The Beast of Mysore (Wellington Undead Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  Wellesley turned in the saddle to look behind him, saw that the friendly artillery was being drawn forwards on its limbers and caissons, but that it much too far behind them.

  They cannot possibly be in a suitable position to support our attack by the time we close with the enemy. This will be over by the time they get a single shot off. No, his division would have to go in without artillery behind him, trusting to Floyd’s cavalry to provide support…though he had not the faintest idea where they had got to.

  The enemy-held ridge drew ever closer, and as Arthur fixed his eyes once more upon that prize, he saw that out there standing on the extreme right wing was a portly figure, dressed in such a great amount of jeweled finery that he stood out from the rest of the defensive line like a beacon.

  Well, well. The Colonel smiled what was his first genuine smile of the night, exposing the tips of his incisor teeth. Good morning, my dear Sultan.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Tipu’s face was split wide with a grin that ran from the lobe of gold-hooped ear to gold-hooped ear. Every time that a cannon fired from either his left or from his right, the pressure wave of the explosive gasses leaving the barrel slammed into his chest and made him feel so utterly alive.

  As the wheeled artillery pieces slammed backwards, only to be hauled back into position by their sweat-drenched gun crews, the Sultan got a visceral reminder of his ability to hurt the English invaders of his homeland. It was an ability that he intended to keep on using.

  Each and every ball that reduced a red-jacketed enemy to a bloody ruin elicited a growl of approval. Those shots which missed – which were becoming fewer and fewer as the British drew closer and closer – earned their crews a disappointed hiss, though none could hear over the torrent of fire that the gunners were laying down.

  Unable to contain his energy for a moment longer, Tipu prowled the length of his defensive line. Jamelia was an ever-present shadow at his side, easily matching her master’s pace with her own long and graceful stride.

  “Keep at them!” Tipu was ever-present, popping up at one gun carriage after another. “Lay into them! Spill the blood of the invader with every last ball. Show them what it means to step one foot in the territory of Mysore!”

  His presence on the battlefield is easily worth a thousand men, Jamelia reflected as she watched Tipu work his charms upon the men who served him. Just look at their faces…that look of almost rapturous adoration. They really would die for him, without hesitation, if he so much as asked it of them. They love him; and why shouldn’t they?

  The cannonade was almost constant by now, a barrage of rolling thunder that rippled across the ridgeline in no particular order. Perfectly-synchronized batteries would have fired from left to right or vice versa, but each gun captain had been given the Sultan’s permission to fire at will, just as soon as they had reloaded, and so those better-trained crews which were slightly faster at ramming, sponging out, and loading were slinging lead more quickly than their neighbors. In Jamelia’s imagination it sounded like an angry, irregular heartbeat, but a heartbeat whose sole purpose was to slaughter as many British soldiers as it possibly could.

  It was a heartbeat of which she fully approved.

  Jamelia’s roving gaze wandered outward over the slope that descended from the front of their position, following it down into the now-empty village and then further out onto the plains below. Tamar Singh had done his job beautifully; at first taunting the British general into closing the range, and then withdrawing from the village, falling back in good order towards the main defensive position on top of the ridge…and the British had followed, fools that they were, determined to take the hill at the point of their bayonets, without the faintest idea of the massed force that awaited them on the reverse slope. They had not come directly on, more was the pity, but even their attempt to swing wide of the village had not been enough to save them from being targeted by a significant portion of the enemy artillery batteries.

  It is going to be a massacre. Mysore shall become the graveyard of the British.

  A smile spread slowly across her lips at the thought.

  The first returning horse-soldiers were streaming towards her, passing easily through the gaps between cannon emplacements. So superbly trained were the cavalry mounts that they did little more than whinny at the close-range roar of the cannon, never bucking or throwing their riders.

  She was intrigued to see that several of the horsemen were double-mounted, and it took a moment for Jamelia to recognize that their passengers were captive British redcoats, their hands bound tightly behind their backs with torn strips of cloth. There were a total of six, and all were now being driven at the point of a blade to stand before the Sultan. Surprisingly, he broke into a fit of braying, snorting laughter.

