Flashman at the Charge

Synopsis: The fourth packet of the Flashman Papers (1854--1855) picks up the memoirs of the celebrated soldier as England is moving towards war with Russia. Captain Flashman--a public hero of the Afghanistan campaign but, as he reveals, a private coward--seeks to avoid the coming storm by joining the Board of Ordnance in London.

Flashman finds himself promoted to the rank of colonel and ordered to active service as an aide and guardian to the young Prince William of Celle, a German relative of Prince Albert. This assignment comes to a tragic end when, at the battle of the Alma, the young prince charges ahead and Flashman lags behind. Flashman then, as an aide and galloper on General Lord Raglan's staff, to his overwhelming horror, gets involved in the charge of the Light Brigade. He was, in fact, somewhat to blame for its starting off in the wrong direction; having drunk some Russian champagne, he is bloated. His booming flatulence annoys General Cardigan to the point of giving the order to charge, with Flashman, terror-struck, in the van.

By some miracle, Flashman survives the disaster and is captured by the Russians. He is taken into the interior and, on the way, meets a Russian captain, the cruel and icyhearted Count Ignatieff. Flashman's prison turns out, much to his surprise, to be the private estate of an old Cossack nobleman, Count Pencherjevsky, where he is well treated and given limited freedom. Another surprise is the discovery of his fellow prisoner--Scud East, an acquaintance from Rugby days.

Flashman then--as a result of the count's bizarre whim--falls into secret, torrid lovemaking with Valla, the count's beautiful daughter. That is interrupted, however, when Flashman and East manage to overhear a council of war presided over by the tsar himself. The strategy being plotted is a Russian attack on India by way of Persia. East is determined to escape and carry the news back to the British. That chance comes when rebellious peasants launch an attack on Pencherjevsky's manor house. Flashman, East and Valla--who has had no time to dress--escape in a horse-drawn sleigh.

They reach a causeway that leads to the Crimea and suddenly, through the snow and darkness, Flashman sights Cossack cavalry in pursuit. Trying desperately to lighten the sleigh, he throws out everything moveable--and at last dumps the naked Valla into the snow. But, once across the causeway and close to safety, they suffer an accident when the sleigh overturns and Flashman is pinned beneath it. East explains that, much as it pains him, he must go on alone to take the intelligence to the British high command. Hurt and moaning with fear, Flashman is recaptured by the Russians.

I Suppose my life has been full of poetic justice--an expression customarily used by Holy Joes to cloak the vindictive pleasure they feel when some enterprising fellow fetches himself a cropper. They are the kind who'll say unctuously that I was properly hoist with my own petard at Arabat, and serve the bastard right. I'm inclined to agree; East would never have abandoned me if I hadn't heaved Valla out of the sled in the first place. He'd have stuck by me and the Christian old-school code, and let his military duty go hang. But my treatment of his beloved made it easy for him to forget the ties of comradeship and brotherly love and do his duty; all his pious protestations about leaving me were really hypocritical moonshine, spouted out to salve his own conscience.

I know my Easts and Tom Browns, you see. They're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they're doing the right, Christian thing--and never mind the consequences to anyone else. Selfish brutes. Damned unreliable it makes 'em, too. On the other hand, you can always count on me. I'd have got the news through to Raglan out of pure cowardice and self-love, and to hell with East and Valla both; but your pious Scud had to have a grudge to pay off before he'd abandon me. Odd, ain't it? They'll do for us yet, with their sentiment and morality.

In the meantime, he had done for me, handsomely. If you're one of the aforementioned who take satisfaction in seeing the wicked go arse over tip into the pit which they have digged, you'll relish the situation of old Flashy, a half-healed crack in his head, a broken rib crudely strapped up with rawhide, lousy after a week in a filthy cell under Fort Arabat and with his belly muscles fluttering in the presence of Captain Count Nicholas Pavlovitch Ignatieff.

They had hauled me into the guard-room and there he was, the inevitable cigarette clamped between his teeth, those terrible, hypnotic, blue-brown eyes regarding me with no more emotion than a snake's. For a full minute he stared at me, and then, without a change of expression, he lashed me back and forth across the face with his gloves, while I struggled feebly between my Cossack guards.

"Don't!" I cried. "Pajalusta! I'm a wounded prisoner! I'm a British officer! For God's sake, stop!"

He gave one last swipe and dropped the gloves at the feet of his aide. "Burn those," he said in an icy whisper. Then, in his deadly, unemotional voice, he said to me, "You plead for mercy--you, a betrayer of the vilest kind? You gave your most solemn oath to protect the daughter of a man who had treated you with every consideration--only to escape, abduct her and, finally, abandon her to her death."

"It's a lie!" I shouted. "It wasn't my fault. She fell from the sled by accident! Besides, we'd given no parole. We had the right of any prisoners of war. . . ."

"You thought to take advantage," he said softly, "because you believed that Pencherjevsky was doomed. Fortunately, he was not a hetman of Cossacks for nothing. He cut his way clear and, in spite of your unspeakable treatment of his daughter, she, too, survived."

"Thank God for that!" cries 1. "Believe me, sir, I intended no betrayal. And, as for the matter of the accident--"

"The only accident was the one that prevented you from escaping," he went on in that level, sibilant voice, "and you will live to wish that sled had crushed your life out. You have lost every right to be treated as an honourable man. One thing alone can mitigate your punishment." He paused to let that sink in while he lit another cigarette.

"I require an answer to one question," says Ignatieff, "and you will supply it in your own language." His next words were in English: "Why did you try to escape?"

Terrified as I was, I daren't tell him the truth. I knew that if he learned that I'd found out about his expedition to India, all was up with me. "Because it is the prisoner's duty to try to escape--to rejoin his own army. I swear we had no other--"

"You lie. The attempt would have been both foolhardy and dishonourable--unless you had some very pressing reason. As for that reason, you will be dying in excruciating agony within five minutes unless you can tell me"--he paused, inhaling on his cigarette, his blue-brown eyes seeming to bore into my brain--"what is meant by item seven."

There was nothing for it; I had to confess. I stammered out hoarsely in English, "It's a plan to invade India. Please, for God's sake--"

"How did you discover it?"

I babbled out how we had eaves-dropped in the gallery and heard him talking to the tsar. "It was just by chance . . . I didn't mean to spy . . . it was East who said we must get away to warn our people! It was all his notion."

"Gag him," says Ignatieff, "and bring him to the courtyard with another prisoner. Anyone in the cells will do." So, in a minute, I found myself in the icy courtyard, shivering in my shirt and breeches. Presently, a Cossack appeared, driving in front of him a scared and dirty peasant with fetters on his legs. "What was this fellow's offence?" asks Ignatieff.

"Insubordination, Lord Count," says the Cossack guard.

Two more Cossacks appeared, carrying a curious bench like a vaulting horse with very short legs and a flat top. The prisoner shrieked at the sight of it, but they tore off his clothes and bound him to it face down, with thongs at his ankles, knees, waist and neck, so that he lay there naked, still screaming horribly.

One of the Cossacks handed Ignatieff a thick black coil of something that looked for all the world like shiny liquorice. He hefted it in his hands, stepped in front of me and placed it over my head. I shuddered as it touched my shoulders and I was astonished by the weight of the thing. At a sign from Ignatieff, the Cossack grasped the end and slowly drew it off my shoulders and, as it uncoiled like an obscene black snake, I realized that it was a huge whip, over 12 feet long, as thick as my arm at the butt and tapering to a point as thin as a bootlace.

"You will have heard of the knout," says Ignatieff softly. "Its use is illegal." At this, the Cossack grasped the butt with both hands, swept the knout back over his shoulder and then struck. The diabolical thing cut through the air with a noise like a steam whistle's, ending with a crack like a pistol shot and a fearful, choked scream of agony.

They pushed me forwards to the bench and forced me to look. With the bile nearly choking me behind my gag, I saw that the man's buttocks were cut clean across, as by a sabre, and the blood was pouring out. "That is the drawing stroke," says Ignatieff. "Proceed."

Five more explosive cracks, five more razor gashes and the snow beneath the bench was sodden with blood. The victim was still conscious, making awful, animal sounds. "Now observe the effect of a flat blow," says Ignatieff. This time, the Cossack didn't snap the knout but let it fall flat on the man's spine. The sound was like that of a wet cloth slapped on stone. The victim was silent. When they unstrapped him from the bench. I saw that he'd been nearly broken in two.

They took me inside and dropped me, half-fainting, into a chair. Ignatieff lit another cigarette and began to talk quietly. "When your time comes, I shall see how many of the drawing strokes a man can suffer before he dies. Your one hope of escaping that fate lies in doing precisely what I am about to tell you." I watched him like a rabbit before a snake. He had committed that hideous butchery just to impress me. And I was enormously impressed.

"That you had somehow learned of item seven I had already suspected," says Ignatieff at last. "Regrettably, Major East was never recaptured, and thus I must assume that Lord Raglan has received the intelligence. Do not take cheer from that, however--it can be made to work to our advantage. Whereas your authorities will now suppose that they have seven months to prepare, in fact, within four months (continued on page 146)Flashman at the Charge(continued from page 144) our army, thirty thousand strong, will be advancing over the Khyber Pass with at least half as many Afghan allies. At their backs, your English troops will have a rebellious Indian population. Our agents are already preparing that insurrection.

"You may wonder how it is possible to advance the time of our attack. It is simple. We have given up any thought of the southern route through Persia and now adhere to General Khruleff's original northern plan. Transport of the army across the Caspian and Aral seas can begin immediately. The Syr Daria and Amu Daria tribesmen will be pacified by our army as it moves."

I didn't doubt a word of it--not that I cared a patriotic damn. They could have India, China and the whole bloody Orient if I could only find some way out for myself.

"In this, you will play a small rôle," Ignatieff went on. "We possess, you see, the most extensive dossiers in Europe--dossiers that are remarkably detailed about your activities in Afghanistan fourteen years ago: Your work among the Gilzai and other tribes, your dealings with Muhammed Akbar Khan, your solitary survival of the British army disaster--a disaster in which our own intelligence service played some part."

Shaken and fearful as I was, one part of my mind was noting something from all this. Master Ignatieff was a devilish clever man, but he had one of the weaknesses of youth: He was vain as an Etonian duke. Thus, he talked too much.

"It will be most convenient," says he, "to have a British officer with some small reputation in Afghanistan. He can persuade the tribal leaders that the decay of British power is imminent and that their advantage lies in joining the invasion." By the tilt of his cigarette and the glitter in his strange eye, I knew he was enjoying all this.

"My dossier reading tells me of a man brave to the point of recklessness. My own observation of you tends to contradict it--I do not judge you to be of heroic material. Still, there are the eyewitness accounts from Balaclava, and I may be wrong. In any case, even a hero would weight a refusal to cooperate against being displayed naked in an iron cage and being made to suffer the knout at the end of the journey. That is all."

You may not credit it, but my feelings, as they clamped chains on my ankles and wrists and thrust me into an underground pit, were of profound relief. For one thing, I was out of the presence of that evil madman with his leery optic. Point two, I had my good health for at least four months--and I was old soldier enough to know that a lot can happen in that time. Afghanistan, ghastly place, was home country to me and all I would need was a yard's start on any Russian pursuer.

Thinking about that, I could make a guess that if there were a point where the Russian force might run into trouble, it would be in the wild country before Afghanistan. There were the independent khanates at Bokhara, Samarkand and in the Syr Daria country, where the Russians had been trying to extend their empire for some time--and had been getting a bloody nose in the process. Fearsome bastards, those northern tribes of Tajiks, Uzbeks and the remnants of the Great Horde. Still, wouldn't an army of 30,000, with 10,000 Cossack cavalry and artillery trains, eat the tribes up at leisure? In all, perhaps I'd better wait until Afghanistan to lift mine eyes up unto the hills--or down to the nearest hiding hole.

You may think it strange that I could plan ahead so calmly. But, since my early days, I'd learned that there's no use in cramping your digestion with laments over evil luck. Even if your knees knock as hard as mine did, remember the golden rule: When the game's going against you, stay calm and cheat.

• • •

I began my journey from Fort Arabat the following day--a journey such as I don't suppose any other Englishman has ever made. You can trace it on the map, all 1500 miles of it, and your finger will go over places you never dreamed of, from the edge of civilisation to the real back of beyond, over seas and deserts to mountains that perhaps nobody will ever climb, through towns and tribes that belong to the Arabian Nights rather than to the true story of a reluctant English gentleman (as the guidebooks would say) with two enormous scowling Cossacks brooding over him the whole way.

The first part of the journey was all too familiar, by sled back along the Arrow of Arabat, over the bridge at Genitchi, and then east along that dreary winter coast to Taganrog, where the snow was already beginning to melt in the foul little streets and the locals still appeared to be recovering from the excesses of the great winter fair at Rostov. Russians, in my experience, are part drunk most of the time, but if there's a sober soul between the Black Sea and the Caspian for weeks after the Rostov kermess, he must be a Baptist hermit; Taganrog was littered with returned revellers. Rostov I don't much remember, or the famous river Don, but after that we took to telegas, and since the great Ignatieff was riding at the front of our little convoy of six vehicles, we made good speed. Too good for Flashy, bumping along uncomfortably on the straw in one of the middle wagons; my chains were beginning to be damned uncomfortable and every jolt of those infernal telegas bruised my wrists and ankles.

Cossacks, of course, never wash (although they brush their coast daily with immense care) and I wasn't allowed to, either, so by the time we were rolling east into the half-frozen steppe beyond Rostov, I was filthy, bearded, tangled and itchy beyond belief, stinking with the garlic of their awful food and only praying that I wouldn't contract some foul disease from my noisome companions--for they even slept either side of me, with their nagaikas knotted into my chains. It ain't like a honeymoon at Baden, I can tell you.

There were 400 miles of that interminable plain, getting worse as it went on; it took us about five days, as near as I remember, with the telegas going like blazes and new horses at every posthouse. The only good thing was that as we went, the weather grew slightly warmer, until when we were entering the great salt flats of the Astrakhan, the snow vanished altogether and you could even travel without your tulup.

Astrakhan city itself is a hellhole. The land all about is as flat as the Wash country, and the town itself lies so low they have a great dyke all round to prevent the Volga washing it into the Caspian, or t'other way round. As you might expect, it's a plague spot; you can smell the pestilence in the air, and before we passed through the dyke, Ignatieff ordered everyone to soak his face and hands with vinegar, as though that would do any good. Still, it was the nearest I came to making toilet the whole way.

