Sharpe's Fortress

by Bernard Cornwell

  “Tent was on fire, sir,” Sharpe said woodenly. “Me and Sergeant Lockhart decided to rescue whatever was inside.”

  “How very public-spirited of you.” The Captain gave Sharpe a long, speculative look, then turned back to Lockhart. “Is he dead, Sergeant?”

  “Near as makes no difference, sir,” Lockhart called back.

  “Use your pistol to make sure,” the Captain ordered, then sighed. “A shame,” he said. “I rather liked Naig. He was a rogue, of course, but rogues are so much more amusing than honest men.” He watched as Lockhart lowered the shaft, then stooped over the prostrate body and put a bullet into its skull. “I suppose I’ll have to find some carts to fetch these supplies back where they belong,” the Captain said.

  “I’ll do that, sir,” Sharpe said.

  “You will?” The Captain seemed astonished to discover such willingness. “Why on earth would you want to do that, Ensign?”

  “It’s my job, sir,” Sharpe said. “I’m Captain Torrance’s assistant.”

  “You poor benighted bastard,” the Captain said pityingly.

  “Poor, sir? Why?”

  “Because I’m Captain Torrance. Good day to you, Ensign.” Torrance turned on his heel and walked away through the crowd.

  “Bastard,” Sharpe said, for he had suddenly understood why Torrance had been so keen to hang Naig.

  He spat after the departed Captain, then went to find some bullocks and carts. The army had its supplies back, but Sharpe had made a new enemy. As if Hakeswill were not enough, he now had Torrance as well.

  The palace in Gawilghur was a sprawling one-story building that stood on the highest point within the Inner Fort. To its north was a garden that curled about the largest of the fortress’s lakes. The lake was a tank, a reservoir, but its banks had been planted with flowering trees, and a flight of steps led from the palace to a small stone pavilion on the lake’s northern shore. The pavilion had an arched ceiling on which the reflections of the lake’s small waves should have rippled, but the season had been so dry that the lake had shrunk and the water level was some eight or nine feet lower than usual. The water and the exposed banks were rimed with a green, foul-smelling scum, but Beny Singh, the Killadar of Gawilghur, had arranged for spices to be burned in low, flat braziers so that the dozen men inside the pavilion were not too offended by the lake’s stench.

  “If only the Rajah was here,” Beny Singh said, “we should know what to do.” Beny Singh was a short, plump man with a curling mustache and nervous eyes. He was the fortress commander, but he was a courtier by avocation, not a soldier, and he had always regarded his command of the great fortress as a license to make his fortune rather than to fight the Rajah’s enemies.

  Prince Manu Bappoo was not surprised that his brother had chosen not to come to Gawilghur, but had instead fled farther into the hills. The Rajah was like Beny Singh, he had no belly for a fight, but Bappoo had watched the first British troops creep across the plain beneath the fort’s high walls and he welcomed their coming. “We don’t need my brother here to know what we must do,” he said. “We fight.” The other men, all commanders of the various troops that had taken refuge in Gawilghur, voiced their agreement.

  “The British cannot be stopped by walls,” Beny Singh said. He was cradling a small white lapdog which had eyes as wide and frightened as its master’s.

  “They can, and they will,” Bappoo insisted.

  Singh shook his head. “Were they stopped at Seringapatam? At Ahmednuggur? They crossed those city walls as though they had wings! They are—what is the word your Arabs use?—djinnsl” He looked about the gathered council and saw no one who would support him. “They must have the djinns on their side,” he added weakly.

  “So what would you do?” Bappoo asked.

  “Treat with them,” Beny Singh said. “Ask for cowle.”

  “Cowle?” It was Colonel Dodd who intervened, speaking in his crude, newly learned Marathi. “I’ll tell you what terms Wellesley will offer you. None! He’ll march you away as a prisoner, he’ll slight these walls and take away the Rajah’s treasures.”

  “There are no treasures here,” Beny Singh said, but no one believed him. He was soothing the little dog which had been frightened by the Englishman’s harsh voice.

  “And he’ll give your women to his men as playthings,” Dodd added nastily.

