Sharpe's Triumph (34 page)

More flies congregated on the shining blue spill of the disembowelled man's guts.
Another man crawled through stubble, dragging his musket by its whitened sling.

“Steady now!” Harness shouted.

“Damn your haste! Ain't running a race! Think of your mothers!”

“Mothers?” Blackiston asked.

“Close up!” a sergeant shouted.

“Close up!”

The Mahratta gunners would be frantically reloading, but this time with canister.
The gunsmoke was dissipating, twisting as the small breeze carried it away, and Sharpe
could see the misty shapes of men ramming barrels and carrying charges to muzzles. Other
men hand spiked gun trails to line the recoiled weapons on the Scots.

Wellesley was curbing his stallion lest it get too far ahead of the Highlanders.
Nothing showed on the right. The sepoys were still in dead ground and the right flank was
lost among the scatter of trees and broken ground to the north, so that for the moment it
seemed as if Harness's Highlanders were fighting the battle all on their own, six hundred
men against a hundred thousand, but the Scotsmen did not falter. They just left their
wounded and dead behind and crossed the open land towards the guns that were loaded with
their deaths. The piper began playing again, and the wild music seemed to put a new spring
in the Highlanders' steps. They were walking to death, but they went in perfect order and
in seeming calm. No wonder men made songs about the Scots, Sharpe thought, then turned as
hooves sounded behind and he saw it was Captain Campbell returning from his errand.

The Captain grinned at Sharpe.

“I thought I'd be too late.”

“You're in time, sir. Just in time, sir,” Sharpe said, but for what? he wondered.

Campbell rode on to Wellesley to make his report. The General listened, nodded, then
the guns straight ahead started firing again, only raggedly this time as each enemy gun
fired as soon as it was loaded.

The sound of each gun was a terrible bang, as deafening as a thump on the ear, and the
canister flecked the field in front of the Scots with a myriad puffs of dust before
bouncing up to snatch men backwards.

Each round was a metal canister, crammed with musket balls or shards of metal and
scraps of stone, and as it left the barrel the canister was ripped apart to spread its
missiles like a giant blast of duck shot

Another cannon fired, then another, each gunshot pummelling the land and each taking
its share of Scotsmen to eternity, or else making another cripple for the parish or a
sufferer for the surgeon. The drummer boys were still playing, though one was limping and
another was dripping blood onto his drums king The piper began playing a jauntier tune,
as though this walk into an enemy horde was something to celebrate, and some of the
Highlanders quickened their pace.

“Not so eager!” Harness shouted.

“Not so eager!” His basket-hilted claymore was in his hand and he was close behind his
men's two ranks as though he wanted to spur through and carry the dreadful blade against the
gunners who were flaying his regiment. A bearskin was blown apart by canister, leaving
the man beneath untouched.

“Steady now!” a major called.

“Close up! Close up!” the sergeants shouted.

“Close the files!”

Corporals, designated as file-closers, hurried behind the ranks and dragged men left
and right to seal the gaps blown by the guns. The gaps were bigger now, for a well-aimed
barrel of canister could take four or five files down, while a round shot could only blast
away a single file at a time.

Four guns fired, a fifth, then a whole succession of guns exploded together and the
air around Sharpe seemed to be filled with a rushing, shrieking wind, and the Highlanders'
line seemed to twist in that violent gale, but though it left men behind, men who were
bleeding and vomiting and crying and calling for their comrades or their mothers, the
others closed their ranks and marched stolidly on. More guns fired, blanketing the enemy
with smoke, and Sharpe could hear the canister hitting the regiment. Each blast brought a
rattling sound as bullets struck muskets, while the Highlanders, like infantry
everywhere, made sure their guns' wide stocks covered their groins. The line was shorter
now, much shorter, and it had almost reached the lingering edge of the great bank of smoke
pumped out by the enemy's guns.

'ySth,“ Harness shouted in a huge voice, 'halt!”

