Sharpe looked at him. “You loaded the musket, didn’t you, Bill?”
“Of course!”
“You ever felt gunpowder that smooth and fine?” Sharpe gazed into the Lieutenant’s face.
“It could have been gunpowder dust!” Lawford insisted angrily.
“That shiny?” Sharpe said derisively. “Gunpowder dust is full of rat shit and sawdust! And did you really think, Bill”—he pronounced the name sarcastically—“that the bleeding Tippoo would let us have loaded guns before he was sure he could trust us? And with him standing not six feet away? And did you bother to taste the powder? I did, and it weren’t salty at all. That weren’t gunpowder, Lieutenant, that were either ink powder or black pigment, but whatever it was it was never going to spark.”
Lawford gaped at Sharpe. “So you knew all along the gun wouldn’t fire?”
“Of course I bloody knew! I wouldn’t have pulled the trigger else. You mean you didn’t realize that weren’t powder?”
Lawford turned away. Once again he had been made to look like a fool and he blushed at the realization. “I’m sorry,” he said. He was crestfallen, and again he felt a galling sense of inadequacy compared to this common soldier.
Sharpe stared at a patrol of the Tippoo’s lancers who were riding back toward the city. Three of them were wounded and were being supported in their saddles by their comrades, which suggested the British were not so very far away now. “I’m sorry, sir,” he said very softly, and deliberately using the word “sir” to mollify Lawford, “but I’m not trying to be insolent. I’m just trying to keep you and me alive.”
“I know. I’m sorry too. I should have known it wasn’t powder.”
“It was confusing, weren’t it?” Sharpe said, trying to console his companion. “What with the Tippoo being there. Fat little bugger, ain’t he? But you’re doing all right, sir.” Sharpe spoke feelingly, knowing that the young Lieutenant desperately needed encouragement. “And you were clever as hell, sir, saying you wore an apron. I should have splashed some ink on your uniform, shouldn’t I? But I never thought of it, but you got us out of that one.”
“I was thinking of Private Brookfield,” Lawford said, not without some pride at the memory of his inspired lie. “You know Brookfield?”
“The clerk of Mister Stanbridge’s company, sir? Fellow who wears spectacles? Does he wear a pinny?”
“He says it keeps the ink off him.”
“He always was an old woman,” Sharpe said scornfully, “but you did well. And I’ll tell you something else. We have to get out of here soon because I know why we came now. We don’t have to find your merchant fellow, we just have to get out. Unless you think we ought to rescue your uncle, but if you don’t, then we can just run, because I know why we came now.”
Lawford gaped at him. “You know?”
“The Colonel spoke to me, sir, while we was going through that pantomime back there in the palace. He says we’re to tell General Harris to avoid the west wall. Nothing else, just that.”
Lawford stared at Sharpe, then glanced across the angle of the city walls toward the western defenses, but nothing he could see there looked strange or suspicious. “You’d better stop calling me ‘sir,’” he said. “Are you sure about what he said?”
“He said it twice. Avoid the west wall.”
A bellow from the next cavalier made them turn. Rothière was pointing south, suggesting that the two Englishmen watch that direction as they were supposed to instead of gaping like yokels toward the west. Sharpe obediently stared southward, though there was nothing to be seen there except some women carrying loads on their heads and a thin naked boy herding some scrawny cattle along the riverbank. His duty now, Sharpe thought, was to escape this place and get back to the British army, but how in God’s name was he ever to do that? If he were to jump off the wall now, Sharpe reckoned, he would stand a half-chance of breaking a leg, and even if he survived the jump he would only land in the glacis ditch, and if he managed to cross the glacis he would merely reach the military encampment that was built hard around the city’s southern and eastern walls, and if he was lucky enough to escape the hundreds of soldiers who would converge on him, he would still need to cross the river, and meanwhile every gun on the encampment wall would be hammering at his heels, and once he had crossed the river, if he ever did, the Tippoo’s lancers would be waiting on the far bank. The sheer impossibility of escaping the city made him smile. “God knows how we’ll ever get out of here,” he said to Lawford.
“Maybe at night?” Lawford suggested vaguely.
