"Flashman, Harry - Flashman in the Great Game" - читать интересную книгу автора (Flashman Harry)
Sure enough, a gust of smoke came billowing in the doorway, setting us coughing and stumbling; a fire-arrow came zipping in to bury itself in Private Ryan's side, and the yells of the niggers redoubled triumphantly. I staggered through the reek, and Thomson was clutching my arm, shouting:
"Must break out . . . two volleys straight in front .. . run for it. .."
It was an affair of split seconds; there wasn't time to think or argue. He and Delafosse and two of the privates stumbled to the door, Thomson yells "Fire!", they all let blast together, and then we put our heads down and went charging out of the temple, with the flames licking up behind us, and drove in a body across the clearing for the shelter of the jungle. The niggers shrieked at the sight of us, I saw the man before me tumble down with a spear in his back, I cannoned into a black figure and he fell away, and then we were haring through the trees, my musket was gone, and no thought but flight. Delafosse was in front of me; I followed him as he swerved on to the path, with the arrows whipping past us; booted feet were thumping behind me, and Thomson was shouting, "On, on - we can distance 'em! - come on, Murphy, Sullivan - to the boat!"
How we broke clear, God knows - the very suddenness with which we'd rushed from the temple must have surprised them - but we could hear their yells in the jungle behind, and they weren't giving up the hunt, either. My lungs were bursting as we ploughed through the thicker jungle near the river, tripping on snags, tearing ourselves, sobbing with exhaustion - and then we were on the bank, and Delafosse was sliding to a halt in the mud and yelling.
"It's gone! Vibart! My God, the boat's gone!"
The mudbank was empty - there was the great groove where the barge had been, but the brown stretch of water was unbroken to the wall of green on its far side; of the barge there wasn't a sign.
"It must have slid off - " Delafosse was crying, and I thought, good for you, my boy, let's stop to consider how it happened, eh, and the niggers can come up and join in. I didn't even check stride; I went into the water in the mightiest racing dive I ever performed, and I heard the cries and splashes as the others took to the river behind me. I was striking out blindly, feeling the current tugging me downstream - I didn't mind; anywhere would do so long as it was away from those black devils screeching in the forest behind. The far bank was too distant to reach, but downstream where the river curved there were islands and sandbanks, and we were being carried towards them far faster than our pursuers could hope to run. I swam hard with the current, until the yelping of the niggers had faded into the distance, and then glanced round to see how the others were getting along. There were four heads bobbing in the water - Delafosse, Thomson, Murphy, and Sullivan, all swimming in my wake, and I was just debating whether to make for the nearest sandbank or allow myself to be carried past, when Delafosse reared up in the water, yelling and gesturing ahead of me. I couldn't make him out, and then the single shrieked word "Muggers!" reached me, and as I looked where he was pointing the steamy waters of the Ganges seemed to turn to ice.
On a mudbank a hundred yards ahead and to my right, shapes were moving - long, brown, hideously scaly dragons waddling down to the water at frightening speed, plashing into the shallows and then gliding out inexorably to head us off, their half-submerged snouts rippling the surface. For an instant I was paralysed - then I was thrashing at the water in a frenzy of terror, trying to get out into midstream, fighting the sluggish current. I knew it was hopeless; they must intercept us long before we could reach the islands, but I lashed out blindly, ploughing through the water, too terrified to look and expecting every moment to feel the agonising stab of crocodile teeth in my legs. I was almost done, with exhaustion and panic, and then Sullivan was alongside, tugging at me, pointing ahead - and I saw that the placid surface was breaking up into a long, swirling race where the water ran down between two little scrubby mudbanks. There was just a chance, if we could get into that broken water, that the faster current might carry us away - muggers hate rough water, anyway - and I went for it with the energy of despair.
