Sharpe's Fortress

by Bernard Cornwell

  “And you were too ill to detect his treachery?”

  “Yes, sir,” Torrance said almost pleadingly. “At first, sir, yes, sir.”

  Wellesley gazed at Torrance for a few silent seconds, and the Captain had the uncomfortable feeling that the blue eyes saw right into his soul. “So where is this treacherous clerk now, Captain?” Wellesley asked at last.

  “We hanged him, sir,” Torrance said and Sharpe, who had not heard of Dilip’s death, stared at him in astonishment.

  The General slapped the table, making Torrance jump in alarm. “You seem very fond of hanging, Captain Torrance?”

  “A necessary remedy for theft, sir, as you have made plain.”

  “I, sir? I?” The General’s voice, when he became angry, did not become louder, but more precise and, therefore, more chilling. “The general order mandating summary death by hanging for thievery, Captain, applies to men in uniform. King’s and Company men only. It does not apply to civilians. Does the dead man have family?”

  “No, sir,” Torrance said. He did not really know the answer, but decided it was better to say no than to prevaricate.

  “If he does, Captain,” Wellesley said softly, “and if they complain, then I shall have no choice but to put you on trial, and depend upon it, sir, that trial will be in the civilian courts.”

  “I apologize, sir,” Torrance said stiffly, “for my overzealousness.”

  The General stayed silent for a few seconds. “Supplies were missing,” he said after a while.

  “Yes, sir,” Torrance agreed weakly.

  “Yet you never reported the thefts?” Wellesley said.

  “I did not believe you wished to be troubled by every mishap, sir,” Torrance said.

  “Mishap!” Wellesley snapped. “Muskets are stolen, and you call that a mishap? Such mishaps, Captain Torrance, lose wars. In future you will inform my staff when such depredations are made.” He stared at Torrance for a few seconds, then looked at Sharpe. “Colonel Huddlestone tells me it was you, Sharpe, who discovered the missing supplies?”

  “All but the muskets, sir. They’re still missing.”

  “How did you know where to look?”

  “Captain Torrance’s clerk told me where to buy supplies, sir.” Sharpe shrugged. “I guessed they were the missing items, sir.”

  Wellesley grunted. Sharpe’s answer appeared to confirm Torrance’s accusations, and the Captain gave Sharpe a grateful glance. Wellesley saw the glance and rapped the table, demanding Torrance’s attention. “It is a pity, Captain, that we could not have questioned the merchant before you so summarily executed him. May I presume you did interrogate the clerk?”

  “My sergeant did, sir, and the wretch confessed to having sold items to Naig.” Torrance blushed as he told the lie, but it was so hot in the tent and he was sweating so heavily that the blush went unnoticed.

  “Your sergeant?” Wellesley asked. “You mean your havildar?”

  “Sergeant, sir,” Torrance said. “I inherited him from Captain Mackay, sir. Sergeant Hakeswill.”

  “Hakeswill!” the General said in astonishment. “What’s he still doing here? He should be back with his regiment!”

  “He stayed on, sir,” Torrance said, “with two of his men. His other two died, sir, fever. And he had no alternative orders, sir, and he was too useful to let go, sir.”

  “Useful!” Wellesley said. He had been the commanding officer of the 33rd, Hakeswill’s regiment, and he knew the Sergeant well. He shook his head. “If you find him useful, Torrance, then he can stay till Gawilghur’s fallen. But then he returns to his regiment. You’ll make sure of that, Campbell?”

  “Yes, sir,” the aide said. “But I believe some of the 33rd are on their way here, sir, so the Sergeant can return with them.”

  “The 33rd coming here?” Wellesley asked in surprise. “I ordered no such thing.”

  “Just a company, sir,” Campbell explained. “I believe headquarters detailed them to escort a convoy.”

  “Doubtless we can make use of them,” the General said grudgingly.

