The Beast of Mysore (Wellington Undead Book 1)

by Richard Estep

  “Forgive me, General Baird. I was merely thinking aloud.” Arthur gathered his thoughts once more. He cleared his throat with a slight cough. “Say what you will of Tipu, gentlemen, but he is neither a coward nor a fool, if all accounts are to be believed.” Wellesley began to tick off his reasons on the fingers of one hand. “Firstly, he knows that we outnumber him, his 30,000 to our 50,000. Tipu’s soldiers are in part a mercenary army, but their reputation for fierceness and proficiency is well-earned. He has beaten British forces in the field before.” There was general muttering and dissent around the table at this remark. None wanted to remember the humiliating defeats dealt to the British forces twenty years before, during the Second Anglo-Mysore War. Tipu had actually gotten away with the unthinkable, dictating terms of surrender to the British commander, who had had little alternative but to agree and return to London in shame. His shame was not to last long, however, as the Minister of War ordered the luckless General Sir Hector Munro be tied to a gun carriage at Horse Guards Parade just prior to the sunrise. When dawn broke that following morning, honor was publicly satisfied when Munro was immolated in a blazing column of fire which could be seen from clear across the river.

  His Majesty, King George of England, was a famously unforgiving man.

  “Aye, that may be so,” Baird rumbled. “But Cornwallis handed him his arse a few years later, didn’t he?” The big General crossed his arms smugly.

  “True,” Wellesley conceded, “but it was a damned close-run thing. When Cornwallis knocked him back on his heels, Tipu used the same method of denying him his lifeline. Crops burned. Cattle put to the sword. Wells poisoned.”

  “Bloody heathen Hindu,” Baird spat. “It’s no way for civilized men to wage a war.”

  “As a matter of fact, he is a Muslim,” corrected Wellesley, ignoring Baird’s eye-roll and give me strength expression. The Major-General had lost none of his legendary irascibility when he had received the Dark Gift. Perhaps a different tack was needed.

  “It may seem as though I am splitting hairs,” Arthur conceded, his tone now somewhat conciliatory, “but the key to victory lies in knowing everything possible about one’s adversary. Tipu is a Muslim who has somehow managed to maintain control of a predominately Hindu region, without the populace rising up against him. This is by no means a small achievement, and we would do well not to underestimate him.”

  “You admire him, Colonel Wellesley?” This from Major Shee, who sounded genuinely curious rather than judgmental.

  “I respect him,” Arthur corrected. “There is a difference.”

  “Quite so.” Harris nodded his approval. “One does not have to hate an adversary in order to destroy him; and destroy him we shall, make no mistake about that, gentlemen.” The vampire general stood, indicating the fortress of Seringapatam with the pointed nail of one pale, bony finger. “Seringapatam remains his base of power, and our strategy remains the same. We shall advance upon him in his den, crushing any resistance that we may meet upon the way, then encircle it and lay siege.”

  “Those walls are rated formidable, General,” cautioned Shee.

  “Indeed they are. I have seen them with my own eyes,” confirmed Baird. “Formidable, but not invincible. Nothing that the siege guns cannot handle, at any rate.”

  The siege guns to which he referred were the prize of Harris’ artillery train, two gigantic cannons capable of hurling a 24-pound shot. Most of the other guns could handle 18-, 12-, or 9-pound cannonballs, and were intended to either duel the enemy cannon or blast bloody swathes through his lines of infantry. Not so the siege guns, the sole purpose of which was to reduce the fortified walls of Seringapatam to rubble – or at the very least, to create enough of a breach that the redcoats could enter and then assault the city.

  “How long do we estimate that it will take to make a practicable breach?” asked Harris. “Days? Weeks?”

  “No more than a couple of days, General,” Baird responded confidently. “It’s just a matter of picking the right spot to site the artillery, or so Colonel Gent tells me, and then simply keeping the enemy from harassing the gunners while they go about the business of tearing the Tipu a second arsehole.”