  “Just look at the gift that my Tiger Horse have set before me!” he crowed, arms spread wide as if to address the entire world. “Six red lambs, lost in my lands and all alone. Where is your shepherd, little lambs?”

  The redcoats stared sullenly at their boots, hatred for the Sultan and his army self-evident in their body language. But there seem to be no fools amongst them, Jamelia thought with a sly smirk, because they are all clever enough to look none of us in the eye. They know that to challenge the Tiger of Mysore means death, and not a swift or pleasant one at that.

  “I will show you where your shepherd is, lost little lambs. Come.” Tipu was clearly warming to his theme now. He was a man who loved the sound of his own voice, and beckoned to the man with three white chevrons sewn onto the sleeve of his red jacket. When the man muttered something under his breath, the Sultan wrapped the fingers of one ring-covered fist around one of his white cross-belts, tightening his grip with almost insolent slowness, and then dragged the sergeant to the crest of the hill.

  Jerked off balance, the man moved unsteadily, his center of gravity thrown off by having both wrists bound behind his back. Instead of falling, he took three quick steps in succession, managing to just about right himself. The Sultan pretended not to notice.

  “What is your name?” the Sultan demanded. His was still grinning, but no joy reached those cold, dead eyes.

  “Belton. Nathaniel…Sergeant,” the Redcoat corrected himself quickly, mustering what little dignity he could from the deeply humiliating situation. A coldly rational voice in the back of the sergeant’s mind kept reminding him that the Sultan was not a man who was known to be merciful to his captives. Around the campfires, Nathaniel had heard stories of the Sultan feeding them to his pet tigers, or using one of his specially-trained strongmen – known as jetis – to break the prisoners’ necks, twisting each head completely around until the spine snapped. Another favored method of execution that was carried out by the jetis in Tipu’s dungeons, or so the rumors went, was that of a nail being driven into the skull of the condemned man using only the bare palm of one hand.

  You just keep your bloody mouth shut, Nathaniel. Don’t you say nothing, my boy, and you might just make it out of this pickle alive. There’s a good lad.

  “Well, Nathaniel Sergeant, do you see your comrades on the plain below us?” He used the tip of the silver-plated blade that he was carrying to point out the two wide lines of infantry who were approaching their position from the east, losing men to enemy cannon fire at a worrisome rate. The constant flares of light from the cannon barrels had rendered his night vision effectively useless, but he decided to play along, and so nodded mutely.

  Tipu looked at him sideways, finally eliciting a resentful “yes…sir…” from the man. Satisfied, the Sultan went on. “Here comes your General Harris, Nathaniel Sergeant. One cannot fault his bravery, it is true, but he is leading your fellow soldiers to their deaths. For if you look down there, directly behind us,” Tipu gestured towards the rear slope of the hill on which they stood, “stands the instrument of their destruction.”

  Nathaniel knew that there was no way Harris was going to do his own dirty work. It would be one of the general’s lesser comma
nders leading this particular attack, or maybe even Colonel Wellesley, but he did not bother to tell the Sultan that.

  When the captive sergeant turned to look in the direction pointed out by the Tipu, he could scarcely credit his eyes; for at the foot of the reverse slope, completely hidden from the view of the approaching British column – was a natural bowl in the ground, and that depression was crammed to bursting with a mass of enemy infantry. Infantry and…bloody hell, are those elephants?

  Two conflicting imperatives warred within Nathaniel Belton at that moment. One was the fierce pride and sense of duty that was instilled in almost every decent British soldier, particularly those who had attained any sort of rank or responsibility; that one was telling him to run, to make a break for it, the risks be damned. Somebody had to let the officers know what was waiting for them back there. Realistically, he knew that he wouldn’t get very far before one of the tiger-soldiers put a musket ball in his back, but it was his duty to at least try.

