The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  “Yes. And I’ll enjoy being your friend while I do. Fair?”

  “Fair. Although I doubt women ever appreciate the doomlike knell of the word friend in these circumstances.” He surprised her with another laugh. “And accordingly, why don’t we go have a friendly waltz?”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “Railways are out of the question,” Warburton fretted. “So is anything where the opposition could be watching. And we must get to Bombay within three weeks—they can’t delay the departure any more than that without Parliament starting to take notice and ask questions. They can scarcely tell the prime minister that we needed the time to recover from our wounds.”

  “Trust me,” Elias said. “There are many ways to Bombay.” He smiled, the wrinkled face suddenly looking like a map of some mysterious, mountainous country in the bright morning sunlight.

  “This was a very old land before the first Angrezi dropped anchor off Malabar,” he said. “And in every age there have been those who had absolute need to travel, or send goods or letters, without the knowledge of those who dwelt in the seats of power. Smugglers’ routes, pilgrim pathways, roads that run alongside and through the roads of day, from one house to another—established for religion, or for politics—you would know more of those, Sir Manfred—or to avoid the cadasters of the tax collectors.”

  “And you know them?” King said curiously.

  “Some. Some, a little. Tche-veh! I am ancient in this land myself!” He grinned. “And not all our family’s business over the generations has been so respectable as selling your apples and cheeses and dried apricots and remitting net-minus-four-percent-plus-shipping, young lordling.”

  Well, I can take a hint, King thought, quelling any further questions. And life is full of new experiences.

  Up to now, he’d never run across someone who found the landed gentry amusing. His mouth quirked; he’d met plenty of resentment, buried or overt—you had to have much, much more money than a zamindar to equal his social weight, if the money came from trade. No amount of business money would get you an Army commission, for instance—a regiment’s officers had to vote unanimously on admitting new subalterns, and they’d blackball anyone with the wrong background.

  But never before had he met a subtle sense that those to the man or born were faintly ridiculous.

  The other members of the party were bustling about with bundles and parcels. Yasmini came dressed in the burqua, carrying another—hers was of the type where even the slit between nose and brow was covered by a mesh, lest the color of her eyes attract attention, and with sleeves long enough to reach the fingertips. Warburton put his on, and—being a professional, after all—immediately altered walk, stance, and movement. Yasmini looked at him critically, and after a moment said:

  “It will do . . . Mother.”

  “A child should obey!” Warburton replied. His voice had become a querulous old lady’s, his walk a limping waddle. “Children today have no respect—none—none for Gods or parents.”

  King raised his eyebrows at the motortrucks waiting in the courtyard. “First-class service,” he said.

  “As far as the outskirts,” Elias said. “Hired—through intermediaries. The delivery company has no link to me. With luck, that will delay any seekers for a while yet. Better yet if you could have left this house earlier, but—” He shrugged; their wounded had needed the time. “Go with His blessing, and mine—for what that is worth.

  And come tell me of what passed, when it is over.”

  “I will, sir,” King said, taking his hand. “My father never did a wiser thing than telling me to take your counsel.”

  “Keep your own counsel—and use your head for something besides a battering ram, that is my advice to you. Keep up your chess; it stretches the mind and makes it supple. Go then!”

  King helped pass the bundles into the forward truck. He saw David bar-Elias climbing into the second, in his traveling garb once more, with his retainers. That was reassuring; the middle-aged Jew was a good friend to have at your back, and had proved it abundantly in the most concrete way possible. He gave the man a thumbs-up gesture and settled into the motortruck’s compartment; it was a little warm and stuffy with the doors closed, despite the mild winter’s day.

  The vehicle had an advertisement above the rear doors proclaiming that none but Brahmins were allowed to touch the interior or handle the goods, which meant its regular business was probably delivering high-priced fresh produce; there was a faint smell of butter and ghee to confirm it, and shreds of some leafy vegetable caught in cracks in the planks which made up the cab. There was also a narrow slit in the front which showed the open seat where the driver sat at his big horizontal wheel; he set his back to the thin wooden boards and squatted easily as the motor started with a soft thudump of kerosene burners.

