Читать книгу Sharpe’s Triumph: The Battle of Assaye, September 1803 - Bernard Cornwell - Страница 9

Colonel McCandless led his small force into Sir Arthur Wellesley’s encampment late the following afternoon. For most of the morning they had been shadowed by a band of enemy horsemen who sometimes galloped close as if inviting Sevajee’s men to ride out and fight, but McCandless kept Sevajee on a tight leash and at midday a patrol of horsemen in blue coats with yellow facings had chased the enemy away. The blue-coated cavalry were from the 19th Light Dragoons and the Captain leading the troop gave McCandless a cheerful wave as he cantered after the enemy who had been prowling the road in hope of finding a laggard supply wagon. Four hours later McCandless topped a gentle rise to see the army’s lines spread across the countryside while, four miles farther north, the red walls of Ahmednuggur stood in the westering sun. From this angle the fort and the city appeared as one continuous building, a vast red rampart studded with bastions. Sharpe cuffed sweat from his face. ‘Looks like a brute, sir,’ he said, nodding at the walls.

‘The wall’s big enough,’ the Colonel said, ‘but there’s no ditch, no glacis and no outworks. It’ll take us no more than three days to punch a hole.’

‘Then pity the poor souls who must go through the hole,’ Sevajee commented.

‘It’s what they’re paid to do,’ McCandless said brusquely.

The area about the camp seethed with men and animals. Every cavalry horse in the army needed two lascars to gather forage, and those men were busy with sickles, while nearer to the camp’s centre was a vast muddy expanse where the draught bullocks and pack oxen were picketed. Puckalees, the men who carried water for the troops and the animals, were filling their buckets from a tank scummed with green. A thorn hedge surrounded six elephants that belonged to the gunners, while next to the great beasts was the artillery park with its twenty-six cannon, and after that came the sepoys’ lines where children shrieked, dogs yapped and women carried patties of bullock dung on their heads to build the evening fires. The last part of the journey took them through the lines of the 78th, a kilted Highland regiment, and the soldiers saluted McCandless and then looked at the red facings on Sharpe’s coat and called out the inevitable insults. ‘Come to see how a real man fights, Sergeant?’

‘You ever done any proper fighting?’ Sharpe retorted.

‘What’s a Havercake doing here?’

‘Come to teach you boys a lesson.’

‘What in? Cooking?’

‘Where I come from,’ Sharpe said, ‘it’s the ones in skirts what does the cooking.’

‘Enough, Sharpe,’ McCandless snapped. The Colonel liked to wear a kilt himself, claiming it was a more suitable garment for India’s heat than trousers. ‘We must pay our respects to the General,’ McCandless said, and turned towards the larger tents in the centre of the encampment.

It had been two years since Sharpe had last seen his old Colonel and he doubted that Major-General Sir Arthur Wellesley would prove any friendlier now than he ever had. Sir Arthur had always been a cold fish, sparing with approval and frightening in his disapproval, and his most casual glance somehow managed to make Sharpe feel both insignificant and inadequate, and so, when McCandless dismounted outside the General’s tent, Sharpe deliberately hung back. The General, still a young man, was standing beside a line of six picketed horses and was evidently in a blazing temper. An orderly, in the blue-and-yellow coat of the 19th Dragoons, was holding a big grey stallion by its bridle and Wellesley was alternately patting the horse and snapping at the half-dozen aides who cowered nearby. A group of senior officers, majors and colonels, stood beside the General’s tent, suggesting that a council of war had been interrupted by the horse’s distress. The grey stallion was certainly suffering. It was shivering, its eyes were rolling white and sweat or spittle was dripping from its drooping head.

Wellesley turned as McCandless and Sevajee approached. ‘Can you bleed a horse, McCandless?’

‘I can put a knife in it, sir, if it helps,’ the Scotsman answered.

‘It does not help, damn it!’ Wellesley retorted savagely. ‘I don’t want him butchered, I want him bled. Where is the farrier?’

‘We’re looking for him, sir,’ an aide replied.

‘Then find him, damn it! Easy, boy, easy!’ These last three words were spoken in a soothing tone to the horse which had let out a feeble whinny. ‘He’s fevered,’ Wellesley explained to McCandless, ‘and if he ain’t bled, he’ll die.’

A groom hurried to the General’s side carrying a fleam and a blood stick, both of which he mutely offered to Wellesley. ‘No good giving them to me,’ the General snapped, ‘I can’t bleed a horse.’ He looked at his aides, then at the senior officers by the tent. ‘Someone must know how to do it,’ Wellesley pleaded. They were all men who lived with horses and professed to love them, though none knew how to bleed a horse, for that was a job left to servants, but finally a Scottish major averred that he had a shrewd idea of how the thing was done, and so he was given the fleam and its hammer. He took off his red coat, chose a fleam blade at random and stepped up to the shivering stallion. He placed the blade on the horse’s neck and drew back the hammer with his right hand.

‘Not like that!’ Sharpe blurted out. ‘You’ll kill him!’ A score of men stared at him while the Scottish Major, the blade unhit, looked rather relieved. ‘You’ve got the blade the wrong way round, sir,’ Sharpe explained. ‘You have to line it up along the vein, sir, not across it.’ He was blushing for having spoken out in front of the General and all the army’s senior officers.

Wellesley scowled at Sharpe. ‘Can you bleed a horse?’

‘I can’t ride the things, sir, but I do know how to bleed them. I worked in an inn yard,’ Sharpe added as though that was explanation enough.

‘Have you actually bled a horse?’ Wellesley demanded. He showed not the slightest surprise at seeing a man from his old battalion in the camp, but in truth he was far too distracted by his stallion’s distress to worry about mere men.

