him on the jaw. Morris squealed with pain, then gasped as Sharpe
backhanded him across the cheek, then struck him again. A group of men
had followed and were watching wide-eyed. Morris turned to appeal to
them, but Sharpe hit him yet again and the Cap-268
tain’s eyes turned glassy as he swayed and collapsed. Sharpe bent over
him.
“You might outrank me,” he said, ‘but you’re a piece of shit, Charlie,
and you always were. Now can I take the company?”
“No,” Morris said through the blood on his lips.
“Thank you, sir,” Sharpe said, and stamped his boot hard down on
Morris’s head, driving it onto a rock. Morris gasped, choked, then lay
immobile as the breath scraped in his throat.
Sharpe kicked Morris’s head again, just for the hell of it, then
turned, smiling.
“Where’s Sergeant Green?”
“Here, sir.” Green, looking anxious, pushed through the watching
men.
“I’m here, sir,” he said, staring with astonishment at the immobile
Morris.
“Captain Morris has eaten something that disagreed with him,” Sharpe
said, ‘but before he was taken ill he expressed the wish that I should
temporarily take command of the company.”
Sergeant Green looked at the battered, bleeding Captain, then back to
Sharpe.
“Something he ate, sir?”
“Are you a doctor, Sergeant? Wear a black plume on your hat, do
you?”
“No, sir.”
“Then stop questioning my statements. Have the company paraded,
muskets loaded, no bayonets fixed.” Green hesitated.
“Do it, Sergeant!”
Sharpe roared, startling the watching men.
“Yes, sir!” Green said hurriedly, backing away.
Sharpe waited until the company was in its four ranks. Many of them
looked at him suspiciously, but they were powerless to challenge his
authority, not while Sergeant Green had accepted it.
“You’re a light company,” Sharpe said, ‘and that means you can go where
other soldiers can’t. It makes you an elite. You know what that
means? It means you’re the best in the bloody army, and right now the
army needs its best men.
It needs you. So in a minute we’ll be climbing up there’ he pointed to
the ravine ‘crossing the wall and carrying the fight to the enemy.
It’ll be hard work for a bit, but not beyond a decent light company.”
He looked to his left and saw Eli Lockhart leading his men down the
side of the ravine with one of the discarded bamboo ladders.
“I’ll go first,” he told the company, ‘and Sergeant Green will go last.
If any man refuses to climb, Sergeant, you’re to shoot the bugger.”
“I am, sir?” Green asked nervously.
“In the head,” Sharpe said.
Major Stokes had followed Lockhart and now came up to Sharpe.
“I’ll arrange for some covering fire, Sharpe,” he said.
“That’ll be a help, sir. Not that these men need much help. They’re
the 33rd’s Light Company. Best in the army.”
“I’m sure they are,” Stokes said, smiling at the seventy men who,
seeing a major with Sharpe, supposed that the Ensign really did have
the authority to do what he was proposing.
Lockhart, in his blue and yellow coat, waited with the ladder.
“Where do you want it, Mister Sharpe?”
“Over here,” Sharpe said.
“Just pass it up when we’ve reached the top.
Sergeant Green! Send the men in ranks! Front rank first!” He walked
to the side of the ravine and stared up his chosen route. It looked
steeper from here, and much higher than it had seemed when he was
staring through the telescope, but he still reckoned it was climbable.
He could not see the Inner Fort’s wall, but that was good, for neither
could the defenders see him. All the same, it was bloody steep. Steep
enough to give a mountain goat pause, yet if he failed now then he
would be on a charge for striking a superior officer, so he really had
no choice but to play the hero.
So he spat on his bruised hands, looked up one last time, then started
to climb.
The second assault on the Inner Fort’s gatehouse fared no better than
the first. A howling mass of men charged through the wreckage of the
shattered gate, stumbled on the dead and dying as they turned up the