Sharpe's Tiger

by Bernard Cornwell

  He did not put all his faith in the single massive mine. That mine could well kill or maim hundreds of the assaulting troops, but there were thousands more enemy soldiers who could be sent against the city and so the Tippoo prepared his army for its test. The western walls would be crammed with men when the time came, and those men would each have at least three loaded muskets, and behind each fighting soldier would be men trained to reload the discharged weapons. The British storm would thus be met with a blistering hail of musket fire, and mixed with that maelstrom of lead would be round shot and canister fired from the cannons that had replaced the destroyed guns and which were now concealed behind the mutilated ramparts. Thousands of rockets were also ready. At long range the weapon was erratic, but in the close confines of a breach, where men were crammed as tight as sheep in a pen, the rockets could inflict a dreadful slaughter. 'We shall stuff hell with infidel souls,' the Tippoo boasted, though at every prayer time he took care to beseech Allah for an early monsoon and every dawn he would look at the sky in hope of seeing some signs of rain, but the skies remained obstinately clear. An early monsoon would drown the British in torrential rain before the rockets and guns could cut them to bloody shreds, but it seemed the rains would not come early to Mysore this year.

  The skies might be clear, but every other omen was good. The ill luck that had led to the loss of the mill fort had been diverted by the sacrifice of the British prisoners and now the Tippoo's dreams and auguries spoke only of victory. The Tippoo recorded his dreams each morning, writing them down in a large book before discussing their portents with his advisers. His diviners peered into pots of heated oil to read the shifting coloured swirls on the surface, and those shimmering signs, like the dreams, forecast a great victory. The British would be destroyed in southern India and then, when the French sent troops to reinforce Mysore's growing empire, the redcoats would be scoured from the north of the country. Their bones would bleach on the sites of their defeats and their silken colours would fade on the walls of the Tippoo's great palaces. The tiger would rule from the snowy mountains of the north to the palm-edged beaches of the south, and from the Coromandel Coast to the seas off Malabar. All that glory was foretold by the dreams and by the glistening auguries of the oil.

  But then, one dawn, it seemed the auguries might be deceiving, for the British suddenly unmasked four of their newly made breaching batteries and the great guns crashed back on their trails and the intricate network of trenches and earthworks was shrouded by the giant gusts of smoke that were belched out with every thunderous recoil.

  The balls were not aimed where the Tippoo had hoped, at the vulnerable part of the wall behind the missing section of glacis, but at the city's mighty north-west bastion: a complex of battlements that loomed high above the river and, from its topmost ramparts, dominated both the northern and western walls. The whole city seemed to shake as the balls slammed home again and again and every strike sprang dust from the old masonry until at last the first stones fell. From the north bank of the river, where the smaller British camp was sited, more guns added their fire and still more stones tumbled down into the ditches as the gunners gnawed away at the great bastion.

  Next day more of the siege guns opened fire, but these new weapons were aimed at the cavaliers at the very southern end of the western wall. There were small cannon mounted in those cavaliers, but their embrasures were destroyed in less than a morning's work and the defenders' guns were hurled back off their carriages. And still the batteries hammered at the north-west bastion until, an hour after midday, the great fortification collapsed. At first the sound of the bastion's fall was like the creak and groan of a deep earthquake, then it turned into a rumble like thunder as the massive battlements disintegrated beneath a huge cloud of dust that slowly drifted to settle on the Cauvery so that, for almost a mile downstream, the water was turned as white as milk. There was an eerie silence after the bastion had been toppled, for the besiegers' guns had fallen silent. The Tippoo's troops rushed to the walls, their muskets and rockets ready, but no attackers stirred from the British lines. Their impudent flags flapped in the breeze, but the redcoats and their native allies stayed in their trenches.

