CHAPTER 10

Mister Hakeswill was not sure whether he was a lieutenant in William Dodd's eyes, but he knew he was a Mister and he dimly apprehended that he could be much more. William Dodd was going to win, and his victory would make him ruler of Gawilghur and tyrant of all the wide land that could be seen from its soaring battlements. Mister Hakeswill was therefore well placed, as Dodd's only white officer, to profit from the victory and, as he approached the palace on Gawilghur's summit, Hakeswill was already imagining a future that was limited only by the bounds of his fancy. He could be a rajah, he decided.

“I shall have an harem,” he said aloud, earning a worried look from his Havildar.

“An harem I'll have, all of me own. Bibbis in silk, but only when it's cold, eh? Rest of the time they'll have to be naked as needles.” He laughed, scratched at the lice in his crotch, then lunged with his sword at one of the peacocks that decorated the palace gardens.

“Bad luck, them birds,” Hakeswill told the Havildar as the bird fled in a flurry of bright severed feathers.

“Bad luck, they are. Got the evil eye, they do. Know what you should do with a peacock? Roast the bugger. Roast it and serve it with 'taters. Very nice, that.”

“Yes, sahib,” the Havildar said nervously. He was not certain he liked this new white officer whose face twitched so compulsively, but Colonel Dodd had appointed him and the Colonel could do no wrong as far as the Havildar was concerned.

“Haven't tasted a 'tater in months,” Hakeswill said wistfully.

“Christian food, that, see? Makes us white.”

“Yes, sahib.”

"And I won't be sahib, will I? Your highness, that's what I'll be. Your bleeding highness with a bedful of bare bibb is His face twitched as a bright idea occurred to him.

"I could have Sharpie as a servant.

Cut off his goo lies first, though. Snip snip." He bounded enthusiastically up a stone staircase, oblivious of the sound of gunfire that had erupted in the ravine just north of the Inner Fort. Two Arab guards moved to bar the way, but Hakeswill shouted at them.

“Off to the walls, you scum! No more shirking! You ain't guarding the royal pisspot any longer, but has to be soldiers. So piss off!”

The Havildar ordered the two men away and, though they were reluctant to abandon their post, they were overawed by the number of bayonets that faced them. So, just like the guards who had stood at the garden gate, they fled.

“So now we look for the little fat man,” Hakeswill said, 'and give him a bloodletting."

“We must hurry, sahib,” the Havildar said, glancing back at the wall above the ravine where the gunners were suddenly at work.

“God's work can't be hurried,” Hakeswill answered, pulling at one of the latticed doors that led into the palace, 'and Colonel Dodd will die of old age on that wall, sonny. Ain't a man alive who can get through that gate, and certainly not a pack of bleeding Scotchmen. Bugger this door."

He raised his right foot and battered down the locked lattice with his boot.

Hakeswill had expected a palace dripping with gold, festooned with silk and paved with polished marble, but Gawilghur had only ever been a summer refuge, and Berar had never been as wealthy as other Indian states, and so the floors were common stone, the walls were painted in lime wash and the curtains were of cotton. Some fine furniture of ebony inlaid with ivory stood in the hallway, but Hakeswill had no eye for such chairs, only for jewels, and he saw none. Two bronze jars and an iron cuspidor stood by the walls where lizards waited motionless, while a brass poker, tongs and fire shovel, cast in Birmingham, mounted on a stand and long bereft of any hearth, had pride of place in a niche. The hallway had no guards, indeed no one was in sight and the palace seemed silent except for a faint sound of choking and moaning that came from a curtained doorway at the far end of the hall. The noise of the guns was muffled. Hakeswill hefted his sword and edged towards the curtain.

His men followed slowly, bayonets ready, eyes peering into every shadow.

Hakeswill swept the curtain aside with the blade, and gasped.

The Killadar, with a tulwar slung at his side and a small round shield strapped to his left arm, stared at Hakeswill above the bodies of his wives, concubines and daughters. Eighteen women were on the floor.

Most were motionless, but some still writhed as the slow pain of the poison worked its horrors. The Killadar was in tears.

“I could not leave them for the English,” he said.

“What did he say?” Hakeswill demanded.

“He preferred they should die than be dishonoured,” the Havildar translated.

“Bleeding hell,” Hakeswill commented. He stepped down into the sunken floor where the women lay. The dead had greenish dribbles coming from their mouths and their glassy eyes stared up at the lotuses painted on the ceiling, while the living jerked spasmodically. The cups from which they had drunk the poison lay on the tiled floor.

“Some nice bibb is here,” Hakeswill said ruefully.

“A waste!” He stared at a child, no more than six or seven. There was a jewel about her neck and Hakeswill stooped, grasped the pendant and snapped the chain.

“Bleeding waste,” he said in disgust, then used his sword blade to lift the said of a dying woman. He raised the silk to her waist, then shook his head.

“Look at that!” he said.

“Just look at that! What a bleeding waste!”

The Killadar roared in anger, drew his tulwar and ran down the steps to drive Hakeswill from his women. Hakeswill, alarmed, backed away, then remembered he was to be a rajah and could not show timidity in front of the Havildar and his men, so he stepped forward again and thrust the sword forward in a clumsy lunge. It might have been clumsy, but it was also lucky, for the Killadar had stumbled on a body and was lurching forward, his tulwar flailing as he sought his balance, and the tip of Hakeswill's blade ripped into his throat so that a spray of blood pulsed onto the dead and the dying. The Killadar gasped as he fell. His legs twitched as he tried to bring the tulwar round to strike at Hakeswill, but his strength was going and the Englishman was above him now.

“You're a djinnl” the Killadar said hoarsely.

The sword stabbed into Beny Singh's neck.

“I ain't drunk, you bastard,” Hakeswill said indignantly.

“Ain't seen a drop of mother's milk in three years!” He twisted the sword blade, fascinated by the way the blood pulsed past the steel. He watched until the blood finally died to a trickle, then jerked the blade free.

“That's him gone,” Hakeswill said.

“Another bloody heathen gone down to hell, eh?”

The Havildar stared in horror at Beny Singh and at the corpses drenched with his blood.

“Don't just stand there, you great pudding!” Hakeswill snapped.

