Sharpe's Fortress

by Bernard Cornwell

  Hakeswill, at the very right-hand end of the line, cowered among the rocks. He had been sheltering with Kendrick and Lowry, but the enemy cannonade had driven him still further right to where there was a deep cleft. He knew he was safe there, but even so every screaming rocket made him flinch, while the sound of the shells exploding and the round shots cracking against stone made him draw his knees up into his chest. He knew there was a senior officer visiting the picket line because the message telling of the Colonel’s presence had been passed down the line. Kenny’s visit struck Hakeswill as a daft thing for any man with gold braid on his coat to do, but when the Colonel hissed his name aloud he kept silent. At least he assumed it was the visiting officer, for the summons was insistent and authoritative, but Hakeswill ignored it. He did not want to draw attention to himself in case the heathen blackamoor gunners aimed their cannon at him. Let the officer hiss away, he decided, and a moment later the man went away.

  “Who are you?” a low voice asked Private Kendrick just a few yards from Hakeswill’s hiding place.

  “Kendrick, sir.”

  “To me, Private. I need your help.”

  Kendrick slipped back toward the voice. Bastard interfering officer, he thought, but he had to obey. “Where are you, sir?” he asked.

  “Here, man! Hurry, now, hurry!”

  Kendrick slipped on a slanting stone and sat down with a bump. A rocket slashed overhead, spewing fire and sparks, and in its brief light he saw a shadow above him, then felt a blade at his throat. “One noise,” the voice hissed, “and you’re dead.”

  Kendrick went very still. He did not make any noise at all, but he still died.

  A lucky shell struck a pair of oxen, disemboweling the beasts that lowed pitifully as they collapsed onto the road. “Get them out of the way!” a voice roared, and sepoys struggled with the massive animals, cutting their harnesses and pulling the dying beasts into the rocks. Other men ran the empty cart back to the encampment, making way for the next wagon to drag more gabions forward. “Kill them!” the officer ordered. “Use your bayonets! No musket fire!” The sepoys finished off the oxen, stabbing again and again into their thick necks while the bloody hooves thrashed violently. Another shell landed nearby, slicing its fragments among the rocks. The road was slippery with spilled guts over which the next cart rolled impassively, its axle screeching like a demon.

  “All well, soldier?” a voice asked Private Lowry.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’m Colonel Kenny,” the man said, dropping down beside Lowry.

  “Yes, sir,” Lowry acknowledged nervously.

  “See anything?”

  “Nothing, sir,” Lowry said, then gasped as he felt a blade at his throat.

  “Where’s Hakeswill?” the voice hissed in his ear, and Lowry suddenly knew this was not Colonel Kenny who had him in a tight grip.

  “Dunno, sir,” Lowry said, then began to cry out, but the cry was cut off as the blade sawed deep into his gullet.

  A ball, fired low, struck plumb on the great boulder that sheltered Hakeswill and the Sergeant whimpered as he tried to wriggle deeper into the cleft. A rocket landed thirty paces behind him and began to chase its tail, whirling about on the turf, scattering sparks, until it finally lodged against a rock and burned itself out in a display of small blue flames. Another round shot hammered into the gabions, but now they were well stacked and the ball’s impact was soaked up by the tight-packed soil.

  A whistle blew from the battery site, then blew twice more. Morris, relieved by the sound, called to the men to his right. “Back to the road! Pass it on! Back to the road!” Thank God the worst of the ordeal was over! Now he was supposed to withdraw to the battery, ready to protect it through the remaining hours of the dark night, but Morris knew he would feel a good deal safer once he was behind the gabions, just as he knew that the cessation of the work would probably persuade the Mahrattas to cease fire. “Close on me!” he called to his company. “Hurry!”

  The message was passed along the picket line and the men ran at a crouch back to where Morris waited. They bumped into each other as they gathered, then squatted as Morris called for Hakeswill.

  “Not here, sir,” Sergeant Green finally decided.

