The musketry fire blazed along the embankment’s lip, each shot a spark of brightness that glowed briefly in the dark smoke, but the fire was wildly inaccurate for the attackers were still in the night-shadowed low ground and concealed by the defenders’ own powder smoke. Far off to their left other battalions were assaulting the northern stretch of the embankment and Fitzgerald heard a cheer as those men charged home, then Captain West gave the order to charge and the men of the 33rd’s two flank companies let loose their own cheer as they were released from the leash.
They ran hard toward the embankment. Musket balls whipped overhead. All the redcoats wanted now was to get this attack over and done. Kill a few bastards, loot a few bodies, then get the hell back to the camp. They cheered as they reached the embankment and clambered up its short steep slope. “Kill them, boys!” Fitzgerald shouted as he reached the crest, but there was suddenly no enemy there, only a still stretch of dark gleaming water and, as the attackers joined him, they all checked rather than plunge into the aqueduct.
A blast of musketry erupted from the farther bank. The Light Company, poised on the lip of the western bank, was silhouetted against the remnants of the daylight while the Tippoo’s men were shrouded by the tope’s night-dark trees.
Redcoats fell as the bullets thumped home. The aqueduct was only about ten paces wide and, at that range, the Mysorean infantry could not miss. One man was lifted right off his feet and thrown back onto the ground behind the embankment. Rockets slashed across the dark water, their fiery trails slicing just inches above the twin embankments. For a few seconds no one knew what to do. A man gasped as a rocket snatched off his foot, then he slid down into the weed-thick water where his blood swirled dark. Some redcoats fired back at the trees, but they fired blind and their bullets hit nothing. The wounded stumbled back down the embankment, the dead twitched as they were struck by bullets, while the living were dazed by the noise and dazzled by the rockets’ dreadful red tails. Captain Morris stared in confusion. He had somehow not expected to cross the aqueduct. He had thought the trees were on this side of the water and he did not know what to do, but then Lieutenant Fitzgerald gave a shout of defiance and jumped down into the waterway. The black water came up to his waist. “Come on, boys! Come on! There’s not so many of the bastards!” He waded forward, his naked sabre bright in the starlight. “Let’s flush them out! Come on, Havercakes!”
“Follow him, lads!” Sergeant Green shouted and about half the Light Company jumped into the green-scummed water. The others crouched, waiting for Morris’s orders, but Morris was still confused and Sergeant Hakeswill was crouching at the foot of the embankment out of the enemy’s sight.
“Go on!” Wellesley shouted, angered at their hesitation. “Go on! Don’t let them stand there! Captain West! On! On! Captain Morris, move!”
“Oh Jesus, Mother!” Hakeswill called as he scrambled up the embankment. “Mother, Mother!” he shouted as he dropped into the warm water. Fitzgerald and the first half of the company was already across the farther embankment and inside the tope now and Hakeswill could hear shouts and shots and a chilling clash as steel scraped on steel.
Wellesley saw his two flank companies at last advance across the aqueduct and he sent an aide back to summon Major Shee and the rest of the battalion. The musket fire in the tope was dense, an unending crackle of shots, each flash momentarily illuminating the fog of powder smoke that spread between the leaves. It looked like something from hell: flash after flash of fire blooming in the dark, rocket trails blazing among the trees, and always the moans of dying men and shrieks of pain. A sergeant yelled at his men to close up, another man shouted desperately, wanting to know where his comrades were. Fitzgerald was cheering his men forward, but too many of the redcoats were being penned back against the embankment where they were in danger of being overwhelmed. Wellesley sensed he had done this all wrong. He should have used the whole battalion instead of just the two flank companies, and the realization of his mistake annoyed him. He took pride in his profession, but if a professional soldier could not hurl a few enemy infantry and rocketmen out of a small wood, then what good was he? He thought about spurring Diomed, his horse, across the aqueduct and into the flaring smoke patches among the tope, but he resisted the impulse for then he would be among the trees and out of touch with the rest of the 33rd and he knew he needed Shee’s remaining eight companies to reinforce the attackers. If necessary he could summon the two sepoy battalions as reinforcements, but he was sure the remainder of the 33rd would be sufficient to retrieve victory from confusion and so he turned and galloped back to hurry the battalion forward.
