Flashman's Lady

by George MacDonald Fraser

  So let us drink while we have breath

  For there’s no drinking after death

  and carried on solo to the end, goggling like an owl, while Brooke beat the table and cried, good boy. Charlie, sick ’em, pup. The others looked embarrassed, but Brooke rounded on Keppel, badgering him to sing; Keppel didn’t want to, at first, and sat looking annoyed and sheepish, but Brooke worked away at him, full of high spirits, and what else was the chap to do? So he sang “Spanish Ladies”—he sang well, I’m bound to say, in a rolling bass—and by this lime even the tiredest round the table were grinning and joining in the chorus, with Brooke encouraging and keeping time, and watching us like a hawk. He sang “The Arethusa” himself, and even coaxed Paitingi, who gave us a psalm, at which Charlie giggled hysterically, but Keppel joined in like thunder, and then Brooke glanced at me, nodding quietly, so I found myself giving ’em “Drink, Puppy, Drink”, and they stamped and thumped to make the cabin shiver.

  It was a shameful performance—so forced and false it was disgusting, this jolly lunatic putting heart into his men by making ’em sing, and everyone hating it. But they sang, you’ll notice, and me along with ’em, and at the finish Brooke jumps up and cries:

  “Come, that’s none so bad! We’ll have a choir yet. Spy-boats will lead tomorrow—5 a.m. sharp, then Dido’s pinnace, the two cutters, gig. Jolly Bachelor, then the small boats. Dinner at seven, prompt. Good-night, gentlemen!”

  And off he went, leaving us gawking at each other; then Keppel shook his head, smiling, and sighed, and we dispersed, feeling pretty foolish, I dare say. I found myself wondering why they tolerated Brooke and his schoolboy antics, which were patently pathetic; why did they humour him?—for that is what it was. It wasn’t fear, or love, or even respect; I suspect they felt it would somehow be mean to disappoint him, and so they fell in with every folly, whether it was charging a pirate prau in a jolly-boat or singing shanties when they ought to have been nursing their wounds or crawling away to sink into an exhausted sleep. Yes, they did humour him—G-d only knows why. Mind you, mad and dangerous as he was, I’m bound to say he was difficult to refuse, in anything.

  I managed it later that night, though, admittedly not to his face. I was snug under the Jolly Bachelor’s ladder when the pirates came sneaking silently out of the mist in sampans and tried to take us by surprise. They were on the deck and murdering our look-outs before we were any the wiser, and if it hadn’t been that the deck was littered with tacks to catch their bare feet, that would have been the end of the ship, and everyone aboard, including me. As it was, there was the deuce of a scrap in the dark, with Brooke yelling for everyone to pitch in—I burrowed closer into cover myself, clutching my pistol, until the hurroosh had died down, when I scuttled up quickly and blundered about, glaring and letting on that I’d been there all the time. I did yeoman work helping to heave dead pirates overside, and then we stood to until daylight, but they didn’t trouble us again.

  Next day it began to rain like fury, and we set off up the Skrang into a perfect sheet of water which cut visibility almost to nothing and pitted the river like small-shot. All day we toiled slowly into the murk, with the river narrowing until it was a bare furlong wide, and d---l an enemy did we see. I sat sodden in Paitingi’s spy-boat, reduced to the nadir of misery, baling constantly until my whole body cried out with one great ache; by dark I was dropping with fatigue—and then, when we anchored, d--n my skin if we didn’t have to shave and wash and dig out clean duds for Brooke’s dinner-party on the Jolly Bachelor. Looking back. I can’t imagine why I put up with it—I don’t attempt to fathom the minds of the others; they all dressed in their best, soaking wet, and I couldn’t show unwilling, could I? We assembled in the Jolly Bachelor’s cabin, steaming and dripping, and there was the table laid for dinner, silver, glass, and all, with Brooke in his blue swallow-tail and brass buttons, welcoming us like a b----y governor-general, taking wine with Keppel, waving us to our seats, and frowning because the turtle soup was cold.

