Sharpe's Triumph (40 page)

“Bastard!” Sharpe shouted as he tugged the blade free and he whirled around to kill the
next man who came near, but instead it was Captain Campbell who was there, and behind him
were a dozen troopers who spurred their horses into the enemy and hacked down with their
sabres.

For a second or two Sharpe could scarcely believe that he was alive.

Nor could he believe that the fight was over. He wanted to kill again.

His blood was up, the rage was seething in him, and there was no more enemy and so he
contented himself by slashing the sabre down onto the Mahratta officer's head.

“Bastard!” he shouted, then booted the man's face to jolt the blade free. Then,
suddenly, he was shaking. He turned and saw that Wellesley was staring at him aghast and
Sharpe was certain he must have done something wrong. Then he remembered what it was.

“Sorry, sir,” he said.

“You're sorry?” Wellesley said, though he seemed scarcely able to speak. The General's
face was pale.

“For pushing you, sir,” Sharpe said.

“Sorry, sir. Didn't mean to, sir.”

“I hope you damn well did mean to,” Wellesley said forcibly, and Sharpe saw that the
General, usually so calm, was shaking too.

Sharpe felt he ought to say something more, but he could not think what it was.

“Lost your last horse, sir,” he said instead.

“Sorry, sir.”

Wellesley gazed at him. In all his life he had never seen a man fight like Sergeant
Sharpe, though in truth the General could not remember everything that had happened in
the last two minutes. He remembered

Diomed falling and he remembered trying to loosen his feet from the stirrups, and he
remembered a blow on the head that was probably one of Diomed's flailing hooves, and he
thought he remembered seeing a bayonet bright in the sky above him and he had known that he
must be killed at that moment, and then everything was a dizzy confusion. He recalled
Sharpe's voice, using language that shocked even the General, who was not easily
offended, and he remembered being thrust back against the gun so that the Sergeant could
face the enemy alone, and Wellesley had approved of that decision, not because it spared
him the need to fight, but because he had recognized that Sharpe would be hampered by his
presence.

Then he had watched Sharpe kill, and he had been astonished by the ferocity,
enthusiasm and skill of that killing, and Wellesley knew that his life had been saved, and
he knew he must thank Sharpe, but for some reason he could not find the words and so he just
stared at the embarrassed Sergeant whose face was spattered with blood and whose long hair
had come loose so that he looked like a fiend from the pit.

Wellesley tried to frame the words that would express his gratitude, yet the syllables
choked in his throat, but just then a trooper came trotting to the gun with the reins of the
roan mare in his hand. The mare had survived unhurt, and now the trooper offered the reins
towards Wellesley who, as if in a dream, walked out of the sheltered space inside the gun's
tall wheel to step across the bodies Sharpe had put onto the ground. The General suddenly
stooped and picked up a stone.

“This is yours, Sergeant,” he said to Sharpe, holding out the ruby.

“I saw it fall.”

“Thank you, sir. Thank you.” Sharpe took the ruby.

The General frowned at the ruby. It seemed wrong for a sergeant to have a stone that
size, but once Sharpe had closed his fingers about the stone, the General decided it must
have been a blood-soaked piece of rock. It surely was not a ruby?

“Are you all right, sir?” Major Blackis-ton asked anxiously.

“Yes, yes, thank you, Blackiston.” The General seemed to shake off his torpor and went
to stand beside Campbell who had dismounted to kneel beside Diomed. The horse was shaking
and neighing softly.

“Can he be saved?” Wellesley asked.

“Don't know, sir,” Campbell said.

“The pike blade's deep in his lung, poor thing.”

“Pull it out, Campbell. Gently. Maybe he'll live.” Wellesley looked around him to see
that the yth Native Cavalry had scoured the gunners away and driven the remaining
Mahratta horsemen off, while Harness's 778th had again marched into canister and round
shot to capture the southern part of the Mahratta artillery. Harness's adjutant now
cantered through the bodies scattered around the guns.

“We've nails and mauls if you want us to spike the guns, sir,” he said to Wellesley.

“No, no. I think the gunners have learned their lesson, and we might take some of the
cannon into our own service,” Wellesley said, then saw that he was still holding his
sword. He sheathed it.

