“First we kill them, then we give them water,” the Indian said.
“Funny business, war, sir,” Sharpe said.
“Do you enjoy it?” Sevajee asked.
“Don’t rightly know, sir. Haven’t seen much.” A short skirmish in Flanders, the swift victory of Malavelly, the chaos at the fall of Seringapatam, the horror of Chasalgaon and today’s fierce escalade; that was Sharpe’s full experience of war and he harboured all the memories and tried to work out from them some pattern that would tell him how he would react when the next violence erupted in his life. He thought he enjoyed it, but he was dimly aware that perhaps he ought not to enjoy it.
“You, sir?” he asked Sevajee.
“I love it, Sergeant,” the Indian said simply.
“You’ve never been wounded?” Sharpe guessed.
“Twice. But a gambler does not stop throwing dice because he loses.”
McCandless came running back from the wounded man.
“Dodd’s heading for the north gate!”
“This way,” Sevajee said, sawing his reins and leading his cut-throats off to the right where he reckoned they would avoid the press of panicked people crowding the centre of the city.
“That wounded man was the kill adar,”I McCandless said as he fiddled his left boot into the stirrup, then hauled himself into the saddle.
“Dying, poor fellow. Took a bullet in the stomach.”
“Their chief man, eh?” Sharpe said, looking up at the gatehouse where a Highlander was ripping down Scindia’s flags.
“And he was bitterly unhappy with our Lieutenant Dodd,” McCandless said as he spurred his horse after Sevajee.
“It seems he deserted the de fences
“He’s in a hurry to get away, sir,” Sharpe suggested.
“Then let us hurry to stop him,” McCandless said, quickening his horse so that he could push through Sevajee’s men to reach the front ranks of the pursuers. Sevajee was using the alleyways beneath the eastern walls and for a time the narrow streets were comparatively empty, but then the crowds increased and their troubles began. A dog yapped at the heels of McCandless’s horse, making it rear, then a holy cow with blue painted horns wandered into their path and Sevajee insisted they wait for the beast, but McCandless angrily banged the cow’s bony rump with the flat of his claymore to drive it aside, then his horse shied again as a blast of musketry sounded just around the corner. A group of sepoys were shooting open a locked door, but McCandless could not spare the time to stop their depredations.
“Wellesley will have to hang some of them,” he said, spurring on.
Refugees were fleeing into the alleys, hammering on locked doors or scaling mud walls to find safety. A woman, carrying a vast bundle on her head, was knocked to the ground by a sepoy who began slashing at the bundle’s ropes with his bayonet. Two Arabs, both armed with massive matchlock guns with pearl-studded stocks, appeared ahead of them and Sharpe unslung his musket, but the two men were not disposed to continue a lost fight and so vanished into a gateway. The street was littered with discarded uniform jackets, some green, some blue, some brown, all thrown off by panicking defenders who now tried to pass themselves off as civilians. The crowds thickened as they neared the city’s northern edge and the air of panic here was palpable. Muskets sounded constantly in the city and every shot, like every scream, sent a shudder through the crowds that eddied in hopeless search of an escape.
McCandless was shouting at the crowds, and using the threat of his sword to make a passage. There were plenty of men in the streets who might have opposed the Colonel’s party, and some of those men still had weapons, but none made any threatening move. Ahmednuggur’s surviving defenders only wanted to live, while the civilians had been plunged into terror. A crowd had invaded a Hindu temple where the women swayed and wailed in front of their garlanded idols. A child carrying a birdcage scurried across the road and McCandless wrenched his horse aside to avoid trampling the toddler, and then a loud volley of musketry sounded close ahead. There was a pause, and Sharpe imagined the men tearing open new cartridges and ramming the bullets into their muzzles, and then, exactly at the moment he expected it, the second volley sounded. This was not the ragged noise of plundering men blasting open locked doors, but a disciplined infantry fight.