The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  To give you some notion of the kind of blood-stained bedlam the country was, she’d already slaughtered one-half of her subjects, say a million or so, and passed decrees providing for a wall round the whole island to keep out foreigners (it would only have had to be three thousand miles long), four gigantic pairs of scissors to be set up on the approaches to her capital, to snip invaders in two, and the building of massive iron plates from which the cannon-shots of European ships would rebound and sink them. Eccentric, what? Of course, all this was unknown to me when I landed; I began to find out about it, painfully, when they hauled me out of the cooler next morning, still – in my innocence – protesting and demanding to see my lawyer.

  My French-speaking officer had disappeared, so all my entreaties earned was blows and kicks. I’d had no food or drink for hours, but now they gave me a stinking mess of fish, beans, and rice, and a leaf-spoon to eat it with. I gagged it down with the help of their vile brown rice-water, and then, despite my objections, I and a gang of other unfortunates, all black of course, were herded up through the town, heading inland.

  Tamitave’s not much of a settlement. It has a fort, and a few hundred wooden houses, some of them quite large, with the high-pitched Malagassy thatches. At first sight it looks harmless enough, like the people: they’re black, but not Negro, I’d say, perhaps a touch of Malay or Polynesian, well-built, not bad-looking, lazy, and stupid. The folk I saw at first were poorer-class peasants, slaves, and provincials, both men and women wearing simple loin-cloths or sarongs, but occasionally we encountered one of the better-off, being toted about in a sedan – no rich or aristocratic Malagassy will walk a hundred yards, and there’s a multitude of slaves, bearers, and couriers to carry ’em. The nobs wore lambas – robes not unlike Roman togas, although in Antan’ itself their clothing was sometimes of the utmost outlandish extravagance, like my commandant. That’s the extraordinary thing about Madagascar – it’s full of parodies of the European touch gone wrong, and their native culture and customs are bizarre enough to start with, G-d knows.

  For example, they have their markets at a distance from their villages and towns – nobody knows why. They hate goats and pigs, and will lay babies out in the street to see if their births are “fortunate” or not;34 they are unique, I believe, in the whole world in having no kind of organized religion – no priests, no shrines or temples – but they worship a tree or a stone if they feel like it, or personal household gods called sampy, or charms, like the famous idol Rakelimalaza, which consists of three dirty little bits of wood wrapped in silk – I’ve seen it. Yet they’re superstitious beyond belief, even to the extent of dispraising those things they value most, to avert jealous evil spirits, and believing that when a man is dying you must stuff his mouth with food at the last minute – mind you, that may be because they’re the most amazing gluttons, and drunkards, too. But, as with so many of their practices, you sometimes feel they are just determined to be different from the rest of the world.

  I noticed that the soldiers who escorted our chain-gang were of a different stamp from the rest of the people – tall, narrow-headed fellows who marched in step, to a mixture of English and French words of command. They were brutes, who thrashed us along if we lagged, and treated the populace like dirt. I learned later they were from the Queen’s tribe, the Hovas, once the pariahs of the island, but now dominant by reason of their cunning and cruelty.

  I’ve endured some horrible journeys in my time – Kabul to the Khyber, Crimea to Middle Asia, for a couple – but I can’t call to mind anything worse than that march from Tamitave to Antan’. It was 140 miles, and it took us eight days of blistered feet and chafing chains, trudging along, at first over scrubby desert, then through open fields, with peasants stopping in their work to stare at us indifferently, then through forest country, with the great jungly mountains of the interior coming slowly closer. We passed mud-walled villages and farms, but at night our captors just made us lie and sleep where we stopped; they carried no rations, but took what they wanted from unprotesting villagers, and we prisoners got the scraps. We were sodden by rain, burned agonizingly by the sun, bitten raw by mosquitoes, punished by blows and welts – but the worst of it was ignorance. I didn’t know where I was, where I was going, what had happened to Elspeth, or even what was being said around me. There was nothing for it but to be herded on, like an animal, in pain and despair. After the first day or so I was beyond thought; all that mattered was survival.

