"Man abat (* "Man abat lit. “Who’s your father?” seems to have been an Abyssinian catchphrase used as a facetious greeting, not unlike “What’s up?” or “What’s cooking?”) cries Theodore, startled. “Ah, it is you, Samuel! Did I call you?” He closed his eyes, blew out his cheeks, and gave me a huge beam. “Oh, my friend, we have talked long and drunk well, have we not? And indeed it is time to part, if not to sleep. Is my queen awake?”
Samuel hesitated. “The royal lady Tooroo-Wark is on Magdala, getow. With your son Alamayo. But Meshisha is here, and may be—”
“I asked for my queen—my new queen!” bawls Theodore, suddenly enraged. “Not my bastards! Summon her, my lady Tamagno, that I may present her to my friend… my guest, you say… Go!”
Samuel vanished, and Theodore calmed down enough to refill our cups. “Tamagno is to be my queen,” says he. “Alamayo, who is my true son and heir, you shall meet tomorrow. I wish to have him educated at a great English school, such as one I have heard of… Harrah?”
“Harrow? Certainly not, your majesty. Lair of bestial parvenus. Rugby’s the place for your lad… and Meshisha, did you say?”
“Meshisha is a by-blow, gotten in an evil hour,” says he. “A bastard, an idle great fool, but one must employ one’s children, the false get as well as the true. Ah, but here is my true queen that shall be! Tamagno, this is my friend, the Ras Flashman, who brings us comfort from the army of the white queen Victoria, wherefore we do him honour!” He waved a hand wildly in introduction, and the lady and I appraised each other as she rolled in, with Samuel holding the door obsequiously.
My first thought was why the devil was Theodore even looking at her when he had beauties like Miriam to play with. Madam Tamagno was fat, coarse, and looked what she was: a whore, for while Theodore
t "Man abatT' lit. “Who’s your father?” seems to have been an Abyssinian catchphrase used as a facetious greeting, not unlike “What’s up?” or “What’s cooking?”
might talk of making her a queen, in fact she was only his chief concubine. Unlike most Ab women, she painted, and while they tend to conceal their passionate appetites behind demure appearance, this one wore her lust on her sleeve, or rather in her lecherous expression. Someone, I forget who, described her as the most lascivious-looking female he’d ever seen, and recalling the hungry leer with which she surveyed me, I can’t contradict him. She was dressed to match, in the gaudiest silks with a profusion of bangles and necklaces, all tarted up for work, as her first words showed. For when Theodore reached up to fondle her fat paw and slaver it with a drunken kiss, and she’d stripped me in imagination and torn her eyes away, she reproved him playfully for neglecting her while he rioted with foreign prisoners in the cooler. “And I left lonely,” she murmurs.
No prisoner but a guest, cries he, and staggered to his feet with his trollop and Samuel assisting. But then he seemed to forget about me altogether, for he embraced her with mawkish endearments, pawing and nuzzling, and I dare say would have set about her on the spot if she hadn’t guided him out, bestowing one last wanton smile on me as she went. I was glad to watch her go, for she was seventeen stone of dangerous desire if ever I’d seen it, the sort who don’t care about driving a lover crazy by the way she licks her chops over every new fellow she meets. I’d trouble enough just then without a jealous Theodore running amok; he was like a mine primed to explode, and no way to anticipate him.
For consider: in short order he’d tried to brain me, had me loaded with chains only to bring me booze and jollity like a boon com panion, quoted Scripture like a Scotch elder, raved at me as a spy and conspirator, threatened me with mutilation, babbled nonsense and burst into tears, tried to pump me for military intelligence, won dered about having me tortured, sworn eternal friendship, collapsed in a drunken stupor, and introduced me to his black gallop.
Eccentric, eh? I just hoped to God that Napier might get here in time.
You’ve probably never worn chains, and may be interested to know that they can be a sight easier to put on than to take off. The Ab variety consist of massive links between anklets which are secured with soft iron rivets; once hammered shut, they have to be pried open with a wedge, which likewise has to be ham mered with a sledge, and damned unnerving it is to have a grinning blackamoor swinging it down full force, jarring the anklet open, and if he misses his aim you’ll never set that foot on the ground again. Then they slip a leather rope into the anklet, and half a dozen strong men pull it open wide enough to get your foot clear. It takes half an hour and hurts like sin.
