Sharpe's Fortress

by Bernard Cornwell

  Sharpe frowned. “Why doesn’t Sajit just identify which men were ordered up the mountain? They must have got their chitties from him?”

  “I want to be sure, Sharpe, I want to be sure!” Torrance pleaded.

  “My testimony, sahib, would not be believed,” Sajit put in, “but no one would doubt the word of an English officer.”

  “Bloody hell,” Sharpe said. The last thing he felt like doing was wandering about the bullock camp identifying drivers. He was not sure he could do it anyway. “So why not summon the bullock men here?” he demanded.

  “The bad ones would run away, sahib, rather than come,” Sajit said.

  “Best to ambush them in their encampment, Sharpe,” Torrance said.

  “I’ll do my best,” Sharpe grunted,

  “I knew you would!” Torrance seemed relieved. “Do it now, Sharpe, and perhaps you could join me for a late dinner? Say at half past one?”

  Sharpe nodded, then went back into the sunlight to wait for Sajit.

  Kendrick and Lowry had vanished, presumably with Hakeswill. Ahmed had found a bucket of water and Stokes’s mare was drinking greedily. “You can stay here, Ahmed,” Sharpe said, but the boy shook his head. “You’re my bleeding shadow,” Sharpe grumbled.

  “Shadow?”

  Sharpe pointed to his own shadow. “Shadow.”

  Ahmed grinned, all white teeth in a grubby face. He liked the word. “Sharpe’s shadow!” he said.

  Sajit emerged from the house with a pink silk parasol that he offered to Sharpe. Sharpe refused, and the clerk, who had discarded his apron, gratefully shaded himself from the fierce midday sun. “I am sorry to be troublesome to you, sahib,” he said humbly.

  “No trouble,” Sharpe said dourly, following the clerk. Ahmed came behind, leading the Major’s mare.

  “The boy need not come,” Sajit insisted, glancing behind at the horse which seemed to alarm him.

  “You tell him that,” Sharpe said, “but don’t blame me if he shoots you. He’s very fond of shooting people.”

  Sajit hurried on. “I think I know, sahib, which is the bad man who is cheating us. He is a fellow from Mysore. He gave me many chitties and swore you signed them in front of him. If you would be so kind as to confirm or deny his story, we shall be finished.”

  “Then let’s find the bugger and be done with it.”

  Sajit led Sharpe through the bullock lines where the wealthier herdsmen had erected vast dark and sagging tents. Women slapped bread dough beside small ox-dung fires, and more piles of the fuel dried in the sun beside each tent entrance. Sharpe looked for Naig’s big green tents, but he could not see them and he assumed that whoever had inherited Naig’s business had packed up and gone.

  “There, sahib, that is the bad man’s tent.” Sajit nervously led Sharpe toward a brown tent that stood slightly apart from the others. He stopped a few paces from the entrance and lowered his voice. “He is called Ranjit, sahib.”

  “So fetch the bugger,” Sharpe said, “and I’ll tell you if he’s lying or not.”

  Sajit seemed nervous of confronting Ranjit for he hesitated, but then plucked up his courage, collapsed the parasol and dropped to the ground to crawl into the tent which sagged so deeply that the doorway was scarce higher than a man’s knee. Sharpe heard the murmur of voices, then Sajit backed hurriedly out of the low fringed entrance. He slapped at the dust on his white robes, then looked at Sharpe with a face close to tears. “He is a bad man, sahib. He will not come out. I told him a sahib was here to see him, but he used rude words!”

  “I’ll take a look at the bastard,” Sharpe said. “That’s all you need, isn’t it? For me to say whether I’ve seen him or not?”

  “Please, sahib,” Sajit said, and gestured at the tent’s entrance.

  Sharpe took off his hat so it would not tangle with the canvas, hoisted the tent’s entrance as high as he could, then ducked low under the heavy brown cloth.

  And knew instantly that it was a trap.

  And understood, almost in the same instant, that he could do nothing about it.

  The first blow struck his forehead, and his vision exploded in streaks of lightning and shuddering stars. He fell backward, out into the sunlight, and someone instantly grabbed one of his ankles and began pulling him into the deep shadow. He tried to kick, tried to push himself against the tent’s sides, but another hand seized his second leg, another blow hammered the side of his skull and, mercifully, he knew nothing more.

