Authors: Bernard Cornwell
The noise seemed to go on forever. First there was the swelling bang of the powder exploding, then the grinding crash of stones cracking and tumbling and the whistle of shards whirling away across the city, and then there was a ringing in Sharpe's ears and above the ringing, but sounding as far away and as thin as the trumpet that had heralded the
assault, the screams of men caught by fire or blast or stone. After that came the sound of a wind, an unnatural wind that scoured thatch off houses, threw down tiles, and raised dust devils in streets a quarter of a mile away from the explosion.
The men on the walls nearest the gatehouse saw nothing, unless it was the flash that ended their lives, for the explosion plucked the Tippoo's defenders clean off the ramparts south of the breach. The wall itself was undamaged, even where it ran past the gatehouse, for there the old outer archway was blown out like a bung and a monstrous jet of smoky flame jetted from the city wall to vent the explosive's power safely beneath the ramparts, but the squat tower over the old gateway fell. It collapsed slowly, sliding down into the space between the inner and outer walls. Scraps of brick and stone arched up and outward, splashing in the river just ahead of Baird's advancing columns. More scraps of stone rained down on the city.
The noise slowly faded. The ringing in Sharpe's ears diminished until he could hear a man whimpering somewhere in the horror. He peered out again and saw that the explosion had scoured the alley of dead and wounded men. There was no sign of the handcart. There was nothing except broken stone, burning thatch, and smears of blood.
North of the breach, where the lick of flame and blast had been lessened by distance, the defenders were dizzied by noise. Their banners of gold and scarlet and green silk whipped stiff in the blast as men crouched in embrasures or reeled like drunks before the hot wind. The Tippoo's heroes who had volunteered to fight the Forlorn Hopes on the breach were killed almost to a man, for they were on the inner side of the breach where nothing could save them, while the survivors of the Forlorn Hopes, thrust back by the first charge of the Tippoo's men, had been shielded by the southern shoulder of the broken wall.
In the breach itself there was a vast veil of swirling dust. A huge boiling pyre of smoke churned above the walls, but the breach, for a moment at least, was undefended. The Tippoo's men who should have been guarding the shoulders of the breach were either dead or so shocked as to be unable to respond, while the men on the inner wall had ducked down as the terrible noise and heat and dust pounded about them. Most of them still crouched, fearful of the strange silence that followed the explosion.
“Now, boys, now!” a man shouted on the breach, and the survivors of the Forlorn Hopes climbed into the smoke, then up the broken stonework of the walls. They choked on the airborne dust and their red coats were whitened by it, but they were men who had steeled themselves to the worst ordeal of war, the storming of a breach, and the steel was hard and cold in their souls so that they were scarcely aware of the horror of the last few seconds, only of the need to climb the shoulders of the breach and start their killing. Those who went south found an empty wall, while those who went north climbed to meet dazed men. The redcoats and sepoys had expected no mercy in this assault and were prepared to show none, and so they began their slaughter. “Pigsticking time, lads!” one corporal shouted. He stabbed his bayonet into a wild-eyed man and rid his blade of the body's encumbrance by shaking the corpse over the inner ramparts' edge. His comrades stormed past him, their blood whipped into rage by the fear of being the first men into the enemy citadel. Now, up on the ramparts, they killed in a frenzy to let their fear escape in a torrent of enemy blood.
Baird had still been west of the river when the explosion occurred and he had felt a momentary pang of horror as the great blast blossomed in the city. For a terrible second he thought the whole city, all its houses and temples and palaces, was about to disintegrate before his eyes, but he had
kept moving, indeed he had quickened his pace so that he splashed into the South Cauvery while the debris was still falling. He waded the shallows as all around him the river foamed with falling stone, and he shouted incomprehensibly, desperate to take his heavy sword to the enemy that had once imprisoned him. The dust obscuring the breach shifted as a snatch of wind caught and whirled it northwards and Baird saw that his Forlorn Hopes were on the walls now. He saw some red coats, oddly whitened, moving north, then he glimpsed a rush of the enemy coming from the southern bastions to replace the defenders who had been scoured from the ramparts by the explosion. Those reinforcements were running past a great roiling gray-white plume of smoke amongst which pale flames licked the sky. Baird assumed the explosion had been the Tippoo's feared mine, but his horror at its force turned to exultation as he realized that the blast had been premature and that, instead of slaughtering his men, it had opened the city to storm. But he also recognized that the enemy was now waking from his nightmare and rushing men to face the attack, and so Baird hurried out of the river, through the shattered glacis, and up the breach that was now vividly slicked with great splashes of fresh blood. He chose to turn southward to help that Forlorn Hope face the rush of the Tippoo's reinforcements.
