The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  His grin faded to an ugly look. “We’ll see about dat,” he whispered. “Whether I hold it or not … depends, does it not, sorr?”

  He sat back against the bars, glowering truculently, and just then there was a sudden uproar on the bridge, and Brabazon was shouting to me to come and look. Smoke was swirling over the bridge from the nearest battery, but when it cleared I saw that the mandarin and his staff were at the parapet just beneath us, pointing and yelling excitedly, and there, far out on the plain, where visibility ended in a bright haze flecked gold by the morning sun, little figures were moving – hundreds of them, advancing out of the mist towards the Imperial army. They couldn’t be more than a mile away, French infantry in open order, rifles at the trail; their trumpets were sounding through the thunder of the Chinese guns, and as the stone shot kicked up fountains of dust among them they held on steadily, moving directly towards us, the Tricolour standards waving before them.

  “Oh, vive la France!” mutters Brabazon. “Strange little buggers. See ’em strut, though! Stick it, you Frogs!”

  The Chinese horns and gongs were going full blast now, and there was more hullaballoo and racing about on the bridge as lines of British and Indian infantry came into view on the French left flank; in between there was a little line of dust, thrown up by hooves, and above it the twinkling lance-points and the thin slivers of the sabres: Fane’s Horse and the Dragoon Guards, knee to knee. Down beyond the parapet the Chinese gunners were labouring like billy-be-damned; their shot was churning the ground all along the allied line, but still it came on, unhurried and unbroken, and the Chinks were yelling exultantly in their ranks, their banners waving in triumph, for out on the plain could be seen how small was our army, advancing on that mighty mass of Imperials, who outflanked it half a mile on either side. Brabazon was muttering excitedly, speaking my own thought:

  “Oh, run away, you silly Chinamen! You ain’t got a hope!”

  There was a great stir to the Imperial right, and we saw the Tartar horse were advancing, a great mass swinging out to turn the British flank; the Armstrong shells were bursting above them, little flashes of flame and smoke, but they held together well, weathering it as their stride lengthened to a canter, and Brabazon was beating his fist on the bars.

  “My God, do they think Grant’s asleep? He’s been up for hours, you foolish fellows – look! Look there!”

  For suddenly a trumpet was shrilling from the allied line, and like a gate swinging on its hinge our cavalry came drumming out of the centre, sweeping round in a deadly arc, the lances going down and the sabres twinkling as they were advanced; like a great fist they tore into the Tartar flank, scattering them, riding them down; as the enemy cavalry wavered and gave back, with Fane’s and the Dragoons tearing into their heart, there was another blast of trumpets, and Probyn’s riders came charging in to complete the rout. Brabazon was bellowing like a madman, and the two Sikhs were dancing at the bars: “Yah sowar! Sat-sree-akal! Shabash!”

  Suddenly one of the Sikhs yelled and fell back, blood welling from a gash in his thigh. Nolan caught him, swearing in amazement, and then we saw the Bannerman on the bridge beneath us, screaming curses and brandishing a bloody spear. The mandarin’s staff were shaking their fists at the cage, until the crash of an Armstrong shell on the bridge end sent them headlong for cover; another burst on the far parapet, splinters whining everywhere; the Armstrongs had ranged on the Chinese guns’ positions, and through the thunder of the Imperial salvoes we could hear the thumping strains of the “Marseillaise”; there were the dear little Crapauds storming into the Chinese forward positions, with the Armstrong bursts creeping ahead of them; behind the Chink front line it was like an antheap kicked over, and then another shell burst plumb on the summit of the bridge and we were dashed to the floor of the cage.

  When I raised my head Brabazon was back at the bars, staring down in disgust at a bloody palpitating mass on the flags which had been a Bannerman, or possibly two. The ugly mandarin was standing beside it, staring at a bloody gash on his hand, and Brabazon, the eternal oaf, had to sing out:

  “Take that, you villain! That’ll teach you to attack a prisoner!”

  The mandarin looked up. He couldn’t understand the words, but he didn’t need to. I never saw such livid hate in a human face, and I thought we were goners there and then. Then he strode to the cage, gibbering with fury.

  “Fan-qui scum! You see this?” He flourished his bloody hand. “For every wound I take, one of you dies! I’ll send his head back to your gunners, you spawn of the White Whore!” He turned to scream orders to his men, and I thought, oh Jesus, here goes one of us, but it was evidently a promise for the future, for all their response was to line the parapet and blaze away with their jingals at the Frogs, who were still engaged in the forward entrenchments three hundred yards away.

