Sharpe's Fortress

by Bernard Cornwell

  “What did he say?” Hakeswill demanded.

  “He preferred they should die than be dishonored,” the havildar translated.

  “Bleeding hell,” Hakeswill commented. He stepped down into the sunken floor where the women lay. The dead had greenish dribbles coming from their mouths and their glassy eyes stared up at the lotuses painted on the ceiling, while the living jerked spasmodically. The cups from which they had drunk the poison lay on the tiled floor. “Some nice bibbis here,” Hakeswill said ruefully. “A waste!” He stared at a child, no more than six or seven. There was a jewel about her neck and Hakeswill stooped, grasped the pendant and snapped the chain. “Bleeding waste,” he said in disgust, then used his sword blade to lift the sari of a dying woman. He raised the silk to her waist, then shook his head. “Look at that!” he said. “Just look at that! What a bleeding waste!”

  The Killadar roared in anger, drew his tulwar and ran down the steps to drive Hakeswill from his women. Hakeswill, alarmed, backed away, then remembered he was to be a rajah and could not show timidity in front of the havildar and his men, so he stepped forward again and thrust the sword forward in a clumsy lunge. It might have been clumsy, but it was also lucky, for the Killadar had stumbled on a body and was lurching forward, his tulwar flailing as he sought his balance, and the tip of Hakeswill’s blade ripped into his throat so that a spray of blood pulsed onto the dead and the dying. The Killadar gasped as he fell. His legs twitched as he tried to bring the tulwar around to strike at Hakeswill, but his strength was going and the Englishman was above him now. “You’re a djinnl” the Killadar said hoarsely.

  The sword stabbed into Beny Singh’s neck. “I ain’t drunk, you bastard,” Hakeswill said indignantly. “Ain’t seen a drop of mother’s milk in three years!” He twisted the sword blade, fascinated by the way the blood pulsed past the steel. He watched until the blood finally died to a trickle, then jerked the blade free. “That’s him gone,” Hakeswill said. “Another bloody heathen gone down to hell, eh?”

  The havildar stared in horror at Beny Singh and at the corpses drenched with his blood.

  “Don’t just stand there, you great pudding!” Hakeswill snapped. “Get back to the walls!”

  “The walls, sahib?”

  “Hurry! There’s a battle being fought, or ain’t you noticed? Go on! Off with you! Take the company and report to Colonel Dodd as how the fat little bugger’s dead. Tell him I’ll be back in a minute or two. Now off with you! Quick!”

  The havildar obeyed, taking his men back through the hallway and out into the sunlight that was being hazed by the smoke rising from the ravine. Hakeswill, left alone in the palace, stooped to his work. All the dead wore jewelry. They were not great jewels, not like the massive ruby that the Tippoo Sultan had worn on his hat, but there were pearls and emeralds, sapphires and small diamonds, all mounted in gold, and Hakeswill busied himself delving through the bloodied silks to retrieve the scraps of wealth. He crammed the stones into his pockets where they joined the gems he had taken from Sharpe, and then, when the corpses were stripped and searched, he roamed the palace, snarling at servants and threatening scullions, as he ransacked the smaller rooms. The rest of the defenders could fight; Mr. Hakeswill was getting rich.

  The fight in the ravine was now a merciless massacre. The garrison of the Outer Fort was trapped between the soldiers who had captured their stronghold and the kilted Highlanders advancing up the narrow road, and there was no escape except over the precipice, and those who jumped, or were pushed by the panicking mass, fell onto the shadowed rocks far below. Colonel Chalmers’s men advanced with bayonets, herding the fugitives toward Kenny’s men who greeted them with more bayonets. A thousand men had garrisoned the Outer Fort, and those men were now dead or doomed, but seven thousand more defenders waited within the Inner Fort and Colonel Kenny was eager to attack them. He tried to order men into ranks, tugging them away from the slaughter and shouting for gunners to find an enemy cannon that could be fetched from the captured ramparts and dragged to face the massive gate of the Inner Fort, but the redcoats had an easier target in the huddled fugitives and they enthusiastically killed the helpless enemy, and all the while the guns of the Inner Fort fired down at the redcoats while rockets slammed into the ravine to add to the choking fog of powder smoke.

