Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe’s Tiger, Sharpe’s Triumph, Sharpe’s Fortress - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 12

It was funny, Richard Sharpe thought, that there were no vultures in England. None that he had seen, anyway. Ugly things they were. Rats with wings.

He thought about vultures a lot, and he had a lot of time to think because he was a soldier, a private, and so the army insisted on doing a lot of his thinking for him. The army decided when he woke up, when he slept, when he ate, when he marched, and when he was to sit about doing nothing and that was what he did most of the time – nothing. Hurry up and do nothing, that was the army’s way of doing things, and he was fed up with it. He was bored and thinking of running.

Him and Mary. Run away. Desert. He was thinking about it now, and it was an odd thing to worry about right now because the army was about to give Richard Sharpe his first proper battle. He had been in one fight, but that was five years ago and it had been a messy, confused business in fog, and no one had known why the 33rd Regiment was in Flanders or what they were supposed to be doing there, and in the end they had done nothing except fire some shots at the mist-shrouded French and the whole thing had been over almost before young Richard Sharpe had known it had begun. He had seen a couple of men killed. He remembered Sergeant Hawthorne’s death best because the Sergeant had been hit by a musket ball that drove a rib clean out of his red coat. There was hardly a drop of blood to be seen, just the white rib sticking out of the faded red cloth. ‘You could hang your hat on that,’ Hawthorne had said in a tone of wonder, then he had sobbed, and after that he had choked up blood and collapsed. Sharpe had gone on loading and firing, and then, just as he was beginning to enjoy himself, the battalion had marched away and sailed back to England. Some battle.

Now he was in India. He did not know why he was invading Mysore and nor did he particularly care. King George III wanted Richard Sharpe to be in India, so in India Richard Sharpe was, but Richard Sharpe had now become bored with the King’s service. He was young and he reckoned life had more to offer than hurrying up and doing nothing. There was money to be made. He was not sure how to make money, except by thieving, but he did know that he was bored and that he could do better than stay on the bottom of the dungheap. That was where he was, he kept telling himself, the bottom of a dungheap and everyone knew what was piled on top of a dungheap. Better to run, he told himself. All that was needed to get ahead in the world was a bit of sense and the ability to kick a bastard faster than the bastard could kick you, and Richard Sharpe reckoned he had those talents right enough.

Though where to run in India? Half the natives seemed to be in British pay and those would turn you in for a handful of tin pice, and the pice was only worth a farthing, and the other Indians were all fighting against the British, or readying to fight them, and if he ran to them he would just be forced to serve in their armies. He would fetch more pay in a native army, probably far more than the tuppence a day Sharpe got now after stoppages, but why change one uniform for another? No, he would have to run to some place where the army would never find him, or else it would be the firing squad on some hot morning. A blast of musket shots, a scrape in the red earth for a grave, and next day the rats with wings would be yanking the guts out of your belly like a bunch of blackbirds tugging worms out of a lawn.

That was why he was thinking about vultures. He was thinking that he wanted to run, but that he did not want to feed the vultures. Do not get caught. Rule number one in the army, and the only rule that mattered. Because if you got caught the bastards would flog you to death or else reorganize your ribs with musket balls, and either way the vultures got fat.

The vultures were always there, sometimes circling on long wings that tilted to the sudden winds of the warm upper air and sometimes standing hunched on branches. They fed on death and a marching army gave them a glutton’s diet, and now, in this last year of the eighteenth century, two allied armies were crossing this hot fertile plain in southern India. One was a British army and the other belonged to a British ally, the Nizam of Hyderabad, and both armies provided a feast of vulture fodder. Horses died, oxen died, camels died, even two of the elephants that had seemed so indestructible had died, and then the people died. The twin armies had a tail ten times longer than themselves: a great sprawl of camp followers, merchants, herders, whores, wives, and children, and among all of those people, as it did among the armies themselves, the plagues ran riot. Men died with bloody dysentery, or shaking with a fever or choking on their own vomit. They died struggling for breath or drenched in sweat or raving like mad things or with skins blistered raw. Men, women and children all died, and whether they were buried or burned it did not matter because, in the end, the vultures fed on them anyway, for there was never enough time nor sufficient timber to make a proper funeral pyre and so the vultures would rip the half-cooked flesh off the scorched bones, and if the bodies were buried then no amount of stones heaped on the soil would stop the scavenging beasts from digging up the swollen, rotting flesh and the vultures’ hooked beaks took what the ravenous teeth left behind.

And this hot March day promised food in abundance and the vultures seemed to sense it for, as the early afternoon passed, more and more birds joined the spiring column of wings that circled above the marching men. The birds did not flap their wings, but simply soared in the warm air as they glided, tilted, slid and waited, always waited, as if they knew that death’s succulence would fill their gullets soon enough. ‘Ugly bastard birds,’ Sharpe said, ‘just rats with wings,’ but no one in the 33rd’s Light Company answered him. No one had the breath to answer him. The air was choking from the dust kicked up by the men ahead so that the rearward ranks stumbled through a warm, gritty mix that parched their throats and stung their eyes. Most of the men were not even aware of the vultures, while others were so weary that they had not even noticed the troop of cavalry that had suddenly appeared a half-mile to the north. The horsemen trotted beside a grove of trees that were bright with red blossom, then accelerated away. Their drawn sabres flashed reflected sunlight as they wheeled away from the infantrymen, but then, as inexplicably as they had hurried and swerved away, they suddenly stopped. Sharpe noticed them. British cavalry, they were. The fancy boys come to see how proper soldiers fought.

Ahead, from the low rise of land where a second group of horsemen was silhouetted against the furnace whiteness of the sky, a gun fired. The crack of the cannon was immense, a billow of sound that punched hollow and malignant across the plain. The gun’s smoke billowed white as the heavy ball thrashed into some bushes, tore leaves and blossoms to tatters, struck dust from the baked ground, then ran on in ever decreasing bounces to lodge against a gnarled fallen tree from which a pale shower of decaying wood spurted. The shot had missed the red-coated infantry by a good two hundred paces, but the sound of the cannon woke up the weary. ‘Jesus!’ a voice in the rear file said. ‘What was that?’

‘A bleeding camel farted, what the hell do you think it was?’ a corporal answered.

‘It was a bloody awful shot,’ Sharpe said. ‘My mother could lay a gun better than that.’

‘I didn’t think you had a mother,’ Private Garrard said.

‘Everyone’s got a mother, Tom.’

‘Not Sergeant Hakeswill,’ Garrard said, then spat a mix of dust and spittle. The column of men had momentarily halted, not because of any orders, but rather because the cannon shot had unnerved the officer leading the front company who was no longer sure exactly where he was supposed to lead the battalion. ‘Hakeswill wasn’t born of a mother,’ Garrard said vehemently. He took off his shako and used his sleeve to wipe the dust and sweat from his face. The woollen sleeve left a faint trace of red dye on his forehead. ‘Hakeswill was spawned of the devil,’ Garrard said, jamming the shako back on his white-powdered hair.