‘I’ve bled dozens, sir,’ Sharpe said, which was true, but those horses had been big heavy carriage beasts, and this white stallion was plainly a thoroughbred.

‘Then do it, damn it,’ the General said. ‘Don’t just stand there, do it!’

Sharpe took the fleam and the blood stick from the Major. The fleam looked like a misshapen penknife, and inside its brass case were folded a dozen blades. Two of the blades were shaped as hooks, while the rest were spoon-shaped. He selected a middle-sized spoon, checked that its edge was keen, folded the other blades away and then approached the horse. ‘You’ll have to hold him hard,’ he told the dragoon orderly.

‘He can be lively, Sergeant,’ the orderly warned in a low voice, anxious not to provoke another outburst from Wellesley.

‘Then hang on hard,’ Sharpe said to the orderly, then he stroked the horse’s neck, feeling for the jugular.

‘How much are you going to let out?’ Wellesley asked.

‘Much as it takes, sir,’ Sharpe said, who really had no idea how much blood he should spill. Enough to make it look good, he reckoned. The horse was nervous and tried to pull away from the orderly. ‘Give him a stroke, sir,’ Sharpe said to the General. ‘Let him know it ain’t the end of the world.’

Wellesley took the stallion’s head from the orderly and gave the beast’s nose a fondling. ‘It’s all right, Diomed,’ he said, ‘we’re going to make you better. Get on with it, Sharpe.’

Sharpe had found the jugular and now placed the sharp curve of the spoon-blade over the vein. He held the knife in his left hand and the blood stick in his right. The stick was a small wooden club that was needed to drive the fleam’s blade through a horse’s thick skin. ‘All right, boy,’ he murmured to the horse, ‘just a prick, nothing bad,’ and then he struck the blade hard with the stick’s blunt head.

The fleam sliced through hair and skin and flesh straight into the vein, and the horse reared up, but Sharpe, expecting the reaction, held the fleam in place as warm blood spurted out over his shako. ‘Hold him!’ he snapped at Wellesley, and the General seemed to find nothing odd in being ordered about by a sergeant and he obediently hauled Diomed’s head down. ‘That’s good,’ Sharpe said, ‘that’s good, just keep him there, sir, keep him there,’ and he skewed the blade slightly to open the slit in the vein and so let the blood pulse out. It ran red down the white horse’s flank, it soaked Sharpe’s red coat and puddled at his feet.

The horse shivered, but Sharpe sensed that the stallion was calming. By relaxing the pressure on the fleam he could lessen the blood flow and after a while he slowed it to a trickle and then, when the horse had stopped shivering, Sharpe pulled the blade free. His right hand and arm were drenched in blood.

He spat on his clean left hand, then wiped the small wound. ‘I reckon he’ll live, sir,’ he told the General, ‘but a bit of ginger in his feed might help.’ That was another trick he had learned at the coaching tavern.

Wellesley stroked Diomed’s nose and the horse, suddenly unconcerned by the fuss all about him, lowered his head and cropped at a miserable tuft of grass. The General smiled, his bad mood gone. ‘I’m greatly obliged to you, Sharpe,’ Wellesley said, relinquishing the bridle into the orderly’s grasp. ‘ ’Pon my soul, I’m greatly obliged to you,’ he repeated enthusiastically. ‘As neat a blood-letting as ever I did see.’ He put a hand into his pocket and brought out a haideri that he offered to Sharpe. ‘Well done, Sergeant.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Sharpe said, taking the gold coin. It was a generous reward.

‘Good as new, eh?’ Wellesley said, admiring the horse. ‘He was a gift.’

‘An expensive one,’ McCandless observed drily.

‘A valued one,’ Wellesley said. ‘Poor Ashton left him to me in his will. You knew Ashton, McCandless?’

‘Of course, sir.’ Henry Ashton had been Colonel of the 12th, a Suffolk regiment posted to India, and he had died after taking a bullet in the liver during a duel.

‘A damned shame,’ Wellesley said, ‘but a fine gift. Pure Arab blood, McCandless.’

Most of the pure Arab blood seemed to be on Sharpe, but the General was delighted with the horse’s sudden improvement. Indeed, Sharpe had never seen Wellesley so animated. He grinned as he watched the horse, then he told the orderly to walk Diomed up and down, and he grinned even more widely as he watched the horse move. Then, suddenly aware that the men about him were taking an amused pleasure from his own delight, his face drew back into its accustomed cold mask. ‘Obliged to you, Sharpe,’ he said yet again, then he turned and walked towards his tent. ‘McCandless! Come and give me your news!’

McCandless and Sevajee followed the General and his aides into the tent, leaving Sharpe trying to wipe the blood from his hands. The dragoon orderly grinned at him. ‘That’s a six-hundred-guinea horse you just bled, Sergeant,’ he said.

‘Bloody hell!’ Sharpe said, staring in disbelief at the dragoon. ‘Six hundred!’

‘Must be worth that. Best horse in India, Diomed is.’

‘And you look after him?’ Sharpe asked.

The orderly shook his head. ‘He’s got grooms to look after his horses, and the farrier to bleed and shoe them. My job is to follow him into battle, see? And when one horse gets tired I give him another.’

‘You drag all those six horses around?’ Sharpe asked, astonished.

‘Not all six of them,’ the dragoon said, ‘only two or three. But he shouldn’t have six horses anyway. He only wants five, but he can’t find anyone to buy the spare. You don’t know anyone who wants to buy a horse, do you?’

‘Hundreds of the buggers,’ Sharpe said, gesturing at the encampment. ‘Every bleeding infantryman over there for a start.’

‘It’s theirs if they’ve got four hundred guineas,’ the orderly said. ‘It’s that bay gelding, see?’ He pointed. ‘Six years old and good as gold.’