Wellesley curbed his horse. Sharpe looked to his right and saw the sepoys coming out of
the valley in one long red line, a broken line, for there were gaps between the battalions
and the passage through the shrub-choked valley had skewed the sepoys' dressing, and then
the guns in the northern part of the Mahratta line opened fire and the line of sepoys
became even more ragged. Yet still, like the Scots to their left, they pressed on into the
gunfire.

“Present!” Harness shouted, a note of anticipation in his voice.

The Scotsmen brought their fire locks to their shoulders. They were only sixty yards
from the guns and even a smoothbore musket was accurate enough at that range.

“Don't fire high, you dogs!” Harness warned them.

“I'll flog every man who fires high. Fire!”

The volley sounded feeble compared to the thunder of the big guns, but it was a
comfort all the same and Sharpe almost cheered as the Highlanders fired and their crackling
volley whipped away across the stubble. The gunners were vanishing. Some must have been
killed, but others were merely sheltering behind the big trails of their cannon.

“Reload!” Harness shouted.

“No dallying! Reload!”

This was where the Highlanders' training paid its dividends, for a musket was an
awkward brute to reload, and made more cumbersome still by the seventeen-inch bayonet
fixed to its muzzle. The triangular blade made it difficult to ram the gun properly,
and some of the Highlanders twisted the blades off to make their job easier, but all
reloaded swiftly, just as they had been trained to do in hard long weeks at home. They
loaded, rammed, primed, then slotted the ramrods back into the barrel hoops. Those who had
removed their bayonets refastened them to the lugs, then brought the guns back to the
ready.

“You save that volley for the infantry!” Harness warned them.

“Now, boys, forward, and give the heathen bastards a proper Sabbath killing!”

This was revenge. This was anger let loose. The enemy guns were still not loaded and
their crews had been hard hit by the volley, and most of the guns would not have time to
charge their barrels before the Scots were on them. Some of the gunners fled. Sharpe saw a
mounted Mahratta officer rounding them up and driving them back to their pieces with the
flat of his sword, but he also saw one gun, a painted monster directly to his front,
being rammed hard by two men who heaved on the rammer, plucked it free then ran aside.

“For what we are about to receive,” Blackiston murmured. The engineer had also seen
the gunners charge their barrel.

The gun fired, and its jet of smoke almost engulfed the General's family. For an
instant Sharpe saw Wellesley's tall figure outlined against the pale smoke, then he could
see nothing but blood and the General falling. The heat and discharge of the gun's gasses
rushed past Sharpe just a heartbeat after the scraps of canister had filled the air about
him, but he had been directly behind the General and was in his shadow, and it was
Wellesley who had taken the gun's blast.

Or rather it was his horse. The stallion had been struck a dozen times while Wellesley,
charmed, had not taken a scratch. The big horse ii [ toppled, dead before he struck the
ground, and Sharpe saw the General kick his feet out from the stirrups and use his hands to
push himself up from the saddle as the horse collapsed. Wellesley's right foot touched the
ground first and, before the stallion's weight could roll onto his leg, he jumped away,
staggering slightly in his hurry. Campbell turned towards him, but the General waved
him away. Sharpe kicked the mare on and untied Diomed's reins from his belt. Was he supposed
to get the saddle off the dead horse? He supposed so, and thus slid out of his own saddle.
But what the hell was he to do with the mare and Diomed while he untangled the saddle from
the dead stallion? |" Then he thought to tie both to the dead horse's bridle.

“Four hundred guineas gone to a penny bullet,” Wellesley said sarcastically,
watching as Sharpe unbuckled the girth from the dead stallion. Or near dead, for the beast
still twitched and kicked as the flies came to feast on its new blood.

“I'll take Diomed,” Wellesley told Sharpe, then stooped to help, tugging the saddle with
its attached bags and holsters free of the dying horse, but then a feral scream made the
General turn back to watch as Harness's men charged into the gun line. The scream was the
noise they made as they struck home, a scream that was the release of all their fears and a
terrible noise presaging their enemies' death. And how they gave it. The Scotsmen found
the gunners who had stayed at their posts crouching under the trails and they dragged them
out and bayoneted them again and again.

“Bastard,” one man screamed, plunging his blade repeatedly into a dead gunner's
belly.

