The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  It was supposed to be like the lost Homeland—although from what she’d read, she doubted that terraced vineyards and rice fields had been all that common in pre-Fall England. Certainly this was green and lovely enough in the glowing long-shadow light of sunset; thickly forested mountain slopes surrounding a mile-high patchwork quilt of plowed land, pasture, prosperous farmsteads, the regular lines of apple and peach orchards, almonds and apricots, roads lined with great poplars and chinars and oaks. Parkland and garden surrounded the country seats of landowners and the boarding schools that were almost as numerous—the climate was famous for healthfulness. Some of those schools bore names like Eton and Winchester, United Services and Cheltenham, and they drew children from all over the Empire.

  Rexin was there, the King estate near Avantipur. Not really home anymore, she thought, with a trace of sadness, although she was always welcome on visits. Athelstane’s, really. I’m an Oxford girl now. The eldest son inherited, and the siblings had to make their own way in the world, by marriage or career.

  The city brought further murmurs from the other passengers; Cassandra ignored the ancient monuments, the famous racecourse, polo fields, botanic gardens, and Lord’s cricket grounds, even the lakes and the Jehelum River where Cambridge came to row against Oxford and usually be soundly thrashed, which was a high point of the Empire’s social year. Her eyes were on the mellow stone of the university’s quadrangles, glimpsed among the trees and ivy. The ships of the Exodus had borne books and instruments and scholars, as well as weapons and machinery and hungry refugees crammed into every nook and cranny—more of St. Disraeli’s foresight. Work had begun on the university in the fourth year after the Fall, and continued even during the terrible years when survival hung by a hair. The workaday city had grown up around it in the generations that followed.

  Now there was a considerable airship port on the lakeside as well, with great arched sheds and another huge silvery shape curving up from the water even as she watched, off south to Delhi and Madras, perhaps even to Singapore and Perth. Sunlight remained on the mountain peaks, tingeing the snow with crimson, but night was falling on the lake and city below. Lights appeared and twinkled, the blue-white of the airship port’s electric arcs, the softer yellow and yellow-white of lamp flame and gaslight in the streets and houses beyond.

  The Goan steward with the xylophone came through again. “Prepare for landing, memsahibs and sahibs. Prepare for landing, please.”

  Part of Cassandra King’s stomach unclenched. Fairly soon her feet would be on the ground, away from this flying bomb. Another part of her nerves thrummed yet more tautly. That meant she’d have to oversee the priceless cargo that was in her trust, as well.

  Yasmini lay still on the narrow bed, for the moment simply enjoying the sensation of space around her. Most people would have considered the little attic room of the Kashmiri inn to be strait quarters. But it was all hers; even the Master had to knock to gain entrance, for appearance sake. None watched or spoke or shouted; there was only the low murmur of sound from below, smells of curry and garlic from the kitchens, wheels and feet from the street outside. Compared to the pens at home, it was a palace. Space and quiet and . . .

  Her mind shied away from freedom with an automatic reflex, as mindless as the flinch before a Master’s upraised hand. The time lines where she failed to do that were—

  How are they worse than what I see? she thought suddenly.

  True, they mostly ended in death. Often death by torture. But she was twenty-four years old; she had been Active for nearly ten years. Soon it would be her daughters the Master would want, not her visions.

  Unbidden, a face from the dreams. An Anglichani face; a man, young—only a few years older than herself. Dark brown hair, brown eyes, a square jaw, and a thin scar along one cheek. The vision had a sharp outline; only a few paths led to it, then. An overtone that meant the vision was close and personal, something that might happen to her, yet with overtones of weight—enormous, crushing weight.

  Her breath came faster, and her hands felt clammy with fear. That meant that whatever it was concerned both her and a huge number of other world lines; instinctively, she strained to see more. The lines twisted. There were glimpses of fire, of a floating sensation unlike anything she had ever known. The clash of sabers, and a body falling into infinite blue space—

  No. That way lay death. A wash of no-thought went through her; she controlled her breathing, concentrating instead on an unvarying hum at the back of her mind.

  Chapter Three

  “Duty calls, chaebli,” Athelstane King said over his shoulder to the naked woman behind him.

