Sharpe's Fortress Read Online Free Page A

of the redcoat line. He turned his horse and kicked it to where the Mahratta warlord

    waited under his banners. Dodd forced his horse through the aides until he reached Prince

    Manu Bappoo.
    “Throw everything forward, sahib,” he advised Bappoo, 'now!"
    Manu Bappoo showed no sign of having heard Dodd. The Mahratta commander was a tall and

    lean man with a long, scarred face and a short black beard. He wore yellow robes, had a

    silver helmet with a long horse-tail plume, and carried a drawn sword that he claimed to

    have taken in single combat from a British cavalry officer. Dodd doubted the claim, for

    the sword was of no pattern that he recognized, but he was not willing to challenge

    Bappoo directly on the matter.
    Bappoo was not like most of the Mahratta leaders that Dodd knew.
    Bappoo might be a prince and the younger brother of the cowardly Rajah of Berar, but

    he was also a fighter.
    “Attack now!” Dodd insisted. Much earlier in the day he had advised against fighting

    the British at all, but now it seemed that his advice had been wrong, for the British assault

    had dissolved in panic long before it reached musket range.
    “Attack with everything we've got, sahib,” Dodd urged Bappoo.
    “If I throw everything forward, Colonel Dodd,” Bappoo said in his oddly sibilant

    voice, 'then my guns will have to cease fire. Let the ;
    British walk into the cannon fire, then we shall release the infantry." i Bappoo had

    lost his front teeth to a lance thrust, and hissed his words so that, to Dodd, he sounded like

    a snake. He even looked reptilian.
    Maybe it was his hooded eyes, or perhaps it was just his air of silent menace. But at

    least he could fight. Bappoo's brother, the Rajah of Berar, had fled before the battle at

    Assaye, but Bappoo, who had not been present at Assaye, was no coward. Indeed, he could

    bite like a serpent.
    “The British walked into the cannon fire at Assaye,” Dodd growled, 'and there were fewer

    of them and we had more guns, but still they won."
    Bappoo patted his horse which had shied away from the sound of a nearby cannon. It was a

    big, black Arab stallion, and its saddle was encrusted with silver. Both horse and saddle

    had been gifts from an Arabian sheik whose tribesmen sailed to India to serve in Bappoo's

    own regiment. They were mercenaries from the pitiless desert who called themselves the

    Lions of Allah and they were reckoned to be the most savage regiment in all India. The

    Lions of Allah were arrayed behind Bappoo: a phalanx of dark-faced, white-robed

    warriors armed with muskets and long, curved scimitars.
    “You truly think we should fight them in front of our guns?” Bappoo asked Dodd.
    “Muskets will kill more of them than cannon will,” Dodd said. One of the things he liked

    about Bappoo was that the man was willing to listen to advice.
    "Meet them halfway, sahib, thin the bastards out with musket fire, then pull back to let

    the guns finish them with canister.
    Better still, sahib, put the guns on the flank to rake them."
    “Too late to do that,” Bappoo said.
    “Aye, well. Mebbe.” Dodd sniffed. Why the Indians stubbornly insisted on putting guns

    in front of infantry, he did not know. Daft idea, it was, but they would do it. He kept

    telling them to put their cannon between the regiments, so that the gunners could slant

    their fire across the face of the infantry, but Indian commanders reckoned that the sight

    of guns directly in front heartened their men.
    “But put some infantry out front, sahib,” he urged.
    Bappoo thought about Dodd's proposal. He did not much like the Englishman who was a

    tall, ungainly and sullen man with long yellow teeth and a sarcastic manner, but Bappoo

    suspected his advice was good. The Prince had never fought the British before, but he was

    aware that they were somehow different from the other enemies he had slaughtered on a

    score of battlefields across western India. There was, he understood, a