bodies and running with blood.
“Advance twenty paces!” Chalmers ordered.
The Highlanders marched, halted, knelt and began firing again.
Bappoo’s survivors, betrayed by Dodd, were trapped between two forces.
They were stranded in a hell above emptiness, a slaughter in the high
hills. There were screams as men tumbled to their deaths far beneath
and still the fire kept coming. It kept coming until there was nothing
left but quivering men crouching in terror on a road that was rank with
the stench of blood, and then the redcoats moved forward with
bayonets.
The Outer Fort had fallen and its garrison had been massacred.
And William Dodd, renegade, was Lord of Gawilghur.
CHAPTER 10
Mister Hakeswill was not sure whether he was a lieutenant in William
Dodd’s eyes, but he knew he was a Mister and he dimly apprehended that
he could be much more. William Dodd was going to win, and his victory
would make him ruler of Gawilghur and tyrant of all the wide land that
could be seen from its soaring battlements. Mister Hakeswill was
therefore well placed, as Dodd’s only white officer, to profit from the
victory and, as he approached the palace on Gawilghur’s summit,
Hakeswill was already imagining a future that was limited only by the
bounds of his fancy. He could be a rajah, he decided.
“I shall have an harem,” he said aloud, earning a worried look from his
Havildar.
“An harem I’ll have, all of me own. Bibbis in silk, but only when it’s
cold, eh? Rest of the time they’ll have to be naked as needles.” He
laughed, scratched at the lice in his crotch, then lunged with his
sword at one of the peacocks that decorated the palace gardens.
“Bad luck, them birds,” Hakeswill told the Havildar as the bird fled in
a flurry of bright severed feathers.
“Bad luck, they are. Got the evil eye, they do. Know what you should
do with a peacock? Roast the bugger. Roast it and serve it with
‘taters. Very nice, that.”
“Yes, sahib,” the Havildar said nervously. He was not certain he liked
this new white officer whose face twitched so compulsively, but Colonel
Dodd had appointed him and the Colonel could do no wrong as far as the
Havildar was concerned.
“Haven’t tasted a ‘tater in months,” Hakeswill said wistfully.
“Christian food, that, see? Makes us white.”
“Yes, sahib.”
“And I won’t be sahib, will I? Your highness, that’s what I’ll be.
Your bleeding highness with a bedful of bare bibb is His face twitched
as a bright idea occurred to him.
“I could have Sharpie as a servant.
Cut off his goo lies first, though. Snip snip.” He bounded
enthusiastically up a stone staircase, oblivious of the sound of
gunfire that had erupted in the ravine just north of the Inner Fort.
Two Arab guards moved to bar the way, but Hakeswill shouted at them.
“Off to the walls, you scum! No more shirking! You ain’t guarding the
royal pisspot any longer, but has to be soldiers. So piss off!”
The Havildar ordered the two men away and, though they were reluctant
to abandon their post, they were overawed by the number of bayonets
that faced them. So, just like the guards who had stood at the garden
gate, they fled.
“So now we look for the little fat man,” Hakeswill said, ‘and give him
a bloodletting.”
“We must hurry, sahib,” the Havildar said, glancing back at the wall
above the ravine where the gunners were suddenly at work.
“God’s work can’t be hurried,” Hakeswill answered, pulling at one of
the latticed doors that led into the palace, ‘and Colonel Dodd will die
of old age on that wall, sonny. Ain’t a man alive who can get through
that gate, and certainly not a pack of bleeding Scotchmen. Bugger this
door.”
He raised his right foot and battered down the locked lattice with his
boot.
Hakeswill had expected a palace dripping with gold, festooned with silk
and paved with polished marble, but Gawilghur had only ever been a
summer refuge, and Berar had never been as wealthy as other Indian
states, and so the floors were common stone, the walls were painted in