One glance I spared to my right - my God, there was one of the brutes within ten yards, swirling towards me. I had a nightmare glimpse of that hideous snout breaking surface, of the great tapering jaws suddenly yawning in a cavern of teeth - and I regret to say I did not notice whether the fourth tooth of the lower jaw was overlapping or not. A naturalist chap, to whom I described my experience a few years ago, tells me that if I'd taken note of this, I'd have known whether I was being attacked by a true crocodile or gavial, or by some other species, which would have added immense interest to the occasion.33 As it was, I can only say that the bloody thing looked like an Iron Maiden rushing at me through the water, and I was just letting out a last wail of despair when Sullivan seized me by the hair, the current tore at our legs, and we were swept away into the rough water between the islands, striking out any old way, going under into the choking brown, coming up again and struggling to stay afloat - and then the water had changed to clinging black ooze, and Sullivan was crying:
"Up, up, sir, for Christ's sake!" and he was half-dragging me through the slime towards the safety of a tangled mass of creeper on top of a mudbank. Delafosse was staggering out beside us, Thomson was knee-deep in the water smashing with a piece of root at the head of a mugger which lunged and snapped before swirling away with a flourish of its enormous tail: Murphy, his arm trickling blood, was already up on the top of the bank, reaching down to help us. I heaved up beside him, shuddering, and I remember thinking: that must be the end, nothing more can happen now, and if it does, I don't care, I'll just have to die, because there's nothing I can do. Sullivan was kneeling over me, and I remember I said:
"God bless you, Sullivan. You are the noblest man alive," or something equally brilliant - although I meant it, by God - and he replied: "I daresay you're right, sir; you'll have to tell my missus, for damn me if she thinks so." And then I must have swooned away, for all I can remember is Delafosse saying: "I believe they are friends - see, Thomson, they are waving to us - they mean us no harm," and myself thinking, if it's the muggers waving, don't you trust the bastards an inch, they're only pretending to be friendly ...
Luck, as I've often observed, is an agile sprite who jumps both ways in double quick time. You could say it had been evil chance that took me to Meerut and the birth of the Mutiny - but I'd escaped, only to land in the hell of Cawnpore, from which I was one of only five to get clear away after the ghat massacre. It had been the foulest luck to run into those wild men in the jungle, and the infernal muggers - but if they hadn't chased us, we mightn't have fetched up on a mudbank under the walls of one of those petty Indian rulers who stayed loyal to the Sirkar. For that was what had happened - the new niggers whom Delafosse saw waving and hallooing from the shore turned out to be the followers of one Diribijah Singh, a tough old maharaj who ruled from a fort in the jungle, and was a steadfast friend of the British. So you see, all that matters about luck is that it should run good on the last throw.
Not that the game was over, you understand; when I think back on the Mutiny, even on Cawnpore, I can say that the worst was still to come. And yet, I feel that the tide turned on that mudbank; at least, after a long nightmare, I can say that there followed a period of comparative calm, for me, in which I was able to recruit my tattered nerves, and take stock, and start planning how to get the devil out of this Indian pickle and back to England and safety.
For the moment, there was nothing to do but thank God and the loyal savages who picked us up from that shoal, with the muggers snuffling discontentedly in the wings. The natives took us ashore, to the maharaj's castle, and he was a brick - a fine old sport with white whiskers and a belly like a barrel, who swore damnation to all mutineers and promised to return us to our own folk as soon as we had recovered and it seemed safe to pass through the country round. But that wasn't for several weeks, and in the meantime the five of us could only lie and recuperate and contain our impatience as best we might - Delafosse and Thomson were itching to get back into the thick of things; Murphy and Sullivan, the two privates, kept their counsel and ate like horses; while I, making an even greater show of impatience than my brother-officers, was secretly well content to rest at ease, blinking in the sun and eating mangoes, to which I'm partial.
In the meantime, we later discovered, great things were happening in the world beyond. When news of Cawnpore's fall got out, it gave the Mutiny a tremendous fillip; revolt spread all along the Ganges valley and in Central India, the garrisons at Mhow and Agra and a dozen other places rebelled, and most notable of all, Henry Lawrence got beat fighting a dani' silly battle at Chinhat, and had to hole up in Lucknow, which went under siege. On the credit side, my old friend the First Gravedigger (General Havelock to you) finally got up off his Puritan rump and struck through Allahabad at Cawnpore; he fought his way in after a nine-day march, and recaptured the place a bare three weeks after we'd been driven out - and I suppose all the world knows what he found when he got there.
