Sharpe's Tiger

by Bernard Cornwell

'She can't,' Sharpe said curtly. 'Tell him, Mary.'

  Mary ran to catch up. 'I'm not safe while Hakeswill's alive,' she told Lawford.

  'You could have been looked after,' Lawford suggested vaguely.

  'Who by?' Mary asked. 'A man looks after a woman in the army and he wants his price. You know that, sir.'

  'Call him Bill!' Sharpe snarled. 'Our lives might depend on it! If one of us calls him "sir" then they'll feed us to their bloody tigers.'

  'And it isn't just Hakeswill,' Mary went on. 'Sergeant Green wants to marry me now, which is at least more than Hakeswill does, but I don't want either. I just want to be left in peace with Richard.'

  'God knows,' Lawford said bitterly, 'but you've probably jumped out of the frying pan into the fire.'

  'I'll take my chances,' Mary said obstinately, though she had taken what care she could to reduce her chances of being raped. She had dressed herself in a torn dark frock and a filthy apron, both garments as drab and greasy as she could find. She had smeared ashes and dirt into her hair, but she had done nothing to disguise the lively beauty in her face. 'Besides,' she said to Lawford, 'neither you nor Richard speak any of the languages. You need me. And I brought some more food.' She hoisted the cloth bundle.

  Lawford grunted. Behind them the horizon was now marked with a pale glow that silhouetted trees and bushes. He guessed they had travelled about a dozen miles and, as the pale glow turned brighter and the dawn's light seeped across the landscape, he suggested they stop and rest. Mary's bundle held a half-dozen loaves of flat unleavened bread and had two canteens of water which they shared as their breakfast. After he had eaten, Lawford went into the bushes for privacy and, as he came back, he saw Sharpe hit Mary hard in the face. 'For God's sake, man,' Lawford shouted, 'what are you doing?'

  'Blacking my eye,' Mary answered. 'I asked him to.'

  'Dear God!' Lawford said. Mary's left eye was already swelling, and tears were running down her cheeks. 'Whatever for?'

  'Keep the buggers off her, of course,' Sharpe said. 'Are you all right, love?'

  'I'll live,' Mary said. 'You hit hard, Richard.'

  'No point in hitting softly. Didn't mean to hurt you, though.'

  Mary splashed water on her eye, then they all started walking again. They were now in an open stretch of country that was dotted with groves of bright-blossomed trees. There were no villages in sight, though they did come to an aqueduct an hour after dawn and wasted another hour trying to find a way across before simply plunging into the weed-filled water and wading through. Seringapatam lay well below the horizon, but Lawford knew the city was almost due west and he planned to angle southwards until he reached the Cauvery and then follow that river to the city.

  The Lieutenant's spirits were low. He had volunteered for this mission readily enough, but in the night it had begun to dawn on him just how risky the errand was. He felt lonely too. He was only two years older than Sharpe and he envied Sharpe Mary's companionship, and he still resented the Private's lack of deference. He did not dare express that resentment, for he knew it would be scorned, but nor did he really wish to express it, for he had discovered that he wanted Sharpe's admiration rather than his deference. Lawford wanted to prove that he was as tough as the Private, and that desire kept him stoically walking on towards the horrid unknown.

  Sharpe was equally worried. He liked Lawford, but suspected he would have to work hard to keep the Lieutenant out of trouble. He was a quick study, the Lieutenant, but so ignorant of the world's ways that he could easily betray the fact that he was no common soldier. As for the Tippoo, he was an unknown danger, but Sharpe was canny enough to know that he would have to do whatever the Tippoo's men wanted. He worried about Mary too. He had persuaded her to come on this fool's errand, and she had not taken much persuading, but now she was here Sharpe was concerned that he could not protect both her and Lawford. But despite his worries he still felt free. He was, after all, off the army's leash and he reckoned he could survive so long as Lawford made no mistake, and if Sharpe survived he knew how to prosper. The rules were simple: trust no one, be ever watchful and if trouble came hit first and hit hard. It had worked for him so far.

