Sharpe's Triumph

But he dared not move.

The humid air stank of blood and of the rotted egg smell made by powder
smoke. The very last thing he remembered doing was thrusting his pack, haversack and
cartridge box into the glowing ashes of a fire, and now the ammunition from the
cartridge box exploded. Each blast of powder fountained sparks and ashes into the hot
air. A couple of men laughed at the sight. They stopped to watch it for a few seconds, poked
at the nearby bodies with their muskets, then walked on.

Sharpe lay still. A fly crawled on his eyeball and he forced himself to stay absolutely
motionless. There was blood on his face and more blood had puddled in his right ear, though
it was drying now. He blinked, fearing that the small motion would attract one of the
killers, but no one noticed.

Chasalgaon. That's where he was. Chasalgaon; a miserable, thorn walled fort on the
frontier of Hyderabad, and because the Rajah of Hyderabad was a British ally the fort
had been garrisoned by a hundred sepoys of the East India Company and fifty mercenary
horsemen from Mysore, only when Sharpe arrived half the sepoys and all of the horsemen had
been out on patrol.

Sharpe had come from Seringapatam, leading a detail of six privates and carrying a
leather bag stuffed with rupees, and he had been greeted by Major Crosby who commanded at
Chasalgaon. The Major proved to be a plump, red-faced, bilious man who disliked the heat
and hated Chasalgaon, and he had slumped in his canvas chair as he unfolded

Sharpe's orders. He read them, grunted, then read them again.

“Why the hell did they send you?” he finally asked.

“No one else to send, sir.”

Crosby frowned at the order.

“Why not an officer?”

“No officers to spare, sir.”

“Bloody responsible job for a sergeant, wouldn't you say?”

“Won't let you down, sir,” Sharpe said woodenly, staring at the leprous yellow of the
tent's canvas a few inches above the Major's head.

“You'd bloody well better not let me down,” Crosby said, pushing the orders into a pile
of damp papers on his camp table.

“And you look bloody young to be a sergeant.”

“I was born late, sir,” Sharpe said. He was twenty-six, or thought he was, and most
sergeants were much older.

Crosby, suspecting he was being mocked, stared up at Sharpe, but there was nothing
insolent on the Sergeant's face. A good-looking man, Crosby thought sourly. Probably had
the bibb is of Seringapatam falling out of their saris, and Crosby, whose wife had died of
the fever ten years before and who consoled himself with a two-rupee village whore every
Thursday night, felt a pang of jealousy.

“And how the devil do you expect to get the ammunition back to Seringapatam?” he
demanded.

“Hire ox carts, sir.” Sharpe had long perfected the way to address unhelpful
officers. He gave them precise answers, added nothing unnecessary and always sounded
confident.

“With what? Promises?”

“Money, sir.” Sharpe tapped his haversack where he had the bag of rupees.

“Christ, they trust you with money?”

Sharpe decided not to respond to that question, but just stared impassively at the
canvas. Chasalgaon, he decided, was not a happy place. It was a small fort built on a
bluff above a river that should have been overflowing its banks, but the monsoon had failed
and the land was cruelly dry. The fort had no ditch, merely a wall made of cactus thorn
with a dozen wooden fighting platforms spaced about its perimeter. Inside the wall was a
beaten-earth parade ground where a stripped tree served as a flagpole, and the parade
ground was surrounded by three mud-walled barracks thatched with palm, a cook house tents
for the officers and a stone-walled magazine to store the garrison's ammunition. The
sepoys had their families with them, so the fort was overrun with women and children, but
Sharpe had noted how sullen they were. Crosby, he thought, was one of those crabbed
officers who were only happy when all about them were miserable.

“I suppose you expect me to arrange the ox carts?” Crosby said indignantly.

“I'll do it myself, sir.”

“Speak the language, do you?” Crosby sneered.

“A sergeant, banker and interpreter, are you?”

“Brought an interpreter with me, sir,” Sharpe said. Which was over egging the pudding a
bit, because Davi Lal was only thirteen, an urchin off the streets of Seringapatam. He was
a smart, mischievous child whom Sharpe had found stealing from the armoury cook house and,
after giving the starving boy a clout around both ears to teach him respect for His
Britannic Majesty's property, Sharpe had taken him to Lali's house and given him a
proper meal, and Lali had talked to the boy and learned that his parents were dead, that he
had no relatives he knew of, and that he lived by his wits. He was also covered in lice.

