Flashman on the March fp-12 Read online

  Talk about the female o’ the species if you like—Uliba cried in glee, clapping her hands, fairly revelling in the brute’s anguish, and now she sweetened his last moments with a gesture which I doubt even Ranavalona or the Empress Tsu-hsi or my little Apache charmer Sonsee-array would have thought of—and they knew how to tickle their male victims, I can tell you. She leaned over, jeering down into that glaring agonised face, and with slow deliberation undid the laces of her leather tunic and let it fall, leaving her naked but for a loincloth. She puckered her lips at him in a mockery of kissing, and told me to replace the trapdoor.

  “Slowly, to give him time to think,” murmurs she, so I did as I was told, lowering the door gently; it couldn’t close entirely flush because of the suspending rope, but enough to cut off the horrid sight and sound of that wailing wretch, clinging in terror until pain and cold should loosen his hold. Uliba turned to me, her mouth shaking as if with an ague, and there was a light in her eyes which a lady novelist would certainly have called unholy. She flung her arms round my neck, pulling my face down to hers, gasping what I could only assume were indelicate suggestions, for in her agita tion the poor thing was babbling in Amharic. Let’s make hay while she’s hot, thinks I, and swung her up in my arms, unbreeching myself skilfully with one hand while clasping that lovely trembling flesh with the other, planted her firmly in the saddle to the accom paniment of gratifying squeals, and was making her the happiest of women as we subsided on to the mattress.

  You never can tell, I’ve found, what different women will prefer as a stimulating accompaniment to la galop. I think of dear Lola with her hairbrush, Jeendan and her canes, Mandeville booted and spurred, Cleonie humming French nursery rhymes, and my own dear wife gossiping relentlessly to the last blissful moment and beyond. Each to her taste and God bless her, say I, but going at it like a Simla widow while a former admirer is dying by inches under the bed is not, I think, in the best of taste. Not that I gave a dam; Flashy in ecstatio has no thought to spare for tottering thrones or collapsing empires, let alone beastly rivals collecting their well-deserved rations.

  Speaking of whom, when we’d exhausted our rapture and recov ered sufficiently to raise the trap for a look-see, Yando had gone.

  If you take-a look at my map you’ll see how our road lay, from Ad Abaga south-west to Lake Tana, easy riding for the most part, while over the mountains to eastward Napier’s army was grinding its way through those impossible highlands of huge peaks and deep chasms, carving a road along precipices, round mountain tops, and across rock-strewn plateaux. Horse, foot, guns, mules, and elephants, growing lighter and hungrier by the mile as they abandoned gear and clothing and camp-followers, pressing on desperately beyond hope of return in the race for Magdala, while far to the south Theodore’s dwindling army and motley rabble of prisoners were closing on the capital from Debra Tabor, with fewer miles to travel but hampered by the ponderous artillery dragged in his train, including his mighty mortar “Sevastopol".

  I don’t know which of them, the British general or the mad monarch, deserves the higher marks for leadership and determination and sheer ability in taking an army through and over hellish country, but you could say they were a matched pair and not be far wrong. They reached their goals against all the odds, and Hannibal and Marlborough couldn’t have done better.

  Our immediate concern was to keep well clear of the various forces converging on Magdala, and somehow make our way to Queen Masteeat undetected. “We must ride wide to westward to avoid Gobayzy’s scouts,” says Uliba-Wark. “They will be along the Takazy river from Micara as far south as the Kerissa fork, so we shall go by way of Idaga, and then south over the river past Sokar and Gondar to the lake.” She traced a slim finger through the sand on which she had made a rough map with grass stems and pebbles. “It is a long way about, but there is no other safe path.”

  “This one is safe, is it?” says I, and she laughed.

  “In Habesh, where is safety? Who knows what raiding bands are abroad in Lasta these days, scavenging after the armies? Rebels, outlaws, brigands, slavers—perhaps even the main powers of Menelek and Gobayzy, although I think they will be farther south, in Begemder, watching Theodore and waiting. Somewhere thereabouts we should find Masteeat also, but only when we reach the lake will we have sure word of them. Meanwhile we ride carefully, by secret ways, approaching villages and ambas only when we must.” She swept a hand across the sand, obliterating her map, smiling lazily as she dusted her fingers and sat closer, stroking her cheek against mine. “It will be slow, but we have time… and we know how to beguile it, do we not?”