  I don’t believe this is happening, thinks I; it’s all a terrible nightmare, and Stuart isn’t sitting opposite me in his black broadcloth with his string-cravat tied in a fancy bow, and this ain’t real champagne I’m drinking by the light of reeking slush-lamps, with everyone crowded round the board in the tiny cabin, and they’re not listening breathlessly while I tell ’em about getting Alfred Mynn leg-before at Lord’s. There aren’t any pirates, really, and we’re not miles up some stinking creek in Borneo, drinking the loyal toast with the thunder bellowing outside and the rain gushing down the companion, and Brooke clipping cigars and passing them round while the Malay steward puts the port on the table. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that all round us was a fleet of sampans and spy-boats, loaded with Dyaks and blue-jackets and other assorted savages, and that tomorrow we would be reliving the horror of Patusan all over again; it was all too wild and confused and unreal, and although I must have accounted for a bottle of warm champagne, and about a pint of port. I got up from that table as sober as I sat down.

  It was real enough in the morning, though—the morning of that last dreadful day on the Skrang river. The weather had cleared like magic just before dawn, and the narrow waterway ahead was gleaming brown and oily in the sunlight between its olive walls of jungle. It was deathly hot, and for once the forest was comparatively silent, but there was an excitement through the fleet that you could almost feel beating in waves through the muggy air; it wasn’t only that Brooke had predicted that this would be the last battle—I believe there was a realisation too that if we didn’t reach conclusions with the pirates lurking somewhere ahead, our expedition would come to a halt through sheer exhaustion, and there would be nothing for it but to turn downriver again. It bred a kind of wild desperation in the others; Stuart was shivering with impatience as he dropped beside me into Paitingi’s spy-boat, drawing his pistol and shoving it back in his belt, then doing the same thing over again; even Paitingi, in the bow, was taut as a fiddle-string, snapping at the Lingas and twitching at his red beard. My own condition I leave you to guess.

  Our boy hero, of course, was his usual jaunty self. He was perched in the Jolly Bachelor’s bows as our spy-boat shoved off, straw hat on head, issuing his orders and cracking jokes fit to sicken you.

  “They’re there, old ’un,” cries he to Paitingi. “All right, I dare say you can’t smell ’em, but I can. We’ll fetch up with them by afternoon at latest, probably sooner. So keep a sharp lookout, and don’t get more than a pistol-shot ahead of the second spy, d’you hear?”

  “Aye, aye,” says Paitingi. “I don’t like it. J.B. It’s gey quiet. Suppose they’ve taken to the side-creeks—scattered and hid?”

  “Sulu Queen can’t hide,” calls Brooke. “She’s bound to hold to the mainstream, and that’s going to shoal on her before long. She’s the quarry, mind—take her, and the snake’s head is cut clean off. Here, have a mango.” He threw the fruit to Paitingi. “Never you mind the side-creeks; the instant you sight that steam-brig, up with a blue light and hold your station. We’ll do the rest.”

  Paitingi muttered something about ambush in the narrow water, and Brooke laughed and told him to stop croaking. “Remember the first chap you ever fought against?” cries he. “Well, what’s a parcel of pirates compared to him? Off you go, old lad—and good luck.”

  He waved as we shot away, the paddles skimming us into midstream and up to the first bend, with the other spies lining out in our wake and the Dido’s pinnace and Jolly Bachelor leading the heavier craft behind. I asked Stuart what Brooke had meant about the first chap Paitingi had fought, and he laughed.

  “That was Napoleon. Didn’t you know? Paitingi was in the Turkish army at the Battle of the Pyramids31—weren’t you, gaffer?”

  “Aye,” growls Paitingi. “And got weel beat for my pains. But I tell ye. Stuart. I felt easier that day than I do this.” He fidgeted in the bow, leaning on the carronade to stare upriver under his hand. “There’s something no’ can
ny; I can feel it. Listen.”

  We strained our ears above the swish of the paddles, but except for the cries of birds in the forest, and the hum of the insect clouds close inshore, there was nothing. The river was empty, and by the sound of it the surrounding jungle was, too.

  “Don’t hear anything out o’ the way,” says Stuart.

  “Precisely,” says Paitingi. “No war-gongs—yet we’ve heard them every day for this week past. What ails them?”

  “Dunno,” says Stuart. “But ain’t that a good sign?”

  “Ask me this evening,” says Paitingi. “I hope I’ll be able to tell ye then.”