  “Is it awkward for you, Sharpe? Serving with Hakeswill?” Officers who were promoted from the ranks were never expected to serve with their old regiments, and Wellesley was plainly wondering whether Sharpe found his old comrades an embarrassment. “I daresay you’ll get by,” the General said, not waiting for an answer. “You usually do. Wallace tells me he’s recommended you for the Rifles?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That could suit you, Sharpe. Suit you very well. In the meantime, the more you learn about supplies, the better.” The cold eyes looked back to Torrance, though it appeared the General was still talking to Sharpe. “There is a misapprehension in this army that supplies are of small importance, whereas wars are won by efficient supply, more than they are won by acts of gallantry. Which is why I want no more delays.”

  “There will be none, sir,” Torrance said hastily.

  “And if there are,” Wellesley said, “there will be a court-martial. You may depend upon that, Captain. Major Elliott?” The General spoke to the engineer who until now had been a spectator of Torrance’s discomfiture. “Tell me what you need to build our road, Major.”

  “A hundred bullocks,” Elliott said sourly, “and none of your spavined beasts, Torrance. I want a hundred prime Mysore oxen to carry timber and road stone. I’ll need rice every day for a half-battalion of sepoys and an equivalent number of pioneers.”

  “Of course, sir,” Torrance said.

  “And I’ll take him”—Elliott stabbed a finger at Sharpe—”because I need someone in charge of the bullocks who knows what he’s doing.”

  Torrance opened his mouth to protest, then sensibly shut it. Wellesley glanced at Sharpe. “You’ll attach yourself to Major Elliott, Sharpe. Be with him at dawn tomorrow, with the bullocks, and you, Captain Torrance, will ensure the daily supplies go up the road every dawn. And I want no more summary hangings.”

  “Of course not, sir.” Torrance, relieved to be let off so lightly, ducked his head in an awkward bow.

  “Good day to you both,” the General said sourly, then watched as the two officers left the tent. He rubbed his eyes and stifled a yawn. “How long to drive the road, Elliott?”

  “Two weeks?” the Major suggested.

  “You’ve got one week. One week!” The General forestalled Elliott’s protest. “Good day to you, Elliott.”

  The engineer grumbled as he ducked out into the fading light. Wellesley grimaced. “Is Torrance to be trusted?” he asked.

  “Comes from a good family, sir,” Blackiston said.

  “So did Nero, as I recall,” Wellesley retorted. “But at least Torrance has got Sharpe, and even if Sharpe won’t make a good officer, he’s got the makings of a decent sergeant. He did well to find those supplies.”

  “Very well, sir,” Campbell said warmly.

  Wellesley leaned back in his chair. A flicker of distaste showed on his face as he recalled the terrible moment when he had been unhorsed at Assaye. He did not remember much of the incident for he had been dazed, but he did recall watching Sharpe kill with a savagery that had astonished him. He disliked being beholden to such a man, but the General knew he would not be alive if Sharpe had not risked his own life. “I should never have given Sharpe a commission,” he said ruefully. “A man like that would have been quite content with a fiscal reward. A fungible reward. That’s what our men want, Campbell, something that can be turned into rum or arrack.”

  “He appears to be a sober man, sir,” Campbell said.

  “Probably because he can’t afford the drink! Officers’ messes are damned expensive places, Campbell, as you well know. I reward Sharpe by plunging him into debt, eh? And God knows if the Rifles are any cheaper. I can’t imagine they will be. He needs something fungible, Campbell, something fungible.” Wellesley turned and rummaged in the saddlebags that were piled behind his chair. He brought out the new telescope with the shallow eyepiece that had been a gift from the
merchants of Madras. “Find a goldsmith in the camp followers, Campbell, and see if the fellow can replace that brass plate.”

  “With what, sir?”

  Nothing too flowery, the General thought, because the glass was only going to be pawned to pay mess bills or buy gin. “In gratitude, AW,” he said, “and add the date of Assaye. Then give it to Sharpe with my compliments.”

  “It’s very generous of you, sir,” Campbell said, taking the glass, “but perhaps it would be better if you presented it to him?”

  “Maybe, maybe. Blackiston! Where do we site guns?” The General unrolled the sketches. “Candles,” he ordered, for the light was fading fast.

  The shadows stretched and joined and turned to night around the British camp. Candles were lit, lanterns hung from ridge-poles and fires fed with bullock dung. The pickets stared at shadows in the darkness, but some, lifting their gaze, saw that high above them the tops of the cliffs were still in daylight and there, like the home of the gods, the walls of a fortress showed deadly black where Gawilghur waited their coming.

