and sweating puckakes hurried up the battery road with yet more skins
of water to replenish the great vats.
Garrard was sitting by himself, but he had noticed a ragged Indian was
watching him. He ignored the man, hoping he would go away, but the
Indian edged closer. Garrard picked up a fist-sized stone and tossed
it up and down in his right hand as a hint that the man should go away,
but the threat of the stone only made the Indian edge closer.
“Sahib!” the Indian hissed.
“Bugger off,” Garrard growled.
“Sahib! Please!”
“I’ve got nothing worth stealing, I don’t want to buy anything, and I
don’t want to roger your sister.”
“I’ll roger your sister instead, sahib,” the Indian said, and Garrard
twisted round, the stone drawn back ready to throw, then he saw that
the dirty robed man had pushed back his grubby white head cloth and was
grinning at him.
“You ain’t supposed to chuck rocks at officers, Tom,” Sharpe said.
“Mind you, I always wanted to, so I can’t blame you.”
“Bloody hell!” Garrard dropped the stone and held out his right
hand.
“Dick Sharpe!” He suddenly checked his outstretched hand.
“Do I have to call you “sir”?”
“Of course you don’t,” Sharpe said, taking Garrard’s hand.
“You and me? Friends from way back, eh? Red sash won’t change that,
Tom.
How are you?”
“Been worse. Yourself?”
“Been better.”
Garrard frowned.
“Didn’t I hear that you’d been captured?”
“Got away, I did. Ain’t a bugger born who can hold me, Tom. Nor you.”
Sharpe sat next to his friend, a man with whom he had marched in the
ranks for six years.
“Here.” He gave Garrard a strip of dried meat.
“What is it?”
“Goat. Tastes all right, though.”
The two sat and watched the gunners at work. The closest guns were in
the two enfilading batteries, and the gunners were using their twelve
pounders to systematically bring down the parapets of the ramparts
above Gawilghur’s gate. They had already unseated a pair of enemy guns
and were now working on the next two embrasures. An ox-drawn limber
had just delivered more ammunition, but, on leaving the battery, the
limber’s wheel had loosened and five men were now standing about the
canted wheel arguing how best to mend it. Garrard pulled a piece of
stringy meat from between his teeth.
“Pull the broken wheel off and put on a new one,” he said scornfully.
“It don’t take a major and two lieutenants to work that out.”
“They’re officers, Tom,” Sharpe said chidingly, ‘only half brained.”
“You should know.” Garrard grinned.
“Buggers make an inviting target, though.” He pointed across the
plunging chasm which separated the plateau from the Inner Fort.
“There’s a bloody great gun over there.
Size of a bloody hay wain, it is. Buggers have been fussing about it
for a half-hour now.”
Sharpe stared past the beleaguered Outer Fort to the distant cliffs.
He thought he could see a wall where a gun might be mounted, but he was
not sure.
“I need a bloody telescope.”
“You need a bloody uniform.”
“I’m doing something about that,” Sharpe said mysteriously.
Garrard slapped at a fly.
“What’s it like then?”
“What’s what like?”
“Being a Jack-pudding?”
Sharpe shrugged, thought for a while, then shrugged again.
“Don’t seem real. Well, it does. I dunno.” He sighed.
“I mean I wanted it, Tom, I wanted it real bad, but I should have known
the bastards wouldn’t want me. Some are all right. Major Stokes, he’s
a fine fellow, and there are others. But most of them? God knows.
They don’t like me, anyway.”
“You got ’em worried, that’s why,” Garrard said.
“If you can become an officer, so can others.” He saw the unhappiness
on Sharpe’s face.
“Wishing you’d stayed a sergeant, are you?”
“No,” Sharpe said, and surprised himself by saying it so firmly.
“I
can do the job, Tom.”
“What job’s that, for Christ’s sake? Sitting around while we do all
the bloody work? Having a servant to clean your boots and scrub your
arse?”
“No,” Sharpe said, and he pointed across the shadowed chasm to the
Inner Fort.
“When we go in there, Tom, we’re going to need fellows who know what