‘No use looking at me,’ Sharpe said. ‘I hate the bloody things.’

‘You do?’

‘Lumpy, smelly beasts. I’m happier on my feet.’

‘You see the world from a horse’s back,’ the dragoon said, ‘and catch women’s eyes.’

‘So they’re not entirely useless,’ Sharpe said and the orderly grinned. He was a happy, round-faced young man with tousled brown hair and a ready smile. ‘How come you’re the General’s orderly?’ Sharpe asked him.

The dragoon shrugged. ‘He asked my Colonel to give him someone and I was chosen.’

‘You don’t mind?’

‘He’s all right,’ the orderly said, jerking his head towards Wellesley’s tent. ‘Don’t crack a smile often, leastwise not with the likes of you and me, but he’s a fair man.’

‘Good for him.’ Sharpe stuck out his bloodied hand. ‘My name’s Dick Sharpe.’

‘Daniel Fletcher,’ the orderly said, ‘from Stoke Poges.’

‘Never heard of it,’ Sharpe said. ‘Where can I get a scrub?’

‘Cook tent, Sergeant.’

‘And riding boots?’ Sharpe asked.

‘Find a dead man in Ahmednuggur,’ Fletcher said. ‘It’ll be cheaper than buying them off me.’

‘That’s true,’ Sharpe said, then he limped to the cook tent. The limp was caused by the sore muscles from long hours in the saddle. He had purchased a length of cotton cloth in the village where they had spent the night, then torn the cloth into strips that he had wrapped about his calves to protect them from the stirrup leathers, but his calves still hurt. God, he thought, but he hated bloody horses.

He washed the worst of Diomed’s blood from his hands and face, diluted what was on his uniform, then went back to wait for McCandless. Sevajee’s men still sat on their horses and stared at the distant city that was topped by a smear of smoke. Sharpe could hear the murmur of voices inside the General’s tent, but he paid no attention. It wasn’t his business. He wondered if he could scrounge a tent for his own use, for it had already rained earlier in the day and Sharpe suspected it might rain again, but Colonel McCandless was not a man much given to tents. He derided them as women’s luxuries, preferring to seek shelter with local villagers or, if no peasant house or cattle byre was available, happily sleeping beneath the stars or in the rain. A pint of rum, Sharpe thought, would not go amiss either.

‘Sergeant Sharpe!’ Wellesley’s familiar voice broke into his thoughts and Sharpe turned to see his old commanding officer coming from the big tent.

‘Sir!’ Sharpe stiffened to attention.

‘So Colonel McCandless has borrowed you from Major Stokes?’ Wellesley asked.

‘Yes, sir,’ Sharpe said. The General was bareheaded and Sharpe saw that his temples had turned prematurely grey. He seemed to have forgotten Sharpe’s handiwork with his horse, for his long-nosed face was as unfriendly as ever.

‘And you saw this man Dodd at Chasalgaon?’

‘I did, sir.’

‘Repugnant business,’ Wellesley said, ‘repugnant. Did he kill the wounded?’

‘All of them, sir. All but me.’

‘And why not you?’ Wellesley asked coldly.

‘I was covered in blood, sir. Fair drenched in it.’

‘You seem to be in that condition much of the time, Sergeant,’ Wellesley said with just a hint of a smile, then he turned back to McCandless. ‘I wish you joy of the hunt, Colonel. I’ll do my best to help you, but I’m short of men, woefully short.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ the Scotsman said, then watched as the General went back into his big tent which was crammed with red-coated officers. ‘It seems,’ McCandless said to Sharpe when the General was gone, ‘that we’re not invited to supper.’

‘Were you expecting to be, sir?’

‘No,’ McCandless said, ‘and I’ve no business in that tent tonight either. They’re planning an assault for first light tomorrow.’

Sharpe thought for a moment that he must have misheard. He looked northwards at the big city wall. ‘Tomorrow, sir? An assault? But they only got here today and there isn’t a breach!’

‘You don’t need a breach for an escalade, Sergeant,’ McCandless said. ‘An escalade is nothing but ladders and murder.’

Sharpe frowned. ‘Escalade?’ He had heard the word, but was not really sure he knew what it meant.

‘March straight up to the wall, Sharpe, throw your ladders against the ramparts and climb.’ McCandless shook his head. ‘No artillery to help you, no breach, no trenches to get you close, so you must accept the casualties and fight your way through the defenders. It isn’t pretty, Sharpe, but it can work.’ The Scotsman still sounded disapproving. He was leading Sharpe away from the General’s tent, seeking a place to spread his blanket. Sevajee and his men were following, and Sevajee was walking close enough to listen to McCandless’s words. ‘Escalades can work well against an unsteady enemy,’ the Colonel went on, ‘but I’m not at all convinced the Mahrattas are shaky. I doubt they’re shaky at all, Sharpe. They’re dangerous as snakes and they usually have Arab mercenaries in their ranks.’

‘Arabs, sir? From Arabia?’

‘That’s where they usually come from,’ McCandless confirmed. ‘Nasty fighters, Sharpe.’

‘Good fighters,’ Sevajee intervened. ‘We hire hundreds of them every year. Hungry men, Sergeant, who come from their bare land with sharp swords and long muskets.’

‘Doesn’t serve to underestimate an Arab,’ McCandless agreed. ‘They fight like demons, but Wellesley’s an impatient man and he wants the business over. He insists they won’t be expecting an escalade and thus won’t be ready for one, and I pray to God he’s right.’

‘So what do we do, sir?’ Sharpe asked.

‘We go in behind the assault, Sharpe, and beseech Almighty God that our ladder parties do get into the city. And once we’re inside we hunt for Dodd. That’s our job.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Sharpe said.