  Had he still been flesh and blood, Harris might actually have blushed at the profanity. Save it for the troops, Baird, thought Wellesley disapprovingly. Baird glanced up sharply, flashing his fangs in a toothy grin that was also part challenge. Now it was Arthur’s turn to curse, though only inwardly. He had forgotten that the older and more powerful another vampire was, the more capable they were of reading one’s mind. He bolstered his psychic defenses with a conscious effort of will, erecting a stronger mental barrier against intrusion.

  “If this is indeed the Sultan moving against us, then we would do well to meet him on the open plain, where our forces have the advantage.” Harris referred to the redcoats’ vaunted ability to fire volley after volley of aimed musket-fire into the ranks of an enemy, an ability that had broken opponent after opponent. “The baggage train shall remain encamped tonight. We shall send out more cavalry scouts to ascertain Tipu’s position in greater detail - General Baird, please see to it.”

  A rustling sound indicated that the tent flap had just been opened once more. Heads turned to see that Ensign Brigham had been admitted by the sentries. The lanky boy – at fourteen, he truly was little more than a boy – looked to be scared half to death at being in the presence of so many of his superiors at the same time.

  “Mr. Brigham, pray come closer and give us your news.” Harris’s tone was jovial, a blatant attempt to put the boy at his ease. All those present knew that ice water ran through the general’s long-dead veins.

  Flushed and sweating, Brigham approached the table with palpable reluctance.

  “Your hat, Mr. Brigham,” Wellesley reminded him gently.

  “My…uh, my…”

  “Your hat, sir. Pray remove it.”

  The ensign’s face turned crimson. Eyes shooting straight upwards, he frantically snatched at the front corner of his bicorn hat and tore it from his head, stammering, “my…my…my apologies, sir.”

  “A pardonable offense,” Baird said good-naturedly, but could not resist adding, “this time.” The Major-General flashed the boy the same type of grin with which a cat might favor a mouse, the tips of his white fangs appearing from behind the upper lip. Much to his credit, Brigham did not immediately soil his britches then and there, although all of the blood did immediately drain from his face until it was practically as pale as that of the other officers in the room.

  “I must beg to report, sirs, that word has come in from the main column. Captain Ponsonby’s compliments, sirs, and he reports that one of the men has deserted, sirs.”

  “One of the men?” asked Baird. “D’ye mean one of our men, or one of the…native men?” The word native was infused with venom and bile. He really does not like them, Wellesley thought guardedly to himself, and that may well be our undoing, if we do not take care.

  “One of ours, sir,” Brigham nodded. The ensign clutched his hat wretchedly between his fingertips, nervously twisting and turning it without any actual awareness of what he was doing. “A private, sir. From the 33rd.”

  Baird was on his feet in an instant, slapping the table so hard that a great crack appeared in the thick wood. “A bally redcoat - and one of yours, Wellesley? Good God, sir, this shall not do, d’ye hear?”

  Arthur’s face remained frozen, impassive and utterly expressionless. Inside, however, his rage was already beginning to build. He stood slowly and said with great deliberation, “I most definitely do hear, General Baird. And I shall attend to the matter. Immediately.”

  “Best take care of it, Wellesley.” Harris locked eyes with his and the two officers exchanged a meaningful look, one which brooked no misunderstanding. “Make an example. Quickly - before the rot spreads.”

  “You may depend upon it, General. Please excuse me.”

  In a swirling cloud of dark black smoke, Wellesley
was suddenly gone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Private Thomas Gilman, late of His Majesty’s 33rd Regiment of Foot, opened his eyes slowly, and wished with every single fiber of his being to be back on parade, even under the all-seeing and sadistic gaze of Sergeant Belton.

  He was lying on a hard tile floor that was composed of hundreds, perhaps thousands of tiny little squares of all shapes, sizes, and colors. Exactly what image the mosaic formed in totality was still up for question.

  When the tiger pounced, Thomas had been prepared to die, or at least as prepared as any man could have been on such short notice. Screwing his eyes tightly shut and taking one last breath of sweet, sweet evening air, he had mentally prepared himself to scream all the way to the imminent meeting with his maker. His mind was already standing on its tiptoes, ready to describe to him in excruciating detail every sensation of those razor-sharp claws and teeth tearing his flesh and muscle into bloody strips and chunks.

  Then, it had all gone black.