  The sides of the the motortruck creaked as it turned and made its way out into the street. None within saw the eyes that watched over a compound wall whose top was set with shards of broken glass.

  Narayan Singh grinned at him from the other end of the cab. “So, sahib—we are away, the game is afoot, and our enemies none the wiser!”

  “If they were the wiser, would they send a message so that we, too, might know?” Ibrahim Khan said. “Would they beat a dhol-drum, lest we be in doubt? Light a fire and dance about it, snapping their fingers and singing—”

  “Peace,” King said, and both the younger men settled down with a slightly sulky air.

  The chaffing between the Sikh and the hillman was only half-serious. On the other hand, half of it was serious, and neither was a man to be trifled with or take lightly in a quarrel. Narayan Singh had his strength back, and an agreeable prospect of further revenge on the men who had dared to abduct him and torture him and—even worse—think that they could wring betrayal out of him; and at the best of times he had a rather stuffy sense of his own dignity as a noncommissioned officer. The Pathan was in good spirits because he’d helped carry off a daring raid, and because he’d found an agreeable servant-girl, which gave him a high opinion of himself—coming as he did from a land of reavers where all women were under guard, and for very good reason.

  They were both on edge and ready to strike; it was a leader’s duty to see that the blows went in the right direction.

  The black burqua that covered Yasmini somehow conveyed an attitude of acute interest; King gave her an imperceptible nod. Warburton moved a little, too. King looked at him with a raised eyebrow. You could see out of the mesh in a burqua’s eye slit much better than anyone at a distance could look in.

  “Wish Mr. Bar-Binyamin was in the Political Service,” the agent said—and the man’s voice was astonishing, because the whole posture beneath the all-concealing garment was female, and elderly. “We’ve got two tasks—one, get to Bombay. Two, get aboard the Garuda and stop the deviltry planned. How”—the shrug was verbal, rather than a gesture—“we’ll see.”

  The motortrucks were fast, once out of Old Delhi and on the broad highways leading west: a good thirty-five miles an hour, faster than anything else on land except a train. The problem was that motor vehicles were impossibly conspicuous anywhere beyond city limits. Driving one through a village would set tongues to wagging for a year and a day, and the enemy seemed to have a disconcerting number of ears.

  We might as well put up a sign, HURRAH, WE’RE HERE, King thought. He’d never seen a motor vehicle in his life until he went away to school and passed through Oxford. Even in most of Delhi they weren’t so common that you saw one at every glance on the streets, and there was more motor transport within the city limits of Delhi than in all the rest of the world together—over twenty thousand of them all told.

  When he voiced the thought aloud, Warburton chuckled through the burqua.

  “Trust Elias,” he said, speaking softly—Yasmini had laid her head on a rope-wrapped bundle beside him and was sleeping, one small hand beneath her head. “He knows West Delhi better than you. Has property there, he told me.
”

  King looked out the slit again. The packed urban mass of Delhi was fraying, opening out into greenery—but not green fields. The houses looked like miniature manors, and were set in large gardens that looked pretty even in winter; above one brick boundary wall he could see the whirling plumes of a sprinkler keeping lawns green, never easy in the lowland climate. Children played amid the trees and flower banks, gardeners clipped and mowed and watered, ladies in bright saris or tunic-and-trousers took post-breakfast strolls with parasols. Yet there were no fields beyond the gardens, no villages or plowland, and after half an hour he’d seen enough mansions behind wrought-iron gates to furnish manors for a province. A light dawned:

  “Oh, I’d heard of this—read about it in a newspaper. The New Garden City, isn’t it?”

  A good third of the houses seemed to have small buildings for motors attached, many converted from stables.

  “Yes,” Warburton replied, the burqua giving an eerie disembodied note to the speech. “When I was your age, this was all farms. Myself, I wouldn’t want to live here—it’s neither country nor city, fish nor fowl nor good red meat, and I was born inside the Old Delhi walls.”