“Pity to spike good guns,” he added. It could take hours of hard work to drill a driven
nail out of a touch-hole, and so long as the enemy gunners were defeated then the guns
would no longer be a danger. The General turned to an Indian trooper who had joined
Campbell beside Diomed.

“Can you save him?” he asked anxiously.

The Indian very gently pulled at the pike, but it would not move.

“Harder, man, harder,” Campbell urged him, and laid his own hands on the pike's bloodied
shaft.

The two men tugged at the pike and the fallen horse screamed with pain.

“Careful!” Wellesley snapped.

“You want the pike in or out, sir?” Campbell asked.

“Try and save him,” the General said, and Campbell shrugged, took hold of the shaft
again, put his boot on the horse's red wet chest, and gave a swift, hard heave. The horse
screamed again as the blade left his hide and as a new rush of blood welled down to soak his
white hair.

“Nothing more we can do now, sir,” Campbell said.

“Look after him,” Wellesley ordered the Indian trooper, then he frowned when he saw
that his last horse, the roan mare, still had her trooper's saddle and that no one had
thought to take his own saddle off Diomed. That was the orderly's job and Wellesley looked
for Sharpe, then remembered he had to express his thanks to the Sergeant, but again the
words would not come and so Wellesley asked Campbell to change the saddles, and once that
was done he climbed onto the mare's back.

Captain Barclay, who had survived his dash across the field, reined in beside the
General.

“Wallace's brigade is ready to attack, sir.”

“We need to get Harness's fellows into line,” Wellesley said.

“Any news of Maxwell?”

“Not yet, sir,” Barclay said. Colonel Maxwell had led the cavalry in their pursuit
across the River Juah.

“Major!” Wellesley shouted at the commander of the Native Cavalry.

“Have your men hunt down the gunners here. Make sure none of them live, then guard the guns
so they can't be retaken. Gentlemen?”

He spoke to his aides.

“Let's move on.”

Sharpe watched the General ride away into the thinning skein of cannon smoke, then he
looked down at the ruby in his hand and saw that it was as red and shiny as the blood that
dripped from his sabre tip. He wondered if the ruby had been dipped in the fountain of
Zum-Zum along with the Tippoo's helmet. Was that why it had saved his life? It had done
bugger all for the Tippoo, but Sharpe was alive when he should have been dead, and so, for
that matter, was Major General Sir Arthur Wellesley.

The General had left Sharpe alone by the gun, all but for the dead and dying men and the
trooper who was trying to staunch Diomed's wound with a rag. Sharpe laughed suddenly,
startling the trooper.

“He didn't even say thank you,” Sharpe said aloud.

“What, sahib?” the trooper asked.

“You don't call me sahib,” Sharpe said.

"I'm just another bloody soldier like you. Good for bloody nothing except fighting
other people's battles.

And ten to one the buggers won't thank you." He was thirsty so he opened one of the
General's canteens and drank from it greedily.

“Is that horse going to live?”

The Indian did not seem to understand everything Sharpe said, but the question must
have made some sense for he pointed at Diomed's mouth.

The stallion's lips were drawn back to reveal yellow teeth through which a pale pink
froth seeped. The Indian shook his head sadly.

“I bled that horse,” Sharpe said, 'and the General said he was greatly obliged to me.
Those were his very words, “greatly obliged”. Gave me a bloody coin, he did. But you save his
life and he doesn't even say thank you! I should have bled him, not his bloody horse. I should
have bled him to bloody death." He drank more of the water and wished it were arrack or
rum.

“You know what the funny thing is?” he asked the Indian.

“I didn't even do it because he was the General. I did it because I like him. Not
personally, but I do like him. In a strange sort of way. I wouldn't have done it for you.
I'd have done it for Tom Garrard, but he's a friend, see? And I'd have done it for Colonel
McCandless, because he's a proper gentleman, but I wouldn't have done it for too many
others.” Sharpe sounded drunk, even to himself,

but in truth he was stone cold sober in a battlefield that had suddenly gone silent
beneath the westering sun. It was almost evening, but there was still enough daylight left
to finish the battle, though whether Sharpe would have anything to do with the finishing
seemed debatable, for he had lost his job as the General's orderly, had lost his horse,
had lost his musket and was stranded with nothing but a dented sabre.

