The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection

by George MacDonald Fraser

  Well, no one was going to argue with that, least of all Flashy, grinding his teeth, or the Tien Wang, staring and hanging on every word, so to speak. Then he lay back with a gentle groan, as she leaned forward over him, reading rapturously.

  “Temptation results from indecision. As a homeless person wanders, seeking relief, so the unstable mind is always subject to temptation, which beguiles the senses of the unwary, or,” her voice sank to a whisper, “those who lack the power of decision.”

  She sighed convulsively, no doubt at the pathos of the thing, and with difficulty I restrained a sharp cry. The Tien Wang, on the other hand, emitted a low, percolating sound, staring up at them like one who lacked the power of decision but would get round to it presently.

  “A mind lured by temptation will deteriorate from day to day,” whispers the reading girl soulfully, and shook her pagoda, which tinkled. “Conscience will perish. Ah, beware when conscience perishes, for then … then lust will grow.”

  There was much in what she said, as the veins standing out on my bulging forehead testified. She’d been practically suffocating him, but now she straightened up, rolling her scroll, and his majesty gave a little whimper, and reached up a pawing hand. At the same moment the female at my feet stirred, gliding up to rest her arms on the divan, blast her, her hand straying on to his knee. He gaped vacantly at her, going red in the face and breathing with difficulty, looked back at the reading girl, who was opening another scroll, and began to growl – whether it was possible for his mind to deteriorate any further was doubtful, but plainly conscience was about to perish.

  “As lust grows, and conscience dies, the Devil will seize his opportunity,” croons the reading hussy, and I contemplated her twin’s alabaster bottom, poised within easy reach, and wondered if I dared play the Devil myself. In the nick of time I recalled that this panting idiot on the couch was the monster who had slaughtered millions and took heads off for adultery; God knew what he did to molesters of the Heavenly Harem. I bit my knuckles instead, watching helpless as the reader reached her peroration; the brute was dazedly pawing at her with one hand while the other clutched at her twin, who seemed to be trying to climb into his lap. Suddenly the reading girl flung aside her scroll and lunged down at him, babbling:

  “Suppress temptation! Throw out evil! Cleanse the heart! So the felicity of Paradise will be won! Everyone shall conquer temptation, and having thus strengthened himself, will be able to attack the small demons! Universal peace will follow!”

  And I’ve no doubt it did, to judge by the gasps and sobs and rhythmic pagoda tinklings which pursued me as I fled a-tiptoe for the archway. Well, it would have been damned bad form to stay, and I swear to God I couldn’t have – not without committing the fearful lèse-majesté of plunging into the mêlée crying “Me, too!” Not that they’d have noticed, probably. The women were ecstatics, and as for that lecherous lunatic with his crimson bowels and visits to heaven – well, aside from being the starkest maniac I’d ever struck, he was also a damned poor host. And he had inspired the Taiping rebellion? It passed belief – but he did, and if you doubt one word of his conversation with me, or his concubine’s recitation, you’ll find every last syllable of them in scholarly works written about him by learned men – all except about Dr Sylvester, for whom I believe I’m the sole authority. And that, you’ll allow, was the sanest part of it.15

  No – he was a raving, dangerous, dreadful madman, and one of the most diabolical powers ever loosed on a suffering world. Hung Hsiu Chu’an, the Coolie King. As to his depravity – in my eyes his one redeeming quality – I’ve told my tale, and you may put it in the balance between those who claim he was a celibate saint, and t’others who say he was topsides with Tiberius. I’ll add only that no one disputes that he lived surrounded by a thousand women, eighty-eight of ’em “wives”. And devil a thought for his guests.

  I emerged in the corridor panting like the town bull, to find the Bearer of Heavenly Decrees wide-eyed and palpitating anxiously; by George, she’ll never know how close she came to being dragged off and ravished. But here was Lee, pale and eager.

  “You saw him? He spoke with you? What did he say?” He gripped my arm in his excitement, and I had sense enough to take time to reply.

  “General Lee,” says I, gulping. “I’ve never seen or heard the like in my life.”

  He let out a hissing breath, and then smiled slowly. “I knew it. I knew it. He is like God, is he not?”

