Flashman on the March fp-12

by George MacDonald Fraser

  I told him, because they took the shilling; the sepoys, for their salt. He said it was a great mystery, and waxed philosophical about the minds and motives of fighting men—sane, sensible chat such as you’d hear in a gathering of civilians, if not from soldiers, who ain’t interested. But the point is, if you’d seen and heard him then, you’d have said here was this intelligent, good-humoured, per fectly normal man of authority, with not an ounce of harm in him. Quite so.

  We came off the Fala saddle just as it began to drizzle, with clouds gathering overhead and the light starting to fade. It was about four in the afternoon, and the armourers who’d been freeing pris oners were packing up their traps and shepherding those who were still chained to some old broken-down stables on the south side of the Islamgee plain, not a furlong from Theodore’s tent and ours. They were to be kept there overnight, and freed next day, the last of the six hundred or so whom Miriam and I had seen being brought down from Magdala two days earlier. About two hundred had been freed yesterday, but only half as many today, most of the armourers having been diverted to the work on Fala. Those still chained and sent to the stables were more than two” hundred in number.

  I’m exact about this so that you can be clear about how things stood on that close, sultry afternoon as I walked with Theodore and his attendants to his pavilion, aware of a slight commotion from the chained prisoners as they were driven towards the stables. I didn’t know, of course, that they’d had no food since they’d left Magdala, and only such water as they’d begged from the soldiers’ camp nearby. Nor did I know that most of them were “political” prisoners who’d offended, often in the most trivial ways—as Miriam said, by laughing when his majesty was in the dumps, and vice versa.

  Impatient at still being in irons with another hungry night ahead of them, they were in no mood to go quietly to the stables, hence the row they were making, but no one paid much heed, least of all Theodore; three o’clock was when he started drinking as a rule, and being an hour late he lost no time in embarking on a splendid spree in his tent, with the tej flowing like buttermilk, and myself expected to go bowl for bowl with him. I couldn’t; the amount he sank in the first hour would have put me on the floor, and he jeered at me for a weakling and summoned “Queen” Tamagno to join us, vowing that she would show me how to drink.

  Which I’m bound to say she did, seating her ponderous bulk beside him and laying into the liquor like a thirsty marine. Theodore applauded and kept her goblet brimmed, kissing and caressing her between his own hearty swigs, murmuring endearments like a lovesick swain, which was sufficiently repellent, but what was truly unnerving was that she never took her eyes off me once. I believe he sensed her interest, for after a while he left off cuddling and told her to leave us, and she heaved up her great jelly of a body in its gaudy silks and went, giving me a last long stare over her fat shoulder. Again, I was damned glad to see her away.

  When she’d gone he drank in silence for some time, pretty moody, eyeing me in a most discomforting way, as though on the point of an outburst, but when it came it was the last thing I might have expected. For he heaved a great sigh, supped some more tej, and exclaimed:

  “My dear friend, do not misjudge me. I truly love you, not you alone but my good friend Mr Rassam, and Mr Prideaux also, although it is difficult to love the Consul Cameron who betrayed me to the Egyptians. But I try.” A longish pause in which he stared at the roof of the tent. “I also love the Dr Blanc, who has healed many of my people. But you I love most of all, for you have shown no fear of me.” Then I’m a sight better actor than I thought I was, thinks I. “I have behaved ill to you, dear friend, but I had an end to serve.” He paused again, looking heavy, and then came the most astonishing declaration I ever heard from this astonishing man.

  “I never used to believe I was mad,” says he, and the tears were rolling down his cheeks. “People said I was mad, but I did not believe it. But after the way I have behaved to you, raising my hand to strike you, putting you in chains, I believe I am mad.” He gave a great retching sigh, wiping his cheeks. “But you will forgive me. As Christians we ought to forgive each other.”

  I cried amen to that in a hurry, assuring him there was nothing to forgive, he’d behaved like a perfect gentleman, and if all kings played such a straight bat the world would be a better place… that was the gist of it, anyway.

