Flashman on the March. George Fraser MacDonald

She will be paid for this service, of course. Which reminds me, Moore has a purse of two hundred dollars for your expenses … Yes,’ says he, taking another tug at his face-furniture, hesitant-like, ‘another thing you should know is that, ah, Madam … Uliba is peculiarly qualified for this mission by being herself a Galla – indeed, she is the younger half-sister of the rival queens, Masteeat and Warkite, the child of a concubine, and so excluded from the throne. A position,’ he sounded almost apologetic, ‘which Speedy tells me she very much resents.’

      Well, he’d kept the best for the last, hadn’t he? I began to see why I’d been instructed by careful stages, and why he’d interrupted Speedy a while ago, so that only now, at the eleventh hour, had the full mischief become plain – I was to be escorted, on my embassy to a queenly barbarian, by a jealous sibling who was no doubt itching to cut her big sister’s throat and seize her throne … and didn’t she look the part, too, a real Abyssinian Goneril with that handsome figurehead and arrogant tilt to her chin, toying with her little spear and knowing dam’ well that everyone in the tent was eyeing her shape – by gad, it was all there, though. You can see I was distracted, what with the prospect of deadly danger, diplomatic complications, a possible attempted coup d’etat, a siege to arrange … and two weeks in the intimate company of as splendid a piece of bounce as I’d seen since … since that fat little bundle on the voyage to Trieste – not that Fraulein von Thingamabob could compare with this superb Amazon. I won’t deny I’d rather have been squiring Elspeth to a Belgravia bunfight in safe, humdrum old England, but what the devil, when your fate’s fixed, you make the best of it, and now that Napier was asking if there was anything more he could do for me, I did what I’d done so often, and put on a Flashy brag, the bravado of despair, I guess it is, the fraudster’s instinct to play out the charade.

      ‘I’d be obliged for a revolver and fifty rounds, sir. Oh, and a box of cheroots, if you have one to spare.’

      D’you know, he clapped his hands, and when I think back to that strange, fateful evening at Mai Dehar, my most vivid memory isn’t of the bizarre commission they laid on me, or the pantomime figure of Speedy in his outlandish toggery, or even of those sleek polished limbs a-glow in the lamplight … no, what I remember is a tired, lined old face lit by a sudden brilliant smile.

      ‘Come closer, into the firelight where I can see you,’ says Uliba-Wark. ‘If you are to be a horse-trader out of Hindustan you’d best look like one.’

      I shifted my seat before the fire until our faces were no more than a foot apart, and was pleasantly aware of smooth shoulders and well-filled tunic bodice, and the faint musky perfume of oiled skin as she leaned forward, black eyes intent. She put out a hand to feel my hair, which fortunately I was wearing long, and flicked at my whiskers with disdain.

      ‘Those must go, and you’ll let your hair grow and oil it with ghi in the Indian fashion.’ She ran a finger-tip through my moustache, cool as you please. ‘Less hair on your upper lip and no beard.’ So much for your notions, Napier. ‘You can speak the tongue of India, at need?’

      ‘More than one of them, sultana,’ says I. ‘And better than my Arabic, for which you must forgive me. It is a long time since I was among the badawi.’

      ‘You speak it well enough,’ says she. ‘Why do you call me sultana? I am no queen.’

      ‘You look like one.’ It’s a compliment I’ve found useful with barbarian ladies, and it made this one laugh with a curl of those enchanting lips that looked as though they’d been carved from purple marble.

      ‘That has been said to me before,’ says she, ‘and surely you have said it to others.’ She sat back, folding her long legs beneath her, mocking me. ‘Well, Khasim Tamwar, for so I must think of you now, you are a very handsome rogue of a horse-trader with a tongue to match, and now that we’ve exchanged our compliments we can leave flirting for the moment and be serious.’

      Napier was right; she was unusual. Talking to her in my halting Arabic, and accustoming my ears to hers, so musically different in accent from the guttural desert speech, I found her a bewildering contradiction: she looked like a noble savage, a primitive from out yonder, but with a thoroughly worldly mind, unless I was much mistaken, and while she bore herself with the freedom and authority of a man, she was as conscious of her sex and how to use it as any coquette on the boulevards.

      She’d charmed Napier, no question, which I’d have thought nigh impossible for a half-naked female savage toting a spear, but he’d referred to her, hesitantly, as ‘Madam’ and inclined his head gallantly over her hand on parting. And he’d been ready to consign me, and the fate of my mission, to her without a qualm, apparently; you know how bare had been his instructions to me, and it was only at the last minute that he’d touched on the vital matter of how I should communicate with him after I’d reached Queen Masteeat. If all went well with her, no doubt she’d provide a messenger; if things went wrong … well, we’d just have to wait and see, what?

      I doubt if I’ve ever been sent into the deep field with a more definite object and less instruction on how to attain it, but now that we were under way, sitting round a camp-fire a mile or so from Mai Dehar, I felt encouraged by the way Uliba-Wark had taken things in her stride: one moment I’d been wrapping the money-belt of two hundred dollars under my sash, being bidden God speed by Napier and having my hand mangled by Speedy – and the next we were out in the chill dark, her two Ab escorts hasting ahead up the hill, dim shadows disappearing over the crest behind the camp. She hadn’t even motioned me to follow, just a glance to make sure I was keeping pace with her. In a moment we’d passed beyond the glow of the camp, and I’d lost her in the gloom until a slim hand closed on mine, leading me at a swift walk – and that guidance, steady and sure, had confirmed what I’d said to Napier: she knew her business.