Sahib Khan chimed in again: “So runs the proverb: ‘While the gun-barrel lies in its stock, and the blade is unbroken’. It will be all that is left to us, Yakub.”
Yakub Beg sighed, and then smiled at me. He was one of your spirited rascals who can never be glum for more than a moment. “It may be. If they overrun us, I shall not live to see it; I’ll make young bones somewhere up by Ak Mechet. You understand, Flashman bahadur, we may buy you a little time here, in Syr Daria – no more. Your red soldiers may avenge us, but only God can help us.”
“And He has a habit of choosing the winning side, which will not be ours,” says Kutebar. “Well, I’m overdue for Paradise; may I find it by a short cut and a bloody one.”
Ko Dali’s daughter spoke for the first time, and I was surprised how high and yet husky her voice was – the kind that makes you think of French satin sofas, with the blinds down and purple wall-paper. She was lying prone now, tickling the kitten’s belly and murmuring to it.
“Do you hear them, little tiger, these great strong men? How they enjoy their despair! They reckon the odds, and find them heavy, and since fighting is so much easier than thinking they put the scowl of resignation on the face of stupidity, and swear most horribly.” Her voice whined in grotesque mimicry. “‘By the bowels of Rustum, we shall give them a battle to remember – hand me my scimitar, Gamal, it is in the woodshed. Aye, we shall make such-and-such a slaughter, and if we are all blown to the ends of Eblis – may God protect the valorous! – we shall at least be blown like men. Eyewallah, brothers, it is God’s will; we shall have done our best.’ This is how the wise warriors talk, furry little sister – which is why we women weep and children go hungry. But never fear – when the Russians have killed them all, I shall find myself a great, strong Cossack, and you shall have a lusty Russian torn, and we shall live on oranges and honey and cream forever.”
Yakub Beg just laughed, and silenced Kutebar’s angry growl. “She never said a word that was not worth listening to. Well, Silk One, what must we do to be saved?”
Ko Dali’s daughter rolled the kitten over. “Fight them now, before they have moved, while they have their backs to the sea. Take all your horsemen, suddenly, and scatter them on the beach.”
“Oh, cage the wind, girl!” cries Kutebar. “They have thirty thousand muskets, one-third of them Cossack cavalry. Where can we raise half that number?”
“Send to Buzurg Khan to help you. At need, ask aid from Bokhara.”
“Bokhara is lukewarm,” says Yakub Beg. “They are the last to whom we can turn for help.”
The girl shrugged. “When the Jew grows poor, he looks to his old accounts. Well, then, you must do it alone.”
“How, woman? I have not the gift of human multiplication; they outnumber us.”
“But their ammunition has not yet come – this much we know from your spies at Fort Raim. So the odds are none so great – three to one at most. With such valiant sabres as Kutebar here, the thing should be easy.”
“Devil take your impudence!” cries Kutebar. “I could not assemble ten thousand swords within a week, and by then their powder and cartridge ships will have arrived.”
“Then you should have assembled them before this,” was the tart rejoinder.
“Heaven lighten your understanding, you perverse Chinese bitch! How could I, when I was rotting in jail?”
“That was clever,” says she, “that was sound preparation, indeed. Hey, puss-puss-puss, are they not shrewd, these big strong fellows?”
“If there were a hope of a surprise attack on their camp succeeding, I should have ordered it,” says Yakub Beg. “To stop them here, before their advance has begun …” He looked at me. “That would solve your need as well as ours, Englishman. But I see no way. Their powder ships will arrive in a week, and three days, perhaps four thereafter, they will be moving up Syr Daria. If something is to be done, it must be done soon.”
“Ask her, then,” says Kutebar sarcastically. “Is she not waiting to be asked? To her, it will be easy.”
“If it were easy, even you would have thought of it by now,” says the girl. “Let me think of it instead.” She rose, picking up her cat, stroking it and smiling as she nuzzled it. “Shall we think, little cruelty? And when we have thought, we shall tell them, and they will slap their knees and cry: ‘Mashallah, but how simple! It leaps to the eye! A child could have conceived it.’ And they will smile on us, and perhaps throw us a little jumagi,f or a sweetmeat, for which we shall be humbly thankful. Come, butcher of little mice.”
