the army’s train, all loaded with round shot, powder, tools, salt beef,
arrack, horseshoes, bandages, flints, muskets,
spices, rice, and with them came the merchants’ beasts and the
merchants’ families, and the ox herdsmen had their own families and
they all needed more beasts to carry their tents, clothes and food. A
dozen elephants plodded in the herd’s centre, while a score of
dromedaries swayed elegantly behind the elephants. Mysore cavalry
guarded the great caravan, while beyond the mounted picquets halfnaked
grass-cutters spread into the fields to collect fodder that they
stuffed into nets and loaded onto yet more oxen.
Dodd glanced at the sentries who guarded the southern stretch of
Gawilghur’s walls and he saw the awe on their faces as they watched the
enormous herd approach. The dust from the hooves rose to smear the
southern skyline like a vast sea fog.
“They’re only oxen!” Dodd growled to the men.
“Only oxen! Oxen don’t fire guns. Oxen don’t climb walls.”
None of them understood him, but they grinned dutifully.
Dodd walked eastwards. After a while the wall ended, giving way to the
bare lip of a precipice. There was no need for walls around much of
the perimeters of Gawilghur’s twin forts, for nature had provided the
great cliffs that were higher than any rampart a man could make, but
Dodd, as he walked to the bluff’s edge, noted places here and there
where an agile man could, with the help of a rope, scramble down the
rock face.
A few men deserted Gawilghur’s garrison every day, and Dodd did not
doubt that this was how they escaped, but he did not understand why
they should want to go. The fort was impregnable! Why would a man not
wish to stay with the victors?
He reached a stretch of wall at the fort’s southeastern corner and
there, high up on a gun platform, he opened his telescope and stared
down into the foothills. He searched for a long time, his glass
skittering over trees, shrubs and patches of dry grass, but at last he
saw a group of men standing beside a narrow path. Some of the men were
in red coats and one was in blue.
“What are you watching, Colonel?” Prince Manu Bappoo had seen Dodd on
the rampart and had climbed to join him.
“British,” Dodd said, without taking his eye from the telescope.
“They’re surveying a route up to the plateau.”
Bappoo shaded his eyes and stared down, but without a telescope he
could not see the group of men.
“It will take them months to build a road up to the hills.”
“It’ll take them two weeks,” Dodd said flatly.
“Less. You don’t know how their engineers work, sahib, but I do.
They’ll use powder to break through obstacles and a thousand axe men to
widen the tracks. They’ll start their work tomorrow and in a fortnight
they’ll be running guns up to the hills.” Dodd collapsed the
telescope.
“Let me go down and break the bastards,” he demanded.
“No,” Bappoo said. He had already had this argument with Dodd who
wanted to take his Cobras down into the foothills and there harass the
road-makers. Dodd did not want a stand-up fight, a battle of musket
line against musket line, but instead wanted to raid, ambush and scare
the enemy. He wanted to slow the British work, to dishearten the
sappers and, by such delaying tactics, force Wellesley to send forage
parties far into the countryside where they would be prey to the
Mahratta horsemen who still roamed the Deccan Plain.
Bappoo knew Dodd was right, and that the British road could be slowed
by a campaign of harassment, but he feared to let the white coated
Cobras leave the fortress. The garrison was already nervous, awed by
the victories of Wellesley’s small army, and if they saw the Cobras
march out of the fort then many would think they were being abandoned
and the trickle of deserters would become a flood.
“We have to slow them!” Dodd snarled.
“We shall,” Bappoo said.
“I shall send silladars, Colonel, and reward them for every weapon they
bring back to the fort. But you will stay here, and help prepare the