“Get back to the walls!”

“The walls, sahib?”

“Hurry! There's a battle being fought, or ain't you noticed? Go on! Off with you! Take the company and report to Colonel Dodd as how the fat little bugger's dead. Tell him I'll be back in a minute or two. Now off with you! Quick!”

The Havildar obeyed, taking his men back through the hallway and out into the sunlight that was being hazed by the smoke rising from the ravine. Hakeswill, left alone in the palace, stooped to his work. All the dead wore jewellery. They were not great jewels, not like the massive ruby that the Tippoo Sultan had worn on his hat, but there were pearls and emeralds, sapphires and small diamonds, all mounted in gold, and Hakeswill busied himself delving through the bloodied silks to retrieve the scraps of wealth. He crammed the stones into his pockets where they joined the gems he had taken from Sharpe, and then, when the corpses were stripped and searched, he roamed the palace, snarling at servants and threatening scullions, as he ransacked the smaller rooms. The rest of the defenders could fight; Mister Hakeswill was getting rich.

The fight in the ravine was now a merciless massacre. The garrison of the Outer Fort was trapped between the soldiers who had captured their stronghold and the kilted Highlanders advancing up the narrow road, and there was no escape except over the precipice, and those who jumped, or were pushed by the panicking mass, fell onto the shadowed rocks far below. Colonel Chalmers's men advanced with bayonets, herding the fugitives towards Kenny's men who greeted them with more bayonets. A thousand men had garrisoned the Outer Fort, and those men were now dead or doomed, but seven thousand more defenders waited within the Inner Fort and Colonel Kenny was eager to attack them. He tried to order men into ranks, tugging them away from the slaughter and shouting for gunners to find an enemy cannon that could be fetched from the captured ramparts and dragged to face the massive gate of the Inner Fort, but the redcoats had an easier target in the huddled fugitives and they enthusiastically killed the helpless enemy, and all the while the guns of the Inner Fort fired down at the redcoats while rockets slammed into the ravine to add to the choking fog of powder smoke.

The slaughter could not endure. The beaten defenders threw down their guns and fell to their knees, and gradually the British officers called off the massacre. Chalmers's Highlanders advanced up the road that was now slippery with blood, driving the few prisoners in front of them. Wounded Arabs crawled or limped. The survivors were stripped of their remaining weapons and sent under sepoy guard back up to the Outer Fort, and for every step of their way they suffered from the fire that flamed and crackled from the Inner Fort. Finally, exhausted, they were taken out through the Delhi Gate and told to wait beside the tank.

The parched prisoners threw themselves at the green-scummed water and some, seeing that the sepoy guards were few in number, slipped away northwards. They went without weapons, master less fugitives who posed no threat to the British camp, which was guarded by a half battalion of Madrassi sepoys.

The northern face of the ravine, which looked towards the unconquered Inner Fort, was now crowded with some three thousand redcoats, most of whom did nothing but sit in whatever small shade they could find and grumble that the pucka lees had not fetched water.

Once in a while a man would fire a musket across the ravine, but the balls were wild at that long range, and the enemy fire, which had been heavy during the massacre on the western road, gradually eased off as both sides waited for the real struggle to begin.

Sharpe was halfway down the ravine, seated beneath a stunted tree on which the remnants of some red blossom hung dry and faded. A tribe of black-faced, silver-furred monkeys had fled the irruption of men into the rocky gorge, and those beasts now gathered behind Sharpe where they gibbered and screamed. Tom Garrard and a dozen men of the 33rd's Light Company had gathered around Sharpe, while the rest of the company was lower down the ravine among some rocks.

“What happens now?” Garrard asked.

“Some poor bastards have to get through that gate,” Sharpe said.

“Not you?”

“Kenny will call us when he needs us,” Sharpe said, nodding towards the lean Colonel who had at last organized an assault party at the bottom of the track which slanted up towards the gate.

“And he bloody will, Tom. It ain't going to be easy getting through that gate.” He touched the scorch mark on his cheek.

“That bloody hurts!”

Tut some butter on it," Garrard said.

“And where do I get bleeding butter here?” Sharpe asked. He shaded his eyes and peered at the complex ramparts above the big gate, trying to spot either Dodd or Hakeswill, but although he could see the white jackets of the Cobras, he could not see a white man on the ramparts.

“It's going to be a long fight, Tom,” he said.

The British gunners had succeeded in bringing an enemy five pounder cannon to the edge of the ravine. The sight of the gun provoked a flurry of fire from the Inner Fort, wreathing its gatehouse in smoke as the round shot screamed across the ravine to plunge all around the threatening gun. Somehow it survived. The gunners rammed it, aimed it, then fired a shot that bounced just beneath the gate, ricocheted up into the woodwork, but fell back.

The defenders kept firing, but their smoke obscured their aim and the small captured cannon had been positioned behind a large low rock that served as a makeshift breastwork. The gunners elevated the barrel a trifle and their next shot struck plumb on the gates, breaking a timber.

Each successive shot splintered more wood and was greeted by an ironic cheer from the redcoats who watched from across the ravine. The gate was being demolished board by board, and at last a round shot cracked into its locking bar and the half-shattered timbers sagged on their hinges.

Colonel Kenny was gathering his assault troops at the foot of the ravine. They were the same men who had gone first into the breaches of the Outer Fort, and their faces were stained with powder burns, with dust and sweat. They watched the destruction of the outer gate of the Inner Fort and they knew they must climb the path into the enemy's fire as soon as the gun had done its work. Kenny summoned an aide.

“You know Plummer?” he asked the man.

“Gunner Major, sir?”

“Find him,” Kenny said, 'or any gunner officer. Tell them we might need a light piece up in the gateway." He pointed with a reddened sword at the Inner Fort's gatehouse.

“The passage ain't straight,” he explained to the aide.

“Get through the gate and we turn hard left. If our axe men can't deal with the other gates we'll need a gun to blow them in.”

The aide climbed back up to the Outer Fort, looking for a gunner.

Kenny talked to his men, explaining that once they were through the shattered gate they would find themselves faced by another and that the infantry were to fire up at the flanking fire steps to protect the axe men who would try to hack their way through the successive obstacles.