  One of the Peshawar Club’s discreet manservants had slipped the calling card under the door. As King read, he fended off the soft rounded warmth that pressed to his back, and the hands that reached teasingly around his body and tried to undo the bath towel wrapped about his waist.

  The card was severely plain, printed in black-on-beige:Sir Manfred Warburton, Bart.

  Imperial Political Service

  Metcalfe House, Chandi Chowk

  Delhi

  On the back was a scribbled: requests the pleasure of your company at dinner, at 7:15, to discuss matters pertaining to the King-Emperor’s service.

  He turned to give the young woman a kiss and then a firm smack on the backside. Seven o’clock already, dammit! Ganesha alone knew how long the card had lain ignored. The Club had telephones since year before last—no expense spared here. Why couldn’t the man have called up?

  He hadn’t planned on going downstairs at all. In fact, he’d planned on having something sent up for dinner and spending the rest of the evening the way he’d spent the afternoon; it had been a long four months of involuntary celibacy on the frontier. Then when he was exhausted enough and Hasamurti was crying for mercy, there would be time to read accumulated letters from his mother and twin sister and younger siblings, and then sleep for eighteen hours. But . . .

  The Political Service?

  Politicals served as advisors at the courts of the Empire’s client states; they supervised the Tribal Agencies beyond the frontier; they adventured far into the barbarian lands, sniffing out troubles to come and staking claims; they ran the Intelligence departments . . . and they fought the Great Game with the Czar’s agents, and the Mikado’s, and the Caliph’s, and assorted subversives.

  The Army and Navy were the Empire’s sword and fist; the Political Service was its eyes and a goodly part of its brain besides.

  “Not now, chaebli,” he said again, grabbing the wrist of an exploring hand as it crept around his waist.

  Hasamurti pouted despite the endearment—darling, roughly—and flounced off to sit poised beside the sunken marble tub, still full of steaming water with wisps of foam on its surface. She leaned back on one hand and tossed her hair.

  “Wouldn’t you rather be with me than with some moldy old bookmonger kitub-wallah from the capital?” she said.

  He chuckled and nodded as he finished toweling himself off. Good to be clean again, he thought. And to smell slightly of rosewater and musk, rather than horse sweat and his own unwashed hide.

  “If it were mine to say, I’d stay,” he said.“But needs must.”

  Quite a change from squatting to scrub in a chatti of ice water, waiting for an Afridi to pop out from behind a rock waving a knife, he thought. And Hasamurti makes a pleasant change of scenery, too.

  The troopers of the Peshawar Lancers were good lads one and all, but not much aesthetically. His mistress was a classic Kashmiri beauty of nineteen, strong-featured, with wavy raven hair falling past her full breasts to a narrow waist and hips that completed the hourglass figure. A cross on a silver chain dangled between her breasts, and tooled-leather bands sewn with silver bells were clasped about her ankles. Altogether a pleasing sight . . . She tried one more time as he tied on his loincloth and dressed.

  “But chaebli, I want you to make my new bells ring again!” she said, shaking one long slender le
g amid a sweet chiming.

  “The things I do for the Sirkar,” he sighed, and grinned at her. His arm was a little sore, but a gentleman always showed consideration. “Later, my sweet.”

  She subsided, grumbling and pulling on a robe and flouncing off to the bedroom, there to entertain herself with sweets and a trashy novel. It was the usual arrangement; she was a shopkeeper’s daughter in Avantipur, a market town near Rexin, the King estate. King had met her when he dropped into her father’s place to dicker over a saddle. He’d see that she got a husband and a substantial going-away present for a dowry, when his mother finally managed to shackle him to some horsy deb; in the meantime, they jogged along very well with friendship and honest mutual lust. He wasn’t a harem-keeper—that sort of thing was out of fashion anyway in these enlightened times, when there was even serious talk about giving women the vote. And he wouldn’t have wanted the type who adored his shadow; that would be cruelty, when he’d be bringing home a wife someday.