Sharpe wondered whether Tom Garrard would run with him. Two men might survive better than one. And what about Mary? Would she come? He thought about Mary a lot, when he was not thinking about everything else, except that Mary was inextricably twisted into everything else. It was confusing. She was Sergeant Bickerstaff’s widow and she was half Indian and half English and she was twenty-two, which was the same age as Sharpe, or at least he thought it was the same age. It could be that he was twenty-one, or twenty-three; he was not really sure on account of not ever having had a mother to tell him. Of course he did have a mother, everyone had a mother, but not everyone had a Cat Lane whore for a mother who disappeared just after her son was born. The child had been named for the wealthy patron of the foundling home that had raised him, but the naming had not brought Richard Sharpe any patronage, only brought him to the reeking bottom of the army’s dungheap. Still, Sharpe reckoned, he could have a future, and Mary spoke one or two Indian languages which could be useful if he and Tom did run.

The cavalry off to Sharpe’s right spurred into a trot again and disappeared beyond the red-blossomed trees, leaving only a drifting cloud of dust behind. Two galloper guns, light six-pounder cannons, followed them, bouncing dangerously on the uneven ground behind their teams of horses. Every other cannon in the army was drawn by oxen, but the galloper guns had horse teams that were three times as fast as the plodding draught cattle. The lone enemy cannon fired again, its brutal sound punching the warm air with an almost palpable impact. Sharpe could see more enemy guns on the ridge, but they were smaller than the gun that had just fired and Sharpe presumed they did not have the long range of the bigger cannon. Then he saw a trace of grey in the air, a flicker like a vertical pencil stroke drawn against the pale blue sky and he knew that the big gun’s shot must be coming straight towards him, and he knew too that there was no wind to carry the heavy ball gently aside, and all that he realized in the second or so that the ball was in the air, too short a time to react, only to recognize death’s approach, but then the ball slammed into the ground a dozen paces short of him and bounced on up over his head to run harmlessly into a field of sugar cane. ‘I reckon the bastards have got your mother laying the gun now, Dick,’ Garrard said.

‘No talking now!’ Sergeant Hakeswill’s voice screeched suddenly. ‘Save your godless breath. Was that you talking, Garrard?’

‘Not me, Sarge. Ain’t got the breath.’

‘You ain’t got the breath?’ Sergeant Hakeswill came hurrying down the company’s ranks and thrust his face up towards Garrard. ‘You ain’t got the breath? That means you’re dead, Private Garrard! Dead! No use to King or country if you’s dead, but you never was any bleeding use anyway.’ The Sergeant’s malevolent eyes flicked to Sharpe. ‘Was it you talking, Sharpie?’

‘Not me, Sarge.’

‘You ain’t got orders to talk. If the King wanted you to have a conversation I’d have told you so. Says so in the scriptures. Give me your firelock, Sharpie. Quick now!’

Sharpe handed his musket to the Sergeant. It was Hakeswill’s arrival in the company that had persuaded Sharpe that it was time to run from the army. He had been bored anyway, but Hakeswill had added injustice to boredom. Not that Sharpe cared about injustice, for only the rich had justice in this world, but Hakeswill’s injustice was touched with such malevolence that there was hardly a man in the Light Company not ready to rebel, and all that kept them from mutiny was the knowledge that Hakeswill understood their desire, wanted it and wanted to punish them for it. He was a great man for provoking insolence and then punishing it. He was always two steps ahead of you, waiting round a corner with a bludgeon. He was a devil, was Hakeswill, a devil in a smart red coat decorated with a sergeant’s badges.

Yet to look at Hakeswill was to see the perfect soldier. It was true that his oddly lumpy face twitched every few seconds as though an evil spirit was twisting and jerking just beneath his sun-reddened skin, but his eyes were blue, his hair was powdered as white as the snow that never fell on this land, and his uniform was as smart as though he stood guard at Windsor Castle. He performed drill like a Prussian, each movement so crisp and clean that it was a pleasure to watch, but then the face would twitch and his oddly childlike eyes would flicker a sideways glance and you could see the devil peering out. Back when he had been a recruiting sergeant Hakeswill had taken care not to let the devil show, and that was when Sharpe had first met him, but now, when the Sergeant no longer needed to gull and trick young fools into the ranks, Hakeswill did not care who saw his malignancy.

Sharpe stood motionless as the Sergeant untied the scrap of rag that Sharpe used to protect his musket’s lock from the insidious red dust. Hakeswill peered at the lock, found nothing wrong, then turned away from Sharpe so that the sun could fall full on the weapon. He peered again, cocked the gun, dry-fired it, then seemed to lose interest in the musket as a group of officers spurred their horses towards the head of the stalled column. ‘Company!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Company! ’Shun!’

The men shuffled their feet together and straightened as the three officers galloped past. Hakeswill had stiffened into a grotesque pose; his right boot tucked behind his left, his legs straight, his head and shoulders thrown back, his belly thrust forward and his bent elbows straining to meet in the concavity at the small of his back. None of the other companies of the King’s 33rd Regiment had been stood to attention in honour of the passing officers, but Hakeswill’s gesture of respect was nevertheless ignored. The neglect had no effect on the Sergeant who, when the trio of officers had gone past, shouted at the company to stand easy and then peered again at Sharpe’s musket.

‘You’ll not find ’owt wrong with it, Sarge,’ Sharpe said.

Hakeswill, still standing at attention, did an elaborate about turn, his right boot thumping down to the ground. ‘Did I hear me give you permission to speak, Sharpie?’

‘No, Sarge.’

‘No, Sarge. No, you did not. Flogging offence that, Sharpie.’ Hakeswill’s right cheek twitched with the involuntary spasm that disfigured his face every few seconds and the vehement evil of the face was suddenly so intense that the whole Light Company momentarily held its breath in expectation of Sharpe’s arrest, but then the thumping discharge of the enemy cannon rolled across the countryside and the heavy ball splashed and bounced and tore its way through a bright-green patch of growing rice, and the violence of the harmless missile served to distract Hakeswill who turned to watch as the ball rolled to a stop. ‘Poor bloody shooting,’ Hakeswill said scathingly. ‘Heathens can’t lay guns, I dare say. Or maybe they’re toying with us. Toying!’ The thought made him laugh. It was not, Sharpe suspected, the anticipation of excitement that had brought Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill to this state of near joviality, but rather the thought that a battle would cause casualties and misery, and misery was the Sergeant’s delight. He liked to see men cowed and frightened, for that made them biddable, and Sergeant Hakeswill was always at his happiest when he was in control of unhappy men.

The three officers had stopped their horses at the head of the column and now used telescopes to inspect the distant ridge which was clouded by a ragged fringe of smoke left from the last discharge of the enemy cannon. ‘That’s our Colonel, boys,’ Hakeswill announced to the 33rd’s Light Company, ‘Colonel Arthur Wellesley himself, God bless him for a gentleman, which he is and you ain’t. He’s come to see you fight, so make sure you do. Fight like the Englishmen you are.’

‘I’m a Scot,’ a sour voice spoke from the rear rank.

‘I heard that! Who said that?’ Hakeswill glared at the company, his face twitching uncontrollably. In a less blithe mood the Sergeant would have ferreted out the speaker and punished him, but the excitement of pending battle persuaded him to let the offence pass. ‘A Scot!’ he said derisively instead. ‘What is the finest thing a Scotsman ever saw? Answer me that!’ No one did. ‘The high road to England, that’s what. Says so in the scriptures, so it must be true.’ He hefted Sharpe’s musket as he looked down the waiting ranks. ‘I shall be watching you,’ he snarled. ‘You ain’t none of you been in a proper fight before, not a proper fight, but on the other side of that bleeding hill there’s a horde of black-faced heathens what can’t wait to lay their filthy hands on your womenfolk, so if so much as one of you turns his back I’ll have the skin off the lot of you! Bare bones and blood, that’s what you’ll be. But you does your duty and obeys your orders and you can’t go wrong. And who gives the orders?’