  A brave man of the Tippoo's army ventured up the mound of rubble that had been the north-west corner of the city's defences. Dust coated the tiger stripes of his tunic as he clambered across the unsteady ruins to find the green flag that had been flying from the bastion's topmost rampart. He retrieved the flag, shook the dust from its folds, and waved it in the air. One enemy gunner saw the movement on top of the rubble heap and fired his huge gun. The ball screamed through the dust, ricocheted from a boulder and bounced on up over the northern defences to fall into the whitened river. The soldier, unscathed, waved the flag again, then planted its broken staff at the summit of the bastion's ruins.

  The Tippoo inspected the damage to his western defences. The guns were gone from the southern cavaliers, and the north-west bastion was untenable, but there was no breach in either place and both the outer and inner walls were undamaged. The low glacis had protected the bottom part of the walls, and though some of the north-west bastion's stones had fallen into the flooded ditch there was no ramp up which a storming party could climb. 'What they were doing,' the Tippoo announced to his entourage, 'was destroying our flanking guns. Which means they still plan to attack in the centre of the wall. Which is where we want them to attack.'

  Colonel Gudin agreed. For a time, like the Tippoo, he had been worried that the British bombardment meant that they planned to enter the city at its north-western corner, but now, in the lull after the collapse of the towers, the enemy's strategy seemed plain. They had not been trying to make a breach, but instead had knocked down the two places where the Tippoo could mount high guns to plunge their fire onto the flanks of the storming troops. The breach would be made next. 'It will be where we want it to be, I'm sure,' Gudin confirmed the Tippoo's guess.

  The man who had planted the flag on the crest of the fallen bastion was brought to the Tippoo on the western wall close to where the towers had fallen. The Tippoo rewarded him with a purse of gold. The man was a Hindu, and that pleased the Tippoo who worried about such men's loyalties. 'Is he one of yours?' he asked Appah Rao who was accompanying the Tippoo on the inspection.

  'No, Your Majesty.'

  The Tippoo suddenly turned and gazed up into the tall Appah Rao's face. He was frowning. 'Those wretched men of Gudin's,' the Tippoo said, 'wasn't there a woman with them?'

  'Yes, Your Majesty.'

  'And didn't she go to your house?' the Tippoo charged Appah Rao.

  'She did, Highness, but she died.' Appah Rao told the lie smoothly.

  The Tippoo was intrigued. 'Died?'

  'She was a drab sick creature,' Appah Rao said carelessly, 'and just died. As should the men who brought her here.' He still feared that the arrest of Sharpe and Lawford could lead to his own betrayal and, though he did not truly wish them dead, nor did he wish the Tippoo to believe that he desired them to live.

  'Those two will die,' the Tippoo promised grimly, his query about Mary apparently forgotten. 'They will surely die,' he promised again as he clambered up the ruins of the north-western bastion. 'We shall either offer their black souls to avert ill fortune, or we shall sacrifice them as thanks for our victory.' He would prefer the latter, and he imagined killing the two men on the very same day that he first ascended the silver steps of his tiger throne, the throne he had sworn never to use until his enemies were destroyed. He felt a fierce pang of anticipation. The redcoats would come to his city and there they would be seared by the fires of vengeance and crushed by falling stone. Their groans would echo through the days of their dying, and then the rains would come and the sluggish Cauvery would swell into its full drowning spate and the remaining British, who were already low on food, would have no choice but to withdraw. They would leave their guns behind and begin their long journey across Mysore and every mile of their retreat would be dogged by the Tippoo's
lancers and sabremen. The vultures would grow fat this year, and a trail of sun-whitened bones would be left across India until the very last red-coated man died. And there, the Tippoo decided, where the last Englishman died, he would erect a high pillar of marble, white and gleaming and crowned with a snarling tiger's head.

  The muezzin's call echoed across the city, summoning the faithful to prayer. The sound was beautiful in the silence after the guns. The Tippoo, obedient to his God, hurried towards his palace with one last backward glance at the damned. They could make their breach, they could cross the river and they could come to his walls. But once at the walls they would die.

  'P-I-K,' Sharpe said, scratching the letters in the dust of the cell's floor where he had cleared a patch of straw. 'L-O-K.'