Hakeswill slithered down the farther embankment into the black shadows among the trees. He held the musket in his left hand and the halberd in his right. He crouched beside a tree trunk and tried to make sense of the chaos around him. He could see muskets flashing, their garish flames momentarily suffusing the smoke with light and glinting off the leaves, he could hear a man crying and he could hear shouts, but he had no idea what was happening. A handful of his men had stayed close to him, but Hakeswill did not know what to tell them; then a terrible war cry sounded close to his left and he whirled round to see a group of tiger-striped infantry charging toward him. He screamed in pure panic, fired the musket one-handed, and dropped the weapon immediately as he fled into the trees to avoid the assault. Some of the redcoats scattered blindly, but others were too slow and were overrun by the Indians. Their shouts were cut short as bayonets did their work, and Hakeswill, knowing that the Tippoo’s men were slaughtering the small group of redcoats, blundered desperately through the tangling trees to get clear. Captain Morris was calling Hakeswill’s name, a note of panic in his voice. “I’m here, sir!” Hakeswill called back. “I’m here, sir!”
“Where?”
“Here, sir!” A volley of musketry crashed in the trees and the balls slashed through leaves and thumped into trunks. Rockets screamed up to clatter among the high branches. Their fiery exhausts blinded the men and the explosions of their powder-filled cones rained down shards of hot metal and fluttering scraps of leaves. “Mother!” Hakeswill shouted and shrank down beside a tree.
“Form line!” Morris shouted. “Form line!” He had a dozen men with him and they formed a nervous line and crouched among the trees. The reflected flames of the burning rockets flickered red on their bayonets. Somewhere nearby a man panted as he died, the blood bubbling in his gullet at the end of every labored breath. A volley crackled and splintered a few yards away, but it was fired away from Morris who nevertheless ducked. Then, for a few blessed seconds, the confusing noise of battle diminished and in the comparative silence Morris looked around to try and find some bearings. “Lieutenant Fitzgerald!” he shouted.
“I’m here, sir!” Fitzgerald called confidently from the darkness ahead. “Up afront of you. Cleared the buggers out of here, sir, but some of the rascals are working about your flank. Watch the left, sir.” The Irishman sounded indecently cheerful.
“Ensign Hicks!” Morris called.
“I’m here, sir, right beside you, sir,” a small voice said from almost beneath Morris.
“Jesus Christ!” Morris swore. He had been hoping that Hicks could have brought reinforcements, but it seemed that no one except Fitzgerald had any control in the chaos. “Fitzgerald!” Morris shouted.
“Still here, sir! Got the buggers worried, we have.”
“I want you here, Lieutenant!” Morris insisted. “Hakeswill! Where are you?”
“Here, sir,” Hakeswill said, but not moving from his hiding place among the bushes. He guessed he was a few paces north of Morris, but Hakeswill did not want to risk being ambushed by a tiger-striped soldier as he blundered about in search of his Captain and so he stayed put. “Coming to join you, sir,” he called, then crouched even lower among the shrouding leaves.
“Fitzgerald!” Morris shouted irritably. “Come here!”
“The bloody man,” Fitzgerald said under his breath. His left arm w
as useless now, and he sensed it had been injured more badly than he had supposed. He had ordered a man to tie a handkerchief around the wound and hoped the pressure would staunch the blood. The thought of gangrene was nagging at him, but he pushed that worry away to concentrate on keeping his men alive. “Sergeant Green?”
“Sir?” Green responded stoically.
“Stay with the men here, Sergeant,” Fitzgerald ordered. The Irishman had led a score of the Light Company deep into the tope and he saw no point in surrendering the ground just because Morris was nervous. Besides, Fitzgerald was fairly sure that the Tippoo’s troops were just as confused as the British and if Green stayed steady and used volley fire he should be safe enough. “I’ll bring the rest of the company back here,” Fitzgerald promised Sergeant Green, then the Lieutenant turned and called back through the trees. “Where are you, sir?”
“Here!” Morris called irritably. “Hurry, damn you!”
“Back in a minute, Sergeant,” Fitzgerald reassured Green, and headed off through the trees in search of Morris.
