The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  “Discretion,” the IPS agent said. “A matter of political importance. And to your family, Dr. King. I knew your father, by the way. Before you were born—at United Services School, and in the service.”

  “By all means, then, Sir Manfred. Any assistance I can give to the Sirkar, of course; or to a friend of Father’s.”

  The servants laid out blankets and seating cushions on the thick green turf, while Cassandra used the tent to change into a plain country gentlewoman’s riding habit. The two Imperials sank down naturally into a cross-legged posture.

  “Tea, Sir Manfred?”

  As she poured, Cassandra composed herself. There was no use in pretending that the . . . incident . . . hadn’t happened. Or that it wouldn’t continue to affect her life, and in ways more obvious than the fading nightmares.

  They exchanged polite nothings—not quite an empty social ritual, when he mentioned King family matters that nobody who hadn’t known her father would know. Not that there was any real possibility of someone impersonating a Political Service Officer, of course. And it set her a little at ease, enough to react calmly when he went on:

  “You had a priority problem consulting the Oxford Engine recently, did you not, Dr. King? You and your colleagues on the Project.”

  “Yes, and none of us were overly happy about it,” she said. “I presume, since your name was attached, that you were the author of our woes?”

  Sir Manfred spread his hands in a placating gesture. “I understand your impatience, Dr. King,” he said; oddly, she felt it was sincere. “In the long run, your work—the Project’s work—is vital to the future of the whole human race. We cannot afford another Fall, and the Project has already proven that such impacts are a recurrent part of Earth’s history. Of course, in the light of those studies . . . even if we knew it was coming, perhaps we could not do much. Adding only the terror of anticipation, as it were.”

  “That’s nonsense,” Cassandra snapped. “If the Old Empire had had several years warning, most of the worst of the Fall could have been avoided easily enough. Simply maintaining large food stockpiles and having plans to evacuate coastal areas would have preserved civilization in Europe and North America. We do maintain famine reserves, and that’s partly the reason.”

  “Ah, forgive me . . . I had in mind the research on far worse impacts, ones which Oxford’s students of Darwinian Geological Catastrophes have demonstrated to be responsible for mass extinctions.”

  “Oh.” Cassandra blushed; she knew her temper overcame such social graces as she possessed all too often. “I am sorry, Sir Manfred. Yes, a much larger impact—one such as ended the dinosaurian era sixty-odd million years ago—yes, that would be deadly even with all possible precautions. Perhaps enough so that the survival of the human race would be endangered, not merely civilization. Even there, though, theoretically there are countermeasures; very large cannon, for instance, capable of throwing shells beyond the atmosphere, or possibly rockets. Nothing we could do now, but science is progressive. In a century, who knows what we will be able to accomplish?”

  She leaned forward, earnest. “Yet who knows if we have a century? Or if a century will be enough? Another Fall could occur at any moment. Our network of observatories is pathetically inadequate—much of the sky is uncovered, particularly in the northern hemisphere. Ideally we need—”

  Sir Manfred made another gesture, exquisitely polite. “Yes, Dr. King. I fully and completely agree with everything you say . . . which is why the Political Service was forced to interrupt your work.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said in honest puzzlement. “Could you explain, please?”

  Sir Manfred smiled. “Dr. King, if only you knew how refreshing a request for an explanation is . . . yes. What could be more important than the Project? Determining how and why someone—some powerful agency—is attempting to destroy the Project.”

  Cassandra felt her lips begin to shape that’s ridiculous, and then fall silent; she’d always despised anyone who rejected a hypothesis merely because it jarred on their set notions. She set her teacup down with a slight clink of stoneware—no sense in taking anything fancy on a mountaineering trip.

  “Why on earth . . . the Project benefits everyone. It’s not as if it . . . oh, increases the strength of the Empire relative to some other country, the way some military or commercial endeavor might. We spend the resources, and everyone else benefits as much as we!”