  The slaughter could not endure. The beaten defenders threw down their guns and fell to their knees, and gradually the British officers called off the massacre. Chalmers’s Highlanders advanced up the road that was now slippery with blood, driving the few prisoners in front of them. Wounded Arabs crawled or limped. The survivors were stripped of their remaining weapons and sent under sepoy guard back up to the Outer Fort, and for every step of their way they suffered from the fire that flamed and crackled from the Inner Fort. Finally, exhausted, they were taken out through the Delhi Gate and told to wait beside the tank. The parched prisoners threw themselves at the green-scummed water and some, seeing that the sepoy guards were few in number, slipped away northward. They went without weapons, masterless fugitives who posed no threat to the British camp, which was guarded by a half-battalion of Madrassi sepoys.

  The northern face of the ravine, which looked toward the uncon-quered Inner Fort, was now crowded with some three thousand redcoats, most of whom did nothing but sit in whatever small shade they could find and grumble that the puckakes had not fetched water. Once in a while a man would fire a musket across the ravine, but the balls were wild at that long range, and the enemy fire, which had been heavy during the massacre on the western road, gradually eased off as both sides waited for the real struggle to begin.

  Sharpe was halfway down the ravine, seated beneath a stunted tree on which the remnants of some red blossom hung dry and faded. A tribe of black-faced, silver-furred monkeys had fled the irruption of men into the rocky gorge, and those beasts now gathered behind Sharpe where they gibbered and screamed. Tom Garrard and a dozen men of the 33rd’s Light Company had gathered around Sharpe, while the rest of the company was lower down the ravine among some rocks. “What happens now?” Garrard asked.

  “Some poor bastards have to get through that gate,” Sharpe said.

  “Not you?”

  “Kenny will call us when he needs us,” Sharpe said, nodding toward the lean Colonel who had at last organized an assault party at the bottom of the track which slanted up toward the gate. “And he bloody will, Tom. It ain’t going to be easy getting through that gate.” He touched the scorch mark on his cheek. “That bloody hurts!”

  “Put some butter on it,” Garrard said.

  “And where do I get bleeding butter here?” Sharpe asked. He shaded his eyes and peered at the complex ramparts above the big gate, trying to spot either Dodd or Hakeswill, but although he could see the white jackets of the Cobras, he could not see a white man on the ramparts. “It’s going to be a long fight, Tom,” he said.

  The British gunners had succeeded in bringing an enemy five-pounder cannon to the edge of the ravine. The sight of the gun provoked a flurry of fire from the Inner Fort, wreathing its gatehouse in smoke as the round shot screamed across the ravine to plunge all around the threatening gun. Somehow it survived. The gunners rammed it, aimed it, then fired a shot that bounced just beneath the gate, ricocheted up into the woodwork, but fell back.

  The defenders kept firing, but their smoke obscured their aim and the small captured cannon had been positioned behind a large low rock that served as a makeshift breastwork. The gunners elevated the barrel a trifle and their next shot struck plumb on the gates, breaking a timber. Each successive shot splintered more wood and was greeted by an ironic cheer from the redcoats who watched from across the ravine. The gate was being demolished board by board, and at last a round shot cracked into its locking bar and the half-shattered timbers sagged on their hinges.

  Colonel Kenny was gathering his assault troops at the foot of the ravine. They were the same men who had gone first into the breaches of the Outer Fort, and their faces were stained wit
h powder burns, with dust and sweat. They watched the destruction of the outer gate of the Inner Fort and they knew they must climb the path into the enemy’s fire as soon as the gun had done its work. Kenny summoned an aide. “You know Plummer?” he asked the man.

  “Gunner Major, sir?”

  “Find him,” Kenny said, “or any gunner officer. Tell them we might need a light piece up in the gateway.” He pointed with a reddened sword at the Inner Fort’s gatehouse. “The passage ain’t straight,” he explained to the aide. “Get through the gate and we turn hard left. If our axemen can’t deal with the other gates we’ll need a gun to blow them in.”

