Sharpe 3-Book Collection 1: Sharpe’s Tiger, Sharpe’s Triumph, Sharpe’s Fortress

Seven hundred muskets came up to seven hundred shoulders. The muskets were tipped with steel, seven hundred muskets aimed at the head of the column and about to blast seven hundred ounces of lead at the leading ranks of that fast-moving, confident mass that was plunging straight towards the pair of British colours under which Colonel Arthur Wellesley waited. The tiger men were hurrying now, their front rank breaking apart as they began running. The wagon was about to hit the fence.

Arthur Wellesley had waited six years for this moment. He was twenty-nine years old and had begun to fear that he would never see battle, but now, at last, he would discover whether he and his regiment could fight, and so he filled his lungs to give the order that would start the slaughter.

Colonel Jean Gudin sighed, then, for the thousandth time in the last hour, he fanned his face to drive away the flies. He liked India, but he hated flies, which made India quite hard to like, but on balance, despite the flies, he did like India. Not nearly as much as he liked his native Provence, but where on earth was as lovely as Provence? ‘Your Majesty?’ he ventured diffidently, then waited as his interpreter struggled to gain the Tippoo’s attention. The interpreter was exchanging Gudin’s French for the Tippoo’s Persian tongue. The Tippoo did understand some French and he spoke the local Kanarese language well enough, but he preferred Persian for it reminded him that his lineage went back to the great Persian dynasties. The Tippoo was ever mindful that he was superior to the darker-skinned natives of Mysore. He was a Muslim, he was a Persian and he was a ruler, while they were mostly Hindus, and all of them, whether rich, poor, great or lowly, were his obedient subjects. ‘Your Majesty?’ Colonel Gudin tried again.

‘Colonel?’ The Tippoo was a short man inclined to plumpness, with a moustached face, wide eyes and a prominent nose. He was not an impressive-looking man, but Gudin knew the Tippoo’s unprepossessing appearance disguised a decisive mind and a brave heart. Although the Tippoo acknowledged Gudin, he did not turn to look at the Colonel. Instead he leaned forward in his saddle with one hand clasped over the tiger hilt of his curved sabre as he watched his infantry march on the infidel British. The sword was slung on a silken sash that crossed the pale yellow silk jacket that the Tippoo wore above chintz trousers. His turban was of red silk and pinned with a gold badge showing a tiger’s mask. The Tippoo’s every possible accoutrement was decorated with the tiger, for the tiger was his mascot and inspiration, but the badge on his turban also incorporated his reverence for Allah, for the tiger’s snarling face was formed by a cunning cipher that spelled out a verse of the Koran: ‘The Lion of God is the Conqueror.’ Above it, pinned to the turban’s brief white plume and brilliant in the day’s sunlight, there glittered a ruby the size of a pigeon’s egg. ‘Colonel?’ the Tippoo said again.

‘It might be wise, Your Majesty,’ Gudin suggested hesitantly, ‘if we advanced cannon and cavalry onto the British flank.’ Gudin gestured to where the 33rd waited in its thin red line to receive the charge of the Tippoo’s column. If the Tippoo threatened a flank of that fragile line with cavalry then the British regiment would be forced to shrink into square and thus deny three quarters of their muskets a chance to fire at the column.

The Tippoo shook his head. ‘We shall sweep that scum away with our infantry, Gudin, then send the cavalry against the baggage.’ He let go of his sword’s hilt to touch his fingers fleetingly together. ‘Please Allah.’

‘And if it does not please Allah?’ Gudin asked, and suspected that his interpreter would change the insolence of the question into something more acceptable to the Tippoo.

‘Then we shall fight them from the walls of Seringapatam,’ the Tippoo answered, and turned briefly from watching the imminent battle to offer Colonel Gudin a quick smile. It was not a friendly smile, but a feral grimace of anticipation. ‘We shall destroy them with cannon, Colonel,’ the Tippoo continued with relish, ‘and shatter them with rockets, and in a few weeks the monsoon will drown their survivors, and after that, if Allah pleases, we shall hunt fugitive Englishmen from here to the sea.’