  “Hmmm,” King said; it seemed unnatural, but . . . “I suppose in a city of four million, you get a lot of everything—even men willing and able to buy motors just to drive to their work, or manor houses without estates.”

  He racked his memory and came up with the Latin tag the newspaper had used for areas of this sort: rus-in-urbe, or rusurbs for short.

  The rusurb . . . ghastly name . . . ended in an ocean of building sites, half-dug cellars and half-built walls, streets in every stage from sealed tarmacadam to trenches for water and sewer pipes, piles of sand and stone and brick, timber and iron and doorframes. The quiet half-life of the Garden City gave way to a semblance of noisy urban bustle, with hundreds of horse carts and oxcarts, thousands of bare-legged laborers in dhotis chattering or chanting as they worked, dirt flying from shovels, women carrying traylike baskets of it on their heads, foremen with lathis of split bamboo yelling, contractors arguing and waving papers, craftsmen working with plane and chisel and saw. The tink-tink-tink of hundreds of masons sounded, as they squatted amid piles of chips to shape stone with flying hammers.

  I’d hand out punishment detail to men who made that much fuss on a work detachment, he thought. Civilians!

  The motortrucks pulled up behind several huge piles of building materials, and a line of young trees with their root balls wrapped in burlap. Four big oxcarts were waiting, each with two painted wheels as high as a tall man and a pair of huge white Gujarati oxen, plus gaudy designs on the sides and an overhanging curved roof—what conservative but modestly affluent country folk would use for a trip to town. Horses were tethered nearby, including the ones on which King and his two followers had ridden into Delhi. Those looked sleek with good feeding; Ibrahim gave a grunt of satisfaction at the sight of his Kashmiri gelding, doubly his since King had bestowed it and he’d killed the previous owner of the—stolen—beast.

  King jumped down immediately, shaking Yasmini gently by the shoulder. She started up, shivering and looking around her as if bewildered, then began to speak. He gave her his hand, making a slight shush gesture, and then both of them were clucking solicitously over their “mother.”

  In a nondescript turban and countryman’s traveling clothes, King could pass at a distance for a wealthy North Indian Muslim; Ibrahim Khan added to the picture, for he was just the sort of swaggering fortune-seeking Afghan blade such a man might hire as armed retainer—if he had high confidence in his womenfolk, or none of nubile age. An unmistakable Sikh spoiled the ensemble—the Protestants of the Hindu world had never forgotten how many of their early Gurus were killed by Muslim rulers—but Narayan was undercover again soon. David bar-Elias vaulted into the rear of the cart; he had his side curls up under his turban, and could have been of any dozen faiths or peoples himself.

  “The drivers are our men,” he said, and pulled out a map. “Now’s the time to decide on our course.”

  He laid the paper down on the floorboards of the cart, swaying easily as it lurched into motion. “Here we are—just southwest of Delhi. There are three paths we could take to get to Bombay, avoiding the trunk roads and the railways. I suggest going through Alwar and then—”

  “No,” Yasmini said.

  They all looked at her; she unfastened the buttons beneath her hood and pushed it back. Her eyes didn’t have quite the blank look they had when she’d led them through Allenby’s house, but they were intense enough.

  “Death, here,” she said, sketching a finger along the most direct of the routes between the capital and Bombay. “Many forms of death—many men waiting for us. Nearly as bad here. And further west—least bad.” She frowned. “I am . . . crossing the path of my own earlier dreams here. It makes things . . . hazy. Makes more the possibilities. But that is as much as I can give you.”

  David looked doubtful. King, with more experience of Yasmini’s talent, held up a hand for silence, finger on the map. “They must have spotted us leaving Delhi,” he said, looking at Yasmini.

  She shrugged, wiping one palm across her forehead, looking shaken and wrung-out from her sleep instead of rested. “I cannot be sure. Only that they are waiting, as I said.”

  “Not sooner, Yasmini?” King asked.