I wore my fetters for less than twenty-four hours. What it was like to wear them for months, and even years, I learned next day, when all the prisoners, not only the Europeans but Ab rebels and the like were brought down from Magdala. After I’d been freed and given a breakfast of bread and tej I was seated under guard on a pile of stones near the red royal tent, and watched the captive pro cession winding its way slowly across the Islamgee plain, through the little hutted villages to the tents of the camp. They were still some way off when there was a commotion behind me, and here comes Theodore down the hill from Selassie, with his astrologers and courtiers and the ferret Samuel. When he saw me his majesty gave a great halloo of greeting and came striding to me with both hands out, clasping mine as though I were a long-lost brother.
“My friend, I see you are well!” cries he. “I too am well, and rejoice to see you at liberty! Did you sleep well? Are you refreshed? Let me tell you what I have seen! Your army is crossing the Bechelo, and we have seen elephants descending into the ravine. What does that mean, Ras Flashman?”
I told him it meant big guns, and he rounded on his followers. “You hear? Did I not tell you, but you doubted me? You know nothing! But the hour is coming when you will learn! Go now, assemble the leaders of the regiments, all officers, and the leaders of sections! I shall address them presently. Now, my friend, let us sit—see, your people are coming from the amba, and will soon be with us. Let us drink to your meeting!”
For a man who’d been ripe to roll in gutters only a few hours earlier, he was uncommon spry, and in full fig: a cloth-of-gold coat adorned with silks of many colours, and the most extraordinary pants of what looked like tinsel. He was in such cheerful fettle I wondered if he’d been using hasheesh, but from what I learned later he had no indulgences of that kind, no doubt because booze and fornication occupied most of his leisure time. You’d not have thought he was about to be deposed and possibly slain by an invading army, for he was all hospitality, pledging me in tej and summoning sundry of his military big-wigs to make them known to me—Hasani, commandant of Magdala, austere and unsmiling; the portly Damash, whom I already knew; Gabrie, the army com mander; Engedda, his chief minister, and several others whose names I disremember. Then I must be shown his artillery park below Selassie, and especially his mighty mortar, Sevastopol, an enor mous lump of metal weighing seventy tons and mounted on a wagon with drag-chains which it took five hundred men to pull, he told me proudly. Had I ever seen the like? In truth, I hadn’t, and said so, admiringly, but thinking privately that no one in his right mind would have built such a piece, for at that size it couldn’t be accurate, and what’s the use of a gun that takes all day to position? I reckon his German workmen had simply done what he’d bidden them, and kept their thoughts to themselves.
“You cannot conceive the labour of bringing this wonder to my ambaV cries he. “You have seen my road, but oh, my friend, if you had witnessed our toil, through rain and storm and mud, across rivers and plains, over mountain and desert, and my faithful people on the point of exhaustion, and myself straining on the ropes as we dragged our great guns onward and ever onward. Never was such a journey—no, not even Napoleon himself could have accomplished it!”
Oh, sing us a song, do, thinks I—but d’ye know, when I think of that park of artillery, big pieces, and that monstrous beast of a mortar, I have to admit that, mad or not, he was one hell of a sapper and gunner. A hundred miles over hellis
h country, months on the road with his soldiers marching on their chinstraps and out of food and forage, their strength dwindling by the day, and still he’d kept ’em going by fear and will and example, through hostile country, for with Menelek and Gobayzy in arms, and Masteeat’s Gallas on the lurk, and Napier on his way, Theodore hadn’t a friend to his name on that hellish trek from Debra Tabor.
“We had to plunder as we went,” he told me, slapping his great mortar proudly, for all the world like some motorist showing off his new machine. “We were like to starve, and the peasant jackals of the villages, who had kissed my feet in the days of my power, hung on the flanks of our army, stinging like mosquitoes when they dared, and cutting the throats of stragglers. So, when we took pris oners,” says he with satisfaction, “we burned them alive. Aye, a long march, and slow… Now, tell me, why does your army march so slowly, and why have they come by the salt plain?”