  “He’s got a thick skull, our Sharpie,” Hakeswill said with a grin. He prodded Sharpe’s prone body and got no reaction. “Fast asleep, he is.” The Sergeant’s face twitched. He had hit Sharpe with the heavy brass-bound butt of a musket and he was amazed that Sharpe’s skull was not broken. There was plenty of blood in his black hair, and he would have a bruise the size of a mango by nightfall, but his skull seemed to have taken the two blows without splintering. “He always was a thick-headed bugger,” Hakeswill said. “Now strip him.”

  “Strip him?” Kendrick asked.

  “When his body is found,” Hakeswill explained patiently, “if it is found, and you can’t rely on bleeding blackamoors to do a proper job and hide it, we don’t want no one seeing he’s a British officer, do we? Not that he is an officer. He’s just a jumped-up bit of muck. So strip him, then tie his hands and feet and cover his eyeballs.”

  Kendrick and Lowry jerked and tugged Sharpe’s coat free, then handed the garment to Hakeswill who ran his fingers along the hems.

  “Got it!” he exulted when he felt the lumps in the cloth. He took out a knife, slit the coat and the two privates stared in awe as he eased the glittering jewels out of the tightly sewn seam. It was dark in the shadowed tent, but the stones gleamed bright. “Get on with it!” Hakeswill said. “The rest of his clothes off!”

  “What are you doing?” Sajit had sidled into the tent and now stared at the jewels.

  “None of your bleeding business,” Hakeswill said.

  “You have jewels?” Sajit asked.

  Hakeswill slid out his bayonet and stabbed it at Sajit, checking the lunge a fraction before the blade would have punctured the clerk’s neck. “The jewels ain’t your business, Sajit. The jewels are my business. Your business is Sharpie, got it? I agreed to give him to your bleeding uncle, but I gets what he carries.”

  “My uncle will pay well for good stones,” Sajit said.

  “Your Uncle Jama’s a bleeding monkey who’d cheat me soon as fart at me, so forget the bleeding stones. They’re mine.” Hakeswill thrust the first handful into a pocket and started searching the rest of Sharpe’s clothes. He slit open all the seams, then cut Sharpe’s boots apart to discover a score of rubies hidden in the folded boot-tops. They were small rubies, scarce bigger than peas, and Hakeswill was looking for one large ruby. “I saw it, I did. The bloody Tippoo had it on his hat. Large as life! Look in his hair.”

  Kendrick obediently ran his fingers through Sharpe’s blood-encrusted hair. “Nothing there, Sarge.”

  “Turn the bugger over and have a look you know where.”

  “Not me!”

  “Don’t be so bloody squeamish! And tie his hands. Fast now! You don’t want the sod waking up, do you?”

  The clothes and boots yielded sixty-three stones. There were rubies, emeralds, sapphires and four small diamonds, but no large ruby. Hakeswill frowned. Surely Sharpe would not have sold the ruby? Still, he consoled himself, there was a fortune here, and he could not resist putting all the stones together on a mat and staring at them. “I do like a bit of glitter,” he breathed as his fingers greedily touched the jewels. He put ten of the smaller stones in one pile, another ten in a second, and pushed the two piles toward Kendrick and Lowry.”That’s your cut, boys. Keep you in whores for the rest of your lives, that will.”

  “Perhaps I will tell my uncle about your stones,” Sajit said, staring at the jewels.

  “I expect you will,” Hakeswill said, “and so bleeding what? I ain’t as dozy as Sharpie. You wo
n’t catch me.”

  “Then maybe I shall tell Captain Torrance.” Sajit had positioned himself close to the entrance so that he could flee if Hakeswill attacked him. “Captain Torrance likes wealth.”

  Likes it too much, Hakeswill thought, and if Torrance knew about the stones he would make Hakeswill’s life hell until he yielded a share. The Sergeant’s face juddered in a series of uncontrollable twitches. “You’re a bright lad, Sajit, ain’t you?” he said. “You might be nothing but a bleeding heathen blackamoor but you’ve got more than bullock dung for brains, ain’t you? Here.” He tossed Sajit three of the stones. “That keeps your tongue quiet, and if it don’t, I’ll cut it out and have a feed on it. Partial to a plate of tongue, I am. Nice piece of tongue, knob of butter and some gravy. Proper food, that.” He pushed the rest of the stones into his pocket, then stared broodingly at Sharpe’s naked trussed body. “He had more,” Hakeswill said with a frown, “I know he had more.” The Sergeant suddenly clicked his fingers. “What about his pack?”

