The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  Athelstane King blinked fully awake in less time than it took for his greatcoat to slide to the floor. Moonlight and starlight seeped past a bulky shape in the half-open window, glittered on steel. No time to reach for a weapon; the intruder’s shoulders were already inside the window. If King scrabbled for blade or pistol, the hillman would be inside the compartment, or mostly; and unpleasant experience had given the Lancer a hearty respect for what that breed could do with a few lightning-quick hacking chora-strokes.

  “Turn out!” he shouted.

  In the same motion he struck upward with a knee, the only blow he could make from his slouched position on the couch. Cat-quick, the Pathan twisted his head. That meant his jaw wasn’t broken against the unyielding steel he gripped between his teeth, but the knee glanced painfully off his temple instead and the long heavy knife dropped to the floorboards rather than into a waiting hand.

  For an instant the Pathan was dazed. King’s scrabbling left hand found the hem of his opponent’s sheepskin coat and wrenched it forward, pinning his arms and covering his head for a crucial moment. The same movement also pulled the hillman three-quarters of the way into the compartment, shins across the windowsill and head down between the seats.

  Narayan Singh woke cursing, confused but throwing himself into the fight. For a minute and a half the darkness of the railcar compartment was a confusion of grappling, punching, kicking, gripping, wrenching combat. There was no science to it, scarcely even much comprehension; half the blows of the two Imperial soldiers landed on each other or the wood and horsehair upholstery of the train. At one point King found himself wrestling with the Pathan’s filthy pugaree-turban rather than the head he thought he’d been grappling, even as the man tried to tear out his collarbone with his teeth.

  This is like trying to fight a tiger hand-to-hand in a closet, he thought, snarling in pain and heaving the mountaineer off; there was no breath to spare for yells, only hisses and grunts and the dry hard sound of blows delivered point-blank.

  Narayan Singh gave a strangled roar as the Pathan tried to wrench out a handful of his beard and throw himself backward out of the open window at the same time. That move put a little distance between the combatants, and let in some light. Sparing his aching and still-healing right arm, King kicked once more and managed to connect with his enemy’s stomach. There wasn’t much space to swing his foot, and the target was armored in hard muscle—he’d been aiming the reinforced toe of his riding boot at the other man’s crotch, and missed by a foot—but breath went out of him with an ooof.

  Narayan Singh had kept a grip on the hand that tried to rip out his beard. He jerked it forward; King grabbed the other, the one trying to drive ragged dirty fingernails into his nose again. Together they twisted both arms behind the hillman’s back. That took two hands for King; unwounded, Narayan Singh had a hamlike fist free to pound over and over again into the back of the pinioned man’s neck. Eventually the Pathan went mostly limp.

  Thank the ten thousand faces of God for that, King thought, winded, every one of his bruises aching again and some new ones added. The Pathan had added another to a short list of men he’d met who were as strong as he was.

  Of course, I’m not at my best, he reassured himself.

  The Sikh orderly reached for the short utility knife at his own belt and jerked the prisoner’s head back to bare the throat. King shook his head:

  “No. He must answer questions.”

  Just then someone thumped against the other wall of the compartment and called for quiet. King grinned despite the pain of a split lip and pulled out a linen handkerchief to wipe at the blood pouring from his nose. Ganesha alone knew what they thought had been going on: despite the way the nightmare fight had felt like forever, it had taken less than two minutes.

  “Han, sahib—I mean, Kiram Shaw,” Narayan Singh said, grinning harshly as he bound the man’s arms behind his back with his own pugaree and pushed him roughly into the seat opposite. “Questioned with things sharp, or heavy, or hot—or all three, huzoor?”

  “We’ll see,” King said, not sharing the Sikh’s bloodthirsty enthusiasm, despite the fact that they’d both lost friends to the prisoner’s kinsmen.

  If you faced capture by Pathans, rolling to your rifle and blowing out your brains was infinitely preferable to letting them turn you over to their wives. Torture was women’s work across the Border, although men would do well enough if they were put to it. And there were times when you had to get information to save your own men’s lives, or the mission, no matter how—although an officer walked around a rock when that was necessary.

