They are nervous, but also eager, Wellesley thought, sifting through the racing, thudding beats of so many pounding hearts. He had fed earlier that evening, drinking very sparingly from the blood of a camp follower. Who could blame them? They are like greyhounds, straining at the leash, ready for the off. The men want to get stuck into the enemy before the monsoons come, else this shall all have been for naught. Monsoons would raise the level of the Cauvery to such a height that it would be unfordable, and the Sultan would be able to simply sit behind his stout walls and mock the besiegers while they slowly starved.
What at first appeared to be a low rise in front of them in fact turned out to be a small wall or berm made of earth, perhaps four feet in height. When it was momentarily illuminated in the aftermath of a rocket that was sent streaking over their heads and disappearing westward towards their camp, the redcoats saw that the berm in fact marked the near-side border of the aqueduct. They made straight for it, angling directly towards the silhouette of the dark trees; trees in which the enemy lay in wait for them.
Despite their best efforts to maintain some sort of noise discipline, Arthur was only too aware that one did not move five hundred heavily-armed men through the darkness without making a certain amount of noise. His heightened sense of hearing caught everything, magnified even the slightest scuffing of leather boots on rock or the softest, under-the-breath curse into something jarringly loud, and each time he resisted the urge to wince.
They know that we are coming. They must.
Arthur peered into the stand of trees ahead. He could just make out human-shaped blobs of light moving about within the tope, but could not discern enough detail to pick them out clearly. Trees and thick vegetation were still an effective form of concealment, even against vampire eyes.
The line of redcoats moved up to the berm, most of them hesitating, reluctant to step upwards and render themselves so utterly exposed. Although the aqueduct wasn’t all that wide – one could easily have thrown a stone from one side to the other – the water running through it absolutely stank.
“Bloody move it!” a sergeant hissed from somewhere inside the ranks of Fourth Company. Wellesley nodded in satisfaction. If the sergeant hadn’t said it, then he was going to.
“It’s only a bit of bloody water,” whispered a corporal from closer by. Somewhat encouraged, the first redcoats began to pick their way down the muddy embankment, boots slipping and sliding as they sought to find purchase, before splashing into the dirty knee-high water. A good job that they cannot see it as I can, Arthur thought, else the scum and filth floating in it would be a far more effective deterrent than the Tipu’s soldiers could ever be.
More boots splashed into the aqueduct, the men of the rearmost ranks now starting to climb the berm themselves. Suddenly, the entire treeline in front of them exploded in a storm of white-hot musket-fire. The men of the Third Company were taking the brunt of the enemy ambush. They screamed as a hail of the weighty leaden musket-balls struck home, tearing mercilessly into their ranks at almost point-blank range. The bodies of some British soldiers plunged face-first into the water, while others were blown backwards by the sheer force of the enemy musketry.
A strange sort of daze had hit the redcoats along with that first shocking volley. It was almost as though the entire Third Company had been struck on the head and concussed; but led by the Shadow Company, the four companies to their left and right continued to move forwards, splashing across the aqueduct and up the slope of the far bank. They even managed to maintain relatively good order while doing it, something that impressed their captains to no small degree.
Arthur had taken three musket balls to the chest and one to his knee, which came as no great surprise when he considered the central position that he had chosen in the front of the first rank. Each wound bled a small amount of viscous black ichor, but closed itself up in the space of seconds, the flesh beneath his uniform knitting and repairing itself at a frenzied rate. The incredibly accelerated healing process worked the musket balls forwards and out of his skin, which in turn sealed itself up behind the projectiles as each one dropped into the putrid water in which he now stood. The spent balls disappeared beneath the surface without trace, already forgotten.
