Sharpe's Tiger

by Bernard Cornwell

  'So now you know,' Sharpe said defiantly.

  The officer smiled. 'But maybe you were given the name of a man who might help you inside the city? That is the name we want.'

  Sharpe shook his head. 'Didn't give us any names. Not one.'

  'Maybe,' the officer said, then nodded at the two jettis who seized hold of Sharpe, then ripped the coat down his back so that its buttons tore off one by one as it was dragged down. He wore no shirt beneath, only the bandages that still covered the wounds caused by his flogging. One of the jettis drew a knife and unceremoniously sliced through the bandages, making Sharpe flinch as the blade cut into the almost healed wounds. The bandages were tossed aside, and the smell of them made one of the tigers stir. The other jetti had crossed to the four soldiers where he had drawn out one of their muskets' ramrods. Now he stood behind Sharpe and, when the Tippoo nodded, he gave Sharpe's back a vicious cut with the metal rod.

  The sudden pain was every bit as bad as the flogging. It stabbed up and down Sharpe's spine and he gasped with the effort not to scream aloud as the force of the blow threw him forwards. He broke his fall with his hands and now his back faced the sky and the jetti, slashed down three more times, opening the old wounds, cracking a rib and spurting blood onto the courtyard's sand. One of the tigers growled and the links of its chain jangled as the beast lunged towards the smell of fresh blood. 'We shall beat him until we have the name,' the officer told Lawford mildly, 'and when he is dead we shall beat you until you are dead.'

  The jetti struck down again, and this time Sharpe rolled onto his side, but the second jetti pushed him back onto his belly. Sharpe was grunting and panting, but was determined not to cry aloud.

  'You can't do this!' Lawford protested.

  'Of course we can!' the officer answered. 'We shall start splintering his bones now, but not his spine, not yet. We want the pain to go on.' He nodded, and the jetti slashed down again and this time Sharpe did cry aloud as the stab of pain brought back all the agony of the flogging.

  'A merchant!' Lawford blurted out.

  The officer held up his hand to stop the beating. 'A merchant, Lieutenant? The city is full of merchants.'

  'He deals in metals,' Lawford said. 'I don't know more than that.'

  'Of course you do,' the officer said, then nodded at the jetti who raised the ramrod high in the air.

  'Ravi Shekhar!' Lawford shouted. The Lieutenant was bitterly ashamed for giving the name away, and the shame was obvious on his face, but nor could Lawford stand by and watch Sharpe beaten to death. He believed, or he wanted to believe, that he could have endured the pain of the beating himself without betraying the name, but it was more than he could bear to watch another man pounded into a bloody pulp.

  'Ravi Shekhar,' the officer said, checking the jetti's stroke. 'And how did you find him?'

  We didn't,' Lawford said. 'We didn't know how! We were waiting till we spoke some of your language, then we were going to ask for him about the city, but we haven't tried yet.'

  Sharpe groaned. Blood trickled down his sides and dripped onto the stones. One of the tigers staled beside the wall and the smell of urine filled the courtyard with its thin sour stench.

  The officer, who was wearing one of the prized gold tiger medallions about his neck, talked with the Tippoo who stared dispassionately at Sharpe, then asked a question.

  'And what, Lieutenant,' the officer translated, 'would you have told Ravi Shekhar?'

  'Everything we'd discovered about the defences,' Lawford said miserably. 'That's why we were sent.'

  'And what did you discover?'

  'How many men you have, how many guns, how many rockets.'

  'That's all?'

  'It's enough, isn't it?' Lawford retorted.

  The officer translated the answers. The Tippoo shrugged, glanced at Lawford, then took a small brown leather bag from inside a pocket of his yellow silk tunic. He unlaced the bag's mouth, stepped to Sharpe's side, then trickled salt onto the beaten man's open wounds. Sharpe hissed with the pain.

  'Who else would you have told in the city?' the officer asked.

  'There was no one else!' Lawford pleaded. 'In the name of God, there was no one else. We were told Ravi Shekhar could get a message out. That was all!'

  The Tippoo believed him. Lawford's chagrin was so clear and his shame so palpable that he was utterly believable. Besides, the story made sense. 'And so you've never seen Ravi Shekhar?' the officer asked.

  'Never.'

  'You're looking at him now,' the officer said, gesturing at the tigers. 'His body was fed to the tigers weeks ago.'

  'Oh, God,' Lawford said, and he closed his eyes as he realized just what an utter failure he had been. For a moment he wanted to retch, then he controlled the impulse and opened his eyes to watch as the Tippoo picked up Sharpe's red coat and dropped it onto the bloody back.

