Sharpe's Fortress (26 page)

“I have poison!” Beny Singh said, not comprehending Dodd's last words.

“If they look like winning, Colonel, you'll send me word?”

Dodd smiled.

“You have my promise, sahib,” he said with a pretended humility.

“Better my women should die,” Beny Singh insisted.

“Better that you should die,” Dodd said, 'unless you want to be forced to watch the white
djinns take their pleasure on your dying women."

“They wouldn't!”

“What else do they want in here?” Dodd asked.

“Have they not heard of the beauty of your women? Each night they talk of them around
their fires, and every day they dream of their thighs and their breasts. They can't wait,
Killadar. The pleasures of your women pull the redcoats towards us.”

Beny Singh fled from the horrid words and Dodd smiled. He had come to realize that only
one man could command here. Beny Singh was the fortress commander and though he was a
despicable coward he was also a friend of the Rajah's, and that friendship ensured the
loyalty of much of Gawilghur's standing garrison. The rest of the fortress defenders
were divided into two camps. There were Manu Bappoo's soldiers, led by the remnants of
the Lions of Allah and loyal to the Prince, and Dodd's Cobras. But if only one of the
three leaders was left, then that man would rule Gawilghur, and whoever ruled Gawilghur
could rule all India.

Dodd touched the stock of the rifle. That would help, and Beny Singh's abject terror
would render the Killadar harmless. Dodd smiled and climbed to the ramparts from where,
with a telescope, he watched the British heave the first gun up to the edge of the plateau. A
week, he thought, maybe a day more, and then the British would come to his slaughter. And make
his wildly ambitious dreams come true.

“The fellow was using a rifle!” Major Stokes said in wonderment. “I do declare, a
rifle! Can't have been anything else at that range. Two hundred paces if it was an inch, and
he fanned my head! A much underestimated weapon, the rifle, don't you think?”

“A toy,” Captain Morris said.

“Nothing will replace muskets.”

“But the accuracy!” Stokes declared.

“Soldiers can't use rifles,” Morris said.

“It would be like giving knives and forks to hogs.” He twisted in the camp chair and
gestured at his men, the 33rd's Light Company.

“Look at them! Half of them can't work out which end of a musket is which. Useless
buggers. Might as well arm the bastards with pikes.”

“If you say so,” Stokes said disapprovingly. His road had reached the plateau and now he
had to begin the construction of the breaching batteries, and the 33rd's Light Company,
which had escorted Stokes north from Mysore, had been charged with the job of protecting
the sappers who would build the batteries. Captain Morris had been unhappy with the
orders, for he would have much preferred to have been sent back south rather than be camped
by the rock isthmus that promised to be such a lively place in these next few days. There was
a chance that Gawilghur's garrison might sally out to destroy the batteries, and even if
that danger did not materialize, it was a certainty that the Mahratta gunners on the
Outer Fort's walls would try to break down the new works with cannon fire.

Sergeant Hakeswill approached Stokes's tent. He looked distracted, so much so that his
salute was perfunctory.

“You heard the news, sir?” He spoke to Morris.

Morris squinted up at the Sergeant.

“News,” he said heavily, 'news?

Can't say I have, Sergeant. The enemy has surrendered, perhaps?"

“Nothing so good, sir, nothing so good.”

“You look pale, man!” Stokes said.

“Are you sickening?”

“Heart-sick, sir, that's what I am in my own self, sir, heart-sick.”

Sergeant Hakeswill sniffed heavily, and even cuffed at a non-existent tear on his
twitching cheek.

“Captain Torrance,” he announced, 'is dead, sir." The Sergeant took off his shako and
held it against his breast.

“Dead, sir.”

“Dead?” Stokes said lightly. He had not met Torrance.

"Took his own life, sir, that's what they do say. He killed his clerk with a knife, then
turned his pistol on himself The Sergeant demonstrated the action by pretending to point
a pistol at his own head and pulling the trigger. He sniffed again.

“And he was as good an officer as ever I did meet, and I've known many in my time.
Officers and gentlemen, like your own good self, sir,” he said to Morris.

Morris, as unmoved by Torrance's death as Stokes, smirked.