He could smell the blood now, the blood of dead and dying men; no, of dead and dying Englishmen, he corrected himself. They were his responsibility. He had led them here to this place, straight into the jaws of an enemy trap. Well, enough of that. Let’s get the bloody business over with…
Suddenly he was bellowing, sword in hand, waving it towards the far bank. “Up and at ‘em, 33rd!” Arthur began to run towards the tope, his blade leading the way, surrounded on all sides by the warriors of his Shadow Company. Another rocket flashed up from the western end beneath the trees, highlighting for the briefest of moments a scene of devastation and utter confusion. Then it was dark again, and the afterimage of his silhouette was burned into the retinas of the men; their colonel, charging forwards with neither fear nor uncertainty, directly into the face of the enemy. He could have levitated clear of the water with relative ease, but that wasn’t the point. Arthur needed the men to see him run as they must run, hear the splashing of his boots as he led them forwards. Otherwise, why else should he expect them to follow him?
And follow him they did. It began with the sergeants and corporals. “You heard the colonel, lads,” roared Sergeant Johnson, one of the stalwarts of Third Company, “up and into the bastards!” True to his word, the sergeant took off for the far-side embankment at a run, gaining it at almost the same time as his colonel did.
“Well done, Johnson—that’s the style!” Arthur cried, for all to hear. He did not need to look backwards to know that the redcoats were once more starting to slosh their way across the aqueduct, for not only could he hear it, he could also sense their steadily-mounting anger at having been caught out in the open like that. Well, the Tipu’s men were going to pay for it, he resolved, leaping to the top of the berm and starting to run towards the stand of trees.
Muskets crackled from behind him now, and incredibly, not one of them hit him in the back. The men of Shadow Company were so close that they could make out his form, see the ambient light reflecting from the blade of his sword, and knew to aim around him. Screams came from the tree-line up ahead, signs that at least some of the British musketry had hit home, but then the Sultan’s men answered with a second burst, more ragged than the first had been – indeed, hardly worth of the name “volley” at all, so irregular was it – but still deadly effective. More dead soldiers dropped into the water behind him, but the remainder kept their feet and continued to push forward.
With just a few more steps, Wellesley was inside the tope. The closest enemy soldiers were mere feet away. He lunged, stabbing one through the throat with the point of his blade, and then used the man as a shield to absorb the shot fired at him by one of his comrades. The musket ball passed through the cloth of the man’s turban and entered his skull just above his ear, the force and cavitation of its passage blowing most of his brains out of the opposite side of his head.
Letting the corpse fall to the ground, Arthur closed the distance between them both in the space of a single leap. The tiger soldier’s eyes bulged out of their sockets, and an expression of incredulity spread across his face. Looking down, the last thing he ever saw was the British officer’s sword buried up to the hilt in his abdomen. Mouth open and uttering something wordlessly, the man finally went slack when Arthur sawed the blade sideways, severing both the spinal column and the great blood vessels in a single stroke.
The thunder of muskets again shattered the night from somewhere off to his left, somewhere close. They were British, he could tell, and were answered with more screams. Screams…and then something else, something altogether different: the growl of a tiger.
Arthur frowned, looked about him. Off towards the eastern edge of the tope, he could just barely make out a lithe feline form, slinking cautiously through the vegetat
ion in the middle distance. The cat’s body passed behind a particularly dense cluster of trees, but then emerged almost directly ahead of him. It were almost as though the beast was aware of his presence, but that couldn’t possibly be true, he reasoned, because vampires gave off no discernible scent or odor, and there was no way at all that the thing could see him in light conditions that were this low...at least, an ordinary tiger couldn’t, he reminded himself. These were no ordinary jungle cats.
The defenders fired again, punching a few more holes in the British ranks. Many of the redcoats were taking cover behind the thicker trees now, which made for quite an effective shield if one were to turn sideways-on. Quite a few of the men who had reloaded already were kneeling, the barrels of their muskets tracking slowly back and forth in the dark as they tried in vain to find a viable enemy target. The cleverer ones waited for the flash of a musket firing to come from up ahead, and then returned fire along the same trajectory. Others simply fired blindly, loading and firing, reloading and firing, working their way steadily through the supply of musket balls that each man was required to carry.
