Sharpe's Tiger

by Bernard Cornwell

  'Thank you, sir.'

  'It's been distributed?'

  'Tomorrow, sir.' Morris blushed. The form should have been copied out four times. One copy went to the General commanding the army, who would have it copied again and distributed to every unit under his command. A second copy would go to Madras in case Sharpe ran there. A third copy went to the War Office in London to be copied again and given to all recruiting officers in case the man succeeded in reaching Britain and tried to rejoin the army, while the last copy was supposedly sent to the man's home parish to alert his neighbours to his treachery and the local constables to his crime. In Sharpe's case, there was no home parish, but once Morris caught up with his paperwork and the company clerk had made the necessary copies, Sharpe's description would be broadcast throughout the army. If Sharpe was then found in Seringapatam, which Baird suspected he would be, he was supposed to be arrested, but it was far more likely that he would be killed. Most soldiers resented deserters, not because of their crime, but because they had dared to do what so many others never had the courage to try, and no officer would punish a man for killing a deserter.

  Baird put the open book onto Morris's table. 'I want you to add a note under "General Remarks",' Baird told the Captain.

  'Of course, sir.'

  'Just say that it is vital that Private Sharpe be taken alive. And that if he is captured he must be brought either to me or to General Harris.'

  Morris gaped at Baird. 'You, sir?'

  'Baird, B-A-I-R-D. Major General.'

  'Yes, sir, but . . .' Morris had been about to ask what possible business a major general had with a deserter, then realized that such a question would never fetch a civil answer, so he just dipped a quill in ink and hurriedly added the words Baird had requested. 'You think we might see Sharpe again, sir?' he asked.

  'I do hope so, Captain.' Baird stood. 'I even pray as much. Now may I thank you for your hospitality?'

  'Yes, sir, of course, sir.' Morris half stood as the General left, then dropped back onto his chair and stared at the words he had just written. 'What in God's name is all that about?' he asked when Baird was safely out of earshot.

  Hakeswill sniffed. 'No good, sir, I'll warrant that.'

  Morris uncovered the arrack and took a sip. 'First the bastard is summoned to Harris's tent, then he runs, and now Baird says we'll see him again and wants him kept alive! Why?'

  'He's up to no good, sir,' Hakeswill said. 'He took his woman and vanished, sir. Ain't no general who can condone that behaviour, sir. It's unforgivable, sir. The army's going to the dogs, sir.'

  'I can't disobey Baird,' Morris muttered.

  'But you don't wants Sharpie back here either, sir,' Hakeswill said fervently. 'A soldier who's a general's pet? He'll be given a sergeant's stripes next!' The thought of such an affront struck Hakeswill momentarily speechless. His face quivered with indignation, then, with a visible effort, he controlled himself. 'Who knows, sir,' he suggested slyly, 'but the little bastard might be reporting on you and me, sir, like the traitor what he is. We don't need snakes in our bosoms, sir. We don't want to disturb the happy mood of the company, not by harbouring a general's pet, sir.'

  'General's pet?' Morris repeated softly. The Captain was a venal man and, though no worse than many, he nevertheless dreaded official scrutiny, but he was far too lazy to correct the malfeasances half concealed in the closely penned columns of the pay books. Worse, Morris feared that Sharpe could somehow reveal his complicity in the false charge that had resulted in Sharpe's flogging, and though it seemed impossible for a mere private to carry that much weight in the army, so it seemed equally impossible that a major general should make a special errand to discuss that private. There was something very odd going on, and Morris disliked strange threats. He merely asked for the quiet life, and he wanted Sharpe out of it. 'But I can't leave those words off the form,' he complained to Hakeswill, gesturing at the new addition on Sharpe's page.

  'Don't need to, sir. With respect, sir. Ain't no form being distributed here, sir, not in the 33rd, sir. Don't need a form, do we? We knows what the bugger looks like, we does, so they won't give us no form, sir. They never do, sir. So I'll let it be known that if anyone sees Sharpie they're to oblige the army by putting a goolie in his back.' Hakeswill saw Morris's nervousness. 'Won't be no fuss, sir, not if the bugger's in Seringapatam and we're pulling the bloody place to pieces. Kill him quick, sir, and that's more than he deserves. He's up to no good, sir, I can feel it in my waters, and a bugger up to no good is a bugger better off dead. Says so in the scriptures, sir.'

