The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  De Vascogne laughed. “Of a certainty, that would be an asset for any Intelligence service! Just imagine being able to tell which man can be suborned or threatened, how he will react to—”

  He paused; Warburton’s face had gone entirely blank. “You don’t believe these rumors, Sir Manfred?”

  “I would be well-advised not to,” Warburton replied. “Officers who babble of occult reasons behind the failures of their departments don’t tend to have very successful careers—at least, not in our Empire.”

  “Nor in ours,” de Vascogne answered. “We have a phrase—le cafard. The . . . bug, you would say.”

  “Equivalent to our doolalli,” the Angrezi officer said. “Named for an insane asylum of former days.” He sighed. “Moving on to other matters, what do you think of our princess? More to the point, what will your ruler and his son think of her?”

  “Enchanting. Personally, I find her enchanting,” Henri de Vascogne said.

  Then he shrugged expressively and spread his hands in a purely Gallic gesture. “His Majesty Napoleon VI is . . . shall we say, somewhat more stiff and given to extreme decorum than your humble servant? I venture to say the prince will be more of my opinion . . . and . . .” A momentary sadness showed on his face. “. . . in any case, this is a political matter, n’est-ce pas?”

  Sir Manfred sipped his tea. “Indubitably. However, the point of a dynastic measure is to improve relations between the two nations. If the marriage is an unhappy one—”

  He shrugged. “For purely political negotiations, your Ambassador Fleury would have done well enough—very well indeed. He gave us fits over the trade treaty back in ’20; for a man with a losing hand, he fought like a mongoose. He did handle the preliminaries for this, and extremely competently.”

  Henri made an extravagant gesture. “But for negotiations with a beautiful young princess, Ambassador Fleury is . . . perhaps . . .”

  “Too fat?” Warburton asked. “Too old? Too obsessed with food and drink? Too testy when his dyspepsia strikes?”

  “Most exactly.” Henri caught himself stroking a vanished mustache. “Whereas I . . .”

  “Are young, handsome, dashing, and charming,” Warburton said with a slight smile. “And your Imperial prince trusts you with this delicate mission?”

  Henri nodded. “I think I may say with pride that our prince, and his father, trust me as they would no other man. The prince and I are of an age, and we have been close since birth—very close.”

  “Home,” Athelstane King breathed, looking up through the terraced fields to the blue fir forests on the hills and the white peaks above.

  “And not before time, huzoor,” Narayan Singh said.

  He felt the same sense of relief as he filled his lungs with the cool crisp highland air. The rice was in and stooked, sheaves resting in tripods; maize rustled dryly ripe; tobacco spread its broad green leaves and rippled in the wind. A team of oxen pulled a plow, and from the steel share furrows turned in crumbling red-brown earth through the stubble. The plowman raised a hand from the grips and waved to the riders passing by; in a meadow beyond sheep wandered with their muzzles down amid the green of pasture; everything breathed peace amid the musty dampness and autumn smell of woodsmoke and fresh-turned earth.

  Narayan knew it was foolishness to feel easy here; if enemies of the Raj and his lord could steal into the Peshawar Club, could they not crawl unseen into Kashmir? Yet these mountains and fields were the framework of his life; on these trees he had climbed as a boy, in these fields he had labored beside his kin. Soldiering was a man’s life, honorable and well paid, and adventure in far lands fed his soul, so that he did not walk forever in the same rut like an ox. But a man needed a home—which barracks could never be. Here as nowhere else he felt secure.

  “Fat land,” Ibrahim Khan put in from behind them, unasked. “Fat and rich.” He smacked his lips. “What a countryside to loot!” He met the scowls cast over the other men’s shoulders with an innocent smile.

  Border wolf indeed, Narayan thought, before he shrugged and turned forward once more.

  The familiar road up from the river was lined with Chinar trees, some of them left over from Old Empire times and all of them enormous—many were twenty or thirty feet thick at the base and a hundred high. They met overhead, and the shade they cast was densely umbrageous, with only an occasional flicker of sun; when the three men crossed an irrigation channel on a wooden bridge the light was an explosion that made them squint against the glare. The broad flat leaves shone in autumn purple, claret red, and burnt gold, making the roadway ahead into a tunnel of fire for a moment amid the hollow clopping sound of hoof on plank.

