as the bayonets stabbed again and again through his robes. The Scots
were back, thrusting and snarling up the centre, and Sharpe forced
himself up another step. Garrard was beside him now, and the two were
only a step from the summit of the breach.
“Bastards! Bastards!” Sharpe was panting as he hacked and lunged, but
the Arabs’ robes seemed to soak up the blows, then suddenly, almost
miraculously, they backed away from him.
A musket fired from inside the fortress and one of the Arabs crumpled
down onto the breach’s inner ramp, and Sharpe realized that the men who
had fought their way through the left-hand breach must have turned and
come to attack this breach from the inside.
“Come on!” he roared, and he was on the summit at last and there were
Scots and Light Company men all about him as they spilt down into the
Outer Fortress where a company of the Scotch Brigade waited to welcome
them. The defenders were fleeing to the southern gate which would lead
them to the refuge of the Inner Fort.
“Jesus,” Tom Garrard said, leaning over to catch his breath.
“Are you hurt?” Sharpe asked.
Garrard shook his head.
“Jesus,” he said again. Some enemy gunners, who had stayed with their
weapons till the last minute, jumped down from the fire step dodged
past the tired redcoats scattered inside the wall and fled southwards.
Most of the Scots and sepoys were too 25′
breathless to pursue them and contented themselves with some musket
shots. A dog barked madly until a sepoy kicked the beast into
silence.
Sharpe stopped. It seemed suddenly quiet, for the big guns were silent
at last and the only muskets firing were from the Mahrattas defending
the gatehouse. A few small cannon were firing to the south, but Sharpe
could not see them, nor guess what their target was. The highest part
of the fort lay to his right, and there was nothing on the low summit
but dry grassland and a few thorny trees. No defenders gathered there.
To his left he could see Kenny’s men assaulting the gatehouse. They
were storming the steps to the parapet where a handful of Arabs were
making a stand, though they stood no chance, for over a hundred
redcoats now gathered under the wall and were firing up at the fire
step The defenders’ robes turned red. They were trapped now between
the musket balls and the bayonets of the men climbing the steps, and
though some tried to surrender, they were all killed. The other
Mahrattas had fled, gone over the high ground in the centre of the
Outer Fort to the ravine and to the larger fort beyond.
A vat stood in an embrasure of the wall and Sharpe heaved himself up
and found, as he had hoped, that the barrel contained water for the
abandoned guns. They were very small cannon, mostly mounted on iron
tripods, but they had inflicted a hard punishment on the men crammed
along the fort’s approach. The dead and wounded had been pushed aside
to make way for the stream of men approaching the breaches. Major
Stokes was among them, Ahmed at his side, and Sharpe waved to them,
though they did not see him. He dipped his hands in the water, slung
it over his face and hair, then stooped and drank. It was filthy
stuff, stagnant and bitter with powder debris, but he was desperately
thirsty.
A cheer sounded as Colonel Kenny’s men hoisted the British flag above
the captured Delhi Gate. Manu Bappoo’s flag was being folded by an
aide, to be carried back to Britain. A squad of Scotsmen unbarred the
big inner gate, then the outer one, to let even more redcoats into the
fort that had fallen so quickly. Exhausted men slumped in the wall’s
shade, but Kenny’s officers were shouting at them to find their units,
to load their muskets and move on south.
“I think our orders are to guard the breach,” Morris suggested as
Sharpe jumped down from the fire step
“We go on,” Sharpe said savagely.
“We ‘ “We go on, sir,” Sharpe said, investing the ‘sir’ with a savage