  “Count the men, Sergeant,” Morris ordered.

  Sergeant Green numbered the men off. “Three missing, sir,” he reported. “Hakeswill, Lowry and Kendrick.”

  “Damn them,” Morris said. A rocket hissed up from the gatehouse, twisted in the night to leave a crazy trail of flame-edged smoke, then dived down to the left, far down, plunging into the ravine that edged the isthmus. The light of the exhaust flashed down the steep cliffs, finally vanishing a thousand feet below Morris. Two guns fired together, their balls hammering towards the fake lanterns. The battery lanterns had vanished, evidence that the sappers had finished their work.

  “Take the men to the battery,” Morris ordered Green. “Garrard? You stay with me.”

  Morris did not want to do anything heroic, but he knew he could not report that he had simply lost three men, so he took Private Tom Garrard west across the tumbled ground where the picket line had been stretched. They called out the names of the missing men, but no reply came.

  It was Garrard who stumbled over the first body. “Don’t know who it is, sir, but he’s dead. Bloody mess, he is.”

  Morris swore and crouched beside the body. A rocket’s bright passage showed him a slit throat and a spill of blood. It also revealed that the man had been stripped of his coat which lay discarded beside the corpse. The sight of the gaping throat made Morris gag.

  “There’s another here, sir,” Garrard called from a few paces away.

  “Jesus!” Morris twisted aside, willing himself not to throw up, but the bile was sour in his throat. He shuddered, then managed to take a deep breath. “We’re going.”

  “You want me to look for the other fellow, sir?” Garrard asked.

  “Come on!” Morris fled, not wanting to stay in this dark charnel house.

  Garrard followed.

  The gunfire died. A last rocket stitched sparks across the stars, then Gawilghur was silent again.

  Hakeswill cowered in his hiding place, shuddering as the occasional flare of an exploding shell or passing rocket cast lurid shadows into the narrow cleft. He thought he heard Lowry call aloud, but the sound was so unexpected, and so quickly over, he decided it was his nerves. Then, blessedly, he heard the whistle that signaled that the sappers were done with their work, and a moment later he heard the message being called along the line. “Back to the road! Back to the road!”

  The rockets and guns were still battering the night, so Hakeswill stayed where he was until he sensed that the fury of the fire was diminishing, then he crept out of his cleft and, still keeping low, scuttled eastward.

  “Hakeswill!” a voice called nearby.

  He froze.

  “Hakeswill?” The voice was insistent.

  Some instinct told the Sergeant that there was mischief in the dark, and so Hakeswill crouched lower still. He heard something moving in the night, the scrape of leather on stone, the sound of breathing, but the man did not come close to Hakeswill who, petrified, edged on another pace. His hand, feeling the ground ahead of him, suddenly found something wet and sticky. He flinched, brought his fingers to his nose and smelled blood.

  “Jesus,” he swore under his breath. He groped again, and this time found a corpse. His hands explored the face, the open mouth, then found the gaping wound in the neck. He jerked his hand back.

  It had to be Lowry or Kendrick, for this was about where he had left the two privates, and if they were dead, or even if only one of them was dead, then it meant that Captain Torrance’s death had been no lovers’ tiff. Not that Hakeswill had ever believed it was. He knew who it was. Bloody Sharpe was alive. Bloody Sharpe was hunting his enemies, and three, maybe four, were already dead. And Hakeswill knew he would be next.

  “Hakeswill!” the voice hissed, but farther away now
.

  A gun fired from the fort and in its flash Hakeswill saw a cloaked shape to his north. The man was crossing the skyline, not far from Hakeswill, but at least he was going away. Sharpe! It had to be Sharpe! And a terror grew in Hakeswill so that his face twitched and his hands shook.

  “Think, you bugger,” he told himself, “think!”

  And the answer came, a sweet answer, so obvious that he wondered why he had taken so long to find it.