The Sergeant waited for an answer and eventually Private Mallinson offered one. ‘The officers, Sergeant.’

‘The officers! The officers!’ Hakeswill spat his disgust at the answer. ‘Officers are here to show us what we are fighting for. Gentlemen, they are. Proper gentlemen! Men of property and breeding, not broken potboys and scarlet-coated pickpockets like what you are. Sergeants give the orders. Sergeants is what the army is. Remember that, lads! You’re about to go into battle against heathens and if you ignore me then you’ll be dead men!’ The face twitched grotesquely, its jaw wrenched suddenly sideways, and Sharpe, watching the Sergeant’s face, wondered if it was nervousness that had made Hakeswill so voluble. ‘But keeps your eyes on me, lads,’ Hakeswill went on, ‘and you’ll be right as trivets. And you know why?’ He cried the last word out in a high dramatic tone as he stalked down the Light Company’s front rank. ‘You know why?’ he asked again, now sounding like some dissenting preacher ranting in a hedgerow. ‘Because I cannot die, boys, I cannot die!’ He was suddenly intense, his voice hoarse and full of fervour as he spoke. It was a speech that all the Light Company had heard many times before, but it was remarkable for all that, though Sergeant Green, who was outranked by Hakeswill, turned away in disgust. Hakeswill jeered at Green, then tugged at the tight constriction of the leather stock that circled his neck, pulling it down so that an old dark scar was visible at his throat. ‘The hangman’s noose, boys!’ he cried. ‘That’s what marked me there, the hangman’s noose! See it? See it? But I am alive, boys, alive and on two feet instead of being buried under the sod, proof as never was that you needs not die!’ His face twitched again as he released the stock. ‘Marked by God,’ he finished, his voice gruff with emotion, ‘that’s what I am, marked by God!’

‘Mad as a hare,’ Tom Garrard muttered.

‘Did you speak, Sharpie!’ Hakeswill whipped around to stare at Sharpe, but Sharpe was so palpably still and staring mutely ahead that his innocence was indisputable. Hakeswill paced back down the Light Company. ‘I have watched men die, better men than any of you pieces of scum, proper men, but God has spared me! So you do what I says, boys, or else you’ll be carrion.’ He abruptly thrust the musket back into Sharpe’s hands. ‘Clean weapon, Sharpie. Well done, lad.’ He paced smartly away and Sharpe, to his surprise, saw that the scrap of rag had been neatly retied about the lock.

The compliment to Sharpe had astonished all the Light Company. ‘He’s in a rare good mood,’ Garrard said.

‘I heard that, Private Garrard!’ Hakeswill shouted over his shoulder. ‘Got ears in the back of me head, I have. Silence now. Don’t want no heathen horde thinking you’re frit! You’re white men, remember, bleached in the cleansing blood of the bleeding lamb, so no bleeding talking in the ranks! Nice and quiet, like them bleeding nuns what never utters a sound on account of having had their papist tongues cut out.’ He suddenly crashed to attention once again and saluted by bringing his spear-tipped halberd across his body. ‘Company all present, sir!’ he shouted in a voice that must have been audible on the enemy-held ridge. ‘All present and quiet, sir! Have their backs whipped bloody else, sir.’

Lieutenant William Lawford curbed his horse and nodded at Sergeant Hakeswill. Lawford was the Light Company’s second officer, junior to Captain Morris and senior to the brace of young ensigns, but he was newly arrived in the battalion and was as frightened of Hakeswill as were the men in the ranks. ‘The men can talk, Sergeant,’ Lawford observed mildly. ‘The other companies aren’t silent.’

‘No, sir. Must save their breath, sir. Too bleeding hot to talk, sir, and besides, they got heathens to kill, sir, mustn’t waste breath on chit-chat, not when there are black-faced heathens to kill, sir. Says so in the scriptures, sir.’

‘If you say so, Sergeant,’ Lawford said, unwilling to provoke a confrontation, then he found he had nothing else to say and so, awkwardly aware of the scrutiny of the Light Company’s seventy-six men, he stared at the enemy-held ridge. But he was also conscious of having ignominiously surrendered to the will of Sergeant Hakeswill and so he slowly coloured as he gazed towards the west. Lawford was popular, but thought to be weak, though Sharpe was not so sure of that judgement. He thought the Lieutenant was still finding his way among the strange and sometimes frightening human currents that made up the 33rd, and that in time Lawford would prove a tough and resilient officer. For now, though, William Lawford was twenty-four years old and had only recently purchased his lieutenancy, and that made him unsure of his authority.

Ensign Fitzgerald, who was only eighteen, strolled back from the column’s head. He was whistling as he walked and slashing with a drawn sabre at tall weeds. ‘Off in a moment, sir,’ he called up cheerfully to Lawford, then seemed to become aware of the Light Company’s ominous silence. ‘Not frightened, are you?’ he asked.

‘Saving their breath, Mister Fitzgerald, sir,’ Hakeswill snapped.

‘They’ve got breath enough to sing a dozen songs and still beat the enemy,’ Fitzgerald said scornfully. ‘Ain’t that so, lads?’

‘We’ll beat the bastards, sir,’ Tom Garrard said.

‘Then let me hear you sing,’ Fitzgerald demanded. ‘Can’t bear silence. We’ll have a quiet time in our tombs, lads, so we might as well make a noise now.’ Fitzgerald had a fine tenor voice that he used to start the song about the milkmaid and the rector, and by the time the Light Company had reached the verse that told how the naked rector, blindfolded by the milkmaid and thinking he was about to have his heart’s desire, was being steered towards Bessie the cow, the whole company was bawling the song enthusiastically.

They never did reach the end. Captain Morris, the Light Company’s commanding officer, rode back from the head of the battalion and interrupted the singing. ‘Half-companies!’ he shouted at Hakeswill.

‘Half-companies it is, sir! At once, sir. Light Company! Stop your bleeding noise! You heard the officer!’ Hakeswill bellowed. ‘Sergeant Green! Take charge of the after ranks. Mister Fitzgerald! I’ll trouble you to take your proper place on the left, sir. Forward ranks! Shoulder firelocks! Twenty paces, forward, march! Smartly now! Smartly!’

Hakeswill’s face shuddered as the front ten ranks of the company marched twenty paces and halted, leaving the other nine ranks behind. All along the battalion column the companies were similarly dividing, their drill as crisp as though they were back on their Yorkshire parade ground. A quarter-mile off to the 33rd’s left another six battalions were going through the same manoeuvre, and performing it with just as much precision. Those six battalions were all native soldiers in the service of the East India Company, though they wore red coats just like the King’s men. The six sepoy battalions shook out their colours and Sharpe, seeing the bright flags, looked ahead to where the 33rd’s two great regimental banners were being loosed from their leather tubes to the fierce Indian sun. The first, the King’s Colour, was a British flag on which the regiment’s battle honours were embroidered, while the second was the Regimental Colour and had the 33rd’s badge displayed on a scarlet field, the same scarlet as the men’s jacket facings. The tasselled silk banners blazed, and the sight of them prompted a sudden cannonade from the ridge. Till now there had only been the one heavy gun firing, but abruptly six other cannon joined the fight. The new guns were smaller and their round shot fell well short of the seven battalions.

