"Captain Morris's company escorted a convoy here, " Wellesley answered.
"A light company, eh?" Kenny said, glancing at Morris's epaulettes.
"You might even be useful. I could do with another company in the assault party." He snorted the snuff, stopping one nostril at a time.
"It cheers my boys up, " he added, 'seeing white men killed." Kenny commanded the first battalion of the tenth Madrassi Regiment.
"What's in your assault unit now?" Wellesley asked.
"Nine companies, " Kenny said.
"The grenadiers and two others from the Scotch Brigade, the flankers from my regiment and four others.
Good boys, all of them, but I daresay they won't mind sharing the honours with an English light company."
"And I've no doubt you'll welcome a chance to assault a breach, Morris?" Wellesley asked drily.
"Of course, sir, " Morris said, cursing Kenny inwardly.
"But in the meantime, " Wellesley went on coldly, 'bring your men's bodies in."
"Yes, sir."
"Do it now."
Sergeant Green took a half-dozen men down the neck of land, but they only found two bodies. They were expecting three, but Sergeant Hakeswill was missing. The enemy, seeing the redcoats among the rocks above the reservoir, opened fire and the musket balls smacked into stones and ricocheted up into the air. Green took a bullet in the heel of his boot. It did not break the skin of his foot, but the blow hurt and he hopped on the short, dry grass.
"Just grab the buggers and drag them away, " he said. He wondered why the enemy did not fire their cannon, and just then a gun discharged a barrel of canister at his squad.
The balls hissed all about the men, but miraculously none was hit as the soldiers seized Kendrick and Lowry by their feet and ran back towards the half-completed battery where Captain Morris waited. Both the dead men had slit throats.
Once safe behind the gab ions the corpses were treated more decorously by being placed on makeshift stretchers. Colonel Kenny intercepted the stretcher-bearers to examine the corpses which were already smelling foul.
"They must have sent a dozen cut-throats out of the fort, " he reckoned.
"You say there's a sergeant missing?"
"Yes, sir, " Morris answered.
"Poor fellow must be a prisoner. Be careful tonight, Captain! They'll probably try again. And I assure you, Captain, if I decide to take a stroll this evening, it won't be to your picquet line."
That night the 33rd's Light Company again formed a screen in front of the new batteries, this time to protect the men dragging up the guns. It was a nervous night, for the company was expecting throat-slitting Mahrattas to come silently through the darkness, but nothing stirred.
The fortress stayed silent and dark. Not a gun fired and not a rocket flew as the British cannon were hauled to their new emplacements and as powder charges and round shot were stacked in the newly made ready magazines.
Then the gunners waited.
The first sign of dawn was a grey lightening of the east, followed by the flare of reflected sun as the first rays lanced over the world's rim to touch the summit of the eastern cliffs. The fortress walls showed grey black Still the gunners waited. A solitary cloud glowed livid pink on the horizon. Smoke rose from the cooking fires inside the fortress where the flags hung limp in the windless air. Bugles roused the British camp which lay a half-mile behind the batteries where officers trained telescopes on Gawilghur's northern wall.
Major Stokes's job was almost finished. He had made the batteries, and now the gunners must unmake the walls, but first Stokes wanted to be certain that the outermost breach would be made in the right place.
He had fixed a telescope to a tripod and now he edged it from side to side, searching the lichen-covered stones just to the right of a bastion in the centre of the wall. The wall sloped back slightly, but he was sure he could see a place where the old stones bulged out of alignment, and he watched that spot as the sun rose and cast a hint of shadow where the stones were not quite true. Finally he screwed the telescope's mount tight shut, so that the tube could not move, then summoned the gun captain of the battery's eighteen-pounder. A major actually commanded this battery, but he insisted that his sergeant go to the spyglass.
"That's your target, " Stokes told the Sergeant.
The Sergeant stooped to the telescope, then straightened to see over the glass, then stooped again. He was chewing a wad of tobacco and had no lower front teeth so that the yellow spittle ran down his chin in a continuous dribble. He straightened, then stooped a third time. The telescope was powerful, and all he could see in the glass circle was a vertical joint between two great stones. The joint was some four feet above the wall's base, and when it gave way the wall would spill forward down the slope to make the ramp up which the attackers could swarm.
"Smack on the joint, sir?" the Sergeant asked in a Northumbrian accent so pronounced that Stokes did not at first understand him.
"Low on the joint, " Stokes said.
"Low it is, sir, " the Sergeant said, and stooped to squint through the glass once more.
"The joint gapes a bit, don't it?"
"It does, " Stokes said.
The Sergeant grunted. For a while, he reckoned, the battering would drive the stones in, sealing the gap, but there was pressure there and the wall must eventually give way as the battered stones weakened.
"That bugger'll burst like an abscess, " the Sergeant said happily, straightening from the telescope. He returned to his gun and barked at his men to make some minute adjustments to its trail. He himself heaved on the elevating screw, though as yet the gun was still masked by some half filled gab ions that blocked the embrasure. Every few seconds the Sergeant climbed onto the trail to see over the gab ions then he would demand that the gun was shifted a half-inch left or a finger's breadth to the right as he made another finicky adjustment to the screw. He tossed grass in the air to gauge the wind, then twisted the elevation again to raise the barrel a tiny amount.
"Stone cold shot, " he explained to Stokes, 'so I'm pointing her a bit high. Maybe a half turn more." He hammered the screw with the heel of his hand.
«Perfect,» he said.
The pucka lees were bringing water which they poured into great wooden tubs. The water was not just to slake the gunners' thirst and soak the sponges that cleaned out the barrels between shots, but was also intended to cool the great weapons. The sun was climbing, it promised to be a searing hot day, and if the huge guns were not drenched intermittently with water they could overheat and explode the powder charges prematurely. The Sergeant was choosing his shot now, rolling two eighteen-pounder balls up and down a stretch of bare earth to judge which was the more perfect sphere.
"That one, " he said, spitting tobacco juice onto his chosen missile.
Morris's Light Company trailed back up the road, going to the camp where they would sleep. Stokes watched them pass and thought of Sharpe. Poor Sharpe, but at least, from wherever he was imprisoned inside the fortress, he would hear the siege guns and know that the redcoats were coming. If they got through the breach, Stokes thought gloomily, or if they ever managed to cross the fortress's central ravine.
He tried to suppress his pessimism, telling himself that his job was simply to make the breach, not win the whole victory.
The chosen shot was rolled into the gun's muzzle, then rammed down onto the canvas bags of powder. The Sergeant took a length of wire that hung looped on his belt and rammed it through the cannon's touch-hole, piercing the canvas bag beneath, then selected a priming tube, a reed filled with finely milled powder, and slid it down into the powder charge, but leaving a half-inch of the reed protruding above the touchhole.