Читать книгу Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe’s Tiger, Sharpe’s Triumph, Sharpe’s Fortress - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 19

The siege works advanced steadily, hampered only by the Tippoo’s guns and by a shortage of the heavy timber needed to shore up the trenches and construct the batteries where the big siege guns would be emplaced. Colonel Gent, an engineer of the East India Company, supervised the work, and he agreed whole-heartedly with General Harris that the decayed stretch of the city’s western walls was the obvious and opportune target. Then, just days after the construction of the siege works had begun, a local farmer revealed the existence of a new second wall behind the first. The man insisted the new wall was unfinished, but Harris was worried enough by the farmer’s news to call his deputies to his tent where Colonel Gent delivered the gloomy intelligence about the new inner ramparts. ‘The fellow says his sons were taken away to help build the walls,’ the engineer reported, ‘and he seems to be telling the truth.’

Baird broke the brief silence that followed Gent’s words. ‘They can’t surely garrison both walls,’ the Scotsman insisted.

‘The Tippoo has no shortage of men,’ Wellesley pointed out. ‘Thirty or forty thousand, we hear. More than enough to defend both walls, I should think.’

Baird ignored the young Colonel, while Harris, uncomfortably aware of the bad feeling between his two deputies, stared fixedly at his map of the city in the hope that some new inspiration would strike. Colonel Gent sat beside Harris. The engineer unfolded a pair of wire-framed spectacles and hooked them over his ears as he peered down at the map.

Harris sighed. ‘I still think it has to be the west,’ he said, ‘despite this new wall.’

‘The north?’ Wellesley asked.

‘According to our farmer fellow,’ Gent answered, ‘the new inner wall goes all the way round the north.’ He picked up a pencil and sketched the line of the new inner wall on the map to show that wherever the river flowed close to the city there was now a double rampart. ‘And the west is infinitely preferable to the north,’ Gent added. ‘The South Cauvery’s shallow, while the main river can still be treacherous at this time of year. If our fellows have to wade through the Cauvery, let them do it here.’ He tapped the city’s western approach. ‘Of course,’ he added optimistically, ‘maybe that fellow was right, and maybe that inner wall ain’t finished.’

Harris wished to God that McCandless was still with the army. That subtle Scotsman would have despatched a dozen disguised sepoys and discovered within hours the exact state of the new inner wall, but McCandless was lost and so, Harris suspected, were the two men sent to rescue him.

‘We could cross the Arrakerry Ford,’ Baird suggested, ‘then blast our way in from the east like Cornwallis did.’

Harris lifted the hem of his wig and scratched at his old scalp wound. ‘We discussed all this before,’ he said wearily. He offered Baird a wan smile to take the sting from his mild reproof, then explained his reasons for not assaulting from the east. ‘First we have to force the crossing, and the enemy has the river banks entrenched. Then we must get through the new wall around their encampment’ – he touched the map, showing where the Tippoo had constructed a stout mud wall, well served with guns, that surrounded the encampment which lay outside the city’s southern and eastern walls – ‘and after that we have to lay siege to the city proper, and we know that both the east and south ramparts already have inner walls. And to breach those walls every round shot and pound of powder will have to be carried across the river.’

‘And one good rainfall will make the ford impassable,’ Gent put in gloomily, ‘not to mention bringing those damned crocodiles back.’ He shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t want to be carrying three tons of supplies a day across a half-flooded river full of hungry teeth.’

‘So wherever we attack,’ Wellesley asked, ‘we have to pierce two walls?’

‘That’s what the man said,’ Baird growled.

‘This new inner wall,’ Wellesley asked Gent, ignoring Baird, ‘what do we know of it?’

‘Mud,’ Gent said, ‘red mud bricks. Just like Devon mud.’

‘Mud will crumble,’ Wellesley pointed out.

‘If it’s dry, it will,’ Gent agreed, ‘but the core of the wall won’t be dry. Thoroughly good stuff, mud. Soaks up the cannon fire. I’ve seen twenty-four-pounder shots bounce off mud like currants off a suet pudding. Give me a good stone wall to break down any day. Break its crust and the guns turn the rubble core into a staircase. But not mud.’ Gent stared at the map, picking his teeth with the sharpened nib of a quill. ‘Not mud,’ he added in a gloomy undertone.

‘But it will yield?’ Harris asked anxiously.

‘Oh, it’ll yield, sir, it’ll yield, I can warrant you that, but how much time do we have to persuade it to yield?’ The engineer peered over his spectacles at the bewigged General. ‘The monsoon ain’t so far off, and once the rains begin we might as well go home for all the good we’ll ever do. You want a path through both walls? It’ll take two weeks more, and even then the inner breach will be perilously narrow. Perilously narrow! Can’t enfilade it, you see, and the breach in the outer wall will serve as a glacis to protect the base of the inner wall. Straight on fire, sir, and all aimed a deal higher than any respectable gunner would want. We can make you a breach of sorts, but it’ll be narrow and high, and God only knows what’ll be waiting on the other side. Nothing good, I dare say.’