Major Shee, the Irishman who commanded the 33rd while its Colonel, Arthur Wellesley, had control of the whole brigade, cantered his horse back, spoke briefly to Morris, then wheeled away towards the head of the column. ‘We’re going to push the bastards off the ridge!’ Morris shouted at the Light Company, then bent his head to light a cigar with a tinderbox. ‘Any bastard that turns tail, Sergeant,’ Morris went on when his cigar was properly alight, ‘will be shot. You hear me?’

‘Loud and clear, sir!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Shot, sir! Shot like the coward he is.’ He turned and scowled at the two half-companies. ‘Shot! And your names posted in your church porch at home as the cowards you are. So fight like Englishmen!’

‘Scotsmen,’ a voice growled behind Sharpe, but too softly for Hakeswill to hear.

‘Irish,’ another man said.

‘We ain’t none of us cowards,’ Garrard said more loudly.

Sergeant Green, a decent man, hushed him. ‘Quiet, lads. I know you’ll do your duty.’

The front of the column was marching now, but the rearmost companies were kept waiting so that the battalion could advance with wide intervals between its twenty half-companies. Sharpe guessed that the scattered formation was intended to reduce any casualties caused by the enemy’s bombardment which, because it was still being fired at extreme range, was doing no damage. Behind him, a long way behind, the rest of the allied armies were waiting for the ridge to be cleared. That mass looked like a formidable horde, but Sharpe knew that most of what he saw was the two armies’ civilian tail: the chaos of merchants, wives, sutlers and herdsmen who kept the fighting soldiers alive and whose supplies would make the siege of the enemy’s capital possible. It needed more than six thousand oxen just to carry the cannonballs for the big siege guns, and all those oxen had to be herded and fed and the herdsmen all travelled with their families who, in turn, needed more oxen to carry their own supplies. Lieutenant Lawford had once remarked that the expedition did not look like an army on the march, but like a great migrating tribe. The vast horde of civilians and animals was encircled by a thin crust of red-coated infantry, most of them Indian sepoys, whose job was to protect the merchants, ammunition and draught animals from the quick-riding, hard-hitting light cavalry of the Tippoo Sultan.

The Tippoo Sultan. The enemy. The tyrant of Mysore and the man who was presumably directing the gunfire on the ridge. The Tippoo ruled Mysore and he was the enemy, but what he was, or why he was an enemy, or whether he was a tyrant, beast or demigod, Sharpe had no idea. Sharpe was here because he was a soldier and it was sufficient that he had been told that the Tippoo Sultan was his enemy and so he waited patiently under the Indian sun that was soaking his lean tall body in sweat.

Captain Morris leaned on his saddle’s pommel. He took off his cocked hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief that had been soaked in cologne water. He had been drunk the previous night and his stomach was still churning with pain and wind. If the battalion had not been going into battle he would have galloped away, found a private spot and voided his bowels, but he could hardly do that now in case his men thought it a sign of weakness and so he raised his canteen instead and swallowed some arrack in the hope that the harsh spirit would calm the turmoil in his belly. ‘Now, Sergeant!’ he called when the company in front had moved sufficiently far ahead.

‘Forward half-company!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Forward march! Smartly now!’

Lieutenant Lawford, given supervision of the last half-company of the battalion, waited until Hakeswill’s men had marched twenty paces, then nodded at Sergeant Green. ‘Forward, Sergeant.’

The redcoats marched with unloaded muskets for the enemy was still a long way off and there was no sign of the Tippoo Sultan’s infantry, nor of his feared cavalry. There were only the enemy’s guns and, high in the fierce sky, the circling vultures. Sharpe was in the leading rank of the final half-company and Lieutenant Lawford, glancing at him, thought once again what a fine-looking man Sharpe was. There was a confidence in Sharpe’s thin, sun-darkened face and hard blue eyes that spoke of an easy competence, and that appearance was a comfort to a young nervous lieutenant advancing towards his first battle. With men like Sharpe, Lawford thought, how could they lose?

Sharpe was ignorant of the Lieutenant’s glance and would have laughed had he been told that his very appearance inspired confidence. Sharpe had no conception of how he looked, for he rarely saw a mirror and when he did the reflected image meant nothing, though he did know that the ladies liked him and that he liked them. He knew, too, that he was the tallest man in the Light Company, so tall, indeed, that he should have been in the Grenadier Company that led the battalion’s advance, but when he had first joined the regiment, six years before, the commanding officer of the Light Company had insisted on having Sharpe in his ranks. Captain Hughes was dead now, killed by a bowel-loosening flux in Calcutta, but in his time Hughes had prided himself on having the quickest, smartest men in his company, men he could trust to fight alone in the skirmish line, and it had been Hughes’s tragedy that he had only ever seen his picked men face an enemy once, and that once had been the misbegotten, fever-ridden expedition to the foggy island off the coast of Flanders where no amount of quick-wittedness by the men could salvage success from the commanding general’s stupidity. Now, five years later, on an Indian field, the 33rd again marched towards an enemy, though instead of the enthusiastic and generous Captain Hughes, the Light Company was now commanded by Captain Morris who did not care how clever or quick his men were, only that they gave him no trouble. Which was why he had brought Sergeant Hakeswill into the company. And that was why the tall, good-looking, hard-eyed private called Richard Sharpe was thinking of running.

Except he would not run today. Today there would be a fight and Sharpe was happy at that prospect. A fight meant plunder, what the Indian soldiers called loot, and any man who was thinking of running and striking up life on his own could do with a bit of loot to prime the pump.

The seven battalions marched towards the ridge. They were all in columns of half-companies so that, from a vulture’s view, they would have appeared as one hundred and forty small scarlet rectangles spread across a square mile of green country as they advanced steadily towards the waiting line of guns on the enemy-held ridge. The sergeants paced beside the half-companies while the officers either rode or walked ahead. From a distance the red squares looked smart, for the men’s red coats were bright scarlet and slashed with white crossbelts, but in truth the troops were filthy and sweating. Their coats were wool, designed for battlefields in Flanders, not India, and the scarlet dye had run in the heavy rains so that the coats were now a pale pink or a dull purple, and all were stained white with dried sweat. Every man in the 33rd wore a leather stock, a cruel high collar that dug into the flesh of his neck, and each man’s long hair had been pulled harshly back, greased with candle wax, then twisted about a small sand-filled leather bag that was secured with a strip of black leather so that the hair hung like a club at the nape of the neck. The hair was then powdered white with flour, and though the clubbed and whitened hair looked smart and neat, it was a haven for lice and fleas. The native sepoys of the East India Company were luckier. They did not cake their hair with powder, nor did they wear the heavy trousers of the British troops but instead marched bare-legged. They did not wear the leather stocks either and, even more amazing, there was no flogging in the Indian battalions.

An enemy cannonball at last found a target and Sharpe saw a half-company of the 33rd broken apart as the round shot whipped through the ranks. He thought he glimpsed an instant red mist appear in the air above the formation as the ball slashed through, but maybe that was an illusion. Two men stayed on the ground as a sergeant closed the ranks up. Two more men were limping and one of them staggered, reeled and finally collapsed. The drummer boys, advancing just behind the unfurled colours, marked the rhythm of the march with steady beats interspersed with quicker flourishes, but when the boys marched past the twin heaps of offal that had been soldiers of the Grenadier Company a few seconds before they began to hurry their sticks and thus quickened the regiment’s pace until Major Shee turned in his saddle and damned their eagerness.