  'Picklock,' Lawford said. 'Very good, but you've left out two Cs.'

  'But I've got the picklock, sir,' Sharpe said, and produced it from his coat pocket. It was a small cluster of metal shafts, some curiously bent at their tips, which he quickly hid once he had shown it to Lawford.

  'Why didn't they find it?' Lawford asked. Both men had been searched when they had been taken to the palace after their arrest, and though the guards had left the page of the Bible in Lawford's pocket, they had taken everything else of value.

  'I had it somewhere it couldn't be found, sir,' Sharpe said. 'Colonel Gudin thought I was scratching my arse, if you follow me, but I was hiding it.'

  'I'd rather not know,' Lawford said primly.

  'A good picklock like that can take care of those old padlocks in seconds, sir,' Sharpe said, nodding at the lock on their cell door. 'Then we just have to rush the guards.'

  'And get a bellyful of lead?' Lawford suggested.

  'When the assault comes,' Sharpe said, 'the guards will like as not be at the top of the steps, trying to see what's happening. They won't hear us.' Sharpe's back was still painful, and the wounds inflicted by the jetti were crusted with dried blood and pus that tore whenever he moved too quickly, but there was no gangrene and he had been spared any fever, and that good fortune was restoring his confidence.

  'When the assault comes, Sharpe,' Colonel McCandless intervened, 'our guards are more likely to be on the walls, leaving our security to the tiger.'

  'Hadn't thought of that, sir.' Sharpe sounded disappointed.

  'I don't think even you can rush a tiger,' McCandless said.

  'No, sir. I don't suppose I can,' Sharpe admitted. Each night, at dusk, the guards left the cells, but first they released the tiger. It was a difficult process, for the tiger had to be held away from the guards with long spears as they retreated up the steps. It had evidently tried to charge the guards once for it bore a long scar down one muscular striped flank, and these days, to prevent another such attack, the guards tossed down a great chunk of raw goat meat to satisfy the tiger's hunger before they released it, and the prisoners would spend the night hours listening to the creature grinding and slavering as it ripped the last pieces of flesh from the bones. Each dawn the tiger was herded back to its cell where it slept through the heat of the day until its time for guard duty came again. It was a huge and mangy beast, not nearly so sleek as the six tigers kept in the palace yard, but it had a hungrier look and sometimes, in the moonlight, Sharpe would watch it pacing up and down the short corridor, the fall of its pads silent on the stone as it endlessly went up and down, up and down, and he wondered what tiger thoughts brewed behind its night-glossed yellow eyes. Sometimes, for no reason, it would roar in the night and the hunting cheetahs would call back and the night would be loud with the sound of the animals. Then the tiger would leap lithely up the steps and roar another challenge from the bars at the head of the staircase. It always came back down, its approach silent and its gaze malevolent.

  By day, when the tiger twitched in its sleep, the guards would watch the cells. Sometimes there were just two guards, but at other times there were as many as six. Each morning a pair of prisoners from the city's civilian jail arrived in leg irons to take away the night-soil buckets, and when these had been emptied and returned, the first meal was served. It was usually cold rice, sometimes with beans or scraps of fish in it, with a tin jug of water. A second pail of rice was brought in the afternoon, but otherwise the prisoners were left alone. They listened to the sounds above them, ever fearful that they might be summoned to face the Tippoo's dreaded killers, and while they waited McCandless prayed, Hakeswill mocked, Lawford worried and Sharpe learned his letters.

  At first the learning was hard and it was made no easier by Hakeswill's constant scoffing. Lawford and McCandless would tell the Sergeant to be quiet, but after a while Hakeswill would chuckle again and start talking, ostensibly to himself, in the far corner of his cage. 'Above himself, ain't he?' Hakeswill would mutter just loud enough for Sharpe to hear. 'Got hairs and bleeding graces. That's what Sharpie's got. Hairs and graces. Learning to read! Might as well teach a stone to fart! It ain't natural, ain't right. A private soldier should know his place, says so in the scriptures.'