  His uneasiness infected me like the plague, for I knew he had as good a nose as any fighting-man I’d ever struck, and when such a one starts to twitch, look out. I had lively recollections of Sergeant Hudson sniffing trouble in the bleak emptiness of the Jallalabad road—by G-d, he’d been right, against all the signs, and here was Paitingi on the same tack, cocking his head, frowning, standing up from time to time to scan the impenetrable green, glancing at the sky, tugging his whiskers—it got on my nerves, and Stuart’s, too, yet there wasn’t sight nor smell of trouble as we glided up the silent river in the bright sunshine, slow mile after slow mile, through the brilliant bends and reaches, and always the stream brown and empty as far as we could see ahead. The air was empty and still; the sound of a mugger slipping with its heavy splash off a sandbank had us jumping up, reaching for our pistols; then a bird would screech on the other shore, and we would start round again, sweating cold in that steamy loneliness—I don’t know any place where you feel as naked and exposed as an empty jungle river, with that vast, hostile age-old forest all about you. Just like Lord’s, but no pavilion to run to.

  Paitingi stood it for a couple of hours and then lost patience. He had been using his glass to rake the mouths of the little, overhung side-creeks that we passed every now and then, dim, silent tunnels into the wild; now he glowered back at the second spy-boat, a hundred yards in our wake, and snapped an order to the paddlers to increase their stroke. The spy surged ahead, trembling beneath us; Stuart looked back anxiously at the widening gap.

  “J.B. said not more than a pistol-shot ahead,” says he, and Paitingi rounded on him.

  “If J.B. has his way, we’ll spring the trap wi’ our whole fleet! Then where’ll he be? D’ye think he kens more about handling a spy-boat than I do?”

  “But we’re to hold steady till we come up with the Sulu Queen—”

  “Shaitan take the Sulu Queen! She’s lying up in one o’ these creeks, whatever J.B. likes tae think. They’re not ahead of us. I tell ye—they’re either side! Sit doon, d-n ye!” he snaps at me. “Stuart! Pass the word—port paddles be ready to back water at my signal. Keep the stroke going! We’ll win him a half-mile of water to manœuvre in, if we’re lucky! Steady—and wait for my word!”

  I couldn’t make anything of this, but it was plainly dreadful news. By what he said, we were inside the jaws of the trap already, and the woods full of hidden fiends waiting to pounce, and he was forging ahead to spring the ambush before the rest of our boats got well inside. I sat gagging with fear, staring at that silent wall of leaves, at the eddies swirling round the approaching bend, at Paitingi’s broad back as he crouched over the prow. The river had narrowed sharply in the last mile, to a bare hundred paces or so; the banks were so close I imagined I could see through the nearest trees, into the dark shadows beyond—was there something stirring there, could I hear some awful presence?—the spy-boat was fairly flying round the bend, and behind us the river was empty for a couple of furlongs, we were alone, far ahead—

  “Now!” roars Paitingi, dropping to his knees and clutching the gunwales, and as the port paddlers backed water the spy-boat spun crazily on her heel, her bow rearing clear out of the water so that we had to cling like grim death to avoid being hurled out. For an awful instant she hung suspended at a fearful angle, with the water a good six feet beneath my left elbow, then she came smashing down as though she would plunge to the bottom, wallowed with the water washing over her sides—and we were round and driving downriver, with Paitingi yelling to us to bale for our lives.

  The water was ankle deep as I scooped at it with my hat, dashing it over the side; the paddlers were gasping like leaky engines, the current helping to scud us along at a frightening pace—and then there was a yell from Paitingi, I raised my head to look, and saw a sight that froze me in my seat.

  A hundred yards ahead, downriver, something was moving from the tangle of the bank—a raft, poling slowly out on the bosom of the stream, crowded with men. At the same moment there was a great rending, tearing noise from the jungle on the opposite bank; the forest seemed to be moving slowly outward, and then it detached itself into one huge tree, a mass of tangled green, falling ponderously with a mighty splash to block a third of the stream on our port bow. From the jungle either side came the sudden thunderous boom of war-gongs; behind the first raft another was setting out; there were small canoes sprouting like black fingers from the banks ahead, each loaded with savages—where a moment since the river had been silent and empty it was now vomiting a horde of pirate craft, baying their war-cries, their boats alive with steel and yelling, cruel faces, cutting us off, swarming towards us. There were others on the banks on our beams, archers and blow-pipemen; the whist-whist-whist of shafts came lancing towards us.

  “There—ye see?” roars Paitingi. “Whaur’s your clever J.B. now, Stuart? Sulu Queen, says he! Aye, weel, he’s got clear water tae work in—small thanks to himsel’! These sons o’ Eblis looked to trap a fleet—they’ve got one wee spy-boat!” And he stood up, roaring with laughter and defiance. “Drive for the gap, steersman! On, on! Charge!”