  Then, on the other hand, there was the entirely human instinct towards self-preservation, the silkily smooth-voiced little demon that sat on his shoulder and whispered into his ear: Give up. You’re out of this battle, caught and captured fair and square. It’s not your fight any more. Resist, and this mad, fat little bastard will either have you killed outright, or turn you over to his bloody torturers. It’s not like you owe the bigwigs anything, is it? You’ve done your duty. Let somebody else run the risks now.

  But then a very queer thing happened. For just a moment, Nathaniel Belton had managed to shut out all of the world surrounding him, having become entirely focused on the tug o’ war between those two conflicting urges: try to escape from captivity and warn his comrades that they were marching into a trap, or to sit quietly, shut up, do what he was told, and hope to somehow get out of this mess alive. But then a third voice intruded, and it was one that, try as he might, he could not ignore, because it was accompanied by the stare of two mercilessly cold red eyes.

  “If the enemy should reach you before I do…be sure to give a good account of yourselves.”

  Shit.

  The colonel.

  You’d be better off dead than a disappointment to Wellesley.

  Looking desperately about him, Nathaniel tried to catch his bearings. The Sultan seemed entranced by the advancing line of redcoats, no doubt gleefully contemplating the damage his soldiers were about to inflict on them. Forgotten in his reverie, the Tipu held the gleaming blade loosely at his side, its tip lightly brushing the dirt. An 18-pounder battery stood some twenty yards to their left, its crew entirely focused on serving the guns and laying fire on the enemy below. And to his right…

  At first, Nathaniel wasn’t sure whether or not to believe what his eyes were screaming at him. Still more members of the Mysore horse were straggling in through the gap, and beyond them was a breathtakingly beautiful Indian woman. Her affect was one of constantly watchful readiness, and he noticed that her gaze never stopped roaming for even an instant, though her gaze seemed to be ever on the Sultan. But as beautiful as this tigress was, she wasn’t the cause of Nathaniel’s sudden start.

  Because off in the near distance, our there in front of the enemy army’s right flank, was a second line of redcoats, advancing at the quick march. They were on a collision course, climbing the western slope and angling directly towards the right flank of the Sultan’s defensive position.

  Nathaniel had no problem recognizing the aristocratic figure sitting proudly astride the grey Arabian stallion. This was the second time this night that the sergeant had been on the receiving end of those burning red eyes. For just an instant, he could have sworn that Wellesley was looking straight at him, was seeing into the very depths of his soul, measuring that which he found there...and was finding him wanting.

  “If the enemy should reach you before I do…be sure to give a good account of yourselves.”

  The 18-pounder thundered again, and a cloud of dirty smoke enveloped not only himself and the Sultan, but also his female watchdog. For just this one fleeting moment, the full extent of his world was a fog of grey and white.

  You’ll not find Nathaniel Belton wanting.

  He suddenly pivoted to the right on the balls of both feet, lining himself up as best he could with where he thought the line of Wellesley’s Redcoats was.

  Then he bolted.

  Engulfed in the smoke from an 18-pounder, Tipu coughed and spluttered. That had been a particularly forceful blast, plenty of powder behind that ball. He approved. The more powder, the more force to hurl chunks of metal death at the face of his enemies.

  Moving a little further down the line to his right, he absently brandished the beautifully-crafted tulwar, whose curved blade was inlaid heavily with flecks of silver. Behind him, Jamelia shivered. Just the mere thought of that blade accidentally brushing against her skin made her blood run cold. Its merest touch could be fatal to one such as she.

  It was then that she saw them.

  “Your Majesty.” The Sultan was standing with arms folded, engrossed once more by the actions of the 18-pounder’s gun crew. His eyes eagerly followed every motion they made, watching with rapt attention as the barrel was sponged out with filthy cold water, making the heated copper sizzle angrily. The spiking of a powder bag and the ramming of the cannon’s payload down into the barrel, performed as a dance by the team of shirtless artillerymen who had all repeated these same actions time and time again. Muscles flexed beneath their gleaming brown skin as the men primed the cannon with its next payload. “Your Majesty!”

