Free Lance

by George Shipway

  Sepoys manned the ropes, jostling in the gloom, thankful for the blink of lightning playing upon the peaks. Marriott sat on a rock and held his horse’s reins. Drivers and crew of the gun that was left squatted around the wagon, passed a houcca from hand to hand, or curled on the ground and slept. A grey metallic sheen burnished the eastern sky. Marriott counted a gun wheel’s spokes, and gave thanks to the Hindoo gods for bringing daylight nearer.

  Winding down the track that dropped through trees and thorn-scrub the scarlet files returned for the second gun.

  Exhausted men and lathered horses tugged on ropes and traces, horses sliding on the pebbles, sepoys’ bodies slanted till their elbows touched the ground. Welladvice chanted aloud, like a foremastman turning a capstan, screeching under the strain as he shouldered a skidding limber. ‘Heave, yer heathen bastards - heave! Hold - hold, don’t let her slide! Now, all together - heave!’

  Panting, muscles cracking, they laboured yard by yard up a track that climbed like a ladder. Twice they stopped and rested - not for long. ‘Man yer ropes!’ called Welladvice. ‘Are yer ready? Heave!’

  Gradually the gradient levelled. Marriott, pushing a limber, peered through the sweat that fogged his eyes. Hircarrahs of the cavalry troop stood guard on the gun which had first gone up. They pulled alongside, dropped the ropes, leaned gasping on the wheels. Daylight revealed a triangular plateau, the base upon the summit they had reached, sides tapering to an apex at a precipitous cleft in the hills.

  ‘Is this the place?’

  Amaury sucked a bleeding finger. ‘Near enough for the moment. Mr Welladvice, water and feed - a stream runs over there. Henry, your men may rest and eat.’ He pulled a watch from his fob. ‘You have an hour.’

  Amaury sent hircarrahs to watch the pass, sat beside Marriott and chewed a hunk of bread.

  ‘The worst,’ he said indistinctly, spitting crumbs, ‘is over. Now we shall fight on ground of our choice. For the rest - I foretell a massacre.’

  Marriott scanned the ruddy face. Dust pocketed the folds in Amaury’s regimentals, his boots were scarred by rocks and thorn, the knees of his breeches rent. Otherwise he betrayed no signs of a thirty-mile march, a sleepless night and bodily stress.

  Marriott yawned. ‘I am heartily glad to hear it, though I think you remarkably confident.’ He stretched aching limbs. ‘What next do you intend?’

  ‘We shall survey the ground and prepare our dispositions.’ He glanced again at his watch. ‘The officers have rested enough. Come on!’

  He led them half a mile to the narrow cleft in the hills, and thence identified the salient features. The plateau, enclosed by slopes climbed in a trough to the gorge that crowned the pass, so forming a triangular funnel whose spout was at the cleft. The ground was freckled by wiry grass, bushes and stunted trees. Amaury pointed. ‘Here, gentlemen, is the place of slaughter. We hold our fire while the enemy debouches from the gap, marches towards the plateau's edge - there, where we left the guns - then close the trap.’

  ‘Trap? They will see us directly they top the pass,’ Todd objected.

  ‘You picture your men formed shoulder to shoulder in rank? Not so, Henry. Your companies will flank the trough, six platoons each side a hundred paces apart.’

  ‘The companies disjoined? No regular firing line? Infernally unusual--’

  ‘Exactly so.’ Amaury grinned. ‘Humphrey Bland, I fear, will swivel in his grave. Mr Welladvice, your guns will close the funnel's mouth, eight hundred yards from the defile. Thus Vedvyas's men will be hemmed on three long sides, the fourth a narrow passage which the tail of his army blocks. Nor, Henry, will they see us, for we shall be concealed. Your men must dig.’

  ‘Upon my soul! Dig?’

  ‘Aye, sir, dig trenches - why do you suppose we brought the tools? - and cover them with foliage. You also, Mr Welladvice: your guns must not be obvious from the front. Time presses. I shall show your precise positions; your men will then prepare them.’

  Amaury conducted them over the ground, piling cairns of pebbles on platoon and gun positions. The whole force started digging - hircarrahs, sepoys, gun crews. The labour in that stony ground was sinew-tearing work for men already tired. They piled the spoil in parapets, and hid it with the bushes which they cut. Amaury looked often at his watch, scanned the clouds, felt intermittent raindrops brush his face. ‘Go no deeper than a man may fire kneeling,’ he told the workers. ‘Concealment, not protection, is our aim.’