“That ain't really true,” he confessed to the uncomprehending Indian, 'what I said
about liking him. I want him to like me, and that's different, ain't it? I thought the
miserable bugger might make me an officer! Sod that for a hope, eh? No sash for me, lad.
It's back to being a bloody infantryman."

He used the bloody sabre to cut a strip of cloth from the robes of a dead Arab, and he
folded the strip into a pad that he pushed under his jacket to staunch the blood from the
tulwar wound on his left shoulder. It was not a serious injury, he decided, for he could
feel no broken bones and his left arm was unhindered. He tossed the dented sabre away,
found a discarded Mahratta musket, tugged the cartridge box and bayonet off the dead
owner's belt, then went to find someone to kill.

It took half an hour to form the new line from the five battalions that had marched
through the Mahratta gunfire and put Pohlmann's right to flight, but now the five
battalions faced north towards Pohlmann's new position which rested its left flank on
Assaye's mud walls then stretched along the southern bank of the River Juah. The Mahrattas
had forty guns remaining, Pohlmann still commanded eight thousand infantry and
innumerable cavalry, and the Rajah of Berar's twenty thousand infantrymen still
waited behind the village's makeshift ramparts.

Wellesley's infantry numbered fewer than four thousand men, he had only two light guns
that were serviceable and scarcely six hundred cavalrymen mounted on horses that were
bone weary and parched dry.

“We can hold them!” Pohlmann roared at his men.

“We can hold them and beat them! Hold them and beat them.” He was still on horseback, and
still in his gaudy silk coat. He had dreamed of riding his elephant across a field strewn
with the enemy's dead and piled with the enemy's captured weapons, but instead he was
encouraging his men to a last stand beside the river.

“Hold them,” he shouted, 'hold them and beat them." The Juah flowed behind his men, while
in front of them the shadows stretched long across Assaye's battle-littered
farmlands.

Then the pipes sounded again, and Pohlmann turned his horse to look at the right-hand end
of his line and he saw the tall black bearskins and the swinging kilts of the damned Scottish
regiment coming forward again. The sun caught their white crossbelts and glinted from
their bayonets. Beyond them, half hidden by the trees, the British cavalry was
threatening, though they seemed to be checked by a battery of cannon on the right of
Pohlmann's line. The Hanoverian knew the cavalry was no danger. It was the infantry, the
unstoppable red-jacketed infantry, that was going to beat him, and he saw the sepoy
battalions starting forward on the Highlanders' flank and he half turned his horse,
thinking to ride to where the Scottish regiment would strike his line. It would hit Saleur's
compoo, and suddenly Pohlmann could not care less any more. Let Saleur fight his battle,
because Pohlmann knew it was lost. He stared at the y78th and he reckoned that no force on
earth could stop such men.

“The best damned infantry on earth,” he said to one of his aides.

“Sahib?”

“Watch them! You'll not see better fighting men while you live,” Pohlmann said bitterly,
then sheathed his sword as he gazed at the Scots who were once again being battered by
cannon fire, but still their two lines kept marching forward. Pohlmann knew he should go
west to encourage Saleur's men, but instead he was thinking of the gold he had left behind
in Assaye. These last ten years had been a fine adventure, but the Mahratta
Confederation was dying before his eyes and Anthony Pohlmann did not wish to die with
it. The rest of the Mahratta princedoms might fight on, but Pohlmann had decided it was
time to take his gold and run.

Saleur's compoo was already edging backwards. Some of the men from the rearward ranks
were not even waiting for the Scots to arrive, but were running back to the River Juah and
wading through its muddy water that came up to their chests. The rest of the regiments
began to waver. Pohlmann watched. He had thought these three compoos were as fine as any
infantry in the world, but they had proved to be brittle. The British fired a volley and
Pohlmann heard the heavy balls thump into his infantry and he heard the cheer from the
redcoats as they charged forward with the bayonet, and suddenly there was no army
opposing them, just a mass of men fleeing to the river.

Pohlmann took off his gaudily plumed hat that would mark him as a prize capture and threw
it away, then stripped off his sash and coat and tossed them after the hat as he spurred
towards Assaye. He had a few minutes, he reckoned, and those minutes should be enough to
secure his money and get away. The battle was lost and, for Pohlmann, the war with it. It
was time to retire.