  “He’s certainly like nothing on earth,” says I, and caught a drift of tantalising perfume from the Bearer of Heavenly Decrees, who had edged up, all eyes and ears. I gritted my teeth and tried not to notice her. “D’ye mind sending her away?” says I hoarsely. “After such an experience I find her presence … distracting.” He snapped a word and she sped off, undulating in a way which brought sweat to my temples.

  “I can see you are much moved,” says Lee gently. “It was inevitable, but I am uplifted beyond all expression.” He fairly glowed with holy zeal. “For now that you have seen him, you too have … faith.”

  It didn’t sink in for a moment. “D’you mean to say,” I croaked, “… that was why you had me brought … just to see … him?” I gaped at the man. “In God’s name! Did you have to kidnap me? I’d have gone willingly if you’d –”

  “There was no time to explain. It was necessary to be secret and sudden – as you saw. I had learned that there were those who would have kept you from his presence if they could. Fortunately, they failed.”

  “But … who were they? Why? See here, I might have had my throat cut by those swine, whoever –”

  “It does not matter, now. For you have seen him, in his divinity. And now you, too, believe.” He studied my face. “For you do believe, do you not?”

  “By God, I do!” cries I fervently. What I believed, I wasn’t about to tell him, which was that his Heavenly King and the whole kit-boodle of them were cracked beyond repair. I’d have a fine report to give Bruce, if ever I got out of their demented clutches. I shook my head like a man awe-struck. “General Lee,” says I solemnly, “I am in your debt. You have opened my eyes to the full.”

  “No. He has done that,” says he, looking like Joan of Arc. “Now you can tell your people what manner of being leads the Taiping. They will share your faith.” He nodded, content. “And I can go to Soochow, and later to Shanghai, with a quiet mind. Whatever my enemies may wish, they cannot undo what has been done for you tonight.”

  “Amen,” says I, and on that he said that henceforth I could stay at his brother’s place in perfect safety, for now I’d seen the Heavenly King no one would molest me. I assured him again that it had been the biggest thing in my life, and because I’m cursed with curiosity, I asked him: “General – you have been privileged to see the Heavenly King countless times. Tell me, does he usually receive visitors … alone? Or does he have … er … attendants with him?”

  He frowned, and then slowly shook his head. “Whenever I have stood in his divine presence,” says he, “I have never been aware of any but him.”

  Which suggested either that I had caught his majesty off duty, so to speak, or that his faithful followers were so besotted with worship that they didn’t notice, or didn’t care, when naked trollops climbed all over him. Some damned odd cabinet meetings they must have had. One thing was sure, they didn’t call Lee the Loyal Prince for nothing.

  Now I’ve told you plain, at some length, of my first day and night in Nanking, because there’s no better way of showing you what the Taiping was like, and in the two long months I was with them everything I saw merely went to confirm that first impression. I saw much of their city, of their crazy laws and crazier religion, of the might and ruthlessness of the military (when I was with Lee at the capture and sack of Soochow), of the blossoming incompetence of their topheavy administration, of the abyss between the despotic, luxuriating rulers and the miserable slave populace in this glorious revolution dedicated to equality – it’s all in my Dawns
and Departures of a Soldier’s Life (one of the volumes D’Israeli’s bailiffs never got their hands on), and ain’t to the point here. Enough to say that I recognised the Taiping as a power that bade fair to engulf China – and was already mad and rotten at the heart.

  Don’t mistake me; I don’t preach. You know my morals and ideals, and you won’t find the Archbishop shopping for ’em in a hurry. But I know right from wrong, as perhaps only a scoundrel can, and I’ll say that there was great virtue in the notion of Taiping – if it hadn’t somehow been jarred sideways, and become a perversion, so that the farther it went, the farther it ran off the true. One thing I knew I would tell Bruce: the Manchoos might be a corrupt, unsavoury, awkward crew, but we mustn’t touch this ship of fools with a bargepole – not even if the alternative was to go to war with them. And that was a daunting thought, for the one thing right about the Taiping was its army.