‘But we can breach this outer wall quickly enough?’ Harris asked, tapping the place on his map.

‘Aye, sir. It’s mostly mud again, but it’s older so the centre will be drier. Once we break through the crust the thing should fall apart in hours.’

Harris stared down at the map, unconsciously scratching beneath his wig. ‘Ladders,’ he said after a long pause.

Baird looked alarmed. ‘You’re not thinking of an escalade, God save us?’

‘We’ve no timber!’ Gent protested.

‘Bamboo scaling ladders,’ Harris said, ‘just a few.’ He smiled as he leaned back in his chair. ‘Make me a breach, Colonel Gent, and forget the inner wall. We’ll assault the breach, but we won’t go through it. Instead we’ll attack the shoulders of the breach. We’ll use ladders to climb off the breach onto the walls, then attack round the ramparts. Once those outer walls are ours, the beggars will have to surrender.’

There was silence in the tent as the three officers considered Harris’s suggestion. Colonel Gent tried to clean his spectacle lenses with a corner of his sash. ‘You’d better pray our fellows get up on the walls damned fast, sir.’ Gent broke the silence. ‘You’ll be sending whole battalions across the river, General, and the lads behind will be pushing the fellows in front, and if there’s any delay they’ll spill into the space between the walls like water seeking its level. And God knows what’s in between those walls. A flooded ditch? Mines? But even if there’s nothing there, the poor fellows will still be trapped between two fires.’

‘Two Forlorn Hopes,’ Harris said, thinking aloud and ignoring Gent’s gloomy comments, ‘instead of one. They both attack two or three minutes ahead of the main assault. Their orders will be to climb off the breach and onto the walls. One Hope turns north along the outer ramparts, the other south. That way they don’t need to go between the walls.’

‘It’ll be a desperate business,’ Gent said flatly.

‘Assaults always are,’ Baird said stoutly. ‘That’s why we employ Forlorn Hopes.’ The Forlorn Hope was the small band of volunteers who went first into a breach to trigger the enemy’s surprises. Casualties were invariably heavy, though there was never a shortage of volunteers. This time, though, it did promise to be desperate, for the two Forlorn Hopes were not being asked to fight through the breach, but rather to turn towards the walls either side of the breach and fight their way up onto the ramparts. ‘You can’t take a city without shedding blood,’ Baird went on, then stiffened in his chair. ‘And once again, sir, I request permission to lead the main assault.’

Harris smiled. ‘Granted, David.’ He spoke gently, using Baird’s Christian name for the first time. ‘And God be with you.’

‘God be with the damned Tippoo,’ Baird said, hiding his delight. ‘He’s the one who’ll need the help. I thank you, sir. You do me honour.’

Or I send you to your death, Harris thought, but kept the sentiment silent. He rolled up the city map. ‘Speed, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘speed. The rains will come soon enough, so let’s get this business done.’

The troops went on digging, zigzagging their way across the fertile fields between the aqueduct and the south branch of the Cauvery. A second British army, six and a half thousand men from Cannanore on India’s western Malabar coast, arrived to swell the besiegers’ ranks. The newcomers camped north of the Cauvery and placed gun batteries that could sweep the approach to the proposed breach so that the city, with its thirty thousand defenders, was now besieged by fifty-seven thousand men, half of whom marched under British colours and half under the banners of Hyderabad. Six thousand of the British troops were actually British, the rest were sepoys, and behind all the troops, in the sprawling encampments, more than a hundred thousand hungry civilians waited to plunder the supplies rumoured to be inside Seringapatam.

Harris had men enough for the siege and assault, but not enough to ring the city entirely and so the Tippoo’s cavalry made daily sallies from the unguarded eastern side of the island to attack the foraging parties who ranged deep into the country in search of timber and food. The Nizam of Hyderabad’s horsemen fought off the daily attacks. The Nizam was a Muslim, but he had no love for his coreligionist, the Tippoo, and the men of Hyderabad’s army fought fiercely. One horseman came back to the camp with the heads of six enemies tied by their long hair to his lance. He held the bloody trophies aloft and galloped proudly along the tent lines to the cheers of the sepoys and redcoats. Harris sent the man a purse of guineas, while Meer Allum, the commander of the Nizam’s forces, more practically ordered a concubine to express his gratitude.

The trenches made ground daily, but one last formidable obstacle prevented their approach close enough to the city for the siege guns to begin their destructive work. On the southern bank of the Cauvery, a half-mile west of the city, stood the ruins of an old watermill. Built of stone, the ancient walls were thick enough to withstand the artillery fire from Harris’s camp and from the new British positions across the river. The ruined buildings had been converted into a stout fort that was equipped with a deep defensive ditch and was strongly garrisoned by two of the Tippoo’s finest cushoons, reinforced by cannon and rocketmen, and so long as the mill fort existed no British gun could be dragged within battering range of the city’s walls. The two flags that flew over the mill fort were shot away every day, but each dawn the flags would be hoisted again, albeit on shorter staffs, and once again the British and Indian gunners would blaze away with round shot and shell, and once again the sun flag and the banner of the Lion of God would be felled, but whenever skirmishers went close to the fort to discover if any defender survived, there would be a blast of cannon, rockets and musketry to prove that the Tippoo’s men were still dangerous. The Tippoo could even reinforce the garrison thanks to a deep trench that ran close to the south branch of the Cauvery and up which his men could creep through the night to relieve the fort’s battered garrison.

