Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2005

Copyright © George MacDonald Fraser 2005

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman? © The Beneficiaries of the Literary

Estate of George MacDonald Fraser 2015

Map © John Gilkes 2015

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

Cover illustration © Gino D’Achille

George MacDonald Fraser asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it, while at times based on historical events and figures, are the work of the author’s imagination.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007197408

Ebook Edition © 2015 ISBN: 9780007325627

Version: 2015-07-22

The following piece was found in the author’s study in 2013 by the Estate of George MacDonald Fraser.

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?

‘How did you get the idea of Flashman?’ and ‘When are we going to get his U.S. Civil War memoirs?’ are questions which I have ducked more often than I can count. To the second, my invariable response is ‘Oh, one of these days’. Followed, when the inquirer is an impatient American, by the gentle reminder that to an old British soldier like Flashman the unpleasantness between the States is not quite the most important event of the nineteenth century, but rather a sideshow compared to the Mutiny or Crimea. Before they can get indignant I add hastily that his Civil War itinerary is already mapped out; this is the only way of preventing them from telling me what it ought to be.

To the question, how did I get the idea, I simply reply that I don’t know. Who ever knows? Anthony Hope conceived The Prisoner of Zenda on a walk from Westminster to the Temple, but I doubt if he could have said, after the calendar month it took him to write the book, what triggered the idea. In my case, Flashman came thundering out of the mists of forty years living and dreaming, and while I can list the ingredients that went to his making, heaven only knows how and when they combined.

One thing is sure: the Flashman Papers would never have been written if my fellow clansman Hugh Fraser, Lord Allander, had confirmed me as editor of the Glasgow Herald in 1966. But he didn’t, the canny little bandit, and I won’t say he was wrong. I wouldn’t have lasted in the job, for I’d been trained in a journalistic school where editors were gods, and in three months as acting chief my attitude to management, front office, and directors had been that of a seigneur to his serfs – I had even put Fraser’s entry to the House of Lords on an inside page, assuring him that it was not for the Herald, his own paper, to flaunt his elevation, and that a two-column picture of him was quite big enough. How cavalier can you get?

And doubtless I had other editorial shortcomings. In any event, faced with twenty years as deputy editor (which means doing all the work without getting to the big dinners), I promised my wife I would ‘write us out of it’. In a few weeks of thrashing the typewriter at the kitchen table in the small hours, Flashman was half-finished, and likely to stay that way, for I fell down a waterfall, broke my arm, and lost interest – until my wife asked to read what I had written. Her reaction galvanised me into finishing it, one draft, no revisions, and for the next two years it rebounded from publisher after publisher, British and American.

I can’t blame them: the purported memoir of an unregenerate blackguard, bully, and coward resurrected from a Victorian school story is a pretty eccentric subject. By 1968 I was ready to call it a day, but thanks to my wife’s insistence and George Greenfield’s matchless knowledge of the publishing scene, it found a home at last with Herbert Jenkins, the manuscript looking, to quote Christopher MacLehose, as though it had been round the world twice. It dam’ nearly had.

They published it as it stood, with (to me) bewildering results. It wasn’t a bestseller in the blockbuster sense, but the reviewers were enthusiastic, foreign rights (starting with Finland) were sold, and when it appeared in the U.S.A. one-third of forty-odd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir, to the undisguised glee of the New York Times, which wickedly assembled their reviews. ‘The most important discovery since the Boswell Papers’ is the one that haunts me still, for if I was human enough to feel my lower ribs parting under the strain, I was appalled, sort of.

You see, while I had written a straightforward introduction describing the ‘discovery’ of the ‘Papers’ in a saleroom in Ashby-de-la-Zouche (that ought to have warned them), and larded it with editorial ‘foot-notes’, there had been no intent to deceive; for one thing, while I’d done my best to write, first-person, in Victorian style, I’d never imagined that it would fool anybody. Nor did Herbert Jenkins. And fifty British critics had recognised it as a conceit. (The only one who was half-doubtful was my old chief sub on the Herald; called on to review it for another paper, he demanded of the Herald’s literary editor: ‘This book o’ Geordie’s isnae true, is it?’ and on being assured that it wasn’t, exclaimed: ‘The conniving bastard!’, which I still regard as a high compliment.)

With the exception of one left-wing journal which hailed it as a scathing attack on British imperialism, the press and public took Flashman, quite rightly, at face value, as an adventure story dressed up as the memoirs of an unrepentant old cad who, despite his cowardice, depravity and deceit, had managed to emerge from fearful ordeals and perils an acclaimed hero, his only redeeming qualities being his humour and shameless honesty as a memorialist. I was gratified, if slightly puzzled, to learn that the great American publisher, Alfred Knopf, had said of the book: ‘I haven’t heard this voice in fifty years’, and that the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police was recommending it to his subordinates. My interest increased as I wrote more Flashman books, and noted the reactions.

I was, several critics agreed, a satirist. Taking revenge on the nineteenth century on behalf of the twentieth, said one. Waging war on Victorian hypocrisy, said another. Plainly under the influence of Conrad, said yet another. A full-page review in a German paper took me flat aback when my eye fell on the word ‘Proust’ in the middle of it. I don’t read German, so for all I know the review may have been maintaining that Proust was a better stand-off half than I was, or used more semi-colons. But there it was, and it makes you think. And a few years ago a highly respected religious journal said that the Flashman Papers deserved recognition as the work of a sensitive moralist, and spoke of service not only to literature and history, but to the study of ethics.

My instant reaction to this was to paraphrase Poins: ‘God send me no worse fortune, but I never said so!’ while feeling delighted that someone else had said it, and then reflecting solemnly that this was a far cry from long nights with cold tea and cigarettes, scheming to get Flashman into the passionate embrace of the Empress of China, or out of the toils of a demented dwarf on the edge of a snake-pit. But now, beyond remarking that the anti-imperial left-winger was sadly off the mark, that the Victorians were mere amateurs in hypocrisy compared to our own brainwashed, sanctimonious, self-censoring and terrified generation, and that I hadn’t read a word of Conrad by 1966 (and my interest in him since has been confined to Under Western Eyes, in the hope that I might persuade Dick Lester to film it as only he could), I have no comments to offer on opinions of my work. I know what I’m doing – at least, I think I do – and the aim is to entertain (myself, for a start) while being true to history, to let Flashman comment on human and inhuman nature, and devil take the romantics and the politically correct revisionists both. But my job is writing, not explaining what I’ve written, and I’m well content and grateful to have others find in Flashy whatever they will (I’ve even had letters psychoanalysing the brute), and return to the question with which I began this article.

A life-long love affair with British imperial adventure, fed on tupenny bloods, the Wolf of Kabul and Lionheart Logan (where are they now?), the Barrack-Room Ballads, films like Lives of a Bengal Lancer and The Four Feathers, and the stout-hearted stories for boys which my father won as school prizes in the 1890s; the discovery, through Scott and Sabatini and Macaulay, that history is one tremendous adventure story; soldiering in Burma, and seeing the twilight of the Raj in all its splendour; a newspaper-trained lust for finding the truth behind the received opinion; being a Highlander from a family that would rather spin yarns than eat … I suppose Flashman was born out of all these things, and from reading Tom Brown’s Schooldays as a child – and having a wayward cast of mind.

Thanks to that contrary streak (I always half-hoped that Rathbone would kill Flynn, confounding convention and turning the story upside down – Basil gets Olivia, Claude Rains triumphs, wow!), I recognised Flashman on sight as the star of Hughes’ book. Fag-roasting rotter and poltroon he might be, he was nevertheless plainly box-office, for he had the looks, swagger and style (‘big and strong’, ‘a bluff, offhand manner’, and ‘considerable powers of being pleasant’, according to his creator) which never fail to cast a glamour on villainy. I suspect Hughes knew it, too, and got rid of him before he could take over the book – which loses all its spirit and zest once Flashy has made his disgraced and drunken exit.

[He was, by the way, a real person; this I learned only recently. A letter exists from one of Hughes’ Rugby contemporaries which is definite on the point, but tactfully does not identify him. I have sometimes speculated about one boy who was at Rugby in Hughes’ day, and who later became a distinguished soldier and something of a ruffian, but since I haven’t a shred of evidence to back up the speculation, I keep it to myself.]

What became of him after Rugby seemed to me an obvious question, which probably first occurred to me when I was about nine, and then waited thirty years for an answer. The Army, inevitably, and since Hughes had given me a starting-point by expelling him in the late 1830s, when Lord Cardigan was in full haw-haw, and the Afghan War was impending … just so. I began with no idea of where the story might take me, but with Victorian history to point the way, and that has been my method ever since: choose an incident or campaign, dig into every contemporary source available, letters, diaries, histories, reports, eye-witness, trivia (and fictions, which like the early Punch are mines of detail), find the milestones for Flashy to follow, more or less, get impatient to be writing, and turn him loose with the research incomplete, digging for it as I go and changing course as history dictates or fancy suggests.

In short, letting history do the work, with an eye open for the unexpected nuggets and coincidences that emerge in the mining process – for example, that the Cabinet were plastered when they took their final resolve on the Crimea, that Pinkerton the detective had been a trade union agitator in the very place where Flashman was stationed in the first book, that Kipling’s The Man Who Would Be King had a factual basis, or that Bismarck and Lola Montez were in London in the same week (of 1842, if memory serves, which it often doesn’t: whenever Flashman has been a subject on Mastermind I have invariably scored less than the contestants).

Visiting the scenes helps; I’d not have missed Little Big Horn, the Borneo jungle rivers, Bent’s Fort, or the scruffy, wonderful Gold Road to Samarkand, for anything. Seeking out is half the fun, which is one reason why I decline all offers of help with research (from America, mostly). But the main reason is that I’m a soloist, giving no hints beforehand, even to publishers, and permitting no editorial interference afterwards. It may be tripe, but it’s my tripe – and I do strongly urge authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children, and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.

One of the great rewards of writing about my old ruffian has been getting and answering letters, and marvelling at the kindness of readers who take the trouble to let me know they have enjoyed his adventures, or that he has cheered them up, or turned them to history. Sitting on the stairs at 4 a.m. talking to a group of students who have phoned from the American Midwest is as gratifying as learning from a university lecturer that he is using Flashman as a teaching aid. Even those who want to write the books for you, or complain that he’s a racist (of course he is; why should he be different from the rest of humanity?), or insist that he isn’t a coward at all, but just modest, and they’re in love with him, are compensated for by the stalwarts who’ve named pubs after him (in Monte Carlo, and somewhere in South Africa, I’m told), or have formed societies in his honour. They’re out there, believe me, the Gandamack Delopers of Oklahoma, and Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, and the Royal Society of Upper Canada, with appropriate T-shirts.

I have discovered that when you create – or in my case, adopt and develop – a fictional character, and take him through a series of books, an odd thing happens. He assumes, in a strange way, a life of his own. I don’t mean that he takes you over; far from it, he tends to hive off on his own. At any rate, you find that you’re not just writing about him: you are becoming responsible for him. You’re not just his chronicler: you are also his manager, trainer, and public relations man. It’s your own fault – my own fault – for pretending that he’s real, for presenting his adventures as though they were his memoirs, putting him in historical situations, giving him foot-notes and appendices, and inviting the reader to accept him as a historical character. The result is that about half the letters I get treat him as though he were a person in his own right – of course, people who write to me know that he’s nothing of the sort – well, most of them realise it: I occasionally get indignant letters from people complaining that they can’t find him in the Army List or the D.N.B., but nearly all of them know he’s fiction, and when they pretend that he isn’t, they’re just playing the game. I started it, so I can’t complain.

When Hughes axed Flashman from Tom Brown’s Schooldays, brutally and suddenly (on page 170, if I remember rightly), it seemed a pretty callous act to abandon him with all his sins upon him, just at the stage of adolescence when a young fellow needs all the help and understanding he can get. So I adopted him, not from any charitable motives, but because I realised that there was good stuff in the lad, and that with proper care and guidance something could be made out of him.

And I have to say that with all his faults (what am I saying, because of his faults) young Flashy has justified the faith I showed in him. Over the years he and I have gone through several campaigns and assorted adventures, and I can say unhesitatingly that coward, scoundrel, toady, lecher and dissembler though he may be, he is a good man to go into the jungle with.

George MacDonald Fraser

Dedication

For Kath, twelve in a row

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

How Did I Get the Idea of Flashman?

Dedication

Biographical Note

Explanatory Note

Map

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Appendix I

Appendix II

Appendix III

Footnotes

Notes

About the Author

The FLASHMAN Papers: In chronological order

The FLASHMAN Papers: In order of publication

Also by George MacDonald Fraser

About the Publisher

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

FLASHMAN, Harry Paget, brigadier-general, V.C., K.C.B., K.C.I.E.: Chevalier, Legion of Honour; Order of Maria Theresa, Austria; Order of the Elephant, Denmark (temporary); U.S. Medal of Honor; San Serafino Order of Purity and Truth, 4th class; b. May 5, 1822, s. of H. Buckley Flashman, Esq., Ashby, and Hon. Alicia Paget; m. Elspeth Rennie Morrison, d. of Lord Paisley, one s., one d. Educ. Rugby School, 11th Hussars, 17th Lancers. Served Afghanistan 1841–2 (medals, thanks of Parliament); chief of staff to H.M. James Brooke, Rajah of Sarawak, Batang Lupar expedn, 1844; milit. adviser with unique rank of sergeant-general to H.M. Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar, 1844–5; Sutlej campaign, 1845–6 (Ferozeshah, Sobraon, envoy extraordinary to Maharani Jeendan, Court of Lahore); polit. adviser to Herr (later Chancellor Prince) von Bismarck, Schleswig-Holstein, 1847–8; Crimea, staff (Alma, Sevastopol, Balaclava), prisoner of war, 1854; artillery adviser to Atalik Ghazi, Syr Daria campaign, 1855; India, Sepoy Mutiny, 1857–8, dip. envoy to H.R.H. the Maharani of Jhansi, trooper 3rd Native Cavalry, Meerut, subseq. att. Rowbotham’s Mosstroopers, Cawnpore (Lucknow, Gwalior, etc., V.C.); adjutant to Captain John Brown, Harper’s Ferry, 1859; China campaign 1860, polit. mission to Nanking, Taiping Rebellion, polit. and other services, Imperial Court, Pekin; U.S. Army (major, Union forces, 1862, colonel (staff) Army of the Confederacy, 1863); a.d.c. to H.I.M. Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, 1867; interpreter and observer Sioux campaign, U.S., 1875–6 (Camp Robinson conference, Little Big Horn, etc.); Zulu War, 1879 (Isandhlwana, Rorke’s Drift); Egypt 1882 (Kassassin, Tel-el-Kebir); personal bodyguard to H.I.M. Franz-Josef, Emperor of Austria, 1883; Sudan 1884–5 (Khartoum); Pekin Legations, 1900. Travelled widely in military and civilian capacities, among them supercargo, merchant marine (West Africa), agriculturist (Mississippi valley), wagon captain and hotelier (Santa Fe Trail); buffalo hunter and scout (Oregon Trail); courier (Underground Railroad); majordomo (India), prospector (Australia); trader and missionary (Solomon Islands, Fly River, etc.), lottery supervisor (Manila), diamond broker and horse coper (Punjab), dep. marshal (U.S.), occasional actor and impersonator. Hon. mbr of numerous societies and clubs, including Sons of the Volsungs (Strackenz), Mimbreno Apache Copper Mines band (New Mexico), Khokand Horde (Central Asia), Kit Carson’s Boys (Colorado), Brown’s Lambs (Maryland), M.C.C., White’s and United Service (London, both resigned), Blackjack (Batavia). Chmn, Flashman and Bottomley, Ltd; dir. British Opium Trading Co.; governor, Rugby School; hon. pres. Mission for Reclamation of Reduced Females. Publications: Dawns and Departures of a Soldier’s Life; Twixt Cossack and Cannon; The Case Against Army Reform. Recreations: Oriental studies, angling, cricket (performed first recorded ‘hat trick’, wickets of Felix, Pilch, Mynn, for 14 runs, Rugby Past and Present v. Kent, Lord’s 1842; five for 12, Mynn’s Casuals v. All-England XI, 1843). Add: Gandamack Lodge, Ashby, Leics.

EXPLANATORY NOTE

In the campaigns covered by the first eleven packets of his autobiographical Papers – Afghanistan, First Sikh War, Crimea, Indian Mutiny, Brooke’s expedition against the Borneo pirates, the march to Pekin, Custer’s Little Big Horn debacle – Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., etc., the notorious Victorian hero and poltroon, has always been at or near the heart of the action, a reluctant and often jaundiced eye-witness of people and events, and uncomfortably aware of history unfolding about him.

Not so in the Abyssinian War of 1868, surely the strangest of all imperial campaigns, when a British Indian army invaded one of the least known and most dangerous countries on earth, and in the face of apparently insuperable hazards, and predictions of certain failure, marched and fought their way across a trackless wilderness of rocky chasm and jagged mountain to their goal, did what they had come to do, and marched out again with hardly a casualty. There has never perhaps been a success like it in the history of war. It took twelve thousand men, a mighty fleet, nine million pounds (a staggering sum at that time), a meticulous if extravagant organisation, and a remarkable old soldier – and all to rescue a tiny group of British citizens held captive by a mad monster of an African king. Those were, to quote Flashman, the days.