‘When are we going to load?’ Private Mallinson asked Sergeant Green.

‘When you’re told to, lad, when you’re told to. Not before. Oh, sweet Jesus!’ This last imprecation from Sergeant Green had been caused by a deafening ripple of gunfire from the ridge. A dozen more of the Tippoo’s smaller guns had opened fire and the crest of the ridge was now fogged by a grey-white cloud of smoke. The two British galloper guns off to the right had unlimbered and started to return the fire, but the enemy cannon were hidden by their own smoke and that thick screen obscured any damage the small galloper guns might be inflicting. More cavalry trotted forward to the 33rd’s right. These newcomers were Indian troops dressed in scarlet turbans and holding long, wicked-pointed lances.

‘So what are we bleeding supposed to do?’ Mallinson complained. ‘Just march straight up the bloody ridge with empty muskets?’

‘If you’re told to,’ Sergeant Green said, ‘that’s what you’ll do. Now hold your bloody tongue.’

‘Quiet back there!’ Hakeswill called from the half-company in front. ‘This ain’t a bleeding parish outing! This is a fight, you bastards!’

Sharpe wanted to be ready and so he untied the rag from his musket’s lock and stuffed it into the pocket where he kept the ring Mary had given him. The ring, a plain band of worn silver, had belonged to Sergeant Bickerstaff, Mary’s husband, but the Sergeant was dead now and Green had taken Bickerstaff’s sergeant’s stripes and Sharpe his bed. Mary came from Calcutta. That was no place to run, Sharpe thought. Place was full of redcoats.

Then he forgot any prospect of deserting, for suddenly the landscape ahead was filling with enemy soldiers. A mass of infantry was crossing the northern end of the low ridge and marching down onto the plain. Their uniforms were pale purple, they had wide red hats and, like the British Indian troops, were bare-legged. The flags above the marching men were red and yellow, but the wind was so feeble that the flags hung straight down to obscure whatever device they might have shown. More and more men appeared until Sharpe could not even begin to estimate their numbers.

‘Thirty-third!’ a voice shouted from somewhere ahead. ‘Line to the left!’

‘Line to the left!’ Captain Morris echoed the shout.

‘You heard the officer!’ Sergeant Hakeswill bawled. ‘Line to the left! Smartly now!’

‘On the double!’ Sergeant Green called.

The leading half-company of the 33rd had halted and every other half-company angled to their left and sped their pace, with the final half-company, in which Sharpe marched, having the farthest and fastest to go. The men began to jog, their packs and pouches and bayonet scabbards bumping up and down as they stumbled over the small fields of crops. Like a swinging door, the column, that had been marching directly towards the ridge, was now turning itself into a line that would lie parallel to the ridge and so bar the advance of the enemy infantry.

‘Two files!’ a voice shouted.

‘Two files!’ Captain Morris echoed.

‘You heard the officer!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Two files! On the right! Smartly now!’

All the running half-companies now split themselves into two smaller units, each of two ranks and each aligning itself on the unit to its right so that the whole battalion formed a fighting line two ranks deep. As Sharpe ran into position he glanced to his right and saw the drummer boys taking their place behind the regiment’s colours which were guarded by a squad of sergeants armed with long, axe-headed poles.

The Light Company was the last into position. There were a few seconds of shuffling as the men glanced right to check their alignment, then there was stillness and silence except for the corporals fussily closing up the files. In less than a minute, in a marvellous display of drill, the King’s 33rd had deployed from column of march into line of battle so that seven hundred men, arrayed in two long ranks, now faced the enemy.

‘You may load, Major Shee!’ That was Colonel Wellesley’s voice. He had galloped his horse close to where Major Shee brooded under the regiment’s twin flags. The six Indian battalions were still hurrying forward on the left, but the enemy infantry had appeared at the northern end of the ridge and that meant the 33rd was the nearest unit and the one most likely to receive the Tippoo’s assault.

‘Load!’ Captain Morris shouted at Hakeswill.

Sharpe felt suddenly nervous as he dropped the musket from his shoulder to hold it across his body. He fumbled with the musket’s hammer as he pulled it back to the half cock. Sweat stung his eyes. He could hear the enemy drummers.

‘Handle cartridge!’ Sergeant Hakeswill shouted, and each man of the Light Company pulled a cartridge from his belt pouch and bit through the tough waxed paper. They held the bullets in their mouths, tasting the sour salty gunpowder.

‘Prime!’ Seventy-six men trickled a small pinch of powder from the opened cartridges into their muskets’ pans, then closed the locks so that the priming was trapped.

‘Cast about!’ Hakeswill called and seventy-six right hands released their musket stocks so that the weapons’ butts dropped towards the ground. ‘And I’m watching you!’ Hakeswill added. ‘If any of you lilywhite bastards don’t use all his powder, I’ll skin your hides off you and rub salt on your miserable flesh. Do it proper now!’ Some old soldiers advised only using half the powder of a cartridge, letting the rest trickle to the ground so that the musket’s brutal kick would be diminished, but faced by an advancing enemy, no man thought of employing that trick this day. They poured the remainder of their cartridges’ powder down their musket barrels, stuffed the cartridge paper after the powder, then took the balls from their mouths and pushed them into the muzzles. The enemy infantry was two hundred yards away and advancing steadily to the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets. The Tippoo’s guns were still firing, but they had turned their barrels away from the 33rd for fear of hitting their own infantry and were instead aiming at the six Indian regiments that were hurrying to close the gap between themselves and the 33rd.

‘Draw ramrod!’ Hakeswill shouted and Sharpe tugged the ramrod free of the three brass pipes that held it under the musket’s thirty-nine-inch barrel. His mouth was salty with the taste of gunpowder. He was still nervous, not because the enemy was tramping ever closer, but because he had a sudden idiotic idea that he might have forgotten how to load a musket. He twisted the ramrod in the air, then placed the ramrod’s flared tip into the barrel.

‘Ram cartridge!’ Hakeswill snapped. Seventy-six men thrust down, forcing the ball, wadding and powder charge to the bottom of the barrels.

‘Return ramrod!’ Sharpe tugged the ramrod up, listening to it scrape against the barrel, then twirled it about so that its narrow end would slide down into the brass pipes. He let it drop into place.

‘Order arms!’ Captain Morris called and the Light Company, now with loaded muskets, stood to attention with their guns held against their right sides. The enemy was still too far off for a musket to be either accurate or lethal and the long, two-deep line of seven hundred redcoats would wait until their opening volley could do real damage.

‘’Talion!’ Sergeant Major Bywaters’s voice called from the centre of the line. ‘Fix bayonets!’

Sharpe dragged the seventeen-inch blade from its sheath which hung behind his right hip. He slotted the blade over the musket’s muzzle, then locked it in place by twisting its slot onto the lug. Now no enemy could pull the bayonet off the musket. Having the blade mounted made reloading the musket far more difficult, but Sharpe guessed that Colonel Wellesley had decided to shoot one volley and then charge. ‘Going to be a right mucky brawl,’ he said to Tom Garrard.

‘More of them than us,’ Garrard muttered, staring at the enemy. ‘The buggers look steady enough.’