The fort had to be taken. Harris ordered a dusk attack that was led by Indian and Scottish flank companies supported by a party of engineers whose job was to bridge the mill’s deep ditch. For an hour before the assault the artillery on both banks of the river rained shells into the mill. The twelve-pounder guns were loaded with howitzer shells and the wispy trails of their burning fuses sputtered across the darkening sky to plunge into the smoke which churned up from the battered fort. To the waiting infantry who would have to wade through the Little Cauvery, cross the ditch and assault the mill it seemed as if the small fort was being obliterated, for there was nothing to be seen but the boiling smoke and dust amongst which the shells exploded with dull red flashes, but every few moments, as if to belie the destruction that seemed so complete, an Indian gun would flash back its response and a round shot would scream across the fields towards the British batteries. Or else a rocket would flare up from the defenders and snake its thicker smoke trail across the delicate tracery left by the fuses of the howitzer shells. The largest guns on the city wall were also firing, trying to bounce their shot up from the ground so that the ricochets would reach the besiegers’ artillery. Sharpe, inside the city, heard the vast hammering of the guns and wondered if it presaged an assault on the city’s walls, but Sergeant Rothière assured the men that it was only the British wasting ammunition on the old mill.

The bombardment suddenly ceased and the Tippoo’s men came scrambling out of the mill’s damp cellars to take their places at their fire-scorched ramparts. They reached their broken firesteps just in time, for the leading engineers were already hurling lit carcasses into the ditch. The carcasses were bundles of damp straw tight wrapped about a paper-cased shell of saltpetre, corned gunpowder and antimony. The carcasses burned fiercely, consuming the straw from the inside to billow choking streams of smoke through vents left in the casings so that within seconds the ditch was filled with a dense fog of grey smoke into which the frightened defenders poured a badly aimed musket volley. More carcasses were hurled, adding to the blinding smoke, and under this cover a dozen planks were thrown across the ditch and screaming attackers charged across with fixed bayonets. Only a few of the Tippoo’s men still had loaded muskets. Those men fired, and one of the attackers fell through the smoke to fall on the hissing carcasses, but the rest were already scrambling over the walls. Half the attackers were Macleod’s Highlanders from Perthshire, the others were Bengali infantry, and both came into the mill like avenging furies. The Tippoo’s men seemed stunned by the suddenness of the assault, or else they had been so shaken by the shelling and were so confused by the choking smoke that they were incapable of resistance, and incapable, too, of surrender. Bengalis and Highlanders hunted through the ruins, their war cries shrill as they bayoneted and shot the garrison, while behind them, before the smoke of the carcasses had even begun to fade or the fighting in the mill die down, the engineers were constructing a stouter bridge across which they could haul their siege guns so they could turn the old mill into a breaching battery.

The smoke of the carcasses at last died and drifted away, its remnants touched red by the setting sun, and in the lurid light a Highlander capered on the ramparts with the captured sun banner at the end of his bayonet while a Bengali havildar waved the Tippoo’s lion flag in celebration. The assault had turned into a massacre and the officers now tried to calm the attackers down as they pierced ever deeper into the mill’s vaults. The innermost cellar was grimly defended by a group of the Tippoo’s infantry, but an engineer brought the last remaining carcass into the mill, lit its fuse, waited until the smoke began to pour from the vents and then hurled it down the steps. There were a few seconds of silence, then dazed and gasping defenders came scrambling up the steep stairs. The mill fort was taken, and astonishingly only one of the attackers had been killed, but a shocked Highlander lieutenant counted two hundred dead bodies dressed in the Tippoo’s tiger-striped tunic, and still more enemy dead were piled bloodily in every embrasure. The rest of the garrison was either taken prisoner or else had managed to flee down the connecting trench to the city. A Scottish sergeant, finding one of the Tippoo’s rockets in a magazine, stuck it vertically between two of the ruin’s bigger stones, then lit the fuse. There were cheers as the rocket flamed and smoked, then louder cheers as it screamed up into the sky. It began to corkscrew, leaving a crazy trail of smoke in the twilight air, and then, reaching its apogee, and by now almost invisible, it tumbled and fell into the Cauvery.