‘And once we have the traitor we take him to Madras, put him on trial and have him hanged,’ McCandless said with satisfaction, as though the job was as good as done. His gloomy forebodings of the previous night seemed to have vanished. He had stopped at a bare patch of ground. ‘This looks like a fair billet. No more rain in the offing, I think, so we should be comfortable.’

Like hell, Sharpe thought. A bare bed, no rum, a fight in the morning, and God only knew what kind of devils waiting across the wall, but he slept anyway.

And woke when it was still dark to see shadowy men straggling past with long ladders across their shoulders. Dawn was near and it was time for an escalade. Time for ladders and murder.

Sanjit Pandee was Killadar of the city, which meant that he commanded Ahmednuggur’s garrison in the name of his master, Dowlut Rao Scindia, Maharajah of Gwalior, and in principle every soldier in the city, though not in the adjacent fortress, was under Pandee’s command. So why had Major Dodd ejected Pandee’s troops from the northern gatehouse and substituted his own men? Pandee had sent no orders, but the deed had been done anyway and no one could explain why, and when Sanjit Pandee sent a message to Major Dodd and demanded an answer, the messenger was told to wait and, so far as the Killadar knew, was still waiting.

Sanjit Pandee finally summoned the courage to confront the Major himself. It was dawn, a time when the Killadar was not usually stirring, and he discovered Dodd and a group of his white-coated officers on the southern wall from where the Major was watching the British camp through a heavy telescope mounted on a tripod. Sanjit Pandee did not like to disturb the tall Dodd who was being forced to stoop awkwardly because the tripod was incapable of raising the glass to the level of his eye. The Killadar cleared his throat, but that had no effect, and then he scraped a foot on the firestep, and still Dodd did not even glance at him, so finally the Killadar demanded his explanation, though in very flowery terms just in case he gave the Englishman offence. Sanjit Pandee had already lost the battle over the city treasury which Dodd had simply commandeered without so much as a by-your-leave, and the Killadar was nervous of the scowling foreigner.

‘Tell the bloody man,’ Dodd told his interpreter without taking his eye from the telescope, ‘that he’s wasting my bloody time. Tell him to go and boil his backside.’

Dodd’s interpreter, who was one of his younger Indian officers, courteously suggested to the Killadar that Major Dodd’s attention was wholly consumed by the approaching enemy, but that as soon as he had a moment of leisure, the Major would be delighted to hold a conversation with the honoured Killadar.

The Killadar gazed southwards. Horsemen, British and Indian, were ranging far ahead of the approaching enemy column. Not that Sanjit Pandee could see the column properly, only a dark smudge among the distant green that he supposed was the enemy. Their feet kicked up no dust, but that was because of the rain that had fallen the day before. ‘Are the enemy truly coming?’ he enquired politely.

‘Of course they’re not bloody coming,’ Dodd said, standing upright and massaging the small of his back. ‘They’re running away in terror.’

‘The enemy are indeed approaching, sahib,’ the interpreter said deferentially.

The Killadar glanced along his defences and was reassured to see the bulk of Dodd’s regiment on the firestep, and alongside them the robed figures of his Arab mercenaries. ‘Your regiment’s guns,’ he said to the interpreter, ‘they are not here?’

‘Tell the interfering little bugger that I’ve sold all the bloody cannon to the enemy,’ Dodd growled.

‘The guns are placed where they will prove most useful, sahib,’ the interpreter assured the Killadar with a dazzling smile, and the Killadar, who knew that the five small guns were at the north gate where they were pointing in towards the city rather than out towards the plain, sighed in frustration. Europeans could be so very difficult.

‘And the three hundred men the Major has placed at the north gate?’ Sanjit Pandee said. ‘Is it because he expects an attack there?’

‘Ask the idiot why else they would be there,’ Dodd instructed the interpreter, but there was no time to tell the Killadar anything further because shouts from the ramparts announced the approach of three enemy horsemen. The emissaries rode beneath a white flag, but some of the Arabs were aiming their long-barrelled matchlocks at the approaching horsemen and the Killadar quickly sent some aides to tell the mercenaries to hold their fire. ‘They’ve come to offer us cowle,’ the Killadar said as he hurried towards the south gate. Cowle was an offer of terms, a chance for the defenders to surrender rather than face the horrors of assault, and the Killadar hoped he could prolong the negotiations long enough to persuade Major Dodd to bring the three hundred men back from the north gate.

The Killadar could see that the three horsemen were riding towards the south gate which was topped by a squat tower from which flew Scindia’s gaudy green and scarlet flag. To reach the tower the Killadar had to run down some stone steps because the stretch of wall just west of the gate possessed no firestep, but was simply a high, blank wall of red stone. He hurried along the foot of the wall, then climbed more steps to reach the gate tower just as the three horsemen reined in beneath.

Two of the horsemen were Indians while the third was a British officer, and the three men had indeed come to offer the city cowle. If the Killadar surrendered, one of the Indians shouted, the city’s defenders would be permitted to march from Ahmednuggur with all their hand weapons and whatever personal belongings they could carry. General Wellesley would guarantee the garrison safe passage as far as the River Godavery, beyond which Pohlmann’s compoo had withdrawn. The officer finished by demanding an immediate answer.

