That last remained a mystery. He sat the five of us down before his tent, and started gassing about everything under the sun – how his fancy dress was made of French silk, how he had had to rebuke Damash for belittling our army, and then a great harangue about a rifle that someone had stolen from the King’s tent several months before and poor Damash had led an expedition to recover it and been cut up by the Gallas. From that he passed on to the Crimea, and the American war, and I noticed that Cameron, Blanc and Prideaux had nothing to say, but Rassam was in like quicksilver, always echoing Theodore, and evidently afraid that I’d put him in the shade, having been in both campaigns. I took no part, until Theodore summoned his little son Alamayo, a bright nipper of six, and I chaffed him about going to Rugby, while Rassam listened with a stuffed smile. But not a word was said about Napier, or Theodore’s intentions, and I could feel Prideaux fairly bursting with impatience beside me.
At last Theodore said we might retire to rest in a tent that had been set aside for us, and we withdrew, except for Rassam, who stayed, hinting that he’d be glad of a private word in the King’s ear.
“No doubt to pay him a few well-chosen compliments,” says Prideaux. “Would you believe he wrote Theodore a letter congratulating him on getting all his artillery to Magdala? He’ll be offering to taste his food next.”44
“Policy,” says Blanc, shrugging. “Theodore likes him, and if he takes advantage of it, do we not all benefit?”
“I just wish he didn’t seem to like Theodore quite so much,” says Prideaux. “I like to be sure our spokesman is on our side. But that’s no matter,” he added, turning eagerly on me. “However did they come to take you, sir, and what can you tell us? Is Napier about to attack?”
I’d made up my mind to tell them nothing of my mission to Masteeat, on the principle of least said, soonest mended, and also I was leery of Rassam. So I said I’d been on a long scout and run into an ambush. Napier I believed to be no more than a day’s march away, but did Theodore mean to fight him, that was the point? I asked if they had any notion.
“All we know is that he is insane,” says Blanc, “and altogether unpredictable. He has received a letter of ultimatum from Sir Robert Napier, and Rassam urges him to write in reply, but it is dangerous even to hint that he would be well advised to sue for peace.”
“Theodore’ll fight,” says Cameron, sounding dog-tired. “He cannot back down now.”
“Then God help us all,” says Blanc. “But I believe you are right, Consul. Even if he faces certain defeat, he will give battle, out of pride and superstition. Oh, he is ruled by his astrologers, and his lunatic fatalism! You heard him just now, lamenting his lost rifle? He regarded it as a talisman, and is sure that catastrophe will follow if it is not recovered! That is why he is here, at Magdala – nothing but superstition.” Seeing my expression, he laughed, and explained.
“Magdala is another talisman; he believes that while he holds it, he cannot fail. Only last week he cried aloud that while he had lost all Abyssinia, Magdala remained, and he would hold it and emerge again as a conqueror. He truly believes it, too.”
“He can’t believe it!” Automatically I added: “He must be –”
“Mad?” says Prideaux. “You’ve noticed, sir? Yes, his majesty is a trifle erratic.”
“We can thank God for it,” says Cameron. “If he didn’t think of that rock as a symbol of victory, he would not have determined to hold it … and God knows where we would have been taken to by now. At least we’re here, where Napier can find us.”
They were silent, and I knew they were thinking: “If we survive.” At least they were sane enough to do nothing but wait; no wild talk of trying to break out, or blow up the powder magazine which was only a few yards from our tent, by the artillery park. Captivity had taught them patience; that was evident from what they told me of schemes for escape that had been considered and rejected, of plots with the rebels to storm the amba in Theodore’s absence, and of the hideous consequences of conspiracies gone amiss, with the guilty being mutilated and flung over cliffs, and one girl of sixteen being flogged to death with girafs. Small wonder that attempts to suborn their jailers hadn’t got far, although in some respects even leading men on the amba had been helpful and friendly, despite the risk of arousing Theodore’s displeasure.
