Sharpe's Fortress

by Bernard Cornwell

  “I stay with you,” the boy said stubbornly.

  “You bloody don’t.” Sharpe patted the boy on the head, wondering what Ahmed made of the slaughter that had been inflicted on his countrymen in the ravine, but the boy seemed blessedly unaffected. “Go and help the Sergeant,” he told Ahmed.

  Ahmed led the cavalrymen uphill. “What are you doing, Richard?” Stokes asked.

  “We can climb up to the wall,” Sharpe said, pointing to where the trail of weeds and bushes snaked up the other side of the ravine. “Not you, sir, but a light company can do it. Go up the ravine, send a ladder up and cross the wall.”

  Stokes trained the telescope and stared at the opposing cliff for a long while. “You might get up,” he said dubiously, “but then what?”

  Sharpe grinned. “We attack the gatehouse from the back, sir.”

  “One company?”

  “Where one company can go, sir, another can follow. Once they see we’re up there, other men will come.” He still held the great claymore which was too big to fit into the scabbard of his borrowed sword, but now he discarded that scabbard and shoved the claymore into his belt. He liked the sword. It was heavy, straight-bladed and brutal, not a weapon for delicate work, but a killer. Something to give a man confidence. “You stay here, sir,” he told Stokes, “and look after Ahmed for me. The little bugger would love to get in a fight, but he ain’t got the sense of a louse when it comes to a scrap and he’s bound to get killed. Tom!” he called to Garrard, then beckoned that he and the rest of the 33rd’s Light Company should follow him down to where Morris sheltered among the rocks. “When Eli gets here with the ladder, sir,” he added to Stokes, “send him down.”

  Sharpe ran down the ravine’s steep side into the smoke-reeking shadows where Morris was seated under a tree making a meal out of bread, salt beef and whatever liquor was left in his canteen. “Don’t have enough food for you, Sharpe,” he said.

  “Not hungry,” Sharpe lied.

  “You’re sweating, man,” Morris complained. “Why don’t you find yourself some shade? There’s nothing we can do until the gunners knock that bloody gatehouse flat.”

  “There is,” Sharpe said.

  Morris cocked a skeptical eye up at Sharpe. “I’ve had no orders, Ensign,” he said.

  “I want you and the Light Company, sir,” Sharpe said respectfully. “There’s a way up the side of the ravine, sir, and if we can get a ladder to the top then we can cross the wall and go at the bastards from the back.”

  Morris tipped the canteen to his mouth, drank, then wiped his lips. “If you, twenty like you and the Archangel Gabriel and all the bloody saints asked me to climb the ravine, Sharpe, I would still say no. Now for Christ’s sake, man, stop trying to be a bloody hero. Leave it to the poor bastards who are under orders, and go away.” He waved a hand.

  “Sir,” Sharpe pleaded, “we can do it! I’ve sent for a ladder.”

  “No!” Morris interrupted loudly, attracting the attention of the rest of the company. “I am not giving you my company, Sharpe. For God’s sake, you’re not even a proper officer! You’re just a bumped-up sergeant! A bloody ensign too big for your boots and, allow me to remind you, Mr. Sharpe, forbidden by army regulations to serve in this regiment. Now go away and leave me in peace.”

  “I thought you’d say that, Charles,” Sharpe said ruefully.

  “And stop calling me Charles!” Morris exploded. “We are not friends, you and I. And kindly obey my order to leave me in peace, or had you not noticed that I outrank you?”

  “I had noticed. Sorry, sir,” Sharpe said humbly and he started to turn away, but suddenly whipped back and seized Morris’s coat. He dragged the Captain back into the rocks, going so fast that Morris was momentarily incapable of resistance. Once among the rocks, Sharpe let go of the patched coat and thumped Morris in the belly. “That’s for the flogging you gave me, you bastard,” he said.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Sharpe?” Morris asked, scrambling away on his bottom.

  Sharpe kicked him in the chest, leaned down, hauled him up and thumped him on the jaw. Morris squealed with pain, then gasped as Sharpe backhanded him across the cheek, then struck him again. A group of men had followed and were watching wide-eyed. Morris turned to appeal to them, but Sharpe hit him yet again and the Captain’s eyes turned glassy as he swayed and collapsed. Sharpe bent over him. “You might outrank me,” he said, “but you’re a piece of shit, Charlie, and you always were. Now can I take the company?”