  Warburton cleared his throat. “Yes. However, the fact remains that someone did attempt to destroy the mirror for the new telescope—and had the attempt succeeded fully, many of our foremost scientists would have died at the same time. They did succeed in killing one of our finest physicists.”

  “I thought . . . was that not, mmm, Bengali secessionists?”

  “Yes. Captain Malusre has developed several very promising lines of evidence which lead in that direction. However, while the evidence is satisfactory, the motivation is not. Malusre—a man wasted in his present post and due for promotion—has also uncovered some evidence indicating that money and arms have been flowing to the secessionists and other subversives from the diwan of the Caliph of Damascus.”

  Cassandra frowned. “But doesn’t that just push the problem further back?” she pointed out. “The Caliph and his people can’t want another Fall, surely!”

  Sir Manfred raised a brow. Cassandra flushed; she had studied history, even if it wasn’t her specialty. The Fall hadn’t been a complete catastrophe everywhere; in the low-lying deserts of the Middle East for example. They had suffered wild weather and floods and unseasonable cold, but nothing like the devastation to the north. And afterward, the Arab peoples had seen their Turkish oppressors and Christian enemies struck down—by the very hand of God, or so it seemed. These days the Caliph in Damascus ruled from Hungary to the Baluchi frontier of the Raj in what had once been Persia.

  “Well, they were lucky,” she said. “Given the location of the strike. They might not be, again.”

  Sir Manfred nodded. “I know that, Dr. King. You know that. It’s quite likely the Caliph and his advisors don’t. They have some extremely shrewd men among their number, as we’ve found to our cost. They don’t have a scientific tradition. Not a living one; they have only some rote-learned engineering tricks they picked up before the Fall, or during it from refugees; no theoretical framework. Even if a few of them are familiar with the physical explanation for the Fall, it isn’t emotionally real to them.”

  Cassandra bowed her head in thought, running one finger meditatively over her upper lip. “Your pardon, Sir Manfred,” she said. “I don’t want to encroach on your specialty . . . but that’s no reason for them to actively hinder the Project, is it? And they wouldn’t dare to provoke the Raj.”

  “They might dare,” the man said. “A major war with them is looking increasingly likely—” He waved a hand at her shock. “Your pardon; another matter entirely. No, you’re right. They have no reason to aim specifically at the Project, even if they were indeed supplying subversives with arms and money. Nor do the subversives themselves—they gain nothing but public dislike. Yet someone gave them money and arms; and I must assume that that someone also made the aid conditional on this attack against the Project. And against you specifically, Dr. King. You and your family.”

  She put a hand to her throat and swallowed. “My family?” she said faintly.

  “Indeed. This is a business whose roots seem to follow a twisted path—”

  When he finished, Cassandra blinked, her mind racing. “I’m not altogether sure your suspicions are totally credible,” she said. “And if they are, you certainly haven’t done me any favors by telling me.”

  He smiled bleakly. “No, I haven’t . . . but I may have done the Empire a favor; and the human race, for that matter. You see, going through the records of the Service, I’ve found evidence that several other agents have come to the same conclusion that I did . . . but only hints.”

  “Why on earth?”
<
br />   “Because . . . things . . . happened to them. They were killed in duels; in hunting accidents; run over by motorcars, of all unlikely chances—and that a generation ago, when the damned things were rare as hen’s teeth. Records were lost in fires, misfiled—”

  “Oh, come now, Sir Manfred!” Cassandra said. “This is the twenty-first century; we don’t believe in curses and witches.”

  “No,” he said grimly. “I don’t believe in coincidences, either, my dear, not on that scale.”

  He pulled a manila envelope out of his saddlebags, one secured by string and a wax seal. “You said you were willing to do anything for the King-Emperor, Dr. King,” he said. “Apart from doing your best to remain alive, what I’d most like you to do is keep this; it’s a duplicate of my research.”

  “Keep it?” Cassandra said, taking the heavy envelope reluctantly.

  It crinkled slightly under her hand, and she felt as if she should be wrapped in lead, like one of the researchers on radiant materials after Dr. Currant’s mysterious burns.

