Sharpe’s Triumph: The Battle of Assaye, September 1803. Bernard Cornwell
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Major made a terrible gurgling sound, then his body jerked uncontrollably and was finally still. ‘Praise the Lord, pull down the flag and find the pay chest,’ Dodd said to himself, then he stepped over the Major’s corpse to see that the pay chest was where he expected it to be, under the bed. ‘Subadar!’
‘Sahib?’
‘Two men here to guard the pay chest.’
‘Sahib!’
Major Dodd hurried back onto the parade ground where a small group of redcoats, British redcoats, were offering defiance, and he wanted to make sure that his sepoys took care of them, but a havildar had anticipated Dodd’s orders and was leading a squad of men against the half-dozen soldiers. ‘Put the blades in!’ Dodd encouraged them. ‘Hard in! Twist them in! That’s the way! Watch your left! Left!’ His voice was urgent, for a tall sergeant had suddenly appeared from behind the cookhouse, a white man with a musket and bayonet in his hands, but one of the sepoys still had a loaded musket of his own and he twisted, aimed and fired and Dodd saw another mist of bright blood sparkle in the sunlight. The sergeant had been hit in the head. He stopped, looked surprised as the musket fell from his hands and as blood streamed down his face, then he fell backwards and was still.
‘Search for the rest of the bastards!’ Dodd ordered, knowing that there must still be a score of the garrison hidden in the barracks. Some of the men had escaped over the thorn wall, but they would be hunted down by the Mahratta horsemen who were Dodd’s allies and who should by now have spread either side of the fort. ‘Search hard!’ He himself went to look at the horses of the garrison’s officers and decided that one of them was marginally better than his own. He moved his saddle to the better horse, then led it into the sunlight and picketed it to the flagpole. A woman ran past him, screaming as she fled from the red-coated killers, but a sepoy caught and tripped her and another pulled the sari off her shoulder. Dodd was about to order them away from the woman, then he reckoned that the enemy was well beaten and so his men could take their pleasure in safety. ‘Subadar?’ he shouted.
‘Sahib?’
‘One squad to make sure everyone’s dead. Another to open the armoury. And there are a couple of horses in the stable. Pick one for yourself, and we’ll take the other back to Pohlmann. And well done, Gopal.’
‘Thank you, sahib,’ Subadar Gopal said.
Dodd wiped the blood from his sword, then reloaded his pistol. One of the fallen redcoats was trying to turn himself over, so Dodd crossed to the wounded man, watched his feeble efforts for a moment, then put a bullet into the man’s head. The man jerked in spasm, then was still. Major Dodd scowled at the blood that had sprayed his boots, but he spat, stooped and wiped the blood away. Sharpe watched the tall officer from the corner of his eye. He felt responsible, angry, hot, bitter and scared. The blood had poured from the wound in his scalp. He was dizzy, his head throbbed, but he was alive. There were flies in his mouth. And then his ammunition began to explode and the tall officer whipped round, thinking it was trouble, and a couple of men laughed at the sight of the ashes bursting into the air with each small crack of powder.
Sharpe dared not move. He listened to women screaming and children crying, then heard hooves and he waited until some horsemen came into view. They were Indians, of course, and all wild-looking men with sabres, matchlocks, spears, lances and even bows and arrows. They slid out of their saddles and joined the hunt for loot.
Sharpe lay like the dead. The crusting blood was thick on his face. The blow of the musket ball had stunned him, so that he did not remember dropping his own musket or falling to the ground, but he sensed that the blow was not deadly. Not even deep. He had a headache, and the skin of his face felt taut with the crusted blood, but he knew head wounds always bled profusely. He tried to make his breathing shallow, left his mouth open and did not even gag when a fly crawled down to the root of his tongue, and then he could smell tobacco, arrack, leather and sweat and a horseman was bending over him with a horrid-looking curved knife with a rusty blade and Sharpe feared his throat was about to be cut, but instead the horseman began slashing at the pockets of Sharpe’s uniform. He found the big key that opened Seringapatam’s main magazine, a key that Sharpe had ordered cut in the bazaar so that he would not always have to fill in the form in the armoury guardhouse. The man tossed the key away, slit another pocket, found nothing valuable and so moved on to another body. Sharpe stared up at the sun.