  For a second the Tippoo hesitated, wondering whether to release the tigers onto the two men. Then he turned away. 'Take them to the cells,' he ordered.

  The sacrifice of prisoners had yielded up the traitors and turned the Tippoo's luck. There was no need for a further sacrifice, not yet, but the Tippoo knew that fortune was ever capricious and so the prisoners could wait until another sacrifice was needed and then, to guarantee victory or to stave off defeat, they would die. And till then, the Tippoo decided, they could just rot.

  Chapter 9

  The dungeons lay in one of the palace's northern courtyards, hard under the city's inner mud wall. The courtyard stank of sewage, the smell powerful enough to make Sharpe half retch as he staggered beside Lawford at the point of a bayonet. The courtyard was a busy place. The families of the palace servants lived in low thatched buildings surrounding the yard where their lives were spent cheek by jowl with the Tippoo's stables and the small enclosure where he kept eight cheetahs he used for hunting gazelles. The cheetahs were taken to the hunt in wheeled cages and at first Sharpe thought they were to be placed inside one of the barred vehicles, but then one of the escorts pushed him past the ponderous carts towards a flight of stone steps that descended to a long narrow trench of stone that lay open to the sky. A tall fence of iron bars surrounded the pit that was guarded by a pair of soldiers. One of them used a key to open a padlock the size of a mango, then the escort shoved Sharpe and Lawford through the open gate.

  The dungeon guards did not carry muskets, but instead had coiled whips in their belts and bell-mouthed blunderbusses on their shoulders. One of them pointed mutely down the steps and Sharpe, following Lawford down the stairs, saw that the trench was a stone-flagged, dead-end corridor lined on either side with barred cells. There were eight cells in the pit, four on each side, and each separated from its neighbours, and from the central trench-like corridor, by iron bars alone, but bars that were as thick as a man's wrist. The turnkey indicated that they should wait while he unlocked a cell, but the first padlock he attempted to open had become stiff, or else had rusted, for it would not budge, and then he could not find a key to fit another of the big old locks. Something stirred in the straw of the cell that lay at the far right-hand end of the corridor. Sharpe, waiting as the guard sorted through his keys, heard the straw rustle again, then there was a growl as a huge tiger heaved up from its bed to stare at them with blank yellow eyes.

  More straw stirred in the first cell on the left, close by where Sharpe and Lawford were standing. 'Look who it isn't!' Hakeswill had come to the bars. 'Sharpie!'

  'Be quiet, Sergeant,' Lawford snapped.

  'Yes, sir, Mister Lieutenant Lawford, sir, quiet it is, sir.' Hakeswill clung to the bars of his cage, staring wide-eyed at the two newcomers. His face twitched. 'Quiet as the grave, sir, but no one talks to me down here. He won't.' He nodded towards the cell opposite that the guard was now unlocking. 'Likes it quiet, he does,' Hakeswill went on. 'Like a bleeding church. Says his prayers too. Always quiet it is here, except when the darkies are having a shout at each other. Dirty bastards they are. Smell the sewage, can you? One giant j
akes!' Hakeswill's face twisted in rictus and, in the gloom of the shadowed cells, his eyes seemed to glitter with an unholy delight. 'Been missing company, I have.'

  'Bastard,' Sharpe muttered.

  'Quiet! Both of you,' Lawford insisted and then, with his innate politeness, the Lieutenant nodded thanks to the guard who had finally opened the cell directly opposite Hakeswill's lair. 'Come on, Sharpe,' Lawford said, then stepped fastidiously into the filthy straw. The cell was eight foot deep and ten foot long and a little over the height of a man. The sewage smell was rank, but no worse than in the courtyard above. The barred door clashed shut behind them and the key was turned.

  'Willie,' a tired voice said from the shadows of the cell, 'how very good of you to visit me.' Sharpe, his eyes accustoming themselves to the dimness of the dungeons, saw that Colonel McCandless had been crouching in one corner, half shrouded by straw. The Colonel now stood to greet them, but he was weak for he tottered as he stood, though he shook off Lawford's attempt to help him. 'A fever,' he explained. 'It comes and it goes. I've had it for years. I suspect the only thing that will cure it will be some soft Scottish rain, but that seems an ever more unlikely prospect. It is good to see you, Willie.'

  'You too, sir. You've met Private Sharpe, I think.'

  McCandless gave Sharpe a grim look. 'I have a question for you, young man.'

