The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  “I have to agree with Her Grace, though,” she said. “Your instruction has been quite good . . . tutors?”

  “For the last year. Cheltenham until then—Aunt Jane thought it would do me good to mix.” She smiled again at Cassandra. “I hate it when people go easy on me, though. I can tell you won’t.”

  “No, Sita, I most certainly won’t,” Cassandra agreed. “And—”

  A crisp smack of hands on wood and steel sounded as the guards came to attention.

  Well, well, Cassandra thought. Sir Manfred. But I doubt I’m going to badger him in this company. The heir to the throne, no less . . . and who’s that with him?

  A moment later Prince Charles was kissing her hand. Their eyes met for a moment. Why, he isn’t nearly as horse-faced as his pictures, she thought in astonishment.

  “Charles!” Sita said enthusiastically. “Miss . . . Dr. Rexin is going to be giving me some advanced training. She’s from Oxford.”

  The prince shot her a sudden look; then his face went carefully blank. “I’m glad to hear it,” he said.

  Oh, no. Not another male intimidated by a woman with a degree! Cassandra thought.

  Sir Manfred coughed discreetly. “The lady and I are acquainted,” he said. “But if I may present my friend—”

  It was Cassandra’s turn to blink. A foreigner, here? A nobleman, of course; and a soldier, if she’d ever met one. Still, he seemed to be in Sir Manfred’s company. An uneasy feeling stirred in the pit of her stomach. One reason she’d gone into astronomy was that it was—not simple, but straightforward, for all its complexity. It didn’t have the bending, confused squishiness of human affairs.

  She was getting that squishy feeling now. Things were going on, and she didn’t know quite what.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, Your Highness,” she said to Charles, realizing with a start that she’d ignored something he said.

  “Koi bat naheen, not a problem,” the heir to the Lion Throne said. “I was merely asking if you rode or hunted, Dr. Rexin.”

  “To hounds,” she said. “Actually my sport of choice is rock-climbing; I’m an alpinist.”

  She waited with resignation for the baffled aversion. Instead, Charles smiled: The expression sat a little uneasily on his naturally solemn face, but it was oddly charming.

  “I’ve done a little myself,” he said. “I envy you the opportunities in Oxford, so close to the mountains. There’s little sport near the capital, but there is one place—”

  “It sounds a little like Kashmir, or the Hunza Valley,” Sita said thoughtfully, arms around one knee.

  Henri de Vascogne still wasn’t comfortable sprawled on pillows, but that was the Imperial idea of moderate informality. As one penetrates the public veneer, the less English these Angrezi seem, he thought—and caught himself thinking in Hindi rather than French.

  “Perhaps. It is a valley inland from Algiers, yes, and a rich one. In the spring, the villages are like the red-tiled centers of flowers, for then the almond and cherry orchards blossom about them, and the flower plantations for the perfumeries—the scent alone can make youths and maidens drunk with love, an old song says. The prince has a small country palace there—not more than a great farmhouse, really, though the gardens are very lovely—between Blida and Boufarik. In the winter, you can see the white peaks of the Tell Atlas to the south; nothing compared to the Himalayas, but grand enough—and there is excellent hunting. Peaceful lands besides, being so near to the capital; and the inhabitants nearly all French and Christian.”

  He shaped the air with his hands: “But in season, the Veiled Men come north to trade—”

  Sita clapped her hands. “The Veiled Men?”

  “Yes, so they call themselves. The Tuareg—or as some others say, the Forsaken of God; also the Blue Men, for their veils are dyed with indigo, and it stains their skin. Among them men are veiled and women not; curious, for Muslims. They are nomads of the deep Sahara, camel-riders of the sand seas; fierce warriors, too, who fight with great broadswords and lances. We trade with them, but always there is skirmishing at the edge of the desert, raid and foray and razziah.”

  “Like us with the Afghans,” Sita said.

  “Even so. The Tuareg caravans cross the desert from oasis to oasis, down to the Bilaud-as-Sudan, the Land of the Blacks, where they trade dates from their own groves, salt, and our manufactures for gold and cattle, grain and slaves and kola nuts. Thousands of miles between there and the northernmost outposts of your Empire, of course.”

