“You remember I spoke to you about the Old Man of the Mountains, of whom you had never heard?”
“What’s he got to do with me rushing about like a lunatic?”
“He lived many years ago, in Persia, beyond the Two Seas and the Salt Desert. He was the master of the mad fighting-men – the hasheesheen – who nerved themselves to murder and die by drinking the hasheesh drug – what the Indians call bhang. It is prepared in many ways, for many purposes – it can be so concocted that it will drive a man to any lengths of hatred and courage – and other passions.”
And she said it as calm as a virgin discussing flower arrangement, sitting there gravely cross-legged on a charpaia in a corner of her garden, with her vile kitten gorging itself on a saucer of milk beside her. I stared at her astounded.
“The hasheesheen – you mean the Assassins?44 Great God, woman, d’you mean to say you filled me with an infernal drug, that sent me clean barmy?”
“It was in your kefir,” says she, lightly. “Drink, little tiger, there is more if you need it.”
“But … but …” I was almost gobbling. “What the devil for?”
“Because you were afraid. Because I knew, from the moment I first saw you, that fear rules you, and that in the test, it will always master you.” The beautiful face was quite impassive, the voice level. “And I could not allow that to happen. If you had proved a coward that night, when all depended on you, we would have been lost – Yakub’s enterprise would have failed, and Khokand with it. I would do – anything, rather than see him fail. So I drugged you – has it done any harm, in the end?”
“I never heard of such infernal impudence in my life!” I stormed. By George, I was angry, and resentful, and bursting with it. “Blast you, I might have got myself killed!”
She suddenly laughed, showing those pretty teeth. “You are sometimes an honest man, angliski! Is he not, puss? And he does wrong to rage and abuse us – for is he not alive? And if he had turned coward, where would he have been?”
A sound argument, as I’ve realized since, but it didn’t do much to quieten me just then. I detested her in that moment, as only a coward can when he hears the truth to his face, and I didn’t have to look far to see how to vent my spite on her.
“If I’m honest, it’s more than you are. All this fine talk of not failing your precious Yakub Beg – we know how much that’s worth! You pretend to be devoted to him – but it doesn’t stop you coupling like a bitch in heat with the first chap that comes along. Hah! That shows how much you care for him!”
She didn’t even blush, but smiled down at the kitten, and stroked it. “Perhaps it does, eh, puss? But the angliski would not be pleased if we said as much. But then –”
“Stop talking to the blasted cat! Speak plain, can’t you?”
“If it pleases you. Listen angliski, I do not mock – now, and I do not seek to put shame on you. It is no sin to be fearful, any more than it is a sin to be one-legged or red-haired. All men fear – even Yakub and Kutebar and all of them. To conquer fear, some need love, and some hate, and some greed, and some even – hasheesh. I understand your anger – but consider, is it not all for the best? You are here, which is what matters most to you – and no one but I knows what fears are in your heart. And that I knew from the beginning. So –” she smiled, and I remember it still as a winning smile, curse her. “‘Lick up the honey, stranger, and ask no questions’.”
And that was all I could get from her – but somewhere in it I detected a tiny mite of consolation. I’ve got my pride in one direction, you know – or had then. So before I left her, I asked the question:
“Why did you goad me into making love to you?”
“Call that a drug, too, if you will – to make certain you ate my kefir.”
“Just that, eh? Lot of trouble, you Chinese girls go to.”
She laughed aloud at that, and gave a little pout. “And I had never met an angliski before, you remember. Say I was curious.”
“May I ask if your curiosity was satisfied?”
“Ah, you ask too much, angliski. That is one tale I tell only to my kitten.”
I daresay I’ve no cause to remember her with much affection, but I do, like the old fool I am. As indeed I do all my girls, now that they’re at a safe distance. Perhaps she was right, and I owed it to her that I’d come out with a whole skin – but that was blind luck, and anyway, she had plunged me into the stew in the first place. But it’s all by now, and I have only to hold that faded flower scarf that she gave me as a parting gift, and I’m back in the bright garden behind the ranges, looking into those black almond eyes, and feeling the sun’s warmth and those soft lips against my cheek, and – aye, but she knew too much, the Silk One. Kutebar was decidedly right.
Still, I had no cause for complaint, once I’d recovered from the shock of realizing that I’d fought a do-or-die action by means of a bellyful of some disgusting Oriental potion. I’ve often wondered since, if chaps like Chinese Gordon and Bobs and Custer always went about feeling the way I did that night – not knowing what fear was? It would account for a lot, you know. But God help anyone who’s born that way; I’m sorry for ’em. You can’t know real peace of mind, I think, unless you’ve got a windy streak in you.
But I didn’t think too long about it just then. The danger was past, all right, I was safe out of the Russians’ reach, and among friendly folk who thought I was the best thing to come their way since Tamburlaine – but I’d no wish to linger. When I took stock of what I’d been through in the past year, from the hell of Balaclava and the snow-sodden nightmare of Russia, with its wolves and knouts and barbarous swine like Ignatieff, to the shocking perils of Fort Raim and the go-down (I shudder to this day at the mention of Guy Fawkes), I had only one notion in my head: India, and a hero’s welcome, no doubt, and after that home, and the sounds of London and Leicestershire, and the comfort of clubs and taverns and English bed-clothes and buttered toast, and above all my beautiful blonde Elspeth – who didn’t have the wit to converse with kittens, and could be relied on not to lace my kidneys and bacon with opium. By God, though, I wondered if Cardigan had been mooching round in my absence – unless he’d got himself killed, with luck? For that matter, was the war over, or what? Decidedly I must get back to civilization quickly.