  Chapter 5

  The first part of the road was easy enough to build, for the existing track wound up the gentler slopes of the foothills, but even on the first day Major Elliott was filled with gloom. “Can’t do it in a week!” the engineer grumbled. “Man’s mad! Expects miracles. Jacob’s ladder, that’s what he wants.” He cast a morbid eye over Sharpe’s bullocks, all of them prime Mysore beasts with brightly painted horns from which tassels and small bells hung. “Never did like working with oxen,” Elliott complained. “Bring any elephants?”

  “I can ask for them, sir.”

  “Nothing like an elephant. Right, Sharpe, load the beasts with small stones and keep following the track till you catch up with me. Got that?” Elliott hauled himself onto his horse and settled his feet in the stirrups. “Bloody miracles, that’s what he wants,” the Major growled, then spurred onto the track.

  “Elliott!” Major Simons, who commanded the half-battalion of sepoys who guarded the pioneers building the road, called in alarm. “I haven’t reconnoitered beyond the small hillock! The one with the two trees.”

  “Can’t wait for your fellows to wake up, Simons. Got a road to build in a week. Can’t be done, of course, but we must look willing. Pinckney! I need a havildar and some stout fellows to carry pegs. Tell ‘em to follow me.”

  Captain Pinckney, the officer in charge of the East India Company pioneers, spat onto the verge. “Waste of bloody time.”

  “What is?” Sharpe asked.

  “Pegging out the route! We follow the footpath, of course. Bloody natives have been scurrying up and down these hills for centuries.” He turned and shouted at a havildar to organize a party to follow Elliott up the hill, then set the rest of his men to loading the oxen’s panniers with small stones.

  The road made good progress, despite Elliott’s misgivings, and three days after they had begun the pioneers cleared a space among the trees to establish a makeshift artillery park where the siege guns could wait while the rest of the road was forged. Sharpe was busy and, because of that, happy. He liked Simons and Pinckney, and even Elliott proved affable. The Major had taken Wellesley’s demands that the road be made in a week as a challenge, and he pressed the pioneers hard.

  The enemy seemed to be asleep. Elliott would ride far ahead to reconnoiter the route and never once saw a Mahratta. “Stupid fools,” Elliott said one night beside the fire, “they could hold us here for months!”

  “You still shouldn’t ride so far ahead of my pickets,” Simons reproved the Major.

  “Stop fussing, man,” Elliott said, and next morning, as usual, he rode out in front to survey the day’s work.

  Sharpe was again bringing stones up the road that morning. He was walking at the head of his ox train on the wooded stretch above the newly made artillery park. The day’s heat was growing and there was little wind in the thick woods of teak and cork trees that covered the low hills. Groups of pioneers felled trees where they might obstruct a gun carriage’s progress, and here and there Sharpe saw a whitewashed peg showing where Elliott had marked the track. Shots sounded ahead, but Sharpe took no notice. The upland valleys had become a favorite hunting ground for the shikarees who used nets, snares and ancient matchlocks to kill hares, wild pigs, deer, quail and partridge that they sold to the officers, and Sharpe assumed a party of the hunters was close to the track, but after a few seconds the firing intensified. The musketry was muffled by the thick leaves, but for a moment the sound was constant, almost at battle pitch, before, as suddenly as it had erupted, it stopped.

  His bullock drivers had halted, made nervous by the firing. “Come on!” Sharpe encouraged them. None of them spoke English, and Sharpe had no idea which language they did speak, but they were good-natured men, eager to please, and they prodded their heavily laden bullocks onward. Ahmed had unslung his musket and was peering ahead. He suddenly raised the gun to his shoulder, and Sharpe pushed it down before the boy could pull the trigger. “They’re ours,” he told the lad. “Sepoys.”