I had two nights in a steaming cell before they put us aboard a steamer for the trip across the Caspian. It's a queer sea, that one, for at the north end it isn't above 20 meters deep, and consequently the boats are of shallow draught and bucket about like canoes. I spewed most of the way, but the Cossacks, who'd never sailed before, were in a fearful way, vomiting and praying by turns. They never let go of me, though, and I realized with a growing sense of alarm that if these two watchdogs were kept on me all the way to Kabul, I'd stand little chance of giving them the slip. Their terror of Ignatieff was, if anything, even greater than mine, and in the worst of the boat's heaving, one of them was always clutching my ankle chains, even if he was rolling about the deck, retching at the same time.

It was four days of misery before we began to steam through clusters of ugly, sandy little islands towards the port of Tishkandi, which was our destination. I'm told it isn't there any longer, and this is another strange thing about the Caspian--its coast line changes continually, almost like the Mississippi shores. One year there are islands and next they have become hills on a peninsula, while a few miles away a huge stretch of coast will have changed into a lagoon.

(continued on page 212)Flashman at the Charge(continued from page 146)

Tishkandi's disappearance can have been no loss to anyone; it was a dirty collection of huts with a pier, and beyond it the ground climbed slowly through marshy salt flats to 200 miles of arid, empty desert. You could call it steppe. I suppose, but it's dry, rocky, heartbreaking country, fit only for camels and lizards.

"Ust-Urt," says one of the officers as he looked at it, and the very name sent my heart into my boots.

It's dangerous country, too. There was a squadron of lancers waiting for us when we landed, to guard us against the wild desert tribes, for this was beyond the Russian frontiers, in land where they were still just probing at the savage folk who chopped up their caravans and raided their outposts whenever they had the chance. When we made camp at night, it was your proper little laager, with sangars at each corner, and sentries posted, and half a dozen lancers out riding herd. All very businesslike and not what I'd have expected from Ruskis, really. But this was their hard school, as I was to learn, like our North-West Frontier, where you either soldiered well or not at all.

It was five days through the desert, not too uncomfortable while we were moving but freezing hellish at night, and the dromedaries with their native drivers must have covered the ground at a fair pace, 40 miles a day or thereabouts. Once or twice we saw horsemen in the distance, on the low rocky barkhans, and I heard for the first time names like Kazak and Turka, but they kept a sale distance. On the last day, though, we saw more of them, much closer and quite peaceable, for these were people of the Aral coast, and the Russians had them fairly well in order on that side of the sea. When I saw them near, I had a strange sense of recognition--those swarthy faces, with here and there a hooked nose and a straggling moustache, the dirty puggarees swathed round the heads and the open belted robes took me back to northern India and the Afghan hills. It's a strange thing, to come through hundreds of miles of wilderness, from a foreign land and moving in the wrong direction, and suddenly find yourself sniffing the air and thinking, "Home." If you're British and have soldiered in India, you'll understand what I mean.

Late that afternoon, we came through more salty flats to a long coast line of rollers sweeping in from a sea so blue that I found myself muttering through my beard. "Thalassa or thalatta, the former or the latter?" it seemed so much like the ocean that old Arnold's Greeks had seen after their great march. And suddenly I could close my eyes and hear his voice droning away on a summer afternoon at Rugby, and smell the cut grass coming in through the open windows, and hear the fags at cricket outside, and from that I found myself dreaming of the smell of hay in the fields beyond Renfrew, and Elspeth's body warm and yielding, and the birds calling at dusk along the river, and the pony champing at the grass, and it was such a sweet, torturing longing that I groaned aloud, and when I opened my eyes the tears came, and there was a hideous Russian voice clacking "Aralskoje More! [Aral Sea!]" and bright Asian sunlight, and the chains galling my wrists and anklebones, and foreign flat faces all round.

There was a big military camp on the shore and a handy little steamer lying off. They put us aboard the steamer that evening and I was so tuckered out by the journey that I just slept where I lay down. And in the morning there was a coast ahead, with a great new wooden pier, and a huge river flowing down between low banks to the sea. As far as I could see, the coast was covered with tents, and there was another steamer, and half a dozen big wooden transports, and one great warship, all riding at anchor between the pier and the river mouth. There were bugles sounding on the distant shore, and swarms of people everywhere, among the tents, on the pier and on the ships, and a great hum of noise in the midst of which a military band was playing a rousing march; this is the army. I thought, or most of it; this is their Afghan expedition.

I asked one of the Russian sailors what the river might be and he said: "Syr Daria." and then, pointing to a great wooden stockaded fort on the rising land above the river, he added: "Fort Raim."1 And then one of the Cossacks pushed him away, cursing, and told me to hold my tongue.

They landed us in lighters, and there was a delegation of smart uniforms to greet Ignatieff, and an orderly holding a horse for him, and all round tremendous bustle of unloading and ferrying from the ships, and gangs of Orientals at work, with Russian noncoms bawling at them and swinging whips, and gear being stowed in the newly built wooden sheds along the shore. I watched gun limbers being swung down by a derrick and cursing, half-naked gangs hauling them away.

Ignatieff came trotting down to where I was sitting between my Cossacks, and at a word they hauled me up and we set off at his heels through the confusion, up the long, gradual slope to the fort. It was farther off than I'd expected, about a mile, so that it stood well back from the camp, which was all spread out like a sand table down the shore line. As we neared the fort he stopped, and his orderly was pointing at the distant picket lines and identifying the various regiments--New Russian Dragoons, Rumiantzoff's Grenadiers, Astrakhan Carabiniers and Aral Hussars, I remember. Ignatieff saw me surveying the camp and came over. He hadn't spoken to me since we left Arabat.

"You may look," says he in that chilling murmur of his, "and reflect on what you see. The next Englishman to catch sight of them will be your sentry on the walls of Peshawar. And while you are observing, look yonder also and see the fate of all who oppose the majesty of the tsar."

I looked where he pointed, up the hill towards the fort, and my stomach turned over. To one side of the gateway was a series of wooden gallows and from each one hung a human figure--although some of them were hard to recognize as human. A few hung by their arms, some by their ankles, one or two lucky ones by their necks. Some were wasted and blackened by exposure; at least one was still alive and stirring feebly. An awful carrion reek drifted down on the clear spring air.

"Unteachables," says Ignatieff. "Bandit scum and rebels of the Syr Daria who have been unreceptive to our sacred Russian imperial mission. Perhaps, when we have lined their river with sufficient of these examples, they will learn. It is the only way to impress recalcitrants. Do you not agree?"

He wheeled his horse and we trailed up after him towards the fort. It was bigger, far bigger, than I'd expected, a good 200 yards square, with timber ramparts 20 feet high, and at one end they were already replacing the timber with rough stone. The Russian eagle ensign was fluttering over the roofed gatehouse, there were grenadiers drawn up and saluting as Ignatieff cantered through, and I trudged in, clanking, to find myself on a vast parade, with good wooden barracks round the walls, troops drilling in the dusky square and a row of two-storey administrative buildings down one side. It was a very proper fort, something like those of the American frontier in the Seventies; there were even some small cottages which I guessed were officers' quarters.

Ignatieff was getting his usual welcome from a tubby chap who appeared to be the commandant; I wasn't interested in what they said, but I gathered the commandant was greatly excited and was babbling some great news.

"Not both of them?" I heard Ignatieff say, and the other clapped his hands in great glee and said, yes, both, a fine treat for General Perovski and General Khruleff when they arrived.

"They will make a pretty pair of gallows, then," says Ignatieff. "You are to be congratulated, sir. Nothing could be a better omen for our march through Syr Daria."

"Ah, ha, excellent!" cries the tubby chap, rubbing his hands. "And that will not be long, eh? All is in train here, as you see, and the equipment arrives daily. But come, my dear Count, and refresh yourself."

They went off, leaving me feeling sick and hangdog between my guards; the sight of those tortured bodies outside the stockade had brought back to me the full horror of my own situation. And I felt no better when there came presently a big, brute-faced sergeant of grenadiers, a coiled nagaika in his fist, to tell my Cossacks they could fall out, as he was taking me under his wing.

"Our necks depend on this fellow," says one of the Cossacks doubtfully, and the sergeant sneered and scowled at me.

"My neck depends on what I've got in the cells already," growls he. "This offal is no more precious than my two birds. Be at peace; he shall join them in my most salubrious cell, from which even the lizards cannot escape. March him along!"

They escorted me to a corner on the landward side of the fort, down an alley between the wooden buildings and to a short flight of stone steps leading down to an ironshod door. The sergeant hauled back the massive bolts, thrust back the creaking door and then reached up, grabbing me by my wrist chains.

"In, tut!" he snarled, and yanked me headlong down into the cell. The door slammed, the bolts ground to and I heard him guffawing brutally as their footsteps died away.

I lay there trembling on the dirty floor, just about done in with fatigue and fear. At least it was dim and cool in there. And then I heard someone speaking in the cell and raised my head; at first I could make nothing out in the faint light that came from a single window high in one wall, and then I started with astonishment, for suspended flat in the air in the middle of the cell, spread-eagled as though in flight, was the figure of a man. As my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness. I drew in a shuddering breath, for now I could see that he was cruelly hung between four chains, one to each limb from the top corners of the room. More astonishing still, beneath his racked body, which hung about three feet from the floor, was crouched another figure, supporting the hanging man on his back, presumably to take the appalling strain of the chains from his wrists and ankles. It was the crouching man who was speaking, and to my surprise, his words were in Persian.

"It is a gift from God, brother," says he, speaking with difficulty. "A rather dirty gift, but human--if there is such a thing as a human Russian. At least, he is a prisoner, and if I speak politely to him, I may persuade him to take my place for a while and bear your intolerable body. I am too old for this and you are heavier than Abu Hassan, the breaker of wind."

The hanging man, whose head was away from me, tried to lift it to look. His voice, when he spoke, was hoarse with pain, but what he said was, unbelievably, a joke.

"Let him . . . approach . . . then . . . and I pray . . . to God . . . that he has . . . fewer fleas . . . than you. . . . Also . . . you are . . . a most . . . uncomfortable . . . support. . . . God help . . . the woman . . . who shares . . . your bed."

"Here is thanks," says the crouching man, panting under the weight. "I bear him as though I were the Djinn of the Seven Peaks, and he rails at me. You, nasrani [Christian]," he addressed me. "If you understand God's language, come and help me to support this ingrate, this sinner. And when you are tired, we shall sit in comfort against the wall and gloat over him. Or I may squat on his chest, to teach him gratitude. Come, Ruski, are we not all God's creatures?"

And even as he said it, his voice quavered, he staggered under the burden above him and slumped forward unconscious on the floor.

The hanging man gave a sudden cry of anguish as his body took the full stretch of the chains; he hung there moaning and panting until, without really thinking. I scrambled forward and came up beneath him, bearing his trunk across my stooped back. His face was hanging backwards beside my own, working with pain.

"God . . . thank you!" he gasped at last. "My limbs are on fire! But not for long--not for long--if God is kind." His voice came in a tortured whisper. "Who are you--a Ruski?"

"No," says I, "an English colonel. Flashman, British army."

"You speak . . . our tongue . . . in God's name?" He groaned again; he was a devilish weight. And then: "Providence . . . works strangely," says he. "An angliski . . . here. Well, take heart, stranger . . . you may be . . . more fortunate . . . than you know."

I couldn't see that, not by any stretch, stuck in a lousy cell with some Asiatic nigger breaking my back. Indeed, I was regretting the impulse which had made me bear him up--who was he to me, after all, that I shouldn't let him dangle? But when you're in adversity, it don't pay to antagonize your companions, at least until you know what's what, so I stayed unwillingly where I was, puffing and straining.

"I am Yakub Beg,"2 whispers he, and even through his pain you could hear the pride in his voice. "Kush Begi, Khan of Khokand and guardian of . . . the White Mosque. You are my . . . guest . . . sent to me . . . from heaven. Touch . . . on my knee . . . touch on my bosom . . . touch where you will."

I recognized the formal greeting of the hill folk, which wasn't appropriate in the circumstances. "Can't touch anything but your arse at present," I told him, and I felt him shake--my God, he could even laugh, with the arms and legs being drawn out of him.

"It is a . . . good answer," says he. "You talk . . . like a Tajik. We laugh . . . in adversity. Now I tell you . . . Englishman . . . when I go hence . . . you go, too."

I thought he was just babbling, of course. And then the other fellow, who had collapsed, groaned and sat up and looked about him. "Ah, God, I was weak," says he. "Yakub, my son and brother, forgive me. I am as an old wife with dropsy; my knees are as water."

Yakub Beg turned his face towards mine, and you must imagine his words punctuated by little gasps of pain. "That ancient creature who grovels on the floor is Izzat Kutebar,"3 says he. "A poor fellow of little substance and less wit, who raided one Ruski caravan too many and was taken, through his greed. So they made him 'swim upon land,' as I am swimming now, and he might have hung here till he rotted--and welcome--but I was foolish enough to think of rescue and scouted too close to this fort of Shaitan. So they took me and placed me in his chains, as the more important prisoner of the two--for he is dirt, this feeble old Kutebar. He swung a good sword once, they say--God, it must have been in Timur's time."

"By God!" cries Kutebar. "Did I lose Ak Mechet to the Ruskis? Was I whoring after the beauties of Bokhara when the beast Perovski massacred the men of Khokand with his grapeshot? No, by the pubic hairs of Rustum! I was swinging that good sword, laying the Muscovites in swathes along the Syr Daria, while this fine fighting chief here was loafing in the bazaar with his darlings, saying, 'Ayawallah, it is hot today. Give me to drink, Miriam, and put a cool hand on my forehead.' Come out from under him, feringhee, and let him swing for his pains."

"You see?" says Yakub Beg, craning his neck and trying to grin. "A dotard, flown with dreams. A badawi zhazh-kayan [wild babbler] who talks as the wild sheep defecate, at random, everywhere. When you and I go hither, Flashman bahadur, we shall leave him, and even the Ruskis will take pity on such a dried-up husk and employ him to clean their privies--those of the common soldiers, you understand, not the officers."

If I hadn't served long in Afghanistan and learned the speech and ways of the Central Asian tribes. I suppose I'd have imagined that I was in a cell with a couple of madmen. But I knew this trick that they have of reviling those they respect most, in banter, of their love of irony and formal imagery, which is strong in Pushtu and even stronger in Persian, the loveliest of all languages.