  He still didn’t like tormenting helpless men, even ones who’d be glad enough to kill him by inches; and he remembered things Narayan Singh’s father had taught him.

  “Turn up the light,” he said, before the groggy Pathan could do more than mumble. “And search him.”

  The Sikh did so, and also blocked the door to the corridor when a train attendant came by to ask if anything was wrong, snarling something that sent the man scurrying off again.

  And scurrying off is exactly what he’d have done if he’d found our bled-out bodies instead, King thought sardonically. There were times when he thought it would do the sheltered folk of the inner provinces good to be exposed to frontier conditions, a little, now and then. On the other hand, protecting them from that was precisely his duty . . .

  The gaslight had a yellow tinge, even when the incandescent mantle around it started to glow. It showed the hillman’s face with merciless clarity, nose and lips and both eyes starting to swell, a sheen of sweat, and blood clotting in the dense silky black beard. King judged the other man’s age to be a little less than his own—somewhere around twenty—and they were about of a size, which made the other a tall man even among Afghans. His skin was an olive color only slightly darker than King’s, his nose a hawk beak in a long, high-cheeked, full-lipped face; without his turban, his head showed only cropped stubble apart from a love-lock on one side.

  King bent carefully—keeping the other man’s feet pinioned with one boot—and picked up the chora. It was a fine example of the bladesmith’s art, and cruelly sharp. The Lancer officer laid it across his knees and waited.

  “Here, Kiram Shaw,” Narayan Singh said. “This purse—six rupees, a dozen piece, one silver dinar of Kabul. Two small knives—good knives. And this piece of paper; nothing else upon him but lice. Though if we could train up the stink of this savage to obedience, it would cleave teakwood.”

  King unfolded the paper. It was heavy and rather rough, yellowish, a hand-made product of some little town beyond the Imperial frontier. Sketched on it in charcoal was a face, done rather skillfully but in a style he knew by instinct had never been taught within the Raj . . . and a woman’s hand as well, he thought.

  A man’s face framed by a turban, clean-shaven save for close-clipped sideburns and mustaches. A young man: one he saw every morning in the mirror, and an arrow carefully marked out the scar on his jaw. The words below were written in Pushtu and Hindi, using the Angrezi—Roman—script; they were succinct and to the point: two hundred gold mohurs for this man’s head.

  King grunted, although he knew well enough that someone was trying to kill him, not that someone was evidently willing to pay a very considerable sum—a gold mohur would buy four good horses, or pay a year’s wages for a noncom such as he was pretending to be. Five mohurs were a year’s rent from a yeoman-farm.

  Two hundred were a small fortune, or a not-so-small one across the Border.

  “So,” King said, tapping the paper against the blade of the chora. “What would you do with two hundred gold mohurs, man of the hills? Give him water,” he added to Narayan Singh.

  The Sikh grumbled but obeyed. The Pathan’s eyes flickered between the two men, and then he sucked at the waterskin and grinned—painfully.

  “Istrafugallah!” he said. “What would I not do with your head and so much gold, gora-log?”

  That was the less complem
entary term for the Angrezi, and Narayan Sikh raised a hand. King waved him back.

  “With the gold and the fame of slaying you I would build a fort—raise a lashkar such as Iskander of the Silver Hand commanded—become an emir—”

  The hillman spoke good Hindi, with the rough accent of the Border country. “But instead I shall hang with the filthy pig.”

  He shrugged, pretending indifference to dying sewn into a raw pigskin and with a piece of pork thrust down his throat.

  The officer and the Sikh exchanged the slightest of glances. “Perhaps,” King said casually. “Who gave you this picture of me, O Pathan?” He considered the man closely. “If you were to tell me, perhaps the pigskin could be spared.”

  The hillman grinned. “You will not trick Ibrahim Khan son of Ali that easily, unbeliever,” he said. “A fakir gave it me—a holy man. But his name I never knew, nor his home. Nor could you make me tell, even if I knew. Such is against your law.”

  “I have leather for a knotted cord, huzoor,” Narayan Singh said eagerly. “Give me leave—betake yourself to the dining car—he will talk. Easily, if he is so stupid he cannot tell the difference between us and a judge, or the distance between this place and a law court.”