  Sharpe was alive, he was not a prisoner in Gawilghur, but haunting the British camp, which meant that there was one place that would be utterly safe for Hakeswill to go. He could go to the fortress, and Sharpe would never reach him there for the rumor in the camp was that the assault on Gawilghur was likely to be a desperate and bloody business. Likely to fail, some men said, and even if it did not, Hakeswill could always pretend he had been taken prisoner. All he wanted at this moment was to be away from Sharpe and so he sidled southward, down the hill, and once he reached the flatter ground, he ran toward the now dark walls of the fort through the drifting skeins of foul-smelling powder smoke.

  He ran past the tank, along the approach road, and around to the left where the great gatehouse loomed above him in the dark. And once there he pounded on the massive, iron-studded doors.

  No one responded.

  He pounded again, using the butt of his musket, scared witless that the sound would bring an avenging horror from the dark behind, and suddenly a small wicket gate in the larger door was pulled open to flood flame light into the night.

  “I’m a deserter!” Hakeswill hissed. “I’m on your side!”

  Hands seized him and pulled him through the small doorway. A smoking torch burned high on the wall to show Hakeswill the long, narrow entranceway, the dark ramparts, and the dark faces of the men who had him prisoner. “I’m on your side!” he shouted as the gate was closed behind him and his musket was snatched away. “I’m on your side!”

  A tall, hawk-faced man strode down the stone road. “Who are you?” he asked in English.

  “I’m someone willing to fight for you, sir. Willing and able, sir. Old soldier, sir.”

  “My name is Manu Bappoo,” the man said in a sibilant voice, “and I command here.”

  “Very good, sir. Sahib, I mean, very good.” Hakeswill bobbed his head. “Hakeswill, sir, is my name. Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill.”

  Manu Bappoo stared at the redcoat. He disliked deserters. A man who deserted his flag could not be trusted under any other flag, but the news that a white soldier had run from the enemy ranks could only hearten his garrison. Better, he decided, to leave this man alive as a witness to the enemy’s crumbling morale than shoot him out of hand. “Take him to Colonel Dodd,” he ordered one of his men. “Give him back his firelock. He’s on our side.”

  So Hakeswill was inside Gawilghur and among the enemy. But he was safe from the terror that had turned his life to sudden nightmare. He was safe from Sharpe.

  Chapter 8

  The sappers who had emplaced the gabions were too excited to go to sleep and instead were milling about a pair of smoky fires. Their laughter rose and fell on the night wind. Major Stokes, pleased with their work, had produced three jars of arrack as a reward, and the jugs were being passed from hand to hand.

  Sharpe watched the small celebration and then, keeping to the shadows among Syud Sevajee’s encampment, he went to a small tent where he stripped off his borrowed Indian robes before crawling under the flap. In the dark he blundered into Clare who, kept awake by the sound of the bombardment and then by the voices of the sappers, put up a hand and felt bare flesh. “You’re undressed!” She sounded alarmed.

  “Not quite,” Sharpe said, then understood her fear. “My clothes were soaking,” he explained, “so I took them off. Didn’t want to wet the bed, eh? And I’ve still got my shirt on.”

  “Is it raining? I didn’t hear it.”

  “It was blood,” he said, then rummaged under the blanket he had borrowed from Syud Sevajee and found Torrance’s pouch.

  Clare heard the rattle of stones. “What is it?”

  “Just stones,” he said, “pebbles.” He put the twenty jewels he had retrieved from Kendrick and Lowry into the pouch, stowed it safe under the blanket, then lay down. He doubted he had found every stone, but he reckoned he had retrieved most of them. They had been loose in the two privates’ pockets, not even hidden away in their coat seams. God, he felt tired and his body had still not recovered from Hakeswill’s kicking. It hurt to breathe, the bruises were tender and a tooth was still loose.

  “What happened out there?” Clare asked.