With the last scattering of musket fire, Arthur realized that he had lost track of the tiger. Looking around, he saw nothing; suddenly, the beast was upon him. Its movement must have been inhumanly fast, because the great cat was pouncing from less than ten yards away, flying through the air towards his left front quarter.
Reflexively, Arthur swung the sword around in that direction, attempting to ward the tiger off, but he wasn’t quite able to make it in time. The beast landed hard on his chest, thrusting him backwards and slamming his body forcefully into the thick trunk of a baobab tree. Waves of hot, fetid breath washed across Arthur’s face as the tiger craned its neck and opened its maw wide. Instantly his free hand flew to the beast’s throat, pointed fingernails digging in through the tufts of fur in an attempt to find the windpipe and crush it.
The bulk of the tiger’s body mass pressed against him, pinning his sword arm against the side of his body. Grunting with exertion, Arthur squeezed harder, trying to exert more pressure through the layers of fur, skin, and fatty tissue. For its part, the tiger roared once more in outrage, the resultant wall of sound hitting him squarely in the face at close range with all the fury of a cannon-ball. A giant paw came up and swatted at the side of Arthur’s head, the claws leaving a series of long furrows in the flesh of his cheek and temple. Black fluid began to leak out, but the wounds quickly sealed themselves.
In lashing out at him, the tiger had unwittingly released just enough pressure from his sword arm to allow him a little leverage. Arthur brought his sword arm up and plunged the point desperately into the side of the tiger’s neck, thrusting it in as deeply as the awkward angle would allow. Throwing back its head in a combination of blinding pain and rage, the tiger released Arthur from its grip and turned tail, running away into the darkness at the heart of the tope.
That blow would have killed any natural beast. This is certainly something else, something far beyond nature. The temptation to think that this was something beyond nature in the same way that he and all of vampire-kind were beyond nature fleetingly crossed his mind, but Arthur repressed the thought savagely. We are nothing like them – we are civilized, cultured. They are savages, nothing more than mere beasts. He pushed the issue to the back of his mind, did not want to face it now, here in this place, particularly with his men still imperiled.
His right hand felt strangely vacant, and Arthur realized that the tiger had fled with his sword still impaled in its neck. Simply unbelievable, he thought ruefully, shaking his head with bemusement. But what now? He could still lead the attack, even without a sword. His innate speed and strength would see to that. Arthur took a moment to assess the situation. The volume of musketry emanating from the Tipu’s men was steadily increasing, and he could tell by listening carefully for a moment that his redcoats, realizing that you couldn’t hit what you couldn’t see to aim at, were firing less and less often, choosing instead to lurk behind such cover as they could find. Their morale had taken something of a beating, Arthur knew, and although he could hear the company’s officers and sergeants trying to verbally spur the men onward, the Sultan’s men were hollering and jeering too, making the whole thing sound like nothing more than a huge chaotic mess.
There is no order here, no real semblance of discipline. We must withdraw, reassess the tactical situation, and begin anew. The thought sickened him, the next words he spoke leaving the cold taste of ashes in his mouth; nonetheless, it must be done.
“33rd!” A pause. He did not want to say it, but knew that no other sane choice remained. “The 33rd will withdraw!”
Voices took up the order in a chorus, their owners invisible to one another in the dark; at least, invisible to all but Wellesley, who saw the palpable relief become evident on each human-shaped frame as they heard the news.
“Fall back! Fall back!”
The redcoats did not simply flee – they were far too professional for that, even in the face of tonight’s sudden reversal. They backed slowly out of the tope, each man pausing occasionally to load and fire his musket if any semblance of a target presented itself. The enemy cheering had reached a fever pitch now, though Wellesley knew from the low moaning which came from within their position that the British must have hurt them in return; a few desultory musket balls came zinging out of the tope, though only a few found their intended targets.
