“I know, sir.”
“So don’t use your muskets! I hear musket fire, Captain, and I think infantry. Then I send for the Madrassi lads, and the next moment the whole place is swarming with redcoats who can’t tell who’s who in the dark. So no firing, you understand? Unless you see enemy infantry. Then send a message to me, fight the good fight and wait for support.”
Morris grunted. He had been told this twice already, and did not need the instructions a third time, but he still turned to the company which was paraded and ready. “No one’s to fire without my express permission, you understand?”
“They understands, sir,” Hakeswill answered for the company. “One musket shot without permission and the culprit’s earned himself a skinned back, sir.”
Morris took the company forward, following the old road that led directly to the gateway of the Outer Fort. The night was horribly dark, and within a few paces of leaving the engineer’s encampment, Morris could hardly see the road at all. His men’s boots scuffed loud on the hard-packed stones. They went slowly, feeling their way and using what small light came from the merest sliver of moon that hung like a silver blade above Gawilghur.
“Permission to speak, sir?” Hakeswill’s hoarse voice sounded close to Morris.
“Not too loud, Sergeant.”
“Like a mouse, sir, quiet I will be, but, sir, if we’re here, does that mean we’ll be joining the assault on the fort, sir?”
“God, no,” Morris said fervently.
Hakeswill chuckled. “I thought I should ask, sir, on account of making a will.”
“A will?” Morris asked. “You need a will?”
“I have some wealth,” Hakeswill said defensively. And soon, he reckoned, he would have even more, for he had cleverly confirmed his surmise that Sharpe’s missing pack was in Major Stokes’s keeping.
“You have some wealth, do you?” Morris asked sarcastically. “And who the hell will you leave it to?”
“Your own self, sir, if you’ll forgive me, sir. No family, apart from the army, sir, which is mother’s milk to me.”
“By all means make your will,” Morris said. “Connors can draw one up for you.” Connors was the company clerk. “I trust, of course, that the document proves redundant.”
“Whatever that means, sir, I hopes the same.”
The two men fell silent. The dark loom of the fortress was much closer now, and Morris was nervous. What was the point of this futile exercise anyway? He would be damned if he would be able to see any enemy infantrymen, not in this pitch black, unless the fools decided to carry a lantern. Some lights showed in Gawilghur. There was a glow above the Outer Fort that must have been cast by the fires and lights in the Inner Fort, while closer Morris could see a couple of flickering patches where fires or torches burned inside the nearer defenses. But those scattered lights would not help him see an enemy force debouching from the gate.
“Far enough,” he called. He was not really sure if he had gone close enough to the fort, but he had no fancy to go further, and so he stopped and hissed at Hakeswill to spread the men westward across the isthmus. “Five paces between each pair of men, Sergeant.”
“Five paces it is, sir.”
“If anyone sees or hears anything, they’re to pass the message back here to me.”
“They’ll do so, sir.”
“And no fool’s to light a pipe, you hear me? Don’t want the enemy spraying us with canister because some blockhead needs tobacco.”
“Your orders is noted, sir. And where would you want me, sir?”
“Far end of the line, Sergeant.” Morris was the sole officer with the company, for both his lieutenant and ensign had the fever and so had stayed in Mysore. But Hakeswill, he reckoned, was as good as any lieutenant. “You can order men to fire if you’re certain you see the enemy, but God help you if you’re wrong.”
“Very good, sir,” Hakeswill said, then hissed at the men to spread out. They vanished into the blackness. For a moment there was the sound of boots, the thump of musket stocks hitting rocks and the grunts as the redcoats settled, but then there was silence. Or near silence. The wind sighed at the cliff’s edge while, from the fort, there drifted a plangent and discordant music that rose and fell with the wind’s vagaries. Worse than bagpipes, Morris thought sourly.
The first axle squeals sounded as the oxen dragged the gabions forward. The noise would be continuous now and, sooner or later, the enemy must react by opening fire. And what chance would he have of seeing anything then, Morris wondered. The gun flashes would blind him. The first he would see of an enemy would be the glint of starlight on a blade. He spat. Waste of time.