“If we put up enough fire,” Kenny said, 'the enemy'll take shelter. It won't take long." He looked at his axe men all of them huge sappers, all carrying vast-bladed axes that had been sharpened to wicked edges.

Kenny turned and watched the effect of the five-pounder shots. The gate's locking bar had been struck plumb, but the gate still held. A badly aimed shot cracked into the stone beside the gate, starting up dust, then a correction to the gun sent a ball hammering into the bar again and the thick timber broke and the remnants of the gates fell inwards.

“Forward!”

Kenny shouted.

“Forward!”

Four hundred redcoats followed the Colonel up the narrow track that led to the Inner Fort. They could not run to the assault, for the hill was too steep; they could only trudge into the fury of Dodd's fusillade.

Cannon, rockets and muskets blasted down the hill to tear gaps in Kenny's ranks.

“Give them fire!” an officer on the ravine's northern side shouted at the watching redcoats, and the men loaded their muskets and fired at the smoke-masked gatehouse. If nothing else, the wild fire might keep the defenders' heads down. Another cannon had been fetched from the Outer Fort, and now added its small round shots to the fury that beat audibly on the gatehouse ramparts. Those ramparts were thick with the powder smoke gouted by the defenders' cannon and muskets and it was that smoke which protected Kenny's men as they hurried up the last few yards to the broken gate.

“Protect the sappers!” Kenny shouted and then, his sword in his hand, he clambered over the broken timbers and led his attackers into the entrance passage.

Facing Kenny was a stone wall. He had expected it, but even so he was astonished by the narrowness of the passage that turned sharply to his left and then climbed steeply to the second unbroken gate.

“There it is!”

he shouted, and led a surge of men up the cobbled road towards the iron-studded timbers.

And hell was loosed.

The fire steps above the gateway passage were protected by the outer wall's high rampart, and Dodd's men, though they could hear the musket balls beating against the stones, were safe from the wild fire that lashed across the deep ravine. But the redcoats beneath them, the men following Colonel Kenny into the passage, had no protection. Musket fire, stones and rockets slashed into a narrow space just twenty-five paces long and eight wide. The leading axe men were among the first to die, beaten down by bullets. Their blood splashed high on the walls. Colonel Kenny somehow survived the opening salvo, then he was struck on the shoulder by a lump of stone and driven to the ground. A rocket slashed past his face, scorching his cheek, but he picked himself up and, sword in numbed hand, shouted at his men to keep going. No one could hear him. The narrow space was filled with noise, choking with smoke in which men died and rockets flared. A musket ball struck Kenny in the hip and he twisted, half fell, but forced himself to stand and, with blood pouring down his white breeches, limped on. Then another musket ball scored down his back and threw him forward. He crawled on bloodslicked stones, sword still in his hand, and shuddered as a third ball hit him in the back. He still managed to reach the second gate and reared up to strike it with his sword, and then a last musket ball split his skull and left him dead at the head of his men. More bullets plucked at his corpse.

Kenny's surviving men tried to brave the fire. They tried to climb the slope to the second gate, but the murderous fire did not cease, and the dead made a barrier to the living. Some men attempted to fire up at their tormentors on the fire step but the sun was high now and they aimed into a blinding glare, and soon the redcoats began to back down the passage. The weltering fire from above did not let up. It flayed the Scotsmen, ricocheted between the walls, struck dead and dying and living, while the rockets, lit and tossed down, seared like great comets between the stone walls and filled the space with a sickening smoke.

The dead were burned by rocket flames which exploded their cartridge boxes to pulse gouts of blood against the black walls, but the smoke hid the survivors who, under its cover, stumbled back to the hill outside the fortress. They left a stone-walled passage filled with the dying and the dead, trickling with blood, foul with smoke and echoing with the moans of the wounded.

“Cease fire!” Colonel Dodd shouted.

“Cease fire!”

The smoke cleared slowly and Dodd stared down at a pit of carnage in which a few bodies twitched.

“They'll come again soon,” Dodd warned his Cobras.

“Fetch more stones, make sure your muskets are loaded. More rockets!” He patted his men on the shoulders, congratulating them. They grinned at him, pleased with their work. It was like killing rats in a barrel. Not one Cobra had been hit, the first enemy assault had failed and the others, Dodd was certain, would end in just the same way. The Lord of Gawilghur was winning his first victory.

Major Stokes had found Sharpe shortly before Kenny made his assault, and the two men had been joined first by Syud Sevajee and his followers, then by the dozen cavalrymen who accompanied Eli Lockhart.

All of them, Stokes, Sevajee and Lockhart, had entered the Outer Fort after the fight for the breaches was finished, and now they stood watching the failure of Kenny's assault. The survivors of the attack were crouching just yards from the broken entrance that boiled with smoke, and Sharpe knew they were summoning the courage to charge again.

“Poor bastards,” he said.

“No choice in the matter,” Stokes said bleakly.

“No other way in.”

“That ain't a way in, sir,” Sharpe said dourly, 'that's a fast road to a shallow grave."

“Overwhelm them,” Stokes said, 'that's the way to do it. Overwhelm them."

“Send more men to be killed?” Sharpe asked angrily.

“Get a gun over that side,” Stokes suggested, 'and blast the gates down one after the other. Only way to prise the place open, Sharpe."

The covering fire that had blazed across the ravine died when it was obvious the first attack had failed, and the lull encouraged the defenders to come to the outer embrasures and fire down at the stalled attackers.

“Give them fire!” an officer shouted from the bed of the ravine, and again the muskets flared across the gorge and the balls spattered against the walls.

Major Stokes had levelled his telescope at the gate where the thick smoke had at last dissipated.

“It ain't good,” he admitted.

“It opens onto a blank wall.”

“It does what, sir?” Eli Lockhart asked. The cavalry Sergeant was looking aghast at the horror across the ravine, grateful perhaps that the cavalry was never asked to break into such deathtraps.

“The passage turns,” Stokes said.

“We can't fire straight up the entranceway. They'll have to drag a gun right into the archway.”

“They'll never make it,” Sharpe said. Any gun positioned in the outer arch would get the full fury of the defensive fire, and those defenders were protected by the big outer wall. The only way Sharpe could see of getting into the fortress was by battering the whole gatehouse flat, and that would take days of heavy cannon fire.

