The officer, who was wearing one of the prized gold tiger medallions about his neck, talked with the Tippoo who stared dispassionately at Sharpe, then asked a question.
‘And what, Lieutenant,’ the officer translated, ‘would you have told Ravi Shekhar?’
‘Everything we’d discovered about the defences,’ Lawford said miserably. ‘That’s why we were sent.’
‘And what did you discover?’
‘How many men you have, how many guns, how many rockets.’
‘That’s all?’
‘It’s enough, isn’t it?’ Lawford retorted.
The officer translated the answers. The Tippoo shrugged, glanced at Lawford, then took a small brown leather bag from inside a pocket of his yellow silk tunic. He unlaced the bag’s mouth, stepped to Sharpe’s side, then trickled salt onto the beaten man’s open wounds. Sharpe hissed with the pain.
‘Who else would you have told in the city?’ the officer asked.
‘There was no one else!’ Lawford pleaded. ‘In the name of God, there was no one else. We were told Ravi Shekhar could get a message out. That was all!’
The Tippoo believed him. Lawford’s chagrin was so clear and his shame so palpable that he was utterly believable. Besides, the story made sense. ‘And so you’ve never seen Ravi Shekhar?’ the officer asked.
‘Never.’
‘You’re looking at him now,’ the officer said, gesturing at the tigers. ‘His body was fed to the tigers weeks ago.’
‘Oh, God,’ Lawford said, and he closed his eyes as he realized just what an utter failure he had been. For a moment he wanted to retch, then he controlled the impulse and opened his eyes to watch as the Tippoo picked up Sharpe’s red coat and dropped it onto the bloody back.
For a second the Tippoo hesitated, wondering whether to
release the tigers onto the two men. Then he turned away. ‘Take them to the cells,’ he ordered.
The sacrifice of prisoners had yielded up the traitors and turned the Tippoo’s luck. There was no need for a further sacrifice, not yet, but the Tippoo knew that fortune was ever capricious and so the prisoners could wait until another sacrifice was needed and then, to guarantee victory or to stave off defeat, they would die. And till then, the Tippoo decided, they could just rot.
CHAPTER 9
The dungeons lay in one of the palace’s northern courtyards, hard under the city’s inner mud wall. The courtyard stank of sewage, the smell powerful enough to make Sharpe half retch as he staggered beside Lawford at the point of a bayonet. The courtyard was a busy place. The families of the palace servants lived in low thatched buildings surrounding the yard where their lives were spent cheek by jowl with the Tippoo’s stables and the small enclosure where he kept eight cheetahs he used for hunting gazelles. The cheetahs were taken to the hunt in wheeled cages and at first Sharpe thought they were to be placed inside one of the barred vehicles, but then one of the escorts pushed him past the ponderous carts towards a flight of stone steps that descended to a long narrow trench of stone that lay open to the sky. A tall fence of iron bars surrounded the pit that was guarded by a pair of soldiers. One of them used a key to open a padlock the size of a mango, then the escort shoved Sharpe and Lawford through the open gate.
The dungeon guards did not carry muskets, but instead had coiled whips in their belts and bell-mouthed blunderbusses on their shoulders. One of them pointed mutely down the steps and Sharpe, following Lawford down the stairs, saw that the trench was a stone-flagged, dead-end corridor lined on either side with barred cells. There were eight cells in the pit, four on each side, and each separated from its neighbours, and from the central trench-like corridor, by iron bars alone, but
bars that were as thick as a man’s wrist. The turnkey indicated that they should wait while he unlocked a cell, but the first padlock he attempted to open had become stiff, or else had rusted, for it would not budge, and then he could not find a key to fit another of the big old locks. Something stirred in the straw of the cell that lay at the far right-hand end of the corridor. Sharpe, waiting as the guard sorted through his keys, heard the straw rustle again, then there was a growl as a huge tiger heaved up from its bed to stare at them with blank yellow eyes.