  Rexin manor was half a mile away southwestward on a low hilltop, surrounded by park and garden; some of the great trees that shaded it were English oaks, descendants of a basket of acorns the sahib’s many-times-grandfather had brought out from England—some place called Yorkshire—during the Exodus. Narayan’s own ancestors had been in the Kings’ fighting tail even then, and had followed them to Kashmir.

  A fortunate thing, he thought: He’d seen the Sikh homeland in the Punjab often, and while the Seven Rivers country was fertile enough—abundantly so, near the irrigation canals—it was far too flat and harshly dry for his taste.

  And you cannot find good fruit or good mutton there; summer is like a bake oven; only the dust you eat is of note.

  “Shall we go to the manor, sahib?” Narayan asked, nodding his chin in that direction.

  “Not directly,” King replied. “Best we lie up and sniff the winds first.”

  “My home, then,” Narayan said. “I’ll ride ahead and give the pitaji warning.”

  “A good thought. Namaste from me to Ranjit Singh, and we’ll follow when you signal us.”

  Narayan grinned to himself with anticipation as he pressed his thighs against the horse’s flanks and turned up the rutted side lane that ran through his family’s steading toward his home. The house was set in the middle of their farm, for there was no need to huddle close for protection amid the long peace of the Empire’s inner provinces. Nor was the holding small; it covered a hundred acres, many times that of a ryot, a common peasant. By Mahatma Disraeli’s wise law every zamindar’s estate had ten such yeoman-tenant farms let at half rent to families of the loyal martial castes; a garrison in the terrible years, recruiting grounds for the Imperial armies now.

  A countryman’s eye showed the farm in good heart as he rode, ready for the wet cold and occasional snow of a Kashmiri winter. The hedges of multiflora rose were neatly trimmed, the yellow-coated dairy herds plump and contented amid the clover, with thatched hayricks here and there. The low brick-built farmhouse itself was hidden by orchards until he rode close enough to hear voices; there were apples, peaches, pears, grapes raised on trellises, hops twining up tall poles, quinces, apricots, and walnuts and cherries. Kashmiri fruit was famous, and latterly some produce was even air-freighted from Oxford to the great cities of the southern plains. The sahib’s mother had been debating buying a motorwagon for years now; more expensive than horses, but there was always a premium price in town for the freshest fruit.

  Narayan drew rein outside the courtyard gate—the buildings of the homestead were grouped around it, barns and sheds about a yard cobbled with round stones from the river. He could hear his father’s voice now, raised in a stentorian bellow:

  “So!”

  The young man’s grin grew wider; he could well imagine the scene within. His father was nearer fifty than forty, with a rolling limp to his stride, legacy of a left knee that had never worked well after it stopped the lead slug of an Afridi jezail, long years ago. Despite that, despite the iron gray of his beard and the solid fat that overlay hard muscle, he looked to be exactly what he was; a long-service saddle-and-lance man, a retired cavalry noncom with a voice that could still flay the hide from an ox. His bellow had an edge of rough good nature to it, but only the very foolish would ignore the words:

  “Slugabeds!
Lazy idlers! Good-for-nothings! Do I feed you fat and fill your pockets with rupees so that you may sleep? The rice is in, but is the tobacco all cut? Is there no dung to be carted to make the wheatfields ready for plowing? Is there no—”

  Right now he’d be slapping his considerable belly and belching contentedly as he strode through the rear doorway of his farmhouse, full of Gogji Shabdegh—good Kashmiri mutton and turnips, served with fragrant buzhbattah rice from their own fields. Narayan’s mother cooked better mutton and turnips than anyone else on the King lands; he could smell it now, and his mouth spurted saliva after months away.

  Narayan dismounted and led his horse through the gates in time to see dust smoke off his father’s rough jacket and cummerbund as he slapped his belly again, it being working dress and the rice harvest just in. His mouth opened for another bellow, before he saw his son. That turned into a great shout:

  “Narayan!”

