Sharpe's Triumph

by Bernard Cornwell

  The big painted eighteen-pounder gun offered some small safety, and so Sharpe stooped, took hold of Wellesley's collar, and unceremoniously dragged the General towards the cannon. The General was not unconscious, for he clung to his slim straight sword, but he was half stunned and helpless. Two men ran to cut Sharpe off from the gun's sanctuary and he let go of the General's stiff collar and attacked the pair.

  "Bastards," he screamed as he fought them. Bugger the advice about straight arm and parrying, this was a time to kill in sheer rage and he went for the two gunners in a berserk fury. The sabre was a clumsy weapon, but it was sharp and heavy and he almost severed the first man's neck and the subsequent backswing opened the second man's arm to the bone, and Sharpe turned back to Wellesley, who was still not recovered from the impact of his fall, and he saw an Arab lancer spurring his horse straight at the fallen General. Sharpe bellowed an obscenity at the man, then leaped forward and slashed the sabre's heavy blade across the face of the lancer's horse and saw the beast swerve aside. The lance blade jerked up into the air as the Arab tried to control his pain-maddened horse, and Sharpe stooped, took Wellesley's collar again, and hauled the General into the space between the gun's gaudy barrel and one of its gigantic wheels.

  "Stay there!" Sharpe snapped to Wellesley, then turned around to see that the Arab had been thrown from his horse, but was now leading a charge of gunners. Sharpe went to meet them. He swept the lance aside with the sabre's blade, then rammed the weapon's bar hilt into the Arab's face. He felt the man's nose break, kicked him in the balls, shoved him back, hacked down with the sabre, then turned to his left and sliced the blade within an inch of a gunner's eyes.

  The attackers backed away, leaving Sharpe panting. Wellesley at last stood, steadying himself with one hand on the gun wheel

  "Sergeant Sharpe?" Wellesley asked in puzzlement.

  "Stay there, sir," Sharpe said, without turning round. He had four men in front of him now, four men with bared teeth and bright weapons.

  Their eyes nicked from Sharpe to Wellesley and back to Sharpe. The Mahrattas did not know they had the British General trapped, but they knew the man beside the gun must be a senior officer for his red coat was bright with braid and lace, and they came to capture him, but to reach him they first needed to pass Sharpe. Two men came from the gun's far side, and Wellesley parried a pike blade with his sword, then stepped away from the gun to stand beside Sharpe and immediately a rush of enemy came to seize him.

  "Get back!" Sharpe shouted at Wellesley, then stepped into the enemy's charge.

  He grabbed a pike that was reaching for the General's belly, tugged it towards him, and met the oncoming gunner with the sabre's tip. Straight into the man's throat, and he twisted the blade free and swung it right and felt the steel jar on a man's skull, but there was no time to assess the damage, just to step left and stab at a third man. His shoulder was bleeding, but there was no pain. He was keening a mad noise as he fought and it seemed to Sharpe at that instant as though he could do nothing wrong. It was as if the enemy had been magically slowed to half speed and he had been quickened. He was much taller than any of them, he was much stronger, and he was suddenly much faster. He was even enjoying the fight, had he known anything of what he felt, but he sensed only the madness of battle, the sublime madness that blots out fear, dulls pain and drives a man close to ecstasy. He was screaming obscenities at the enemy, begging them to come and be killed.

  He moved to his right and slashed the blade in a huge downward cut that opened a man's face. The enemy had retreated, and Wellesley again came to Sharpe's side and so invited the attackers to close in again, and Sharpe again pushed the General back into the space between the tall gun wheel and the huge painted barrel of the eighteen-pounder.

  "Stay there," he snapped, 'and watch under the barrel!" He turned away to face the attackers.

  "Come on, you bastards! Come on! I want you!"

  Two men came, and Sharpe stepped towards them and used both his hands to bring the heavy sabre down in a savage cut that bit through the hat and skull of the nearest enemy. Sharpe screamed a curse at the dying man, for his sabre was trapped in his skull, but he wrenched it free and sliced it right, a grey jelly sliding off its edge, to chase the second man back. That man held up his hands as he retreated, as if to suggest that he did not want to fight after all, and Sharpe cursed him as he slashed the blade's tip through his gullet. He spat on the staggering man and spat dry-mouthed again at the enemies who were watching him.

