The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  F: Your majesty, may I make a suggestion? A moment ago you spoke of love and friendship between yourself and our Dedjaz Napier, and I can tell you he’d cry “Amen!” to that with three times three. Well, if you were to send me to him, I could settle things in no time –

  T [suddenly fierce]: And tell him the disposition of my army, and where my great guns are sited, and my mortar Sevastopol! Ah, my friend, you do not deceive me! That is what you would settle! [Swaying drunkenly, yelling with rage.] Was this a thing planned with Masteeat and the Gallas? Were you put into my hand so that you might spy out the nakedness of the land –?

  F [horrified]: Good God, no!

  T: – and shall I cut off your garments to the middle, even to your buttocks, as the Ammonites did to the servants of King David, thinking them spies? [Baring his teeth savagely] Shall I cut off more than your garments … and will you then confess?

  He was absolutely screaming now, this frenzied drunkard who a moment since had been calling me his dearest friend, and babbling of Damocles and pregnant women, and I could only sit petrified, unable even to scramble back because of my fetters, while he shook his fists and threw himself to and fro in his fury. He began to bay like a hound, beating his temples, and then buried his face in his hands as he’d done when he killed the soothsayer, wailing bitterly. I daren’t say a word, waiting and praying to God he’d come out of it into one of his sane moods. At last he raised his head, filled his tej cup, sank the contents at a gulp (Heaven knew how much he had on board, gallons I shouldn’t wonder) – and then, as God’s my witness, he noticed that my cup was empty and hastened to fill it, with mumbled apologies. His eyes were rolling in his head, and tej was dribbling down his chin and on to his naked chest, but he steadied after a moment, regarding me owlishly.

  Theodore: Do you know there is an ancient prophecy that a European ruler will meet a ruler of Habesh, and whether they dispute in combat or not, afterwards a monarch will reign in this country who is greater than any before? That prophecy is about to be fulfilled, but will I be that greatest of kings? Is that to be my destiny?

  F [with confidence]: Not the slightest doubt about it, in my opinion. Who but your majesty, I mean to say –?

  T [doubtfully]: It may be this woman who sends her soldiers against me.

  F: You don’t mean the Queen! Good gracious, your majesty, that shot ain’t even on the table! I can assure you, Sir Robert Napier is under strict orders to withdraw as soon as the captives have been released –

  T: When did the British lion leave its kill untasted? You have eaten half the world, and shall Habesh be spared?

  F: Of course it will, honour bright –

  T [gloomy]: If they spare us it will be because we are not worth the conquest. England laughs at me and derides my poverty. [Pauses] Do they despise me because my skin is black?

  F: Certainly not! We ain’t Yankees! Why, more than half the army that is coming against you is made up of nig—Indian troops, what? Dam’ stout fellas, too –

  T: But few in number! How lowly they value me, that they send a handful of the mighty British power … How many? Twelve thousand came over the sea, but how many now stand above the Bechelo? Ten thousand? No. Five thousand? … Two thousand …?

  The voice was slurred with drink, the thin lips hung slack in the sweating black face, but under half-lowered lids I caught the glint of a watchful eye … or thought I did.

  F: Can’t say, your majesty. Enough, I guess.

  T: If Miriam were to ask you, in ways too dreadful to speak of, would you tell her how many is “enough”? No matter. [Hiccoughs, sinks another quart or so of tej, lowers chin on chest, sighs.] You are my dear friend. I will not permit a hair of your head to be harmed. Let me embrace you. [Lunges forward from sitting position, flings arms round F’s neck, groans and belches, falls asleep.]43

  As before, there was nothing to be done but sit waiting; you don’t wake a mad drunkard even when he’s snoring in your ear; nor do you heave him off. I’d ha’ been there till morning, no doubt, but someone had been eavesdropping, and when the conversation ceased he decided to take a look, cautiously opening the door and popping his head in, a ferrety little cove with a bright eye and a clever smile. He put a finger to his lips, slipped inside, took a look at majesty comatose, nodded, and tapped him smartly on the shoulder. And damned if Theodore’s head didn’t come up like a jack-in-the-box, full and all as he was.