But if he bore no share in the campaign proper, Flashman’s was still the vital part on which success or failure hung – the intelligence mission which was to take him into a series of fearful perils (some of them new even to him) in a war-torn land of mystery, treachery, intrigue, lonely castles, ghost cities, the most beautiful (and savage) women in Africa, and at last into the power of the demented tyrant in his stronghold at the back of beyond. All of which he records with his customary shameless honesty, and it may be that along with the light he casts on a unique chapter of imperial history, he invites a comparison with a later and less glorious day.

For Flashman’s story is about a British army sent out in a good and honest cause by a government who knew what honour meant. It was not sent without initial follies and hesitations in high places, or until every hope of a peaceful issue was gone. It went with the fear of disaster hanging over it, but with the British public in no doubt that it was right. It served no politician’s vanity or interest. It went without messianic rhetoric. There were no false excuses, no deceits, no cover-ups or lies, just a decent resolve to do a government’s first duty: to protect its people, whatever the cost. To quote Flashman again, those were the days.

As with previous Papers, I have merely corrected his spelling, which in this instance meant introducing consistency into his bizarre renderings of Abyssinian names.

G.M.F.

‘Half a million in silver, did you say?’

‘In Maria Theresa dollars. Worth a hundred thou’ in quids.’ He held up a gleaming coin, broad as a crown, with the old girl double-chinned on one side and the Austrian arms on t’other. ‘Dam’ disinheritin’ old bitch, what? Mind, they say she was a plum in her youth, blonde and buxom, just your sort, Flashy—’

‘Ne’er mind my sort. The cash must reach this place in Africa within four weeks? And the chap who was to have escorted it is laid up in Venice with yellow jack?’

‘Or the clap, or the sailor’s itch, or heaven knows what.’ He spun the coin, grinning foxy-like. ‘You’ve changed your mind, haven’t you? You’re game to do it yourself! Good old Flash!’

‘Don’t rush your fences, Speed, my boy. When’s it due to be shipped out?’

‘Wednesday. Lloyd packet to Alexandria. But with Sturgess comin’ all over yellow in Venice, that won’t do, and there ain’t another Alex boat for a fortnight – far too late, and the Embassy’ll run my guts up the flagpole, as though ’twas my fault, confound ’em—’

‘Aye, it’s hell in the diplomatic. Well, tell you what, Speed – I’ll ride guard on your dollars to Alex for you, but I ain’t waiting till Wednesday. I want to be clear of this blasted town by dawn tomorrow, so you’d best drum up a steam-launch and crew, and get your precious treasure aboard tonight – where is it just now?’

‘At the station, the Strada Ferrata – but dammit, Flash, a private charter’ll cost the moon—’

‘You’ve got Embassy dibs, haven’t you? Then use ’em! The station ain’t spitting distance from the Klutsch mole, and if you get a move on you can have the gelt loaded by midnight. Heavens, man, steam craft and spaghetti sailors are ten a penny in Trieste! If you’re in such a sweat to get the dollars to Africa—’

‘You may believe it! Let me see … quick run to Alex, then train to Cairo and on to Suez – no camel caravans across the desert these days, but you’ll need to hire nigger porters—’

‘For which you’ll furnish me cash!’

He waved a hand. ‘Sturgess would’ve had to hire ’em, anyway. At Suez one of our Navy sloops’ll take you down the Red Sea – there are shoals of ’em, chasin’ the slavers, and I’ll give you an Embassy order. They’ll have you at Zoola – that’s the port for Abyssinia – by the middle of February, and it can’t take above a week to get the silver up-country to this place called Attegrat. That’s where General Napier will be.’

‘Napier? Not Bob the Bughunter? What the blazes is he doing in Abyssinia? We haven’t got a station there.’

‘We have by now, you may be sure!’ He was laughing in disbelief. ‘D’you mean to tell me you haven’t heard? Why, he’s invadin’ the place! With an army from India! The silver is to help fund his campaign, don’t you see? Good God, Flashy, where have you been? Oh, I was forgettin’ – Mexico. Dash it, don’t they have newspapers there?’

‘Hold up, can’t you? Why is he invading?’

‘To rescue the captives – our consul, envoys, missionaries! They’re held prisoner by this mad cannibal king, and he’s chainin’ ’em, and floggin’ ’em, and kickin’ up no end of a row! Theodore, his name is – and you mean to say you’ve not heard of him? I’ll be damned – why, there’s been uproar in Parliament, our gracious Queen writin’ letters, a penny or more on the income tax – it’s true! Now d’you see why this silver must reach Napier double quick – if it don’t, he’ll be adrift in the middle of nowhere with not a penny to his name, and your old chum Speedicut will be a human sacrifice at the openin’ of the new Foreign Office!’

‘But why should Napier need Austrian silver? Hasn’t he got any sterling?’

‘Abyssinian niggers won’t touch it, or anythin’ except Maria Theresas. Purest silver,¹ you see, and Napier must have it for food and forage when he marches up-country to fight his war.’

‘So it’s a war-chest? You never said a dam’ word about war last night.’

‘You never gave me a chance, did you? Soon as I told you I was in Dickie’s meadow,² with this damned fortune to be shipped and Sturgess in dock, what sympathy did dear old friend Flashy offer? The horse’s laugh, and wished me joy! All for England, home, and the beauteous Elspeth, you were … and now,’ says he, with that old leery Speedicut look, ‘all of a sudden, you’re in the dooce of a hurry to oblige … What’s up, Flash?’

‘Not a dam’ thing. I’m sick of Trieste and want away, that’s all!’

‘And can’t wait a day? You and Hookey Walker!’

‘Now, see here, Speed, d’ye want me to shift your blasted bullion, or don’t you? Well, I go tonight or not at all, and since this cash is so all-fired important to Napier, your Embassy funds can stand the row for my passage home, too, when the thing’s done! Well, what d’ye say?’

‘That something is up, no error!’ His eyes widened. ‘I say, the Austrian traps ain’t after you, are they – ’cos if they were I daren’t assist your flight, silver or no silver! Dash it, I’m a diplomat—’

‘Of course ’tain’t the traps! What sort of fellow d’ye think I am? Good God, ha’nt we been chums since boyhood?’

‘Yes, and it’s ’cos I know what kind of chum you can be that I repeat “What’s up, Flash?”’ He filled my glass and pushed it across. ‘Come up, old boy! This is old Speed, remember, and you can’t humbug him.’

Well, true enough, I couldn’t, and since you, dear reader, may be sharing his curiosity, I’ll tell you what I told him that night in the Hôtel Victoria – not the smartest pub in Trieste, but as a patriotic little minion of our Vienna Embassy, Speedicut was bound to put up there – and it should explain the somewhat cryptic exchanges with which I’ve begun this chapter of my memoirs. If they’ve seemed a mite bewildering you’ll see presently that they were the simplest way of setting out the preliminaries to my tale of the strangest campaign in the whole history of British arms – and that takes in some damned odd affairs, a few of which I’ve borne a reluctant hand in myself. But Abyssinia took the cake, currants and all. Never anything like it, and never will be again.

For me, the business began in the summer of ’67, on the day when that almighty idiot, the Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, strode out before a Juarista firing squad, unbuttoned his shirt cool as a trout, and cried ‘Viva Mejico! Viva la independencia! Shoot, soldiers, through the heart!’ Which they did, with surprising accuracy for a platoon of dagoes, thereby depriving Mexico of its crowned head and Flashy of his employer and protector. I was an anxious spectator skulking in cover on a rooftop nearby, and when I saw Max take a header into the dust I knew that the time had come for me to slip my cable.

You see, I’d been his fairly loyal aide-de-camp in his recent futile struggle against Juarez’s republicans – not a post I’d taken from choice, but I’d been a deserter from the French Foreign Legion at the time.³ They were polluting Mexico with their presence in those days, supporting Max on behalf of his sponsor, that ghastly louse Louis Napoleon, and I’d been only too glad of the refuge Max had offered me – he’d been under the mistaken impression that I’d saved his life in an ambush at Texatl, poor ass, when in fact I’d been one of Jesus Montero’s gang of ambushers, but we needn’t go into that at the moment. What mattered was that Max had taken me on the strength, and had given the Legion peelers the rightabout when they’d come clamouring for my unhappy carcase.

Then the Frogs cleared out in March of ’67, leaving Max in the lurch with typical Gallic loyalty, but while that removed one menace to my wellbeing, there remained others from which Max could be no protection, quick or dead – like the Juaristas, who’d rather have strung up a royalist a.d.c. than eaten their dinners, or that persevering old bandolero Jesus Montero, who was bound to find out eventually that I didn’t know where Montezuma’s treasure was. Hell of a place, Mexico, and dam’ confused.

But all you need to know for the present is that after Max bought the bullet I’d have joined him in the dead-cart if it hadn’t been for the delectable Princess Agnes Salm-Salm, and the still happily ignorant Jesus. They’d been my associates in a botched attempt to rescue Max on the eve of his execution. We’d failed because (you’ll hardly credit this) the great clown had refused point-blank to escape because it didn’t sort with his imperial dignity, Austro-Hungarian royalty preferring to die rather than go over the wall. Well, hell mend ’em, I say, and if the House of Hapsburg goes to the knackers it won’t be my fault; I’ve done my unwilling best for them, ungrateful bastards.⁴

At all events, darling Aggie and greasy Jesus had seen me safe to Vera Cruz, where she had devised the most capital scheme for getting me out of the country. Max having been brother to the Austrian Emperor Franz-Josef, his death had caused a sensation in Vienna; they hadn’t done a dam’ thing useful to save his life, but they made up for it with his corpse, sending a warship to ferry it home, with a real live admiral and a great retinue of court reptiles. And since Aggie was the wife of a German princeling, a heroine of the royalist campaign, and handsome as Hebe, they were all over her when we went aboard the Novara frigate at Sacraficios. Admiral Tegethoff, a bluff old sport, all beard and belly, munched her knuckles and gave glad welcome even to the begrimed and ragged peon whom she presented as the hoch und wohlgeboren Oberst Sir Harry Flashman, former aide, champion, and all-round hero of the campaign and the ill-starred attempt to snatch his imperial majesty from the firing squad.

‘The Emperor’s English right arm, gentlemen!’ says Aggie, who was a great hand at the flashing-eyed flourish. ‘So his majesty called him. Who more fitting to guard his royal master and friend on his last journey home?’

Blessed if they could think of anyone fitter, and I was received with polite enthusiasm: the reptiles left off sneering at my beastly peasant appearance and clicked their heels, old Tegethoff stopped just short of embracing me, and I was aware of the awestruck admiration in the wide blue eyes of the enchanting blonde poppet whom he presented as his great-niece, Gertrude von und zum something-or-other. My worldly Aggie noticed it too, and observed afterwards, when we made our adieus at the ship’s rail, that if I looked like a scarecrow I was at least a most romantic one.

‘The poor little idiot will doubtless break her foolish heart over you en voyage,’ says she. ‘And afterwards wonder what she saw in the so dashing English rascal.’

‘Jealous of her, princess?’ says I, and she burst out laughing.

‘Of her youth, perhaps – not of her infatuation.’ She gave that slantendicular smile that had been driving me wild for months. ‘Well, not very much. But if I were sixteen again, like her, who knows? Adios, dear Harry.’ And being royally careless of propriety, she kissed me full on the lips before the startled squareheads – and for a delightful moment it was the kiss of the lover she’d never been, which I still count a real conquest. Pity she was so crazy about her husband, I remember thinking, as she waved an elegant hand from her carriage and was gone.⁵

After that they towed Max’s coffin out to the ship in a barge and hoisted it inboard, and as the newly appointed escort to his cadaver I was bound to give Tegethoff and his entourage a squint at the deceased, so that they could be sure they’d got the right chap. It was no end of a business, for his Mexican courtiers had done him proud with no fewer than three coffins, one of rosewood, a second of zinc, and the third of cedar, with Max inside the last like one of those Russian dolls. He’d been embalmed, and I must say he looked in capital fettle, bar being a touch yellow and his hair starting to fall out. We screwed him in again, a chaplain said a prayer, and all that remained was to weigh anchor to thunderous salutes from various attendant warships, and for me to remind Tegethoff that a bath and a change of clobber would be in order.

I’ve never had any great love for the cabbage-chewers, having been given my bellyful by Bismarck and his gang in the Schleswig-Holstein affair,fn1 and Tegethoff’s party included more than one of the crop-headed schlager-swingers whom I find especially detestable, but I’m bound to say that on that voyage, which lasted from late November ’67 to the middle of January, they couldn’t have been more amiable and hospitable – until the very morning we dropped anchor off Trieste, when Tegethoff discovered that I’d been giving his great-niece a few exercises they don’t usually teach in young ladies’ seminaries.

Aggie had been right, you see: the silly chit had gone nutty on me at first sight, and who’s to blame her? Stalwart Flashy all bronzed and war-weary in sombrero and whiskers might well flutter a maiden heart, and if at forty-five I was old enough to be her father, that never stopped an adoring innocent yet, and you may be sure it don’t stop me either. Puppy-fat and golden sausage curls ain’t my style as a rule, but combined with a creamy complexion, parted rosebud lips, and great forget-me-not eyes alight with idiotic worship, they have their attraction. For one thing they awoke blissful memories of Elspeth on that balmy evening when I first rattled her in the bushes by the Clyde. The resemblance was more than physical, for both were brainless, although my darling half-wit is not without a certain native cunning, but what made dear little Fraulein Gertrude specially irresistible was her truly unfathomable ignorance of the more interesting facts of life, and her touching faith in me as a guide and mentor.

Her attachment to me on the voyage was treated as something of a joke by Tegethoff’s people, who seemed to regard her as a child still, more fool they, and since her duenna was usually too sea-sick to interfere, we were together a good deal. She was the most artless prattler, and was soon confiding her girlish secrets, dreams, and fears; I learned that her doting great-uncle had brought her on the cruise as a betrothal present, and that on her return to Vienna she was to be married to a most aristocratic swell, a graf no less, whom she had never seen and who was on the brink of the grave, being all of thirty years old.

‘It is such an honour,’ sighs she, ‘and my duty, Mama says, but how am I to be worthy of it? I know nothing of how to be a wife, much less a great lady. I am too young, and foolish, and … and little! He is a great man, a cousin to the Emperor, and I am only a lesser person! How do I know how to please him, or what it is that men like, and who is to tell me?’ Yearning, dammit, drowning me in her blue limpid pools, with her fat young juggs heaving like blancmange. Strip off, lie back, and enjoy it, would have been the soundest advice, but I patted her hand, smiled paternally, and said she mustn’t worry her pretty little head, her graf was sure to like her.

‘Oh, so easy to say!’ cries she. ‘But if he should not? How to win his affection?’ She rounded on me eagerly. ‘If it were you –’ and from her soulful flutter she plainly wished it was, sensible girl ‘– if it were you, how could I best win your heart? How make you … oh, admire me, and honour me, and … and love me! What would delight you most that I could do?’

You may talk about sitting birds, but where a lesser man might have taken swift advantage of that guileless purity, I’m proud to say that I did not. She might be the answer to a lecher’s prayer, but I knew it would take delicate management and patience before we could have her setting to partners in the Calcutta Quadrille. So I went gently to work, indulgent uncle in the first week, brotherly arm about her shoulders in the second, peck on the cheek in the third, touch on the lips at Christmas to make her think, sudden lustful growl and passionate kiss for New Year, meeting her startled-fawn bewilderment with a nice blend of wistful adoration and unholy desire which melted the little simpleton altogether, and bulled her speechless all the way along the Adriatic. Very discreet, mind; a ship’s a small place, and chaste young ladies tend to be excitable the first few times and need to be hushed. Elspeth, and my second wife, Duchess Irma, were like ecstatic banshees, I remember.

Unfortunately, she shared another characteristic with Elspeth – she had no more discretion than the town crier, and just as Elspeth had babbled joyfully of our jolly rogering to her elder sister, who had promptly relayed it to her horrified parents, so sweet imbecile Gertrude had confided in her duenna, who had swooned before passing on the glad news to old Tegethoff.

This must have been on the very morning we dropped anchor off the Molo St Carlo at Trieste and I was supervising the lifting of the coffin from below decks, and in the very act of securing Max’s crown and archducal cap to the lid, when Tegethoff damned near fell down the companion, with a couple of aides at his heels trying to restrain him. He was in full fig, cocked hat and ceremonial sword which he was trying to lug out, purple with rage, and bellowing ‘Verräter! Vergewaltiger! Pirat!’fn2 which summed up things nicely and explained why he was behaving like Attila with apoplexy.

One of the aides clung to his sword-arm and hauled him back by main force, while the other, a hulking junkerish brute with scars all over his ugly dial, whipped his glove across my face before dashing it at my feet and stamping off. That was all they had time for just then, what with the barge coming alongside to take Max on shore leave, the Duke of Wurtemburg and all the other big guns lined up on the landing stage, the waterfront swathed in black, and muted brass bands playing a cheery Wagnerian air. But I can take a hint, and saw that by the time they’d finished escorting Max to the Vienna train, I had best be in the nearest deep cover, lying doggo.