“The gates of hell,” Stokes said softly, staring through his glass at the bodies left inside the arch.

“Can I borrow the telescope, sir?” Sharpe asked.

“Of course.” Stokes cleaned the eyepiece on the hem of his jacket.

“It ain't a pretty sight though.”

Sharpe took the glass and aimed it across the ravine. He gave the gatehouse a cursory glance, then edged the lens along the wall which led westwards from the besieged gate. The wall was not very high, perhaps only twelve or fifteen feet, much lower than the great ramparts about the gatehouse, and its embrasures did not appear to be heavily manned. But that was hardly a surprise, for the wall stood atop a precipice. The de fences straight ahead were not the wall and its handful of defenders, but the stony cliff which fell down into the ravine.

Stokes saw where Sharpe was aiming the glass.

“No way in there, Richard.”

Sharpe said nothing. He was staring at a place where weeds and small shrubs twisted up the cliff. He tracked the telescope from the bed of the ravine to the base of the wall, searching every inch, and he reckoned it could be climbed. It would be hard, for it was perilously steep, but if there was space for bushes to find lodgement, then a man could follow, and at the top of the cliff there was a brief area of grass between the precipice and the wall. He took the telescope from his eye.

“Has anyone seen a ladder?”

“Back up there.” It was Ahmed who answered.

“Where, lad?”

“Up there.” The Arab boy pointed to the Outer Fort.

“On the ground,” he said.

Sharpe twisted and looked at Lockhart.

“Can you boys fetch me a ladder?”

“What are you thinking of?” Lockhart asked.

“A way in,” Sharpe said, 'a bloody way in." He gave the telescope to Stokes.

“Get me a ladder, Sergeant,” he said, 'and I'll fix those buggers properly. Ahrned? Show Sergeant Lockhart where you saw the ladder."

“I stay with you,” the boy said stubbornly.

“You bloody don't.” Sharpe patted the boy on the head, wondering what Ahmed made of the slaughter that had been inflicted on his countrymen in the ravine, but the boy seemed blessedly unaffected.

“Go and help the Sergeant,” he told Ahmed.

Ahmed led the cavalrymen uphill.

“What are you doing, Richard?”

Stokes asked.

“We can climb up to the wall,” Sharpe said, pointing to where the trail of weeds and bushes snaked up the other side of the ravine.

“Not you, sir, but a light company can do it. Go up the ravine, send a ladder up and cross the wall.”

Stokes trained the telescope and stared at the opposing cliff for a long while.

“You might get up,” he said dubiously, 'but then what?"

Sharpe grinned.

“We attack the gatehouse from the back, sir.”

“One company?”

“Where one company can go, sir, another can follow. Once they see we're up there, other men will come.” He still held the great claymore which was too big to fit into the scabbard of his borrowed sword, but now he discarded that scabbard and shoved the claymore into his belt.

He liked the sword. It was heavy, straight-bladed and brutal, not a weapon for delicate work, but a killer. Something to give a man confidence.

“You stay here, sir,” he told Stokes, 'and look after Ahmed for me. The little bugger would love to get in a fight, but he ain't got the sense of a louse when it comes to a scrap and he's bound to get killed. Tom!" he called to Garrard, then beckoned that he and the rest of the 33rd's Light Company should follow him down to where Morris sheltered among the rocks.

“When Eli gets here with the ladder, sir,” he added to Stokes, 'send him down."

Sharpe ran down the ravine's steep side into the smoke-reeking shadows where Morris was seated under a tree making a meal out of bread, salt beef and whatever liquor was left in his canteen.

“Don't have enough food for you, Sharpe,” he said.

“Not hungry,” Sharpe lied.

“You're sweating, man,” Morris complained.

“Why don't you find yourself some shade? There's nothing we can do until the gunners knock that bloody gatehouse flat.”

“There is,” Sharpe said.

Morris cocked a sceptical eye up at Sharpe.

“I've had no orders, Ensign,” he said.

“I want you and the Light Company, sir,” Sharpe said respectfully.

“There's a way up the side of the ravine, sir, and if we can get a ladder to the top then we can cross the wall and go at the bastards from the back.”

Morris tipped the canteen to his mouth, drank, then wiped his lips.

“If you, twenty like you and the Archangel Gabriel and all the bloody saints asked me to climb the ravine, Sharpe, I would still say no. Now for Christ's sake, man, stop trying to be a bloody hero. Leave it to the poor bastards who are under orders, and go away.” He waved a hand.

“Sir,” Sharpe pleaded, 'we can do it! I've sent for a ladder."

“No!” Morris interrupted loudly, attracting the attention of the rest of the company.

“I am not giving you my company, Sharpe. For God's sake, you're not even a proper officer! You're just a bumped-up sergeant! A bloody ensign too big for your boots and, allow me to remind you, Mister Sharpe, forbidden by army regulations to serve in this regiment. Now go away and leave me in peace.”

“I thought you'd say that, Charles,” Sharpe said ruefully.

“And stop calling me Charles!” Morris exploded.

“We are not friends, you and I. And kindly obey my order to leave me in peace, or had you not noticed that I outrank you?”

“I had noticed. Sorry, sir,” Sharpe said humbly and he started to turn away, but suddenly whipped back and seized Morris's coat. He dragged the Captain back into the rocks, going so fast that Morris was momentarily incapable of resistance. Once among the rocks, Sharpe let go of the patched coat and thumped Morris in the belly.

“That's for the flogging you gave me, you bastard,” he said.

“What the hell do you think you're doing, Sharpe?” Morris asked, scrambling away on his bottom.

Sharpe kicked him in the chest, leaned down, hauled him up and thumped him on the jaw. Morris squealed with pain, then gasped as Sharpe backhanded him across the cheek, then struck him again. A group of men had followed and were watching wide-eyed. Morris turned to appeal to them, but Sharpe hit him yet again and the Cap-268

tain's eyes turned glassy as he swayed and collapsed. Sharpe bent over him.

“You might outrank me,” he said, 'but you're a piece of shit, Charlie, and you always were. Now can I take the company?"

“No,” Morris said through the blood on his lips.

