Sharpe's Tiger (4 page)

“Load!” Captain Morris shouted at Hakeswill.

Sharpe felt suddenly nervous as he dropped the musket from his shoulder to hold it across his body. He fumbled with the musket's hammer as he pulled it back to the half cock. Sweat stung his eyes. He could hear the enemy drummers.

Handle cartridge!” Sergeant Hakeswill shouted, and each man of the Light Company pulled a cartridge from his belt pouch and bit through the tough waxed paper. They held the bullets in their mouths, tasting the sour salty gunpowder.

“Prime!” Seventy-six men trickled a small pinch of powder from the opened cartridges into their muskets' pans, then closed the locks so that the priming was trapped.

“Cast about!” Hakeswill called and seventy-six right hands released their musket stocks so that the weapons' butts dropped toward the ground. “And I'm watching you!” Hakeswill added. “If any of you lilywhite bastards don't use all his powder, I'll skin your hides off you and rub salt on
your miserable flesh. Do it proper now!” Some old soldiers advised only using half the powder of a cartridge, letting the rest trickle to the ground so that the musket's brutal kick would be diminished, but faced by an advancing enemy, no man thought of employing that trick this day. They poured the remainder of their cartridges' powder down their musket barrels, stuffed the cartridge paper after the powder, then took the balls from their mouths and pushed them into the muzzles. The enemy infantry was two hundred yards away and advancing steadily to the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets. The Tippoo's guns were still firing, but they had turned their barrels away from the 33rd for fear of hitting their own infantry and were instead aiming at the six Indian regiments that were hurrying to close the gap between themselves and the 33rd.

“Draw ramrod!” Hakeswill shouted and Sharpe tugged the ramrod free of the three brass pipes that held it under the musket's thirty-nine-inch barrel. His mouth was salty with the taste of gunpowder. He was still nervous, not because the enemy was tramping ever closer, but because he had a sudden idiotic idea that he might have forgotten how to load a musket. He twisted the ramrod in the air, then placed the ramrod's flared tip into the barrel.

“Ram cartridge!” Hakeswill snapped. Seventy-six men thrust down, forcing the ball, wadding and powder charge to the bottom of the barrels.

“Return ramrod!” Sharpe tugged the ramrod up, listening to it scrape against the barrel, then twirled it about so that its narrow end would slide down into the brass pipes. He let it drop into place.

“Order arms!” Captain Morris called and the Light Company, now with loaded muskets, stood to attention with their guns held against their right sides. The enemy was still too far off for a musket to be either accurate or lethal and the
long, two-deep line of seven hundred redcoats would wait until their opening volley could do real damage.

“‘Talion!” Sergeant Major Bywaters's voice called from the center of the line. “Fix bayonets!”

Sharpe dragged the seventeen-inch blade from its sheath which hung behind his right hip. He slotted the blade over the musket's muzzle, then locked it in place by twisting its slot onto the lug. Now no enemy could pull the bayonet off the musket. Having the blade mounted made reloading the musket far more difficult, but Sharpe guessed that Colonel Wellesley had decided to shoot one volley and then charge. “Going to be a right mucky brawl,” he said to Tom Garrard.

“More of them than us,” Garrard muttered, staring at the enemy. “The buggers look steady enough.”

The enemy indeed looked steady. The leading troops had momentarily paused to allow the men behind to catch up, but now, reformed into a solid column, they were readying to advance again. Their ranks and files were ramrod straight. Their officers wore waist sashes and carried highly curved sabres. One of the flags was being waved to and fro and Sharpe could just make out that it showed a golden sun blazoned against a scarlet sky. Vultures swooped lower. The galloper guns, unable to resist the target of the great column of infantry, poured solid shot into its flank, but the Tippoo's men stoically endured the punishment as their officers made certain that the column was tight packed and ready to deliver its crushing blow on the waiting redcoat line.