  Thomas didn’t have the faintest idea how much time had passed, but during his blackout, he had somehow been transported to a grand reception hall or someplace similar in scale and purpose. It was palatial in both size and ornamentation. Brightly-colored silk curtains and draperies bedecked every side of the room, vying for the eye’s attention with tapestries and painted murals that depicted legendary Indian heroes in the process of conducting heroic deeds. The vast majority of those deeds seemed to involve tigers.

  In fact, tigers appeared to be the dominant theme here, Thomas realized, because everywhere he looked there were tigers. Golden-encrusted tiger statues with precious gems for eyes; tiger-skin rugs and wall-hangings; even the two muscle-bound guardsmen who stood either side of the huge wooden doors wore tiger-striped shirts.

  With a sudden, sickening jolt, Thomas realized exactly where it was that he must be.

  The Tipu’s palace. Oh, shit.

  Sensation was returning through abused and battered nerves, and along with it came a nagging prickle across the length of his right shoulder. Thomas raised a hand and felt something warm and sticky. Blood, he saw. Most of it was congealed now, but he had somehow received a gaping wound just above his right collarbone; when he looked down, the edges appeared ragged and torn, but strangely enough were not actively bleeding any more. Had he been a little less confused, Thomas might have asked himself exactly how it could be that such a nasty wound – the whitely-glistening bone of the clavicle itself was visible through the torn flaps of muscle and connective tissue – was causing him such a small amount of pain.

  “You are an admirer of my tiger motifs, private?” The voice came from behind him. Its tone was imperious, a voice that brooked no dissent. Its owner was patently a man who was used to being obeyed.

  “Sit up, please. Juldi. Juldi!” There was a double hand-clap, the sound as loud as thunder in Thomas’s still-sensitive ears. Nevertheless, he obligingly struggled up into a sitting position, bringing his knees in close to his chest and twisting his body around to face the speaker. The possibility of not doing precisely as commanded did not even cross his mind.

  Thomas hadn’t given much thought to the matter, but if he had ever tried to imagine just what the infamous Tipu Sultan might have looked like, the reality now standing before him would have turned out to be very different.

  The Beast of Mysore was a short, squat, and rather fat little man. A bright orange turban was wounded around his skull, fronted by a tiger-faced brooch which held a large green feather in place between the tiger’s jaws. A turquoise silk jacket, embroidered with several leaping tiger motifs, was belted at the Sultan’s ample waist by a length of golden cord, which itself was crossed with a scarlet sash, the end of which was thrown casually over the Sultan’s right shoulder.

  What really drew Thomas’s eye was the curved sword which dangled casually on a loop of finely-embroidered rope from the Sultan’s right wrist. The blade gleamed, doubtless polished to a perfect shine by some minion. Its pommel was wrought in the shape of a snarling tiger’s head. Remembering his encounter in the village, Thomas could not help but shudder.

  The Sultan paced slowly back and forth in front of him, taking ten or twelve steps at a time before performing a graceful about-face. Each turn was punctuated by an idle swing of the blade, such as a child might do when playing at soldiers. His eyes were intelligent, Thomas noticed – this was not a stupid man, by any stretch of the imagination. Beneath a set of thin, arched eyebrows that met one another in the middle, those dark, piercing eyes were constantly in motion. Those were not eyes that you would want to try and lie to. They had a feral quality that reminded him of…

  Thomas sat bolt upright. Tipu smiled, white teeth gleaming beneath a prominent mustache.

  “I can see that you know who I am.” Swish, slash. Pivot. Ten more steps. Twelve. Turn. Slash. “I am right, am I not…Private?” The rank was put as a question, rather than a statement. Thomas nodded nervously.

  “Yes…sir.” He was unsure of which honorific to use on the man who held his life at the end of a blade, and so fell back on the one that he knew best. “You are the Tipu Sultan, sir.” Then, because it couldn’t possibly hurt to flatter, he added, “The Tiger of Mysore.”

  Tipu seemed pleased with this response; at least, his smile broadened into a wide grin. “You are quite right, Private. Quite right. Perhaps more than you realize.” Stride. Swish. Slash. Turn. “And what, may I ask, is your name?”