‘If Allah pleases,’ Gudin said resignedly. Officially he was an adviser to the Tippoo, sent by the Directorate in Paris to help Mysore defeat the British, and the patient Gudin had just done his best to give advice and it was none of his fault if the advice was spurned. He brushed flies from his face, then watched as the 33rd brought their muskets to their shoulders. When those muskets flamed, the Frenchman thought, the front of the Tippoo’s column would crumple like a honeycomb hit by a hammer, but at least the slaughter would teach the Tippoo that battles could not be won against disciplined troops unless every weapon was used against them: cavalry to force them to bunch up in protection, then artillery and infantry to pour fire into the massed ranks. The Tippoo surely knew that, yet he had insisted on throwing his three thousand infantry forward without cavalry support, and Gudin could only suppose that either the Tippoo believed Allah would be fighting on his side this afternoon, or else he was so consumed by his famous victory over the British seventeen years before that he believed he could always beat them in open conflict.

Gudin slapped at flies again. It was time, he thought, to go home. Much as he liked India he felt frustrated. He suspected that the government in Paris had forgotten about his existence, and he was keenly aware that the Tippoo was not receptive to his advice. He did not blame the Tippoo; Paris had made so many promises, but no French army had come to fight for Mysore and Gudin sensed the Tippoo’s disappointment and even sympathized with it, while Gudin himself felt useless and abandoned. Some of his contemporaries were already generals; even little Bonaparte, a Corsican whom Gudin had known slightly in Toulon, now had an army of his own, while Jean Gudin was stranded in distant Mysore. Which made victory all the more important, and if the British were not broken here then they would have to be beaten by the massed artillery and rockets that waited on Seringapatam’s walls. That was also where Gudin’s small battalion of European soldiers was waiting, and Seringapatam, he suspected, was where this campaign would be decided. And if there was victory, and if the British were thrown out of southern India, then Gudin’s reward would surely be back in France. Back home where the flies did not swarm like mice.

The enemy regiment waited with levelled muskets. The Tippoo’s men cheered and charged impetuously onwards. The Tippoo leaned forward, unconsciously biting his lower lip as he waited for the impact.

Gudin wondered whether his woman in Seringapatam would like Provence, or whether Provence would like her. Or maybe it was time for a new woman. He sighed, slapped at flies, then involuntarily shuddered.

For, beneath him, the killing had begun.

‘Fire!’ Colonel Wellesley shouted.

Seven hundred men pulled their triggers and seven hundred flints snapped forward onto frizzens. The sparks ignited the powder in the pans, there was a pause as the fire fizzed through the seven hundred touchholes, then an almighty crackling roar as the heavy muskets flamed.

The brass butt of the gun slammed into Sharpe’s shoulder. He had aimed the weapon at a sashed officer leading the enemy column, though even at sixty yards’ range it was hardly worth aiming a musket for it was a frighteningly inaccurate weapon, but unless the ball flew high it ought to hit someone. He could not tell what damage the volley had caused for the instant the musket banged into his shoulder his vision was obscured by the filthy bank of rolling smoke coughed out of the seven hundred musket muzzles. He could hardly hear anything either, for the sound of the rear rank muskets, going off close beside his head, had left his ears ringing. His right hand automatically went to find a new cartridge from his pouch, but then, above the ringing in his ears, he heard the Colonel’s brusque voice. ‘Forward! Thirty-third, forward!’

‘Go on, boys!’ Sergeant Green called. ‘Steady now! Don’t run! Walk!’

‘Damn your eagerness!’ Ensign Fitzgerald shouted at the company. ‘Hold your ranks! This ain’t a race!’

The regiment marched into the musket smoke which stank like rotting eggs. Lieutenant Lawford suddenly remembered to draw his sword. He could see nothing beyond the smoke, but imagined a terrible enemy waiting with raised muskets. He touched the pocket of his coat in which he kept the Bible given to him by his mother.

The front rank advanced clear of the stinking smoke fog and suddenly there was nothing ahead but chaos and carnage.

The seven hundred lead balls had converged on the front of the column to strike home with a brutal efficiency. Where there had been orderly ranks there were now only dead men and dying men who writhed on the ground. The rearward ranks of the enemy could not advance over the barrier of the dead and injured, so they stood uncertainly as, out of the smoke, the seven hundred bayonets appeared.

‘On the double! On the double! Don’t let them stand!’ Colonel Wellesley called.

‘Give them a cheer, boys!’ Sergeant Green called. ‘Go for them now! Kill the buggers!’