Behind Baird the twin columns of redcoats splashed through the river. Each column had three thousand men, and their task was to encircle the city and so capture the whole ring of Seringapatam's walls and bastions and towers and gates, but the Tippoo's men were recovering their wits now and the invading streams were at last being opposed. Muskets blasted down from ramparts, concealed guns were unmasked, and rockets streaked away from the parapets. Canister and round shot slashed down at the two columns, the missiles exploding high gouts of water as they struck the
river. Sepoys and redcoats fell. Some crawled to safety, others were carried downstream, while the least fortunate were trampled by the boots of the men crossing the river. The leading troops of each column scrambled up the broken shoulders of the walls. The engineers shoved ladders against those shoulders, and still more men climbed their rungs to the ramparts.
And there the fight changed. Now, on the narrow firestep of the outer wall, the columns had to force their way forward, but the Tippoo's men were firing volley after volley into the attackers' ranks. The most damaging fire came from the inner wall, for there the Tippoo's men were protected by a parapet while the British and their Indian allies had no such protection on the inner side of the captured outer wall. Men fired at them from their front, and a torrent of fire came from their flank, yet still they pushed on, consumed by the blind rage of war. The only way to survive horror was to win through, and so they stepped over the dead to fire their muskets, then crouched to reload while the ranks behind pushed on. The wounded fell, some of them tumbling down to the inner ditch, while behind them, in the foaming river, the tails of the two columns hurried on toward the battle.
The breach had been taken, but the city had not fallen yet. The sepoys and the redcoats had taken a hundred yards of the outer wall on either side of the breach, but the Tippoo's soldiers were fighting back hard, and the Tippoo himself led the defenders north of the breach. The Tippoo had cursed Gudin for blowing the mine too early and thus wasting its terrible destructive power, but now he tried to revive the defense by his personal example. He stood in the front rank of his soldiers while behind him a succession of aides loaded jewel-encrusted hunting rifles. One by one the rifles were given to the Tippoo who aimed and fired, aimed and fired, and redcoat after redcoat was struck down. Whenever an
enemy tried to rush along the ramparts, the Tippoo would drop that man, then pass the gun back, take another, step forward through the powder smoke, and fire again. Musket balls hissed about him. Two of his aides were wounded and a score of soldiers fighting at the Tippoo's side were killed or maimed, but the Tippoo's life seemed charmed. He stepped in blood, but none of it was his and it seemed as though he could not die, but only kill, and so he did, cold-bloodedly, deliberately, exultantly defending his city and his dream against the barbarians who had come to snatch his tiger throne.
The fight on the walls intensified as more men came to the threatened ramparts. The men in red came from the river and the men in tiger stripes came from other parts of the city wall, and both came to kill on top of the wall: a narrow place, scarce five paces wide, lifted in the sky.
Where the vultures flew, scenting death.
Sharpe scooped up three fallen muskets from the end of the alley where they had been blown by the explosion. He checked that his new guns were undamaged, loaded the two which were empty, then went back to Lawford, “You stay with the Colonel, sir,” he suggested, “and put your coat right side out. Lads will be here soon. And when they're here, sir, you might like to find Lali.” Lawford colored. “Lali?”
“Look after her, sir. I promised the lass she'd come to no harm.”
“You did?” Lawford asked with a trace of indignation. He was wondering just how well Sharpe knew the girl, then he decided it was better not to ask. “Of course I'll look after her,” Lawford said, still blushing, then he noted that Sharpe, despite his own advice, had still not donned his red coat. “Where are you going?” the Lieutenant asked.