  There are moments in life which defy description—in my black moods they seem to have occurred about once a week, and I have difficulty distinguishing them. The last minutes at Balaclava, the moment when the Welsh broke at Little Hand Rock and the Zulus came bounding over our position, the breaching of Piper’s Fort gate, the neck-or-nothing race for Reno’s Bluff with the Sioux braves running among the shattered rabble of Custer’s Seventh—I’ve stretched my legs in all of those, knowing I was going to die, and being d----d noisy at the prospect. But in Paitingi’s spy-boat running was impossible—so, depressingly, was surrender. I observed those flat, evil faces sweeping down on us behind their glittering lance-heads and kampilans, and decided they weren’t open to discussion; there was nothing for it but to sit and blaze away in panic—and then a red-hot pain shot through my left ribs, and I looked down bewildered to see a sumpitan shaft in my side. Yellow, it was, with a little black tuft of lint on its butt, and I pawed at it, whimpering, until Stuart reached over and wrenched it clear, to my considerable discomfort. I screamed, twisted, and went over the side.

  I dare say it was that that saved me, although I’m blessed if I know how. I took a glance at the official account of the action before I wrote this, and evidently the historian had a similar difficulty in believing that anyone survived our little water-party, for he states flatly that every man-jack of Paitingi’s crew was slaughtered. He notes that they had got too far ahead, were cut off by a sudden ambush of rafts and praus, and by the time Brooke’s fleet had come storming up belatedly to the rescue, Paitingi and his followers had all been killed—there’s a graphic account of twenty boats jammed together in a bloody mêlée, of thousands of pirates yelling on the bank, of the stream running crimson, with headless corpses, wreckage, and capsized craft drifting downstream—but never a word about poor old Flashy struggling half-foundered, dyeing the water with his precious gore, spluttering “Wait, you callous b-----s, I’m sinking!” Quite hurtful, being ignored like that, although I was glad enough of it at the time, when I saw how things were shaping.

  It was. I’ve since gathered, touch and go that Brooke’s whole fleet wasn’t wiped out; indeed, if it hadn’t been for Paitingi’s racing ahead, sacrificing his spy-boat like the gallant idiot he was, the pirates w
ould have jumped the whole expedition together, but as it was, Brooke had time to dress his boats into line and charge in good order. It was a horrid near-run thing, though; Keppel confessed later that when he saw the fighting horde that was waiting for him, “for a moment I was at a loss what steps to take”—and there was one chap, treading water upstream with a hole in his belly and roaring for succour, who shared his sentiments exactly. I was viewing the action from t’other side, so to speak, but it looked just as confused and interesting to me as it did to Keppel. I was busy, of course, holding my wounded guts with one hand and clutching at a piece of wreckage with the other, trying to avoid being run down by boats full of ill-disposed persons with swords, but as I came up for the tenth time. I saw the last seconds of Paitingi’s spy-boat, crashing into the heart of the enemy, its bow-gun exploding to tear a bloody cleft through the crew of a raft.

  Then the pirate wave swept over them; I had a glimpse of Stuart, stuck like a pin-cushion with sumpitan darts, toppling into the water; of a Linga swordsman clearing a space with his kampilan swinging in a shining circle round his head; of another in the water, stabbing fiercely up at the foes above him; of the steersman, on hands and knees on the raft, being hacked literally into bits by a screaming crowd of pirates; of Paitingi, a bristling, red giant, his turban gone, roaring “Allah-il-Allah!” with a pirate swung up in his huge arms—and then there was just the shell of the spy-boat, overturned, in the swirling, bloody water, with the pirate boats surging away from it, turning to meet the distant, unseen enemy downstream.

  I didn’t have time to see any more. The water was roaring in my ears. I could feel my strength ebbing away through the tortured wound in my side, my fingers slipping from their grip on the wreckage, the sky and treetops were spinning slowly overhead, and across the surface of the water something—a boat? a raft?—was racing down on me with a clamour of voices. Air and water were full of the throbbing of war-gongs, and then I was hit a violent blow on the head, something scraped agonisingly over my body, forcing me down, choking with water, my ears pounding, lungs bursting…And then, as old Wild Bill would have said: “Why, boys—I drowned!”32