“Thank you, sir,” Sharpe said, and stamped his boot hard down on Morris's head, driving it onto a rock. Morris gasped, choked, then lay immobile as the breath scraped in his throat.

Sharpe kicked Morris's head again, just for the hell of it, then turned, smiling.

“Where's Sergeant Green?”

“Here, sir.” Green, looking anxious, pushed through the watching men.

“I'm here, sir,” he said, staring with astonishment at the immobile Morris.

“Captain Morris has eaten something that disagreed with him,” Sharpe said, 'but before he was taken ill he expressed the wish that I should temporarily take command of the company."

Sergeant Green looked at the battered, bleeding Captain, then back to Sharpe.

“Something he ate, sir?”

“Are you a doctor, Sergeant? Wear a black plume on your hat, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Then stop questioning my statements. Have the company paraded, muskets loaded, no bayonets fixed.” Green hesitated.

“Do it, Sergeant!”

Sharpe roared, startling the watching men.

“Yes, sir!” Green said hurriedly, backing away.

Sharpe waited until the company was in its four ranks. Many of them looked at him suspiciously, but they were powerless to challenge his authority, not while Sergeant Green had accepted it.

“You're a light company,” Sharpe said, 'and that means you can go where other soldiers can't. It makes you an elite. You know what that means? It means you're the best in the bloody army, and right now the army needs its best men.

It needs you. So in a minute we'll be climbing up there' he pointed to the ravine 'crossing the wall and carrying the fight to the enemy. It'll be hard work for a bit, but not beyond a decent light company." He looked to his left and saw Eli Lockhart leading his men down the side of the ravine with one of the discarded bamboo ladders.

“I'll go first,” he told the company, 'and Sergeant Green will go last. If any man refuses to climb, Sergeant, you're to shoot the bugger."

“I am, sir?” Green asked nervously.

“In the head,” Sharpe said.

Major Stokes had followed Lockhart and now came up to Sharpe.

“I'll arrange for some covering fire, Sharpe,” he said.

“That'll be a help, sir. Not that these men need much help. They're the 33rd's Light Company. Best in the army.”

“I'm sure they are,” Stokes said, smiling at the seventy men who, seeing a major with Sharpe, supposed that the Ensign really did have the authority to do what he was proposing.

Lockhart, in his blue and yellow coat, waited with the ladder.

“Where do you want it, Mister Sharpe?”

“Over here,” Sharpe said.

"Just pass it up when we've reached the top.

Sergeant Green! Send the men in ranks! Front rank first!" He walked to the side of the ravine and stared up his chosen route. It looked steeper from here, and much higher than it had seemed when he was staring through the telescope, but he still reckoned it was climbable. He could not see the Inner Fort's wall, but that was good, for neither could the defenders see him. All the same, it was bloody steep. Steep enough to give a mountain goat pause, yet if he failed now then he would be on a charge for striking a superior officer, so he really had no choice but to play the hero.

So he spat on his bruised hands, looked up one last time, then started to climb.

The second assault on the Inner Fort's gatehouse fared no better than the first. A howling mass of men charged through the wreckage of the shattered gate, stumbled on the dead and dying as they turned up the passage, but then the killing began again as a shower of missiles, rockets and musket fire turned the narrow, steep passage into a charnel house. An axe man succeeded in reaching the second gate and he stood above Colonel Kenny's scorched body to sink his blade deep into the timber, but he was immediately struck by three musket balls and dropped back, leaving the axe embedded in the dark, iron-studded wood. No one else went close to the gate, and a major, appalled at the slaughter, called the men back.

“Next time,” he shouted at them, 'we designate firing parties to give cover. Sergeant! I want two dozen men."

“We need a cannon, sir,” the Sergeant answered with brutal honesty.

“They say one's coming.” The aide whom Kenny had sent to fetch a cannon had returned to the assault party.

“They say it'll take time, though,” he added, without explaining that the gunner officer had declared it would take at least two hours to manhandle a gun and ammunition across the ravine.

The Major shook his head.

“We'll try without the gun,” he said.

“God help us,” the Sergeant said under his breath.

Colonel Dodd had watched the attackers limp away. He could not help smiling. This was so very simple, just as he had foreseen. Manu Bappoo was dead and the Havildar had returned from the palace with the welcome news of Beny Singh's murder, which meant that Gawilghur had a new commander. He looked down at the dead and dying redcoats who lay among the small flickering blue flames of the spent rockets.

“They've learned their lesson, Gopal,” he told his Jemadar, 'so next time they'll try to keep us quiet by firing bigger volleys up at the fire steps

Toss down rockets, that'll spoil their aim."

“Rockets, sahib.”

“Lots of rockets,” Dodd said. He patted his men on their backs. Their faces were singed by the explosions of the powder in their muskets' pans, they were thirsty and hot, but they were winning, and they knew it.

They were his Cobras, as well trained as any troops in India, and they would be at the heart of the army that Dodd would unleash from this fortress to dominate the lands the British must relinquish when their southern army was broken.

“Why don't they give up?” Gopal asked Dodd. A sentry on the wall had reported that the bloodied attackers were forming to charge again.

“Because they're brave men, Jemadar,” Dodd said, 'but also stupid."

The furious musket fire had started again from across the ravine, a sign that a new attack would soon come into the blood-slick gateway.

Dodd drew his pistol, checked it was loaded, and walked back to watch the next failure. Let them come, he thought, for the more who died here, the fewer would remain to trouble him as he pursued the beaten remnant south across the Deccan Plain.

“Get ready!” he called. Slow matches burned on the fire step and his men crouched beside them with rockets, waiting to light the fuses and toss the terrible weapons down into the killing place.

A defiant cheer sounded, and the redcoats came again to the slaughter.

The cliff face was far steeper than Sharpe had anticipated, though it was not sheer rock, but rather a series of cracks in which plants had taken root, and he found that he could pull himself up by using stony outcrops and the thick stalks of the bigger shrubs. He needed both hands. Tom Garrard came behind, and more than once Sharpe trod on his friend's hands.

“Sorry, Tom.”

“Just keep going,” Garrard panted.