Thus there had been a continuous correspondence carried on with our politicals in Egypt and Aden, with letters sewn into the clothes of Ab couriers, and supplies of money and comforts coming in for the prisoners. You may read about it at length in the memoirs of Blanc and Rassam, if you’ve a mind to, and it’s the strangest tale – in a way, my own experience of Theodore mirrors it in miniature. For sometimes they’d been treated as honoured guests, sometimes beaten and tortured; splendidly fed with luxurious dinners of seven courses, and loaded with chains; well housed and allowed the freedom to wander, tend their gardens, and promised early release, then dragged away from one prison to another. There had simply been no pattern to their strange existence. No wonder, when Samuel the ferret came to summon us back to the royal presence, my companions exchanged anxious looks. “Now what?” wonders Prideaux. “Chains or candy?”
In fact it was to be given an alarming reassurance – reassuring because it was a promise from Theodore, speaking at his sanest, that in the event of danger we’d be put in a safe place, along with his family; alarming because it suggested that battle was imminent.
That was not my only anxiety. Among the great concourse of priests, generals, courtiers, astrologers, and servants assembled before the red pavilion to hear his majesty’s pronouncements were a number of his women, with the bloated “Queen” Tamagno to the fore. She was seated with her attendants close to the King, being fanned with great ostrich plumes, and once again I was conscious of being appraised like a prize bullock in the ring. Prideaux muttered beside me.
“Careful o’ that one, sir. She’s a Haymarket Hussar,a and quite desperate altogether.” From which I gathered that he, too, had taken the lady’s fancy, and avoided her for his own good.
“Haymarket or Grant Road?” says I, and he said ’twas no joke, Theodore being a real mad miser with his women. “A fellow on sentry-go at the hareem cadged a cup of tej from one of the concubines, and was lashed to a pulp. Best to keep together when the likes of Madam Tamagno’s on the prowl; safety in numbers, what?”
“Unless she likes to drill by platoons,” says I, and he exclaimed “I say!”, at which point Theodore announced that it was time for him to address the troops, who’d been waiting patiently in the sun for an hour or more. So we were marshalled by Damash, and trooped obediently in the King’s wake through the camp to the plain where the flower of the Habesh military stood at attention in orderly silence, and gazing at the huge array under the silken banners, I found myself praying that Napier would keep to the open ground.
The speech was pure Theodore, a rousing address contradicted at the end. He began by trotting before them on a stallion and then dismounted to climb on a rock, displaying himself in his rainbow attire and delivering a great harangue against the invaders of the country. “Understand,” bellows he, “that in a day or two you will be obliged to confront the finest army in the world outside Africa, men far superior to you in strength and in arms, whose very uniforms are bedecked with gold, to say nothing of their treasures, which can only be borne by elephants!” That’ll cheer them up, thinks I, but then he went on, flourishing his arms on high.
“Are you ready to fight?” bawls he. “To fight, and enrich yourselves with the spoil of these white slaves! Will you conquer, or will you leave me in the lurch? Think of my great deeds in the past, of my conquests, of great battles in which you have triumphed over my enemies! You have adorned your weapons with their weapons, ha-ha! [Prolonged cheering.] When these white kaffirs approach you, what will you do? You will wait until they fire on you, and before they can reload, you will fall upon them with your spears! [Less enthusiastic cheers.] Your valour will meet with its reward, a
nd you will enrich yourselves with spoils beside which this rich dress that I am wearing will seem but a shabby trifle.” [Sensation, and clashing of spears and swords.]
Stirring stuff, and I was remarking to Prideaux on the neat way he’d cried up our army and then changed tack by depicting us as lambs to the slaughter, when a beaming old codger at the head of one of the foot regiments stepped forward, brandishing his spear and shouting:
“Oh, only wait, great king, until these foreign asses make their appearance! We’ll tear them to pieces, and those who are lucky enough to escape will have a sorry tale to tell in England!”
