Sharpe's Fortress s-3

by Бернард Корнуэлл

  «Hurry!» Bappoo shouted, and his men pushed on up the hill, but still the gates did not open.

  The British fire became heavier. Redcoats were lining the hilltop now and pouring musket fire into the ravine. Bullets ricocheted from the stone sides and flicked down into the press of men. Panic began to infect them, and Bappoo shouted at them to be calm and return the fire, while he pushed through the throng to discover why the Inner Fort's gates were closed.

  «Dodd!» he shouted as he came close.

  "Dodd!»

  Colonel Dodd's face appeared above the rampart. He looked quite calm, though he said nothing.

  "Open the gate! " Bappoo shouted angrily.

  Dodd's response was to raise the rifle to his shoulder.

  Bappoo stared up into the muzzle. He knew he should run or twist away, but the horror of fate kept him rooted to the path.

  "Dodd?" he said in puzzlement, and then the rifle was blotted out by the smoke of its discharge.

  The bullet struck Bappoo on the breastbone, shattering it and driving scraps of bone deep into his heart. The Prince took two shuddering breaths and then was dead.

  His men gave a great wail as the news of their Prince's death spread, and then, unable to endure the plunging fire from the Outer Fort, and denied entrance to the Inner, they fled west towards the road which dropped to the plain.

  But the road was blocked. The Highlanders of the 78th were nearing its summit and they now saw a great panicked mass surging towards them.

  The Scotsmen had endured the artillery fire of the Outer Fort during their long climb, but now those guns had been abandoned. To their right the cliffs soared up to the Inner Fort, while to their left was a precipice above a dizzying gorge.

  There was only room for twelve men to stand abreast on the road, but Colonel Chalmers, who led the 78th, knew that was space enough. He formed his leading half-company into three ranks with the front row kneeling.

  "You'll fire by ranks, " he said quietly.

  The panicked defenders ran towards the kilted Highlanders, who waited until every shot could kill.

  "Front rank, fire! " Chalmers said.

  The muskets started, and one by one the three ranks fired, and the steady fusillade tore into the approaching fugitives. Some tried to turn and retreat, but the press behind was too great, and still the relentless fire ripped into them, while behind them redcoats came down from the Outer Fort to attack their rear.

  The first men jumped off the cliff, and their terrible screams faded as they plunged down to the rocks far beneath. The road was thick with bodies and running with blood.

  "Advance twenty paces! " Chalmers ordered.

  The Highlanders marched, halted, knelt and began firing again.

  Bappoo's survivors, betrayed by Dodd, were trapped between two forces. They were stranded in a hell above emptiness, a slaughter in the high hills. There were screams as men tumbled to their deaths far beneath and still the fire kept coming. It kept coming until there was nothing left but quivering men crouching in terror on a road that was rank with the stench of blood, and then the redcoats moved forward with bayonets.

  The Outer Fort had fallen and its garrison had been massacred.

  And William Dodd, renegade, was Lord of Gawilghur.

  CHAPTER 10

  Mister Hakeswill was not sure whether he was a lieutenant in William Dodd's eyes, but he knew he was a Mister and he dimly apprehended that he could be much more. William Dodd was going to win, and his victory would make him ruler of Gawilghur and tyrant of all the wide land that could be seen from its soaring battlements. Mister Hakeswill was therefore well placed, as Dodd's only white officer, to profit from the victory and, as he approached the palace on Gawilghur's summit, Hakeswill was already imagining a future that was limited only by the bounds of his fancy. He could be a rajah, he decided.

  "I shall have an harem, " he said aloud, earning a worried look from his Havildar.

  "An harem I'll have, all of me own. Bibbis in silk, but only when it's cold, eh? Rest of the time they'll have to be naked as needles." He laughed, scratched at the lice in his crotch, then lunged with his sword at one of the peacocks that decorated the palace gardens.

  "Bad luck, them birds, " Hakeswill told the Havildar as the bird fled in a flurry of bright severed feathers.

  "Bad luck, they are. Got the evil eye, they do. Know what you should do with a peacock? Roast the bugger. Roast it and serve it with 'taters. Very nice, that."

  "Yes, sahib, " the Havildar said nervously. He was not certain he liked this new white officer whose face twitched so compulsively, but Colonel Dodd had appointed him and the Colonel could do no wrong as far as the Havildar was concerned.

  "Haven't tasted a 'tater in months, " Hakeswill said wistfully.

  "Christian food, that, see? Makes us white."

  "Yes, sahib."

  "And I won't be sahib, will I? Your highness, that's what I'll be. Your bleeding highness with a bedful of bare bibb is His face twitched as a bright idea occurred to him.

  "I could have Sharpie as a servant.

  Cut off his goo lies first, though. Snip snip." He bounded enthusiastically up a stone staircase, oblivious of the sound of gunfire that had erupted in the ravine just north of the Inner Fort. Two Arab guards moved to bar the way, but Hakeswill shouted at them.

  "Off to the walls, you scum! No more shirking! You ain't guarding the royal pisspot any longer, but has to be soldiers. So piss off!»

  The Havildar ordered the two men away and, though they were reluctant to abandon their post, they were overawed by the number of bayonets that faced them. So, just like the guards who had stood at the garden gate, they fled.

  "So now we look for the little fat man, " Hakeswill said, 'and give him a bloodletting."

  "We must hurry, sahib, " the Havildar said, glancing back at the wall above the ravine where the gunners were suddenly at work.

  "God's work can't be hurried, " Hakeswill answered, pulling at one of the latticed doors that led into the palace, 'and Colonel Dodd will die of old age on that wall, sonny. Ain't a man alive who can get through that gate, and certainly not a pack of bleeding Scotchmen. Bugger this door."

  He raised his right foot and battered down the locked lattice with his boot.

  Hakeswill had expected a palace dripping with gold, festooned with silk and paved with polished marble, but Gawilghur had only ever been a summer refuge, and Berar had never been as wealthy as other Indian states, and so the floors were common stone, the walls were painted in lime wash and the curtains were of cotton. Some fine furniture of ebony inlaid with ivory stood in the hallway, but Hakeswill had no eye for such chairs, only for jewels, and he saw none. Two bronze jars and an iron cuspidor stood by the walls where lizards waited motionless, while a brass poker, tongs and fire shovel, cast in Birmingham, mounted on a stand and long bereft of any hearth, had pride of place in a niche. The hallway had no guards, indeed no one was in sight and the palace seemed silent except for a faint sound of choking and moaning that came from a curtained doorway at the far end of the hall. The noise of the guns was muffled. Hakeswill hefted his sword and edged towards the curtain.

  His men followed slowly, bayonets ready, eyes peering into every shadow.

  Hakeswill swept the curtain aside with the blade, and gasped.

  The Killadar, with a tulwar slung at his side and a small round shield strapped to his left arm, stared at Hakeswill above the bodies of his wives, concubines and daughters. Eighteen women were on the floor.

  Most were motionless, but some still writhed as the slow pain of the poison worked its horrors. The Killadar was in tears.

  "I could not leave them for the English, " he said.

  "What did he say?" Hakeswill demanded.

  "He preferred they should die than be dishonoured, " 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 an
d 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 bibb is 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 said 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 round 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 jewellery. 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; Mister 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 towards 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 northwards. They went without weapons, master less 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 towards the unconquered 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 pucka lees 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 towards the lean Colonel who had at last organized an assault party at the bottom of the track which slanted up towards 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!»

  Tut 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 with powder burns, with dust and sweat. They watched the destruction of the outer gate of the Inner Fo
rt 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 axe men 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 axe men 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 axe men 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 inwards.

  "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.