  A dozen sepoys hurried back through the trees. Major Simons was with them and, as they came closer, Sharpe saw the men were carrying a makeshift stretcher made from tree branches and jackets. “It’s Elliott.” Simons paused by Sharpe as his men hurried ahead. “Bloody fool got a chest wound. He won’t live. Stupid man was too far forward. I told him not to get ahead of the pickets.” Simons took a ragged red handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped the sweat from his face. “One less engineer.” Sharpe peered at Elliott who was blessedly unconscious. His face had gone pale, and pinkish blood was bubbling at his lips with every labored breath. “He won’t last the day,” Simons said brutally, “but I suppose we should get him back to the surgeons.”

  “Where are the enemy?” Sharpe asked.

  “They ran,” Simons said. “Haifa dozen of the bastards were waiting in ambush. They shot Elliott, took his weapons, but ran off when they saw us.”

  Three shikarees died that afternoon, ambushed in the high woods, and that night, when the road-builders camped in one of the grassy upland valleys, some shots were fired from a neighboring wood. The bullets hissed overhead, but none found a target. The pickets blazed back until a havildar shouted at them to hold their fire. Captain Pinckney shook his head. “I thought it was too good to last,” he said gloomily. “It’ll be slow work now.” He poked the fire around which a half-dozen officers were sitting.

  Major Simons grinned. “If I was the enemy,” he said, “I’d attack Mr. Sharpe’s oxen instead of attacking engineers. If they cut our supply line they’d do some real damage.”

  “There’s no point in shooting engineers,” Pinckney agreed. “We don’t need Royal Engineers anyway. We’ve been making roads for years. The fellows in the blue coats just get in the way. Mind you, they’ll still send us another.”

  “If there are any left,” Sharpe said. The campaign had been fatal for the engineers. Two had died blowing up the enemy guns at Assaye, another three were fevered and now Elliott was either dying or already dead.

  “They’ll find one,” Pinckney grumbled. “If there’s something the King’s army doesn’t need then you can be sure they’ve got a healthy supply of it.”

  “The Company army’s better?” Sharpe asked.

  “It is,” Major Simons said. “We work for a sterner master than you, Sharpe. It’s called bookkeeping. You fight for victories, we fight for profits. Leadenhall Street

  won’t pay for fancy engineers in blue coats, not when they can hire plain men like us at half the cost.”

  “They could afford me,” Sharpe said. “Cheap as they come, I am.”

  Next morning Simons threw a strong picket line ahead of the work parties, but no Mahrattas opposed the pioneers who were now widening the track where it twisted up a bare and steep slope that was littered with rocks. The track was ancient, worn into the hills by generations of travelers, but it had never been used by wagons, let alone by heavy guns. Merchants
who wanted to carry their goods up the escarpment had used the road leading directly to the fortress’s Southern Gate, while this track, which looped miles to the east of Gawilghur, was little more than a series of paths connecting the upland valleys where small farms had been hacked from the jungle. It was supposed to be tiger country, but Sharpe saw none of the beasts. At dawn he had returned to Deogaum to collect rice for the sepoys, and then spent the next four hours climbing back to where the pioneers were working. He was nervous at first, both of tigers and of an enemy ambush, but the worst he suffered was a series of drenching rainstorms that swept up the mountains.

  The rain stopped when he reached the working parties who were driving the road through a small ridge. Pinckney was setting a charge of gunpowder that would loosen the rock and let him cut out a mile of looping track. His servant brought a mug of tea that Sharpe drank sitting on a rock. He stared southward, watching the veils of gray rain sweep across the plain.

  “Did Wellesley say anything about sending a new engineer?” Major Simons asked him.

  “I just collected the rice, sir,” Sharpe said. “I didn’t see the General.”

  “I thought you were supposed to be a friend of his?” Simons observed sourly.

  “Everyone thinks that,” Sharpe said, “except him and me.”

  “But you saved his life?”

  Sharpe shrugged. “I reckon so. Either that or stopped him getting captured.”

  “And killed a few men doing it, I hear?”

  Sharpe looked at the tall Simons with some surprise, for he had not realized that his exploit had become common knowledge. “Don’t remember much about it.”

  “I suppose not. Still,” Simons said, “a feather in your cap?”

  “I don’t think Wellesley thinks that,” Sharpe said.

  “You’re a King’s officer now, Sharpe,” Simons said enviously. As an East India Company officer he was trapped in the Company’s cumbersome system of promotion. “If Wellesley thrives, he’ll remember you.”