  “What did he say?” Brabazon was demanding. “Sir – what was he shouting at us?”

  None of them understood Chinese, of course. The unwounded Sikh and the little priest were bandaging the wounded man’s leg; Nolan was a yard off, slightly behind me; Brabazon at my side, questioning. And in that moment I had what I still maintain was one of the most brilliant inspirations of my life – and I’ve had one or two.

  Hoaxing Bismarck into a prize-fight, convincing Jefferson Davis that I’d come to fix the lightning-rod, hitting Rudi Starnberg with a bottle of Cherry Heering, hurling Valentina out of the sledge into a snow-drift – all are fragrant leaves to press in the book of memory. But I’m inclined to think Pah-li-chao was my finest hour.

  “What did he say, sir?” cried Brabazon again. I shook my head, shrugging, and spoke just loud enough for Nolan to overhear.

  “Well, someone’s in luck. He’s going to send one of us under a white flag to the Frogs. Try to make terms, I suppose. Well, he can see it’s all up.”

  “Good heavens!” cries Brabazon. “Then we’re saved!”

  “I doubt that,” says I. “Oh, the chap who goes will be all right. But the Frogs won’t parley – I wouldn’t, if I commanded ’em. What, trust these yellow scoundrels? When the game’s all but won? No, the French ain’t such fools. They’ll refuse … and we know what our captors will do then …” I looked him in the eye. “Don’t we?”

  Now, if we’d been a directors’ meeting, no doubt there’d have been questions, and eleventeen holes shot in my specious statement – but prisoners in a cage surrounded by blood-thirsty Chinks don’t reason straight (well, I do, but most don’t). Anyway, I was the bloody colonel, so he swallowed it whole.

  “My God!” says he, and went grey. “But if the French commander knows that five lives are –”

  “He’ll do his duty, my boy. As you or I would.”

  His head came up. “Yes, sir … of course. Who shall go, sir? It ought to be … you.”

  I gave him my wryest Flashy grin and clapped him on the shoulder. “Thanks, my son. But it won’t do. No … I think we’ll leave it to chance, what? Let the Chinks pick the lucky one.”

  He nodded – and behind me I could almost hear Nolan’s ears waving as he took it all in. Brabazon stepped resolutely away from the cage door. I stayed at the bars, studying the mandarin’s health.

  There had been a brief lull in the Armstrong barrage, but now they began again; the Frogs were trying to carry the second line of works, and making heavy weather of it. The jingal-men were firing volleys from the bridge, the ugly mandarin rushing about in the smoke, exhorting ’em to aim low for the honour of old Pekin High School, no doubt. He even jumped on the parapet, waving his sword; you won’t last long, you silly sod, thinks I – sure enough, came a blinding flash that rocked the cage, and when the smoke had cleared, there were half a dozen Manchoos splattered on the marble, and the mandarin leaning on the parapet, clutching his leg and bawling for the ambulance.

  My one fear was that he’d have Brabazon marked down as his victim, but he hadn’t. He was a man of his word, though; he screamed an order, there was a rush of armoured feet,
the cage door was flung open, a Manchoo officer poked his head in, shrieking – and Trooper Nolan, glaring desperately about him, had made good and sure he was closest to the door. The Manchoo officer shouted again, gesturing; Nolan, wearing what I can best describe as a grin of gloating guilt, took a step towards him; Brabazon was standing back, ramrod-straight, while I did my damnedest not to catch the chairman’s eye.

  “Take him!” yells the officer, and two of his minions plunged in and flung Nolan from the cage. The door slammed shut, I sighed and loafed across to it, looking down through the bars at him as he stood gripped by two Bannermen.

  “Be sure and tell ’em about Tang-ku Fort,” says I softly, and he goggled in bewilderment. Then, as they ran him to the parapet, he must have realised what was happening, for he began to struggle and yell, and I staggered back from the door, crying to Brabazon in stricken accents:

  “My God! What are they doing? Why, that lying hound of a mandarin – ah, no, it cannot be!”

  They had forced Nolan to his knees before the wounded mandarin, who left off bellowing long enough to spit in his face; then they hauled him up on to the parapet, and while two gripped his arms and bent him double, a third seized his hair and dragged his head forward. The officer drew his sword, shook back his sleeve, and braced himself.