  Mary too had doubts. She had persuaded herself she was in love with Sharpe, but she sensed a restlessness in him that made her think he might not always be in love with her. Still, she was happier here than back with the army, and that was not just because of Sergeant Hakeswill's threat but because, although the army was the only life Mary had ever known, she sensed the world could offer her more. She had grown up in Calcutta and, though her mother had been Indian, Mary had never felt at home in either the army or in India. She was neither one thing nor the other. To the army she was a bibbi, while to the Indians she was outside their castes, and she was acceptable to neither. She was a half-breed, suspended in a purgatory of distrust, with only her looks to help her survive, and though the army was the place that provided the friendliest company, it hardly offered a secure future. Ahead of her stretched a succession of husbands, each one succeeding as the previous one was killed in battle or else died of a fever, and when she was too old to attract another man she would be left with her children to fend as best she could. Mary, just like Sharpe, wanted to find some way up and out of that fate, but how she was to do it she did not know, though this expedition at least gave her a chance to break temporarily out of the trap.

  Lawford led them to a slight hill from where, screened by flowering bushes, he scanned the country ahead. He thought he could see a gleam of water to the south and the small glimpse was sufficient to persuade him that it must be the River Cauvery. 'That way,' he said, 'but we'll have to avoid the villages.' There were two in sight, both barring the direct path to the river.

  'The villagers will see us anyway,' Mary said. 'They don't miss much.'

  'We're not here to trouble them,' Lawford said, 'so perhaps they'll leave us alone?'

  'Turn our coats, Bill,' Sharpe suggested.

  'Turn our coats?'

  'We're running, aren't we? So put your coat on back to front as a sign that you're on the run.'

  'The villagers will hardly realize the significance of that,' Lawford observed tartly.

  'Bugger the villagers,' Sharpe said. 'It's the Tippoo's bloody men I'm worried about. If those bastards see red coats, they'll shoot before they ask questions.' Sharpe had already undone his crossbelts and was shrugging off the wool coat, grunting with the pain that the exertion gave to his back. Lawford, watching, saw that blood had seeped through the thick bandages to stain the dirty shirt.

  Lawford was reluctant to turn his coat. A turned coat was a sign of disgrace. Battalions that had let the army down in battle were sometimes forced to turn their coats as a badge of shame, but once again the Lieutenant saw the wisdom of Sharpe's argument and so he stripped and turned his coat so that its grey lining was outermost. 'Maybe we shouldn't carry the muskets?" he suggested.

  'No deserter would throw away his gun,' Sharpe answered. He buckled his belt over the turned coat and picked up his gun and pack. He had carried the pack in his hand all night rather than have its weight press on his wounds. 'Are you ready?'

  'In a moment,' Lawford said, then, to Sharpe's surprise, the Lieutenant went on one knee and said a silent prayer. 'I don't pray often,' Lawford admitted as he stood, 'but maybe some help from on high would be providential today.' For today, Lawford guessed, would be the day they would meet the Tippoo's patrols.

  They walked south towards the gleam of water. All three were tired, and Sharpe was plainly weakened by the loss of blood, but anticipation gave them all a nervous energy. They skirted the nearest village, watched by cows with pendulous folds of skin hanging beneath their necks, then they walked through groves of cocoa trees as the sun climbed. They saw no one. A deer skittered away from their path in the late morning and an hour later an excited troupe of small monkeys scampered beside them. At midday they rested in the small shade offered by a grove of bamboos, then pressed on again beneath the
baking sun. By early afternoon the river was in sight and Lawford suggested they should rest on its bank. Mary's eye had swollen and blackened, giving her the grotesque look she believed would protect her.

  'I could do with a rest now,' Sharpe admitted. The pain was terrible and every step was now an agony. 'And I need to wet the bandages.'

  'Wet them?' Lawford asked.

  'That's what that bastard Micklewhite said. Said to keep the bandages damp or else the stripes won't heal.'

  'We'll wet them at the river,' Lawford promised.

  But they never reached the river bank. They were walking beside some beech trees when a shout sounded behind them and Sharpe turned to see horsemen coming from the west.

  They were fine-looking men in tiger-striped tunics and with spiring brass helmets who couched their lances and galloped hard towards the three fugitives. Sharpe's heart pounded. He stepped ahead of his companions and held up a hand to show they meant no harm, but the leading lancer only grinned in reply and lowered his lance point as he pricked back his spurs.

  Sharpe shook his head and waved, then realized the man intended to skewer the spear into his belly. 'Bastard!' Sharpe shouted, and dropped his pack and put both hands on his musket as though it was a quarterstaff. Mary screamed in terror.

  'No!' Lawford shouted at the galloping lancers. 'No!'