  'I'm sure it does, Sergeant, I'm sure it does,' Morris said, then closed the Punishment Book. 'You must do whatever you think is best, Sergeant. I know I can trust you.'

  'You do me honour, sir,' Hakeswill said with feigned emotion. 'You do me honour. And I'll have the bastard for you, sir, have him proper dead.'

  In Seringapatam.

  'What in God's name did you think you were doing, Sharpe?' Lawford demanded furiously. The Lieutenant was much too angry to go along with the pretence of being a private, and, besides, the two men were now alone for the first time that day. Alone, but not unguarded, for though they were standing sentry in one of the south wall cavaliers there were a dozen men of Gudin's battalion within sight, including the burly Sergeant, called Rothiere, who watched the two newcomers from the next cavalier along. 'By God, Private,' Lawford hissed, 'I'll have you flogged for that display when we're back! We're here to rescue Colonel McCandless, not to kill him! Are you mad?'

  Sharpe stared south across the landscape, saying nothing. To his right the shallow river flowed between shelving green banks. Once the monsoon came the river would swell and spread and drown the wide flat rocks that dotted its bed. He was feeling more comfortable now, for Doctor Venkatesh had placed some salve on his back which had taken away a lot of the pain. The doctor had then put on new bandages and warned Sharpe that they must not be dampened, but ought to be changed each day until the wounds healed.

  Colonel Gudin had then taken the two Englishmen to a barracks room close by the city's south-western corner. Every man in the barracks was a European, most of them French, but with a scattering of Swiss, Germans and two Britishers. They all wore the blue coats of French infantry, but there were none to spare for the two new men, and so Sergeant Rothiere had issued Sharpe and Lawford with tiger tunics like those the Tippoo's men wore. The tunics did not open down the front like a European coat, but had to be pulled over the head. 'Where you boys from?' an English voice asked Sharpe as he pulled down the dyed cotton tunic.

  '33rd,' Sharpe had said.

  'The Havercakes?' the man said. 'Thought they were up north, in Calcutta?'

  'Brought down to Madras last year,' Sharpe said. He gingerly sat on his cot, an Indian bed made from ropes stretched between a simple wooden frame. It proved surprisingly comfortable. 'And you?' he asked the Englishman.

  'Royal bleeding Artillery, mate, both of us. Ran three months back. Name's Johnny Blake and that's Henry Hickson.'

  'I'm Dick Sharpe and that's Bill Lawford,' Sharpe said, introducing the Lieutenant who looked desperately awkward in his knee-length tunic of purple and white stripes. Over the tunic he wore two crossbelts and an ordinary belt from which hung a bayonet and a cartridge pouch. They had been issued with heavy French muskets and warned they would have to do their share of sentry duty with the rest of the small battalion.

  'Used to be a lot more of us,' Blake told Sharpe, 'but men die here like flies. Fever mostly.'

  'But it ain't bad here,' Henry Hickson offered. 'Food's all right. Plenty of bibbis and Gudin's a real decent officer. Better than any we ever had.'

  'Right bastards we had,' Blake agreed.

  'Aren't they all?' Sharpe had said.

  'And the pay's good, when you get it. Five months overdue now, but maybe we'll get it when we beat the stuffing out of the British.' Blake laughed at the suggestion.

  Blake and Hickson were not required to stand guard, b
ut instead manned one of the big tiger-mouthed guns that crouched behind a nearby embrasure. Sharpe and Lawford stood their watch alone and it was that privacy which had encouraged Lawford into his furious attack.

  'Have you got nothing to say for yourself, Private?' he challenged Sharpe who still stared serenely over the green landscape through which the river curled south about the city's island. 'Well?' Lawford snapped.

  Sharpe looked at him. 'You loaded the musket, didn't you, Bill?'

  'Of course!'

  'You ever felt gunpowder that smooth and fine?' Sharpe gazed into the Lieutenant's face.

  'It could have been gunpowder dust!' Lawford insisted angrily.

  'That shiny?' Sharpe said derisively. 'Gunpowder dust is full of rat shit and sawdust! And did you really think, Bill'—he pronounced the name sarcastically—'that the bleeding Tippoo would let us have loaded guns before he was sure he could trust us? And with him standing not six feet away? And did you bother to taste the powder? I did, and it weren't salty at all. That weren't gunpowder, Lieutenant, that were either ink powder or black pigment, but whatever it was it was never going to spark.'

