The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  Warburton nodded. “Not popular in some quarters, though. The Kapenaars are howling about it, from Table Bay to Mount Kenya.”

  King shrugged. The Cape Viceroyalty always voted two-thirds Tory; Australia went two-thirds Whig; India was the swing vote. None of the other parts of the Empire had enough MPs to matter, as yet.

  De Vascogne selected a cigarillo, sniffed it appreciatively, snipped off the end with a silver clipper, and leaned forward to light it from the gas lamp in the center of the table. The staff cleared away the dishes and brought the cheese platter, cardamom-scented coffee, and snifters of brandy.

  “My sovereign is also of an enlightened mind, and quite sincere,” the Tunisian nobleman said. “The time has come for this affair of Suez and many another project of extreme value. Like his namesake, the third Napoleon, our ruler is possessed of a passion for la grande mise en valeur. So much so that he has proposed a co-dominium, a joint protection of the unhappy lands of the Nile to promote order and progress and permit the reconstruction of the Suez Canal, that product of French genius.”

  A talkative nation, King thought. Yet he had a feeling that the outre-mer Frenchman was revealing precisely what was intended, and no more.

  “Well, this is capital,” King said, lighting his own and taking a draught of the fragrant smoke; first-rate Zambezi, and no mistake. He followed it with a sip of the brandy. “But, if you’ll pardon me asking, Sir Manfred, Monsieur le Vicomte . . . why are you discussing it with an anonymous captain in a down-country cavalry pultan ?”

  The Political Service agent and the foreign nobleman exchanged glances. Sir Manfred spoke slowly:

  “For several reasons. Keeping an eye on an old friend’s son, and all that. And . . . perhaps it’s thought, in certain circles, that your talents are wasted in . . . hmmm, ‘a down-country cavalry pultan.’ Not that the Lancers aren’t a first-rate regiment.”

  King nodded, feeling a tingling along his nerves, and pride at the steadiness of his hand as he held up the cigar and glanced at the glowing end.

  “Mmmmh?”

  “You have languages, I believe?” the baronet went on.

  “Hindi, Punjabi, Pushtu, Tadjik”—which was close enough to speaking Persian for government work—“Bengali, modern French, Arabic, and Russian, some Nipponese,” King admitted. “And the classics, of course.” He shrugged. “Languages come easily to me; more of a sport than work.”

  “Double first in Moderns and Ancients—and a paper or two on philology since,” the Secret Service bimbashi continued.

  “Family tradition,” King said. Rare but not unknown for an officer, and his family had a custom of combining scholarship with Imperial service. He added reluctantly: “In fact . . .”

  “Yes, your sister is a Fellow of the Royal Academy and has a doctorate in mathematics and astronomy,” Sir Manfred noted, reading from some file in his mind. “I read her paper . . . ‘Orbital Characteristics of an Asteroid . . .’ with some interest.”

  De Vascogne’s brows headed for his hairline, demonstrating that he had more than a nodding acquaintance with the Empire. Even in these progressive times and in this progressive land and in a Whig family, that was unusual; Oxford had only started admitting women to the degree program fifteen years ago, when Queen-Empress Alice added her patronage to a generation’s agitation by various radicals. A bare few hundred had taken advantage of it since, and far fewer in the sciences.

  Not respectable, really, King acknowledged, thinking of his twin sister. But then, Cassandra had never taken convention seriously.

  “Remarkable, and commendable,” Warburton said. “Returning to your own record, Captain . . . you’ve already been poaching on the Political Service’s preserves, what? That mission to the Orakzai chiefs—”

  “Needs must, Sir Manfred. We had to keep those passes open, and—”

  “—and you charmed them, impressed them in that dust-up with their neighbors you rode out on, and generally kept them sewed up. Passed as an Afghan yourself for several weeks. Saved us several nasty little actions.”

  King felt his arm twinge in remembrance. He’d gone through those weeks, disguised among aliens who hated his kind, in a state of continuous, well-controlled fear. Probably that had been what kept him alive, just.

  “So you see,” the older man said. “Our little bandobast ”—organization—“has had its eye on you for some years.”