You remember that when we escaped the massacre at the Suttee Ghat, the barges with the women and children were caught by the pandies. Well, Nana took them ashore, all 200 of them, and locked them up in a place called the Bibigarh, in such filth and heat that thirty of them died within a week. He made our women grind corn; then, when word came that Havelock was fighting his way in, and slaughtering all opposition, Nana had all the women and children butchered. They say even the pandies wouldn't do it, so he sent in hooligans with cleavers from the Cawnpore bazaar; they chopped them all up, even the babies, and threw them, dead and still living, down a well. Havelock's people found the Bibigarh ankle-deep in blood, with children's toys and hats and bits of hair still floating in it; they had got there two days too late.
I don't suppose any event in my lifetime - not Balaclava nor Shiloh nor Rorke's Drift nor anywhere else I can think of - has had such a stunning effect on people's minds as that Cawnpore massacre of the innocents. I didn't see the full horror of it, of course, as Havelock's folk did, but I was there a few weeks after, and walked in the Bibigarh, and saw the bloody floor and walls, and near the well I found the skeleton bones of a baby's hand, like a little white crab in the dust. I'm a pretty cool hand, as you know, but it made me gag, and if you ask me what I think of the vengeance that old General Neill wreaked, making captured mutineers clean up the Bibigarh, flogging 'em and forcing 'em to lick up the blood with their tongues before they were hanged - well, I was all for it then, and I still am. Perhaps it's because I knew the corpses that went into that well - I'd seen them playing on the Cawnpore rampart, and being heard their lessons in that awful barrack, and laughing at the elephant dunging. Perhaps that baby hand I found belonged to the infant I'd seen in the arms of the woman in the torn gown. Anyway, I'd have snuffed out every life in India, and thought naught of it, in that moment when I looked at Bibigarh - and if you think that shocking, well, maybe I'm just more like Nana Sahib than you are.
Anyway, what I think don't signify. What mattered was the effect that Cawnpore had on our people. I know it turned our army crazy; they were ready to slaughter anything that even sniffed of mutiny, from that moment on. Not that they'd been dealing exactly kindly before; Havelock and Neill had been hanging right, left and centre from Allahabad north, and I daresay had disposed of quite a number of innocents - just as the pandies at Meerut and Delhi had done.35
What beats me is the way people take it to heart - what do they expect in war? It ain't conducted by missionaries, or chaps in Liberal clubs, snug and secure. But what amuses me most is the way fashionable views change - why, for years after Cawnpore, any vengeance wreaked on an Indian, mutineer or not, was regarded as just vengeance; nothing was too bad for 'em. Now it's t'other way round, with eminent writers crying shame, and saying nothing justified such terrible retribution as Neill took, and we were far guiltier than the niggers had been. Why? Because we were Christians, and supposed to know better? - and because England contains this great crowd of noisy know-alls that are forever defending our enemies' behaviour and crying out in pious horror against our own. Why our sins are always so much blacker, I can't fathom - as to Cawnpore, it don't seem to me one whit worse to slay in revenge, like Neill, than out of sheer spite and cruelty, like Nana; at least it's more understandable.
The truth is, of course, that both sides were afraid - the pandy who'd mutinied, and feared punishment, decided he might as well be hanged for a sheep, and let his natural bloodlust go - they're cruel bastards at bottom. And our folk - they'd had an almighty scare, and Cawnpore brought their natural bloodlust to the top in turn; just give 'em a few well-chosen texts about vengeance and wrath of God and they could fall to with a will - as I've already observed about Rowbotham's Mosstroopers, there's nothing crueller than a justified Christian. Except maybe a nigger running loose.
So you can see it was a jolly summer in the Ganges valley, all right, as I and my four companions discovered, when Diribijah Singh finally convoyed us out from his fort and back to Cawnpore after Havelock had retaken it. I hadn't seen old Blood-and-Bones since he'd stood grumping beside my bed at Jallalabad fifteen years before, and time hadn't improved him; he still looked like Abe Lincoln dying of diarrhoea, with his mournful whiskers and bloodhound eyes. When I told him my recent history he just listened in silence, and then grabbed me by the wrist with his great bony hand, dragged me down on to my knees beside him, and began congratulating God on lugging Flashy out of the stew again, through His infinite mercy.
"The shield of His truth has been before thee, Flash-man," cries he. "Has not the Hand which plucked thee from the paw of the bear at Kabul, and the jaws of the lion at Balaclava, delivered thee also from the Philistine at Cawnpore?"