  The dozen or so folk within the courtyard froze—two of Narayan’s younger brothers’ sons had been wrestling, stripped to their waists; a gang of day laborers was hitching the oxen to a heaped cart of pungent, well-rotted manure and straw; his aunt and a maidservant gripped the handles of a great wicker basket loaded with laundry, on their way to the washhouse.

  The younger Sikh heard his name repeated a dozen times; by his brothers, his aunt, the housemaid, his mother come out of her kitchen with a ladle still in her hand. His sister Neerja—how she’d grown, she was a maiden now and no gawky schoolgirl!—fairly shrieked it as she dropped a shallow basket full of cracked maize. The hens she’d been scattering handfuls to descended on it in squawking ecstasy as she dashed over and hovered about, jumping from one foot to the other in excitement and letting the shawl slip from her braided black hair.

  “Pitaji!” Narayan said, putting his palms together and making the reverence due one’s sire. “Father! I have returned.”

  “So I see,” Ranjit Singh growled, putting his fists on his hips and mock-scowling. “And late, as usual—wasting your leave time carousing among the gambling dens and loose women of Peshawar town, when we could have used an extra pair of hands with the harvest!”

  His scowl broke into a roar of laughter as he gave his son the gesture of blessing, then folded him into his arms and danced the young Lancer around in a circle.

  “And grown to be a burra-sowar, a real horse-soldier, I see!” he said, releasing him. “Perhaps the Sirkar will make a rissaldar of thee before thy hanging, boy! And where is thy sahib? We heard news that he was wounded—but not badly?”

  “No,” Narayan said, feeling the joy of homecoming wash out of him at the reminder of their peril. “Not badly; he is indeed well.”

  He leaned close to his father again, whispered in his ear: “And he is with me, disguised, at the corner where the laneway meets the Manor Road. But he must not be seen—can you make it so?”

  Ranjit Singh’s face changed for an instant, then put on pleasure again. Narayan felt another rush of relief. He might be a man grown and a daffadar of the Peshawar Lancers himself, but he knew the value of his father’s shrewdness—he was old enough now to put aside a youth’s resentment of age. The older Sikh turned to the folk of his holding:

  “About your tasks! Donkal, slaughter a lamb—no, two yearlings. Wife, set about preparing a welcoming feast for our son. Let nothing be spared in preparation, and let no ordinary work go undone between now and sunset either!” He clapped his hands, and the throng began to scatter. “And young Atkins, my thanks to your father for the repair of the bridle—tell him he and his are bid to the feasting.”

  Young Thomas blushed; it was fairly obvious, for his pathetically downy attempt at a mustache was the color of saffron, his eyes pale blue, and his pink skin showed his feelings nakedly, flushing up to the edge of his plain dark brown turban. Narayan knew him well; among the yeoman-tenants of the Kings were five lesser sahib-log families like the Atkins family, four of Sikhs including his own, and two Rajputs. He remembered Thomas as a spotty-faced youth two years behind him in the village school, but the boy—young man—had put on inches and broadened in the shoulders of late. He exchanged a glance with Neerja as he left; she let her eyes fall, and hurried in to help her mother.

  “Oh, so?” Narayan said to his father.

  The older Sikh’s chin jutted and his mouth set. “That is in hand. He must leave for his military service soon—we will arrange a good match for Neerja while he is gone. The memory of youth is short, and any nonsense will be forgotten. I will have no half-caste grand-children.”

  “It would be a good match, if he were a Sikh,” Narayan pointed out—caste barriers were less strong in Kashmir than most provinces, and the population more mixed.

  And if Neerja’s look was as I thought, there will be a battle like elephants battering their heads together, he mused. Stubbornness ran in the family on both sides.

  “But he is not a Sikh,” Ranjit said, and shook his head. “Now, come, we have business of real weight to discuss. I will say that two friends of yours have come to visit your home on leave—but that will not hold for long. I must hear what has happened, from the young captain-sahib’s own lips.”

  Athelstane King sat his horse quietly, smiling as he looked at his home once more; the beast twitched its ears, shifted weight from hoof to hoof, swished its tail at flies, opened nostrils, and swung its head toward the water that pooled in the roadside ditch.