And without so much as a glance at us, she sauntered off, with those tight white pants stirring provocatively, and Izzat cursing under his breath.
“Ko Dali should have whipped the demons out of that baggage before she grew teeth! But then, what do the Chinese know of education? If she were mine, by death, would I not discipline her?”
“You would not dare, father of wind and grey whiskers,” says Yakub genially. “So let her think – and if nothing comes of it, you may have the laugh of her.”
“A bitter laugh it will be, then,” says Kutebar. “By Shaitan, it will be the last laugh we have.”
Now their discussion had been all very well, no doubt, but it was of no great interest to me whether they got themselves cut up by the Russians now or a month hence. The main thing was to get Flashy on his way to India, and I made bold to raise the subject again. But Yakub Beg disappointed me.
“You shall go, surely, but a few days will make no difference. By then we shall have made a resolve here, and it were best your chiefs in India knew what it was. So they may be the better prepared. In the meantime, Flashman bahadur, blood brother, take your ease among us.”
I couldn’t object to that, and for three days I loafed about, wandering through the camp, observing the great coming and going of couriers, and the arrival each day of fresh bands of horsemen. They were coming in from all parts of the Red Sands, and beyond, from as far as the Black Sands below Khiva, and Zarafshan and the Bokhara border – Uzbeks with their flat yellow faces and scalp-locks, lean, swarthy Tajiks and slit-eyed Mongols, terrible-looking folk with their long swords and bandy legs – until there must have been close on five thousand riders in that valley alone. But when you thought of these wild hordes pitted against artillery and disciplined riflemen, you saw how hopeless the business was; it would take more than the Silk One to think them out of this.
An extraordinary young woman that – weeping passionately over Yakub’s wounds on the night of the rescue, but in council with the men as composed (and bossy) as a Mayfair mama. A walking temptation, too, to a warm-blooded chap like me, so I kept well clear of her in those three days. She might be just the ticket for a wet weekend, but she was also Yakub Beg’s intended – and that apart, I’m bound to confess that there was something about the cut of her shapely little jib that made me just a mite uneasy. I’m wary of strong, clever women, however beddable they may be, and Ko Dali’s daughter was strong and too clever for comfort. As I was to find out to my cost – God, when I think what that Chinese-minded mort got me into!
I spent my time, as I say, loafing, and getting more impatient and edgy by the hour. I wanted to get away for India, and every day that passed brought nearer the moment when those Russian brutes (with Ignatieff well to the fore, no doubt) came pouring up the Syr Daria valley from Fort Raim, guns, Cossacks, foot and all, and spread like a tide over the Khokand country. I wanted to be well away before that happened, bearing the glad tidings to India and reaping the credit; Yakub Beg and his hairy fellows could fight the Russians how they liked, for although I’ll own I’d conceived an affection for him and his Tajiks and Uzbeks, and wished them no harm, it was all one to me how they fared, so long as I was safely out of it. But Yakub still seemed uncertain how to prepare for the fight that was coming; he’d tried his overlord, Buzurg Khan, for help, and got little out of him, and egged on by Kutebar, he was coming round to the Silk One’s notion of one mad slash at the enemy before they had
got under way from Fort Raim with their magazines full. It was a doomed enterprise, of course, but he figured he’d do them more damage on the beach than when they were upcountry on the march; good luck, thinks I, just give me a horse and an escort first, and I’ll bless your enterprise as I wave farewell.
And. it would have fallen out like that, too, but for the infernal ingenuity of that kitten-tickling besom – Kutebar was right: Ko Dali should have whaled the wickedness out of her years ago.