  “Could I see the Sahara?” Sita asked.

  “Of a certainty,” Henri smiled. Suitably escorted, he thought. Aloud: “The prince himself was stationed there for a time at Fort Zinderneuf—it is customary for the heir of our ruler to follow a military career, as a young man.”

  The daughter of the King-Emperor nodded, unsurprised; the Raj had the same tradition. “Were you there?”

  “I was stationed with that regiment of the Legion, yes,” Henri said. “As I said, the prince and I are close comrades.”

  He smiled wryly to himself at memories of sand and monotony, winds drying your skin to leather, hardtack and jerky and constant longing thoughts of the orange groves and vineyards and tinkling fountains of the north. And men going mad with le cafard, running berserk through the barracks until their comrades roped them and left them raving in the punishment cells . . . Places like Zinderneuf were extremely romantic, contemplated at a distance, or between the covers of a book.

  Since his task was courtship, rather than disillusionment—and courtship was far more enjoyable, in any case—he went on: “And the prince bears a scar from a Tuareg lance.”

  “Where?” Sita asked curiously.

  Henri grinned, teeth white against the ugly-handsome Mediterranean face, blue-black with incipient stubble despite twice-daily shaving:

  “In an indelicate position, I am afraid, for the nomad surprised him while he answered a call of nature.”

  Sita giggled; it made her look much younger than her just-turned-eighteen years. He launched into a story of newspapers in Algiers and the duels their editors fought—with words and swords—and that had her laughing aloud.

  It also awoke the chaperone—de Vascogne’s mind thought of her as a duenna; there was a good deal of Spanish in the bloodlines of France-outre-mer, and in their tongue. That lady was an elderly noblewoman of impeccable breeding, and nearly stone-deaf herself; they were alone save for her, the princess having dismissed reluctant ladies-in-waiting some time ago.

  They shared a divan in a dayroom of Sita’s private quarters, raised on a dais beneath a dome of almond-shaped alabaster panes. Columns of ruddy rose quartz stood around the rest of the room, their capitals gilded flowers; the smooth pale marble of the floor bore a red-and-blue Fatipur carpet. There was a huge arched window on one side of the room with the curtains drawn back to reveal a view of the Palace of the Lion Throne, a fantasy of dome and spire, tile and marble and mosaic, of ruddy stone and green garden and brilliant flowers hardly brighter than the crowds who thronged over causeway and gate. In the aching blue sky above it floated a great whale shape of silver, the Union Jack on its fins and the lion-and-unicorn sigil of the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas on its side as the silent air engines drove it above the city.

  It was hard to notice the surroundings, when the laughing face of the girl was so close. She wore some light perfume, and her dark hair fell like a jewel-bound wave across the creamy white silk of her gown.

  Henri rose, clearing his throat; the neck of his blue uniform tunic suddenly seemed a little tight. He walked around a great golden ewer of iced sherbet, and a truly hideous Old Empire walnut table holding a clock of equally elaborate bad taste. The clock was an heirloom from the reign of Victoria I, stopped at precisely 2 P.M.; the hour of the evacuation of Buckingham Palace—June 21, 1879, a day of sleet and freezing rain. Nodding toward the window, he said:

  “That airship; it is the yacht, is it not?”

  Sita swung up and came to stand beside
him; he could feel the slight pleasant warmth of her body. “Yes, the Garuda. It’s named after—”

  “But yes, the mount of Indra,” Henri said. “My homework was most thorough.”

  “Oh, ogrelike Brahmin tutors made you memorize the Vedas, too? I know exactly how you feel,” she said sympathetically, and then laughed. “Yes, the Garuda’s been in the yards, getting an overhaul. We’re going down to Rajputana, Charles and I. Political; keeping the rajas sweet—everyone with three goats and his own well is a king in Rajputana—but they didn’t want Father to make an Imperial progress out of it. Can you come along, Henri? There’ll be a lot of fun, too.”

  “I would be delighted,” he said sincerely. “But I fear duty may intrude—Sir Manfred wished me to go over some material with him.”

