Sharpe's Tiger

Chapter 9

The dungeons lay in one of the palace's northern courtyards, hard under the city's inner mud wall. The courtyard stank of sewage, the smell powerful enough to make Sharpe half retch as he staggered beside Lawford at the point of a bayonet. The courtyard was a busy place. The families of the palace servants lived in low thatched buildings surrounding the yard where their lives were spent cheek by jowl with the Tippoo's stables and the small enclosure where he kept eight cheetahs he used for hunting gazelles. The cheetahs were taken to the hunt in wheeled cages and at first Sharpe thought they were to be placed inside one of the barred vehicles, but then one of the escorts pushed him past the ponderous carts towards a flight of stone steps that descended to a long narrow trench of stone that lay open to the sky. A tall fence of iron bars surrounded the pit that was guarded by a pair of soldiers. One of them used a key to open a padlock the size of a mango, then the escort shoved Sharpe and Lawford through the open gate.

The dungeon guards did not carry muskets, but instead had coiled whips in their belts and bell-mouthed blunderbusses on their shoulders. One of them pointed mutely down the steps and Sharpe, following Lawford down the stairs, saw that the trench was a stone-flagged, dead-end corridor lined on either side with barred cells. There were eight cells in the pit, four on each side, and each separated from its neighbours, and from the central trench-like corridor, by iron bars alone, but bars that were as thick as a man's wrist. The turnkey indicated that they should wait while he unlocked a cell, but the first padlock he attempted to open had become stiff, or else had rusted, for it would not budge, and then he could not find a key to fit another of the big old locks. Something stirred in the straw of the cell that lay at the far right-hand end of the corridor. Sharpe, waiting as the guard sorted through his keys, heard the straw rustle again, then there was a growl as a huge tiger heaved up from its bed to stare at them with blank yellow eyes.

More straw stirred in the first cell on the left, close by where Sharpe and Lawford were standing. 'Look who it isn't!' Hakeswill had come to the bars. 'Sharpie!'

'Be quiet, Sergeant,' Lawford snapped.

'Yes, sir, Mister Lieutenant Lawford, sir, quiet it is, sir.' Hakeswill clung to the bars of his cage, staring wide-eyed at the two newcomers. His face twitched. 'Quiet as the grave, sir, but no one talks to me down here. He won't.' He nodded towards the cell opposite that the guard was now unlocking. 'Likes it quiet, he does,' Hakeswill went on. 'Like a bleeding church. Says his prayers too. Always quiet it is here, except when the darkies are having a shout at each other. Dirty bastards they are. Smell the sewage, can you? One giant jakes!' Hakeswill's face twisted in rictus and, in the gloom of the shadowed cells, his eyes seemed to glitter with an unholy delight. 'Been missing company, I have.'

'Bastard,' Sharpe muttered.

'Quiet! Both of you,' Lawford insisted and then, with his innate politeness, the Lieutenant nodded thanks to the guard who had finally opened the cell directly opposite Hakeswill's lair. 'Come on, Sharpe,' Lawford said, then stepped fastidiously into the filthy straw. The cell was eight foot deep and ten foot long and a little over the height of a man. The sewage smell was rank, but no worse than in the courtyard above. The barred door clashed shut behind them and the key was turned.

'Willie,' a tired voice said from the shadows of the cell, 'how very good of you to visit me.' Sharpe, his eyes accustoming themselves to the dimness of the dungeons, saw that Colonel McCandless had been crouching in one corner, half shrouded by straw. The Colonel now stood to greet them, but he was weak for he tottered as he stood, though he shook off Lawford's attempt to help him. 'A fever,' he explained. 'It comes and it goes. I've had it for years. I suspect the only thing that will cure it will be some soft Scottish rain, but that seems an ever more unlikely prospect. It is good to see you, Willie.'

'You too, sir. You've met Private Sharpe, I think.'

McCandless gave Sharpe a grim look. 'I have a question for you, young man.'

'It wasn't gunpowder, sir,' Sharpe said, remembering his first confrontation with the Colonel and thus anticipating the question. 'It tasted wrong, sir. Wasn't salty.'

'Aye, it didn't look like powder,' the Scotsman said. 'It was blowing in the wind like flour, but that wasn't my question, Private. My question, Private, is what would you have done if it had been gunpowder?'

'I'd have shot you, sir,' Sharpe said, 'begging your pardon, sir.'

'Sharpe!' Lawford remonstrated.

'Quite right, man,' McCandless said. 'The wretched fellow was testing you, wasn't he? He was giving you a recruitment test, and you couldn't fail it. I'm glad it wasn't powder, but I don't mind saying you had me worried for a brief while. Do you mind if I sit, Willie? I'm not in my usual good health.' He sank back into his straw from where he frowned up at Sharpe. 'Nor are you, Private. Are you in pain?'

'Bastards cracked a rib, sir, and I'm bleeding a bit. Do you mind if I sit?' Sharpe gingerly sat against the side bars of the cell and carefully lifted away the coat that had been draped over his back. 'Bit of fresh air will heal it, sir,' he said to Lawford who was insisting on examining the newly opened wounds, though there was nothing he could do to help them mend.

'You won't get fresh air here,' McCandless said. 'You smell the sewage?'

'You can't miss that smell, Uncle,' Lawford said.

'It's the new inner wall,' McCandless explained. 'When they built it they cut the city drains, so now the night soil can't reach the river and the sewage puddles just east of here. Some of it seeps away through the Water Gate, but not enough. One learns to pray for a west wind.' He smiled grimly. 'Among other things.'

McCandless wanted news, not only of what had brought Lawford and Sharpe into Seringapatam, but of the siege's progress and he groaned when he heard where the British had placed their works. 'So Harris is coming from the west?'

'Yes, sir.'

'Straight into the Tippoo's loving arms.' The Scotsman sat quietly for a moment, sometimes shivering because of his fever. He had wrapped himself in straw again, but he was still cold, despite the day's intense damp heat. 'And you couldn't get a message out? No, I suppose not. Those things are never easy.' He shook his head. 'Let's hope the Tippoo doesn't finish his mine.'