To which any intelligent leader would have responded with a hearty grin and a flourished fist. So what does Theodore do, eh? Waits for the cheering to die down, and then cries:
“What are you talking about, you old fool? Have you ever seen a British soldier? Do you know what weapons he carries? Why, before you know where you are he’ll have given you a bellyful of bullets! These people have cannon, elephants, guns without number! We can’t fight them! You think our muskets are any good? If they were, they wouldn’t have sold them to us!” And while his army stared in amazed silence, he turned to the priests and generals and courtiers. “It’s your fault, you people of Magdala! You should have advised me better!”
D’you know, for a second I thought he was trying a dam’ silly joke? But he wasn’t. All in a moment his black mood had come on him, and he was telling the truth. Why, heaven only knows. He’d given his troops jingo and ginger, and now he was striding off to his tent with a face like a wet week, leaving ’em stunned and silent with the fight knocked clean out of them. By the way, if you doubt my story, look at Blanc and Rassam.
After his parade, he flung himself aboard a mule and rode up Selassie to spy out Napier’s movements. He can’t have liked what he saw, for he came down in the foulest of tempers; we were dining in our tent, but we heard him screaming curses, and soon after there was a volley of musketry which seemed to come from the direction of the Fala saddle. A few single shots sounded a moment later, and Rassam told one of the servants to find out what was afoot, but the guards on our tent wouldn’t let him pass.
So we waited, wondering, and then word came. Theodore had remembered that a few months before one of his storekeepers had deserted and taken refuge among the Gallas; the recollection had sent him into a frenzy and he had ordered up the storekeeper’s wife and infant, who had been in prison since the desertion. They and five other of his Ab prisoners had been taken to the nearest precipice, shot by a firing squad, and their bodies thrown down the cliff. The later single shots had been the finishing off of those who were still alive after the fall.
“Including the child?” says Cameron, and Samuel, who had brought the news, said yes, including the child. He begged that we should not remonstrate with Theodore, who had embarked on another drinking spree, and was still undetermined what to do about Napier, whose troops were believed to be preparing to cross the Bechelo river next morning.
When Samuel had gone there was a long silence, broken by Prideaux.
“Napier will be here the day after tomorrow.”
More silence and then Rassam says: “We must do nothing to excite the King’s … passions. In the morning I think I shall ask him to communicate with Sir Robert.”
Nobody said aye or no to that. Nobody wanted to utter a word that might influence Rassam, who might in turn influence Theodore, perhaps with terrible consequences. It all hung in the balance – Napier’s progress, Theodore’s madness, sheer blind chance. Blanc muttered something in Latin, and I asked what it was.
“A quotation I recollected from somewhere,” says he. “‘At the mercy of Tiberius.’”
* * *
a Haymarket Hussar: a courtesan of the better class. Grant Road was the prostitutes’ quarter in Bombay.
Chapter 15
I’m not good on dates as a rule, but I know the next day was April the ninth, because Rassam said it aloud as he made an entry in his journal, and it stays fixed in my memory45 as the day on which I was forced to witness one of the foulest crimes I’ve ever seen. As you know, I’m no stranger to human wickedness and cruelty and death; slaughter in battle aside, I’ve watched mass scalpings and blowing from guns and the knouting of a Russian peasant, and I’ve seen the torture pits of Madagascar and what was left of the occupants of a New Mexican hacienda after the Mimbreno Apaches had come to call. But what happened on the eve of Good Friday at Islamgee was an atrocity apart – I can’t tell why, unless it’s because ’twas so unexpected and unreal and without sense or reason, committed not by a primitive savage but by a man who only moments before had been earnestly considering Christian ethics and the problems of Church and State. Blind passion I can understand, and cruelty for its own sake, but I guess madness is a law unto itself. And yet none of these, not anger or sadistic bloodlust or lunacy, even, has ever seemed to me sufficient explanation for what happened on that day at Islamgee.
Yet it began tamely enough, after a peaceful night in which the five of us slept undisturbed in our fine silk tent, with the other European prisoners and the German workmen in lesser tents close by. No one spoke of last night’s murders, and we were at breakfast when a messenger arrived bearing compliments to Rassam from the King, which delighted him, and an order for me to present myself to the royal presence instanter, which didn’t. I wasn’t specially happy myself to be singled out, but there was nothing for it, so off I went.
