Sharpe watched fascinated as an officer turned one of the long weapons on the flat top of the parapet so that its tin cone pointed directly towards the nearest group of horsemen. The rocketman waited beside his officer, swinging a length of slow match to keep its burning end bright and hot. The officer fussed with the rocket’s alignment, then, satisfied at last, he stepped back and nodded to the rocketman who grinned and touched his slow match to the twist of paper at the rocket’s base.
The fuse paper, Sharpe guessed, had been soaked in water diluted with gunpowder, then dried, because it immediately caught the glowing fire which ate its way swiftly up the fuse as the rocketman stepped hurriedly away. The glowing trail vanished into the iron cylinder, there was silence for a second, then the rocket twitched as a bright flame abruptly choked and spat from the tube’s base. The twitch of the igniting powder charge threw the heavy rocket out of its careful alignment, but there was no chance to correct the weapon’s aim for a jet of flame was spitting fiercely enough from the cylinder to scorch the rocket’s quivering bamboo stick, and then, very suddenly, the bright flame roared into a furnace-like intensity with a noise like a huge waterfall, only instead of water it was spewing sparks and smoke, as the rocket began to move. It trembled for an instant, scraped an inch or two across the parapet, then abruptly accelerated away into the air, leaving a thick cloud of smoke and a scorch mark on the parapet’s coping. For a few seconds it seemed as if the rocket was having trouble staying aloft, for the long scorched tail wobbled as the fiery tube fought against gravity and as the smoke trail stitched a crazy whorl above the ditch at the foot of the wall, but then at last it gained momentum and raced away across the glacis, the encampment and the river. It spewed a tail of sparks, fire and smoke as it flew, then, as the powder charge began to be exhausted, the rocket fell earthwards. Beneath the missile the group of horsemen had collapsed their spyglasses and were fleeing in every direction as the fire-tailed demon came shrieking out of the sky. The rocket struck the ground, bounced, tumbled, then exploded with a small crack of noise and a burst of flame and white smoke. None of the horsemen had been touched, but their panic delighted the Tippoo’s men on the bastions who gave the rocketmen a cheer. Sharpe cheered with them. Farther up the wall a cannon fired at a second group of horsemen. The smoke of the gun billowed out across the encampment beneath the
walls and the heavy round shot screamed across the river to disembowel a horse a half-mile away, but no one cheered the gunners. Guns were not so spectacular as rockets.
‘He’s got thousands of those bloody things,’ Sharpe told Lawford, indicating a pile of the rockets.
‘They really aren’t very accurate,’ Lawford said with pedantic disapproval.
‘But fire enough at once and you wouldn’t know if you were in this world or the next. I wouldn’t fancy being on the wrong end of a dozen of those things.’
Behind them, from one of the tall white minarets of the city’s new mosque, the muezzin was chanting the summons for the evening prayer and the Muslim rocketmen hastened to unroll their small prayer mats and face westwards towards Mecca. Sharpe and Lawford also faced west, not out of any respect for the Tippoo’s religion, but because the vanguard of British and Indian cavalry was scouting the flat land beyond the South Gauvery which was plainly visible from the summit of the Mysore Gate. The main body of the two armies was making camp well to the south of the city, but the horsemen had ridden ahead to reconnoitre the western country in preparation for the next day’s short march. Sharpe could even see officers pacing out and marking where the lascars would pitch the armies’ tents. It seemed that General Harris had decided to attack from the west, the one direction that McCandless had warned against.