'It's near finished, sir.' Sharpe delivered yet more bad news. 'I saw it.'

'Aye, it would be. He's an efficient man, the Tippoo,' McCandless said, 'efficient and clever. Cleverer than his father, and old Hyder Ali was canny enough. I never met him, but I think I'd have liked the old rogue. This son, now, I never met him either until I was captured, and I wish I hadn't. He's a good soldier but a bad enemy.' McCandless closed his eyes momentarily as a shudder racked his body.

'What will he do with us?' Lawford asked.

'That I cannot say,' Colonel McCandless replied. 'It depends, probably, on his dreams. He's not as good a Muslim as he'd like us to think, for he still believes in some older magic and he sets great store by his dreams. If his dreams tell him to kill us then doubtless we'll have our heads turned back to front like the unfortunate gentlemen who shared these cells with me until quite recently. You heard about them?'

'We heard,' Lawford said.

'Murdered to amuse the Tippoo's troops!' McCandless said disapprovingly. 'And there were some good Christian men among them too. Only that thing over there survived.' He jerked his head towards Hakeswill's cell.

'He survived, sir,' Sharpe said vengefully, 'because he betrayed us.'

'It's a lie, sir!' Hakeswill, who had been avidly listening to Sharpe and Lawford's tale, snapped indignantly from across the corridor. 'A filthy lie, sir, as I'd expect from a gutter soldier like Private Sharpe.'

McCandless turned to gaze at the Sergeant. 'Then why were you spared?' he asked coldly.

'Touched by God, sir. Always have been, sir. Can't be killed, sir.'

'Mad,' McCandless said quietly.

'You can be killed, Obadiah,' Sharpe said. 'Christ, if it wasn't for you, you bastard, I'd have taken our news to General Harris.'

'Lies, sir! More lies,' Hakeswill insisted.

'Quiet, both of you,' McCandless said. 'And Private Sharpe?'

'Sir?'

'I'd be grateful if you did not blaspheme. Remember that "Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain; for the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh his name in vain." Exodus twenty, verse seven.'

'Amen, sir,' Hakeswill called, 'and praise the Lord, sir.'

'Sorry, sir,' Sharpe muttered.

'You do know your Ten Commandments, don't you, Sharpe?' McCandless asked.

'No, sir.'

'Not one of them?' McCandless asked, shocked.

'Thou shalt not be found out, sir? Is that one of them?' Sharpe asked guilelessly.

McCandless stared at him in horror. 'Do you have any religion, Sharpe?'

'No, sir. Never found a need for it.'

'You were born with a hunger for it, man.' The Colonel spoke with some of his old energy.

'And for a few things else, sir.'

McCandless shivered under his mantle of straw. 'If God spares me, Sharpe, I may attempt to repair some of the damage to your immortal soul. Do you still have the Bible your mother gave you, Willie?'

'They took it from me, sir,' Lawford said. 'But I did manage to save one page.' He took the single page from his trouser pocket. He was blushing, for both he and Sharpe knew why the page had been torn from the holy book, and it was not for any purpose that Colonel McCandless would have approved. 'Just the one page, sir,' Lawford said apologetically.

'Give it here, man,' McCandless said fiercely, 'and let us see what the good Lord has to say to us.' He took the crumpled page, smoothed it and tipped it to the light. 'Ah! The Revelation!' He seemed pleased. '"Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord,"' he read aloud. 'Amen to that.'

'Not very cheerful, sir,' Sharpe ventured.

'It is the most cheerful thing I can contemplate in this place, Private. A promise from the Lord God Almighty Himself that when I die I shall be carried into His glory.' The Colonel smiled for that consolation. 'Might I assume, Private, that you cannot read?'

'Me, sir? No, sir. Never taught, sir.'

'He's stupid, sir, he is, sir,' Hakeswill offered from across the corridor. 'Always was, sir. Dumb as a bucket.'

'We must teach you your letters,' McCandless said, ignoring the Sergeant's comments.

'Mister Lawford was going to do that, sir,' Sharpe said.

'Then I suggest he begins now,' McCandless said firmly.

Lawford smiled diffidently. 'It's difficult to know where to begin, Uncle.'

'Why not with T for tiger?' McCandless suggested.

The beast growled, then settled in its straw. And Sharpe, some years late, began his lessons.

The siege works advanced fast. Redcoats and sepoys worked day and night, sapping forward and shoring up the trench sides with bamboo mats. Rockets continually harassed the work, and the Tippoo succeeded in remounting some of his guns on the western walls, though their fire did little to disturb the work and the gunners suffered grievously from the counter-fire of the British eighteen-pounders emplaced in the captured mill fort. Smaller guns, twelve-pounders and short-barrelled howitzers, joined the bombardment of the ramparts and their shells and round shot seared above the ground where yard by yard the red earth was broken until, at last, the big short-range breaching batteries were dug and the rest of the massive siege guns were rolled forward in the night and concealed in their gun pits. To the Tippoo's troops, watching from the battered summit of the western wall, the approaches to the city were now a maze of newly turned earth. Approach trenches angled their way across the farmland, ending in larger mounds of earth thrown up from the deeper pits that held the breaching guns. Not all those bigger mounds concealed guns, for some of the spoil heaps were deliberately thrown up as deceptions so that the Tippoo could not guess where the real guns were emplaced until they opened fire. The Tippoo only knew that the British would aim at his western wall, but he did not yet know the exact stretch of wall that the enemy engineers had chosen, and it suited General Harris that the Tippoo should not learn that spot until it was necessary for the breaching batteries to open fire. If the defenders had too much warning of the place chosen for the storm then they would have time to build elaborate new defences behind it.