  Sita pouted slightly. “I thought I was your duty,” she said.

  “Only the most pleasant part of it,” Henri said; which was true enough. “And the only pleasant part.”

  Which was a minor lie. Most of the rest was fascinating, if strenuous.

  “Rajadharma,” Sita sighed. Ruler’s duty.

  “But . . .”

  “But?”

  “But yes, there may be a cruise in the offing. It was thought . . .” He hesitated.

  “Leave it at that and I’ll throttle you like a Thug, you . . . you . . . you diplomat!”

  The Frenchman laughed aloud. “Well, any actual marriage would be years away,” he said. “But a state visit by you and your brother . . . possibly even your father . . . a cementing of ties, a little touring of interesting places in our modest country . . .”

  Sita glowed. Henri shook himself mentally. Keep your heart whole, de Vascogne, he scolded himself. This is, unfortunately, an affair of politics and interest, not the heart.

  “Rajadharma,” he said in turn. “Yet it need not always be a burden.”

  Chapter Ten

  Yasmini stopped her pacing and splashed water on her face from the basin. It was lukewarm and tasted faintly of some chemical. Heat stifled her, noise beat around her, until she pressed her fists against her temples and panted.

  No. She told herself the simple word again and again, like what the people of these lands called a mantra. More and more of late, the visions of her own future had come.

  The count will not send me to the breeding pens yet. I am too valuable. The very best of all.

  But that was why he would, in the hope of daughters who would be her equals, or superior. And she was old for a functioning Dreamer, ever closer to the madness that was the price of the talent.

  The lines lay very close together there, bunching and knotting, all ending with a face above hers—a jerking idiot face, tearing pain, and then blackness. Not death; her own personal world line did not terminate. What ended was her ability to use the talent itself; it was terrifying in a way mere nonexistence was not. As if she could see the loss of her own eyes, ears, tongue—see it approaching closer and closer.

  At least then I would not see the death of all the world. The other vision would not leave her either. The mountain, the mountain of steel falling from forever.

  “Pajalsta,” she murmured to herself, her tongue feeling dry in a mouth gone gritty. “Pajalsta . . . mercy, Excellence; mercy, your pardon . . .”

  But there would be no mercy from Ignatieff. Not in any of the lines that she could reach, even under the drugs. Not in any line that held close analogues of herself and her master at all.

  Yasmini stopped, lowered the hands from her head, took a deep breath, closed her eyes. Other eyes opened within, deep and brown, clever and infinitely sad.

  There were some things you could only decide to do if you did not think of them. She knew where Ignatieff kept the bhang lassi; in a little portable icebox—another one of those astonishing Imperial luxuries. A wave of vision overwhelmed her as she touched the smooth lacquered surface of the teak; again and again, the touch of the steel on her neck, and then—

  No. Yes. No. Her hand quivered. A deep breath. Yasmini hummed softly, the sound in her throat growing inside her until it filled the ears of her inner self. Mind becomes no-mind, she thought; then she was acting in a waking trance.

  Open. Startling cold on her skin, in the close heat of the room. Beads of moisture on the pebbled glass of the jar, a slight sticky resistance as she pulled the glass-topped cork free. Sour-tart taste on her tongue.

  A silent explosion went off behind her eyes. Yasmini’s own eyes were keen, but she had spoken with those who needed corrective lenses and heard them tell of how they turned blurred outlines into shapes hard and definite. This was something similar, but it was a clarity so sharp that it cut.

  So clear that there was no need to think. Turn. A thousand thousand Yasminis turned in her mind, receding in an infinite series as if she were trapped between two mirrors—but the images stretched on every side, backward and forward in time, blurring into the her that saw. Now there was no need for choice. Only one action in any second could lead to the best result, after all. Strange to be using it for herself . . .

  Turn. Walk three steps toward the window. Ignatieff’s chest was there. Look down. A piece of wire . . . pick it up. Bend. Bend. Kneel by the chest. Push the wire into the keyhole. Turn . . . so. And so.

