Goddess of the Dead (Wellington Undead Book 2)

by Richard Estep

  “Grenadiers: reload!”

  Thank God for Sergeant Pace. In the heat of the moment, he had completely forgotten that the men’s muskets were dry. This is how a good NCO saves his officer, Colin thought ruefully. Ramrods flashed as the men pushed a fresh load down into the barrels of their muskets and poured in a gunpowder charge to propel it.

  While he was waiting, Colin ran a shaking hand through his sweat-soaked hair and looked out across the gateway towards the neighboring bastion. Pace was there at his shoulder.

  “The 74th are doing well, sir,” he said with grudging approval. Wallace’s men had thrown a pair of scaling ladders against their bastion, and the bearskin-wearing Highlanders were getting stuck in to the defenders with boot and bayonet alike.

  “Aye, a magnificent job of it they’ve done, right enough,” Campbell agreed, “and it’s time we capitalized on our success.”

  With that, the determined lieutenant tightened his grip on the claymore’s hilt and led his men down the stone steps into the bastion’s black heart.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Repulsion

  The vanguard of the 33rd may have taken less fire than their comrades in the 74th and the 78th, but that did not mean that they hadn’t suffered losses. Roundshot fired from cannon and a constant volume of musketry had taken their toll, thinning the ranks and leaving behind a steady stream of the dead and wounded.

  Despite the bloodshed, the redcoats simply gritted their teeth and leaned into the six-pounded cannon, pushing and pulling it in equal measure, getting closer to the pettah wall’s main gate with every hard-fought step.

  Watching intently through his field telescope, their general silently urged them on. Diomed must somehow be sensing his master’s agitation, he realized, because the grey stallion was suddenly skittish. Arthur attempted to calm him with a few gentle pats from a cold hand.

  Come on, Connolly…come on!

  Never could he recall a time when he had felt so impotent. It was one thing to lead the charge oneself, Arthur reflected, facing the enemy head-on with sword in hand; it was something else entirely when you were the commander, forced to sit back and watch helplessly while other men — disposable men — fought and died in accordance with the orders that you had just given.

  The additional load of the cannon had caused the 33rd to lag behind the Scottish regiments. As soon as their column got to within musket-range of Ahmednuggur, Colonel Connolly formed them into line of battle. Obediently, the troops pushed out towards the flanks in an expanding red line that thinned as it extended to both the left and to the right at the same time. In the center, more or less, came the six-pound cannon, the key with which they would brutally unlock the gates to the city.

  It suddenly became apparent to the vampire colonel that the enemy fire was beginning to ebb in strength. Looking up, he scanned the pettah walls quickly. The line of white-garbed soldiers was conspicuously thinner than it had been just a few moments ago.

  Then he saw why.

  Infantrymen from the 74th and 78th were swarming up the ladders into their respective bastions, facing only minimal opposition from further down the ramparts, and more importantly, none whatsoever from on top of each tower. Several piles of dead bodies lay clustered around the base of each scaling ladder, serving as mute testament to the ferocity of the enemy defense just moments before.

  Flashes of brilliant light from within the firing loops partway up the bastion suggested to him that Harness and Wallace’s men were sweeping the enemy from each room of the bastion, which indeed they were; although some of the Arab mercenaries were shot down in brief exchanges of fire inside the close confines of the towers, the majority were killed or ejected at the point of a bayonet.

  Splattered with blood from head to toe, Lieutenant Colin Campbell stepped over the body of the last mercenary to unsuccessfully defend his bastion and opened the ground-level door with a swift kick. The door flew back on its hinges, revealing an open stretch of ground inside the pettah walls that led towards a series of buildings.

  Campbell and Pace were ten steps into the open, their troops following closely behind them, when they realized that it was swarming with enemy troops.