  “No,” Morris said through the blood on his lips.

  “Thank you, sir,” Sharpe said, and stamped his boot hard down on Morris’s head, driving it onto a rock. Morris gasped, choked, then lay immobile as the breath scraped in his throat.

  Sharpe kicked Morris’s head again, just for the hell of it, then turned, smiling. “Where’s Sergeant Green?”

  “Here, sir.” Green, looking anxious, pushed through the watching men. “I’m here, sir,” he said, staring with astonishment at the immobile Morris.

  “Captain Morris has eaten something that disagreed with him,” Sharpe said, “but before he was taken ill he expressed the wish that I should temporarily take command of the company.”

  Sergeant Green looked at the battered, bleeding Captain, then back to Sharpe. “Something he ate, sir?”

  “Are you a doctor, Sergeant? Wear a black plume on your hat, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then stop questioning my statements. Have the company paraded, muskets loaded, no bayonets fixed.” Green hesitated. “Do it, Sergeant!” Sharpe roared, startling the watching men.

  “Yes, sir!” Green said hurriedly, backing away.

  Sharpe waited until the company was in its four ranks. Many of them looked at him suspiciously, but they were powerless to challenge his authority, not while Sergeant Green had accepted it. “You’re a light company,” Sharpe said, “and that means you can go where other soldiers can’t. It makes you an elite. You know what that means? It means you’re the best in the bloody army, and right now the army needs its best men. It needs you. So in a minute we’ll be climbing up there”—he pointed to the ravine—”crossing the wall and carrying the fight to the enemy. It’ll be hard work for a bit, but not beyond a decent light company.” He looked to his left and saw Eli Lockhart leading his men down the side of the ravine with one of the discarded bamboo ladders. “I’ll go first,” he told the company, “and Sergeant Green will go last. If any man refuses to climb, Sergeant, you’re to shoot the bugger.”

  “I am, sir?” Green asked nervously.

  “In the head,” Sharpe said.

  Major Stokes had followed Lockhart and now came up to Sharpe. “I’ll arrange for some covering fire, Sharpe,” he said.

  “That’ll be a help, sir. Not that these men need much help. They’re the 33rd’s Light Company. Best in the army.”

  “I’m sure they are,” Stokes said, smiling at the seventy men who, seeing a major with Sharpe, supposed that the Ensign really did have the authority to do what he was proposing.

  Lockhart, in his blue and yellow coat, waited with the ladder. “Where do you want it, Mr. Sharpe?”

  “Over here,” Sharpe said. “Just pass it up when we’ve reached the top. Sergeant Green! Send the men in ranks! Front rank first!” He walked to the side of the ravine and stared up his chosen route. It looked steeper from here, and much higher than it had seemed when he was staring through the telescope, but he still reckoned it was climbable. He could not see the Inner Fort’s wall, but that was good, for neither could the defenders see him. All the same, it was bloody steep. Steep enough to give a mountain goat pause, yet if he failed now then he would be on a charge for striking a superior officer, so he really had no choice but to play the hero.

  So he spat on his bruised hands, looked up one last time, then started to climb.

  The second assault on the Inner Fort’s gatehouse fared no better than the first. A howling mass of men charged throug
h the wreckage of the shattered gate, stumbled on the dead and dying as they turned up the passage, but then the killing began again as a shower of missiles, rockets and musket fire turned the narrow, steep passage into a charnel house. An axeman succeeded in reaching the second gate and he stood above Colonel Kenny’s scorched body to sink his blade deep into the timber, but he was immediately struck by three musket balls and dropped back, leaving the axe embedded in the dark, iron-studded wood. No one else went close to the gate, and a major, appalled at the slaughter, called the men back. “Next time,” he shouted at them, “we designate firing parties to give cover. Sergeant! I want two dozen men.”

  “We need a cannon, sir,” the Sergeant answered with brutal honesty.

  “They say one’s coming.” The aide whom Kenny had sent to fetch a cannon had returned to the assault party. “They say it’ll take time, though,” he added, without explaining that the gunner officer had declared it would take at least two hours to manhandle a gun and ammunition across the ravine.