  “The engineers put the gabions in place. When it’s light they’ll scrape the gun platform and make the magazines, and tomorrow night they’ll bring up the guns.”

  “What happened to you?” Clare amended her question.

  Sharpe was silent for a while. “I looked up some old friends,” he said. But he had missed Hakeswill, damn it, and Hakeswill would be doubly alert now. Still, a chance would come. He grinned as he remembered Morris’s scared voice. The Captain was a bully to his men and a toadie to his superiors.

  “Did you kill someone?” Clare asked.

  “Two men,” he admitted, “but it should have been three.”

  “Why?”

  He sighed. “Because they were bad men,” he said simply, then reflected it was a true answer. “And because they tried to kill me,” he added, “and they robbed me. You knew them,” he went on. “Kendrick and Lowry.”

  “They were horrid,” Clare said softly. “They used to stare at me.”

  “Can’t blame them for that, love.”

  She was silent for a while. The laughter of the sappers was subsiding as men drifted toward their tents. The wind gusted at the tent’s entrance and brought the smell of burned powder from the rocky isthmus where patches of grass still flamed around the exhausted rocket tubes. “Everything’s gone wrong, hasn’t it?” Clare said.

  “It’s being put right,” Sharpe replied.

  “For you,” she said.

  Again she was silent, and Sharpe suspected she was crying. “I’ll get you home to Madras,” he said.

  “And what’ll happen to me there?”

  “You’ll be all right, lass. I’ll give you a pair of my magic pebbles.”

  “What I want,” she said softly, “is to go home. But I can’t afford it.”

  “Marry a soldier,” Sharpe said, “and be carried home with him.” He thought of Eli Lockhart who had been admiring Clare from a distance. They would suit each other, Sharpe thought.

  She was crying very softly. “Torrance said he’d pay my way home when I’d paid off the debt,” she said.

  “Why would he make you work for one passage, then give you another?” Sharpe asked. “He was a lying bastard.”

  “He seemed so kind at first.”

  “We’re all like that,” Sharpe said. “Soft as lights when you first meet a woman, then you get what you want and it changes. I don’t know. Maybe not every time.”

  “Charlie wasn’t like that,” Clare said.

  “Charlie? Your husband?”

  “He was always good to me.”

  Sharpe lay back. The light of the dying fires flickered in the tent’s loose weave. If it rained, he thought, the cloth would leak like a pepper pot. “There are good men and bad,” he said.

  “What are you?” Clare asked.

  “I think I’m good,” he said, “but I don’t know. All the time I get into trouble, and I only know one way out. I can fight. I can do that all right.”

  “Is that what you want? To fight?”

  “God knows what I want.” He laughed softly. “I wanted to be an officer more than I’d wanted anything in my life! I dreamed of it, I did. I wanted it so bad that it hurt, and then the dream came true and it woke me up and I wondered why I’d wanted it so much.” He paused. Syud Sevajee’s horses stamped their feet softly behind the tent. “Some buggers are trying to persuade me to leave
the army. Sell the commission, see? They don’t want me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I piss in their soup, lass.”

  “So will you leave?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t want to.” He thought about it. “It’s like a club, a society. They don’t really want me, so they chuck me out, and then I have to fight my way back in. But why do I do it if they don’t want me? I don’t know. Maybe it’ll be different in the Rifles. I’ll try ‘em, anyway, and see if they’re different.”

  “You want to go on fighting?” Clare asked.

  “It’s what I’m good at,” Sharpe said. “And I do enjoy it. I mean I know you shouldn’t, but there ain’t any other excitement like it.”

  “None?”

  “Well, one.” He grinned in the dark.

  There was a long silence, and he thought Clare had fallen asleep, but then she spoke again. “How about your French widow?”

  “She’s gone,” Sharpe said flatly.

  “Gone?”

  “She buggered off, love. Took some money of mine and went. Gone to America, I’m told.”

  Clare lay in silence again. “Don’t you worry about being alone?” she asked after a while.