"When you go hither!" scoffs Kutebar, climbing to his feet and peering at his friend. "When will that be? When Buzurg Khan remembers you? God forbid I should depend on the good will of such a one. Or when Sahib Khan comes blundering against this place as you and he did two years ago and lost two thousand men? Ayah! Why should they risk their necks for you--or me? We are not gold; once we are buried, who will dig us up?"

"My people will come," says Yakub Beg. "And she will not forget me."

"Put no faith in women, and as much in the Chinese," says Kutebar cryptically, "Better if this stranger and I try to surprise the guard and cut our way out."

"And who will cut these chains?" says the other. "No, old one, put the foot of courage in the stirrup of patience. They will come, if not tonight, then tomorrow. Let us wait."

"And while you're waiting," says I, "put the shoulder of friendship beneath the backside of helplessness. Lend a hand, man, before I break in two."

Kutebar took my place, exchanging insults with his friend, and I straightened up to take a look at Yakub Beg. He was a tall fellow, so far as I could judge, narrow-waisted and big-shouldered--for he was naked save for his loose pyjama trousers--with great corded arm muscles. His wrists were horribly torn by his manacles, and while I sponged them with water from a chatty [water jug] in the corner. I examined his face. It was one of your strong hill figureheads, lean and long-jawed, but straight-nosed for once--he'd said he was a Tajik, which meant he was hall Persian. His head was shaved, Uzbek fashion, with a little scalp lock to one side, and so was his face, except for a tuft of forked beard on his chin. A tough customer, by the look of him; one of those genial mountain scoundrels who'll tell you merry stories while they stab you in the guts just for the fun of hearing their knife-hilt bells jingle.

"You spoke of getting out of here," says I to Yakub Beg. "Is it possible? Will your friends attempt a rescue?"

"He has no friends," says Kutebar. "Except me, and see the pass I am brought to, propping up his useless trunk."

"They will come," says Yakub Beg softly. He was pretty done, it seemed to me, with his eyes closed and his face ravaged with pain. "When the light fades, you two must leave me to hang--no, Izzat, it is an order. You and Flashman bahadur must rest, for when the Lady of the Great Horde comes over the wall, the Ruskis will surely try to kill us before we can be rescued. You two must hold them, with your shoulders to the door."

"If we leave you to hang, you will surely die," says Kutebar gloomily. "What will I say to her then?" And suddenly he burst into a torrent of swearing, slightly muffled by his bent position. "These Russian apes! These scum of Muscovy! God smite them to the nethermost pit! Can they not give a man a clean death, instead of racking him apart by inches?"

In spite of Kutebar's protests, Yakub Beg was adamant. When the light began to fade, he insisted that we support him no longer but let him hang at full stretch in his chains. I don't know how he endured it, for his muscles creaked and he bit his lip until the blood ran over his cheek, while Kutebar wept like a child. He was a burly, grizzled old fellow, stout enough for all his lined face and the grey hairs on his cropped head, but the tears fairly coursed over his leathery cheeks and beard, and he damned the Russians as only an Oriental can. Finally, he kissed the hanging man on the forehead, and clasped his chained hand, and came over to sit by me against the wall.

I finally fell asleep. When dawn came, three Russians came with it bearing a dish of nauseating porridge: they jeered at us and then withdrew. Yakub Beg was half-conscious, swinging in his fetters, and through that interminable day Kutebar and I took turns to prop him up. I was on the point, once or twice, of rebelling at the work, which didn't seem worth it for all the slight relief it gave his tortured joints: but one look at Kutebar's face made me think better of it. Yakub Beg was too weak to joke now, or say much at all, and Kutebar and I just crouched or lay in silence, until evening came, Yakub Beg somehow dragged himself back to sense then, just long enough to order Kutebar hoarsely to let him swing, so that we should save our strength. My back was aching with the strain, and in spite of my depression and fears, I went off to sleep almost at once, with that stark figure spread horribly overhead in the fading light.

Suddenly I was awake, trembling and sweating, with Kutebar's hand clamped across my mouth, and his voice hissing me to silence. It was still night and the cold in the cell was bitter. There wasn't a sound except Kutebar's hoarse breathing, and then, from somewhere outside, very faint, came a distant sighing noise, like a sleepy night bird, dying away into nothing. Kutebar stiffened and Yakub Beg's chains clinked as he turned and whispered:

"Bihishti-sawar! [Heavenly!] The Sky-blue Wolves are in the fold!"

Kutebar rose and moved over beneath the window. I heard him draw in his breath, and then, between his teeth, he made that same strange, muffled whistle--it's the kind of solt, low noise you sometimes think you hear at night but don't regard, because you imagine it is coming from inside your own head. The Khokandians can make it travel up to a mile and enemies in between don't even notice it. We waited and, sure enough, it came again, and right on its heels the bang of a musket, shattering the night.

There was a cry of alarm, another shot, and then a positive volley culminating in a thunderous roar of explosion, and the dim light from the window suddenly increased, as with a lightning flash. And then a small war broke out, shots and shrieks and Russian voices roaring and, above all, the hideous din of yelling voices--the old ghazi war cry that had petrified me so often on the Kabul road.

Kutebar was across the cell in a flash, roaring to me. We threw ourselves against the door, listening for the sounds of our guards.

"They have blown in the main gate with barut [gunpowder]," cries Yakub Beg weakly. "Listen--the firing is all on the other side!"

Kutebar's shout of alarm cut him short. Above the tumult of shooting and yelling, we heard a rush of feet, the bolts were rasping back and a great weight heaved at the door on the other side. We strained against it, there was a roar in Russian, and then a concerted thrust from without. With our feet scrabbling for purchase on the rough floor, we held them; they charged together and the door gave back, but we managed to heave it shut again, and then came the sound of a muffled shot and a splinter flew from the door between our faces.

"Ba-nasnas! [Apes!]" bawled Kutebar. "Monkeys without muscles! Can two weak prisoners hold you, then? Must you shoot, you bastard sons of filth?"

Another shot, close beside the other, and I threw myself sideways: I wasn't getting a bullet in my guts if I could help it. Kutebar gave a despairing cry as the door was forced in: he stumbled back into the cell, and there on the threshold was the big sergeant, torch in one hand and revolver in the other, and two men with bayoneted muskets at his heels.

"That one first!" bawls the sergeant, pointing at Yakub Beg. "Still, you!" he added to me and I crouched back beside the door as he covered me. Kutebar was scrambling up beyond Yakub Beg: the two soldiers ignored him, one seizing Yakub Beg about the middle to steady him while the other raised his musket aloft to plunge the bayonet into the helpless body.

"Death to all Ruskis!" cries Yakub. "Greetings. Timur--"

But before the bayonet could come down. Kutebar had launched himself at the soldier's legs: they fell in a thrashing tangle of limbs, Kutebar yelling blue murder, while the other soldier danced round them with his musket, trying to get a chance with his bayonet, and the sergeant bawled to them to keep clear and give him a shot.

I know that the thing to do on these occasions is find a nice dark corner and crawl into it. But out of sheer self-preservation. I daren't--I knew that if I didn't take a hand. Kutebar and Yakub would be dead inside a minute, and where would Cock Flashy be then, poor thing? The sergeant was within a yard of me, side on, revolver hand extended towards the wrestlers on the floor: there was two feet of heavy chain between my wrists, so with a silent frantic prayer I swung my hands sideways and over, lashing the doubled chain at his forearm with all my strength. He screamed and staggered, the gun dropping to the floor, and I went plunging after it, scrabbling madly. He fetched up beside me, but his arm must have been broken, for he tried to claw at me with his far hand and couldn't reach: I grabbed the gun, stuck it in his face and pulled the trigger--and the bloody thing was a single-action weapon and wouldn't fire!

He floundered over me, trying to bite--and his breath was poisonous with garlic--while I wrestled with the hammer of the revolver. His sound hand was at my throat: I kicked and heaved to get him off, but his weight was terrific. I smashed at his face with the gun and he released my throat and grabbed my wrist: he had a hold like a vice, but I'm strong, too, especially in the grip of fear, and with a huge heave I managed to get him half off me--and in that instant the soldier with the bayonet was towering over us, his weapon poised to drive down at my midriff.

There was nothing I could do but scream and try to roll away: it saved my life, for the sergeant must have felt me weaken and with an animal snarl of triumph flung himself back on top of me--just as the bayonet came down to spit him clean between the shoulder blades. I'll never forget that engorged face, only inches from my own--the eyes starting, the mouth snapping open in agony and the deafening scream that he let out. The soldier, yelling madly, hauled on his musket to free the bayonet: it came out of the writhing, kicking body just as I finally got the revolver cocked, and before he could make a second thrust, I shot him through the body.

The other soldier had broken free from Kutebar and was in the act of seizing his fallen musket; I blazed away at him and missed--it's all too easy, I assure you--and he took the chance to break for the door. I snapped off another round at him and hit him about the hip, I think, for he went hurtling into the wall. Before he could struggle up, Kutebar was on him with the fallen musket, yelling some outlandish war cry as he sank the bayonet to the locking ring in the fellow's breast.

The cell was a shambles. Three dead men on the floor, all bleeding busily, the air thick with powder smoke, Kutebar brandishing his musket and inviting Allah to admire him. Yakub Beg exulting weakly and calling us to search the sergeant for his fetter keys and myself counting the shots left in the revolver--two, in fact.

We found a key in the sergeant's pocket and released Yakub's ankles, lowering him gently to the cell floor and propping him against the wall with his arms still chained to the corners above his head. He couldn't stand--I doubted if he'd have the use of his limbs inside a week--and when we tried to unlock his wrist shackles, the key didn't fit. While Izzat searched the dead man's clothes, fuming, I kept the door covered; the sounds of distant fighting were still proceeding merrily and it seemed to me we'd have more Russian visitors before long. We were in a damned tight place until we could get Yakub fully released; Kutebar had changed his tack now and was trying to batter open a link in the chain with his musket butt.

"Strike harder, feeble one!" Yakub encouraged him. "Has all your strength gone in killing one wounded Ruski?"

"Am I a blacksmith?" says Kutebar. "By the Seven Pools of Eblis, do I have iron teeth? I save your life--again--and all you can do is whine. We have been at work, this feringhee and I, while you swung comfortably--God, what a fool's labour is this!"

"Cease!" cries Yakub. "Watch the door!"

There were feet running and voices; Kutebar took the other side from me, his bayonet poised, and I cocked the revolver. The feet stopped, and then a voice called. "Yakub Beg?" and Kutebar flung up his hands with a crow of delight. "Inshallah! There is good in the Chinese, after all! Come in, little dogs, and look on the bloody harvest of Kutebar!"

The door swung back, and before you could say Jack Robinson, there were half a dozen of them in the cell--robed, bearded figures with grinning hawk faces and long knives--I never thought I'd be glad to see a ghazi, and these were straight from that stable. They fell on Kutebar, embracing and slapping him, while the others were either stopped short at sight of me or hurried on to Yakub Beg, slumped against the far wall. And foremost was a lithe black-clad figure, tight-turbaned round head and chin, with a flowing cloak--hardly more than a boy. He stooped over Yakub Beg, cursing softly, and then shouted shrilly to the tribesmen: "Hack through those chains! Bear him up--gently--ah, God, my love, my love, what have they done to you?"

He was positively weeping, and then suddenly he was clasping the wounded man, smothering his cheeks with kisses, cupping the lolling head between his hands, murmuring endearments and finally kissing him passionately on the mouth.

Well, the Pathans are like that, you know, and I wasn't surprised to find these near relations of theirs similarly inclined to perversion: bad luck on the girls, I always think, but all the more skirt for chaps like me. Disgusting sight, though, this youth slobbering over him like that.

Our rescuers were eyeing me uncertainly, until Kutebar explained whose side I was on; then they all turned their attention to Oscar and Bosie. One of the tribesmen had hacked through Yakub's chains and four of them were bearing him towards the door, while the black-clad boy flitted alongside, cursing them to be careful. Kutebar motioned me to the door and I followed him up the steps, still clutching my revolver; the last of the tribesmen paused, even at that critical moment, to pass his knife carefully across the throats of the three dead Russians, and then joined us, giggling gleefully.

"The hallal [ritual throat cutting]!" says he. "Is it not fitting, for the proper despatch of animals?"

"Blasphemer!" says Kutebar. "Is this a time for jest?"

The boy hissed at them and they were silent. He had authority, this little spring violet, and when he snapped a command they jumped to it, hurrying along between the buildings, while he brought up the rear, glancing back towards the sound of shooting from the other side of the fort. There wasn't a Russian to be seen where we were, but I wasn't surprised. I could see the game--a sudden attack, with gunpowder and lots of noise, at the main gate, to draw every Russian in that direction, while the lifting party sneaked in through some rear bolthole. They were probably inside before the attack began, marking the sentries and waiting for the signal--but they hadn't bargained, apparently, for the sergeant and his men having orders to kill Yakub Beg as soon as a rescue was attempted. We'd been lucky there.

Suddenly we were under the main wall and there were figures on the catwalk overhead; Yakub Beg's body, grotesquely limp, was being hauled up, with the boy piping feverishly at them to be easy with him. Not 50 feet away, to our left, muskets were blazing from one of the guard towers, but they were shooting away from us. Strong lean hands helped me as I scrambled clumsily at a rope ladder; voices in Persian were muttering round us in the dark, robed figures were crouching at the embrasures, and then we were sliding down the ropes on the outside and I fell the last ten feet, landing on top of the man beneath, who gave a brief commentary on my parentage, future and personal habits as only a hillman can and then called softly: "All down, Silk One, including the clown Kutebar, your beloved the Kush Begi and this misbegotten pig of a feringhee with the large feet."

"Go!" said the boy's voice from the top of the wall, and as they thrust me forward in the dark, a long keening wail broke out from overhead; it was echoed somewhere along the wall, and even above the sound of firing I heard it farther off still. I was stumbling along in my chains, clutching at the hand of the man who led me.

About half a mile from the fort, there was a gully, with cypress trees, and horses stamping in the dark, and I just sat on the ground, limp and thankful, beside Kutebar, while he reviled our saviours genially. Presently, the boy in black came slipping out of the shadows, kneeling beside us.

"I have sent Yakub away," says he. "It is far to the edge of the Red Sands. We wait here, for Sahib Khan and the others--God grant they have not lost too many!"

"To build the house, trees must fall." says Kutebar complacently. I agreed with him entirely, mind you. "And how is His Idleness, the Falcon on the Royal Wrist?"