It became easier after the first ten feet, for the face now sloped away, and there was even room for two or three men to stand together on a weed-covered ledge. Sharpe called for the ladder and it was pushed up to him by the cavalrymen. The bamboo was light and he hooked the top rung over his right shoulder and climbed on upwards, following a jagged line of rocks and bushes that gave easy footing. A line of redcoats trailed him, muskets slung. There were more bushes to Sharpe's left, shielding him from the ramparts, but after he had climbed twenty feet those bushes ended and he prayed that the defenders would all be staring at the beleaguered gatehouse rather than at the precipice below. He pulled himself up the last few feet, cursing the ladder that seemed to get caught on every protrusion. The sun beat off the stone and the sweat poured down him. He was panting when he reached the top, and now there was nothing but steep, open ground between him and the wall's base. Fifty feet of rough grass to cross and then he would be at the wall.

He crouched at the edge of the cliff, waiting for the men to catch up.

Still no one had seen him from the walls. Tom Garrard dropped beside him.

“When we go, Tom,” Sharpe said, 'we run like bloody hell. Straight to the wall. Ladder up, climb like rats and jump over the bloody top.

Tell the lads to get over fast. Bastards on the other side are going to try and kill us before we can get reinforced, so we're going to need plenty of muskets to fend the buggers off."

Garrard peered up at the embrasures.

“There's no one there.”

“There's a few there,” Sharpe said, 'but they ain't taking much notice.

Dozy, they are," he added, and thank God for that, he thought, for a handful of defenders with loaded muskets could stop him dead. And dead is what he had better be after striking Morris, unless he could cross the ramparts and open the gates. He peered up at the battlements as more men hauled themselves over the edge of the cliff. He guessed the wall was lightly manned by little more than a picquet line, for no one would have anticipated that the cliff could be climbed, but he also guessed that once the redcoats appeared the defenders would quickly reinforce the threatened spot.

Garrard grinned at Sharpe.

“Did you thump Morris?”

“What else could I do?”

"He'll have you court-martialed

“Not if we win here,” Sharpe said.

“If we get those gates open, Tom, we'll be bloody heroes.”

“And if we don't?”

“We'll be dead,” Sharpe said curtly, then turned to see Eli Lockhart scrambling onto the grass.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Sharpe demanded.

“I got lost,” Lockhart said, and hefted a musket he had taken from a soldier below.

“Some of your boys ain't too keen on being heroes, so me and my boys are making up the numbers.”

And it was not just Lockhart's cavalrymen who were climbing, but some kilted Highlanders and sepoys who had seen the Light Company scrambling up the cliff and decided to join in too. The more the merrier, Sharpe decided. He counted heads and saw he had thirty men, and more were coming. It was time to go, for the enemy would not stay asleep for long.

“We have to get over the wall fast,” he told them all, 'and once we're over, we form two ranks."

He stood and hefted the ladder high over his head, holding it with both hands, then ran up the steep grass. His boots, which were Syud Sevajee's cast-offs, had smooth soles and slipped on the grass, but he stumbled on, and went even faster when he heard an aggrieved shout from high above him. He knew what was coming next and he was still thirty feet from the walls, a sitting target, and then he heard the bang of the musket and saw the grass flatten ahead of him as the gases from the barrel lashed downwards. Smoke eddied around him, but the ball had thumped into one of the ladder's thick uprights, and then another musket fired and he saw a fleck of turf dance up.

“Give them fire!” Major Stokes roared from the bottom of the ravine.

“Give them fire!”

A hundred redcoats and sepoys blasted up at the walls. Sharpe heard the musket shots clatter on the stone, and then he was hard under the rampart and he dropped the leading end of the ladder and rammed it into the turf and swung the other end up and over. A bloody escalade,

he thought. A breach and an escalade, all in one day, and he pulled the claymore out from his belt and pushed Garrard away from the foot of the ladder.

“Me first,” he growled, and began to climb. The rungs were springy and he had the terrible thought that maybe they would break after the first few men had used the ladder, and then a handful of soldiers would be trapped inside the fortress where they would be cut down by the Mahrattas, but there was no time to dwell on that fear, just to keep climbing. The musket balls raided the stones to left and right in a torrent of fire that had driven the defenders back from the parapet, but at any second Sharpe would be alone up there. He roared a shout of defiance, reached the top of the ladder and extended his free hand to grip the stone. He hauled himself through the embrasure. He paused, trying to get a sense of what lay beyond, but Garrard shoved him and he had no option but to spring through the embrasure.

There was no fire step Jesus, he thought, and jumped. It was not a long jump down, maybe eight or ten feet, for the ground was higher on the inner side of the wall. He sprawled on the turf and a musket bullet whipped over his back. He rolled, got to his feet, and saw that the defenders had low wooden platforms that they had been using to peer over the top of the wall. Those defenders were running towards him now, but they were few, very few, and already Sharpe had five redcoats on his side of the wall, and more were coming. But so was the enemy, some from the west and more from the east.

“Tom! Look after those men.” Sharpe pointed westwards, then he turned the other way and dragged three men into a crude rank.

“Present!” he called. The muskets went up into their shoulders.

“Aim low, boys,” he said.

“Fire!”

The muskets coughed out smoke. A Mahratta slid on the grass. The others turned and ran, appalled at the stream of men now crossing the wall. It was a curious mix of English skirmishers, Highland infantry, sepoys, cavalrymen and even some of Syud Sevajee's followers in their borrowed red jackets.

“Two ranks!” Sharpe shouted.

“Quick now! Two ranks! Tom! What's happening behind me?”

“Buggers have gone, sir.”

“Two ranks!” Sharpe shouted again. He could not see the gatehouse from here because the hill inside the wall bulged outwards and hid the great ramparts from him, but the enemy was forming two hundred paces eastwards. The wall's defenders, in brown jackets, were joining a company of white-coated Cobras who must have been in reserve and those men would have to be defeated before Sharpe could hope to advance on the gatehouse. He glanced up the hill and saw nothing there except a building half hidden by trees in which monkeys gibbered. No defenders there, thank God, so he could ignore his right flank.

A Scottish sergeant had shoved and tugged the men into two ranks.

“Load!” Sharpe said, though most of the men were already loaded.

“Sergeant?”

“Sir?”

“Advance along the wall. No one's to fire till I give the word. Sergeant Green?” Sharpe called, waited.

