“Hang him?” Sharpe asked in puzzlement.
“It’s the penalty for theft, ain’t it?” the cavalryman insisted.
Sharpe looked to the Scottish Captain, who nodded uncertainly. “That’s what the General said,” the Scotsman confirmed.
“I’d like to know how he got the supplies, sir,” Sharpe said.
“You’ll give the fat bastard time to concoct a story?” the cavalryman demanded. He had an arrogance that annoyed Sharpe, but everything about the cavalryman irritated Sharpe. The man was a dandy. He wore tall, spurred boots that sheathed his calves and knees in soft, polished leather. His white breeches were skintight, his waistcoat had gold buttons, while his red tailcoat was clean, uncreased and edged with gold braid. He wore a frilled stock, a red silk sash was draped across his right shoulder and secured at his left hip by a knot of golden braid, his sabre was scabbarded in red leather, while his cocked hat was plumed with a lavishly curled feather that had been dyed pale green. The clothes had cost a fortune, and clearly his servants must spend hours on keeping their master so beautifully dressed. He looked askance at Sharpe, a slight wrinkle of his nostrils suggesting that he found Sharpe’s appearance distressing. The cavalryman’s face suggested he was a clever man, but also that he despised those who were less clever than himself. “I don’t suppose Sir Arthur will be vastly pleased when he hears that you let the fellow live, Ensign,” he said acidly. “Swift and certain justice, ain’t that the penalty for theft? Hang the fat beast.”
“That is what the standing orders say,” the Scotch Brigade Captain agreed, “but does it apply to civilians?”
“He should have a trial!” Sharpe protested, not because he was so committed to Naig’s right to a hearing, but because he feared the whole episode was getting out of hand. He had thought to find the supplies, maybe have a tussle with Naig’s guards, but no one was supposed to die. Naig deserved a good kicking, but death?
“Standing orders apply to anyone within the picket lines,” the cavalry Captain averred confidently. “So for God’s sake get on with it! Dangle the bastard!” He was sweating, and Sharpe sensed that the elegant cavalryman was not quite so confident as he appeared.
“Bugger a trial,” Sergeant Lockhart said happily. “I’ll hang the bastard.” He snapped at his troopers to fetch a nearby oxcart. Naig had tried to retreat to the protection of his guards, but the cavalry Captain had drawn a pistol that he now held close to Naig’s head as the grinning troopers trundled the empty oxcart into the open space in front of the pilfered supplies.
Sharpe crossed to the tall cavalryman. “Shouldn’t we talk to him, sir?”
“My dear fellow, have you ever tried” to get the truth out of an Indian?” the Captain asked. “They swear by a thousand gaudy gods that they’ll tell the truth, then lie like a rug! Be quiet!” Naig had begun to protest and the cavalryman rammed the pistol into the Indian’s mouth, breaking a tooth and gashing Naig’s gum. “Another damned word, Naig, and I’ll castrate you before I hang you.” The cavalryman glanced at Sharpe, who was frowning. “Are you squeamish, Ensign?”
“Don’t seem right, sir. I mean I agree he deserves to be hung, but shouldn’t we talk to him first?”
“If you like conversation so much,” the cavalryman drawled, “institute a Philosophical Society. Then you can enjoy all the hot air you like. Sergeant?” This last was to Lockhart. “Take the bastard off my hands, will you?”
“Pleasure, sir.” Lockhart seized Naig and shoved him toward the cart. One of the cavalry troopers had cut a length of guy rope from the burned remnants of the tent and he now tied one end to the tip of the single shaft that protruded from the front of the oxcart. He made a loop in the rope’s end.
Naig screamed and tried to pull away. Some of his guards started forward, but then a hard voice ordered them back and Sharpe turned to see that a tall, thin Indian in a black and green striped robe had come from the larger tent. The newcomer, who looked to be in his forties, walked with a limp. He crossed to the cavalry Captain and spoke quietly, and Sharpe saw the cavalryman shake his head vehemently, then shrug as if to suggest that he was powerless. Then the Captain gestured to Sharpe and the tall Indian gave the Ensign a look of such malevolence that Sharpe instinctively put his hand on his sabre’s hilt. Lockhart had pulled the noose over Naig’s head. “Are you sure, sir?” he asked the cavalry Captain.