  “Mother o’ mercy! Oh, Christ, don’t –!”

  The scream ended abruptly – cut off, as you might say, and I sank my face into my hands with a hollow groan, reflecting that who steals my purse may get away with it, but he who filches from me my good name will surely find his tits in the wringer.

  “The filthy butchers!” roars Brabazon. “Oh, the poor fellow! But why, in heaven’s name, when they’d said –”

  “Because that’s the kind of swine John Chinaman is!” I growled. “They lie for the pleasure of it, Brabazon!”

  He gritted his teeth and drew a shuddering breath. “And my last words to him were a rebuke! Did you … did you know him well, sir?”

  “Well enough,” I said. “A rough diamond, but … Here, how are the Frogs getting along?”

  In fact, they were making capital progress, bayonetting away with élan in the second entrenchment, and while the Chinese positions to the right were hidden by smoke, from the sounds of things the British attack was going well. The Imps seemed to be giving back all along the line; hundreds of them were streaming over the bridge, with officers trying to rally them, riding about and howling, but there was only one way the battle could go – the question was, would they slaughter us before we could be rescued? Torn between terror and hope, I reckoned it was odds on our preservation, unless that reckless fool of a mandarin stopped another splinter – in which case we’d better chivvy up the priest, he being well stricken in years and presumably in a state of grace. I looked anxiously for the mandarin, and saw he was being held up by two of his pals while directing operations; but the Armstrongs seemed to have given over for the moment, and clattering up the bridge came a cavalcade of gorgeously-armoured nobles, accompanied by standard-bearers; my heart rose in my throat as I saw that their leader was Sang-kol-in-sen.

  He was reining up, addressing the mandarin, and now the whole gang turned towards the cage, the mandarin pointing and yelling orders. My knees gave under me – hell, were they going to serve us as they’d served Nolan? The Bannermen swarmed in and three of us were hauled out – they left the Sikhs, and in a moment I understood why. For they flung us down on the flags before Sang’s horse, and that ghoulish face was turned on us, pale eyes glaring under the wizard’s helmet, as he demanded to know if any of us spoke Chinese.

  Now, he wasn’t asking that for the purpose of execution, so I hauled myself upright and said I did. He considered me, frowning malevolently, and then snarled:

  “Your name, reptile?”

  “Flashman, colonel on the staff of Lord Elgin. I demand the immediate release of myself and my four companions, as well as –”

  “Silence, foulness!” he screamed, on such a note that his pony reared, and he hammered its head with his mailed glove to quiet it. “Snake! Pig!” He leaned down from the saddle, mouthing like a madman, and struck me across the face. “Open your mouth again and it will be sewn up! Bring him!” He wheeled his mount and clattered away, and I was seized, my wrists bound, and I was flung bodily on to a cart. As it rolled away I had one glimpse of Brabazon looking after me, and the little priest, head bowed, telling his beads. I never saw them again. No one did.34

  This may seem an odd time to mention it, but my entry to Pekin recalls a conversation which I had a couple of years ago with the eminent wiseacre and playwright, George B. Shaw (as I call him, to his intense annoyance, though it don’t rile him as much as “Bloomsbury Bernie”). I was advising him on pistol-play for a frightful pantomime he was writing about a lynching in a Kansas cow-town35; discussing hangings set him off on the subject of pain in general, and he advanced the fatuous opinion that mental anguish was worse than physical. When I could get a word in, I asked him if spiritual torment had ever made him vomit; he allowed it hadn’t, so I told him what my Apache wife had done to Ilario the scalp-hunter, and had the satisfaction of watching our leading dramatist bolting for the lavatory with his handkerchief to his mouth. (Of course, I didn’t get the better of him; as he said later, it was the thought that had made him spew, not pain itself. The hell with him.)

  I reflect on this only because the most prolonged pain I ever endured – and I’ve been shot, stabbed, hung by the heels, flogged, half-drowned, and even stretched on the rack – was on the road into Pekin. All they did was tie my hands and feet – and pour water on my bonds; then they hauled my wrists up behind me and tied ’em to a spar above the cart, and set off at a slow trot. The blazing sun and the bouncing cart did the rest; I’ll not describe it, because I can’t, save to say that the fiery agony in wrists and ankles spreads through every nerve of your body until you’re a living mass of pain, which will eventually drive you mad. Luckily, Pekin is only eleven miles from Tang-chao.