  "Come on! Come on!" he taunted them.

  "Yellow bastards! Come on!"

  There were at last horsemen riding back to help now, but more Mahrattas were closing in on the fight. Two men tried to reach Wellesley across the cannon barrel and the General stabbed one in the face, then slashed at the arm of the other as he reached beneath the gun barrel. Behind him Sharpe was screaming insults at the enemy and one man took up the challenge and ran at Sharpe with a bayonet. Sharpe shouted in what sounded like delight as he parried the lunge and then punched the sabre's hilt into the man's face. Another man was coming from the right and so Sharpe kicked his first assailant's legs out from under him, then slashed at the newcomer. Christ knows how many of the bastards there were, but Sharpe did not care. He had come here to fight and God had given him one screaming hell of a battle. The man parried Sharpe's cut, lunged, and Sharpe stepped past the lunge and hammered the sabre's bar hilt into the man's eye. The man screamed and clutched at Sharpe, who tried to throw him off by punching the hilt into his face again. The other attackers were vanishing now, fleeing from the horsemen who spurred back towards Wellesley.

  But one Mahratta officer had been stalking Sharpe and he now saw his opportunity as Sharpe was held by the half-blinded man. The officer came from behind Sharpe and he swung his tulwar at the back of the redcoat's neck.

  The stroke was beautifully aimed. It hit Sharpe plumb on the nape of his neck, and it should have cut through his spine and dropped him dead to the bloody ground in an instant, but there was a dead king's ruby hidden in the leather bag around which Sharpe's hair was clubbed and the big ruby stopped the blade dead. The jolt of the blow jerked Sharpe forward, but he kept his feet and the man who had been clutching him at last released his grip and Sharpe could turn. The officer swung again and Sharpe parried so hard that the Sheffield steel slashed clean through the tulwar's light blade and the next stroke cut through the blade's owner.

  "Bastard!" Sharpe shouted as he tugged the blade free and he whirled around to kill the next man who came near, but instead it was Captain Campbell who was there, and behind him were a dozen troopers who spurred their horses into the enemy and hacked down with their sabres.

  For a second or two Sharpe could scarcely believe that he was alive.

  Nor could he believe that the fight was over. He wanted to kill again.

  His blood was up, the rage was seething in him, and there was no more enemy and so he contented himself by slashing the sabre down onto the Mahratta officer's head.

  "Bastard!" he shouted, then booted the man's face to jolt the blade free. Then, suddenly, he was shaking. He turned and saw that Wellesley was staring at him aghast and Sharpe was certain he must have done something wrong. Then he remembered what it was.

  "Sorry, sir," he said.

  "You're sorry?" Wellesley said, though he seemed scarcely able to speak. The General's face was pale.

  "For pushing you, sir," Sharpe said.

  "Sorry, sir. Didn't mean to, sir."

  "I hope you damn well did mean to," Wellesley said forcibly, and Sharpe saw that the General, usually so calm, was shaking too.

  Sharpe felt he ought to say something more, but he could not think what it was.

  "Lost your last horse, sir," he said instead.

  "Sorry, sir."

  Wellesley gazed at him. In all his life he had never seen a man fight like Sergeant Sharpe, though in truth the General could not remember everything that had happened in the last two minutes. He remem
bered

  Diomed falling and he remembered trying to loosen his feet from the stirrups, and he remembered a blow on the head that was probably one of Diomed's flailing hooves, and he thought he remembered seeing a bayonet bright in the sky above him and he had known that he must be killed at that moment, and then everything was a dizzy confusion. He recalled Sharpe's voice, using language that shocked even the General, who was not easily offended, and he remembered being thrust back against the gun so that the Sergeant could face the enemy alone, and Wellesley had approved of that decision, not because it spared him the need to fight, but because he had recognized that Sharpe would be hampered by his presence.

  Then he had watched Sharpe kill, and he had been astonished by the ferocity, enthusiasm and skill of that killing, and Wellesley knew that his life had been saved, and he knew he must thank Sharpe, but for some reason he could not find the words and so he just stared at the embarrassed Sergeant whose face was spattered with blood and whose long hair had come loose so that he looked like a fiend from the pit.