  “It is time to retire, getow,”a says the ferret. “You wish to be abroad at dawn, remember. And you will not wish,” he added, glancing at me, “to keep your guest from his rest.”

  “Man abat?”b cries Theodore, startled. “Ah, it is you, Samuel! Did I call you?” He closed his eyes, blew out his cheeks, and gave me a huge beam. “Oh, my friend, we have talked long and drunk well, have we not? And indeed it is time to part, if not to sleep. Is my queen awake?”

  Samuel hesitated. “The royal lady Tooroo-Wark is on Magdala, getow. With your son Alamayo. But Meshisha is here, and may be –”

  “I asked for my queen – my new queen!” bawls Theodore, suddenly enraged. “Not my bastards! Summon her, my lady Tamagno, that I may present her to my friend … my guest, you say … Go!”

  Samuel vanished, and Theodore calmed down enough to refill our cups. “Tamagno is to be my queen,” says he. “Alamayo, who is my true son and heir, you shall meet tomorrow. I wish to have him educated at a great English school, such as one I have heard of … Harrah?”

  “Harrow? Certainly not, your majesty. Lair of bestial. Parvenus. Rugby’s the place for your lad … and Meshisha, did you say?”

  “Meshisha is a by-blow, gotten in an evil hour,” says he. “A bastard, an idle great fool, but one must employ one’s children, the false get as well as the true. Ah, but here is my true queen that shall be! Tamagno, this is my friend, the Ras Flashman, who brings us comfort from the army of the white queen Victoria, wherefore we do him honour!” He waved a hand wildly in introduction, and the lady and I appraised each other as she rolled in, with Samuel holding the door obsequiously.

  My first thought was why the devil was Theodore even looking at her when he had beauties like Miriam to play with. Madam Tamagno was fat, coarse, and looked what she was: a whore, for while Theodore might talk of making her a queen, in fact she was only his chief concubine. Unlike most Ab women, she painted, and while they tend to conceal their passionate appetites behind demure appearance, this one wore her lust on her sleeve, or rather in her lecherous expression. Someone, I forget who, described her as the most lascivious-looking female he’d ever seen, and recalling the hungry leer with which she surveyed me, I can’t contradict him. She was dressed to match, in the gaudiest silks with a profusion of bangles and necklaces, all tarted up for work, as her first words showed. For when Theodore reached up to fondle her fat paw and slaver it with a drunken kiss, and she’d stripped me in imagination and torn her eyes away, she reproved him playfully for neglecting her while he rioted with foreign prisoners in the cooler. “And I left lonely,” she murmurs.

  No prisoner but a guest, cries he, and staggered to his feet with his trollop and Samuel assisting. But then he seemed to forget about me altogether, for he embraced her with mawkish endearments, pawing and nuzzling, and I dare say would have set about her on the spot if she hadn’t guided him out, bestowing one last wanton smile on me as she went. I was glad to watch her go, for she was seventeen stone of dangerous desire if ever I’d seen it, the sort who don’t care about driving a lover crazy by the way she licks her chops over every new fellow she meets. I’d trouble enough just then without a jealous Theodore running amok; he was like a mine primed to explode, and no way to anticipate him.

  For consider: in short order he’d tried to brain me, had me loaded with chains only to bring me booze and jollity like a boon companion, quoted Scripture like a Scotch elder, raved at me as a spy and conspirator, threatened me with mutilation, babbled nonsense and burst into tears, tried to pump me for military intelligence, wondered
about having me tortured, sworn eternal friendship, collapsed in a drunken stupor, and introduced me to his black gallop.

  Eccentric, eh? I just hoped to God that Napier might get here in time.

  * * *

  a Geta means master, getow supreme master.

  b “Man abat?” lit. “Who’s your father?” seems to have been an Abyssinian catchphrase used as a facetious greeting, not unlike “What’s up?” or “What’s cooking?”

  Chapter 14

  You’ve probably never worn chains, and may be interested to know that they can be a sight easier to put on than to take off. The Ab variety consist of massive links between anklets which are secured with soft iron rivets; once hammered shut, they have to be pried open with a wedge, which likewise has to be hammered with a sledge, and damned unnerving it is to have a grinning blackamoor swinging it down full force, jarring the anklet open, and if he misses his aim you’ll never set that foot on the ground again. Then they slip a leather rope into the anklet, and half a dozen strong men pull it open wide enough to get your foot clear. It takes half an hour and hurts like sin.