“Of course I’m sure, Sergeant,” the cavalryman said angrily. “Just get on with it.”
“Sir?” Sharpe appealed to the Scots Captain, who frowned uncertainly, then turned and walked away as though he wanted nothing more to do with the affair. The tall Indian in the striped robe spat into the dust, then limped back to the tent.
Lockhart ordered his troopers to the back of the cart. Naig was attempting to pull the noose free of his neck, but Lockhart slapped his hands down. “Now, boys!” he shouted.
The troopers reached up and hauled down on the back-board so that the cart tipped like a seesaw on its single axle and, as the troopers pulled down, so the shaft rose into the air. The rope stretched and tightened. Naig screamed, then the cavalryman jumped up to sit on the cart’s back and the shaft jerked higher still and the scream was abruptly choked off. Naig was dangling now, his feet kicking wildly under the lavishly embroidered robe. None of the crowd moved, none protested.
Naig’s face was bulging and his hands were scrabbling uselessly at the noose which was tight about his neck. The cavalry officer watched with a small smile. “A pity,” he said in his elegant voice. “The wretched man ran the best brothel I ever found.”
“We’re not killing his girls, sir,” Sharpe said.
“That’s true, Ensign, but will their next owner treat them as well?” The cavalryman turned to the big tent’s entrance and took off his plumed hat to salute a group of sari-clad girls who now watched wide-eyed as their employer did the gallows dance. “I saw Nancy Merrick hang in Madras,” the cavalryman said, “and she did the jig for thirty-seven minutes! Thirty-seven! I’d wagered on sixteen, so lost rather a lot of tin. Don’t think I can watch Naig dance for half an hour. It’s too damned hot. Sergeant? Help his soul to perdition, will you?”
Lockhart crouched beneath the dying man and caught hold of his heels. Then he tugged down hard, swearing when Naig pissed on him. He tugged again, and at last the body went still. “Do you see what happens when you steal from us?” the cavalry Captain shouted at the crowd, then repeated the words in an Indian language. “If you steal from us, you” will die!” Again he translated his words, then gave Sharpe a crooked grin. “But only, of course, if you’re stupid enough to be caught, and I didn’t think Naig was stupid at all. Rather the reverse. Just how did you happen to discover the supplies, Ensign?”
“Tent was on fire, sir,” Sharpe said woodenly. “Me and Sergeant Lockhart decided to rescue whatever was inside.”
“How very public-spirited of you.” The Captain gave Sharpe a long, speculative look, then turned back to Lockhart. “Is he dead, Sergeant?”
“Near as makes no difference, sir,” Lockhart called back.
“Use your pistol to make sure,” the Captain ordered, then sighed. “A shame,” he said. “I rather liked Naig. He was a rogue, of course, but rogues are so much more amusing than honest men.” He watched as Lockhart lowered the shaft, then stooped over the prostrate body and put a bullet into its skull. “I suppose I’ll have to find some carts to fetch these supplies back where they belong,” the Captain said.
“I’ll do that, sir,” Sharpe said.
“You will?” The Captain seemed astonished to discover such willingness. “Why on earth would you want to do that, Ensign?”
“It’s my job, sir,” Sharpe said. “I’m Captain Torrance’s assistant.”
“You poor benighted bastard,” the Captain said pityingly.
“Poor, sir? Why?”
“Because I’m Captain Torrance. Good day to you, Ensign.” Torrance turned on his heel and walked away through the crowd.
He spat after the departed Captain, then went to find some bullocks and carts. The army had its supplies back, but Sharpe had made a new enemy. As if Hakeswill were not enough, he now had Torrance as well.
The palace in Gawilghur was a sprawling one-story building that stood on the highest point within the Inner Fort. To its north was a garden that curled about the largest of the fortress’s lakes. The lake was a tank, a reservoir, but its banks had been planted with flowering trees, and a flight of steps led from the palace to a small stone pavilion on the lake’s northern shore. The pavilion had an arched ceiling on which the reflections of the lake’s small waves should have rippled, but the season had been so dry that the lake had shrunk and the water level was some eight or nine feet lower than usual. The water and the exposed banks were rimed with a green, foul-smelling scum, but Beny Singh, the Killadar of Gawilghur, had arranged for spices to be burned in low, flat braziers so that the dozen men inside the pavilion were not too offended by the lake’s stench.