  Having had her first taste of Flashy only the day before, she was still in honeymoon mood, so we beguiled away there and then, on the riverbank just within the edge of the woodland which she had pointed out to me from the top of her tower. We had slipped out of the citadel in the cold small hours, as she had planned, and she had picked her unerring way down to the valley floor and along the river in the dark to the shelter of the trees. Somewhere along the way we must have passed the remains of Yando spread over the rocks, but she didn’t pause to pay respects, and before daylight we were snug in cover, having breakfast and a flask of tej, considering our route, and enjoying the aforesaid bout of hareem gymnastics, in the course of which we rolled down the bank into the water, not that Uliba seemed to notice, the dear enamoured girl, for she thrashed about in the shallows like a landed trout.

  A happy prelude to our journey, and a prudent one, I always think, for while the old Duke said one should never miss the opportunity of a run-off or a sleep, I say never miss the chance of a rattle, especially when going into mortal danger, for it may be your last, and you don’t want to die a prey to vain regret. Also, it puts you in fettle, and I was in prime trim when we set forward that morning through countryside as fresh and fair as an English spring, along wooded valleys where clear streams bubbled under the sycamores and wild flowers grew by the waters edge – and by afternoon we were pushing our way through fields of waving grass as high as our horses’ heads, and by evening ascending a rocky desert slope towards mountains of fantastic shapes, twisted peaks and ugly cliffs looming over us as night came down. That’s Habesh, elysium fol lowed by Valley of the Shadow, and not improved by the savagery of its inhabitants.

  I’d seen the havoc wreaked by war and foray on the road up from Zoola to Attegrat, and what we encountered on our ride west to Idaga was of a piece: the occasional burned-out village and deserted farm, the carcases of beasts lying in neglected fields, the distant smoke-clouds where raiders had been at work, the peasants still going doggedly about their business but keeping their distance. There were armed guards on the ambas and hill-top communities, and escorts for the water porters carrying their cargoes up from the wells.

  We kept well clear of them all at first, for Uliba was known in the countryside and in the towns of Adowa and Axum not far to our north, and we daren’t risk her being recognised. So the task of buying food and drink along the way fell on Khasim Tamwar, who needs must learn enough elementary Amharic to enable him to ask for woha (water), halib (milk), engard (bread) and quantah (dried meat), while putting on his most charming Hyderabadi smile and proffering the little sticks of salt which are the local small change and the only currency in the country apart from the Maria Theresa dollar—known as the gourshi, and worth five salt sticks. I’ve a gift for languages, as you know, and got a smattering of Amharic in no time. [30] It’s gone now, but I must have become reasonably fluent, because by the end of my Abyssinian odyssey I was conversing with Abs who had no Arabic; even in the first week, with Uliba’s tuition, I had enough to haggle with, for I remember at one farm I got two guinea fowls and a mess of kidmeat for two “salts", which she assured me was well below the going rate.

  She stayed far out of sight with the led-beast whenever I went shopping, and since my foreign garb and eccentric vocabulary seemed to excite no interest, let alone suspicion, I began to think her fear of Yando’s rascals spreading w
ord of our coming might be groundless. She shook her head, and said it would be different beyond the Takazy river. “Theodore will be on the watch for us down yonder, you may be sure. Hereabouts the folk care nothing for him and his policies, and they are used to foreigners far stranger than an Indian horse-coper.”

  She told me that only a couple of years before a Neapolitan lunatic named de Bisson had invaded this region, hoping to found a kingdom; he’d had a rabble of mercenaries, uniformed, bemedalled, and armed to the teeth, and his beauteous wife in the full fig of a Zouave cavalryman, red britches, kepi and all, but the local tribes had given them the rightabout, and he and his gang had been lucky to get out alive, much the worse for wear. He’d tried to sue the Egyptian Government for not supporting him, without success, and retired to the Riviera in disgust.

