"Close on me! " he called to his company.
"Hurry!»
The message was passed along the picquet line and the men ran at a crouch back to where Morris waited. They bumped into each other as they gathered, then squatted as Morris called for Hakeswill.
"Not here, sir, " Sergeant Green finally decided.
"Count the men, Sergeant, " Morris ordered.
Sergeant Green numbered the men off.
"Three missing, sir, " he reported.
"Hakeswill, Lowry and Kendrick."
"Damn them, " Morris said. A rocket hissed up from the gatehouse, twisted in the night to leave a crazy trail of flame-edged smoke, then dived down to the left, far down, plunging into the ravine that edged the isthmus. The light of the exhaust flashed down the steep cliffs, finally vanishing a thousand feet below Morris. Two guns fired together, their balls hammering towards the fake lanterns. The battery lanterns had vanished, evidence that the sappers had finished their work.
"Take the men to the battery, " Morris ordered Green.
"Garrard? You stay with me."
Morris did not want to do anything heroic, but he knew he could not report that he had simply lost three men, so he took Private Tom Garrard west across the tumbled ground where the picquet line had been stretched. They called out the names of the missing men, but no reply came.
It was Garrard who stumbled over the first body.
"Don't know who it is, sir, but he's dead. Bloody mess, he is."
Morris swore and crouched beside the body. A rocket's bright passage showed him a slit throat and a spill of blood. It also revealed that the man had been stripped of his coat which lay discarded beside the corpse. The sight of the gaping throat made Morris gag.
"There's another here, sir, " Garrard called from a few paces away.
«Jesus!» Morris twisted aside, willing himself not to throw up, but the bile was sour in his throat. He shuddered, then managed to take a deep breath.
"We're going."
"You want me to look for the other fellow, sir?" Garrard asked.
"Come on! " Morris fled, not wanting to stay in this dark charnel house.
Garrard followed.
The gunfire died. A last rocket stitched sparks across the stars, then Gawilghur was silent again.
Hakeswill cowered in his hiding place, shuddering as the occasional flare of an exploding shell or passing rocket cast lurid shadows into the narrow cleft. He thought he heard Lowry call aloud, but the sound was so unexpected, and so quickly over, he decided it was his nerves. Then, blessedly, he heard the whistle that signalled that the sappers were done with their work, and a moment later he heard the message being called along the line.
"Back to the road! Back to the road!»
The rockets and guns were still battering the night, so Hakeswill stayed where he was until he sensed that the fury of the fire was diminishing, then he crept out of his cleft and, still keeping low, scuttled eastwards.
«Hakeswill!» a voice called nearby.
He froze.
"Hakeswill?" The voice was insistent.
Some instinct told the Sergeant that there was mischief in the dark, and so Hakeswill crouched lower still. He heard something moving in the night, the scrape of leather on stone, the sound of breathing, but the man did not come close to Hakeswill who, petrified, edged on another pace. His hand, feeling the ground ahead of him, suddenly found something wet and sticky. He flinched, brought his fingers to his nose and smelt blood.
«Jesus,» he swore under his breath. He groped again, and this time found a corpse. His hands explored the face, the open mouth, then found the gaping wound in the neck. He jerked his hand back.
It had to be Lowry or Kendrick, for this was about where he had left the two privates, and if they were dead, or even if only one of them was dead, then it meant that Captain Torrance's death had been no lovers' tiff. Not that Hakeswill had ever believed it was. He knew who it was. Bloody Sharpe was alive. Bloody Sharpe was hunting his enemies, and three, maybe four, were already dead. And Hakeswill knew he would be next.
«Hakeswill!» the voice hissed, but farther away now.
A gun fired from the fort and in its flash Hakeswill saw a cloaked shape to his north. The man was crossing the skyline, not far from Hakeswill, but at least he was going away. Sharpe! It had to be Sharpe!
And a terror grew in Hakeswill so that his face twitched and his hands shook.
"Think, you bugger, " he told himself, 'think!»
And the answer came, a sweet answer, so obvious that he wondered why he had taken so long to find it.
Sharpe was alive, he was not a prisoner in Gawilghur, but haunting the British camp, which meant that there was one place that would be utterly safe for Hakeswill to go. He could go to the fortress, and Sharpe would never reach him there for the rumour in the camp was that the assault on Gawilghur was likely to be a desperate and bloody business.
Likely to fail, some men said, and even if it did not, Hakeswill could always pretend he had been taken prisoner. All he wanted at this moment was to be away from Sharpe and so he sidled southwards, down the hill, and once he reached the flatter ground, he ran towards the now dark walls of the fort through the drifting skeins of foul-smelling powder smoke.
He ran past the tank, along the approach road, and round to the left where the great gatehouse loomed above him in the dark. And once there he pounded on the massive, iron-studded doors.
No one responded.
He pounded again, using the butt of his musket, scared witless that the sound would bring an avenging horror from the dark behind, and suddenly a small wicket gate in the larger door was pulled open to flood flame light into the night.
"I'm a deserter! " Hakeswill hissed.
"I'm on your side!»
Hands seized him and pulled him through the small doorway. A smoking torch burned high on the wall to show Hakeswill the long, narrow entranceway, the dark ramparts, and the dark faces of the men who had him prisoner.
"I'm on your side! " he shouted as the gate was closed behind him and his musket was snatched away.
"I'm on your side!»
A tall, hawk-faced man strode down the stone road.
"Who are you?"
he asked in English.
"I'm someone willing to fight for you, sir. Willing and able, sir. Old soldier, sir."
"My name is Manu Bappoo, " the man said in a sibilant voice, 'and I command here."
"Very good, sir. Sahib, I mean, very good." Hakeswill bobbed his head.
"Hakeswill, sir, is my name. Sergeant Obadiah Hakeswill."
Manu Bappoo stared at the redcoat. He disliked deserters. A man who deserted his flag could not be trusted under any other flag, but the news that a white soldier had run from the enemy ranks could only hearten his garrison. Better, he decided, to leave this man alive as a witness to the enemy's crumbling morale than shoot him out of hand.
"Take him to Colonel Dodd, " he ordered one of his men.
"Give him back his firelock. He's on our side."
So Hakeswill was inside Gawilghur and among the enemy. But he was safe from the terror that had turned his life to sudden nightmare.
He was safe from Sharpe.
CHAPTER 8
The sappers who had em placed the gab ions were too excited to go to sleep and instead were milling about a pair of smoky fires. Their laughter rose and fell on the night wind. Major Stokes, pleased with their work, had produced three jars of arrack as a reward, and the jugs were being passed from hand to hand.
Sharpe watched the small celebration and then, keeping to the shadows among Syud Sevajee's encampment, he went to a small tent where he stripped off his borrowed Indian robes before crawling under the flap. In the dark he blundered into Clare who, kept awake by the sound of the bombardment and then by the voices of the sappers, put up a hand and felt bare flesh.