It seemed a capital notion; I pinned the wriggling wench to the floor, brandished my pistol, and mouthed at her to be silent. She lay shuddering in my grip, her face working with terror – lovely little face it was, part Chink-Indian-Malay, probably, great eyes filled with tears, short nose, plump little lips – and, by George, she was handsomely built, too; more by instinct than a-purpose, I found myself taking an appraising fondle, and she trembled under my hand, but had sense enough to keep her mouth shut.
I listened fearfully; the pirates were moving just beyond our screen wall, and then suddenly they were blazing away again, yelling and cursing or crying out in agony, feet running and shots whining horribly near – I clapped a hand over her mouth and gripped her close, terrified that she would scream and bring some bestial savage cleaving through the flimsy wall to fillet me; we lay there, in the stuffy dimness of the stair-foot, with the noise of battle pounding by not six feet away, and once, during a second’s lull in the tumult, I heard the sounds of squealing and wailing somewhere overhead – the other young ladies of the Patusan finishing school waiting to be ravished and murdered, presumably. I found I was hissing hysterically in her ear: “Quiet, quiet, quiet, for G-d’s sake!” and to my astonishment she was whimpering tearfully back, “Amiga sua, amiga sua!” stroking my sweating face with her hand, a look of terrified entreaty in her eyes – she was even trying to smile, too, a pathetic little grimace, straining to bring her slobbering lips up to mine, making little moaning noises.
Well, I’ve seen women in the grip of terror often enough, but I couldn’t account for this passionate frenzy – until I realized that my shuddering was of a curiously rhythmic nature, that I had a quivering tit in one hand and a plump thigh in the other, that our nether garments seemed to have come adrift somehow, and that my innards were convulsing with another sensation besides fear. I was so startled I nearly broke stride – I’d never have believed that I could gallop a female without realizing I was doing it, yet here we were, thundering away like King Hal on honeymoon, after all I’d been through that day, and with battle, murder, and sudden death raging around us. It just shows how your better instinct will prevail in a crisis – some fall to prayer, others cry upon Queen and Country, but here’s one, I’m proud to say, who instinctively fornicated in the jaws of death, gibbering with fright and reckless lust, but giving of his best, for when you realize it may be your last ride you make the most of it. And, d’you know, it may well be true that perfect love casteth out fear, as Dr Arnold used to say; leastways, I doubt if I can ever have been in finer tupping trim, for in the last ecstatic moment my partner fainted clean away, and you can’t do better by ’em than that.
They were still going at it hammer and tongs outside, but after a while the action seemed to move along, and when presently I heard in the distance the unmistakable sound of a British cheer, I judged it was safe to venture forth again. My wench had come to, and was lying limp and blubbering, too scared to stir; I had to lay the flat of my sword across her rump to drive her up the stairs, and then, after a cautious prowl, I sallied out.
It was all over by then. My blue-jackets, who didn’t seem to have missed me, had driven off the pirate attack, and were busy emptying the fort of its valuables before it was burned, for Brooke was determined to destroy the pirate nests utterly. I told ’em that during the fighting I’d heard the cries of women in one of the buildings, and that the poor creatures must be sought out and treated with all consideration – I was very stern about that, but when they went to look it appeared that the whole gaggle had decamped into the jungle; there wasn’t a living soul left in the place, so I went off to find Brooke and report.29
Outside the fort it was a nightmare. The open space down to the river was littered with enemy corpses – most of them headless, for the victorious Dyaks had been busy at their ghastly work of collecting trophies, and the river itself was just a mess of smoking wreckage. The pirate praus had either been burned in the battle or had fled upriver; fewer than a quarter of them had escaped, scores of their crews had been killed or driven into the jungle, and great numbers of wounded and prisoners had been herded into one of the captured forts. All five of them had been taken, and two of them were already alight; when night came down on Patusan it was still as bright as day from the orange flare of the burning buildings, the heat was so intense that for a time we had to retire to our boats, but all through the night the work had to go on – prisoners to be guarded and fed, our own wounded to be cared for, the loot of the forts assessed and shipped, our vessels repaired, stores replenished, fresh weapons and ammunition issued, dead counted, and the whole sickening confusion restored to some sort of order.