“Heathen black bastard!” He kicked the man's head, then stabbed down with his bayonet
again. Colonel Harness back swung his sword to kill a man, then casually wiped the blood
off the blade onto his horse's black mane.

“Form line!” he shouted.

“Form line! Hurry, you rogues!”

A scatter of gunners had fled back from the Scots to the safety of the Mahratta
infantry who were now little more than a hundred paces away.

They should have charged, Sharpe thought. While the Scots were blindly hacking away at the
gunners, the infantry should have advanced, but instead they waited for the next stage of
the Scots attack. To his right there were still guns firing at the sepoys, but that was a
separate battle, unrelated to the scramble as sergeants dragged Highlanders away from
the dead and dying gunners and pushed them into their ranks.

“There are still gunners alive, sir!” a lieutenant shouted at Harness.

“Form up!” Harness shouted, ignoring the lieutenant. Sergeants and corporals shoved
men into line.

“Forward!” Harness shouted.

“Hurry, man,” Wellesley said to Sharpe, but not angrily. Sharpe had heaved the saddle
over Diomed's back and now stooped under the grey horse's belly to gather the girth.

“He doesn't like it too tight,” the General said.

Sharpe buckled the strap and Wellesley took Diomed's reins from him and heaved himself up
into the saddle without another word. The General's coat was smeared with blood, but it
was horse blood, not his own.

“Well done, Harness!” he called ahead to the Scotsman, then rode away and Sharpe
unhitched the mare from the dead horse's bridle, clambered onto her back and followed.

Three pipers played for the y78th now. They were far from home, under a furnace sun in a
blinding sky, and they brought the mad music of Scotland's wars to India. And it was
madness. The ySth had suffered hard from the gunfire and the line of their advance was
littered with dead, dying and broken men, yet the survivors now re-formed to attack the
main Mahratta battle line. They were back in two ranks, they held their bloody bayonets in
front, and they advanced against Pohlmann's own compoo on the right of the enemy line. The
Highlanders looked huge, made into giants by their tall bearskin hats with their feather
plumes, and they looked terrible, for they were. These were northern warriors from a hard
country and not a man spoke as they advanced. To the waiting Mahrattas they must have
seemed like creatures from nightmare, as terrible as the gods who writhed on their temple
walls.

Yet the Mahratta infantry in their blue and yellow coats were just as proud. They were
warriors recruited from the martial tribes of northern India, and now they levelled
their muskets as the two Scottish ranks approached.

The Scots were terribly outnumbered and it seemed to Sharpe that they must all die in
the coming volley. Sharpe himself was in a half daze stunned by the noise yet aware that his
mood was swinging between elation at the Scottish bravery and the pure terror of battle.
He heard a cheer and looked right to see the sepoys charging into the guns.

He watched gunners flee, then saw the Madrassi sepoys tear into the laggards with their
bayonets.

“Now we'll see how their infantry fights,” Wellesley said savagely to Campbell, and
Sharpe understood that this was the real testing point, for infantry was everything. The
infantry was despised for it did not have the cavalry's glamour, nor the killing
capacity of the gunners, but it was still the infantry that won battles. Defeat the
enemy's infantry and the cavalry and gunners had nowhere to hide.

The Mahrattas waited with levelled muskets. The Highlanders, silent again, marched on.
Ninety paces to go, eighty, and then an officer's sword swung down in the Mahratta ranks
and the volley came. It seemed ragged to Sharpe, maybe because most men did not fire on the
word of command, but instead fired after they heard their neighbour's discharge, and he
was not even aware of a bullet going close past his head because he was watching the Scots,
terrified for them, but it seemed to him that not a man fell. Some men must have been hit,
for he saw ripples where the files opened to step past the fallen, but the 778th, or what was
left of the y78th, was intact still and still Harness did not fire, but just kept marching
them onward.

“They fired high!” Campbell exulted.

“They drill well, fire badly,” Barclay observed happily.

"Seventy paces to go, then sixty. A Highlander staggered from the line and collapsed.
Two other men who had been wounded by the canister, but were now recovered, hurried from
the rear and pushed their way into the ranks.