So I let the pall-bearers get their load on deck, waited until the guns of the assembled shipping had started their salutes and Tegethoff and Co. would be safely away, and slunk ashore with a hastily packed valise. The cortège was proceeding along the boulevard beyond the Grand Canal which runs into the heart of the city; solemn music, mobs of chanting clergy, friars carrying crosses, battalions of infantry, and I thought ‘Hasta la vista, old Max’ and hurried up-town to lose myself for a few hours.⁶ Tegethoff’s gang would be off to Vienna with the corpse presently, nursing their wrath against me, no doubt, but unable to indulge it, and then I could consider how the devil I was to raise the blunt for a passage to England, for bar a few pesos and Yankee dollars my pockets were to let.

Trieste ain’t much of a town unless you’re in trade or banking or some other shady pursuit; Napoleon’s spymaster, Fouché, is buried there, and Richard the Lionheart did time in jail, but the only other excitements are the Tergesteum bazaar and the Corso, which is the main drag between the new and old cities, and you can stare at shop windows and drink coffee to bursting point.

At evening I mooched up to the Exchange plaza and into the casino club, where the smart set foregathered and I thought I might run across some sporting rich widow eager for carnal amusement, but I’d barely begun to survey the fashionable throng when I found myself face to face with the last man I’d have thought to meet, my old chum of Rugby and the Cider Cellars, Speedicut, whom I’d barely seen since the night the Minor Club in St James’s was raided, and we’d fled from the peelers and I’d found refuge in the carriage (and later the bed) of Lola Montez, bless her black heart. That had been all of twenty-five years before, but we knew each other on the instant, and there was great rejoicing, in a wary sort of way, for we’d never been your usual bosom pals, both being leery by nature.

So now I learned that he was in the diplomatic, which didn’t surprise me, for he was a born toad-eater with a great gift of genteel sponging and an aversion to work. He was full of woe because, as you’ll already have gathered, he’d brought this fortune in silver down from Vienna for shipment to Abyssinia, and lo! the appointed escort had fallen by the way and he was at his wits’ end to find another – couldn’t go himself, diplomatic duty bound him to Austrian soil, etc., etc… . It was at that point that it dawned on him that here was good old Harry, knight of the realm, hero of Crimea and the Mutiny, darling of Horse Guards, and just the chap who could be trusted with a vital mission in his country’s service. Why, I was heaven-sent and no mistake, dear old lad that I was!

There wasn’t a hope of touching him for a loan to see me home, for coming of nabob wealth he was as mean as Solomon Levi, but by pretending interest I was able to take a decent dinner off him at the Locanda Granda before telling him, fairly politely, for one hates to offend, what he could do with his cargo of dollars. He howled a bit, but didn’t press me, for he hadn’t really expected me to agree, and we parted on fair terms, he to visit the station to see that his minions were taking care of the doubloons, I to find a cheap bed for the night. And I hadn’t turned the corner before I saw something that had me skipping for the nearest alleyway with my undigested dinner in sudden turmoil. Not twenty yards away across the street, the Austrian lout who’d slapped my face and hurled his challenge at my feet was conferring with two uniformed constables and a bearded villain in a billycock hat with plain-clothes peeler written all over him. And there were two armed troopers in tow as well.

Even as I watched them disperse, the officer mounting the steps to the Locanda which I’d just left, the fearful truth was dawning – Tegethoff had left this swine behind to track me down and either hale me to justice as a ravisher of youth (squareheads have the most primitive views about this, as I’d discovered in Munich in ’47 when Bismarck’s bullies interrupted my dalliance with that blubbery slut Baroness Pechmann), or more likely cut me up in a sabre duel. Trieste had suddenly become too hot to hold me – so now you know why a couple of hours later I was in Speedicut’s room at the Victoria, clamouring to be allowed to remove his bullion for him, to Abyssinia or Timbuctoo or any damned place away from Austrian vengeance.

In my funk I even conjured up the nightmare thought that if Tegethoff got his hands on me and instituted inquiries, he might easily discover I was a Legion deserter and hand me over to the bloody Frogs, in which case I’d end my days as a slave in their penal battalion in the Sahara. A groundless fear, looking back, but I’m a great one for starting at shadows, as you may know. I didn’t mention this particular phantasm to Speed, but I did tell him all about Gertrude, ’cos that sort of thing was nuts to him, and he was lost in admiration of my behaviour both as amorist and fugitive.

‘How the blazes you always contrive to slide out o’ harm’s way beats me – aye, often as not with some charmer languishin’ after you! Well, ’twas dam’ lucky for you I was here this time!’

‘Lucky for both of us. So, now that you know all about my guilty past, d’you still feel like trusting me with your half-million? No fears that I might tool along the coast to Monte Carlo and blue the lot at the wheel?’

Put like that, with a wink and a grin, he didn’t care for it above half, but common sense told him I wasn’t going to levant,fn3 and he’d no choice, anyway. So a couple of hours after midnight, there I was at the Klutsch mole, watching Speed’s clerk settle up with the skipper of a neat little smack or yawl or whatever they call ’em, while its crew of Antonios chattered and loafed on the hatches – even in those days Trieste was more Italian than Austrian – and here came Speed in haste across the deserted plaza from the station, with a squad of Royal Marines from his Embassy wheeling the goods on a hand-cart: scores of little strong-boxes with the locks sealed with the royal arms.⁷ There were four of the Bootnecks⁸ under a sergeant with a jaw like a pike, all very trim with their Sniders slung; Speed’s dollars would be safe from sea pirates and land banditti with this lot on hand.

It may have been my jest about Monte or his natural fear at seeing his precious cargo pass out of his ken, but now that the die was cast Speed had a fit of the doubtfuls; earlier he’d been begging me to come to his rescue, but now he was chewing his lip as they swung the boxes down to the deck with the Eyeties jabbering and the sergeant giving ’em Billingsgate, while I took an easy cheroot at the rail, trying my Italian pidgin on the skipper.

‘This ain’t a joke, Flash!’ says Speed. ‘It’s bloody serious! You’re carryin’ my career along with those dollars – my good name, dammit!’ As if he had one. ‘Jesus, if anything should go wrong! You will take care, old chap, won’t you? I mean, you’ll do nothin’ wild … you know, like … like …’ He broke off, not caring to say ‘like buggering off to Pago Pago with the loot’. Instead he concluded glumly: ‘’Tain’t insured, you know – not a penny of it!’

I assured him that his specie would reach Napier safely in less than four weeks, but he still looked blue and none too eager to hand over the Embassy passport requesting and requiring H.M. servants, civil and military, to speed me on my way, and a letter for Napier, asking him to give me a warrant and funds for my passage home. I shook hands briskly before he could change his mind, and as we shoved off and the skipper spun the wheel and his crew dragged the sail aloft, damned if he wasn’t here again, running along the mole, waving and hollering:

‘I say, Flash, I forgot to ask you for a receipt!’

I told him to forge my signature if it would make him sleep sounder, and his bleating faded on the warm night air as we stood out from the mole, the little vessel heeling over suddenly as the wind cracked in her sail; the skipper bawled commands as the hands scampered barefoot to tail on to the lines, and I looked back at the great brightly lit crescent of the Trieste waterfront and felt a mighty relief, thinking, well, Flashy my boy, that’s another town you’re glad to say goodbye to on short acquaintance, and here’s to a jolly holiday cruise to a new horizon and an old friend, and then hey! for a swift passage home, and Elspeth waiting. Strange, little Gertrude was fading from memory already, but I found myself reflecting that thanks to my tuition her princeling husband would be either delighted or scandalised on his wedding night – possibly both, the lucky fellow.

You gather from this that I was in a tranquil, optimistic mood as I set off on my Abyssinian odyssey, ass that I was. You’d ha’ thought, after all I’d seen and suffered in my time, that I’d have remembered all the occasions when I’d set off carefree and unsuspecting along some seemingly primrose path only to go head first into the pit of damnation at t’other end. But you never can tell.

I couldn’t foresee, as I stood content in the bow, watching the green fire foaming up from the forefoot, feeling the soft Adriatic breeze on my face, hearing the oaths and laughter of the Jollies and the strangled wailing of some frenzied tenor in the crew – I couldn’t foresee the screaming charge of long-haired warriors swinging their hideous sickle-blades against the Sikh bayonets, or the huge mound of rotting corpses under the precipice at Islamgee, or the ghastly forest of crucifixes at Gondar, or feel the agonising bite of steel bars against my body as I swung caged in the freezing gale above a yawning void, or imagine the ghastly transformation of an urbane, cultivated monarch into a murderous tyrant shrieking with hysterical glee as he slashed and hacked at his bound victims.

No, I foresaw none of those horrors, or that amazing unknown country, Prester John’s fabled land of inaccessible mountain barriers and bottomless chasms, and wild, war-loving beautiful folk, into which Napier was to lead such an expedition as had not been seen since Cortes and Pisarro (so Henty says), through impossible hazards and hopeless odds – and somehow lead it out again. A land of mystery and terror and cruelty, and the loveliest women in all Africa … a smiling golden nymph in her little leather tunic, teasing me as she sat by a woodland stream plaiting her braids … a gaudy barbarian queen lounging on cushions surrounded by her tame lions … a tawny young beauty remarking to my captors: ‘If we feed him into the fire, little by little, he will speak …’

Aye, it’s an interesting country, Abyssinia.

If you’ve read my previous memoirs you’ll know me better than Speedicut did, and won’t share his misgivings about trusting me with a cool half million in silver. Old Flash may be a model of the best vices – lechery, treachery, poltroonery, deceit, and dereliction of duty, all present and correct, as you know, and they’re not the half of it – but larceny ain’t his style at all. Oh, stern necessity may have led to my lifting this and that on occasion, but nothing on the grand scale – why, you may remember I once had the chance to make away with the great Koh-i-noor diamond,fn1 but wasn’t tempted for an instant. If there’s one thing your true-bred coward values, it’s peace of mind, and you can’t have that if you’re a hunted outlaw forever far from home. Also, pocketing a diamond’s one thing, but stacks of strong-boxes weighing God knows what and guarded by five stout lads are a very different palaver.

Speed had spoken lightly of a quick trip to Alexandria, but with that pack of dilatory dagoes tacking to and fro and putting about between the heel of Italy and Crete, we must have covered all of two thousand miles, and half the time allotted me to reach Napier had gone before we sighted Egypt. It’s a sand-blown dunghill at any time, but I was dam’ glad to see it after that dead bore of a voyage – and no dreary haul across the desert in prospect either. The camel journey was a penance I’d endured in the past, but now it was rails all the way from Alex to Suez, by way of Cairo, and what had once taken days of arse-burning discomfort was now a journey of eight hours, thanks to our engineers who’d won the concession in the teeth of frantic French opposition. They were hellish jealous of their great canal, which was then within a year of completion, with gangs of thousands of the unfortunate fellaheen being mercilessly flogged on the last lap, for it was built with slave labour in all but name.⁹

We didn’t linger in Alexandria; Egypt’s the last place you want to carry a cargo of valuables, so I made a quick sortie to the Hôtel de l’Europe for a bath and a civilised breakfast while the Marine sergeant drummed up the local donkey drivers to carry the boxes to the station, and then we were rattling away, four hours to Cairo, another four on the express to Suez, and before bed-time I’d presented myself to the port captain and was dining in the Navy mess. Abyssinia was on every lip, and when it was understood that the celebrated Flashy was bringing Napier his war-chest,¹⁰ it was heave and ho with a vengeance. A steam sloop commanded by a cheerful infant named Ballantyne with a sun-peeled nose and a shock of fair hair bleached almost white by the sun was placed at my disposal, his tars hoisted the strong-boxes aboard and stowed them below, the Jollies were crammed into the tiny focsle, and as the sun came up next morning we were thrashing down the Gulf of Suez to the Red Sea proper, having been in and out of Egypt in twenty-four hours, which is a day longer than you’d care to spend there.

The Suez gulf isn’t more than ten miles across at its narrowest point, and Ballantyne, who was as full of gas and high spirits as a twenty-year-old with an independent command can be, informed me that this was where the Children of Israel had made their famous crossing in the Exodus, ‘but it’s all balls and Banbury about the sea being parted and Pharaoh’s army being drowned, you know. There are places where you can walk from Egypt to the Sinai at low tide, and an old Gyppo nigger told me it wasn’t Pharaoh who was chasing ’em, either, but a lot of rascally Bedouin Arabs, and after Moses had got over at low water, the tide came in and the buddoos were drowned and serve ’em right. And there wasn’t a blessed chariot to be seen when the tide went out, so there!’¹¹

His bosun said beggin’ his pardon, sir, but that was blasphemy, and they fell to arguing while the tars grinned and chaffed and my Bootneck sergeant scowled disapproval; he wasn’t used to the free and easy style of these Navy youngsters who couldn’t help bringing their fifth-form ways to sea, and treated their men more like a football team of which they were captain, than a crew. It was natural enough: the young cornet or ensign in the Army, when he joined his regiment for the first time, entered a world of rigid formality and discipline, but here was this lad just out of his ’teens with a little floating kingdom all his own, sent to fight slavers and pirates, chase smugglers, shepherd pilgrims, and escort the precious bullion on which a whole British army would depend – and not a senior to turn to for advice or guidance, but only his own sense and judgment. Young Ballantyne couldn’t follow orders, because he hadn’t any beyond a roving commission; his crew were all older than he was, but he must live with ’em and mess with ’em, share their hardships and dangers as one of ’em, and make them like and trust him because he was what he was, so that when he said ‘Go!’ they’d obey, even unto death.

I’d never have done for the Navy. You may fool soldiers by holding aloof and looking martial, but Jack would have seen through me before we’d crossed the bar. That’s the hellish thing about life aboard ship – there’s nowhere to hide either your carcase or your nature.

We had a taste of Ballantyne’s the second day out, just after we’d passed the Ras Mohammed point at the foot of Sinai, and the hand in the bows spotted a low, ugly-looking craft with a great lateen sail which sheered away at sight of us, running for a little cluster of islands near the Egyptian shore.

‘Slaver, pound to a penny!’ yells our young Nelson. ‘Bosun, clear away the gun. Tomkins, open the arms chest! Sir Harry, I’d be obliged if your fellows would take station two either side, ready to fire if need be. Tally-ho!’ And he seized the wheel while his engineer thundered his motor and our little sloop fairly flew over the water. Ballantyne’s dozen tars were diving below deck and emerging with pieces and cutlasses, and I directed my sergeant to place his fellows at the rail as requested, and shocked his military soul by countermanding his order to them to put on their hats and coats. You shoot straighter in shirt-sleeves when there’s an African sun blazing down on you.

But they didn’t get the chance, for the slavers reached a rocky island ahead of us and abandoned ship, taking their human cargo with them. We were still half a mile off and powerless to interfere as a dozen or so white-robed Arabs and upwards of a hundred naked niggers, men, women, and children, were tumbling ashore and up into the rocks; we could hear their squeals and the crack of the courbashes as the slavers lashed them on, the leader of the gang turning to jeer and gesture obscenely as we hove to a pistol-shot off shore. Ballantyne danced with rage and shook his fist.

‘You disgusting bastards, I’ll larn you!’ yells he, his voice fairly cracking. ‘Bosun, stand by the gun – no, belay that! Marines, take aim at that son-of-a-bitch – no, dammit, belay that too!’ For the slavers’ leader had snatched up one of the infants as a shield, and his rascals followed suit or mingled with the panic-stricken slaves so that we daren’t fire.

‘Oh, you cads!’ bawls Ballantyne. ‘Oh, you cowardly rotters! You shan’t escape us! Run her in, bosun! Stand by with your cutlasses, you men! We’ll settle your hash, you beastly black villains! They can’t outrun us with the slaves! Pistols, Tomkins, and load two for me! And two for Sir Harry – and a cutlass! We’ll run ’em to earth in a jiffy, sir, what? Ha-ha!’

He was such a happy little blood-spiller, just bursting to be at the enemy, that I hated to spoil his fun, but I was shot if I was going to be plunged into a cut-and-thrust brawl with those desperate brutes – and I had the perfect excuse for overriding him. I bellowed an order to the engineer to hold on, and cut short Ballantyne’s falsetto protest.

‘Sorry, my lad, it’s no go! We’re carrying an army’s treasury, and it ain’t to be risked for a gaggle of slaves!’

‘But we can cut ’em up in no time, and rescue the poor souls!’ cries he. ‘We’ve done it before, you know! Bosun’ll tell you—’

‘Well, you ain’t doing it today,’ says I, and he was hitting Top C until the bosun shook his head and said I was right, beggin’ your pardon, sir, can’t risk the dollars no-how. Ballantyne looked as though he would cry, but made the best of it like a good ’un.

‘Quite right, Sir Harry, I wasn’t thinkin’! Forgive me – dam’ thoughtless! I say, though, we can sink the beggars’ boat! That’ll spoil their filthy trade for them! Bosun, man the gun!’

‘Wot abaht the slaves, sir?’ says bosun. ‘Them black devils is liable to cut their throats aht o’ spite if we sink her.’

Ballantyne weighed this for a good two seconds, frowning judicially like Buggins Major undecided whether to thrash Juggins Minor or set him a hundred lines of Virgil. Then he snapped: ‘No. If we don’t scupper ’em those poor creatures will be sold like cattle. They cannot be worse off if they and those fiends are left stranded. And by gum there’ll be one less hell-ship runnin’ black ivory!’