“Get rid of him,” she had advised Sharpe, but Sharpe had seen something of his own
childhood in Davi Lal and so he had dragged him down to the River Cauvery and given him a
decent scrubbing.

After that Davi Lal had become Sharpe's errand boy. He learned to pipe clay belts,
blackball boots and speak his own version of English which, because it came from the lower
ranks, was liable to shock the gentler born.

“You'll need three carts,” Crosby said.

“Yes, sir,” Sharpe said.

“Thank you, sir.” He had known exactly how many carts he would need, but he also knew it
was stupid to pretend to knowledge in the face of officers like Crosby.

“Find your damn carts,” Crosby snapped, 'then let me know when you're ready to load
up."

“Very good, sir. Thank you, sir.” Sharpe stiffened to attention, about turned and marched
from the tent to find Davi Lal and the six privates waiting in the shade of one of the
barracks.

“We'll have dinner,” Sharpe told them, 'then sort out some carts this afternoon."

“What's for dinner?” Private Atkins asked.

“Whatever Davi can filch from the cook house Sharpe said, 'but be nippy about it, all
right? I want to be out of this damn place tomorrow morning.”

Their job was to fetch eighty thousand rounds of prime musket ii cartridges that had been
stolen from the East India Company armoury in Madras. The cartridges were the best
quality in India, and the thieves who stole them knew exactly who would pay the highest
price for the ammunition. The princedoms of the Mahratta Confederation were forever
at war with each other or else raiding the neighbouring states, but now, in the summer of
1803, they faced an imminent invasion by British forces. The threatened invasion had
brought two of the biggest Mahratta rulers into an alliance that now gathered its forces to
repel the British, and those rulers had promised the thieves a king's ransom in gold for the
cartridges, but one of the thieves who had helped break into the Madras armoury had refused
to let his brother join the band and share in the profit, and so the aggrieved brother had
betrayed the thieves to the Company's spies and, two weeks later, the caravan carrying
the cartridges across India had been ambushed by sepoys not far from Chasalgaon. The
thieves had died or fled, and the recaptured ammunition had been brought back to the
fort's small magazine for safekeeping. Now the eighty thousand cartridges were to be
taken to the armoury at Seringapatam, three days to the south, from where they would be
issued to the British troops who were readying themselves for the war against the
Mahrattas. A simple job, and Sharpe, who had spent the last four years as a sergeant in the
Seringapatam armoury, had been given the responsibility.

Spoilage, Sharpe was thinking while his men boiled a cauldron of I river water on a
bullock-dung fire. That was the key to the next few days, spoilage. Say seven thousand
cartridges lost to damp? No one in Seringapatam would argue with that, and Sharpe reckoned
he could sell the seven thousand cartridges on to Vakil Hussein, so long, of course, as
there were eighty thousand cartridges to begin with. Still, Major Crosby had not quibbled
with the figure, but just as Sharpe was thinking that, so Major Crosby appeared from his
tent with a cocked hat on his head and a sword at his side.

“On your feet!” Sharpe snapped at his lads as the Major headed towards them.

“Thought you were finding ox carts?” Crosby snarled at Sharpe.

“Dinner first, sir.”

“Your food, I hope, and not ours? We don't get rations to feed King's troops here,
Sergeant.” Major Crosby was in the service of the East India Company, and though he wore
a red coat like the King's army, there was little love lost between the two forces.

“Our food, sir,” Sharpe said, gesturing at the cauldron in which rice j and kid meat,
both stolen from Crosby's stores, boiled.

“Carried it with us, sir.”

A hamldar shouted from the fort gate, demanding Crosby's attention, but the Major
ignored the shout.

“I forgot to mention one thing, Sergeant.”

“Sir?”

Crosby looked sheepish for a moment, then remembered he was talking to a mere
sergeant.

“Some of the cartridges were spoiled. Damp got to them.”

“I'm sorry to hear that, sir,” Sharpe said straight-faced.

“So I had to destroy them,” Crosby said.

“Six or seven thousand as I remember.”

“Spoilage, sir,” Sharpe said.

“Happens all the time, sir.”

