Authors: Bernard Cornwell
“Bastard,” Sharpe muttered.
“Quiet! Both of you,” Lawford insisted and then, with his innate politeness, the Lieutenant nodded thanks to the guard who had finally opened the cell directly opposite Hakeswill's lair. “Come on, Sharpe,” Lawford said, then stepped fastidiously into the filthy straw. The cell was eight foot deep and ten foot long and a little over the height of a man. The sewage
smell was rank, but no worse than in the courtyard above. The barred door clashed shut behind them and the key was turned.
“Willie,” a tired voice said from the shadows of the cell, “how very good of you to visit me.” Sharpe, his eyes accustoming themselves to the dimness of the dungeons, saw that Colonel McCandless had been crouching in one corner, half shrouded by straw. The Colonel now stood to greet them, but he was weak for he tottered as he stood, though he shook off Lawford's attempt to help him. “A fever,” he explained. “It comes and it goes. I've had it for years. I suspect the only thing that will cure it will be some soft Scottish rain, but that seems an ever more unlikely prospect. It is good to see you, Willie.”
“You too, sir. You've met Private Sharpe, I think.”
McCandless gave Sharpe a grim look. “I have a question for you, young man.”
“It wasn't gunpowder, sir,” Sharpe said, remembering his first confrontation with the Colonel and thus anticipating the question. “It tasted wrong, sir. Wasn't salty.”
“Aye, it didn't look like powder,” the Scotsman said. “It was blowing in the wind like flour, but that wasn't my question, Private. My question, Private, is what would you have done if it had been gunpowder?”
“I'd have shot you, sir,” Sharpe said, “begging your pardon, sir.”
“Sharpe!” Lawford remonstrated.
“Quite right, man,” McCandless said. “The wretched fellow was testing you, wasn't he? He was giving you a recruitment test, and you couldn't fail it. I'm glad it wasn't powder, but I don't mind saying you had me worried for a brief while. Do you mind if I sit, Willie? I'm not in my usual good health.” He sank back into his straw from where he frowned up at Sharpe. “Nor are you, Private. Are you in pain?”
“Bastards cracked a rib, sir, and I'm bleeding a bit. Do you mind if I sit?” Sharpe gingerly sat against the side bars of the cell and carefully lifted away the coat that had been draped over his back. “Bit of fresh air will heal it, sir,” he said to Lawford who was insisting on examining the newly opened wounds, though there was nothing he could do to help them mend.
“You won't get fresh air here,” McCandless said. “You smell the sewage?”
“You can't miss that smell, Uncle,” Lawford said.
“It's the new inner wall,” McCandless explained. “When they built it they cut the city drains, so now the night soil can't reach the river and the sewage puddles just east of here. Some of it seeps away through the Water Gate, but not enough. One learns to pray for a west wind.” He smiled grimly. “Among other things.”
McCandless wanted news, not only of what had brought Lawford and Sharpe into Seringapatam, but of the siege's progress and he groaned when he heard where the British had placed their works. “So Harris is coming from the west?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Straight into the Tippoo's loving arms.” The Scotsman sat quietly for a moment, sometimes shivering because of his fever. He had wrapped himself in straw again, but he was still cold, despite the day's intense damp heat. “And you couldn't get a message out? No, I suppose not. Those things are never easy.” He shook his head. “Let's hope the Tippoo doesn't finish his mine.”
“It's near finished, sir.” Sharpe delivered yet more bad news. “I saw it.”
“Aye, it would be. He's an efficient man, the Tippoo,” McCandless said, “efficient and clever. Cleverer than his father, and old Hyder Ali was canny enough. I never met him, but I think I'd have liked the old rogue. This son, now,
I never met him either until I was captured, and I wish I hadn't. He's a good soldier hut a bad enemy.” McCandless closed his eyes momentarily as a shudder racked his body.
“What will he do with us?” Lawford asked.
“That I cannot say,” Colonel McCandless replied. “It depends, probably, on his dreams. He's not as good a Muslim as he'd like us to think, for he still believes in some older magic and he sets great store by his dreams. If his dreams tell him to kill us then doubtless we'll have our heads turned back to front like the unfortunate gentlemen who shared these cells with me until quite recently. You heard about them?”
“We heard,” Lawford said.
“Murdered to amuse the Tippoo's troops!” McCandless said disapprovingly. “And there were some good Christian men among them too. Only that thing over there survived.” He jerked his head toward Hakeswill's cell.
“He survived, sir,” Sharpe said vengefully, “because he betrayed us.”
“It's a lie, sir!” Hakeswill, who had been avidly listening to Sharpe and Lawford's tale, snapped indignantly from across the corridor. “A filthy lie, sir, as I'd expect from a gutter soldier like Private Sharpe.”
McCandless turned to gaze at the Sergeant. “Then why were you spared?” he asked coldly.
“Touched by God, sir. Always have been, sir. Can't be killed, sir.”
“Mad,” McCandless said quietly.
“You can be killed, Obadiah,” Sharpe said. “Christ, if it wasn't for you, you bastard, I'd have taken our news to General Harris.”
