The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  Flashy: Did he, though? Impudent bastard!

  Mangas: He came to me after we Mimbreno rode a raid into Sonora with Hashkeela of the Coyoteros, who is husband to my second daughter – she is not so fair as Sonsee-array, by the way. You like Sonsee-array, don’t you, pinda-lickoyee Flaz’man? You truly love my little gazelle?

  Flashy: Mad about her … I can’t wait.

  Mangas (with a great sigh and belch): It is good. She is a delightful child – wilful, but of a spirit! That is from me; her beauty is her mother’s – she was a Mexican lady, you understand, taken on a raid into Coahuila, ah! so many years ago! I saw her among the captives, lovely as a frightened deer, and I thought: that is my woman, now and forever. I forgot the loot, the cattle, even the killing – only one thought possessed me, in that moment—

  Flashy: I know what you mean.

  Mangas: I took her! I shall never forget it. Uuurrgh! Then we rode home. Already I had two wives of our people; their families were enraged that I brought a new foreign wife – I had to fight my brothers-in-law, naked, knife to knife! I defied the law – for her! I ripped out their bowels – for her! I tore out their hearts with my fingers – for her! I was red to the shoulders with their blood! Do they not call me the Red Sleeves – Mangas Colorado? Uuurrghh!

  Flashy (faintly): Absolutely! Bravo, Mangas – may I call you Mangas?

  Mangas: When my little dove, my dear Sonsee-array, told me how you had fought for her – how you sank your knife in the belly of the pinda-lickoyee scalp-hunter, and tore and twisted his vitals, and drank his blood – I thought, there is one with the spirit of Mangas Colorado! (Gripping my shoulder, tears in his eyes.) Did you not exult as the steel went home – for her?

  Flashy: By George, yes! That’ll teach you, I thought—

  Mangas: But you did not take his heart or scalp?

  Flashy: Well, no … I was thinking about looking after her, you see, and—

  Mangas: And afterwards … you did not uuurrghh! with her?

  Flashy (quite shocked): Heavens, no! Oh, I mean, I was in a perfect sweat for her, of course – but she was tired, don’t you know … and … and distressed, naturally …

  Mangas (doubtfully): Her mother was tired and distressed – but I had only one thought … (shakes head) But you pinda-lickoyee have different natures, I know … you are colder—

  Flashy: Northern climate.

  Mangas (taking another swig): What was I saying when you began to talk of women? Ah, yes … my raid with Hashkeela six moons ago, when we slaughtered in Sonora, and took much loot and many slaves. And afterwards this Americano fool – this pony soldier – came and told me it was wrong! He told me, Mangas Colorado, that it was wrong!

  Flashy: He never!

  Mangas: “Why fool,” I told him, “these Mexicanos are your enemies – have you not fought them?” “Yes,” says he, “but now they have yielded under our protection, at peace. So we cannot suffer them to be raided.” “Look, fool,” I told him, “when you fought them, did you ask our permission?” “No,” says he. “Then why should we ask yours?” I said.

  Flashy: Dam’ good!

  Mangas: It was then he said it was his law, and we must heed it. I said: “We Mimbreno do not ask you to obey our law; why, then, do you ask us to obey yours?” He could not answer except to say that it was his great chief’s word, and we must – which is no reason. Now, was he a fool, or did he speak with a double tongue? You are pinda-lickoyee, you know their minds. Tell me.

  Flashy: May I borrow your flask? Thanks. Well, you see, he was just saying what his great chief told him to say – obeying orders. That’s how they work, you know.

  Mangas: Then he and his chief are fools. If I gave such an order to an Apache, without good reason, he would laugh at me.

  Flashy: I’ll bet he wouldn’t.

  Mangas: Huh?

  Flashy: Sorry. Wind.

  Mangas: Why should the Americanos try to force their law on us? They cannot want our country; it has little oro-hay, and the rocks and desert are no good for their farmers. Why can they not leave us alone? We never harmed them until they harmed us – why should we, with the Mexicanos to live off? At first I thought it was because they feared us, the warrior Apache, and would have us quiet. But other tribes – Arapaho, Cheyenne, Shoshoni – have been quiet, and still the pinda-lickoyee force law on them. Why?

  Flashy: I don’t know, Mangas Colorado.