"He is well, God be thanked," says the boy, and then the furious little pansy began to snivel like a girl. "His poor limbs are torn and helpless--but he is strong, he will mend!"

And the disgusting young lout flung his arms round Kutebar's neck, murmuring gratefully and kissing him, until the old fellow pushed him away--he was normal, at least.

"Shameless thing!" mutters he. "Respect my grey hairs! Is there no seemliness among you Chinese, then? Away, you barefaced creature--practise your gratitude on this angliski, if you must, but spar me!"

"Indeed I shall," says the youth and, turning to me, he put his hands on my shoulders. "You have saved my love, stranger; therefore, you have my love, forever and all." He was a nauseatingly pretty one, this, with his full lips and slanting Chinee eyes, and his pale, chiselled face framed by the black turban. The tears were still wet on his cheeks, and then to my disgust he leaned forward, plainly intending to kiss me, too.

"No, thank'ee!" cries I. "No offence, my son, but I ain't one for your sort, if you don't mind. . . ."

But his arms were round my neck and his lips on mine before I could stop him--and then I felt two firm young breasts pressing against my chest, and there was no mistaking the womanliness of the soft cheek against mine. A female, begad--leading a ghazi storming party on a neck-or-nothing venture like this! And such a female, by the feel of her. Well, of course, that put a different complexion on the thing entirely, and I suffered her to kiss away to her heart's content, and mine. What else could a gentleman do?

There are some parts of my life that I'd be glad to relive any time--and some that I don't care to remember at all. But there aren't many that I look back on and have to pinch myself to believe that they really happened. The business of the Khokandian Horde of the Red Sands is one of these, and yet it's one of the few episodes in my career that I can verify from the history books if I want to. There are obscure works on Central Asia by anonymous surveyors and military writers,4 and I can look in them and find the names and places--Yakub Beg. Izzat Kutebar and Katti Torah; Buzurg Khan and the Seven Khojas, the Great and Middle Hordes of the Black Sands and the Golden Road, the Sky-blue Wolves of the Hungry Steppe. Sahib Khan and the remarkable girl they called the Silk One. You can trace them all, if you are curious, and learn how in those days they fought the Russians inch by inch from the Jaxartes to the Oxus, and if it reads to you like a mixture of Robin Hood and the Arabian Nights--well, I was there for part of it, and even I look back on it as some kind of frightening fairy tale come true.

On the night of the rescue from Fort Raim, of course. I knew next to nothing about them--except that they were obviously of the warlike tribes constantly resisting the Russians who were trying to invade their country and push the tsar's dominions south to Afghanistan and east to the China border. It was a bloody, brutal business, that, and the wild people--the Tajiks, the Kirghiz-Kazaks, the Khokandians, the Uzbeks and the rest--were being forced back up the Syr Daria into the Hungry Steppe and the Red Sands, harrying all the way, raiding the new Russian outposts and cutting up their caravans.

But they weren't just savages, by any means. Behind them, far up the Syr Daria and the Amu Daria, were their great cities of Tashkent and Khokand and Samarkand and Bokhara, places that had been civilized when the Russians were running round bare-arsed--these were the spots that Moscow was really after.

It was to the brink of no man's land that they carried us on the night of our deliverance from Fort Raim--a punishing ride, hour after hour, through the dark and the silvery morning, over miles of desert and gully and parched steppeland. They had managed to sever my ankle chain, so that I could back a horse, but I rode in an exhausted dream, only half-conscious of the robed figures flanking me, and when we finally halted, I remember only arms supporting me, and the smell of camel's-hair robes, and sinking onto a blessed softness to sleep forever.

It was a good place, that--an oasis deep in the Red Sands of the Kizil Kum, where the Russians still knew better than to venture. I remember waking there, to the sound of rippling water, and crawling out of the tent into bright sunlight and blinking at a long valley, crowded with tents, and a little village of beautiful white houses on the valley side, with trees and grass, and women and children chattering, and Tajik riders everywhere, with their horses and camels--lean, ugly, bearded fellows, bandoleered and booted, and not the kind of company I care to keep, normally. But one of them sings out: "Salaam, angliski!" as he clattered by, and one of the women gave me bread and coffee, and all seemed very friendly.

That first morning, as the local smith was filing off my fetters in the presence of a grinning, admiring crowd. I was already beginning to think ahead to the next leap. Very likely, Yakub Beg was on dining-out terms with half the bud-mashes [ruffians] and cattle thieves between here and Jalalabad. In gratitude for my services in the cell at Fort Raim, he couldn't refuse giving me an escort along the road through Afghanistan. And, with my Persian and Pushtu, I'd have no difficulty in passing as an Afghan, as I had once before.

Then my thoughts went bounding ahead to my triumphant arrival in India--the renowned Flashy, last seen vanishing into the Russian army at Balaclava, emerging at Peshawar in romantic disguise.

"Rough trip halfway across Russia, through Astrakhan, over the Aral Sea and across the Hindu Kush? No-o, not really, though I'll be glad when these fetter-marks have healed up. By the way, you might let the governor-general know that there's a Russian army of thirty thousand coming down through the Khyber shortly--I learned it from the tsar's secret cabinet, you know. Now, be a good fellow and get it on the telegraph to Calcutta."

Gad, the press would be full of it--"Saviour of India." assuming the damned place would be saved. East's scuttle through the snow would look puny by comparison, though I'd give him a pat on the back and point out that he'd done his duty, even though it meant sacrificing his old companion. I might, if I played it properly, get a knighthood out of it.

Not to waste time. I broached my travel plans to Izzat Kutebar that afternoon over a dish of kefir in the neighbouring tent where he was recovering noisily from his captivity.

"Eat, and thank Providence for such delights as this, which you infidels call ambrosia," says Kutebar, while an old serving-woman put the dish of honey-coloured curds before me. "The secret of its preparation was specially given by God to Abraham himself. Personally, I prefer it even to a Tashkent melon--and you know the proverb runs that the Caliph of the Faithful would give ten pearl-breasted beauties from his hareem for a single melon of Tashkent. Myself, I would give five, perhaps, or six, if the melon were a big one." He wiped his beard. "And you would go to Afghanistan, then, and to your folk in India? It can be arranged--we owe you a debt, Flashman bahadur. Yakub and I and all our people. As you owe to us, for your own deliverance," he added gently. I protested my undying gratitude at once, and he nodded gravely.

"Between warriors let a word of thanks be like a heartbeat--a small thing, hardly heard, but it suffices," says he, and then grinned sheepishly. "What do I say? The truth is, we all owe our chief debt to that wild witch, Ko Dali's daughter. She whom they call the Silk One."

"Who is she?" I asked, for I'd seen--and felt--just enough of that remarkable female last night to be thoroughly intrigued. "Do you know, Izzat, last night until she . . . er, kissed me--I was sure she was a man."

"So Ko Dali must have thought, when the fierce little bitch came yelping into the world," says he. "Who is Ko Dali?--a Chinese war lord, who had the good taste to take a Khokandian wife and the ill luck to father the Silk One. He governs in Kashgar, a Chinese city of East Turkestan a thousand miles east of here, below the Issik Kul and the Seven Rivers Country. Would to God he could govern his daughter as well--so should we be spared much shame, for is it not deplorable to have a woman who struts like a khan among us and leads such enterprises as that which freed you and me last night? Who can fathom the ways of Allah, who lets such things happen?"

"Well," says I, "it happened among the Ruskis, you know, Kutebar. They had an empress--why, in my own country, we are ruled by a queen."

"So I have heard." says he, "but you are infidels. Besides, does your sultana, Vik Taria, go unveiled? Does she plan raid and ambush? No, by the black tomb of Timur. I'll wager she does not."

"Not that I've heard, lately," I admitted. "But this Silk One--"

"She came, on a day--it would be two years ago, after the Ruskis had built that devil's house. Fort Raim, and then she was among us, with her shameless bare face and bold talk and a dozen Chinese devil fighters attending on her. It was a troubled time, with the world upside down, and we scratching with our finger-nails to hold the Ruskis back by foray and ambuscade: in such disorders, anything is possible, even a woman fighting chief. And Yakub saw her and. . . ." He spread his hands, "She is beautiful, as the lily at morning--and clever, it is not to be denied. Doubtless they will marry, someday, if Yakub's wife will let him--she lives at Julek, on the river. But he is no fool, my Yakub--perhaps he loves this female hawk, perhaps not, but he is ambitious and he seeks such a kingdom for himself as Kashgar. Who knows, when Ko Dali dies, if Yakub finds the throne of Khokand beyond his reach, he may look to Ko Dali's daughter to help him wrest Kashgar Province from the Chinese. He has spoken of it, and she sits, devouring him with those black Mongolian eyes of hers. It is said," he went on confidentially, "that she devours other men also and that it was for her scandalous habits that the governor of Fort Raim. Engmann the Ruski--may wild dogs mate above his grave!--had her head shaved when she was taken last year, after the fall of Ak Mechet. They say--"

"They lie!" screeched the old woman, who had been listening. "In their jealousy they throw dirt on her, the pretty Silk One!"

"Will you raise your head, mother of discord and ruiner of good food?" says Izzat. "They shaved her scalp, I say, which is why she goes with a turban about her always--for she has kept it shaved, and vowed to do so until she has Engmann's own head on a plate at her feet. God, the perversity of women! But what can one do about her? She is worth ten heads in the council, she can ride like a Kazak and is as brave as . . . as . . . as I am, by God! If Yakub and Buzurg Khan of Khokand--and I. of course--hold these Russian swine back from our country, it will be because she has the gift of seeing their weaknesses and showing us how they may be confounded. She is touched by God, I believe."

"And you say she'll make him a king one day and be his queen? An extraordinary girl, indeed. Meanwhile, she helps you fight the Ruskis."

"She helps not me, by God! She may help Yakub, who fights as chief of the Tajiks and military governor under Buzurg Khan, who rules in Khokand. They fight for their state, for all the Kirghiz-Kazak people, against an invader. But I, Izzat Kutebar, fight for myself and my own band. I am no statesman, I am no governor or princeling. I need no throne but my saddle. I," says this old ruffian, with immense pride, "am a bandit, as my fathers were. For upwards of thirty years--since I first ambushed the Bokhara caravan, in fact--I have robbed the Russians. Let me wear the robe of pride over the breastplate of distinction, for I have taken more loot and cut more throats of theirs since they put their thieving noses east of the Blue Lake [Aral Sea] than any--"

"Each to his own cause, I say."

"But you shall see for yourself, when we go to greet Yakub tonight--aye, and you shall see the Silk One, too, and judge what manner of thing she is. God keep me from the marriage bed of such a demon, and when I find paradise, may my houris not come from China."

So that evening, when I had bathed, trimmed my beard and had the filthy rags of my captivity replaced by shirt. pyjama trousers and soft Persian boots, Kutebar took me through the crowded camp, with everyone saluting him as he strutted by, with his beard oiled and his silver-crusted belt and broad gold medal worn over his fine green coat.

We climbed up to the white houses of the village and Izzat led me through a low archway into a little garden, where there was a fountain and an open pillared pavilion such as you might find in Aladdin's pantomime. It was a lovely little place, shaded by trees in the warm evening, with birds murmuring in the branches, the first stars beginning to peep in the dark-blue sky overhead and some flutelike instrument playing softly beyond the wall. It's strange, but the reality of the East is always far beyond anything the romantic poets and artists can create in imitation.

Yakub Beg was lying on a pile of cushions beneath the pavilion, bareheaded and clad only in his pyjamas, so that his shoulders could be massaged by a stout woman who was working at them with warmed oil. He was tired and hollow-eyed still, but his lean face lit up at the sight of us. I suppose he was a bit of a demon king, with his forked beard and scalp lock, and that rare thing in Central Asia, which they say is a legacy of Alexander's Greek mercenaries--the bright-blue eyes of the European. And he had the happiest smile, I think, that ever I saw on a human face. You had only to see it to understand why the Syr Daria tribes carried on their hopeless struggle against the Russians: fools will always follow the Yakub Begs of this world.

He greeted me eagerly and presented me to Sahib Khan, his lieutenant, of whom I remember nothing except that he was unusually tall, with moustaches that fell below his chin; I was trying not to look too pointedly at the third member of the group, who was lounging on the cushions near Yakub, playing with a tiny Persian kitten on her lap. Now that I saw her in full light, I had a little difficulty in recognizing the excitable, passionate creature I had taken for a boy only the night before; Ko Dali's daughter this evening was a very self-possessed, consciously feminine young woman, indeed--of course, girls are like that, squealing one minute, all assured dignity the next. She was dressed in the tight-wrapped white trousers the Tajik women wear, with curled Persian slippers on her dainty feet, and any illusion of boyishness was dispelled by the roundness of the cloth-of-silver blouse beneath her short embroidered jacket. Round her head she wore a pale-pink turban, very tight, framing a striking young face as pale as alabaster--you'll think me susceptible, but I found her incredibly fetching, with her slanting almond eyes (the only Chinese thing about her), the slightly protruding milk-white teeth which showed as she teased and laughed at the kitten, the determined little chin and the fine straight nose that looked as though it had been chiselled out of marble.

"Izzat tells me you are eager to rejoin your own people in India, Flashman bahadur. Before we discuss that, I wish to make a small token sign of my gratitude to you for . . . well, for my life, no less. There are perhaps half a dozen people in the world who have saved Yakub Beg at one time or another--three of them you see here. . . ."

"More fool we." growls Kutebar. "A thankless task, friends."

"But you are the first feringhee to render me that service. So"--he gave that frank impulsive grin and ducked his shaven head--"if you are willing, and will do me the great honour to accept. . . ."

I wondered what was coming and caught my breath when, at a signal from Sahib Khan, a servant brought in a tray on which were four articles--a little bowl containing salt, another in which an ember of wood burned smokily, a small square of earth with a shred of rank grass attaching to it and a wave-bladed Persian dagger with the snake-and-hare design on its blade. I knew what this meant and it took me aback, for it's the ultimate honour a hillman can do to you: Yakub Beg wanted to make me his blood brother. And while you could say I had saved his life--still, it was big medicine, on such short acquaintance.

However, I knew the formula, for I'd been blood brother to young Ilderim of Mogala years before, so I followed him in tasting the salt, and passing my hand over the fire and the earth, and then laying it beside his on the knife while he said, and I repeated:

"By earth and salt and fire; by hilt and blade; and in the name of God in whatever tongue men call Him, I am thy brother in blood henceforth. May He curse me and consign me to the pit forever, if I fail thee, my friend."

