Sharpe's Triumph (2 page)

“I'm going for a piss.”

“He never goes anywhere without his bleeding pack,” Atkins commented.

“Doesn't want you thieving his spare shirt,” Phillips answered.

“He's got more than a shirt in that pack. Hiding something he is.”

Atkins twisted round.

“Hey. Hedgehog!” They all called Davi Lal "Hedgehog' because his hair stuck up in spikes;
no matter how greasy it was or how short it was cut, it still stuck up in unruly spikes.

“What does Sharpie keep in the pack?”

Davi Lal rolled his eyes.

“Jewels! Gold. Rubies, diamonds, emeralds, sapphires and pearls.”

“Like sod he does.”

Davi Lal laughed, then turned back to the cauldron. Out by the fort's gate Captain Leonard
was greeting the visitors. The guard presented arms as the officer leading the sepoys
rode through the gate. The visitor returned the salute by touching a riding crop to the
brim of his cocked hat which, worn fore and aft, shadowed his face. He was a tall man,
uncommonly tall, and he wore his stirrups long so that he looked much too big for his
horse, which was a sorry, sway-backed beast with a mangy hide, though there was nothing odd
in that. Good horses were a luxury in India, and most Company officers rode decrepit
nags.

“Welcome to Chasalgaon, sir,” Leonard said. He was not certain he ought to call the
stranger 'sir', for the man wore no visible badge of rank on his red coat, but he carried
himself like a senior officer and he reacted to Leonard's greeting with a lordly
nonchalance.

“You're invited to dine with us, sir,” Leonard added, hurrying after the horseman who,
having tucked his riding crop under his belt, now led his sepoys straight onto the parade
ground. He stopped his horse under the flagpole from which the British flag drooped in the
windless air, then waited as his company of red-coated sepoys divided into two units
of two ranks each that marched either side of the flagpole. Crosby watched from inside his
tent. It was a flamboyant entrance, the Major decided.

“Halt!” the strange officer shouted when his company was in the very centre of the
fort. The sepoys halted.

"Outwards turn! Ground fire locks

Good morning!" He at last looked down at Captain Leonard.

“Are you Crosby?”

“No, sir. I'm Captain Leonard, sir. And you, sir?” The tall man ignored the question. He
scowled about Chasalgaon's fort as though he disapproved of everything he saw. What the
hell was this? Leonard wondered. A surprise inspection?

“Shall I have your horse watered, sir?”

Leonard offered.

“In good time, Cartfain, all in good time,” the mysterious officer said, then he
twisted in, his saddle and growled an order to his company.

“Fix bayonets!” The sepoys pulled out their seventeen-inch blades and slotted them
onto the muzzles of their muskets.

“I like to offer a proper salute to a fellow Englishman,” the tall man explained to
Leonard.

“You are English, aren't you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Too many damned Scots in the Company,” the tall man grumbled.

“Have you ever noticed that, Leonard? Too many Scots and Irish. Glib sorts of fellow,
they are, but they ain't English. Not English at all.” The visitor drew his sword, then took
a deep breath.

“Company!” he shouted.

“Level arms!”

The sepoys brought their muskets to their shoulders and Leonard saw, much too late, that
the guns were aimed at the troops of the garrison.

“No!” he said, but not loudly, for he still did not believe what he saw.

“Fire!” the officer shouted, and the parade ground air was murdered by the double
ripple of musket shots, heavy coughing explosions that blossomed smoke across the
sun-crazed mud and slammed lead balls into the unsuspecting garrison.

“Hunt them now!” the tall officer called.

“Hunt them! Fast, fast, fast!”

He spurred his horse close to Captain Leonard and, almost casually, slashed down with
his sword, ripping the blade hard back once it had bitten into the Captain's neck so that
its edge sawed fast and deep through the sinew, muscle and flesh.

“Hunt them! Hunt them!” the officer shouted as Leonard fell. He drew a pistol from his
saddle holster and rode towards the officers' tents. His men were screaming their war
cries as they spread through the small fort to chase down every last sepoy of Chasalgaon's
garrison. They had been ordered to leave the women and children to the last and hunt down
the men first.

Crosby had been staring in horror and disbelief, and now, with shaking hands, he
started to load one of his pistols, but suddenly the door of his tent darkened and he saw
that the tall officer had dismounted from his horse.

