Flashman Papers 3-Book Collection 4: Flashman and the Dragon, Flashman on the March, Flashman and the Tiger. George Fraser MacDonald
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– they left the Sikhs, and in a moment I understood why. For they flung us down on the flags before Sang’s horse, and that ghoulish face was turned on us, pale eyes glaring under the wizard’s helmet, as he demanded to know if any of us spoke Chinese.
Now, he wasn’t asking that for the purpose of execution, so I hauled myself upright and said I did. He considered me, frowning malevolently, and then snarled:
“Your name, reptile?”
“Flashman, colonel on the staff of Lord Elgin. I demand the immediate release of myself and my four companions, as well as –”
“Silence, foulness!” he screamed, on such a note that his pony reared, and he hammered its head with his mailed glove to quiet it. “Snake! Pig!” He leaned down from the saddle, mouthing like a madman, and struck me across the face. “Open your mouth again and it will be sewn up! Bring him!” He wheeled his mount and clattered away, and I was seized, my wrists bound, and I was flung bodily on to a cart. As it rolled away I had one glimpse of Brabazon looking after me, and the little priest, head bowed, telling his beads. I never saw them again. No one did.34
This may seem an odd time to mention it, but my entry to Pekin recalls a conversation which I had a couple of years ago with the eminent wiseacre and playwright, George B. Shaw (as I call him, to his intense annoyance, though it don’t rile him as much as “Bloomsbury Bernie”). I was advising him on pistol-play for a frightful pantomime he was writing about a lynching in a Kansas cow-town35; discussing hangings set him off on the subject of pain in general, and he advanced the fatuous opinion that mental anguish was worse than physical. When I could get a word in, I asked him if spiritual torment had ever made him vomit; he allowed it hadn’t, so I told him what my Apache wife had done to Ilario the scalp-hunter, and had the satisfaction of watching our leading dramatist bolting for the lavatory with his handkerchief to his mouth. (Of course, I didn’t get the better of him; as he said later, it was the thought that had made him spew, not pain itself. The hell with him.)
I reflect on this only because the most prolonged pain I ever endured – and I’ve been shot, stabbed, hung by the heels, flogged, half-drowned, and even stretched on the rack – was on the road into Pekin. All they did was tie my hands and feet – and pour water on my bonds; then they hauled my wrists up behind me and tied ’em to a spar above the cart, and set off at a slow trot. The blazing sun and the bouncing cart did the rest; I’ll not describe it, because I can’t, save to say that the fiery agony in wrists and ankles spreads through every nerve of your body until you’re a living mass of pain, which will eventually drive you mad. Luckily, Pekin is only eleven miles from Tang-chao.
I don’t remember much except the pain – long rows of suburbs, yellow faces jeering and spitting into the cart, a towering redoubt of purple stone topped by crenellated turrets (the Anting Gate), foul narrow streets, a blue-covered carriage with the driver sitting on the shaft – he called to his passengers to look, and I was aware of two cold, lovely female faces regarding me without expression as I half-hung, whimpering, in my bonds. They weren’t shocked, or pitying, or amused, or even curious; merely indifferent, and in my agony I felt such a blazing rage of hatred that I was almost exalted by it – and now I can say, arrant coward that I am, that at least I understand how martyrs bear their tortures: they may have faith, and hope, and all the rest of it, but greater than these is blind, unquenchable red anger. It sustained me, I know – the will to endure and survive and make those ice-faced bitches howl for mercy.
It must have cleared my mind, for I remember distinctly coloured pagoda roofs bigger than I’d ever seen, and a teahouse with dragons’ heads above its eaves, and the great scarlet Gate of Valour into the Imperial City – for Pekin, you must know, is many cities within each other, and innermost of all is the Forbidden City, the Paradise, the Great Within, girded by gleaming yellow walls and entered by the Gate of Supreme Harmony.
