid. Even if the guns fired makeshift grapeshot he was not
certain that they were worth keeping. Every battalion in India had such close-support
artillery, but in Dodd's opinion the guns only served to slow down a regiment's
manoeuvres. The weapons themselves were cumbersome, and the livestock needed to haul
them was a nuisance, and if he were ever given his own compoo he would strip the regiments
of field guns for if a battalion of infantry could not defend itself with fire locks what
use was it? But he was stuck with the five guns, so he would use them as giant shotguns and
open fire at three hundred yards. The gunners would moan about the damage to their barrels,
but damn the gunners.

Dodd inspected the howitzer, found it as clean as the other guns, and nodded to the
gunner-sub adar He offered no compliment, for Dodd did not believe in praising men for
merely doing their duty.

I Praise was due to those who exceeded their duty, punishment for those I who fell
short, and silence must serve the rest.

I Once the five guns had been inspected Dodd walked slowly down the white-jacketed
infantry ranks where he looked every man in the ; eye and did not change his grim
expression once, even though the soldiers had taken particular care to be well turned out
for their new commanding officer. Captain Joubert followed a pace behind Dodd and there
was something ludicrous about the conjunction of the tall, long-legged Dodd and the
diminutive Joubert who needed to scurry to keep up with the Englishman. Once in a while
the Frenchman would make a comment.

“He's a good man, sir,” he might say as they passed a soldier, but Dodd ignored all the
praise and, after a while, Joubert fell silent and just scowled at Dodd's back. Dodd sensed
the ; Frenchman's dislike, but did not care.

Dodd showed no reaction to the regiment's appearance, though all the same he was
impressed. These men were smart and their weapons were as clean as those of his own sepoys
who, re-issued with white jackets, now paraded as an extra company at the regiment's
left flank where, in British regiments, the skirmishers paraded. East India Company
battalions had no skirmishers, for it was believed that sepoys were i' no good at the
task, but Dodd had decided to make his loyal sepoys into the finest skirmishers in
India. Let them prove the Company , wrong, and in the proving they could help destroy the
Company.

Most of the men looked up into Dodd's eyes as he walked by, although few of them looked at
him for long, but instead glanced quickly away. Joubert saw the reaction, and
sympathized with it for there was something distinctly unpleasant about the
Englishman's long sour face that edged on the frightening. Probably, Joubert decided,
this Englishman was a flogger. The English were notorious for using the whip on their
own men, reducing redcoats' backs to welters of broken flesh and gleaming blood, but
Joubert was quite wrong about Dodd.

Major Dodd had never flogged a man in his life, and that was not just because the
Company forbade it in their army, but because William Dodd disliked the lash and hated to
see a soldier flogged. Major Dodd liked soldiers. He hated most officers, especially
those senior to him, but he liked soldiers. Good soldiers won battles, and victories made
officers famous, so to be successful an officer needed soldiers who liked him and who
would follow him. Dodd's sepoys were proof of that. He had looked after them, made sure they
were fed and paid, and he had given them victory. Now he would make them wealthy in the
service of the Mahratta princes who were famous for their generosity.

He broke away from the regiment and marched back to its colours, a pair of bright-green
flags marked with crossed tulwars. The flags had been the choice of Colonel Mathers, the
Englishman who had commanded the regiment for five years until he resigned rather than
fight against his own countrymen, and now the regiment would be known as Dodd's regiment.
Or perhaps he should call it something else. The Tigers? The Eagles? The Warriors of
Scindia? Not that the name mattered now. What mattered now was to save these nine hundred
well trained men and their five gleaming guns and take them safely back to the Mahratta army
that was gathering in the north. Dodd turned beneath the colours.

“My name is Dodd!” he shouted, then paused to let one of his Indian officers translate
his words into Marathi, a language Dodd did not speak. Few of the soldiers spoke Marathi
either, for most were mercenaries from the north, but men in the ranks murmured their own
translation and so Dodd's message was relayed up and down the files.

"I

am a soldier! Nothing but a soldier! Always a soldier!" He paused again.