As Arthur emerged from beneath the jungle canopy once more, the launch of yet another rocket lit the night up for the briefest of moments. Distinctive in the uniform of a British officer, one of the enemy infantrymen must have picked him out and taken aim, because the crack of a single musket was followed almost instantly by the sound of the ball splintering the bark of the tree just two feet to his left. There was something odd about this shot, Arthur thought, though couldn’t quite pin down the reason why. Something about the way that it had sounded, the amount of air displaced by the ball in flight, had been just a little bit…off, for want of a better word.
More than a little curious, Arthur shut out the sights and sounds of the retreat and peered closely at the small hole which had fractured the tree trunk. From within, there came an icily cold blue glow, at least it looked that way to his eyes. To those of an ordinary mortal, nothing would have seemed to be the slightest bit amiss; but any vampire would know this weapon for what it truly was.
One of the Sultan’s men had almost taken his head off with a musket-ball that had been cast entirely from silver.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
It was still dark when the dejected body of troops returned to the British lines just before the break of dawn that morning, yet in truth, things had not gone quite as badly as they might have done in the grand scheme of things. Although their attack upon the tope had been bloodily repulsed, the 33rd had been the only unit to suffer a reversal. All of the territory to the north had been captured successfully by the 12th under Colonel Shawe and his supporting battalions, and with relatively minor loss of life on the British side.
“It’s a bad business, Colonel,” Harris said flatly when Wellesley delivered his after-action report, “but hardly an unforgivable one. An attack across water into a heavily-defended position is quite the challenge.”
“As a King’s officer, sir, it is my responsibility to rise to any challenge,” Arthur replied stiffly. Harris sighed.
“Look here, Wellesley. This was more than a simple infantry action. Tipu’s Tigers were about, and if what we believe concerning them is true, then you are frankly rather lucky that more of your men were not left behind on the field of battle. Prisoners were taken by the enemy?”
“Yes, sir,” he replied miserably. “Eight men. But many more died, including an officer. Poor Fitzgerald, sir.” He had failed, knew that he had failed, and failure was utterly unacceptable to a Wellesley. For his part, Harris knew that this was a tricky moment in the relatively junior officer’s career. If his spirit was crushed now, a
fter this one early reversal, Wellesley might be irretrievably broken as a leader forever – something which Harris could not afford, particularly while they were standing on the borders of the enemy’s stronghold. This had to be nipped in the bud.
“Colonel…Arthur,” Wellesley looked up sharply. The general had never called him by his Christian name before. “Mistakes were made, undoubtedly. That is the nature of command. The men of the 33rd – your men – made a valiant effort, and none can fault them for their bravery. Many paid with their lives. I am going to going to order a second attack later this morning, but this time, the troops shall be supported by cannon if necessary.”
Arthur opened his mouth to speak, but Harris cut him off before he could get a word out. “I know what you are going to say, so you may as well save your breath. You wish to request the opportunity to lead a second attack against the aqueduct and tope tonight, do you not?” Harris saw the truth of it in his subordinate’s face. “No. The 94th shall clear that blasted tope today. You must chalk this up to experience, Colonel. A good officer will learn from his mistakes, as well he ought to, for they are usually devilish expensive indeed – paid for in the blood of his men. But there comes a point when the lesson has been learned, and he must allow the emotional baggage which accompanies it to fade away.”
There was a moment of silence between the two men. General Harris regarded Wellesley appraisingly. There was no hint of reproach in either his manner or tone, Arthur saw.
“Well, Colonel…has the lesson been learned?”
Arthur gave the question the serious consideration that it deserved. Once the tope was cleared later today, Colonels Montague and Saxon would begin to site their siege artillery upon the city walls. Although it was impossible to say how long even those huge guns would take to make a breach in the walls, one thing was for certain: before days (or certainly weeks) were out, somebody was going to have to lead the redcoats into that breach and storm the city. Even if things went perfectly, many more British lives were going to be lost. They called it ‘the Butcher’s Bill,’ because it was simply the price that had to be paid for assaulting a well-defended fortification.
The Beast of Mysore (Wellington Undead Book 1) Page 19
