Hakeswill's face shuddered as the front ten ranks of the company marched twenty paces and halted, leaving the other nine ranks behind. All along the battalion column the companies were similarly dividing, their drill as crisp as though they were back on their Yorkshire parade ground. A quarter-mile off to the 33rd's left another six battalions were going through the same manoeuvre, and performing it with just as much precision. Those six battalions were all native soldiers in the service of the East India Company, though they wore red coats just like the King's men. The six sepoy battalions shook out their colours and Sharpe, seeing the bright flags, looked ahead to where the 33rd's two great regimental banners were being loosed from their leather tubes to the fierce Indian sun. The first, the King's Colour, was a British flag on which the regiment's battle honours were embroidered, while the second was the Regimental Colour and had the 33rd's badge displayed on a scarlet field, the same scarlet as the men's jacket facings. The tasselled silk banners blazed, and the sight of them prompted a sudden cannonade from the ridge. Till now there had only been the one heavy gun firing, but abruptly six other cannon joined the fight. The new guns were smaller and their round shot fell well short of the seven battalions.

Major Shee, the Irishman who commanded the 33rd while its Colonel, Arthur Wellesley, had control of the whole brigade, cantered his horse back, spoke briefly to Morris, then wheeled away towards the head of the column. 'We're going to push the bastards off the ridge!' Morris shouted at the Light Company, then bent his head to light a cigar with a tinderbox. 'Any bastard that turns tail, Sergeant,' Morris went on when his cigar was properly alight, 'will be shot. You hear me?'

'Loud and clear, sir!' Hakeswill shouted. 'Shot, sir! Shot like the coward he is.' He turned and scowled at the two half-companies. 'Shot! And your names posted in your church porch at home as the cowards you are. So fight like Englishmen!'

'Scotsmen,' a voice growled behind Sharpe, but too softly for Hakeswill to hear.

'Irish,' another man said.

'We ain't none of us cowards,' Garrard said more loudly.

Sergeant Green, a decent man, hushed him. 'Quiet, lads. I know you'll do your duty.'

The front of the column was marching now, but the rearmost companies were kept waiting so that the battalion could advance with wide intervals between its twenty half-companies. Sharpe guessed that the scattered formation was intended to reduce any casualties caused by the enemy's bombardment which, because it was still being fired at extreme range, was doing no damage. Behind him, a long way behind, the rest of the allied armies were waiting for the ridge to be cleared. That mass looked like a formidable horde, but Sharpe knew that most of what he saw was the two armies' civilian tail: the chaos of merchants, wives, sutlers and herdsmen who kept the fighting soldiers alive and whose supplies would make the siege of the enemy's capital possible. It needed more than six thousand oxen just to carry the cannonballs for the big siege guns, and all those oxen had to be herded and fed and the herdsmen all travelled with their families who, in turn, needed more oxen to carry their own supplies. Lieutenant Lawford had once remarked that the expedition did not look like an army on the march, but like a great migrating tribe. The vast horde of civilians and animals was encircled by a thin crust of red-coated infantry, most of them Indian sepoys, whose job was to protect the merchants, ammunition and draught animals from the quick-riding, hard-hitting light cavalry of the Tippoo Sultan.

The Tippoo Sultan. The enemy. The tyrant of Mysore and the man who was presumably directing the gunfire on the ridge. The Tippoo ruled Mysore and he was the enemy, but what he was, or why he was an enemy, or whether he was a tyrant, beast or demigod, Sharpe had no idea. Sharpe was here because he was a soldier and it was sufficient that he had been told that the Tippoo Sultan was his enemy and so he waited patiently under the Indian sun that was soaking his lean tall body in sweat.

Captain Morris leaned on his saddle's pommel. He took off his cocked hat and wiped sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief that had been soaked in cologne water. He had been drunk the previous night and his stomach was still churning with pain and wind. If the battalion had not been going into battle he would have galloped away, found a private spot and voided his bowels, but he could hardly do that now in case his men thought it a sign of weakness and so he raised his canteen instead and swallowed some arrack in the hope that the harsh spirit would calm the turmoil in his belly. 'Now, Sergeant!' he called when the company in front had moved sufficiently far ahead.

