The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  Not to mention covering up for me with Mother in that embarrassing little matter of the nautch-girl, he thought.

  If there was anyone on Rexin who could help him make sense of all this, it was Ranjit Singh. And he certainly trusted the older man far more than he did the Political Service.

  The Sikh cast a pawky eye at Ibrahim Khan, who squatted on his hams a little to the rear; an eyebrow rose to see the chora-knife hanging from the Pathan’s belt. It was not illegal to carry a blade, strictly speaking, at least outside city boundaries. Only firearms were closely controlled by law. It was certainly unusual to see an armed Pathan this far from the Border, though.

  “I presume this one”—he jerked a thumb at the Muslim—“is part of the tale?”

  “He is,” King said. “Listen, then . . .”

  “It is a bad business,” Ranjit said at last, slowly. With a brief, grim smile: “Except that thou, Narayan, have played the man at the young sahib’s side past all expectation. You are now comrades who owe each other a life; that is good.”

  He shook his head. “I do not like this matter of the E-rus fakir.”

  He sat on an upturned bucket, rubbing absently at the knee that had never quite healed properly, staring off into times long gone. Then, abruptly, he began to speak.

  “Young sahib, there are things of which I have never spoken to you. Things concerning your father.”

  King blinked in surprise; he hadn’t expected that. Half his boyhood that he remembered was sitting at Ranjit Singh’s knee, hearing tales of his father and the Sikh, wild adventures together across half the Empire and beyond. Border skirmishes, raids on slave-traders’ nests in the Gulf; the terrible campaign in Siam; an expedition against the Masai in the African highlands behind Mombasa; hunts for tiger and elephant in the jungles of the Terai country on the lowland edges of Nepal.

  Even faring to Europe, when a detachment was sent to guard scientists probing the bush-grown, savage-haunted ruins of the pre-Fall cities. Armed nights spent listening to the drums of the cannibal tribes throbbing in the dark valley of the Rhine while the archaeologists dug among the stones and bones of Essen; trekking through the endless forests and steppes to the east . . .

  “You know that your father fell in an Afridi ambush in the Border country,” the older man said. “What I have never told you is why we were on that patrol. Oh, the records say it was a routine matter—to question a village headman over a trifle of cattle-lifting from an estate near the frontier, perhaps to levy a fine or take back the loose-wallahs who did it. Question the headman of a tributary tribe, safe and law-abiding, or so the kitubs say in the books in Delhi.”

  King nodded warily. After years of service in the same lands, he could fill in the rest himself. Hooves clattering up a rough track amid huge man-empty hillsides scored by gulley and ravine, rearing into rock piles that cut off heaven. The sudden volley of slugs from long-barreled jezails, and of bullets from stolen rifles, the harsh war cries, a rumble of boulders tipped downslope. Then a sudden screaming wave of men in dirty brown coats and pugarees, their fists filled with bright steel, rising out of the very earth. In among the horses too quickly for the lancers to react, a wild, hacking, stabbing melee . . .

  “The report is honest, in that it does not lie,” Ranjit Singh said softly. “But it does not tell all the truth. Nor could I, under my military oath; we were all cautioned by the colonel-sahib, later; Colonel Haighton that was, long retired and dead these ten years. Yet I was—am—thy father’s man before I am the Sirkar’s. I ate his salt when still a lad; my father bequeathed to me the task of being his shield-on-shoulder; and now my duty is to you.”

  He leaned forward. “The patrol was not just a patrol. It was a palitikal matter. With us rode Warburton sahib . . . ah, I see you know him.”

  “A man of middling height, slender, yellow-haired? About my father’s age he would have been then, or a little younger. With a face that shows nothing save what he wishes. One who moves well, very still at rest, and I would think swift in action.”

  “Han, sahib, that is him—to the inch.”

  The Sikh held up a hand, scarred and gnarled and with one joint of the little finger missing:

  “I do not say that Warburton sahib is not a true man, and a brave one. He fought very well; not a man to smash down a foeman with heavy blows, but skilled—and quick, quick. But he had a mind as twisted as the path of the little silver viper, the kerait, as it circles through tall grass. I could tell my sahib was troubled by our mission and what the palitikal officer said, although it was not fitting for me to listen to their private speech.