  Mangas: You know. So do I. It is because their spirit tells them to spread their law to all people, and they believe their spirit is better than ours. Whoever believes that is wrong and foolish. It is such a spirit as was in the world in the beginning, when it was rich and wicked, and God destroyed it with a great flood. But when He saw that the trees and birds and hills and great plains had perished with the people, His heart was on the ground, and He made it anew. And He made the Apache His people, and gave us His way, which is our way.

  Flashy: Mmh, yes. I see. But (greatly daring) He made the pinda-lickoyee, too, didn’t he?

  Mangas: Yes, but He made them fools, to be destroyed. He gave them their evil spirit, so that they should blunder among us – perhaps He designed them for our prey. I do not know. But we shall destroy them, if they come against us, the whole race of pinda-lickoyee, even all ten thousand. They do not know how to fight – they ride or walk in little lines, and we draw them into the rocks and they die at our leisure. They are no match for us. (Suddenly) Why were you among the Americanos?

  Flashy (taken aback): I … told you … I was a trader … I …

  Mangas (grinning sly and wicked): An Inglese trader – among the Americanos? Strange … for you hate each other, because you once ruled their land, and they were your slaves, and rose against you, and you have fought wars against them. This I know – for are there not still chiefs among the Dacotah of the north who carry pesh-klitso pictures of the Snow Woman’s ancestors, given to their fathers long ago, when your people ruled?38 Huh! I think you were among the Americanos because you had angered the Snow Woman, and she drove you out, because she saw the spirit of the snake in your eyes, and knew that you do not speak with a straight tongue. (Fixes terrified Flashy with a glare, then shrugs) It does not matter; sometimes I have a forked tongue myself. Only remember – when you speak to Sonsee-array, let it be with a straight tongue.

  Flashy (petrified): Rather!

  Mangas: Ugh. Good. You will be wise to do so, for I have favoured you, and you will be one of the people, and your heart will be opened. When we fight the Americanos, you will be glad, for you are their enemy as we are. Perhaps one day I shall send to the Snow Woman, even as the pinda-lickoyee of Texas sent messengers to her, with offers of friendship. Fear not – the anger she bears you will go out of her heart when she knows you come from Mangas Colorado, huh?

  Flashy: Oh, like a shot. She’ll be delighted.

  Mangas: She must be a strange woman, to rule over men. Is she as beautiful as Sonsee-array?

  Flashy (tactfully): Oh, dear me, no! About the same build, but nothing like as pretty. No woman is.

  We were sitting among the ruins by now and at this point he toppled slowly backwards and lay with his huge legs in the air, singing plaintively. God, he was drunk! But I must have been drunker, for presently he carried me home in one hand (I weighed about fourteen stone then) and dropped me into my wickiup – through the roof, not the door, unfortunately. But if my final memories of that celebration were confused, I’m clear about what he said earlier, and if it sounds like drunkard’s babble, just remark some of the things that supposedly simple savage knew – along with all his fanciful notions.

  He’d heard of Spanish and British colonial rule, and of the American wars of ’76 and 1812; he’d even somehow got wind of Britain’s negotiations with the old Texas Republic before it joined the States in ’46. At the same time he’d no idea of what Spain or Britain or the United States or even Texas really were – dammit, he thought the whole white race was only ten thousand strong, and obviously imagin
ed Queen Victoria living in a wickiup somewhere over the hills. He probably thought the American troops he’d seen were some sort of tribal war party whom the ’Pash could wipe up whenever they chose. And yet, he could already read with uncanny wisdom the minds of a white race he hardly knew. “Their spirit tells them to spread their law … they believe their spirit is better than ours.” Poor old Red Sleeves; wasn’t he right, just?

  No, he wasn’t an ordinary man.39 I knew him over several months, and can say he had the highest type of that lucid Indian mind which can put the civilised logician to shame, yet whose very simplicity of wisdom has been the redskin’s downfall. He was a fine psychologist – you’ll note he had weighed me for a rascal and fugitive on short acquaintance – an astute politician, and a bloody, cruel, treacherous barbarian who’d have been a disgrace to the Stone Age. If that seems contradictory – well, Indians are contrary critters, and Apaches more than most. Mangas Colorado taught me that, and gave me my first insight into the Indian mind, which is such a singular mechanism, and so at odds with ours, that I must try to tell you about it here.