Sharpe had no thought of deserting now, for now he was about to fight. If there was any one good reason to join the army, it was to fight. Not to hurry up and do nothing, but to fight the King’s enemies, and this enemy had been shocked by the awful violence of the close-range volley and now they stared in horror as the redcoats screamed and ran towards them. The 33rd, released from the tight discipline of the ranks, charged eagerly. There was loot ahead. Loot and food and stunned men to slaughter and there were few men in the 33rd who did not like a good fight. Not many had joined the ranks out of patriotism; instead, like Sharpe, they had taken the King’s shilling because hunger or desperation had forced them into uniform, but they were still good soldiers. They came from the gutters of Britain where a man survived by savagery rather than by cleverness. They were brawlers and bastards, alley-fighters with nothing to lose but tuppence a day.

Sharpe howled as he ran. The sepoy battalions were closing up on the left, but there was no need for their musketry now, for the Tippoo’s vaunted tiger infantry were not staying to contest the afternoon. They were edging backwards, looking for escape, and then, out of the north where they had been half hidden by the red-blossomed trees, the British and Indian cavalry charged to the sound of a trumpet’s call. Lances were lowered and sabres held like spears as the horsemen thundered onto the enemy’s flank.

The Tippoo’s infantry fled. A few, the lucky few, scrambled back up the ridge, but most were caught in the open ground between the 33rd and the ridge’s slope and there the killing became a massacre. Sharpe reached the pile of dead and leapt over them. Just beyond the bloody pile a wounded man tried to bring up his musket, but Sharpe slammed the butt of his gun onto the man’s head, kicked the musket out of his enfeebled hands and ran on. He was aiming for an officer, a brave man who had tried to rally his troops and who now hesitated fatally. The man was carrying a drawn sabre, then he remembered the pistol in his belt and fumbled to draw it, but saw he was too late and turned to run after his men. Sharpe was faster. He rammed his bayonet forward and struck the Indian officer on the side of the neck. The man turned, his sabre whistling as he sliced the curved blade at Sharpe’s head. Sharpe parried the blow with the barrel of his musket. A sliver of wood was slashed off the stock as Sharpe kicked the officer between the legs. Sharpe was screaming a challenge, a scream of hate that had nothing to do with Mysore or the enemy officer, and everything to do with the frustrations of his life. The Indian staggered, hunched over and Sharpe slammed the musket’s heavy butt into the dark face. The enemy officer went down, his sabre falling from his hand. He shouted something, maybe offering his surrender, but Sharpe did not care. He just put his left foot on the man’s sword arm, then drove the bayonet hard down into his throat. The fight might have lasted three seconds.

Sharpe advanced no farther. Other men ran past, screaming as they pursued the fleeing enemy, but Sharpe had found his victim. He had thrust the bayonet so hard that the blade had gone clean through the officer’s neck into the soil beneath and it was hard work to pull the steel free, and in the end he had to put a boot on the dying man’s forehead before he could tug the bayonet out. Blood gushed from the wound, then subsided to a throbbing pulse of spilling red as Sharpe knelt and began rifling the man’s gaudy uniform, oblivious of the choking, bubbling sound that the officer was making as he died. Sharpe ripped off the yellow silk sash and tossed it aside together with the silver-hilted sabre and the pistol. The sabre scabbard was made of boiled leather, nothing of any value to Sharpe, but behind it was a small embroidered pouch and Sharpe drew out his knife, unfolded the blade and slashed through the pouch’s straps. He fumbled the pouch open to find that it was filled with nothing but dry rice and one small scrap of what looked like cake. He smelt it gingerly and guessed it was made of some kind of bean. He tossed the food aside and spat a curse at the dying man. ‘Where’s your bleeding money?’

The man gasped, made a choking sound, then his whole body jerked as his heart finally gave up the struggle. Sharpe tore at the tunic that was decorated with mauve tiger stripes. He felt the seams, looking for coins, found none so pulled off the wide red turban that was sticky with fresh blood. The dead man’s face was already crawling with flies. Sharpe pulled the turban apart and there, in the very centre of the greasy cloth, he found three silver and a dozen small copper coins. ‘Knew you’d have something,’ he told the dead man, then pushed the coins into his own pouch.

The cavalry was finishing off the remnants of the Tippoo’s infantry. The Tippoo himself, with his entourage and standard-bearers, had gone from the top of the ridge, and there were no cannon firing there either. The enemy had slipped away, abandoning their trapped infantry to the sabres and lances of the British and Indian cavalry. The Indian cavalry had been recruited from the city of Madras and the East Coast states which had all suffered from the Tippoo’s raids and now they took a bloody revenge, whooping and laughing as their blades cut down the terrified fugitives. Some cavalrymen, running out of targets, were already dismounted and searching the dead for plunder. The sepoy infantry, too late to join the killing, arrived to join the plunder.