“If only the Rajah was here,” Beny Singh said, “we should know what to do.” Beny Singh was a short, plump man with a curling mustache and nervous eyes. He was the fortress commander, but he was a courtier by avocation, not a soldier, and he had always regarded his command of the great fortress as a license to make his fortune rather than to fight the Rajah’s enemies.
Prince Manu Bappoo was not surprised that his brother had chosen not to come to Gawilghur, but had instead fled farther into the hills. The Rajah was like Beny Singh, he had no belly for a fight, but Bappoo had watched the first British troops creep across the plain beneath the fort’s high walls and he welcomed their coming. “We don’t need my brother here to know what we must do,” he said. “We fight.” The other men, all commanders of the various troops that had taken refuge in Gawilghur, voiced their agreement.
“The British cannot be stopped by walls,” Beny Singh said. He was cradling a small white lapdog which had eyes as wide and frightened as its master’s.
“They can, and they will,” Bappoo insisted.
Singh shook his head. “Were they stopped at Seringapatam? At Ahmednuggur? They crossed those city walls as though they had wings! They are—what is the word your Arabs use?—djinns!” He looked about the gathered council and saw no one who would support him. “They must have the djinns on their side,” he added weakly.
“So what would you do?” Bappoo asked.
“Treat with them,” Beny Singh said. “Ask for cowle.”
“Cowle?” It was Colonel Dodd who intervened, speaking in his crude, newly learned Marathi. “I’ll tell you what terms Wellesley will offer you. None! He’ll march you away as a prisoner, he’ll slight these walls and take away the Rajah’s treasures.”
“There are no treasures here,” Beny Singh said, but no one believed him. He was soothing the little dog which had been frightened by the Englishman’s harsh voice.
“And he’ll give your women to his men as playthings,” Dodd added nastily.
Beny Singh shuddered. His wife, his concubines and his children were all in the palace, and they were all dear to him. He pampered them, worshiped them and adored them. “Perhaps I should remove my people from the fort?” he suggested hesitantly. “I could take them to Multai? The British will never reach Multai.”
“You’d run away?” Dodd asked in his harsh voice. “You bloody won’t!” He spoke those three words in English, but everyone understood what they meant. He leaned forward. “If you run away,” he said, “the garrison loses heart. The rest of the soldiers can’t take their women away, so why should you? We fight them here, and we stop them here. Stop them dead!” He stood and walked to the pavilion’s edge where he spat onto the green-scummed bank before turning back to Beny Singh. “Your women are safe here, Killadar. I could hold this fortress from now till the world’s end with just a hundred men.”
“The British are djinns,” Beny Singh whispered. The dog in his arms was shivering.
“They are not djinns,” Dodd snapped. “There are no demons! They don’t exist!”
“Winged djinns,” Beny Singh said in almost a whimper, “invisible djinns! In the air!”
Dodd spat again. “Bloody hell,” he said in English, then turned fast toward Beny Singh. “I’m an English demon. Me! Understand? I’m a djinn, and if you take your women away I’ll follow you and I’ll come to them at night and fill them with black bile.” He bared his yellowed teeth and the Killadar shuddered. The white dog barked shrilly.
Manu Bappoo waved Dodd back to his seat. Dodd was the only European officer left in his forces and, though Bappoo was glad to have the Englishman’s services, there were times when Colonel Dodd could be tiresome. “If there are djinns,” Bappoo told Singh, “they will be on our side.” He waited while the Killadar soothed the frightened dog, then he leaned forward. “Tell me,” he demanded of Beny Singh, “can the British take the fortress by using the roads up the hill?”
Beny Singh thought about those two steep winding roads that twisted up the hill beneath Gawilghur’s walls. No man could survive those climbs, not if the defenders were raining round shot and rocks down the precipitous slopes. “No,” he admitted.
