“You save that volley for the infantry!” Harness warned them.
“Now, boys, forward, and give the heathen bastards a proper Sabbath killing!”
This was revenge. This was anger let loose. The enemy guns were still not loaded and their crews had been hard hit by the volley, and most of the guns would not have time to charge their barrels before the Scots were on them. Some of the gunners fled. Sharpe saw a mounted Mahratta officer rounding them up and driving them back to their pieces with the flat of his sword, but he also saw one gun, a painted monster directly to his front, being rammed hard by two men who heaved on the rammer, plucked it free then ran aside.
“For what we are about to receive,” Blackiston murmured. The engineer had also seen the gunners charge their barrel.
The gun fired, and its jet of smoke almost engulfed the General’s family. For an instant Sharpe saw Wellesley’s tall figure outlined against the pale smoke, then he could see nothing but blood and the General falling. The heat and discharge of the gun’s gasses rushed past Sharpe just a heartbeat after the scraps of canister had filled the air about him, but he had been directly behind the General and was in his shadow, and it was Wellesley who had taken the gun’s blast.
Or rather it was his horse. The stallion had been struck a dozen times while Wellesley, charmed, had not taken a scratch. The big horse ii [ toppled, dead before he struck the ground, and Sharpe saw the General kick his feet out from the stirrups and use his hands to push himself up from the saddle as the horse collapsed. Wellesley’s right foot touched the ground first and, before the stallion’s weight could roll onto his leg, he jumped away, staggering slightly in his hurry. Campbell turned towards him, but the General waved him away. Sharpe kicked the mare on and untied Diomed’s reins from his belt. Was he supposed to get the saddle off the dead horse? He supposed so, and thus slid out of his own saddle. But what the hell was he to do with the mare and Diomed while he untangled the saddle from the dead stallion? |” Then he thought to tie both to the dead horse’s bridle.
“Four hundred guineas gone to a penny bullet,” Wellesley said sarcastically, watching as Sharpe unbuckled the girth from the dead stallion. Or near dead, for the beast still twitched and kicked as the flies came to feast on its new blood.
“I’ll take Diomed,” Wellesley told Sharpe, then stooped to help, tugging the saddle with its attached bags and holsters free of the dying horse, but then a feral scream made the General turn back to watch as Harness’s men charged into the gun line. The scream was the noise they made as they struck home, a scream that was the release of all their fears and a terrible noise presaging their enemies’ death. And how they gave it. The Scotsmen found the gunners who had stayed at their posts crouching under the trails and they dragged them out and bayoneted them again and again.
“Bastard,” one man screamed, plunging his blade repeatedly into a dead gunner’s belly.
“Heathen black bastard!” He kicked the man’s head, then stabbed down with his bayonet again. Colonel Harness back swung his sword to kill a man, then casually wiped the blood off the blade onto his horse’s black mane.
“Form line!” he shouted.
“Form line! Hurry, you rogues!”
A scatter of gunners had fled back from the Scots to the safety of the Mahratta infantry who were now little more than a hundred paces away.
They should have charged, Sharpe thought. While the Scots were blindly hacking away at the gunners, the infantry should have advanced, but instead they waited for the next stage of the Scots attack. To his right there were still guns firing at the sepoys, but that was a separate battle, unrelated to the scramble as sergeants dragged Highlanders away from the dead and dying gunners and pushed them into their ranks.
“There are still gunners alive, sir!” a lieutenant shouted at Harness.