“Morris!” a voice hissed from the dark. “Captain Morris!”
“Here!” He turned toward the voice, which had come from behind him on the road back to the plateau. “Here!”
“Colonel Kenny,” the voice said, still in a sibilant whisper. “Don’t mind me prowling around.”
“Of course not, sir.” Morris did not like the idea of a senior officer coming to the picket line, but he could hardly send the man away. “Honored to have you, sir,” he said, then hissed a warning to his men. “Senior officer present, don’t be startled. Pass the word on.”
Morris heard Kenny’s footsteps fade to his right. There was the low murmur, of a brief conversation, then silence again, except for the demonic squeal of the oxcart axles. A moment later a lantern light showed from behind the rocks where Stokes was making one of his main batteries. Morris braced himself for the enemy reaction, but the fortress stayed silent.
The noise grew louder as the sappers heaved the gabions from the carts and manhandled them up onto the rocks to form the thick bastion. A man swore, others grunted and the great baskets thumped on stone. Another lantern was unmasked, and this time the man carrying it stepped up onto the rocks to see where the gabions were being laid. A voice ordered him to get down.
The fort at last woke up. Morris could hear footsteps hurrying along the nearer fire step, and he saw a brief glow as a linstock was plucked from a barrel and blown into red life. “Jesus,” he said under his breath, and a moment later the first gun fired. The flame stabbed bright as a lance from the walls, its glare momentarily lighting all the rocky isthmus and the green-scummed surface of the tank, before it was blotted out by the rolling smoke. The round shot screamed overhead, struck a rock and ricocheted wildly up into the sky. A second gun fired, its flame lighting the first smoke cloud from within so that it seemed as if the wall of the fort was edged with a brief vaporous luminance. The ball struck a gabion, breaking it apart in a spray of earth. A man groaned. Dogs were barking in the British camp and inside the fortress.
Morris stared toward the dark gateway. He could see nothing, because the guns’ flames had robbed him of his night vision. Or rather he could see wraithlike shapes which he knew were more likely to be his imagination than the approach of some savage enemy. The guns were firing steadily now, aiming at the small patch of lantern light, but then more lights, brighter ones, appeared to the west of the isthmus, and some of the gunners switched their aim, not knowing that Stokes had unveiled the second lights as a feint.
Then the first rockets were fired, and they were even more dazzling than the guns. The fiery trails seemed to limp up from the fort’s bastions, seething smoke and sparks, then they leaped up into the air, wobbling in their flight, to sear over Morris’s head and slash north toward the camp. None went near their targets, but their sound and the flaming exhausts were nerve-racking. The first shells were fired, and they added to the night’s din as they cracked apart among the rocks to whistle shards of shattered casing over the struggling sappers. The firing was deliberate as the gun captains took care to lay their pieces before firing, but still there were six or seven shots every minute, while the rockets were more constant. Morris tried to use the brightness of the rocket trails to see the ground between his hiding place and the fort, but there was too much smoke, the shadows flickered wildly, and hi
s imagination made movement where there was none. He held his fire, reckoning he would hear the gate open or the sound of enemy footsteps. He could hear the defenders shouting on the wall, either calling insults to the enemy hidden in the dark or else encouraging each other.
Hakeswill, at the very right-hand end of the line, cowered among the rocks. He had been sheltering with Kendrick and Lowry, but the enemy cannonade had driven him still further right to where there was a deep cleft. He knew he was safe there, but even so every screaming rocket made him flinch, while the sound of the shells exploding and the round shots cracking against stone made him draw his knees up into his chest. He knew there was a senior officer visiting the picket line because the message telling of the Colonel’s presence had been passed down the line. Kenny’s visit struck Hakeswill as a daft thing for any man with gold braid on his coat to do, but when the Colonel hissed his name aloud he kept silent. At least he assumed it was the visiting officer, for the summons was insistent and authoritative, but Hakeswill ignored it. He did not want to draw attention to himself in case the heathen blackamoor gunners aimed their cannon at him. Let the officer hiss away, he decided, and a moment later the man went away.