  Based upon their uniforms, which were more formal than those of the soldiers that had been manning the walls, Campbell judged these to be regulars from one of Scindia’s compoos. They had obviously been laying in wait for the British soldiers to penetrate the city defenses, and now was their moment to strike.

  An officer barked a command in the local language which Colin could not decipher; based on the fact that somewhere in the region of a hundred matchlocks came up into the mens’ shoulders, he was fairly confident that the word meant ‘aim.’

  This is it. We are going to die here, in this narrow stretch of killing ground.

  Damn it…

  Double-shotted

  “One last effort, my lads! Three…two…one…heave!”

  Colonel Connolly was glad that, along with several other bodily functions that he found rather distasteful, he was no longer capable of sweating. The same could not be side of the men under his command, particularly those who were charged with maneuvering the six-pound cannon into position.

  With muskets slung over their shoulders by the strap, the small group of redcoats strained until their backs and legs felt fit to burst, while their fellow soldiers maintained line of battle formation and traded shots with those few enemy defenders still manning the pettah walls.

  Two of his vampire captains had even pitched in, despite the distasteful nature of what to all intents and purposes could be considered manual labor; but even with the boost provided by two supernatural entities, it had been a long, painful, and above all else a slow process to manhandle the weapon up the length of the road that led to the main gate.

  Finally, with a definite air of anti-climax, the flared muzzle of the six-pounder kissed the heavy wooden door.

  “Stand aside!” The sergeant in charge of the gun was on loan from an East India Company artillery unit. He waved the men away with both hands. They hurried to obey, not wanting their soft flesh to be anywhere near the carnage that was about to take place. “Take cover!”

  All of a sudden, or so it seemed, the sergeant found himself standing alone, with just the cannon and burning port-fire in his hand to keep him company. The red-jacketed men of the 33rd had scattered, most of them pressing their bodies against the outer stone of the pettah walls in an attempt to shield themselves from the shrapnel that they knew was soon to come their way.

  Hesitantly, with his heart in his mouth, the artillery sergeant brought the flame of the portfire into contact with precisely the correct spot to ignite the big gun’s primer. It flashed and sizzled.

  The sergeant turned and sprinted for all that he was worth.

  Into the Pettah

  Lieutenant Colin Campbell watched the man that he presumed was the Maratha commander open his mouth in preparation to give the command for his men to open fire.

  Then the world exploded in noise and fury.

  The pettah gate was made of thick wood that was reinforced with bands of iron running horizontally across its length, none of which made the slightest bit of difference to a double-shotted cannon firing into them at point-blank range.

  Campbell felt the percussive shock wave slam into him like a hammer blow, driving him backwards several steps. Fortunately for him, the rounded corner of the stone bastion shielded both he and Pace from the hailstorm of shrapnel that was flung outward when the gate was smashed into smithereens, disintegrating as though struck a blow by some vengeful titan.

  The Maratha soldiers were not so fortunate. Most of them had formed an irregular line directly in front of the gate, the better to take both bastion inner doorways under their fire. Their commanding officer had not anticipated the British actually breaking through the gateway itself, and in the heat of battle none had communicated the existence of the six-pounder to him.

&nb
sp; Splinters of wood, fragments of metal shrapnel, and lastly two heavy cannonballs exploded into the white-jacketed Maratha ranks. The white almost immediately turned to vivid red as hundreds of puncture wounds erupted, spraying blood and tissue in every direction.

  One unlucky Maratha standing in the second rank managed to escape the torrent of destruction due to being shielded from the blast by the man in front, only to be blinded by bone fragments that were propelled from the same soldier’s shattered skull. His eyes began to weep tears of hot blood, streaming across his cheekbones and down his neck.

  To a man, the entire mass of Maratha soldiers was stunned. Campbell, never one to miss an opportunity whenever one should present itself, decided to seize the moment.

  “Come on, Grenadiers – let’s have at ‘em!” He swung the claymore in a circle above his head, then launched himself into a charge towards the enemy lines.