  I saw that for myself when Lee took me to Soochow, the last big Imp foothold in the Yangtse valley, about thirty miles south of Nanking and one hundred and fifty from Shanghai. It was a strong place, with heavy fortifications on White Dragon Hill, and as soon as I saw them I put Lee down privately as a bungler who must have been lucky until now, for he’d brought hardly a gun with him. Twenty thousand good infantry, marching like guardsmen and chanting their war-songs, transport and commissariat as fine as you could wish for, the whole advance perfectly conducted – but when I looked at those crenellated walls, with the Imp gunners blazing away long before our vanguard came in range, and the paper tigers and devil banners being waved from ramparts crowded with men … well, it’s your infantry you’ll be wasting, thinks I. How long a siege did he anticipate, I asked him, and he smiled quietly and says:

  “My banner will be on White Dragon Hill within three hours.”

  And it was. He told me later he had close on three hundred infiltrators inside the walls, disguised as Imp soldiers; they’d been at work with friendly citizens, and at the given time two of the gates were blown open from within, and the Taiping infantry just rolled in like a wave. I’ve never seen the like: those long ranks of red coats simply thundered forward, changing formation as they went, into two hammerheads that engulfed the gates, up went the black death banners, and heedless of the storm of shot that met them those howling devils surged into the city and carried all before them. The battle lasted perhaps an hour, and then the Imps wisely changed sides, and they and the Taipings sacked the place, slaughtering and looting wholesale. I wasn’t inside the walls until next day, by which time it was a smoking, bloodstained ruin; if there was a living citizen left he wasn’t walking about, I can tell you.

  “Nothing can withstand the might of the Tien Wang,” says Lee, and I thought, God help Shanghai. I realised then that my soldiering had been of the genteel, polite variety – well-mannered actions like Cawnpore and Balaclava and the Kabul retreat in which at least the occasional prisoner was taken. In China, the idea of war is to kill everything that stirs and burn everything that don’t. Just that.

  I was a week at Soochow with Lee, and then he sent me back to Nanking, to ponder and count the weeks till my release. I won’t bore you with their passage; I was well housed and cared for at Lee’s palace, feeding of the best, but nothing to do except loaf and fret and improve my Chinese, and devil a wench to bless myself with, thanks to their godless laws. Which, when I considered what was going on in the Grand Palace of Glory and Light, was enough to make me bay at the stars.

  The only diversion I had while I ate the beansprouts of idleness and brooded lewdly on the Bearer of Heavenly Decrees and the Tien Wang’s Heavenly Twins (I was never inside his palace again, by the way) was when Hung Jen-kan would have me over to his house for a prose. The more I saw of him, the better I liked him; he was stout and jolly and full of fun, and was plainly the only dog in the pack with two sane brains to rub together – damned good brains they were, too, as I discovered, and for all his jokes and guffaws he was a dangerous and ambitious man. He had great charm, and when you sat with him in his big cluttered yamen (for he kept nothing like the sybaritic state of the other Wangs; rude comfort was his sort) it was like gossiping with a chum in the gunroom: the place was littered with port bottles, full and empty, along with three Colt revolvers on the side-table, boxes of patent matches, a broken telescope, a well-thumbed Bible next to the Woolwich Manual of Fortification, a shelf packed with jars of Coward’s mixed pickles, bundles of silver ingots tied with red waxed string and thrown carelessly on the bed, an old barometer, piles of French crockery, jade ornaments, tea-cups, a print of the Holy Well in Flintshire propped up against The Young Cricketer’s Companion, and papers, books, and rubbish spread in dusty confusion.

  And in the middle of it all, that laughing fat rascal in his untidy yellow robe, swilling port by the pint and eating steak with a knife and fork, pushing the bottle at me, lighting our cheroots, chortling at his own jokes, and crying thanks after his servants – who were the ugliest old crones imaginable, for Jen-kan of all the Wangs kept no harem, or affected any grand style. Aye, it was easy to forget that in little more than a year he’d climbed within a step of supreme power in this crazy revolution, and held in his podgy fingers all the reins of state.16

  The other Wangs were a surly crew of peasants beside him – Hung Jen-ta, the Heavenly King’s elder brother, who gave himself ridiculous airs and sported silk robes of rainbow colours; Ying Wang, the Heroic King, who bit his nails and stuttered; and the formidable Chen Yu-cheng, who had abetted Lee in the great defeat of the Imps a few weeks before; he was from the same stable as the Loyal Prince, but even younger and more handsome, dressed like a plain soldier, never saying a word beyond a grunt, and staring through you with black snake eyes. They said he was the most ferocious of all the Taiping leaders, and I believed it.