  He smiled and added other details, ones that left King shaken behind an impassive front. The Department had a reputation for omniscience, but it was uncomfortable to have the all-seeing eye applied to oneself.

  “Am I to assume you wish me seconded to the Political Service, Sir Manfred?” King asked.

  His unspoken flicker of the eyes added: And why the devil are you doing it with a foreigner in earshot, even if it’s a friendly foreigner? Granted, there was no set application procedure; you didn’t apply, they asked you. This is pushing the boundaries of informality rather far, I would have thought. Nor was he sure he wanted to leave the regiment—generations of Kings and their retainers had served with the Peshawar Lancers.

  “Not precisely, Captain King . . . and not quite yet, in any case.” Warburton paused for a moment. “Tell me, young fellow, who are the friends of progress? And who are its enemies?”

  He hadn’t expected that. “Order and Progress” was the Empire’s motto, near enough.

  “Enemies? Why . . . the barbarians, of course, Sir Manfred. The Russians, too, of course; well, they worship Satan, so what would you expect? A few of the wild-man fringe of the Tories, here and in the Cape. As to the friends . . . we are, of course. Mostly. And the other civilized and allied countries,” he added politely, nodding to de Vascogne.

  “True enough in outline, old chap,” Warburton said. “But the devil’s in the details, don’t you know. For example, the Empire’s prosperous as never before.”

  King nodded. “Yes, we’re finally getting back to where we were before the Fall,” he agreed. “Even surpassing the ancestors, in some ways; we’re far more advanced in the biological sciences, for instance. Damn me if I can see how anyone would object. Except our enemies, of course.”

  “Ah, but in any rise, mon capitaine, there is a rearrangement of positions,” de Vascogne said softly. “N’est-ce pas?”

  Warburton nodded. “To name an example, more prosperity means more natives with the franchise.”

  “It’s always been open, even in Old Empire times,” King said. “Why, the Queen-Empress Victoria promised in 1858, right after the First Mutiny, when the old East India Company was wound up—”

  “—that all positions would be open to every qualified subject, without consideration of religion or origin, yes,” Warburton said. “However, that’s been fairly theoretical until recently. Now with the cities growing so fast . . . why, I doubt there’s a sahib-log family as wealthy as the Patnas, to name only one.”

  “It is of a muchness in my sovereign’s dominions,” de Vascogne said. “Although we have always made a place for a Moor who is, how do you say, assimilé, yet there are among us those who are unhappy that recently so many of our subjects desire to take up our expressed wish, and to acquire a new past, one in which their ancestors were Gauls.”

  He chuckled. “Not to mention the extreme misery that this causes the Caliph and his mullahs. That we rule Muslims angers them; that we convert them is an anguish inexpressible.”

  Warburton continued: “So you see there might be some of our own people who feel . . . how shall I put it? To be charitable, who feel that the Empire’s gone soft since the days of our great-grandfathers.”

  King winced slightly behind a gentleman’s impassive mask. His ancestors of the Exodus and the Second Mutiny had been heroic, no doubt of that . . . but like many of his generation, there were aspects of that period he preferred to keep in the footnotes. They’d done what they had to do, those post-Fall Victorians, to preserve the Empire and civilization and the lives of their families. It had been a ti
me when men had no good choices; you didn’t, when your children were hungry, and the only way to get them food was to take away someone else’s. That didn’t justify turning brutal necessity into a virtue. He forced himself to think, let smoke dribble from his nostrils, and added:

  “I suppose there are others who’re displeased at the course of things, too,” he said.

  Some of the Sikhs and their leaders, for instance, who’d been close allies of the Sirkar in both Mutinies, and had been rewarded well for it; better than a quarter of the land in the Punjab was Sikh-owned. The Rajput nobility, who had their representatives in the House of Lords; and the rulers of the Protected States like Nepal. None of them would be happier than the stiffest of the sahib-log at seeing Gujarati or Bengali box-wallahs making inroads on the seats of power.

  “Now,” Warburton said. “Consider for a moment— who would be . . . not happy . . . who would like to see a Third Mutiny?”

