Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements (6 page)

I
n the name of Allah the all-powerful, all-merciful, all-knowing, know that it is by his holy will that we come to free the peoples of the Nile from their immemorial and most cruel bondage to the Turks and the Mamelukes, free men of Frankistan bringing freedom, respecting Islam and the tenets of the holy prophet, may his name be praised and the holy name of Allah most high exalted for ever more.

T
he disembarkation was a fucking shambles and we only took Alexandria as quick as we did to get a fucking drink somewhere, because we were near dead with the thirst. There he sat watching, on a mess of old ruins called Pompey’s Pillar, slashing away at old bits of pot with that whip of his. The town was full of a lot of half-starved blacks, near-blacks you could call them, in filthy rags, raising their hands to the bloody burning heavens when they saw us come in, shouting Allah Allah and so on. Some old bints with veils on gave us fucking filthy water to drink, but filthy or not it was like elation and ecstasy and so on. There was hardly a solitary fucking thing worth having in the whole town, all half-starved goats and so on, and talk about the fucking heat and the smell. Anyway, what they called sheikhs came and gave him the keys, and the officers did all right with like knives and scimitars with jewels on, but then we had to move on to Damanhur and Rahmaniya and so on, near dropping with the fucking heat.

The trouble is, Carné said, all the fucking lies. First we were sailing to England, and then it was Malta we took, and now we’re here, and Christ knows why. The fucking heat and the flies and scorpions and all this fucking sand. On on on, loaded with fucking equipment, only dry biscuits to eat and no water bottles, not that there’d be any water to put in them. Thiriet went mad, crying out ha ha ha I see you mother stop swirling about in the air with all that water pouring out of your tits, then she seemed to call out shoot yourself son, better that way, and by Jesus he did. Blondy and Tireux saw what they swore was the Nile just over the next sandhill, and Hubert said it was what they call a mirage, then he wanted to peel down his breeches to shit but we were told on on on on, got to get there before the Nile floods, wherever the fucking Nile is, so he shat all the time in his breeches like the rest of us.
The
sun
of
glory
fills
the
sky
, but it was a big baker’s oven up there with the doors wide open. Fossard screamed out that he’d gone blind, and so did Teisseire a bit later on, and later on Jacques Carrère. These fucking great swarms of black flies had plenty to drink, which was the sweat on our necks and faces. In a way you could see that a man could laugh at the extremes of the misery of it, for misery could not easily go any further, three days of it, stumbling through all this white sand like hot snow, the dried shit in our breeches, and knowing we were marching on on on on only to get cut to pieces with fucking axes and scimitars at the end of it. Man is born free but is everywhere in chains, as that bastard said. Once or twice we came to villages, but they were all empty or full of dead that the Bedouins had left to the flies and the ants, and the wells had been filled in with stones. Soon it was Alexandre Carrère that went mad and shot himself and nobody stopped him. We were like silent ghosts going through that sand, and the only sound was the buzzing of these fucking great black flies. The sky was pure metal, pewter or brass or something, clanking down on your head with no noise, and the sun was like a great round arse shitting fire.

“W
hat I hear,” Bonaparte said in his tent, whisking at the flies with his whip, “sounds very like mutiny. I gave General Mireur a chance which he dredged up enough honor to take, but there will be no more suicides on my staff. I will shoot General Dumas with my own hand.”

“There’s a lllimit—”

“I will set an example. At the same time let it be known to all ranks that their troubles are nearly over. Temporarily, of course. We shall soon be in Cairo. Murad and Ibrahim are frightened. Now you can tell Croisier to come in.” He took a draught of Italian wine unmixed with water. Captain Croisier almost tottered in, young, scared, pale, sweating. Bonaparte said:

“Your military conduct shows you unfit to be an aide-de-camp. You are a trained soldier leading trained soldiers. It was inexcusable of you not to wipe out that band of Bedouins. They penetrated some of the outer tents. They killed, they stole, they got away.”

“It was a very large band, sir. I had only a handful—”

“Don’t interrupt. To think that an officer of the French Army, an officer moreover entrusted with so high and intimate an appointment—I am ashamed. A ragged troop of marauding Moors, flea-bitten, disease-ridden—”

“As I said, sir, we were outnumbered.”

