the dead wore jewellery. They were not great jewels, not like the
massive ruby that the Tippoo Sultan had worn on his hat, but there were
pearls and emeralds, sapphires and small diamonds, all mounted in gold,
and Hakeswill busied himself delving through the bloodied silks to
retrieve the scraps of wealth. He crammed the stones into his pockets
where they joined the gems he had taken from Sharpe, and then, when the
corpses were stripped and searched, he roamed the palace, snarling at
servants and threatening scullions, as he ransacked the smaller rooms.
The rest of the defenders could fight; Mister Hakeswill was getting
rich.
The fight in the ravine was now a merciless massacre. The garrison of
the Outer Fort was trapped between the soldiers who had captured their
stronghold and the kilted Highlanders advancing up the narrow road, and
there was no escape except over the precipice, and those who jumped, or
were pushed by the panicking mass, fell onto the shadowed rocks far
below. Colonel Chalmers’s men advanced with bayonets, herding the
fugitives towards Kenny’s men who greeted them with more bayonets. A
thousand men had garrisoned the Outer Fort, and those men were now dead
or doomed, but seven thousand more defenders waited within the Inner
Fort and Colonel Kenny was eager to attack them. He tried to order men
into ranks, tugging them away from the slaughter and shouting for
gunners to find an enemy cannon that could be fetched from the captured
ramparts and dragged to face the massive gate of the Inner Fort, but
the redcoats had an easier target in the huddled fugitives and they
enthusiastically killed the helpless enemy, and all the while the guns
of the Inner Fort fired down at the redcoats while rockets slammed into
the ravine to add to the choking fog of powder smoke.
The slaughter could not endure. The beaten defenders threw down their
guns and fell to their knees, and gradually the British officers called
off the massacre. Chalmers’s Highlanders advanced up the road that was
now slippery with blood, driving the few prisoners in front of them.
Wounded Arabs crawled or limped. The survivors were stripped of their
remaining weapons and sent under sepoy guard back up to the Outer Fort,
and for every step of their way they suffered from the fire that flamed
and crackled from the Inner Fort. Finally, exhausted, they were taken
out through the Delhi Gate and told to wait beside the tank.
The parched prisoners threw themselves at the green-scummed water and
some, seeing that the sepoy guards were few in number, slipped away
northwards. They went without weapons, master less fugitives who posed
no threat to the British camp, which was guarded by a half battalion of
Madrassi sepoys.
The northern face of the ravine, which looked towards the unconquered
Inner Fort, was now crowded with some three thousand redcoats, most of
whom did nothing but sit in whatever small shade they could find and
grumble that the pucka lees had not fetched water.
Once in a while a man would fire a musket across the ravine, but the
balls were wild at that long range, and the enemy fire, which had been
heavy during the massacre on the western road, gradually eased off as
both sides waited for the real struggle to begin.
Sharpe was halfway down the ravine, seated beneath a stunted tree on
which the remnants of some red blossom hung dry and faded. A tribe of
black-faced, silver-furred monkeys had fled the irruption of men into
the rocky gorge, and those beasts now gathered behind Sharpe where they
gibbered and screamed. Tom Garrard and a dozen men of the 33rd’s Light
Company had gathered around Sharpe, while the rest of the company was
lower down the ravine among some rocks.
“What happens now?” Garrard asked.
“Some poor bastards have to get through that gate,” Sharpe said.
“Not you?”
“Kenny will call us when he needs us,” Sharpe said, nodding towards the
lean Colonel who had at last organized an assault party at the bottom
of the track which slanted up towards the gate.
“And he bloody will, Tom. It ain’t going to be easy getting through