But the Tippoo was gambling that he already knew where the British would choose to make their breach, and in the old gatehouse where the massive mine was concealed his engineers finished their preparations. They stacked stone around the vast powder charge so that its explosion would be directed northwards into the space between the walls. For the mine to be effective the British had to site their breach in the short stretch of wall between the old gatehouse and the city's north-west bastion, and the Tippoo's gamble was not an outrageous risk for it was not difficult to forecast that the breach would indeed be blasted in that section of wall. The site was dictated by the outer wall's decay, and by the shortcomings of the low glacis that lay outside that inviting wall. The rudimentary glacis half protected most of the city's western battlements, its raw earth slope designed to deflect cannonballs up from the wall's base, but where the city wall was most decayed the river ran very close to the defences and there had been no room to construct even the pretence of a glacis. Instead a low mud wall continued the line of the glacis, and that wall penned in the water that had been pumped into the ditch between the outer ramparts and the glacis. That low wall was no obstacle compared to a glacis and the Tippoo reckoned it would be an irresistible target for the enemy engineers.

He did not put all his faith in the single massive mine. That mine could well kill or maim hundreds of the assaulting troops, but there were thousands more enemy soldiers who could be sent against the city and so the Tippoo prepared his army for its test. The western walls would be crammed with men when the time came, and those men would each have at least three loaded muskets, and behind each fighting soldier would be men trained to reload the discharged weapons. The British storm would thus be met with a blistering hail of musket fire, and mixed with that maelstrom of lead would be round shot and canister fired from the cannons that had replaced the destroyed guns and which were now concealed behind the mutilated ramparts. Thousands of rockets were also ready. At long range the weapon was erratic, but in the close confines of a breach, where men were crammed as tight as sheep in a pen, the rockets could inflict a dreadful slaughter. 'We shall stuff hell with infidel souls,' the Tippoo boasted, though at every prayer time he took care to beseech Allah for an early monsoon and every dawn he would look at the sky in hope of seeing some signs of rain, but the skies remained obstinately clear. An early monsoon would drown the British in torrential rain before the rockets and guns could cut them to bloody shreds, but it seemed the rains would not come early to Mysore this year.

The skies might be clear, but every other omen was good. The ill luck that had led to the loss of the mill fort had been diverted by the sacrifice of the British prisoners and now the Tippoo's dreams and auguries spoke only of victory. The Tippoo recorded his dreams each morning, writing them down in a large book before discussing their portents with his advisers. His diviners peered into pots of heated oil to read the shifting coloured swirls on the surface, and those shimmering signs, like the dreams, forecast a great victory. The British would be destroyed in southern India and then, when the French sent troops to reinforce Mysore's growing empire, the redcoats would be scoured from the north of the country. Their bones would bleach on the sites of their defeats and their silken colours would fade on the walls of the Tippoo's great palaces. The tiger would rule from the snowy mountains of the north to the palm-edged beaches of the south, and from the Coromandel Coast to the seas off Malabar. All that glory was foretold by the dreams and by the glistening auguries of the oil.

But then, one dawn, it seemed the auguries might be deceiving, for the British suddenly unmasked four of their newly made breaching batteries and the great guns crashed back on their trails and the intricate network of trenches and earthworks was shrouded by the giant gusts of smoke that were belched out with every thunderous recoil.

The balls were not aimed where the Tippoo had hoped, at the vulnerable part of the wall behind the missing section of glacis, but at the city's mighty north-west bastion: a complex of battlements that loomed high above the river and, from its topmost ramparts, dominated both the northern and western walls. The whole city seemed to shake as the balls slammed home again and again and every strike sprang dust from the old masonry until at last the first stones fell. From the north bank of the river, where the smaller British camp was sited, more guns added their fire and still more stones tumbled down into the ditches as the gunners gnawed away at the great bastion.

Next day more of the siege guns opened fire, but these new weapons were aimed at the cavaliers at the very southern end of the western wall. There were small cannon mounted in those cavaliers, but their embrasures were destroyed in less than a morning's work and the defenders' guns were hurled back off their carriages. And still the batteries hammered at the north-west bastion until, an hour after midday, the great fortification collapsed. At first the sound of the bastion's fall was like the creak and groan of a deep earthquake, then it turned into a rumble like thunder as the massive battlements disintegrated beneath a huge cloud of dust that slowly drifted to settle on the Cauvery so that, for almost a mile downstream, the water was turned as white as milk. There was an eerie silence after the bastion had been toppled, for the besiegers' guns had fallen silent. The Tippoo's troops rushed to the walls, their muskets and rockets ready, but no attackers stirred from the British lines. Their impudent flags flapped in the breeze, but the redcoats and their native allies stayed in their trenches.

A brave man of the Tippoo's army ventured up the mound of rubble that had been the north-west corner of the city's defences. Dust coated the tiger stripes of his tunic as he clambered across the unsteady ruins to find the green flag that had been flying from the bastion's topmost rampart. He retrieved the flag, shook the dust from its folds, and waved it in the air. One enemy gunner saw the movement on top of the rubble heap and fired his huge gun. The ball screamed through the dust, ricocheted from a boulder and bounced on up over the northern defences to fall into the whitened river. The soldier, unscathed, waved the flag again, then planted its broken staff at the summit of the bastion's ruins.

The Tippoo inspected the damage to his western defences. The guns were gone from the southern cavaliers, and the north-west bastion was untenable, but there was no breach in either place and both the outer and inner walls were undamaged. The low glacis had protected the bottom part of the walls, and though some of the north-west bastion's stones had fallen into the flooded ditch there was no ramp up which a storming party could climb. 'What they were doing,' the Tippoo announced to his entourage, 'was destroying our flanking guns. Which means they still plan to attack in the centre of the wall. Which is where we want them to attack.'

Colonel Gudin agreed. For a time, like the Tippoo, he had been worried that the British bombardment meant that they planned to enter the city at its north-western corner, but now, in the lull after the collapse of the towers, the enemy's strategy seemed plain. They had not been trying to make a breach, but instead had knocked down the two places where the Tippoo could mount high guns to plunge their fire onto the flanks of the storming troops. The breach would be made next. 'It will be where we want it to be, I'm sure,' Gudin confirmed the Tippoo's guess.

The man who had planted the flag on the crest of the fallen bastion was brought to the Tippoo on the western wall close to where the towers had fallen. The Tippoo rewarded him with a purse of gold. The man was a Hindu, and that pleased the Tippoo who worried about such men's loyalties. 'Is he one of yours?' he asked Appah Rao who was accompanying the Tippoo on the inspection.