  Wellesley tried to frame the words that would express his gratitude, yet the syllables choked in his throat, but just then a trooper came trotting to the gun with the reins of the roan mare in his hand. The mare had survived unhurt, and now the trooper offered the reins towards Wellesley who, as if in a dream, walked out of the sheltered space inside the gun's tall wheel to step across the bodies Sharpe had put onto the ground. The General suddenly stooped and picked up a stone.

  "This is yours, Sergeant," he said to Sharpe, holding out the ruby.

  "I saw it fall."

  "Thank you, sir. Thank you." Sharpe took the ruby.

  The General frowned at the ruby. It seemed wrong for a sergeant to have a stone that size, but once Sharpe had closed his fingers about the stone, the General decided it must have been a blood-soaked piece of rock. It surely was not a ruby?

  "Are you all right, sir?" Major Blackis-ton asked anxiously.

  "Yes, yes, thank you, Blackiston." The General seemed to shake off his torpor and went to stand beside Campbell who had dismounted to kneel beside Diomed. The horse was shaking and neighing softly.

  "Can he be saved?" Wellesley asked.

  "Don't know, sir," Campbell said.

  "The pike blade's deep in his lung, poor thing."

  "Pull it out, Campbell. Gently. Maybe he'll live." Wellesley looked around him to see that the yth Native Cavalry had scoured the gunners away and driven the remaining Mahratta horsemen off, while Harness's 778th had again marched into canister and round shot to capture the southern part of the Mahratta artillery. Harness's adjutant now cantered through the bodies scattered around the guns.

  "We've nails and mauls if you want us to spike the guns, sir," he said to Wellesley.

  "No, no. I think the gunners have learned their lesson, and we might take some of the cannon into our own service," Wellesley said, then saw that he was still holding his sword. He sheathed it.

  "Pity to spike good guns," he added. It could take hours of hard work to drill a driven nail out of a touch-hole, and so long as the enemy gunners were defeated then the guns would no longer be a danger. The General turned to an Indian trooper who had joined Campbell beside Diomed.

  "Can you save him?" he asked anxiously.

  The Indian very gently pulled at the pike, but it would not move.

  "Harder, man, harder," Campbell urged him, and laid his own hands on the pike's bloodied shaft.

  The two men tugged at the pike and the fallen horse screamed with pain.

  "Careful!" Wellesley snapped.

  "You want the pike in or out, sir?" Campbell asked.

  "Try and save him," the General said, and Campbell shrugged, took hold of the shaft again, put his boot on the horse's red wet chest, and gave a swift, hard heave. The horse screamed again as the blade left his hide and as a new rush of blood welled down to soak his white hair.

  "Nothing more we can do now, sir," Campbell said.

  "Look after him," Wellesley ordered the Indian trooper, then he frowned when he saw that his last horse, the roan mare, still had her trooper's saddle and that no one had thought to take his own saddle off Diomed.

  That was the orderly's job and Wellesley looked for Sharpe, then remembered he had to express his thanks to the Sergeant, but again the words would not come and so Wellesley asked Campbell to change the saddles, and once that was done he climbed onto the mare's back.

  Captain Barclay, who had survived his dash across the field, reined in beside the General.

  "Wallace's brigade is ready to attack, sir."

  "We need to get Harness's fellows into line," Wellesley said.

  "Any news of Maxwell?"

  "Not yet, sir," Barclay said. Colonel Maxwell had led the cavalry in their pursuit across the River Juah.

  "Major!" Wellesley shouted at the commander of the Native Cavalry.

  "Have your men hunt down the gunners here. Make sure none of them live, then guard the guns so they can't be retaken. Gentlemen?"

  He spoke to his aides.

  "Let's move on."

  Sharpe watched the General ride away into the thinning skein of cannon smoke, then he looked down at the ruby in his hand and saw that it was as red and shiny as the blood that dripped from his sabre tip. He wondered if the ruby had been dipped in the fountain of Zum-Zum along with the Tippoo's helmet. Was that why it had saved his life? It had done bugger all for the Tippoo, but Sharpe was alive when he should have been dead, and so, for that matter, was Major General Sir Arthur Wellesley.

  The General had left Sharpe alone by the gun, all but for the dead and dying men and the trooper who was trying to staunch Diomed's wound with a rag. Sharpe laughed suddenly, startling the trooper.

  "He didn't even say thank you," Sharpe said aloud.

  "What, sahib?" the trooper asked.

