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

I’d seen, but you have to imagine what it was like to be living at the mercy of that creature, day in day out, without hope of release. Fear spread from her like a mist, and if her court was a proper little viper’s nest of intrigue and spying and plotting, it wasn’t because her noble and advisers were scheming for power, but for sheer survival. They went in terror of those evil snake eyes and that flat grunting voice so rarely heard – and then usually to order arrest, torture, and horrible death. Those are easy words to write, and you probably think they’re an exaggeration; they’re not. That beastly slaughter I’d witnessed under the cliff at Ambohipotsy was just a piece of the regular ritual of purge and persecution and butchery which was everyday at Antan’ in my time; her appetite for blood and suffering was insatiable, and all the worse because it was unpredictable.

      It wouldn’t have seemed so horrible, perhaps, if Madagascar had been some primitive nigger tribal state where everyone ran about naked chanting mumbo-jumbo and living in huts. Well, I remember my old chum King Gezo of Dahomey, sitting slobbering like a beast before his death-house (built of skulls, if you please) tucking into his luncheon while his fighting women chopped prisoners into bloody gobbets within a yard of him. But he was an animal, and looked like one; Ranavalona wasn’t – quite.

      She had not bad taste in clothes, for example, and knew enough to hang pictures on the walls, and have her banquets laid with knives and forks just so, and place-cards (Solomon was right: I saw ’em – “Serjeant-General Flatchman, Esq., yours truly” was what mine said on one occasion, in copperplate handwriting). I mean, she had carpets, and silk sheets, and a piano, and her nobles wore trousers and frock coats, and addressed their women-folk as “Mam’selle” – my G-d, haven’t I seen a couple of her Comtesses, sitting at a palace dinner, chattering like civilized women, with silver and crystal and linen before them, ignoring the cutlery and gobbling food with their fingers, and then one turning to t’other and twittering: “Permittez-moi, chérie,” and proceeding to delouse her neighbour’s hair. That was Madagascar – savagery and civilization combined into a horrid comic-opera, a world turned upside down.

      And at the head of the table she would sit, in a fine yellow satin gown from Paris, a feather boa stuck through her crown, pearls on her black bosom and in her long earrings, chewing on a chicken leg, holding up her goblet to be refilled, and getting drunker and drunker – for when it came to lowering the booze she could have seen a sergeants’ mess under the table. It didn’t show in her face; the plump black features never changed expression, only the eyes glittered in their piercing uncanny stare. She wouldn’t smile; her talk would be an occasional growl to the terrified sycophants sitting beside her, and when she rose at last, wiping her sullen mouth, everyone would spring up and bow and scrape while two of her generals, perspiring, would escort her down the room and out on to the great balcony, lending her an arm if she staggered, and over the great crowd waiting in the courtyard below would fall a terrible silence – the silence of death.

      I’ve seen her, leaning on that verandah, with her creatures about her, gazing down on the scene below; the ring of Hova guardsmen, the circle of torches flaming over the archways, the huddled groups of unfortunates, male and female, from mere striplings to old decrepit folk, cowering and waiting. They might be recaptured slaves, or fugitives hunted out of the forests and mountains, or criminals, or non-Hova tribesmen, or suspected Christians, or anyone who, under her tyranny, had merited punishment. She would look down for a long time, and then nod at one group and grunt: “Burning,” and then at another, “Crucifixion,” and at a third, “Boiling.” And so on, through the ghastly list – starvation, or flaying alive, or dismembering, or whatever horror occurred to her monstrous taste. Then she would go inside – and next day the sentences would be carried out at Ambohipotsy in front of a cheering mob. Sometimes she attended herself, watching unmoved, and then going home to the palace to spend hours praying to her personal idols under the paintings in her reception room.

      While most of her cruelties were practised on common folk and slaves, her court was far from immune. I remember at one of her levées, at which I was in humble attendance with the military, she suddenly accused a young nobleman of being a secret Christian. I’ve no idea whether he was or not, but there and then he was submitted to ordeal – they have any number of ingenious forms of this, including swimming rivers infested by crocodiles, but in his case they boiled up a cauldron of water, right in front of her seat, and she sat staring fixedly at his face as he tried to snatch coins out of the bubbling pot, plucking, and screaming while the rest of us watched, trying not to be sick. He failed, of course – I can still see that pathetic figure writhing on the floor, clutching his scalded arm, before they carried him out and sawed him in half.

      Not quite what we’re accustomed to at Balmoral, you’ll agree, but at least Ranavalona didn’t go in for tartan carpets. Her wants were simple: just give her an ample supply of victims to mutilate and gloat over and she was happy – not that you’d have guessed it to look at her, and indeed I’ve heard some say that she was just plain mad and didn’t know what she was doing. That’s an old excuse which ordinary folk take refuge in because they don’t care to believe there are people who enjoy inflicting pain. “He’s mad,” they’ll say – but they only say it because they see a little of themselves in the tyrant, too, and want to shudder away from it quickly, like well-bred little Christians. Mad? Aye, Ranavalona was mad as a hatter, in many ways – but not where cruelty was concerned. She knew quite what she was doing, and studied to do it better, and was deeply gratified by it, and that’s the professional opinion of kindly old Dr Flashy, who’s a time-served bully himself.

      So you see what a jolly, carefree life it was for her court, of whom I suppose I was one in my capacity of mount of the moment. It was a privileged position, as I soon realized; you recall I told you how I took pains to curry favour with the top military nobles – well, I soon discovered that the compliment was returned, slave though I was officially. They toadied me something pitiful, those black sweating faces and trembling paws in gaudy uniforms – they assumed, you see, that I only had to whisper the word in her ear and they’d be off to the pits and the cross. They needn’t have fretted; I never knew one of ’em from t’other, hardly, and anyway I was too alarmed for my own safety to do anything with her d----d black ear but chew it, loving-like.

      You may wonder how I stuck it out; or how I could bring myself to make love to that female beast. Well, I’ll tell you; if it’s a choice between romping and being boiled or roasted, you can bring yourself to it, believe me. She wasn’t bad-looking beneath the neck, after all, and she seemed to like me, which always helps – you may find it difficult to believe (I do myself) but there were even moments, on warm, silent afternoons, when we would be drowsing on the bed, or by her bath, and I would steal a glance along the pillow at that placid black face, comely enough with the eyes closed, and feel even a touch of affection for her. You can’t hate a woman you sleep with, I suppose. Mind you, once that black eyelid lifted, and that eye was on you, it was another story.

      One thing, though, I feel inclined to say in her defence, having said so much ill of her, and rightly. At least some of her excesses, especially in the persecution of Christians (I wasn’t one, by the way, during my Madagascar sojourn, as I took pains to point out to anyone who’d listen), were inspired by her idol-keepers. I’ve said there was no religion in her country, which is true – their superstition was not on an organized basis – but there were these fellows who read omens and looked after the stones and sticks and lumps of mud which passed for household gods. (Ranavalona had two, a boar tusk and a bottle, which she used to mutter to.)

      Well, the idol-keepers had helped her to the throne when she was a young woman, after her husband the king died, and his nephew, the rightful heir, had been all set to ascend the throne. The idol-keepers, in their role as augurs, had said the omens favoured Ranavalona instead, and since she at the same time was busily organizing a coup d’état, slaughtering the unlucky nephew and all her other immediate relatives, you couldn’t say the idol-keepers were wrong: they’d picked the winner. They obtained such influence with her that they even persuaded her to kill off the lovers who had helped her coup, and she relied on them for guidance ever after.

I was always very civil to them myself, with a cheery “Good morning” and a dollar or two, mangy brutes though they were, shuffling through