Bosun touched his hat, but pointed out that their six-pounder would take all day to smash the slaver’s timbers. ‘Then burn the bugger!’ cries Ballantyne, and two men were sent in the gig to set her ablaze with bundles of tow. She went up like a November bonfire, while the slavers screamed helplessly from the hillside. Then we stood off, Ballantyne scowling and vowing vengeance.

‘It’s too bad!’ says he. ‘The white-livered ruffians always take to the nearest shore, but we’ve chased ’em and brought off the slaves two or three times, ’cos they never make a fight of it, the chicken-hearted scoundrels!’ He stared back at the shore and the blazing vessel. ‘Aye, they’re well up in the rocks, the beasts – and you must be careful, you know. Chum of mine, Jack Legerwood, chased one gang too far, just a couple of months ago. They caught him, made an awful mess of him, poor old chap. Gad, if I could only lay hands on them!’

You know my opinion of heroics, and I’d not break sweat myself to save a parcel of handless niggers being sold into slavery – which is probably no worse than the lives they’ve been living in some desert pesthole, and may well be a blessed change for the females who find a billet in some randy bashaw’s harem. I mentioned this to Ballantyne, and he blushed crimson and exclaimed: ‘I say!’ A true-blue Arnoldian paladin, he was, pure of heart and full of Christian zeal to cherish the weak and have a grand time cutting up the ungodly.

But I ain’t mocking him, much, and I’ve a sight more use for him and his like than for the psalm-smiting Holy Joes who pay lip-service to delivering the heathen from error’s chain by preaching and giving their ha’pence to the Anti-Slavery Society, but spare never a thought for young Ballantyne holding the sea-lanes for civilisation and Jack Legerwood dying the kind of death you wouldn’t wish for your worst enemy. I’ve even heard ’em maligned like my old shipmate Brookefn2 for taking a high hand and shooting first and hammering slavers and pirates and brigands like the wrath of God. Censure’s so easy at a distance, but I’ve seen them on the frontiers, schoolboys with the down still on their cheeks doing a man’s work and getting a seedeboy’s pay¹² and damn-all thanks and more often than not a bullet for their twenty-first birthday – why, I’d just seen one, too young to vote, weighing a hundred black lives in the balance, and deciding, in a couple of seconds, the kind of fearful question his reverend seniors at home would have shied a mile from.

I think he was right, by the way, and I speak from experience, having shirked responsibility too often to count. But the Ballantynes and Legerwoods didn’t, and if the slave trade has been swept off the face of the seas, it hasn’t really been the work of reformers and statesmen with lofty ideals in London and Paris and Washington, but because a long-forgotten host of fairly feckless young Britons did it for fun. And you may tell the historians I said so.

It’s about a thousand miles from Sinai to the Abyssinian port of Zoola, and I supposed our frisky little steamer would cover it in no time, but it didn’t. Half way the boiler sprang a leak, and it was the grace of God that we were off Jedda at the time, for in those days it was the only place worth a damn on the whole benighted Red Sea coast, being the port where the Muslim pilgrims disembark for Mecca, which lies a couple of days’ march inland. Consequently the place is aswarm with them, arriving and departing in every kind of boat from Chinese junks and ancient steamers to feluccas and coracles. We had a consul there, and the Navy were always on hand; they used the place as a rendezvous, with a supply depot and smithy where our engineer was able to get his kettle mended.

There’s a place called El Golea in the deep Sahara which they say is the hottest spot on earth, but I’ll put my money on Jedda – or anywhere else on the Red Sea for that matter. We sweltered for days, and the bosun won a bet from the marines by frying an egg on the deck. The waterfront was a bedlam of boats, and the town itself was choked with a vast milling horde of pilgrims who turned it into a human ant-heap, with the heat and stench rising from it in choking waves which I’ll swear were visible above the famous white walls. I lay gasping under an awning trying to ignore the deafening din of a million niggers shouting and wailing as I leafed through an old copy of Punch in which there was a rhyme about Britons in chains in Abyssinia, and a cartoon of Emperor Theodore as a thick-lipped sambo – well wide of the mark, as I was to discover.

Punch didn’t think much of our expedition, and had a fine old grouse about War Office muddle, and the cost to the middle classes which they said should be defrayed by nabbing Theodore and exhibiting him in a cage at the Egyptian Hall on Piccadilly at a shilling a time.¹³

If I was impatient of delay, Ballantyne was fit to burst; there were a couple of sloops like ours about to weigh anchor for some place down the Arabian coast where our native spies had word of a great cargo of slaves coming from the African shore, and our young hero was like a baby denied its bottle.

‘More than a thousand slaves bound for El Confound-it,fn3 and we’re stuck in this beastly hole! Of all the luck! We’ll never be fit in time!’

‘Oh, I dunno,’ says our informant, another sprightly juvenile, modishly clad in jellaba, brass-buttoned jacket, and pirate head-scarf. ‘Slavers mayn’t show for a week yet, and Confound-it ain’t far across from Zoola. Tell your engineer you’ll stop his grog if he don’t get a move on, why don’t you?’

A dam’ silly suggestion, since the surest way to make a British workman take his time is to threaten him, especially if you call him a Port Mahon baboon into the bargain, and it was all of another ten days, a week later than Speed had reckoned, before we were steaming down Annesley Bay, the gulf on which Zoola lies. And d’you know, only now, with my first glimpse of the Abyssinian shore, did it come home to me that apart from the sketch I’d been given by Speed, and a few scraps I’d picked up from Ballantyne and the boys at Jedda, I knew nothing about the country or people or why we were going to war with them, really. I’d left Trieste in the deuce of a hurry, quite elated at escaping the consequences of my evil conduct and the novelty of the commission I’d been given, and here I was, with the job almost done, and wondering for the first time what the dickens it was all about.

And since you, honest reader, know no more than I did myself as we threaded our way through the vast fleet assembled in Annesley Bay and were engulfed in Zoola’s two most charming attractions, borne by the land breeze – a fine powdery dust that hung over us in a cloud, and the most appalling stench – it seems a proper time to tell you of things which I had yet to learn, about Abyssinia and the casus belli that had brought Napier and his army all the way from India to this mysterious coast.

To begin with, you must understand that the Abyssinians are like no other Africans, being some kind of Semitic folk who came from Arabia in the far-off time, handsome, cruel, and bloodthirsty, but civilised beyond any in the continent bar the Egyptians, with whom they shared a fierce mutual hatred, partly because the Gyppoes were forever carrying off their beautiful women and boys as slaves, partly because the Abs (as I call ’em for convenience) are devout and violently militant Christians, and can’t abide Muslims – or Roman Catholics. Very orthodox, they are, having been Christian long before we were, and of fairly primitive doctrine – I’ve seen church paintings (admission one dollar) of a Byzantinish-looking St George slaying the dragon while Pharaoh’s daughter and her handmaidens look on in admiration, and a depiction of the Last Supper with places laid for fourteen.

And their Christianity don’t run to morality, not far at least. They lie and deceive with a will, drink to excess, slaughter each other for amusement, and the women couple like stoats. The corollary to their adage that ‘a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband’ is that there are dam’ few crowned heads in Abyssinia, and hear, hear! say I, for ’twould be a cruel shame to have all that splendid married pulchritude going to waste.

They don’t look at all negroid; indeed, the Ab females fit my notion of Cleopatra with their straight noses, chiselled lips, almond eyes, saucy shapes, and in many cases skins no darker than an Italian’s. They know how to preen, too, the Shoho women of the north in shell-embroidered black cloaks over tight leather tunics from bosom to thigh, jolly fetching, and the Galla girls of the south, reckoned the handsomest of all, their perfect faces framed by elaborate oiled braids plaited from crown to shoulder. Some go naked to the waist, with little aprons made of thongs, and by gad they can stand the exposure. But if they’re fair, they’re fierce; one I knew was such a peach that the slavers who’d taken her expected a record price, but were disappointed when she discouraged the buyers by juggling a throwing-knife during the bidding, and they had to give her away.

In the men, the Egyptian look is enhanced by their white cotton robes, and their laziness, for they’re the idlest folk alive except when fighting, which they are much of the time, for everyone’s a warrior and goes armed. They don’t seem to know what fear is; the younger nobles have a curious custom of waiting at river fords to challenge travellers to single combat – and how they came by that Arthurian custom must be an interesting story.

Their houses aren’t much better than large huts, thatched and simply furnished, although they have occasional castle-like buildings on hill-tops; their towns are large walled villages with what seem to be permanent fairs and markets, and even their cities (if you can call ’em that) are no more than a collection of houses on top of a massive precipitous height called an amba. Magdala, the goal of Napier’s expedition, was like that; you don’t need battlements when you have sheer rock walls below you.¹⁴

So there you have the Abs, a pretty rum lot, first brought to our notice in the 1770s by a Scotch eccentric whom nobody believed – mind you, he was pretty rum himself, fooling about with the Barbary corsairs, seeking the source of the Nile, and finally breaking his neck while helping a lady downstairs, which shows that even the most seasoned mad adventurers can’t be too careful.¹⁵

Very few Europeans had ventured into Abyssinia before him, for it was a traveller’s nightmare, rugged and desolate beyond description, racked by perpetual civil wars in which the tribal leaders fought for the supreme lordship. One of these, Ras Ali, had made himself king of most of the country by 1840, but made the mistake of giving his daughter, Tewabetch the Beautiful, in marriage to an ambitious young mercenary, Lijkassa, the son of a woman who sold tape-worm medicine, which the Abs take in quantity as a result of their partiality to raw beef, ’nuff said. But he was a first-class soldier, clever, brave, and unscrupulous, and in no time he’d usurped the throne.

While still a lad, he’d become convinced that he was the Messiah named in an old prophecy and would become the greatest king on earth, master of all Ethiopia and Egypt; he would scourge the infidels out of Palestine, purge Jerusalem of its defilers (the Muslims), and would be called Theodore. So he changed his name accordingly, and proclaimed himself Emperor and King of Kings. He was young, handsome, muscular, literate (unlike most Abs), and full of reforming notions, like abolishing slavery and generally improving the lot of the commonalty. If he had a tendency to berserk rages, butchering his enemies, holding mass executions, flogging people to death or cutting off their limbs and leaving ’em for the wild beasts, well, savage despots can’t afford to behave like Tiny Tim.

His queen was a moderating influence, and so were two Englishmen, Plowden, our consul, and Bell, a soldier of fortune who became Theodore’s chamberlain. Unfortunately all three died almost simultaneously, the two Britons cut up by rebels and Tewabetch of natural causes. Theodore massacred the rebels in reprisal, but with the three best influences in his life gone, he began to behave like a real absolute monarch at last, taking to drink and concubines and committing even more atrocities than before. He married again, but since his bride was the daughter of a rival claimant to the throne whom Theodore had humiliated and imprisoned, the marriage was not a success.

We sent out a new consul, Captain Cameron, who presented Theodore with two pistols from Queen Victoria. This so delighted him that he wrote a letter proposing that he send an envoy to London, and remarking that he’d wiped out Plowden’s murderers ‘to win the friendship of her majesty’.

You’d have thought he couldn’t say fairer than that, but would you believe that those monumental half-wits at the F.O. didn’t give his letter to the Queen, or even acknowledge it? Why? Oh, other things, like Bertie the Bounder’s wedding to Alexandra of Denmark,¹⁶ were occupying their lordships’ attention, and who was this distant African upstart, anyway? Or quite possibly some chinless oaf simply mistook it for his wine bill and tossed it into a pigeonhole. God knows how our foreign affairs haven’t been one long catalogue of disaster … stay, though, they have, haven’t they?

What followed was inevitable, with a short-tempered, arrogant barbarian monarch who thought he was God’s anointed. After a year of being ignored he arrested Cameron, who’d visited Egypt, Theodore’s mortal enemy, to investigate cotton supplies which we were liable to need with the American Civil War disrupting our business. Then a missionary called Stern (who was trying to convert Abyssinian Jews to Christianity, if you’ll believe it) published offensive remarks about Theodore. Result: Cameron chained, flogged, and stretched on the rack; Stern brutally beaten and two of his servants lashed to death with hippo-hide whips; other Europeans arrested and bound with cords soaked so that they cut their limbs; missionaries forced to watch the death by torture of malefactors whose blood the executioners smeared on the horrified spectators … and so on, while the letter whose delivery might have prevented these horrors lay unanswered in Whitehall.

Eventually a reply was sent, the messenger being a wily Oriental gentleman named Hormuzd Rassam from our Aden office who delayed six months before venturing up-country with conciliatory messages and presents which included a swing for Theodore’s children. (Gad, I’m proud to be British!) Much good it did: Rassam and his party were added to the chain gang, and at long last, after four years in which the public had heard little beyond rumours, Parliament awoke, members began to ask where Abyssinia was, and the Russell government, having stifled debate on the remarkable ground that it might irritate Theodore, fell from office, leaving the mess to the Tories who, not without agonised dithering, ordered Napier to take a force from India to Abyssinia, make a final demand for the prisoners’ release, and then ‘take such measures as he thinks expedient’, and good luck to him.

You notice that with typical parliamentary poltroonery the Derby–D’Israeli gang left it up to the soldier to make the fatal decision, but for once I could understand if not sympathise, for if ever a government was caught between Scylla and t’other thing, they were. On the one hand, they couldn’t leave the prisoners in Theodore’s clutches, for our credit’s sake – what, have a tinpot nigger king showing us his arse? Abandoning Britons, and telling the world we couldn’t defend our own? Letting India, where we’d been given an almighty fright only ten years before, see that we could be defied with impunity? ‘Never!’ cries John Bull, even if it took an army of thousands to free a handful, and cost the three and a half million of Dizzy’s estimate, and lasted months or years, still it must be done, and that was flat.

On the other hand, it was odds on that invasion would fail. Abyssinia was tropical territory incognita, our army would be cut off miles from the sea, without reserves, in country without roads or reliable water supply, where every ounce of food, gear, and ammunition would have to be carried – where? There was no certain information of where the captives were exactly, and what if Theodore cut their throats or carried them into the trackless fastnesses hundreds of miles inland? And what of the hundreds of thousands of ferocious tribesmen between the coast and Magdala – if indeed Magdala proved to be the goal? What if, as seemed very likely, Napier’s army vanished into the wilds of Prester John and never came out again?

That, I’m told, was the tenor of the warnings and prophecies that filled the press when the government’s decision became known: the expedition was doomed, but it would have to go anyway.¹⁷

But none of that was clear to me as we steamed into the dust and stink of Zoola on that fine February morning. I didn’t have the benefit of public opinion from home, and at Jedda they’d been far too taken up with pirates and pilgrims to give thought to the consequences of what was happening in the mysterious south, beyond the far-off peaks dimly seen through the haze that hung over Annesley Bay. But now you know the how and why of Napier’s expedition, and enough of the land and people for the moment. And from what I’ve told you, you may have been struck by a thought which has absolutely occurred to me only now, as I write: for perhaps the first time in her long and turbulent history Britain was going into a war which everyone believed we were going to lose. Everyone, that is, except Bughunter Bob Napier.

The expedition had been ashore for three months, but still supply ships and troopers and men-of-war were arriving daily to swell the fleet of steamships, sailing vessels, and small craft discharging cargo on to the causeway running out into the bay. It had a railway with bogies moving the goods inshore, where they were piled in mountains of bales and boxes among the tent-lines which stretched away into the distance.

It was a quartermaster’s nightmare, too much gear coming ashore too quickly and nowhere to put it, with confusion worse confounded by the milling mob of what someone called the ‘pierhead democracy’ – staff men and Madras coolies, generals and drummer-boys, dockside gangs both black and white labouring under despairing civilian overseers, work parties of soldiers ignoring the bawlings of perspiring non-coms, clerks and water-carriers and native women forage-cutters, every sort and colour of African and Asiatic, and a positive Noah’s Ark of animals. Next to our berth on the causeway, elephants were being hoisted ashore from a barge, squealing and trumpeting as they swung perilously aloft in their belly-bands, and the crane-tackles groaned and shuddered until the great beasts came to earth with a dangerous thrashing of trunks and limbs; cursing troopers were saddling and loading mules which had one leg strapped up to prevent their lashing out; water-hoys were pumping their streams into huge wheeled tanks on the railway – for every drop of drink in Zoola had to be brought ashore from the condensers of the ships in the bay – and even as I stepped ashore one of the hoses burst asunder, gushing over the pack-mules and swirling round the feet of the elephants which bellowed and reared in panic as their drivers clung to their trunks to quiet them.

Britannia’s bridgehead into Abyssinia was, in fact, a godless mess, made infinitely worse by the dust and the stink. Beyond the harbour and camp lay a wide plain with mountains far off, but you could barely see them through the fawn-coloured cloud that hung over the tents and sheds and rootiesfn1 and even the waters of the bay, covering everything in a fine powder which you had to be constantly brushing off your clothes and skin, and spitting out.

But it was nothing to the stink, a foul carrion-reek that took you by the throat and made breathing a poisonous misery.