  I don’t remember much except the pain – long rows of suburbs, yellow faces jeering and spitting into the cart, a towering redoubt of purple stone topped by crenellated turrets (the Anting Gate), foul narrow streets, a blue-covered carriage with the driver sitting on the shaft – he called to his passengers to look, and I was aware of two cold, lovely female faces regarding me without expression as I half-hung, whimpering, in my bonds. They weren’t shocked, or pitying, or amused, or even curious; merely indifferent, and in my agony I felt such a blazing rage of hatred that I was almost exalted by it – and now I can say, arrant coward that I am, that at least I understand how martyrs bear their tortures: they may have faith, and hope, and all the rest of it, but greater than these is blind, unquenchable red anger. It sustained me, I know – the will to endure and survive and make those ice-faced bitches howl for mercy.

  It must have cleared my mind, for I remember distinctly coloured pagoda roofs bigger than I’d ever seen, and a teahouse with dragons’ heads above its eaves, and the great scarlet Gate of Valour into the Imperial City – for Pekin, you must know, is many cities within each other, and innermost of all is the Forbidden City, the Paradise, the Great Within, girded by gleaming yellow walls and entered by the Gate of Supreme Harmony.

  There are palaces for seven hundred princes within the Imperial City, but they pale before the Great Within. It is simply not of this world. Like the Summer Palace, outside Pekin, it’s entirely cut off from reality, a dreamland, if you like, where the Emperor and his creatures live out a great play in their stately halls and gorgeous gardens, and all that matters is formality and finger-nails and fornication. Nothing is seen or heard of the rest of mankind, except what his ministers think fit. There he dwells, remote as a god, sublime not in omniscience but in ignorance, lost to the world. He might as well be in the Athenaeum.

  I saw most of it, later – the Palace of Earthly Repose, for the Emperor’s consort; the Temple of Imperial Ancestors, for sacrifices; the Gate o
f Extensive Peace, a hundred and ten feet high, for kowtowing; the Hall of Intense Mental Exercise, for studying Confucius; the Temple of the Civic Deity – don’t know what that’s for, paying rates, I dare say – and the library, the portrait hall, and even the office of the local rag, the Imperial Gazette, which circulates every day to all the nobles and officials in China. That’s the unreality of the country – they nail thieves’ hands together, and have a daily paper.

  For the moment all I saw was the great gilt copper tower in which incense is kept perpetually burning, filling the city with its sweet, musky odour; and beyond it the holy of holies, the Palace of Heavenly Tranquillity (which it ain’t). I was dragged in through a round doorway, and flung into a great room utterly bare of furniture, where I lay for several hours on a cold marble floor, too sick and sore and parched even to move, or to do anything except groan. I must have slept, for suddenly I was aware of tramping feet, and a door crashing open, and the glare of torches, and the revolting face of Sang-kol-in-sen glaring down at me.

  He was still in full martial fig, brazen breastplate, mailed gloves, spurred greaves, and all, but with a fur-lined robe of green silk over his shoulders. He was bare-headed, so I had the benefit of his bald Mongol skull as well as the obscene little beard on the brutal moon-features. He fetched me a shattering kick and shouted:

  “Get on your knees, louse!”

  I tried to obey, but my limbs were so painful that I pitched over, and received several more kicks before I managed to kneel, croaking for a drink of water. “Silence!” he bawled, and cuffed me left and right, cracking the skin with his brass fingers. I crouched, sobbing, and he laughed at me spitefully. “A soldier, you!” He kicked me again. He didn’t seem to remember me from Tang-ku Fort, not that that was any comfort.

  There were two Manchoo Bannermen flanking the door, and now came two others, bearing an open sedan in which sat Prince I, the skull-faced monster who had raved and shrieked at Parkes at Tang-chao. He looked even more of a spectre in the glare of torchlight, sitting lean and motionless in his shimmering yellow robe, hands on knees – the silver cases on his nails came half-way down his shins. Only his eyes moved, gleaming balefully on me. To complete the comedy trio there was a burly, thick-lipped Manchoo in dragon robes, his fingers heavy with rings, a ruby button in his hat. This, I was to learn, was Sushun, the Assistant Grand Secretary of the Imperial Government, a vulture for corruption and the Emperor’s tutor in vice and debauchery, on which, to judge by his pupil’s condition, he must have been the greatest authority since Caligula. To me, for the moment, he was only another very nasty-looking Manchoo.