  'It wasn't gunpowder, sir,' Sharpe said, remembering his first confrontation with the Colonel and thus anticipating the question. 'It tasted wrong, sir. Wasn't salty.'

  'Aye, it didn't look like powder,' the Scotsman said. 'It was blowing in the wind like flour, but that wasn't my question, Private. My question, Private, is what would you have done if it had been gunpowder?'

  'I'd have shot you, sir,' Sharpe said, 'begging your pardon, sir.'

  'Sharpe!' Lawford remonstrated.

  'Quite right, man,' McCandless said. 'The wretched fellow was testing you, wasn't he? He was giving you a recruitment test, and you couldn't fail it. I'm glad it wasn't powder, but I don't mind saying you had me worried for a brief while. Do you mind if I sit, Willie? I'm not in my usual good health.' He sank back into his straw from where he frowned up at Sharpe. 'Nor are you, Private. Are you in pain?'

  'Bastards cracked a rib, sir, and I'm bleeding a bit. Do you mind if I sit?' Sharpe gingerly sat against the side bars of the cell and carefully lifted away the coat that had been draped over his back. 'Bit of fresh air will heal it, sir,' he said to Lawford who was insisting on examining the newly opened wounds, though there was nothing he could do to help them mend.

  'You won't get fresh air here,' McCandless said. 'You smell the sewage?'

  'You can't miss that smell, Uncle,' Lawford said.

  'It's the new inner wall,' McCandless explained. 'When they built it they cut the city drains, so now the night soil can't reach the river and the sewage puddles just east of here. Some of it seeps away through the Water Gate, but not enough. One learns to pray for a west wind.' He smiled grimly. 'Among other things.'

  McCandless wanted news, not only of what had brought Lawford and Sharpe into Seringapatam, but of the siege's progress and he groaned when he heard where the British had placed their works. 'So Harris is coming from the west?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Straight into the Tippoo's loving arms.' The Scotsman sat quietly for a moment, sometimes shivering because of his fever. He had wrapped himself in straw again, but he was still cold, despite the day's intense damp heat. 'And you couldn't get a message out? No, I suppose not. Those things are never easy.' He shook his head. 'Let's hope the Tippoo doesn't finish his mine.'

  'It's near finished, sir.' Sharpe delivered yet more bad news. 'I saw it.'

  'Aye, it would be. He's an efficient man, the Tippoo,' McCandless said, 'efficient and clever. Cleverer than his father, and old Hyder Ali was canny enough. I never met him, but I think I'd have liked the old rogue. This son, now, I never met him either until I was captured, and I wish I hadn't. He's a good soldier but a bad enemy.' McCandless closed his eyes momentarily as a shudder racked his body.

  'What will he do with us?' Lawford asked.

  'That I cannot say,' Colonel McCandless replied. 'It depends, probably, on his dreams. He's not as good a Muslim as he'd like us to think, for he still believes in some older magic and he sets great store by his dreams. If his dreams tell him to kill us then doubtless we'll have our heads turned back to front like the unfortunate gentlemen who shared these cells with me until quite recently. You heard about them?'

  'We heard,' Lawford said.

  'Murdered to amuse the Tippoo's troops!' McCandless said disapprovingly. 'And there were some good Christian men among them too. Only that thing over there survived.' He jerked his head towards Hakeswill's cell.

  'He survived, sir,' Sharpe said vengefully, 'because he betrayed us.'

  'It's a lie, sir!' Hakeswill, who had been avidly listening to Sharpe and Lawford's tale, snapped indignantly from across the corridor. 'A filthy lie, sir, as I'd expect from a gutter soldier like Private Sharpe.'

  McCandless turned to gaze at the Sergeant. 'Then why were you spared?' he asked coldly.

  'Touched by God, sir. Always have been, sir. Can't be killed, sir.'

  'Mad,' McCandless said quietly.

  'You can be killed, Obadiah,' Sharpe said. 'Christ, if it wasn't for you, you bastard, I'd have taken our news to General Harris.'

  'Lies, sir! More lies,' Hakeswill insisted.

  'Quiet, both of you,' McCandless said. 'And Private Sharpe?'

  'Sir?'

  'I'd be grateful if you did not blaspheme. Remember that "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain." Exodus twenty, verse seven.'

  'Amen, sir,' Hakeswill called, 'and praise the Lord, sir.'

  'Sorry, sir,' Sharpe muttered.

  'You do know your Ten Commandments, don't you, Sharpe?' McCandless asked.

  'No, sir.'