Yakub Beg had some difficulty, his shoulders were still crippled and Sahib Khan had to lift his hand to the tray for him. And then he had to carry both his hands round my neck as I stooped for the formal embrace, after which Kutebar and Ko Dali's daughter and Sahib Khan murmured their applause and we drank hot black coffee with lemon essence and opium, sweetened with sherbet.

And then the serious business began. I had to recite, at Yakub Beg's request, my own recent history and how I had come into the hands of the Russians. So I told them, in brief, much of what I've written here, from my capture at Balaclava to my arrival in Fort Raim--leaving out the discreditable bits, of course, but telling them what they wanted to hear most, which was why there was a great Russian army assembling at Fort Raim, for the march to India. They listened intently, the men only occasionally exploding in a "Bismillah!" or "Ayah!" with a handclap by way of emphasis and the woman silent, fondling the kitten and watching me with those thoughtful, almond eyes. And when I had done, Yakub Beg began to laugh--so loud and hearty that he hurt his torn muscles.

"So much for pride, then! Oh, Khokand, what a little thing you are, and how insignificant your people in the sight of the great world! We had thought, in our folly, that this great army was for us, that the White Tsar was sending his best to trample us flat--and we are just to be licked up in the bygoing, like a mosquito brushed from the hunter's eye when he sights his quarry. And the Great Bear marches on India, does he?" He shook his head. "Can your people stop him at the Khyber gate?"

"Perhaps," says I, "if I get word to them in time."

"In three weeks you might be in Peshawar," says he, thoughtfully. "Not that it will profit us here. The word is that the Ruskis will begin their advance up Syr Daria within two weeks, which means we have a month of life left to us. And then"--he made a weary little gesture--"Tashkent and Khokand will go; Perovski will drink his tea in the serai by Samarkand bazaar and his horses will water in the See-ah stream. The Cossacks will ride over the Black Sands and the Red."

"Well," says I, helpfully, "perhaps you can make some sort of . . . accommodation with them. Terms, don't you know."

"Terms?" says Yakub. "Have you made terms with a wolf lately, Englishman? Shall I tell you the kind of terms they make? When this scum Perovski brought his soldiers and big guns to my city of Ak Mechet two years ago, invading our soil for no better reason than that he wished to steal it. what did he tell Mahomed Wali, who ruled in my absence?" His voice was still steady, but his eyes were shining. "He said: 'Russia comes not for a day, not for a year, but forever.' Those were his terms. And when Wali's people fought for the town, even the women and children throwing their kissiaks [hard dung balls used as missiles] against the guns, and held until there was no food left, and the swords were all broken, and the little powder gone, and the walls blown in, and only the citadel remained. Wali said: 'It is enough. We will surrender.' And Perovski tore up the offer of surrender and said: 'We will take the citadel with our bayonets.' And they did. Two hundred of our folk they mowed down with grape, even the old and young. That is the honour of a Russian soldier; that is the peace of the White Tsar."5

"My wife and children died in Ak Mechet, beneath the White Mosque," says Sahib Khan. "They did not even know who the Russians were. My little son clapped his hands before the battle, to see so many pretty uniforms and the guns all in a row."

They were silent again and I sat uncomfortably, until Yakub Beg says: "I took seven thousand men against Ak Mechet two winters since and saw them routed; I went again with twice as many and saw my thousands slain. The Russians lost eighteen killed. Oh, if it were sabre to sabre, horse to horse, man to man, I would not shirk the odds--but against their artillery, their rifles, what can our riders do?"

"Fight," growls Kutebar. "So it is the last fight, let it be one they will remember. A month, you say? In that time we can run the horsetail banner to Kashgar and back; we can raise every Muslim fighting man from Turgai to the Killer-of-Hindus [Hindu Kush range]. from Khorasan to the Tarim Desert." His voice rose steadily from a growl to a shout. "When the Chinese slew the Kalmuks in the old time, what was the answer given to the fainthearts: 'Turn east, west, north, south, there you shall find the Kirghiz. Why should we lie down to a handful of strangers?' They have arms, they have horses--so have we. If they come in their thousands, these infidels, have we not the Great Horde of the far steppes, the people of the Blue Wolf,6 to join our jihad [holy war]? We may not win, but, by God, we can make them understand that the ghosts of Timur and Chinghiz Khan still ride these plains; we can mark every yard of the Syr Daria with a Russian corpse; we can make them buy this country at a price that will cause the tsar to count his change in the Kremlin palace!"

Yakub Beg sighed, and then smiled at me. He was one of your spirited rascals who can never be glum for more than a moment. "It may be. If they overrun us. I shall not live to see it; I'll make young bones somewhere up by Ak Mechet. You understand, Flashman bahadur, we may buy you a little time here, in Syr Daria--no more. Your red soldiers may avenge us, but only God can help us."

Ko Dali's daughter spoke for the first time and I was surprised how high and yet husky her voice was--the kind that makes you think of French satin sofas, with the blinds down and purple wallpaper. She was lying prone now, tickling the kitten's belly and murmuring to it.

"Do you hear them, little tiger, these great strong men? How they enjoy their despair! They reckon the odds and find them heavy, and since fighting is so much easier than thinking, they put the scowl of resignation on the face of stupidity and swear most horribly." Her voice whined in grotesque mimicry. " 'By the bowels of Rustum, we shall give them a battle to remember--hand me my scimitar, Gamal, it is in the woodshed. Aye, we shall make such and such a slaughter, and if we are all blown to the ends of Eblis--may God protect the valorous!--we shall at least be blown like men. Ayawallah, brothers, it is God's will; we shall have done our best.' This is how the wise warriors talk, furry little sister--which is why we women weep and children go hungry. But never fear--when the Russians have killed them, all, I shall find myself a great strong Cossack and you shall have a lusty Russian tom, and we shall live on oranges and honey and cream forever."

Yakub Beg just laughed and silenced Kutebar's angry growl. "She never said a word that was not worth listening to. Well. Silk One, what must we do to be saved?"

Ko Dali's daughter rolled the kitten over. "Fight them now, before they have moved, while they have their backs to the sea. Take all your horsemen, suddenly, and scatter them on the beach."

"Oh, cage the wind, girl!" cries Kutebar. "They have thirty thousand muskets, one third of them Cossack cavalry. Where can we raise half that number?"

"Send to Buzurg Khan to help you. At need, ask aid from Bokhara."

"Bokhara is lukewarm." says Yakub Beg. "They are the last to whom we can turn for help."

The girl shrugged. "When the Jew grows poor, he looks to his old accounts. Well, then, you must do it alone."

"How, woman? I have not the gift of human multiplication; they outnumber us."

"But their ammunition has not yet come--this much we know from your spies at Fort Raim. So the odds are none so great--three to one at most. With such valiant sabres as Kutebar here, the thing should be easy."

"If there were a hope of a surprise attack on their camp succeeding. I should have ordered it," says Yakub Beg. "But I see no way. Their powder ships will arrive in a week, and three days, perhaps four, thereafter, they will be moving up Syr Daria."

"Ask her, then," says Kutebar sarcastically. "Is she not waiting to be asked? To her, it will be easy."

"If it were easy, even you would have thought of it by now," says the girl. "Let me think of it instead." She rose, picking up her cat, stroking it and smiling as she nuzzled it. "Shall we think, little cruelty? And when we have thought, we shall tell them and they will slap their knees and cry: 'Mashallah, but how simple! It leaps to the eye! A child could have conceived it.' And they will smile on us and perhaps throw us a little jumagi [pocket money] or a sweetmeat, for which we shall be humbly thankful. Come, butcher of little mice." And without so much as a glance at us, she sauntered off, with those tight white pants stirring provocatively and Izzat cursing under his breath.

"Ko Dali should have whipped the demons out of that baggage before she grew teeth! But then, what do the Chinese know of education? If she were mine, by death, would I not discipline her?"

"You would not dare, father of wind and grey whiskers," says Yakub genially. "So let her think--and if nothing comes of it, you may have the laugh of her."

Now, their discussion had been all very well, no doubt, but it was of no great interest to me whether they got themselves cut up by the Russians now or a month hence. The main thing was to get Flashy on his way to India, and I made bold to raise the subject again. But Yakub Beg disappointed me.

"You shall go, surely, but a few days will make no difference. By then we shall have made a resolve here, and it were best your chiefs in India knew what it was. So they may be the better prepared. In the meantime, Flashman bahadur, blood brother, take your ease among us."

I couldn't object to that and for three days I loafed about, wandering through the camp, observing the great coming and going of couriers and the arrival each day of fresh bands of horsemen. They were coming in from all parts of the Red Sands and, beyond, from as far as the Black Sands below Khiva, and Zarafshan and the Bokhara border--Uzbeks with their flat yellow faces and scalp locks, lean, swarthy Tajiks and slit-eyed Mongols, terrible-looking folk with their long swords and bandy legs--until there must have been close on 5000 riders in that valley alone. But when you thought of these wild hordes pitted against artillery and disciplined riflemen, you saw how hopeless the business was; it would take more than the Silk One to think them out of this.

An extraordinary young woman, that--weeping passionately over Yakub's wounds on the night of the rescue, but in council with the men as composed (and bossy) as a Mayfair mama. A walking temptation, too, to a warm-blooded chap like me, so I kept well clear of her in those three days. She might be just the ticket for a wet weekend, but she was also Yakub Beg's intended--and that apart, I'm bound to confess that there was something about the cut of her shapely little jib that made me just a mite uneasy. I'm wary of strong, clever women, however beddable they may be, and Ko Dali's daughter was strong and too clever for comfort. As I was to find out to my cost--God, when I think what that Chinese-minded mort got me into!

I spent my time, as I say, loafing and getting more impatient and edgy by the hour. I wanted to get away for India, and every day that passed brought nearer the moment when those Russian brutes (with Ignatieff well to the fore, no doubt) came pouring up the Syr Daria valley from Fort Raim. guns. Cossacks, foot and all. But Yakub still seemed uncertain how to prepare for the fight that was coming; he'd tried his overlord, Buzurg Khan, for help, and got little out of him, and egged on by Kutebar, he was coming round to the Silk One's notion of one mad slash at the enemy before they had got under way from Fort Raim. Good luck, thinks I, just give me a horse and an escort first and I'll bless your enterprise as I wave farewell.

It was the fourth day and I was lounging in the camp's little market, improving my Persian by learning the 99 names of God (only the Bactrian camels know the 100th, which is why they look so deuced superior) from an Astrabad caravan guard turned murderer, when Kutebar came in a great bustle to take me to Yakub Beg at once. I went, thinking no evil, and found him in the pavilion with Sahib Khan and one or two others, squatting round their coffee table. Ko Dali's daughter was lounging apart, listening and saying nothing, feeding her kitten with sweet jelly. Yakub, whose limbs had mended to the point where he could move with only a little stiffness, was wound up like a fiddlestring with excitement; he was smiling gleefully as he touched my hand in greeting and motioned me to sit.

"News, Flashman bahadur! The Ruski powder boats come tomorrow. They have loaded at Tokmak, the Obrucheff steamer and the Mikhail, and by evening they will be at anchor off Syr Daria's mouth, with every grain of powder, every cartridge, every pack for the artillery in their holds! The next day their cargoes will be dispersed through the Ruski host, who at the moment have a bare twenty rounds to each musket." He rubbed his hands joyfully. "You see what it means, angliski? God has put them in our hands--may His name be ever blessed!"

I didn't see what he was driving at, until Sahib Khan enlightened me. "If those two powder boats can be destroyed," says he, "there will be no Ruski army on the Syr Daria this year. They will be a bear without claws."

"And there will be no advance on India this year, either!" cries Yakub. "What do you say to that, Flashman?"

It was big news, certainly, and their logic was flawless--so far as it went: Without their main munitions, the Russians couldn't march. From my detached point of view, there was only one small question to ask. "Can you do it?"

He looked at me, grinning, and something in that happy bandit face started the alarms rumbling in my lower innards.

"That you shall tell us," says he. "Indeed. God has sent you here. Listen. now. What I have told you is sure information; every slave who labours on that beach at Fort Raim, unloading and piling baggage for those Ruski filth, is a man or a woman of our people--so that not a word is spoken in that camp, not a deed done, not a sentry relieves himself but we know of it. We know to the last peck of rice, to the last horseshoe, what supplies already lie on that beach, and we know, too, that when the powder ships anchor off Fort Raim, they will be ringed about with guard boats, so that not even a fish can swim through. So we cannot hope to mine or burn them by storm or surprise."

Well, that dished him, it seemed to me, but on he went, happily disposing of another possibility. "Nor could we hope to drag the lightest of the few poor cannon we have to some place within shot of the ships. What then remains?" He smiled triumphantly and produced from his breast a roll of papers, written in Russian; it looked like a list.

"Did I not say we were well served for spies? This is a manifest of stores and equipment already landed and lying beneath the awnings and in the sheds. My careful Silk One"--he bowed in her direction--"has had them interpreted and has found an item of vast interest. It says--now listen, and bless the name of your own people, from whom this gift comes--it says: "Twenty stands of British rocket artillery: two hundred boxes of cases.' "

He stopped, staring eagerly at me, and I was aware that they were all waiting expectantly.

"Congreves?" says I, "Well. what--"

"What is the range of such rockets?" asked Yakub Beg.

"Why--about two miles." I knew a bit about Congreves from my time at Woolwich. "Not accurate at that distance, of course: if you want to make good practice, then half a mile, three quarters, but--"

"The ships will not be above half a mile from the shore." says he softly. "And these rockets, from what I have heard, are fiercely combustible--like Greek fire! If one of them were to strike the upper works of the steamer or the wooden hull of the Mikhail."

"Forgive me," says I. "But the Ruskis have these rockets--you don't. And if you're thinking of stealing some of 'em, I'm sorry, Yakub, but you're eating green corn. D'ye know how much a single Congreve rocket head weighs, without its stick? Thirty-two pounds. And the stick is fifteen feet long--and before you can fire one you have to have the firing frame, which is solid steel weighing God knows what, with iron half-pipes. Oh, I daresay friend Kutebar here has some pretty thieves in his fighting tail, but they couldn't hope to lug this kind of gear out from under the Russians' noses--not unseen. Dammit. you'd need a mule train. And if, by some miracle, you did get hold of a frame and rockets, where would you find a firing point close enough? For that matter, at two miles--maximum range, trained at fifty-five degrees--why, you could blaze away all night and never score a hit!"

