Sharpe's Tiger (36 page)

“Yes, sir.”

The General placed the bullet in the barrel, then pulled out the pistol's short ramrod. “They're going to tell him, Aruna. However brave they are, they will talk in the end. Of course”—he paused as he rammed the bullet hard down—”the Tippoo might remember your existence. And if he does, Aruna, then he will send for you and you will be questioned too, but not so gently as I am questioning you now.”

“No, sir,” Mary whispered.

Appah Rao slotted the short ramrod back in its hoops. He primed the gun, but did not cock it. “I want no harm to come to you, Aruna, so tell me why the two men came to Seringapatam.”

Mary stared at the pistol in the General's hand. It was a beautiful weapon with a butt inlaid with ivory and a barrel chased with silver whorls. Then she looked up into the General's eyes and saw that he had no intention of shooting her. She did not see threat in those eyes, just fear, and it was that fear which decided her to tell the truth. “They came, sir,” she said, “because they had to reach a man called McCandless.”

It was the answer Rao had feared. “And did they?”

“No, sir.”

“So what did they find out?” Rao asked, laying the pistol down on the table. “What did they find out?” he asked in a harder voice.

“Private Sharpe told me that the British shouldn't attack in the west, sir.” Mary said, forgetting to describe Sharpe as her brother. “That's all he said, honestly, sir.”

“All?” Rao asked. “Surely not. Why would he tell you that? Did he think you could get the news out of the city?”

Mary stared down at the pistol. “I was to find a man, sir.” she said at last.

“Who?”

She looked up at the General, fear in her eyes. “A merchant, sir, called Ravi Shekhar.”

“Anyone else?”

“No, sir! Truly.”

Rao believed her, and felt a wash of relief. His greatest fear was that Sharpe and Lawford might have been given his own name, for although Colonel McCandless had promised to keep Rao's treachery a secret Rao could not be certain that the promise had been kept. McCandless himself bad not been questioned under torture, for the Tippoo seemed convinced that the elderly Colonel “Ross” had indeed been foraging when he had been captured, but Rao still felt the threat of discovery moving insidiously closer. Lawford and Sharpe could not identify Rao himself as a traitor, but they very well might identify-McCandless and then the Tippoo
's
jettis
would turn their attentions to the elderly Scotsman, and how long would he endure their merciless treatment? The General wondered if he should make a dash from the city to the British lines, but rejected the thought almost as soon as it occurred to him. Such an escape might secure Appah Rao's own safety, but it would sacrifice his large family and all the faithful servants who were in his employment. No, he decided, this dangerous game must be seen to its finish. He pushed the pistol closer to Mary. “Take it,” he ordered her.

Mary looked astonished. “The pistol, sir?”

“Take it! Now listen, girl. Ravi Shekhar is dead and his body was fed to the tigers. It's possible the Tippoo will forget you even existed, but if he remembers then you might need that pistol.” Appah Rao wondered if he could smuggle the
girl clean out of the city. It was a tempting thought, but every civilian was stopped at the gates and had to produce a pass stamped by the Tippoo himself, and very few received that pass. A soldier might succeed in escaping the city, but not a civilian. Appah Rao gazed into Mary's dark eyes. “I am told that placing it in your mouth and pointing it slightly upwards is the most effective,” Mary shuddered and the General nodded to Kunwar Singh. “I give her to your care,” he said.

Kunwar Singh bowed his head.

Mary went back to the women's quarters while Appall Rao made an offering at his household shrine. He lingered there, thinking how he envied the certainty of men like the Tippoo or Colonel McCandless. Neither man seemed to have any doubts, but rather believed that destiny was whatever they themselves made of it. They were not subject to other men's wills and Appah Rao would have liked such certainty for himself. He would have liked to live in a Mysore ruled by its ancient Hindu house, and a Mysore in which no other nations intruded: no British, no French, no Mahrattas, and no Muslims, but instead he found himself caught between two armies and somehow he had to keep his wife, his children, his servants, and himself alive. He closed his eyes, touched his hands to his forehead, and bowed to Ganesh, the elephant-headed god who guarded Appah Rao's household. “Just keep us alive,” he prayed to the god, “just keep us alive.”