  “After such a portent, who is going to think twice about a mere wanderer from Hindustan?” says Uliba. “Whatever befalls later, all is well now, so let us be thankful, and travel well together.”

  So we did, but if that ride to the Takazy passed without disaster it was thanks to her woodcraft; she was an even better jancada than Speedy had said, with that strange gift that you get in the half-wild (like Bridger and Carson) of being able to sense a living presence long before she’d seen or heard it. Time and again she turned us aside into cover of rocks or undergrowth where we waited until, sure enough, a few minutes later a camel train or a party of peas ants would heave in view and pass by. And once she saved our hides altogether, detecting the approach of a gang of slave-traders, armed and mounted, lashing along a wretched coffle of women and boys.

  As we lay watching, one of the boys collapsed, and when flogging didn’t revive him, the gang rode on another thirty yards or so, when two of them, laughing and plainly challenging each other, turned in their saddles and used the feebly stirring form for target practice, hurling their lances—and hitting him, too, at that distance. They retrieved their lances from the dying boy’s body, yelling with delight, and galloped after their companions. I was as shocked by their accuracy as by their callousness, but Uliba merely remarked that a Galla warrior could hit any target up to fifty yards with a spear or a knife or even a stone snatched up at random.

  “Those bastards were Gallas?” cries I, astonished. “But they’re your people, ain’t they? Why, they may know where Masteeat’s to be found! Why did you not—”

  “Bid them good day? I thought of it,” says she, “when I recog nised their leader—one of those who speared the boy—as my cousin. But he is an Ambo Galla, a subject of Queen Warkite, and while he and some other of my relatives might well prefer me, or even Masteeat, as monarch of all Galla—for no one loves Warkite, a sour old bitch—still, he is a slave-trader, after all, and I would fetch a splendid price at El Khartoum… and even more,” she added complacently, “at Jibout’ or Zanzibar; the coast buyers have finer discernment than the Soudanis.”

  “Holy smoke! D’you mean he’d sell you—his kinswoman? And a chief’s wife?”

  “He would sell his own mother… and quite probably has. And if I am kin, and half-royal, still, I had the poor taste to wed a Christian. No, he would surely have sold me—and you. A white eunuch would be a novelty in Arabia.”

  I almost fell over. “A white… I ain’t a bloody eunuch!”

  “You would have been if they had seen us. Did you not mark the baubles which decorated their lances? Those were the genitals of prisoners and enemies.”

  A discouraging tidbit of information, you’ll allow, and if I’d seen the remotest chance of a flight to safety, or even known where the hell I was, I might well have turned tail on the spot, Napier or no Napier. But being entirely out of reckoning, I’d no choice but to follow on, trusting to luck and consoling myself that there are worse travelling companions than a long-legged expert savage who’s taken a passionate fancy to you. That’s the best of memory, when terrors and hardships no longer matter, and I can look back and still see her reclining by the stream, dabbling her toes as she anoints those sleek limbs with her cosmetic oil until they gleam like bronze in the firelight, humming softly as she plaits her braids, and lying back smiling with her head on her little wooden pillow, holding out a hand to me.

  But if that first week had its idyllic moments, they ended when we crossed the Takazy and rode south into a new and horrible world. I’ve seen more war-scarred country than I care to remember, from the shattered ruin of the Summer Palace and the corpse-choked waters of the Sutlej to the putrid mud of the Crimea and the scorched highway blazed by Sherman from Atlanta to the sea, but what lay before us now was beyond description. Even the war of the Taipings, the blood iest in human history, which seemed to carpet China with dead in heaps of countless thousands, was no more frightful than the charnel-house that Theodore had made in Lasta and Gondar and Begemder.

  From the river down to Lake Tana is more than a hundred and twenty miles, and I doubt if we saw more than a score of living things in all that distance, bar vultures, hyenas, scorpions, and white ants, or a building whole and standing except for some of the flat-roofed stone houses which the better-off inhabit. Of the normal round thatched homes of the populace, there wasn’t one; every village and farm was a cold charred ruin in a vast graveyard where skeletons human and animal lay in the rubble. The fields and plain had been swept clean of people and their beasts; in the wooded valleys of the high country even the birds seemed to have gone, and we rode in an eerie silence. I dare say there were folk living in Micara and Sokar, small towns to which we gave a wide berth, as we did to the few ambas and adobe forts which showed signs of being occupied. I couldn’t fathom it, for plainly this had been a well-inhabited, pros perous land; where the devil had everyone gone?