Sharpe licked his dry lips. So these, he thought, were the Tippoo's men. Fine-looking bastards they were, too, and close enough now so that he could see that their tunics were not plain pale purple, but were instead cut from a creamy-white cloth decorated with mauve tiger stripes. Their cross-belts were black and their turbans and waist sashes crimson. Heathens, they might be, but not to be despised for that, for
only fifteen years before these same tiger-striped men had torn apart a British army and forced its survivors to surrender. These were the famed tiger troops of Mysore, the warriors of the Tippoo Sultan who had dominated all of southern India until the British thought to climb the ghats from the coastal plain and plunge into Mysore itself. The French were these men's allies, and some Frenchmen served in the Tippoo's forces, but Sharpe could see no white faces in the massive column that at last was ready and, to the deep beat of a single drum, lurched ponderously forward. The tiger-striped troops were marching directly toward the King's 33rd and Sharpe, glancing to his left, saw that the sepoys of the East India Company regiments were still too far away to offer help. The 33rd would have to deal with the Tippoo's column alone.

“Private Sharpe!” Hakeswill's sudden scream was loud enough to drown the cheer that the Tippoo's troops gave as they advanced, “Private Sharpe!” Hakeswill screamed again. He was hurrying along the back of the Light Company and Captain Morris, momentarily dismounted, was following him. “Give me your musket, Private Sharpe!” Hakeswill bellowed.

“Nothing wrong with it,” Sharpe protested. He was in the front rank and had to turn and push his way between Garrard and Mallinson to hand the gun over.

Hakeswill snatched the musket and gleefully presented it to Captain Morris. “See, sir!” the Sergeant crowed. “Just as I thought, sir! Bastard sold his flint, sir! Sold it to an ‘eathen darkie.” Hakeswill's face twitched as he gave Sharpe a triumphant glance. The Sergeant had unscrewed the musket's doghead, extracted the flint in its folded leather pad, and now offered the scrap of stone to Captain Morris. “Piece of common rock, sir, no good to man or beast. Must have
flogged his flint, sir. Flogged it in exchange for a pagan whore, sir, I dare say. Filthy beast that he is.”

Morris peered at the flint. “Sell the flint, did you. Private?” he asked in a voice that mingled derision, pleasure, and bitterness.

“No, sir.”

“Silence!” Hakeswill screamed into Sharpe's face, spattering him with spittle. “Lying to an officer! Flogging offence, sir, flogging offence. Selling his flint, sir? Another flogging offence, sir. Says so in the scriptures, sir.”

“It is a flogging offence,” Morris said with a tone of satisfaction. He was as tall and lean as Sharpe, with fair hair and a fine-boned face that was just beginning to show the ravages of the liquor with which the Captain assuaged his boredom. His eyes betrayed his cynicism and something much worse: that he despised his men. Hakeswill and Morris, Sharpe thought as he watched them, a right bloody pair.

“Nothing wrong with that flint, sir,” Sharpe insisted.

Morris held the flint in the palm of his right hand. “Looks like a chip of stone to me.”

“Common grit, sir,” Hakeswill said. “Common bloody grit, sir, no good to man or beast.”

“Might I?” A new voice spoke. Lieutenant William Lawford had dismounted to join Morris and now, without waiting for his Captain's permission, he reached over and took the flint from Morris's hand. Lawford was blushing again, astonished by his own temerity in thus intervening. “There's an easy way to check, sir,” Lawford said nervously, then he drew out his pistol, cocked it, and struck the loose flint against the pistol's steel. Even in the day's bright sunlight there was an obvious spark. “Seems like a good flint to me, sir,” Lawford said mildly. Ensign Fitzgerald, standing behind Lawford, gave Sharpe a conspiratorial grin. “A perfectly good flint,” Lawford insisted less diffidently.

Morris gave Hakeswill a furious look then turned on his heel and strode back toward his horse. Lawford tossed the flint to Sharpe. “Make your gun ready, Sharpe,” he said.

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

Lawford and Fitzgerald walked away as Hakeswill, humiliated, thrust the musket back at Sharpe. “Clever bastard, Sharpie, aren't you?”

“I'll have the leather as well, Sergeant,” Sharpe said and, once he had the flint's seating back, he called after Hakeswill who had begun to walk away. “Sergeant!”

Hakeswill turned back.

“You want this, Sergeant?” Sharpe called. He took a chip of stone out of his pocket. He had found it when he had untied the rag from the musket's lock and realized that Hakeswill had substituted the stone for the flint when he had pretended to inspect Sharpe's musket. “No use to me. Sergeant,” Sharpe said. “Here.” He tossed the stone at Hakeswill who ignored it. Instead the Sergeant spat and turned away. “Thanks, Tom,” Sharpe said, for it had been Garrard who had supplied him with a spare flint.