'Forward half-company!' Hakeswill shouted. 'Forward march! Smartly now!'

Lieutenant Lawford, given supervision of the last half-company of the battalion, waited until Hakeswill's men had marched twenty paces, then nodded at Sergeant Green. 'Forward, Sergeant.'

The redcoats marched with unloaded muskets for the enemy was still a long way off and there was no sign of the Tippoo Sultan's infantry, nor of his feared cavalry. There were only the enemy's guns and, high in the fierce sky, the circling vultures. Sharpe was in the leading rank of the final half-company and Lieutenant Lawford, glancing at him, thought once again what a fine-looking man Sharpe was. There was a confidence in Sharpe's thin, sun-darkened face and hard blue eyes that spoke of an easy competence, and that appearance was a comfort to a young nervous lieutenant advancing towards his first battle. With men like Sharpe, Lawford thought, how could they lose?

Sharpe was ignorant of the Lieutenant's glance and would have laughed had he been told that his very appearance inspired confidence. Sharpe had no conception of how he looked, for he rarely saw a mirror and when he did the reflected image meant nothing, though he did know that the ladies liked him and that he liked them. He knew, too, that he was the tallest man in the Light Company, so tall, indeed, that he should have been in the Grenadier Company that led the battalion's advance, but when he had first joined the regiment, six years before, the commanding officer of the Light Company had insisted on having Sharpe in his ranks. Captain Hughes was dead now, killed by a bowel-loosening flux in Calcutta, but in his time Hughes had prided himself on having the quickest, smartest men in his company, men he could trust to fight alone in the skirmish line, and it had been Hughes's tragedy that he had only ever seen his picked men face an enemy once, and that once had been the misbegotten, fever-ridden expedition to the foggy island off the coast of Flanders where no amount of quick-wittedness by the men could salvage success from the commanding general's stupidity. Now, five years later, on an Indian field, the 33rd again marched towards an enemy, though instead of the enthusiastic and generous Captain Hughes, the Light Company was now commanded by Captain Morris who did not care how clever or quick his men were, only that they gave him no trouble. Which was why he had brought Sergeant Hakeswill into the company. And that was why the tall, good-looking, hard-eyed private called Richard Sharpe was thinking of running.

Except he would not run today. Today there would be a fight and Sharpe was happy at that prospect. A fight meant plunder, what the Indian soldiers called loot, and any man who was thinking of running and striking up life on his own could do with a bit of loot to prime the pump.

The seven battalions marched towards the ridge. They were all in columns of half-companies so that, from a vulture's view, they would have appeared as one hundred and forty small scarlet rectangles spread across a square mile of green country as they advanced steadily towards the waiting line of guns on the enemy-held ridge. The sergeants paced beside the half-companies while the officers either rode or walked ahead. From a distance the red squares looked smart, for the men's red coats were bright scarlet and slashed with white crossbelts, but in truth the troops were filthy and sweating. Their coats were wool, designed for battlefields in Flanders, not India, and the scarlet dye had run in the heavy rains so that the coats were now a pale pink or a dull purple, and all were stained white with dried sweat. Every man in the 33rd wore a leather stock, a cruel high collar that dug into the flesh of his neck, and each man's long hair had been pulled harshly back, greased with candle wax, then twisted about a small sand-filled leather bag that was secured with a strip of black leather so that the hair hung like a club at the nape of the neck. The hair was then powdered white with flour, and though the clubbed and whitened hair looked smart and neat, it was a haven for lice and fleas. The native sepoys of the East India Company were luckier. They did not cake their hair with powder, nor did they wear the heavy trousers of the British troops but instead marched bare-legged. They did not wear the leather stocks either and, even more amazing, there was no flogging in the Indian battalions.