Yakub Beg was deuced good about it – as well he might have been, considering the risks I’d run on his behalf – and after a tremendous feast in the Kizil Kum valley, at which we celebrated the Russians’ confusion, and the salvation of Khokand – oh, and India, too – we set out for Khiva, where he was moving his folk out of reach of Russian reprisals. From there we went east to Samarkand, where he had promised to arrange for some Afghan pals of his to convoy me over the mountains and through Afghanistan to Peshawar. I wasn’t looking forward, much, to that part of the journey, but our trip to Samarkand was like a holiday outing. It was clear air and good horses, with Kutebar and Yakub snarling happily at each other, and Ko Dali’s daughter, though I never entirely trusted that leery glint in her eye, was as cheerful and friendly as you could wish. I tried to board her at Khiva, but the caravanserai was too crowded, and on the Samarkand road there wasn’t the opportunity, which was a pity. I’d have liked another tussle with her, but Yakub Beg was too much with us.
He was a strange, mad, mystic-cheery fellow, that one. I don’t know how much he knew, or what Ko Dali’s daughter told him, but for some reason he talked to me a good deal on our journey – about Khokand, and whether the British would help him maintain its independence, and his ambitions to found a state of his own, and always his talk would turn to the Silk One, and Kashgar, far over the deserts and mountains, where even the Russians could never reach. The very last words he said to me were on that score.
We had passed the night in Samarkand, in the little serai near the market, under the huge turquoise walls of the biggest mosque in the world, and in the morning they rode out with me and my new escort a little way on the southern road. It was throng
ed with folk – bustling crowds of Uzbeks in their black caps, and big-nosed hillmen with their crafty faces, and veiled women, and long lines of camels with their jingling bells shuffling up the yellow dust, and porters staggering under great bales, and children underfoot, and everywhere the babbling of twenty different languages. Yakub and I were riding ahead, talking, and we stopped at a little river running under the road to water our beasts.
“The stream of See-ah,” says Yakub, laughing. “Did I say the Ruskis would water their horses in it this autumn? I was wrong – thanks to you – and to my silk girl and Kutebar and the others. They will not come yet, to spoil all this” – and he gestured round at the crowds streaming by – “or come at all, if I can help it. And if they do – well, there is still Kashgar, and a free place in the hills.”
“‘Where the wicked cease from troubling,’ eh,” says I, because it seemed appropriate.
“Is that an English saying?” he asked.
“I think it’s a hymn.” If I remember rightly, we used to sing it in chapel at Rugby before the miscreants of the day got flogged.
“All holy songs are made of dreams,” says he. “And this is a great place for dreams, such as mine. You know where we are, Englishman?” He pointed along the dusty track, which wound in and out of the little sand-hills, and then ran like a yellow ribbon across the plain before it forked towards the great white barrier of the Afghan mountains. “This is the great Pathway of Expectation, as the hill people say, where you may realize your hopes just by hoping them. The Chinese call it the Baghdad Highway, and the Persians and Hindus know it as the Silk Trail, but we call it the Golden Road.” And he quoted a verse which, with considerable trouble, I’ve turned into rhyming English:
To learn the age-old lesson day by day:
It is not in the bright arrival planned,
But in the dreams men dream along the way,
They find the Golden Road to Samarkand.
“Very pretty,” says I. “Make it up yourself?”
He laughed. “No – it’s an old song, perhaps Firdausi or Omar. Anyway, it will take me to Kashgar – if I live long enough. But here are the others, and here we say farewell. You were my guest, sent to me from heaven: touch upon my hand in parting.”
So we shook, and then the others arrived, and Kutebar was gripping me by the shoulders in his great bear-hug and shouting: “God be with you, Flashman – and my compliments to the scientists and doctors in Anglistan.” And Ko Dali’s daughter approached demurely to give me the gift of her scarf and kiss me gently on the lips – and just for an instant the minx’s tongue was half-way down my throat before she withdrew, looking like St Cecilia. Yakub Beg shook hands again and wheeled his horse.
“Goodbye, blood brother. Think of us in England. Come and visit us in Kashgar some day – or better still, find a Kashgar of your own!”
And then they were thundering away back on the Samarkand road, cloaks flying, and Kutebar turning in the saddle to give me a wave and a roar. And it’s odd – but for a moment I felt lonely, and wondered if I should miss them. It was a deeply-felt sentimental mood which lasted for at least a quarter of a second, and has never returned, I’m happy to say. As to Kashgar, and Yakub’s invitation – well, if I could get guaranteed passports from the Tsar, and the Empress of China, and every hill-chief between Astrakhan and Lake Baikal, and a private Pullman car the whole way with running buffet, bar, and waitresses in constant attendance – I might think quite hard about it before declining. I’ve too many vivid memories of Central Asia; at my time of life Scarborough is far enough east for me.