  King was appalled, but he responded with slow, careful calm. “Well, the Mikado.” The Far Eastern empire would be the dominant power in Asia and the world if the Raj were badly weakened. “And the Czar, of course.”

  Both the other men nodded. Here’s a catechism for me to go through, King thought, with wry amusement. That brought back a sudden flicker of memories; old Father Gordon, the smell of hassocks and psalmbooks, light flickering through stained glass. King went on, feeling his way forward:

  “And the various subversives, the ones who’d like to overthrow the Raj or split their home provinces away. After which the Afghans would invade. There wouldn’t be a rupee or a virgin between Peshawar and Calcutta six months later; then the Czar’s men would arrive to sacrifice everyone to Tchernobog and eat their hearts.”

  “Fanaticism does not make for a realistic or long-term political perspective,” Warburton said, nodding.

  “And,” de Vascogne added, “some among the influential in the smaller powers would also love to see the Raj trimmed back. For fear of your power; for envy of your wealth; and to remove the disturbances of custom your trade and ideas bring.”

  King’s eyes narrowed as he glanced at Warburton. “But even the . . . excessively conservative, shall we say . . . among our own people couldn’t wish the Raj overthrown.”

  “No.” Warburton nodded. “But you see, my young friend, that would only happen if a rebellion succeeded, which is most exceedingly unlikely, despite what some of our home-grown radicals think.”

  He sighed, tapped his cigarillo against a carved brass ashtray. “Comes of expanding the supply of graduates from second-rate universities faster than the number of bureaucratic jobs. They should remember where the Sirkar’s army is recruited.”

  King rubbed a hand along his jaw. There were the sahib-log, of course; Sikhs; Marathas; high-caste Rajputs; Jats and others from the canal colonies of the Punjab; many came from client kingdoms like Nepal, or were mercenaries from beyond the Imperial frontiers. And there’s the military in the Cape and Australia, of course, and the outlying garrisons. The Empire kept three-quarters of a million men under arms, and that was counting professional soldiers only, not reservists and militia and police and the armies of the vassal states.

  Warburton went on: “But a failed rebellion, with reprisals and confiscations afterward . . . that could set relations with the other castes back a century. Cripple the manufacturing cities, perhaps let full-plumed neo-feudalism make a comeback. Or should I say neoneofeudalism ?”

  He smiled and shrugged and leaned back. “And now, since the cricket season is coming, what do you think of Oxford’s chance against the All-Australia 11?”

  Narayan Singh was content. The Peshawar Club had many military members—and those officers were fighting men stationed on the most dangerous frontier of the Raj, not commanders of garrison troops or hangers-on at court. Their orderlies were not valets in uniform, but picked fighting men themselves, often born to the duty as he had been, jajmani-followers in a hereditary patron-client link between families.

  So the quarters for those servants were as you would expect. Not as luxurious as those for their employers, but spacious, with soft beds and baths of water and steam; there were ample spaces where a man might throw dice or swap stories, wrestle or fence; and you did not have to go out into the bazaar to find music, clean girls, or liquor. Clad only in his drawers, the Sikh leaned back at ease in his private room, while one such combed and oiled his waist-length hair.

  “Eye-wallah, Miriam, give me to drink,” he said. “Chasing Pathans is thirsty work.”

  Then he stretched, pleasantly conscious of the ripple of muscle along his heavy shoulders and arms, and the scars that seamed white against brown skin and heavy black body hair. The girl—she was wearing considerably less than he—cast an admiring glance at him as she went to mix cane spirit with mango juice and pour them over crushed ice in a tall glass. Then she rolled her rump where she stood and winked at him over one shoulder.

  Narayan grinned, with a stomach pleasantly full of rice and curried lamb and more pleasures to follow. He considered himself a man of reasonable piety, if not as much as his mother would have liked. He read the Adi Granth at times; he followed the Five K’s—he kept his hair uncut, wore a soldier’s drawers, carried a steel comb and wore the steel bracelet and kept a kirpan, a steel blade, at his side. When there was time he prayed at the amritvela-hour of dawn, reciting the Name; when there was a place of Sikh worship to hand, he attended a gurudwara to make his offerings and receive the blessed kara-prasad. He had even taken time on leave to visit the birthplace of Nanak Guru. Nor did he touch tobacco or bhang or any other narcotic.

