climbed twenty feet those bushes ended and he prayed that the defenders
would all be staring at the beleaguered gatehouse rather than at the
precipice below. He pulled himself up the last few feet, cursing the
ladder that seemed to get caught on every protrusion. The sun beat off
the stone and the sweat poured down him. He was panting when he
reached the top, and now there was nothing but steep, open ground
between him and the wall’s base. Fifty feet of rough grass to cross
and then he would be at the wall.
He crouched at the edge of the cliff, waiting for the men to catch
up.
Still no one had seen him from the walls. Tom Garrard dropped beside
him.
“When we go, Tom,” Sharpe said, ‘we run like bloody hell. Straight to
the wall. Ladder up, climb like rats and jump over the bloody top.
Tell the lads to get over fast. Bastards on the other side are going
to try and kill us before we can get reinforced, so we’re going to need
plenty of muskets to fend the buggers off.”
Garrard peered up at the embrasures.
“There’s no one there.”
“There’s a few there,” Sharpe said, ‘but they ain’t taking much
notice.
Dozy, they are,” he added, and thank God for that, he thought, for a
handful of defenders with loaded muskets could stop him dead. And dead
is what he had better be after striking Morris, unless he could cross
the ramparts and open the gates. He peered up at the battlements as
more men hauled themselves over the edge of the cliff. He guessed the
wall was lightly manned by little more than a picquet line, for no one
would have anticipated that the cliff could be climbed, but he also
guessed that once the redcoats appeared the defenders would quickly
reinforce the threatened spot.
Garrard grinned at Sharpe.
“Did you thump Morris?”
“What else could I do?”
“He’ll have you court-martialed
“Not if we win here,” Sharpe said.
“If we get those gates open, Tom, we’ll be bloody heroes.”
“And if we don’t?”
“We’ll be dead,” Sharpe said curtly, then turned to see Eli Lockhart
scrambling onto the grass.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Sharpe demanded.
“I got lost,” Lockhart said, and hefted a musket he had taken from a
soldier below.
“Some of your boys ain’t too keen on being heroes, so me and my boys
are making up the numbers.”
And it was not just Lockhart’s cavalrymen who were climbing, but some
kilted Highlanders and sepoys who had seen the Light Company scrambling
up the cliff and decided to join in too. The more the merrier, Sharpe
decided. He counted heads and saw he had thirty men, and more were
coming. It was time to go, for the enemy would not stay asleep for
long.
“We have to get over the wall fast,” he told them all, ‘and once we’re
over, we form two ranks.”
He stood and hefted the ladder high over his head, holding it with both
hands, then ran up the steep grass. His boots, which were Syud
Sevajee’s cast-offs, had smooth soles and slipped on the grass, but he
stumbled on, and went even faster when he heard an aggrieved shout from
high above him. He knew what was coming next and he was still thirty
feet from the walls, a sitting target, and then he heard the bang of
the musket and saw the grass flatten ahead of him as the gases from the
barrel lashed downwards. Smoke eddied around him, but the ball had
thumped into one of the ladder’s thick uprights, and then another
musket fired and he saw a fleck of turf dance up.
“Give them fire!” Major Stokes roared from the bottom of the ravine.
“Give them fire!”
A hundred redcoats and sepoys blasted up at the walls. Sharpe heard
the musket shots clatter on the stone, and then he was hard under the
rampart and he dropped the leading end of the ladder and rammed it into
the turf and swung the other end up and over. A bloody escalade,
he thought. A breach and an escalade, all in one day, and he pulled