‘They’ve got an early supper,’ Sharpe told the bemused guards on the gate. ‘Hope they’ve got an appetite.’
The guards, not understanding a word, grinned back. Sharpe took one look behind, spat, and walked away. A debt, he reckoned, was properly paid. Now all he needed to do was hide till the redcoats came. And then he saw the pearl-hung palanquin, and another debt came to mind.
For a time it seemed as if the Tippoo could hold his city. He fought like a tiger himself, knowing that this blaze of violence beneath a smoke-shrouded sun would decide his fate. It would be the tiger throne or the grave.
He did not know what was happening on the southern stretch of the walls, except that the distant fury of constant musket fire told him that fighting continued there; he only knew that he and his men were taking a terrible toll of the attackers on the northern wall. The Tippoo had been forced slowly back by the sheer weight of numbers that poured onto the ramparts, and that bloody retreat had driven him off the western ramparts, back around the corner by the remnants of the north-western bastion and so onto the long stretch of northern wall which faced towards the River Cauvery, but there his retreat had stopped. A cushoon of infantry had been stationed in the Sultan Battery, the largest bastion in the north wall, and that garrison hurried along the walls to reinforce the Tippoo who now possessed enough men to overwhelm the musketry of the attackers on the narrow northern firestep. The Tippoo still led the fight. He was dressed in a white linen tunic and loose chintz drawers with a red silk sash about his waist. He had jewelled armlets, the great ruby glittered on the feathered plume of his helmet, there were pearls and an emerald necklace at his throat and the gold-hilted tiger sword
at his side. Those gaudy stones made him a target for every redcoat and sepoy, yet he insisted on staying in the very front rank where he could pour his rifle fire at the stalled attackers, and his charms worked, for though the bullets flicked close none hit him. He was the tiger of Mysore, he could not die, only kill.
The attackers suffered even worse damage from the men on the inner wall. That wall had not been breached, it had not even been attacked, and more and more tiger-striped infantry hurried up its ramps to reinforce the defenders. They fired across the inner ditch and their musket balls flayed at the crowded attackers and their cannon fire cleared whole stretches of the outer wall. Only the blinding powder smoke that hung between the walls protected the attackers, who either endured the terrible flank fire or else crouched behind dismounted cannon and prayed that their ordeal would soon end. They had captured the north-western corner of the outer wall, but it seemed to have gained them nothing but death, for now it was the turn of the Tippoo’s men to be the slaughterers.
Baird, heading south from the breach, encountered similar resistance, but Baird was in no mood to be delayed. He caught up and passed the survivors of the Forlorn Hope and, shouting like a demon, led a crazed charge past the ruined gatehouse where the remnants of the Tippoo’s mine smoked like the pit of hell. Baird was a major general, but he would gladly have given all the gold lace on his uniform for this one chance to fight like a common soldier. This was revenge, and the great claymore hacked into the Tippoo’s men as Baird bellowed his challenge that mingled fury with the agonized memories of his humiliation in this city. He fought like a creature possessed, stepping over the dead and slipping on their blood as he carried the battle down the walls. His men howled with him. They were caught up in Baird’s madness. At this hour, under the fire of the sun and emboldened by the arrack and rum they had drunk in their long wait in the
trenches, the redcoats and sepoys had become gods of war. They gave death with impunity as they followed a war-maddened Scotsman down an enemy wall that was sticky with blood. Baird would have his city or else he would die in its dust.