Next morning the first eighteen-pounders were already emplaced in the mill. The range to the city was long, but not impossible, and Harris gave the order for the guns to open fire. The eighteen-pounder cannon were among the heavy siege guns that would make the breach, but for now they were employed to batter the enemy’s own guns. Seringapatam’s outer wall was protected by a glacis, but there was not enough distance between the river and the wall to construct a full glacis with a gently sloping outer face high enough to bounce cannon shot over the city’s walls, and so the low glacis could only protect the wall’s base, not the parapet, and the eighteen-pounders’ first shots were aimed to scour that parapet of its guns. The good fortune that had accompanied the Bengalis and the Highlanders in their assault on the old mill now seemed to settle on the shoulders of the gunners for their very first shot cracked apart an embrasure and the second dismounted the gun behind it, and after that every shot seemed to have an equally destructive effect. British and Indian officers watched through spyglasses as embrasure after embrasure was destroyed and as gun after gun was thrown down. A dozen heavy cannon were tumbled forward into the flooded ditch between the city wall and the glacis, and every tumbling fall was greeted by a cheer from the besiegers. The city’s western wall was being stripped of guns, and the artillerymen’s prowess seemed to promise an easy assault. Spirits in the allied ranks soared.

While inside the city, watching his precious cannon being destroyed, the Tippoo fumed. The mill fort, on which he had pinned such high hopes of delaying the enemy till the monsoon washed them away, had fallen like a child’s wooden toy. And now his precious guns were being obliterated.

It was time, the Tippoo decided, to show his soldiers that these red-coated enemies were not invulnerable demons, but mortal men, and that like any other mortal men, they could be made to whimper. It was time to unsheath the tiger’s claws.

A half-hour’s walk east of the city, just outside the embrasured wall that protected the Tippoo’s encampment, lay his Summer Palace, the Daria Dowlat. It was much smaller than the Inner Palace within the city, for the Inner Palace was where the Tippoo’s enormous harem lived and where his government had its offices and his army its headquarters, and so it was a sprawl of stables, storehouses, courtyards, state rooms and prison cells. The Inner Palace seethed with activity, a place where hundreds of folk had their daily living, while the Summer Palace, set in its wide green gardens and protected by a thick hedge of aloe, was a haven of peace.

The Daria Dowlat had not been built to impress, but rather for comfort. Only two storeys high, the building was made from huge teak beams over which stucco had been laid, then modelled and painted so that every surface glittered in the sunlight. The whole palace was surrounded by a two-storeyed verandah and on the western outer wall, under the verandah where the sun could not fade it, the Tippoo had ordered painted a vast mural showing the battle of Pollilur at which, seventeen years before, he had destroyed a British army. That great victory had extended Mysore’s dominion along the Malabar Coast and, in honour of the triumph, the palace had been built and received its name, the Daria Dowlat or Treasure of the Sea. The palace lay on the road leading to the island’s eastern tip, the same road on which was built the fine, elegant mausoleum in which the Tippoo’s great father, Hyder Ali, and his mother, the Begum Fatima, were buried. There too, one day, the Tippoo prayed he would lie at rest.

The Daria Dowlat’s garden was a wide lawn dotted with pools, trees, shrubs and flowers. Roses grew there, and mangoes, but there were also exotic strains of indigo and cotton mixed with pineapples from Africa and avocados from Mexico, all of them plants that the Tippoo had encouraged or imported in the hope that they would prove profitable for his country, but on this day, the day after the mill fort had been swamped with smoke, fire and blood, the garden was filled with two thousand of the Tippoo’s thirty thousand troops. The men paraded in three sides of a hollow square to the north of the palace, leaving the Daria Dowlat’s shadowed facade as the fourth side of their square.

The Tippoo had ordered entertainment for his troops. There were dancers from the city, two jugglers and a man who charmed snakes, but, best of all, the Tippoo’s wooden tiger organ had been fetched from the Inner Palace and the soldiers laughed as the life-size model tiger raked its claws across the redcoat’s blood-painted face. The bellow-driven growl did not carry very far, any more than did the pathetic cry of the tiger’s victim, but the action of the toy alone was sufficient to amuse the men.

The Tippoo arrived in a palanquin just after midday. None of his European advisers accompanied him, nor were any of his European troops present, though Appah Rao was in attendance, for two of the five cushoons parading in the palace gardens came from Rao’s brigade, and the Hindu General stood tall and silent just behind the Tippoo on the palace’s upper verandah. Appah Rao disapproved of what was about to happen, but he dared not make a protest, for any sign of disloyalty from a Hindu was enough to rouse the Tippoo’s suspicions. Besides, the Tippoo could not be dissuaded. His astrologers had told him that a period of ill luck had arrived and that it could only be averted by sacrifice. Other sages had peered into the smoke-misted surface of a pot of hot oil, the Tippoo’s favourite form of divination, and had deciphered the strange-coloured and slow-moving swirls to declare that they told the same grim tale: a season of bad fortune had come to Seringapatam. That bad luck had caused both the fall of the mill fort and the destruction of the guns on the outer western wall and the Tippoo was determined to avert this sudden ill fortune.

The Tippoo let his soldiers enjoy the tiger for a few moments longer, then he clapped his hands and ordered his servants to carry the model back to the Inner Palace. The tiger’s place was taken by a dozen jettis who strode onto the forecourt with their bare torsos gleaming. For a few moments they amused the soldiers with their more commonplace tricks: they bent iron rods into circles, lifted grown men on both hands or juggled with cannonballs.