The enemy indeed looked steady. The leading troops had momentarily paused to allow the men behind to catch up, but now, reformed into a solid column, they were readying to advance again. Their ranks and files were ramrod straight. Their officers wore waist sashes and carried highly curved sabres. One of the flags was being waved to and fro and Sharpe could just make out that it showed a golden sun blazoned against a scarlet sky. Vultures swooped lower. The galloper guns, unable to resist the target of the great column of infantry, poured solid shot into its flank, but the Tippoo’s men stoically endured the punishment as their officers made certain that the column was tight packed and ready to deliver its crushing blow on the waiting redcoat line.

Sharpe licked his dry lips. So these, he thought, were the Tippoo’s men. Fine-looking bastards they were, too, and close enough now so that he could see that their tunics were not plain pale purple, but were instead cut from a creamy-white cloth decorated with mauve tiger stripes. Their crossbelts were black and their turbans and waist sashes crimson. Heathens, they might be, but not to be despised for that, for only seventeen years before these same tiger-striped men had torn apart a British army and forced its survivors to surrender. These were the famed tiger troops of Mysore, the warriors of the Tippoo Sultan who had dominated all of southern India until the British thought to climb the ghats from the coastal plain and plunge into Mysore itself. The French were these men’s allies, and some Frenchmen served in the Tippoo’s forces, but Sharpe could see no white faces in the massive column that at last was ready and, to the deep beat of a single drum, lurched ponderously forward. The tiger-striped troops were marching directly towards the King’s 33rd and Sharpe, glancing to his left, saw that the sepoys of the East India Company regiments were still too far away to offer help. The 33rd would have to deal with the Tippoo’s column alone.

‘Private Sharpe!’ Hakeswill’s sudden scream was loud enough to drown the cheer that the Tippoo’s troops gave as they advanced. ‘Private Sharpe!’ Hakeswill screamed again. He was hurrying along the back of the Light Company and Captain Morris, momentarily dismounted, was following him. ‘Give me your musket, Private Sharpe!’ Hakeswill bellowed.

‘Nothing wrong with it,’ Sharpe protested. He was in the front rank and had to turn and push his way between Garrard and Mallinson to hand the gun over.

Hakeswill snatched the musket and gleefully presented it to Captain Morris. ‘See, sir!’ the Sergeant crowed. ‘Just as I thought, sir! Bastard sold his flint, sir! Sold it to an ’eathen darkie.’ Hakeswill’s face twitched as he gave Sharpe a triumphant glance. The Sergeant had unscrewed the musket’s doghead, extracted the flint in its folded leather pad and now offered the scrap of stone to Captain Morris. ‘Piece of common rock, sir, no good to man or beast. Must have flogged his flint, sir. Flogged it in exchange for a pagan whore, sir, I dare say. Filthy beast that he is.’

Morris peered at the flint. ‘Sell the flint, did you, Private?’ he asked in a voice that mingled derision, pleasure and bitterness.

‘No, sir.’

‘Silence!’ Hakeswill screamed into Sharpe’s face, spattering him with spittle. ‘Lying to an officer! Flogging offence, sir, flogging offence. Selling his flint, sir? Another flogging offence, sir. Says so in the scriptures, sir.’

‘It is a flogging offence,’ Morris said with a tone of satisfaction. He was as tall and lean as Sharpe, with fair hair and a fine-boned face that was just beginning to show the ravages of the liquor with which the Captain assuaged his boredom. His eyes betrayed his cynicism and something much worse: that he despised his men. Hakeswill and Morris, Sharpe thought as he watched them, a right bloody pair.

‘Nothing wrong with that flint, sir,’ Sharpe insisted.

Morris held the flint in the palm of his right hand. ‘Looks like a chip of stone to me.’

‘Common grit, sir,’ Hakeswill said. ‘Common bloody grit, sir, no good to man or beast.’

‘Might I?’ A new voice spoke. Lieutenant William Lawford had dismounted to join Morris and now, without waiting for his Captain’s permission, he reached over and took the flint from Morris’s hand. Lawford was blushing again, astonished by his own temerity in thus intervening. ‘There’s an easy way to check, sir,’ Lawford said nervously, then he drew out his pistol, cocked it and struck the loose flint against the pistol’s steel. Even in the day’s bright sunlight there was an obvious spark. ‘Seems like a good flint to me, sir,’ Lawford said mildly. Ensign Fitzgerald, standing behind Lawford, gave Sharpe a conspiratorial grin. ‘A perfectly good flint,’ Lawford insisted less diffidently.

Morris gave Hakeswill a furious look then turned on his heel and strode back towards his horse. Lawford tossed the flint to Sharpe. ‘Make your gun ready, Sharpe,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

Lawford and Fitzgerald walked away as Hakeswill, humiliated, thrust the musket back at Sharpe. ‘Clever bastard, Sharpie, aren’t you?’

‘I’ll have the leather as well, Sergeant,’ Sharpe said and, once he had the flint’s seating back, he called after Hakeswill who had begun to walk away. ‘Sergeant!’

Hakeswill turned back.

‘You want this, Sergeant?’ Sharpe called. He took a chip of stone out of his pocket. He had found it when he had untied the rag from the musket’s lock and realized that Hakeswill had substituted the stone for the flint when he had pretended to inspect Sharpe’s musket. ‘No use to me, Sergeant,’ Sharpe said. ‘Here.’ He tossed the stone at Hakeswill who ignored it. Instead the Sergeant spat and turned away. ‘Thanks, Tom,’ Sharpe said, for it had been Garrard who had supplied him with a spare flint.

‘Worth being in the army to see that,’ Garrard said, and all around him men laughed to have seen Hakeswill and Morris defeated.

‘Eyes to your front, lads!’ Ensign Fitzgerald called. The Irish Ensign was the youngest officer in the company, but he had the confidence of a much older man. ‘Got some shooting to do.’

Sharpe pushed back into his file. He brought up the musket, folded the leather over the flint and seated it in the doghead, then looked up to see that the mass of the enemy was now just a hundred paces away. They were shouting rhythmically and pausing occasionally to let a trumpet sound or a drum flourish a ripple, but the loudest sound was the beat of their feet on the dry earth. Sharpe tried to count the column’s front rank, but kept losing count as enemy officers marched slantwise across the column’s face. There had to be thousands of the tiger troops, all marching like a great sledgehammer to shatter the two-deep line of redcoats.

‘Cutting it fine, aren’t we?’ a man complained.

‘Wait lads, wait,’ Sergeant Green said calmly.

The enemy now filled the landscape ahead. They came in a column formed of sixty ranks of fifty men, three thousand in all, though to Sharpe’s inexperienced eye it seemed as if there must be ten times that number. None of the Tippoo’s men fired as they advanced, but held their fire just as the 33rd were holding theirs. The enemy’s muskets were tipped with bayonets while their officers were holding deeply curved sabres. On they came and to Sharpe, who was watching the column from the left of the line so that he could see its flank as well as its leading file, the enemy formation seemed as unstoppable as a heavily loaded farm wagon that was rolling slowly and inexorably towards a flimsy fence.

He could see the enemy’s faces now. They were dark, with black moustaches and oddly white teeth. The tiger men were close, so close, and their chanting began to dissolve into individual war shouts. Any second now, Sharpe thought, and the heavy column would break into a run and charge with levelled bayonets.