"Absolutely, amen," says I, but when I took him into my confidence - about Palmerston, and why I came to India in the first place, and suggested there was no good reason why I shouldn't head for home at once - he shook his great coffin head.
"It cannot be," says he. "That mission is over, and we need every hand at the plough. The fate of this country is in the balance, and I can ill spare such a seasoned soldier as yourself. There is a work of cleansing and purging before us," he went on, and you could see by the holy fire in his eyes that he was just sweating to get to grips with it. "I shall take you on to my staff, Flashman - nay, sir, never thank me; it is I shall be the gainer, rather than you."
So there I was, and it might have been worse. I'd had no real hope of being sent home - no high command in their right mind would have dispensed with the famous Flash when there was a campaign on hand, and since I had to be here I'd rather be under Havelock's wing than anyone's. He was a good soldier, you see, and as canny as Campbell in his own way; there'd be no massacres or Last Stands round the Union Jack with the Gravedigger in charge.
So I settled in as Havelock's intelligence aide - a nice safe billet in the circumstances, but if you would learn the details of how I fared with him you must consult my official history, Dawns and Departures of a Soldier's Life (in three handsomely-bound morocco volumes, price two gns. each or five gns. the set, though you may have difficulty laying hands on Volume III, since it had to be called in and burned by the bailiffs after that odious little Whitechapel sharper D'Israeli egged on one of his toadies to sue me for criminal information. Suez Canal shares, eh? I'll blacken the bastard's memory yet, though, just see if I don't. Truth will out).
However, the point is that my present tale isn't truly concerned with the main course of the Mutiny henceforth - although I bore my full reluctant part in that - but still with that mad mission on which Pam had sent me out in the first place, to Jhansi and the bewitching Lakshmibai. For I wasn't done with her, whatever Havelock might think, and however little I guessed it myself; the rest of the Mutiny was just the road that led me back to her, and to that final terrible adventure of the Jhansi flight and the guns of Gwalior when - but I'll come to that presently.
In the meantime I'll tell you as briskly as I can what happened in the few months after I joined Havelock at Cawnpore. At first it was damned bad news all round: the Mutiny kept spreading, Nana had sheered off after losing Cawnpore and was raising cain farther up-country, Delhi was still held by the pandies with our people banging away at it, and Havelock at Cawnpore didn't have the men or means to relieve Lucknow, only forty miles away, where Lawrence's garrison was hemmed in. He tried hard enough, but found that the pandy forces, while they didn't make best use of their overwhelming numbers, fought better defensive actions than anyone had expected, and Havelock got a couple of black eyes before he'd gone ten miles, and had to fall back. To make matters worse, Lloyd's advance guard got cut up at Arah, and no one down in Calcutta seemed to have any notion of overall strategy - that clown Canning was sitting like a fart in a trance, they tell me, and no proper order was taken.
I wasn't too upset, though. For one thing I was snug at the Cawnpore headquarters, making a great bandobast*(*Organisation, administration.) over collecting information from our spies and passing the gist on to Havelock (intelligence work is nuts to me, so long as I can stay close to bed, bottle and breakfast and don't have to venture out). And for another, I could sense that things were turning our way; once the first flood of pandy successes had spent itself, there could only be one end, and old Campbell, who was the best general in the business, was coming out to take command-in-chief.
In September we moved on Lucknow in style, with fresh troops under Outram, a dirty-looking little chap on a waler horse, more like a Sheeny tailor than a general. They tell me it was a hell of a march; certainly it rained buckets all the way, and there was some stern fighting at Mangalwarh and at the Alum Bagh near Lucknow town - I know, because I got reports of it in my intelligence ghari at the rear of the column, where I was properly ensconced writing reports, examining prisoners, and getting news from friendly natives - at least, they were friendly by the time my Rajput orderlies had basted 'em a bit. From time to time I poked my head out into the rain, and called cheery encouragement to the reinforcements, or sent messages to Havelock - I remember one of them was that Delhi had fallen at last, and that old Johnny Nicholson had bought a bullet, poor devil. I drank a quiet brandy to him, listening to the downpour and the guns booming, and thought God help poor soldiers on a night like this.