The parade was being held in the open space inside the gate and a crowd of townsfolk had
gathered to gape at the troops, and among the crowd was a scatter of [ the robed Arab
mercenaries who were reputed to be the fiercest of all the Mahratta troops. They were
wild-looking men, armed with every conceivable weapon, but Dodd doubted they had the
discipline of his regiment.

“Together,” he shouted at his men, 'you and I shall fight and we shall win." He kept his
words simple, for soldiers always liked simple things. Loot was simple, winning and
losing were simple ideas, and even death, despite the way the damned preachers tried to tie
it up in superstitious knots, was a simple concept.

“It is my intent,” he shouted, then waited for the translation to ripple up and down
the ranks, 'for this regiment to be the finest in Scindia's service! Do your job well and I
shall reward you. Do it badly, and I shall let your fellow soldiers decide on your
punishment." They liked that, as Dodd had known they would.

“Yesterday,” Dodd declaimed, 'the British crossed our frontier!

Tomorrow their army will be here at Ahmednuggur, and soon we shall fight them in a great
battle!" He had decided not to say that the battle would be fought well north of the city,
for that might discourage the listening civilians.

“We shall drive them back to Mysore. We shall teach them that the army of Scindia is greater
than any of their armies. We shall win!” The soldiers smiled at his confidence.

“We shall take their treasures, their weapons, their land and their women, and those
things will be your reward if you fight well. But if you fight badly, you will die.” That
phrase sent a shudder through the four white-coated ranks.

“And if any of you prove to be cowards,” Dodd finished, “I shall kill you myself.”

He let that threat sink in, then abruptly ordered the regiment back to its duties
before summoning Joubert to follow him up the red stone steps of the city wall to where
Arab guards stood behind the merlons ranged along the fire step Far to the south, beyond the
horizon, a dusky cloud was just visible. It could have been mistaken for a distant rain
cloud, but Dodd guessed it was the smear of smoke from the British campfires.

“How long do you think the city will last?” Dodd asked Joubert.

The Frenchman considered the question.

“A month?” he guessed.

“Don't be a fool,” Dodd snarled. He might want the loyalty of his men, but he did not give
a fig for the good opinion of its two European officers. Both were Frenchmen and Dodd had
the usual Englishman's opinion of the Frogs. Good dancing masters, and experts in tying
a stock or arranging lace to fall prettily on a uniform, but about as much use in a fight
as spavined lap dogs Lieutenant Silliere, who had followed Joubert to the fire step was
tall and looked strong, but Dodd mistrusted a man who took such care with his uniform and he
could have sworn he detected a whiff of lavender water coming from the young Lieutenant's
carefully brushed hair.

“How long are the city walls?” he asked Joubert.

The Captain thought for a moment.

“Two miles?”

“At least, and how many men in the garrison?”

“Two thousand.”

“So work it out, Monsewer,” Dodd said.

"One man every two yards?

We'll be lucky if the city holds for three days." Dodd climbed to one of the bastions from
where he could stare between the crenellations at the great fort which stood close to the
city. That two-hundred-year-old fortress was an altogether more formidable stronghold
than the city, though its very size made it vulnerable, for the fort's garrison, like the
city's, was much too small. But the fort's high wall was faced by a big ditch, its embrasures
were crammed with cannon and its bastions were high and strong, although the fort was worth
nothing without the city.

The city was the prize, not the fort, and Dodd doubted that General Wellesley would
waste men against the fort's garrison. Boy Wellesley would attack the city, breach the
walls, storm the gap and send his men to slaughter the defenders in the rat's tangle of
alleys and courtyards, and once the city had fallen the redcoats would hunt for supplies
that would help feed the British army. Only then, with the city in his possession, would
Wellesley turn his guns against the fort, and it was possible that the fort would hold the
British advance for two or three weeks and thus give Scindia more time to assemble his army,
and the longer the fort held the better, for the overdue rains might come and hamper the
British advance. But of one thing Dodd was quite certain; as Pohlmann had said, the war would
not be won here, and to William Dodd the most important thing was to extricate his men so
that they could share that victory.

“You will take the regiment's guns and three hundred men and garrison the north gate,”
Dodd ordered Joubert.

The Frenchman frowned.