Sharpe's Fortress Part 23

"The Traitor's Hole," Bappoo said, as he paused beside Dodd, 'but the bones are from baby monkeys."

"But they do eat men?" Dodd asked, intrigued by the shadowed blackness at the foot of the'^hole.

"They kill men," Bappoo said, 'but don't eat them. They're not big enough."

"I can't see any," Dodd said, disappointed, then suddenly a sinuous shadow writhed swiftly between two crevices.

"There!" he said happily.

"Don't they grow big enough to eat men?"

"Most years they escape," Bappoo said.

"The monsoon floods the pit and the snakes swim to the top and wriggle out. Then we must find new ones. This year we've been saved the trouble. These snakes will grow bigger than usual."

Beny Singh waited a few paces away, clutching his small dog as though he feared Dodd would throw it down to the snakes.

"There's a b.a.s.t.a.r.d who ought to be fed to the snakes," Dodd said to Bappoo, nodding towards the Killadar.

"My brother likes him," Bappoo said mildly, touching Dodd's arm to indicate that they should walk on.

"They share tastes."

"Such as?"

"Women, music, luxury. We really do not need him here."

Dodd shook his head.

"If you let him go, sahib, then half the d.a.m.ned garrison will want to run away. And if you let the women go, what will the men fight for? Besides, do you really think there's any danger?"

"None," Bappoo admitted. He had led the officers up a steep rock stairway to a natural bastion where a vast iron gun was trained across the chasm towards the distant cliffs of the high plateau. From here the far cliffs were almost a mile away, but Dodd could just see a group of hors.e.m.e.n cl.u.s.tered at the chasm's edge. It was those hors.e.m.e.n, all in native robes, who had prompted the Outer Fort's gunners to open fire, but the gunners, seeing their shots fall well short of the target, had given up.

Dodd drew out his telescope, trained it, and saw a man in the uniform of the Royal Engineers sitting on the ground a few paces from his companions. The engineer was sketching. The hors.e.m.e.n were all Indians.

Dodd lowered the telescope and looked at the huge iron gun.

"Is it loaded?" he asked the gunners.

"Yes, sahib."

"A haideri apiece if you can kill the man in the dark uniform. The one sitting at the cliff's edge."

The gunners laughed. Their gun was over twenty feet long and its wrought-iron barrel was cast with decorations that had been painted green, white and red. A pile of round shot, each over a foot in diameter, stood beside the ma.s.sive carriage that was made from giant baulks of teak. The gun captain fussed over his aim, shouting at his men to lever the vast carriage a thumb's width to the right, then a finger's breadth back, until at last he was satisfied. He squinted along the barrel for a second, waved the officers who had followed Bappoo to move away from the great gun, then leaned over the breach to dab his glowing port fire onto the gun's touch-hole.

The reed glowed and smoked for a second as the fire dashed down to the charge, then the vast cannon crashed back, the teak runners sliding up the timber ramp that formed the lower half of the carriage.

Smoke jetted out into the chasm as a hundred startled birds flapped from their nests on the rock faces and circled in the warm air.

Dodd had been standing to one side, watching the engineer through his gla.s.s. For a second he actually saw the great round shot as a flicker of grey in the lower right quadrant of his lens, then he saw a boulder close to the engineer shatter into sc.r.a.ps. The engineer fell sideways, his sketch pad falling, but then he picked himself up and scrambled up the slope to where his horse was being guarded by the cavalrymen.

Dodd took a single gold coin from his pouch and tossed it to the gunner.

"You missed," he said, 'but it was d.a.m.ned fine shooting."

"Thank you, sahib."

A whimper made Dodd turn. Beny Singh had handed his dog to a servant and was staring through an ivory-barrelled telescope at the enemy hors.e.m.e.n.

"What is it?" Bappoo asked him.

"Syud Sevajee," Singh said in a small voice.

"Who's Syud Sevajee?" Dodd asked.

Bappoo grinned.

"His father was once kill adar here, but he died.

Was it poison?" he asked Beny Singh.

"He just died," Singh said.

"He just died!"

"Murdered, probably," Bappoo said with amus.e.m.e.nt, 'and Beny Singh became kill adar and took the dead man's daughter as his concubine."

Dodd turned to see the enemy hors.e.m.e.n vanis.h.i.+ng among the trees beyond the far cliff.

"Come for revenge, has he? You still want to leave?" he demanded of Beny Singh.

"Because that fellow will be waiting for you. He'll track you through the hills, Killadar, and slit your throat in the night's darkness."

"We shall stay here and fight," Beny Singh declared, retrieving the dog from his servant.

"Fight and win," Dodd said, and he imagined the British breaching batteries on that far cliff, and he imagined the slaughter that would be made among the crews by this one vast gun. And there were fifty other heavy guns waiting to greet the British approach, and hundreds of lighter pieces that fired smaller missiles. Guns, rockets, canister, muskets and cliffs, those were Gawilghur's de fences and Dodd reckoned the British stood no chance. No chance at all. The big gun's smoke drifted away in the small breeze.

"They will die here," Dodd said, 'and we shall chase the survivors south and cut them down like dogs." He turned and looked at Beny Singh.

"You see the chasm? That is where their demons will die. Their wings will be scorched, they will fall like burning stones to their deaths, and their screams will lull your children to a dreamless sleep." He knew he spoke true, for Gawilghur was impregnable.

"I take pleasure, no, Dilip, make that I take humble pleasure in reporting the recovery of a quant.i.ty of stolen stores." Captain Torrance paused. Night had just fallen and Torrance uncorked a bottle of arrack and took a sip.

"Am I going too fast for you?"

"Yes, sahib," Dilip, the middle-aged clerk, answered.

"Humble pleasure," he said aloud as his pen moved laboriously over the paper, 'in reporting the recovery of a quant.i.ty of stolen stores."