I’ve seen the aftermath of battle fifty times if I’ve seen it once, and it’s h-ll, but through all the foulness and exhaustion there’s always one cheery thought – I’m here. Sick and sore and weary, perhaps, but at least alive and sound with a place to lie down – and I’d had a good if somewhat alarming rattle into the bargain. The one snag was that there’d been no sign of the Sulu Queen, so the whole filthy business would have to be gone through again, which was not to be contemplated.
I said as much to Brooke, in the faint hope that I might get him to give up – of course, I played it full of manly anguish, torn between love of Elspeth and concern at what her rescue had already cost. “T’ain’t right, raja,” says I, looking piously constipated. “I can’t ask this kind of … of sacrifice from you and your people. G-d knows how many lives will be lost – how many noble fellows … no, it won’t do. She’s my wife, and – well, it’s up to me, don’t you see …”
It was dreadful humbug, hinting I’d take on the job single-handed, in some unspecified fashion – given the chance I’d have legged it for Singapore that instant, sent out reward notices, and sat back out of harm’s way. From which you may gather that a busy day among the Borneo pirates had quite dissipated the conscientious lunacy which had temporarily come over me in the stokehold the previous night. But I was wasting my time, of course; he just gripped my hand with tears in his eyes and cried:
“Do you truly think there’s a man of us who would fail you now? We’ll win her back at any cost! Besides,” and he gritted his teeth, “there are these pirate rascals to stamp out still – we’ve won the decisive battle, thanks to valour such as yours, but we must give ’em the coup de grâce! So you see, I’d be bound to go on, even if your loved one were not in their foul hands.” He gripped my shoulder. “You’re a white man, Flashman – and I know you’d go on alone if you had to; well, you can count on J.B. to blazes and beyond, so there!” That was what I’d been afraid of.
We were another two days at Patusan, waiting for news from Brooke’s spies and keeping to windward of the Dyaks’ funeral pyres on the river-bank, before word came that the Sulu Queen had been sighted twenty miles farther upstream, with a force of enemy praus, but when we cruised up there on the 10th the birds had flown to Sharif Muller’s fort on the Undup river, so for two more days we must toil after them, plagued by boiling heat and mosquitoes, the stream running stronger all the time and our pace reduced to a struggling crawl. The Phlegethon had to be left behind because of the current and snags, to which the pirates had added traps of tree-trunks and sunken rattan nets to trammel our sweeps; every few minutes there would have to be a halt while we cut our way loose, hacking at the creeper ropes, and then hauling on, drenched with sweat and oily water, panting for breath, eyes forever turning to that steaming olive wall that hemmed us in either side, waiting for the whistle of a sumpitan dart that every now and then would come winging out of the jungle to strike a paddler or quiver in the gunwales. Beith, Keppel’s surgeon, was up and down the fleet constantly, digging the beastly things out of limbs and cauterizing wounds; fortunately they were seldom fatal, but I reckoned we were suffering a casualty every half-hour.
It wouldn’t have been too bad if I’d still had the Phlegethon’s iron sheets to skulk behind, but I had been assigned to Paitingi’s spy-boat, which
was as often as not in the lead; only at night did I go back aboard the Jolly Bachelor with Brooke, and that wasn’t much comfort – huddled up for sleep at the foot of her ladder after the tintacks had been scattered on her deck against night attack, sweating in the cramped dark, filthy and unkempt, listening to the screaming noise of the jungle and the occasional distant throb of a war-gong – doom, doom, doom, out of the misty dark.
“Drum away, Muller,” Brooke would say, “we’ll be playing you a livelier tune presently, just you wait. We’ll see some fun then – eh, Flashy?”
By his lights, I suppose that what happened on the third day along the Undup was fun – a dawn attack on Muller’s fort, which was a great stockaded bamboo castle on a steep hill. The rocket-praus pounded it, and the remnants of the pirate fleet in their anchorage, and then Dido’s men and the Dyaks swarmed ashore, the latter war-dancing on the landing-ground before the assault, leaping, shaking their sumpitans and yelling “Dyak!” (“that’s aye their way,” says Paitingi to me as we watched from the spy-boat, “they’d sooner yelp than fight” – which I thought pretty hard). Poor Charlie Wade was killed storming the fort; I heard later he’d been shot while carrying a Malay child to shelter, which shows what Christian charity gets you.
