Sharpe's Tiger

by Bernard Cornwell

  He pushed through a crowd of fearful women, passed the cheetah cages and so went back to the dungeons. The bodies of the three jettis were crawling with flies and beyond them the outer gate of the dungeons still swung open. Sharpe ran through the gate and jumped down the stairs to where his tiger lay dead.

  'Sharpie!' Hakeswill came to the bars. 'You came back, lad! I knew you would. So what's happening, lad? No! Don't do that!' Hakeswill had seen Sharpe take a musket from his shoulder. 'I like you, boy, always have! I might have seemed a bit hard on you at times, but only for your own good, Sharpie. You're a good boy, you are. You're a proper soldier. No!' Sharpe had aimed the musket.

  Sharpe turned the muzzle away from Hakeswill and aimed it at the padlock. He did not want to waste time with the picklock so he simply held the musket against the ancient loop of the padlock and pulled the trigger. The iron loop sheared and the lock fell from the hasp. Sharpe dragged the cell door open. 'I've come to get you, Obadiah,' he said.

  'Knew you would, Sharpie, knew you would.' Hakeswill's face twitched. 'Knew you wouldn't leave your sergeant to rot.'

  'So come on out,' Sharpe said.

  Hakeswill hung back. 'No hard feelings, lad?'

  'I'm not a lad, Obadiah. I'm a sergeant like you are. I've got Colonel Wellesley's promise, I have. I'm a sergeant now, just like you.'

  'So you are, so you are, and so you should be.' Hakeswill's face twitched again. 'I said as much to Mister Morris, didn't I? That Sharpie, I said, he's a sergeant in the making if ever I did see one. A good lad, I told him. Got my eye on him, sir. That's what I told Mister Morris.'

  Sharpe smiled. 'So come on out here, Obadiah.'

  Hakeswill backed all the way to the cell's rear wall. 'Better to stay here, Sharpie,' he said. 'You know what the lads are like when their blood's boiling. Might get hurt out there. Best to stay put a while, let the lads settle it first, eh?'

  Sharpe crossed the cell in two strides and gripped Hakeswill's collar. 'You come with me, you bastard,' he said, tugging the whimpering Sergeant forward. 'I should kill you here, you scum, but you don't deserve a soldier's death, Obadiah. You're too rotten for a bullet.'

  'No, Sharpie, no!' Hakeswill screamed as Sharpe dragged him out of the cell, across the tiger's carcass and up the stone steps. 'I ain't done nothing to you!'

  'Nothing!' Sharpe turned furiously on Hakeswill. 'You had me flogged, you bastard, and then you betrayed us!'

  'I never did! Cross my heart and hope to die, Sharpie!'

  Sharpe spun Hakeswill up against the bars of the dungeon's outer cage, slamming him against the iron rods, then punched the Sergeant in the chest. 'You're going to die, Obadiah, I promise. Because you did betray us.'

  'I didn't do nothing,' Hakeswill said through his laboured breathing. 'On my mother's dying breath, Sharpie, I didn't. The flogging, yes. I did do that to you, and I was wrong!' He tried to fall to his knees, but Sharpe dragged him upright. 'I didn't betray you, Sharpie. I wouldn't do that to another Englishman.'

  'You'll still be telling lies when you go through the gates of hell, Obadiah,' Sharpe said as he grabbed the Sergeant's collar again. 'Now come on, you bastard.' He pulled Hakeswill through the dungeon's outer gate, across the courtyard and into the alley which led south towards the palace. A squad of tiger-striped soldiers ran past the mouth of the alley, going to the western walls, but none took any notice of Sharpe. The guard on the northern palace gate did notice him and levelled his musket, but Sharpe snarled the magic words at the man, 'Gudin! Colonel Gudin,' and such was the confidence in Sharpe's voice that the guard lowered the musket and stepped aside.

  'Where are you taking me, Sharpie?' Hakeswill panted.

  'You'll find out.'

  Two more guards were stationed at the inner courtyard gate and they too pointed their muskets, but Sharpe shouted at them and once again Gudin's name was a talisman sufficient to allay their suspicions. Besides, Sharpe had a red-coated prisoner, and the two nervous guards mistook him for one of Gudin's men and so let him pass.