  “What I do know is that there were rumors also of guns among the Afridis—not their own rubbish, nor a few stolen from our men, but many. Breech-loading rifles. Berdans.”

  King shaped a silent whistle. That was the Russian weapon—had been, rather, in his father’s time; they used a magazine rifle now. Even single-shot Berdans were much better than what the Afghan tribes usually carried, though. They were bad enough with their native weaponry, and pure murder with stolen arms—even though those were few, and ammunition for them even scarcer. If they were to get modern or even semimodern guns en masse . . .

  He shuddered slightly. The things they came up with on their own were bad enough. Some of the Border clans had started making imitation mortars, for instance; cursed good imitations, too. The western tribes, over by Herat, had even taken to experimenting with crude airships, this past generation.

  Ibrahim Khan hissed between his teeth. “We raid and rob the worshipers of Shaitan, too,” he pointed out, speaking for the first time. There was an edge of doubt in his voice. “And we fight them when they come among the hills in reprisal, or on razziah for sacrificial victims to slay on the altars of the Peacock Angel and devour in their devil feasts.” He spat. “We steal their guns, too, when we can. My father has a Cossack saber that his grandfather took from one such.”

  “You do not raid them for hundreds of new Berdans—still packed in the grease, in their crates, with the writing of the E-rus burned into the planks, and the double-headed eagle,” said Ranjit Singh. “Silence, child of misbelief. Silence is the beginning of wisdom.”

  His eyes went back to King. “Yet, young sahib, I think that somehow these rifles were a lure, a trap. We tracked down the cave where they lay too easily; aye, and smashed and burned them, with their ammunition. Then we set ourselves to cut our way back to the frontier forts, but the paths which were easy going in became a hornet’s nest when we sought to leave.

  “The pursuers dogged our track like hounds upon that of a jackal, and pushed ahead to cut us off—as if they could read our intentions, although your father led us with cunning skill. And when they ambushed us at the last, the cliffs fell—those were blasting charges that brought the mountain down on our heads, laid with skill, no mere pile of rocks. Yes, perhaps it was some such as this”—he nodded to Ibrahim—“who served a term in the Sappers, and was false to his salt, and took his training back to his kin.”

  The Sikh set both big hands on his knees and leaned forward over his kettle belly.

  “But I do not think so, sahib. While we were among the Afridi villages, there was a woman, and she and I . . . no matter; it was long ago, and the wench is dead. She spoke of a fakir who preached jihad against the Raj; that it was lawful to take any aid against the Angrezi, even that of the servants of Shaitan, for the Raj was closer and a greater threat than the E-rus. This fakir gained great credence among the hill people, because he had a seeress with him, a seeress who could pierce the minds of men and tell things that were secret and make true prophecies. The fakir himself claimed to be a Kurd—a servant of the Caliph from the Zagros Mountains far to the west. He had one eye that was brown, another blue . . .”

  Ibrahim stirred, like a boulder moving under the tent of the sheepskin coat he wore loose from his shoulders. “The fakir I told of was one-eyed,” he pointed out. Then: “Bismillah! If—”

  Narayan Singh snorte
d. “This is a Pathan who can see a millstone and cry out on it for a cheap looking glass that shows not his ugliness,” he said. “Yes, a man with eyes of different colors would be easy to mark. But a man who lost one eye in a fight, or to some illness—you will see some such in any crowd. An eye patch can hide many things. So that none would think back a generation. And Ibrahim, what age was this fakir?”

  The Pathan frowned. “Hard to say. Not young—but still strong. Perhaps . . .” He shrugged. “Thirty years at least? Perhaps forty; perhaps even fifty. You plains-dwellers age slowly. The woman? Young, but she wore the burqua always.”

  “That walks too well with thy story, pitaji,” the young Sikh said.

