Flashman on the March

one’s children, the false get as well as the true. Ah, but here is my true queen that shall be! Tamagno, this is my friend, the Ras Flashman, who brings us comfort from the army of the white queen Victoria, wherefore we do him honour!” He waved a hand wildly in introduction, and the lady and I appraised each other as she rolled in, with Samuel holding the door obsequiously.

My first thought was why the devil was Theodore even looking at her when he had beauties like Miriam to play with. Madam Tamagno was fat, coarse, and looked what she was: a whore, for while Theodore

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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