passage, but then the killing began again as a shower of missiles,
rockets and musket fire turned the narrow, steep passage into a charnel
house. An axe man succeeded in reaching the second gate and he stood
above Colonel Kenny’s scorched body to sink his blade deep into the
timber, but he was immediately struck by three musket balls and dropped
back, leaving the axe embedded in the dark, iron-studded wood. No one
else went close to the gate, and a major, appalled at the slaughter,
called the men back.
“Next time,” he shouted at them, ‘we designate firing parties to give
cover. Sergeant! I want two dozen men.”
“We need a cannon, sir,” the Sergeant answered with brutal honesty.
“They say one’s coming.” The aide whom Kenny had sent to fetch a
cannon had returned to the assault party.
“They say it’ll take time, though,” he added, without explaining that
the gunner officer had declared it would take at least two hours to
manhandle a gun and ammunition across the ravine.
The Major shook his head.
“We’ll try without the gun,” he said.
“God help us,” the Sergeant said under his breath.
Colonel Dodd had watched the attackers limp away. He could not help
smiling. This was so very simple, just as he had foreseen. Manu
Bappoo was dead and the Havildar had returned from the palace with the
welcome news of Beny Singh’s murder, which meant that Gawilghur had a
new commander. He looked down at the dead and dying redcoats who lay
among the small flickering blue flames of the spent rockets.
“They’ve learned their lesson, Gopal,” he told his Jemadar, ‘so next
time they’ll try to keep us quiet by firing bigger volleys up at the
fire steps
Toss down rockets, that’ll spoil their aim.”
“Rockets, sahib.”
“Lots of rockets,” Dodd said. He patted his men on their backs. Their
faces were singed by the explosions of the powder in their muskets’
pans, they were thirsty and hot, but they were winning, and they knew
it.
They were his Cobras, as well trained as any troops in India, and they
would be at the heart of the army that Dodd would unleash from this
fortress to dominate the lands the British must relinquish when their
southern army was broken.
“Why don’t they give up?” Gopal asked Dodd. A sentry on the wall had
reported that the bloodied attackers were forming to charge again.
“Because they’re brave men, Jemadar,” Dodd said, ‘but also stupid.”
The furious musket fire had started again from across the ravine, a
sign that a new attack would soon come into the blood-slick gateway.
Dodd drew his pistol, checked it was loaded, and walked back to watch
the next failure. Let them come, he thought, for the more who died
here, the fewer would remain to trouble him as he pursued the beaten
remnant south across the Deccan Plain.
“Get ready!” he called. Slow matches burned on the fire step and his
men crouched beside them with rockets, waiting to light the fuses and
toss the terrible weapons down into the killing place.
A defiant cheer sounded, and the redcoats came again to the
slaughter.
The cliff face was far steeper than Sharpe had anticipated, though it
was not sheer rock, but rather a series of cracks in which plants had
taken root, and he found that he could pull himself up by using stony
outcrops and the thick stalks of the bigger shrubs. He needed both
hands. Tom Garrard came behind, and more than once Sharpe trod on his
friend’s hands.
“Sorry, Tom.”
“Just keep going,” Garrard panted.
It became easier after the first ten feet, for the face now sloped
away, and there was even room for two or three men to stand together on
a weed-covered ledge. Sharpe called for the ladder and it was pushed
up to him by the cavalrymen. The bamboo was light and he hooked the
top rung over his right shoulder and climbed on upwards, following a
jagged line of rocks and bushes that gave easy footing. A line of
redcoats trailed him, muskets slung. There were more bushes to
Sharpe’s left, shielding him from the ramparts, but after he had