  Speaking of Apaches in particular, you must understand that to them deceit is a virtue, lying a fine art, theft and murder a way of life, and torture a delightful recreation. Aha, says you, here’s old Flashy airing his prejudices, repeating ancient lies. By no means – I’m telling you what I learned at first hand – and remember, I’m a villain myself, who knows the real article when he sees it, and the ’Pash are the only folk I’ve struck who truly believe that villainy is admirable; they haven’t been brought up, you see, in a Christian religion that makes much of conscience and guilt. They reverence what we think of as evil; the bigger a rascal a man is, the more they respect him, which is why the likes of Mangas – whose duplicity and cunning were far more valued in the tribe than his fighting skill – and the Yawner, became great among them. This twisted morality is almost impossible for white folk to understand; they look for excuses, and say the poor savage don’t know right from wrong. Jack Cremony40 had the best answer to that: if you think an Apache can’t tell right from wrong – wrong him, and see what happens.

  At the same time these Apaches, of whom there may be a few thousand at most,41 who live in some of the poorest land in the world, in the most primitive state, who are savage by nature, foul in habit, degraded of appearance (although some of their women are deuced handsome), who are backward and inferior in every outward respect, are nevertheless the most arrogant and self-satisfied people on God’s earth. Their conceit makes the Chinese look modest; they don’t merely pretend or think they’re superior – they know it, like Lord Cardigan. The hatred which they feel towards all other folk springs from no sense of jealousy or fear or unworthiness; on the contrary, they truly despise white civilisation and want none of it, because they know absolutely that their own prehistoric ways are better. They hold the world in contempt, as prey to be lived off. (In some respects, you see, they’re not unlike Britons or Americans.)

  Now, this ingrained redskin conceit (for other tribes had it, too, if not as extremely as the ’Pash) is something the American government has never understood, and probably never will, and it’s been at the root of the whole Indian question. I don’t blame Washington – what civilised white, with his electric and gas light and huge cities and flying machines and centuries of art and literature and progress, could believe that this smelly, wicked, illiterate savage who looks like a cross between a Mongol and an ape absolutely thinks he is superior to them? It flies in the face of civilised reason – but not of Indian reason. They know they’re better – and no demonstration or comparison will change their minds, you see, because their whole system of thought and philosophy is upside down from ours. You could take my old pal the Yawner and show him Paris or London, and it still wouldn’t convince him. He’d say: “Huh, you can build great things and we cannot – but are they worth building? You can fly – but who needs to fly? I’d rather have my wickiup.” And it wouldn’t be sour grapes – the proud, stubborn, dear old bastard would rather have that wretched, stinking, flea-ridden hovel – lord, I itch just to think of it (but I’ve been less hospitably used, mind you, and felt less honoured, in some ducal mansions).

  You see, it’s been the great illusion of our civilisation that when the poor heathen saw our steamships and elections and drains and bottled beer, he’d realize what a benighted ass he’d been and come into the fold. But he don’t. Oh, he’ll take what he fancies, and can use (cheap booze and rifles, for example), but not on that account will he think we’re better. He knows different.

  You begin to understand, perhaps, the impossibility of red man and white man ever understanding each other – not that it would have made a damned bit of difference if they had, or altered the Yankees’ Indian policy, except possibly in the direction of wiping up such intractable bastards even faster than they did. They knew they were going to have to dispossess the redskins, but being good Christian humbugs they kept trying to bully and cajole them into accepting the theft gracefully – which ain’t quite the best position from which to make treaties with unreliable savages who are accustomed to rob rather than be robbed, and who don’t understand what government and responsibility and authority mean, anyway. You can’t treat sensibly with a chief whose braves don’t feel obliged to obey him; contrariwise, if you’re an Indian (worse luck) there’s no point in treating with a government which is eventually going to pinch your hunting-grounds to accommodate the white migration it can’t control. And it doesn’t help when the two sides regard each other respectively as greedy, brutal white thieves and beastly, treacherous red vermin. I’m not saying either was wrong.

  The Indian’s tragedy was that being a spoiled and arrogant savage who wouldn’t lie down, and a brave and expert fighter who happened to be quite useless at war, he could only be suppressed with a brutality that often matched his own. It was the reservation or the grave; there was no other way.

  My little anthropologist would say it was all the white man’s fault for intruding; no doubt, but by that logic Ur of the Chaldees would be a damned crowded place by now.