  The aide climbed back up to the Outer Fort, looking for a gunner. Kenny talked to his men, explaining that once they were through the shattered gate they would find themselves faced by another and that the infantry were to fire up at the flanking fire steps to protect the axemen who would try to hack their way through the successive obstacles. “If we put up enough fire,” Kenny said, “the enemy’ll take shelter. It won’t take long.” He looked at his axemen, all of them huge sappers, all carrying vast-bladed axes that had been sharpened to wicked edges.

  Kenny turned and watched the effect of the five-pounder shots. The gate’s locking bar had been struck plumb, but the gate still held. A badly aimed shot cracked into the stone beside the gate, starting up dust, then a correction to the gun sent a ball hammering into the bar again and the thick timber broke and the remnants of the gates fell inward. “Forward!” Kenny shouted. “Forward!”

  Four hundred redcoats followed the Colonel up the narrow track that led to the Inner Fort. They could not run to the assault, for the hill was too steep; they could only trudge into the fury of Dodd’s fusillade. Cannon, rockets and muskets blasted down the hill to tear gaps in Kenny’s ranks.

  “Give them fire!” an officer on the ravine’s northern side shouted at the watching redcoats, and the men loaded their muskets and fired at the smoke-masked gatehouse. If nothing else, the wild fire might keep the defenders’ heads down. Another cannon had been fetched from the Outer Fort, and now added its small round shots to the fury that beat audibly on the gatehouse ramparts. Those ramparts were thick with the powder smoke gouted by the defenders’ cannon and muskets and it was that smoke which protected Kenny’s men as they hurried up the last few yards to the broken gate. “Protect the sappers!” Kenny shouted and then, his sword in his hand, he clambered over the broken timbers and led his attackers into the entrance passage.

  Facing Kenny was a stone wall. He had expected it, but even so he was astonished by the narrowness of the passage that turned sharply to his left and then climbed steeply to the second unbroken gate. “There it is!” he shouted, and led a surge of men up the cobbled road toward the iron-studded timbers.

  And hell was loosed.

  The fire steps above the gateway passage were protected by the outer wall’s high rampart, and Dodd’s men, though they could hear the musket balls beating against the stones, were safe from the wild fire that lashed across the deep ravine. But the redcoats beneath them, the men following Colonel Kenny into the passage, had no protection. Musket fire, stones and rockets slashed into a narrow space just twenty-five paces long and eight wide. The leading axemen were among the first to die, beaten down by bullets. Their blood splashed high on the walls. Colonel Kenny somehow survived the opening salvo, then he was struck on the shoulder by a lump of stone and driven to the ground. A rocket slashed past his face, scorching his cheek, but he picked himself up and, sword in numbed hand, shouted at his men to keep going. No one could hear him. The narrow space was filled with noise, choking with smoke in which men died and rockets flared. A musket ball struck Kenny in the hip and he twisted, half fell, but forced himself to stand and, with blood pouring down his white breeches, limped on. Then another musket ball scored down his back and threw him forward. He crawled on blood-slicked stones, sword still in his hand, and shuddered as a third ball hit him in the back. He still managed to reach the second gate and reared up to strike it with his sword, and then a last musket ball split his skull and left him dead at the head of his men. More bullets plucked at his corpse.

  Kenny’s surviving men tried to brave the fire. They tried to climb the slope to the second gate, but the murderous fire did not cease, and the dead made a barrier to the living. Some men attempted to fire up at their tormentors on the fire step, but the sun was high now and they aimed into a blinding glare, and soon the redcoats began to back down the passage. The weltering fire from above did not let up. It flayed the Scotsmen, ricocheted between the walls, struck dead and dying and living, while the rockets, lit and tossed down, seared like great comets between the stone walls and filled the space with a sickening smoke. The dead were burned by rocket flames which exploded their cartridge boxes to pulse gouts of blood against the black walls, but the smoke hid the survivors who, under its cover, stumbled back to the hill outside the fortress. They left a stone-walled passage filled with the dying and the dead, trickling with blood, foul with smoke and echoing with the moans of the wounded.

  “Cease fire!” Colonel Dodd shouted. “Cease fire!”