  One other I met at Jen-kan’s house, a weedy, pathetic little lad of about eleven, tricked out in a gold crown and sceptre and a robe fairly crusted with jewels; everyone fawned on him and knocked head something extravagant, for he was the Tien Kuei, the Junior Lord, son of the Heavenly King – which made him Jesus’s nephew, I suppose.

  Possibly they all talked sense in the Council, with Hung Jen-kan, though I doubt it; in public their conversation seemed to consist of childish discussion of the Heavenly King’s latest decree, or poem, or pronouncement, with misquoted references to the Scriptures every other sentence. It was like listening to a gang of labourers who’d got religious mania; it wasn’t real; if I hadn’t had Jen-kan to talk to, I believe I’d have lost all hold on common sense.

  At least he could give me occasional news of the world outside, which he did very fairly and humorously (although if I’d known the thoughts that were passing behind that genial chubby mask I’d have got precious little sleep of nights). It was a waiting time, that early summer of ’60, not only for me, but for all China. Elgin had arrived at last, and sailed north with Grant and the Frogs to the Peiho mouth, whence they would march 15,000 strong to Pekin in August, Jen-kan reckoned, though it was doubtful if they would get there before September. By then Lee would have launched his sudden stroke at Shanghai, forcing Bruce to choose one side or t’other at last; meanwhile Jen-kan was bombarding him with letters to which Bruce didn’t reply. So there was a lull through June and July, with Grant and Elgin girding their loins to the north, and Bruce and the Taipings listening for each other at either end of the Yangtse valley. Only one minor portent disturbed the peace, and when Jen-kan told me about it, I couldn’t believe my ears. But it was plain, sober, unlikely truth, as follows:

  With Shanghai in uncertainty, the China merchants there had got the notion to raise a mercenary force to help defend the city if the Taipings attacked. According to Jen-kan, it was a bit of a joke – a mob of waterfront rowdies, sailors, deserters, and beachcombers, everyone but the town drunk – oh, no, he was there, too, in force. There were Britons, Yankees, Frogs, wogs, wops, Greeks, every sort of dago – and who d’you think was at the head of this band of angels? None o
ther than Mr Frederick Townsend Ward.

  It just shows what can happen when your back’s turned. How he’d graduated from steamboat mate to this new command, I couldn’t imagine, but when they took the field in June it was the biggest farce since Grimaldi retired. For young Fred, not content with guarding Shanghai, led his amazing rabble upriver one fine night to attack a Taiping outpost at Sungkiang. They found the place, for a wonder, but most of ’em were howling drunk by the time they got there, and the Taipings shot the boots off them and they all tumbled back to Shanghai, Ward damning and blinding every step of the way.

  But he didn’t give up, not he. Inside the month he was back with another crew, sober this time, and most of ’em Filippino bandits, with a few American and British officers. He’d drilled some sense and order into them, God knows how … and they took Sungkiang, bigod, after a fearful cut-and-thrust in which they lost sixty dead and a hundred wounded – and friend Frederick got a hundred and thirty thousand bucks commission from the China merchants.

  Jen-kan was disposed to laugh the whole thing off, but I wasn’t so sure. It was beyond belief … and then again, it wasn’t; I’d only to remember that bright eye and reckless grin, and thank God I was well clear of the dangerous young son-of-a-bitch. And take note, he’d done a small but significant thing: he’d knocked the first dent in the invincible Taiping armour, and started something that was to change the face of China. Little mad Fred. But at the time I knew only what Jen-kan told me, heaving with merriment at the thought of how affronted Lee would be to have this Yankee pup nipping his ankle. “Will he be more wary now, when he marches on Shanghai?” he wondered.

  I was doing some wondering on my own account, as July wore out, for Lee was due to march in late August, with me two days ahead of him, and I was counting the time with a will. And then, just after the turn of the month, Jen-kan showed what lay behind his genial mask, and frightened the life out of me.