  “Keep it. Open it when you need to.”

  “But . . . how would I know?”

  “Believe me, Dr. King, when—if—the time comes, you will know. And if you think what I’ve told you strains credibility . . . then you’ll know why I left the rest in there.”

  Aedelia King watched her son ride up the road to the manor, as a cool autumn wind blew wine red leaves like flecks of fire through the rain-washed air. She’d been trimming roses when one of Ranjit’s younger sons pounded up the road with the news, and she’d clipped right through the stem of her best Ranipur Delight. A small sigh escaped her; the days had been long, with no word since the news of the attack on Athelstane in Peshawar. Colonel Claiborne’s bare word that her son was safe had been little comfort.

  They ride away, our men, she thought. Husbands, brothers, sons . . . and until they return all you have left is the memory of the sound the hooves make, falling hollow on the earth, and the rattle of scabbards against the stirrup iron. Until they return. Or they don’t—only their swords and their ashes.

  With an effort, she buried the thought. No need to blight a happy occasion with amateur philosophy.

  Instead she murmured to the man standing two steps down from her on the front terrace of the house:

  “He shapes well.”

  “Han, memsahib,” Ranjit Singh said, equally quietly. “He is become a man to reckon with, these last years, and a burra sahib indeed; though I would not say so to his face, lest the boy suffer from a swelling of the head. His father would be proud.”

  “Narayan won’t disgrace his father, either.”

  She smiled to herself as the elder Sikh expanded a little with pride; she knew exactly how he felt. Not that that was a new experience. Ranjit’s been a godsend, ever since Eric died. I couldn’t have carried on without him. Well, perhaps—but it would have been hard, hard. Hard for Athelstane, too, without his honorary uncle.

  Besides the family—herself, Cassandra, her youngest two standing in a twin-set of freckles and happy smiles—the manor staff were waiting, and some from the village. The notice had been short—doubly so, with everyone in the middle of the pre-Diwali bouts of housecleaning and preparation. Of course everyone had also been expecting the young lord’s return from the frontier, and puzzled when no day was set for homecoming.

  He rode up to the gates at the entrance to the gardens proper—the area beyond was parkland—and then dismounted. A sais ran to take his horse and those of his two followers, and he walked up the curving, crushed-rock surface of the drive, nodding to the salaams that greeted him. The schoolmistress from the village led two of her pupils forward to curtsy and present him with a bouquet.

  At least I managed to keep Father Gordon from having the choir sing, she thought.

  That would have started up the perennial feud between the village’s four religious specialists. Nobody expected the Kings to be neutral when a matter of faith and caste came up, but they did expect fairness. Herself, she found the modern upper-caste Angrezi belief—that God had ten thousand faces, all true, and that any road truly followed led to the Unknowable at last—comforting enough. She kept up the forms of the Established Church, however; and Father Gordon was old-fashioned.

  Which reminded her, along with the unmistakable Pathan countenance and dress of the man behind her son. She murmured a name aside:

  “Hamadu.”

  The khansama—butler—acknowledged it with an inclination of his head so subtle only twenty-three years of his service enabled her to see it.

  “My son has brought an Afghan in his service home to Rexin. Make sure that there is food in the kitchens ritually pure for a Muslim to eat; also . . .”

  Hamadu made the same infinitesimal gesture. He’d see that a couple of the manor’s veterans—there were dozens—were always unobtrusively about, to make sure that the man stayed well behaved. That was not entirely a matter of suspicion. With the best will in the world—not something you could take for granted with an Afghan, even a tame one—he’d be at sea among alien customs. It wouldn’t do to have some kitchen maid’s idea of a little harmless flirtation be misunderstood. If the man had eaten Athelstane’s salt, it would be extremely awkward to hang him.

  At last her son stood grinning at the foot of the stairs, one booted foot resting on a step, gauntlets in his left hand—the hand that rested on the hilt of his saber to steady it as he walked. Her heart clenched at how much he looked like his father, when he tossed his head like that. His old ayah Damayanta waddled forward with her arms spread, calling his name and getting a hefty buss and hug that hoisted all two hundred twenty pounds of her into the air; well, a nursemaid was allowed such displays. When he put her down again she was smiling and weeping into a fold of her sari at the same time.