He strayed too far north, and suddenly a rocket flared up from the tope’s eastern edge to lodge with a tearing crash among the tangling branches of a tall tree. For a few seconds the trapped missile thrashed wildly, startling scared birds up into the dark, then it became firmly wedged in the crook of a branch. The exhaust poured an impotent torrent of fire and smoke to illuminate a whole patch of the thick woodland, and in the sudden blaze Hakeswill saw the lieutenant stumbling toward him. “Mister Fitzgerald!” Hakeswill called.
“Sergeant Hakeswill?” Fitzgerald asked.
“It’s me, sir. Right here, sir. This way, sir.”
“Thank God.” Fitzgerald crossed the clearing at a run, his left arm hanging useless at his side. “No one knows what the hell they’re doing. Or where they are.”
“I know what I’m doing, sir,” Hakeswill said, and as the fierce crackling fire in the high leaves died away he lunged upward with the halberd’s spear point at the Lieutenant’s belly. His face twitched as the newly sharpened blade ripped through the Lieutenant’s clothes and into his stomach. “It isn’t the soldierly thing, sir, to contradict a sergeant in front of his men, sir,” he said respectfully. “You do understand that, sir, don’t you, sir?” Hakeswill said, and grinned with joy for the pleasure of the moment. The spear point was deep in Fitzgerald’s belly, so deep that Hakeswill was certain he had felt its razor-sharp point lodge against the man’s backbone. Fitzgerald was on the ground now and his body was jerking like a gaffed and landed fish. His mouth was opening and closing, but he seemed unable to speak, only to moan as Hakeswill gave the spear a savage twist in an effort to free its blade. “We is talking about proper respect, sir,” Hakeswill hissed at the Lieutenant. “Respect! Sergeants must be supported, sir, says so in the scriptures, sir. Don’t worry, sir, won’t hurt, sir. Just a prick,” and he jerked the bloodied blade free and thrust it down again, this time into the lieutenant’s throat. “Won’t be showing me up again, sir, will you, sir? Not in front of the men. Sorry about that, sir. And good night, sir.”
“Fitzgerald!” Morris shouted frantically. “For Christ’s sake, Lieutenant! Where the hell are you?”
“He’s gone to hell.” Hakeswill chuckled softly. He was searching the Lieutenant’s body for coins. He dared not take anything that might be recognized as the Lieutenant’s property, so he left the dead man’s sabre and the gilded gorget he had worn about his throat, but he did find a handful of unidentifiable small change which he pushed into his pouch before scrambling a few feet away to make sure no one saw him with his victim.
“Who’s that?” Morris called as he heard Hakeswill pushing through the undergrowth.
“Me, sir!” Hakeswill called. “I’m looking for Lieutenant Fitzgerald, sir.”
“Come here instead!” Morris snapped.
Hakeswill ran the last few yards and dropped down between Morris and a frightened Ensign Hicks. “I’m worried about Mister Fitzgerald, sir,” Hakeswill said. “Heard him up in the bushes, and there was heathens there, sir. I know, sir, ’cos I killed a couple of the black bastards.” He flinched as some muskets flamed and banged some yards away, but he could not tell who fired, or at what.
“You think the bastards found Fitzgerald?” Morris asked.
“I reckon so,” Hakeswill said. “Poor little bastard. I tried to find him, sir, but there was just heathens there.”
“Jesus.” Morris ducked as a volley of bullets flicked through the leaves overhead. “What about Sergeant Green?”
“Probably skulking, sir. Hiding his precious hide, I don’t wonder.”
“We’re all bloody skulking,” Morris answered truthfully enough.
“Not me, sir. Not Obadiah Hakeswill, sir. Got me halberd proper wet, sir. Want to feel it, sir?” Hakeswill held out the spearpoint. “Heathen blood, sir, still warm.”
Morris shuddered at the thought of touching the spear, but took some comfort in having Hakeswill at his side. The tope was filled with shouts as a group of the Tippoo’s troops charged. Muskets hammered. A rocket exploded nearby, while another, this one with a solid shot in its cone, ripped through bushes and crashed into a tree. A man screamed, then the scream was abruptly chopped off. “Jesus,” Morris cursed uselessly.
“Maybe we should go back?” Ensign Hicks suggested. “Back across the aqueduct?”