“Are you Crosby?” the officer demanded.

Crosby found he could not speak. His hands quivered. Sweat was pouring down his face.

“Are you Crosby?” the man asked again in an irritated voice.

“Yes,” Crosby managed to say.

“And who the devil are you?”

“Dodd,” the tall man said, “Major William Dodd, at your service.” And Dodd raised his big
pistol so that it pointed at Crosby's face.

“No!” Crosby shouted.

Dodd smiled.

“I assume you're surrendering the fort to me, Crosby?”

“Damn you,” Crosby riposted feebly.

“You drink too much, Major,” Dodd said.

“The whole Company knows you're a sot. Didn't put up much of a fight, did you?” He pulled
the trigger and Crosby's head was snatched back in a mist of blood that spattered onto the
canvas.

“Pity you're English,” Dodd said.

“I'd much rather shoot a Scotsman.” The dying Major made a terrible gurgling sound,
then his body jerked uncontrollably and was finally still.

“Praise the Lord, pull down the flag and find the pay chest,” Dodd said to himself, then he
stepped over the Major's corpse to see that the pay chest was where he expected it to be,
under the bed.

“SubadaA' ”Sahib?"

“Two men here to guard the pay chest.”

"Sahibr Major Dodd hurried back onto the parade ground where a small group of
redcoats, British redcoats, were offering defiance, and he wanted to make sure that his
sepoys took care of them, but a havildar had anticipated Dodd's orders and was leading
a squad of men against the half-dozen soldiers.

“Put the blades in!” Dodd encouraged them.

"Hard in!

Twist them in! That's the way! Watch your left! Left!" His voice was urgent for a tall
sergeant had suddenly appeared from behind the cook house a white man with a musket and
bayonet in his hands, but one of the sepoys still had a loaded musket of his own and he
twisted, aimed and fired and Dodd saw another mist of bright blood sparkle in the sunlight.
The sergeant had been hit in the head. He stopped, looked surprised as the musket fell from
his hands and as blood streamed down his face, then he fell backwards and was still.

“Search for the rest of the bastards!” Dodd ordered, knowing that there must still be a
score of the garrison hidden in the barracks. Some of the men had escaped over the thorn
wall, but they would be hunted down by the Mahratta horsemen who were Dodd's allies and who
should by now have spread either side of the fort.

“Search hard!” He himself went to look at the horses of the garrison's officers and
decided that one of them was marginally better than his own. He moved his saddle to the
better horse, then led it into the sunlight and picketed it to the flagpole. A woman ran
past him, screaming as she fled from the red-coated killers, but a sepoy caught and tripped
her and another pulled the said off her shoulder. Dodd was about to order them away from
the woman, then he reckoned that the enemy was well beaten and so his men could take their
pleasure in safety.

“Subadar?” he shouted.

“Sahib?”

“One squad to make sure everyone's dead. Another to open the armoury. And there are a
couple of horses in the stable. Pick one for yourself, and we'll take the other back to
Pohlmann. And well done, Gopal.”

“Thank you, sahib,” Subadar Gopal said.

Dodd wiped the blood from his sword, then reloaded his pistol. One of the fallen
redcoats was trying to turn himself over, so Dodd crossed to the wounded man, watched his
feeble efforts for a moment, then put a bullet into the man's head. The man jerked in
spasm, then was still.

Major Dodd scowled at the blood that had sprayed his boots, but he spat, stooped and wiped
the blood away. Sharpe watched the tall officer from the corner of his eye. He felt
responsible, angry, hot, bitter and scared.

The blood had poured from the wound in his scalp. He was dizzy, his head throbbed, but he
was alive. There were flies in his mouth. And then his ammunition began to explode and the
tall officer whipped round, thinking it was trouble, and a couple of men laughed at the
sight of the ashes bursting into the air with each small crack of powder.

Sharpe dared not move. He listened to women screaming and children crying, then heard
hooves and he waited until some horsemen came into view. They were Indians, of course,
and all wild-looking! men with sabres, matchlocks, spears, lances and even bows and arrows.!
They slid out of their saddles and joined the hunt for loot.