  “What pack?” Lowry asked.

  “The bleeding pack he carries, which he shouldn’t, being an officer, which he ain’t. Where’s his pack?”

  The privates shrugged. Sajit frowned. “He had no pack when he came to the Captain’s house.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “He came on a horse,” Lowry said helpfully. “It were a gray horse, and he didn’t have no pack.”

  “So where’s the horse?” Hakeswill demanded angrily. “We should look in its saddlebags!”

  Lowry frowned, trying to remember. “A bleeding kid had it,” he said at last.

  “So where’s the kid?”

  “He ran off,” Sajit said.

  “Ran off?” Hakeswill said threateningly. “Why?”

  “He saw you hit him,” Sajit said. “I saw it. He fell out of the tent. There was blood on his face.”

  “You shouldn’t have hit him till he was right inside the tent,” Kendrick said chidingly.

  “Shut your bloody face,” Hakeswill said, then frowned. “So where did the kid run?”

  “Away,” Sajit said. “I chased him, but he climbed onto the horse.”

  “Kid don’t speak English,” Kendrick said helpfully.

  “How the hell do you know that?”

  “Cos I talked to him!”

  “And who’s going to believe a heathen black kid what don’t speak English?” Lowry asked.

  Hakeswill’s face was racked by a quick series of twitches. He suspected he was safe. Lowry was right. Who would believe the kid? Even so the Sergeant wished that Jama’s men were coming earlier to fetch Sharpe. Jama himself had gone away from the camp, reckoning that if he was going to murder a British officer then it was best done a long way from the British army. Hakeswill had warned Jama not to expect Sharpe until the evening, and now he had to guard him until dusk. “I told you to put a bandage on his eyes,” Hakeswill snapped. “Don’t want him to see us!”

  “It don’t matter if he does,” Kendrick said. “He ain’t going to see the dawn, is he?”

  “Got more lives than a basketful of bleeding cats, that one,” Hakeswill said. “If I had any sense I’d slit his throat now.”

  “No!” Sajit said. “He was promised to my uncle.”

  “And your uncle’s paying us, yes?”

  “That too is agreed,” Sajit said.

  Hakeswill stood and walked to Sharpe’s unconscious body. “I put those stripes on his back,” he said proudly. “Lied through my teeth, I did, and had Sharpie flogged. Now I’ll have him killed.” He remembered how Sharpe had flung him among the tigers and his face twitched as he recalled the elephant trying to crush him to death, and in his sudden rage he kicked at Sharpe and went on kicking until Kendrick hauled him away.

  “If you kill him, Sarge,” Kendrick said, “then the blackies won’t pay us, will they?”

  Hakeswill let himself be pulled away. “So how will your uncle kill him?” he asked Sajit.

  “His jettis will do it.”

  “I’ve seen them bastards at work,” Hakeswill said in a tone of admiration. ‘Just make it slow. Make it slow and make it bleeding painful.”

  “It will be slow,” Sajit promised, “and very painful. My uncle is not a merciful man.”

  “But I am,” Hakeswill said. “I am. Because I’m letting another man have the pleasure of killing Sharpie.” He spat at Sharpe. “Dead by dawn, Sharpie. You’ll be down with Old Nick, where you ought to be!”

  He settled against one of the tent poles and trickled jewels from one palm to the other. Flies crawled among the crusting blood in Sharpe’s hair. The Ensign would be dead by dawn, and Hakeswill was a rich man. Revenge, the Sergeant decided, was sweet as honey.

  Ahmed saw Sharpe fall back from the tent entrance, saw blood bright on his forehead, then watched as hands seized Sharpe and dragged him into the deep shadows.

  Then Sajit, the clerk with the pink umbrella, turned toward him. “Boy,” he snapped, “come here!”

