Flashman on the March fp-12 Read online

  I was glad to be shot of the silver, an uncomfortable responsi bility when it was being carried by that troop of thieving black guards; their reluctance to part with their saddle-bags was pitiful to see. In all modesty, I believe that their respect for “Bloody Lance” was what had stopped the villains from trying to filch the odd dollar. It was all tallied out on the paymaster’s table, and since he’d been informed by signal that the rest was coming up, he made out a receipt to be handed over on its arrival. I haven’t had it yet.

  Napier was to meet his princely savage at a place called Mai Dehar, a short day’s ride ahead, so with the Scind ées as escort I set off after tiffin across the valley and past the collection of huts that makes up Attegrat village. There’s a church and a ruined palace, but what takes the eye is the veritable Bluebeard’s castle perched on an eminence high above the valley, a massive keep with four great turrets, at each corner. A sinister sight even in broad day, grim and forbidding behind its curtain wall.

  Our way wound through the hills into a desolation where we began to see all the signs of civil war and spoiling, with villages ruined and abandoned, burned huts, fallow fields, and hardly a living creature except at a distance. The villages still inhabited were all on rising ground, stoutly walled, and on every peak there was a stark adobe tower after the style of the one at Attegrat; some were a good fifty feet high and of five or six storey, built on the lips of precipices, crouched like vultures over the valleys below. A proper simile, for my havildar explained that these were the holds of robber barons who preyed on the countryside, and between them and the slave-raiding Gallas from the south the peasantry had a deuced thin time—it reminded him, he said cheerfully, of home, that blessed frontier where honest chaps lived by pillage and extortion, with only the interfering British Sirkar to mar the idyll. I pointed out that the Sirkar also paid the wages of him and his fellow-thieves when they took a holiday from crime, and he admitted that we had our uses.

  We covered about twenty miles through that waste land, and lay overnight by the well serving the nearby village of Ad Abaga; the wells, being low-lying, are necessarily outside the walls of all the hill communities. I was thankful for my escort of bearded evil faces as we sat round our fire listening to the jackals and the occasional horrid heh-heh of a hyena while we watched the moon rise to silhouette another of those nightmare cliff-castles. I remarked on its ghastly look, and the Scind ée havildar chuckled.

  “The husoor has heard the story of that castle? No? Of the strange Lady of the Fortress who is seen by no one? The tale runs that she is the wife of a robber chief who is a prisoner of the King of Lasta—” he pointed to the distant mountains “—and that she has vowed that the sun shall not shine or the rain fall on her head until he is home again. Others believe she is under a spell, an enchantress bound by some great magician to dwell forever confined and solitary.”

  “A regular Lady of Shalott, eh? And what do the Scind ées think?”

  “Why, that she bribed the King of Lasta to kidnap her man so that she might beguile herself with lusty servitors!” cries he, and his ruffians chortled approval. I quoted Ilderim Khan’s adage: “A Gilzai and a grandmother for scandal!” and they fairly hooted.

  Our way next day lay through more broken country and tumble down remains of raided villages, across a plateau so rough that it was late afternoon before we came up with Napier’s pickets on the crest that overlooks Mai Dehar, a shallow valley cut across by a stream, where John Bull first came face to face with Prester John.

  A momentous meeting and a splendid spectacle, by all accounts, with our stalwart ranks of King’s Own, native cavalry and infantry, and artillery firing salutes from the near side of the stream, while the Tigre army, four thousand strong, suddenly came into view on the far crest, drums thundering as they formed a vast half-moon formation with their monarch in its midst. I say “by all accounts” because I arrived too late to see it, and if you want the colourful details you must refer again to Henty and Stanley or any of the great rabble of correspondents who were on hand. (* This meeting took place on February 25.)

  They’ll tell you how Napier rode to the meeting on an elephant, but had to get off because it scared the Tigre horses, and finally arrived in the royal presence on a charger, which he presented as a gift to King Kussai, along with a rifle, receiving in return a shield, spear, lion tippet, and a white mule. They spent the day in the King’s tent confabbing, and when Kussai remarked that he didn’t care for invaders, much, but would stretch a point if they were Christians, Napier replied diplomatically that he liked all Abs except those who imprisoned our people. Ah, says Kussai, you mean Theodore, an evil son-of-a-bitch who’ll stand deposing, and I’m just the lad to replace him. Alas, says Napier, we ain’t concerned with Ab politics, just our captives, which of course means we shan’t help your competitors either. Can’t say fairer than that, concedes Kussai, carry on through my dominions, give Theodore his gruel and leave the rival claimants to me.