‘Thirty-third!’ Colonel Wellesley’s voice called out sharply from beneath the regiment’s colours. ‘Make ready!’

Sharpe put his right foot behind his left so that his body half turned to the right, then he brought his musket to hip height and pulled the hammer back to full cock. It clicked solidly into place, and somehow the pent-up pressure of the gun’s mainspring was reassuring. To the approaching enemy it seemed as though the whole British line had half turned and the sudden movement, coming from men who had been waiting so silently, momentarily checked their eagerness. Above the tiger troops of Mysore, beneath a bunch of flags on the ridge where the guns fired, a group of horsemen watched the column. Was the Tippoo himself there? Sharpe wondered. And was the Tippoo dreaming of that far-off day when he had broken three and half thousand British and Indian troops and marched them off to captivity in his capital at Seringapatam? The cheers of the attackers were filling the sky now, but still Colonel Wellesley’s voice was audible over the tumult. ‘Present!’

Seven hundred muskets came up to seven hundred shoulders. The muskets were tipped with steel, seven hundred muskets aimed at the head of the column and about to blast seven hundred ounces of lead at the leading ranks of that fast-moving, confident mass that was plunging straight towards the pair of British colours under which Colonel Arthur Wellesley waited. The tiger men were hurrying now, their front rank breaking apart as they began running. The wagon was about to hit the fence.

Arthur Wellesley had waited six years for this moment. He was twenty-nine years old and had begun to fear that he would never see battle, but now, at last, he would discover whether he and his regiment could fight, and so he filled his lungs to give the order that would start the slaughter.

Colonel Jean Gudin sighed, then, for the thousandth time in the last hour, he fanned his face to drive away the flies. He liked India, but he hated flies, which made India quite hard to like, but on balance, despite the flies, he did like India. Not nearly as much as he liked his native Provence, but where on earth was as lovely as Provence? ‘Your Majesty?’ he ventured diffidently, then waited as his interpreter struggled to gain the Tippoo’s attention. The interpreter was exchanging Gudin’s French for the Tippoo’s Persian tongue. The Tippoo did understand some French and he spoke the local Kanarese language well enough, but he preferred Persian for it reminded him that his lineage went back to the great Persian dynasties. The Tippoo was ever mindful that he was superior to the darker-skinned natives of Mysore. He was a Muslim, he was a Persian and he was a ruler, while they were mostly Hindus, and all of them, whether rich, poor, great or lowly, were his obedient subjects. ‘Your Majesty?’ Colonel Gudin tried again.

‘Colonel?’ The Tippoo was a short man inclined to plumpness, with a moustached face, wide eyes and a prominent nose. He was not an impressive-looking man, but Gudin knew the Tippoo’s unprepossessing appearance disguised a decisive mind and a brave heart. Although the Tippoo acknowledged Gudin, he did not turn to look at the Colonel. Instead he leaned forward in his saddle with one hand clasped over the tiger hilt of his curved sabre as he watched his infantry march on the infidel British. The sword was slung on a silken sash that crossed the pale yellow silk jacket that the Tippoo wore above chintz trousers. His turban was of red silk and pinned with a gold badge showing a tiger’s mask. The Tippoo’s every possible accoutrement was decorated with the tiger, for the tiger was his mascot and inspiration, but the badge on his turban also incorporated his reverence for Allah, for the tiger’s snarling face was formed by a cunning cipher that spelled out a verse of the Koran: ‘The Lion of God is the Conqueror.’ Above it, pinned to the turban’s brief white plume and brilliant in the day’s sunlight, there glittered a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg. ‘Colonel?’ the Tippoo said again.

‘It might be wise, Your Majesty,’ Gudin suggested hesitantly, ‘if we advanced cannon and cavalry onto the British flank.’ Gudin gestured to where the 33rd waited in its thin red line to receive the charge of the Tippoo’s column. If the Tippoo threatened a flank of that fragile line with cavalry then the British regiment would be forced to shrink into square and thus deny three quarters of their muskets a chance to fire at the column.

The Tippoo shook his head. ‘We shall sweep that scum away with our infantry, Gudin, then send the cavalry against the baggage.’ He let go of his sword’s hilt to touch his fingers fleetingly together. ‘Please Allah.’

‘And if it does not please Allah?’ Gudin asked, and suspected that his interpreter would change the insolence of the question into something more acceptable to the Tippoo.

‘Then we shall fight them from the walls of Seringapatam,’ the Tippoo answered, and turned briefly from watching the imminent battle to offer Colonel Gudin a quick smile. It was not a friendly smile, but a feral grimace of anticipation. ‘We shall destroy them with cannon, Colonel,’ the Tippoo continued with relish, ‘and shatter them with rockets, and in a few weeks the monsoon will drown their survivors, and after that, if Allah pleases, we shall hunt fugitive Englishmen from here to the sea.’

‘If Allah pleases,’ Gudin said resignedly. Officially he was an adviser to the Tippoo, sent by the Directorate in Paris to help Mysore defeat the British, and the patient Gudin had just done his best to give advice and it was none of his fault if the advice was spurned. He brushed flies from his face, then watched as the 33rd brought their muskets to their shoulders. When those muskets flamed, the Frenchman thought, the front of the Tippoo’s column would crumple like a honeycomb hit by a hammer, but at least the slaughter would teach the Tippoo that battles could not be won against disciplined troops unless every weapon was used against them: cavalry to force them to bunch up in protection, then artillery and infantry to pour fire into the massed ranks. The Tippoo surely knew that, yet he had insisted on throwing his three thousand infantry forward without cavalry support, and Gudin could only suppose that either the Tippoo believed Allah would be fighting on his side this afternoon, or else he was so consumed by his famous victory over the British seventeen years before that he believed he could always beat them in open conflict.

Gudin slapped at flies again. It was time, he thought, to go home. Much as he liked India he felt frustrated. He suspected that the government in Paris had forgotten about his existence, and he was keenly aware that the Tippoo was not receptive to his advice. He did not blame the Tippoo; Paris had made so many promises, but no French army had come to fight for Mysore and Gudin sensed the Tippoo’s disappointment and even sympathized with it, while Gudin himself felt useless and abandoned. Some of his contemporaries were already generals; even little Bonaparte, a Corsican whom Gudin had known slightly in Toulon, now had an army of his own, while Jean Gudin was stranded in distant Mysore. Which made victory all the more important, and if the British were not broken here then they would have to be beaten by the massed artillery and rockets that waited on Seringapatam’s walls. That was also where Gudin’s small battalion of European soldiers was waiting, and Seringapatam, he suspected, was where this campaign would be decided. And if there was victory, and if the British were thrown out of southern India, then Gudin’s reward would surely be back in France. Back home where the flies did not swarm like mice.

The enemy regiment waited with levelled muskets. The Tippoo’s men cheered and charged impetuously onwards. The Tippoo leaned forward, unconsciously biting his lower lip as he waited for the impact.

Gudin wondered whether his woman in Seringapatam would like Provence, or whether Provence would like her. Or maybe it was time for a new woman. He sighed, slapped at flies, then involuntarily shuddered.

For, beneath him, the killing had begun.

‘Fire!’ Colonel Wellesley shouted.

Seven hundred men pulled their triggers and seven hundred flints snapped forward onto frizzens. The sparks ignited the powder in the pans, there was a pause as the fire fizzed through the seven hundred touchholes, then an almighty crackling roar as the heavy muskets flamed.

