The Beast of Mysore (Wellington Undead Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  “Yes sir,” Arthur said at last, and was slightly surprised to realize that he truly meant it. “It has, sir.”

  “Good. It is a fine thing to hear.” Harris sounded satisfied.

  “I do have one request to make, sir.”

  “Then go ahead and make it, Colonel.”

  “I hereby request permission to lead the assault upon the city, sir -when the time comes.”

  For a moment, Arthur thought that the general would say no. His answer was only a moment in coming. “I had originally chosen another officer for that task – General Baird. David was a fierce man, who fought like a lion and could inspire the troops as none other.”

  “I…yes, sir.” What else was there to say? Baird was the ideal candidate for the job. But Baird is gone.

  “I think that the general would find your request a pleasing one, under the circumstances,” Harris continued. “Although the two of you were as different as chalk and cheese, I rather suspect that he would appreciate your leading the attack. Your request is approved, Colonel Wellesley,” he finished formally.

  “Thank you, General. I am most grateful.” Arthur felt a wave of relief wash over him, saw the opportunity to regain the face that he had lost this day.

  “Thank me if you survive. Besides, we have to batter our way inside first…”

  To the Earl of Mornington.

  Camp before Seringapatam, 18thApril 1799.

  My dear Mornington,

  On the night of the 5th we made an attack on the enemy’s outposts, which at least on my side, was not quite so successful as could have been wished. The fact was that the night was very dark, that the enemy expected us, and were strongly posted in an almost impenetrable jungle. We lost an officer killed, and others and some men wounded (of the 33rd); and at last, as I could not find out the post which it was desirable I should occupy, I was obliged to desist from the attack, the enemy also having retired from the post. In the morning they re-occupied it, and I attacked it again at daylight, and carried it with ease and little loss. In the course of the night of the 5th and the day of the 6th the General was enabled to occupy a line of posts which gave complete security to his camp until the Bombay army joined, at the same time that they enabled him to commence his operations for the siege with advantage.

  I got a slight touch on the knee, from which I have felt no inconvenience, on the night of the 5th; and I have come to a determination, when in my power, never to suffer an attack to be made by night upon an enemy who is prepared and strongly posted, and whose posts have not been reconnoitered by daylight. We remained in the posts which we occupied on the 6th till the Bombay army joined on the 14th.

  Believe me,

  ARTHUR WELLESLEY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  One of Tipu’s many favorite pastimes was that of being seen to reward bravery. Within his great hall, a handful of the men who had conducted the defense of the tope were lined up before his tiger throne in order to receive such beneficence as he deemed worthy. True, the soldiers of Mysore had been driven out of the tope later that same morning at the point of the British bayonet, but that did nothing to change the fact of them having given the upstarts a black eye the night before.

  And so it was that six men found themselves promoted, while a further five who had distinguished themselves in the face of the enemy were rewarded financially with hefty increases in pay. All of the men received a welcome bonus in the form of a handful of precious stones each. The cost was a mere drop in the bucket when considered in purely financial terms, but the effect upon his army’s morale would be incalculable, Tipu knew. The men would fight all the harder when motivated by the image of the outrageous wealth now being dangled before them.

  Three of the award winners were members of the Tiger Guard, which was only to be expected. Even more rewarding was the fact that one of them was the British deserter, Thomas Gilman. Tipu had grinned from ear to ear when he had heard of the Englishman having turned berserker and gone on a rampage through the ranks of the attacking redcoats. At least ten had perished under his claws and jaws. He was obviously taking well to his new tiger form, now that the pain of the initial transformation had passed.

  There had been muttered complaints about his having elevated a foreigner, an Englishman of all things, into the prestigious ranks of his elite personal guard; but Tipu had seen the bitter hatred present in the man’s eyes. It was why he had spared him, biting to inflict change rather than to kill. The hatred was not directed towards his captor, the Sultan, but rather back towards the British from who he had run – particularly this Colonel Wellesley, who the man seemed to despise beyond all reason.

  For his part, Thomas knelt immediately when his turn came to receive favor from the Sultan. By his reckoning, the handful of precious gems that Tipu had given him would amount to more than three years’ pay for a private soldier in the British Army. “Thank you, sir,” was all that he could think to stammer, and though his gratitude was genuine, the Sultan had already given him the greatest gift imaginable when he had bitten into his neck that night.

  Turning tiger was a painful experience, and never got any easier according to the few blokes who could talk to him in their pidgin English. But once the initial agony was over, running in the body of a hunting beast was nothing short of exhilarating, each and every second of it. His senses were more aware and alert than ever before, particularly his sense of smell, which had opened up a whole new world of olfactory pleasure to him that he had never known existed.

  Best of all, however, was the power. Slashing and rending his way through the ranks of the redcoats last night had been nothing short of orgasmic. Thomas had thought at first that killing men from his own side, even from his own regiment, would have made him feel guilty, so he was surprised to find that it had done no such thing. He had even known a couple of them personally. Jacob Dickes had been a friend of his, and he had known Corporal Steven Frost at least well enough to talk to. Yet when the moment had come in the darkness and confusion of the tope, he had seen them not as former friends or comrades, but rather as prey – something to be stalked and killed.