  Ahmed pretended not to understand, though he understood well enough that he was a witness to something deeply wrong. He backed away, tugging Major Stokes’s mare with him. He let the musket slip down from his shoulder and Sajit, seeing the threat, suddenly rushed at him, but Ahmed was even faster. He jumped up to sprawl across the saddle and, without bothering to seat himself properly, kicked the horse into motion. The startled mare leaped away as Ahmed hauled himself onto her back. The stirrups were too long for him, but Ahmed had been raised with horses and could have ridden the mare bareback, blindfolded and back to front. He swerved southward, galloping between tents, fires and grazing bullocks, and leaving Sajit far behind. A woman shouted a protest as he nearly galloped over her children. He slowed the mare as he reached the edge of the encampment and looked back to see that he had left Sajit far behind.

  What the hell should he do? He knew no one in the British camp. He looked up at the high summit where Gawilghur just showed. He supposed his old comrades in Manu Bappoo’s Lions of Allah were up there, but his uncle, with whom he had traveled from Arabia, was dead and buried in Argaum’s black earth. He knew other soldiers in the regiment, but he also feared them. Those other soldiers wanted Ahmed to be their servant, and not just to cook for them and clean their weapons. Sharpe alone had shown him friendliness, and Sharpe now needed help, but Ahmed did not know how to provide it. He thought about the problem as he knotted the stirrup leathers.

  The plump, red-faced and white-haired man in the hills had been friendly, but how was Ahmed to talk to him? He decided he ought to try and so he turned the horse, planning to ride her all about the camp perimeter and then back up the road into the hills, but an officer of the camp pickets saw him. The man was riding a horse and he spurred it close to Ahmed and noted the British saddlecloth. “What are you doing, boy?” he asked. The officer presumed Ahmed was exercising the horse, but Ahmed took fright at the challenge and kicked back.

  “Thief!” the officer shouted and gave chase. “Stop! Thief!”

  A sepoy turned with his musket and Ahmed nudged the horse so that she ran the man down. There was a group of houses close by and Ahmed turned toward them, jumped a garden wall, thumped through some beds of vegetables, jumped another wall, ducked under some fruit trees, jumped a hedge and splashed through a muddy pond before kicking the horse up a bank and into some trees. The officer had not dared follow him through the gardens, but Ahmed could hear the hue and cry beyond the houses. He patted the mare’s neck as she threaded through the trees, then curbed her at the wood’s edge. There was about a half-mile of open country, then more thick woods that promised safety if only the tired mare could make the distance without faltering. “If Allah wills it,” Ahmed said, then kicked the horse into a gallop.

  His pursuers were well behind, but they saw him break cover and now a dozen horsemen were chasing him. Someone fired at him. He heard the musket shot, but the ball went nowhere near him. He leaned over the mane and just let the horse run. He looked back onc
e and saw the pursuers bunching in his path, and then he was in the trees and he twisted northward, cut back west, then went north again, going ever deeper into the woods until at last he slowed the blowing horse so that the sound of her thumping hooves would not betray him.

  He listened. He could hear other horses blundering through the leaves, but they were not coming any closer, and then he began to wonder if it would not be better to let himself be caught after all, for surely someone among the British would speak his language? Maybe if he went all the way to where the men were making the road in the hills he would be too late to help Sharpe. He felt miserable, utterly unsure what he should do, and then he decided he must go back and find help within the encampment and so he turned the horse back toward his pursuers.

  And saw a musket pointing straight at his throat.

  The man holding the musket was an Indian and had one of the spiraling brass helmets that the Mahrattas wore. He was a cavalryman, but he had picketed his horse a few yards away and had crept up on Ahmed on foot. The man grinned.

  Ahmed wondered if he should just kick the tired mare and risk his luck, but then another Mahratta stepped from the leaves, and this one held a curved tulwar. A third man appeared, and then more men came, all mounted, to surround him.

  And Ahmed, who knew he had panicked and failed, wept.

  It seemed to Dodd that Prince Manu Bappoo’s policy of rewarding freebooters with cash for weapons captured from the British was failing miserably. So far they had fetched in three ancient matchlocks that must have belonged to shikarees, a broken musket of local manufacture, and a fine pistol and sword that had been taken from an engineer officer. No scabbard for the sword, of course, but the two trophies, so far as Dodd was concerned, were the only evidence that the Mahrattas had tried to stop the British approach. He pestered Manu Bappoo, pleading to be allowed to take his Cobras down to where the pioneers were driving the road, but the Rajah’s brother adamantly refused to let Dodd’s men leave the fortress.