  Beny Singh shuddered. His wife, his concubines and his children were all in the palace, and they were all dear to him. He pampered them, worshiped them and adored them. “Perhaps I should remove my people from the fort?” he suggested hesitantly. “I could take them to Multai? The British will never reach Multai.”

  “You’d run away?” Dodd asked in his harsh voice. “You bloody won’t!” He spoke those three words in English, but everyone understood what they meant. He leaned forward. “If you run away,” he said, “the garrison loses heart. The rest of the soldiers can’t take their women away, so why should you? We fight them here, and we stop them here. Stop them dead!” He stood and walked to the pavilion’s edge where he spat onto the green-scummed bank before turning back to Beny Singh. “Your women are safe here, Killadar. I could hold this fortress from now till the world’s end with just a hundred men.”

  “The British are djinns” Beny Singh whispered. The dog in his arms was shivering.

  “They are not djinns” Dodd snapped. “There are no demons! They don’t exist!”

  “Winged djinns,” Beny Singh said in almost a whimper, “invisible djinns! In the air!”

  Dodd spat again. “Bloody hell,” he said in English, then turned fast toward Beny Singh. “I’m an English demon. Me! Understand? I’m a djinn, and if you take your women away I’ll follow you and I’ll come to them at night and fill them with black bile.” He bared his yellowed teeth and the Killadar shuddered. The white dog barked shrilly.

  Manu Bappoo waved Dodd back to his seat. Dodd was the only European officer left in his forces and, though Bappoo was glad to have the Englishman’s services, there were times when Colonel Dodd could be tiresome. “If there are djinns” Bappoo told Singh, “they will be on our side.” He waited while the Killadar soothed the frightened dog, then he leaned forward. “Tell me,” he demanded of Beny Singh, “can the British take the fortress by using the roads up the hill?”

  Beny Singh thought about those two steep winding roads that twisted up the hill beneath Gawilghur’s walls. No man could survive those climbs, not if the defenders were raining round shot and rocks down the precipitous slopes. “No,” he admitted.

  “So they can only come one way. Only one way! Across the land bridge. And my men will guard the Outer Fort, and Colonel Dodd’s men will defend the Inner Fort.”

  “And no one,” Dodd said harshly, “no one will get past my Cobras.” He still resented that his well-trained, white-coated soldiers were not defending the Outer Fort, but he had accepted Manu Bappoo’s argument that the important thing was to hold the Inner Fort. If, by some chance, the British did capture the Outer Fort, they would never fight past Dodd’s men. “My men,” Dodd growled, “have never been defeated. They never will be.”

  Manu Bappoo smiled at the nervous Beny Singh. “You see, Killadar, you will die here of old age.”

  “Or of too many women,” another man put in, provoking laughter.

  A cannon sounded from the Outer Fort’s northern ramparts, followed a few seconds later by another. No one knew what might have caused the firing and so the dozen men followed Manu Bappoo as he left the pavilion and walked toward the Inner Fort’s northern ramparts. Silver-furred monkeys chattered at the soldiers from the high branches.

  Arab guards stood at the gate of the Rajah’s garden. They were posted to stop any common soldiers of the garrison going to the paths beside the tank where the Killadar’s women liked to stroll in the cool of the evening. A hundred paces beyond the garden gate was a steep-sided rock pit, about twice as deep as a man stood high, and Dodd paused to look down into its shadowed depths. The side
s had been chiseled smooth by stone-workers so that nothing could climb up from the floor that was littered with white bones. “The Traitor’s Hole,” Bappoo said, as he paused beside Dodd, “but the bones are from baby monkeys.”

  “But they do eat men?” Dodd asked, intrigued by the shadowed blackness at the foot of the hole.

  “They kill men,” Bappoo said, “but don’t eat them. They’re not big enough.”

  “I can’t see any,” Dodd said, disappointed, then suddenly a sinuous shadow writhed swiftly between two crevices. “There!” he said happily. “Don’t they grow big enough to eat men?”

  “Most years they escape,” Bappoo said. “The monsoon floods the pit and the snakes swim to the top and wriggle out. Then we must find new ones. This year we’ve been saved the trouble. These snakes will grow bigger than usual.”