  Lawford gaped at Sharpe. 'So you knew all along the gun wouldn't fire?'

  'Of course I bloody knew! I wouldn't have pulled the trigger else. You mean you didn't realize that weren't powder?'

  Lawford turned away. Once again he had been made to look like a fool and he blushed at the realization. 'I'm sorry,' he said. He was crestfallen, and again he felt a galling sense of inadequacy compared to this common soldier.

  Sharpe stared at a patrol of the Tippoo's lancers who were riding back towards the city. Three of them were wounded and were being supported in their saddles by their comrades, which suggested the British were not so very far away now. 'I'm sorry, sir,' he said very softly, and deliberately using the word 'sir' to mollify Lawford, 'but I'm not trying to be insolent. I'm just trying to keep you and me alive.'

  'I know. I'm sorry too. I should have known it wasn't powder.'

  'It was confusing, weren't it?' Sharpe said, trying to console his companion. 'What with the Tippoo being there. Fat little bugger, ain't he? But you're doing all right, sir.' Sharpe spoke feelingly, knowing that the young Lieutenant desperately needed encouragement. 'And you were clever as hell, sir, saying you wore an apron. I should have splashed some ink on your uniform, shouldn't I? But I never thought of it, but you got us out of that one.'

  'I was thinking of Private Brookfield,' Lawford said, not without some pride at the memory of his inspired lie. 'You know Brookfield?'

  'The clerk of Mister Stanbridge's company, sir? Fellow who wears spectacles? Does he wear a pinny?'

  'He says it keeps the ink off him.'

  'He always was an old woman,' Sharpe said scornfully, 'but you did well. And I'll tell you something else. We have to get out of here soon because I know why we came now. We don't have to find your merchant fellow, we just have to get out. Unless you think we ought to rescue your uncle, but if you don't, then we can just run, because I know why we came now.'

  Lawford gaped at him. 'You know?'

  'The Colonel spoke to me, sir, while we was going through that pantomime back there in the palace. He says we're to tell General Harris to avoid the west wall. Nothing else, just that.'

  Lawford stared at Sharpe, then glanced across the angle of the city walls towards the western defences, but nothing he could see there looked strange or suspicious. 'You'd better stop calling me "sir",' he said. 'Are you sure about what he said?'

  'He said it twice. Avoid the west wall.'

  A bellow from the next cavalier made them turn. Rothiere was pointing south, suggesting that the two Englishmen watch that direction as they were supposed to instead of gaping like yokels towards the west. Sharpe obediently stared southwards, though there was nothing to be seen there except some women carrying loads on their heads and a thin naked boy herding some scrawny cattle along the riverbank. His duty now, Sharpe thought, was to escape this place and get back to the British army, but how in God's name was he ever to do that? If he were to jump off the wall now, Sharpe reckoned, he would stand a half-chance of breaking a leg, and even if he survived the jump he would only land in the glacis ditch, and if he managed to cross the glacis he would merely reach the military encampment that was built hard around the city's southern and eastern walls, and if he was lucky enough to escape the hundreds of soldiers who would converge on him, he would still need to cross the river, and meanwhile every gun on the encampment wall would be hammering at his heels, and once he had crossed the river, if he ever did, the Tippoo's lancers would be waiting on the far bank. The sheer impossibility of escaping the city made him smile. 'God knows how we ever get out of here,' he said to Lawford.

  'Maybe at night?' Lawford suggested vaguely.

  'If they ever let us stand guard at night,' Sharpe said dubiously, then thought of Mary. Could he leave her in the city?

  'So what do we do?' Lawford asked.

  'What we always do in the army,' Sharpe said stoically. 'Hurry up and do nothing. Wait for the opportunity. It'll come, it'll come. And in the meantime, maybe we can find out just what the devils are doing in the west of the city, eh?'

  Lawford shuddered. 'I'm glad I brought you, Sharpe.'

  'You are?' Sharpe grinned at that compliment. 'I'll tell you when I'll be glad. When you take me back home to the army.' And suddenly, after weeks of thinking about desertion, Sharpe realized that what he had just said was true. He did want to go back to the army, and that knowledge surprised him. The army had bored Richard Sharpe, then done its best to break his spirits. It had even flogged him, but now, standing on Seringapatam's battlements, he missed the army.