I suddenly stopped talking. I'd been expecting to see their faces fall, but Yakub was grinning broader by the second, Kutebar was nodding grimly, even Sahib Khan was smiling.

"What's the joke, then?" says I. "You can't do it, you see."

"We do not need to do it." says Yakub, looking like a happy crocodile. "Tell me: These things are like great skyrockets, are they not? How long would it take unskilled men--handless creatures like the ancient Kutebar, for example--to prepare and fire one?"

"To erect the frame?--oh, two minutes, for artillerymen. Ten times as long, probably, for your lot. Adjust the aim, light the fuse and off she goes--but dammit, what's the use of this to you?"

"Yallah!" cries he, clapping his hands delightedly. "I should call you saped-pa--white foot, the bringer of good luck and good news, for what you have just told us is the sweetest tidings I have heard this summer." He reached over and slapped my knee. "Have no fear--we do not intend to steal a rocket, although it was my first thought. But, as you have pointed out, it would be impossible: this much we had realized. But my Silk One, whose mind is like the puzzles of her father's people, intricately simple, has found a way. Tell him, Kutebar."

"We cannot beat the Ruskis, even if we launch our whole power, five or six thousand riders, upon their beach camp and Fort Raim." says the old bandit. "They must drive us back with slaughter in the end. But"--he wagged a finger like an eagle's talon under my nose--"we can storm their camp by night, in one place, where these feringhee ra-kets are lying--and that is hard by the pier, in a little godown [warehouse]. This our people have already told us. It will be a strange thing if, descending out of the night past Fort Raim like a thunderbolt, we cannot hold fifty yards of beach for an hour, facing both ways. And in our midst, we shall set up this ra-ket device, and while our riders hold the enemy at bay, our gunners can launch this fire of Eblis against the Ruski powder ships. They will be in fair range, not half a mile--and in such weather, with timbers as dry as sand, will not one ra-ket striking home be sufficient to burn them to Jehannum?"

I looked at the Silk One with my skin crawling. She'd schemed up this desperate, doomed nonsense, in which thousands of men were going to be cut up, and there she sat, dusting her kitten's whiskers. Mind you. I didn't doubt, when I thought of the thing, that they could bring it off, given decent luck. Five thousand sabres, with the likes of Kutebar roaring about in the dark, could create havoc in that Russian camp and probably secure a beachhead just long enough for them to turn the Russians' own rockets on the powder ships. And I knew any fool could lay and fire a Congreve. But afterwards? I thought of the shambles of that beach in the dark--and those rows of gallows outside Fort Raim.

And yet, there they sat, those madmen, looking as pleased as if they were going to a birthday party. Yakub Beg calling for coffee and sherbet. Kutebar's evil old face wreathed in happy smiles. Well, it was no concern of mine if they wanted to throw their lives away--and if they did succeed in crippling the Russian invasion before it had even started, so much the better. It would be glad news to bring into Peshawar--by Jove. I might even hint that I'd engineered the whole thing.

And then Yakub Beg's voice broke in on my daydreams:

"Who shall say there is such a thing as chance?" he was exulting. "All is as God directs. He sends the Ruski powder ships. He sends the means of their destruction. And"--he reached out to pass me my coffee cup--"best of all. He sends you. blood brother, without whom all would be nought."

You may think that until now I'd been slow on the uptake--that I should have seen the danger signal as soon as this lunatic mentioned Congreve rockets. But I'd been so taken aback by the scheme and had it so fixed in my mind that I had no part in it, anyway, that the fearful implication behind his last words came like a douche of cold water. I nearly dropped my coffee cup.

"Nought?" I echoed. "What d'you mean?"

"Who among us would have the skill or knowledge to make use of these rockets of yours?" says he. "I said you were sent by God. A British officer, who knows how these things are employed, who can ensure success where our bungling fingers would--"

"You mean you expect me to fire these bloody things for you? Look. Yakub Beg--I'm sorry, but it cannot be. You know I must go to India, to carry the news of this Russian invasion . . . this army. . . . I can't risk such news going astray. . . ."

"But there will be no invasion," says he contentedly. "We will see to that."

"But if we--you--I mean. if it doesn't work?" I cried. "I can't take the risk! I mean, it's not that I don't wish to help you--I would if I could, of course. But if I were killed and the Russians marched in spite of your idiotic--I mean, your daring scheme--they would catch my people unprepared!"

"Rest assured." says he, "the news will go to Peshawar. I pledge my honour, just as I pledge my people to fight these Ruskis tooth and nail from here to the Killer-of-Hindus. But we will stop them here"--and he struck the ground beside him. "I know it! And your soldiers in India will be prepared for a blow that never comes. For we will not fail. The Silk One's plan is sound. Is she not the najid?" And the grinning ape bowed again in her direction, pleased as Punch.

By George, this was desperate. I didn't know what to say. He was bent on dragging me into certain destruction and I had to weasel out somehow--but, at the same time, I daren't let them see the truth, which was that the whole mad scheme terrified me out of my wits. That might well be fatal--you've no idea what those folk are like, and if Yakub Beg thought I was letting him down . . . well, one thing I could be sure of: There'd be no excursion train ordered up to take me to the coral strand in a hurry.

"Yakub, my friend." says I, "think but a moment. I would ask nothing better than to ride with you and Kutebar on this affair. I have my own score to settle with these Ruski pigs, believe me. And if I could add one asper in the scale of success. I would be with you heart and soul. But I am no artilleryman. I know something of these rockets but nothing to the purpose. Any fool can aim them and fire them--Kutebar can do it as easily as he breaks wind"--that got them laughing, as I intended it should. "And I have my duty, which is to my country. I, and I alone, must take that news--who else would be believed? Don't you see--you may do this thing without me?"

"Not as surely," says he. "How could we? An artilleryman you may not be, but you are a soldier, with those little skills that mean the difference between success and failure. You know this--and think, blood brother, whether we stand or fall, when those ships flame like the rising sun and sink into destruction, we will have shattered the threat to your folk and mine! We will have lit a fire that will singe the Kremlin wall! By God, what a dawn that will be!"

I sat pretty quiet, feverishly trying to plot a way out of this and getting nowhere. The others got down to the details of the business and I had to take part and try to look happy about it. I must say, looking back, they had it well schemed out: They would take 5000 riders, under Yakub and Kutebar and Sahib Khan, each commanding a division, and just go hell for leather past Fort Raim at four in the morning, driving down to the beach and cutting off the pier. Sahib Khan's lot would secure the northern flank beyond the pier. facing the Syr Daria mouth; Yakub would take the south side, fronting the main beach; and their forces would join up at the landward end of the pier, presenting a ring of fire and steel against the Russian counterattacks. Kutebar's detachment would be inside the ring, in reserve, and shielding the firing party--here they looked at me with reverent eyes and I managed an off-hand grin that any dentist would have recognized first go.

And then, while all hell was breaking loose round us, the intrepid Flashy and his assistants would set the infernal things up and blaze away at the powder ships. And when the great Guy Fawkes explosion occurred--supposing that it did--we would take to the sea; it was half a mile across the Syr Daria mouth and Katti Torah--a horrible little person with yellow teeth and a squint, who was one of the council that night--would be waiting on the other side to cover all who could escape that way.

• • •

I loafed about my tent, worrying, next morning, while the camp hummed round me--you never saw so many happy faces at the prospect of impending dissolution. How many of them would be alive next day? Not that I cared--I'd have seen 'em all dead and damned if only I could come off safe. My guts were beginning to churn in earnest as the hours went by, and finally I was in such a sweat I couldn't stand it any longer. I decided to go up to the pavilion and have a last shot at talking some sense into Yakub Beg--I didn't know what I could say, but if the worst came to the worst. I might even chance a flat refusal to have anything to do with his mad venture and see what he would do about it. In this desperate frame of mind. I made my way up through the village, which was quiet with everyone being down in the camp below, went through the little archway and past the screen to the garden--and there was Ko Dali's daughter, alone, sitting by the fountain, trailing her fingers in the water, with that damned kitten watching the ripples.

In spite of my fearful preoccupations--which were entirely her fault, in the first place--I felt the old Adam stir at the sight of her. She was wearing a close-fitting white robe with a gold-embroidered border and her shapely little bare feet peeping out beneath it: round her head was the inevitable turban, also of white. She looked like Scheherazade in the caliph's garden, and didn't she know it, just?

"Yakub is not here," says she, before I'd even had time to state my business. "He has ridden out with the others to talk with Buzurg Khan; perhaps by evening he will have returned." She stroked the kitten. "Will you wait?"

It was an invitation if ever I heard one--and I'm used to them. But it was unexpected and, as I've said, I was something wary of this young woman. So I hesitated, while she watched me, smiling with her lips closed, and I was just on the point of making my apology and withdrawing, when she leaned down to the kitten and said:

"Why do you suppose such a tall fellow is so afraid, little sister? Can you tell? No? He would be wise not to let Yakub Beg know it--for it would be a great shame to the Kush Begi to find fear in his blood brother."

I don't know when I've been taken more aback. I stood astonished as she went on, with her face close to the kitten's:

"We knew it the first night, at Fort Raim--you remember I told you? We felt it even in his mouth. And we both saw it, last night, when Yakub Beg pressed him into our venture--the others did not, for he dissembles well, this angliski. But we knew, you and I, little terror of the larder. We saw the fear in his eyes when he tried to persuade them. We see it now." She picked the kitten up and nuzzled it against her cheek. "What are we to make of him, then?"

"Well, I'm damned!" I was beginning, and took a stride forward, red in the face, and stopped.

"Now he is angry, as well as frightened," says she, pretending to whisper in the brute's ear. "Is that not fine? We have stirred him to rage, which is one of the seven forbidden sins he feels against us. Yes, pretty tiger, he feels another one as well. Which one? Come, little foolish, that is easy--no, not envy, why should he envy us? Ah, you have guessed it, you wanton of the night walls, you trifler in jimai najaiz [illicit love]. Is it not scandalous? But be at ease--we are safe from him. For does he not fear?"

Kutebar was undoubtedly right--this one should have had the mischief tanned out of her when she was knee-high. I stood there, wattling, no doubt, and trying to think of a cutting retort--but interrupting a conversation between a woman and a cat ain't as easy as it might seem. One tends to look a fool.

"You think it a pity, scourge of the milk bowls? Well . . . there it is. If lechery cannot cast out fear, what then? What does he fear, you ask? Oh, so many things--death, as all men do. That is no matter, so that they do not cross the line from 'will' to 'will not.' But he fears also Yakub Beg, which is wisdom--although Yakub Beg is far away and we are quite alone here. So . . . still he wavers, although desire struggles with fear in him. Which will triumph, do you suppose? Is it not exciting, little trollop of the willow trees? Are your male cats so timorous? Do they fear even to sit beside you?"

I wasn't standing for that, anyway--besides, I was becoming decidedly interested. I came round the fountain and sat down on the grass. And, damme, the kitten popped its face round her head and miaowed at me.

"There, brave little sister!" She cuddled it, turned to look at me out of those slanting black eyes and returned to her conversation. "Would you protect your mistress, then? Ayah, it is not necessary--for what will he do? He will gnaw his lip, while his mouth grows dry with fear and desire--he will think. Oh, such thoughts--there is no protection against them. Do you not feel them touching us, embracing us, enfolding us, burning us with their passion? Alas, it is only an illusion--and like to remain one, so great is his fear."

I've seduced--and been seduced--in some odd ways, but never before with a kitten pressed into service as pimp. She was right, of course--I was scared, not only of Yakub Beg but of her: She knew too much, this one, for any man's comfort. There was something else--but with that slim white shape tantalizing me within arm's length, and that murmuring voice, and the drift of her perfume, subtle and sweet as a garden flower, I didn't care. I reached out--and hesitated, sweating lustfully. My God, I wanted her, but--

"And now he pants, and trembles, and fears to touch, my furry sweet. Like the little boys at the confectioner's stall or a beardless youth biting his nails outside a brothel, and he such a fine, strong--nothing of a man. He--"

"Damn you!" roars I, "and damn your Yakub Beg! Come here!"

And I grabbed her round the body, one hand on her breast, the other on her belly, and pulled her roughly to me. She came without resistance, her head back and those almond eyes looking up at me, her lips parted; I was shaking as I brought my mouth down on them and pulled the robe from her shoulders, gripping her sharp-pointed breasts in my hands. She lay quivering against me for a moment, and them pulled free, pushing the kitten gently aside with her foot.

And then she turned towards me, pushing me back and down, with her hands on my chest, and sliding astride of me while her tongue flickered out against my lips and then my eyelids and cheeks and into my ear. I grappled her, yammering lustfully, as she shrugged off the robe and began working nimbly at my girdle--and no sooner had we set to partners and commenced heaving passionately away than up comes that damned kitten beside my head and Ko Dali's daughter had to pause and lift her face to blow at it.

"Does no one pay heed to you, then? Fie, selfish little inquisitive! Can your mistress not have a moment of pleasure herself with an angliski--a thing she has never done before?" And they purred at each other while I was going mad--I've never been more mortified in my life.

"I shall tell you all about it later," said she, which is an astonishing thing to hear, when you're at grips.

"Never mind telling the blasted cat!" I roared, straining at her. "Dammit, if you're going to tell anyone, tell me!"

"Ah," says she, sitting back. "You are like the Chinese--you wish to talk as well? Then here is a topic of conversation." And she reached up and suddenly plucked off her turban, and there she was, shaved like a Buddhist monk, staring mischievously down at me.

"Good God!" I croaked. "You're bald!"

"Did you not know? It is my vow. Does it make me"--she stirred her rump deliciously--"less desirable?"

"My God, no!" I cried and fell to again with a will, but every time I became properly engrossed, she would stop to chide the cat, which kept loafing round miaowing, until I was near crazy, with that naked alabaster beauty squirming athwart my hawse, as the sailors say, and nothing to be done satisfactorily until she had left off talking and come back to work. And once she nearly unmanned me completely by stopping short, glancing up and crying, "Yakub!" and I let out a frantic yelp and near as anything heaved her into the fountain as I strained my head round to look at the archway and see--nothing. But before I could remonstrate or swipe her head off, she was writhing and plunging away again, moaning with her eyes half-closed, and this time, for a wonder, the thing went on uninterrupted until we were lying gasping and exhausted.

Presently she got up and went off, returning with a little tray on which there were cups of sherbet and two big bowls of kefir--just the thing after a hot encounter, when you're feeling well and contented, and wondering vaguely whether you ought not to slide out before the man of the house comes back, and deciding the devil with him. It was good kefir, too--strangely sweet, with a musky flavour that I couldn't place, and as I spooned it down gratefully, she sat watching me, with those mysterious dark eyes, and murmuring to her kitten as it played with her fingers.

