Authors: Bernard Cornwell
“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 fire-step.
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 countercharge 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 spearpoint 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 Cau-very'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 toward the river so that they could examine the city walls, and it was one such group that drew the first rocket fire.
Sharpe watched fascinated as an officer turned one of the long weapons on the flat top of the parapet so that its tin cone pointed directly toward the nearest group of horsemen. The rocketman waited beside his officer, swinging a length
of slow match to keep its burning end bright and hot. The officer fussed with the rocket's alignment, then, satisfied at last, he stepped back and nodded to the rocketman who grinned and touched his slow match to the twist of paper at the rocket's base.
The fuse paper, Sharpe guessed, had been soaked in water diluted with gunpowder, then dried, because it immediately caught the glowing fire which ate its wav swiftly up the fuse as the rocketman stepped hurriedly away. The glowing trail vanished into the iron cylinder, there was silence for a second, then the rocket twitched as a bright flame abruptly choked and spat from the tube's base. The twitch of the igniting powder charge threw the heavy rocket out of its careful alignment, but there was no chance to correct the weapon's aim for a jet of flame was spitting fiercely enough from the cylinder to scorch the rocket's quivering bamboo stick, and then, very suddenly, the bright flame roared into a furnace-like intensity with a noise like a huge waterfall, only instead of water it was spewing sparks and smoke, as the rocket began to move. It trembled for an instant, scraped an inch or two across the parapet, then abruptly accelerated away into the air, leaving a thick cloud of smoke and a scorch mark on the parapet's coping. For a few seconds it seemed as if the rocket was having trouble staving aloft, for the long scorched tail wobbled as the fiery tube fought against gravity and as the smoke trail stitched a crazy whorl above the ditch at the foot of the wall, but then at last it gained momentum and raced away across the glacis, the encampment, and the river. It spewed a tail of sparks, fire, and smoke as it flew, then, as the powder charge began to be exhausted, the rocket fell earthward. Beneath the missile the group of horsemen had collapsed their spyglasses and were fleeing in every direction as the fire-tailed demon came shrieking out of the sky. The rocket struck the ground, bounced, tumbled, then
exploded with a small crack of noise and a burst of flame and white smoke. None of the horsemen had been touched, but their panic delighted the Tippoo's men on the bastions who gave the rocketmen a cheer. Sharpe cheered with them. Farther up the wall a cannon fired at a second group of horsemen. The smoke of the gun billowed out across the encampment beneath the walls and the heavy round shot screamed across the river to disembowel a horse a half-mile away, but no one cheered the gunners. Guns were not so spectacular as rockets.
“He's got thousands of those bloody things,” Sharpe told Lawford, indicating a pile of the rockets.
“They really aren't very accurate,” Lawford said with pedantic disapproval.
“But fire enough at once and you wouldn't know if you were in this world or the next. I wouldn't fancy being on the wrong end of a dozen of those things.”
Behind them, from one of the tall white minarets of the city's new mosque, the muezzin was chanting the summons for the evening prayer and the Muslim rocketmen hastened to unroll their small prayer mats and face westward toward Mecca. Sharpe and Lawford also faced west, not out of any respect for the Tippoo's religion, but because the vanguard of British and Indian cavalry was scouting the flat land beyond the South Cauvery which was plainly visible from the summit of the Mysore Gate. The main body of the two armies was making camp well to the south of the city, but the horsemen had ridden ahead to reconnoiter the western country in preparation for the next day's short march. Sharpe could even see officers pacing out and marking where the lascars would pitch the armies' tents. It seemed that General Harris had decided to attack from the west, the one direction that McCandless had warned against.
“Poor bloody fools,” Sharpe said, though neither he nor
Lawford yet knew what was dangerous about the western defenses. Nor had they been given the slightest chance to escape from the city. They were never unwatched, they were never allowed to stand guard at night, and Sharpe knew that even the smallest attempt to break away from the city would lead to immediate death, yet they were not otherwise treated badly. They had been accepted well enough by their new comrades, but Sharpe could detect a reserve and he supposed that until he and Lawford proved their reliability-there would always be an undercurrent of suspicion. “It ain't that they don't trust you,” Henry Hickson had explained on their first night, “but till they've actually seen you bang a few balls off at your old mates, they won't really know whether you're stout.” Hickson was sewing up the frayed edge of his leather thumbstall which protected his hand when a cannon was swabbed out. The gunner had to stop the touchhole so that the rammer could not drive a jet of fresh air down the barrel and so ignite any scraps of remaining powder, and Hickson's old and blackened thumbstall betrayed how long he had been an artilleryman. “Had this in America,” Hickson said, flourishing the ancient scrap of leather. “Stitched for me by a little girl in Charleston. Lovely little thing she was.”
“How long have you been in the artillery?” Lawford had asked the gray-haired Hickson.
“Bleeding lifetime, Bill. Joined in 76.” Hickson laughed. “King and country! Go and save the colonies, eh? And all I did was march up and down like a little lost lamb and only ever fired a dozen shots. I should have stayed there, shouldn't I, when they kicked us out, but, like a fool, I didn't. Went to Gibraltar, polished cannon for a couple of years, then got posted out here.”
“So why did you run?” Lawford asked.
“Money, of course. The Tippoo might be a black heathen bastard, but he pays well for gunners. When he pays at all,
of course, which isn't precisely frequent, but all the same he ain't done bad by me. And if I'd stayed in the gunners I wouldn't have met Suni, would I?” He had jerked his callused thumb toward his Indian woman who was cooking the evening meal with the wives of the other soldiers.
