of companies, and by midnight, under a clear moon, he could no longer
even hear the British trumpets. He knew that men would still be dying,
ridden down by cavalry and pierced by lances or slashed by sabres, but
Dodd had got clean away. His men were tired, but they were safe in a
dark countryside of millet fields, drought-emptied irrigation ditches
and scattered villages where dogs barked frantically when they caught
the scent of the marching column.
Dodd did not trouble the villagers. He had sufficient food, and
earlier in the night they had found an irrigation tank that had yielded
enough water for men and beasts.
“Do you know where we are, Jemadar?” he asked.
“No, sahib.” Gopal grinned, his teeth showing white in the darkness.
“Nor do I. But I know where we’re going.”
“Where, sahib?”
“To Gawilghur, Gopal. To Gawilghur.”
“Then we must march north, sahib.” Gopal pointed to the mountains that
showed as a dark line against the northern stars.
“It is there, sahib.”
Dodd was marching to the fortress that had never known defeat. To the
impregnable fastness on the cliff. To Gawilghur.
Dawn came to the millet fields. Ragged-winged birds flopped down
beside corpses. The smell of death was already rank, and would only
grow worse as the sun rose to become a furnace in a cloudless sky.
Bugles called reveille, and the picquets who had guarded the sleeping
army around Argaum cleared their muskets by loosing off shots. The
gunfire startled birds up from corpses and made the feasting dogs growl
among the human dead.
Regiments dug graves for their own dead. There were few enough to
bury, for no more than fifty redcoats had died, but there were hundreds
of Mahratta and Arab corpses, and the lascars who did the army’s
fetching and carrying began the task of gathering the bodies.
Some enemies still lived, though barely, and the luckiest of those were
despatched with a blow of a mattock before their robes were rifled.
The unlucky were taken to the surgeons’ tents.
The enemy’s captured guns were inspected, and a dozen selected as
suitable for British service. They were all well made, forged in Agra
by French-trained gunsmiths, but some were the wrong calibre and a few
were so overdecorated with writhing gods and goddesses that no
self-respecting gunner could abide them. The twenty-six rejected guns
would be double-shot ted and exploded.
“A dangerous business,” Lieutenant Colonel William Wallace remarked to
Sharpe.
“Indeed, sir.”
“You saw the accident at Assaye?” Wallace asked. The Colonel took off
his cocked hat and fanned his face. The hat’s white plumes were still
stained with blood that had dried black.
“I heard it, sir. Didn’t see it,” Sharpe said. The accident had
occurred after the battle of Assaye when the enemy’s captured cannon
were being destroyed and one monstrous piece, a great siege gun, had
exploded prematurely, killing two engineers.
“Leaves us short of good engineers,” Wallace remarked, ‘and we’ll need
them if we’re going to Gawilghur.”
“Gawilghur, sir?”
“A ghastly fortress, Sharpe, quite ghastly.” The Colonel turned and
pointed north.
“Only about twenty miles away, and if the Mahrattas have any sense
that’s where they’ll be heading.” Wallace sighed.
“I’ve never seen the place, so maybe it isn’t as bad as they say, but I
remember poor McCandless describing it as a brute. A real brute.
Like Stirling Castle, he said, only much larger and the cliff’s twenty
times higher.”
Sharpe had never seen Stirling Castle, so had no real idea what the
Colonel meant. He said nothing. He had been idling the morning away
when Wallace sent for him, and now he and the Colonel were walking
through the battle’s litter. The Arab boy followed a dozen paces
behind.
“Yours, is he?” Wallace asked.
“Think so, sir. Sort of picked him up yesterday.”
“You need a servant, don’t you? Urquhart tells me you don’t have
one.”
So Urquhart had been discussing Sharpe with the Colonel. No good could
come of that, Sharpe thought. Urquhart had been nagging Sharpe to find
a servant, implying that Sharpe’s clothes were in need of cleaning and
pressing, which they were, but as he only owned the clothes he wore, he