Then a goatskin drum sounded and thejettis, obedient to its strokes, went back to the shadows under the Tippoo’s balcony. The watching soldiers fell into an expectant silence, then growled as a sorry party of prisoners was herded onto the forecourt. There were thirteen prisoners, all in red coats, all of them men of the 33rd who had been captured during the night battle at the Sultanpetah tope.

The thirteen men stood uncertainly amidst the ring of their enemies. The sun beat down. One of the prisoners, a sergeant, twitched as he stared at the ranks of tiger-striped soldiers, and still his face twitched as he turned around and gazed with a curious intensity when the Tippoo stepped to the rail of the upper verandah and, in a clear high voice, spoke to his troops. The enemy, the Tippoo said, had been fortunate. They had gained some cheap victories to the west of the city, but that was no reason to fear them. The British sorcerers, knowing they could not defeat the tigers of Mysore by force alone, had made a powerful spell, but with the help of Allah that spell would now be confounded. The soldiers greeted the speech with a long and approving sigh while the prisoners, unable to understand any of the Tippoo’s words, looked anxiously about, but could make no sense of the occasion.

Guards surrounded the prisoners and pushed them back to the palace, leaving just one man alone on the forecourt. That man tried to go with his companions, but a guard thrust him back with a bayonet and the uneven contest between a confused prisoner and an armed guard sparked a gust of laughter. The prisoner, driven back to the centre of the forecourt, waited nervously.

Two jettis walked towards him. They were big men, formidably bearded, tall and with their long hair bound and tied about their heads. The prisoner licked his lips, the jettis smiled and suddenly the redcoat sensed his fate and took two or three hurried steps away from the strongmen. The watching soldiers laughed as the redcoat tried to escape, but he was penned in by three walls of tiger-striped infantry and there was nowhere to run. He tried to dodge past the two jettis, but one of them reached out and snatched a handful of his red coat. The prisoner beat at the jetti with his fists, but it was like a rabbit cuffing at a wolf. The watching soldiers laughed again, though there was a nervousness in their amusement.

The jetti drew the soldier in to his body, then hugged him in a terrible last embrace. The second jetti took hold of the redcoat’s head, paused to take breath, then twisted.

The prisoner’s dying scream was choked off in an instant. For a second his head stared sightlessly backwards, then the jettis released him and, as the twisted neck grotesquely righted itself, the man collapsed. One of the jettis picked up the corpse in one huge hand and contemptuously tossed it high into the air like a terrier tossing a dead rat. The watching soldiers were silent for a second, then cheered. The Tippoo smiled.

A second redcoat was driven to the jettis, and this man was forced to kneel. He did not move as the nail was placed on his head. He uttered one curse, then died in seconds as his blood spurted out onto the gravel forecourt. A third man was killed with a single punch to his chest, a blow so massive that it drove him back a full twelve paces before, shuddering, his ruptured heart gave up. The watching soldiers shouted that they wanted to see another man’s neck wrung like a chicken, and the jettis obliged. And so, one by one, the prisoners were forced to their killers. Three of the men died abjectly, calling for mercy and weeping like babes. Two died saying prayers, but the rest died defiantly. Three put up a fight, and one tall grenadier raised an ironic cheer from the watching troops by breaking a jetti’s finger, but then he too died like the rest. One after the other they died, and those who came last were forced to watch their comrades’ deaths and to wonder how they would be sent to meet their Maker; whether they would be spiked through the skull or have their necks twisted north to south or simply be beaten to bloody death. And all of the prisoners, once dead, were decapitated by a sword blow before the two parts of their bodies were wrapped in reed mats and laid aside.

The jettis saved the Sergeant till last. The watching soldiers were in a fine mood now. They had been nervous at first, apprehensive of cold-blooded death on a sun-drenched afternoon, but the strength of the jettis and the desperate antics of the doomed men trying to escape had amused them and now they wanted to enjoy this last victim who promised to provide the finest entertainment of the day. His face was twitching in what the spectators took to be uncontrollable fear, but despite that terror he proved astonishingly agile, forever scuttling out of the jettis’ way and shouting up towards the Tippoo. Again and again he would appear to be cornered, but somehow he would always slide or twist or duck his way free and, with his face shuddering, would call desperately to the Tippoo. His shouts were drowned by the cheers of the soldiers who applauded every narrow escape. Two more jettis came to help catch the elusive man and, though he tried to twist past them, they at last had the Sergeant trapped. The jettis advanced in a line, forcing him back towards the palace, and the watching soldiers fell silent in expectation of his death. The Sergeant feinted to his left, then suddenly twisted and ran from the advancing jettis towards the palace. The guards moved to drive him back towards his executioners, but the man stopped beneath the verandah and stared up at the Tippoo. ‘I know who the traitors are here!’ he shouted in the silence. ‘I know!’

A jetti caught the Sergeant from behind and forced him to his knees.

