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

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