The only part I took in the fight, though, was when a prau broke free from the pirate anchorage and made off upriver, sweeps going like blazes and war-gong thundering. Paitingi danced up and down, roaring in Scotch and Arabic that he could see Muller’s personal banner on her, so our spy set off in pursuit. The prau foundered, burning from rocket-fire, but Muller, a persevering big villain in quilted armour and black turban, took to a sampan; we overhauled it, banging away, and I was having the horrors at the thought of boarding when the sensible chap dived overboard with his gang at his heels and swam for it. We lost him near the jungle-edge, and Paitingi tore his beard, cussing as only an Arab can.
“Come back and fight, ye son-of-a-Malay-b---h!” cries he, shaking his fist. “Istagfurallah! Is it thus that pirates prove their courage? Aye, run to the jungle, ye Port Said pimp, you! By the Seven Heroes, I shall give thy head to my Lingas yet, thou uncircumcised carrion! Ach! Burn his grandmither – he’s awa’ wi’ it, so he is!”
By this time the fort was taken,30 and we left it burning, and the dead unburied, for it had been discovered from a prisoner that our principal quarry, Suleiman Usman, with the Sulu Queen – and presumably my errant wife – had taken refuge up the Skrang river with a force of praus. So it was back down the Undup again, a good deal faster than we had come up, to the mainstream, where Phlegethon was guarding the junction.
“You can’t run much farther now, Usman, my son,” says Brooke. “Skrang’s navigable for a few miles at most; if he takes Sulu Queen any distance up he’ll ground her. He’s bound to stand and fight – why, he’s still got more men and keels than we have, and while we’ve been chasing Muller he’s had time to put ’em in order. He must know we’re pretty used up and thinned out, too.”
That was no lie, either. The faces round the table in Phlegethon’s tiny ward-room were puffy and hollow-eyed with fatigue; Keppel, the spruce naval officer of a week ago, looked like a scarecrow with his unshaven cheeks and matted hair, his uniform coat cut and torn and the epaulette burned away; Charlie Johnson, with his arm in a bloodstained sling, was dozing and waking like a clockwork doll; even Stuart, normally the liveliest of fellows, was sitting tuckered out, with his head in his hands, his half-cleaned revolver on the table before him. (I can see it now, with the little brass ram-rod sticking out of the barrel, and a big black moth perched on the foresight, rubbing its feelers.) Only Brooke was still as offensively chipper as ever, clean-shaven and alert, for all that his eyes looked like streaky bacon; he glanced round at us, and I could guess that he was thinking: this pack can’t follow much longer.
“However,” says he, grinning slyly, “we ain’t as used up as all that, are we? I reckon there’s three days’ energy left in every man here – and four in me. I tell you what …” he squared his elbows on the table “… I’m going to give a dinner-party tomorrow night – full dress for everyone, of course – on the eve of what is going to be our last fight against these rascals—”
“Bismillah! I’d like tae believe that,” says Paitingi.
“Well, our last on this expedition, anyway,” cries Brooke. “It’s bound to be – either we wipe them up or they finish us – but that ain’t going to happen, not after the drubbings we’ve given ’em already. I’ve got a dozen of champagne down below, and we’ll crack ’em to our crowning success, eh?”
“Wouldn’t it be better to keep ’em for afterwards?” says Keppel, but at this Stuart raised his head and shook it, smiling wearily.
“Might not all be here by then. This way, everyone’s sure of a share beforehand – that’s what you said the night before we went in against the Lingas in the old Royalist, ain’t it, J.B.? Remember – the nineteen of us, five years ago? ‘There’s no drinking after death.’ By Jove, though – there ain’t many of the nineteen left …”
“Plenty of new chums, though,” says Brooke quickly, “and they’re going to sing for their supper, just the way we did then, and have done ever since.” He shoved Charlie Johnson’s nodding head to and fro. “Wake up, Charlie! It’s singing night, if you want your dinner tomorrow! Come on, or I’ll shove a wet sponge down your back! Sing, laddie, sing! George has given you the lead!”
Johnson blinked and stammered, but Brooke gave tongue with “Here’s a health to the King, and a lasting peace”, thumping the table, and Charlie came in, croaking, on the lines
“So let us drink while we have breath
For there’s no drinking after death”
and carried on solo to the end, goggling like an owl, while Brooke beat the table and cried, good boy, Charlie, sick ’em, pup. The others looked embarrassed, but Brooke rounded on Keppel, badgering him to sing; Keppel didn’t want to, at first, and sat looking annoyed and sheepish, but Brooke worked away at him, full of high spirits, and what else was the chap to do? So he sang “Spanish Ladies” – he sang well, I’m bound to say, in a rolling bass – and by this time even the tiredest round the table were grinning and joining in the chorus, with Brooke encouraging and keeping time, and watching us like a hawk. He sang “The Arethusa” himself, and even coaxed Paitingi, who gave us a psalm, at which Charlie giggled hysterically, but Keppel joined in like thunder, and then Brooke glanced at me, nodding quietly, so I found myself giving ’em “Drink, puppy, drink”, and they stamped and thumped to make the cabin shiver.