“Who are you?” a low voice asked Private Kendrick just a few yards from Hakeswill’s hiding place.
“Kendrick, sir.”
“To me, Private. I need your help.”
Kendrick slipped back toward the voice. Bastard interfering officer, he thought, but he had to obey. “Where are you, sir?” he asked.
“Here, man! Hurry, now, hurry!”
Kendrick slipped on a slanting stone and sat down with a bump. A rocket slashed overhead, spewing fire and sparks, and in its brief light he saw a shadow above him, then felt a blade at his throat. “One noise,” the voice hissed, “and you’re dead.”
Kendrick went very still. He did not make any noise at all, but he still died.
A lucky shell struck a pair of oxen, disemboweling the beasts that lowed pitifully as they collapsed onto the road. “Get them out of the way!” a voice roared, and sepoys struggled with the massive animals, cutting their harnesses and pulling the dying beasts into the rocks. Other men ran the empty cart back to the encampment, making way for the next wagon to drag more gabions forward. “Kill them!” the officer ordered. “Use your bayonets! No musket fire!” The sepoys finished off the oxen, stabbing again and again into their thick necks while the bloody hooves thrashed violently. Another shell landed, nearby, slicing its fragments among the rocks. The road was slippery with spilled guts over which the next cart rolled impassively, its axle screeching like a demon.
“All well, soldier?” a voice asked Private Lowry.
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m Colonel Kenny,” the man said, dropping down beside Lowry.
“Yes, sir,” Lowry acknowledged nervously.
“See anything?”
“Nothing, sir,” Lowry said, then gasped as he felt a blade at his throat.
“Where’s Hakeswill?” the voice hissed in his ear, and Lowry suddenly knew this was not Colonel Kenny who had him in a tight grip.
“Dunno, sir,” Lowry said, then began to cry out, but the cry was cut off as the blade sawed deep into his gullet.
A ball, fired low, struck plumb on the great boulder that sheltered Hakeswill and the Sergeant whimpered as he tried to wriggle deeper into the cleft. A rocket landed thirty paces behind him and began to chase its tail, whirling about on the turf, scattering sparks, until it finally lodged against a rock and burned itself out in a display of small blue flames. Another round shot hammered into the gabions, but now they were well stacked and the ball’s impact was soaked up by the tight-packed soil.
A whistle blew from the battery site, then blew twice more. Morris, relieved by the sound, called to the men to his right. “Back to the road! Pass it on! Back to the road!” Thank God the worst of the ordeal was over! Now he was supposed to withdraw to the battery, ready to protect it through the remaining hours of the dark night, but Morris knew he would feel a good deal safer once he was behind the gabions, just as he knew that the cessation of the work would probably persuade the Mahrattas to cease fire. “Close on me!” he called to his company. “Hurry!”
The message was passed along the picket line and the men ran at a crouch back to where Morris waited. They bumped into each other as they gathered, then squatted as Morris called for Hakeswill.
“Not here, sir,” Sergeant Green finally decided.
“Count the men, Sergeant,” Morris ordered.
Sergeant Green numbered the men off. “Three missing, sir,” he reported. “Hakeswill, Lowry and Kendrick.”
“Damn them,” Morris said. A rocket hissed up from the gatehouse, twisted in the night to leave a crazy trail of flame-edged smoke, then dived down to the left, far down, plunging into the ravine that edged the isthmus. The light of the exhaust flashed down the steep cliffs, finally vanishing a thousand feet below Morris. Two guns fired together, their balls hammering towards the fake lanterns. The battery lanterns had vanished, evidence that the sappers had finished their work.
“Take the men to the battery,” Morris ordered Green. “Garrard? You stay with me.”
Morris did not want to do anything heroic, but he knew he could not report that he had simply lost three men, so he took Private Tom Garrard west across the tumbled ground where the picket line had been stretched. They called out the names of the missing men, but no reply came.
It was Garrard who stumbled over the first body. “Don’t know who it is, sir, but he’s dead. Bloody mess, he is.”