‘Get these black bastards off me!’ the Sergeant screamed. ‘Listen, Your Honour, I know what’s going on here! There’s a British officer in the city wearing your uniform! For God’s sake! Mother!’ This last cry was torn from Obadiah Hakeswill as a second jetti placed his hands on the Sergeant’s head. Hakeswill wrenched his face round and bit down hard on the ball of the jetti’s thumb and the astonished man jerked his hands away, leaving a scrap of flesh in the Sergeant’s mouth.

Hakeswill spat the morsel out. ‘Listen, Your Grace! I know what the bastards are up to! Traitors. On my oath. Get away from me, you heathen black bastard! I can’t die! I can’t die! Mother!’ The jetti with the bitten hand had gripped the Sergeant’s head and begun to turn it. Usually the neck was wrung swiftly, for a huge explosion of energy was needed to break a man’s spine, but this time the jetti planned a slow and exquisitely painful death in revenge for his bitten hand. ‘Mother!’ Hakeswill screamed as his face was forced farther around, and then, just as it was twisted back past his shoulder, he made one last effort. ‘I saw a British officer in the city! No!’

‘Wait,’ the Tippoo called.

The jetti paused, still holding Hakeswill’s head at an unnatural angle.

‘What did he say?’ the Tippoo asked one of his officers who spoke some English and who had been translating the Sergeant’s desperate words. The officer translated again.

The Tippoo waved one of his small delicate hands and the aggrieved jetti let go of Hakeswill’s head. The Sergeant cursed as the agonizing tension left his neck, then rubbed at the pain. ‘Bleeding heathen bastard!’ he said. ‘You murdering black bugger!’ He spat at the jetti, shook himself out of the grip of the man holding him, then stood and walked two paces towards the palace. ‘I saw him, didn’t I? With my own eyes! In a frock, like them.’ He gestured at the watching soldiers in their tiger-striped tunics. ‘A lieutenant, he is, and the army says he went back to Madras, but he didn’t, did he? ’Cos he’s here. ’Cos I saw him. Me! Obadiah Hakeswill, Your Highness, and keep that bleeding heathen darkie away from me.’ One of the jettis had come close and Hakeswill, his face twitching, turned on the looming man. ‘Go on, bugger off back to your sty, you bloody great lump.’

The officer who spoke English called down from the verandah. ‘Who did you see?’ he asked.

‘I told you, Your Honour, didn’t I?’

‘No, you didn’t. Give us a name.’

Hakeswill’s face twitched. ‘I’ll tell you,’ he wheedled, ‘if you promise to let me live.’ He dropped to his knees and stared up at the verandah. ‘I don’t mind being in your dungeons, my Lord, for Obadiah Hakeswill never did mind a rat or two, but I don’t want these bleeding heathens screwing me neck back to front. It ain’t a Christian act.’

The officer translated for the Tippoo who, at last, nodded and so prompted the officer to turn back to Hakeswill. ‘You will live,’ he called down.

‘Word of honour?’ Hakeswill asked.

‘Upon my honour.’

‘Cross your heart and hope to die? Like it says in the scriptures?’

‘You will live!’ the officer snapped. ‘So long as you tell us the truth.’

‘I always do that, sir. Honest Hakeswill, that’s my name, sir. I saw him, didn’t I? Lieutenant Lawford, William he’s called. Tall lanky fellow with fair hair and blue eyes. And he ain’t alone. Private bleeding Sharpe was with him.’

The officer had not understood everything that Hakeswill had said, but he had understood enough. ‘You are saying this man Lawford is a British officer?’ he asked.

‘’Course he is! In my bleeding company, what’s more. And they said he’d gone back to Madras on account of carrying despatches, but he never did, ’cos there weren’t no despatches to be carried. He’s here, Your Grace, and up to no bleeding good and, like I said, dolled up in a stripy frock.’

The officer seemed sceptical. ‘The only Englishmen we have here, Sergeant, are prisoners or deserters. You’re lying.’

Hakeswill spat on the gravel that was soaked with the blood from the decapitated prisoners. ‘How can he be a deserter? Officers don’t desert! They sell their commissions and bugger off home to Mummy. I tell you, sir, he’s an officer! And the other one’s a right bastard! Flogged, he was, and quite right too! He should have been flogged to bleeding death, only the General sent for him.’

The mention of the flogging woke a memory in the Tippoo. ‘When was he flogged?’ The officer translated the Tippoo’s question.

‘Just before he ran, sir. Raw, he must have been, but not raw enough.’

‘And you say the General sent for him?’ The officer sounded disbelieving.

‘Harris, sir, the bugger what lost a lump out of his skull in America. He sent our Colonel, he did, and Colonel Wellesley stopped the flogging. Stopped it!’ Hakeswill’s indignation was still keen. ‘Stopping a flogging what’s been properly ordered! Never seen anything so disgraceful in all me born days! Going to the dogs, the army is, going to the dogs.’

The Tippoo listened to the translation, then stepped back from the railing. He turned to Appah Rao who had once served in the East India Company’s army. ‘Do British officers desert?’