“So they can only come one way. Only one way! Across the land bridge. And my men will guard the Outer Fort, and Colonel Dodd’s men will defend the Inner Fort.”
“And no one,” Dodd said harshly, “no one will get past my Cobras.” He still resented that his well-trained, white-coated soldiers were not defending the Outer Fort, but he had accepted Manu Bappoo’s argument that the important thing was to hold the Inner Fort. If, by some chance, the British did capture the Outer Fort, they would never fight past Dodd’s men. “My men,” Dodd growled, “have never been defeated. They never will be.”
Manu Bappoo smiled at the nervous Beny Singh. “You see, Killadar, you will die here of old age.”
“Or of too many women,” another man put in, provoking laughter.
A cannon sounded from the Outer Fort’s northern ramparts, followed a few seconds later by another. No one knew what might have caused the firing and so the dozen men followed Manu Bappoo as he left the pavilion and walked toward the Inner Fort’s northern ramparts. Silver-furred monkeys chattered at the soldiers from the high branches.
Arab guards stood at the gate of the Rajah’s garden. They were posted to stop any common soldiers of the garrison going to the paths beside the tank where the Killadar’s women liked to stroll in the cool of the evening. A hundred paces beyond the garden gate was a steep-sided rock pit, about twice as deep as a man stood high, and Dodd paused to look down into its shadowed depths. The sides had been chiseled smooth by stone-workers so that nothing could climb up from the floor that was littered with white bones. “The Traitor’s Hole,” Bappoo said, as he paused beside Dodd, “but the bones are from baby monkeys.”
“But they do eat men?” Dodd asked, intrigued by the shadowed blackness at the foot of the hole.
“They kill men,” Bappoo said, “but don’t eat them. They’re not big enough.”
“I can’t see any,” Dodd said, disappointed, then suddenly a sinuous shadow writhed swiftly between two crevices. “There!” he said happily. “Don’t they grow big enough to eat men?”
“Most years they escape,” Bappoo? said. “The monsoon floods the pit and the snakes swim to the top and wriggle out. Then we must find new ones. This year we’ve been saved the trouble. These snakes will grow bigger than usual.”
Beny Singh waited a few paces away, clutching his small dog as though he feared Dodd would throw it down to the snakes. “There’s a bastard who ought to be fed to the snakes,” Dodd said to Bappoo, nodding toward the Killadar.
“My brother likes him,” Bappoo said mildly, touching Dodd’s arm to indicate that they should walk on. “They share tastes.”
“Such as?”
“Women, music, luxury. We
really do not need him here.”
Dodd shook his head. “If you let him go, sahib, then half the damned garrison will want to run away. And if you let the women go, what will the men fight for? Besides, do you really think there’s any danger?”
“None,” Bappoo admitted. He had led the officers up a steep rock stairway to a natural bastion where a vast iron gun was trained across the chasm toward the distant cliffs of the high plateau. From here the far cliffs were almost a mile away, but Dodd could just see a group of horsemen clustered at the chasm’s edge. It was those horsemen, all in native robes, who had prompted the Outer Fort’s gunners to open fire, but the gunners, seeing their shots fall well short of the target, had given up. Dodd drew out his telescope, trained it, and saw a man in the uniform of the Royal Engineers sitting on the ground a few paces from his companions. The engineer was sketching. The horsemen were all Indians. Dodd lowered the telescope and looked at the huge iron gun. “Is it loaded?” he asked the gunners.
“Yes, sahib.”
“A haideri apiece if you can kill the man in the dark uniform. The one sitting at the cliff’s edge.”
The gunners laughed. Their gun was over twenty feet long and its wrought-iron barrel was cast with decorations that had been painted green, white and red. A pile of round shot, each over a foot in diameter, stood beside the massive carriage that was made from giant balks of teak. The gun captain fussed over his aim, shouting at his men to lever the vast carriage a thumb’s width to the right, then a finger’s breadth back, until at last he was satisfied. He squinted along the barrel for a second, waved the officers who had followed Bappoo to move away from the great gun, then leaned over the breach to dab his glowing portfire onto the gun’s touch-hole.
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's Triumph, Sharpe's Fortress Page 83