Morris swore and crouched beside the body. A rocket’s bright passage showed him a slit throat and a spill of blood. It also revealed that the man had been stripped of his coat which lay discarded beside the corpse. The sight of the gaping throat made Morris gag.
“There’s another here, sir,” Garrard called from a few paces away.
“Jesus!” Morris twisted aside, willing himself not to throw up, but the bile was sour in his throat. He shuddered, then managed to take a deep breath. “We’re going.”
“You want me to look for the other fellow, sir?” Garrard asked.
“Come on!” Morris fled, not wanting to stay in this dark charnel house.
Garrard followed.
The gunfire died. A last rocket stitched sparks across the stars, then Gawilghur was silent again.
Hakeswill cowered in his hiding place, shuddering as the occasional flare of an exploding shell or passing rocket cast lurid shadows into the narrow cleft. He thought he heard Lowry call aloud, but the sound was so unexpected, and so quickly over, he decided it was his nerves. Then, blessedly, he heard the whistle that signaled that the sappers were done with their work, and a moment later he heard the message being called along the line. “Back to the road! Back to the road!”
The rockets and guns were still battering the night, so Hakeswill stayed where he was until he sensed that the fury of the fire was diminishing, then he crept out of his cleft and, still keeping low, scuttled eastward.
“Hakeswill!” a voice called nearby.
He froze.
“Hakeswill?” The voice was insistent.
Some instinct told the Sergeant that there was mischief in the dark, and so Hakeswill crouched lower still. He heard something moving in the night, the scrape of leather on stone, the sound of breathing, but the man did not come close to Hakeswill who, petrified, edged on another pace. His hand, feeling the ground ahead of him, suddenly found something wet and sticky. He flinched, brought his fingers to his nose and smelled blood.
“Jesus,” he swore under his breath. He groped again, and this time found a corpse. His hands explored the face, the open mouth, then found the gaping wound in the neck. He jerked his hand back.
It had to be Lowry or Kendrick, for this was about where he had left the two privates, and if they were dead, or even if only one of them was dead, then it meant that Captain Torrance’s death had been no lovers’ tiff. Not th
at Hakeswill had ever believed it was. He knew who it was. Bloody Sharpe was alive. Bloody Sharpe was hunting his enemies, and three, maybe four, were already dead. And Hakeswill knew he would be next.
“Hakeswill!” the voice hissed, but farther away now.
A gun fired from the fort and in its flash Hakeswill saw a cloaked shape to his north. The man was crossing the skyline, not far from Hakeswill, but at least he was going away. Sharpe! It had to be Sharpe! And a terror grew in Hakeswill so that his face twitched and his hands shook.
“Think, you bugger,” he told himself, “think!”
And the answer came, a sweet answer, so obvious that he wondered why he had taken so long to find it.
Sharpe was alive, he was not a prisoner in Gawilghur, but haunting the British camp, which meant that there was one place that would be utterly safe for Hakeswill to go. He could go to the fortress, and Sharpe would never reach him there for the rumor in the camp was that the assault on Gawilghur was likely to be a desperate and bloody business. Likely to fail, some men said, and even if it did not, Hakeswill could always pretend he had been taken prisoner. All he wanted at this moment was to be away from Sharpe and so he sidled southward, down the hill, and once he reached the flatter ground, he ran toward the now dark walls of the fort through the drifting skeins of foul-smelling powder smoke.
He ran past the tank, along the approach road, and around to the left where the great gatehouse loomed above him in the dark. And once there he pounded on the massive, iron-studded doors.
No one responded.
He pounded again, using the butt of his musket, scared witless that the sound would bring an avenging horror from the dark behind, and suddenly a small wicket gate in the larger door was pulled open to flood flame light into the night.
“I’m a deserter!” Hakeswill hissed. “I’m on your side!”
Hands seized him and pulled him through the small doorway. A smoking torch burned high on the wall to show Hakeswill the long, narrow entranceway, the dark ramparts, and the dark faces of the men who had him prisoner. “I’m on your side!” he shouted as the gate was closed behind him and his musket was snatched away. “I’m on your side!”
Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe's Tiger, Sharpe's Triumph, Sharpe's Fortress Page 97