  When the click came it startled her for a second. She took another deep breath, another, faded back into the multiplex now. Ignatieff’s weapons were inside—she took a light double-bladed khindjal knife, tucked the sheath into her belt, and a revolver. Imperial make, an Adams, the only one small enough to easily suit her hand. It was empty; she went through the slow process of swinging down the gate beside the cylinder and slipping a round into each chamber. Money. Papers. Close the chest, twist the wire again until the click sound came.

  “Why?” she murmured, then tried to drown the thought. A glimpse of Ignatieff; seeing the open chest, his face flashing through puzzlement, thought, dawning rage, turning on his heel. A flash of pain, an iron hand gripping the back of her neck and a slamming impact as it rammed her head forward into a wall of dusty brick, then nothing.

  Ignatieff, walking through the door; the chest closed. Throwing himself down on the bed, sleeping, waking to call for her—

  Shivering, she repeated the breathing exercises. So easy to lose control, under the drug. So easy to stand here lost in the visions for hours.

  The burqua came next, the all-covering tentlike black garment of orthodox Islam. Not common among modern Delhi-born Muslims, but you saw enough of the garments on the streets—the Imperial capital was a magnet that sucked in travelers from the remotest regions and spat them forth again.

  The stairs creaked beneath her feet. She stood aside, in a patch of shadow; a man came around the bend of the stairs, muttering in some Dravidian dialect, passed her without seeing. Out into the savage brightness of the street . . .

  “I’m getting used to being anonymous,” King murmured. “I may take it up full-time. Tempting.”

  I’m joking, of course, he thought. But only half-joking.

  It had been a pleasant enough ride down from the mountains; even Ibrahim Khan was good company, if an acquired taste. Nobody looked twice at the three young men riding south from the high country, except to examine their horses, try to sell them something, or to pick their pockets. There had been a fair bit of that, since they were well dressed and rode excellent mounts. Nobody tried to kill him—well, not counting an innocent brawl here and there in a wayside caravanserai—and he wasn’t responsible for anyone except his two followers, both of whom were well able to take care of themselves most of the time.

  Now the villages were thickening, merging gradually until you could say you’d been riding in the outer fringes of Delhi for half a day, through slums and warehouses and factories and worksteads and streets of shops, until the buildings reared three or four stories and shut out the horizon. The crowds were just as varied; all of India’s races and castes and classes, Hindu and Muslim and sahib-log, everything from Imperial Univer
sity savants down to a group of Bhil bowmen from the Vindhaya jungles who were probably head-hunters, staring about them in amazement as deep as Ibrahim’s.

  And more, from all over the Empire and beyond; a train of yellow-robed lamas spinning their prayer wheels; Lesser Vehicle Buddhist monks from Ceylon glaring at their Nepalese rivals; flat-faced Malays in sarongs with wavy-bladed knives thrust through their sashes; a Brazilian nobleman in billowing pantaloons and broad-brimmed plumed hat and rapier; an Australian station-holder in a motorcar with a ram’s head emblazoned on the door; a man from one of the weird theocratic city-states on the west coast of America earnestly talking about the First Men and the Tree of Life to a Jain who wore a scarf across his mouth lest he commit murder by inadvertently inhaling a fly . . .

  They said that to be tired of Delhi was to be tired of life, because sooner or later here you’d meet every variety of human being in the whole wide world.

  A singsong voice from above broke into his reverie: “Hamare ghal ana, acha din!”

  He grinned and waved to the tart who’d called the invitation as she leaned from her balcony, displaying smooth brown breasts.

  Hello, and come into our street, big boy, he translated to himself, chuckling. Her face wasn’t much, but two weeks of involuntary celibacy focused his attention considerably lower. Probably poxed, to be sure. Not that that was any great matter these days—modern medicine could clear it up in a week—but he was a fastidious man, in some respects.

  A different voice cut through the swarm in the street. A man chanting as he walked, old and thin and tough as rawhide, vastly bearded and with a mane of gray-white hair falling past his waist, naked save for a meager loincloth, carrying nothing save for begging bowl and staff:“Utterly quiet

  Made clean of passion

  The mind of the yogi

  Knows that Brahman,