his musket’s lock and stuffed it into the pocket where he kept the ring Mary had given him. The ring, a plain band of worn silver, had belonged to Sergeant Bickerstaff, Mary’s husband, but the Sergeant was dead now and Green had taken Bickerstaff’s sergeant’s stripes and Sharpe his bed. Mary came from Calcutta. That was no place to run, Sharpe thought. Place was full of redcoats.
Then he forgot any prospect of deserting, for suddenly the landscape ahead was filling with enemy soldiers. A mass of infantry was crossing the northern end of the low ridge and marching down onto the plain. Their uniforms were pale purple, they had wide red hats and, like the British Indian troops, were bare-legged. The flags above the marching men were red and yellow, but the wind was so feeble that the flags hung straight down to obscure whatever device they might have shown. More and more men appeared until Sharpe could not even begin to estimate their numbers.
‘Thirty-third!’ a voice shouted from somewhere ahead. ‘Line to the left!’
‘Line to the left!’ Captain Morris echoed the shout.
‘You heard the officer!’ Sergeant Hakeswill bawled. ‘Line to the left! Smartly now!’
‘On the double!’ Sergeant Green called.
The leading half-company of the 33rd had halted and every other half-company angled to their left and sped their pace, with the final half-company, in which Sharpe marched, having the farthest and fastest to go. The men began to jog, their packs and pouches and bayonet scabbards bumping up and down as they stumbled over the small fields of crops. Like a swinging door, the column, that had been marching directly towards the ridge, was now turning itself into a line that would lie parallel to the ridge and so bar the advance of the enemy infantry.
‘Two files!’ a voice shouted.
‘Two files!’ Captain Morris echoed.
‘You heard the officer!’ Hakeswill shouted. ‘Two files! On the right! Smartly now!’
All the running half-companies now split themselves into two smaller units, each of two ranks and each aligning itself on the unit to its right so that the whole battalion formed a fighting line two ranks deep. As Sharpe ran into position he glanced to his right and saw the drummer boys taking their place behind the regiment’s colours which were guarded by a squad of sergeants armed with long, axe-headed poles.
The Light Company was the last into position. There were a few seconds of shuffling as the men glanced right to check their alignment, then there was stillness and silence except for the corporals fussily closing up the files. In less than a minute, in a marvellous display of drill, the King’s 33rd had deployed from column of march into line of battle so that seven hundred men, arrayed in two long ranks, now faced the enemy.
‘You may load, Major Shee!’ That was Colonel Wellesley’s voice. He had galloped his horse close to where Major Shee brooded under the regiment’s twin flags. The six Indian battalions were still hurrying forward on the left, but the enemy infantry had appeared at the northern end of the ridge and that meant the 33rd was the nearest unit and the one most likely to receive the Tippoo’s assault.
‘Load!’ Captain Morris shouted at Hakeswill.
Sharpe felt suddenly nervous as he dropped the musket from his shoulder to hold it across his body. He fumbled with the musket’s hammer as he pulled it back to the half cock. Sweat stung his eyes. He could hear the enemy drummers.
‘Handle cartridge!’ Sergeant Hakeswill shouted, and each man of the Light Company pulled a cartridge from his belt pouch and bit through the tough waxed paper. They held the bullets in their mouths, tasting the sour salty gunpowder.
‘Prime!’ Seventy-six men trickled a small pinch of powder from the opened cartridges into their muskets’ pans, then closed the locks so that the priming was trapped.
‘Cast about!’ Hakeswill called and seventy-six right hands released their musket stocks so that the weapons’ butts dropped towards the ground. ‘And I’m watching you!’ Hakeswill added. ‘If any of you lilywhite bastards don’t use all his powder, I’ll skin your hides off you and rub salt on your miserable flesh. Do it proper now!’ Some old soldiers advised only using half the powder of a cartridge, letting the rest trickle to the ground so that the musket’s brutal kick would be diminished, but faced by an advancing enemy, no man thought of employing that trick this day. They poured the remainder of their cartridges’ powder down their musket barrels, stuffed the cartridge paper after the powder, then took the balls from their mouths and pushed them into the muzzles. The enemy infantry was two hundred yards away and advancing steadily to the beat of drums and the blare of trumpets. The Tippoo’s guns were still firing, but they had turned their barrels away from the 33rd for fear of hitting their own infantry and were instead aiming at the six Indian regiments that were hurrying to close the gap between themselves and the 33rd.
‘Draw ramrod!’ Hakeswill shouted and Sharpe tugged the ramrod free of the three brass pipes that held it under the musket’s thirty-nine-inch barrel. His mouth was salty with the taste of gunpowder. He was still nervous, not because the enemy was tramping ever closer, but because he had a sudden idiotic idea that he might have forgotten how to load a musket. He twisted the ramrod in the air, then placed the ramrod’s flared tip into the barrel.
‘Ram cartridge!’ Hakeswill snapped. Seventy-six men thrust down, forcing the ball, wadding and powder charge to the bottom of the barrels.
‘Return ramrod!’ Sharpe tugged the ramrod up, listening to it scrape against the barrel, then twirled it about so that its narrow end would slide down into the brass pipes. He let it drop into place.
‘Order arms!’ Captain Morris called and the Light Company, now with loaded muskets, stood to attention with their guns held against their right sides. The enemy was still too far off for a musket to be either accurate or lethal and the long, two-deep line of seven hundred redcoats would wait until their opening volley could do real damage.
‘’Talion!’ Sergeant Major Bywaters’s voice called from the centre of the line. ‘Fix bayonets!’
Sharpe dragged the seventeen-inch blade from its sheath which hung behind his right hip. He slotted the blade over the musket’s muzzle, then locked it in place by twisting its slot onto the lug. Now no enemy could pull the bayonet off the musket. Having the blade mounted made reloading the musket far more difficult, but Sharpe guessed that Colonel Wellesley had decided to shoot one volley and then charge. ‘Going to be a right mucky brawl,’ he said to Tom Garrard.
‘More of them than us,’ Garrard muttered, staring at the enemy. ‘The buggers look steady enough.’
The enemy indeed looked steady. The leading troops had momentarily paused to allow the men behind to catch up, but now, reformed into a solid column, they were readying to advance again. Their ranks and files were ramrod straight. Their officers wore waist sashes and carried highly curved sabres. One of the flags was being waved to and fro and Sharpe could just make out that it showed a golden sun blazoned against a scarlet sky. Vultures swooped lower. The galloper guns, unable to resist the target of the great column of infantry, poured solid shot into its flank, but the Tippoo’s men stoically endured the punishment as their officers made certain that the column was tight packed and ready to deliver its crushing blow on the waiting redcoat line.
Sharpe licked his dry lips. So these, he thought, were the Tippoo’s men. Fine-looking bastards they were, too, and close enough now so that he could see that their tunics were not plain pale purple, but were instead cut from a creamy-white cloth decorated with mauve tiger stripes. Their crossbelts were black and their turbans and waist