Sharpe lay like the dead. The crusting blood was thick on his face. The blow of the musket
ball had stunned him, so that he did not remember dropping his own musket or falling to the
ground, but he sensed that the blow was not deadly. Not even deep. He had a headache, and the
skin of his face felt taut with the crusted blood, but he knew head wounds always bled
profusely. He tried to make his breathing shallow, left his mouth open and did not even gag
when a fly crawled down to the root of his tongue, and then he could smell tobacco, arrack,
leather and sweat and a horseman was bending over him with a horrid-looking curved knife
with a rusty blade and Sharpe feared his throat was about to be cut, but instead the horseman
began slashing at the pockets of Sharpe's uniform.

He found the big key that opened Seringapatam's main magazine, a key that Sharpe had
ordered cut in the bazaar so that he would not always have to fill in the form in the
armoury guardhouse. The man tossed the key away, slit another pocket, found nothing
valuable and so moved on to another body. Sharpe stared up at the sun.

Somewhere nearby a garrison sepoy groaned, and almost immediately he was
bayoneted and Sharpe heard the hoarse exhalation of breath as the man died and the
sucking sound as the murderer dragged the blade back from the constricting flesh. It had
all happened so fast! And Sharpe blamed himself, though he knew it was not his fault. He had
not let the killers into the fort, but he had hesitated for a few seconds to throw his
pack, pouches and cartridge box onto the fire, and now he chided himself because maybe he
could have used those few seconds to save his six men.

Except most of them had already been dead or dying when Sharpe had first realized there
was a fight. He had been pissing against the back wall of the cook house store hut when a
musket ball ripped through the reed-mat wall and for a second or two he had just stood
there, incredulous, hardly believing the shots and screams his ears registered, and he
had not bothered to button his trousers, but just turned and saw the dying campfire and had
thrown his pack onto it, and by the time he had cocked the musket and run back to where his
men had been expecting dinner the fight was almost over. The musket ball had jerked his
head back and there had been a stabbing pain either side of his eyes, and the next he knew he
was lying with blood crusting on his face and flies crawling down his gullet.

But maybe he could have snatched his men back. He tortured himself with the thought that
he could have saved Davi Lal and a couple of the privates, maybe he could have crossed the
cactus-thorn wall and run into the trees, but Davi Lal was dead and all six privates were
dead and Sharpe could hear the killers laughing as they carried the ammunition out of the
small magazine.

“Subadar!” the tall officer shouted.

“Fetch that bloody flag down! I wanted it done an hour ago!”

Sharpe blinked again because he could not help himself, but no one noticed, and then he
closed his eyes because the sun was blinding him, and he wanted to weep out of anger and
frustration and hatred. Six men dead, and Davi Lal dead, and Sharpe had not been able to do
a damned thing to help them, and he wondered who the tall officer was, and then a voice
provided the answer.

“Major Dodd, sahib?”

“Subadar?”

“Everything's loaded, sahib.”

“Then let's go before their patrols get back. Well done, Subadart Tell the men there'll
be a reward.”

Sharpe listened as the raiders left the fort. Who the hell were they?

Major Dodd had been in East India Company uniform, and so had all his men for that
matter, but they sure as hell were not Company troops.

They were bastards, that's what they were, bastards from hell and they had done a
thorough piece of wicked work in Chasalgaon. Sharpe doubted they had lost a single man in
their treacherous attack, and still he lay silent as the sounds faded away. A baby cried
somewhere, a woman sobbed, and still Sharpe waited until at last he was certain that
Major Dodd and his men were gone, and only then did Sharpe roll onto his side. The fort
stank of blood and buzzed with flies. He groaned and got to his knees. The cauldron of rice
and kid had boiled dry and so he stood and kicked it off its tripod.

“Bastards,” he said, and he saw the surprised look on Davi Lal's face and he wanted to
weep for the boy.

A half-naked woman, bleeding from the mouth, saw Sharpe stand from among the bloodied
heap of the dead and she screamed before snatching her child back into a barracks hut.
Sharpe ignored her. His musket was gone. Every damn weapon was gone.

“Bastards!” he shouted into the hot air, then he kicked at a dog that was sniffing at
Phillips's corpse. The smell of blood and powder and burned rice was thick in his throat. He
gagged as he walked into the cook house and there found a jar of water. He drank deep, then
splashed the water onto his face and rubbed away the clotted blood. He wet a rag and
flinched as he cleaned the shallow wound in his scalp, then suddenly he was overcome with
horror and pity and he fell onto his knees and half sobbed. He swore instead.