  “Most of them are dead,” says Uliba. “This was rebel country, remember, and it is not Theodore’s way to spare any who resist him, man, woman or child. If we have seen none of Gobayzy’s troops it can mean only that they have gone south after Theodore—and doubtless the banditti have gone also, for what is left to steal in Lasta?” We had reined in on the outskirts of yet another ruined village, beside a little walled enclosure filled with a great pile of bones, many of them plainly belonging to infants. I ain’t over-queasy, as you know, but the thought of how they’d come to be there turned my stomach. Uliba viewed them dispassionately.

  “Thus Theodore wins the love of his people. You see now why Habesh rejoices in your British invasion; whether it deleivers your ca ptives or not, it will surely destroy him.”

  Amen to that, thinks I. Until that moment I’d given little enough thought to this monster of an emperor and the atrocities he’d com mitted on his own people. You hear folk like Napier and Speedy talk of them, but it means nothing—and then you see ’em at point-blank, and can’t conceive of such wickedness. Until you come to Gondar, that is, and find yourself contemplating Hell on earth.

  It lay about a hundred miles below the Takazy, and was once the capital of Abyssinia, a metropolis of forty-four churches and a great royal palace, standing on a hill from which there was a magnificent prospect of Lake Tana, forty miles away. For generations it had housed wealthy Muslim merchants and a revered priesthood, a magnet for traders from Egypt and the Soudan and the southern lakes, a city peaceful, flourishing, and rich—which was its undoing. Theodore had taxed it exorbitantly, virtually holding it to ransom, and not unnaturally the city fathers had tended to sympathise with the rebels fleeing the Emperor’s vengeance, and give them shelter.

  This much Uliba told me as we came down towards it on the fifth day after crossing the river; I wondered if it would be safe to venture close to such a busy centre, and she laughed on a bitter note.

  “Over the ridge yonder we shall see great Gondar on its hill,” says she, “and you can see how busy are its folk.”

  We topped the ridge, and sure enough there was a distant rise crowned with buildings, some of ’em imposing adobe and stone structures, so far as I could tell from far off, but the lower slopes were covered in the bu
rned ruins of thousands of the thatched houses of the common folk. There was an odd smell in the air, not the foulness of corruption, but more like an aftermath of decay, musty and stale. There was no sign of life on the hill, or on the plain below it, which was empty save for rows of upright objects that I took at first to be leafless trees, until we rode down to them, and I saw they were great crosses, hundreds of them to the edge of the city. And at the foot of each cross was a little pile of whitened bones, except for a few crosses on which were twisted blackened shapes that had once been human, preserved by some freak of the weather like so many withered mummies.

  I could only sit and stare in disbelief, aware that Uliba was watching me with an expression of amused curiosity, resting easy in her saddle with one foot cocked up on the crupper. I dare say I was a sight to see, open-mouthed and appalled, asking myself such futile questions as what kind of creature could have done such a thing, and when, and above all, in God’s name, why?

  Don’t misunderstand me. As I’ve said, I was inured to mass slaughter, and barbarous cruelty: when you’ve seen the mounds of Taiping dead, or the ghastly harvest of an Apache raid, you don’t gag or faint. But you can be stricken speechless at the sight of a mass carnage that has been conceived and designed and executed with meticulous care—no wild hot-blooded massacre, but a planned methodical operation, with hundreds of timber baulks cut and gath ered and fashioned into crosses, hundreds of victims condemned and marshalled and nailed or bound, hundreds of crucifixes reared and planted by hundreds of executioners, hundreds of tortured voices screaming—and whoever had ordered this must have nodded approval and commended it with a “Well done, men, a good day’s work", as he turned away from the ghastly sight and sounds and rode off to see what cook was preparing for supper.

  Or perhaps he had given orders to crucify the population, and been miles away when his troops did the business.