Sharpe twisted the bayonet off his musket, wiped it clean on the dead man’s sash, scooped up the sabre and pistol, then went to find more loot. He was grinning, and thinking that there was nothing to this fighting business, nothing at all. A few shots in Flanders, one volley here; and neither fight was worthy of the name battle. Flanders had been a muddle and this fight had been as easy as slaughtering sheep. No wonder Sergeant Hakeswill would live for ever. And so would he, Sharpe reckoned, because there was nothing to this business. Just a couple of bangs and it was all over. He laughed, slid the bayonet into its sheath and knelt beside another dead man. There was work to do and a future to finance.

If only he could decide where it would be safe to run.

CHAPTER TWO

Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill glanced about to see what his men were doing. Just about all of them were plundering, and quite right too. That was a soldier’s privilege. Fight the battle then strip the enemy of anything worth a penny. The officers were not looting, but officers never did, at least not so that anyone noticed them, but Hakeswill did see that Ensign Fitzgerald had somehow managed to get himself a jewelled sabre that he was now flashing around like a shilling whore given a guinea fan. Mister bloody Ensign Fitzgerald was getting above himself in Sergeant Hakeswill’s considered opinion. Ensigns were the lowest of the low, apprentice officers, lads in silver lace, and Mister bloody Fitzgerald had no business countermanding Hakeswill’s orders so Mister bloody Fitzgerald must be taught his place, but the trouble was that Mister Fitzgerald was Irish and Hakeswill was of the opinion that the Irish were only half civilized and never did understand their place. Most of them, anyway. Major Shee was Irish, and he was civilized, at least when he was sober, and Colonel Wellesley, who was from Dublin, was wholly civilized, but the Colonel had possessed the sense to make himself more English than the English, while Mister bloody Fitzgerald made no pretence about his birth.

‘See this, Hakeswill?’ Fitzgerald, sublimely unaware of Hakeswill’s glowering thoughts, stepped across a body to show off his new sabre.

‘See what, sir?’

‘Damned blade is made in Birmingham! Will you credit that? Birmingham! Says so on the blade, see? “Made in Birmingham.”’

Hakeswill dutifully examined the legend on the blade, then fingered the sabre’s pommel which was elegantly set with a ring of seven small rubies. ‘Looks like glass to me, sir,’ he said dismissively, hoping he could somehow persuade Fitzgerald to relinquish the blade.

‘Nonsense!’ Fitzgerald said cheerfully. ‘Best rubies! Bit small, maybe, but I doubt the ladies will mind that. Seven pieces of glitter? That adds up to a week of sin, Sergeant. It was worth killing the rascal for that.’

If you did kill him, Hakeswill thought sourly as he stumped away from the exuberant Ensign. More likely picked it up off the ground. And Fitzgerald was right; seven rubies, even small ones, would buy a lot of Naig’s ladies. ‘Nasty’ Naig was a merchant from Madras, one of the many travelling with the army, and he had brought his brothel with him. It was an expensive brothel, officers only, or at least only those who could pay an officer’s price, and that made Hakeswill think of Mary Bickerstaff. Mrs Mary Bickerstaff. She was a half and half, half Indian and half British, and that made her valuable. Very valuable. Most of the women who followed the army were dark as Hades, and while Obadiah Hakeswill had no distaste for dark skin he did miss the touch of white flesh. So did many of the officers, and there was a guinea or two to be made out of that lust. Naig would pay well for a skin as pale as Mary Bickerstaff’s.

She was a rare beauty, Mary Bickerstaff. A beauty amongst a pack of ugly, rancid women. Hakeswill watched as a group of the battalion’s wives ran to take part in the plundering and almost shuddered as he contemplated their ugliness. About two thirds of the wives were bibbis, Indians, and most of those, Hakeswill knew, were not properly married with the Colonel’s permission, while the rest were those lucky British women who had won the brutal lottery that had taken place on the night before the battalion had sailed from England. The wives had been gathered in a barrack room, their names had been put into ten shakos, one for each company, and the first ten names drawn from each hat were allowed to accompany their husbands. The rest had to stay in Britain, and what happened to them there was anybody’s guess. Most went on the parish, but parishes resented feeding soldiers’ wives, so as like as not they were forced to become whores. Barrack-gate whores, for the most part, because they lacked the looks for anything better. But a few, a precious few, were pretty, and none was prettier than Sergeant Bickerstaff’s half and half widow.

