trailing a shattered leg.
Another, blood oozing from his belly, collapsed on the mud and lapped
at the filthy water.
Sharpe half choked on the thick smoke as he stumbled up the rising
ground. Big black round shot lay here, left from the cannonade that
had made the first breach. Two redcoat bodies had been heaved aside,
three others twitched and called for help, but Kenny had posted another
aide here to keep the troops moving. Dust spurted where musket balls
lashed into the ground, then Sharpe was on the breach itself, half lost
his balance as he climbed the ramp, and then was pushed from behind.
Men jostled up the stones, clambered up, hauled themselves up with one
hand while the other gripped their musket. Sharpe put his hand on a
smear of blood. The dusty rubble was almost too hot to touch, and the
ramp was much longer than Sharpe had anticipated. Men shouted hoarsely
as they climbed, and still the bullets thudded down. An arrow struck
and quivered in a musket stock. A rocket crashed into the flood of
men, parting it momentarily as the carcass flamed madly where it had
lodged between a boulder and a cannonball. Someone unceremoniously
dumped a dead Scotsman on top of the hissing rocket and the press of
men clambered on up over the corpse.
Once at the summit the attackers turned to their left and ran down the
inside of the breach to the dry grass that separated the two walls. A
fight was going on in the left-hand breach, and men were bunching
behind it, but Sharpe could see the Scots were gradually inching up the
slope. By God, he thought, but they were almost in! The British guns
had ceased firing for fear of hitting their own men.
Sharpe turned right, going to the second inner breach that Morris’s
company was supposed to seal off. High above him, from the fire step
of the inner wall, defenders leaned over to fire down into the space
between the ramparts. Sharpe seemed to be running through a hail of
bullets that magically did not touch him. Smoke wreathed about him,
then he saw the broken stones of the breach in front and he leaped onto
them and clambered upwards.
“I’m with you, Dick!” Tom Garrard shouted just behind, then a man
appeared in the smoke above Sharpe and heaved down a baulk of wood.
The timber struck Sharpe on the chest, throwing him back onto Garrard
who clutched at him as the two men fell on the stones. Sharpe swore as
a fusillade of musket fire came down from the breach summit. A handful
of men was with him, maybe six or seven, but none seemed to be hit.
They crouched behind him, waiting for orders.
“No farther!”
Morris shouted.
“No farther!”
“Bugger him,” Sharpe said, and he picked up his musket. Just then the
British guns, seeing that the right-hand breach was still occupied by
the Mahrattas, opened fire again and the balls hammered into the stones
just a few feet over Sharpe’s head. One defender was caught smack in
the belly by an eighteen-pounder shot and it seemed to Sharpe that the
man simply disintegrated in a red shower. Sharpe ducked as the blood
poured down the stones, trickling past him and Garrard in small
torrents.
“Jesus,” Sharpe said. Another round shot slammed into the breach, the
sound of the ball’s strike as loud as thunder. Shards of stone whipped
past Sharpe, and he seemed to be breathing nothing but hot dust.
“No farther!” Morris said.
“Here! To me! Rally! Rally!” He was crouched under the inner wall,
safe from the defenders on the breach, though high above him, on the
undamaged fire step Arab soldiers still leaned out to fire straight
down.
“Sharpe! Come here!” Morris ordered.
“Come on!” Sharpe shouted. Bugger Morris, and bugger all the other
officers who said you could put a racing saddle on a cart horse but the
beast would not go quick.
“Come on!” he shouted again as he clambered up the stones, and
suddenly there were more men to his right, but they were Scots, and he
saw that the leading men of the second assault group had reached the