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that men would

    still be dying, ridden down by cavalry and pierced by lances or slashed by sabres, but Dodd

    had got clean away. His men were tired, but they were safe in a dark countryside of millet

    fields, drought-emptied irrigation ditches and scattered villages where dogs barked

    frantically when they caught the scent of the marching column.
    Dodd did not trouble the villagers. He had sufficient food, and earlier in the night

    they had found an irrigation tank that had yielded enough water for men and beasts.
    “Do you know where we are, Jemadar?” he asked.
    “No, sahib.” Gopal grinned, his teeth showing white in the darkness.
    “Nor do I. But I know where we're going.”
    “Where, sahib?”
    “To Gawilghur, Gopal. To Gawilghur.”
    “Then we must march north, sahib.” Gopal pointed to the mountains that showed as a dark

    line against the northern stars.
    “It is there, sahib.”
    Dodd was marching to the fortress that had never known defeat. To the impregnable

    fastness on the cliff. To Gawilghur.
    Dawn came to the millet fields. Ragged-winged birds flopped down beside corpses. The

    smell of death was already rank, and would only grow worse as the sun rose to become a

    furnace in a cloudless sky.
    Bugles called reveille, and the picquets who had guarded the sleeping army around

    Argaum cleared their muskets by loosing off shots. The gunfire startled birds up from

    corpses and made the feasting dogs growl among the human dead.
    Regiments dug graves for their own dead. There were few enough to bury, for no more than

    fifty redcoats had died, but there were hundreds of Mahratta and Arab corpses, and the

    lascars who did the army's fetching and carrying began the task of gathering the

    bodies.
    Some enemies still lived, though barely, and the luckiest of those were despatched with a

    blow of a mattock before their robes were rifled.
    The unlucky were taken to the surgeons' tents.
    The enemy's captured guns were inspected, and a dozen selected as suitable for

    British service. They were all well made, forged in Agra by French-trained gunsmiths, but

    some were the wrong calibre and a few were so overdecorated with writhing gods and

    goddesses that no self-respecting gunner could abide them. The twenty-six rejected

    guns would be double-shot ted and exploded.
    “A dangerous business,” Lieutenant Colonel William Wallace remarked to Sharpe.
    “Indeed, sir.”
    “You saw the accident at Assaye?” Wallace asked. The Colonel took off his cocked hat and

    fanned his face. The hat's white plumes were still stained with blood that had dried black.
    “I heard it, sir. Didn't see it,” Sharpe said. The accident had occurred after the

    battle of Assaye when the enemy's captured cannon were being destroyed and one

    monstrous piece, a great siege gun, had exploded prematurely, killing two

    engineers.
    “Leaves us short of good engineers,” Wallace remarked, 'and we'll need them if we're

    going to Gawilghur."
    “Gawilghur, sir?”
    “A ghastly fortress, Sharpe, quite ghastly.” The Colonel turned and pointed north.
    “Only about twenty miles away, and if the Mahrattas have any sense that's where they'll

    be heading.” Wallace sighed.
    "I've never seen the place, so maybe it isn't as bad as they say, but I remember poor

    McCandless describing it as a brute. A real brute.
    Like Stirling Castle, he said, only much larger and the cliff's twenty times

    higher."
    Sharpe had never seen Stirling Castle, so had no real idea what the Colonel meant. He

    said nothing. He had been idling the morning away when Wallace sent for him, and now he and

    the Colonel were walking through the battle's litter. The Arab boy followed a dozen paces

    behind.
    “Yours, is he?” Wallace asked.
    “Think so, sir. Sort of picked him up yesterday.”
    “You need a servant, don't you? Urquhart tells me you don't have one.”
    So Urquhart had been discussing Sharpe with the Colonel. No good could come of that,