‘None that I’ve ever heard of, Your Majesty,’ Appah Rao said, glad that the shadows of the balcony were hiding his pale and worried face. ‘They might resign and sell their commission, but desert? Never.’

The Tippoo nodded down to the kneeling Hakeswill. ‘Put that wretch back in the cells,’ he ordered, ‘and tell Colonel Gudin to meet me at the Inner Palace.’

Guards dragged Hakeswill back to the city. ‘And he had a bibbi with him!’ Hakeswill shouted as he was pulled away, but no one took any notice. The Sergeant was shedding tears of pure happiness as he was taken back through the Bangalore Gate. ‘Thank you, Mother,’ he called to the cloudless sky, ‘thank you, Mother, for I cannot die!’

The twelve dead men were hidden in a makeshift grave. The troops marched back to their encampment while the Tippoo, being carried to the Inner Palace beneath the tiger-striped canopy of his palanquin, reflected that the sacrifice of the twelve prisoners had not been in vain for it had revealed the presence of enemies. Allah be thanked, he reflected, for his luck had surely turned.

‘You think Mrs Bickerstaff has gone over to the enemy?’ Lawford asked Sharpe for the third or fourth time.

‘She’s gone to his bed,’ Sharpe said bleakly, ‘but I reckon she’ll still help us.’ Sharpe had washed both his and Lawford’s tunics and now he patted the cloth to see if it had dried. Looking after kit in this army, he reflected, was a deal easier than in the British. There was no pipeclay here to be caked onto crossbelts and musket slings, no blackball to be used on boots and no grease and powder to be slathered on the hair. He decided the tunics were dry enough and tossed one to the Lieutenant, then pulled his own over his head, carefully freeing the gold medallion so that it hung on his chest. His tunic also boasted a red cord on his left shoulder, the Tippoo’s insignia of a corporal. Lawford seemed to resent Sharpe bearing these marks of rank that were denied to him.

‘Suppose she betrays us?’ Lawford asked.

‘Then we’re in trouble,’ Sharpe said brutally. ‘But she won’t. Mary’s a good lass.’

Lawford shrugged. ‘She jilted you.’

‘Easy come, easy go,’ Sharpe said, then belted the tunic. Like most of the Tippoo’s soldiers he now went bare-legged beneath the knee-length garment, though Lawford insisted on keeping his old British trousers. Both men wore their old shakos, though George III’s badge had been replaced by a tin tiger with an upraised paw. ‘Listen,’ Sharpe said to a still worried Lawford, ‘I’ve done what you asked, and the lass says she’ll find this Ravi whatever his name is, and all we have to do now is wait. And if we get a chance to run, we run like buggery. You reckon that musket’s ready for inspection?’

‘It’s clean,’ Lawford said defensively, hefting his big French firelock.

‘Christ, you’d be on a charge for that musket back in the proper army. Give it here.’

Sergeant Rothière’s daily inspection was not for another half-hour, and after that the two men would be free until mid afternoon when it would be the turn of Gudin’s battalion to stand guard over the Mysore Gate. That guard duty ended at midnight, but Sharpe knew there would be no chance of an escape, for the Mysore Gate did not offer an exit from the Tippoo’s territory, but rather led into the city’s surrounding encampment which, in turn, had a strong perimeter guard. The previous night Sharpe had experimented to see whether his red cord and gold medallion would be authority enough for him to wander through the encampment, maybe allowing him to find a shadowed and quiet stretch of its earthworks over which he could scramble in the dark, but he had been intercepted within twenty yards of the gate and politely but firmly ushered back. The Tippoo, it seemed, was taking no chances.

‘I already had Wazzy clean that,’ Lawford said, nodding at the musket in Sharpe’s hands. Wazir was one of the small boys who hung around the barracks to earn pice for washing and cleaning equipment. ‘I paid him,’ Lawford said indignantly.

‘If you want a job done properly,’ Sharpe said, ‘you do it yourself. Hell!’ He swore because he had pinched his finger on the musket’s mainspring which he had uncovered by unscrewing the lock plate. ‘Look at that rust!’ He managed to unseat the mainspring without losing the trigger mechanism, then began to file the rust off the spring’s edge. ‘Bloody rubbish, these French muskets,’ he grumbled. ‘Nothing like a proper Birmingham bundook.’

‘Do you clean your own musket like that?’ Lawford asked, impressed that Sharpe had unscrewed the lock plate.

‘’Course I do! Not that Hakeswill ever cares. He only looks at the outside.’ Sharpe grinned. ‘You remember that day you saved my skin with the flint? Hakeswill had changed it for a bit of stone, but I caught it before he could do any damage. He’s a fly bastard, that one.’

‘He changed it?’ Lawford seemed shocked.

‘Bloody snake, that Obadiah. How much did you pay Wazzy?’

‘An anna.’

‘He robbed you. You want to pass me that oil bottle?’