  'Not one of them?' McCandless asked, shocked.

  'Thou shalt not be found out, sir? Is that one of them?' Sharpe asked guilelessly.

  McCandless stared at him in horror. 'Do you have any religion, Sharpe?'

  'No, sir. Never found a need for it.'

  'You were born with a hunger for it, man.' The Colonel spoke with some of his old energy.

  'And for a few things else, sir.'

  McCandless shivered under his mantle of straw. 'If God spares me, Sharpe, I may attempt to repair some of the damage to your immortal soul. Do you still have the Bible your mother gave you, Willie?'

  'They took it from me, sir,' Lawford said. 'But I did manage to save one page.' He took the single page from his trouser pocket. He was blushing, for both he and Sharpe knew why the page had been torn from the holy book, and it was not for any purpose that Colonel McCandless would have approved. 'Just the one page, sir,' Lawford said apologetically.

  'Give it here, man,' McCandless said fiercely, 'and let us see what the good Lord has to say to us.' He took the crumpled page, smoothed it and tipped it to the light. 'Ah! The Revelation!' He seemed pleased. '"Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord,"' he read aloud. 'Amen to that.'

  'Not very cheerful, sir,' Sharpe ventured.

  'It is the most cheerful thing I can contemplate in this place, Private. A promise from the Lord God Almighty Himself that when I die I shall be carried into His glory.' The Colonel smiled for that consolation. 'Might I assume, Private, that you cannot read?'

  'Me, sir? No, sir. Never taught, sir.'

  'He's stupid, sir, he is, sir,' Hakeswill offered from across the corridor. 'Always was, sir. Dumb as a bucket.'

  'We must teach you your letters,' McCandless said, ignoring the Sergeant's comments.

  'Mister Lawford was going to do that, sir,' Sharpe said.

  'Then I suggest he begins now,' McCandless said firmly.

  Lawford smiled diffidently. 'It's difficult to know where to begin, Uncle.'

  'Why
not with T for tiger?' McCandless suggested.

  The beast growled, then settled in its straw. And Sharpe, some years late, began his lessons.

  The siege works advanced fast. Redcoats and sepoys worked day and night, sapping forward and shoring up the trench sides with bamboo mats. Rockets continually harassed the work, and the Tippoo succeeded in remounting some of his guns on the western walls, though their fire did little to disturb the work and the gunners suffered grievously from the counter-fire of the British eighteen-pounders emplaced in the captured mill fort. Smaller guns, twelve-pounders and short-barrelled howitzers, joined the bombardment of the ramparts and their shells and round shot seared above the ground where yard by yard the red earth was broken until, at last, the big short-range breaching batteries were dug and the rest of the massive siege guns were rolled forward in the night and concealed in their gun pits. To the Tippoo's troops, watching from the battered summit of the western wall, the approaches to the city were now a maze of newly turned earth. Approach trenches angled their way across the farmland, ending in larger mounds of earth thrown up from the deeper pits that held the breaching guns. Not all those bigger mounds concealed guns, for some of the spoil heaps were deliberately thrown up as deceptions so that the Tippoo could not guess where the real guns were emplaced until they opened fire. The Tippoo only knew that the British would aim at his western wall, but he did not yet know the exact stretch of wall that the enemy engineers had chosen, and it suited General Harris that the Tippoo should not learn that spot until it was necessary for the breaching batteries to open fire. If the defenders had too much warning of the place chosen for the storm then they would have time to build elaborate new defences behind it.

  But the Tippoo was gambling that he already knew where the British would choose to make their breach, and in the old gatehouse where the massive mine was concealed his engineers finished their preparations. They stacked stone around the vast powder charge so that its explosion would be directed northwards into the space between the walls. For the mine to be effective the British had to site their breach in the short stretch of wall between the old gatehouse and the city's north-west bastion, and the Tippoo's gamble was not an outrageous risk for it was not difficult to forecast that the breach would indeed be blasted in that section of wall. The site was dictated by the outer wall's decay, and by the shortcomings of the low glacis that lay outside that inviting wall. The rudimentary glacis half protected most of the city's western battlements, its raw earth slope designed to deflect cannonballs up from the wall's base, but where the city wall was most decayed the river ran very close to the defences and there had been no room to construct even the pretence of a glacis. Instead a low mud wall continued the line of the glacis, and that wall penned in the water that had been pumped into the ditch between the outer ramparts and the glacis. That low wall was no obstacle compared to a glacis and the Tippoo reckoned it would be an irresistible target for the enemy engineers.