'No, Your Majesty.'

The Tippoo suddenly turned and gazed up into the tall Appah Rao's face. He was frowning. 'Those wretched men of Gudin's,' the Tippoo said, 'wasn't there a woman with them?'

'Yes, Your Majesty.'

'And didn't she go to your house?' the Tippoo charged Appah Rao.

'She did, Highness, but she died.' Appah Rao told the lie smoothly.

The Tippoo was intrigued. 'Died?'

'She was a drab sick creature,' Appah Rao said carelessly, 'and just died. As should the men who brought her here.' He still feared that the arrest of Sharpe and Lawford could lead to his own betrayal and, though he did not truly wish them dead, nor did he wish the Tippoo to believe that he desired them to live.

'Those two will die,' the Tippoo promised grimly, his query about Mary apparently forgotten. 'They will surely die,' he promised again as he clambered up the ruins of the north-western bastion. 'We shall either offer their black souls to avert ill fortune, or we shall sacrifice them as thanks for our victory.' He would prefer the latter, and he imagined killing the two men on the very same day that he first ascended the silver steps of his tiger throne, the throne he had sworn never to use until his enemies were destroyed. He felt a fierce pang of anticipation. The redcoats would come to his city and there they would be seared by the fires of vengeance and crushed by falling stone. Their groans would echo through the days of their dying, and then the rains would come and the sluggish Cauvery would swell into its full drowning spate and the remaining British, who were already low on food, would have no choice but to withdraw. They would leave their guns behind and begin their long journey across Mysore and every mile of their retreat would be dogged by the Tippoo's lancers and sabremen. The vultures would grow fat this year, and a trail of sun-whitened bones would be left across India until the very last red-coated man died. And there, the Tippoo decided, where the last Englishman died, he would erect a high pillar of marble, white and gleaming and crowned with a snarling tiger's head.

The muezzin's call echoed across the city, summoning the faithful to prayer. The sound was beautiful in the silence after the guns. The Tippoo, obedient to his God, hurried towards his palace with one last backward glance at the damned. They could make their breach, they could cross the river and they could come to his walls. But once at the walls they would die.

'P-I-K,' Sharpe said, scratching the letters in the dust of the cell's floor where he had cleared a patch of straw. 'L-O-K.'

'Picklock,' Lawford said. 'Very good, but you've left out two Cs.'

'But I've got the picklock, sir,' Sharpe said, and produced it from his coat pocket. It was a small cluster of metal shafts, some curiously bent at their tips, which he quickly hid once he had shown it to Lawford.

'Why didn't they find it?' Lawford asked. Both men had been searched when they had been taken to the palace after their arrest, and though the guards had left the page of the Bible in Lawford's pocket, they had taken everything else of value.

'I had it somewhere it couldn't be found, sir,' Sharpe said. 'Colonel Gudin thought I was scratching my arse, if you follow me, but I was hiding it.'

'I'd rather not know,' Lawford said primly.

'A good picklock like that can take care of those old padlocks in seconds, sir,' Sharpe said, nodding at the lock on their cell door. 'Then we just have to rush the guards.'

'And get a bellyful of lead?' Lawford suggested.

'When the assault comes,' Sharpe said, 'the guards will like as not be at the top of the steps, trying to see what's happening. They won't hear us.' Sharpe's back was still painful, and the wounds inflicted by the jetti were crusted with dried blood and pus that tore whenever he moved too quickly, but there was no gangrene and he had been spared any fever, and that good fortune was restoring his confidence.

'When the assault comes, Sharpe,' Colonel McCandless intervened, 'our guards are more likely to be on the walls, leaving our security to the tiger.'

'Hadn't thought of that, sir.' Sharpe sounded disappointed.

'I don't think even you can rush a tiger,' McCandless said.

'No, sir. I don't suppose I can,' Sharpe admitted. Each night, at dusk, the guards left the cells, but first they released the tiger. It was a difficult process, for the tiger had to be held away from the guards with long spears as they retreated up the steps. It had evidently tried to charge the guards once for it bore a long scar down one muscular striped flank, and these days, to prevent another such attack, the guards tossed down a great chunk of raw goat meat to satisfy the tiger's hunger before they released it, and the prisoners would spend the night hours listening to the creature grinding and slavering as it ripped the last pieces of flesh from the bones. Each dawn the tiger was herded back to its cell where it slept through the heat of the day until its time for guard duty came again. It was a huge and mangy beast, not nearly so sleek as the six tigers kept in the palace yard, but it had a hungrier look and sometimes, in the moonlight, Sharpe would watch it pacing up and down the short corridor, the fall of its pads silent on the stone as it endlessly went up and down, up and down, and he wondered what tiger thoughts brewed behind its night-glossed yellow eyes. Sometimes, for no reason, it would roar in the night and the hunting cheetahs would call back and the night would be loud with the sound of the animals. Then the tiger would leap lithely up the steps and roar another challenge from the bars at the head of the staircase. It always came back down, its approach silent and its gaze malevolent.

By day, when the tiger twitched in its sleep, the guards would watch the cells. Sometimes there were just two guards, but at other times there were as many as six. Each morning a pair of prisoners from the city's civilian jail arrived in leg irons to take away the night-soil buckets, and when these had been emptied and returned, the first meal was served. It was usually cold rice, sometimes with beans or scraps of fish in it, with a tin jug of water. A second pail of rice was brought in the afternoon, but otherwise the prisoners were left alone. They listened to the sounds above them, ever fearful that they might be summoned to face the Tippoo's dreaded killers, and while they waited McCandless prayed, Hakeswill mocked, Lawford worried and Sharpe learned his letters.

At first the learning was hard and it was made no easier by Hakeswill's constant scoffing. Lawford and McCandless would tell the Sergeant to be quiet, but after a while Hakeswill would chuckle again and start talking, ostensibly to himself, in the far corner of his cage. 'Above himself, ain't he?' Hakeswill would mutter just loud enough for Sharpe to hear. 'Got hairs and bleeding graces. That's what Sharpie's got. Hairs and graces. Learning to read! Might as well teach a stone to fart! It ain't natural, ain't right. A private soldier should know his place, says so in the scriptures.'