  “Into the bastards, lads!” Pace yelled, putting on a burst of speed in order to keep up with his new company commander. In his experience, officers had a way of getting in over their heads if there wasn’t a capable NCO around to keep an eye on them.

  The 33rd’s Grenadier Company needed no further prompting, streaming down the inner staircase of the bastion that they had paid such a hefty price in blood to take. They fanned out into the open space beyond the doorway and without any ceremony, lowered their bayonets and got stuck into the dazed enemy ranks.

  Led by Colonel Connolly, their brothers swarmed through the smoking ruins of the main gateway and into the town itself. It became nothing less than a massacre, as was traditional throughout military history when a fortified settlement dared to resist its besiegers. The men of an attacking force who had lost friends and comrades in taking the prize usually made the inhabitants suffer greatly in terms of violence, theft, and rape.

  Bayonets and swords rose and fell, cutting a bloody swathe through those few Maratha soldiers left standing. The 33rd was nothing less than a superbly-trained killing machine; it had been honed to that level of perfection by their former colonel, Arthur Wellesley. With the pettah ramparts in the process of being mopped up by the 74th and the 78th, Connolly’s men focused their attention on taking the settlement itself.

  A quarter of an hour later, Wellesley eased Diomed through the still-smoking ruins of the arched gateway. Lieutenant Hunter and a brace of subalterns accompanied him at a respectful distance. The six-pounder sat abandoned, having done its job with a single blast. Scores of dead bodies filled the space behind the pettah walls, and although he found that the sight of the fallen in the aftermath of a battle usually brought on a deep melancholy within him, Arthur was at least gratified to note that there were far more white uniforms than red.

  Of Jamelia – if, indeed, Jamelia it actually was – he saw no sign.

  They began to sweep from door-to-door, meeting surprisingly little organized resistance. Here and there, a few pockets of Arab mercenaries tried to make a fight of it, usually a last stand within a building, but a short, violent response by the redcoats soon put an end to such minor irritations.

  A few of the more fortunate mercenaries had managed to escape into the fortress itself, but the majority were either forced to surrender, or were killed during the process of pacification.

  “Lieutenant Hunter.”

  “Sir?”

  “From the sounds of it, the town is well on the way to being cleared. My compliments to Colonels Harness, Wallace, and Connolly; you will instruct them to stamp out all resistance and, when the sun rises, direct their junior officers to search this place with the utmost care and thoroughness. The men will go room-by-room if necessary. I want the enemy killadar found and brought to me by any means necessary. Is that clear?”

  “Yes, sir!” Hunter rode back to his fellows in order to disseminate the General’s orders.

  Dismounting, Arthur bade Diomed to stay. He walked across to the nearest knot of dead men, their corpses shredded by a mixture of fragmentation trauma and wounds inflicted by the redcoats. The vampire’s eyes glowed redly as he focused upon their uniforms. It wasn’t difficult to tell the mercenaries from Scindia’s regulars; the trousers and tunics of the latter were far more, well, uniform than the more diverse garb of the former.

  He moved on cautiously through the darkness, following the line of the inner walls and trusting to his hyper-acute senses and the sword belted at his hip to protect him from danger. There was no way that a battalion of even the best fighting men and a few companies of mercenaries could have defended fortifications of this length; there was simply too much distance to cover, and the possibility of a flanking attack could not have been discounted, which meant that any remotely competent killadar would have been forced to post a portion of their force in the rear to guard against such an eventuality.

  Outlined starkly against the darkness, white-uniformed bodies hung limply over the firesteps on the rampart above, silent testament to the marksmanship of the British picquets. In the distance, Wellesley could hear the crackle of musketry, but already it was growing fainter and less intense. The resistance was collapsing, he knew, yet the bodies he had seen were almost entirely those of the Arab mercenaries. Precious few of the regulars lay dead among them on the ground or up on the walls.