However, having got Lucknow, Havelock and Outram didn't know what the devil to do with it, for the pandies were still thick around as fleas, and it soon became evident that far from raising the siege, our forces were nothing but reinforcement to the garrison. So we were all besieged, for another seven weeks, and the deuce of a business it must have been, with bad rations and the pandies forever trying to tunnel in under our defences, and our chaps fighting 'em in the mines which were like a warren underground. I say "must have been", for I knew nothing about it; the night we entered Lucknow my bowels began to explode in all directions, and before morning I was flat on my back with cholera, for the second time in my life.
For once, it was a blessing, for it meant I was spared knowledge of a siege that was Cawnpore all over again, if not quite as bad. I gather I raved a good deal of the time, and I know I spent weeks lying on a cot in a beastly little cellar, as weak as a rat and not quite in my right mind. It was only in the last fortnight of the siege that I began to get about again, and by that time the garrison was cheery with the news that Campbell was on his way. I limped about gamely at first, looking gaunt and noble, and asking "Is the flag flying still?" and "Is there anything I can do, sir? - I'm much better than I look, I assure you." I was, too, but I took care to lean on my stick a good deal, and sit down, breathing hard. In fact, there wasn't much to do, except wait, and listen to the pandies sniping away - they didn't hit much.
In the last week, when we knew for certain that Camp-bell was only a few days away, with his Highlanders and naval guns and all, I was careless enough to look like a whole man again - it seemed safe enough now, for you must know that at Lucknow, unlike Cawnpore, we were defending a large area, and if one kept away from the outer works, which unemployed convalescents like me were entitled to do, one could promenade about the Residency gardens without peril. There were any number of large houses, half-ruined now, but still habitable, and we occupied them or camped out in the grounds - when I came out of my cellar I was sent to the bungalow, where Havelock was quartered with his staff people, but he packed me off to Outram's headquarters, in case I should be of some use there. Havelock himself was pretty done by this time, and not taking much part in the command; he spent most of his time in Gubbins's garden, reading some bilge by Macaulay - and was greatly intrigued to know that I'd met Lord Know-all and discussed his "Lays" with the Queen; I had to tell Havelock all about that.
For the rest, I yarned a good deal with Vincent Eyre, who'd been in the Kabul retreat with me, and was now one of the many wounded in the garrison, or chaffed with the ladies in the old Residency garden, twitting them about their fashions - for after a six-month siege everyone was dressed any old how, with scraps and curtains and even towels run up into clothes. I was hailed everywhere, of course - jovial Flash, the hero on the mend - and quizzed about my adventures from Meerut to, Cawnpore. I never mind telling a modest tale, if the audience is pretty enough, so I did, and entertained them by imitating Makarram Khan, too, which attracted much notice and laughter. It was an idiot thing to do, as you'll see - it earned another man the V.C., and nearly won me a cut throat.
What happened was this. One morning, it must have been about November 9th or loth, there was a tremendous commotion over on the southern perimeter, where some-one in Anderson's Post claimed he had heard Campbell's pipers in the distance; there was huge excitement, with fellows and ladies and niggers and even children hastening through the ruined buildings, laughing and cheering - and then everything went deadly still as we stood to listen, and sure enough, above the occasional crack of firing, far, far away there was the faintest whisper on the breeze of a pig in torment, and someone sings out, "The Campbells are coming, hurrah, hurrah!" and people were embracing and shaking hands and leaping in the air, laughing and crying all together, and a few dropping to their knees to pray, for now the siege was as good as over. So there was continued jubilation throughout the garrison, and Outram sniffed and grunted and chewed his cheroot and called a staff conference.
He had been smuggling out messages by native spies all through the siege, and now that the relief force was so close he wanted to send explicit directions to Campbell on the best route to take in fighting his way through the streets and gardens of Lucknow to the Residency. It was a great maze of a place, and our folk had had the deuce of a struggle getting in two months earlier, being cut up badly in the alleys. Outram wanted to be sure Campbell didn't have the same trouble, for he had a bare 5,000 men against 6o,000 pandies, and if they strayed or were ambushed it might be the end of them - and consequently of us.