  For at heart, as Richard Sharpe had just discovered for himself, he was a soldier.

  Chapter 6

  The armies of Britain and Hyderabad reached Seringapatam four days later. The first evidence of their coming was a cloud of dust that thickened and rose to obscure the eastern horizon, a great fog of dust kicked up by thousands of hooves, boots and wheels. The two armies had crossed the river well to the city's east and were now on its southern bank and Sharpe climbed with the rest of Gudin's men to the firestep above the Mysore Gate to watch the first British cavalry patrols appear in the distance. A torrent of lancers clattered out of the gate to challenge the invaders. The Tippoo's men rode with green and scarlet pennants on their lance heads and beneath silk banners showing the golden sun blazoned against a scarlet field. Once the lancers had passed through the gate a succession of painted ox carts squealed and ground their way into the city, each loaded with rice, grain or beans. There was plenty of water inside Seringapatam, for not only did the River Cauvery wash beneath two of the walls, but each street had its own well, and now the Tippoo was making certain that the granaries were filled to overflowing. The city's magazines were already crammed with ammunition. There were guns in every embrasure and, behind the walls, spare guns waited to replace any that were dismounted. Sharpe had never seen so many guns. The Tippoo Sultan had great faith in artillery and he had collected cannon of every shape and size. There were guns with barrels disguised as crouching tigers, and guns inscribed with flowing Arabic letters, and guns supplied from France, some still with the ancient Bourbon cipher incised close to their touchholes. There were huge guns with barrels over twenty feet long that fired stone balls close to fifty pounds in weight and small guns, scarce longer than a musket, that fired individual balls of grape. The Tippoo intended to meet any British assault with a storm of cannon fire.

  And not just cannon fire, for as the two enemy armies marched closer to the city the rocket-men brought their strange weapons to the firesteps. Sharpe had never seen rockets before and he gaped as the missiles were stacked against the parapets. Each was an iron tube some four or five inches wide and about eighteen inches long that was attached by leather thongs to a bamboo stick that stood higher than a man. A crude tin cone tipped the iron cylinder, and inside the cone was either a smal
l solid shot or else an explosive charge that was ignited by the rocket's own gunpowder propellant. The missiles were fired by lighting a twist of paper that emerged from the base of the iron cylinders. Some of the rocket tubes had been wrapped with paper, then painted with either snarling tigers or verses from the Koran. 'There's a man in Ireland working on a similar weapon,' Lawford told Sharpe, 'though I don't think he puts tigers on his rocket heads.'

  'How do you aim the bloody things?' Sharpe asked. Some of the rockets had been placed ready to fire, but there was no gun barrel to direct them, instead they were simply laid on the parapet and pointed in the general direction of the enemy.

  'You don't really aim them,' Lawford said, 'at least I don't think you do. They're just pointed in the right direction and fired. They are notoriously inaccurate,' he added, 'at least I hope they are.'

  'We'll see soon enough,' Sharpe said as another handcart of the strange missiles was heaved up the ramp to the firestep.

  Sharpe looked forward to seeing the rockets fired, but then it became apparent that the British and Hyderabad armies were not approaching the city directly and thus bringing themselves into range, but instead planned to march clear around Seringapatam's southern margin. The progress of the two armies was painfully slow. They had appeared at dawn, but by nightfall they had still not completed their half-circuit of the island on which Seringapatam sat. A crowd of spectators thronged the city ramparts to watch the enormous sprawl of herds, battalions, cavalry squadrons, guns, civilians and wagons that filled the southern landscape. Dust surrounded the armies like an English fog. From time to time the fog thickened as a group of the Tippoo's lancers attacked some vulnerable spot, but each time the lancers were met by a counter-charge of allied cavalry and more dust would spew up from the horses' hooves as the riders charged, clashed, circled and fought. One lancer rode back to the city with a British cavalryman's hat held aloft on his spear point and the soldiers on the walls cheered his return, but gradually the greater number of allied cavalry gained the upper hand and the cheers died away as more and more of the Tippoo's horsemen splashed back wounded through the South Cauvery's ford. Some of the enemy, when the Tippoo's cavalry was driven away, ventured closer to the city. Small groups of officers trotted their horses towards the river so that they could examine the city walls, and it was one such group that drew the first rocket fire.