  Sharpe lifted the gate's latch and dragged it open. The six tigers, already disturbed by the terrible noises that had been battering about the city, leapt towards the opening gate and their six chains cracked taut. Hakeswill saw the animals and screamed. 'No, Sharpie! No! Mother!'

  Sharpe dragged the struggling Hakeswill into the courtyard. 'You reckon you can't die, Obadiah? I reckon different. So when you get to hell, you bastard, tell them it was Sergeant Sharpe who sent you.'

  'No, Sharpie! No!' This last word was a yelp of despair as Sharpe pulled Hakeswill into the centre of the courtyard and there spun him around at arm's length. 'No!' the Sergeant wailed as Sharpe spun him faster, then Sharpe suddenly let go of Hakeswill's collar. The Sergeant was unbalanced and out of control. He staggered and flailed his arms, but nothing could stop his momentum. 'No!' he screamed a last time as he fell and slid across the sand to where three tigers waited.

  'Goodbye, Obadiah,' Sharpe said, 'you bastard.'

  'I cannot die!' Hakeswill screamed, then his cry was cut off as a great yellow-eyed beast growled above him.

  'They've got an early supper,' Sharpe told the bemused guards on the gate. 'Hope they've got an appetite.'

  The guards, not understanding a word, grinned back. Sharpe took one look behind, spat, and walked away. A debt, he reckoned, was properly paid. Now all he needed to do was hide till the redcoats came. And then he saw the pearl-hung palanquin, and another debt came to mind.

  For a time it seemed as if the Tippoo could hold his city. He fought like a tiger himself, knowing that this blaze of violence beneath a smoke-shrouded sun would decide his fate. It would be the tiger throne or the grave.

  He did not know what was happening on the southern stretch of the walls, except that the distant fury of constant musket fire told him that fighting continued there; he only knew that he and his men were taking a terrible toll of the attackers on the northern wall. The Tippoo had been forced slowly back by the sheer weight of numbers that poured onto the ramparts, and that bloody retreat had driven him off the western ramparts, back around the corner by the remnants of the north-western bastion and so onto the long stretch of northern wall which faced towards the River Cauvery, but there his retreat had stopped. A cushoon of infantry had been stationed in the Sultan Battery, the largest bastion in the north wall, and that garrison hurried along the walls to reinforce the Tippoo who now possessed enough men to overwhelm the musketry of the attackers on the narrow northern firestep. The Tippoo still led the fight. He was dressed in a white linen tunic and loose chintz drawers with a red silk sash about his waist. He had jewelled armlets, the great ruby glittered on the feathered plume of his helmet, there were pearls and an emerald necklace at his throat and the gold-hilted tiger sword at his side. Those gaudy stones made him a target for every redcoat and sepoy, yet he insisted on staying in the very front rank where he could pour his rifle fire at the stalled attackers, and his charms worked, for though the bullets flicked close none hit him. He was the tiger of Mysore, he could not die, only kill.

  The attackers suffered even worse damage from the men on the inner wall. That wall had not been breached, it had not even been attacked, and more and more tiger-striped infantry hurried up its ramps to reinforce the defenders. They fired across the inner ditch and their musket balls flayed at the crowded attackers and their cannon fire cleared whole stretches of the outer wall. Only the blinding powder smoke that hung between the walls protected the attackers, who either endured the terrible flank fire or else crouched behind dismounted cannon and prayed that their ordeal would soon end. They had captured the north-western corner of the outer wall, but it seemed to have gained them nothing but death, for now it was the turn of the Tippoo's men to be the slaughterers.

  Baird, heading south from the breach, encountered similar resistance, but Baird was in no mood to be delayed. He caught up and passed the survivors of the Forlorn Hope and, shouting like a demon, led a crazed charge past the ruined gateho
use where the remnants of the Tippoo's mine smoked like the pit of hell. Baird was a major general, but he would gladly have given all the gold lace on his uniform for this one chance to fight like a common soldier. This was revenge, and the great claymore hacked into the Tippoo's men as Baird bellowed his challenge that mingled fury with the agonized memories of his humiliation in this city. He fought like a creature possessed, stepping over the dead and slipping on their blood as he carried the battle down the walls. His men howled with him. They were caught up in Baird's madness. At this hour, under the fire of the sun and emboldened by the arrack and rum they had drunk in their long wait in the trenches, the redcoats and sepoys had become gods of war. They gave death with impunity as they followed a war-maddened Scotsman down an enemy wall that was sticky with blood. Baird would have his city or else he would die in its dust.