It was the fourth day, and I was lounging in the camp’s little market, improving my Persian by learning the ninety-nine names of God (only the Bactrian camels know the hundredth, which is why they look so deuced superior) from an Astrabad caravan-guard-turned-murderer, when Kutebar came in a great bustle to take me to Yakub Beg at once. I went, thinking no evil, and found him in the pavilion with Sahib Khan and one or two others, squatting round their coffee table. Ko Dali’s daughter was lounging apart, listening and saying nothing, feeding her kitten with sweet jelly. Yakub, whose limbs had mended to the point where he could move with only a little stiffness, was wound up like a fiddle-string with excitement; he was smiling gleefully as he touched my hand in greeting and motioned me to sit.
“News, Flashman bahadur! The Ruski powder boats come tomorrow. They have loaded at Tokmak, the Obrucheff steamer and the Mikhail, and by evening they will be at anchor off Syr Daria’s mouth, with every grain of powder, every cartridge, every pack for the artillery in their holds! The next day their cargoes will be dispersed through the Ruski host, who at the moment have a bare twenty rounds to each musket.” He rubbed his hands joyfully. “You see what it means, angliski? God has put them in our hands – may his name be ever blessed!”
I didn’t see what he was driving at, until Sahib Khan enlightened me.
“If those two powder boats can be destroyed,” says he, “there will be no Ruski army on the Syr Daria this year. They will be a bear without claws.”
“And there will be no advance on India this year, either!” cries Yakub. “What do you say to that, Flashman!”
It was big news, certainly, and their logic was flawless – so far as it went: without their main munitions, the Russians couldn’t march. From my detached point of view, there was only one small question to ask.
“Can you do it?”
He looked at me, grinning, and something in that happy bandit face started the alarms rumbling in my lower innards.
“That you shall tell us,” says he. “Indeed, God has sent you here. Listen, now. What I have told you is sure information; every slave who labours on that beach at Fort Raim, unloading and piling baggage for those Ruski filth, is a man or a woman of our people – so that not a word is spoken in that camp, not a deed done, not a sentry relieves himself, but we know of it. We know to the last peck of rice, to the last horse-shoe, what supplies already lie on that beach, and we know, too, that when the powder-ships anchor off Fort Raim, they will be ringed about with guard-boats, so that not even a fish can swim through. So we cannot hope to mine or burn them by storm or surprise.”
Well, that dished him, it seemed to me, but on he went, happily disposing of another possibility.
“Nor could we hope to drag the lightest of the few poor cannon we have to some place within shot of the ships. What then remains?” He smiled triumphantly and produced from his breast a roll of papers, written in Russian; it looked like a list.
“Did I not say we were well served for spies? This is a manifest of stores and equipment already landed, and lying beneath the awnings and in the sheds. My careful Silk One” – he bowed in her direction – “has had them interpreted, and has found an item of vast interest. It says – now listen, and bless the name of your own people, from whom this gift comes – it says: ‘Twenty stands of British rocket artillery; two hundred boxes of cases.’”
He stopped, staring eagerly at me, and I was aware that they were all waiting expectantly.
“Congreves?” says I. “Well, what –”
“What is the range of such rockets?” asked Yakub Beg.
“Why – about two miles,” I knew a bit about Congreves from my time at Woolwich. “Not accurate at that distance, of course; if you want to make good practice, then half a mile, three-quarters, but –”
“The ships will not be above half a mile from the shore,” says he, softly. “And these rockets, from what I have heard, are fiercely combustible – like Greek fire! If one of them were to strike the upperworks of the steamer, or the wooden hull of the Mikhail –”
“We would have the finest explosion this side of Shaitan’s lowest pit!” exulted Kutebar, thumping the table.
“And then – a Russian army without powder, with cannon that would be so much useless lumber, with soldiers armed for nothing better than a day’s hunting!” cries Yakub. “They will be an army bahla dar!”g
For the life of me, I couldn’t understand all this excitement.
