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

encamp and to rest and reinvigorate our men. Report spoke of some ten thousand Turks, many of them of the new militia or, in their language, yeniceri , yeni meaning new, and frenched to janissaries, colorful in their red and blue and well-trained in the employment of musket, saber and pistol. When lui observed their formation—one line on flat ground and another on Mount Vizir—he said what was difficult at first wholly to understand: “She was wrong about water, wrong, wrong, wrong.” We concentrated on the line that stretched along the plain, Lannes with L’Estaing breaking the center, and your humble servant (whom, I fear, you will be shocked to see changed facially if not in heart or in the prowess of the amorous lists) to lead the cavalry against the flanks. As expected, the whole line retreated in some disorder to join their fellows on the hill, and then it was a matter of a vigorous cavalry charge into the very heart of these Mussulman worthies. It was on this occasion that your servant lost his good looks. I was honored to be confronted by the Turkish general himself, a fine if ancient fellow named Mustufa or Mustafa, the Mussulman being uncertain as to his vowels, who fired straight at my jaw with some inevitable disordering of both bone and dentition, whereupon I slashed at my assailant’s hand, driving to the ground in one saber-stroke both the pistol and two of his fingers. The pain in my lower jaw was slow in declaring itself, and I was able to share in the ensuing victory. The gallant victor must ever have some measure of compassion for the vanquished, especially when they are rendered pitiable by forces beyond the scope of the attacker. Thus, the sight of thousands of terrified janissaries plunged to certain drowning is not one I would willingly witness again. The two thousand or so who lay, transformed speedily to garishly attired cadavers, were of the general order of the fairly slain, and the shivering prisoners foiled of more severed French heads, were worthy of the contempt that the lower ranks lavished upon them. It would seem that the Turkish threat has been lifted from Egypt, but the British ships continue to parade their power in the Middle Sea, and Acre remains a blot and a humiliation. Sir Smith compounds the humiliation with the foxy subtlety of his race, ensuring that certain packets reach Alexandria for transportation to headquarters at Cairo, these being exclusively made up of newspapers that report sad things of the patrie , which I for one would be glad to believe pure English slander, though I fear there may be all too much truth in the uneasy reports.
    “S top reading those old magazines or whatever they are,” she pouted.
    “Eh? Who?” And he went on frowning at the six-weeks-old copy of the Gazette Française de Francfort . It all seemed hardly credible, what with the English and the Russians in Holland and the Austrians and the Russians in Zurich and the Turks and the Russians in Corfu, and Naples, where that royal bitch was, joining in the anti-French alliance. He had not reckoned with the Russians, who had a watery diffused kind of country. He had a sudden hunger, which chimed in with a dyspeptic jab or might have been somehow cognate with it, for some maps of Russia. Instead he had the pink and gold map of this houri here, spread over the bed and swiping languidly with a feather fan at the flying insect life. Outside the palms whistled in the night breeze.
    “Away all this time fighting your stupid wars and now you sit there with your uniform buttoned up to your chin and not a single word for your little—”
    “Very well.” He sighed and put the newspaper down on a camp stool. She had, he now noticed, tacked some engravings to the walls—fat allegorical nudes by nameless and disregardable artists. She did not have the taste, this one, of that traitorous whore in Paris. And that too, another confrontation, along with those Directory swine. Oh yes, the time had come, and