“If they ever let us stand guard at night,” Sharpe said dubiously, then thought of Mary. Could he leave her in the city?
“So what do we do?” Lawford asked.
“What we always do in the army,” Sharpe said stoically. “Hurry up and do nothing. Wait for the opportunity. It’ll come, it’ll come. And in the meantime, maybe we can find out just what the devils are doing in the west of the city, eh?”
Lawford shuddered. “I’m glad I brought you, Sharpe.”
“You are?” Sharpe grinned at that compliment. “I’ll tell you when I’ll be glad. When you take me back home to the army.” And suddenly, after weeks of thinking about desertion, Sharpe realized that what he had just said was true. He did want to go back to the army, and that knowledge surprised him. The army had bored Richard Sharpe, then done its best to break his spirits. It had even flogged him, but now, standing on Seringapatam’s battlements, he missed the army.
For at heart, as Richard Sharpe had just discovered for himself, he was a soldier.
CHAPTER 6
The armies of Britain and Hyderabad reached Seringapatam four days later. The first evidence of their coming was a cloud of dust that thickened and rose to obscure the eastern horizon, a great fog of dust kicked up by thousands of hooves, boots, and wheels. The two armies had crossed the river well to the city’s east and were now on its southern bank and Sharpe climbed with the rest of Gudin’s men to the firestep above the Mysore gate to watch the first British cavalry patrols appear in the distance. A torrent of lancers clattered out of the gate to challenge the invaders. The Tippoo’s men rode with green and scarlet pennants on their lanceheads and beneath silk banners showing the golden sun blazoned against a scarlet field. Once the lancers had passed through the gate a succession of painted ox carts squealed and ground their way into the city, each loaded with rice, grain, or beans. There was plenty of water inside Seringapatam, for not only did the River Cauvery wash beneath two of the walk, but each street had its own well, and now the Tippoo was making certain that the granaries were filled to overflowing. The city’s magazines were already crammed with ammunition. There were guns in every embrasure and, behind the walls, spare guns waited to replace any that were dismounted. Sharpe had never seen so many guns. The Tippoo Sultan had great faith in artillery and he had collected cannon of every shape and size. There were guns with barrels disguised as crouching tigers, and guns inscribed with flowing Arabic letters, and guns supplied from France, some still with the ancient Bourbon cipher incised close to their touchholes. There were huge guns with barrels over twenty feet long that fired stone balls close to fifty pounds in weight and small guns, scarce longer than a musket, that fired individual balls of grape. The Tippoo intended to meet any British assault with a storm of cannon fire.
And not just cannon fire, for as the two enemy armies marched closer to the city the rocketmen brought their strange weapons to the firesteps. Sharpe had never seen rockets before and he gaped as the missiles were stacked against the parapets. Each was an iron tube some four or five inches wide and about eighteen inches long that was attached by leather thongs to a bamboo stick that stood higher than a man. A crude tin cone tipped the iron cylinder, and inside the cone was either a small solid shot or else an explosive charge that was ignited by the rocket’s own gunpowder propellant. The missiles were fired by lighting a twist of paper that emerged from the base of the iron cylinders. Some of th
e rocket tubes had been wrapped with paper, then painted with either snarling tigers or verses from the Koran. “There’s a man in Ireland working on a similar weapon,” Lawford told Sharpe, “though I don’t think he puts tigers on his rocket heads.”
“How do you aim the bloody things?” Sharpe asked. Some of the rockets had been placed ready to fire, but there was no gun barrel to direct them; instead they were simply laid on the parapet and pointed in the general direction of the enemy.
“You don’t really aim them,” Lawford said, “at least I don’t think you do. They’re just pointed in the right direction and fired. They are notoriously inaccurate,” he added, “at least I hope they are.”
“We’ll see soon enough,” Sharpe said as another handcart of the strange missiles was heaved up the ramp to the firestep.