“Got a job to do, sir,” Sharpe answered vaguely. “And, sir? Can I thank you, sir? I couldn't have done any of this without you.” Sharpe was not used to offering such heartfelt compliments and he spoke awkwardly. “You're a brave bugger, sir, you really are.”
Lawford felt absurdly pleased. He knew he should have stopped Sharpe from leaving, for this was no time for a man to be roaming Seringapatam's streets, but Sharpe was already gone. Lawford turned his coat the right side out and pushed his arms through the sleeves. Gudin, beside him, waved away a fly and wondered why the dust and smoke did not keep the pests away. “What will they do with me, Lieutenant?” he asked Lawford.
“They'll treat you well, sir, I'm sure. They'll probably send you back to France.”
“I'd like that,” Gudin said and suddenly realized that was all he really did want. “Your Private Sharpe” he said.
“Sergeant Sharpe now, sir.”
“Your Sergeant Sharpe, then. He's a good man, Lieutenant.”
“Yes, sir,” Lawford said, “he is.”
“If he lives, he'll go far.”
“If he lives, sir, yes.” And if the army lets him live, Lawford thought.
“Look after him, Lieutenant,” Gudin said. “An army isn't made of its officers, you know, though we officers like to think it is. An army is no better than its men, and when you find good men, you must look after them. That's an officer's job.”
“Yes, sir,” Lawford said dutifully. The first fugitives from the walls were visible at the end of the alley now, men in dust-smeared tiger tunics who staggered or limped away from the fighting. The noise of that fight was the continuous staccato of musket fire, shouts, and screams, and it could not
be long before the first murderous attackers broke into the streets. Lawford wondered if he should have demanded Gudin's sword, then worried about having allowed Sharpe to go off on his own.
Sharpe lived so far. He had thought about putting on his red coat, then decided there was no point in making himself conspicuous, even though the coat was now so filthy that it hardly looked like a uniform any more, and so he left the turned jacket knotted about his neck and, with two muskets slung on each shoulder, ran northward through the city. The crackle of muskets was constant, but above that crisp sound he could also hear the roar of maddened men going into a brutal fight. In a few minutes that fight would spread into the city and Sharpe planned to use those minutes well. He ran through the small square where the rocket carts were still parked and then hurried past the Inner Palace where a tiger-striped guard, thinking that Sharpe was a deserter from the Tippoo's European troops, shouted a challenge at him, but by the time the guard had cocked his musket Sharpe had already disappeared into the labyrinth of alleys and yards that lay to the north of the palace.
He pushed through a crowd of fearful women, passed the cheetah cages, and so went back to the dungeons. The bodies of the three
jettis
were crawling with flies and beyond them the outer gate of the dungeons still swung open. Sharpe ran through the gate and jumped down the stairs to where his tiger lay dead.
“Sharpie!” Hakeswill came to the bars. “You came back, lad! I knew you would. So what's happening, lad? No! Don't do that!” Hakeswill had seen Sharpe take a musket from his shoulder. “I like you, boy, always have! I might have seemed a bit hard on you at times, but only for your own good, Sharpie. You're a good boy, you are. You're a proper soldier. No!” Sharpe had aimed the musket.
Sharpe turned the muzzle away from Hakeswill and aimed it at the padlock. He did not want to waste time with the picklock so he simply held the musket against the ancient loop of the padlock and pulled the trigger. The iron loop sheared and the lock fell from the hasp. Sharpe dragged the cell door open. “I've come to get you, Obadiah,” he said.
“Knew you would, Sharpie, knew you would.” Hakeswill's face twitched. “Knew you wouldn't leave your sergeant to rot.”
“So come on out,” Sharpe said.
Hakeswill hung back. “No hard feelings, lad?”
“I'm not a lad, Obadiah. I'm a sergeant like you are. I've got Colonel Wellesley's promise, I have. I'm a sergeant now, just like you.”
“So you are, so you are, and so you should be.” Hakeswill's face twitched again. “I said as much to Mister Morris, didn't I? That Sharpie, I said, he's a sergeant in the making if ever I did see one. A good lad, I told him. Got my eye on him, sir. That's what I told Mister Morris.”