'It says nothing of the sort, Sergeant!' McCandless would always snap after such an assertion.

And always, every daylight hour of every day, there was the sound of the besiegers' guns. Their thunderous percussions filled the sky and were echoed by the crack of iron on sun-dried mud as the eighteen-pound round shots struck home, while, nearer, the Tippoo's own guns answered. Few such cannon had survived on the western walls, but closer to the dungeons, on the northern rampart, the Tippoo's gunners traded shot for shot with the batteries across the Cauvery and the sound of the weapons punched the warm air incessantly.

'Working hard, them gunners!' Hakeswill would say. 'Doing a proper job, like real soldiers should. Working up a proper muck sweat. Not wasting their time with bleeding letters. C-A-T? Who the hell needs to know that? It's still a bleeding pussy cat. All you needs to know is how to skin the thing, not how to spell it.'

'Quiet, Sergeant,' McCandless would growl.

'Yes, sir. I shall be quiet, sir. Like a church mouse, sir.' But a few moments later the Sergeant could be heard grumbling again. 'Private Morgan, I remembers him, and he could read and he wasn't nothing but trouble. He always knew more than anyone else, but he didn't know better than to be flogged, did he? Would never have happened if he hadn't had his letters. His mother taught him, the silly Welsh bitch. He read his Bible when he should have been cleaning his musket. Died under the lash, he did, and good riddance. A private soldier's got no business reading. Bad for the eyes, sends you blind.'

Hakeswill even talked at night. Sharpe would wake to hear the Sergeant talking in a low voice to the tiger, and one night even the tiger stopped to listen. 'You're not such a bad puss, are you?' Hakeswill crooned. 'Down here all alone, you are, just like me.' The Sergeant reached a tentative hand through the bars and gave the beast's back a swift pat. He was rewarded with a low snarl. 'Don't you growl at me, puss, or I'll have your bleeding eyes out. And how will you catch mouses then? Eh? You'll be a hungry blind pussy cat, that's what you'll be. That's it. Lay you down now and rest your big head, see? Doesn't hurt, does it?' And the Sergeant reached out and, with remarkable tenderness, scratched the big cat's flank and, to Sharpe's wonder, the huge beast settled itself comfortably against the bars of the Sergeant's cell. 'You're awake, aren't you, Sharpie?' Hakeswill called softly as he scratched the tiger. 'I knows you are, I can tell. So what happened to little Mary Bickerstaff, eh? You going to tell me, boy? Some heathen darkie got his filthy hands on her, has he? She'd have done better lifting her skirts to me. Instead she's being rogered by some blackie, ain't she? Is that what happened? Still now, still!' he soothed the tiger. Sharpe pretended to be asleep, but Hakeswill must have sensed his attention. 'Officer's pet, Sharpie? Is that what you are? Learning to read so you can be like them, is that what you want? It won't do you no good, boy. There's only two sorts of officers in this army, and the one sort's good and the other sort ain't. The good sort knows better than to get their hands dirty with you rankers; they leave it all to the sergeants. The bad sort interfere. That young Mister Fitzgerald, he was an interferer, but he's gone to hell now and hell's the best place for him, seeing as how he was an upstart Irishman with no respect for sergeants. And your Mister Lawford, he ain't no good either, no good at all.' Hakeswill suddenly quietened as Colonel McCandless groaned.

The Colonel's fever was growing worse, though he tried hard not to complain. Sharpe, abandoning his pretence of sleep, carried the water bucket to him. 'Drink, sir?'

'That's kind of you, Sharpe, kind.'

The Colonel drank, then propped his back against the stone wall at the back of the cell. 'We had a rainstorm last month,' he said, 'not a severe one, but these cells were flooded all the same. And not all of the flooding was rain, a good deal was sewage. I pray God gets us out of here before the monsoon.'

'No chance of us still being here then, is there, sir?'

'It depends, Sharpe, whether we take the city or not.'

'We will, sir,' Sharpe said.

'Maybe.' The Colonel smiled at Sharpe's serene confidence. 'But the Tippoo might decide to kill us first.' McCandless fell silent for a while, then shook his head. 'I wish I understood the Tippoo.'

'Nothing to understand, sir. He's just an evil bastard, sir.'

'No, he's not that,' the Colonel said severely. 'He's actually rather a good ruler. Better, I suspect, than most of our Christian monarchs. He's certainly been good for Mysore. He's fetched it a deal of wealth, given it more justice than most countries enjoy in India and he's been tolerant to most religions, though I fear he did persecute some unfortunate Christians.' The Colonel grimaced as a shudder racked his body. 'He's even kept the Rajah and his family alive, not in comfort, but alive, and that's more than most monarchs would ever do. Most usurpers kill their country's old ruler, but not here. I can't forgive him for what he did to those poor prisoners of ours, of course, but I suppose some capricious cruelty is probably necessary in a ruler. All in all, I think, and judging him by the standards of our own monarchy, we should have to give the Tippoo fairly high marks.'

'So why the hell are we fighting him, sir?'

McCandless smiled. 'Because we want to be here, and he doesn't want us to be here. Two dogs in a small cage, Sharpe. And if he beats us out of Mysore he'll bring in the French to chase us out of the rest of India and then we can bid farewell to the best part of our eastern trade. That's what it's about, Sharpe, trade. That's why you're fighting here, trade.'

Sharpe grimaced. 'It seems a funny thing to be fighting about, sir.'

'Does it?' McCandless seemed surprised. 'Not to me, Sharpe. Without trade there's no wealth, and without wealth there's no society worth having. Without trade, Private Sharpe, we'd be nothing but beasts in the mud. Trade is indeed worth fighting for, though the good Lord knows we don't appreciate trade much. We celebrate kings, we honour great men, we admire aristocrats, we applaud actors, we shower gold on portrait painters and we even, sometimes, reward soldiers, but we always despise merchants. But why? It's the merchant's wealth that drives the mills, Sharpe; it moves the looms, it keeps the hammers falling, it fills the fleets, it makes the roads, it forges the iron, it grows the wheat, it bakes the bread and it builds the churches and the cottages and the palaces. Without God and trade we would be nothing.'