Sharpe looked forward to seeing the rockets fired, but then it became apparent that the British and Hyderabad armies were not approaching the city directly and thus bringing themselves into range, but instead planned to march clear around Seringapatam’s southern margin. The progress of the two armies was painfully slow. They had appeared at dawn, but by nightfall they had still not completed their half-circuit of the island on which Seringapatam sat. A crowd of spectators thronged the city ramparts to watch the enormous sprawl of herds, battalions, cavalry squadrons, guns, civilians, and wagons that filled the southern landscape. Dust surrounded the armies like an English fog. From time to time the fog thickened as a group of the Tippoo’s lancers attacked some vulnerable spot, but each time the lancers were met by a countercharge of allied cavalry and more dust would spew up from the horses’ hooves as the riders charged, clashed, circled, and fought. One lancer rode back to the city with a British cavalryman’s hat held aloft on his spearpoint and the soldiers on the walls cheered his return, but gradually the greater number of allied cavalry gained the upper hand and the cheers died away as more and more of the Tippoo’s horsemen splashed back wounded through the South Cauvery’s ford. Some of the enemy, when the Tippoo’s cavalry was driven away, ventured closer to the city. Small groups of officers trotted their horses toward the river so that they could examine the city walls, and it was one such group that drew the first rocket fire.
Sharpe watched fascinated as an officer turned one of the long weapons on the flat top of the parapet so that its tin cone pointed directly toward the nearest group of horsemen. The rocketman waited beside his officer, swinging a length of slow match to keep its burning end bright and hot. The officer fussed with the rocket’s alignment, then, satisfied at last, he stepped back and nodded to the rocketman who grinned and touched his slow match to the twist of paper at the rocket’s base.
The fuse paper, Sharpe guessed, had been soaked in water diluted with gunpowder, then dried, because it immediately caught the glowing fire which ate its way swiftly up the fuse as the rocketman stepped hurriedly away. The glowing trail vanished into the iron cylinder, there was silence for a second, then the rocket twitched as a bright flame abruptly choked and spat from the tube’s base. The twitch of the igniting powder charge threw the heavy rocket out of its careful alignment, but there was no chance to correct the weapon’s aim for a jet of flame was spitting fiercely enough from the cylinder to scorch the rocket’s quivering bamboo stick, and then, very suddenly, the bright flame roared into a furnace-like intensity with a noise like a huge waterfall, only instead of water it was spewing sparks and smoke, as the rocket began to move. It trembled for an instant, scraped an inch or two across the parapet, then abruptly accelerated away into the air, leaving a thick cloud of smoke and a scorch mark on the parapet’s coping. For a few seconds it seemed as if the rocket was having trouble staying aloft, for the long scorched tail wobbled as the fiery tube fought against gravity and as the smoke trail stitched a crazy whorl above the ditch at the foot of the wall, but then at last it gained momentum and raced away across the glacis, the encampment, and the river. It spewed a tail of sparks, fire, and smoke as it flew, then, as the powder charge began to be exhausted, the rocket fell earthward. Beneath the missile the group of horsemen had collapsed their spyglasses and were fleeing in every direction as the fire-tailed demon came shrieking out of the sky. The rocket struck the ground, bounced, tumbled, then exploded with a small crack of noise and a burst of flame and white smoke. None of the horsemen had been touched, but their panic delighted the Tippoo’s men on the bastions who gave the rocketmen a cheer. Sharpe cheered with them. Farther up the wall a cannon fired at a second group of horsemen. The smoke of the gun billowed out across the encampment beneath the walls and the heavy round shot screamed across the river to disembowel a horse a half-mile away, but no one cheered the gunners. Guns were not so spectacular as rockets.
“He’s got thousands of those bloody things,” Sharpe told Lawford, indicating a pile of the rockets.
“They really aren’t very accurate,” Lawford said with pedantic disapproval.
“But fire enough at once and you wouldn’t know if you were in this world or the next. I wouldn’t fancy being on the wrong end of a dozen of those things.”
Behind them, from one of the tall white minarets of the city’s new mosque, the muezzin was chanting the summons for the evening prayer and the Muslim rocketmen hastened to unroll their small prayer mats and face westward toward Mecca. Sharpe and Lawford also faced west, not out of any respect for the Tippoo’s religion, but because the vanguard of British and Indian cavalry was scouting the flat land beyond the South Cauvery which was plainly visible from the summit of the Mysore Gate. The main body of the two armies was making camp well to the south of the city, but the horsemen had ridden ahead to reconnoiter the western country in preparation for the next day’s short march. Sharpe could even see officers pacing out and marking where the lascars would pitch the armies’ tents. It seemed that General Harris had decided to attack from the west, the one direction that McCandless had warned against.