  A thrill of a different sort gripped him as he turned to look again in the mirror, settling his indigo-colored turban and tugging at his jacket. He was in civilian mufti, high-collared tunic-jacket of midnight blue silk trimmed with silver braid at neck and cuffs, worn over a white cotton blouse; loose trousers of the same dark silk tucked into half boots; and a crimson sash under a tooled-leather belt. It set off broad shoulders, narrow waist, long legs; he smoothed down one of his sleek brown mustachios and contemplated a face tanned to oak color, high in the cheeks, straight-nosed and square-chinned, with level dark brown eyes flecked with green and a thin white scar from a sword slash along the right side of his jaw.

  That had hurt like blazes when a frothing Ghazi administered it with a chora-knife, but it gave a certain gravitas and distinction to a face still a few years short of thirty, he decided. And considering that he’d blown the man’s brains out with his Webley a second later, he didn’t really have grounds for complaint.

  The modest silver-and-enamel aigrette on his turban showed the family crest, pistol and pen quartered with a crown and the King motto: Kuch dar nahin hai—There is no such thing as fear.

  Altogether the sort of outfit a well-to-do zamindar’s son from Kashmir might wear, or an Imperial cavalry officer on leave; since he fitted both categories precisely, it was appropriate enough. Even if he had also taken a double first at Oxford.

  He hesitated a moment before he picked up a knife and pushed it through the sash, a seven-inch curved blade of wootz steel, with checked ebony handle and silver sheath. A formality, these days; barbarians, cannibals, bandits, and rebels were a lot less likely to swing through a window or come down the chimney than they had been in his great-grandfather’s time. Even the Border country was peaceful in this Year of Grace 2025, by those standards.

  There were other challenges and dangers, though, even if they were less physical. And he was going to meet them. It never hurt to be prepared.

  “Thank you, Lakshmi, Patni,” Cassandra King said.

  Oxford’s airship port bustled about her. One more young lady disembarking with her maids juggling the luggage behind was nothing to remark. The heavy dolly that followed, with four well-paid and extremely careful porters about it, decidedly was. So was her anxious care for the square timber box on it.

  She looked about. Passengers were flooding off the Diana through the connecting corridor, meeting their personal attendants from the steerage deck, and those were hailing uniformed porters as luggage was brought in and placed on long tables. Turbans and head scarves and hats in a hundred different colors waved against the rows of ticket offices along the walls, and swirled through the pointed-arch doorways to waiting cabs or restaurants or shops. Families and friends greeted each other with cool reserve, or glad cries and embraces—her lip curled a little in scorn at that. Some of the servants were holding up signs with names on them, to guide arriving guests to the carriages of their hosts, or in a few cases to their motorcars.

  Voices and unintelligible clunks and clanks from the machinery elsewhere filled the air along with the scent of jasmine in the man-high stone jars that stood here and there on the marble of the floor. The last light of sunset speared down from the high clerestory windows, off the bright gilding that covered the arched ceiling; then the floods came on with a pop and flare of brightness that turned it to a shimmering haze of gold.

  Interesting, she thought, looking up as she always did here. The building was five years old, and the spider-web complexity of gilt, groined vaulting above her was all laminated wood, the latest thing—everything from teak to bamboo, in precisely calculated gradients. With scientific tree-breeding and modern resins, it was almost as strong as steel girderwork, and much lighter. Not to mention cheaper. And the mathematics had been done here in Kashmir, at the university’s own great Engine.

  The rest was not much different from a railway station, even to the murals of Work and Sacrifice and Duty and other uplifting sentiments lining the upper walls. Bronzed sahib-log engineers in dusty turbans laying out irrigation canals, with grateful peasants invoking the gods in the background; missionaries in some godsforsaken ruin (probably Europe, by the vegetation) reclaiming hairy savages who crouched in awe at their feet; noble soldiers heroic on rearing steeds, trampling cringing enemies beneath their hooves.

  She snorted slightly; they’d left out the traders with crates of gin and beads and cheap muskets, and the prospectors. Whenever her brother saw official military art, he tended to laugh. Or curse, if he’d had a gin and tonic or two, and swear at how many young subalterns got killed trying to act out nonsense like that before they learned better.

  “Dr. King!” a voice called.

  She craned her neck, then saw him. “Dr. Ghose!” she replied happily.