Sharpe laughed softly. 'Trade never did 'owt for me, sir.'

'Did it not?' McCandless asked gently. The Colonel smiled. 'So what do you think is worth fighting for, Private?'

'Friends, sir. And pride. We have to show that we're better bastards than the other side.'

'You don't fight for King or country?'

'I've never met the King, sir. Never even seen him.'

'He's not much to look at, but he's a decent enough man when he's not mad.' McCandless stared across at Hakeswill. 'Is he mad?'

'I think so, sir.'

'Poor soul.'

'He's evil, too,' Sharpe said, speaking too softly for Hakeswill to hear him. 'Takes a joy, sir, in having men punished. He thieves, he lies, he rapes, he murders.'

'And you've done none of those things?'

'Never raped, sir, and as for the others, only when I had to.'

'Then I pray God you'll never have to again,' McCandless said fervently, and with that he leaned his grey head against the wall and tried to sleep.

Sharpe watched the dawn light seep into the dungeon pit. The last bats of the night wheeled in the patch of sky above, but soon they were gone and the first gun of the day spoke. It was clearing its throat, as the gunners liked to say, for the city and its besiegers were waking and the fight would go on.

The opening shot of the day was aimed at the low mud wall that plugged the gap in the glacis and kept the water dammed in the ditch behind. The wall was thick and the shot, which fell low and so lost much of its force as it ricocheted up from the riverbank, did little more than shiver dust from the wall's crevices.

One by one the other siege guns woke and had their throats blasted clear. The first few shots were often lackadaisical as the gun barrels were still cool and thus caused the balls to fly low. A handful of guns answered the fire from the city walls, but none of them was large. The Tippoo was hiding his big guns for the assault, but he permitted his gunners to mount and fire their small cannon, some of which discharged a ball no bigger than a grapeshot. The defenders' fire did no damage, but even the sound of their guns gave the citizens a feeling that they were fighting back.

This morning the British guns seemed erratic. Every battery was at work, but their fire was uncoordinated. Some aimed at the wall in the glacis while others targeted the higher ramparts, but an hour after dawn they all fell silent and, a moment later, the Tippoo's gunners also ceased firing. Colonel Gudin, staring through a spyglass from the western ramparts, distinctly saw the sepoy gunners in one breaching battery heaving at the trail of their piece. Gudin reckoned that the big guns were at last being carefully aligned on the section of wall that had been chosen for the breach. The guns were hot now, they would fire true, and soon they would concentrate a dreadful intensity of iron against the chosen spot in the city's defences. With his spyglass he could see men straining at the gun, but he could not see the gun itself for the embrasure had been momentarily stopped up with wicker baskets filled with earth. Gudin prayed that the British would take the Tippoo's bait and aim their pieces at the weakest section of the wall.

He trained his glass on the nearest battery which was scarce four hundred yards from the vulnerable section of wall. The gunners were stripped to the waist, and no wonder, for the temperature would soon be well over ninety degrees and the humidity was already stifling and these men had to handle enormous weights of gun and shot. An eighteen-pounder siege gun weighed close to twelve tons, and all that mass of hot metal was hurled back with each shot and the gun then had to be manhandled back into its firing position. The shot of such a gun measured a little over five inches across, and each gun could fire perhaps one such ball every two minutes and the Tippoo's spies had reported that General Harris now had thirty-seven of these heavy guns, and two more cannon, even heavier, that each fired a twenty-four-pound missile. Gudin, waiting for the gunfire to start again, made a simple computation in his head. Each minute, he reckoned, about three hundred and fifty pounds of iron, travelling at unimaginably high velocities, would hammer into the city wall. And to that hefty weight of metal the British could add a score of howitzers and several dozen twelve-pounders that would be used to bombard the walls either side of the place General Harris had chosen to make his breach.

Gudin knew that the serious business of making the breach was about to begin and he almost held his breath as he waited for the first shot, for that opening gun would tell him whether or not the Tippoo's gamble had succeeded. The waiting seemed to stretch for ever, but at last one of the batteries unmasked a gun and the great brute belched a jet of smoke fifty yards in front of its embrasure. The sound came a half-second later, but Gudin had already seen the shot fall.

The British had swallowed the bait. They were coming straight for the trap.

The rest of the breaching guns now opened fire. For a moment a rumbling thunder filled the sky that was flapping with the wings of startled birds. The shots seared over the dry land, across the river and slammed into the brief curtain wall that joined the sections of glacis. The wall lasted less than ten minutes before an eighteen-pounder shot pierced through it and suddenly the water of the inner ditch was gushing out into the South Cauvery. For a few seconds the water was a clear, thin spurt arcing out to the river, then the force of the flow abraded the remaining mud and the wall collapsed so that a murky flood washed irresistibly down the riverbank.

The guns scarcely paused, only now they raised their aim very slightly so that the balls could strike against the base of the outer rampart which had been completely unmasked by the collapse of the glacis's brief connecting wall. Shot after shot slammed home, their impacts reverberating down the whole length of the ancient battlements, and each shot punched out a handful of mud bricks. The water from the punctured ditch kept flowing out, and the shots kept slamming home as the gunners sweated and hauled and spiked and sponged out and rammed and fired again.

All day long they fired, and all day long the old wall crumbled. The shots were kept low, aimed to strike at the foot of the wall so that the bricks above would collapse to make a ramp of rubble that would lead up and through the gap that the guns were making.

By nightfall the wall still stood, but at its base there was a crumbling, dusty cavern that had been carved deep into the rampart. A few British guns fired in the night, mostly scattering canister or grapeshot in an attempt to stop the Tippoo's men from repairing the cavern, but in the dark it was difficult to keep the guns aimed true and most of the shots went wild, and in the morning the British gunners pointed their telescopes and saw that the cavern had been plugged with earth-filled wicker gabions and baulks of timber. The first few shots made short shrift of those repairs, scattering the timber and soil in huge gouts as the balls bit home, and once the cavern was re-exposed the gunners went to work on it. The land between the aqueduct and the river became shrouded with a mist of powder smoke as the artillery poured in their fire until, at midday, a cheer from the British lines marked the wall's collapse.