  “I try to be a good Christian,” says he, “although some of the priests doubt my devotion. It is the bane of a monarch’s life, in all religions and countries, that his priests are forever at work to gain ascendancy over him. It was so, I have heard, with some of your English kings. My priests, in their insolence, say that I wear three matabs—a Christian one, a Muslim one, and a Frankish one! What folly! I told them: ’You pretend that I wish to change my religion, but it is a lie! I would sooner cut my throat!” And on that he stopped, drank, and raised his head to listen.

  I’d been aware for a few moments of another sound above the faint murmur of the camp, but only now, when he cocked his head, frowning, did I identify it: a distant chant, one word over and over: "Abiet! Abietl", which means “Lord, master” in Amharic, and with it now came a faraway clashing of chains, and Theodore was exclaiming impatiently and calling out to know what was the matter. Samuel came hurrying to explain that the chained prisoners were pleading for water and bread, and knowing his unpredictable majesty I’d not have been surprised if he’d told Samuel to shut them up p.d.q., or ordered him to serve them a hearty supper.

  He did neither. For a moment he sat perfectly still, and then came to his feet without haste, staring from Samuel to me and back again, and then his expression changed, uncannily and quite slowly, from blank to wondering to frowning to growing rage and then to such a glare of demonic malevolence as sent a shudder up my spine. He let out an almighty scream of fury, scrambling over his couch to snatch up his sabre from the table, and swept it from its sheath.

  “Swine! Filth! Treacherous vermin! I shall school them, by the power of God!” He lunged at me, seizing my arm, and dragged me after him. “Come! Oh, come and see how I teach them to squeal for food while my faithful soldiers are starving!” It was news to me that they were starving, but I didn’t mention that. He was bawling for his guards, hauling me out of the pavilion, hurling Samuel out of his path, and rushing on, brandishing his sword. I’d no choice but to run with him, for his grip was like a vice on my arm, and I’d no wish to resist and have him decapitate me.

  “Guards! Guards!” he kept shouting. “Attend me! To the stables!” They came running out of the dusk from the tents, and behind me I heard Rassam’s voice demanding to know what was up, and Samuel begging him to go back to his tent and keep his compan ions under cover. I’d have given a pension to join them, but Theodore urged me on, vowing vengeance on the villains who’d dared to disturb his leisure. There was a squall of rain, I remember, just as we reached the stable buildings near the edge of the Islamgee cliff, and a rumble of thunder overhead.

  “Bring them out!” bawls Theodore. “Let us see these pampered animals! Have them out, I say!” He let go my arm at last, yelling at me out of a face that seemed to have lost all human expression; he was like a demented ape, spraying spittle and gibbering at me. “You’ll see! You’ll see!”

  A guard drew the bar from its sockets and flung open the double doors, and a chained woman, bent double, stumbled out into the half-light. Theodore ran forward, shrieking curses, and brought down the sabre in a sickening cut that fell between neck and shoulder and almost severed the arm. The woman fell screaming, blood spurting up in a fountain, and as a second prisoner blundered out Theodore buried the sabre in his skull. It snapped with the force of the blow and the fellow sank dead with the foible embedded in his brow, leaving the bloody truncheon of the sword in Theodore’s hand. He glared at it, mouthing incoherently, and raised it to slash his next victim… a naked boy of about five who came running out, howling, with his fists screwed into his eyes.

  Stricken horrified
as I was, I thought, that’ll sober him, the beastly lunatic, and indeed he did throw the bloody shard of the sabre away, but he screamed an order at the nearest guard, and the brute seized the child and hurled him wailing over the cliff.

  That was how it began, the horror in the twilight at Islamgee, but it got worse. For with that ghastly infanticide, his mad rage seemed to cool, and I thought that ends it, but I was wrong; he continued his hellish extermination of the prisoners with a calm deliberation that was infinitely more terrible than his murderous fury; killing in a frenzy is at least to be understood, but what can you say of one who, in level tones, inquires of a poor devil his name and offence, and on being answered, almost idly condemns him to be flung to his death?

  That is what Theodore did to two hundred prisoners in the next two hours. As thus:

  “What is your name, and country, and why are you here?”