“Forgive me,” says I. “But the Ruskis have these rockets – you don’t. And if you’re thinking of stealing some of ’em, I’m sorry, Yakub, but you’re eating green corn. D’ye know how much a single Congreve rocket-head weighs, without its stick? Thirty-two pounds. And the stick is fifteen feet long – and before you can fire one you have to have the firing-frame, which is solid steel weighing God knows what, with iron half-pipes. Oh, I daresay friend Kutebar here has some pretty thieves in his fighting-tail, but they couldn’t hope to lug this kind of gear out from under the Russians’ noses – not unseen. Dammit, you’d need a mule-train. And if, by some miracle, you did get hold of a frame and rockets, where would you find a firing-point close enough? For that matter, at two miles – maximum range, trained at fifty-five degrees – why, you could blaze away all night and never score a hit!”
I suddenly stopped talking. I’d been expecting to see their faces fall, but Yakub was grinning broader by the second, Kutebar was nodding grimly, even Sahib Khan was smiling.
“What’s the joke, then?” says I. “You can’t do it, you see.”
“We do not need to do it,” says Yakub, looking like a happy crocodile. “Tell me: these things are like great sky-rockets, are they not? How long would it take unskilled men – handless creatures like the ancient Kutebar, for example – to prepare and fire one?”
“To erect the frame? – oh, two minutes, for artillerymen. Ten times as long, probably, for your lot. Adjust the aim, light the fuse, and off she goes – but dammit, what’s the use of this to you?”
“Yallah!” cries he, clapping his hands delightedly. “I should call you saped-pa – white foot, the bringer of good luck and good news, for what you have just told us is the sweetest tidings I have heard this summer.” He reached over and slapped my knee. “Have no fear – we do not intend to steal a rocket, although it was my first thought. But, as you have pointed out, it would be impossible; this much we had realised. But my Silk One, whose mind is like the puzzles of her father’s people, intricately simple, has found a way. Tell him, Kutebar.”
“We cannot beat the Ruskis, even if we launch our whole power, five or six thousand riders, upon their beach camp and Fort Raim,” says the old bandit. “They must drive us back with slaughter in the end. But” – he wagged a finger like an eagle’s talon under my nose – “we can storm their camp by night, in one place, where these feringhi ra-kets are lying – and that is hard by the pier, in a little go-down.h This our people have already told us. It will be a strange thing if, descending out of the night past Fort Raim like a thunderbolt, we cannot hold fifty yards of beach for an hour, facing both ways. And in our midst, we shall set up this ra-ket device, and while our riders hold the enemy at bay, our gunners can launch this fire of Eblis against the Ruski powder ships. They will be in fair range, not half a mile – and in such weather, with timbers as dry as sand, will not one ra-ket striking home be sufficient to burn them to Jehannum?”
“Why – yes, I suppose so – those Congreves burn like hell. But, man,” I protested, “you’ll never get o
ff that beach alive – any of you! They’ll ring your storming party in, and cut it down by inches – there are thirty thousand of them, remember? Even if you do succeed in blowing their ship to kingdom come, you’ll lose – I don’t know, a thousand, two thousand swords doing it.”
“We shall have saved our country, too,” says Yakub Beg, quietly. “And your India, Flashman bahadur. Like enough many will die on that beach – but better to save Khokand for a year, or perhaps even for a generation, and die like men, than see our country trampled by these beasts before the autumn comes.” He paused. “We have counted the odds and the cost, and I ask your advice, as a soldier of experience, not on the matter of holding the beach and fighting off the Ruskis, for that is an affair we know better than you, but only as to these rockets. From what you have told us, I see that it can be done. Silk One” – he turned towards her, smiling and touching his brow – “I salute your woman’s wit – again.”
I looked at her with my skin crawling. She’d schemed up this desperate, doomed nonsense, in which thousands of men were going to be cut up, and there she sat, dusting her kitten’s whiskers. Mind you, I didn’t doubt, when I thought of the thing, that they could bring it off, given decent luck. Five thousand sabres, with the likes of Kutebar roaring about in the dark, could create havoc in that Russian camp, and probably secure a beachhead just long enough for them to turn the Russians’ own rockets on the powder ships. And I knew any fool could lay and fire a Congreve. But afterwards? I thought of the shambles of that beach in the dark – and those rows of gallows outside Fort Raim.
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