The Tippoo himself came to the courtyard where the tigers had been restored to their long chains. Four infantrymen guarded the two Englishmen. The Tippoo did not come in state, with chamberlains and courtiers, but was accompanied by only one officer and two
jettis
who watched impassively as the Tippoo strode to Sharpe and tugged the medallion from around his neck. He pulled so hard that the chain cut into
the back of Sharpe's neck before it snapped. Then the Tippoo spat into Sharpe's face and turned away.

The officer was a suave young Muslim who spoke good English. “His Majesty,” he said when the Tippoo turned back to face the prisoners, “wishes to know why you came to the city.”

Lawford stiffened. “I am an officer in His Britannic Majesty's” he began, but the Indian cut him off with a gesture.

“Quiet!” the officer said wearily. “You are nothing except what we make you. So why are you here?”

“Why do you think?” Sharpe said.

The officer looked at him. “I think,” he said judiciously, “that you came here to spy.”

“So now you know,” Sharpe said defiantly.

The officer smiled. “But maybe you were given the name of a man who might help you inside the city? That is the name we want.”

Sharpe shook his head. “Didn't give us any names. Not one.”

“Maybe,” the officer said, then nodded at the
two jettis
who seized hold of Sharpe, then ripped the coat down his back so that its buttons tore off one by one as it was dragged down. He wore no shirt beneath, only the bandages that still covered the wounds caused by his flogging. One of
the
jettis
drew a knife and unceremoniously sliced through the bandages, making Sharpe flinch as the blade cut into the almost healed wounds. The bandages were tossed aside, and the smell of them made one of the tigers stir. The other
jetti
had crossed to the four soldiers where he had drawn out one of their muskets' ramrods. Now he stood behind Sharpe and, when the Tippoo nodded, he gave Sharpe's back a vicious cut with the metal rod.

The sudden pain was every bit as bad as the flogging. It stabbed up and down Sharpe's spine and he gasped with the
effort not to scream aloud as the force of the blow threw him forward. He broke his fall with his hands and now his back faced the sky and the
jetti
slashed down three more times, opening the old wounds, cracking a rib, and spurting blood onto the courtyard's sand-One of the tigers growled and the links of its chain jangled as the beast lunged toward the smell of fresh blood. “We shall beat him until we have the name,” the officer told Lawford mildly, “and when he is dead we shall beat you until you are dead.”

The
jetti
struck down again, and this time Sharpe rolled onto his side, but the second
jetti
pushed him back onto his belly. Sharpe was grunting and panting, but was determined not to cry aloud.

“You can't do this!” Lawford protested.

“Of course we can!” the officer answered. “We shall start splintering his hones now, but not his spine, not yet. We want the pain to go on.” He nodded, and the
jetti
slashed down again and this time Sharpe did cry aloud as the stab of pain brought back all the agony of the flogging.

“A merchant!” Lawford blurted out.

The officer held up his hand to stop the beating. “A merchant, Lieutenant? The city is full of merchants.”

“He deals in metals,” Lawford said.

“I don't know more than that.”

“Of course you do,” the officer said, then nodded at the
jetti
who raised the ramrod high in the air.

“Ravi Shekhar!” Lawford shouted. The Lieutenant was bitterly ashamed for giving the name away, and the shame was obvious on his face, but nor could Lawford stand by and watch Sharpe beaten to death. He believed, or he wanted to believe, that he could have endured the pain of the beating himself without betraying the name, but it was more than he could bear to watch another man pounded into a bloody pulp.

“Ravi Shekhar,” the officer said, checking the
jetti's
stroke. “And how did you find him?”

“We didn't,” Lawford said. “We didn't know how! We were waiting till we spoke some of your language, then we were going to ask tor him about the city, but we haven't tried yet.”

Sharpe groaned. Blood trickled down his sides and dripped onto the stones. One of the tigers staled beside the wall and the smell of urine filled the courtyard with its thin sour stench. The officer, who was wearing one of the prized gold tiger medallions about his neck, talked with the Tippoo who stared dispassionately at Sharpe, then asked a question.

“And what, Lieutenant,” the officer translated, “would you have told Ravi Shekhar?”

“Everything we'd discovered about the defenses,” Lawford said miserably. “That's why we were sent.”

And what did you discover?”

“How many men you have, how many guns, how many rockets.”

“That's all?”