  Athelstane mounted the steps, his spurs jingling quietly on the marble. “Mother,” he said, raising her hand to his lips.

  “Athelstane,” she replied, offering her cheek for his kiss; Cassandra did likewise; the younger sisters got a rumpling of russet locks that left them squealing with dismay at the ruin of carefully arranged coiffures.

  “Do remember they’re not nine anymore, Athelstane,” she said.

  Sixteen, in fact—she’d been pregnant with them when the news of their father’s death came. “Now run along, girls. There are adult matters to discuss.”

  “Haven’t got the rangolis done yet,” he said whimsically, looking down as they crossed the threshold. It wasn’t marked with the colorful, intricate chalk patterns whose drawing marked the beginning of Diwali.

  “You know that’s supposed to be bad luck, starting early,” she said, leading the way down the great hallway. “And the head of the house should do it.”

  Ancestral portraits of Kings and their relatives looked down from the high pale plastered walls under an inscription that read Kuch Dar Nahin Hai!

  She’d learned all their stories when she came here as a bride, half her lifetime ago. She suspected some of those stories were as much fiction as anything Kipling or Hardy or Tagore had written. Take that stalwart dark-haired man with the cavalry whiskers and the ribbons of the Victoria Cross and the Military Medal; a collateral of the Kings and the Padgets.

  If half the official stories about him were true, he’d have been the greatest paladin since Galahad—and she doubted that even a tenth were, because that was a rogue’s face if she’d ever seen one. The sort who died old, honored, and rich.

  But people live by stories, she thought, looking back over her shoulder at her tall son. Athelstane grew up with these . . . and he’ll make them real by living them.

  “It’s good for the people to do the festival properly,” Aedelia went on aloud. “We were waiting for you.”

  “Yes, of course I knew,” Aedelia King said twenty minutes later. “Ranjit told me when he brought your father’s sword back from the frontier.”

  Little had changed in the study that had once been Eric King’s; his wife ha
d left the dark-wood décor, the heads of tiger and sambhur on the walls between the bookcases, the souvenirs ranging from a Nipponese screen to a rusty battle-ax hammered out of a chunk of railway iron by some European barbarian. It had been just short of seventeen years since Ranjit Singh rode up the road to Rexin Manor with a plain funeral urn balanced on his saddlebow beside a sheathed saber wrapped in its scabbard belt. Still, only the flowers and a basket with balls of wool and knitting were hers.

  Those years had dealt kindly with the lady of Rexin; at fifty her face had a pink-cheeked prettiness that a woman ten years younger might have envied—although the Kashmiri climate was itself commonly supposed to stretch out youth. She wore a plain maroon sari trimmed in green with a fold over her graying black hair, and sensible flat-heeled sandals. The gray eyes behind the wire-rimmed spectacles were warm but shrewd as she looked across the desk at her eldest children.

  “Do drink your tea, Athelstane,” she went on. “And try to look a little less like a carp. And of course Ranjit also gave me the gist of what was going on when he came up to get your uniform.”

  Athelstane King hauled his jaw closed and sipped politely. Well, that’s the mater, he thought. The Sirkar may think I’m a cavalry captain, and the Political Service may think I’m a devil of a fellow, but she can always make me feel like a six-year-old again.

  Nearly two decades of acting as zamindar, Justice of the Peace, and, for all practical purposes, ruler of several hundred souls might have something to do with it, but Athelstane suspected that she’d had the same force of character the day his father brought her back from Kandy. The years alone had probably let it show more plainly, just as they’d worn away a Ceylonese accent until it was no more than a trace of hardness in the vowels.

  Cassandra cleared her throat. “Then why did you never tell us, Mother?”

  Aedelia sipped at her own cup. “Because you didn’t need to know, dears, and it would have done nothing except worry you unnecessarily.”