‘If you think this is bad you should ha’ been here a month ago,’ says the transport wallah who supervised the loading of my strong-boxes into a railway bogie; he was a languid, amiable young haw-haw named Twentyman, a Hussar, complete with fly-whisk and followed by a chicofn2 with a bucket of camphorated water whose duty it was to supply his master with wet clouts to sponge away the dust. ‘What is it? Thousands o’ dead beasts rottin’, that’s what. Cavalry mounts droppin’ like flies, mules too, no one knows why, vets never saw the like.’ He dropped his wet rag into the bucket with a weary sigh. ‘Thank God for the vultures or we’d ha’ had an epidemic.’

I introduced myself, expecting to have to explain my arrival, but no such thing.

‘We know all about you, Sir Harry!’ says he blithely. ‘Mail sloop from Jedda brought word of you last week, deputation from H.Q.’s been waitin’ for three days, great excitement, what? And these are the long-awaited spondulikos, are they? Splendid, chuck ’em aboard, sarn’t, and you, dragoman, summon your stout lads to give us a shove, there’s a good chap!’

I bade a hasty farewell to Ballantyne, who was itching to get himself and his ship back into fresh air, and climbed into the bogie with Twentyman, followed by the Marines, who seated themselves on the strong-boxes.

‘Sound move, sarn’t, keep their posteriors planted just so,’ says Twentyman approvingly. ‘Can’t be too careful with the 33rd on hand, thievin’ Irish scoundrels to a man, desperate fellows. So keep an eye down on the dollars, or Paddy’ll be over the hedge with his pockets jinglin’, what? …¹⁸ I say, dragoman, jildi jao, sub admi push karo!’fn3

The dragoman bellowed and belaboured the coolies with his staff, and we were propelled towards the head of the causeway. I said it was as well they had a railway, with freight as heavy as mine, and how far did it go.

‘Five miles, so far,’ says Twentyman cheerfully. ‘It’s about a hundred and twenty to Attegrat, so it’s mules for you, I’m afraid, sir. They do twelve miles a day, supposin’ you can get ’em, for we’ve fewer than ten thousand pack animals when we’re supposed to have thirty thousand. Well, I ask you! Bombay bandobast,fn4 what?’

I thanked God privately that I wasn’t part of the expedition, and asked how quickly I could get word to Napier of my arrival.

‘Oh, couple of hours – telegraph’s only half way to Attegrat, but we’ve flag signallin’ by day, magnesium flare lamps for night messages, latest thing, bang-up-to-date, what? Ah, there’s one o’ the deputation! Hollo, Henty, he’s here at last!’

As we jumped down, a burly, beef-faced chap in a dust coat and kepi was striding up, grinning hugely, with his hand out.

‘Don’t remember me, Sir Harry, I’ll be bound!’ cries he. ‘George Henty¹⁹ of the Standard – we shared a billet with Billy Russell and Lew Nolan at Sevastopol, and you went down with dysentery. Before poor old Lew got himself killed, and you and Cardigan charged to glory!’fn5

He pumped my fin like a long-lost brother, but shot if I could place him.

‘D’ye know, you launched my journalistic career?’ cries he. ‘I was in the hospital commissariat, you know, until I offered a piece to the Advertiser describing your part in the Charge, and … well, here I am, eh?’ I found myself wondering if he was the idiot who’d written that foul purple tosh which George Paget, curse him, had clipped out and framed and hung in the 4th Lights’ mess, all about ‘with what nobility and power the gallant Flashman rode, his eye flashing terribly.’ And farting like a deflating balloon, had they but known.

My immediate thought was to give this familiar brute a set-down, but it’s best to keep in with the press, so I cried, to be sure, I remembered him well, and how had he been all these years? He went rosy with gratitude at being remembered by the famous Flashy.

‘But here’s another who’s been counting the hours to see you!’ cries he, and there, emerging from a tent, came Giant Despair dressed for a gypsy wedding, and I could only stand and gape.

Bar Mangas Colorado, he was the biggest man I’d ever seen in my life, closer to seven feet than six and built like an overgrown gorilla. His enormous body was wrapped in a robe made of lions’ manes which covered him from the white scarf round his neck to his massive half-boots, he wore a black beard to his chest, horn-rimmed spectacles, and a smoking-cap, and carried a throwing spear in one hand and a straw umbrella in the other. To complete this bespoke costume, he had a sabre on his hip, a revolver in his belt, and a round native shield slung on his back. When he grinned, with a fierce glitter of teeth in the beard, he looked like a Ghazi on hasheesh – and then he spoke, brisk and high-pitched, his huge hand gently enfolding mine, and he might have been a vicar welcoming me to the sale of work.

‘Charles Speedy, Sir Harry, used to be adjutant of the Tenth Punjabis, saw you once on the Grand Trunk, near Fatehpur, oh, ever so long ago, but you didn’t see me.’

Then you must have been lying down in cover and wearing mufti, thinks I. My astonishment showed, for he gave a whimsical shrug and spread his arms in display.

‘Sir Robert Napier likes me to dress native, thinks it impresses the local sidis, bless ’em! I’m his political adviser, and at present your committee of welcome.’ He gave another alarming grin, accompanied by even more alarming words. ‘Can’t tell you how glad we all are to have you with us.’

Now, that was the very first intimation I had of the possible ghastly sequel to the mission I was carrying out simply to oblige an old school chum. Of course, you could interpret the words two ways, and I lost no time in putting him right.

‘I ain’t with you. Delivering the messages, rather.’ I nodded at the boxes which the coolies were unloading under the watchful eye of Twentyman and my Bootneck sergeant. ‘I hear it’ll take ten days to get ’em up to Napier by mule. How short o’ the ready is he?’

‘Tight, but one chestful of dollars should cover his immediate needs, and we’ll get those to him inside forty-eight hours. Can’t have his pockets to let when he meets the King of Tigre to arrange our passage through his territory. Napier’s been waiting beyond Attegrat for days, but his majesty’s hanging back, scared to commit himself, likely. Theodore may be a long way off, but these petty rulers go in terror of him still.’ He gave his great booming laugh. ‘As political, ’twill fall to me to persuade King Kussai that we’ll be the winning side, so the sooner we’re southbound the better. You and I and Henty here can split a chest of silver among our saddlebags, with a couple of led-beasts. Hear that, George? You can stop scribbling and do something useful for a change!’

‘Tain’t every day two such lions as Sir Harry Flashman, V.C., and the Basha Fallaka shake hands,’ says Henty, pocketing his notebook. ‘You’re good copy, Charlie, the pair of you. When do we leave, then?’

‘After tiffin,’ says Speedy. ‘If that suits, Sir Harry?’ Henty laughed and said no wonder the Abs called him Basha Fallaka, which means Quick Chief, and was their pun on Speedy’s name.

I was deciding he was a sight too quick for me. Here I was, hardly ten minutes ashore, and I was being dragooned into the saddle by a crazy Goliath in Hallowe’en rig to go tearing up-country on a forty-eight-hour gallop to Napier’s command post. True, I’d sworn to Speedicutfn6 that I’d see his dollars all the way to Attegrat, but that had been back in Trieste with the hosts of Midian prowling round, and now here was Napier’s own political on hand to collect the dibs – and after that mention of being ‘with’ them I’d no wish to venture nearer the theatre of operations than I must, in case Napier got a notion to drag me into the stew. I know these bloody generals. I’d been there before.

On t’other hand, I was well retired, hadn’t worn the Queen’s coat since China in ’60, and I’d need Napier’s personal kitabfn7 for a paid passage home. He’d expect me to call on him, and offhand I couldn’t think of a good excuse for not doing so, fool that I was. I should have told Speedy I was sickening for mumps, or pleaded my belly, or done any damned thing to stay at a safe distance from a campaign which, to judge from the gloom at tiffin, promised to be the biggest catastrophe since the Kabul retreat.

I’ve told you of the pessimism which, unknown to me, was prevailing at home, but now I was hearing it from the men on the spot, grousing in their shirt-sleeves in the stifling heat of the mess-tent: Native Infantry officers, Punjabi Pioneers, King’s Own, cavalrymen from the Scinde Horse irregulars and Native Cavalry regiments, Baluch, Madras Sappers, even a Dragoon Guardee, and altogether as mixed a collection as you could hope to find, all croaking like the never-wearied rook. In short order I gathered that fat-headed Bombay politicals had hampered Napier at every turn and thrown his plans into disarray; that our transport was in chaos because they’d hired drivers who were the scum of the Levant, Greeks and dagoes and the like, who’d mutinied and had to be replaced by Persians and Hindus; that we were far too soft with the Abs, as witness Pottinger’s giving way to a crowd of Shohos who’d blocked the road, and the armed attack on a sentry which had had to be repulsed by the bayonets of Cooper’s Irishmen; that we were fools to rely on local intelligence which reported Theodore and the captives in half a dozen different places at once; that with the mercury at 116 (and that on a cool day) we’d have an epidemic if the army wasn’t moved up-country to the high ground; that baboons were swinging on the telegraph wires, which would have to be coated in rubber and buried – I’d heard the like from the Khyber to Chattanooga, and if the words were different the tune was the same.

‘Oh, for the Army Works Corps that we had in Crimea!’

‘As if they’d make a ha’porth o’ difference! God Himself couldn’t lay more than a mile of road a day over solid rock sky-high with boulders.’

‘Mile a day should get us to Magdala next year, what?’

‘Ah, so we shan’t be in and out by April?’ General laughter.

‘Dam’ lucky if we get out at all. See here – twelve thousand men, three-quarters of ’em on support, depots, transport, and so on, two thousand to go for Magdala—’

‘Flyin’ column, you mean? Napier’s good at those.’

‘Flyin’ column be damned! – in country where you’ll make ten miles a day with luck? An’ it’s four hundred miles! So where d’you find mule forage for forty days, to say nothin’ of takin’ elephants and mountain guns and mortars over ground that’d have Hannibal cryin’ for his pension?’

‘Talkin’ like a book, ye are. An’ will the tribes let us be? They say Theodore can put a hundred thousand into the field.’

‘If the chiefs support him. Merewether reckons they won’t.’

‘Does he, now? D’ye know, I don’t reckon Merewether’s optimism counts for much against odds of fifty to one.’²⁰

‘Oh, shield-and-spear niggers. Not much firepower.’

‘That’s not the point, confound it!’ This from a grizzled major of Baluch. ‘Time and distance are our enemy – not the tribes! We’re not here for conquest or victory, even! Eating, not fighting, is going to be what matters! Aye, survival!’ This was greeted by a brief silence, followed by a drawl from a Scinde Horse subaltern.

‘Ah, well … any volunteers for the relief expedition in two years’ time?’ Some laughter, by no means hearty.

The usual grumble-and-grin of men in the field, if you like, but with a decided note of uncertainty in it – and these weren’t just any soldiers, but the best India could show. Still, I might have dismissed them as croakers if Speedy’s silence during the meal hadn’t convinced me that he shared their misgivings.

You see, we poltroons have a talent for spotting heroes – we have to, in order to steer well clear of them – and from what I learned from Henty, who sat by me at tiffin, Speedy was a prime specimen, and an expert to boot. A gentle giant who looked like the wrath of God but had no side at all, had served in four armies, and probably killed more men than the dysentery. He knew Abyssinia inside out, spoke Amharic, which is the principal lingo of the country, and had been drill instructor in the service of Emperor Theodore, who had particularly admired his party trick of cleaving a sheep in two (lengthwise, God help us) with a single sword-stroke. But they’d fallen out, and Speedy had been farming and fighting Maoris in New Zealand when the present crisis arose; Napier had insisted on having him as his political, and Speedy had rolled up for service with nothing but the clothes he stood in and a couple of blankets.

That tells you the sort of chap he was,²¹ another of the crazy gentleman-adventurers who infested the frontiers in the earlies, and when a fellow with his authority don’t contradict croaking, you draw your own conclusions – mine being that I must lose no time in tapping Napier for my ticket home.

Just for interest I asked Speedy, when we were making ready for our departure up-country, how he thought Napier might set about the campaign, and was shocked when he said coolly that his only hope was to go hell-for-leather for Magdala with a small force, trust to luck he’d find the prisoners there, and high-tail it back to civilisation double-quick.

‘You went with Grant to Pekin, didn’t you, and Gough to the Sutlej – aye, and Sherman to the sea?’ He shook his shaggy head. ‘’Tain’t that kind of trip. They knew where they were going, with proper transport, commissariat, lines of communication, knowing who and where their enemy was, and with force enough to do the trick. Napier’s got none o’ that. As that old Baluch said, it’s time and the country he’s up against, and all he can do is raid and run.’

‘Man to man, what are the odds?’

He thought a moment, tugging his beard. ‘Even chance. Six to four against if ’twas anyone else, but Napier’s the best since old Colin Campbell. Yes, I’d risk a monkeyfn8 on him – if I had one!’

He was all action now, breaking the seals on one of the strong-boxes and having the glittering mass of Maria Theresas transferred to saddlebags by the Marines, with the sergeant watching like a hawk to see that no coins stuck to crafty fingers – he made ’em strip to their drawers and bare feet to make sure no one slipped cash into his clothing, and Twentyman again gave thanks that the 33rd weren’t on hand.

‘Aye, a parcel of Fenian thieves,’ says Speedy, ‘but well worth their salt when they form square. Did you hear that they went on an almighty drunk, and when Cooper swore they’d be left down-country their spokesmen asked for fifty lashes a man if only they could join the advance? What could Cooper do but pardon them, the impudent rascals?’

The Provost-Marshal was called to take charge of the remaining boxes, and I commended my Bootnecks to him as the best guard for the dollars he could hope to find. Their sergeant smiled for the first time in our acquaintance, and I supplied a little touch of Flashy by thanking him and his file for their good and trusty work, shaking hands with each man by name, which I knew must go well. Popularity Jack, that’s me.

The weight of the specie was such that we needed half a dozen beasts apart from our own,²² and Speedy decided that so many led-horses must slow us down, so a half-section of the Scinde Horse were whistled up, stalwart frontier riders in the long green coats and trowsers, with red sash and puggaree, that I hadn’t seen since the Mutiny, each man with a twin-barrelled rifle and sword – not the chaps I’d have picked myself, since half of them were Pathans who’d sooner steal than sleep. But Speedy swore by them, and to my gratification their havildar was a leathery veteran from the Mogala country who claimed to remember ‘Bloody Lance’, as he addressed me, pouring out the old tale of how Ifflass-mann slaughtered the four Gilzais – so much lying tommyrot, you understand, but I daresay I could still dine out on it in the caravanserais along the Jugdulluk road.fn9

We saddled up, Speedy inspecting the saddlebags on every ‘Scindee’, and then we set ahead through the bedlam of the camp; five miles it stretched from the Zoola causeway, on either side of the railway tracks, with the two locomotives puffing and squealing up and down. They weren’t used on the causeway itself, for fear of their weight causing a landslip. What with piled gear, work gangs, Ab vendors who’d set up their stalls as a bazaar in the tent-lines, and no attempt to bring order to the camp, it took us the best part of an hour to reach open country, and Speedy cursed the delay. I didn’t mind, for there was plenty to take the eye, chiefly the Shoho girls with their saucy smiles and hair frizzed into great turbans, bare to their loin-cloths and well pleased with the catcalls they drew as they sashayed along with their pots balanced on their heads.

‘Fine crop of half-caste babes there’ll be by Christmas,’ says Speedy. ‘Can’t blame our fellows either; ’tain’t often they run into beauties like these beyond the borders.’

There was an elephant train loading up on the edge of the camp, half a dozen of the enormous brutes kneeling, each beside a sloping ramp up which the great mortars and Armstrong guns were being hauled to be secured on platforms on the elephants’ backs. Speedy explained that there was no other way the heavy artillery could be carried through the ravines and along the narrow winding paths cut into the cliff-sides in the high country; the lighter mountain guns could be taken apart and carried by led-mules.

‘That old Baluch major was right, you see. We stand or fall on animal transport; without it we’re dead in our tracks in the middle of nowhere. And transport depends on forage, and forage depends on money.’ He slapped his saddlebag of coin. ‘That’s Napier’s life-blood you’ve brought us. This’ll keep him going for a day or so, and God willing the mules’ll bring up the rest within the fortnight.’

‘Can we count on the tribes for supplies? Some of the fellows at tiffin seemed to think they might fight.’

He shook his head. ‘Not at the moment. They’re too glad to see us – and our dollars. Fact is, the common folk would like nothing better than to have us conquer the country and rule it. We pay, we’d give ’em peace from their endless civil wars, protect ’em from rebels and bandits and locusts and slavers, maybe even relieve their poverty – d’you know that many are so poor they’ll sell their wives and daughters, even? They’re priest-ridden, too; their kangaroo Christian church gets two-thirds of the peasantry’s produce – aye, two-thirds! The king and their chiefs get a cut of what’s left, so there ain’t too much over for the brigands to pinch, is there?’

I wondered if we’d add Abyssinia to our savage possessions, but he said there was no chance of that. ‘We’re here to free the prisoners – bus!’fn10 says he. ‘Oh, the chiefs are all for our removing Theodore and installing one of them in his place, but Napier won’t play politics, or take sides, and so he’s told ’em. They can’t believe we ain’t bent on conquest – and I daresay our European pals and the Yankees share their view – but they’re dead wrong. Even the Tories think Britannia’s got quite enough empire, thank’ee very much, and stands in no need of the most advanced barbarians in Africa, whose idea of politics is civil war and massacre. Anyway,’ he added, ‘what profit is there in a country that’s mostly rock and desert? Why, no colonists would look at it!’