  That was how Thomas was starting to see most people now, no matter whose side they were on. Not “people” as such, but rather, things to be hunted. He wondered how soon after the transformation he had begun to feel this way, and realized that it had been the morning that the Tipu had released him from his cell, only to find that in the night he had butchered all six of the prisoners from the 33rd that had been shoved into captivity with him. Seeing Sergeant Belton’s cold, dead eyes staring back at him had made him feel…nothing. Nothing whatsoever.

  It was then that Thomas had known with absolute certainty: he was no longer just a man; he was far more beast now.

  “Excellent work, Private Gilman,” Tipu smiled down at him from his seat on the tiger throne. “I can only hope that you will fight as bravely when your Colonel Wellesley is knocking upon our walls, hmm?”

  “Don’t you worry about that, sir,” Thomas replied earnestly. “I’ll have the posh bastard’s throat out meself, sir, if you’ll just give your leave.”

  Tipu’s grin grew even broader, if such a thing were possible. “My leave is given, Private Gilman.”

  “Yes, sir.” Thomas grinned back, in a rather more feral way.

  The Sultan clapped his hands together twice, signifying that the audience was over. His Tiger Guard ushered the newly-rewarded soldiers out, leaving him alone with Jamelia. Tipu wondered whether her foul mood persisted.

  “The British are emplacing their artillery even as we speak, my dear,” he said casually, testing the emotional waters. “I expect that they will begin to knock upon our door in the very near future.”

  “We may still hold them until the monsoons come.” Jamelia stepped out into the light from where she had been lurking behind the gargantuan throne.

  “We may.” Tipu sounded noncommittal. “Does that still hurt, my dear?” He stared meaningfully at her throat. It now
bore two livid, angry scars, one on each side of her neck. Yet rather than hide them behind a tasteful scarf or some other suitably fashionable article, Jamelia wore the puckered scars proudly, as befit her warrior heritage.

  “Taking the sword out did,” she said, with a surprising lack of anger in her tone. “But you may be assured that I will return it to the English officer at the first opportunity. Point first,” she added.

  “Do you know his name?” Tipu wondered aloud. Jamelia nodded.

  “Gilman has spoken of him. It is Wellesley, the colonel.”

  Tipu had suspected as much, though he had been careful to say nothing out loud. His dreams had been troubled of late, and this man Wellesley had made an appearance in several. The dream was always the same. Tipu was surrounded by a close, humid darkness that clung to him in the manner of a cloak. The stench of bodily waste was all around him. When he tried to stand, his legs refused to obey, forcing him to sit with his back against some sort of barrier, though of what sort he could not say.

  The only other thing that he could see in the darkness was a gleaming blade, too long to be a knife. It slowly came closer, growing larger with every step of the shadowy figure that wielded it. That figure was Colonel Arthur Wellesley. The vampire took long, slow steps towards him, and all the while Tipu was powerless to either fight or to flee. Finally, the creature was standing over him, twin red eyes glowing as they fixed their baleful glare upon him.

  It was always at that particular moment that he awoke in a cold sweat, bed-linens drenched and sticking to his body.

  Why was it always this Wellesley? Tipu could not help but wonder. Wellesley, who had crushed his right flank at Mallavelly. How had a mere colonel achieved such prominence in an army of generals? For the British had generals for everything: commanding generals, generals of cavalry, of artillery, of infantry, of engineers…Tipu had even heard that the British had a general whose sole task was to oversee the army’s supplies and pay, a meaningless proposition if ever he had heard one. Tipu’s own soldiers had not been paid for the past three months, and nothing much had come of it other than the odd grumble, and those men he fed to his tigers.

  “I have heard of this Wellesley. I saw him from a distance at Mallavelly. He must have fought well indeed to get a blade into you.”

  “The vampire fought well,” Jamelia conceded, absently tracing the length of the scar along the left side of her neck. “He will not find things quite so easy the next time that we meet.”

  The Sultan locked eyes with her, and she saw that all traces of humor were now gone.

  “See that he does not, my dear. See that he does not.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Sieges are traditionally a long, drawn-out business, and the siege of Seringapatam was turning out to be no different, Arthur reflected as he and the senior officers accompanied General Harris on horseback to oversee the present state of affairs. Nevertheless, every man in the British fighting force had worked hard and been kept busy as the days had turned slowly into weeks.

  The tope had easily fallen to what was now universally known as “Baird’s Scottish Brigade” the morning after the 33rd had been so bloodily repulsed, in a daylight attack led by flesh-and-blood officers. Over the course of the following week, the pioneers and engineers had begun to dig their trench lines, working their way steadily forwards, inching towards Seringapatam with every shovelful of dirt. In a stroke of good fortune, the army that was under the command of the vampire Lieutenant-General James Stuart that had been dispatched from Bombay some weeks ago arrived to join them just one week after they had secured the tope and aqueduct, guided and escorted in by a force of Harris’s cavalry. The two armies wasted no time in consolidating their supplies, pooling what resources they had brought with them and helping to make up for some of the losses incurred at Mallavelly.

