“I understand!” Beny Singh said desperately.
Manu Bappoo hauled the Killadar safely back from the pit’s edge.
“You will go to the palace, Beny Singh,” he ordered, ‘and you will stay
there, and you will send no more messages to the enemy.” He pushed the
Killadar away, then turned his back on him.
“Colonel Dodd?”
“Sahib?”
“A dozen of your men will make certain that the Killadar sends no
messages from the palace. If he does, you may kill the messenger.”
Dodd smiled.
“Of course, sahib.”
Bappoo went back to the beleaguered Outer Fort while the Killadar slunk
back to the hilltop palace above its green-scummed lake. Dodd detailed
a dozen men to guard the palace’s entrance, then went back to the
rampart to brood over the ravine. Hakeswill followed him there.
“Why’s the Killadar so scared, sir? Does he know something we
don’t?”
“He’s a coward, Sergeant.”
But Beny Singh’s fear had infected Hakeswill who imagined a vengeful
Sharpe come back from the dead to pursue him through the nightmare of a
fortress fallen.
“The bastards can’t get in, sir, can they?” he asked anxiously.
Dodd recognized Hakeswill’s fear, the same fear he felt himself, the
fear of the ignominy and shame of being recaptured by the British and
then condemned by a merciless court. He smiled.
“They will probably take the Outer Fort, Sergeant, because they’re very
good, and because our old comrades do indeed fight like djinns, but
they cannot cross the ravine. Not if all the powers of darkness help
them, not if they besiege us for a year, not if they batter down all
these walls and destroy the gates and flatten the palace by gunfire,
because they will still have to cross the ravine, and it cannot be
done. It cannot be done.”
And who rules Gawilghur, Dodd thought, reigns in India.
And within a week he would be Rajah here.
Gawilghur’s walls, as Stokes had guessed, were rotten. The first
breach, in the outer wall, took less than a day to make. In
mid-afternoon the wall had still been standing, though a cave had been
excavated into the dusty rubble where Stokes had pointed the guns, but
quite suddenly the whole rampart collapsed. It slid down the brief
slope in a cloud of dust which slowly settled to reveal a steep ramp of
jumbled stone leading into the space between the two walls. A low stub
of the wall’s rear face still survived, but an hour’s work served to
throw that remnant down.
The gunners changed their aim, starting the two breaches in the higher
inner wall, while the enfilading batteries, which had been gnawing at
the embrasures to dismount the enemy’s guns, began firing slantwise
into the first breach to dissuade the defenders from building obstacles
at the head of the ramp. The enemy guns, those which survived,
redoubled their efforts to disable the British batteries, but their
shots were wasted in the gab ions or overhead. The big gun which had
inflicted such slaughter fired three times more, but its balls cracked
uselessly into the cliff face, after which the Mahratta gunners
mysteriously gave up.
Next day the two inner breaches were made, and now the big guns
concentrated on widening all three gaps in the walls. The eighteen
pounder shots slammed into rotten stone, gouging out the wall’s fill to
add to the ramps. By evening the breaches were clearly big enough and
now the gunners aimed their pieces at the enemy’s remaining cannon.
One by one they were unseated or their embrasures shattered. A
constant shroud of smoke hung over the rocky neck of land. It hung
thick and pungent, twitching every time a shot whipped through. The
enfilading twelve-pounders fired shells into the breaches, while the
howitzer lobbed more shells over the walls.
The British guns fired deep into dusk, and minute by minute the enemy
response grew feebler as their guns were wrecked or thrown off the fire
steps Only as black night dropped did the besiegers’ hot guns cease
fire, but even now there would be no respite for the enemy. It was at
night that the defenders could turn the breaches into deathtraps. They
could bury mines in the stony ramps, or dig wide trenches across the