  The rider’s gaze was on the manor where the shadows of afternoon were falling mellow across brick and tile and garden. The house itself was a rambling structure of wings and annexes added over the years, comfortable and homey rather than grand. Below the hilltop was the complex of barns, stables, and workshops that were the business side of the estate, and Kingsby village strung along the road. There were small brick houses for the hired laborers who did what work the Home Farm needed beyond the labor-service of the ryots; more homes for house servants and grooms and gardeners; and the shop-residences of the craftsmen—blacksmith, tailor, wheelwright, estate carpenter, and more.

  Among them stood larger homes for the bailiff, accountant, parson, doctor; a teahouse-cum-tavern; a shop or two; a church, a Sikh gurudwara, a miniature temple for orthodox Hindus, and a small mosque; a stone-built mill beside its clacking waterwheel; a school, bakery, fruit-packing sheds, a small jam factory. The whole complex was silhouetted against the Pir Panjal range to the southwest, slopes where cloud-shadow slid across huge folds of earth. Those heights rose blue with deodar-cedar forest varied with crimson maple, until they reached the tree line. There birches were gold-leafed splashes, before they gave way to crags white and pale rose with sun-splashed snow.

  “It’s well that you are rich,” Ibrahim Khan said, jarring him out of his reverie. “This horse is a sorry nag, if it’s the one you meant me to keep.”

  “You’ll get a good one from my stables here,” King said, amused.

  “That is well. Although a wealthy man could surely afford to pay his sworn man a decent wage—so far, even the food hasn’t been very good, nor overmuch at a serving.”

  King snorted laughter; the Pathan hadn’t stopped trying to wheedle money out of him yet, and probably wouldn’t.

  “You’ll be well fed while we’re here,” he said. “For gold, you’ll have to hope we find the E-rus.”

  “Or they will find us,” Ibrahim said. “Ah, thy Sikh calls us.”

  King nodded, and they heeled their horses into a canter up the laneway that led to the farm—the mounts showing an eagerness that probably came of the scents of fodder and stable. Ranjit Singh greeted them, his arms folded over his barrel chest.

  “Come,” the yeoman said curtly—when he saw Ibrahim’s Pathan features, his hand made an unconscious move to the hilt of a tulwar that hung by his bedside now. “We will talk in the stables; that is natural enough. Go thence, and I will join you in moments.”

  In the stables there was none of the comfortable, functional clutter that the rest of the farm showed; the
brick floors between straw-bedded stalls were scoured clean, the tack and saddles stowed just so, tools racked, the boards and rails of the pens and loose-boxes painted and neat, just as they would have been in the horse lines of the Peshawar Lancers. Three of the horses were elderly cavalry mounts, with the lion’s-head military brand; the rest cobby dual-purpose farm stock. Narayan Singh shooed the stableboy out, and the three young men spent a moment unsaddling and rubbing down the horses before turning them in to empty stalls. It was a chore as automatic as breathing to horsemen, and Narayan reached for the pitchfork on the wall without looking, hand guided by the unconscious familiarity of a lifetime. He tossed shredded maize-fodder and clover into the mangers, and wet chewing sounds followed.

  Ranjit Singh appeared in the doorway, noted what had been done, nodded approval.

  “A troop of monkeys in a ruined temple has less curiosity than the folk of this farm,” he grumbled. “And better manners; at least the monkeys will run away when you shout. Sahib,” the elder Sikh went on, with a courteous bow. “Captain King.”

  “Rissaldar Singh,” King replied, inclining his head.

  Under his calm facade—and the damned itchy new beard—King felt a rush of relief as he watched the brown, broken-nosed face with its gray whiskers, coarse-pored wrinkled skin, and shrewd dark eyes. His own father had died in action when he was six, in the same Border skirmish that gave Ranjit Singh a lifelong limp.

  It had been Narayan’s father who taught him how to hunt, the finer tricks of horsemanship, trained him to handle a rifle and a blade with merciless perfectionism, and set him and Narayan running up the hills beyond Rexin several thousand times over the years, each youth with a heavy sack of wet sand across his shoulders. Every morning from his fourteenth birthday on, along with much else in the way of discipline and preparation.