It was strange, though, to go back into Afghanistan again, with my escort – heaven knows where Yakub had got ’em from, but one look at their wolfish faces and well-stuffed cartridge belts reassured me that this was one party that no right-minded badmash would dream of attacking. It took us a week over the Hindu-Killer, and another couple of days through the hills to Kabul – and suddenly there was the old Bala Hissar again, and I sat in disbelief looking across to the overgrown orchards where Elphy Bey’s cantonment had been, so many years ago, and the Kabul River, and the hillside where Akbar had spread his carpet and McNaghten had died – I could close my eyes and almost hear the drums of the 44th beating “Yankee Doodle” and old Lady Sale berating some unfortunate bearer for brewing tea before the water was thoroughly boiling.
I even took a turn up by the ruined Residency, and found my heart beating faster as I looked at the bullet-pocked walls, and marked the window where Broadfoot had tumbled to his death – and from there I turned and tried to find the spot where the Ghazis had set on me and the Burnes brothers, but I couldn’t find it.
It was strange – everything the same and yet different. I stood looking round at the close-packed houses, and wondered in which one Gul Shah had tried to murder me with his infernal snakes – and at that I found myself shivering and hurrying back to the market where my escort were waiting: sometimes ghosts can hover in too close for comfort. I didn’t want to linger in Kabul any longer, and to the astonishment of my escort I insisted that we journey on to Peshawar by the north bank of the Kabul River although, as the leader pointed out, there was a fine road by way of Boothak and Jallalabad to the south.
“There are serais, huzoor,” says he, “and all comfort for us and our beasts – this way is broken country, where we must lie out by night in the cold. Truly, the south road is better.”
“My son,” says I, “when you were a chotah wallahb gurgling your mother’s milk, I travelled that south road, and I didn’t like it one little bit. So we’ll stick to the river, if you don’t mind.”
“Aye-ee!” says he, grinning with his jagged teeth. “Perchance you owe money to someone in Jallalabad?”
“No,” says I, “not money. Lead on, friend of all travellers – to the river.”
So that way we went, and cold it was by night, but I didn’t have nightmares, waking or sleeping, all the way to the Khyber and the winding road down to Peshawar, where I said goodbye to my escort and rode under the arch where Avitabile used to hang the Gilzais, and so into the presence of a young whipper-snapper of a Company ensign.
“A very good day to you, old boy,” says I. “I’m Flashman.”
He was a fishy-looking, fresh young lad with a peeling nose, and he goggled at me, going red.
“Sergeant!” he squeaks. “What’s this beastly-looking nigger doing on the office verandah?” For I was attired à la Kizil Kum still, in cloak and pyjamys and puggaree, with a bigger beard than Dr Grace.
“Not at all,” says I, affably, “I’m English – a British officer, in fact. Name of Flashman – Colonel Flashman, 17th Lancers, but slightly detached for the moment. I’ve just come from – up yonder, at considerable personal expense, and I’d like to see someone in authority. Your commanding officer will do.”
“It’s a madman!” cries he. “Sergeant, stand by!”
And would you believe it, it took me half an hour before I could convince him not to throw me in the lock-up, and he summoned a peevish-looking captain, who listened, nodding irritably while I explained who and what I was.
“Very good,” says he. “You’ve come from Afghanistan?”
“By way of Afghanistan, yes. But –”
“Very good. This is a customs post, among other things. Have you anything to declare?”
[The end of the fourth packet of the Flashman Papers].
* * *
a Bed platform.
b Little fellow.
APPENDIX I:
Balaclava
So much has been written about this battle, by its survivors, by journalists and historians, and even by propagandists and poets, that it is hardly necessary to say more than that Flashman’s account, while it adds certain graphic details that have not been recorded hitherto, agrees substantially with other eyewitness descriptions. Much of what he says of the actual charge of the Light Brigade, for example, may be verified by comparison with the accounts of those who survive
d the action, such as Paget, Trooper Farquharson, Captain, Morgan, Cardigan, and others.
But the great controversy of Balaclava, which will probably never be settled satisfactorily, is why the Light Brigade attacked the battery at all. Experts and amateurs of history alike, who have read Russell, Kinglake, Woodham-Smith, Fortescue and a host of others, and who are familiar with the points of view of Raglan, Lucan, and Cardigan, may decide for themselves whether Flashman casts valuable light on the subject or not. Many believe that Raglan and Airey were principally at fault for issuing an imprecise order, that Nolan’s excitement in transmitting it to Lucan led to the final fatal confusion, and that neither Cardigan nor Lucan can be fairly blamed for what followed. These are conclusions with which Flashman himself would obviously not disagree. The whole question hinges dramatically on the moment when Nolan made his wild gesture (down the valley? towards the redoubts? how great was the angle of difference anyway? did he say “our guns” or “your guns” or what?) and if he was at fault, he paid the highest price for it. So too, perhaps, did Raglan; he died in the Crimea, like the six hundred sabres, and if there was a blunder, it was buried with them.
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