  Appah Rao's cushoons defended the south-western corner of the city and Appah Rao watched appalled as the hugely tall Scotsman hacked his way towards him. He watched the torrent of redcoats swarming behind the giant, and he heard their shouts and he watched their victims fall off the ramparts. The brigade that defended that stretch of wall was being killed man by man, and those that lived were giving way and some were running rather than face the horror, and Appah Rao's men were next for the slaughter.

  But to die for what? he wondered. The city was gone and the Tippoo's dynasty was doomed. Appah Rao knew his men were watching him, waiting for the order that would hurl them into battle, but instead the General turned to his second-in-command. 'When were the men last paid?' he asked.

  The officer frowned, puzzled by the question, but at last managed an answer. 'Three months at least, sahib. Four, I think.'

  'Tell them there will be a pay parade this afternoon.'

  'Sahib?' The second-in-command gaped up at Appah Rao.

  The General raised his voice so that as many of his men as possible could hear him. 'The pay is overdue, so this afternoon we shall have a pay parade in the encampment. Men shouldn't fight without pay.' He ostentatiously sheathed his sword and walked calmly down from the ramparts. Here, at the Mysore Gate, there was no ditch between the inner and outer walls, and Rao airily strode through the inner gate. For a second his men watched him, then first in ones and twos, and afterwards in a rush, they followed. One instant the wall was crammed with men, the next it was emptying so that Baird, cutting his furious way through the last of the west wall's guards, suddenly saw that the city was his. He howled again, this time in victory. His butcher's sword was red with blood, his right sleeve soaked with it. A redcoat, perhaps forgetting that the Scotsman was a general, slapped his back and Baird hugged the man for pure joy.

  The Tippoo still fought and still thought he could win, but on the northern wall, just twenty yards beyond the north-west bastion, a single cross-wall joined the inner and outer ramparts. The cross-wall served as a buttress for the old outer wall, and at one time it had been intended to thicken the buttressing cross-wall, then make the space it contained into an even larger bastion, but the work had never been done and now the wall, its coping just eight inches across, offered itself as a perilously narrow bridge to the redcoats and sepoys who were trapped by the Tippoo's fire. If they could cross that bridge they could assault the inner wall and scour its defenders from the deadly parapet. One man tried to cross and was shot down. He wailed as he fell into the ditch. A moment later another man dashed across and reached halfway before a musket ball shattered his lower leg. He dropped his own musket and fell onto the wall's coping, cursing as he tried to keep his balance, then a second shot tipped him over the side. For a second or two he managed to cling to the top of the wall, shuddering as pain shook his body, then he too dropped.

  The Tippoo's men on the outer wall cheered and edged forward to drive the enemy away from the buttressing cross-wall, but a rush of sepoys checked their progress. A new musket duel broke out, Indian against Indian, a torrent of fire in which the Tippoo somehow survived like a charmed being. The sepoys fired volley after volley, came forward, died, and more men came to take their places.

  The Light Company of the King's 12th regiment followed the sepoys. Captain Goodall, their commander, eyed the narrow buttress. It led directly to the inner wall which was heavy with defenders, but it was also a bridge to victory. 'Death or glory!' Goodall shouted the cliché, but it was a truism too at that moment, and then he stepped out onto the narrow coping and fired his pistol into the lingering powder smoke that obscured the far end of the wall. 'Come on!' he called, then ran along the top of the wall, miraculously keeping his footing. He jumped onto the inner wall's parapet and slashed down with his sword. A man fired up at him, but Goodall's Sergeant, coming hard behind, had unceremoniously shoved his Captain out of the way and Goodall fell down onto the inner wall's firestep and the bullet missed him. The Sergeant was next across the parapet, then a line of screaming men followed as Goodall fought his way eastwards. The fire from the inner wall, which had been gutting the attackers, began to falter, and suddenly a rush of redcoats, who had been crouching for shelter from the inner wall's musketry, ran eastwards along the outer wall towards the Tippoo. Others crossed the makeshift bridge to reinforce the 12th's Light Company.