“Sergeant Green!” Green had evidently not crossed the wall yet, or maybe he had not even climbed the cliff.

“Sergeant Green!” Sharpe bellowed again.

“Why do you need him?” a voice called.

It was a Scottish captain. Christ, Sharpe thought, but he was outranked.

“To bring the next group on!”

“I'll do it,” the Scotsman said, 'you go!"

“Advance!” Sharpe shouted.

“By the centre!” the Sergeant shouted.

“March!”

It was a ragged advance. The men had no file-closers and they spread out, but Sharpe did not much care. The thing was to close on the enemy. That had always been McCandless's advice. Get close and start killing, because there's bugger all you can do at long range, though the Scottish Colonel would never have used that word. This is for you, McCandless, Sharpe thought, this one's for you, and it struck him that this was the first time he had ever taken troops into formal battle, line against line, muskets against muskets. He was nervous, and made even more nervous by the fact that he was leading a makeshift company in full view of the thousands of redcoats on the ravine's northern slope. It was like being trapped on stage in a full theatre; lose here, he thought, and all the army would know. He watched the enemy officer, a tall man with a dark face and a large moustache. He looked calm and his men marched in three tight ranks. Well trained, Sharpe thought, but then no one had ever said William Dodd could not whip troops into shape.

The Cobras stopped when the two units were a hundred paces apart.

They levelled their muskets and Sharpe saw his men falter.

“Keep going!” he ordered.

“Keep going!”

“You heard the man!” the Scottish Sergeant bellowed.

“Keep going!”

Sharpe was at the right-hand flank of his line. He glanced behind to see more men running to catch up, their equipment flapping as they stumbled over the uneven ground. Christ, Sharpe thought, but I'm inside! We're in! And then the Cobras fired.

And Sharpe, ensign and bullock driver, had a battle on his hands.

The redcoats stormed the gatehouse a third time, this attempt led by two squads who hugged the walls either side of the passage and then turned their muskets up to blast the defenders on the opposite fire step

The tactic seemed to work, for they ripped off their first volley and under its cover a third squad comprised of axe men charged over the dead and dying and scrambled up the steep stone path towards the second gate.

Then the lit rockets began to drop from on high. They struck the bodies and then flamed into life and ricocheted madly about the confined space. They tore into the two musket squads, flamed among the axe men choked men with their smoke, burned them with flame and exploded to strew the carnage with more blood and guts. The axe men never even reached the gate. They died under the musket fire that followed the rockets, or else, wounded, they tried to crawl back through the thick smoke. Rocks hurtled down from the flanking fire steps pulping the dead and the living into horror. The survivors fled, defeated again.

“Enough!” Colonel Dodd shouted at his men.

“Enough!” He peered down into the stone chamber. It looked like something from hell, a place where broken things twitched in blood beneath a reeking pall of smoke. The rocket carcasses still burned. The wounded cried for help that was not coming, and Dodd felt an elation sear through him. It was even easier than he had dared to hope.

“Sahib!” Gopal said urgently.

“Sahib?”

“What?”

“Sahib, look!” Gopal was pointing westwards. There was smoke and the crackling sound of a musket fight. The noise and smoke were coming from just beyond the curve of the hill so Dodd could not see what was happening, but the sound was enough to convince him that a considerable fight had broken out a quarter-mile away, and that might not have mattered, except that the smoke and the noise came from inside the wall.

“Jesus!” Dodd swore.

“Find out what's happening, Gopal. Quick!” He could not lose. He must not lose.

“Where's Mister Hakeswill?” he shouted, wanting the deserter to take over Gopal's responsibilities on the fire step but the twitching Sergeant had vanished. The musketry went on, but beneath Dodd there were only moans and the smell of burning flesh. He stared westwards. If the damned redcoats had crossed the wall then he would need more infantry to drive them out and seal whatever place they had found to penetrate the Inner Fort.

“Havildar!”

He summoned the man who had accompanied Hakeswill to the palace.

“Go to the Southern Gate and tell them to send a battalion here. Quick!”

“Sahib,” the man said, and ran.

Dodd found that he was shaking slightly. It was just a small tremor in his right hand which he stilled by gripping the gold elephant-shaped hilt of his sword. There was no need to panic, he told himself, everything was under control, but he could not rid himself of the thought that there would be no escape from this place. In every other fight since he had defected from British service he had made certain of a route along which he could retreat, but from this high fortress on its soaring bluff there was no way out. He must win, or else he must die. He watched the smoke to the west. The firing was constant now, suggesting that the enemy was inside the fort in force. His hand twitched, but this time he did not notice as, for the first time in weeks, the Lord of Gawilghur began to fear defeat.

The volley from the company of white-coated Cobras hammered towards Sharpe's men, but because they were spread more widely than usual many of the balls wasted themselves in the gaps between the files. Some men went down, and the rest instinctively checked, but Sharpe shouted at them to keep marching. The enemy was hidden in smoke, but Sharpe knew they would be reloading.

“Close the files, Sergeant,” he shouted.

“Close up! Close up!” the Scots Sergeant called. He glanced at Sharpe, suspecting that he was taking the small company too close to the enemy. The range was already down to sixty yards.

Sharpe could just see one of the Indians through the smoke. The man was the left flanker of the front rank, a small man, and he had bitten off his cartridge and was pouring the powder down the muzzle of his musket. Sharpe watched the bullet go in and the ramrod come up ready to plunge down into the barrel.

“Halt!” he called.

“Halt!” the Sergeant echoed.

“Present!”

The muskets came up into the men's shoulders. Sharpe reckoned he had about sixty men in the two ranks, fewer than the enemy's three ranks, but enough. More men were running up from the ladder all the time.

“Aim low,” he said.

“Fire!”

The volley slammed into the Cobras who were still loading. Sharpe's men began to reload themselves, working fast, nervous of the enemy's next volley.

Sharpe watched the enemy bring their muskets up. His men were half hidden by their own musket smoke.

“Drop!” he shouted. He had not known he was going to give the order until he heard himself shout it, but it suddenly seemed the sensible thing to do.

“Flat on the ground!” he shouted.