  “A cobra spits, a Sikh speaks—who will know the difference?” the Pathan said, and there was real anger in the orderly’s answering growl.

  King raised a calming hand. “Peace, brother. This is a Yusufazi Pathan, I would say—of the Chagarzi sept; perhaps of the Nasrat Khel, perhaps of the Dongala.”

  The Pathan gave a slight start; at the knowledge, and at the accentless Pushtu in which King spoke for a moment. The Lancer officer went on:

  “You met a fakir who had two hundred gold mohurs? Two hundred, to spend on one officer of the Empire, among so many?”

  “It was you who suborned the Orakzai chiefs with silver and smooth words, until they stood aside from the war and left my folk alone to face your army, the pig-eating sons of whores,” the Pathan growled. “You are no ordinary unbeliever. Perhaps the fakir had the gold of Damascus, where the Caliph of the Faithful dwells in might.”

  King took the handkerchief from his injured nose. His frown and slight sneer made dried blood crackle in his mustache. “Two men wearing their own winding-sheets tried to kill me in Peshawar. Waited outside the door of my dwelling to meet me.”

  Narayan Singh grinned, too, an unpleasant expression. “Instead they met me. I disturbed their winding-sheets with bloodstains, and in them they were buried—if the konstabeels did not throw them to the pi-dogs.”

  The Pathan’s eyes narrowed, suspecting a trap. “Should I weep for them?” he asked rhetorically. “Such men would be Shia, near as worthless as you Nasrani dogs, or this Hindu idol worshiper.”

  The Shia branch of Islam was common in Persia, although persecuted by the Caliph’s men; and common among the Empire’s Muslims, where the Raj enforced toleration. Pathans were fiercely orthodox Sunni, though. The Sikh growled; his faith was an offshoot of the Hindu stock, but ostentatiously monotheistic.

  “Would your fakir have bought hashasshin killers?” King said. “If he was a Sunni fakir, that is.”

  Narayan Singh pulled something from the neck of his tunic. The Pathan’s eyes went wide. The rumal of the stranglers was unmistakable. The Sikh undid the fold at the end and showed the coin there—gold, also an Imperial mohur, new-stamped, fresh from the Lahore mint.

  “While I slew the hashasshin, my sahib slew others who waited for him within—Deceivers, followers of Kali,” he said. “Would your fakir have dealt with worshipers of the Dreadful Bride?”

  Doubt showed on the Pathan’s face. “The tale of Deceivers who sought the life of a sahib was in the bazaars of Peshawar town,” he muttered.

  King nodded. “They sought to slay me.” His mouth thinned with remembered anger. “And then did kill my woman.”

  The Pathan shrugged indifferently at that. Beastly lot, King thought. Pathans saw women as fit only for work and breeding; many didn’t even think they were worthwhile for pleasure. An old Pathan song went:“There’s a boy across the river With a bottom like a peach But alas, I cannot swim . . .”

  “This fakir, was he of your people?” King said. He lifted the knife. “Speak. If you do, I promise you—on my honor as an Angrezi officer—that you will die clean and your body be buried by the rites of your faith.”

  The Pathan licked his lips. “I am Ibrahim Khan of the Dongala Khel,” he said. “My father is a malik, a great chief. He and my brothers and kindred will avenge me, however I die.”

  Another long moment’s silence, then: “No, the fakir—the man who called himself such—was not Pashtun. Not Pathan, you would say. He was Tadjik—Tadjik of the Wakan uplands. A tall man, who moved like a swordsman, fair of skin. One eye was covered in a patch.”

  Now, who . . . A sudden thought sent a chill crawling up from King’s groin to his gut. Who would be posing as a Tadjik, who wasn’t one? A white man, at that? Tadjiks were common in northern Afghanistan . . . and farther north still, among the human cattle of the Czar. Easy enough to acquire their language there.

  “He called himself a Tadjik,” he said softly. “But was he? Was he even a Muslim?”

  Ibrahim snorted. “He spoke Arabic—more than I ever learned in the medrassa school of my father’s village. He could quote from the holy Book.”

  King lifted the Khyber knife and tapped the flat against his knuckles. “A knife speaks truth, but men lie,” he said, quoting an old Border saying. “I also speak Arabic, and have read the Koran, but that does not make me a Muslim, much less a fakir or mullah.”