  The morning after Mangas’s tizwin party I was rousted out at dawn by a foul-tempered Yawner, who took me miles off into the hills, both with our heads splitting, to prepare for my honeymoon. We must find a pretty, secluded spot, he snarled, and build a bower for my bride’s reception; we lit on a little pine grove by a brook, and there we built a wickiup – or rather, he did, while I got in the way and made helpful suggestions, and he damned the day he’d ever seen me – and stored it with food and blankets and cooking gear. When it was done he glared at it, and then muttered that it would be none the worse for a bit of garden; he’d made one for Alopay, apparently, and she’d thought highly of it.

  So now I sweated, carefully transplanting flowers from the surrounding woods, while the Yawner squinted and frowned and stood back considering; when I’d bedded them around the wickiup to his satisfaction, he came to give them a final pat and smooth, growling at me to go easy with the water. We got it looking mighty pretty between us, and when I said Sonsee-array would be sure to like it, he shrugged and grunted, and we found ourselves grinning at each other across the flower-bed – odd, that’s how I remember him, not as the old man I saw last year, but as the ugly, bow-legged young brave, all Apache from boots to headband, so serious as he arranged the blooms just so, cleaning the earth from his knife and looking sour and pleased among his flowers. A strange memory, in the light of history – but then he’s still the Yawner to me, for all that the world has learned to call him Geronimo.42

  The wedding took place two days later, on the open space before the old fort at Santa Rita, and if my memories of the ceremony itself are fairly vague, it’s perhaps because the preliminaries were so singular. A great fire was lit before the old fort, and while the tribe watched from a distance, all the virgins trooped out giggling in their best dresses and sat round it in a great circle. Then the drummers started as darkness fell, and presen
tly out shuffled the dancers, young bucks and boys, dressed in the most fantastic costumes, capering about the flames – the only time, by the way, that I’ve ever seen Indians dancing round a fire in the approved style. First came the spirit seekers, in coloured kilts with Aztec patterns and the long Apache leggings; they were all masked, and on their heads they bore peculiar frames decorated with coloured points and feathers and half-moons which swayed as they danced and chanted. They were fully-armed, and shook their stone-clubs and lances to drive away devils while they asked God (Montezuma, I believe) for a blessing on Sonsee-array and, presumably, me.

  It was a slow, rhythmic, rather graceful dance, except for the little boys, whose task seemed to be to mock and tease the older men, which they did with great glee, to the delight of all. Then the drumming changed, to a more hollow, urgent note, and all the girls jumped up in mock terror, staring about, and cowering as out of the darkness raced the buffalo-dancers, in coloured, fearsome masks surrounded by animal heads – scalps of bison and wolf and deer and mountain-lion. As they leaped and whooped about the fire, all the virgins screamed and ran for their lives, but after a while, as the drumming grew faster and faster, they began to drift timidly back, until they too were joining in the dance, circling and shuffling among the buffalo-men in the fire-glow. All very proper, mind you, no lascivious nonsense or anything like that.

  Then the drums stopped abruptly, the dance ceased, and the first spirit-dancer took his stance before the fire and began to chant. The Yawner tapped me on the shoulder – I was in my buckskins, by the way, with a garland round my neck – and he and another young brave called Quick Killer conducted me forward to stand before the spirit-chief. We waited while he droned away, and presently out of the darkness comes Mangas, leading Sonsee-array in a beautiful long white robe, all quilled and beaded, with her hair in two braids to her waist. She stood silent by me, and Mangas by the spirit-chief, whose headdress barely topped the Mimbreno giant. Silence fell … and here’s a strange thing. You know how my imagination works, and how at the hitching-rail with Susie I reviewed my past alliances – Elspeth and Irma and Madam Baboon of Madagascar … well, this time I had no such visions. It may be that having Mangas Colorado looming over you, looking like something off the gutters at Notre Dame, concentrates the mind wonderfully; but also, it didn’t seem to be a very religious ceremony, somehow, and I didn’t seem to have much part of it. What was said was in Apache, with no responses or anything for poor old Flash, although Sonsee-array answered three or four times when the spirit-chief addressed her, as did the Yawner, grunting at my elbow. I suppose he was my proxy, since I didn’t speak the lingo, and while it’s a nice thought in old age that Geronimo was your best man – well, there was something dashed perfunctory about the whole thing. I don’t even know at what point we became man and wife; no clasp of hands, or exchange of tokens, or embracing the bride, just a final wail from the spirit-chief and a great yell from the assembly, and then off to the wedding-feast.