Sanjit Pandee hesitated. The cowle was generous, surprisingly generous, and he was tempted to accept because no man would die if he took the terms. He could see the approaching column clearly now, and it looked to him like a red stain smothering the plain. There would be guns there, and the gods alone knew how many muskets. Then he glanced to his left and right and he saw the reassuring height of his walls, and he saw the white robes of his fearsome Arabs, and he contemplated what Dowlut Rao Scindia would say if he meekly surrendered Ahmednuggur. Scindia would be angry, and an angry Scindia was liable to put whoever had angered him beneath the elephant’s foot. The Killadar’s task was to delay the British in front of Ahmednuggur while Scindia gathered his allies and so prepared the vast army that would crush the invader. Sanjit Pandee sighed. ‘There can be no cowle,’ he called down to Wellesley’s three messengers, and the horsemen did not try to change his mind. They just tugged on their reins, spurred their horses and rode away. ‘They want battle,’ the Killadar said sadly, ‘they want loot.’

‘That’s why they come here,’ an aide replied. ‘Their own land is barren.’

‘I hear it is green,’ Sanjit Pandee said.

‘No, sahib, barren and dry. Why else would they be here?’

News spread along the walls that cowle had been refused. No one had expected otherwise, but the Killadar’s reluctant defiance cheered the defenders whose ranks thickened as townsfolk climbed to the firestep to see the approaching enemy.

Dodd scowled when he saw that women and children were thronging the ramparts to view the enemy. ‘Clear them away!’ he ordered his interpreter. ‘I want only the duty companies up here.’ He watched as his orders were obeyed. ‘Nothing’s going to happen for three days now,’ he assured his officers. ‘They’ll send skirmishers to harass us, but skirmishers can’t hurt us if we don’t show our heads above the wall. So tell the men to keep their heads down. And no one’s to fire at the skirmishers, you understand? No point in wasting good balls on skirmishers. We’ll open fire after three days.’

‘In three days, sahib?’ a young Indian officer asked.

‘It will take the bastards one day to establish batteries and two to make a breach,’ Dodd forecast confidently. ‘And on the fourth day the buggers will come, so there’s nothing to get excited about now.’ The Major decided to set an example of insouciance in the face of the enemy. ‘I’m going for breakfast,’ he told his officers. ‘I’ll be back when the bastards start digging their breaching batteries.’

The tall Major ran down the steps and disappeared into the city’s alleys. The interpreter looked back at the approaching column, then put his eye to the telescope. He was looking for guns, but at first he could see only a mass of men in red coats with the odd horseman among their ranks, and then he saw something odd. Something he did not comprehend.

Some of the men in the front ranks were carrying ladders. He frowned, then saw something more familiar beyond the red ranks and tilted the glass so that he could see the enemy’s cannon. There were only five guns, one being hauled by men and the four larger by elephants, and behind the artillery were more redcoats. Those redcoats wore patterned skirts and had high black hats, and the interpreter was glad that he was behind the wall, for somehow the men in skirts looked fearsome.

He looked back at the ladders and did not really understand what he saw. There were only four ladders, so plainly they did not mean to lean them against the wall. Maybe, he thought, the British planned to make an observation tower so that they could see over the defences, and that explanation made sense and so he did not comprehend that there was to be no siege at all, but an escalade. The enemy was not planning to knock a hole in the wall, but to swarm straight over it. There would be no waiting, no digging, no saps, no batteries and no breach. There would just be a charge, a scream, a torrent of fire, and then death in the morning sun.

‘The thing is, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, ‘not to get yourself killed.’

‘Wasn’t planning on it, sir.’

‘No heroics, Sharpe. It’s not your job. We just follow the heroes into the city, look for Mister Dodd, then go back home.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘So stay close to me, and I’m staying close to Colonel Wallace’s party, so if you lose me, look for him. That’s Wallace there, see him?’ McCandless indicated a tall, bare-headed officer riding at the front of the 74th.

‘I see him, sir,’ Sharpe said. He was mounted on McCandless’s spare horse and the extra height allowed him to see over the heads of the King’s 74th who marched in front of him. Beyond the Highlanders the city wall looked dark red in the early sun, and on its summit he could see the occasional glint of a musket showing between the dome-shaped merlons that topped the wall. Big round bastions stood every hundred yards and those bastions had black embrasures which Sharpe assumed hid the defenders’ cannon. The brightly coloured statues of a temple’s tower showed above the rampart while a slew of flags drooped over the gate. No one fired yet. The British were within cannon range, but the defenders were keeping their guns quiet.

Most of the British force now checked a half-mile from the walls while the three assault parties organized themselves. Two of the attacking groups would escalade the wall, one to the left of the gate and the other to the right, and both would be led by Scottish soldiers with sepoys in support. The King’s 78th, the kilted regiment, would attack the wall to the left while their fellow Highlanders of the 74th would assault to the right. The third attack was in the centre and would be led by the 74th’s Colonel, William Wallace, who was also commander of one of the two infantry brigades and evidently an old friend of McCandless for, seeing his fellow Scot, Wallace rode back through his regiment’s ranks to greet him with a warm familiarity. Wallace would be leading men of the 74th in an assault against the gate itself and his plan was to run a six-pounder cannon hard up against the big timber gates then fire the gun to blast the entrance open. ‘None of our gunners have ever done it before,’ Wallace told McCandless, ‘and they’ve insisted on putting a round shot down the gun, but I swear my mother told me you should never load shot to open gates. A double powder charge, she instructed me, and nothing else.’

‘Your mother told you that, Wallace?’ McCandless asked.

‘Her father was an artilleryman, you see, and he brought her up properly. But I can’t persuade our gunners to leave out the ball. Stubborn fellows, they are. English to a man, of course. Can’t teach them anything.’ Wallace offered McCandless his canteen. ‘It’s cold tea, McCandless, nothing that will send your soul to perdition.’

McCandless took a swig of the tea, then introduced Sharpe. ‘He was the fellow who blew the Tippoo’s mine in Seringapatam,’ he told Wallace.

