Fortune Favours the Brave by Ronald Bassett

Author:Ronald Bassett [Bassett, Ronald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lume Books
Published: 2015-09-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

They’d seen plenty of floggings before. There had been none during their brief Chatham days among recruits still awed by a sergeant’s rhetoric, but there had been thirty-three aboard the Simoom — for theft of water or kit, for fighting — and probably a flogging a month in the 60th, mostly for drunkenness. Old soldiers sneered at it and flaunted backs criss-crossed with scars. The whip, they said, was better than prolonged confinement in a stinking cell with an iron weight chained to a leg. And it saved guards. Anyway, what were fifty lashes? Time was when a man had four or five hundred just for silent contempt. Fifty was for boys. B’Christ, there’s been commanding officers who flogged six times a week, regular nigh clockwork, saving Sundays.

The trouble had been the Goorkha women. Brownlow, Dando, and several others had been speculating on the possibilities offered by the several dozen Nepalese females — and the riflemen had been a long time without females. Nobody seemed to know about Goorkhas. After a few years in India, any soldier knew that Rohilkund women were hot and easy, that Madras women grunted and scratched, Bengalis were barrels of nails, Punjabis churned like gun-mules, and show a Patna woman a rupee and she’d be on her back quicker than a whip. But who knew about Goorkhas?

‘Just because they’re small,' Joseph informed his fellows, ‘it don’t mean they’re no good.’

‘They ain’t so small,’ claimed Brownlow. ‘I’ve ‘ad smaller.’

‘Not smaller wimmin,’ Joseph objected. ‘If they was smaller, they couldn’t be wimmin.’

‘‘Corse they soddin’ could. Size don’t mean anythin.’ I’ll tell yer somethin,’ Dando Boy. Some of the randiest ma-dames I’ve known 'ave been small.’

‘Ter spake the truth,’ offered Patrick Holloran, ‘I prefer me divershuns wi’ a foin big woman — somethin’ ye kin get hold ev — but I’d not be torning me nose up at one ev them wee jewels, if she wor to axe.’

Tom Brownlow laughed. ‘This ain’t the land o’ bleedin’ praties an’ buttermilk, Irish. Them Goorkhas ‘ave got soddin' great knives.’

‘Shure, an’ I’ve got a bloddy great fist,’ Holloran nodded. ‘But I’ll tell ye, bucko, I intind ter hev a bit o’ fun wid one of thim little darlints as soon as it’s dark. There’s no woman as’ll resist a bloddy Dublin Jackeen, me bhoyo.’

The tiny Nepalese women, with brown, Oriental faces and dark, almond eyes, chattered and laughed around the Goorkhas’ campfires during the day, throwing coy glances at the distant, watching riflemen. They had never seen so many white men before — or any white men who showed such constant interest in them. They were flattered, and they giggled. A few naked infants tumbled in the dust, squabbling, urinating, sucking on a marrow bone or sleeping soundly, untroubled by crawling flies or barking dogs. At night, the Goorkha men sat at the fire, singing hymn-like songs, and the goats for tomorrow’s meat would be led forward, their heads sliced off with a single slash of a razor-sharp kukri as the Goorkhas cheered.

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