“Killed his clerk, eh? That'll teach the bugger to keep a tidy ledger.”

“They do say, sir,” Hakeswill lowered his voice, 'that he must have been unnatural."

“Unnatural?” Stokes asked.

"With his clerk, sir, pardon me for breathing such a filthy thing.

Him and the clerk, sir.

“Cos he was naked, see, the Captain was, and the clerk was a handsome boy, even if he was
a blackamoor. He washed a lot, and the Captain liked that.”

“Are you suggesting it was a lovers' tiff?” Morris asked, then laughed.

“No, sir,” Hakeswill said, turning to stare across the plateau's edge into the immense
sky above the Deccan Plain, 'because it weren't. The Captain weren't ever unnatural, not
like that. It weren't a lovers' tiff, sir, not even if he was naked as a needle. The Captain,
sir, he liked to go naked. Kept him cool, he said, and kept his clothes clean, but there
weren't nothing strange in it. Not in him. And he weren't a man to be filthy and unnatural.
He liked the bibb is he did. He was a Christian. A Christian gentleman, that's what he was,
and he didn't kill himself. I knows who killed him, I do."

Morris gave Stokes a shrug, as if Hakeswill's maunderings were beyond
understanding.

“But the nub of the thing is, sir' - Hakeswill turned back to face Morris and stood to
attention 'that I ain't with the bullocks no more, sir. I've got orders, sir, to be back
with you where I belongs, sir, seeing as some other officer has got Captain Torrance's
duties and he didn't want me no more on account of having his own sergeant.” He replaced
his shako, then saluted Morris.

“Under orders, sir! With Privates Kendrick and Lowry, sir. Others have taken over our
bullocking duties, sir, and we is back with you like we always wanted to be. Sir!”

“Welcome back, Sergeant,” Morris said laconically.

“I'm sure the company will be overjoyed at your return.”

“I knows they will, sir,” Hakeswill said.

“I'm like a father to them, sir, I am,” Hakeswill added to Stokes.

Stokes frowned.

“Who do you think killed Captain Torrance, Sergeant?” he asked, and when Hakeswill said
nothing, but just stood with his face twitching, the Major became insistent.

“If you know, man, you must speak! This is a crime! You have a duty to speak.”

Hakeswill's face wrenched itself.

“It were him, sir.” The Sergeant's eyes widened.

“It were Sharpie, sir!”

Stokes laughed.

"Don't be so absurd, man. Poor Sharpe is a prisoner!

He's locked away in the fortress, I've no doubt."

“That's what we all hear, sir,” Hakeswill said, 'but I knows better."

“A touch of the sun,” Morris explained to Stokes, then waved the Sergeant away.

“Put your kit with the company, Sergeant. And I'm glad you're back.”

“Touched by your words, sir,” Hakeswill said fervently, 'and I'm glad to be home, sir,
back in me own kind where I belong." He saluted again, then swivelled on his heel and
marched away.

:“Salt of the earth,” Morris said.

Major Stokes, from his brief acquaintance with Hakeswill, was not sure of that verdict,
but he said nothing. Instead he wandered a few paces northwards to watch the sappers who
were busy scraping at the plateau's thin soil to fill gabions that had been newly woven from
green bamboo. The gab ions great wicker baskets stuffed with earth, would be stacked as a
screen to soak up the enemy gunfire while the battery sites were being levelled. Stokes
had already decided to do the initial work at night, for the vulnerable time for making
batteries close to a fortress was the first few hours, and at night the enemy gunfire was ,
likely to be inaccurate.

The Major was making four batteries. Two, the breaching ones, would be constructed
far down the isthmus among an outcrop of great black boulders that lay less than a
quarter-mile from the fortress. The rocks, with the gab ions would provide the gunners some
protection : from the fortress's counter-fire. Sappers, hidden from the fort by the lie of
the land, were already driving a road to the proposed site of the breaching guns. Two
other batteries would be constructed to the east of the isthmus, on the edge of the
plateau, and those guns would enfilade the growing breaches.