  To make matters worse, there was no road to travel – oh no, the Malagassies won’t have ’em, for fear they might be used by an invader. Examine the perverse logic of that, if you like. The only exception is when the Queen travels anywhere, in which case they build a road in front of her, mile by mile, twenty thousand slaves grubbing with picks and rocks, and a great army following, with the court; why, every night they build a town, walls and all, and then leave it empty next day.

  We were privileged to see this, when we reached the high plain midway on our journey, The first thing I noticed was dead bodies scattered about the place, and then groups of wailing, exhausted natives along our line of march. They were the road-builders; there were no rations provided for ’em, you see, so they just fell out and died like flies. This was the Queen’s annual buffalo-hunt, and ten thousand slaves perished on it, inside a week. The stench was indescribable, especially along the road itself – which cut perversely across our line of march – where they were lying in rows, men, women, and children. Some of them would haul themselves up as we passed, and crawl towards us, whimpering for food; the Hovas just kicked them aside.

  To add to the horrors, we passed occasional gallows, on which victims were hung or crucified, or simply tied to die by inches. One abomination I’ll never forget – five staggering skeletons yoked together at the neck by a great iron wheel. They put them in it, and turn them loose, wandering together, until they starve or break each other’s necks.

  The Queen’s procession had passed by long before, up the rough, rock-paved furrow of the road which ran straight as a die through forest and over mountain. She had twelve thousand troops with her, I learned later, and since the Malagassy army has no system of supply or rations they had just picked the country clean, so in addition to the slaves, thousands of peasants starved to death as well.

  You may wonder why they endured it. Well, they didn’t, always. Over the years thousands had fled, in whole tribes and communities, to escape her tyranny, and the jungles were full of these people, living as brigands. She sent regular expeditions against them, as well as against those distant tribes who weren’t Hovas; I’ve heard it reckoned that the slaughter of fugitives, criminals, and those whom her majesty simply disliked, amounted to between twenty and thirty thousand annually, and I believe it. (Far better, of course, than wicked colonial government by Europeans – or so the Liberals would have us believe. G-d, what I’d have given to get Gladstone and that pimp Asquith on the Tamitave road in the earlies; they’d have learned all they needed to know about “enlightened rule by the indigenous population”. Too late now, though; nothing for it but to hire a few roughs to smash windows at the Reform Club – as though I care.)

  In the meantime, I’d little sympathy to spare; my own case, as we finally approached Antan’ after more than a week of tortured tramping, was deplorable. My shirt and trousers were in rags, my shoes were worn out, I was bearded and foul – but strangely enough, having plumbed the depths, I was beginning to perk up a trifle. I wasn’t dead, and they weren’t bringing me all this way to kill me – I was even feeling a touch of light-headed recklessness, probably with hunger. I was lifting my head again, and my recollections of the end of the march are clear enough.

  We passed a great lake along the road, and the guards made us shout and sing all the way past it; I later heard it was to placate the ghost of a dissolute princess buried nearby – dissolute female royalty being Madagascar’s strong suit, evidently. We crossed a great river – the Mangaro – and steaming geysers bu
bbling out of pools of boiling mud, before we came out on a level grass plain, and beyond it, on a great hill, we beheld Antananarivo.

  It took my breath away – of course, I didn’t even know what it was, then, but it was like nothing you’d expect in a primitive nigger country. There was this huge city of houses, perhaps two miles across, walled and embattled in wood, and dominated by a hill on the top of which stood an enormous wooden palace, four storeys high, with another building alongside it which seemed to be made of mirrors, for it shimmered bright as a burning-glass in the sunlight. I stared at it until I was almost blinded, but I couldn’t make out what it was – and in the meantime there were other wonders closer at hand, for as we approached the city across the plain which was dotted with huts and crowded with village people, I thought I must be dreaming – in the distance I could hear a military band playing, horribly flat, but there could be no doubt that the tune was “The Young May Moon"! And here, sure enough, came a regiment in full fig – red tunics, shakos, arms at the shoulder, bayonets fixed, and every man-jack of them black as Satan. I stood and fairly gaped; past they went in column, throwing chests, and shaping dooced well – and at their head, G-d help me, half a dozen officers on horseback, dressed as Arabs and Turks. I was beyond startling now – when a couple of sedans, draped in velvet, passed by bearing black women done up in Empire dresses and feathered hats, I didn’t even give ’em a second glance. They, and the rest of the crowds, were moving across the front of the city, and that was the way our guards drove us, so that we skirted the city wall until we came presently to a great natural amphitheatre in the ground, dominated by a huge cliff – Ambohipotsy, they call it, and there can be no more accursed place on earth.