  “You do not say that this man was of your people!” Ibrahim sneered.

  “By no means. When he spoke your tongue, did he speak it thus? With this sound?”

  Languages were among King’s hobbies; his own Pushtu was idiomatic, to the point of having a slight Kabuli tinge like a courtier of the Emir. With an effort, he gave it another accent; one lisping and purling at the same time. Narayan Singh started, and stared at his commander in surprise.

  “Yes,” Ibrahim said, shrugging. “He used Pushtu much like that. What of it?”

  “That is not how a Tadjik would speak Pushtu,” King said grimly. “That would be thus.” He demonstrated, and the Afghan nodded, puzzled. “As I speak now, that is the mark of a different folk.” He paused for a long moment. “Russki, they call themselves. In your tongue, E-rus.”

  The Pathan froze for an instant, then heaved against the bonds that held him. “You lie! None of the Eaters of Men, the worshipers of Shaitan, would dare walk among us!”

  King shrugged. “Who else? A true fakir from the Caliphate would not consort with Shia—or worse, worshipers of Kali. Who else besides the Commander of the Faithful hates the Raj, and borders on the land of the Afghans, and has gold and guns to buy men?”

  Ibrahim’s face twisted with anger and disgust. The Pathans hated the Angrezi Raj; because the sahib-log were infidels; because they had taken the foothill country and Peshawar from the Afghans long ago and ruled it still; because expeditions punishing raiders had left smoking ruin in the upland villages time after time.

  But they hated the Russians and the Czar who ruled in Samarkand with a frenzied loathing that made their anger toward the Empire a pale and tepid thing.

  “You lie!” Ibrahim said again, but doubt had crept into his tone. “What proof have you?”

  “None,” King said promptly. “Any more than I know why the E-rus should seek my death more than any other Angrezi fighting man’s. But nothing else makes any sense at all, does it?”

  “The only gold I will take from Shaitan’s bum-boys is the gold I take from their lifeless bodies,” Ibrahim growled. “That does not make me love you like a brother, unbeliever—even if your tale be true.”

  “Good,” Narayan Singh said sardonically. “Since you have undoubtedly stabbed all your brothers in the back, over the love of the comeliest sheep in the Border country.”

&
nbsp; Ibrahim glared at him, but restrained his impulse to spit as the Sikh raised a sledgehammer fist.

  King frowned in thought for a long minute. “Listen to me, man of the hills,” he said at last. “For reasons I know not, this E-rus-who-passes-for-a-Tadjik seeks my life in secret razziah. And he has made of you and your kin his dogs and slaves, tricking you to be the servants of abomination. So it seems we both have blood feud with him.”

  “Aye,” Ibrahim said, his eyes kindling. “That is Pukhtunwali, the way of the Pathans. Death for an insult. He has broken the bond of hospitality, lied and deceived his hosts—lied to me. I would aid you in your revenge on him, even though you will soon hand me to the slayers. But why do you tell a dead man all this?”

  King kept his face grave; a smile at the wrong moment could turn the highlander sullen again. They were the most sensitive of men to mockery, although they made an art form of inflicting it on their enemies. Instead he went on solemnly:

  “Because we have an enemy in common, I will forgive—once—that you tried to take my head. I give you your life. You may take it and go, or you may seek this E-rus out with me.”

  Ibrahim’s eyes went wide for a moment; then he snorted. “You would call a Pathan blood brother?”

  “No!” King said. “If you come with me, you will come as my servant and sworn man. Or you may go your way, and if I see you again, I will slay you out of hand.”

  Now the Pathan put on an impassive face of his own. “Will you give me back my knife, if I choose to go?”

  “By Nanak Guru!” Narayan Singh swore. “This is insolence past all belief, even in an Afghan thief; he seeks to cut our throats, and asks for the return of the blade!”

  Ibrahim snorted. “A man who does not try never conquers,” he said, and turned back to King. “If I am thy man, what wage will you pay?”

  “None! You shall have your food and keep, and a horse,” King said promptly. “And when we take the head of the E-rus, two hundred gold mohurs and freedom to ride back to the hills. If we fail . . . dead men need no gold. Turn.”