  The lancer thrust his blade at Sharpe who knocked the spear point aside with the muzzle of the gun, then swung the gun fast back so that its butt smacked hard onto the horse's head. The beast whinnied and reared, throwing its rider backwards. The other lancers laughed, then sawed their reins to swerve past the fallen man. Mary was shouting at them in a language Sharpe did not understand, Lawford was waving his hands desperately, but the lancers bored on in, concentrating on Sharpe who stepped backwards from their wicked-looking spear points. He slashed a second lance aside, then a third man rammed his spurs back and attempted to drive his spear hard into Sharpe's belly. Sharpe half managed to edge away from the blow and, instead of skewering his stomach, the lance sliced through the skin of his waist, through his coat and into the tree behind him. The lancer left his spear buried in the beech and wheeled his horse away. Sharpe was pinned to the bark, his back a sheet of agony where it was forced against the tree. He tugged at the lance, but his loss of blood had made him far too weak and the weapon would not budge, and then another lancer spurred towards him with his spear point aimed at Sharpe's eyes. Mary shouted frantically.

  The spear point paused an inch from Sharpe's left eyeball.

  The lancer looked at Mary, grimaced at her filthy state, then said something.

  Mary answered.

  The lancer, who was evidently an officer, looked back to Sharpe and seemed to be debating whether to kill or to spare him. Finally he grinned, leaned down and grasped the spear pinning Sharpe to the tree. He dragged it free.

  Sharpe swore foully, then collapsed at the foot of the tree.

  There were a score of horsemen and they all now gathered around the fugitives. Two of them held their razor-sharp lances at Lawford's neck while the officer spoke to Mary. She answered defiantly, and to Sharpe, who was struggling to stand, it seemed that the conversation went on for a long time. Nor did the lancers seem friendly. They were magnificent-looking men and Sharpe, despite his pain, noted how well they maintained their weapons. There was no rust on the lance heads, and the shafts were oiled smooth. Mary argued with the officer, and he seemed indifferent to her pleading, but at last she must have made her point for she turned and looked at Lawford. 'He wants to know if you're willing to serve in the Tippoo's forces,' she told the Lieutenant.

  The lance tips were tickling Lawford's neck, and as a recruiting device they worked wonders. The Lieutenant nodded eagerly. 'Absolutely!' he said. 'Just what we want! Volunteers! Tell him we're ready to serve! Both of us! Long live the Tippoo!'

  The officer did not need the enthusiastic reply translated. He smiled and ordered his lancers to take their weapons from the redcoat's neck.

  And thus Sharpe joined the enemy's army.

  Chapter 5

  Sharpe was near to exhausted despair by the time he reached the city. The lancers had driven the three fugitives westwards at an unrelenting pace, but had offered none of them a saddle, and so the three had walked and by the time he stumbled through the ford that took them south across the Cauvery to the island on which Seringapatam was built Sharpe's back burned like a sheet of fire. The city itself still lay a mile to the west, but the whole island had been ringed with new earthworks inside which thousands of refugees were gathered. The refugees had brought their livestock, obedient to the Tippoo's orders that all food stocks should be denied to the slowly advancing British army. A half-mile from the city wall a second earthwork had been thrown up to protect a sprawling encampment of thatched, mud-brick barracks in which thousands of the Tippoo's infantry and cavalry lived. None of the troops was idle. Some were drilling, others were heightening the mud wall around the encampment and still more were firing their muskets at targets of straw men propped against the city's stone wall. The straw men were all dressed in makeshift red coats and Lawford watched aghast as the muskets knocked the targets over or else exploded great chunks from their straw-stuffed torsos. The soldiers' families lived inside the encampment and the women and children flocked to see the two white men pass. They assumed Sharpe and Lawford were prisoners and some jeered as they went by and others laughed when Sharpe staggered in pain.

  'Keep going, Sharpe,' Lawford said encouragingly.

  'Call me Dick, for Christ's sake,' Sharpe snapped.

  'Keep going, Dick,' Lawford managed to say, albeit angrily for having been reproved by the Private.