  Don’t even think about lying, an inner voice warned. “Gilman, sir. Private Thomas Gilman.” Tipu raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Of the 33rd, sir. His Majesty’s 33rd Regiment of Foot.”

  “The 33rd. I have not heard of this regiment.” The Sultan waved dismissively. “It is of no matter. But tell me, Private… who is your commanding officer?”

  “Sergeant Belton, sir,” Thomas said without hesitation. It wasn’t quite a lie – Sergeant Belton was, after all, a non-commissioned officer – but it was the closest to evasion that he could muster under the circumstances. Surprisingly, the Tipu chuckled.

  “Yes, yes. I imagine that your answer is correct, technically speaking.” He wagged a finger at Tom in seemingly good-natured chastisement. Like the other nine, it bore a jeweled ring, the centerpiece of which looked rather like a ruby. “But we both know that is not what I really meant.” The Sultan’s face suddenly grew sober. “It would be unwise to test me, Private Gilman. Most unwise indeed.”

  Thomas somehow knew that the Tipu was speaking the truth. Beneath the facade of bonhomie, a thinly-veiled threat lurked. “Colonel Wellesley, sir,” he blurted. The words went straight to his mouth and out, without stopping anywhere else along the way. “Colonel Arthur Wellesley. But we calls him Nosey, sir. On account of his big, hooky nose, see?”

  “Nosey.” Tipu rolled the word around on his tongue, as though tasting it. “Nosey. Very well. And what manner of man is he, this…Nosey?”

  Thomas shifted his weight on the floor, trying to work the pins and needles out of his feet. “A hard one, sir. Proper bastard. He’s a flogger.” When the Sultan looked confused, Thomas mimed whipping the air. “You know, sir. A flogger. For anything, big or small, doesn’t matter none to him. If he thinks you did wrong, you’ve had it.” Thomas’s own back was striped. He had been given twenty lashes for looking the wrong way at his sergeant, calling him a bastard under his breath one night when he thought that he couldn’t possibly hear it. But Colonel Wellesley happened to have been passing, and the colonel had heard it, and had sent Thomas to the punishment detail for it.

  The entire regiment had been paraded, forming three sides of a hollow square. A triangular wooden frame had been put up in the center, and at midnight Thomas had been tied to it by three of the Shadows, who then cut off his shirt, leaving him spread-eagled and naked from the waist up.

  He could still remember the shock of that first lash, the leather biting angrily into the flesh of his back. Never before or since had Thomas experienced that level
of agony, had never even conceived of it being possible, but he had gritted his teeth and refused to scream. Never show weakness. Take it like a soldier.

  Shutters came down over his vision, narrowing the entire world down to the patch of dirt in front of the whipping frame. He dimly heard the duty sergeant calling out, “One!” It felt utterly surreal, as though the bastard was calling from the end of a very long tunnel.

  “Two!” The second stroke of the lash flayed opened the flesh of his back down to the very bone, spilling hot, sticky blood down the length of Thomas’s spine. This time, the scream did come, would not allow itself to be held back, escaping around the leather gag that had been provided by the Shadows not as any sort of kindness, but rather to prevent him from biting off his own tongue while in the throes of agony.

  Thomas had blacked out somewhere around lash six or seven, which wasn’t all that unusual. A more popular man might have had good mates to smuggle him a bottle of arrack, or something stronger, before the flogging had taken place. Those who went to the whipping post soused often died of the copious bleeding which resulted from it, but they felt a lot less pain than Thomas had been forced to cope with.

  When he’d been released from the battalion surgeon’s care days later and returned to his tent party, the lads had wasted no time in telling him about what had happened while he hung there like a limp rag doll, lolling weakly against the sturdy wooden frame.

  “One of them Shadows came up to you with a bowl,” said Flanagan, the big Irishman who was frightened of snakes. “Started to collect the blood from your back, he did. He got a fair old bit of it, too, didn’t he boys?” Collective nods all round. “He started pushing on your shoulders when the whipping was over and done with; looked like maybe he was trying to milk you or something. Bloody disgusting, it was, if you ask me.”