  “Maryahm, great abiet, of Magdala! I only laughed with my friend Zaudi, your page—”

  “Away with him!”

  So Maryahm was flung down two hundred feet, and a moment later Zaudi followed him, condemned because he’d handed Theodore a musket that had misfired.

  You may think I am inventing horrors to freeze your blood, but look in Blanc and Rassam and you’ll find it’s simple truth. He sat on a rock, like the chairman of governors at a prizegiving, mad as a hatter, and as each unfortunate was dragged out there was the same ritual of question, answer, and execution, with musketeers being sent down the cliff to finish off any survivors. Some went begging and screaming, a few flung defiance at him, others went sheeplike, without protest. Two young lads, I remember, were thrown over because their father had taken liberties with one of the royal concubines, but when the man himself was hauled out, Theodore had him unchained and let go. That was the folly of it; no sense, no logic, no reason, and the lousy bastard didn’t enjoy it, or even care. He just killed them, and I watched, and marvelled, and found myself hoping that Arnold was right, and that there was a Hell for him.

  Blanc says 307 were thrown down, and 91, all rebel chiefs and his deadly enemies, were reserved for slaughter another day. Rassam puts the total of dead at 197, of whom he says only 35 had committed any crime, the rest having broken cups or lost rifles or laughed, like Maryahm, or been the sons of a flirtatious father. I take Rassam’s figure as more likely, but I was too stunned to keep count. I don’t even know why he stopped; probably because he was bored, or it was getting dark. [46]

  He was silent on the way back to his tent, insisting that I join him for a supper which I couldn’t bring myself to eat, but sat mute while he gorged with great appetite and drank himself insensible after an almighty prose about his ancestors and how he’d fight to the death and be worthy of them. “You will see my body,” says he, slurred and bleary-eyed over his last cup, “and say there is a bad man who has injured me. But you will bury me in Christian ground, because you are a friend.” Then he fell off the couch.

  Wiseacres assure me he was in the grip of remorse, or tortured conscience. No such thing. He was a drunken sot as well as a monster, and that’s all about it.

  I left him grunting like a Berkshire hog and made my way through the dark and driving rain to our fine silk tent, and there wasn’t a soul within. I demanded of the sentry where they were, and he gave a shifty grin and said they had been moved, by order, to one of the smaller tents. I asked by whose order, and he grinned shiftier yet, and said I might have the place to myself. I was used up and shaking with the hellishness of what I’d seen, so I rolled inside, half-undressed, blew out the lamp and collapsed on my charpoy.

  And I dreamed, such a beautiful dream, of being in that sunny meadow by the Clyde with Elspeth, and we were talking nonsense to each other, and began to kiss and play, and suddenly she was changing and turning black, and becoming Mrs Popplewell of Harper’s Ferry and glorious memory, crying that I was her sho’nuff baby and taking fearful, wonderful liberties, throwing herself astride of me and going like a Derby winner… and I was awake in that darkened tent on Islamgee, and ’twasn’t Mrs Popplewell but some elephantine succubus, smothering me with mountains of fat, and I knew in a trice that it was “Queen” Tamagno, the randy bitch, who’d bribed the sentry so that she could crawl in and have her wicked will of me, and I was debating in confusion whether to cry “Unhand me!” or let her go her mile, when I heard a distant voice crying aloud, and it wasn’t conscience or my better nature but blasted Theodore coming to the surface through an ocean of tej, and a ghastly vision smote me of the fate of those who had the bad luck to be related to people who made advances to royal concu bines, and I gave one almighty heave and sent unrequited love, all seventeen stone of her, flying from the charpoy. She hit the floor with a fearful flopping sound, and before she’d even had time to squawk I was through the fly of the tent like a startled fawn, seizing the sentry by the throat and demanding directions. He gasped and pointed as Theodore’s voice was heard again, louder this time, calling for his creature comfort, and I hope she heard him and did her duty like a good little concubine. But by that time I was under canvas, tripping over sleepers in the dark and burrowing under a pile of blankets.

