The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection. George Fraser MacDonald

go free – Mauritius, if I can do it safely – I swear—”

      “You swear! D’you imagine I’d trust you for an instant?”

      And then the black’s voice, speaking harsh French, cut across his reply.

      “You.” He was pointing at me. “You say you were a prisoner on that ship. And you are English. Is it so?”

      I looked at the commandant, leaning forward from his sedan in that ludicrous Hallowe’en rig, his great ebony head cocked on one side, bloodshot eyes regarding me. As I nodded in reply to the officer’s question, the commandant took a peeled mango from one of his minions and began to cram it into his mouth, juice spurting over his gloved hand and over his ridiculous kilt. He tossed the stone away, wiped his hand on his shirt, and said in careful French, in a croaking rasp:

      “And your wife, you say, is also a prisoner of this man?”

      “Pardon, excellency.” Solomon pushed forward. “This is a great misunderstanding, as I have tried to explain. This man is of my ship’s company, and is covered by my safe-conduct and trading licence from her majesty. I beg you to allow—”

      “He denies it,” croaked the commandant. He cleared his throat and spat comprehensively, hitting one of the soldiers on the leg. “He swam ashore. And he is English.” He shrugged. “Shipwrecked.”

      “Oh, Ch---t,” muttered Solomon, licking his lips.

      The commandant wagged a finger the size of a black cucumber, peering at Solomon. “He is plainly not covered by your licence or safe-conduct. Nor is his wife. That licence, Monsieur Suleiman, does not exempt you from Malagassy law, as you should know. It is only by special favour that you yourself escape the fanompoana – what you call … corvée?” He gestured at me. “In his case, there is no question.”

      “What the dooce is he talking about?” says I to Solomon. “Where’s the British consul? I’ve had enough—”

      “There’s no such thing, you fool!” Solomon was positively wringing his hands; suddenly he was a fat, frightened man. “Excellency, I implore you to make an exception – this man is not a castaway – I can swear he intended no harm in her majesty’s dominions—”

      “He will do none,” says the commandant and jabbered curtly at the officer. “He is lost” – a phrase whose significance escaped me just then. The coolies lifted the sedan, and away it swayed, the officer barked an order, and a file of his soldiers trotted past us, their leader bawling to one of the boatmen, summoning his craft to the jetty.

      “No – wait!” Solomon’s face was contorted with anguish. “You idiot!” he shrieked at me, and then he started first this way and that, calling to the commandant, and then running down the jetty after the file of soldiers. The black officer laughed, indicated me, and snapped an order to two of his men. It wasn’t till they grabbed my arms and began to run me off the jetty that I came to my senses; I roared and struggled, bawling for Solomon, shouting threats of what would happen to them for laying their filthy hands on an Englishman. I lashed out, and a musket-butt sprawled me half-conscious on the planking. Then they dragged me up, and one of them, his great black face blasting foul breath all over me, snapped shackles on my wrists; they seized the chain and hauled me headlong up the street, with the blacks eyeing me curiously and children running alongside, squealing and laughing.

      That was how I became a captive in Madagascar.

As you know – or rather, you don’t, but if you’re intelligent you’ll have guessed – I’m a truthful man, at least where these memoirs are concerned. I’ve got nothing to lie for any longer, who lied so consistently – and successfully – all my life. But every now and then, in writing, I feel I have to remind you, and myself, that what I tell you is unvarnished fact. There are things that strain belief, you see, and Madagascar was one of them. So I will only say that if, at any point, you doubt what follows, or think old Flash is telling stretchers, just go to your local libraries, and consult the memoirs of my dear old friend Ida Pfeiffer, of the elastic-sided boots, or Messrs Ellis and Oliver, or the letters of my fellow-captives, Laborde of Bombay and Jake Heppick the American shipmaster, or Hastie the missionary.³³ Then you’ll realize that the utterly unbelievable things I tell you of that h--lish island, straight out of “Gulliver”, are simple, sober truth. You couldn’t make ’em up.

      Now I won’t bore you by describing the shock and horror I experienced, either at the beginning, when I realized I had escaped from Solomon’s frying-pan into something infinitely worse, or later, as further abominations unfolded. I’ll just recount what I saw and experienced, as plain as I can.

      My first thoughts, when they threw me chained and battered, into a stuffy go-down at Tamitave, were that this must be some bad dream from which I should soon awake. Then my mind turned to Elspeth; from what had passed on the jetty it had seemed that they’d been going to drag her ashore, too – for what fate I could only guess. You see, I was at a complete nonplus, quite out of my depth; once I’d had my usual little rave and blubber to myself, I tried to remember what Solomon had told me about Madagascar on the voyage out, which hadn’t been much, and what I recalled was far from comforting. Wild and savage beyond description, he’d said … weird customs and superstitions … half the population in slavery … a she-monster of a queen who aped European fashions and held ritual executions by the thousand … a poisonous hatred of all foreigners – well, my present experience confirmed that, all right. But could it truly be as awful as Solomon had painted it? I hadn’t believed him above half, but when I thought of that frightful nigger commandant in his bumbee tartan kilt and brolly … well.

      Fortunately for my immediate peace of mind I didn’t know one of the worst things about Madagascar, which was that once you were inside it, you were beyond hope of rescue. Even the most primitive native countries, in my young days, were at least approachable, but not this one; its capital, Antananarivo (Antan’, to you), might as well have been on the moon. There was no appeal to outside, or even communication; no question of Pam or the Frogs or Yanks sending a gunboat, or making diplomatic representations, even. You see, no one knew about Madagascar, hardly. Barring a few pirates like Kidd and Avery in the old days, and a handful of British and French missionaries – who’d soon been cleared out or massacred – no one had visited it much except heeled-and-ready traders like Solomon, and they walked d----d warily, and did their business from their own decks offshore. We’d had a treaty with an earlier Malagassy king, sending him arms on condition that he stopped slave-trading, but when Queen Ranavalona came to the throne (by murdering all her relatives) in 1828, she’d broken off all traffic with the outside world, forbidden Christianity and tortured all converts to death, revived slavery on a great scale, and set about exterminating all tribes except her own. She was quite mad, of course, and behaved like Messalina and Attila the Hun, either of whom would have taken one look at her and Written to The Times, protesting.

      To give you some notion of the kind of blood-stained bedlam the country was, she’d already slaughtered one-half of her subjects, say a million or so, and passed decrees providing for a wall round the whole island to keep out foreigners (it would only have had to be three thousand miles long), four gigantic pairs of scissors to be set up on the approaches to her capital, to snip invaders in two, and the building of massive iron plates from which the cannon-shots of European ships would rebound and sink them. Eccentric, what? Of course, all this was unknown to me when I landed; I began to find out about it, painfully, when they hauled me out of the cooler next morning, still – in my innocence – protesting and demanding to see my lawyer.

      My French-speaking officer had disappeared, so all my entreaties earned was blows and kicks. I’d had no food or drink for hours, but now they gave me a stinking mess of fish, beans, and rice, and a leaf-spoon to eat it with. I gagged it down with the help of their vile brown rice-water, and then, despite my objections, I and a gang of other unfortunates, all black of course, were herded up through the town, heading inland.

      Tamitave’s not much of a settlement. It has a fort, and a few hundred wooden houses, some of them quite large, with the high-pitched Malagassy thatches. At first sight