There are palaces for seven hundred princes within the Imperial City, but they pale before the Great Within. It is simply not of this world. Like the Summer Palace, outside Pekin, it’s entirely cut off from reality, a dreamland, if you like, where the Emperor and his creatures live out a great play in their stately halls and gorgeous gardens, and all that matters is formality and finger-nails and fornication. Nothing is seen or heard of the rest of mankind, except what his ministers think fit. There he dwells, remote as a god, sublime not in omniscience but in ignorance, lost to the world. He might as well be in the Athenaeum.
I saw most of it, later – the Palace of Earthly Repose, for the Emperor’s consort; the Temple of Imperial Ancestors, for sacrifices; the Gate of Extensive Peace, a hundred and ten feet high, for kowtowing; the Hall of Intense Mental Exercise, for studying Confucius; the Temple of the Civic Deity – don’t know what that’s for, paying rates, I dare say – and the library, the portrait hall, and even the office of the local rag, the Imperial Gazette, which circulates every day to all the nobles and officials in China. That’s the unreality of the country – they nail thieves’ hands together, and have a daily paper.
For the moment all I saw was the great gilt copper tower in which incense is kept perpetually burning, filling the city with its sweet, musky odour; and beyond it the holy of holies, the Palace of Heavenly Tranquillity (which it ain’t). I was dragged in through a round doorway, and flung into a great room utterly bare of furniture, where I lay for several hours on a cold marble floor, too sick and sore and parched even to move, or to do anything except groan. I must have slept, for suddenly I was aware of tramping feet, and a door crashing open, and the glare of torches, and the revolting face of Sang-kol-in-sen glaring down at me.
He was still in full martial fig, brazen breastplate, mailed gloves, spurred greaves, and all, but with a fur-lined robe of green silk over his shoulders. He was bare-headed, so I had the benefit of his bald Mongol skull as well as the obscene little beard on the brutal moon-features. He fetched me a shattering kick and shouted:
“Get on your knees, louse!”
I tried to obey, but my limbs were so painful that I pitched over, and received several more kicks before I managed to kneel, croaking for a drink of water. “Silence!” he bawled, and cuffed me left and right, cracking the skin with his brass fingers. I crouched, sobbing, and he laughed at me spitefully. “A soldier, you!” He kicked me again. He didn’t seem to remember me from Tang-ku Fort, not that that was any comfort.
There were two Manchoo Bannermen flanking the door, and now came two others, bearing an open sedan in which sat Prince I, the skull-faced monster who had raved and shrieked at Parkes at Tang-chao. He looked even more of a spectre in the glare of torchlight, sitting lean and motionless in his shimmering yellow robe, hands on knees – the silver cases on his nails came half-way down his shins. Only his eyes moved, gleaming balefully on me. To complete the comedy trio there was a burly, thick-lipped Manchoo in dragon robes, his fingers heavy with rings, a ruby button in his hat. This, I was to learn, was Sushun, the Assistant Grand Secretary of the Imperial Government, a vulture for corruption and the Emperor’s tutor in vice and debauchery, on which, to judge by his pupil’s condition, he must have been the greatest authority since Caligula. To me, for the moment, he was only another very nasty-looking Manchoo.
“Is this the creature?” growls Sang, and Prince I nodded imperceptibly, and piped in his thin voice: “He was with Pa-hsia-li when that lying dog deceived us at Tang-chao.”
“Then he may go the way of Pa-hsia-li,” snarls Sang. “It is enough for the moment that he is what the barbarian scum call an officer. An officer!” He stooped to scream in my face:
“Who is your commander, pig-dung?”
“General Sir Hope –” I was beginning, and he knocked me flying with his boot.
“You lie! You have no generals! Who commands your ships?”
“Admiral Ho –”
He screamed and stamped on my arm, agonisingly. “Another lie! You have no admirals! You are barbarian swine – you have no nobles, no officers, no generals or colonels or admirals! You have animals