  'Not far now,' Mary said in Sharpe's ear. She was helping Sharpe walk, though at times, when the jeering became raucous, she clung to Sharpe for support. Ahead of them were the city walls and Lawford, seeing them, wondered how anyone could hope to blast through such massive works. The great ramparts were lime-washed so that they seemed to shine in the sun, and Lawford could see cannon muzzles showing in every embrasure. Cavaliers, jutting out like small square bastions, had been built everywhere along the face of the wall so that yet more guns could be brought to bear on any attacker. Above the walls, on which the Tippoo's flags stirred in the small warm wind, the twin white minarets of the city's mosque towered in the sunlight. Beyond the minarets Lawford could see the intricate tower of a Hindu temple, its stone layers elaborately carved and gorgeously painted, while just north of the temple there shone the gleaming green tiles of what Lawford supposed was the Tippoo's palace. The city was all much bigger and grander than Lawford had expected, while the white-painted wall was higher and stronger than he had ever feared. He had expected a mud wall, but as he drew closer to the ramparts he could see that these eastern walls were made from massive stone blocks that would need to be chipped away by the siege guns if a breach were ever to be made. In places, where the wall had been damaged by previous sieges, there were patches where the stone had been repaired by brickwork, but nowhere did the wall look weak. It was true that the city had not had time to build itself a modern European type of defence with star-shaped walls and outlying forts and awkward bastions and confusing ravelins, but even so the place looked dauntingly strong, and even now vast antlike gangs of labourers, some of them naked in the heat, were carrying baskets of deep-red earth on their backs and piling the soil to heighten the glacis that lay directly in front of the lime-washed walls. The growing earthen glacis, that was separated from the walls by a ditch that could be flooded with river water, was designed to deflect the besiegers' shots up and over the ramparts. Lawford consoled himself that Lord Cornwallis had managed to smash into this formidable city seven years before, but the heightening of the glacis demonstrated that the Tippoo had learned from that defeat and suggested that General Harris would not find it nearly so easy.

  The lancers ducked their spired helmets as they clattered through the tunnel of the city's Bangalore Gate and
so led the fugitives into the stinking tangle of crowded streets. The spears forged the lancers' path, driving civilians aside and forcing wagons and handcarts into hasty retreats up any convenient alley. Even the sacred cows that wandered freely inside the city were forced aside, though the lancers did it gently, not wanting to offend the sensibilities of the Hindus. They passed the mosque, then turned down a street lined with shops, their open fronts thickly hung with cloth, silk, silver jewellery, vegetables, shoes and hides. In one alley Lawford caught a glimpse of blood-soaked men butchering two camels and the sight almost made him gag. A naked child hurled a bloody camel's tail at the two white men, and soon a horde of tattered, chanting children were dodging through the lancers' horses to mock the prisoners and pelt them with animal dung. Sharpe cursed them, Lawford hunched low as he walked, and the children only ran away when two European soldiers, both dressed in blue jackets, chased them away. 'Prisonniers?' one of the two men called cheerfully.

  'Non, monsieur,' Lawford answered in his best schoolboy French. 'Nous sommes deserteurs.'

  'C'est bon!' The man tossed Lawford a mango. 'La femme aussi?'

  'La femme est notre prisonniere.' Lawford tried a little wit and was rewarded with a laugh and a farewell shout of bonne chance.

  'You speak French?' Sharpe asked.

  'A little,' Lawford claimed modestly. 'Really only a little.'

  'Bloody amazing,' Sharpe said and Lawford was obscurely pleased that he had at last succeeded in impressing his companion. 'Bet not many private soldiers speak Frog,' Sharpe dashed Lawford's pleasure, 'so don't show yourself as being too good at it. Stick to bloody English.'

  'I didn't think of that,' Lawford said ruefully. He looked at the mango as though he had never seen such a piece of fruit before, and it was plain that his hunger was tempting him to bite into the sweet flesh, but then his manners prevailed and he gallantly insisted that Mary eat the fruit instead.

  The lancers turned into a delicately sculpted archway where two sentries stood guard. Once inside the archway the cavalrymen slid down from their saddles and, lances in hand, led their horses down a narrow passage between two high brick walls. Sharpe, Mary and Lawford were more or less abandoned just inside the gateway where the two sentries ignored them, but did chase away the more curious townsfolk who had gathered to stare at the Europeans. Sharpe sat on a mounting block and tried to ignore the pain in his back. Then the lancer officer returned and shouted at them to follow him. He led them through another arch, then under an arcade where flowers twined round pillars, and so to a guardroom. The officer said something to Mary, then locked the door. 'He says we're to wait,' Mary said. She still had the mango, and though the lancers had stripped Sharpe and Lawford of their coats and packs and had searched the two men for coins and hidden weapons, they had not searched Mary and she took a small folding penknife from an inside pocket of her skirt and cut the fruit into three portions.