I asked what had brought him here, into Theodore’s service, too, and why he’d left it. He rode for a moment in thought, chin down on his chest, and then laughed almost as though he was embarrassed.

‘Blowed if I can think of one good reason! They’re a murderous lot of pirates, cruel, untrustworthy, immoral, and bone idle – and I like ’em! Why? ’Cos they’re brave, and clever, and love to laugh, and they’re so dam’ contradictory!’ He pointed to a herd of bullocks that were being driven into a corral by Ab cow-whackers. ‘Those fellows are so sharp they’ll get the better of our commissaries at a bargain, bamboozle ’em with figures – and yet they can’t write, and believe that we’re buying the bullocks as food for the elephants! And that’s the God’s truth.’ He paused, and laughed again. ‘But I guess my best reason for liking Habesh – that’s Arabic for Abyssinia – is that they like us. We treat ’em fair, and unlike the rest of Africa they’re smart enough to admire us, and know they can learn from us, from our engineers and scientists, aye, and our military. You know what they call us? The Sons of Shaitan – and it’s a compliment!’

‘And Theodore? You must know him better than anyone else.’

‘I don’t know him at all. No one does.’ He took off his specs and polished them carefully. ‘He’s not just one man, he’s many – and they’re all dam’ dangerous. You’re going to ask me what he’s liable to do, will he fight, will he run, will he hold the captives to ransom, will he murder them – and I haven’t the foggiest notion. So I’ll not try to answer. Better to let Napier tell you.’

And that, I may tell you, sent a shiver down my spine for it prompted the question why Napier should want to tell me anything at all. I was pondering this when Speedy added:

‘As to why I left Theodore, ’twas because he’d been listening to lies about me, and I’d no wish to wake up some morning face down on a bed of spear-points. So I asked for my back pay and a clear road. “Suppose I’ll not let you leave?” says he.

‘“Then I’ll fight,” says I, “and you know I’m not an infant.”

‘“I can have you killed,” says he.

‘“Ah, but how quickly?” says I, and laid my hand on my hilt. He had no fear, but he paused, and then smiled and embraced me and said I should have my money, a horse, and a spear, and God be with me.’ He chucked his reins. ‘Let’s raise the pace, shall we?’

From Zoola the barren scrub-land rises slowly to the base of the hills, and it took us five hours’ uncomfortable riding across stone-choked dry river beds and little slithering screes before we came to the plateau from which you could look back at the huge panorama of the distant camp like a sand-table model, and Annesley Bay with its forest of shipping, and the Red Sea beyond. Ahead of us lay the way station of Koomaylee, in a broad basin with sheer cliffs towering on either hand and a massive rampart of stone before us, crimson in the sunset save for the gloomy mouth of the Great Pass which splits it in two as though some god had gashed it with a cleaver. That’s the real gateway to Abyssinia, and at dusk it looks like the road to the Underworld. Beyond it lay range upon range of mighty peaks, rising ever higher as far as you could see.

The Himalays and the Rockies, magnificent as they are, never made me feel as small and helpless as those hellish Abyssinian highlands; they had a power to overwhelm, to make you feel you were in an alien, dreadful world, a desert of peaks that someone likened to the legs of an overturned table, thrusting into a sky of burnished steel. I was seeing them for the first time that night at Koomaylee, and I remember thinking that while the Hindu Kush and the Sangre de Cristo may convince you that they’re the roof of the world, they don’t frighten. Abyssinia did.

My only other memory of Koomaylee, where we bedded down with the Madras Sappers, is of the Norton pumps, like a row of gigantic hallstands, spouting a never-ending stream of wonderful ice-cold water, utterly unlike the stale condensed sludge of Zoola, into the hundred-foot wooden reservoirs. We sank it by the quart. ‘God bless America,’ says Henty, ‘for if they can work as well up-country we shan’t go thirsty at any rate.’

Next day we traversed the Great Pass, mile after mile through that astonishing defile which narrows to as little as five yards in places, with eight hundred feet of solid granite either side and only a strip of sky far overhead to remind you that with luck you won’t meet Charon this trip. We rode single file, the Scindees full of oaths and wonder as we passed through pretty groves of mimosa and laurel, with brilliantly coloured birds fluttering overhead, and when the pass widened at last there were little meadows of wild flowers, splendid woodland of pine and fir on the lower slopes, stands of the magnificent candelabra cactus, pink and white and crimson, and the surrounding peaks changed in the sunlight from orange to silver that looked like snow but was in fact white lichen – and all this in a country which would presently turn from fairyland into a burning desert of barren mountain and bottomless ravine where your way might lie through boulder-filled gullies or along winding cliff paths, or across a plateau as level as a billiard table with a drop of a thousand feet to left and right, and similar flat-topped bluffs rising like islands all the way to the horizon.

But I don’t purpose to write a tourist guide, and if you want a vade mecum from Zoola to Magdala you must turn to Henty or that Yankee blowhard Henry Stanley. They’ll tell you all about the scenery, and describe the army’s labours in making their slow way from the coast up-country, building every yard of their road as they went, blasting away rocks and pounding ’em flat to make a highway for the columns of bullock-carts and mule trains and elephants and camels who hindered us as we pushed on through Senafe, a great supply station which had been Napier’s headquarters before he’d advanced to Attegrat a couple of weeks before our arrival – Speedicut’s judgment of his whereabouts had not been far out. There were troops on the move all the way: I recognised the blue and silver of the 3rd Native Cavalry, the brown puggarees and cotton robes of the Punjabi Pioneers with their picks and shovels at the slope, and the celebrated coats of many colours of the motley crowd of border ruffians, Sikhs, Pathans, Punjabis, and the like, who composed the famous 10th Native Infantry. They looked as always like revellers at a fancy-dress ball, in red puggarees, green puggarees, violet caps, jackets and pantaloons of every shape and hue. A detachment of King’s Own, swinging along in sober khaki, showed altogether drab by comparison, and as Speedy observed, the Baluch in their green coats and black pants, with their band playing ‘Highland Laddie’, looked a sight more like British soldiers than our fellows did.

Well, God help you, Theodore, if this lot catches up with you, thinks I, reflecting that Napier must have had the time of his life choosing such a fine variety. There were Dragoon Guards swapping rum and baccy for chapattis with Bengal Lancers, pigtailed Chinese railway gangers in plate hats giggling and waving to blackavised Cameronian sharpshooters who glowered in response as they filed grimly by, pieces at the trail, long lines of mules bearing the wheels and barrels of the 2,000-yard mountain artillery and the tubes and rockets of the Naval Brigade, escorted by bluejackets with their cutlasses slung – twelve thousand horse, foot, and guns bound for the heart of darkness at a cost of £333 a man (each of whom had recently received a rise in pay of tuppence per diem). And all to rescue a handful of Britons from a savage prison at the back of beyond. Aye, those were the days.

We’d been three nights on the road and two days in the saddle when we reached Attegrat and learned that Napier was still up ahead awaiting the King of Tigre, who was said to have overcome his fears and was expected any day. This news had Speedy and Henty off at the gallop, one to do his diplomatic duty, t’other athirst for ‘copy’. I was left to see the silver delivered to the paymaster, and to follow at my leisure. Another day a-horseback in the heat, but since no one knew if or when Napier would return to Attegrat, there was nothing else for it.

Attegrat’s a shallow valley two miles across, and the tents of our main force, four to five thousand British and Indian troops, were strung out along the valley side, all mighty klim-blim and orderly compared to the Frog’s knapsack of Zoola. Trust Napier; he’d always had an eye like a gimlet and a knack of being into everything. Not that he was a martinet, but it all had to be just so for him.

Being off station, he could hardly be blamed for the piece of disciplinary folly I saw on my way to the paymaster’s tent. A native driver, bare to the waist and tied to a gun-wheel, was being flogged in a half-hearted way, and for once the off-duty loafers who’d assembled to watch the sport were encouraging the flogger to go easy and voicing sympathy for the floggee. It transpired that the unfortunate nigger had dared to shoot and wound an Ab robber who’d been trying to despoil him at pistol-point – and for this he’d been awarded a dozen lashes! Well, I’m all for a hearty flogging myself, but this seemed to be a poor excuse, and I learned from a disgusted paymaster that it had been ordered only because Krapf, an idiot clergyman who’d attached himself to the expedition as an expert,²³ had convinced the Provost-Marshal, another idiot, that there would be a native uprising if the Abs weren’t placated by having the driver whipped.

‘Wait until the chief hears about this!’ fumes my informant. ‘We’re far too soft with these blasted savages, givin’ in to the bastards every time, and a wretched sidi is thrashed for nothing! Well, I just hope that next time he lets himself be robbed, and bills that clown Krapf for the loss! Depend upon it, these damned people despise us as weaklings, and they’ll become insolent to the point of fightin’ us if we don’t show who’s master!’

I was glad to be shot of the silver, an uncomfortable responsibility when it was being carried by that troop of thieving blackguards; their reluctance to part with their saddlebags was pitiful to see. In all modesty, I believe that their respect for ‘Bloody Lance’ was what had stopped the villains from trying to filch the odd dollar. It was all tallied out on the paymaster’s table, and since he’d been informed by signal that the rest was coming up, he made out a receipt to be handed over on its arrival. I haven’t had it yet.

Napier was to meet his princely savage at a place called Mai Dehar, a short day’s ride ahead, so with the Scindees as escort I set off after tiffin across the valley and past the collection of huts that makes up Attegrat village. There’s a church and a ruined palace, but what takes the eye is the veritable Bluebeard’s castle perched on an eminence high above the valley, a massive keep with four great turrets at each corner. A sinister sight even in broad day, grim and forbidding behind its curtain wall.

Our way wound through the hills into a desolation where we began to see all the signs of civil war and spoiling, with villages ruined and abandoned, burned huts, fallow fields, and hardly a living creature except at a distance. The villages still inhabited were all on rising ground, stoutly walled, and on every peak there was a stark adobe tower after the style of the one at Attegrat; some were a good fifty feet high and of five or six storeys, built on the lips of precipices, crouched like vultures over the valleys below. A proper simile, for my havildar explained that these were the holds of robber barons who preyed on the countryside, and between them and the slave-raiding Gallas from the south the peasantry had a deuced thin time – it reminded him, he said cheerfully, of home, that blessed frontier where honest chaps lived by pillage and extortion, with only the interfering British Sirkar to mar the idyll. I pointed out that the Sirkar also paid the wages of him and his fellow-thieves when they took a holiday from crime, and he admitted that we had our uses.

We covered about twenty miles through that waste land, and lay overnight by the well serving the nearby village of Ad Abaga; the wells, being low-lying, are necessarily outside the walls of all the hill communities. I was thankful for my escort of bearded evil faces as we sat round our fire listening to the jackals and the occasional horrid heh-heh of a hyena while we watched the moon rise to silhouette another of those nightmare cliff-castles. I remarked on its ghastly look, and the Scindee havildar chuckled.

‘The husoor has heard the story of that castle? No? Of the strange Lady of the Fortress who is seen by no one? The tale runs that she is the wife of a robber chief who is a prisoner of the King of Lasta –’ he pointed to the distant mountains ‘– and that she has vowed that the sun shall not shine or the rain fall on her head until he is home again. Others believe she is under a spell, an enchantress bound by some great magician to dwell forever confined and solitary.’

‘A regular Lady of Shalott, eh? And what do the Scindees think?’

‘Why, that she bribed the King of Lasta to kidnap her man so that she might beguile herself with lusty servitors!’ cries he, and his ruffians chortled approval. I quoted Ilderim Khan’s adage: ‘A Gilzai and a grandmother for scandal!’ and they fairly hooted.

Our way next day lay through more broken country and tumble-down remains of raided villages, across a plateau so rough that it was late afternoon before we came up with Napier’s pickets on the crest that overlooks Mai Dehar, a shallow valley cut across by a stream, where John Bull first came face to face with Prester John.

A momentous meeting and a splendid spectacle, by all accounts, with our stalwart ranks of King’s Own, native cavalry and infantry, and artillery firing salutes from the near side of the stream, while the Tigre army, four thousand strong, suddenly came into view on the far crest, drums thundering as they formed a vast half-moon formation with their monarch in its midst. I say ‘by all accounts’ because I arrived too late to see it, and if you want the colourful details you must refer again to Henty and Stanley or any of the great rabble of correspondents who were on hand.fn11

They’ll tell you how Napier rode to the meeting on an elephant, but had to get off because it scared the Tigre horses, and finally arrived in the royal presence on a charger, which he presented as a gift to King Kussai, along with a rifle, receiving in return a shield, spear, lion tippet, and a white mule. They spent the day in the King’s tent confabbing, and when Kussai remarked that he didn’t care for invaders, much, but would stretch a point if they were Christians, Napier replied diplomatically that he liked all Abs except those who imprisoned our people. Ah, says Kussai, you mean Theodore, an evil son-of-a-bitch who’ll stand deposing, and I’m just the lad to replace him. Alas, says Napier, we ain’t concerned with Ab politics, just our captives, which of course means we shan’t help your competitors either. Can’t say fairer than that, concedes Kussai, carry on through my dominions, give Theodore his gruel and leave the rival claimants to me.

That was the gist of it, but Henty and Co. will also hold you spellbound with descriptions of the barbaric splendour of the Tigre warriors in their velvet mantles, lion-mane robes, shirts all colours of the rainbow, bearing sickle-bladed swords, shields, lances, and a few muskets, their officers in flowing silk headdresses, Bedouin style, with silver fillets round the forehead, and braided hair and beards. They’ll comment on the noble bearing of young King Kussai in his red-fringed toga and gold gauntlets, mild in speech and manner and not the smartest despot between Cairo and the Cape, perhaps, but amiable to a degree, being in no doubt which side his bread was buttered.

The proceedings concluded with ceremonial inspections, Napier running the rule over the Tigre army, strapping fellows if primitively armed, and Kussai being treated to a display of foot drill and manoeuvres by our gallant lads; there were those who thought we’d have done better to show the Abs our Armstrong guns and rockets in action, by way of warning, for they seem to have come away from that first encounter convinced that while we’d be invincible on the plain, we’d be no match for their irregulars in the high country.

All this was over by the time we breasted the slope to the crest where the pickets were stationed, with the sun setting behind them, and here came a young subaltern of the 3rd Native Cavalry, mighty trim in his blue and silver, cantering downhill to meet us. He greeted me by name, explaining that he’d been on the q.v. all day, with instructions to bring me to Napier’s tent as soon as I was sighted – which would have been flattering if I hadn’t, as you know, been leery of generals who can’t wait to see me. With good cause, for …

‘I wonder, Sir Harry, if you’d be good enough to wear this?’ says he, holding out a long hooded cloak of the kind the Heavies wore in those days. ‘And my rissaldar will look after your Scindees.’

I looked from the cloak to him and his rissaldar, who was throwing me a salaam and calling my escort to attention, and the tiny doubt that had been stirring at the back of my mind since Speedy had rejoiced at my being ‘with’ the expedition grew suddenly into a dreadful foreboding as he put the cloak into my reluctant hand.

‘What the devil’s this?’ I demanded.

‘If you would please keep it close about you,’ says he. ‘Sir Robert wishes your presence to be known to as few people as possible, especially the enem— that is, our Abyssinian friends. There are a number of them moving about our lines, you see … oh, perfectly cordial, merely curious—’

‘And why the hell shouldn’t they see me? I ain’t in purdah!’

‘Sir Robert thinks it best, sir.’ He was pink but firm, all of twenty but not to be over-awed even by the famous Flashy. ‘Indeed, he insists. So, if you wouldn’t mind, sir … the hood will conceal your features, you see.’

It was ridiculous – alarmingly so, but there was no use to protest. I threw the cloak round my shoulders, drew the hood forward, and followed over the crest and down the slope to our lines already lit by storm lanterns against the gathering dusk. Sure enough, there were tall Ab warriors, and womenfolk and children, moving among the tents, staring at our fellows and the jawansfn12 who’d plainly been put on their best behaviour, for they were calling greetings to the Abs, offering them seats by their fires, glad-eyeing the Shoho girls, and letting the chicos play with their equipment. My conductor led the way to a big marquee set apart, with a couple of Dragoons with drawn sabres at the fly, and the gigantic figure of Speedy between them, handing me down and ushering me inside.

‘None o’ the press gang saw him?’ My escort assured him they hadn’t. This was too much, and I said so.

‘Of all the dam’ nonsense! Henty’s seen me, hasn’t he? Why shouldn’t the rest of ’em?’

‘Henty’s safe,’ says Speedy. ‘The rest ain’t, least of all the confounded nosey-parker Stanley – you know him, the Chicago wallah.²⁴ He’d trumpet your arrival to the four winds!’

‘And who’d give a mad clergyman’s fart if he did? Why shouldn’t he? Oh, the blazes with this! Where’s Bob Napier, then? Or has he gone off the deep end too?’ I flung off the cloak, and was about to give my disquiet full flow when I realised that my auditors – the escort, Speedy, and a bookish-looking Sapper captain – were glancing apprehensively at the far end of the tent – and there he was, the Bughunter in person, and even in my agitation my first thought was that if ever a played-out veteran needed a long furlough, he did. He’d always looked middling tired, with his down-turned brows and pouchy eyes and drowsy moustache, but now he was old, too, regarding me with a tolerant but weary smile as he rose from behind his table and came forward under the lamp.