  Ranjit nodded. “So, there is more between those bat ears of thine than bone, Narayan,” he said. “Yes, there are too many similarities in the tales for comfort—a fakir who claims to be Persian or Kurd or Tadjik, accompanied by a woman who sees visions . . . The man spoken of by this Pathan who runs at the sahib’s tail would be the right age. For the fakir of my day was young; a man in years, but in his earliest prime.”

  He looked at King again. “The fall of the cliff killed many of our squadron. After that, sahib, they broke us and harried us through the hills; we ran, and fought, and twisted back upon our path, and it seemed we had our blades out every second step of the way. Little battles to win past the fording of a river, or for food and water or fresh horses, traveling by night and hiding by day. Always they were ahead and turned us back farther into the hills just when we thought we had broken past their cordon. Warburton sahib rubbed stain upon his skin and hair, and donned the clothes of a dead Afghan, and said he would go for help.

  “And by the Guru, he lied not! For am I not here, alive, today? But when help came—sahib, I saw strong men weep with joy when they heard the bugles blowing down the defile, the place where the hillmen had the last of us cornered. I wept myself; partly for relief, partly because my knee was broken and I knew I would never back a horse in battle again. Mostly I wept for your father, Captain Eric King of the Peshawar Lancers, for without him we would assuredly have all died, and he was a man in a hundred, a thousand, a true bahadur. By then he was raving much of the time, for the wound in his side had mortified—a wound he took as he dragged me free from the fight where I got this—”

  Ranjit Singh slapped his crippled leg. “. . . and that he did when every moment was precious, with me useless, howling like a dying dog and blind with pain. On that last day I sat beside him. I had given him what water we had, so he strengthened for some moments, enough to hear the bugles and the shots, I think. I told him we were victorious, that the regiment had come for us, and soon the learned doctors would cure his hurts. He smiled. He knew me and heard my words, and spoke a little—things for the memsahib your mother, and nothing to repeat—and gave me letters. And he gave me this.”

  The Sikh fumbled within his coat. He brought something out, and held it upon his broad leathery palm. The silver chain was incongruously delicate on the callused hand of a farmer and soldier. The chain led through a loop and a narrow band that clenched one end of an ivory rod the thickness of a man’s thumb. The ivory was old, slightly yellow, carved in a simple pattern of bamboo stalks and leaves. About three inches from the band it ended, in a jagged broken surface—as if a longer piece had been snapped in half.

  King’s breath caught. The bit of broken ivory was a tessera hospitalis—a mark of obligation—between his family and whoever held the other half. It wasn’t a common thing and never had been, although perhaps a little less rare in generations past.

  “He gave me this,” Ranjit Singh continued. “And he said . . . sahib, I do not know if his mind was still clear, for afterward he raved once more, calling out orders as if we were in battle, then talking to his lady mother, who was long dead. But when he gave me this, I think he still had command of himself. He closed my hand around it and said For the boy—meaning you, sahib—and then, I should have listened to the Jew. Then he was silent a few moments, and his eyes opened and looked into mine.

  “You will know when the time is, he told me. When he stands in danger from the E-rus. Or if it does not come, then when he weds. Give him this, and say . . . say that he should seek out Elias the Jew, in the Chandi Chowk in Delhi. Ask Elias . . .”

  Silence fell in the rustling dimness of the stable. Ranjit Singh’s face was still, as if he looked through the veil of years and was once more young himself. Crouched beside a dying man, his leg a mass of agony and blood, straining to hear the faint whispers amid the screams and clamor of battle.

  “Yes, rissaldar?” King prompted gently.

  “Sahib, those were his last words for a long time. Then he called out to Daffadar Bucks—who was a week dead—and told him to reinforce the pickets. He no longer knew where he was.”

  He held out his hand, and King extended his. The weight of the silver-bound ivory toppled into his palm, and he closed his hands around the cool smoothness of it, felt the jagged broken portion cutting into his skin.

  Ranjit nodded and sighed, like a man who has carried a weight for a long time, and feels it taken from his back. “I hope it may help you, sahib. This is an evil matter, this thing of assassins in the dark. Perhaps it is even somehow linked to what happened to your sister, the young memsahib Cassandra.”