  I wore my fetters for less than twenty-four hours. What it was like to wear them for months, and even years, I learned next day, when all the prisoners, not only the Europeans but Ab rebels and the like were brought down from Magdala. After I’d been freed and given a breakfast of bread and tej I was seated under guard on a pile of stones near the red royal tent, and watched the captive procession winding its way slowly across the Islamgee plain, through the little hutted villages to the tents of the camp. They were still some way off when there was a commotion behind me, and here comes Theodore down the hill from Selassie, with his astrologers and courtiers and the ferret Samuel. When he saw me his majesty gave a great halloo of greeting and came striding to me with both hands out, clasping mine as though I were a long-lost brother.

  “My friend, I see you are well!” cries he. “I too am well, and rejoice to see you at liberty! Did you sleep well? Are you refreshed? Let me tell you what I have seen! Your army is crossing the Bechelo, and we have seen elephants descending into the ravine. What does that mean, Ras Flashman?”

  I told him it meant big guns, and he rounded on his followers. “You hear? Did I not tell you, but you doubted me? You know nothing! But the hour is coming when you will learn! Go now, assemble the leaders of the regiments, all officers, and the leaders of sections! I shall address them presently. Now, my friend, let us sit – see, your people are coming from the amba, and will soon be with us. Let us drink to your meeting!”

  For a man who’d been ripe to roll in gutters only a few hours earlier, he was uncommon spry, and in full fig: a cloth-of-gold coat adorned with silks of many colours, and the most extraordinary pants of what looked like tinsel. He was in such cheerful fettle I wondered if he’d been using hasheesh, but from what I learned later he had no indulgences of that kind, no doubt because booze and fornication occupied most of his leisure time. You’d not have thought he was about to be deposed and possibly slain by an invading army, for he was all hospitality, pledging me in tej and summoning sundry of his military big-wigs to make them known to me – Hasani, commandant of Magdala, austere and unsmiling; the portly Damash, whom I already knew; Gabrie, the army commander; Engedda, his chief minister, and several others whose names I disremember. Then I must be shown his artillery park below Selassie, and especially his mighty mortar, Sevastopol, an enormous lump of metal weighing seventy tons and mounted on a wagon with drag-chains which it took five hundred men to pull, he told me proudly. Had I ever seen the like? In truth, I hadn’t, and said so, admiringly, but thinking privately that no one in his right mind would have built such a piece, for at that size it couldn’t be accurate, and what’s the use of a gun that takes all day to position? I reckon his German workmen had simply done what he’d bidden them, and kept their thoughts to themselves.

  “You cannot conceive the labour of bringing this wonder to my amba!” cries he. “You have seen my road, but oh, my friend, if you had witnessed our toil, through rain and storm and mud, across rivers and plains, over mountain and desert, and my faithful people on the point of exhaustion, and myself straining on the ropes as we dragged our great guns onward and ever onward. Never was such a journey – no, not even Napoleon himself could have accomplished it!”

  Oh, sing us a song, do, thinks I – but d’ye know, when I think of that park of artillery, big pieces, and that monstrous beast of a mortar, I have to admit that, mad or not, he was one hell of a sapper and gunner. A hundred miles over hellish country, months on the road with his soldiers marching on their chinstraps and out of food and forage, their strength dwindling by the day, and still he’d kept ’em going by fear and will and example, through hostile country, for with Menelek and Gobayzy in arms, and Masteeat’s Gallas on the lurk, and Napier on his way, Theodore hadn’t a friend to his name on that hellish trek from Debra Tabor.

  “We had to plunder as we went,” he told me, slapping his great mortar proudly, for all the world like some motorist showing off his new machine. “We were like to starve, and the peasant jackals of the villages, who had kissed my feet in the days of my power, hung on the flanks of our army, stinging like mosquitoes when they dared, and cutting the throats of stragglers. So, when we took prisoners,” says he with satisfaction, “we burned them alive. Aye, a long march, and slow … Now, tell me, why does your army march so slowly, and why have they come by the salt plain?”