Don't you ever worry that you'll be recaptured?” Lawford asked him.
“Of course I bloody worry! All the bleeding time!” Hickson held the thumbstall close to his right eye to judge the neatness of his stitching. “Christ, Bill, I don't want to be stood up against a bleeding post with a dozen bastards staring down their musket barrels at me. I want to die in Suni's bed.” He grinned. “You do ask the most stupid questions, Bill, but what do you expect of a bleeding clerk! All that reading and writing, mate, it doesn't do a man any bleeding good.” He had shaken his head in despair of Lawford ever seeing sense. Like all of Gudin's soldiers, Hickson was more suspicious of Lawford than of Sharpe. They all understood Sharpe, for he was one of them and good at his trade, but Lawford was patently uncomfortable. They put it down to his having come from a comfortable home that had fallen on hard times, and while they were sympathetic to that misfortune they nevertheless expected him to make the best of it. Others in Gudin's small battalion despised Lawford for his clumsiness with weapons, but Sharpe was his friend and so far no man had been willing to risk Sharpe's displeasure by needling Lawford.
Sharpe and Lawford watched the invading armies make their camp well out of cannon range to the south of the city. A few Mysorean cavalrymen still circled the armies, watching for a chance to snap up a fugitive, but most of the Tippoo's men were now back on the city's island. There was an excited buzz in the city, almost a relief that the enemy was in sight and the waiting at last was over. There was also a feeling of
confidence, for although the enemy horde looked vast, the Tippoo had formidable defenses and plenty of men. Sharpe could detect no lack of enthusiasm among the Hindu troops. Lawford had told him there was bad blood between them and the Muslims, but on that evening, as the Tippoo's men hung more defiant banners above their limewashed walls, the city seemed united in its defiance.
Sergeant Rothière shouted at Sharpe and Lawford from the inner wall of the Mysore Gate, pointing to the big bastion at the city's south-western corner. “Colonel Gudin wants us.” Lawford translated for Sharpe.
“Vite!” Rothière bellowed.
“Now,” Lawford said nervously.
The two men threaded their way through the spectators who crowded the parapets until they found Colonel Gudin in a cavalier that jutted south from the huge square bastion. “How's your back?” the Frenchman greeted Sharpe.
“Mending wonderfully, sir.”
Gudin smiled, pleased at the news. “It's Indian medicine. Sharpe. If I ever go back to France I've a mind to take a native doctor with me. Much better than ours. All a French doctor would do is bleed you dry, then console your widow.” The Colonel turned and gestured south across the river. “Your old friends,” he said, indicating where the British and Indian cavalry were exploring the land between the army's encampment and the city. Most were staving well out of range of Seringapatam's cannon, but a few braver souls were galloping closer to the city, either to tempt the Tippoo's cavalry to come out and dare single combat, or else to provoke the gunners on the city wall. One especially flamboyant group was shouting toward the city, and even waving, as though inviting cannon fire, and every now and then a cannon would boom or a rocket scream across the river, though somehow the jeering cavalrymen always remained untouched.
“They're distracting us,” Gudin explained, “drawing attention away from some others. There, see? Some bushes. Beside the cistern.” He was pointing across the river. “There are some scouts there. On foot. They are trying to see what defenses we have close to the river. You see them? Look in the bushes under the two palm trees.”
Sharpe stared, but could see nothing. “You want us to go and get them, sir?” he offered.
“I want you to shoot them,” Gudin said.
The bushes under the twin palms were nearly quarter of a mile away. “Long bloody range for a musket, sir,” Sharpe said dubiously.
“Try this, then,” Gudin said and held out a gun. It must have been one of the Tippoo's own weapons, for its stock was decorated with ivory, its tiger-head lock was chased with gold, and its barrel engraved with Arabic writing.
Sharpe took and hefted the gun. “Might be pretty, sir,” he said, “but no amount of fancy work on the outside will make it more accurate than that plain old thing.” He patted his heavy French musket.
“You're wrong,” Gudin said. “That's a rifle.”
“A rifle!” Sharpe had heard of such weapons, but he had never handled one, and now he peered inside the muzzle and saw that the barrel was indeed cut in a pattern of spiraling grooves. He had heard that the grooves spun the bullet which somehow made a rifle far more accurate than a shot from a smoothbore musket. Why that should be the case he had not the slightest idea, but every man he had ever spoken to about rifles had sworn it was true. “Still,” he said dubiously, “near a quarter-mile? Long ways for a bullet, sir, even if it is spinning,”
“That rifle can kill at four hundred paces, Sharpe,” Gudin said confidently. “It's loaded, by the way,” the Colonel added, and Sharpe, who had been peering down the muzzle
again, jerked back. Gudin laughed. “Loaded with the best powder and with its bullet wrapped in oiled leather. I want to see how good a shot you are.”
“No, you don't, sir,” Sharpe said, “you want to see if I'm willing to kill my own countrymen.”
“That too, of course,” Gudin agreed placidly, and laughed at having had his small ploy discovered. “At that range you should aim about six or seven feet above your target. I have another rifle for you, Lawford, but I don't suppose we can expect a clerk to be as accurate as a skirmisher like Sharpe?”
“I'll do my best, sir,” Lawford said and took the second rifle from Gudin. Lawford might be clumsy at loading a gun, but he was a practiced shot in the hunting field and had been firing rifled fowling pieces since he was eight years old.