Somewhere nearby a garrison sepoy groaned, and almost immediately he was bayoneted and Sharpe heard the hoarse exhalation of breath as the man died and the sucking sound as the murderer dragged the blade back from the constricting flesh. It had all happened so fast! And Sharpe blamed himself, though he knew it was not his fault. He had not let the killers into the fort, but he had hesitated for a few seconds to throw his pack, pouches and cartridge box onto the fire, and now he chided himself because maybe he could have used those few seconds to save his six men. Except most of them had already been dead or dying when Sharpe had first realized there was a fight. He had been pissing against the back wall of the cookhouse store hut when a musket ball ripped through the reed-mat wall and for a second or two he had just stood there, incredulous, hardly believing the shots and screams his ears registered, and he had not bothered to button his trousers, but just turned and saw the dying campfire and had thrown his pack onto it, and by the time he had cocked the musket and run back to where his men had been expecting dinner the fight was almost over. The musket ball had jerked his head back and there had been a stabbing pain either side of his eyes, and the next he knew he was lying with blood crusting on his face and flies crawling down his gullet.
But maybe he could have snatched his men back. He tortured himself with the thought that he could have saved Davi Lal and a couple of the privates, maybe he could have crossed the cactus-thorn wall and run into the trees, but Davi Lal was dead and all six privates were dead and Sharpe could hear the killers laughing as they carried the ammunition out of the small magazine.
‘Subadar!’ the tall officer shouted. ‘Fetch that bloody flag down! I wanted it done an hour ago!’
Sharpe blinked again because he could not help himself, but no one noticed, and then he closed his eyes because the sun was blinding him, and he wanted to weep out of anger and frustration and hatred. Six men dead, and Davi Lal dead, and Sharpe had not been able to do a damned thing to help them, and he wondered who the tall officer was, and then a voice provided the answer.
‘Major Dodd, sahib?’
‘Subadar?’
‘Everything’s loaded, sahib.’
‘Then let’s go before their patrols get back. Well done, Subadar! Tell the men there’ll be a reward.’
Sharpe listened as the raiders left the fort. Who the hell were they? Major Dodd had been in East India Company uniform, and so had all his men for that matter, but they sure as hell were not Company troops. They were bastards, that’s what they were, bastards from hell and they had done a thorough piece of wicked work in Chasalgaon. Sharpe doubted they had lost a single man in their treacherous attack, and still he lay silent as the sounds faded away. A baby cried somewhere, a woman sobbed, and still Sharpe waited until at last he was certain that Major Dodd and his men were gone, and only then did Sharpe roll onto his side. The fort stank of blood and buzzed with flies. He groaned and got to his knees. The cauldron of rice and kid had boiled dry and so he stood and kicked it off its tripod. ‘Bastards,’ he said, and he saw the surprised look on Davi Lal’s face and he wanted to weep for the boy.
A half-naked woman, bleeding from the mouth, saw Sharpe stand from among the bloodied heap of the dead and she screamed before snatching her child back into a barracks hut. Sharpe ignored her. His musket was gone. Every damn weapon was gone. ‘Bastards!’ he shouted into the hot air, then he kicked at a dog that was sniffing at Phillips’s corpse. The smell of blood and powder and burned rice was thick in his throat. He gagged as he walked into the cookhouse and there found a jar of water. He drank deep, then splashed the water onto his face and rubbed away the clotted blood. He wet a rag and flinched as he cleaned the shallow wound in his scalp, then suddenly he was overcome with horror and pity and he fell onto his knees and half sobbed. He swore instead. ‘Bastards!’ He said the word again