The brass butt of the gun slammed into Sharpe’s shoulder. He had aimed the weapon at a sashed officer leading the enemy column, though even at sixty yards’ range it was hardly worth aiming a musket for it was a frighteningly inaccurate weapon, but unless the ball flew high it ought to hit someone. He could not tell what damage the volley had caused for the instant the musket banged into his shoulder his vision was obscured by the filthy bank of rolling smoke coughed out of the seven hundred musket muzzles. He could hardly hear anything either, for the sound of the rear rank muskets, going off close beside his head, had left his ears ringing. His right hand automatically went to find a new cartridge from his pouch, but then, above the ringing in his ears, he heard the Colonel’s brusque voice. ‘Forward! Thirty-third, forward!’

‘Go on, boys!’ Sergeant Green called. ‘Steady now! Don’t run! Walk!’

‘Damn your eagerness!’ Ensign Fitzgerald shouted at the company. ‘Hold your ranks! This ain’t a race!’

The regiment marched into the musket smoke which stank like rotting eggs. Lieutenant Lawford suddenly remembered to draw his sword. He could see nothing beyond the smoke, but imagined a terrible enemy waiting with raised muskets. He touched the pocket of his coat in which he kept the Bible given to him by his mother.

The front rank advanced clear of the stinking smoke fog and suddenly there was nothing ahead but chaos and carnage.

The seven hundred lead balls had converged on the front of the column to strike home with a brutal efficiency. Where there had been orderly ranks there were now only dead men and dying men who writhed on the ground. The rearward ranks of the enemy could not advance over the barrier of the dead and injured, so they stood uncertainly as, out of the smoke, the seven hundred bayonets appeared.

‘On the double! On the double! Don’t let them stand!’ Colonel Wellesley called.

‘Give them a cheer, boys!’ Sergeant Green called. ‘Go for them now! Kill the buggers!’

Sharpe had no thought of deserting now, for now he was about to fight. If there was any one good reason to join the army, it was to fight. Not to hurry up and do nothing, but to fight the King’s enemies, and this enemy had been shocked by the awful violence of the close-range volley and now they stared in horror as the redcoats screamed and ran towards them. The 33rd, released from the tight discipline of the ranks, charged eagerly. There was loot ahead. Loot and food and stunned men to slaughter and there were few men in the 33rd who did not like a good fight. Not many had joined the ranks out of patriotism; instead, like Sharpe, they had taken the King’s shilling because hunger or desperation had forced them into uniform, but they were still good soldiers. They came from the gutters of Britain where a man survived by savagery rather than by cleverness. They were brawlers and bastards, alley-fighters with nothing to lose but tuppence a day.

Sharpe howled as he ran. The sepoy battalions were closing up on the left, but there was no need for their musketry now, for the Tippoo’s vaunted tiger infantry were not staying to contest the afternoon. They were edging backwards, looking for escape, and then, out of the north where they had been half hidden by the red-blossomed trees, the British and Indian cavalry charged to the sound of a trumpet’s call. Lances were lowered and sabres held like spears as the horsemen thundered onto the enemy’s flank.

The Tippoo’s infantry fled. A few, the lucky few, scrambled back up the ridge, but most were caught in the open ground between the 33rd and the ridge’s slope and there the killing became a massacre. Sharpe reached the pile of dead and leapt over them. Just beyond the bloody pile a wounded man tried to bring up his musket, but Sharpe slammed the butt of his gun onto the man’s head, kicked the musket out of his enfeebled hands and ran on. He was aiming for an officer, a brave man who had tried to rally his troops and who now hesitated fatally. The man was carrying a drawn sabre, then he remembered the pistol in his belt and fumbled to draw it, but saw he was too late and turned to run after his men. Sharpe was faster. He rammed his bayonet forward and struck the Indian officer on the side of the neck. The man turned, his sabre whistling as he sliced the curved blade at Sharpe’s head. Sharpe parried the blow with the barrel of his musket. A sliver of wood was slashed off the stock as Sharpe kicked the officer between the legs. Sharpe was screaming a challenge, a scream of hate that had nothing to do with Mysore or the enemy officer, and everything to do with the frustrations of his life. The Indian staggered, hunched over and Sharpe slammed the musket’s heavy butt into the dark face. The enemy officer went down, his sabre falling from his hand. He shouted something, maybe offering his surrender, but Sharpe did not care. He just put his left foot on the man’s sword arm, then drove the bayonet hard down into his throat. The fight might have lasted three seconds.

Sharpe advanced no farther. Other men ran past, screaming as they pursued the fleeing enemy, but Sharpe had found his victim. He had thrust the bayonet so hard that the blade had gone clean through the officer’s neck into the soil beneath and it was hard work to pull the steel free, and in the end he had to put a boot on the dying man’s forehead before he could tug the bayonet out. Blood gushed from the wound, then subsided to a throbbing pulse of spilling red as Sharpe knelt and began rifling the man’s gaudy uniform, oblivious of the choking, bubbling sound that the officer was making as he died. Sharpe ripped off the yellow silk sash and tossed it aside together with the silver-hilted sabre and the pistol. The sabre scabbard was made of boiled leather, nothing of any value to Sharpe, but behind it was a small embroidered pouch and Sharpe drew out his knife, unfolded the blade and slashed through the pouch’s straps. He fumbled the pouch open to find that it was filled with nothing but dry rice and one small scrap of what looked like cake. He smelt it gingerly and guessed it was made of some kind of bean. He tossed the food aside and spat a curse at the dying man. ‘Where’s your bleeding money?’

The man gasped, made a choking sound, then his whole body jerked as his heart finally gave up the struggle. Sharpe tore at the tunic that was decorated with mauve tiger stripes. He felt the seams, looking for coins, found none so pulled off the wide red turban that was sticky with fresh blood. The dead man’s face was already crawling with flies. Sharpe pulled the turban apart and there, in the very centre of the greasy cloth, he found three silver and a dozen small copper coins. ‘Knew you’d have something,’ he told the dead man, then pushed the coins into his own pouch.

The cavalry was finishing off the remnants of the Tippoo’s infantry. The Tippoo himself, with his entourage and standard-bearers, had gone from the top of the ridge, and there were no cannon firing there either. The enemy had slipped away, abandoning their trapped infantry to the sabres and lances of the British and Indian cavalry. The Indian cavalry had been recruited from the city of Madras and the East Coast states which had all suffered from the Tippoo’s raids and now they took a bloody revenge, whooping and laughing as their blades cut down the terrified fugitives. Some cavalrymen, running out of targets, were already dismounted and searching the dead for plunder. The sepoy infantry, too late to join the killing, arrived to join the plunder.

Sharpe twisted the bayonet off his musket, wiped it clean on the dead man’s sash, scooped up the sabre and pistol, then went to find more loot. He was grinning, and thinking that there was nothing to this fighting business, nothing at all. A few shots in Flanders, one volley here; and neither fight was worthy of the name battle. Flanders had been a muddle and this fight had been as easy as slaughtering sheep. No wonder Sergeant Hakeswill would live for ever. And so would he, Sharpe reckoned, because there was nothing to this business. Just a couple of bangs and it was all over. He laughed, slid the bayonet into its sheath and knelt beside another dead man. There was work to do and a future to finance.

If only he could decide where it would be safe to run.