  By mid-morning the task was done. Sepoys manned the trenches, guns and gunners their emplacements. Amaury went to the defile, rode back slowly, scrutinized the positions from an enemy’s viewpoint, ordered more foliage piled on an obvious earth scar, rated a betraying bayonet peeping above a parapet. He finished his inspection at the guns, and greeted Welladvice gaily.

  ‘We are hidden tight as rabbits in a warren: they will march nearly to our muzzles without seeing us. At the gun positions, Mr Welladvice, you will stack beneath tarpaulins all your shot and cartridge; then send wagons and limbers three hundred yards to the rear and stand them in the open, plain to view. They will act as a magnet to enemy eyes, and distract them from examining the ground on the flanks.’

  He looked quizzically at Marriott. ‘I am afraid I have not consulted you on this, Charles. I hope you approve?’

  ‘Good God, yes! What do I know of military affairs? I trust entirely to your superior judgement.’

  Amaury bowed, and fluttered a hand to his chest in mock obeisance. ‘You do me too much honour, Charles. Where will you post yourself? I recommend a place among the gun teams, where presently I shall join you.’

  ‘A commander skulking comfortably far from danger?’ Marriott smiled wryly. ‘No, Hugo - I shall stand with the sepoys.’

  ‘A singular choice! Kneeling disagreeably in a miry trench? Have it as you wish. Au revoir, Charles - we shall crack a bottle together after the fight!’

  Amaury gave his last instructions, ordered the guns to be loaded with case, and joined the cavalry vedettes who, from the summit of the gorge, watched on the farther side the track that climbed from Hurrondah. ,

  The rain gusts’ fitful flurries redoubled in intensity and blended in a wind that snored through the pass.

  ‘Enemy in sight!’

  Amaury led the vedettes at a canter down the valley, between the hidden sepoys crouching in their trenches, past Welladvice’s cannon concealed in shallow emplacements, and halted at the wagons. There he told the hircarrahs to keep cantering about, shout and brandish lances, do everything they could to attract the foe’s attention.

  Vedvya’s army, horse and foot intermingled, squeezed between the cleft’s precipitous sides and cascaded into the valley. Cavalry flourishing swords and lances, matchlockmen and spearmen, pony carts and palankeens and coolies, an iridescent river - saffron, ochre, mauve and carmine - bursting on the leaden scene in a clarion shout of colour. Gold-banded trumpets, curved like rams’ horns, brayed sonorous tuneless discords, drums rat-tatted wild haphazard rhythms. The wind streamed silken banners like gaudy tasselled slivers: peacock blue, vermilion, emerald green. They brimmed the trough from side to side, the fringes eddying a horse’s length from Todd's leaf-hidden trenches.

  The men in the lead saw Amaury’s prancing horsemen, the gun teams, wagons and limbers ranged conspicuously in rows. They checked and shouted. The current drove them forward. Cavalry broke from the throng and cantered to the front. A spate of armed humanity, two hundred yards across and half a mile in length, spouted down the valley.

  Welladvice peered through the branches festooning the six-pounders’ barrels, watched the torrent roll towards him and loudly sucked his teeth. Gun detachments stooped beside the trails, portfires poised above vents.

  ‘Eighty yards,’ he murmured. ‘Sixty. Forty.’

  A tremendous detonation hammered Welladvice’s eardrums, a thunderclap that stunned and sent him reeling. A flash of blinding fire split the clouds. The growl of the wind climbed high to a scratch, and the r
ain fell down like lances.

  The enemy, appalled, lifted awestruck faces to a sky where gods waged war.

  Welladvice climbed to his feet, and chopped his hand in a downward cut.

  ‘Fire!’

  The storm-blast’s sudden fury disarrayed the vanguard; the case shot tore it in shreds. Canisters holding four-score bullets flew open at the muzzle in a swathe in front of the gun and mowed them down like grass. Signalled by the guns’ discharge, the sepoys simultaneously opened fire from the flanks.

  They used the method called Alternate Firing: each platoon loosed a volley in turn from opposite flanks so that when the sixth platoon had fired the first was ready loaded, butts in shoulders. Every man under Todd’s command could load and fire twice a minute. At a range never longer than fifty yards successive leaden tempests ripped the array in fragments.

  Marriott, brushing aside the foliage masking the trench, leaned elbows on the parapet and watched murder in the mass. A volley crashed from the sepoys in his trench; the jemadar’s words of command cracked above the thunder and the banging of the guns.

  ‘Recover your firelocks!’

