Sharpe’s Fortress: The Siege of Gawilghur, December 1803. Bernard Cornwell
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that grew higher than a man, another cannon fired. The discharge was muffled by the thick stems. A horse neighed, but Sharpe could not see the beast. He could see nothing through the high crops.
‘Are you going to read us a story, Sergeant?’ Corporal McCallum asked. He spoke in English instead of Gaelic, which meant that he wanted Sharpe to hear.
‘I am not, John. I am not.’
‘Go on, Sergeant,’ McCallum said. ‘Read us one of those dirty tales about tits.’
The men laughed, glancing at Sharpe to see if he was offended. One of the sleeping men jerked awake and looked about him, startled, then muttered a curse, slapped at a fly and lay back. The other soldiers of the company dangled their boots towards the ditch’s crazed mud bed that was decorated with a filigree of dried green scum. A dead lizard lay in one of the dry fissures. Sharpe wondered how the carrion birds had missed it.
‘The laughter of fools, John McCallum,’ Sergeant Colquhoun said, ‘is like the crackling of thorns under the pot.’
‘Away with you, Sergeant!’ McCallum said. ‘I heard it in the kirk once, when I was a wee kid, all about a woman whose tits were like bunches of grapes.’ McCallum twisted to look at Sharpe. ‘Have you ever seen tits like grapes, Mister Sharpe?’
‘I never met your mother, Corporal,’ Sharpe said.
The men laughed again. McCallum scowled. Sergeant Colquhoun lowered his Bible and peered at the Corporal. ‘The Song of Solomon, John McCallum,’ Colquhoun said, ‘likens a woman’s bosom to clusters of grapes, and I have no doubt it refers to the garments that modest women wore in the Holy Land. Perhaps their bodices possessed balls of knotted wool as decoration? I cannot see it is a matter for your merriment.’ Another cannon fired, and this time a round shot whipped through the tall plants close to the ditch. The stems twitched violently, discharging a cloud of dust and small birds into the cloudless sky. The birds flew about in panic for a few seconds, then returned to the swaying seedheads.
‘I knew a woman who had lumpy tits,’ Private Hollister said. He was a dark-jawed, violent man who spoke rarely. ‘Lumpy like a coal sack, they were.’ He frowned at the memory, then shook his head. ‘She died.’
‘This conversation is not seemly,’ Colquhoun said quietly, and the men shrugged and fell silent.
Sharpe wanted to ask the Sergeant about the clusters of grapes, but he knew such an enquiry would only cause ribaldry among the men and, as an officer, Sharpe could not risk being made to look a fool. All the same, it sounded odd to him. Why would anyone say a woman had tits like a bunch of grapes? Grapes made him think of grapeshot and he wondered if the bastards up ahead were equipped with canister. Well, of course they were, but there was no point in wasting canister on a field of bulrushes. Were they bulrushes? It seemed a strange thing for a farmer to grow, but India was full of oddities. There were naked sods who claimed to be holy men, snake-charmers who whistled up hooded horrors, dancing bears draped in tinkling bells, and contortionists draped in bugger all, a right bloody circus. And the clowns ahead would have canister. They would wait till they saw the redcoats, then load up the tin cans that burst like duckshot from the gun barrels. For what we are about to receive among the bulrushes, Sharpe thought, may the Lord make us truly thankful.
‘I’ve found it,’ Colquhoun said gravely.
‘Found what?’ Sharpe asked.
‘I was fairly sure in my mind, sir, that the good book mentioned millet. And so it does. Ezekiel, the fourth chapter and the ninth verse.’ The Sergeant held the book close to his eyes, squinting at the text. He had a round face, afflicted with wens, like a suet pudding studded with currants. ‘“Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley,”’ he read laboriously, ‘“and beans, and lentils, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof.”’ Colquhoun carefully closed his Bible, wrapped it in a scrap of tarred canvas and stowed it in his pouch. ‘It pleases me, sir,’ he explained, ‘if I can find everyday things in the scriptures. I like to see things, sir, and imagine my Lord and Saviour seeing the selfsame things.’