  'It says nothing of the sort, Sergeant!' McCandless would always snap after such an assertion.

  And always, every daylight hour of every day, there was the sound of the besiegers' guns. Their thunderous percussions filled the sky and were echoed by the crack of iron on sun-dried mud as the eighteen-pound round shots struck home, while, nearer, the Tippoo's own guns answered. Few such cannon had survived on the western walls, but closer to the dungeons, on the northern rampart, the Tippoo's gunners traded shot for shot with the batteries across the Cauvery and the sound of the weapons punched the warm air incessantly.

  'Working hard, them gunners!' Hakeswill would say. 'Doing a proper job, like real soldiers should. Working up a proper muck sweat. Not wasting their time with bleeding letters. C-A-T? Who the hell needs to know that? It's still a bleeding pussy cat. All you needs to know is how to skin the thing, not how to spell it.'

  'Quiet, Sergeant,' McCandless would growl.

  'Yes, sir. I shall be quiet, sir. Like a church mouse, sir.' But a few moments later the Sergeant could be heard grumbling again. 'Private Morgan, I remembers him, and he could read and he wasn't nothing but trouble. He always knew more than anyone else, but he didn't know better than to be flogged, did he? Would never have happened if he hadn't had his letters. His mother taught him, the silly Welsh bitch. He read his Bible when he should have been cleaning his musket. Died under the lash, he did, and good riddance. A private soldier's got no business reading. Bad for the eyes, sends you blind.'

  Hakeswill even talked at night. Sharpe would wake to hear the Sergeant talking in a low voice to the tiger, and one night even the tiger stopped to listen. 'You're not such a bad puss, are you?' Hakeswill crooned. 'Down here all alone, you are, just like me.' The Sergeant reached a tentative hand through the bars and gave the beast's back a swift pat. He was rewarded with a low snarl. 'Don't you growl at me, puss, or I'll have your bleeding eyes out. And how will you catch mouses then? Eh? You'll be a hungry blind pussy cat, that's what you'll be. That's it. Lay you down now and rest your big head, see? Doesn't hurt, does it?' And the Sergeant reached out and, with remarkable tenderness, scratched the big cat's flank and, to Sharpe's wonder, the huge beast settled itself comfortably against the bars of the Sergeant's cell. 'You're awake, aren't you, Sharpie?' Hakeswill called softly as he scratched the tiger. 'I knows you are, I can tell. So what happened to little Mary Bickerstaff, eh? You going to tell me, boy? Some heathen darkie got his filthy hands on her, has he? She'd have done better lifting her skirts to me. Instead she's being rogered by some blackie, ain't she? Is that what happened? Still now, still!' he soothed the tiger. Sharpe pretended to be asleep, but Hakeswill must have sensed his attention. 'Officer's pet, Sharpie? Is that what you are? Learning to read so you can be like them, is that what you want? It won't do you no good, boy. There's only two sorts of officers in this army, and the one sort's good and the other sort ain't. The good sort knows better than to get their hands dirty with you rankers; th
ey leave it all to the sergeants. The bad sort interfere. That young Mister Fitzgerald, he was an interferer, but he's gone to hell now and hell's the best place for him, seeing as how he was an upstart Irishman with no respect for sergeants. And your Mister Lawford, he ain't no good either, no good at all.' Hakeswill suddenly quietened as Colonel McCandless groaned.

  The Colonel's fever was growing worse, though he tried hard not to complain. Sharpe, abandoning his pretence of sleep, carried the water bucket to him. 'Drink, sir?'

  'That's kind of you, Sharpe, kind.'

  The Colonel drank, then propped his back against the stone wall at the back of the cell. 'We had a rainstorm last month,' he said, 'not a severe one, but these cells were flooded all the same. And not all of the flooding was rain, a good deal was sewage. I pray God gets us out of here before the monsoon.'

  'No chance of us still being here then, is there, sir?'

  'It depends, Sharpe, whether we take the city or not.'