  That was the gist of it, but Henty and Co. will also hold you spellbound with descriptions of the barbaric splendour of tlae Tigre warriors in their velvet mantles, lion-mane robes, shirts all colours of the rainbow, bearing sickle-bladed swords, shields, lances, and a few muskets, their officers in flowing silk head-dresses, Bedouin style, with silver fillets round the forehead, and braided hair and beards. They’ll comment on the noble bearing of young King Kussai in his red-fringed toga and gold gauntlets, mild in speech and manner and not the smartest despot between Cairo and the Cape, perhaps, but amiable to a degree, being in no doubt which side his bread was buttered.

  The proceedings concluded with ceremonial inspections, Napier running the rule over the Tigre army, strapping fellows if primitively armed, and Kussai being treated to a display of foot drill and manoeu vres by our gallant lads; there were those who thought we’d have done better to show the Abs our Armstrong guns and rockets in action, by way of warning, for they seem to have come away from that first encounter convinced that while we’d be invincible on the plain, we’d be no match for their irregulars in the high country.

  All this was over by the time we breasted the slope to the crest where the pickets were stationed, with the sun setting behind them, and here came a young subaltern of the 3rd Native Cavalry, mighty trim in his blue and silver, cantering downhill to meet us. He greeted me by name, explaining that he’d been on the q.v. all day, with instructions to bring me to Napier’s tent as soon as I was sighted—which would have been flattering if I hadn’t, as you know, been leery of generals who can’t wait to see me. With good cause, for…

  “I wonder, Sir Harry, if you’d be good enough to wear this?” says he, holding out a long hooded cloak of the kind the Heavies wore in those days. “And my rissaldar will look after your Scind ées.”

  I looked from the cloak to him and his rissaldar, who was throwing me a salaam and calling my escort to attention, and the tiny doubt that had been stirring at the back of my mind since Speedy had rejoiced at my being “with” the expedition grew sud denly into a dreadful foreboding as he put the cloak into my reluc tant hand.

  “What the devil’s this?” I demanded.

  “If you would please keep it close about you,” says he. “Sir Robert wishes your presence to be known to as few people as poss ible, especially the enem — that is, our Abyssinian friends. There are a number of them moving about our lines, you see… oh, per fectly cordial, merely curious—”

  “And why the hell shouldn’t they see me? I ain’t in purdah!”

  “Sir Robert thinks it best, sir.” He was pink but firm, all of twenty but not to be over-awed even by the famous Flashy. “Indeed, he insists. So, if you wouldn’t mind, sir… the hood will conceal your features, you see.”

  It was ridiculous—alarmingly so, but there was no use to protest. I threw the cloak round my shoulders, drew the hood forward, and followed over the crest and down the slope to our lines already lit by storm lanterns against the gathering dusk. Sure enough, there
were tall Ab warriors, and womenfolk and children, moving among the tents, staring at our fellows and the jawans (* Indian soldiers.) who’d plainly been put on their best behaviour, for they were calling greetings to the Abs, offering them seats by their fires, glad-eyeing the Shoho girls, and letting the chicos play with their equipment. My conductor led the way to a big marquee set apart, with a couple of Dragoons with drawn sabres at the fly, and the gigantic figure of Speedy between them, handing me down and ushering me inside.

  “None o’ the press gang saw him?” My escort assured him they hadn’t. This was too much, and I said so.

  “Of all the dam’ nonsense! Henty’s seen me, hasn’t he? Why shouldn’t the rest of ’em?”

  “Henty’s safe,” says Speedy. “The rest ain’t, least of all the con founded nosey-parker Stanley—you know him, the Chicago wallah. [24] He’d trumpet your arrival to the four winds!”