  In life, George Harris had been a methodical man, rarely given to acting on impulse. He had changed little after receiving the Dark Gift, and so the progress of the siege in its first week was at first measured in yards of trench dug towards the Sultan’s island fortress. Tipu had established a number of fortified outposts on both the north and south sides of the River Cauvery, and the British general dare not push his siege guns to within firing distance of Seringapatam with such a threat looming over their heads; and so, Harris ordered a number of aggressive infantry attacks, amply supported by cavalry and artillery fire, with the intent of clearing these enemy strongholds out for good.

  Wellesley was only peripherally involved with these engagements, as Harris felt that his organizational talents could be put to far better use in arranging the planning and logistical elements of the siege itself. “I have plenty of competent line commanders,” Harris put it bluntly, “but few with the talent for arranging all of the pieces into place like General Close and yourself, Wellesley.” Arthur had been hard-pressed to argue the point, and so it was that as the battalions of redcoats and sepoys chased the Tipu’s men from both the northern and southern banks of the Cauvery, he found himself caught up in the minutiae of supply and demand. By the time the army had spent three weeks encamped on the Sultan’s doorstep, food supplies were beginning to run worryingly short.

  “The situation is not yet desperate, sir,” Arthur had reported to Harris after an entire evening spent calculating the food reserves, “but the assault upon our baggage train by the Sultan’s beasts reduced our transportation capacity enough that we were forced to leave some food behind. Our consumables are beginning to run out.”

  Fighting down a surge of annoyance and wondering why he was only hearing of this now, Harris let out his frustration in a long breath. “How much longer?” he demanded.

  “Three more weeks, sir; the men are already on half-rations, and I should hesitate to cut them further.”

  The two exchanged a knowing look. The last thing they wanted was to send weak and hungry men up against the walls of Seringapatam.

  “Then we shall have to take the city within three weeks…two, if we can manage it. That’s all there is to it.”

  Harris’s plan had worked like a charm, and in no time at all the British had established dominance on both sides of the river. A smaller offshoot of the main river broke off and ran parallel to the South Cauvery, directly in front of the British lines. Showing a remarkable lack of imagination, it had been named the Little Cauvery. The general had been somewhat concerned about one particular strongpoint located along its banks, an abandoned mill that the Sultan’s men had fortified and reinforced.

  “It looks like a tough nut to crack,” Harris had remarked grimly as he watched the 73rd fix their bayonets in preparation for their early evening attack. Yet remarkably, it had not been difficult at all. Colonel Sherbrooke had arranged for the artillery to soften the building up while his men, reinforced by native Indian troops, had made their approach. The tiger-soldiers inside had been halfway-concussed by the constant rain of cannon-balls by the time the redcoats arrived on their doorstep. It was nothing less than a slaughter. Sherbrooke himself had butchered at least fifty of the enemy, his soldiers told anybody who would listen, half with his blade and half with his incredible strength. The men of the 73rd had wet their bayonets in the blood of the tiger, and their colonel had drained it aplenty from the still-warm corpses of his vanquished foes.

  More attacks followed. A strong concentration of the Sultan’s troops had been deployed around the stone bridge that spanned the Little Cauvery. Now that the mill had been taken, this particular boil was the next to be lanced. Arthur had been growing more than a little weary of the constant stream of planning and preparation, and went to Harris in order to request a chance to lead the assault. In truth, he expected the general to refuse him, and so was pleasantly surprised when the senior officer agreed.

  “Take a brigade across at nightfall, Wellesley, and see the buggers off,” was as detailed an instruction as Arthur was to be given. “And make sure that you take an ample supply of entrenching tools,” the general contin
ued. “See ‘em off, and then dig in. I want to see trenches running all the way up to the South Cauvery before the sun comes up – understood?”

  It took a conscious effort of will in order for Arthur to conceal his delight. This was his chance to atone for the tope, he realized; a chance to test his ability to lead infantry troops once more.

  It was a test that he passed with flying colors. Riding high atop Diomed, Arthur divided his attacking force into two halves. Content to let their experienced commanding officers lead the actual assault, he simply kept pace with the rear of first one column and then trotted across to the other, keeping a watchful eye on things but seeing no reason to interfere. The tiger-soldiers put up little resistance, and shortly after making contact with the redcoats for the first time that evening, the Sultan’s men were splashing their way back to Seringapatam island.

  The redcoats were all for pursuing them, but their enthusiasm was suddenly dampened by the sound of a cannon firing from atop the city’s western wall. The heavy shot plowed through the ranks of the 74th, making short work of three privates and a corporal.

  “Dig in!” Wellesley ordered, as the guns and rockets of Seringapatam began to awaken. The British troops dug like men possessed, slinging muskets across their backs and attacking the very ground itself as though it were an enemy to be conquered. By the time that he returned to his coffin at sunrise, Arthur was as pleased as punch at the realization that his troops had pushed their trenches to the very shore of the Cauvery itself.