  The Tippoo saw the enemy revive. They were like a beast that had been wounded, but not killed, and the beast had life in it yet. Too much life, and the Tippoo understood that his night's troublesome dreams had been right after all. The turbid oil pot had told the truth. This day the city would fall, and with it his throne and his palace and his seraglio with its six hundred women, but the disaster did not mean the dynasty was dead. There were great forts in Mysore's northern hills and if he could reach one of those fastnesses then he could still fight on against these devils in red who were stealing his capital.

  The Tippoo retreated fast and his bodyguard went with him. They left other men to defend the outer wall while they ran past the Sultan Battery to the ramp which led down to the Water Gate and there, at the foot of the ramp, the palace chamberlains had thought to have His Majesty's palanquin ready with its bearers. One of the chamberlains, oblivious of the bullets hissing through the sky, bowed low to the Tippoo and invited His Majesty to take his proper place on the plump silk cushions beneath the palanquin's tiger-striped canopy. The Tippoo turned and glanced up at the walls to see what progress the attackers were making. There was fighting on both walls now, and the city was plainly doomed, but the defenders were still resisting stubbornly. The Tippoo felt a pang at deserting them, but swore he would avenge them yet. He rejected the palanquin. It was a slow vehicle in which to make a retreat, while inside the city, just on the other side of the inner wall, he had stables filled with fine horses. He would choose his swiftest horse, snatch up some gold to pay those men who stayed loyal, then flee through the city's unthreatened Bangalore Gate and from there turn north towards his great hill fortresses.

  Above the Tippoo the city's last defenders retreated slowly. The city was falling to the redcoats under a pall of smoke, and God had willed it, but God might yet permit the Tippoo to fight another day and so, rifle in hand, he headed for the inner Water Gate.

  The palanquin was carried by eight men, two to each of its four long gilded handles. When Sharpe first saw it, the clumsy vehicle was being hurried away from the palace by two robed chamberlains who lashed at the bearers with their tiger-headed staves. For a second Sharpe thought the Tippoo must be inside the palanquin, but then he saw that the side curtains were looped back and that the cushions inside were empty. He followed.

  He could sense a panic inside the city now. It had been quiet until a few moments ago, crouching like a beast not wanting to be noticed, but now the city somehow sensed that its doom had come. Beggars huddled together for protection, a woman cried in a shuttered house and the stray dogs yelped piteously. Small groups of the Tippoo's soldiers were fleeing in the streets, their bare feet pattering on the dried mud as they ran towards the Bangalore Gate where no enemy threatened. The sound of battle was
still intense, but the defence was fraying fast.

  The chamberlains led the palanquin towards the Water Gate of the inner wall. The gate lay close to the malodorous lake of sewage that so soured the air and some of the sewage, denied proper drains by the hastily constructed inner wall, had leaked into the Water Gate which was a brick-lined tunnel, fifty feet long, piercing the inner wall. An officer stood guard at its inner doors, but, as the palanquin approached, he unbarred the big teak gates and dragged them open. He shouted something as Sharpe followed the clumsy vehicle into the low tunnel, but Sharpe just shouted Colonel Gudin's name back and the officer was too confused to challenge him again. Instead, once the palanquin and the European soldier had gone through the tunnel, he closed the doors then glanced nervously up to where a mist of smoke betrayed the attackers' progress on the wall above him.

  Sharpe paused inside the tunnel while the palanquin went on ahead. The tunnel's floor had sunk in places and the leaking sewage had gathered in those deep spots. The place stank like an uncleaned barracks latrine. The palanquin's bearers stumbled as they splashed through the pools, then the vehicle went into the sunlight beyond. Sharpe could see soldiers out there in the space between the walls. The soldiers wore tiger stripes and were watching anxiously westwards. He had followed the palanquin instinctively, but now found himself in a bad place. The tunnel's thick teak doors were shut behind him, the air was foul and choking and there was an enemy in front of him. He crouched beside the damp wall, trying to decide what he should do. He had four muskets, all but one loaded, but his spare cartridges were in the pocket of his red coat which, because it was still knotted round his neck, was hard to reach. He stood, propped the muskets against the curved wall and pulled the jacket right side out and then shoved his arms into the tiger-torn sleeves. He was a redcoat again. He loaded the one empty musket, then crept towards the mouth of the tunnel.