  The Major shook his head. “We’ll try without the gun,” he said.

  “God help us,” the Sergeant said under his breath.

  Colonel Dodd had watched the attackers limp away. He could not help smiling. This was so very simple, just as he had foreseen. Manu Bappoo was dead and the havildar had returned from the palace with the welcome news of Beny Singh’s murder, which meant that Gawilghur had a new commander. He looked down at the dead and dying redcoats who lay among the small flickering blue flames of the spent rockets. “They’ve learned their lesson, Gopal,” he told his Jemadar, “so next time they’ll try to keep us quiet by firing bigger volleys up at the fire steps. Toss down rockets, that’ll spoil their aim.”

  “Rockets, sahib.”

  “Lots of rockets,” Dodd said. He patted his men on their backs. Their faces were singed by the explosions of the powder in their muskets’ pans, they were thirsty and hot, but they were winning, and they knew it. They were his Cobras, as well trained as any troops in India, and they would be at the heart of the army that Dodd would unleash from this fortress to dominate the lands the British must relinquish when their southern army was broken.

  “Why don’t they give up?” Gopal asked Dodd. A sentry on the wall had reported that the bloodied attackers were forming to charge again.

  “Because they’re brave men, Jemadar,” Dodd said, “but also stupid.”

  The furious musket fire had started again from across the ravine, a sign that a new attack would soon come into the blood-slick gateway. Dodd drew his pistol, checked it was loaded, and walked back to watch the next failure. Let them come, he thought, for the more who died here, the fewer would remain to trouble him as he pursued the beaten remnant south across the Deccan Plain. “Get ready!” he called. Slow matches burned on the fire step and his men crouched beside them with rockets, waiting to light the fuses and toss the terrible weapons down into the killing place.

  A defiant cheer sounded, and the redcoats came again to the slaughter.

  The cliff face was far steeper than Sharpe had anticipated, though it was not sheer rock, but rather a series of cracks in which plants had taken root, and he found that he could pull himself up by using stony outcrops and the thick stalks of the bigger shrubs. He needed both hands. Tom Garrard came behind, and more than once Sharpe trod on his friend’s hands. “Sorry, Torn.”

  “Just keep going,” Garrard panted.

  It became easier after the first ten feet, for the face now sloped away, and there was even room for two or three men to stand together on a weed-covered ledge. Sharpe called for the ladder and it was pushed up to him by the cavalrymen. The bamboo was light and he hooked the top rung over his right shoulder and climbed on upward, following a jagged line of rocks and bushes that gave easy footing. A line of redcoats trailed him, muskets slung. There were more bushes to Sharpe’s left, shielding him from the ramparts, but after he had climbed twenty feet those bushes ended and he prayed that the defenders would all be staring at the beleaguered gatehouse rather than at the precipice below. He pulled himself up the last few feet, cursing the ladder that seemed to get caught on every protrusion. The sun beat off the stone and the sweat poured down him. He was panting when he reached the top, and now there was nothing but steep, open ground between him and the wall’s base. Fifty feet of rough grass to cross and then he would be at the wall.

  He crouched at the edge of the cliff, waiting for the men to catch up. Still no one had seen him from the walls. Torn Garrard dropped beside him. “When we go, Tom,” Sharpe said, “we run like bloody hell. Straight to the wall. Ladder up, climb like rats and jump over the bloody top. Tell the lads to get over fast. Bastards on the other side are going to try and kill us before we can get reinforced, so we’re going to need plenty of muskets to fend the buggers off.”

  Garrard peered up at the embrasures. “There’s no one there.”

  “There’s a few there,” Sharpe said, “but they ain’t taking much notice. Dozy, they are,” he added, and thank God for that, he thought, for a handful of defenders with loaded muskets could stop him dead. And dead is what he had better be after striking Morris, unless he could cross the ramparts and open the gates. He peered up at the battlements as more men hauled themselves over the edge of the cliff. He guessed the wall was lightly manned by little more than a picket line, for no one would have anticipated that the cliff could be climbed, but he also guessed that once the redcoats appeared the defenders would quickly reinforce the threatened spot.

  Garrard grinned at Sharpe. “Did you thump Morris?”