  Drink in moderation was different—or at least he thought of it so, nor did he deny himself meat or lying with loose women. He had no pretensions to being a sant, a holy man, nor had he the slightest desire to be an Akali, one of the Children of God the Immortal. When the time came he would wed himself a true Sikh kaur, a lioness, and sire sons, and find a guru who could lead him to the opening of the Tenth Gate. Until then he would be true to his soldier’s salt; that was his karman in this life.

  So he pulled the girl onto his knee when she returned, tossed off a swallow of the drink, and handed it to her, scraping his beard over her full breasts as she raised it to her mouth in both hands and giggled. Sometime later she giggled again, into the thick thatch on his chest, and proclaimed that he was so fierce it was remarkable there was a Pathan left alive.

  “And famous, already,” she said. “You and your sahib.”

  “We made some play with steel and shot among the dogs,” he said complacently. “Men see, and speak.”

  “So I heard,” she said. “And the men who said so were Muslim themselves—sais-grooms here. Oh, they were anxious for word of thee, my lord with the great strong baz-baz.” Her hand strayed. “And thy sahib, as well.”

  A chill ran down his belly, and he pushed her hand aside. “Tell me more!” he said, and the girl cowered a little at his tone. He shook his head. “I am not angry with you. But speak.”

  There would be no followers of Islam in the grooms or staff in this club; not so close to the border. That would not be safe. There had been too many raids on the frontier, too many intrigues with Muslim rulers over-border. And from what his grandfather had said of his grandfather’s tales, too many of them had joined in when the Fist of God struck earth and a million starving Afghans poured down the passes to try and take the warm plains from the sahib-log.

  While she spoke, he was dressing. When the last bewildered word was past he was out of the door with his sheathed saber in one hand, running down the corridor toward the stairs and the sahib-log section of the club with a lightness astonishing in a man of his barrelchested heft. If he was wrong, the sahib would laugh at him for being an old woman. That would be as it would be. His honor was to preserve the sahib’s life; and it was also the life of the man who had called him bhai— brother—and fought by his side, and pulled him from a melee when his horse was hamstrung and the Pathan knives we
re out.

  A phonograph disk saved Athelstane King’s life. He could hear it even before he brushed unseeing past two Club servants and opened the door to his rooms; it was one of his favorites, a classic piece in the Keralan style, with a tambura droning, drums, a vina. He didn’t understand the vocalist’s lyrics, Kannada wasn’t one of his languages, but—

  But the devil take it, Hasamurti detests Carnatic music! he thought. She’d never go to all the trouble of winding the phonograph to put one of those disks on when he wasn’t there. The incongruity of it jarred him out of an abstracted brown study.

  He swung the door open. “Greetings, sahib,” Hasamurti said, standing in a pool of light from one of the gas lamps and bowing with hands palm to palm before her face.

  That brought his ears up even more; his mistress never called him that in private—and after leaving her up here while he went to dinner on his first night back from the Frontier, and on top of that sitting late talking, he’d be lucky if it wasn’t “jungle-born pig!” and something heavy thrown at his head and exile to the couch.

  The heavy carved-teak door slammed shut and the bolt snapped home, the gaslight went out, and darkness fell. Hasamurti screamed once, a shrill sound cut off in mid-breath. Lightless colors played before his gaze. The music and the obvious falseness of his mistress’s greeting had alerted him just enough to jerk his chin down and begin to turn as something swept through the air behind him. His left hand came up and caught at it, a smooth fabric that swung as if a weight pulled one end. It closed around his neck with an instant wrenching force that made him hiss with pain.

  His mind was still slow with food and talk and puzzles that it worried as a dog does a bone, but his body and reflexes knew that suddenly, unbelievably, he was fighting for his life in his rooms at the Peshawar Club. A thing as unlikely as assault and battery by the Archbishop of Delhi in the High Cathedral, and to the accompaniment of the plaintive beauty of the music on the phonograph.