  There must have been close on a quarter of a million people thronging the slopes of that great hollow below the cliff – certainly more than I’ve ever seen in one congregation. This great tide of black humanity was gazing down to the foot of the cliff; our guards brought us up short and pointed, grinning, and looking down that vast slope of people I saw that in a clear space long narrow pits had been dug, and in the pits were scores of human beings, tied to stakes. At the end of each pit huge cauldrons were fixed, above roaring fires, and even as we watched a gong boomed out, the enormous chattering crowd fell silent, and a gang of black fiends tilted the first of the cauldrons, slowly, slowly, while the poor devils in the pits shrieked and writhed; boiling water slopped over the cauldron’s lip, first in a small stream, then in a scalding cascade, surging down into the pit with a horrible sizzling cloud of steam that blotted out the view. When it cleared I saw to my horror that it only filled the pit waist deep – the victims were boiling alive by inches, while the onlookers bayed and cheered in a tumult of sound that echoed across that ghastly amphitheatre of death. There were six pits; they filled them one by one.

  That was the main performance, you understand. After that, figures appeared at the top of the cliff, which was three hundred feet up, and the luckier condemned were thrown off, the crowd giving a great rising whistle as each struggling body took flight, and a mighty howl when it struck the ground below – there was particular applause if one landed in the water-pits, which were still steaming mistily with the contorted figures hanging from their stakes. They didn’t just throw the condemned people down the cliff, by the way – they suspended ’em first by ropes, to let the mob have a good look, and then cut them free to drop.

  I make no comment myself – because as I watched this beastly spectacle I seemed to hear the voice of my little Newgate friend in my ear – “Interesting, isn’t it?” – and see again the yelling, gloating audience outside the Magpie and Stump; they were much the same, I suppose, as their heathen brethren. And if you tell me indignantly that hanging is a very different thing from boiling alive – or burning, flaying, flogging, sawing, impaling, and live burial, all of which I’ve seen at Ambohipotsy – I shall only remark that if these spectacles were offered in England it would be a case of “standing room only” – for the first few shows, anyway.

  However, if the relation of such atrocities nauseates you,35 I can only say that I swore to tell the truth of what I saw, and any qualms you may suffer were as nothing to poor old Flashy’s mental distress as we were herded away from the scene of execution – I’ll swear we were only there because our guards didn’t want to miss it – and through one of the massive gates into Antan’ town proper. Its name, by the way, means “City of a Thousand Towns”, and it was as impressive at first hand as it had been from a distance. Wide, clean streets were lined by fine wooden buildings, some of them two and three storeys high (all building must be of wood, by law) and starved and shaken with terror as I was, I could not but marvel at the air of richness there was about the place. Well-stocked booths, shady avenues, neatly-robed folk bustling about their business, expensively-carved and painted sedans swaying through the streets, carrying the better sort, some in half-European clobber, others in splendid sarongs, and lambas of coloured silk. There was no making sense of it – on the one hand, the horrors I had just watched, and on the other this pleasant, airy, civilized-looking city – with Captain Harry Flashman and friends being kicked and flogged through the middle of it, and no one giving us more than a casual glance. Oh, aye – every building had a European lightning conductor.