"Capital kefir, this," says I, cleaning round the bowl. "Any more?"

She gave me another helping and went on whispering to the cat--taking care that I could hear. "Why did we permit him to make love? Oh, such a question! Because of his fine shape and handsome head, you think, and the promise of a great baz-baz [an indelicate synonym for virility]--oh, whiskered little harlot, have you no blushes? What--because he was fearful and we women know that nothing so drives out a man's fear as passion and delight with a beautiful darling? That is an old wisdom, true--is it the poet Firdausi who says 'The making of life in the shadow of death is the blissful oblivion'?

"I call you to witness, curious tiny leopard--you and Firdausi both. He is much braver now--and he is so very strong, with his great powerful arms and thighs, like the black djinn in the story of es-Sinbad of the sea--he is no longer safe with delicate ladies such as we. He might harm us." And with that mocking smile, she went quickly round the fountain, before I could stop her. "Tell me, angliski," she said, looking back but not stopping. "You who speak Persian and know so much of our country--have you ever heard of the Old Man of the Mountain?"

"No, by Jove, I don't think I have," says I. "Come back and tell me about him."

"After tonight--when the work has been done," says she, teasing. "Perhaps then I shall tell you."

"But I want to know now."

"Be content," says she. "You are a different man from the fearful fellow who came here seeking Yakub an hour ago. Remember the Persian saying: 'Lick up the honey, stranger, and ask no questions.' "

And then she was gone, leaving me grinning foolishly after her and cursing her perversity in a good-humoured way. I couldn't account for it, but for some reason, I felt full of buck and appetite and great good humour, and I couldn't even remember feeling doubts or fears or anything much--of course, I knew there was nothing like a good lively female for putting a chap in trim, as her man Firdausi had apparently pointed out. Clever lads, these Persian poets.

I went striding back down to the valley, then, singing, "Ahunting we will go," if I remember rightly, and was just in time to see Yakub and Kutebar return from their meeting with Buzurg Khan in a fine rage: The overlord had refused to risk any of his people in what he, the shirking recreant, regarded as a lost hope. I couldn't believe such poltroonery myself, and said so, loudly. But there it was: The business was up to us and our 5000 sabres, and when Yakub jumped onto a pile of camel bales in the valley market and told the mob it was do or die by themselves for the honour of Old Khokand, and explained how we were going to assault the beach that night and blow up the powder ships, the whole splendid crowd rose to him as a man. There was just a sea of faces, yellow and brown, slit-eyed and hook-nosed, bald-pated and scalp-locked or turbaned and hairy, all yelling and laughing and waving their sabres, with the wilder spirits cracking off their pistols and racing their ponies round the outskirts of the crowd in an ecstasy of excitement, churning up the dust and whooping like Arapaho.

And when Kutebar, to a storm of applause, took his place beside Yakub and thundered in his huge voice: "North, south, east and west--where shall you find the Kirghiz? By the silver hand of Alexander, they are here!" the whole place exploded in wild cheering and they crowded round the two leaders, promising ten Russian dead for every one of ours, and I thought, why not give 'em a bit of civilized comfort, too, so I jumped up myself, roaring. "Hear, hear!" and when they stopped to listen, I gave it to them, straight and manly.

"That's the spirit, you fellows!" I told them. "I second what these two fine associates of mine have told you and have only this to add. We're going to blow these bloody Russians from hell to Huddersfield--and I'm the chap who can do it, let me tell you! So I shall detain you no longer, my good friends--and Tajiks, and niggers, and what not--but only ask you to be upstanding and give a rousing British cheer for the honour of the dear old schoolhouse--hip, hip, hip, hurrah!"

And didn't they cheer, too? Best speech I ever made, I remember thinking, and Yakub clapped me on the back, grinning all over, and said by the beard of Mohammed, if we had proposed a march on Moscow, every man jack would have been in his saddle that minute, riding west.

So I got my crew together--and Ko Dali's daughter was there, too, lovely girl and so attentive, all in black now, shirt, pyjamas, boots and turban, very business-like. And I lectured them about Congreves--it was remarkable how well I remembered each detail about assembling the firing frame and half-pipes and adjusting the range screws and everything; the excellent fellows took it all in, spitting and exclaiming with excitement, and you could see that even if they weren't the kind to get elected to the Royal Society for their mechanical aptitude, their hearts were in the right place. I tried to get Ko Dali's daughter aside afterwards for some special instruction, but she excused herself, so I went off to the grindstone merchant to get a sabre sharpened and got Kutebar to find me a few rounds for my German revolver.

"The only thing that irks me," I told him, "is that we are going to be stuck in some stuffy godown, blazing away with rockets, while Yakub and the others have got the best of the evening. Dammit, Izzat, I want to put this steel across a few Ruski necks--there's a walleyed rascal called Ignatieff, now, have I told you about him? Two rounds from this popgun into his midriff, and then a foot of sabre through his throat--that's all he needs."

I didn't know when I'd felt so blood-lusty, and it got worse as the evening wore on. By the time we saddled up, I was full of hate against a vague figure who was Ignatieff in a Cossack hat with the tsar's eagle across the front of his shirt: I wanted to settle him, gorily and painfully, and all the way on our ride across the Kizil Kum in the gathering dark, I was dreaming fine nightmares in which I despatched him. But from time to time I felt quite jolly, too, and sang a few snatches of The Leather Bottel and John Peel and other popular favourites, while the riders grinned and nudged each other.

It took a good hour in the cold dark to bring all the riders quietly into the safety of the scrubby wood that lies a bare half mile from Frot Raim, each man holding his horse's nostrils or blanketing its head, while I fidgeted with impatience. Yakub Beg emerged out of the shadows, every brave in spiked helmet and red cloak, to say that we should move when the moon hid behind the cloud bank.

And then Yakub was calling softly into the dark: "In the name of God and the Son of God! Kirghiz. Uzbek. Tajik, Kalmuk, Turka--remember Ak Mechet! The morning rides behind us!" And he made that strange, moaning Khokand whistle, and with a great rumbling growl and a drumming of hooves the whole horde went surging forward beneath the trees and out onto the empty steppe towards Fort Raim.

If I'd been a sentry on those walls I'd have had apoplexy. One moment an empty steppe and the next it was thick with mounted men, pouring down on the fort; we must have covered quarter of a mile before the first shot cracked, and then we were tearing at full tilt towards the gap between fort and river, with the shouts to alarm sounding from the walls and musketry popping, and then with one voice the yell of the ghazi war cry burst from the riders (one voice, in fact, was crying. "Tallyho! Ha-ha!"), 5000 mad creatures thundering down the long slope with the glittering sea far ahead, and the ships riding silent and huge on the water, and onto the cluttered beach, with men scattering in panic as we swept in among the great piles of bales, sabring and shooting, leaping crazily in the gloom over the boxes and low shelters. Yakub's contingent streaming out to the left among the sheds and godowns, while our party and Sahib Khan's drove for the pier.

I was in capital fettle as I strode into the godown, which was full of half-naked natives with torches, all in a ferment of excitement.

"Now, then, my likely lads," cries I, "where are those Congreves, eh? Look alive, boys, we haven't got all night, you know."

"Here is the devil fire, O slayer of thousands," says someone, and there, sure enough, was a huge pile of boxes, and in the smoky torchlight I could see the broad arrow and make out the old familiar lettering on them: Royal Small Arms Factory. Handle with Extreme Care, Explosives, Danger, this Side Up.

"And how the deuce did this lot get here, d'ye suppose?" says I to Kutebar. "Depend upon it, some greasy bastard in Birmingham with a pocketful of dollars could tell us. Righto, you fellows, break 'em out, break 'em out!" And as they set to with a will, I gave them another chorus of John Peel and strode to the sea end of the godown, which of course was open, and surveyed the bay.

Ko Dali's daughter was at my elbow, with a chattering nigger pointing out which ship was which. There were two steamers, the farther one being the Obrucheff, three vessels with masts, of which the Mikhail was farthest north, and a ketch, all riding under the moon on the glassy sea, pretty as paint.

"That's the ticket for soup!" says I. "We'll have 'em sunk in half a jiffy. How are you, my dear--I say, that's a fetching rig you're wearing!" And I gave her a squeeze for luck, but she wriggled free.

Then I strode in among the toilers, saw the firing frame broken from its crate and showed them where to position it, at the very lip of the godown, just above the small boats and barges which were rocking gently at their moorings on the water six feet below our feet.

Putting up the frame was simple--it's just an iron fence, you see, with supports both sides and half-pipes running from the ground behind to the top of the fence, to take the rockets. I've never known my fingers so nimble as I tightened the screws and adjusted the half-pipes in their sockets; everyone else seemed slow by comparison, and I cursed them good-naturedly and finally left Ko Dali's daughter to see to the final adjustments while I went off to examine the rockets.

They had them broken out by now, the dull-grey three-foot metal cylinders with their conical heads--I swore when I saw that, as I'd feared, they were the old pattern, without fins and needing the 15-foot sticks.7 Sure enough, there were the sticks, in long canvas bundles; I called for one and set to work to fit it into a rocket head, but the thing was corroded to blazes.

"Now blast these Brummagem robbers~" cries I. "This is too bad--see how British workmanship gets a bad name! At this rate, the Yankees will be streets ahead of us. Break out another box!"

It was a fine, sweaty confusion in the godown as they dragged the rockets down to the firing frame, and I egged 'em on and showed them how to lay a rocket in the half-pipe. No corrosion there, thank God. I noted, and the Silk One fairly twitched with impatience--strange girl, she was, tense as a telegraph wire at moments like this but all composure when she was at home--while I lectured her on the importance of unrusted surfaces, so that the rockets flew straight.

"In God's name, angliski!" cries Kutebar. "Let us be about it! See the Mikhail yonder, with enough munitions aboard to blow the Aral dry--for the love of women, let us fire on her!"

"All right, old fellow," says I. "Let's see how we stand." I squinted along the half-pipe, which was at full elevation. "Give us a box beneath the pipe, to lift her. So--steady." I adjusted the range screw, and now the great conical head of the rocket was pointing just over her mainmast. "That's about it. Right, give me a slow match, someone.

"Stand clear, boys and girls," I sang out. "Papa's going to light the blue touch paper and retire immediately!" And in that instant before I touched the match to the firing vent, I had a sudden vivid memory of November the fifth, with the frosty ground and the dark, and little boys chattering and giggling and the girls covering their ears, and the red eye of the rocket smouldering in the black, and the white fizz of sparks, and the chorus of admiring oohs and aahs as the rocket burst overhead--and it was something like that now, if you like, except that here the fizzing was like a locomotive funnel belching sparks, filling the godown with acrid, reeking smoke, while the firing frame shuddered, and then with an almighty whoosh like an express tearing by, the Congreve went rushing away into the night, clouds of smoke and fire gushing from its tail, and the boys and girls cried, "By Shaitan!" and "Istagfurallah!" and Papa skidded nimbly aside, roaring. "Take that, you sons of bitches!" And we all stood gaping as it soared into the night like a comet, reached the top of its arc, dipped towards the Mikhail--and vanished miles on the wrong side of her.

"Bad luck, dammit! Hard lines! Right, you fellows, let's have another!" And laughing heartily, I had another box shoved under the pipe to level it out. We let fly again, but this time the rocket must have been faulty, for it swerved away crazily into the night, weaving to and fro before plunging into the water a bare 300 yards out with a tremendous hiss and a cloud of steam. We tried three more and all fell short, so we adjusted the range slightly and the sixth rocket flew straight and true, like a great scarlet lance searching for its target: we watched it pass between the masts of the Mikhail and howled with disappointment. But now at least we had the range, so I ordered all the pipes loaded and we touched off the whole battery at once.

It was indescribable and great fun--like a volcano erupting under your feet, and a dense choking fog filling the godown; the men clinging to steady the firing frame were almost torn from their feet, the rush of the launching Congreves was deafening and for a moment we were all staggering about, weeping and coughing in that filthy smoke. It was a full minute before the reek had cleared sufficiently to see how our shots had fared, and then Kutebar was flinging himself into the air and rushing to embrace me.

The Mikhail was hit! There was a red ball of fire clinging to her timbers just below the rail amidships, and even as we watched, there was a climbing lick of flame--and over to the right, by some freakish chance, the ketch had been hit, too: There was a fire on her deck and she was sluing round at anchor. All about me they were dancing and yelling and clapping hands, like schoolgirls when Popular Penelope has won the sewing prize.

"We have hit one, angliski--it is time for the other." Silk One rapped it out and I was aware that her face was strained and her eyes seemed to be searching mine anxiously. 'There is no time to waste--listen to the firing! In a few moments they will have broken through Yakub's line and be upon us!"

You know, I'd been so taken up with our target practise, I'd almost forgotten about the fighting that was going on outside. But she was right; it was fiercer than ever and getting closer.

Perhaps we'd been lucky with the Mikhail, but I fired 20 single rockets at the Obrucheff and never came near enough to singe her cable--they snaked over her, or flew wide, or hit the water short, until the smoky trails of their passing blended into a fine mist across the bay; the godown was a scorching inferno of choking smoke in which we shouted and swore hoarsely as we wrestled sticks and canisters into pipes that were so hot we had to douse them with water after every shot. My good humour didn't survive the 20th miss; I raged and swore and kicked the nearest nigger--I was aware, too, that as we laboured, the sounds of battle outside were drawing closer still, and I was in half a mind to leave these infernal rockets that wouldn't fly straight and pitch into the fighting on the beach. It was like hell, outside and in, and to add to my fury, one of the ships in the bay was firing at us now; the pillar of cloud from the godown must have made a perfect target, and the rocket trails had long since advertised to everyone on that beach exactly what was going on. The smack of musket balls on the roof and walls was continuous--although I didn't know it then, detachments of Russian cavalry had tried three times to drive through the lumbered beach in phalanx to reach the godown and silence us, and Yakub's riders had halted them each time with desperate courage. The ring round our position was contracting all the time as the Khokandian riders fell back; once a shot from the sea pitched right in front of the godown, showering us with spray; another howled overhead like a banshee and a third crashed into the pier alongside us.