I didn't have much part in their deliberations, beyond helping Outram draft his message in the secret Greek code he employed, and making a desperate hash of it. One of the Sappers had the best route all plotted out, and while they talked about that I went into the big verandah room adjoining to rest from the noon heat, convalescent-like. I sprawled on the cot, with my boots off, and must have dozed off, for when I came to it was late afternoon, the murmur of many voices from beyond the chick screen had gone, and there were only two people talking. Outram was saying:
... it is a hare-brained risk, surely - a white man proposing to make his way disguised as a native through a city packed with hostiles! And if he's caught - and the message falls into their hands? What then, Napier?"
"True enough," says Napier, "but to get a guide out to Campbell - a guide who can point his way for him - is better than a thousand messages of direction. And Kavanaugh knows the streets like a bazaar-wallah."
"No doubt he does," mutters Outram, "but he'll no more pass for a native than my aunt's parrot. What - he's more than six feet tall, flaming red hair, blue eyes, and talks poor Hindi with a Donegal accent! Kananji may not be able to guide Campbell, but at least we can be sure he'll get a message to him."
"Kananji swears he won't go if Kavanaugh does. He's ready to go alone, but he says Kavanaugh's bound to be spotted."
"There you are, then!" I could hear Outram muttering and puffing on a fresh cheroot. "Confound it, Napier - he's a brave man . . . and I'll own that if he could reach Campbell his knowledge of the byways of Lucknow would be beyond price - but he's harder to disguise than .. . damme, than any man in this garrison."
I listened with some interest to this. I knew Kavanaugh, a great freckled Irish bumpkin of a civilian who'd spent the siege playing tig with pandy besiegers in the tunnels beneath our defences - mad as a hatter. And now madder still, by the sound of it, if he proposed to try to get through the enemy lines to Campbell. I saw Outram's problem - Kavanaugh was the one man who'd be a reliable guide to Campbell, if only he could get to him. But it was Tattersall's to a tin can that the pandies would spot him, torture his message out of him, and be ready and waiting for Campbell when he advanced. Well, thank God I wasn't called on to decide .. .
... if he can disguise himself well enough to pass muster with me, he can go," says Outram at last. "But I wish to heaven Kananji would accompany him - I don't blame him for refusing, mind . . . but if only there were someone else who could go along - some cool hand who can pass as a native without question, to do the talking if they're challenged by the pandies - for if they are, and if Kavanaugh has to open that great Paddy mouth of his .. . stop, though! Of course, Napier - the very man! Why didn't it occur ... "
I was off the cot and moving before Outram was half-way through his speech; I knew before he did himself whose name was going to pop into his mind as the ideal candidate for this latest lunacy. I paused only to scoop up my boots and was tip-toeing at speed for the verandah rail; a quick vault into the garden, and then let them try to find me before sunset if they could . . . but blast it, I hadn't gone five steps when the door was flung open, and there was Outram, pointing his cheroot, looking like Sam Grant after the first couple of drinks, crying:
"Flashman! That's our man, Napier! Can you think of a better?"
Of course, Napier couldn't - who could, with the famous Flashy on hand, ripe to be plucked and hurled into the bloody soup? It's damnable, the way they pick on a fellow - and all because of my swollen reputation for derring-do and breakneck gallantry. As usual, there was nothing I could do, except stand blinking innocently in my stocking-soles while Outram repeated all that I'd heard already, and pointed out that I was the very man to go along on this hideous escapade to hold the great Fenian idiot's hand for him. I heard him in mounting terror, concealed behind a stern and thoughtful aspect, and replied that, of course, I was at his disposal, but really, gentlemen, was it wise? Not that I cared about the risk (Jesus, the things I've had to say), but I earnestly doubted whether Kavanaugh could pass . . . my convalescent condition, of course, was a trifling matter ... even so, one wouldn't want to fail through lack of strength . . . not when a native could be certain of getting through .. .
"There isn't a loyal sepoy in this garrison who can come near you for skill and shrewdness," says Outram briskly, "or who'd stand half the chance of seeing Kavanaugh safe. Weren't you playing your old Pathan role the other day for the ladies? As to the toll of your illness - I've a notion your strength will always match your spirit, whatever happens. This thing's your meat and drink, Flashman, and you know it - and you've been fairly itching to get into harness again. Eh?"
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