Sharpe's Fortress Part 39

"Elliott!" Major Simons, who commanded the half-battalion of sepoys who guarded the pioneers building the road, called in alarm.

"I haven't reconnoitred beyond the small hillock! The one with the two trees."

"Can't wait for your fellows to wake up, Simons. Got a road to build in a week. Can't be done, of course, but we must look willing. Pinckney! I need a havildar and some stout fellows to carry pegs. Tell 'em to follow me."

Captain Pinckney, the officer in charge of the East India Company pioneers, spat onto the verge.

"Waste of b.l.o.o.d.y time."

"What is?" Sharpe asked.

"Pegging out the route! We follow the footpath, of course. b.l.o.o.d.y natives have been scurrying up and down these hills for centuries." He turned and shouted at a havildar to organize a party to follow Elliott up the hill, then set the rest of his men to loading the oxen's panniers with small stones.

The road made good progress, despite Elliott's misgivings, and three days after they had begun the pioneers cleared a s.p.a.ce among the trees to establish a makeshift artillery park where the siege guns could wait while the rest of the road was forged. Sharpe was busy and, because of that, happy. He liked Simons and Pinckney, and even Elliott proved affable. The Major had taken Wellesley's demands that the road be made in a week as a challenge, and he pressed the pioneers hard.

The enemy seemed to be asleep. Elliott would ride far ahead to reconnoitre the route and never once saw a Mahratta.

"Stupid fools," Elliott said one night beside the fire, 'they could hold us here for months!"

"You still shouldn't ride so far ahead of my picquets," Simons reproved the Major.

"Stop fussing, man," Elliott said, and next morning, as usual, he rode out in front to survey the day's work.

Sharpe was again bringing stones up the road that morning. He was walking at the head of his ox train on the wooded stretch above the newly made artillery park. The day's heat was growing and there was little wind in the thick woods of teak and cork trees that covered the low hills. Groups of pioneers felled trees where they might obstruct a gun carriage's progress, and here and there Sharpe saw a whitewashed peg showing where Elliott had marked the track. Shots sounded ahead, but Sharpe took no notice. The upland valleys had become a favourite hunting ground for the shikarees who used nets, snares and ancient matchlocks to kill hares, wild pigs, deer, quail and partridge that they sold to the officers, and Sharpe a.s.sumed a party of the hunters was close to the track, but after a few seconds the firing intensified. The musketry was m.u.f.fled by the thick leaves, but for a moment the sound was constant, almost at battle pitch, before, as suddenly as it had erupted, it stopped.

His bullock drivers had halted, made nervous by the firing.

"Come on!" Sharpe encouraged them. None of them spoke English, and Sharpe had no idea which language they did speak, but they were good-natured men, eager to please, and they prodded their heavily laden bullocks onwards. Ahmed had unslung his musket and was peering ahead. He suddenly raised the gun to his shoulder, and Sharpe pushed it down before the boy could pull the trigger.

"They're ours," he told the lad.

"Sepoys."

A dozen sepoys hurried back through the trees. Major Simons was with them and, as they came closer, Sharpe saw the men were carrying a makeshift stretcher made from tree branches and jackets.

"It's Elliott."

Simons paused by Sharpe as his men hurried ahead.

"b.l.o.o.d.y fool got a chest wound. He won't live. Stupid man was too far forward. I told him not to get ahead of the picquets." Simons took a ragged red handkerchief from his sleeve and wiped the sweat from his face.

"One less engineer."

Sharpe peered at Elliott who was blessedly unconscious. His face had gone pale, and pinkish blood was bubbling at his lips with every laboured breath.

"He won't last the day," Simons said brutally, 'but I suppose we should get him back to the surgeons."

"Where are the enemy?" Sharpe asked.

"They ran," Simons said.

"Half a dozen of the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds were waiting in ambush. They shot Elliott, took his weapons, but ran off when they saw us."

Three shikarees died that afternoon, ambushed in the high woods, and that night, when the road-builders camped in one of the gra.s.sy upland valleys, some shots were fired from a neighbouring wood. The bullets hissed overhead, but none found a target. The picquets blazed back until a havildar shouted at them to hold their fire. Captain Pinck-they shook his head.

"I thought it was too good to last," he said gloomily.

"It'll be slow work now." He poked the fire around which a half-dozen officers were sitting.

Major Simons grinned.

"If I was the enemy," he said, "I'd attack Mister Sharpe's oxen instead of attacking engineers. If they cut our supply line they'd do some real damage."

"There's no point in shooting engineers," Pinckney agreed.

"We don't need Royal Engineers anyway. We've been making roads for years. The fellows in the blue coats just get in the way. Mind you, they'll still send us another."

"If there are any left," Sharpe said. The campaign had been fatal for the engineers. Two had died blowing up the enemy guns at a.s.saye, another three were fevered and now Elliott was either dying or already dead.

"They'll find one," Pinckney grumbled.

"If there's something the

King's army doesn't need then you can be sure they've got a healthy supply of it."

"The Company army's better?" Sharpe asked.

"It is," Major Simons said.

"We work for a sterner master than you, Sharpe. It's called book-keeping. You fight for victories, we fight for profits. Leadenhall Street won't pay for fancy engineers in blue coats, not when they can hire plain men like us at half the cost."

"They could afford me," Sharpe said.

"Cheap as they come, I am."

Next morning Simons threw a strong picquet line ahead of the work parties, but no Mahrattas opposed the pioneers who were now widening the track where it twisted up a bare and steep slope that was littered with rocks. The track was ancient, worn into the hills by generations of travellers, but it had never been used by wagons, let alone by heavy guns. Merchants who wanted to carry their goods up the escarpment had used the road leading directly to the fortress's Southern Gate, while this track, which looped miles to the east of Gawilghur, was little more than a series of paths connecting the upland valleys where small farms had been hacked from the jungle. It was supposed to be tiger country, but Sharpe saw none of the beasts. At dawn he had returned to Deogaum to collect rice for the sepoys, and then spent the next four hours climbing back to where the pioneers were working. He was nervous at first, both of tigers and of an enemy ambush, but the worst he suffered was a series of drenching rainstorms that swept up the mountains.

The rain stopped when he reached the working parties who were driving the road through a small ridge. Pinckney was setting a charge of gunpowder that would loosen the rock and let him cut out a mile of looping track. His servant brought a mug of tea that Sharpe drank sitting on a rock. He stared southwards, watching the veils of grey rain sweep across the plain.

"Did Wellesley say anything about sending a new engineer?" Major Simons asked him.

"I just collected the rice, sir," Sharpe said.

"I didn't see the General."

"I thought you were supposed to be a friend of his?" Simons observed sourly.

"Everyone thinks that," Sharpe said, 'except him and me."