“It's enough, isn't it?” Lawford retorted.

The officer translated the answers. The Tippoo shrugged, glanced at Lawford, then took a small brown leather bag from inside a pocket of his yellow silk tunic. He unlaced the bag's mouth, stepped to Sharpe's side, then trickled salt onto the beaten man's open wounds. Sharpe hissed with the pain.

“Who else would you have told in the city?” the officer asked.

“There was no one else!” Lawford pleaded. “In the name of God, there was no one else. We were told Ravi Shekhar could get a message out. That was all!”

The Tippoo believed him. Lawford's chagrin was so clear and his shame so palpable that he was utterly believable.
Besides, the story made sense. “And so you've never seen Ravi Shekhar?” the officer asked.

“Never.”

“You're looking at him now,” the officer said, gesturing at the tigers. “His body was fed to the tigers weeks ago.”

“Oh, God,” Lawford said, and he closed his eyes as he realized just what an utter failure he had been. For a moment he wanted to retch, then he controlled the impulse and opened his eves to watch as the Tippoo picked up Sharpe's red coat and dropped it onto the bloody back.

For a second the Tippoo hesitated, wondering whether to release the tigers onto the two men. Then he turned away. “Take them to the cells,” he ordered.

The sacrifice of prisoners had yielded up the traitors and turned the Tippoo's luck. There was no need for a further sacrifice, not yet, but the Tippoo knew that fortune was ever capricious and so the prisoners could wait until another sacrifice was needed and then, to guarantee victory or to stave off defeat, they would die. And till then, the Tippoo decided, they could just rot.

T
he dungeons lay in one of the palace's northern courtyards, hard under the city's inner mud wall. The courtyard stank of sewage, the smell powerful enough to make Sharpe half retch as he staggered beside Lawford at the point of a bayonet. The courtyard was a busy place. The families of the palace servants lived in low thatched buildings surrounding the yard where their lives were spent cheek by jowl with the Tippoo's stables and the small enclosure where he kept eight cheetahs he used for hunting gazelles. The cheetahs were taken to the hunt in wheeled cages and at first Sharpe thought they were to be placed inside one of the barred vehicles, but then one of the escorts pushed him past the ponderous carts toward a flight of stone steps that descended to a long narrow trench of stone that lay open to the sky. A tall fence of iron bars surrounded the pit that was guarded by a pair of soldiers. One of them used a key to open a padlock the size of a mango, then the escort shoved Sharpe and Lawford through the open gate.

The dungeon guards did not carry muskets, but instead had coiled whips in their belts and bell-mouthed blunderbusses on their shoulders. One of them pointed mutely down the steps and Sharpe, following Lawford down the stairs, saw that the trench was a stone-flagged, dead-end corridor lined on either side with barred cells. There were eight cells in the pit, four on each side, and each separated from its neighbors,
and from the central trench-like corridor, by iron bars alone, but bars that were as thick as a man's wrist. The turnkey indicated that they should wait while he unlocked a cell, but the first padlock he attempted to open had become stiff, or else had rusted, for it would not budge, and then he could not find a key to fit another of the big old locks. Something stirred in the straw of the cell that lay at the far right-hand end of the corridor. Sharpe, waiting as the guard sorted through his keys, heard the straw rustle again, then there was a growl as a huge tiger heaved up from its bed to stare at them with blank yellow eyes.

More straw stirred in the first cell on the left, close by where Sharpe and Lawford were standing. “Look who it isn't!” Hakeswill had come to the bars. “Sharpie!”

“Be quiet, Sergeant,” Lawford snapped.

“Yes, sir, Mister Lieutenant Lawford, sir, quiet it is, sir.” I Hakeswill clung to the bars of his cage, staring wide-eyed at the two newcomers. His face twitched. “Quiet as the grave, sir, but no one talks to me down here. He won't.” He nodded toward the cell opposite that the guard was now unlocking. “Likes it quiet, he does,” Hakeswill went on. “Like a bleeding church. Says his prayers, too. Always quiet it is here, except when the darkies are having a shout at each other. Dirty bastards they are. Smell the sewage, can you? One giant jakes!” Hakeswill's face twisted in rictus and, in the gloom of the shadowed cells, his eyes seemed to glitter with an unholy delight. “Been missing company, I have.”