Hakeswill.'
'Hakeswill?' Sevajee asked.
'A bastard I'm going to kill, ' Sharpe said.
'And it'll be easier if he doesn't know I'm still alive.' And this time, Sharpe vowed, he would make sure of the bastard.
'My only worry, ' he told Sevajee, 'is Major Stokes's horse. He's a good man, Stokes.'
'That horse?' Sevajee asked, nodding at the grey mare.
'You reckon a couple of your fellows could return it to him in the morning?'
'Of course.'
'Tell him I got thrown from the saddle and snatched up by the enemy, ' Sharpe said.
'Let him think I'm a prisoner in Gawilghur.'
'And meanwhile you'll be one of us?' Sevajee asked.
'I've just become a Mahratta, ' Sharpe said.
«Welcome,» said Sevajee.
'And what you need now, Sharpe, is some rest.'
'I've had plenty of rest, ' Sharpe said.
'What I need now are some clothes, and some darkness.'
'You need food too, ' Sevajee insisted. He glanced up at the sliver of moon above the fort. It was waning.
'Tomorrow night will be darker, ' he promised, and Sharpe nodded. He wanted a deep darkness, a shadowed blackness, in which a living ghost could hunt.
Major Stokes was grateful for the return of his horse, but saddened over Sharpe's fate.
«Captured!» he told Sir Arthur Wellesley.
'And my own fault too.'
'Can't see how that can be, Stokes.'
'I should never have let him ride off on his own. Should have made him wait till a group went back.'
'Won't be the first prison cell he's seen, ' Wellesley said, 'and I daresay it won't be the last.'
'I shall miss him, ' Stokes said, 'miss him deeply. A good man.'
Wellesley grunted. He had ridden up the improved road to judge its progress for himself and he was impressed, though he took care not to show his approval. The road now snaked up into the hills and one more day's work would see it reach the edge of the escarpment. Half the necessary siege guns were already high on the road, parked in an upland meadow, while bullocks were trudging up the lower slopes with their heavy burdens of round shot that would be needed to break open Gawilghur's walls. The Mahrattas had virtually ceased their raids on the road-makers ever since Wellesley had sent two battalions of sepoys up into the hills to hunt the enemy down. Every once in a while a musket shot would be fired from a long distance, but the balls were usually spent before they reached a target.
'Your work won't end with the road, ' Wellesley told Stokes, as the General and his staff followed the engineer on foot towards some higher ground from where they could inspect the fortress.
'I doubted it would, sir.'^ 'You know Stevenson?'
'I've dined with the Colonel.'
'I'm sending him up here. His troops will make the assault. My men will stay below and climb the two roads.' Wellesley spoke curtly, almost offhandedly. He was proposing to divide his army into two again, just as it had been split for most of the war against the Mahrattas. Stevenson's part of the army would climb to the plateau and make the main assault on the fortress. That attack would swarm across the narrow neck of land to climb the breaches, but to stop the enemy from throwing all their strength into the defence of the broken wall Wellesley proposed sending two columns of his own men up the steep tracks that led directly to the fortress. Those men would have to approach unbroken walls up slopes too steep to permit artillery to be deployed, and Wellesley knew those columns could never hope to break into Gawilghur. Their job was to spread the defenders thin, and to block off the garrison's escape routes while Colonel Stevenson's men did the bloody work.
'You'll have to establish Stevenson's batteries, ' Wellesley told Stokes.
'Major Blackiston's seen the ground' he indicated his aide 'and he reckons two eighteens and three iron twelves should suffice. Major Blackiston, of course, will give you whatever advice he can.'
'No glacis?' Stokes directed the question to Blackiston.
'Not when I was there, ' Blackiston said, 'though of course they could have made one since. I just saw curtain walls with a few bastions.
Ancient work, by the look of it.'
'Fifteenth-century work, ' Wellesley put in and, when he saw that the two engineers were impressed by his knowledge, he shrugged.
'Syud Sevajee claims as much, anyway.'
'Old walls break fastest, ' Stokes said cheerfully. The two big guns, with the three smaller cannon, would batter the wall head on to crumble the ancient stone that was probably unprotected by a glacis of embanked earth to soak up the force of the bombardment, and the Major had yet to find a fortress wall in India that could resist the strike of an eighteen-pounder shot travelling half a mile every two seconds.
'But you'll want some enfilading fire, ' he warned Wellesley.
'I'll send you some more twelves, ' Wellesley promised.
'A battery of twelves and an howitzer, ' Stokes suggested.
'I'd like to drop some nasties over the wall. There's nothing like an howitzer for spreading gloom.'
'I'll send an howitzer, ' Wellesley promised. The enfilading batteries would fire at an angle through the growing breaches to keep the enemy from making repairs, and the howitzer, which fired high in the air so that its shells dropped steeply down, could bombard the repair parties behind the fortress ramparts.
'And I want the batteries established quickly, ' Wellesley said.
'No dallying, Major.'
'I'm not a man to dally, Sir Arthur, ' Stokes said cheerfully. The Major was leading the General and his staff up a particularly steep patch of road where an elephant, supplemented by over sixty sweating sepoys, forced an eighteen-pounder gun up the twisting road. The officers dodged the sepoys, then climbed a knoll from where they could stare across at Gawilghur.
By now they were nearly as high as the stronghold itself and the profile of the twin forts stood clear against the bright sky beyond. It formed a double hump. The narrow neck of land led from the plateau to the first, lower hump on which the Outer Fortress stood. It was that fortress which would receive Stokes's breaching fire, and that fortress which would be assailed by Stevenson's men, but beyond it the ground dropped into a deep ravine, then climbed steeply to the much larger second hump on which the Inner Fortress with its palace and its lakes and its houses stood. Sir Arthur spent a long time staring through his glass, but said nothing.
'I'll warrant I can get you into the smaller fortress, ' Stokes said, 'but how do you cross the central ravine into the main stronghold?'
It was that question that Wellesley had yet to answer in his own mind, and he suspected there was no simple solution. He hoped that the attackers would simply surge across the ravine and flood up the second slope like an irresistible wave that had broken through one barrier and would now overcome everything in its path, but he dared not admit to such impractical optimism. He dared not confess that he was condemning his men to an attack on an Inner Fortress that would have unbreached walls and well-prepared defenders.
'If we can't take it by escalade, ' he said curtly, collapsing his glass, 'we'll have to dig breaching batteries in the Outer Fortress and do it the hard way.'
In other words, Stokes thought, Sir Arthur had no idea how it was to be done. Only that it must be done. By escalade or by breach, and by God's mercy, if they were lucky, for once they were into the central ravine the attackers would be in the devil's hands.
It was a hot December day, but Stokes shivered, for he feared for the men who must go up against Gawilghur Captain Torrance had enjoyed a remarkably lucky evening. Jama had still not returned to the camp, and his big green tents with their varied delights stood empty, but there were plenty of other diversions in the British camp. A group of Scottish officers, augmented by a sergeant who played the flute, gave a concert, and though Torrance had no great taste for chamber music he found the melodies were in tune with his jaunty mood. Sharpe