  Beny Singh waited a few paces away, clutching his small dog as though he feared Dodd would throw it down to the snakes. “There’s a bastard who ought to be fed to the snakes,” Dodd said to Bappoo, nodding toward the Killadar.

  “My brother likes him,” Bappoo said mildly, touching Dodd’s arm to indicate that they should walk on. “They share tastes.”

  “Such as?”

  “Women, music, luxury. We really do not need him here.”

  Dodd shook his head. “If you let him go, sahib, then half the damned garrison will want to run away. And if you let the women go, what will the men fight for? Besides, do you really think there’s any danger?”

  “None,” Bappoo admitted. He had led the officers up a steep rock stairway to a natural bastion where a vast iron gun was trained across the chasm toward the distant cliffs of the high plateau. From here the far cliffs were almost a mile away, but Dodd could just see a group of horsemen clustered at the chasm’s edge. It was those horsemen, all in native robes, who had prompted the Outer Fort’s gunners to open fire, but the gunners, seeing their shots fall well short of the target, had given up. Dodd drew out his telescope, trained it, and saw a man in the uniform of the Royal Engineers sitting on the ground a few paces from his companions. The engineer was sketching. The horsemen were all Indians. Dodd lowered the telescope and looked at the huge iron gun. “Is it loaded?” he asked the gunners.

  “Yes, sahib.”

  “A haideri apiece if you can kill the man in the dark uniform. The one sitting at the cliff’s edge.”

  The gunners laughed. Their gun was over twenty feet long and its wrought-iron barrel was cast with decorations that had been painted green, white and red. A pile of round shot, each over a foot in diameter, stood beside the massive carriage that was made from giant balks of teak. The gun captain fussed over his aim, shouting at his men to lever the vast carriage a thumb’s width to the right, then a finger’s breadth back, until at last he was satisfied. He squinted along the barrel for a second, waved the officers who had followed Bappoo to move away from the great gun, then leaned over the breach to dab his glowing portfire onto the gun’s touch-hole.

  The reed glowed and smoked for a second as the fire dashed down to the charge, then the vast cannon crashed back, the teak runners sliding up the timber ramp that formed the lower half of the carriage.

  Smoke jetted out into the chasm as a hundred startled birds flapped from their nests on the rock faces and circled in the warm air.

  Dodd had been standing to one side, watching the engineer through his glass. For a second he actually saw the great round shot as a flicker of gray in the lower right quadrant of his lens, then he saw a boulder close to the engineer shatter into scraps. The engineer fell sideways, his sketch pad falling, but then he picked himself up and scrambled up the slope to where his horse was being guarded by the cavalrymen.

  Dodd took a single gold coin from his pouch and tossed it to the gunner. “You missed,” he said, “but it was damned fine shooting.”

  “Thank you, sahib.”

  A whimper made Dodd turn. Beny Singh had handed his dog to a servant and was staring through an ivory-barreled telescope at the enemy horsemen. “What is it?” Bappoo asked him.

  “Syud Sevajee,” Singh said in a small voice.

  “Who’s Syud Sevajee?” Dodd asked.

  Bappoo grinned. “His father was once killadar here, but he died. Was it poison?” he asked Beny Singh.

  “He just died,” Singh said. “He just died!”

  “Murdered, probably,” Bappoo said with amusement, “and Beny Singh became killadar and took the dead man’s daughter as his concubine.”

  Dodd turned to see the enemy horsemen vanishing among the trees beyond the far cliff. “Come for revenge, has he? You still want to leave?” he demanded of Beny Singh. “Because that fellow will be waiting for you. He’ll track you through the hills, Killadar, and slit your throat in the night’s darkness.”

  “We shall stay here and fight,” Beny Singh declared, retrieving the dog from his servant.