‘I heard about you, Sharpe!’ Wallace said. ‘A damn fine day’s work, Sergeant, well done.’ And the Scotsman leaned across to give Sharpe his hand. He was a middle-aged man, balding, with a pleasant face and a quick smile. ‘I can tempt you to some cold tea, Sharpe?’

‘I’ve got water, sir, thank you,’ Sharpe said, patting his canteen which was filled with rum, a gift from Daniel Fletcher, the General’s orderly.

‘You’ll forgive me if I’m about my business,’ Wallace said to McCandless, retrieving his canteen. ‘I’ll see you inside the city, McCandless. Joy of the day to you both.’ Wallace spurred back to the head of his column.

‘A very good man,’ McCandless said warmly, ‘a very good man indeed.’

Sevajee and his dozen men cantered up to join McCandless. They all wore red jackets, for they planned to ride into the city with McCandless and none wanted to be mistaken for the enemy, yet somehow the unbuttoned jackets, which had been borrowed from a sepoy battalion, made them look more piratical than ever. They all carried naked tulwars, curved sabres that they had honed to a razor’s edge at dawn. Sevajee reckoned there would be no time for aiming firelocks once they were inside Ahmednuggur. Ride in, charge whoever still put up a fight and cut down hard.

The two escalade parties started forward. Each had a pair of ladders, and each party was led by those men who had volunteered to be first up the rungs. The sun was fully above the horizon now and Sharpe could see the wall more plainly. He reckoned it was twenty foot high, give or take a few inches, and the glint of guns in every embrasure and loophole showed that it would be heavily defended. ‘Ever seen an escalade, Sharpe?’ McCandless asked.

‘No, sir.’

‘Risky business. Frail things, ladders. Nasty being first up.’

‘Very nasty, sir.’

‘And if it fails it gives the enemy confidence.’

‘So why do it, sir?’

‘Because if it succeeds, Sharpe, it lowers the enemy’s spirits. It will make us seem invincible. Veni, vidi, vici.’

‘I don’t speak any Indian, sir, not proper.’

‘Latin, Sharpe, Latin. I came, I saw, I conquered. How’s your reading these days?’

‘It’s good, sir, very good,’ Sharpe answered enthusiastically, though in truth he had not read very much in the last four years other than lists of stores and duty rosters and Major Stokes’s repair orders. But it had been Colonel McCandless and his nephew, Lieutenant Lawford, who had first taught Sharpe to read when they shared a cell in the Tippoo Sultan’s prison. That was four years ago now.

‘I shall give you a Bible, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, watching the escalade parties march steadily forward. ‘It’s the one book worth reading.’

‘I’d like that, sir,’ Sharpe said straight-faced, then saw that the picquets of the day were running ahead to make a skirmish line that would pepper the wall with musket fire. Still no one fired from the city wall, though by now both the picquets and the two ladder parties were well inside musket range. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir,’ Sharpe said to McCandless, ‘what’s to stop that bugger – sorry, sir – what’s to stop Mister Dodd from escaping out the other side of the city, sir?’

‘They are, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, indicating the cavalry that now galloped off on both sides of the city. The British 19th Dragoons rode in a tight squadron, but the other horsemen were Mahratta allies or else silladars from Hyderabad or Mysore, and they rode in a loose swarm. ‘Their job is to harass anyone leaving the city,’ McCandless went on. ‘Not the civilians, of course, but any troops.’

‘But Dodd’s got a whole regiment, sir.’

McCandless dismissed the problem. ‘I doubt that two whole regiments will serve him. In a minute or two there’ll be sheer panic inside Ahmednuggur, and how’s Dodd to get away? He’ll have to fight his way through a crowd of terrified civilians. No, we’ll find him inside the place if he’s still there.’

‘He is,’ Sevajee put in. He was staring at the wall through a small telescope. ‘I can see the uniforms of his men on the firestep. White jackets.’ He pointed westwards, beyond the stretch of wall that would be attacked by the 78th.

The picquets suddenly opened fire. They were scattered along the southern edge of the city, and their musketry was sporadic and, to Sharpe, futile. Men firing at a city? The musket balls smacked into the red stone of the wall which echoed back the crackle of the gunfire, but the defenders ignored the threat. Not a musket replied, not a cannon fired. The wall was silent. Shreds of smoke drifted from the skirmish line which went on chipping the big red stones with lead.

Colonel Wallace’s assault party was late in starting, while the kilted men of the 78th, who were assaulting the wall to the left of the gate, were now far in advance of the other attackers. They were running across open ground, their two ladders in plain sight of the enemy, but still the defenders ignored them. A regiment of sepoys was wheeling left, going to add their musket fire to the picquet line. A bagpiper was playing, but he must have been running for his instrument kept giving small ignominious hiccups. In truth it all seemed ignominious to Sharpe. The battle, if it could even be called a battle, had begun so casually, and the enemy was not even appearing to regard it as a threat. The skirmishers’ fire was scattered, the assault parties looked under strength and there seemed to be no urgency and no ceremony. There ought to be ceremony, Sharpe considered. A band should be playing, flags should be flying, and the enemy should be visible and threatening, but instead it was ramshackle and almost unreal.

‘This way, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, and swerved away to where Colonel Wallace was chivvying his men into formation. A dozen blue-coated gunners were clustered about a six-pounder cannon, evidently the gun that would be rammed against the city gate, while just beyond them was a battery of four twelve-pounder cannon drawn by elephants and, as Sharpe and McCandless urged their horses towards Wallace, the four mahouts halted their elephants and the gunners hurried to unharness the four guns. Sharpe guessed the battery would spray the wall with canister, though the silence of the defenders seemed to suggest that they had nothing to fear from these impudent attackers. Sir Arthur Wellesley, mounted on Diomed who seemed no worse for his blood-letting, rode up behind the guns and called some instruction to the battery commander who raised a hand in acknowledgement. The General was accompanied by three scarlet-coated aides and two Indians who, from the richness of their robes, had to be commanders of the allied horsemen who had ridden to stop the flight of fugitives from the city’s northern gate.