“Quick!” He dropped himself, though only to one knee, and a heartbeat later the enemy fired and their volley whistled over the prostrate company. Sharpe had slowed his men's loading process, but he had kept them alive and now it was time to go for the kill.

“Load!” he shouted, and his men climbed to their feet. This time Sharpe did not watch the enemy, for he did not want to be affected by their timing. He hefted the claymore, comforted by the blade's heaviness.

“Prepare to charge!” he shouted. His men were pushing their ramrods back into their musket hoops, and now they pulled out their bayonets and twisted them onto blackened muzzles. Eli Lockhart's cavalrymen, some of whom only had pistols, drew their sabres.

“Present!” Sharpe called, and the muskets went up into the shoulders again. Now he did look at the enemy and saw that most of them were still ramming.

“Fire!” The muskets flamed and the scraps of wadding spat out after the bullets to flicker their small flames in the grass.

“Charge!” Sharpe shouted, and he led the way from the right flank, the claymore in his hand.

“Charge!” he shouted again and his small company, sensing that they had only seconds before the enemy's muskets were loaded, ran with him.

Then a blast of musketry sounded to Sharpe's right and he saw that the Scottish Captain had formed a score of men on the flank and had poured in a volley that struck the Cobras just before Sharpe's charge closed the gap.

“Kill them!” Sharpe raged. Fear was whipping inside him, the fear that he had mistimed this charge and that the enemy would have a volley ready just yards before the redcoats struck home, but he was committed now, and he ran as hard as he could to break into the white-coated ranks before the volley came.

The Havildar commanding the Cobra company had been appalled to see the redcoats charging. He should have fired, but instead he ordered his men to fix their own bayonets and so the enemy was still twisting the blades onto their muskets when the leading redcoats burst through the smoke. Sharpe hacked his heavy sword at the front rank, felt it bite and slide against bone, twisted it free, lunged, kicked at a man, and suddenly Eli Lockhart was beside him, his sabre slashing down, and two Highlanders were stabbing with bayonets. Sharpe hacked with the sword two-handed, fighting in a red rage that had come from the nervousness that had assailed him during the charge. A sepoy trapped the Cobras' Havildar, feinted with the bayonet, parried the tulwar's counter-lunge, then stabbed the enemy in the belly. The white coats were running now, fleeing back towards the smoke that boiled up from the gatehouse which lay beyond the bulge of the hill. Tom Garrard, his bayonet bloodied to the hilt, kicked at a wounded man who was trying to aim his musket. Other men stooped to search the dead and dying.

The Scottish Captain came in from the flank. He had the winged epaulettes of a light company.

“I didn't know the 74th were up here,” he greeted Sharpe, 'or is it the 33rd?" He peered at Sharpe's coat, and Sharpe saw that Clare's newly sewn facings had been torn in the climb, revealing the old red material beneath.

“I'm a lost sheep, sir,” Sharpe said.

“A very welcome lost sheep,” the Captain said, holding out his hand.

“Archibald Campbell, Scotch Brigade. Brought my company up here, just in case they got bored.”

“Richard Sharpe, 74th,” Sharpe said, shaking Campbell's hand, 'and bloody glad to see you, sir." Sharpe suddenly wanted to laugh. His force, which had pierced the Inner Fort's de fences was a ragged mix of Indians and British, cavalrymen and infantry. There were kilted Highlanders from the 78th, some of Campbell's men from the 94th, maybe half of the 33rd's Light Company, and a good number of sepoys.

Campbell had climbed one of the low timber platforms that had let the defenders peer over the fire step and from its vantage point he stared at the gatehouse which lay a quarter-mile eastwards.

“Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Mister Sharpe?” he asked.

“I'm thinking we should take the gatehouse,” Sharpe said, 'and open the gates."

“Me too.” He shifted to make room for Sharpe on the small platform.

“They'll no doubt be trying to evict us soon, eh? We'd best make haste.”

Sharpe stared at the gatehouse where a great smear of smoke showed above the ramparts that were thick with white-coated Cobras. A shallow flight of stone stairs led from inside the fortress to the fire step and the gates could not be opened until that fire step was cleared of the enemy.

“If I take the fire step he suggested to Campbell, 'you can open the gates?”

“That seems a fair division of labour,” Campbell said, jumping down from the platform. He had lost his hat and a shock of curly black hair hung over his narrow face. He grinned at Sharpe.

“I'll take my company and you can have the rest, eh?” Campbell strode up the hill, shouting for his own Light Company to form in a column of three ranks.

Sharpe followed Campbell off the platform and summoned the remaining men into line.

“Captain Campbell's going to open the gates from the inside,” he told them, 'and we're going to make it possible by clearing the parapets of the bastards. It's a fair distance to the gate, but we've got to get there fast. And when we get there, the first thing we do is fire a volley up at the fire step Clean some of the buggers off before we go up there. Load your muskets now. Sergeant Green!"

Green, red-faced from the effort of climbing up the ravine and running to join Sharpe, stepped forward.

“I'm here, sir, and sir-' ”Number off twenty men, Green," Sharpe ordered the panting Sergeant.

“You'll stay down below and provide covering fire while we climb the steps, understand?”

“Twenty men, sir? Yes, sir, I will, sir, only it's Mister Morris, sir.”

Green sounded embarrassed.

“What about him?” Sharpe asked.

“He's recovered, sir. His tummy, sir, it got better' Green managed to keep a straight face as he delivered that news 'and he said no one else was to climb the cliff, sir, and he sent me to fetch the men what had climbed it back down again. That's why I'm here, sir.”

“No, you're not,” Sharpe said.

“You're here to number off twenty men who'll give the rest of us covering fire.”

Green hesitated, looked at Sharpe's face, then nodded.

“Right you are, sir! Twenty men, covering fire.”

“Thank you, Sergeant,” Sharpe said. So Morris was conscious again, and probably already making trouble, but Sharpe could not worry about that. He looked at his men. They numbered seventy or eighty now, and still more Scotsmen and sepoys were coming up the cliff and crossing the wall. He waited until they all had loaded muskets and their ramrods were back in their hoops.

“Just follow me, lads, and when we get there kill the bastards. Now!” He turned and faced east.

“Come on!”

“At the double!” Campbell called to his company.

“Forward!”

The fox was in the henhouse. Feathers would fly.