  The smoke cleared slowly and Dodd stared down at a pit of carnage in which a few bodies twitched. “They’ll come again soon,” Dodd warned his Cobras. “Fetch more stones, make sure your muskets are loaded. More rockets!” He patted his men on the shoulders, congratulating them. They grinned at him, pleased with their work. It was like killing rats in a barrel. Not one Cobra had been hit, the first enemy assault had failed and the others, Dodd was certain, would end in just the same way. The Lord of Gawilghur was winning his first victory.

  Major Stokes had found Sharpe shortly before Kenny made his assault, and the two men had been joined first by Syud Sevajee and his followers, then by the dozen cavalrymen who accompanied Eli Lockhart. All of them, Stokes, Sevajee and Lockhart, had entered the Outer Fort after the fight for the breaches was finished, and now they stood watching the failure of Kenny’s assault. The survivors of the attack were crouching just yards from the broken entrance that boiled with smoke, and Sharpe knew they were summoning the courage to charge again. “Poor bastards,” he said.

  “No choice in the matter,” Stokes said bleakly. “No other way in.”

  “That ain’t a way in, sir,” Sharpe said dourly, “that’s a fast road to a shallow grave.”

  “Overwhelm them,” Stokes said, “that’s the way to do it. Overwhelm them.”

  “Send more men to be killed?” Sharpe asked angrily.

  “Get a gun over that side,” Stokes suggested, “and blast the gates down one after the other. Only way to prize the place open, Sharpe.”

  The covering fire that had blazed across the ravine died when it was obvious the first attack had failed, and the lull encouraged the defenders to come to the outer embrasures and fire down at the stalled attackers.

  “Give them fire!” an officer shouted from the bed of the ravine, and again the muskets flared across the gorge and the balls spattered against the walls.

  Major Stokes had leveled his telescope at the gate where the thick smoke had at last dissipated. “It ain’t good,” he admitted. “It opens onto a blank wall.”

  “It does what, sir?” Eli Lockhart asked. The cavalry Sergeant was looking aghast at the horror across the ravine, grateful perhaps that the cavalry was never asked to break into such deathtraps.

  “The passage turns,” Stokes said. “We can’t fire straight up the entranceway. They’ll have to drag a gun right into the archway.”

  “They’ll never make it,” Sharpe said. Any gun positioned in the outer arch would get the full fury of the defensive fire, and those defenders were protected by the big outer wall. The only way Sharpe could see of getting into the fortress was by battering the whole gatehouse flat, and that would take days of heavy cannon fire.

  “The gates of hell,” Stokes said softly, staring through his glass at the bodies left inside the arch.

  “Can I borrow the
telescope, sir?” Sharpe asked.

  “Of course.” Stokes cleaned the eyepiece on the hem of his jacket. “It ain’t a pretty sight though.”

  Sharpe took the glass and aimed it across the ravine. He gave the gatehouse a cursory glance, then edged the lens along the wall which led westward from the besieged gate. The wall was not very high, perhaps only twelve or fifteen feet, much lower than the great ramparts about the gatehouse, and its embrasures did not appear to be heavily manned. But that was hardly a surprise, for the wall stood atop a precipice. The defenses straight ahead were not the wall and its handful of defenders, but the stony cliff which fell down into the ravine.

  Stokes saw where Sharpe was aiming the glass. “No way in there, Richard.”

  Sharpe said nothing. He was staring at a place where weeds and small shrubs twisted up the cliff. He tracked the telescope from the bed of the ravine to the base of the wall, searching every inch, and he reckoned it could be climbed. It would be hard, for it was perilously steep, but if there was space for bushes to find lodgment, then a man could follow, and at the top of the cliff there was a brief area of grass between the precipice and the wall. He took the telescope from his eye. “Has anyone seen a ladder?”

  “Back up there.” It was Ahmed who answered.

  “Where, lad?”

  “Up there.” The Arab boy pointed to the Outer Fort. “On the ground,” he said.

  Sharpe twisted and looked at Lockhart. “Can you boys fetch me a ladder?”

  “What are you thinking of?” Lockhart asked.

  “A way in,” Sharpe said, “a bloody way in.” He gave the telescope to Stokes. “Get me a ladder, Sergeant,” he said, “and I’ll fix those buggers properly. Ahmed? Show Sergeant Lockhart where you saw the ladder.”