The attackers from the 78th were just a hundred paces from the wall now. They had no packs, only their weapons. And still the enemy treated them with lordly disdain. Not a gun fired, not a musket flamed, not a single rocket slashed out from the wall.

‘Looks like it will be easy, McCandless!’ Wallace called.

‘I pray as much!’ McCandless said.

‘The enemy has been praying too,’ Sevajee said, but McCandless ignored the remark.

Then, suddenly and appallingly, the silence ended.

The enemy was not ignoring the attack. Instead, from serried loopholes in the wall and from the bastions’ high embrasures and from the merlons along the parapet, a storm of gunfire erupted. One moment the wall had been clear in the morning sun, now it was fogged by a thick screen of powder smoke. A whole city was rimmed white, and the ground about the attacking troops was pitted and churned by the strike of bullets. ‘Ten minutes of seven,’ McCandless shouted over the noise, as though the time was important. Rockets, like those Sharpe had seen at Seringapatam, seared out from the walls to stitch their smoke trails in crazy tangles above the assaulting parties’ heads, yet, despite the volume of fire, the defenders’ opening volley appeared to do little harm. One redcoat was staggering, but the assault parties still went forward, and then a pain-filled squeal made Sharpe look to his right to see that an elephant had been struck by a cannonball. The beast’s mahout was dragging on its tether, but the elephant broke free and, maddened by its wound, charged straight towards Wallace’s men. The Highlanders scattered. The gunners had begun to drag their loaded six-pounder forward, but they were right in the injured beast’s path and now sensibly abandoned the gun to flee from the crazed animal’s charge. The wrinkled skin of the elephant’s left flank was sheeted in red. Wallace shouted incoherently, then spurred his horse out of the way. The elephant, trunk raised and eyes white, thumped past McCandless and Sharpe. ‘Poor girl,’ McCandless said.

‘It’s a she?’ Sharpe asked.

‘All draught animals are female, Sharpe. More docile.’

‘She ain’t docile, sir,’ Sharpe said, watching the elephant burst free of the army’s rear and trample through a field of stubble pursued by her mahout and an excited crowd of small skinny children who had followed the attacking troops from the encampment and now whooped shrilly as they enjoyed the chase. Sharpe watched them, then involuntarily ducked as a musket ball whipped just over his shako and another ricocheted off the six-pounder’s barrel with a surprisingly musical note.

‘Not too close now, Sharpe,’ McCandless warned, and Sharpe obediently reined in his mare.

Colonel Wallace was calling his men back into formation. ‘Damned animals!’ he snarled at McCandless.

‘Your mother had no advice on elephants, Wallace?’

‘None I’d repeat to a godly man, McCandless,’ Wallace said, then spurred his horse towards the six-pounder’s disordered gunners. ‘Pick up the traces, you rogues. Hurry!’

The 78th had reached the wall to the left of the gate. They rammed the foot of their two ladders into the soil, then swung the tops up and over onto the wall’s parapet. ‘Good boys,’ McCandless shouted warmly, though he was far too distant for the attackers to hear his encouragement. ‘Good boys!’ The first kilted Highlanders were already scrambling up the rungs, but then a man was hit by a bullet from the flanking bastion and he stopped, clung to the ladder, then slowly toppled sideways. A crowd of Highlanders jostled at the bottom of the ladders to be the next up the rungs. Poor bastards, Sharpe thought, so eager to climb to death, and he saw that the leading men on both ladders were officers. They had swords. The men climbed with their bayonet-tipped muskets slung over their shoulders, but the officers climbed sword in hand. One of them was struck and the man behind unceremoniously shoved him off the ladder and hurried up to the parapet and there, inexplicably, he stopped.

His comrades shouted at him to get a bloody move on and scramble over the wall, but the man did nothing except to unsling his musket, and then he was hurled backwards in a misting spray of blood. Another man took his place, and the same happened to him. The officer at the top of the second ladder was crouching on the top rung, occasionally peering over the coping of the wall between two of the dome-shaped merlons, but he was making no attempt to cross the parapet. ‘They should have more than two ladders, sir,’ Sharpe grumbled.

‘Wasn’t time, laddie, wasn’t time,’ McCandless said. ‘What’s holding them?’ he asked as he stared with an agonized expression at the stalled men. The Arab defenders in the nearest bastion were being given a fine target and their musketry was having a terrible effect on the crowded ladders. The noise of the defenders’ fire was continuous; a staccato crackle of musketry, the hiss of rockets and the thunderous crash of cannon. Men were blasted off the ladders, and their place was immediately taken by others, but still the men at the top of the rungs did not try to cross the wall, and still the defenders fired and the dead and injured heaped up at the foot of the ladders and the living pushed them aside to reach the rungs and so offer themselves as targets to the unending gunfire. One man at last heaved himself onto the wall and straddled the coping where he unslung his musket and fired a shot down into the city, but almost immediately he was hit by a blast of musket fire. He swayed for a second, his musket clattered down the wall’s red face, then he followed it to the ground. The new man at the top of the ladder heaved himself up, then, just like the rest, he checked and ducked back.

‘What’s holding them?’ McCandless cried in frustration. ‘In God’s name! Go!’

‘There’s no bloody firestep,’ Sharpe said grimly.

McCandless glanced at him. ‘What?’

‘Sorry, sir. Forgot not to curse, sir.’

But McCandless was not worried about Sharpe’s language. ‘What did you say, man?’ he insisted.