I told him that Napier left nothing to chance, and had calculated time and distance and supply to a nicety, and set his pace accordingly; as to his route, across what Theodore called the salt plain, it was the shortest way to Magdala. I weighed every word, you may be sure, for I knew that however amiable he might be just now, the least little thing could turn him into a murderous maniac. I had to force myself to remember that, in the face of his smiles and cheery chat, but ’twasn’t easy. Here he was, in his harlequin coat and glit tering pants, sitting at ease on a gun carriage, laughing and sipping tej, all geniality as he turned the talk to every topic under the sun—the range of our rifles, and our courts martial, and did the Queen ever review her troops, and my opinion of the Prussian needle gun, and the probable cost of his boy’s education at an English school, and what difficulties he might face being black and foreign, and was it likely, did I think, that he’d take up with an English girl… it was all so pleasant and normal, hang it, that I wondered was it possible that this portended a peaceful outcome—in effect, a sur render? I daren’t hope; with this demented bugger, there was no knowing.
And as he talked, his army was falling in on the great plain of Islamgee, rank upon rank, spearmen and swordsmen and riflemen and cavalry by the thousand, white-robed fighters with their banners before them, churning up the dust in rolling clouds, through which appeared presently the Magdala prisoners, plodding wearily to the tent-lines.
The Europeans were in the van, and a sorry lot they were, like tramps on the look-out for a hen-roost; if you’d seen ’em at your gate you’d have set the dog on them. There were a dozen or so of them, all strangers to me, of course, but I guessed that the two in red coats must be Prideaux of the Bombay Army and Cameron, the consul whose imprisonment had started the whole row. Prideaux was your Compleat Subaltern, tall, fairish, with moustache and whiskers; Cameron was burly and black-bearded and had a crutch under one arm. They, and one or two of the others, walked in the oddest way, lifting their feet high at every step, as though treading through mud or heather. That, I discovered, is what wearing heavy irons for months on end does to you; they’d been relieved of them only a few days ago.
Leading the group was a chipper little dago with a bristling head of hair and soup-strainer to match, and at his elbow a hulking fellow who was all beard and pouched eyes; they were Rassam and Blanc, and they were the fellows who, with Prideaux, had carried the first request for Cameron’s release to Theodore two years ago, and been promptly jailed themselves. Who the others in the group were I don’t know, and it don’t matter, for these four were the ones singled out by Theodore for introduction to me. He hailed Rassam effusively, with his usual inquiries about health and happiness and had he slept well, and then took them aback by announcing me with a fine flourish. For of course they all knew me, by name and fame, and shook my hand in turn, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, which I found mighty interesting.
Rassam didn’t like me—or rather, he didn’t like my presence. You see, he’d been the leader of the pack, on account of being in some sort of political job at Aden, and was their spokesman with Theodore, with whom he was very thick. I don’t say he toadied (and I’d not blame him if he had, with a creature like Theodore), but he was at pains to be busy, very much the Emperor’s confidant, and I guess he feared being cut out by the celebrated Flashy. If that seems odd, well, captivity breeds strange germs in people’s minds, rival ries and enmities flourish, and little things wax great. Of course, he was some kind of Levantine Turk or Bedouin chi-chi, so you’d not have expected him to behave like the British prisoners.
Prideaux was the youngest, thirty-ish or thereabouts, cool as a trout with an affected lazy look which I guessed concealed a sharp mind and a deal of hard bark; from the way he glanced towards Theodore I knew that captivity hadn’t cracked him. Nor had it done anything to Cameron’s spirit, although it had played havoc with his body; he’d been racked and flogged even worse than the rest, and was a sick man, but he had that dogged, quiet manner which is generally admired, especially by devout Christians. Not my style, but useful in companions in misfortune. Blanc was a sawbones in the Bombay medical service, grave and tough, and respected by the chief men on the amba for his skill in doctoring them and their families.
Rassam, as I say, wasn’t glad to see me; Prideaux was, and showed it; Blanc was, but didn’t, for demonstration wasn’t his style. Cameron was too used up to do more than acknowledge me, and of course all four wondered what my arrival portended, what news did I have of Napier’s progress, and what, above all, was Theodore about to do.
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 congrat ulating 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 minia ture. For sometimes they’d been treated as honoured guests, some times 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?”