affable. The Major had taken Wellesley’s demands that the road be made
in a week as a challenge, and he pressed the pioneers hard.
The enemy seemed to be asleep. Elliott would ride far ahead to
reconnoitre the route and never once saw a Mahratta.
“Stupid fools,” Elliott said one night beside the fire, ‘they could
hold us here for months!”
“You still shouldn’t ride so far ahead of my picquets,” Simons reproved
the Major.
“Stop fussing, man,” Elliott said, and next morning, as usual, he rode
out in front to survey the day’s work.
Sharpe was again bringing stones up the road that morning. He was
walking at the head of his ox train on the wooded stretch above the
newly made artillery park. The day’s heat was growing and there was
little wind in the thick woods of teak and cork trees that covered the
low hills. Groups of pioneers felled trees where they might obstruct a
gun carriage’s progress, and here and there Sharpe saw a whitewashed
peg showing where Elliott had marked the track. Shots sounded ahead,
but Sharpe took no notice. The upland valleys had become a favourite
hunting ground for the shikarees who used nets, snares and ancient
matchlocks to kill hares, wild pigs, deer, quail and partridge that
they sold to the officers, and Sharpe assumed a party of the hunters
was close to the track, but after a few seconds the firing intensified.
The musketry was muffled by the thick leaves, but for a moment the
sound was constant, almost at battle pitch, before, as suddenly as it
had erupted, it stopped.
His bullock drivers had halted, made nervous by the firing.
“Come on!” Sharpe encouraged them. None of them spoke English, and
Sharpe had no idea which language they did speak, but they were
good-natured men, eager to please, and they prodded their heavily laden
bullocks onwards. Ahmed had unslung his musket and was peering ahead.
He suddenly raised the gun to his shoulder, and Sharpe pushed it down
before the boy could pull the trigger.
“They’re ours,” he told the lad.
“Sepoys.”
A dozen sepoys hurried back through the trees. Major Simons was with
them and, as they came closer, Sharpe saw the men were carrying a
makeshift stretcher made from tree branches and jackets.
“It’s Elliott.”
Simons paused by Sharpe as his men hurried ahead.
“Bloody fool got a chest wound. He won’t live. Stupid man was too far
forward. I told him not to get ahead of the picquets.” Simons took a
ragged red handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped the sweat from his
face.
“One less engineer.”
Sharpe peered at Elliott who was blessedly unconscious. His face had
gone pale, and pinkish blood was bubbling at his lips with every
laboured breath.
“He won’t last the day,” Simons said brutally, ‘but I suppose we should
get him back to the surgeons.”
“Where are the enemy?” Sharpe asked.
“They ran,” Simons said.
“Half a dozen of the bastards were waiting in ambush. They shot
Elliott, took his weapons, but ran off when they saw us.”
Three shikarees died that afternoon, ambushed in the high woods, and
that night, when the road-builders camped in one of the grassy upland
valleys, some shots were fired from a neighbouring wood. The bullets
hissed overhead, but none found a target. The picquets blazed back
until a havildar shouted at them to hold their fire. Captain
Pinck-they shook his head.
“I thought it was too good to last,” he said gloomily.
“It’ll be slow work now.” He poked the fire around which a half-dozen
officers were sitting.
Major Simons grinned.
“If I was the enemy,” he said, “I’d attack Mister Sharpe’s oxen instead
of attacking engineers. If they cut our supply line they’d do some
real damage.”
“There’s no point in shooting engineers,” Pinckney agreed.
“We don’t need Royal Engineers anyway. We’ve been making roads for
years. The fellows in the blue coats just get in the way. Mind you,
they’ll still send us another.”
“If there are any left,” Sharpe said. The campaign had been fatal for
the engineers. Two had died blowing up the enemy guns at Assaye,
another three were fevered and now Elliott was either dying or already