Lawford obliged, then settled back against the stone water trough in which Sharpe had washed the tunics. He felt strangely content, despite the apparent failure of his mission. There was a pleasure in sharing this intimacy with Sharpe, indeed it felt oddly like a privilege. Many young officers were frightened of the men they commanded, fearing their scorn, and they concealed their apprehension with a display of careless arrogance. Lawford doubted he could ever do that now, for he no longer felt any fear of the crude, hard men who formed the ranks of Britain’s army. Sharpe had cured him of that by teaching him that the crudity was unthinking and the hardness a disguise for conscientiousness. Not that every man was conscientious, any more than all Britain’s soldiers were crude, but too many officers assumed they were all brutes and treated them as such. Now Lawford watched as Sharpe’s capable fingers forced the cleaned mainspring back into its cavity, using his picklock as a lever.

‘Lieutenant?’ a voice called respectfully across the yard. ‘Lieutenant Lawford?’

‘Sir?’ Lawford responded without thinking, turning towards the voice and rising to his feet. Then he realized what he had done and blanched.

Sharpe swore.

Colonel Gudin walked slowly across the yard, rubbing his long face as he approached the two Englishmen. ‘Lieutenant William Lawford,’ he enquired gently, ‘of His Majesty’s 33rd Regiment of Foot?’

Lawford said nothing.

Gudin shrugged. ‘Officers are supposedly men of honour, Lieutenant. Are you going to continue to lie?’

‘No, sir,’ Lawford said.

Gudin sighed. ‘So are you a commissioned officer or not?’

‘I am, sir.’ Lawford sounded ashamed, though whether it was because he had been accused of dishonourable behaviour or because he had betrayed his true rank, Sharpe could not tell.

‘And you, Caporal Sharpe?’ Gudin asked sadly.

‘I ain’t an officer, Colonel.’

‘No,’ Gudin said, ‘I did not think you were. But are you a true deserter?’

‘Of course I am, sir!’ Sharpe lied.

Gudin smiled at Sharpe’s confident tone. ‘And you, Lieutenant,’ he asked Lawford, ‘are you truly a deserter?’ Lawford made no reply and Gudin sighed. ‘Answer me on your honour, Lieutenant, if you would be so kind.’

‘No, sir,’ Lawford admitted. ‘Nor is Private Sharpe, sir.’

Gudin nodded. ‘That is what the Sergeant said.’

‘The Sergeant, sir?’ Lawford asked.

Gudin grimaced. ‘I fear the Tippoo executed the prisoners taken the other night. He spared just one, because that man told him of you.’

‘The bastard!’ Sharpe said, throwing the musket down in disgust. Bloody Hakeswill! He swore again, far more viciously.

‘Sir?’ Lawford said to Gudin, ignoring Sharpe’s anger.

‘Lieutenant?’ Gudin responded courteously.

‘We were captured by the Tippoo’s men while wearing our red coats, sir. That means we should be protected as legitimate prisoners of war.’

Gudin shook his head. ‘It means nothing of the sort, Lieutenant, for you lied about your rank and your intentions.’ He sounded disapproving. ‘But I shall still plead for your lives.’ Gudin sat on the water trough’s edge and flapped a hand at a persistent fly. ‘Will you tell me why you came here?’

‘No, sir,’ Lawford said.

‘I suppose not, but I warn you that the Tippoo will want to know.’ Gudin smiled at Sharpe. ‘I had come to the conclusion, Sharpe, that you are one of the best soldiers I have ever had the pleasure to command. But only one thing worried me about you, and that was why a good soldier would desert from his allegiance, even if he had been flogged, but now I see you are a better man than I thought.’ He frowned because Sharpe, while this elegant compliment was being paid, had lifted the back of his tunic and seemed to be scratching his bottom.

‘Sorry, sir,’ Sharpe said, noticing the Colonel’s distaste and dropping his tunic’s hem.

‘I’m sorry to be losing you, Sharpe,’ Gudin went on. ‘I’m afraid there is an escort waiting for you outside the barracks. You’re to be taken to the palace.’ Gudin paused, but must have decided there was nothing he could add that might ameliorate the implied threat of his words. Instead he turned and snapped his fingers to bring a disapproving Sergeant Rothière into the courtyard. Rothière carried their red coats and Sharpe’s white trousers. ‘They may help a little,’ Gudin said, though without any real hope in his voice. The Colonel watched as they discarded their newly cleaned tunics and pulled on their red coats. ‘About your woman,’ he said to Sharpe, then hesitated.

‘She had nothing to do with this, sir,’ Sharpe said hurriedly as he pulled on the trousers. He buttoned his old jacket and the red coat felt strangely confining after the looser tunic. ‘On my honour, sir. And besides,’ he added, ‘she gave me the push.’

‘Twice unlucky, Sharpe. Bad in a soldier, that.’ Gudin smiled and reached out a hand. ‘Your muskets, gentlemen, if you please.’

Sharpe handed over both guns. ‘Sir?’

‘Private Sharpe?’

Sharpe reddened and became awkward. ‘It was an honour to serve you, sir. I mean that. I wish we had more like you in our army.’