“What’s holding them?” McCandless cried in frustration.
“In God’s name! Go!”
“There’s no bloody fire step Sharpe said grimly.
McCandless glanced at him.
“What?”
“Sorry, sir. Forgot not to curse, sir.”
But McCandless was not worried about Sharpe’s language.
“What did you say, man?” he insisted.
“There’s no fire step there, sir.” Sharpe pointed at the wall where the Scotsmen were dying.
“There’s no musket smoke on the parapet, sir.”
McCandless looked back.
“By God, you’re right.”
The wall had merlons and embrasures, but not a single patch of musket smoke showed in those de fences which meant that the castellation was false and there was no fire step on the wall’s far side where defenders could stand. From the outside the stretch of wall looked like any other part of the city’s de fences but Sharpe guessed that once the Highlanders reached the wall’s summit they were faced with a sheer drop on the far side, and doubtless there was a crowd of enemies waiting at the foot of that inner wall to massacre any man who survived the fall. The 778th were attacking into thin air and being bloodied mercilessly by the jubilant defenders.
The two ladders emptied as the officers at last realized their predicament and shouted at their men to come down. The defenders cheered the repulse and kept firing as the two ladders were carried back from the ramparts.
“Dear God,” McCandless said, ‘dear God.”
“I warned you,” Sevajee said, unable to conceal his pride in the fighting qualities of the Mahratta defenders.
“You’re on our side!” McCandless snarled, and the Indian just shrugged.
“It ain’t over yet, sir,” Sharpe tried to cheer up the Scotsman.
“Escalades work by speed, Sharpe,” McCandless said, ‘and we’ve lost surprise now “It will have to be done properly,” Sevajee remarked smugly, ‘with guns and a breach.”
But the escalade was not defeated yet. The assault party of the 74th had now reached the wall to the right of the gate and their two ladders were swung up against the high red stones, but this stretch of wall did possess a fire step and it was crowded with eager defenders who rained a savage fire down onto the attackers. The British twelve-pounders had opened fire, and their canister was savaging the defenders, but the dead and wounded were dragged away to be replaced by reinforcements who quickly learned that if they let the attackers come up the two ladders then the cannon would cease fire, and so they let the Scots climb the rungs and then hurled down baulks of wood that could scrape a ladder clear in seconds. Then a cannon in one of the flanking bastions hammered a barrel load of stones and scrap iron into the men crowding about the foot of the ladders.
“Oh, dear God,” McCandless prayed again, ‘dear God.” More men began to climb the ladders while the wounded crawled and limped back from the walls, pursued by the musket fire of the defenders. A Scottish officer, claymore in hand, ran up one of the ladders with the facility of a sailor swarming up rigging. He cut the claymore at a lunging bayonet, somehow survived a musket blast, put a hand on the coping, but then a spear took him in the throat and he seemed to shake like a gaffed fish before tumbling backwards and carrying two men down to the ground with him. The sound of the defenders’ musketry was punctuated by the deeper crash of the small cannon that were mounted in the hidden galleries of the bastions. One of those cannon now struck a ladder in the flank and Sharpe watched appalled as the whole flimsy thing buckled and broke, carrying seven men down to the ground in its wreckage. The 778th had been repulsed and the 74th had lost one of their two ladders.
“This is not good,” McCandless said grimly, ‘not good at all.”
“Fighting Mahrattas,” Sevajee said smugly, ‘is not like fighting men from Mysore.”
Colonel Wallace’s party was still a good hundred yards from the gate, slowed by the weight of their six-pounder cannon. It seemed to Sharpe that Wallace needed more men to handle the cumbersome gun and the enemy’s musket fire was taking its toll of the few men he did have shoving at the wheels or dragging at the traces. Wellesley was not far behind Wallace, and just behind the General, mounted on one of his spare horses and with a second on a leading rein, was Daniel Fletcher.