  I told him that Napier left nothing to chance, and had calculated time and distance and supply to a nicety, and set his pace accordingly; as to his route, across what Theodore called the salt plain, it was the shortest way to Magdala. I weighed every word, you may be sure, for I knew that however amiable he might be just now, the least little thing could turn him into a murderous maniac. I had to force myself to remember that, in the face of his smiles and cheery chat, but ’twasn’t easy. Here he was, in his harlequin coat and glittering pants, sitting at ease on a gun carriage, laughing and sipping tej, all geniality as he turned the talk to every topic under the sun – the range of our rifles, and our courts martial, and did the Queen ever review her troops, and my opinion of the Prussian needle gun, and the probable cost of his boy’s education at an English school, and what difficulties he might face being black and foreign, and was it likely, did I think, that he’d take up with an English girl … it was all so pleasant and normal, hang it, that I wondered was it possible that this portended a peaceful outcome – in effect, a surrender? I daren’t hope; with this demented bugger, there was no knowing.

  And as he talked, his army was falling in on the great plain of Islamgee, rank upon rank, spearmen and swordsmen and riflemen and cavalry by the thousand, white-robed fighters with their banners before them, churning up the dust in rolling clouds, through which appeared presently the Magdala prisoners, plodding wearily to the tent-lines.

  The Europeans were in the van, and a sorry lot they were, like tramps on the look-out for a hen-roost; if you’d seen ’em at your gate you’d have set the dog on them. There were a dozen or so of them, all strangers to me, of course, but I guessed that the two in red coats must be Prideaux of the Bombay Army and Cameron, the consul whose imprisonment had started the whole row. Prideaux was your Compleat Subaltern, tall, fairish, with moustache and whiskers; Cameron was burly and black-bearded and had a crutch under one arm. They, and one or two of the others, walked in the oddest way, lifting their feet high at every step, as though treading through mud or heather. That, I discovered, is what wearing heavy irons for months on end does to you; they’d been relieved of them only a few days ago.

  Leading the group was a chipper little dago with a bristling head of hair and soup-strainer to match, and at his elbow a hulking fellow who was all beard and pouched eyes; they were Rassam and Blanc, and they were the fellows who, with Prideaux, had carried the first request for Cameron’s release to Theodore two years ago, and been promptly jailed themselves. Who the others in the group were I don’
t know, and it don’t matter, for these four were the ones singled out by Theodore for introduction to me. He hailed Rassam effusively, with his usual inquiries about health and happiness and had he slept well, and then took them aback by announcing me with a fine flourish. For of course they all knew me, by name and fame, and shook my hand in turn, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, which I found mighty interesting.

  Rassam didn’t like me – or rather, he didn’t like my presence. You see, he’d been the leader of the pack, on account of being in some sort of political job at Aden, and was their spokesman with Theodore, with whom he was very thick. I don’t say he toadied (and I’d not blame him if he had, with a creature like Theodore), but he was at pains to be busy, very much the Emperor’s confidant, and I guess he feared being cut out by the celebrated Flashy. If that seems odd, well, captivity breeds strange germs in people’s minds, rivalries and enmities flourish, and little things wax great. Of course, he was some kind of Levantine Turk or Bedouin chi-chi, so you’d not have expected him to behave like the British prisoners.

  Prideaux was the youngest, thirty-ish or thereabouts, cool as a trout with an affected lazy look which I guessed concealed a sharp mind and a deal of hard bark; from the way he glanced towards Theodore I knew that captivity hadn’t cracked him. Nor had it done anything to Cameron’s spirit, although it had played havoc with his body; he’d been racked and flogged even worse than the rest, and was a sick man, but he had that dogged, quiet manner which is generally admired, especially by devout Christians. Not my style, but useful in companions in misfortune. Blanc was a sawbones in the Bombay medical service, grave and tough, and respected by the chief men on the amba for his skill in doctoring them and their families.

  Rassam, as I say, wasn’t glad to see me; Prideaux was, and showed it; Blanc was, but didn’t, for demonstration wasn’t his style. Cameron was too used up to do more than acknowledge me, and of course all four wondered what my arrival portended, what news did I have of Napier’s progress, and what, above all, was Theodore about to do.