  I fell asleep, and in the morning it was as though none of it had happened, not the horror of the murdered prisoners, or my flight from the embraces of that female hippo—unspeakable tragedy fol lowed by terrifying farce. But it did happen, and I dare say the shock of it all would have preoccupied me if great events had not claimed my attention. For April the tenth, Good Friday, was the day the Bughunter uncorked his killing bottle.

  There are days when you get up and smell death in the air, and that Good Friday was one of them. It was a grey, close morning, with ugly clouds that bore the promise of storm, and waking to the memory of the evening’s horrors drove my spirits to the cellar. I told the others what I’d seen, and it struck them silent until one of ’em, I forget who, dropped to his knees and began to intone the Lord’s Prayer. They thought it was all up with them, and when Theodore came on the scene in a raging temper, and ordered everyone back to Magdala, except me, Prideaux shook my hand in what he plainly thought was a last farewell. I didn’t; my guess was that Theodore was keeping his word to put them in a safe place, and you may be sure I demanded to go with them, but he wouldn’t hear of it.

  “You are a soldier!” cries he. “You shall be my witness that if blood is shed, it shall not be my wish! I have word that your army is across the Bechelo and advancing against me. Well, we shall see! We shall see!”

  Rassam pleaded with him to send a message to Napier, but he vowed that he’d do no such thing. “You want me to write to that man, but I refuse to talk with a man sent by a woman!”

  Which was a new one, if you like, but sure enough when a letter arrived from Napier for Rassam, Theodore wouldn’t listen to it and swore that if Rassam wrote to Napier that would be an end of their friendship. So off they went to Magdala, but Rassam slipped the letter to me, begging me to persuade Theodore to look at it. He was no fool, Rassam, for he and the others were barely out of sight when Theodore bade me give the note to Samuel, who read it to him. It was a straight courteous request for the release of the pris oners, and for a long minute I hoped against hope as he stood frowning in thought, but then he lifted his head and I saw the mad glare in his eye.

  “It is no use! I know what I have to do!” He turned on me. “Did I not spend the night in prayer, and do I not know that the die is cast?” Since he’d spent most of the night getting blind blotto, and thereafter roaring for his whore, I doubted if his deci sion had been guided by prayer, much; I think the effect of his massacre was still at work in him, but I’m no mind-reader. All that mattered was that the last chance of a peaceful issue had gone, and it behoved all good men to look after Number One, and bolt at the first chance.

  It never came. He kept me with him all day, and since he was never without his bodyguards, to say nothing of servants, and his generals coming and going, I could only wait and watch with my hopes dim
inishing; plainly the grip was coming, and the question was, when he went down to inevitable bloody defeat, would he take his prisoners with him? Fear said yes; common sense said no, what would be the point? But with a madman, who could tell?

  There was a terrific thunder-plump at about noon, and then the sky cleared for a while and the heat came off the ground in waves; it was breathless, stifling, and even when the cloud thickened and rain began to fall in big drops, it brought no coolness with it. Five miles away, although I didn’t know it, Napier’s battalions were fording the muddy Bechelo barefoot, and climbing out of that mighty ravine in sweltering heat, short of water because the river wasn’t fit to drink, breasting the long spur that brought them to the Afichu plateau that I’d marked on Fasil’s sand-table, and coming near exhausted to the edge of the Arogee plain. That was the main column; the second force came up the King’s Road, which I’d warned Napier to avoid—and he almost paid dear for ignoring my advice.

  Runners brought word to Theodore of our army’s approach, and from early afternoon the Ab army, seven thousand strong, was moving into position from the Islamgee plain to the lower slopes of Fala and Selassie. Theodore himself, with his generals and atten dants and your reluctant correspondent, went up the muddy slope to the gun emplacements on the Fala summit, and looking back I had my first proper sight of what Napier would be up against: rank upon rank of robed black spearmen and swordsmen and musketeers swinging along in fine style, disciplined and damned business-like with waving banners and their red-robed commanders, five hundred strong on horseback, marshalling them to perfection. I didn’t know what force in guns and infantry Napier might have, but I guessed it wouldn’t be above two thousand, and I was right; odds of three to one, but that wouldn’t count against British and Indian troops… unless something went wrong, which it dam’ nearly did.