Free Napoleon Symphony: A Novel in Four Movements by Anthony Burgess Page A

you ungrateful and cowardly effeminate bastards, not one decent cubic millimeter of man’s sperm in the fucking lot of you, I’ll turn you over to the Turks to have great men’s rods stuck up your wincing sweet little arseholes, that’s what I’ll do, I’ll paint and powder you and sell you in the market, not that you’d fetch more than two cunting Turkish piasters, the sweet-breathed girly-wirly mincing and primping lot of you, a load of perverts and bloodless bastards of bitches’ gets, get out of my nauseated line of fire before I spew, you filthy cockless unsoldierly ingrates.” And then there were the sick to be transported back to Cairo (where already the holy war might have spread like the bubonic and smiling beards above gelders’ knives be waiting at the gates), and how in the name of filthy castrating Allah did you march men back through the Sinai who couldn’t even sit a mule? He reviewed the sweating patients in gloom, all distorted with buboes, and if you could kill prisoners, breaking one rule of war, you could. Put them out of their misery, you did it with animals.
    “Out of their misery.” To Desgenettes, in charge of medical services. “A strong dose of laudanum. I think you know what I have in mind.”
    “An overdose? You mean, you suggest, you would order that I give an—?”
    “I did not use that word, you did. A strong dose, I said. An unusually strong dose. That’s not the same as an overdose.”
    Desgenettes gave the cold-blood Turk-slayer a look of special awe: killing your business, mine save lives. “It may act as an emetic. Painful in their weakened—”
    “They’ll vomit the plague up, they may vomit the. What do you want, eh, what are you after?” He double-rayed onto the groom, a good obsequious man, disproportionate lightning. “What horse, you say, which horse do I choose, do I hear aright, horse ? Horses only for the incapacitated, do you hear me, everyone else on his own two feet or one foot or whatever he has. Poor Max, poor poor Max. Including me, yes, me, yes, me, me, me.” And he laid into the groom with his whip. He likes it, Desgenettes thought, he likes to be cruel.
    “Can I go now, sir?” the smarting groom said.
    “Go, go, go.” And a couple of whip-strokes on his back. “Who asked you to come in the first place?”
    A good question to ponder as they trudged. Out of Syria with. Yelling fly-swarms of rear-harriers and. Marauders. He did, lui , but he would, would he not, proclaim himself no more than the agent of the goddess of republics, reason, humanity, knowledge, scientific progress, the goddess being encharged with many portfolios. A book of many volumes, all about Egypt, was being paid for by that man roped to a mule, vomiting endlessly into the sand, the vomit punching a transitory hole into the dense mob of black flies that fed on him, that man in multiplicate. And the British flag flew in the Acre wind and, on the Mediterranean, British warships flaunted like whores in the Place de la Concorde.
    “The laudanum worked, the excess dose.”
    “What?”
    “Some of them expelled the activating organism. Praise God, or lui , or something.”
    Sand and sand and everywhere was sand,
    Sand and sand and sand on hand and hand,
    The Holy Land I understand is sand.
    Expand the planned command that planned the sand,
    With blue too true a blue too blue to view
    Garagorigrawninfieryfieryflaw
    And blue to you who blew the few that flew.
    Then band and bland and brand and gland and grand
    And hand and land and rand and strand and sand
    And then remand the band in ampersand
    And overland and reprimand the sand.
    F rom Murat: They fell on such fleshpots as were, and lui , hardly pausing for a bath and a change of uniform, fell on his little blonde from Carcassonne. It was a matter of watching the sea, and the expected Turkish fleet was sighted making, it was evident, for Alexandria, or rather the peninsula they name Aboukir. We gave them a whole fortnight to