  “And who’d give a mad clergyman’s fart if he did? Why shouldn’t he? Oh, the blazes with this! Where’s Bob Napier, then? Or has he gone off the deep end too?” I flung off the cloak, and was about to give my disquiet full flow when I realised that my auditors—the escort, Speedy, and a bookish-looking Sapper captain—were glancing apprehensively at the far end of the tent—and there he was, the Bughunter in person, and even in my agitation my first thought was that if ever a played-out veteran needed a long furlough, he did. He’d always looked middling tired, with his down-turned brows and pouchy eyes and drowsy moustache, but now he was old, too, regarding me with a tolerant but weary smile as he rose from behind his table and came forward under the lamp.

  “You must not mind Sir Harry’s John Company manners, gentlemen,” says he. “The first time I heard his voice he was addressing a governor-general of India in the most cavalier terms. You remember the great diamond, twenty years ago, at Kussoor?" (* See Flashman and the Mountain of Light.) And blessed if he wasn’t bright-eyed with memory. “Give me your hand, old comrade, and welcome indeed, for I never was so pleased to see anyone, I can tell you!”

  That was the moment when I knew, beyond all doubt, that the doom had come upon me yet again.

  If you’ve read Tom Brown you may remember a worthy called Crab Jones, of whom Hughes said that he was the coolest fish in Rugby, and if he were tumbled into the moon this minute he’d pick himself up without taking his hands out of his pockets. Bob Napier had always reminded me of Crab, in the Sikh War, the Mutiny, China, and along the frontier: the same sure, unhurried style, the quiet voice, the methodical calm that drove his more excitable subordinates wild. He was also the best engi neer in the army, and the most successful commander of troops I ever knew.

  He was nearing sixty in Abyssinia, and if he looked worn it was no wonder. We’d shared several campaigns, but he’d had the rougher passage every time, thanks to his talent for getting in harm’s way—and out again, usually leaking blood. God knows how many wounds he’d taken; once, I recall, he’d had his field-glasses shot out of his hand, three bullet-holes in his coat, and a slug through his foot—he probably clicked his tongue and frowned that time. Not surprisingly, he was as often sick as well; he’d been in a shocking state, they say, when he licked Tantia Topi in the Mutiny, and according to Colin Campbell there had been “no twa pun o’ him hingin’ straight” when he’d planned the capture of Lucknow. (That means he wasn’t at all well, by the way.) When he wasn’t being all heroic, chasing Sikhs with elephant guns and hammering Pathans on the border, he’d laid half the canals and most of the roads in northern India, from Lahore to the Khyber, and built Darjeeling. Now, on the brink of retirement and pension, they’d handed him the poisoned chalice of Abyssinia… and here he was, welcoming me with that famous smile which everyone remembered, perhaps because it was so out of keeping with the stern, old-fashioned figurehead, asking about my doings, remarking how well I looked, inquiring after Elspeth (whom he’d never met), drumming up sandwiches and beer for my refreshment, observing again what luck it was my turning up like this, and how glad they were of the Maria Theresas.

  Dashed unnerving, so much cordiality from a man who’d never been one of your hearties. In a generation of great captains like Campbell and Rose and Outram, such giants as the Lawrences and Nicholson and Havelock and Harry Smith, to say nothing of fighting madmen like Hope Grant and Rake Hodson, Napier had always been the modest, quiet man on the edge of the party, only occasionally showing a flash of sardonic humour, but always happy to escape to his work and his studies, music and painting and peering at rocks. (* See Appendix II.)

  Since he’d mentioned the dollars, I reminded him tactfully that I’d been homeward bound when I’d allowed Speedicut to press me into the service, and hinted politely that I’d be obliged for a warrant and a trifle of journey money to see me on my way again.

  “See to that, Moore, if you please,” says he to the Sapper, whom he introduced as his secretary and interpreter. “By the way, how many languages do you have, Moore? A dozen? How does that compare with your store… Sir Harry?” He’d been on the brink of calling me “Flashman", being my senior by ten years, and now a general; mere “Harry” would have been beyond him altogether these days, and I made a note not to address him by the old familiar “Bob".

  I said I might scratch by in a dozen, but wasn’t fluent in more than six.

  “One of them being Arabic, I seem to remember,” says Napier, which set me worrying. Why Arabic? He didn’t enlarge, but dis missed Moore and my escort and settled back in his chair, motioning Speedy to take a seat by the table. “Well, this is quite splendid, Sir Harry. I gather from Vienna’s message that you’ve been in Mexico lately. Political indaba (* Affair, business (Swahili).) was it?”