“Poor bloody fools,” Sharpe said, though neither he nor Lawford yet knew what was dangerous about the western defenses. Nor had they been given the slightest chance to escape from the city. They were never unwatched, they were never allowed to stand guard at night, and Sharpe knew that even the smallest attempt to break away from the city would lead to immediate death, yet they were not otherwise treated badly. They had been accepted well enough by their new comrades, but Sharpe could detect a reserve and he supposed that until he and Lawford proved their reliability there would always be an undercurrent of suspicion. “It ain’t that they don’t trust you,” Henry Hickson had explained on their first night, “but till they’ve actually seen you bang a few balls off at your old mates, they won’t really know whether you’re stout.” Hickson was sewing up the frayed edge of his leather thumbstall which protected his hand when a cannon was swabbed out. The gunner had to stop the touchhole so that the rammer could not drive a jet of fresh air down the barrel and so ignite any scraps of remaining powder, and Hickson’s old and blackened thumbstall betrayed how long he had been an artilleryman. “Had this in America,” Hickson said, flourishing the ancient scrap of leather. “Stitched for me by a little girl in Charleston. Lovely little thing she was.”
“How long have you been in the artillery?” Lawford had asked the gray-haired Hickson.
“Bleeding lifetime, Bill. Joined in ’76.” Hickson laughed. “King and country! Go and save the colonies, eh? And all I did was march up and down like a little lost lamb and only ever fired a dozen shots. I should have stayed there, shouldn’t I, when they kicked us out, but, like a fool, I didn’t. Went to Gibraltar, polished cannon for a couple of years, then got posted out here.”
“So why did you run?” Lawford asked.
“Money, of course. The Tippoo might be a black heathen bastard, but he pays well for gunners. When he pays at all, of course, which isn’t precisely frequent, but all the same he ain’t done bad by me. And if I’d stayed in the gunners I wouldn’t have met Suni, would I?” He had jerked his callused thumb toward his Indian
woman who was cooking the evening meal with the wives of the other soldiers.
“Don’t you ever worry that you’ll be recaptured?” Lawford asked him.
“Of course I bloody worry! All the bleeding time!” Hickson held the thumbstall close to his right eye to judge the neatness of his stitching. “Christ, Bill, I don’t want to be stood up against a bleeding post with a dozen bastards staring down their musket barrels at me. I want to die in Suni’s bed.” He grinned. “You do ask the most stupid questions, Bill, but what do you expect of a bleeding clerk! All that reading and writing, mate, it doesn’t do a man any bleeding good.” He had shaken his head in despair of Lawford ever seeing sense. Like all of Gudin’s soldiers, Hickson was more suspicious of Lawford than of Sharpe. They all understood Sharpe, for he was one of them and good at his trade, but Lawford was patently uncomfortable. They put it down to his having come from a comfortable home that had fallen on hard times, and while they were sympathetic to that misfortune they nevertheless expected him to make the best of it. Others in Gudin’s small battalion despised Lawford for his clumsiness with weapons, but Sharpe was his friend and so far no man had been willing to risk Sharpe’s displeasure by needling Lawford.
Sharpe and Lawford watched the invading armies make their camp well out of cannon range to the south of the city. A few Mysorean cavalrymen still circled the armies, watching for a chance to snap up a fugitive, but most of the Tippoo’s men were now back on the city’s island. There was an excited buzz in the city, almost a relief that the enemy was in sight and the waiting at last was over. There was also a feeling of confidence, for although the enemy horde looked vast, the Tippoo had formidable defenses and plenty of men. Sharpe could detect no lack of enthusiasm among the Hindu troops. Lawford had told him there was bad blood between them and the Muslims, but on that evening, as the Tippoo’s men hung more defiant banners above their limewashed walls, the city seemed united in its defiance.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's Triumph, Sharpe's Fortress Page 18