  “No. Not before then—I did not dream more than a flicker of an attack in the next three days. That was . . . far away, where none of us were as we are.” Seeing their confusion, she added wearily: “Call it a chance so slight we need not be concerned.”

  King paused for thought. “All right,” he said at last. “They know we’re going overland, not by rail, and they know we’re heading for Bombay. We should use the knowledge against them—it isn’t what you don’t know that’ll kill you; it’s what you think you know that isn’t so. Here’s what we’ll do instead . . .”

  When he finished speaking, David stroked his beard. “I know that country—we have friends and clients there. Can you all ride a camel?” he said.

  “I wouldn’t call myself or Narayan experts, we’re horse-soldiers, but yes,” King said.

  Krishna, but I loathe those smelly brutes, he added to himself. Still, the best bet for what I want.

  Warburton nodded silently.

  “Da,” Yasmini said.

  Ibrahim snorted indignation at the question: “Am I weaned, Jew? Can I walk?”

  “Good. Then we can perhaps do what you suggest, Captain King. Your father thought well in a tight spot, too.”

  He stuck his head out of the cart and called one of his men, giving quick orders. The man nodded, untied and readied two of the horses; master and man swung into the saddle and pounded off, each with another behind him on a leading rein. White dust spurted up behind the hooves and drifted downwind; they were out on an ordinary graveled secondary road now, through ordinary low-country villages.

  Even in November, at noontime it was comfortably warm for lying in the shade, sweating-hot if you had to work in the sun. The winter wheat had just been planted, and a few shoots were showing green in fields damp from irrigation. Ryots were at work with shovel and mattock, clearing channels, building up and breaking down the banks.

  A few looked up to wave as the carts went by. King saw more stopping work and salaaming, and heard the explanation a moment later when a bugle’s harsh cry rang out from the middle distance southward.

  It sounded again, closer, an insistent four notes that said: Make way! Make way for the King-Emperor’s men! Make way, for the lords of humankind!

  The bullock-men of King’s party pulled aside, like the other farm vehicles and the more numerous travelers on foot. An infantry regiment came swinging down the road after the martial music, with a long plume of khaki-colored dust smoking behind them. They were headed northeast toward Delhi; the colonel in front on his charger with the tall poles of the colors following—regimental and national flags, furled inside the leather c
over casings now, carried by picked men; the company officers riding by the side of the road; the other ranks in columns of four sweating in the dust behind the band, which was silent except for the thrip-rip-rip of the drum. The mule carts hauling baggage, kit, ammunition, machine guns, and a few men unable to keep their feet brought up the rear.

  Imperial Service outfit, King thought—the faces in the ranks were all sahib-log, and mostly in their late teens or early twenties. They marched well, booted feet swinging in unison, rifles over their shoulders. Well enough, for short-service men, that is.

  He was prejudiced in favor of professional units like the Peshawar Lancers himself, of course. All members of the martial castes had to do a few years with the colors and train periodically for the reserve until they were middle-aged, but even within those groups only a minority made the Army their life’s work. From their brown tans and the look of their uniforms, this lot had been at field exercises somewhere down in Rajputana, somewhere hot and dry.

  Right where we’re going, King thought grimly, looking at the map again, examining the routes that crossed the Thar Desert. Or even drier.

  Then he folded it and settled down next to Yasmini as the cart lurched back into slow but steady motion. She was lying on pillows—the carts were fitted out for carrying womenfolk, with rugs and cushions, and water bags of canvas hanging from the roof kept cool by their sweating skins. Her eyes were open, but her face was still drawn.

  “Are you all right, miss?” he said. “I’m a little worried for you.”

  She turned her head and smiled wanly at him, murmuring in Russian. He repeated his question in that language, a little alarmed when her eyes glistened.

  “You used the old words,” she said. He nodded; his Russian was book-learned, much of it from texts dating before the Fall. “My mother used them—some of the other Sisters, too. Never where the priests of Tchernobog could hear.”

  “Old words?” he asked.