  “Not exactly, sir. Foreign enlistment, you might say.” “I see. So you have no official position just now? On the retired list?” He nodded. “Well, Moore will have your warrant ready in the morning… if you want to use it immediately, that is.” He glanced at Speedy, and Speedy, sitting there in his barbarous finery like the King of the Cannibal Islands, smiled ever so roguish, as though he were in on some jolly secret.

  “I don’t follow, sir… why shouldn’t I use it?” “No reason at all,” says Napier, “except that, knowing your… your knack for adventurous service, shall I call it?… it had occurred to me that you might care to postpone your departure… in a good cause after your own heart?” He ended on a question, and Speedy chuckled, damn him, watching me with the idiot grin of one waiting to see a glad surprise sprung.

  “It is an altogether unofficial thing, and indeed must be strictly secret.” Napier sat forward, instinctively lowering his voice. “You are entirely strange in the country, Sir Harry, and care has been taken that no highland Abyssinian should lay eyes on you, and that your presence here is unknown to all but a few of our own people who can be relied upon. You see, there is a part to be played—a secret and, it may well be, a perilous part, and one that no other man in the Army could even attempt to play.” He paused, his hooded eyes on mine. “A part on which the success or failure of the ex pedition may well depend.” He paused again. “Shall I continue?” At this point, when it was plain that some beastly folly was about to be unveiled, Inner Flashman would gladly have cried: “Not unless you wish to risk seeing a grown man burst into tears and run wailing into the Abyssinian night!” Outer Flashman, poor devil, could only sit sweating nonchalantly, going red in the face with funk and hoping that Napier might construe it as apoplectic rage at the prospect of having my travel arrangements upset. He took stricken silence for assent, and rose, beckoning me to an easel on which was a map of the country—a most odd map in that it had length but little breadth, like the one which I attach to this memoir, and was made up of several photographs glued together, something I had never seen before.

  “You know what’s to do—find Theodore and secure the release of the captives by whatever means. Here are we at Attegrat, and there is Theodore, with his army, on the road from Debra Tabor to Magdala. Between us lie three hundred miles
of country which, as I’ve no doubt our croakers will have told you—” he gave an amused snort “—is an impassable wilderness of unclimbable peaks and bot tomless chasms in which certain disaster awaits if our supply should fail, or hostile tribes bar our way or lay waste the country, or Theodore himself engages us with overwhelming force, or any one of a hundred difficulties arises to bring us to a standstill.”

  He paused to see how I was taking this, and gave one of his little tired sighs.

  “Well, Sir Harry, I can tell you that with your silver to pay our way, we’ll not fail of supply, if we move swiftly. The tribes…” he shrugged “are unpredictable and untrustworthy. Kussai of Tigre has thirty thousand warriors, and Menelek of Shoa and Gobayzy of Lasta each as many, but they will not trouble us unless we show signs of faltering or failure. Kussai offers us passage and assis tance, and all three hope we shall depose Theodore. Then they will scramble for his throne.”

  “They’re mortal scared of him,” put in Speedy. “Menelek besieged Magdala last year, but thought better of it. He and Gobayzy are still in the field with their armies, willing to wound but afraid to strike.” He scratched his beard thoughtfully. “Can’t say I blame Gobayzy. He sent a message of defiance to Theodore last month, and Theodore gave his messenger the slow death—that’s half-cutting off the limbs at knees and elbows, twisting ’em to seal the arteries, and leaving the victim for the wild beasts. I’ve seen it done,” he added, no doubt seeking to cheer me up.

  “Quite so,” says Napier briskly. “It is of a piece with the atrocities he has been inflicting for years past on his southern provinces.” He touched a spot on the map west of Magdala. “Gondar, where he has been repressing rebellion by wholesale slaughter, torturing tens of thousands to death, laying waste the countryside. Debra Tabor, which he has burned and whose inhabitants have suffered indescribable cruelties, crucifixions, mass burnings alive, and the like. He seems to have gone completely mad, for all Abyssinia is in a ferment against him, except for his army, and that is dwindling, we’re told, through constant desertions. At the moment he is leading it back to Magdala, but slowly, because he is carrying his heavy guns and like us is having to build his road as he goes, no doubt with the labour of rebels enslaved in Gondar.”