  ‘Open your pans!’

  The men tucked locks beneath their armpits, shielding priming powder from the rain, bit the cartridges and primed.

  ‘Shut your pans!’

  ‘Load with cartridge!’

  Ramrods flashed and plunged, drove ball and cartridge down.

  ‘Make ready!’

  The jemadar paused, eyes on a platoon diagonally across his front. A ribbon of fiery daggers stitched the smoke. He raised an arm.

  ‘Present... fire!’

  The devastating volleys and the storm’s astounding violence threshed Vedvyas’s army into weltering confusion. They fired matchlocks wildly at the half-seen scarlet jackets and strove frantically to reload - but the downpour quenched their matches. Pinned in the valley’s trough, flayed by salvoes of case in front and muskets from the sides, they retreated the way they had come and collided with the crowd in the pass like a torrent checked by a dam. Emerging from the defile, to make confusion worse, bullocks yoked in teams dragged lumbering nine-pounders which were hurriedly unlimbered and pointed down the valley.

  ‘Nine hundred yards, at a guess,’ Welladvice observed, squinting at the cannon through a sleeting smoke-hazed waterfall. ‘Belay case! Load roundshot!’

  The guns bucked, belched flame and smoke, cleared the final rounds of case, tore new gaps in a wildly retreating mob. The crews reloaded, naked torsos glistening in the rain. Spongemen thrust down rammers; loaders lifted cartridges from tarpaulin-covered stacks. Wheels slipping in the wet, they ran up the guns. Welladvice, leaping from breech to breech, traversed quickly on the trails, spun elevating screws. The barrels lifted.

  The third salvo found the range and hit a powder wagon which exploded in a fan of yellow flame. A smoky pillar mushroomed to the clouds, stones and broken fragments showered sepoys in the trenches. The concussion slammed Welladvice’s ears. He curved hands round eyes and looked at the devastation he had wrought. One cannon lay on its side; the other, a wheel destroyed, pointed an iron barrel forlornly to the sky. No vestige remained of the crews.

  ‘Ah-h-h!’ Welladvice crowed. ‘There’s gob in yer eye, yer bastards!’

  Bodies in garish tunics quilted the valley’s floor. Beyond them the rout had paused, checked by the jam in the gorge. Spared for a merciful space from the six-pounders’ cannonading, still scourged by the sepoys’ fire, they poured once more towards the guns like water spirted between clenched hands.

  ‘Down muzzles! Continue roundshot - an’ fire quicker, yer misbegotten cripples!’

  He knew his order illogical, for roundshot shooting, by the best-drilled crews, is slower than case by a round a minute. The guns crashed, and recoiled on their trails. Welladvice complacently surveyed the ruinous results.

  Case bored holes in bodies, roundshot sliced them in half. Salvo after salvo scythed the valley’s length, shearing through the crumbling host to the rearmost ranks at the pass. The balls swept men away in rows; the channels they left were a butcher’s shambles. Horses tethered by their own intestines stood shivering and neighing. A man with his chest torn wide, blood-streaked broken ribs exposing purple lungs, tucked head between his knees and rolled like a bouncing hoop.

  The gunners fired and loaded, dancing around the steaming barrels. A charge rammed down ignited instantaneously and spattered the spongeman’s brains in slimy grey-pink globules.

  This treachery from the gun they adored unnerved the crew, who backed away and stared with starting eyes. Welladvice felt the barrel, swore and sucked his hand.

  ‘Cease yer firin’! Sponge an’ drench, yer lubbers - come on, cool ’em down!’

  ‘Division out of action, Mr Welladvice?’

  The sailor regarded ruefully the tall wide-shouldered rider on the big black stallion. Rain had drenched the regimentals from scarlet into crimson, bedraggled the horsehair helmet plumes and burnished Hannibal’s coat.

  ‘Aye, sir. Guns too bleedin’ hot. No shootin’ fer a quarter-hour, I reckon.’

  Amaury scanned a turbulent landscape. Lightning seared the clouds, scrawled sudden zigzag patterns; thunder crashed in roll on roll; rain-rods fountained a myriad jets from a soil dissolved in mud. Tumbled bodies littered the ground from the defile’s cleft to the mouths of the guns. A beaten rabble scurried up the hillsides between the sepoys’ trenches, or cowered sheeplike in the trough.

  ‘Time to finish the business,’ Amaury said.