There would be three breaches. That decision had been made when Stokes, early in the
dawn, had crept as close to the fortress as he had dared and, hidden among the tumbled rocks
above the half-filled tank, had examined the Outer Fort's wall through his telescope. He
had stared a long time, counting the gun embrasures and trying to estimate how many men
were stationed on the bastions and fire steps Those were details that did not really
concern him for Stokes's business was confined to breaking the walls, but what he saw
encouraged him.

There were two walls, both built on the steep slope which faced the

, plateau. The slope was so steep that the base of the inner wall showed high above the
parapet of the outer wall, and that was excellent news, for making a breach depended on
being able to batter the base of a wall.

These walls, built so long ago, had never been designed to stop artillery, but to deter
men. Stokes knew he could lay his guns so that they would hammer both walls at once, and that
when the ancient stonework crumbled, the rubble would spill forward down the slope to make
natural ramps up which the attackers could climb.

The masonry seemed to have stayed largely unrepaired since it had been built. Stokes
could tell that, for the dark stones were covered with grey lichen and thick with weeds
growing from the gaps between the blocks. The walls looked formidable, for they were high and
well provided with massive bastions that would let the defenders provide flanking fire,
but Stokes knew that the dressed stone of the two walls' outer faces merely disguised a
thick heart of piled rubble, and once the facing masonry was shattered the rubble would
spill out. A few shots would then suffice to break the inner faces. Two days' work, he
reckoned. Two days of hard gunnery should bring the walls tumbling down.

Stokes had not made his reconnaissance alone, but had been accompanied by Lieutenant
Colonel William Kenny of the East India Company who would lead the assault on the
breaches. Kenny, a lantern jawed and taciturn man, had lain beside Stokes.

“Well?” he had finally asked after Stokes had spent a silent five minutes examining
the walls.

“Two days' work, sir,” Stokes said. If the Mahrattas had taken the trouble to build a
glacis it would have been two weeks' work, but such was their confidence that they had not
bothered to protect the base of the outer wall.

Kenny grunted.

“If it's that easy, then give me two holes in the inner wall.”

“Not the outer?” Stokes asked.

“One will serve me there,” Kenny said, putting an eye to his own telescope.

“A good wide gap in the nearer wall, Stokes, but not too near the main gate.”

“We shall avoid that,” the Major said. The main gate lay to the left so that the approach
to the fortress was faced by high walls and bastions rather than by a gate vulnerable to
artillery fire. However, this gate was massively defended by bastions and towers,
which suggested it would be thick with defenders.

“Straight up the middle,” Kenny said, wriggling back from his viewpoint.

“Give me a breach to the right of that main bastion, and two on either side of it through
the inner wall, and we'll do the rest.”

It would be easy enough to break down the walls, but Stokes still feared for Kenny's men.
Their approach was limited by the existence of the great reservoir that lay on the right
of the isthmus. The water level was low, and scummed green, but the tank still constricted
the assault route so that Kenny's men would be squeezed between the water and the sheer
drop to the left. That slender space, scarce more than fifty feet at its narrowest, would be
furious with gunfire, much of it coming from the fire steps above and around the main gate
that flanked the approach.

Stokes had already determined that his enfilading batteries should spare some shot
for that gate in an attempt to unseat its cannon and unsettle its defenders.

Now, under the midday sun, the Major wandered among the sappers filling the gab ions
He tested each one, making certain that the sepoys i, were ramming the earth hard into
the wicker baskets, for a loosely filled gabion was no use. The finished gab ions were
being stacked on ox carts, while other carts piled with powder and shot waited nearby. All
was being done properly, and the Major stared out across the plateau where the newly
arrived troops were making their camp. The | closest tents, ragged and makeshift, belonged
to a troop of Mahratta j horsemen who had allied themselves with the British. Stokes,
watching i the robed guards who sat close to the tents, decided it would be best if he
locked his valuables away and made sure his servant kept an eye on the trunk. The rest of the
Mahratta horsemen had trotted northwards, going to seek springs or wells, for it was dry
up here on the plateau. Dry and cooler than on the plain, though it was still damned hot. Dust
devils whirled between the farther tent rows where muskets were stacked in neat tripods.
Some shirt sleeved officers, presumably from the East India Company battalions, were
playing cricket on a smoother stretch of turf, watched by bemused sepoys and men from the
Scotch Brigade.