“Outnumbered? We are always outnumbered. Numbers are nothing, as I showed again and again in Italy. You’re a stain, you’re a blot, a cowardly travesty of a soldier of the Republic. Do you hear me?”

“I can hardly do otherwise, sir.”

“Insolence.” And he cracked Croisier on the body with his whip.

“That, sir, is surely inexcus—”

“Don’t. You. Tell. Me. What.” This time the blow was on the left cheek. In almost no time the flies were feeding. “I hope, sir, you will know how to make amends.”

“Have no fear of that, general. If you want a sacrificial victim, you shall have it.”

“I don’t want a suicide. I don’t want that sort of cowardice again. You’ll have your chance. Now get out.
Out
.” And the whip swished.

Nerves, Berthier was thinking, nerves. Is it worth it, any of it? He had forgotten, in his own exhaustion, what precisely they were supposed to be doing here. Doubts crept:
his
youth, the mess of the disembarkation, the encumbrance of scientific civilians, the worst possible season of the Egyptian year. It was something to do with modernizing this country and something to do with India and Africa and British trade. And saving the Republic, in all this sand, miles from anywhere. Berthier said:

“On bbbehalf of the savants, Monsieur Monge wishes ttt—”

“Soft civilians. No time for them now, let them suffer like the troops. Conquer first, civilize after.”

T
hey could hardly believe it, the retreating arses of all that Mameluke or Turkish cavalry, heathen anyway, crying heathen words as they cantered off in gunsmoke and dust-clouds, dropping spears and jewels and good Birmingham pistols. And soon it was water water water, a world of blessed water, the muddy stinking welcoming mother Nile near Rahmaniya. The citizen troops threw themselves into it like crocodiles and soaked and swilled and gorged, champing the water like solid food, inhaling it like air. Trauner and others burst like blown frogs; others, luckier, vomited up gallons like public fountains. Then Barsacq yelled
watermelons
, and soon they were all gouging and bayoneting and tearing with sore teeth. They lay like babies, sucking succulent pulp. Gabutti got through eight in a single sitting, then the dysenteries started. Mayo and Bonin lay moaning while their entrails pumped out through their anuses. Borderie died wondering what those big pointed things were, staring through the mist, the Holy Trinity perhaps, come to get him.

D
efiling their shadows, infidels, accursed of Allah, with fingernails that are foot-long daggers, with mouths agape like cauldrons full of teeth on the boil, with eyes all fire, shaitans possessed of Iblis, clanking into their wars all linked, like slaves, with iron chains. Murad Bey, the huge, the single-blowed ox-beheader, saw without too much surprise mild-looking pale men dressed in blue, holding, guns, drawn up in squares six deep as though in some massed dance depictive of orchard walls. At the corners of the squares were heavy guns and gunners. There did not seem to be many horsemen. Murad said a prayer within, raised his scimitar to heaven and yelled a fierce and holy word. The word was taken up, many thousandfold, and in a kind of gloved thunder the Mamelukes threw themselves onto the infidel right and nearly broke it. But the squares healed themselves at once, and the cavalry of the faithful crashed in three avenging prongs along the fire-spitting avenues between the walls. A great gun uttered earthquake language at them from within a square, and, rearing and cursing the curses of the archangels of Islam onto the uncircumcised, they wheeled and swung toward their protective village of Embabeh. There they encountered certain of the blue-clad infidel horde on the flat roofs of the houses, coughing musket-fire at them. But then disaster sang along their lines from the rear as shell after shell crunched and the Mamelukes roared in panic and burden to the screams of their terrified mounts, to whose ears these noises were new. Their rear dissolving, their retreat cut off, most sought the only way, that of the river. They plunged in, horseless, seeking to swim across to join the inactive horde of Ibrahim, waiting for action that could now never come. Murad Bey, with such of his horsemen as were left, yelped off inland to Gizeh.