‘There’s no firestep there, sir.’ Sharpe pointed at the wall where the Scotsmen were dying. ‘There’s no musket smoke on the parapet, sir.’

McCandless looked back. ‘By God, you’re right.’

The wall had merlons and embrasures, but not a single patch of musket smoke showed in those defences, which meant that the castellation was false and there was no firestep on the wall’s far side where defenders could stand. From the outside the stretch of wall looked like any other part of the city’s defences, but Sharpe guessed that once the Highlanders reached the wall’s summit they were faced with a sheer drop on the far side, and doubtless there was a crowd of enemies waiting at the foot of that inner wall to massacre any man who survived the fall. The 78th were attacking into thin air and being bloodied mercilessly by the jubilant defenders.

The two ladders emptied as the officers at last realized their predicament and shouted at their men to come down. The defenders cheered the repulse and kept firing as the two ladders were carried back from the ramparts.

‘Dear God,’ McCandless said, ‘dear God.’

‘I warned you,’ Sevajee said, unable to conceal his pride in the fighting qualities of the Mahratta defenders.

‘You’re on our side!’ McCandless snarled, and the Indian just shrugged.

‘It ain’t over yet, sir,’ Sharpe tried to cheer up the Scotsman.

‘Escalades work by speed, Sharpe,’ McCandless said, ‘and we’ve lost surprise now.’

‘It will have to be done properly,’ Sevajee remarked smugly, ‘with guns and a breach.’

But the escalade was not defeated yet. The assault party of the 74th had now reached the wall to the right of the gate and their two ladders were swung up against the high red stones, but this stretch of wall did possess a firestep and it was crowded with eager defenders who rained a savage fire down onto the attackers. The British twelve-pounders had opened fire, and their canister was savaging the defenders, but the dead and wounded were dragged away to be replaced by reinforcements who quickly learned that if they let the attackers come up the two ladders then the cannon would cease fire, and so they let the Scots climb the rungs and then hurled down baulks of wood that could scrape a ladder clear in seconds. Then a cannon in one of the flanking bastions hammered a barrel load of stones and scrap iron into the men crowding about the foot of the ladders. ‘Oh, dear God,’ McCandless prayed again, ‘dear God.’ More men began to climb the ladders while the wounded crawled and limped back from the walls, pursued by the musket fire of the defenders. A Scottish officer, claymore in hand, ran up one of the ladders with the facility of a sailor swarming up rigging. He cut the claymore at a lunging bayonet, somehow survived a musket blast, put a hand on the coping, but then a spear took him in the throat and he seemed to shake like a gaffed fish before tumbling backwards and carrying two men down to the ground with him. The sound of the defenders’ musketry was punctuated by the deeper crash of the small cannon that were mounted in the hidden galleries of the bastions. One of those cannon now struck a ladder in the flank and Sharpe watched appalled as the whole flimsy thing buckled and broke, carrying seven men down to the ground in its wreckage. The 78th had been repulsed and the 74th had lost one of their two ladders. ‘This is not good,’ McCandless said grimly, ‘not good at all.’

‘Fighting Mahrattas,’ Sevajee said smugly, ‘is not like fighting men from Mysore.’

Colonel Wallace’s party was still a good hundred yards from the gate, slowed by the weight of their six-pounder cannon. It seemed to Sharpe that Wallace needed more men to handle the cumbersome gun and the enemy’s musket fire was taking its toll of the few men he did have shoving at the wheels or dragging at the traces. Wellesley was not far behind Wallace, and just behind the General, mounted on one of his spare horses and with a second on a leading rein, was Daniel Fletcher. The musket fire spurted scraps of dried mud all around Wellesley and his aides, but the General seemed to have a charmed life.

The 78th returned to the attack on the left, only this time they ran their two ladders directly at the bastion which flanked the wall where their first attempt had failed. The threatened bastion reacted with an angry explosion of musket fire. One of the ladders fell, its carriers hard hit by the volley, but the other swung on up and as soon as its top struck the bastion’s summit a kilted officer climbed the rungs. ‘No!’ McCandless cried, as the officer was hit and fell. Other men took his place, but the defenders tipped a basket of stones over the parapet and the tumbling rocks scoured the ladder clear. A volley of musketry made the defenders duck and when the smoke cleared Sharpe saw that the kilted officer was again ascending the ladder, this time without his tall hat. He carried his claymore in his right hand and the big sword hampered him. An Arab fleetingly appeared at the top of the ladder with a lump of timber that he hurled down at the attacker, and the officer was thrown back a second time. ‘No!’ McCandless lamented again, but then the same officer appeared a third time. He was determined to have the honour of being first into the city, and this time he had tied his red waist-sash to his wrist and let his claymore hang by its hilt from a loop of the silk, thus leaving both hands free and allowing him to climb much faster. He kept climbing, and his men crowded behind him in their big bearskin hats, and the loopholes in the bastion’s galleries spat flame and smoke as they scrambled past the bastion’s storeys, but magically the officer survived the fusillade and Sharpe had his heart in his mouth as the man drew nearer and nearer to the top. He expected to see a defender appear at any moment, but the attackers who were not queuing at the foot of the ladder were now hammering the bastion’s summit with musket fire and under its cover the bare-headed officer scrambled up the last few rungs, paused to take hold of his claymore’s hilt, then leaped over the top of the wall. Someone cheered, and Sharpe caught a distinct view of the officer’s claymore rising and falling above the red wall’s coping. More Highlanders were clambering up the ladder and though some were blasted off by musket fire from the bastion’s loopholes, others were at last reaching the high parapet and following their officer onto the defences. The second ladder was swung into place and the trickle of attackers became a stream. ‘Thank God,’ McCandless said fervently, ‘thank God indeed.’