It crumpled slowly, jetting a cloud of dust into the air, a cloud so thick that at first no man could see the extent of the damage, but as the small wind cleared the smoke away from the guns and the dust from the wall they could see that a breach had been made. The lime-washed wall now had a gap twenty yards wide, and the gap was filled with a mound of rubble up which a man could climb so long as he was unencumbered by anything other than a musket, a bayonet and his cartridge box. That made the breach practicable.

Yet still the guns fired. Now the gunners were trying to flatten the slope of the breach and some of their shots ricocheted up to the inner wall and for a time Gudin feared that the British were planning to blast a passage clean through that new inner rampart, but then the gunners lowered their aim to keep their balls hammering at the newly-made breach or else to gnaw at the shoulders of the outer wall's gap.

A half-mile away from Gudin, in the British lines, General Harris and General Baird stared at the breach through their telescopes. Now, for the first time, they could inspect a short stretch of the new inner wall. 'It isn't as high as I feared,' Harris commented.

'Let's pray it's unfinished,' Baird growled.

'But still I think it's better to ignore it,' Harris decreed. 'Capture the outer wall first.'

Baird turned to stare at some clouds that lay heavy and low on the western horizon. He feared the clouds presaged rain. 'We could go tonight, sir,' he suggested. Baird was remembering the forty-four months he had endured in the Tippoo's dungeons, some of them spent chained to the wall of his cell, and he wanted revenge. He was also eager to get the bloody business of storming the city done.

Harris collapsed his glass. 'Tomorrow,' he said firmly, and scratched beneath the edge of his wig. 'We risk more by rushing things. We'll do it properly, and we'll do it tomorrow.'

That night a handful of British officers crept out from the leading trenches with small white cotton flags attached to bamboo poles. The sky was laced with a tracery of thin clouds that intermittently hid the waning moon, and in the cloud shadows the officers explored the South Cauvery to find the river's treacherous deep pools. They marked the shallows with their flags and so pointed the path towards the breach.

And all through that night the assault troops filed down the long trenches. Harris was determined that his assault would be overwhelming. He would not tickle the city, he told Baird, but swamp it with men, and so Baird would lead two columns of troops, half of them British and half sepoys, but nearly all of them prime men from the army's elite flanking companies. The six thousand attackers would either be grenadiers, who were the biggest and strongest men, or else from the light companies who were the quickest and cleverest soldiers, and those picked men would be accompanied by a detachment of Hyderabad's finest warriors. The attackers would also be accompanied by engineers carrying fascines to fill in any ditches that the defenders might have dug on the breach's summit and bamboo ladders to scale the edges of the breach. Volunteer gunners would follow the leading troops up onto the ramparts and there turn the Tippoo's own cannon against the defenders on the inner wall. Two Forlorn Hopes would go ahead of the columns, each Hope composed solely of volunteers and each led by a sergeant who would be made an officer if he survived. Both the Forlorn Hopes would carry the British colours into the breach, and those colour-bearers would be the very first men to climb into the enemy's guns. Once on the breach the Forlorn Hopes were ordered not to go on into the space between the walls, but to climb the broken stumps of the shoulders either side of the breach's ramp and from there lead the fight north and south around the whole ring of Seringapatam's ramparts.

'God knows,' Harris said that night at supper, 'but I can think of nothing left undone. Can you, Baird?'

'No, sir, I can't,' Baird said. 'Upon my soul, I can't.' He was trying to sound cheerful, but it was still a subdued meal, though Harris had done his best to make it festive. His table was spread with a linen cloth and was lit by fine spermaceti candles that burned with a pure white light. The General's cooks had killed their last chickens to provide a change from the usual half-ration of beef, but none of the officers round the table had much appetite, nor, it seemed, any enthusiasm for conversation. Meer Allum, the commander of the Hyderabad army, did his best to encourage his allies, but only Wellesley seemed capable of responding to his remarks.

Colonel Gent, who as well as being Harris's chief engineer, had taken on himself the collation of what intelligence came out of the city, poured himself some wine. It was rancid stuff, soured by its long journey from Europe and by the heat of India. 'There's a rumour,' he said heavily when a break in the desultory conversation had stretched for too long, 'that the heathen bastards have planted a mine.'

'There are always such rumours,' Baird said curtly.

'A bit late to tell us, surely?' Harris remonstrated mildly.

'Only heard of it today, sir,' Gent said defensively. 'One of their cavalry fellows deserted. He could be making up tales, [missing text]

[Missing text] would regard the appointment as a slight, yet in truth Baird's hatred of all things Indian disqualified him from such a post. Britain needed a friendly Mysore, and Wellesley was a tactful man who harboured no prejudice against natives. 'Good of you, Wellesley,' Harris said when the toast had been drunk. 'Very good of you, I'm sure.'

'This time tomorrow,' Meer Allum said in his odd English accent, 'we shall all dine in the Tippoo's palace. Drink from his silver and eat from his gold.'

'I pray that we do,' Harris said, 'and I pray we manage it without grievous loss.' He scratched his old wound beneath his wig.

The officers were still sombre when the meal ended. Harris bade them a good night, then stood for a while outside his tent staring at the moon-glossed walls of the distant city. The lime-washed ramparts seemed to glow white, beckoning him, but to what? He went to his bed where he slept badly and, in his waking moments, found himself rehearsing excuses for failure. Baird also stayed awake for a while, but drank a good measure of whisky and, afterwards, in full uniform and with his big claymore propped beside his cot, he slipped in and out of a restless sleep. Wellesley slept well. The men crammed in the trenches hardly slept at all.