  King sat bolt upright. “What?” he said. “Something happened to Cass?”

  Chapter Eight

  Thunk-chink. The hammer on the reverse of her climbing ax drove the piton into the crack in the cliff face. Cassandra King used the best equipment she could buy out of a modest salary and a generous inheritance; this type had an interior screw, and when you put the handle of the ax through the loop at the end and turned it, it drove the sides of the piton out, gripping the rock with unbreakable force. She twisted until the rock creaked, then snapped the support of her harness onto it and let herself sag back a little while she put in two more and reeved the main rope through their eyelets.

  The cold wind blew a flush into her cheeks. She pushed the goggles up onto her forehead, squinting a little against it, let her quick breath subside.

  Odd, she thought. If this view were from an airship, I’d have a knot in my stomach.

  Hanging from a steel wedge hammered into the living rock, she was conscious of nothing but the sheer beauty of it. She was a little under ten thousand feet above sea level; that put her a thousand feet up on a rock face over the Ferozepur nulla—a side valley cut into the ranges on the south side of the Vale of Kashmir.

  Not far away to the right a streamlet bawled and leapt down the crags, the spray wetting the cliff to within a hundred yards of her position. It dissolved in rainbow mist not far below, then became a small river winding through naturally terraced steps of brilliant green meadow starred with white cosmos, flowing down into the woods on the lower slopes. The spurs below were clad in dark green spikes of silver fir, forest opened here and there by sunlit patches of grassland or a crimson explosion of maple, hills turning a deeper and deeper purple as they receded from sight. Across the Vale itself—eighty miles or more distant—hung the great peak of Nanga Parbat, soft pure white in a gauze-like haze of delicate blue.

  Times like this, you feel as if you could float free. Away like thistledown, into an infinite sky.

  It was like the passion of numbers, somehow; on a more emotional plane, but with much of the same eerie transcendence. At last she sighed and willed herself back into the light of common day. It was like turning from the wilder speculations of Ghose—she pushed away a shocking rush of memory—to the solidities of Newton. And that was one reason she’d specialized in astronomy; there, at least, the modern uncertainties had not yet crept in.

  And now it was time to return. The way down was easy after the muscle-cracking effort of the climb; she rappelled down the last hundred yards in a smooth swift rush, then unclipped the harness and skipped over talus and rock to her starting point. That was a stretch of meadow shaded by a big deodar, enough for
the horses and two servants and a small canvas enclosure she used to change her garb—even Cassandra King wasn’t unconventional enough to wear climbing overalls anywhere but on a mountainside. Her retainers were there, but her eyes widened slightly to see others as well. Two horses—very good ones, though not showy—and two men, one a groom and one—

  These days she carried a small revolver tucked into a pocket; a permit wasn’t too difficult to come by, for a zamindar ’s daughter and university professor, especially one with her recent history. Her hand went to the checkered butt of the Adams, finding reassurance in the solid ebony and blued-steel weight of the weapon. Her brother and an old retainer of her father’s had taught her to handle firearms. The hand dropped away in puzzlement; certainly the eminently respectable-looking sahib-log gentleman wasn’t a terrorist. . . .

  “Permit me the liberty of self-introduction, Dr. King,” the man said; he was short, fair, and wiry. “Sir Manfred Warburton, Bart. IPS.”

  He handed her a card, and her brows rose as she read it. Well, when I sent in that memorial of complaint, I didn’t expect a response so early—or one in person.

  “Is this concerning the Analytical Engine assignments?” she asked. “Or the assassination? I was told that my statements were sufficient.”

  The questioners at the sessions after the attack had taken her through the whole business over and over again. A frosty edge came into her voice:

  “The process was long, and unpleasant, and I had assumed that it was over.”

  “Oh, indeed,” the baronet said. “Captain Malusre gave a most complete redaction, and is pursuing the rather meager leads with commendable efficiency. No, I was hoping to speak with you on another matter—related, to be sure, but distinct from both that and the, ah, commandeering of the Engine.”

  “Here?” she said, her brows still high.