There was great action afoot in the camp, and on the north end of Islamgee where the ground rose to the Fala saddle. A mighty crowd of prisoners had been herded together by the troops; there must have been several hundred, chained and foully dirty, squatting in the dust, and recalling the mob of them I’d seen yesterday I found myself wondering how Magdala had contained them all, for that’s where they’d come from; it struck me Theodore must have had half the local population in close tack – rebels, criminals, folk whose faces didn’t fit, but now it seemed there was to be a great jail clearance, for the armourers were passing among them with hammers and leather straps, setting them free, and great rusty piles of fetters were in evidence, while their late wearers wandered about looking dazed and lost. Still, I took it as a good sign; perhaps his mad majesty was seeing sense at last.
My hopes were soon shot; he might be wearing his humane socks, but he was pulling on his jackboots over them. Beyond the assembled prisoners the slopes up to the Fala shoulder were crawling with troops, and they were dragging his artillery pieces along a newly made road to the summit on which the morning mist was just beginning to blow away. My heart sank, for I knew the Fala height commanded the Arogee plain which Napier’s force was bound to cross, and a well-placed park of artillery could play havoc with our advance if the Ab gunners knew their business.
My messenger and I were mounted, but we had the deuce of a job forcing our way up the crowded slope and along the narrow roadway. It was churned to mud by recent rains, and the carts carrying the guns were up to the axles in the red glue. The great mortar Sevastopol was chained in place on its enormous cart, with hundreds of hauliers straining on its huge hawsers, slithering and ploughing through the muck, and Theodore himself on the cart yelling orders and encouragement. It began to rain, coming down in stair-rods that pitted the mud like buckshot, and the steam came off the sweating gangs in clouds; we were sodden in no time, and our beasts were fairly streaming down their flanks.
Theodore waved and roared to me to come on the wagon with him, which I was glad to do, for he had Samuel and a couple of servants holding great brollies overhead. Even so, he was soaked, and presently tore off his shirt and stood bare to the waist, laughing and rubbing the water over his chest and arms as though he were in a bath. He seemed in capital spirits, exulting over the damage that his mortar would do, “for there has never been such a weapon in the world, and how will your soldiers be able to endure it? Even its thunder will terrify the bravest; they will scatter like frightened sheep!”
&nb
sp; I said he’d never seen British and Indian soldiers, and they’d not scatter, because they knew that noise never killed anyone. He looked a bit downcast at this, so I asked him, greatly daring, if he’d decided to fight.
“If I must!” cries he. “I do not want war, but who is this woman who sends her soldiers against a king? By what right does she come to steal my country?”
I wasn’t going to argue, and he ran on about how he had been insulted, and it was not to be borne; he had written in good will and friendship, as one monarch to another, and had been ignored (which I knew was true), and he’d never have laid a finger on any of our people if Cameron hadn’t conspired with his enemies the Egyptians, and he’d have let that pass, even, if only he’d been shown the courtesy due to his rank, but it was plain that the British Government looked down on African kings as petty rulers of no account. So what else could he do, by the power of God, but defy those who had despised and affronted him, even if he died for it?
With him shouting at me through the downpour, getting angrier by the minute, and poor Samuel struggling with his brolly in the wind and beseeching me with his eyes to say something to turn away wrath, I cried that Theodore was absolutely right, he’d been disgracefully put upon, no question, and it was just a shame that so many fine men, Ab and British, should have to die because our Foreign Office had no bloody manners. Even as I said it, I realised that I’d struck a good line, so I expanded on the arrogance, stupidity, and downright laziness of our civil servants, but what could you expect from folk who’d gone to disgusting dens of vice and ignorance like Harrow and Eton, and had he given any further thought to the idea of sending that splendid little lad to Rugby, capital school, been there myself …
The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection Page 396