Sharpe's Tiger by Bernard Cornwell Page A

He rolled his plaid and tied it onto his saddle’s cantle, then rinsed his mouth with water. His horse, picketed close by, had been saddled all night in case some enemy discovered McCandless and his escort. That escort, six picked men of the 4th Native Cavalry, had needed no orders to be about the day. They grinned a greeting at McCandless, stowed their meager bedding, then made a breakfast out of warm canteen water and a dry cake of ground lentils and rice. McCandless shared the cavalrymen’s meal. He liked a cup of tea in the mornings, but he dared not light a fire for the smoke might attract the pestilential patrols of the Tippoo’s Light Cavalry. “It will be a hot day, sahib,” the Havildar remarked to McCandless.
    â€œThey’re all hot,” McCandless answered. “Haven’t had a cold day since I came here.” He thought for a second, then worked out that it must be Thursday the twenty-eighth of March. It would be cold in Scotland today and, for an indulgent moment, he thought of Lochaber and imagined the snow lying deep in Glen Scaddle and the ice edging the loch’s foreshore, and though he could see the image clearly enough, he could not really imagine what the cold would feellike. He had been away from home too long and now he wondered if he could ever live in Scotland again. He certainly would not live in England, not in Hampshire where his sister lived with her petulant English husband. Harriet kept pressing him to retire to Hampshire, saying that they had no relatives left in Scotland and that her husband had a wee cottage that would suit McCandless’s declining years to perfection, but the Colonel had no taste for a soft, plump, English landscape, nor, indeed, for his soft, plump sister’s company. Harriet’s son, McCandless’s nephew William Lawford, was a decent enough young fellow even if he had forgotten his Scottish ancestry, but young William was now in the army, here in Mysore indeed, which meant that the only relative McCandless liked was close at hand and that circumstance merely strengthened McCandless’s distaste for retiring to Hampshire. But to Scotland? He often dreamed of going back, though whenever the opportunity arose for him to take the Company’s pension and sail to his native land, he always found some unfinished business that kept him in India. Next year, he promised himself, the year of our Lord 1800, would be a good year to go home, though in truth he had promised himself the same thing every year for the last decade.
    The seven men unpicketed the horses and hauled themselves into their worn saddles. The Indian escort was armed with lances, sabres, and pistols, while McCandless carried a claymore, a horse pistol, and a carbine that was holstered on his saddle. He glanced once toward the rising sun to check his direction, then led his men northward. He said nothing, but he needed to give these men no orders. They knew well enough to keep a keen lookout in this dangerous land.
    For this was the kingdom of Mysore, high on the southern Indian plateau, and as far as the horsemen could see the land was under the rule of the Tippoo Sultan. Indeed this was theTippoo’s heartland, a fertile plain rich with villages, fields, and water cisterns; only now, as the British army advanced and the Tippoo’s retreated, the country was being blighted. McCandless could see six pillars of smoke showing where the Tippoo’s cavalry had burned granaries to make sure that the hated British could not find food. The cisterns would all have been poisoned, the livestock driven westward, and every storehouse emptied, thus forcing the armies of Britain and Hyderabad to carry all their own supplies on the cumbersome bullock carts. McCandless guessed that yesterday’s brief and unequal battle had been an attempt by the Tippoo to draw the escorting troops away from the precious baggage onto his infantry, after which he would have released his