“Worth being in the army to see that,” Garrard said, and all around him men laughed to have seen Hakeswill and Morris defeated.

“Eyes to your front, lads!” Ensign Fitzgerald called. The Irish Ensign was the youngest officer in the company, but he had the confidence of a much older man. “Got some shooting to do.”

Sharpe pushed back into his file. He brought up the musket, folded the leather over the flint, and seated it in the doghead, then looked up to see that the mass of the enemy was now just a hundred paces away. They were shouting rhythmically and pausing occasionally to let a trumpet sound or a drum flourish a ripple, but the loudest sound was the beat of their feet on the dry earth. Sharpe tried to count the
column's front rank, but kept losing count as enemy officers marched slantwise across the column's face. There had to be thousands of the tiger troops, all marching like a great sledgehammer to shatter the two-deep line of redcoats.

“Cutting it fine, aren't we?” a man complained.

“Wait lads, wait,” Sergeant Green said calmly.

The enemy now filled the landscape ahead. They came in a column formed of sixty ranks of fifty men, three thousand in all, though to Sharpe's inexperienced eye it seemed as if there must be ten times that number. None of the Tippoo's men fired as they advanced, but held their fire just as the 33rd were holding theirs. The enemy's muskets were tipped with bayonets while their officers were holding deeply curved sabres. On they came and to Sharpe, who was watching the column from the left of the line so that he could see its flank as well as its leading file, the enemy formation seemed as unstoppable as a heavily loaded farm wagon that was rolling slowly and inexorably toward a flimsy fence.

He could see the enemy's faces now. They were dark, with black mustaches and oddly white teeth. The tiger men were close, so close, and their chanting began to dissolve into individual war shouts. Any second now, Sharpe thought, and the heavy column would break into a run and charge with leveled bayonets.

“Thirty-third!” Colonel Wellesley's voice called out sharply from beneath the regiment's colors. “Make ready!”

Sharpe put his right foot behind his left so that his body half turned to the right, then he brought his musket to hip height and pulled the hammer back to full cock. It clicked solidly into place, and somehow the pent-up pressure of the gun's mainspring was reassuring. To the approaching enemy it seemed as though the whole British line had half turned and the sudden movement, coming from men who had been waiting so silently, momentarily checked their eagerness.
Above the tiger troops of Mysore, beneath a bunch of flags on the ridge where the guns fired, a group of horsemen watched the column. Was the Tippoo himself there? Sharpe wondered. And was the Tippoo dreaming of that far-off day when he had broken three and a half thousand British and Indian troops and marched them off to captivity in his capital at Seringapatam? The cheers of the attackers were filling the sky now, but still Colonel Wellesley's voice was audible over the tumult. “Present!”

Seven hundred muskets came up to seven hundred shoulders. The muskets were tipped with steel, seven hundred muskets aimed at the head of the column and about to blast seven hundred ounces of lead at the leading ranks of that fast-moving, confident mass that was plunging straight toward the pair of British colors under which Colonel Arthur Wellesley waited. The tiger men were hurrying now, their front rank breaking apart as they began running. The wagon was about to hit the fence.

Arthur Wellesley had waited six years for this moment. He was twenty-nine years old and had begun to fear that he would never see battle, but now, at last, he would discover whether he and his regiment could fight, and so he filled his lungs to give the order that would start the slaughter.

C
olonel Jean Gudin sighed, then, for the thousandth time in the last hour, he fanned his face to drive away the flies. He liked India, but he hated flies, which made India quite hard to like, but on balance, despite the flies, he did like India. Not nearly as much as he liked his native Provence, but where on earth was as lovely as Provence? “Your Majesty?” he ventured diffidently, then waited as his interpreter struggled to gain the Tippoo's attention. The interpreter was exchanging Gudin's French for the Tippoo's Persian tongue. The Tippoo did understand some French and he spoke the
local Kanarese language well enough, but he preferred Persian for it reminded him that his lineage went back to the great Persian dynasties. The Tippoo was ever mindful that he was superior to the darker-skinned natives of Mysore. He was a Muslim, he was a Persian, and he was a ruler, while they were mostly Hindus, and all of them, whether rich, poor, great, or lowly, were his obedient subjects. “Your Majesty?” Colonel Gudin tried again.