  "You don't call me sahib," Sharpe said.

  "I'm just another bloody soldier like you. Good for bloody nothing except fighting other people's battles.

  And ten to one the buggers won't thank you." He was thirsty so he opened one of the General's canteens and drank from it greedily.

  "Is that horse going to live?"

  The Indian did not seem to understand everything Sharpe said, but the question must have made some sense for he pointed at Diomed's mouth.

  The stallion's lips were drawn back to reveal yellow teeth through which a pale pink froth seeped. The Indian shook his head sadly.

  "I bled that horse," Sharpe said, 'and the General said he was greatly obliged to me. Those were his very words, "greatly obliged". Gave me a bloody coin, he did. But you save his life and he doesn't even say thank you! I should have bled him, not his bloody horse. I should have bled him to bloody death." He drank more of the water and wished it were arrack or rum.

  "You know what the funny thing is?" he asked the Indian.

  "I didn't even do it because he was the General. I did it because I like him. Not personally, but I do like him. In a strange sort of way. I wouldn't have done it for you. I'd have done it for Tom Garrard, but he's a friend, see? And I'd have done it for Colonel McCandless, because he's a proper gentleman, but I wouldn't have done it for too many others." Sharpe sounded drunk, even to himself, but in truth he was stone cold sober in a battlefield that had suddenly gone silent beneath the westering sun. It was almost evening, but there was still enough daylight left to finish the battle, though whether Sharpe would have anything to do with the finishing seemed debatable, for he had lost his job as the General's orderly, had lost his horse, had lost his musket and was stranded with nothing but a dented sabre.

  "That ain't really true," he confessed to the uncomprehending Indian, 'what I said about liking him. I want him to like me, and that's different, ain't it? I thought the miserable bugger might make me an officer! Sod that for a hope, eh? No sash for me, lad. It's back to being a bloody infantryman."

  He used the bloody sabre to cut a strip of cloth from the robes of a dead Arab, and he folde
d the strip into a pad that he pushed under his jacket to staunch the blood from the tulwar wound on his left shoulder.

  It was not a serious injury, he decided, for he could feel no broken bones and his left arm was unhindered. He tossed the dented sabre away, found a discarded Mahratta musket, tugged the cartridge box and bayonet off the dead owner's belt, then went to find someone to kill.

  It took half an hour to form the new line from the five battalions that had marched through the Mahratta gunfire and put Pohlmann's right to flight, but now the five battalions faced north towards Pohlmann's new position which rested its left flank on Assaye's mud walls then stretched along the southern bank of the River Juah. The Mahrattas had forty guns remaining, Pohlmann still commanded eight thousand infantry and innumerable cavalry, and the Rajah of Berar's twenty thousand infantrymen still waited behind the village's makeshift ramparts.

  Wellesley's infantry numbered fewer than four thousand men, he had only two light guns that were serviceable and scarcely six hundred cavalrymen mounted on horses that were bone weary and parched dry.

  "We can hold them!" Pohlmann roared at his men.

  "We can hold them and beat them! Hold them and beat them." He was still on horseback, and still in his gaudy silk coat. He had dreamed of riding his elephant across a field strewn with the enemy's dead and piled with the enemy's captured weapons, but instead he was encouraging his men to a last stand beside the river.

  "Hold them," he shouted, 'hold them and beat them." The Juah flowed behind his men, while in front of them the shadows stretched long across Assaye's battle-littered farmlands.

  Then the pipes sounded again, and Pohlmann turned his horse to look at the right-hand end of his line and he saw the tall black bearskins and the swinging kilts of the damned Scottish regiment coming forward again. The sun caught their white crossbelts and glinted from their bayonets. Beyond them, half hidden by the trees, the British cavalry was threatening, though they seemed to be checked by a battery of cannon on the right of Pohlmann's line. The Hanoverian knew the cavalry was no danger. It was the infantry, the unstoppable red-jacketed infantry, that was going to beat him, and he saw the sepoy battalions starting forward on the Highlanders' flank and he half turned his horse, thinking to ride to where the Scottish regiment would strike his line. It would hit Saleur's compoo, and suddenly Pohlmann could not care less any more. Let Saleur fight his battle, because Pohlmann knew it was lost. He stared at the y78th and he reckoned that no force on earth could stop such men.