  The little Bengali beamed at her, a wide white smile in the dark brown face; he was a plump man in his early forties, in white shirt and pantaloons, black waistcoat and canoe-shaped hat. He gave a nod and a word to King’s two attendants; Dr. Chullunder Ghose was a kindly man as well as one of the Empire’s foremost physicists and astronomer-mathematicians.

  Although it didn’t hurt that his family was fabulously wealthy with jute mills and shares in Orissan coal mines; he could have dropped the purchase price of the King estates across a gaming table with a laugh. Not that a Bengali bhadralok—respectable one—would go in for high-stakes gambling. Behind him came Lord Cherwell—Earl Cherwell of Rishikesh—looking sour, his white mustachios working and bushy brows frowning under a crisp, conservative turban of snowy linen, the tail of the pugaree coming almost to his belted waist in the back, and an egret plume nodding from the aigrette in front.

  Damned old fool. I know what you’re thinking, Cassandra said to herself. First natives, then women, what’s the university coming to . . . He did good work once, they say. God, that must have been in Arjuna’s day! Or Victoria I’s, at least.

  It was Ghose who’d shown flaws in the basis of the Kelvin-Maxwell synthesis, the existence of the luminiferous ether; and he’d won the Salisbury Chair in Theoretical Physics by sheer ability. He should be head of the Project.

  Then, reluctantly: Well, be fair. Lord Cherwell’s still a good academic administrator. Why waste a first-rate theorist on that?

  A half dozen others followed, mostly sahib-log except for a Gujarati whose field was Babbage engineering, and male, apart from one painfully shy but brilliant young specialist in Darwinian Geological Catastrophes; she was a Parsi girl from Bombay with buckteeth. They all crowded around the dolly, looking at it with awed reverence. One reached out and touched the rough planks of the box gently.

  “Thirty-four inches . . . what a mirror!”

  Cassandra nodded, throwing the right end of her dupatta —head shawl—over her left shoulder. “Thirty-four inches and perfect,” she said. “Smythe wasn’t drawing the longbow.”

  “Oh, my, yes indeed,” Ghose crooned. “Very much so, yes.”

  “Rather a feather in our caps, what?” Cherwell said, for on
ce sounding cheerful. “Do a deuced good job at reflector-grinding, those Imperial University chappies. Pity they don’t have a mountain to put a machaan on themselves, eh, what?”

  He snorted and rubbed his hands together. “Thoms suggested the Nilgiri Hills, for God’s sake—right down in the jungle country, and barely a few thousand feet. Kiang! I brought the chancellor’s motorwagon down for it. Ladies, gentlemen, chalo! Let’s go!”

  Cassandra paused to wave the porters forward again. There was a commotion a little way off, but she ignored it until someone shouted.

  Then she did look up, frowning. Men were pushing their way in, against the flow of the crowd. Several of them, young men; Bengalis by their looks and dress. Not many wore the dhoti up here in the northwestern provinces, especially in the mountains; the big wraparound loincloth was just too cold for the climate, particularly in October.

  One of them shouted again: “Bande Materam!”

  Hail Motherland, she translated automatically. Why, that’s—

  Then she saw the pistols, and for a moment simply gaped. Revolvers, big and heavy and clumsy-looking, with long barrels. Why, that’s illegal! she thought. The slogan only mildly so—she’d read Tagore’s poetry herself. The pistols were violently illegal for anyone but the military and police; private licenses were extremely rare.

  She had time for one thought before the first weapon boomed. Assassins—

  Time slowed. The men came toward the knot of scholars, shouldering the crowd aside amid shouts and gasps of surprise and indignation. The pistols barked, deep and loud, with long spurts of smoke and flame. Cassandra saw her maid Patni turning, astonishment on her plain middle-aged face, a suitcase in either hand. Then she spun, catching at herself and crying out.

  That brought the scholar out of her daze. She had been a King of Rexin, with all the responsibilities toward dependents that involved, much longer than she’d been a gentlewoman of science. Without another thought she dived, catching both her maids around the waist and throwing them to the ground, her own body over them and sickeningly conscious of blood soaking through the fabric of her clothes, wet and warm over the hands she clamped down to stop its spurting.