‘But why millet?’ Sharpe asked.
‘These crops, sir,’ Colquhoun said, pointing to the tall stems that surrounded them, ‘are millet. The natives call it jowari, but our name is millet.’ He cuffed the sweat from his face with his sleeve. The red dye of his coat had faded to a dull purple. ‘This, of course,’ he went on, ‘is pearl millet, but I doubt the scriptures mention pearl millet. Not specifically.’
‘Millet, eh?’ Sharpe said. So the tall plants were not bulrushes, after all. They looked like bulrushes, except they were taller. Nine or ten feet high. ‘Must be a bastard to harvest,’ he said, but got no response. Sergeant Colquhoun always tried to ignore swear words.
‘What are fitches?’ McCallum asked.
‘A crop grown in the Holy Land,’ Colquhoun answered. He plainly did not know.
‘Sounds like a disease, Sergeant,’ McCallum said. ‘A bad dose of the fitches. Leads to a course of mercury.’ One or two men sniggered at the reference to syphilis, but Colquhoun ignored the levity.
‘Do you grow millet in Scotland?’ Sharpe asked the Sergeant.
‘Not that I am aware of, sir,’ Colquhoun said ponderously, after reflecting on the question for a few seconds, ‘though I daresay it might be found in the Lowlands. They grow strange things there. English things.’ He turned pointedly away.
And sod you too, Sharpe thought. And where the hell was Captain Urquhart? Where the hell was anybody for that matter? The battalion had marched long before dawn, and at midday they had expected to make camp, but then came a rumour that the enemy was waiting ahead and so General Sir Arthur Wellesley had ordered the baggage to be piled and the advance to continue. The King’s 74th had plunged into the millet, then ten minutes later the battalion was ordered to halt beside the dry ditch while Captain Urquhart rode ahead to speak with the battalion commander, and Sharpe had been left to sweat and wait with the company.
Where he had damn all to do except sweat. Damn all. It was a good company, and it did not need Sharpe. Urquhart ran it well, Colquhoun was a magnificent sergeant, the men were as content as soldiers ever were, and the last thing the company needed was a brand new officer, an Englishman at that, who, just two months before, had been a sergeant.
The men were talking in Gaelic and Sharpe, as ever, wondered if they were discussing him. Probably not. Most likely they were talking about the dancing girls in Ferdapoor, where there had been no mere clusters of grapes, but bloody great naked melons. It had been some sort of festival and the battalion had marched one way and the half-naked girls had writhed in the opposite direction and Sergeant Colquhoun had blushed as scarlet as an unfaded coat and shouted at the men to keep their eyes front. Which had been a pointless order, when a score of undressed bibbis were bobbling down the highway with silver bells tied to their wrists and even the officers were staring at them like starving men seeing a plate of roast beef. And if the men were not discussing women, they were probably grumbling about all the marching they had done in the last weeks, criss-crossing the Mahratta countryside under a blazing sun without a sight or smell of the enemy. But whatever they were talking about they were making damn sure that Ensign Richard Sharpe was left out.
Which was fair enough, Sharpe reckoned. He had marched in the ranks long enough to know that you did not talk to officers, not unless you were spoken to or unless you were a slick-bellied crawling bastard looking for favours. Officers were different, except Sharpe did not feel different. He just felt excluded. I should have stayed a sergeant, he thought. He had increasingly thought that in the last few weeks, wishing he was back in the Seringapatam armoury with Major Stokes. That had been the life! And Simone Joubert, the Frenchwoman who had clung to Sharpe after the battle at Assaye, had gone back to Seringapatam to wait for him. Better to be there as a sergeant, he reckoned, than here as an unwanted officer.
No guns had fired for a while. Perhaps the enemy had packed up and gone? Perhaps they had hitched their painted cannon to their ox teams, stowed the canister in its