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The day of the ceremony dawned clear and bright and with the rest of the Battalion the men of the 33rd’s Light Company gathered, reluctantly at first, then as the full import of what was happening started to dawn on them, with increasing enthusiasm and noise.
Ribald comments flew across what was normally a politely ordered parade ground but on this particular day was sporting an embarrassment of colour and spectacle as every rainmaker, seer and prophet for miles around gathered to dance, and utter portents, and generally entertain the troops to an extent which surely none of them actually intended.
Private Richard Sharpe was, secretly, scared to death of it all. He had observed that there were no animals lined up in readiness for sacrifice and it worried him. There were always sacrifices at some point during these ceremonies. He'd heard all about sacrificial lambs while he was growing up and he had observed that in India goats and chickens seemed to be more usual, but today there were no animals at all.
This was a big ceremony, bigger than any he had seen before, and so Sharpe had gradually come to the conclusion that if there were no animals tied up ready for the blade, today must be about human sacrifice.
He stood silent amongst his chattering companions and watched the holy men wailing and dancing, and he wondered how it would work. Had they already decided who needed to be sacrificed? Had Sir Arthur Wellesley agreed how many they could take from his battalion in order to safeguard the rest of the army? Had he given them names, or would the seers experience some kind of mystic vision in which Sharpe would feature as one unworthy to live?
He’d had a dream last night where he was back in the Foundling Home. Jem Hocking had been standing over him with the birch raised high.
“You have sinned,” he had intoned. “You are a filthy little bastard who doesn’t deserve the fine accommodation and food you are freely given here by the goodwill of the parish. Also it is listed in the book - see, it is all written here,” and at this point he had brandished the huge black ledger he was accustomed to hit the boys with, “that you have stolen, you have had impure thoughts, and you have killed.”
In his dream Sharpe had stuttered in shock and fear but had not managed to explain how he was innocent of charges he barely understood. Yes, he had stolen, he would have died of starvation long before had he not, but - so far at least - he had not killed.
But young though he had been, his dream self had recognised that the day might come when he would have to kill someone who was trying to kill him. This was not prophecy, this was understanding the world that, as a parish orphan, he was forced to live in.
Impure thoughts, though, were a different matter. At the age of 7 or 8 or whatever he had been in the dream - he had been very small, he knew that much - all he knew of ‘impure thoughts’ was that it was something men and women did together and that although they might look as if they were fighting and hurting each other it was generally something that the men, at least, chose to do, and enjoyed.
He’d looked up at Jem Hocking, careful to look away again immediately, and had said breathlessly, “No, sir, no impure thoughts, I promise.”
“Do not presume to argue with me,” Hocking had roared, and he had slashed Sharpe about the legs and back with the birch for what seemed like hours, pausing every now and then to repeat the accusations and demand that Sharpe admit them, but he would not, and he would not, and he would not.
Eventually in a fit of frustrated temper, the dream Hocking, just like the real one, had cocked one huge fist and slammed it into Sharpe’s cheekbone and as he lay on the ground with the world tumbling red and black around him he had heard the words of doom.
“You’ll come to a sorry end one day, you will. Bad blood will out and you will suffer the torments of hell. The evil within you will be found out and you will die, horribly and slowly.”
In Sharpe’s dream Hocking had looked excited by the prospect and he had delivered a mighty kick to Sharpe’s back before strolling off to partake of a fine dinner laid out on a huge table that, in the way of dreams, had somehow appeared on a gilded dais nearby just for him.
Sharpe had woken this morning gasping in fear. He had got himself under control before anyone had noticed, but it seemed to him that this visitation of seers and prophets and all manner of men who claimed to know what no mortal man could possibly know must bring about Jem Hocking’s prediction, and that this was the day Richard Sharpe would die.
Because by now he had stolen - many times, far more than just food to keep himself alive - and he had killed, to keep himself and others alive, and now that he properly understood what impure thoughts were, had to admit to having had plenty of those too, and many vastly enjoyable, if generally hurried and slightly grubby, deeds to go with them.
Now he wondered whether being sacrificed by Indian holy men counted as dying horribly and slowly. The animal sacrifices he had seen so far seemed mainly to involve throat-slashing for the goats and neck-wringing for the chickens, and on the whole he thought he’d prefer the throat-slashing, but he had heard dark tales of men called jettis whose skill was to kill by means that did indeed sound slow and horrible.
The cold, logical part of Sharpe’s mind - the closely drilled and disciplined soldier who could march all day and fight at the end of it, who nearly always obeyed orders and did his best to get along with the rest of the Company - that part of his mind said that it was all nonsense, that the dream last night was just that, a dream, and that Hocking had never said any of those things in real life and was anyway, if there was any justice in the world, surely dead by now.
But the part of his mind that was hungry for knowledge and understanding of the world - the part that had been starved his whole life because orphans and foundlings and cheeky little bastards and useless recruits fleeing the hangman, all of those, didn’t need to know anything except to do as they were told, but his desperately seeking mind didn’t understand having nothing to work with so it created words and pictures and reasoning whether he wanted it to or not - that part of his mind had put it all together and had come up with the firm conclusion that this was the day he must die, to pay for sins that didn’t really seem like sins to him but apparently were, and that these seers and prophets and dancers were the men that would find him out and finish him off.
He stood as still as he could manage although his mind was screaming at him to run, and he wondered if he might step forward before they called him and try begging for forgiveness. But that didn’t sound like something he’d be comfortable with, so he settled for vowing to himself that when they came for him he would not cry, he would not beg, and however scared he became he would not piss himself. He would go to his death with as much dignity as a mere Private could muster.
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