was flung open, a Manchoo officer poked his head in, shrieking – and Trooper Nolan, glaring desperately about him, had made good and sure he was closest to the door. The Manchoo officer shouted again, gesturing; Nolan, wearing what I can best describe as a grin of gloating guilt, took a step towards him; Brabazon was standing back, ramrod-straight, while I did my damnedest not to catch the chairman’s eye.
“Take him!” yells the officer, and two of his minions plunged in and flung Nolan from the cage. The door slammed shut, I sighed and loafed across to it, looking down through the bars at him as he stood gripped by two Bannermen.
“Be sure and tell ’em about Tang-ku Fort,” says I softly, and he goggled in bewilderment. Then, as they ran him to the parapet, he must have realised what was happening, for he began to struggle and yell, and I staggered back from the door, crying to Brabazon in stricken accents:
“My God! What are they doing? Why, that lying hound of a mandarin – ah, no, it cannot be!”
They had forced Nolan to his knees before the wounded mandarin, who left off bellowing long enough to spit in his face; then they hauled him up on to the parapet, and while two gripped his arms and bent him double, a third seized his hair and dragged his head forward. The officer drew his sword, shook back his sleeve, and braced himself.
“Mother o’ mercy! Oh, Christ, don’t –!”
The scream ended abruptly – cut off, as you might say, and I sank my face into my hands with a hollow groan, reflecting that who steals my purse may get away with it, but he who filches from me my good name will surely find his tits in the wringer.
“The filthy butchers!” roars Brabazon. “Oh, the poor fellow! But why, in heaven’s name, when they’d said –”
“Because that’s the kind of swine John Chinaman is!” I growled. “They lie for the pleasure of it, Brabazon!”
He gritted his teeth and drew a shuddering breath. “And my last words to him were a rebuke! Did you … did you know him well, sir?”
“Well enough,” I said. “A rough diamond, but … Here, how are the Frogs getting along?”
In fact, they were making capital progress, bayonetting away with élan in the second entrenchment, and while the Chinese positions to the right were hidden by smoke, from the sounds of things the British attack was going well. The Imps seemed to be giving back all along the line; hundreds of them were streaming over the bridge, with officers trying to rally them, riding about and howling, but there was only one way the battle could go – the question was, would they slaughter us before we could be rescued? Torn between terror and hope, I reckoned it was odds on our preservation, unless that reckless fool of a mandarin stopped another splinter – in which case we’d better chivvy up the priest, he being well stricken in years and presumably in a state of grace. I looked anxiously for the mandarin, and saw he was being held up by two of his pals while directing operations; but the Armstrongs seemed to have given over for the moment, and clattering up the bridge came a cavalcade of gorgeously-armoured nobles, accompanied by standard-bearers; my heart rose in my throat as I saw that their leader was Sang-kol-in-sen.
He was reining up, addressing the mandarin, and now the whole gang turned towards the cage, the mandarin pointing and yelling orders. My knees gave under me – hell, were they going to serve us as they’d served Nolan? The Bannermen swarmed in and three of us were hauled out – they left the Sikhs, and in a moment I understood why. For they flung us down on the flags before Sang’s horse, and that ghoulish face was turned on us, pale eyes glaring under the wizard’s helmet, as he demanded to know if any of us spoke Chinese.
Now, he wasn’t asking that for the purpose of execution, so I hauled myself upright and said I did. He considered me, frowning malevolently, and then snarled:
“Your name, reptile?”
“Flashman, colonel on the staff of Lord Elgin. I demand the immediate release of myself and my four companions, as well as –”
“Silence, foulness!” he screamed, on such a note that his pony reared, and he hammered its head with his mailed glove to quiet it. “Snake! Pig!” He leaned down from the saddle, mouthing like a madman, and struck me across the face. “Open your mouth again and it will be sewn up! Bring him!” He wheeled his mount and clattered away, and I was seized, my wrists bound, and I was flung bodily on to a cart. As it rolled away I had one glimpse of Brabazon looking after me, and the little priest, head bowed, telling his beads. I never saw them again. No one did.34
This may seem an odd time to mention it, but my entry to Pekin recalls a conversation which I had a couple of years ago with the eminent wiseacre and playwright, George B. Shaw (as I call him, to his intense annoyance, though it don’t rile him as much as “Bloomsbury Bernie”). I was advising him on pistol-play for a frightful pantomime he was writing about a lynching in a Kansas cow-town35; discussing hangings set him off on the subject of pain in general, and he advanced the fatuous opinion that mental anguish was worse than physical. When I could get a word in, I asked him if spiritual torment had ever made him vomit; he allowed it hadn’t, so I told him what my Apache wife had done to Ilario the scalp-hunter, and had the satisfaction of watching our leading dramatist bolting for the lavatory with his handkerchief to his mouth. (Of course, I didn’t get the better of him; as he said later, it was the thought that had made him spew, not pain itself. The hell with him.)
I reflect on this only because the most prolonged pain I ever endured – and I’ve been shot, stabbed, hung by the heels, flogged, half-drowned, and even stretched on the rack – was on the road into Pekin. All they did was tie my hands and feet – and pour water on my bonds; then they hauled my wrists up behind me and tied ’em to a spar above the cart, and set off at a slow trot. The blazing sun and the bouncing cart did the rest; I’ll not describe it, because I can’t, save to say that the fiery agony in wrists and ankles spreads through every nerve of your body until you’re a living mass of pain, which will eventually drive you mad. Luckily, Pekin is only eleven miles from Tang-chao.
I don’t remember much except the pain – long rows of suburbs, yellow faces jeering and spitting into the cart, a towering redoubt of purple stone topped by crenellated turrets (the Anting Gate), foul narrow streets, a blue-covered carriage with the driver sitting on the shaft – he called to his passengers to look, and I was aware of two cold, lovely female faces regarding me without expression as I half-hung, whimpering, in my bonds. They weren’t shocked, or pitying, or amused, or even curious; merely indifferent, and in my agony I felt such a blazing rage of hatred that I was almost exalted by it – and now I can say, arrant coward that I am, that at least I understand how martyrs bear their tortures: they may have faith, and hope, and all the rest of it, but greater than these is blind, unquenchable red anger. It sustained me, I know – the will to endure and survive and make those ice-faced bitches howl for mercy.
It must have cleared my mind, for I remember distinctly coloured pagoda roofs bigger than I’d ever seen, and a teahouse with dragons’ heads above its eaves, and the great scarlet Gate of Valour into the Imperial City – for Pekin, you must know, is many cities within each other, and innermost of all is the Forbidden City, the Paradise, the Great Within, girded by gleaming yellow walls and entered by the Gate of Supreme Harmony.
There are palaces for seven hundred princes within the Imperial City, but they pale before the Great Within. It is simply not of this world. Like the Summer Palace, outside Pekin, it’s entirely cut off from reality, a dreamland, if you like, where the Emperor and his creatures live out a great play in their stately halls and gorgeous gardens, and all that matters is formality and finger-nails