The women spread out among the dead and dying Mysoreans. If anything they were even more efficient than their men at plundering the dead, for the men tended to hurry and so missed the hiding places where a soldier secreted his money. Hakeswill watched Flora Placket strip the body of a tall tiger-striped corpse whose throat had been slashed to the backbone by the slice of a cavalryman’s sabre. She did not rush her work, but searched carefully, garment by garment, then handed each piece of clothing to one of her two children to fold and stack. Hakeswill approved of Flora Placket for she was a large and steady woman who kept her man in good order and made no fuss about a campaign’s discomforts. She was a good mother too, and that was why Obadiah did not care that Flora Placket was as ugly as a haversack. Mothers were sacred. Mothers were not expected to be pretty. Mothers were Obadiah Hakeswill’s guardian angels, and Flora Placket reminded Obadiah of his own mother who was the only person in all his life who had shown him kindness. Biddy Hakeswill was long dead now, she had died a year before the twelve-year-old Obadiah had dangled on a scaffold for the trumped-up charge of sheep stealing and, to amuse the crowd, the executioner had not let any of that day’s victims drop from the gallows, but had instead hoisted them gently into the air so that they choked slowly as their piss-soaked legs jerked in the death dance of the gibbet. No one had taken much notice of the small boy at the scaffold’s end and, when the heavens had opened and the rain come down in bucketfuls to scatter the crowd, no one had bothered when Biddy Hakeswill’s brother had cut the boy down and set him loose. ‘Did it for your mother,’ his uncle had snarled. ‘God rest her soul. Now be off with you and don’t ever show your face in the dale again.’ Hakeswill had run south, joined the army as a drummer boy, had risen to sergeant and had never forgotten his dying mother’s words. ‘No one will ever get rid of Obadiah,’ she had said, ‘not my Obadiah. Death’s too good for him.’ The gallows had proved that. Touched by God, he was, indestructible!

A groan sounded near Hakeswill and the Sergeant snapped out of his reverie to see a tiger-striped Indian struggling to turn onto his belly. Hakeswill scurried over, forced the man onto his back again and placed his halberd’s spear point at the man’s throat. ‘Money?’ Hakeswill snarled, then held out his left hand and motioned the counting of coins. ‘Money?’

The man blinked slowly, then said something in his own language.

‘I’ll let you live, you bugger,’ Hakeswill promised, leering at the wounded man. ‘Not that you’ll live long. Got a goolie in your belly, see?’ He pointed at the wound in the man’s belly where the bullet had driven home. ‘Now where’s your money? Money! Pice? Dan? Pagodas? Annas? Rupees?’

The man must have understood for his hand fluttered weakly towards his chest.

‘Good boy, now,’ Hakeswill said, smiling again, then his face jerked in its involuntary spasms as he pushed the spear point home, but not too quickly for he liked to see the realization of death on a man’s face. ‘You’re a stupid bugger, too,’ Hakeswill said when the man’s death throes had ended, then he cut open the tunic and found that the man had strapped some coins to his chest with a cotton sash. He undid the sash and pocketed the handful of copper change. Not a big haul, but Hakeswill was not dependent on his own plundering to fill his purse. He would take a cut from whatever the soldiers of the Light Company found. They knew they would have to pay up or else face punishment.

He saw Sharpe kneeling beside a body and hurried across. ‘Got a sword there, Sharpie?’ Hakeswill asked. ‘Stole it, did you?’

‘I killed the man, Sergeant.’ Sharpe looked up.

‘Doesn’t bleeding matter, does it, lad? You ain’t permitted to carry a sword. Officer’s weapon, a sword is. Mustn’t get above your station, Sharpie. Get above yourself, boy, and you’ll be cut down. So I’ll take the blade, I will.’ Hakeswill half expected Sharpe to resist, but the Private did nothing as the Sergeant picked up the silver-hilted blade. ‘Worth a few bob, I dare say,’ Hakeswill said appreciatively, then he laid the sword’s tip against the stock at Sharpe’s neck. ‘Which is more than you’re worth, Sharpie. Too clever for your own good, you are.’

Sharpe edged away from the sword and stood up. ‘I ain’t got a quarrel with you, Sergeant,’ he said.