  “Fight and win,” Dodd said, and he imagined the British breaching batteries on that far cliff, and he imagined the slaughter that would be made among the crews by this one vast gun. And there were fifty other heavy guns waiting to greet the British approach, and hundreds of lighter pieces that fired smaller missiles. Guns, rockets, canister, muskets and cliffs, those were Gawilghur’s defenses, and Dodd reckoned the British stood no chance. No chance at all. The big gun’s smoke drifted away in the small breeze. “They will die here,” Dodd said, “and we shall chase the survivors south and cut them down like dogs.” He turned and looked at Beny Singh. “You see the chasm? That is where their demons will die. Their wings will be scorched, they will fall like burning stones to their deaths, and their screams will lull your children to a dreamless sleep.” He knew he spoke true, for Gawilghur was impregnable.

  “I take pleasure, no, Dilip, make that I take humble pleasure in reporting the recovery of a quantity of stolen stores.” Captain Torrance paused. Night had just fallen and Torrance uncorked a bottle of arrack and took a sip. “Am I going too fast for you?”

  “Yes, sahib,” Dilip, the middle-aged clerk, answered. “Humble pleasure,” he said aloud as his pen moved laboriously over the paper, “in reporting the recovery of a quantity of stolen stores.”

  “Add a list of the stores,” Torrance ordered. “You can do that later. Just leave a space, man.”

  “Yes, sahib,” Dilip said.

  “I had suspected for some time,” Torrance intoned, then scowled as someone knocked on the door. “Come,” he shouted, “if you must.”

  Sharpe opened the door and was immediately entangled in the muslin. He fought his way past its folds.

  “It’s you,” Torrance said unpleasantly.

  “Me, sir.”

  “You let some moths in,” Torrance complained.

  “Sorry, sir.”

  “That is why the muslin is there, Sharpe, to keep out moths, ensigns and other insignificant nuisances. Kill the moths, Dilip.”

  The clerk dutifully chased the moths about the room, swatting them with a roll of paper. The windows, like the door, were closely screened with muslin on the outside of which moths clustered, attracted by the candles that were set in silver sticks on Torrance’s table. Dilip’s work was spread on the table, while Captain Torrance lay in a wide hammock slung from the roof beams. He was naked. “Do I offend you, Sharpe?”

  “Offend me, sir?”

  “I am naked, or had you not noticed?”

  “Doesn’t bother me, sir.”

  “Nudity keeps clothes clean. You should try it. Is the last of the enemy dead, Dilip?”

  “The moths are all deceased, sahib.”

  “Then we shall continue. Where were we?”

  “‘I had suspected for some time,’” Dilip read back the report.

  “Surmised is better, I think. I had surmised for some time.” Torrance paused to draw on the mouthpiece of a silver-bellied hookah. “What are you doing here, Sharpe?”

  “Come to get orders, sir.”

  “How very assiduous of you. I had su
rmised for some time that depredations—I can spell it if you cannot, Dilip—were being made upon the stores entrusted to my command. What the devil were you doing, Sharpe, poking about Naig’s tents?”

  ‘Just happened to be passing them, sir,” Sharpe said, “when they caught fire.”

  Torrance gazed at Sharpe, plainly not believing a word. He shook his head sadly. “You look very old to be an ensign, Sharpe?”

  “I was a sergeant two months ago, sir.”

  Torrance adopted a look of pretended horror. “Oh, good God,” he said archly, “good God alive. May all the spavined saints preserve us. You’re not telling me you’ve been made up from the ranks?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sweet suffering Jesus,” Torrance said. He lay his head back on the hammock’s pillow and blew a perfect smoke ring that he watched wobble its way up toward the ceiling. “Having confidential information as to the identity of the thief, I took steps to apprehend him. You will notice, Sharpe, that I am giving you no credit in this report?”

  “No, sir?”

  “Indeed I am not. This report will go to Colonel Butters, an appallingly bombastic creature who will, I suspect, attempt to take some of the credit for himself before passing the papers on to Arthur Wellesley who, as you may know, is our commander. A very stern man, our Arthur. He likes things done properly. He plainly had a very stern governess in his nursery.”

  “I know the General, sir.”

  “You do?” Torrance turned his head to look at Sharpe. “Socially, perhaps? You and he dine together, do you? Pass the time of day, do you? Hunt together, maybe? Drink port? Talk about old times? Whore together, perhaps?” Torrance was mocking, but there was just an edge of interest in his voice in case Sharpe really did know Sir Arthur.