It was a shameful performance – so forced and false it was disgusting, this jolly lunatic putting heart into his men by making ’em sing, and everyone hating it. But they sang, you’ll notice, and me along with ’em, and at the finish Brooke jumps up and cries:
“Come, that’s none so bad! We’ll have a choir yet. Spy-boats will lead tomorrow – 5 a.m. sharp, then Dido’s pinnace, the two cutters, gig, Jolly Bachelor, then the small boats. Dinner at seven, prompt. Good night, gentlemen!”
And off he went, leaving us gawking at each other; then Keppel shook his head, smiling, and sighed, and we dispersed, feeling pretty foolish, I dare say. I found myself wondering why they tolerated Brooke and his schoolboy antics, which were patently pathetic; why did they humour him? – for that is what it was. It wasn’t fear, or love, or even respect; I suspect they felt it would somehow be mean to disappoint him, and so they fell in with every folly, whether it was charging a pirate prau in a jolly-boat or singing shanties when they ought to have been nursing their wounds or crawling away to sink into an exhausted sleep. Yes, they did humour him – G-d only knows why. Mind you, mad and dangerous as he was, I’m bound to say he was difficult to refuse, in anything.
I managed it later that night, though, admittedly not to his face. I was snug under the Jolly Bachelor’s ladder when the pirates came sneaking silently out of the mist in sampans and tried to take us by surprise. They were on the deck and murde
ring our lookouts before we were any the wiser, and if it hadn’t been that the deck was littered with tacks to catch their bare feet, that would have been the end of the ship, and everyone aboard, including me. As it was, there was the deuce of a scrap in the dark, with Brooke yelling for everyone to pitch in – I burrowed closer into cover myself, clutching my pistol, until the hurroosh had died down, when I scuttled up quickly and blundered about, glaring and letting on that I’d been there all the time. I did yeoman work helping to heave dead pirates overside, and then we stood to until daylight, but they didn’t trouble us again.
Next day it began to rain like fury, and we set off up the Skrang into a perfect sheet of water which cut visibility almost to nothing and pitted the river like small-shot. All day we toiled slowly into the murk, with the river narrowing until it was a bare furlong wide, and d---l an enemy did we see. I sat sodden in Paitingi’s spy-boat, reduced to the nadir of misery, baling constantly until my whole body cried out with one great ache; by dark I was dropping with fatigue – and then, when we anchored, d--n my skin if we didn’t have to shave and wash and dig out clean duds for Brooke’s dinner-party on the Jolly Bachelor. Looking back, I can’t imagine why I put up with it – I don’t attempt to fathom the minds of the others; they all dressed in their best, soaking wet, and I couldn’t show unwilling, could I? We assembled in the Jolly Bachelor’s cabin, steaming and dripping, and there was the table laid for dinner, silver, glass, and all, with Brooke in his blue swallow-tail and brass buttons, welcoming us like a b----y governor-general, taking wine with Keppel, waving us to our seats, and frowning because the turtle soup was cold.
I don’t believe this is happening, thinks I; it’s all a terrible nightmare, and Stuart isn’t sitting opposite me in his black broadcloth with his string-cravat tied in a fancy bow, and this ain’t real champagne I’m drinking by the light of reeking slush-lamps, with everyone crowded round the board in the tiny cabin, and they’re not listening breathlessly while I tell ’em about getting Alfred Mynn leg-before at Lord’s. There aren’t any pirates, really, and we’re not miles up some stinking creek in Borneo, drinking the loyal toast with the thunder bellowing outside and the rain gushing down the companion, and Brooke clipping cigars and passing them round while the Malay steward puts the port on the table. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that all round us was a fleet of sampans and spy-boats, loaded with Dyaks and blue-jackets and other assorted savages, and that tomorrow we would be reliving the horror of Patusan all over again; it was all too wild and confused and unreal, and although I must have accounted for a bottle of warm champagne, and about a pint of port, I got up from that table as sober as I sat down.
The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection Page 80