‘You must not mind Sir Harry’s John Company manners, gentlemen,’ says he. ‘The first time I heard his voice he was addressing a governor-general of India in the most cavalier terms. You remember the great diamond, twenty years ago, at Kussoor?’fn13 And blessed if he wasn’t bright-eyed with memory. ‘Give me your hand, old comrade, and welcome indeed, for I never was so pleased to see anyone, I can tell you!’

That was the moment when I knew, beyond all doubt, that the doom had come upon me yet again.

If you’ve read Tom Brown you may remember a worthy called Crab Jones, of whom Hughes said that he was the coolest fish in Rugby, and if he were tumbled into the moon this minute he’d pick himself up without taking his hands out of his pockets. Bob Napier had always reminded me of Crab, in the Sikh War, the Mutiny, China, and along the frontier: the same sure, unhurried style, the quiet voice, the methodical calm that drove his more excitable subordinates wild. He was also the best engineer in the army, and the most successful commander of troops I ever knew.

He was nearing sixty in Abyssinia, and if he looked worn it was no wonder. We’d shared several campaigns, but he’d had the rougher passage every time, thanks to his talent for getting in harm’s way – and out again, usually leaking blood. God knows how many wounds he’d taken; once, I recall, he’d had his field-glasses shot out of his hand, three bullet-holes in his coat, and a slug through his foot – he probably clicked his tongue and frowned that time. Not surprisingly, he was as often sick as well; he’d been in a shocking state, they say, when he licked Tantia Topi in the Mutiny, and according to Colin Campbell there had been ‘no twa pun o’ him hingin’ straight’ when he’d planned the capture of Lucknow. (That means he wasn’t at all well, by the way.) When he wasn’t being all heroic, chasing Sikhs with elephant guns and hammering Pathans on the border, he’d laid half the canals and most of the roads in northern India, from Lahore to the Khyber, and built Darjeeling. Now, on the brink of retirement and pension, they’d handed him the poisoned chalice of Abyssinia … and here he was, welcoming me with that famous smile which everyone remembered, perhaps because it was so out of keeping with the stern, old-fashioned figurehead, asking about my doings, remarking how well I looked, inquiring after Elspeth (whom he’d never met), drumming up sandwiches and beer for my refreshment, observing again what luck it was my turning up like this, and how glad they were of the Maria Theresas.

Dashed unnerving, so much cordiality from a man who’d never been one of your hearties. In a generation of great captains like Campbell and Rose and Outram, such giants as the Lawrences and Nicholson and Havelock and Harry Smith, to say nothing of fighting madmen like Hope Grant and Rake Hodson, Napier had always been the modest, quiet man on the edge of the party, only occasionally showing a flash of sardonic humour, but always happy to escape to his work and his studies, music and painting and peering at rocks.fn1

Since he’d mentioned the dollars, I reminded him tactfully that I’d been homeward bound when I’d allowed Speedicut to press me into the service, and hinted politely that I’d be obliged for a warrant and a trifle of journey money to see me on my way again.

‘See to that, Moore, if you please,’ says he to the Sapper, whom he introduced as his secretary and interpreter. ‘By the way, how many languages do you have, Moore? A dozen? How does that compare with your store … Sir Harry?’ He’d been on the brink of calling me ‘Flashman’, being my senior by ten years, and now a general; mere ‘Harry’ would have been beyond him altogether these days, and I made a note not to address him by the old familiar ‘Bob’.

I said I might scratch by in a dozen, but wasn’t fluent in more than six.

‘One of them being Arabic, I seem to remember,’ says Napier, which set me worrying. Why Arabic? He didn’t enlarge, but dismissed Moore and my escort and settled back in his chair, motioning Speedy to take a seat by the table. ‘Well, this is quite splendid, Sir Harry. I gather from Vienna’s message that you’ve been in Mexico lately. Political indaba,fn2 was it?’

‘Not exactly, sir. Foreign enlistment, you might say.’

‘I see. So you have no official position just now? On the retired list?’ He nodded. ‘Well, Moore will have your warrant ready in the morning … if you want to use it immediately, that is.’ He glanced at Speedy, and Speedy, sitting there in his barbarous finery like the King of the Cannibal Islands, smiled ever so roguish, as though he were in on some jolly secret.

‘I don’t follow, sir … why shouldn’t I use it?’

‘No reason at all,’ says Napier, ‘except that, knowing your … your knack for adventurous service, shall I call it? … it had occurred to me that you might care to postpone your departure … in a good cause after your own heart?’ He ended on a question, and Speedy chuckled, damn him, watching me with the idiot grin of one waiting to see a glad surprise sprung.

‘It is an altogether unofficial thing, and indeed must be strictly secret.’ Napier sat forward, instinctively lowering his voice. ‘You are entirely strange in the country, Sir Harry, and care has been taken that no highland Abyssinian should lay eyes on you, and that your presence here is unknown to all but a few of our own people who can be relied upon. You see, there is a part to be played – a secret and, it may well be, a perilous part, and one that no other man in the Army could even attempt to play.’ He paused, his hooded eyes on mine. ‘A part on which the success or failure of the expedition may well depend.’ He paused again. ‘Shall I continue?’

At this point, when it was plain that some beastly folly was about to be unveiled, Inner Flashman would gladly have cried: ‘Not unless you wish to risk seeing a grown man burst into tears and run wailing into the Abyssinian night!’ Outer Flashman, poor devil, could only sit sweating nonchalantly, going red in the face with funk and hoping that Napier might construe it as apoplectic rage at the prospect of having my travel arrangements upset. He took stricken silence for assent, and rose, beckoning me to an easel on which was a map of the country – a most odd map in that it had length but little breadth, like the one which I attach to this memoir, and was made up of several photographs glued together, something I had never seen before.

‘You know what’s to do – find Theodore and secure the release of the captives by whatever means. Here are we at Attegrat, and there is Theodore, with his army, on the road from Debra Tabor to Magdala. Between us lie three hundred miles of country which, as I’ve no doubt our croakers will have told you –’ he gave an amused snort ‘– is an impassable wilderness of unclimbable peaks and bottomless chasms in which certain disaster awaits if our supply should fail, or hostile tribes bar our way or lay waste the country, or Theodore himself engages us with overwhelming force, or any one of a hundred difficulties arises to bring us to a standstill.’

He paused to see how I was taking this, and gave one of his little tired sighs.

‘Well, Sir Harry, I can tell you that with your silver to pay our way, we’ll not fail of supply, if we move swiftly. The tribes …’ he shrugged, ‘are unpredictable and untrustworthy. Kussai of Tigre has thirty thousand warriors, and Menelek of Shoa and Gobayzy of Lasta each as many, but they will not trouble us unless we show signs of faltering or failure. Kussai offers us passage and assistance, and all three hope we shall depose Theodore. Then they will scramble for his throne.’

‘They’re mortal scared of him,’ put in Speedy. ‘Menelek besieged Magdala last year, but thought better of it. He and Gobayzy are still in the field with their armies, willing to wound but afraid to strike.’ He scratched his beard thoughtfully. ‘Can’t say I blame Gobayzy. He sent a message of defiance to Theodore last month, and Theodore gave his messenger the slow death – that’s half-cutting off the limbs at knees and elbows, twisting ’em to seal the arteries, and leaving the victim for the wild beasts. I’ve seen it done,’ he added, no doubt seeking to cheer me up.

‘Quite so,’ says Napier briskly. ‘It is of a piece with the atrocities he has been inflicting for years past on his southern provinces.’ He touched a spot on the map west of Magdala. ‘Gondar, where he has been repressing rebellion by wholesale slaughter, torturing tens of thousands to death, laying waste the countryside. Debra Tabor, which he has burned and whose inhabitants have suffered indescribable cruelties, crucifixions, mass burnings alive, and the like. He seems to have gone completely mad, for all Abyssinia is in a ferment against him, except for his army, and that is dwindling, we’re told, through constant desertions. At the moment he is leading it back to Magdala, but slowly, because he is carrying his heavy guns and like us is having to build his road as he goes, no doubt with the labour of rebels enslaved in Gondar.’

‘He always likes to have a few political enemies to slaughter from time to time,’ says Speedy. ‘He’ll execute ’em in hundreds along the way. Thank God our folk are in Magdala and spared that march! When I think of the torture and abuse they’ve suffered …’ His huge hands clenched on the spear lying across his knees, and he growled deep in his throat. ‘One o’ these days I’ll have a word with his majesty on the treatment of white prisoners!’

Napier received this with polite interest before resuming. ‘In any event, he will reach Magdala before we do. He may make his stand there. I hope and believe he will. But if he doubts his ability to withstand a siege, he may retire into the southern wilderness, taking the captives with him—’

‘Unless he’s chopped ’em first!’ grunts Speedy.

‘That, too, is a possibility,’ says Napier quietly. ‘Or he may march to meet us, and we must be prepared to fight him in the passes, perhaps even without our artillery if our transport should prove too slow. That would be a hard thing, but if we must we shall abandon guns, baggage, tents, porters, auxiliaries, and all the rest, and meet him with rifle and bayonet and sixty rounds a man, as we did against the Hassemezeia in the Black Mountain. God willing, we shall have done with him before the June rains, but if not we shall march and fight through them. And at need we shall follow him to the Congo or the Cape.’

They were the kind of words you’d expect to hear from a Brooke or a Custer, spoken with a heroic flourish and a fist on the table. Napier said them with all the fervour of a man reading a railway time-table … but I thought, farewell and adieu, Brother Theodore, your goose is cooked; this quiet old buffer with the dreary whiskers may not shout the odds, but what he says he will surely do. It remained to be seen what ghastly part he expected me to play in the doing. He touched the map again, drawing his finger in an arc south of Magdala.

‘Whether he flees, or is driven southward after we defeat him, that is where his line of retreat must be cut off. And that can be done only with native help – no, not Gobayzy or Menelek, who are not only untrustworthy but would certainly regard a request for assistance as weakness on our part, and might even turn on us. We must enlist a people who are implacable enemies of Theodore but have no political interest in his fate or, for that matter, in Abyssinia, which they regard simply as a source of plunder and slaves. They are the Gallas, of whom you may have heard. Speedy, you have the floor.’

‘Thank’ee, Sir Robert,’ says Speedy, and stood up, possibly to assist thought, for he stood frowning a moment, scratching his beard with his spear. ‘The Gallas,’ says he. ‘Aye. You remember the Ghazis in Afghanistan, Sir Harry? Well, the Gallas are cut from the same cloth – ferocious, cruel, mad as bloody hatters!’ He snapped his fingers. ‘No, I can give you a better comparison than the Ghazis – some fellows you know from the American West. Aye, the Gallas are the Apaches of Abyssinia! They seem to live only for raid and murder and abduction – the Lord alone knows how many youths and maidens they carry off each year and sell into Egypt and Arabia. You saw those burned villages and wasted fields on the way here? Those were Galla work. They are a monstrous crew, and as wicked and dangerous as any tribe in Africa. They loathe Theodore because they’re Mohammedans – so far as they’re anything – and he tried to Christianise ’em, mostly by fire and sword and massacre. He didn’t succeed, but he captured their great amba at Magdala, and made it his capital just so that he could keep an eye on ’em. And they’re waiting and praying for the day when they can tear him down!’

‘And with our arrival they believe that day may be coming,’ says Napier, and Speedy, who’d been going like a camp-meeting preacher, took the hint and sat down. ‘And we must convince them that it is at hand. They fear Theodore, with good cause, and they will not move against him unless they are certain that we are determined on his overthrow and will not rest until he is dead or our prisoner.’

So that was it. Flashy, ambassador extraordinary to a nation of bloodthirsty slave-traders, charged with the task of talking them into a war against a barbarian tyrant who was probably a good deal more civilised than they were themselves – that was what was about to be proposed, plain as print. Fortunately, it was impossible; there was something that Napier, in his eagerness to plunge me into the soup, had overlooked. Perhaps my relief showed in glad surprise which he misunderstood, for he nodded, with a glance at Speedy, who was gleaming in anticipation.

‘I see you read my mind, Sir Harry,’ says Napier. ‘Yes, it is a task for you, and you alone. I said no other man in the Army could play the part required – for it is a part, and one that you have played before, when you entered Lahore disguised as an Afridi horse-coper, when you smuggled Kavanagh out of Lucknow, when you spent months as a sowar of native cavalry at Meerut before the Mutiny.’ He was smiling again, no doubt at my ruptured expression. ‘But your unique fitness for the work aside, I know it is the kind of service that you have always sought, and excelled at, which is why, I am not ashamed to say, I thanked Almighty God in my prayers when the telegraph told me it was you who was bringing the silver from Trieste.’

It was no consolation to me that Speedy was regarding me with something like worship at this recital of my supposed heroics. Of all the godless suggestions! I tried to compose my features into the right expression of bewildered amused regret as I kicked his appalling proposal into touch.

‘But, sir, you’re forgetting something! Of course I’d do it like a shot, or any other useful work …’ Safe enough, thinks I, fool that I was. ‘… but I don’t speak Amharic, or any other local dialect, for that matter—’

‘But you do speak Arabic!’ cries Speedy. ‘That’ll serve your turn. There’s no lack of Arabic speakers up-country, especially among the Mohammedan Gallas, and Queen Masteeat is one of ’em.’

‘Queen who?’

‘Masteeat, Queen o’ the Wollo Gallas, the strongest – aye, and the most savage – tribe in the Galla confederacy. She’s the lass who’ll decide whether they march against Theodore or not. Win her over and we’ve won the Gallas, by the thousand!’ He gave another of his booming laughs that set his barbaric ornaments shaking. ‘Mind you, it may be easier said than done. She’s a remarkable lady, and I doubt if there’s been a shrewder or more ruthless crowned female in this neck of the world since Cleopatra!’

‘Yes, you did say she was formidable,’ murmurs Napier. ‘Indeed, she must be to hold sway over such people. And she is young, and a widow, is she not?’ he went on, his eyes on the big moths fluttering round the lamp. ‘Personable?’

‘What Galla girl isn’t?’ grins Speedy. ‘Masteeat means “looking glass”, so there you are. Not that she’s a girl in years – fair, fat, and forty rather, a real stately Juno, but with a fine bright eye and a whale of an appetite … for her vittles, I mean, regular glutton—’

‘To be sure,’ nods Napier. ‘What more?’

‘Well, tell you the truth, Sir Robert, I was less interested in her looks than in getting out of her presence ek dum – when a playful tyrant with power of life and death starts to wonder whether a chap my size could tackle a full-grown lion with a knife … well, I’m glad to bid her good day!’

‘Dear me. Why should she wonder any such thing?’

‘Well, sir, she was three parts drunk at the time, but I reckon the real reason was feminine pique ’cos I’d declined a post in her service.’ He said it straight-faced, the great idiot; some fellows don’t know a gift mare when she kicks ’em in the trinkets. ‘She’d ha’ pitted me against one of her pet monsters if her chamberlain hadn’t dissuaded her. Oh, she’s a rum ’un, Queen Masteeat. Jolly enough foxed, but wilful and sharp as a sabre when sober, for all her languid airs. Why, for two years she’s ruled the confederacy in despite of her elder sister Warkite, Queen of the Ambo Gallas, and there’s a third claimant—’

‘Thank you, Speedy,’ interrupted Napier. ‘Well … however wilful her majesty, she will hardly fail to respect a senior officer of a British army advancing on Magdala. What do you think, Sir Harry?’

Since Speedy had thrown my Arabic in my face I’d been listening to their exchanges with mounting alarm, and now I made for the only bolthole I could see, while playing up like an eager Dick Champion.

‘Why, of course I’ll go, sir, if you wish it – nothing I’d like better!’ A ringing laugh followed by a rueful smile. ‘But … I hate to say it … surely Captain Speedy is far fitter for this work than I? He knows this queen, and speaks her first language, and knows the country and customs—’

‘That is precisely what disqualifies him – every Abyssinian knows him, and secrecy is essential. Theodore’s spies inform him of every move we make – but he must not know that I have sent an envoy to the Gallas.’ Napier spoke with solemn emphasis, tapping a finger. ‘He would surely set his agents to work to prevent their lending us aid. He might even encompass the death of Queen Masteeat – and your life would not be worth two pice if he knew of your mission. You will be deep in enemy country, remember. That is why you must put on native garb again, a harmless Asian traveller going about his affairs unsuspected.’

You’ll notice that what had begun as an invitation had become a cut-and-dried certainty in the mind of this abominable dotard. I’d be skulking behind enemy lines, figged out like Ali Baba, risking capture by a maniac who twisted his victims’ limbs off, and playing travelling salesman to a demented bitch who thought it ever so jolly to throw visitors to the lions – and not a thing to be done about it except feign eagerness with a churning stomach and a grin of glad hurrah, as I sat sweating in that stifling tent with Napier regarding me like a prize pupil and the benighted buffoon Speedy clapping me on the shoulder.

