The British fire became heavier. Redcoats were lining the hilltop now and pouring musket fire into the ravine. Bullets ricocheted from the stone sides and flicked down into the press of men. Panic began to infect them, and Bappoo shouted at them to be calm and return the fire, while he pushed through the throng to discover why the Inner Fort's gates were closed.
«Dodd!» he shouted as he came close.
"Dodd!»
Colonel Dodd's face appeared above the rampart. He looked quite calm, though he said nothing.
"Open the gate! " Bappoo shouted angrily.
Dodd's response was to raise the rifle to his shoulder.
Bappoo stared up into the muzzle. He knew he should run or twist away, but the horror of fate kept him rooted to the path.
"Dodd?" he said in puzzlement, and then the rifle was blotted out by the smoke of its discharge.
The bullet struck Bappoo on the breastbone, shattering it and driving scraps of bone deep into his heart. The Prince took two shuddering breaths and then was dead.
His men gave a great wail as the news of their Prince's death spread, and then, unable to endure the plunging fire from the Outer Fort, and denied entrance to the Inner, they fled west towards the road which dropped to the plain.
But the road was blocked. The Highlanders of the 78th were nearing its summit and they now saw a great panicked mass surging towards them.
The Scotsmen had endured the artillery fire of the Outer Fort during their long climb, but now those guns had been abandoned. To their right the cliffs soared up to the Inner Fort, while to their left was a precipice above a dizzying gorge.
There was only room for twelve men to stand abreast on the road, but Colonel Chalmers, who led the 78th, knew that was space enough. He formed his leading half-company into three ranks with the front row kneeling.
"You'll fire by ranks, " he said quietly.
The panicked defenders ran towards the kilted Highlanders, who waited until every shot could kill.
"Front rank, fire! " Chalmers said.
The muskets started, and one by one the three ranks fired, and the steady fusillade tore into the approaching fugitives. Some tried to turn and retreat, but the press behind was too great, and still the relentless fire ripped into them, while behind them redcoats came down from the Outer Fort to attack their rear.
The first men jumped off the cliff, and their terrible screams faded as they plunged down to the rocks far beneath. The road was thick with bodies and running with blood.
"Advance twenty paces! " Chalmers ordered.
The Highlanders marched, halted, knelt and began firing again.
Bappoo's survivors, betrayed by Dodd, were trapped between two forces. They were stranded in a hell above emptiness, a slaughter in the high hills. There were screams as men tumbled to their deaths far beneath and still the fire kept coming. It kept coming until there was nothing left but quivering men crouching in terror on a road that was rank with the stench of blood, and then the redcoats moved forward with bayonets.
The Outer Fort had fallen and its garrison had been massacred.
And William Dodd, renegade, was Lord of Gawilghur.
CHAPTER 10
Mister Hakeswill was not sure whether he was a lieutenant in William Dodd's eyes, but he knew he was a Mister and he dimly apprehended that he could be much more. William Dodd was going to win, and his victory would make him ruler of Gawilghur and tyrant of all the wide land that could be seen from its soaring battlements. Mister Hakeswill was therefore well placed, as Dodd's only white officer, to profit from the victory and, as he approached the palace on Gawilghur's summit, Hakeswill was already imagining a future that was limited only by the bounds of his fancy. He could be a rajah, he decided.
"I shall have an harem, " he said aloud, earning a worried look from his Havildar.
"An harem I'll have, all of me own. Bibbis in silk, but only when it's cold, eh? Rest of the time they'll have to be naked as needles." He laughed, scratched at the lice in his crotch, then lunged with his sword at one of the peacocks that decorated the palace gardens.
"Bad luck, them birds, " Hakeswill told the Havildar as the bird fled in a flurry of bright severed feathers.
"Bad luck, they are. Got the evil eye, they do. Know what you should do with a peacock? Roast the bugger. Roast it and serve it with 'taters. Very nice, that."
"Yes, sahib, " the Havildar said nervously. He was not certain he liked this new white officer whose face twitched so compulsively, but Colonel Dodd had appointed him and the Colonel could do no wrong as far as the Havildar was concerned.
"Haven't tasted a 'tater in months, " Hakeswill said wistfully.
"Christian food, that, see? Makes us white."
"Yes, sahib."
"And I won't be sahib, will I? Your highness, that's what I'll be. Your bleeding highness with a bedful of bare bibb is His face twitched as a bright idea occurred to him.
"I could have Sharpie as a servant.
Cut off his goo lies first, though. Snip snip." He bounded enthusiastically up a stone staircase, oblivious of the sound of gunfire that had erupted in the ravine just north of the Inner Fort. Two Arab guards moved to bar the way, but Hakeswill shouted at them.
"Off to the walls, you scum! No more shirking! You ain't guarding the royal pisspot any longer, but has to be soldiers. So piss off!»
The Havildar ordered the two men away and, though they were reluctant to abandon their post, they were overawed by the number of bayonets that faced them. So, just like the guards who had stood at the garden gate, they fled.
"So now we look for the little fat man, " Hakeswill said, 'and give him a bloodletting."
"We must hurry, sahib, " the Havildar said, glancing back at the wall above the ravine where the gunners were suddenly at work.
"God's work can't be hurried, " Hakeswill answered, pulling at one of the latticed doors that led into the palace, 'and Colonel Dodd will die of old age on that wall, sonny. Ain't a man alive who can get through that gate, and certainly not a pack of bleeding Scotchmen. Bugger this door."
He raised his right foot and battered down the locked lattice with his boot.
Hakeswill had expected a palace dripping with gold, festooned with silk and paved with polished marble, but Gawilghur had only ever been a summer refuge, and Berar had never been as wealthy as other Indian states, and so the floors were common stone, the walls were painted in lime wash and the curtains were of cotton. Some fine furniture of ebony inlaid with ivory stood in the hallway, but Hakeswill had no eye for such chairs, only for jewels, and he saw none. Two bronze jars and an iron cuspidor stood by the walls where lizards waited motionless, while a brass poker, tongs and fire shovel, cast in Birmingham, mounted on a stand and long bereft of any hearth, had pride of place in a niche. The hallway had no guards, indeed no one was in sight and the palace seemed silent except for a faint sound of choking and moaning that came from a curtained doorway at the far end of the hall. The noise of the guns was muffled. Hakeswill hefted his sword and edged towards the curtain.
His men followed slowly, bayonets ready, eyes peering into every shadow.
Hakeswill swept the curtain aside with the blade, and gasped.
The Killadar, with a tulwar slung at his side and a small round shield strapped to his left arm, stared at Hakeswill above the bodies of his wives, concubines and daughters. Eighteen women were on the floor.
Most were motionless, but some still writhed as the slow pain of the poison worked its horrors. The Killadar was in tears.
"I could not leave them for the English, " he said.
"What did he say?" Hakeswill demanded.
"He preferred they should die than be dishonoured, " the Havildar translated.
"Bleeding hell, " Hakeswill commented. He stepped down into the sunken floor where the women lay. The dead had greenish dribbles coming from their mouths and their glassy eyes stared up at the lotuses painted on the ceiling, while the living jerked spasmodically. The cups from which they had drunk the poison lay on the tiled floor.