  Which meant that there was almost a battalion of men unaccounted for…not to mention their mysterious commander.

  Slipping the Noose

  Conventional military wisdom has always held that the most difficult maneuver for any commander to pull off effectively is the withdrawal in the face of the enemy.

  Jamelia therefore felt rather pleased with herself. After leaving behind a small rearguard force — little more than a token, really — she had successfully gathered the remainder of her battalion and extricated them from all contact with the attacking forces, pulling them back into the heart of the township.

  The men behaved with absolute professionalism, and in truth, Jamelia had expected nothing less. During her tenure as their commander, she had taken an already outstanding body of troops and, through the rigorous application of hard training and firm but fair discipline, honed them to the sharpness of a razor.

  “That was smartly done, Bindusar,” she commended her second-in-command. The diminutive little officer acknowledged her compliment with a curt nod, his roving eyes concentrating on the shadows, scanning them for potential threats in the manner of a true professional. Although his tulwar still rested in its scabbard, he was able to draw it in the blink of an eye, should the situation require it.

  Bindusar’s small stature — he stood at somewhere around the five foot mark — belied his capabilities as a commander of fighting men. The man had a natural talent for leadership that was rare enough, Jamelia reflected as they marched northward through the interior of the pettah. She had been truly fortunate to inherit him as her second.

  From far off in the distance, the sound of gunfire crackled at their backs. With their escalade complete, the British were pushing their way further into the city.

  They may not hold the fortress - yet - but the pettah is as good as lost. Little sense in throwing good men after bad.

  Fortunately, Wellesley had not wanted a siege, or so it seemed. Rather than surround the fortress and pettah with his soldiers, the vampire general had simply pushed his men straight at the main gate of the pettah, apparently willing to pay any price in the blood of his men in order to see the job done.

  Blood runs freely for those such as he, she thought bitterly, his men little more than mere cattle or pawns in the furtherance of his damned ambitions!

  With their muskets slung and their blades holstered, the battalion of white-uniformed Maratha warriors emerged from the closeness of the dark and shadowy streets and converged on an open stretch of bare ground. Just two hundred yards in front of them, Jamelia was greatly relieved to see that the rear gate was not only still in friendly hands, but also uncontested. A small contingent of Arab mercenaries — just ten, b
y her admittedly quick counting — had been posted there. Each man fingered his matchlock somewhat nervously, some of them flinching as the sounds of musketry drew nearer. Even from this distance, their body language spoke of the men being delighted to see the Maratha soldiers arrive.

  Raising a hand to halt the battalion, Jamelia turned towards Bindusar. “There is a duty which requires my personal attention,” she said, speaking under her breath so that the men could not hear.

  “Yes, Mistress Jamelia.”

  “Lead the battalion out of the city, Bindusar. Begin an immediate forced march, before the forces of the accursed British can move to cut you off.”

  “Their cavalry may already be moving to do so.”

  “Possible, but doubtful. Although Ahmednuggur pettah will soon have fallen, that still leaves the fort to be besieged and taken. It shall be a great deal more difficult to assault than this place was. Besides, it always goes in the same way when the British take a settlement by force. There shall be looting, pillage, and…worse. You may take it from me.”

  Jamelia remembered the fall of Seringapatam as though it had only taken place yesterday. The British and native enlisted men had unleashed their animal passions on the innocent and helpless citizens of her home. Although she had not been there for the aftermath of her father’s death, reports of the humiliation and depravity that had been inflicted upon his people that night had spread far and wide.

  “No,” she continued, shaking her head, “the British shall be drunk within the hour, and good for nothing else for the remainder of the day. Their horsemen shall not trouble us.”

  “As you say, Mistress.”

  “I do say. My mission shall not take long — certainly no more than a few hours at most. March the men towards the rest of Scindia’s army. Drive them hard and do not rest before the sun is high. If all goes according to plan, I shall leave the city before daybreak and rejoin you presently.”