Once again I was hoist with my undeserved reputation for derring-do, my fraudulent record of desperate service, and once again I couldn’t refuse – not and keep my good name. Time was I’d have wriggled and lied and gone to any length to escape from the coils of duty, but experience had taught me to recognise a hopeless case, and this was a beauty – for Napier was right: on the face of it, I was the only man. And I was too great a poltroon to face the disgrace and disgust and social and professional ruin if I shirked and slunk home … no, I hadn’t the game for that.

So I did my damnedest to look like a greyhound in the slips, stiffening the sinews and imitating tigers – and damme if Napier wasn’t regarding me with decidedly wry amusement.

‘I see that I was right in supposing the mission to be one after your own heart. I wonder,’ he sounded almost jocular, ‘if it is perhaps rendered doubly attractive by the fact that it concerns a royal lady of … striking personality. You may not be aware, Speedy, that Sir Harry has great experience in that line. When he was employed as envoy extraordinary to the court of the Maharani of the Punjab he so far succeeded that her majesty proposed marriage. Or so Sir Henry Lawrence assured me. And I recall that on the Pekin expedition the army was consumed with jealousy of the favour shown to him by the Empress of China.’ He made a curious noise which I could only interpret as a roguish chuckle. ‘Really, my dear Sir Harry, you should consider giving a course of lectures at Sandhurst or Addiscombe on the subject of courtly address.’

My, wasn’t this free and easy chat, though? Could he be hinting at the unspoken thought, which had certainly been in the pious minds of Broadfoot and Elgin,²⁵ that I’d best secure royal cooperation by galloping her into what a Frenchman of my acquaintance called a condition of swoon? Surely not? They’d been worldly, wily politicals, but this was a grave, straight-laced senior of the old school who’d never dream … and then I remembered that this same Napier, with his antique whiskers and one foot in the grave, had recently married a spanking little filly of eighteen, which had plainly influenced his outlook on commerce with the fair sex; no wonder he looked as though he’d been fed through the mangle.²⁶ Yes, I knew what he was thinking, the randy old rake; well, I was in no mood to appreciate his lewd levity, if that’s what it was. I said the reports of my diplomatic success had been greatly exaggerated, and that the Army had a deuce of an imagination.

‘But, seriously, sir, are you sure I’m the best man for this?’ Bursting with eagerness to go, you see, but voicing honest doubt. ‘I mean, it’s too big a thing to risk failure, I can see that, and while I’d do my level best, well … It wouldn’t do,’ I burst out, ‘if I let you down through ignorance or inexperience of the country—’

‘My dear Sir Harry,’ says he, so moved by my manly modesty that he put a hand on my shoulder, ‘I know of no man less likely to fail, and none in whom I repose such trust,’ and that, with him looking noble and Speedy muttering ‘Hear, hear!’ was my fate signed, sealed, and shoved down the drain, and I could only await my marching orders looking resolute and wondering how I might still slide out, God only knew how, along the way to the lair of this royal Medusa.

Napier lost no time, calling in Moore to make notes and taking me flat aback by saying I must set out that same night. ‘It is essential you be beyond the possibility of detection before dawn. You need not go far. The guide who is to escort you to Queen Masteeat lives only a few miles hence, and will afford you a roof to rest and prepare for your journey. And to let your beard start to grow,’ he added, ‘so that Khasim Tamwar may present a rather less European appearance.’

‘That’s my nom de guerre, is it? Who am I?’

‘An Indian subject of the Nizam of Hyderabad, whom you served as a diplomat in Syria and Arabia, now travelling to Galla to buy their famous horses for the Nizam’s cavalry – the Gallas ride like centaurs, by the way. You will naturally present the Nizam’s compliments to her majesty, and …’ he raised a finger for emphasis ‘… to her alone will you reveal that you are a British officer and my envoy.’ He took a doubtful tug at his moustache. ‘For your own safety I wish you could remain Indian, but if she is to be persuaded to go to war your true identity may be essential. You agree, Speedy?’

‘Let him be Sir Harry Flashman,’ grins Speedy. ‘Clean-shaven, if possible. I daresay that’s what fetched the Empress of China.’

Napier chose not to be amused. ‘It is no light thing he will be asking her to do. Her life and her people’s lives depend upon it.’ He returned to the map. ‘I spoke of cutting off Theodore’s retreat, and we may have to settle for that, but I am hoping for something more – a steel ring of Galla warriors round Magdala to prevent his even leaving it, to hold him there until we have forced our way through the passes. Then, if he refuses to surrender, we shall take the place by storm.’ He gave me his steady look. ‘That steel ring is what I want of Queen Masteeat. It will be for you to persuade her.’

My innards set to partners at the prospect, but there was a question to be asked.

‘If she’s like any queen of my acquaintance, she’ll have to be bought. Since you tell me Magdala was a Galla place, I guess she’ll want it back. But what more?’

‘The possession of Magdala is a political question, and no concern of ours. You may offer her fifty thousand dollars to invest the city. If she is unwilling to do more than harass Theodore’s retreat, you will lower the payment at your discretion.’

And if she threatens to feed my essentials to her lions, how discreet should I be then, eh? But I kept the thought to myself.

Napier sat silent a moment, then spoke slowly. ‘I’m sorry, Sir Harry, but that is all the brief I can give you. Speedy has shown us her character: shrewd, formidable, but capricious, by turns amiable and ruthless, and no doubt as cruel as such despots usually are. But her present situation and ambitions are hidden from us. That she is Theodore’s mortal enemy is all we can tell with certainty. Yours is a task,’ says he, shaking his grizzled head, ‘which might tax a seasoned ambassador, but I know you will succeed as you have done in the past, and then,’ the old lined face lit up again with that brilliant smile, ‘you can do what no mere diplomat could do, by offering Queen Masteeat a soldierly skill far beyond her own commanders’, to direct the investment of Magdala and, if she wills it, lead her troops into battle!’

She ain’t going to get the chance to will it, you dear old optimist, thinks I, ’cos supposing I get the length of seeing and persuading her, the last thing I’ll ask for is command of her rabble of bloodthirsty niggers. But of course I slapped my knee and stiffened the sinews some more, and Speedy swore that he envied me the trip. God help him, I’ve no doubt he meant it.

‘With Theodore on the road from Debra Tabor to Magdala,’ says he, moving to the map, ‘it’s my guess that Masteeat will be on the move herself, court, council, army and all, keeping an eye on his line of march. Her country lies south of Magdala, but unless I’m mistaken she’ll have come west, somewhere along the Nile²⁷ – see, there – between the Bechelo and Lake Tana.’

‘How far are we from the Nile?’ asks Napier.

‘About three hundred miles, sir, but Sir Harry may have to skirt about. Still, riding steady and with not too many troubles en route, he should be there in a fortnight or thereabouts.’

‘This is February the twenty-fifth,’ muses Napier, ‘and God willing I shall have the army before Magdala by the end of March. You have four weeks, Sir Harry, in which to find Queen Masteeat, exercise your persuasive arts …’ he said it with a dead straight face ‘… and bring her army to encircle Theodore.’ He pulled out a battered half-hunter. ‘It will be full dark soon, and the less time you lose, the better. We took the liberty,’ he went on calmly, ‘of counting on your help, and behind the screen yonder you will find the dress and accoutrements appropriate to Khasim Tamwar, diplomat and horse-coper of Hyderabad. You have every confidence in the guide, Speedy?’

‘Absolute, sir. Uliba-Wark knows the Amhara country like a book, and just how to seek out Queen Masteeat. You couldn’t wish for a better jancada,fn3 Sir Harry, believe me.’

‘Excellent,’ says Napier. ‘I suggest we make them known to each other without delay.’ And as Speedy went out: ‘Meanwhile, Sir Harry, perhaps while you change you can reflect on any questions or observations you wish to put to me. Now, Moore, tomorrow’s orders …’

The suddenness of it struck me dumb. I’d been slapped in the face before with commissions there was no avoiding, but always there had been a breathing space, of hours at least, in which to digest the thing, gather my scattered wits, fight down my dinner, and wonder how best to shirk my duty. But here, after the barest instruction, this cool old bastard was launching me to damnation with barely time to change my shirt – which was what I found myself doing a moment later in the screened corner of the tent, like a man in a nightmare, automatically donning the native clobber because there was nothing else for it, the pyjamys and tunic and doeskin boots (which fitted, for a wonder), winding the waist-sash and slinging the cloak, vowing I’d be damned if I’d wear a puggaree, they could find me a hood or Arabi kafilyeh … and now there was bustle beyond the screen, Napier had given over dictating and was demanding of Speedy if they’d been seen, and Speedy was reassuring him and turning to me with a triumphant grin as I emerged in my fancy dress … and stopped dead in my tracks.

‘Your jancada, Sir Harry!’ cries he. ‘Guide, philosopher, and friend, what? Uliba-Wark – Sir Harry Flashman!’

After the shocks of the past hour I should have been ready for anything, but this was the sharpest yet, and I realised from Speedy’s eager look, and Napier’s watchful eye, that they’d known it would be, and were on edge to see how I’d take it. Behind Speedy stood two tall Ab warriors, wrapped in their dark shamas,fn4 but by his side was a woman such as I’d not seen yet in my brief stay in the country. The word that came into my mind was ‘gazelle’, for she was tall and slender and carried herself with a grace that promised speed and sudden energy; her face was strong and handsome rather than beautiful, almond-shaped after the style of the Malagassy belles I remembered, with heavy chiselled lips and pale amber skin that shone with a cosmetic oil of some kind. Her blue-black hair was cut in a fringe low on the brow, with thick braids to her shoulders. She wore a long black cloak embroidered with shells, but when she turned towards me it fell open, and Moore the Sapper, who’d been staring at her like a boy in a toyshop, dam’ near bit his pencil in two, for beneath she wore only a leather tunic which covered her like a second skin from bosom to thigh, exposing bare arms and shoulders and long splendid legs. Light buskins, sundry necklaces and bangles, and ladder-shaped gold earrings completed her costume, and she carried a light spear, slim as a wand and needle-tipped.

She was appraising me in a quite unfeminine way, amiable enough but with a decided damn-you-me-lad air, and taking in that striking shape in its close-fitting leather I could have wished the pair of us far away in Arcady. You know me; every new one is the ideal woman, especially when there’s that light in the eye that tells me we’re two of a mind. What lay ahead might be as grim as ever, but there should be jolly compensations.

‘Salaam, Uliba-Wark,’ says I, giving her my Flashy smile, open and comradely, and from her raised chin and lazy glance I knew I’d read her aright, and our fancy was mutual.

‘Salaam aleikum, farangi effendi,’ says she, cool and formal, and Speedy added promptly, in English: ‘You may depend upon her for your life, Sir Harry. I have.’

‘And so shall I,’ says I, likewise in English. Speedy spoke to her in what I took to be Amharic, and Napier motioned me aside.

‘There was so much for you to digest in so little time that we thought it best to keep the introduction of your escort to the last,’ says he. ‘Do I take it that you have no … reservations?’

‘Because she’s a woman? Lord, no! When I think of some of the ladies I’ve had to depend on, Sir Robert …’ I could have smiled, thinking of Cassy the killing slave, or the Silk One sabre in hand, or Lakshmibai at the head of her riders, or black Aphrodite bashing Redskins with her brolly, or my own daft, dauntless Elspeth. ‘Well, I’d not have swapped ’em for any man – and this one will know her business, or I’m no judge. You don’t hesitate to let her know my name, I notice.’

‘A measure of the trust Speedy reposes in her. And it would have been difficult – and indeed dangerous – to try to deceive her. She is,’ says he, frowning, ‘an unusual woman. Her husband, a petty chieftain, is at present a prisoner in the hands of King Gobayzy of Lasta, and the … lady, Madam Uliba-Wark, has let it be known that she will not set foot outside her citadel until he is restored to her—’

‘So this is the Lady of Shalott?’ I had to explain that I’d heard of her. ‘Well, she’s outside it now, with a vengeance!’²⁸

‘Her husband’s subjects are unaware of that. While she is away with you, they will suppose her secluded by her vow, which makes a convenient excuse for her absence from public view.’

‘You mean it was cooked up just for this? Phew! Speedy knows her of old, I gather … is she a political of ours?’

‘Not quite that. She will be paid for this service, of course. Which reminds me, Moore has a purse of two hundred dollars for your expenses … Yes,’ says he, taking another tug at his face-furniture, hesitant-like, ‘another thing you should know is that, ah, Madam … Uliba is peculiarly qualified for this mission by being herself a Galla – indeed, she is the younger half-sister of the rival queens, Masteeat and Warkite, the child of a concubine, and so excluded from the throne. A position,’ he sounded almost apologetic, ‘which Speedy tells me she very much resents.’

Well, he’d kept the best for the last, hadn’t he? I began to see why I’d been instructed by careful stages, and why he’d interrupted Speedy a while ago, so that only now, at the eleventh hour, had the full mischief become plain – I was to be escorted, on my embassy to a queenly barbarian, by a jealous sibling who was no doubt itching to cut her big sister’s throat and seize her throne … and didn’t she look the part, too, a real Abyssinian Goneril with that handsome figurehead and arrogant tilt to her chin, toying with her little spear and knowing dam’ well that everyone in the tent was eyeing her shape – by gad, it was all there, though. You can see I was distracted, what with the prospect of deadly danger, diplomatic complications, a possible attempted coup d’etat, a siege to arrange … and two weeks in the intimate company of as splendid a piece of bounce as I’d seen since … since that fat little bundle on the voyage to Trieste – not that Fraulein von Thingamabob could compare with this superb Amazon. I won’t deny I’d rather have been squiring Elspeth to a Belgravia bunfight in safe, humdrum old England, but what the devil, when your fate’s fixed, you make the best of it, and now that Napier was asking if there was anything more he could do for me, I did what I’d done so often, and put on a Flashy brag, the bravado of despair, I guess it is, the fraudster’s instinct to play out the charade.

‘I’d be obliged for a revolver and fifty rounds, sir. Oh, and a box of cheroots, if you have one to spare.’

D’you know, he clapped his hands, and when I think back to that strange, fateful evening at Mai Dehar, my most vivid memory isn’t of the bizarre commission they laid on me, or the pantomime figure of Speedy in his outlandish toggery, or even of those sleek polished limbs a-glow in the lamplight … no, what I remember is a tired, lined old face lit by a sudden brilliant smile.

‘Come closer, into the firelight where I can see you,’ says Uliba-Wark. ‘If you are to be a horse-trader out of Hindustan you’d best look like one.’

I shifted my seat before the fire until our faces were no more than a foot apart, and was pleasantly aware of smooth shoulders and well-filled tunic bodice, and the faint musky perfume of oiled skin as she leaned forward, black eyes intent. She put out a hand to feel my hair, which fortunately I was wearing long, and flicked at my whiskers with disdain.

‘Those must go, and you’ll let your hair grow and oil it with ghi in the Indian fashion.’ She ran a finger-tip through my moustache, cool as you please. ‘Less hair on your upper lip and no beard.’ So much for your notions, Napier. ‘You can speak the tongue of India, at need?’

‘More than one of them, sultana,’ says I. ‘And better than my Arabic, for which you must forgive me. It is a long time since I was among the badawi.’

‘You speak it well enough,’ says she. ‘Why do you call me sultana? I am no queen.’

‘You look like one.’ It’s a compliment I’ve found useful with barbarian ladies, and it made this one laugh with a curl of those enchanting lips that looked as though they’d been carved from purple marble.

‘That has been said to me before,’ says she, ‘and surely you have said it to others.’ She sat back, folding her long legs beneath her, mocking me. ‘Well, Khasim Tamwar, for so I must think of you now, you are a very handsome rogue of a horse-trader with a tongue to match, and now that we’ve exchanged our compliments we can leave flirting for the moment and be serious.’

Napier was right; she was unusual. Talking to her in my halting Arabic, and accustoming my ears to hers, so musically different in accent from the guttural desert speech, I found her a bewildering contradiction: she looked like a noble savage, a primitive from out yonder, but with a thoroughly worldly mind, unless I was much mistaken, and while she bore herself with the freedom and authority of a man, she was as conscious of her sex and how to use it as any coquette on the boulevards.

She’d charmed Napier, no question, which I’d have thought nigh impossible for a half-naked female savage toting a spear, but he’d referred to her, hesitantly, as ‘Madam’ and inclined his head gallantly over her hand on parting. And he’d been ready to consign me, and the fate of my mission, to her without a qualm, apparently; you know how bare had been his instructions to me, and it was only at the last minute that he’d touched on the vital matter of how I should communicate with him after I’d reached Queen Masteeat. If all went well with her, no doubt she’d provide a messenger; if things went wrong … well, we’d just have to wait and see, what?

I doubt if I’ve ever been sent into the deep field with a more definite object and less instruction on how to attain it, but now that we were under way, sitting round a camp-fire a mile or so from Mai Dehar, I felt encouraged by the way Uliba-Wark had taken things in her stride: one moment I’d been wrapping the money-belt of two hundred dollars under my sash, being bidden God speed by Napier and having my hand mangled by Speedy – and the next we were out in the chill dark, her two Ab escorts hasting ahead up the hill, dim shadows disappearing over the crest behind the camp. She hadn’t even motioned me to follow, just a glance to make sure I was keeping pace with her. In a moment we’d passed beyond the glow of the camp, and I’d lost her in the gloom until a slim hand closed on mine, leading me at a swift walk – and that guidance, steady and sure, had confirmed what I’d said to Napier: she knew her business.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.