to some slave-work in Mogala. Yes, that will be best, for you can pray daily for death and never find it. Is the price too high for your night’s pleasure, Flashman?”
I was trying to close my ears to this horror, trying not to believe it, and babbling to him to spare me. He listened, grinning, and then turned to the woman and said:
“But business before pleasure. My dove, we will let him think of the joyous reunion that you two will have – let him wait for – how long? He must wonder about that, I think. In the meantime, there is a more urgent matter.” He turned back to me. “It will not abate your suffering in the slightest if you tell me what I wish to know; but I think you will tell me, anyway. Since your pathetic and cowardly army was slaughtered in the passes, the Sirdar’s army has advanced towards Jallalabad. But we have no word of Nott and his troops at Kandahar. It is suggested that they have orders – to march on Kabul? On Jallalabad? We require to know. Well?”
It took a moment for me to clear my mind of the hellish pictures he had put there, and understand his question.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I swear to God I don’t know.”
“Liar,” said Gul Shah. “You were an aide to Elfistan; you must know.”
“I don’t! I swear I don’t!” I shouted. “I can’t tell you what I don’t know, can I?”
“I am sure you can,” says he, and motioning Narreeman aside he flung off his poshteen and stood in his shirt and pyjamy trousers, skull-cap on head and whip in hand. He reached out and wrenched my shirt from my back.
I screamed as he swung the whip, and leaped as it struck me. God, I never knew such pain; it was like a fiery razor. He laughed and swung again and again. It was unbearable, searing bars of burning agony across my shoulders, my head swam and I shrieked and tried to hurl myself away, but the chains held me and the whip seemed to be striking into my very vitals.
“Stop!” I remember shrieking, and over and over again. “Stop!”
He stepped back, grinning, but all I could do was mouth and mumble at him that I knew nothing. He lifted the whip again; I couldn’t face it.
“No!” I screamed. “Not me! Hudson knows! The sergeant who was with me – I’m sure he knows! He told me he knew!” It was all I could think of to stop that hellish lashing.
“The havildar knows, but not the officer?” says Gul. “No, Flashman, not even in the British army. I think you are lying.” And the fiend set about me again, until I must have fainted from the pain, for when I came to my senses, with my back raging like a furnace, he was picking his robe from the floor.
“You have convinced me,” says he, sneering. “Such a coward as I know you to be would have told me all he knew at the first stroke. You are not brave, Flashman. But you will be even less brave soon.”
He signed to Narreeman, and she followed him up the steps. At the door he paused to mock me again.
“Think on what I have promised you,” says he. “I hope you will not go mad too soon after we begin.”
The door slammed shut, and I was left sagging in my chains, sobbing and retching. But the pain on my back was as nothing to the terror in my mind. It wasn’t possible, I kept saying, they can’t do it … but I knew they would. For some awful reason, which I cannot define even now, a recollection came to me of how I had tortured others – oh, puny, feeble little tortures like roasting fags at school; I babbled aloud how sorry I was for tormenting them, and prayed that I might be spared, and remembered how old Arnold had once said in a sermon: “Call on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.”
God, how I called; I roared like a bull calf, and got nothing back, not even echoes. I would do it again, too, in the same position, for all that I don’t believe in God and never have. But I blubbered like an infant, calling on Christ to save me, swearing to reform and crying gentle Jesus meek and mild over and over again. It’s a great thing, prayer. Nobody answers, but at least it stops you from thinking.
Suddenly I was aware of people moving into the cell, and shrieked in fear, closing my eyes, but no one touched me, and when I opened them there was Hudson again, chained up beside me with his arms in the air, staring at me in horror.
“My God, sir,” says he, “what have the devils done to you?”
“They’re torturing me to death!” I roared. “Oh, dear saviour!” And I must have babbled on, for when I stopped he was praying, too, the Lord’s Prayer, I think, very quietly to himself. We were the holiest jail in Afghanistan that night.
There was no question of sleep; even if my mind had not been full of the horrors ahead, I could not have rested with my arms fettered wide above my head. Every time I sagged the rusty manacles tore cruelly at my wrists, and I would have to right myself with my legs aching from standing. My back was smarting, and I moaned a good deal; Hudson did his best to cheer me up with the kind of drivel about not being done yet and keeping one’s head up which is supposed to raise the spirits in time of trouble – it has never done a damned thing for mine. All I could think of was that woman’s hating eyes coming closer, and Gul smiling savagely behind her, and the knife pricking my skin and then slicing – oh, Jesus, I couldn’t bear it, I would go raving mad. I said so, at the top of my voice, and Hudson says:
“Come on, sir, we ain’t dead yet.”
“You bloody idiot!” I yelled at him. “What do you know, you clod? They aren’t going to cut your bloody pecker off! I tell you I’ll have to die first! I must!”
“They haven’t done it yet, sir,” says he. “Nor they won’t. While I was up yonder I see that half them Afridis have gone off – to join up wi’ the others at Jallalabad, I reckon – an’ there ain’t above half a dozen left, besides your friend and the woman. If I can just …”
I didn’t heed him; I was too done up to think of anything except what they would do to me – when? The night wore away, and except for one visit at noon next day, when the jezzailchi came to give us some water and food, no one came near us before evening. They left us in our chains, hanging like stuck pigs, and my legs seemed to be on fire one minute and numb the next. I heard Hudson muttering to himself from time to time, as though he was working at something, but I never minded; then, just when the light was beginning to fade, I heard him gasp with pain, and exclaim: “Done it, by God!”
I turned to look, and my heart bounded like a stag. He was standing with only his left arm still up in the shackle; the right one, bloody to the elbow, was hanging at his side.
He shook his head, fiercely, and I was silent. He worked his right hand and arm for a moment, and then reached up to the other shackle; the wrist-pieces were kept apart by a bar, but the fastening of the manacles was just a simple bolt. He worked at it for a moment, and it fell open. He was free.
He came over to me, an ear cocked towards the door.
“If I let you loose, sir, can you stand?”
I didn’t know if I could, but I nodded, and two minutes later I was crouched on the floor, groaning with the pain in my shoulders and legs that had been cramped in one position so long. He massaged my joints, and swore softly over the weals that Gul Shah’s whip had left.
“Filthy nigger bastard,” says he. “Look’ee, sir, we’ve got to look sharp they don’t take us unawares. When they come in we’ve got to be standing up, with the chains on our wrists, pretendin’ we’re still trussed up, like.”
“What then?” says I.
“Why, sir, they’ll think we’re helpless, won’t they? We can take ’em by surprise.”
“Much good that’ll do,” says I. “You say there’s half a dozen apart from Gul Shah.”
“They won’t all come,” says he. “For God’s sake, sir, it’s our only hope.”
I didn’t think it was much of one, and said so. Hudson said, well,