Bugles greeted the dawn. The storm clouds had thickened in the west, but there was no rain, and the rising sun soon burned the small wispy clouds from above the city. The assaulting troops crouched in the trenches where they could not be seen from Seringapatam's walls. The small white flags fluttered in the river. The siege guns kept firing, some attempting to open the breach wider, but most just trying to discourage the defenders from making any attempt to repair the breach or place obstacles on its forward slope. The undamaged ramparts gleamed white in the sun, while the breach appeared as a red-brown scar in the long city wall.

The Tippoo had spent the night in a small sentry shelter on the north walls. He woke early for he expected an attack at dawn and he had ordered that all his soldiers should be ready on the walls, but no assault came and, as the sun climbed higher, he allowed some of the defenders back to their barracks to rest while he himself went to the Inner Palace. He sensed a nervous expectancy in the crowded streets, and he himself was a troubled man for during his restless night he had dreamed of monkeys, and monkeys were ever a bad omen, and the Tippoo's mood was not helped when his diviners reported that the oil in their pots had been clouded. Today, it seemed, was an inauspicious day, but luck, as the Tippoo knew, was malleable and he attempted to change the day's ill-starred beginning by giving gifts. He summoned a Hindu priest and presented the man with an elephant, a sack of oilseed and a purse of gold. To the Brahmins who accompanied the priest he gave a bullock, a nanny goat, two buffalo, a black hat, a black coat and one of his precious pots of divining oil. Then he washed his hands and donned a cloth-padded war helmet that had been dipped in a sacred fountain to make its wearer invulnerable. On his right arm, his sword arm, he wore a silver amulet inscribed with verses from the Koran. A servant pinned the great red ruby onto the helmet's plume, the Tippoo slung the gold-hilted sword at his waist, then went back to the western walls.

Nothing had changed. Beyond the gently flowing South Cauvery the sun baked the ground where the British guns still fired. Their massive round shots churned up the rubble ramp, but no redcoats stirred from their trenches and the only signs that an assault might be imminent were the small pennants stuck in the riverbed.

'They want another day to widen the breach,' an officer opined.

Colonel Gudin shook his head. 'They'll come today,' he insisted.

The Tippoo grunted. He was standing just north of the breach from where he watched the enemy trenches through a spyglass. Some of the British round shot struck dangerously close to where he stood, and his aides tried to persuade him to move to a safer place, but even when a stone shard thrown up by a cannonball flicked at his white linen tunic, he would not move. 'They would have come at dawn,' he finally said, 'if they were coming today.'

'They want us to think that,' Gudin protested, 'to lull us. But they will come today. They won't give us another night to make preparations. And why plant the flags?' He pointed at the river.

The Tippoo stepped back from the remains of the parapet. Was his luck changed? He had given gifts to the enemies of his God in the hope that his God would then reward him with victory, but he still felt an unease. He would much have preferred that the storming should be delayed another day so that another set of auspices could be taken, but perhaps Allah willed it otherwise. And nothing would be lost by assuming that the attack would come this day. 'Assume they will come this afternoon,' he ordered. 'Every man back to the walls.'

The walls, already thick with troops, now became crowded with defenders. One company of Muslims had volunteered to face the first enemy who came into the breach and those brave men, armed with swords, pistols and muskets, crouched just inside the breach, but hidden from the enemy's guns by the mound of rubble. Those volunteers would almost certainly die, if not at the hands of the attackers then when the great mine blew, but each man had been assured of his place in paradise and so they went gladly to their deaths. Rockets were piled on the ramparts, and guns that had stayed hidden from the bombardment were manhandled into position to take the attackers in the flanks.

Others of the Tippoo's finest troops were posted on the outer wall above the edges of the breach. Their job was to defend the shoulders of the breach, for the Tippoo was determined to funnel the attackers into the space between the walls where his mine could destroy them. Let the British come, the Tippoo prayed, but let them be shepherded across the breach and into the killing ground.

The Tippoo had decided to lead the fight on the wall north of the breach. Colonel Gudin's battalion would fight south of the breach, but Gudin himself had responsibility for blowing the great mine. It was ready now, a hoard of powder crammed into the old gate passage and shored up by stones and timber so that the blast of the explosion would be forced northwards between the walls. Gudin would watch the killing space from his place on the inner rampart, then signal to Sergeant Rothiere to light the fuse. Rothiere and the fuse were guarded by two of Gudin's steadiest men and by six of the Tippoo's jettis.

The Tippoo assured himself that all had been done that could be done. The city was ready and, in honour of the slaughter of infidels, the Tippoo had arrayed himself in jewels, then consigned his soul and his kingdom into Allah's keeping. Now he could only wait as the late-morning sun climbed higher and yet higher to become a burning whiteness in the Indian sky where the vultures circled on their wide ragged wings.

The British guns fired on. In the mosque some men prayed, but all of them were old men, for any man young enough to fight was waiting on the walls. The Hindus prayed to their gods while the women of the city made themselves ragged and dirty so that, should the city fall, they would not attract the enemy's attention.

Midday came. The city baked in the heat. It seemed strangely silent, for the fire of the siege guns was desultory now. The sound of each shot echoed dully from the walls and each strike would start a trickle of stone and a small cloud of dust and afterwards there would be silence again.

On the walls a horde of men crouched behind their firesteps, while in the trenches across the river an opposing horde waited for the order that would send them against an expectant city.

The Tippoo had a prayer mat brought to the walls and there, facing towards the enemy, he knelt and bowed in prayer. He prayed that Colonel Gudin was wrong and that his enemies would give him one more day, and then, as in a waking dream, a message came to him. He had given gifts, and gifts of charity were blessed, but he had not made sacrifice. He had been saving his sacrifice for the celebration of victory, but perhaps victory would not come unless he made his offerings now. Luck was malleable, and death was a great changer of fortune. He made a last obeisance, touching his forehead to the mat's weave, then climbed to his feet. 'Send for three jettis,' he ordered an aide, 'and tell them to bring me the British prisoners.'

'All of them, Your Majesty?' the aide asked.

'Not the Sergeant,' the Tippoo said. 'Not the one who twitches. The others. Tell the jettis to bring them here.' For his victory needed one last sacrifice of blood before the Cauvery was made dark with it.