“
L
ike a great big meaty stew,” Gallimard of the 32nd kept saying. In the sauce-colored Nile blown corpses floated gently seaward, to be fished out with bent bayonets. There were good pickings here, since each Mameluke carried his gold about him. On the shore lay ornate pommels, daggers, pistols, all encrusted with pearl and jewels, worth a fucking fortune. “Just no end to it,” Gallimard said, fishing. They all laughed to see him got up like one of these Mamelukes, flashing in the sun with forty centuries of history behind him. Verne and Chaillot snarled at each other, tugging like dogs at a belt with what looked like an English guinea mounted on the clasp. “Stop that, lads,” Gallimard smiled. “Whole river’s shining like farm butter with them. Look.” And he started to harpoon out a sogged and bloated dreaming Mameluke or Turk or whatever he was. “Poor bugger’s in paradise now, drinking sherbet, poor bugger.” But where the rest were looking was to the north, all fire and smoke rising. “Ships. That’ll be that Abraham. Wonder he doesn’t burn up Cairo too. I bet he’s had his Marmedukes shit in the wells. Not that it makes any difference.” They were all plump and sleek with Nile mud.

T
he paperwork was beginning and it was all in Arabic. The Mameluke palace was loud with boots, the music of order. He would have thought: like a ship, clean and trim on a dirty sea of pox and camel-dung. But a ship was not a good symbol these days, not after the horror of the news from Aboukir Bay. Water. The Sphinx kept having a look of Nelson, the pyramids took on in dreams the shape of monstrous advancing hulks. He dictated to young Legrand, who had worked for the Egyptian branch of the Propagation of the Faith: “Why, O people of Cairo, is your city poor and ragged when it should be blazing with health and prosperity? The answer is simple: absentee rule from Constantinople, the presence of a haughty and alien military caste that consults not the welfare of the population but only its own aggrandizement.”

Legrand scratched his cheek with one of Conté’s lead pencils and started to Koranize: I say unto you that you have been brought low by kings who lie with houris on the fat sofas of Stamboul and by those that were once among you and came from lands of the sunset, men pale but warlike, to steal your camels and women and snatch the bread from your teeth, in no wise to raise you high among the peoples of the earth. Meanwhile the C-in-C got on with other things—gunpowder factory, street-lighting, Paris-style café, accommodation for laundresses, a balloon demonstration.

“Done that?”

“Yes, general. General, that case of Arabic type isn’t complete. No toks, not enough nuns.”

“Improvise. Surely you can make a tok out of a combined saad and alif. I leave the details to you.”

“If we could send to Paris—”

“There will be no sending to Paris.” Legrand wondered why. “We must learn to make everything ourselves. Even lead pencils. Monsieur Conté himself is with us. That is something to go in a later proclamation perhaps. Bullets melted down to make lead pencils.”

“There are not many here who use lead pencils.”

“They will learn, we shall teach. Have we kept those dignitaries waiting long enough?”

“The eyes of the eternal are blind to time.”

“Is that in the Koran?”

“It’s the sort of thing they say.” They left the office with its sweating clerks and clomped down a long corridor to a sort of council chamber. Imams and muftis and kathis sat here on cushions, turbaned elders who had risen above the squalor of the flesh. The heat was tamed by wide-eyed boys with feathery fans. One of the muftis much admired one of these boys, and he stroked his buttocks with a gentle hand. The smell of the holy was wafted toward entering Bonaparte, who said with care:

“
Salaam aleikum
.”

They nodded at that and waited. Bonaparte sat on a kind of throne. Young Legrand did his best, but it was a long slow business.

“We believe in Allah, we take the Koran as a sacred book. In our land we broke the power of infidel Rum, in his own land we struck down her Sultan whom men call the Pope, in Malta we slew the Knights, sworn enemies of Islam. Inform your people that we are sent by Allah to geld the evil Turk and raise high the people of the Nile.”

“How can slaves be sent by Allah? You all have hairless faces, the mark of the bondsman.”

“That can be put right, with time and God’s holy help. My men shall grow mustaches. The point I would now make is that we French are children of Islam like yourselves. Where lies the difference, save in things of the surface? We believe in brotherhood under one God, the reward of heaven and the punishment of hell, the power of prayer—”

“You drink wine, you have foreskins. These things have been observed.”

“It was not seemly to raise your flags on the minarets.”

“That was a mistake. We were too eager to show that our cause and the cause of Islam are one. They have all been taken down.”

“As for your circumcisions, the chief modin can arrange all. Your wine must return to the earth whence the grape came.
Haram
.”

“Yes yes yes, later. For now I would ask you to proclaim next Friday from the mimbar in the masjid that the French are protectors of the faith and friends of the Prophet.”