“Lies, sir! More lies,” Hakeswill insisted.
“Quiet, both of you,” McCandless said. “And Private Sharpe?”
“Sir?”
“I'd be grateful if you did not blaspheme. Remember that Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain.' Exodus twenty, verse seven.”
“Amen, sir,” Hakeswill called, “and praise the Lord, sir.”
“Sorry, sir,” Sharpe muttered.
“You do know your Ten Commandments, don't you, Sharpe?” McCandless asked. “No, sir.”
“Not one of them?” McCandless asked, shocked.
“Thou shalt not be found out, sir? Is that one of them?” Sharpe asked guilelessly.
McCandless stared at him in horror. “Do you have any religion, Sharpe?”
“No, sir. Never found a need for it.”
“You were born with a hunger for it, man.” The Colonel spoke with some of his old energy.
“And for a few things else, sir.”
McCandless shivered under his mantle of straw. “If God spares me, Sharpe, I may attempt to repair some of the damage to your immortal soul. Do you still have the Bible your mother gave you, Willie?”
“They took it from me, sir,” Lawford said. “But I did manage to save one page.” He took the single page from his trouser pocket. He was blushing, for both he and Sharpe knew why the page had been torn from the holy book, and it was not for any purpose that Colonel McCandless would have approved. “Just the one page, sir,” Lawford said apologetically.
“Give it here, man,” McCandless said fiercely, “and let us see what the good Lord has to say to us.” He took the crumpled page, smoothed it and tipped it to the light. “Ah! The
Revelation!” He seemed pleased. “âBlessed are the dead which die in the Lord,'” he read aloud. “Amen to that.”
“Not very cheerful, sir,” Sharpe ventured.
“It is the most cheerful thing I can contemplate in this place, Private. A promise from the Lord God Almighty Himself that when I die I shall be carried into His glory.” The Colonel smiled for that consolation. “Might I assume, Private, that you cannot read?”
“Me, sir? No, sir. Never taught, sir.”
“Pig stupid, sir, he is, sir,” Hakeswill offered from across the corridor. “Always was, sir. Dumb as a bucket.”
“We must teach you your letters,” McCandless said, ignoring the Sergeant's comments.
“Mister Lawford was going to do that, sir,” Sharpe said.
“Then I suggest he begin now.” McCandless said firmly.
Lawford smiled diffidently. “It's difficult to know where to begin, Uncle.”
“Why not with T for tiger?” McCandless suggested.
The beast growled, then settled in its straw. And Sharpe, some years late, began his lessons.
The siege works advanced fast. Redcoats and sepoys worked day and night, sapping forward and shoring up the trench sides with bamboo mats. Rockets continually harassed the work, and the Tippoo succeeded in remounting some of his guns on the western walls, though their fire did little to disturb the work and the gunners suffered grievously from the counterfire of the British eighteen-pounders emplaced in the captured mill fort. Smaller guns, twelve-pounders and short-barreled howitzers, joined the bombardment of the ramparts and their shells and round shot seared above the ground where yard by yard the red earth was broken until, at last, the big short-range breaching batteries were dug and the rest of the massive siege guns were rolled forward in the night
and concealed in their gun pits. To the Tippoo's troops, watching from the battered summit of the western wall, the approaches to the city were now a maze of newly turned earth. Approach trenches angled their way across the farmland, ending in larger mounds of earth thrown up from the deeper pits that held the breaching guns. Not all those bigger mounds concealed guns, for some of the spoil heaps were deliberately thrown up as deceptions so that the Tippoo could not guess where the real guns were emplaced until they opened fire. The Tippoo only knew that the British would aim at his western wall, but he did not yet know the exact stretch of wall that the enemy engineers had chosen, and it suited General Harris that the Tippoo should not learn that spot until it was necessary for the breaching batteries to open fire. If the defenders had too much warning of the place chosen for the storm then they would have time to build elaborate new defenses behind it.
But the Tippoo was gambling that he already knew where the British would choose to make their breach, and in the old gatehouse where the massive mine was concealed his engineers finished their preparations. They stacked stone around the vast powder charge so that its explosion would be directed northward into the space between the walls. For the mine to be effective the British had to site their breach in the short stretch of wall between the old gatehouse and the city's northwest bastion, and the Tippoo's gamble was not an outrageous risk for it was not difficult to forecast that the breach would indeed be blasted in that section of wall. The site was dictated by the outer wall's decay, and by the shortcomings of the low glacis that lay outside that inviting wall. The rudimentary glacis half protected most of the city's western battlements, its raw earth slope designed to deflect cannonballs up from the wall's base, but where the city wall was most decayed the river ran very close to the defenses and
there had been no room to construct even the pretence of a glacis. Instead a low mud wall continued the line of the glacis, and that wall penned in the water that had been pumped into the ditch between the outer ramparts and the glacis. That low wall was no obstacle compared to a glacis and the Tippoo reckoned it would be an irresistible target for the enemy engineers.
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 colored swirls on the surface, and those shimmering signs, like the dreams, forecast a great victory. The British would he 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 colors 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.