  He led his twenty horsemen past the guns, arranged them in an extended line and drew his sabre. ‘Pursue and kill,’ he told them tersely. The hircarrahs fell on their prey, splitting into groups and hunting separate victims. Amaury galloped ahead, jinked and chased and slew. The sepoys held their fire, the thunder reigned alone.

  Climbing from the trenches, they charged down the slopes in line.

  From the fugitive swarm that choked the pass a single horse-man erupted. He stormed down the vale loose-reined, and yelled incomprehensible war-cries. Lightning speckled fire on crested iron helmet, tinselled the brazen bosses of a targe he bore on his rein arm and glinted on a corselet of mail. A massive, powerful man, he was, and his scimitar whirled like a flame. He swerved from the men who fled from his, path and headed straight for Amaury.

  Amaury pulled to a walk, collected his horse and rammed the spurs in hard. They closed at racing speed, and met with a clang like hammer on anvil. Blade rasped blade in a feather of sparks. The shock spun Hannibal sideways. Amaury wrenched the rein, swung the charger on his hocks. His opponent’s nimble Arabian was already turned to meet him.

  Circling at sword's length they slashed and parried and lunged, a deadly combat harmonied by the scrape and hiss of steel. Amaury feinted and thrust, cut high and pointed low; his edge met a guardian blade, thumped on the leather shield - and his enemy’s sword whirred inches from his face. He shortened the slippery reins, lunged straight at the fierce brown face; the shock of the answering parry jarred his sword arm from shoulder to wrist.

  The duel attracted an audience: sepoys quit their bayoneting, closed the fighters in a ring - muskets dutifully secured - and gazed enthralled. Amaury, glissading a head-high cut, saw a sepoy level a firelock. Angrily he shouted.

  ‘Let be! The man is mine!’

  The horses started slithering in the mud their hooves had churned. Wary of a fall, Amaury reined to a stand, circled Hannibal on his forehand when his adversary swerved to a flank, parried the curving scimitar and waited for an opening. The Arabian, passaging right, slipped on a greasy patch. His chain-mailed rider, alarmed, dropped sword hand on the reins. Amaury flailed his sabre at the helmet left unguarded. Oily with rain and sweat, the hilt turned in his hand. The flat of his blade clanged iron with a noise like a cracked, flawed bell.

  The scimitar spun from the native’s hand, and he toppled from the saddle. Amaury dismounted, straddled the prostrate body. The man sprawled on his ba
ck, breathing jerkily, eyes half closed. A strong square face, deep-trenched from lips to nostrils, a broken nose smudged sideways, black moustache down-curved and a wispy beard.

  He opened his eyes and looked blearily at his conqueror.

  ‘You fought well, sirdarjee,’ Amaury said. ‘Never have I encountered your parity in swordplay. May I know the name of a warrior so valorous?’

  Amaury hauled him upright. He stood swaying, tall as the Englishman and equally broad-shouldered, and glared defiantly.

  ‘I am Vedvyas Daulat Ram, mirasdar of Hurrondah, tributary lord of Bahrampal, master of--’

  ‘No longer.’ Amaury gestured widely to the carnage. ‘Your power, with your army, lies beaten in the mud. The Company rules henceforth in Bahrampal!’

  A mirthless smile curved the full red lips. ‘You savour a premature triumph, sahib. Look around you - your men are scattered, pillaging and pursuing. And there’ - he swung on his heel and thrust an arm to the defile - ‘my vengeance is poised to strike!’

  Amaury looked at the gorge, three hundred yards away. On the crest of the slant a squadron ranked in line, tunics yellow, red and blue, a forest of twelve-foot lances, pennons limp in the rain.

  ‘Your famous bodyguard,’ Amaury said softly. ‘Yet you charged alone - and they did not follow.’

  Vedvyas said disdainfully, ‘My men await my signal.’

  A little ring of sepoys encircled victor and vanquished. Red uniforms sprayed the valley, bayoneted the wounded, chased lingering survivors, shot them down. All the enemy who could use their feet had fled; the battleground was a shambles of mangled men and horses. Amaury looked at the guns. Could Welladvice yet fire? He could not be sure. The Company’s troops were vulnerable, dispersed and unprepared: an easy prey for a resolute cavalry charge.

  He said to the sepoys, ‘Guard this man,’ and hailed a passing jemadar. ‘Return your men to the trenches - quick! Where is Todd Sahib?’ The ensign came at a run, squelching in the wet, a reddened sword in hand. ‘For God’s sake, Henry! - are you blind, can’t you see the threat?’ He pointed to the squadron. Take up your positions, load and make all ready!’