"Damn you!" I roared, shaking my fist. "Come ashore, you swine, and I'll show you!" I seemed to be seeing everything through a red mist, with a terrible, consuming rage swelling up inside me; I was swearing incoherently, I know, as we dragged another rocket into the reeking pipe; half-blinded with smoke and sweat and fury, I touched it off, and this time it seemed to drop just short of the Obrucheff--and then, by God, I saw that the ship was moving; they must have got steam up in her at last, and she was veering round slowly, her stern wheel churning as she prepared to draw out from the shore.

"Cowardly rascals!" I hollered. "Turn tail, will you? Why don't you stand and fight, you measly hounds? Load 'em up, you idle bastards, there!" And savagely I flung myself among them as they hauled up five rockets--one of 'em was still half off its stick, I remember, with a little nigger still wrestling to fix it home even as the man with the match was touching the fuse. I crammed the burning remnant of my match against a vent, and even as the trail of sparks shot out, the whole godown seemed to stand on end. I felt myself falling: something hit me a great crack on the head and my ears were full of cannonading that went on and on until the pain of it seemed to be bursting my brain before blackness came.

I've reckoned since that I must have been unconscious for only a few minutes, but for all I knew when I opened my eyes, it might have been hours. What had happened was that a cannon shot had hit the godown roof just as the rockets went off, and a falling slat had knocked me endways; when I came to, the first thing I saw was the firing frame in ruins, with a beam across it, and I remember thinking, ah, well, no more Guy Fawkes night until next year. Beyond it, through the smoke, I could see the Mikhail burning quite nicely now, but not exploding, which I thought strange; the ketch was well alight, too, but the Obrucheff was under way, with smoke pouring from her funnel and her wheel thrashing great guns.

But the strangest thing was that my head seemed to have floated loose from my shoulders and I couldn't seem to focus properly on things round me. The great berserk rage that had possessed me only a moment since seemed to have gone and I felt quite tranquil and dreamy--it wasn't unpleasant, really, for I felt that nothing much mattered and there was no pain or anxiety, or even inclination to do anything but just lie there, resting body and brain together.

And then Yakub Beg was there, his helmet gone, one arm limp with a great bloodied gash near the shoulder and a naked sabre in his good hand. Strange, thinks I, you ought to be out on the beach, killing Russians; what the deuce are you doing here? "Away!" he was shouting. "Away--take to the water!" And he dropped his sabre and took Ko Dali's daughter by the shoulder. "Quickly, Silk One--it is done! They have driven us in! Swim for it, beloved--and Kutebar! Get them into the sea, Izzat! There are only moments left! Sahib Khan can hold them with his Immortals--but only for minutes. Get you gone--and take the Englishman. Do as I tell you."

She didn't hesitate, but rose, and two of the others half-dragged, half-carried me to the mouth of the godown. I was so dazed I don't think it even crossed my mind that I was in no case to swim; it didn't matter, anyway, for some clever lads were cutting loose the lighter that swung under the edge of the godown and men were tumbling into it. I caught a glimpse of a swirling mass of figures at the doors and I think I even made out a Cossack, laying about him with a sabre, before someone tumbled down on top of me and knocked me flat on the floor of the lighter.

Somehow they must have poled the thing off, for when I had recovered my breath and pulled myself up to the low gunwale, we were about 20 yards from the godown and drifting away from the pier as the eddy from the river mouth, I suppose, caught the lighter and tugged it out to sea. I had only a momentary sight of the interior of the godown, looking for all the world like a mine shaft, with the figures of miners hewing away in it, and then I saw a brilliant light suddenly glowing on its floor, growing in intensity, and then the rush-rush-rush sound of the Congreves as the flames from the burning wall reached them, and I just had sense enough to duck my head below the gunwale before the whole place dissolved in a blinding light--but, strangely enough, without any great roar of explosion, just the rushing noise of a huge whirlwind. There were screams and oaths from the lighter all round me, but when I raised my head, there was just one huge flame where the godown had been, and the pier beside it was burning at its landward end, and the glare was so fierce that beyond there was nothing to be seen.

I just lay, with my cheek on the thwart, wondering if the eddy would carry us out of range before they started shooting at us and thinking how calm and pleasant it was to be drifting along there, after all the hellish work in the godown. I suddenly became aware that Ko Dali's daughter was crouched down beside me at the gunwale, staring back, and people were pressed close about us, and I thought, this is a splendid opportunity to squeeze that lovely little rump of hers. There it was, just nicely curved within a foot of me, so I took a handful and kneaded away contentedly, and she never even noticed--or, if she did, she didn't mind. But I think she was too preoccupied with the inferno we had left behind us; so were the others, craning and muttering as we drifted over the dark water. It's queer, but in my memory that drifting and bum fondling seems to have gone on for the deuce of a long time.

Yakub Beg was saying that the Mikhail was burning to a wreck but the Obrucheff had got away, so our work was only half-done, but better half-done than not done at all, when pat on his words the sun was suddenly in the sky--or so it seemed, for the whole place, the lighter, the sea round and the sky itself, was suddenly as bright as day, and it seemed to me that the lighter was no longer drifting but racing over the water, and then came the most tremendous thundering crash of sound I've ever heard, reverberating over the sea, making the head sing and shudder with the deafening boom of it, and as I tried to put up my hands to my ears to shut out the pain. I heard Kutebar's frantic yell; "The Obrucheff! She has gone--gone to the pit of damnation! Now whose work is half-done? By God!--it is done, it is done, it is done! A thousand times done! Ya. Yakub--is it not done? Now the praise to Him and to the foreign professors!"

More than 2000 Khokandians were killed in the battle of Fort Raim, which shows you what a clever lad Buzurg Khan was to keep out of it. The rest escaped, some by cutting their way eastwards off the beach, some by swimming the Syr Daria mouth and a favoured few travelling in style, by boat and lighter. How many Russians died, no one knows, but Yakub Beg later estimated about 3000. So it was a good deal bigger than many battles that are household words, but it happened a long way away and the Russians doubtless tried to forget it, so I suppose only the Khokandians remember it now.

It achieved their purpose, anyhow, for it destroyed the Russian munition ships and prevented the army marching that year. Which saved British India for as long as I've lived--and preserved Khokand's freedom for a few years more, before the tsar's soldiers came and stamped it flat in the Sixties. I imagine the Khokandians thought the respite was worth while and the 2000 lives well lost--what the 2000 would say, of course, is another matter, but since they went to fight of their own free will (so far as any soldier ever does), I suppose they would support the majority.

Myself, I haven't changed my opinion since I came back to my senses two days afterwards, back in the valley in Kizil Kum. I remember nothing of our lighter's being hauled from the water by Katti Torah's rescue party, or of the journey back through the desert, for by that time I was in the finest hallucinatory delirium since the first Reform Bill, and I came out of it gradually and painfully. The terrible thing was that I remembered the battle very clearly and my own incredible behaviour--I knew I'd gone bawling about like a viking in drink, seeking sorrow and raving heroically in murderous rage--but I couldn't for the life of me understand why. It had been utterly against nature, instinct and judgment--and I knew it hadn't been booze, because I hadn't had any, and anyway, the liquor hasn't been distilled that can make me oblivious of self-preservation. It appalled me, for what security does a right-thinking coward have, if he loses his sense of panic?

At first I thought my memory of that night's work must be playing me false, but the admiring congratulations I got from Yakub Beg and Kutebar (who called me "Ghazi," of all things) soon put paid to that notion. So I must have been temporarily deranged--but why? The obvious explanation, for some reason, never occurred to me--and yet I knew Ko Dali's daughter was at the bottom of it somehow, so I sought her out first thing when I had emerged weak and shaky from my brief convalescence.

"You remember I spoke to you about the Old Man of the Mountain, of whom you had never heard?" she asked.

"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 charpai [bed platform] 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?8 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." She suddenly laughed, showing those pretty teeth. "You are sometimes an honest man, angliski! Is he not, puss? And he would be 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.

"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."

Still, I had no cause for complaint once I'd recovered from the shock of realizing I'd fought that do-or-die action by means of a bellyful of some disgusting Oriental potion. And, now that the danger was past and I was safe out of the Russian reach, I didn't think too long about the matter. I began to wonder whether the war in the Crimea was over, whether--with luck--Cardigan had got himself killed. I thought of going home to my beautiful, blonde Elspeth, who could be relied on not to lace my kidneys and bacon with opium. Decidedly, I must get back to civilisation as soon as possible.

Yakub Beg was deuced good about it and, after a tremendous feast of celebration in the Kizil Kum valley, we set out for Khiva, where he was moving his folk out of reach from Russian reprisals. From there we went east to Samarkand, where he had promised to arrange for some Afghan pals of his to convey me over the mountains, through Afghanistan to Peshawar.

We passed the night in Samarkand, in the little serai near the market, under the huge turquoise walls of one of the biggest mosques 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 thronged 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 20 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."

" 'There 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 other, 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 Inglistan." 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 hallway down my throat before she withdrew, looking like Saint Cecilia.

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.

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 laces and well-stuffed cartridge belts reassured me that this was one party that no right-minded budmash would dream of attacking. It took us a week over the Hindu-Killer and another couple of days through the hills to Kabul.

From there we went on 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 Gilzai, and so into the presence of a young whippersnapper 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 pyjamas and puggaree, with a big beard.

"Not at all," says I affably. "I'm English--a British officer, in fact. Name of Flashman--Colonel Flashman, Seventeenth 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 into the lockup, 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?"

Appendix

Yakub Beg and Izzat Kutebar

Yakub (Yakoob) Beg, who became the greatest chief in Central Asia and the leading resistance fighter against Russian imperialism, was born in Piskent in 1820. He was one of the Persian-Tajik people and claimed to be a descendant of Tamerlane the Great (Timur). Flashman's description of him corresponds closely to the reconstruction of features recently made from Timur's skull by the Russian expert Professor Mikhail Gerasimov.

In 1815, Yakub became chamberlain to the Khan of Khokand, and then Pansad Bashi (commander of 500). He was made Kush Begi (military commander) and governor of Ak Mechet, an important fortress on the Syr Daria, in 1847, and in the same year married a girl from Julek, a river town; she is described as "a Kipchak lady of the Golden Horde." Yakub was active in raiding the new Russian outposts on the Aral coast, and after the fall of Ak Mechet in 1853, he made strenuous efforts to retake it from the Russians, without success.

After the Russian invasion, Yakub eventually turned his attention to making his own state in Kashgar. In 1865, as commander in chief to the decadent Buzurg Khan, he took Kashgar, then dispossessed his own overlord and assumed the throne himself as Amir and Athalik Ghazi; in this same year, he married "the beautiful daughter of Ko Dali, an officer in the Chinese army," by whom he had several children.

As ruler of Kashgar and East Turkestan, Yakub Beg was the most powerful monarch of Central Asia. He remained a bitter enemy of Russia and a close friend of the British, whose envoys were received in Kashgar, where a British--Kashgari commercial treaty was concluded in 1871. (See D. C. Bougler's Life of Yakoob Beg. 1878.)

Izzat Kutebar, brigand, rebel and guerrilla leader, was a Kirghiz, born probably in 1800. He first robbed the Bokhara caravan in 1822 and was at his height as a raider and scourge of the Russians in the 1810s. They eventually persuaded him to suspend his bandit activities and rewarded him with a gold medal, but he cut loose again in the early Fifties, was captured in 1854, escaped or was released, raised a revolt and lived as a rebel in the Ust-Urt until 1858, when he finally surrendered to Count Ignatieff and made his peace with Russia.

1Fort Raim was built on the Syr Daria (Jaxartes) in 1817. The Russian policy of expansion followed the fort's establishment and their armed expeditions eastwards began in 1852.

2Yakub Beg (1820--1877), fighting leader of the Tajiks, chamberlain to the Khan of Khokand, war lord of the Syr Daria, etc. (See Appendix.)

3Izzat Kutebar, bandit, guerrilla fighter, so-called Rob Roy of the Steppe. (See Appendix.)

4Presumably such works as "England and Russia in Central Asia" (1879), "Central Asian Portraits" (1880), by D. C. Boulger, and "Caravan Journeys and Wanderings," by J. P. Ferrier. These and companion volumes give, in addition to biographical details, an account of the occupation of the Eastern lands by Russia, which had its origins in the agreement of 1760, when the Kirghiz-Kazak peoples, under their khan, Sultan Abdul Faiz, became nominal subjects of the tsar, receiving his protection in return for their promise to safeguard the Russian caravans. Neither side kept its bargain.

5The Russian expansion into Central Asia in the middle of the last century, which swallowed up all the independent countries and khanates east of the Caspian as far as China and south to Afghanistan, was conducted with considerable brutality. The massacre at Ak Mechet (the White Mosque) by General Perovski, on August 8, 1853, look place as Yakub Beg describes it, but it was surpassed by such atrocities as Denghil Tepe, in the Kara Kum, in 1879, when the Tekke women and children, attempting to escape from the position which their men-folk were holding, were deliberately shot down by Lomakine's troops. In this, as in other places, the Russian commanders made it clear that they were not interested in receiving surrenders.

It is customary nowadays for Russians to refer to this expansion as "tsarist imperialism"; however, it will be noted that while the much-abused Western colonial powers have now largely divested themselves of their empires, the modern Russian Communist state retains an iron grip on the extensive colonies in Central Asia which the old Russian empire acquired.

6The Mongols were said to be descended from a sky-blue wolf. Flashman's Khokandian friends seem to have used the term rather loosely, possibly because many of them were part Mongol by descent. Incidentally, much of Kutebar's speech at this point is almost word for word with a rallying call heard in the Syr Daria country at the time of the Russian advance.

7The military rockets devised by Sir William Congreve were used in the War of 1812, and those described by Flashman were obviously similar to this early pattern, which continued in use for many years. The 32-pound Congreve was a gigantic skyrocket, consisting of an iron cylinder four inches in diameter and over a yard long, packed with powder and attached to a 15-foot stick. It was fired from a slanting trough or tube and travelled with a tremendous noise and a great trail of smoke and sparks, exploding on impact. Although they could fly two miles, the rockets were extremely erratic, and throughout the first half of the 19th Century, frequent modifications were made, including William Hale's spinning rocket and the grooved and finned rocket, which could be fired without a stick.

8The secret society of Assassins, founded in Persia in the 11th Century by Hasan ibn-al-Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, were notorious for their policy of secret murder and their addiction to the hashish drug from which they took their name. At their height, they operated from hill strongholds, mostly in Persia and Syria, and were active against the Crusaders before being dispersed by the Mongol invasion of Hulagu Khan in the 13 Century. Traces of the sect exist today in the Middle East.

This is the third and final installment of "Flashman at the Charge."