  “Mmm?” His reverie broken, Tipu turned to see what was so urgent as to demand his immediate attention. He followed Jamelia’s outstretched arm to where it pointed out across the ridgeline and towards the extreme right-hand side of their defensive line. It took a moment for him to see what she was getting at, and then suddenly a breeze gusted across the position, clearing a temporary hole in the foul-smelling smoke, and he saw them: two wide lines of the unmistakable figures in bright red jackets overlaid with white cross-belts, their muskets held at the carry and tipped with wicked-looking blades.

  That was not all. Running towards them like some sort of crazed dervish was the captive English sergeant. Having his hands bound behind his back meant that the Englishman was forced to bend forwards at the waist, but the man’s desperation was giving him some real momentum, Tipu saw. The sergeant’s legs pumped hard, fueled by a sudden burst of adrenaline. His boots kicked up dust and loose stones as they pounded the rough and uneven ground.

  Tipu uttered a curse that was vaguely blasphemous, but then quickly realized his error and immediately asked forgiveness of The Prophet for his momentary indiscretion. “The British are moving to flank us on both sides,” the Sultan hissed, his sense of smug invincibility suddenly displaced by a nagging but nonetheless very real feeling of doubt. “Infantry. Infantry! On your feet, you dogs, and prepare to advance. Harris seeks to turn our right flank! We shall attack them first, sweep them from this hill as we would sweep a pile of fallen leaves.”

  Down in the bowl at the base of the hill, the tiger-striped foot soldiers began to shoulder their packs and clamber to their feet. The remaining British prisoners cowered mutely where he had left them, heads down. Well, there would be no more escapes from amongst this lot.

  “Jamelia, attend to the prisoners,” Tipu snapped. “Have them escorted to the rear - and if any of them resist…”He gave them his best glare from beneath a stern brow, and then slowly drew one outstretched finger across his throat and grinned wolfishly. The message was unmistakable.

  Jamelia narrowed her eyes. She could see the Sultan’s infantry mustering below her. There was no need to worry, she reasoned. Some of Tipu’s prime troops were posted at this end of the line. They would give the redcoats a fight to remember.

  Twenty feet away on the back side of the slope, four members of the Sultan’s personal Tiger Guard were lurking in the shadow of a tree, watching their master’s back just as she had
trained them to do. Jamelia snapped her fingers, summoning them to her side. All four carried loaded muskets, one of which she took with an outstretched hand. A quick inspection revealed exactly what she had expected: the musket was well-maintained, loaded, and primed. Bringing the stock up and pulling it tightly into her right shoulder, she swung the barrel up as well and took careful aim at the fleeing English sergeant.

  The man was at extreme range for a musket shot, even one fired by as proficient a sharpshooter as Jamelia was. It would be a difficult shot.

  Difficult, but not impossible.

  Jamelia waited for the redcoat’s broad back to pop up in just the right location once again. When it did, she led the target slightly, correcting for the light breeze that she felt caressing her left cheek and the anticipated drop of the ball over distance, and started to track the man with the weapon’s primitive sights. Taking one final breath, she let half of it out. Her index finger squeezed the trigger, rather than snatching at it as a novice would. The musket bucked in her firm grip, the muzzle going up in the air just a few inches as Jamelia absorbed the recoil.

  Tipu shook his head, already halfway-convinced that the shot had been futile. But then his jaw dropped in amazement. Jamelia answered him with a silent, coldly satisfied smile.

  The body of the British sergeant was sprawled out, flat on its face. He did not move a muscle.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Backed by five battalions of sepoy foot-soldiers, Colonel Arthur Wellesley and the men of the 33rd pushed on hard towards their enemy’s right flank. It was nothing less than miraculous that the Sultan’s artillery had not opened fire on them yet, he knew. The brief feeling of good fortune that accompanied that particular thought was quickly washed away when he reminded himself sternly that Baird’s men were paying the price for his own lack of harassment.