  “What else could I do?”

  “He’ll have you court-martialed.”

  “Not if we win here,” Sharpe said. “If we get those gates open, Tom, we’ll be bloody heroes.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “We’ll be dead,” Sharpe said curtly, then turned to see Eli Lockhart scrambling onto the grass. “What the hell are you doing here?” Sharpe demanded.

  “I got lost,” Lockhart said, and hefted a musket he had taken from a soldier below. “Some of your boys ain’t too keen on being heroes, so me and my boys are making up the numbers.”

  And it was not just Lockhart’s cavalrymen who were climbing, but some kilted Highlanders and sepoys who had seen the Light Company scrambling up the cliff and decided to join in too. The more the merrier, Sharpe decided. He counted heads and saw he had thirty men, and more were coming. It was time to go, for the enemy would not stay asleep for long. “We have to get over the wall fast,” he told them all, “and once we’re over, we form two ranks.”

  He stood and hefted the ladder high over his head, holding it with both hands, then ran up the steep grass. His boots, which were Syud Sevajee’s castoffs, had smooth soles and slipped on the grass, but he stumbled on, and went even faster when he heard an aggrieved shout from high above him. He knew what was coming next and he was still thirty feet from the walls, a sitting target, and then he heard the bang of the musket and saw the grass flatten ahead of him as the gases from the barrel lashed downward. Smoke eddied around him, but the ball had thumped into one of the ladder’s thick uprights, and then another musket fired and he saw a fleck of turf dance up.

  “Give them fire!” Major Stokes roared from the bottom of the ravine. “Give them fire!”

  A hundred redcoats and sepoys blasted up at the walls. Sharpe heard the musket shots clatter on the stone, and then he was hard under the rampart and he dropped the leading end of the ladder and rammed it into the turf and swung the other end up and over. A bloody escalade, he thought. A breach and an escalade, all in one day, and he pulled the claymore out from his belt and pushed Garrard away from the foot of the ladder. “Me first,” he growled, and began to climb. The rungs were springy and he had the terrible thought that maybe they would break after the first few men had used the ladder, and then a handful of soldiers would be trapped inside the fortress where they would be cut down by the Mahrattas, but there was no time to dwell on that fear,
just to keep climbing. The musket balls rattled the stones to left and right in a torrent of fire that had driven the defenders back from the parapet, but at any second Sharpe would be alone up there. He roared a shout of defiance, reached the top of the ladder and extended his free hand to grip the stone. He hauled himself through the embrasure. He paused, trying to get a sense of what lay beyond, but Garrard shoved him and he had no option but to spring through the embrasure.

  There was no fire step! Jesus, he thought, and jumped. It was not a long jump down, maybe eight or ten feet, for the ground was higher on the inner side of the wall. He sprawled on the turf and a musket bullet whipped over his back. He rolled, got to his feet, and saw that the defenders had low wooden platforms that they had been using to peer over the top of the wall. Those defenders were running toward him now, but they were few, very few, and already Sharpe had five redcoats on his side of the wall, and more were coming. But so was the enemy, some from the west and more from the east. “Tom! Look after those men.” Sharpe pointed westward, then he turned the other way and dragged three men into a crude rank. “Present!” he called. The muskets went up into their shoulders. “Aim low, boys,” he said. “Fire!”

  The muskets coughed out smoke. A Mahratta slid on the grass. The others turned and ran, appalled at the stream of men now crossing the wall. It was a curious mix of English skirmishers, Highland infantry, sepoys, cavalrymen and even some of Syud Sevajee’s followers in their borrowed red jackets. “Two ranks!” Sharpe shouted. “Quick now! Two ranks! Tom! What’s happening behind me?”

  “Buggers have gone, sir.”

  “Two ranks!” Sharpe shouted again. He could not see the gatehouse from here because the hill inside the wall bulged outward and hid the great ramparts from him, but the enemy was forming two hundred paces eastward. The wall’s defenders, in brown jackets, were joining a company of white-coated Cobras who must have been in reserve and those men would have to be defeated before Sharpe could hope to advance on the gatehouse. He glanced up the hill and saw nothing there except a building half hidden by trees in which monkeys gibbered. No defenders there, thank God, so he could ignore his right flank.