“Can’t, sir,” Hakeswill said. “Buggers are behind us.”
“You’re sure?” Morris asked.
“Fought the black buggers there myself, sir. Couldn’t hold them. A whole tribe of the bastards, sir. Did my best. Lost some good men.” Hakeswill sniffed with pretended emotion.
“You’re a brave man, Hakeswill,” Morris said gruffly.
“Just following your lead, sir,” Hakeswill said, then ducked as another enemy volley whipped overhead. A huge cheer sounded, followed by the screaming roar of rockets as the Tippoo’s reinforcements, sent from the city, came shouting and fighting through the trees to drive every last infidel from the tope. “Bleeding hell,” Hakeswill said. “But not to worry! I can’t die, sir! I can’t die!”
Behind him there was another cheer as the rest of the 33rd at last crossed the aqueduct.
“Forward!” a voice shouted from somewhere behind the Light Company’s scattered fugitives. “Forward!”
“Bloody hell!” Morris snapped. “Who the hell is that?”
“33rd!” die voice shouted. “To me! To me!”
“Stay where you are!” Morris called to a few eager men, and so they crouched in the warm dark that was loud with the ripping of bullets and filled by the whimpers of dying men and bright with the glare of rockets and foul with the stench of blood that was being spilt in a black place where only chaos and fear prevailed.
CHAPTER 7
Sharpe! Sharpe!” It was Colonel Gudin who, at nightfall, burst into the barracks room. “Come, quick! As you are, hurry!”
“What about me, sir?” Lawford asked. The Lieutenant had been idly reading his Bible as he lay on his cot.
“Come on, Sharpe!” Gudin did not wait to answer Lawford, but just ran across the barracks’ courtyard and out into the street which separated the European soldiers’ quarters from the Hindu temple. “Quick, Sharpe!” the Frenchman called back as he hurried past a pile of mud bricks that were stacked at the street corner. Sharpe, dressed in tiger-striped tunic and boots, but with no hat, crossbelt, pouches, or musket, ran after the Colonel. He leapt over a half-naked man who was sitting cross-legged beside the temple wall, shoved a cow out of his way, then turned the corner and hurried after Gudin toward the Mysore Gate. Lawford had paused to tug on his boots and by the time he reached the street beside the temple, Sharpe had already vanished.
“Can you ride a horse?” Gudin shouted at Sharpe when the two men reached the gate.
“I did a couple of times,” Sharpe said, not bothering to explain that the beasts had been unsaddled draught horses that had ambled docilely around the inn yard.
“Get on that one!” Gudin said, pointing to a small excited mare that was being held by an Indian infantryman along with Gudin’s own horse. “She belongs to Captain Romet, so for God’s sake take care,” Gudin shouted as he swung himself up into the saddle. Captain Romet was one of Gudin’s two deputies, but as both the junior French officers spent most of their lives in the city’s most expensive brothel, Sharpe had yet to meet either of them. He climbed gingerly onto the mare’s back, then kicked back his heels and clung desperately to the horse’s mane as she followed Gudin’s gelding into the gateway. “The British are attacking a wood just north of Sultanpetah,” the Colonel explained as he pushed his horse through the crowded archway.
Sharpe could hear the distant fight. Muskets snapped and shells exploded dully to flicker red bursts of light far to the city’s west. It was very nearly night in the city. The first house lamps had long been lit and flaming torches smoked in the archway of the Mysore Gate through which a stream of men, was hurrying. Some were infantry, others carried rockets. Gudin bellowed at them for passage, used his gelding to force the slower rocketmen aside, and then, once through the gate, he sawed on his reins to turn westward.
Sharpe followed, more intent on staying on the mare than watching the excitement that seethed around him. A narrow bridge led across the South Cauvery just outside the gate and Gudin shouted at its guards to clear the roadway. Rocketmen shrank back against the balustrades as Sharpe and Gudin hurried between the bridge’s small forts and then over the shallow, shrunken river. Once on the far bank they galloped hard across a stretch of muddy grass, then splashed through another small branch of the river. Sharpe clung to the mare’s neck as she lurched up out of the stream. Rockets were flaring in the sky ahead which still glowed from the last rays of the invisible sun.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's Triumph, Sharpe's Fortress Page 21