“Exactly so,” Crosby said, unable to hide his relief at Sharpe's easy acceptance of
his tale, 'exactly so," then he turned towards the gate.

“Humidor?”

“Company troops approaching, sahibV ”Where's Captain Leonard? Isn't he officer of the
day?" Crosby demanded.

“Here, sir, I'm here.” A tall, gangling captain hurried from a tent, tripped on a guy
rope, recovered his hat, then headed for the gate.

Sharpe ran to catch up with Crosby who was also walking towards the gate.

“You'll give me a note, sir?”

“A note? Why the devil should I give you a note?”

“Spoilage, sir,” Sharpe said respectfully.

“I'll have to account for the cartridges, sir.”

“Later,” Crosby said, 'later."

“Yes, sir,” Sharpe said.

“And sod you backwards, you miserable bastard,” he added, though too softly for Crosby
to hear.

Captain Leonard clambered up to the platform beside the gate where Crosby joined him.
The Major took a telescope from his tail pocket and slid the tubes open. The platform
overlooked the small river that should have been swollen by the seasonal rains into a
flood, but the failure of the monsoon had left only a trickle of water between the flat
grey rocks. Beyond the shrunken river, up on the skyline behind a grove of trees, Crosby
could see red-coated troops led by a European officer mounted on a black horse, and his
first thought was that it must be Captain Roberts returning from patrol, but Roberts had a
piebald horse and, besides, he had only taken fifty sepoys whereas this horse man led a
company almost twice that size.

“Open the gate,” Crosby ordered, and wondered who the devil it was. He decided it was
probably Captain Sullivan from the Company's post at Milladar, another frontier fort
like Chasalgaon, but what the hell was Sullivan doing here? Maybe he was marching some new
recruits to toughen the bastards, not that the skinny little brutes needed any
toughening, but it was uncivil of Sullivan not to warn Crosby of his coming.

“Jemadar,” Crosby shouted, 'turn out the guard!"

"Sahibl' The Jemadar acknowledged the order. Other sepoys were dragging the thorn
gates open.

He'll want dinner, Crosby thought sourly, and wondered what his servants were cooking
for the midday meal. Kid, probably, in boiled rice.

Well, Sullivan would just have to endure the stringy meat as a price for not sending any
warning, and damn the man if he expected Crosby to feed his sepoys as well. Chasalgaon's
cooks had not expected visitors and would not have enough rations for a hundred more
hungry sepoys.

“Is that Sullivan?” he asked Leonard, handing the Captain the telescope.

Leonard stared for a long time at the approaching horseman.

“I've never met Sullivan,” he finally said, “so I couldn't say.”

Crosby snatched back the telescope.

“Give the bastard a salute when he arrives,” Crosby ordered Leonard, 'then tell him he
can join me for dinner." He paused.

"You too, he added grudgingly.

Crosby went back to his tent. It was better, he decided, to let Leonard welcome the
stranger, rather than look too eager himself. Damn Sullivan, he thought, for not sending
warning, though there was a bright side, inasmuch as Sullivan might have brought news. The
tall, good-looking Sergeant from Seringapatam doubtless could have told Crosby the latest
rumours from Mysore, but it would be a chill day in hell before Crosby sought news from a
sergeant. But undoubtedly something was changing in the wider world, for it had been nine
weeks since Crosby last saw a Mahratta raider, and that was decidedly odd. The purpose of
the fort at Chasalgaon was to keep the Mahratta horse raiders out of the Rajah of
Hyderabad's wealthy territory, and Crosby fancied he had done his job well, but even so
he found the absence of any enemy marauders oddly worrying. What were the bastards up
to? He sat behind his table and shouted for his clerk. He would write the damned armoury
Sergeant a note explaining that the loss of seven thousand cartridges was due to a leak in
the stone roof of Chasalgaon's magazine. He certainly could not admit that he had sold the
ammunition to a merchant.

“What the bastard did,” Sharpe was saying to his men, 'was sell the bloody stuff to some
heathen bastard."

“That's what you were going to do, Sergeant,” Private Phillips said.

“Never you bleeding mind what I was going to do,” Sharpe said.

“Ain't that food ready?”

“Five minutes,” Davi Lal promised.

“A bloody camel could do it faster,” Sharpe grumbled, then hoisted his pack and
haversack.