  They locked us in an airy, reasonably clean warehouse for the night, took off our fetters, and gave us our first decent meal for a week – a spicy mutton stew, bread and cheese, and more of their infernal rice-piddle. We scoffed it like wolves – a dozen woolly niggers snuffling over their bowls and one English gentleman dining with refinement, I don’t think. But if it did something for my aching, filthy body, it did nothing for my spirits – this nightmare of existence seemed to have endured forever, and it was mad, incredible, out of all reason. But I must hang on – I had played cricket once, and bowled Felix; I had been to Rugby, and Horse Guards, and Buckingham Palace; I had an address in Mayfair; I had dined at White’s – as a guest, granted – and strolled on Pall Mall. I wasn’t just a lost soul in a lunatic black world, I was Harry Flashman, ex-11th Hussars, four medals and Thanks of Parliament, however undeserved. I must hang on – and surely, in the city I’d seen, there must be some civilized person in authority who spoke French or English, to whom I could state my case and receive the treatment that was my due as a British officer and citizen. After all, they weren’t real savages, not with streets and buildings like these – a touch colourful in the way they disposed of malefactors, no doubt, and no poor relief worth a d--n, but no society’s perfect. I must talk to someone.

  The difficulty was – who? When they turned us out next morning, we were taken in charge by a couple of black overseers, who spoke nothing but jabber; they thrust us along a narrow alley, and out into a crowded square in which there was a long platform, railed off to one side, with guards stationed at its corners, to keep the mob back. It looked like a public meeting; there were a couple of black officials on the platform, and two more seated at a small table before it. We were pushed up a flight of steps to the platform, and made to stand in line; I was still blinking from the sunlight, wondering what this might portend, as I looked out over the crowd – blacks in lambas and robes for the most part, a few knots of officers in comic-opera uniforms, plenty of sedans with wealthy Malagassies sitting under striped umbrellas. I scanned the faces of the officers eagerly; those would be the French-speakers, and I was just about to raise a halloo to attract their attention when a face near the front of the crowd caught my eye like a magnet, and my heart leaped with excitement.

  He was a tall man, wide-shouldered but lean, wearing a bright embroidered shirt under a blue broadcloth coat, and with a silk scarf tied like a cravat; he and his neighbour, a portly sambo resplendent in sarong and cocked hat, were taking snuff in the local fashion, the lean chap accepting a pinch from the other’s box on the palm of his hand and engulfing it with a quick flick of his tongue (it tastes beastly, I can tell you). He grimaced and raised his eyes; they m
et mine, and stared – they were bright blue eyes, in a face burned brown under a mane of greying hair. But there was no doubt of it – he was a white man.

  “You!” I roared. “You, sir! Monsieur! Parlez-vous français? anglais? Hindi? Latin? B----y Greek, even? Listen to me – I must talk to you!”

  One of the guards was striding forward to thrust me back, but the lean man was pushing his way through the mob, to my unutterable relief, and at a word from him to the officials he was allowed to approach the platform. He looked up at me, frowning, as I knelt down to be close to him.

  “Français?” says he.

  “I’m English – a prisoner, from a boat that came in at Tamitave! In G-d’s name, how can I get out of this? No one listens to me – they’ve been dragging me all over the bl----d country for weeks! I must—”

  “Gently, gently,” says he, and at the sound of the English words I could have wept. Then: “Smile, monsieur. Smile-what is the word – broadly? Laugh, if you can – but converse quietly. It is for your own good. Now, who are you?”

  I didn’t understand, but I forced a ghastly grin, and told him who I was, what had happened, and my total ignorance of why I’d been brought here. He listened intently, those vivid eyes playing over my face, motioning me to speak softly whenever my voice rose – which, as you can imagine, it tended to do. All the time he was plainly avoiding glancing at my guards or the officials, but he was listening for them. When I had finished he fingered his cravat, nodding, as though I’d been telling him the latest for “Punch”, and smiling pleasantly.

  “Eh bien,” says he. “Now attend, and not interrupt. If my English she is not perfect, I use French, but better not. No? Whatever I say, betray no amaze’, do you see? Smile, if you please. Good. I am Jean Laborde, once of the Emperor’s cavalry. I have been here thirteen years, I am a citizen. You do not know Madagascar?”