The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  A metallic chick-chack sounded, and then a snap as he pointed the muzzle skyward and pulled the trigger. The whole sequence was glass smooth; when he looked down the barrel with the action open the seven shallow grooves were well marked in the glitter of the firelight he was aiming at, so the lands hadn’t been shot out—always a risk, with old weapons in the Reserve armories or civilian hands. The round was the same .40 cake-powder semirimmed as the modern gun, and the ballistics identical, so he wouldn’t be thrown off his aim.

  David noticed him checking. “We carried those to Bokhara in your father’s time,” he said. “And they’ve guarded a good few caravans outside the Empire for Elias and Son before and since. I’m not a soldier, Captain King, but I treat my tools properly.”

  King dipped his head slightly. “I’m sure you do,” he said sincerely. “But I am a soldier, and I also always check my tools and my men’s. Good habits keep you alive—and it’s worth the trouble to keep them up when you don’t have to, for the times you do.”

  “Something to that,” the Jew admitted, pulling out bandoleers of cartridges, slinging one over his shoulder, and handing the others to the men who’d taken rifles.

  The brass cases had been enameled a dark, nonreflective matt green, which was a touch King appreciated—many a patrol had been betrayed by the military mania for polishing things brightly, and dulling all metal was something he always saw to before his men went out the cantonment gate.

  Narayan Singh had checked his own rifle, just as expected; he wasn’t surprised to see Warburton do the same, or Ibrahim Khan take his weapon with a delighted whoop, examine it with familiar confidence, or drape two bandoleers crisscross over his sheepskin jacket with piratical élan.

  It did raise his brows a little when he saw Yasmini take a carbine of her own and dry-fire it with practiced ease. With the butt on the ground it came up past her breastbone, the way a full-sized infantry rifle would on a soldier. She handled the seven-pound weight easily, though; he remembered from her touch that she was surprisingly strong for her size.

  “The Master . . . I mean, Ignatieff, had some of his Cossacks train me with saddle guns,” Yasmini said. “For emergencies, because I was so valuable to him. The priests agreed.”

  A smile, this time a little harder than he was accustomed to from her. “And now I will guard myself because I am valuable to me, and you. This bandoleer is too long, though.”

  It was, drooping past her hip almost to her knee; he smiled at the sight. Makes her look like Cass did, that time she dressed up in Mother’s things when she was seven—the pearl necklace that reached right to her feet, for instance. Except, of course, that Yasmini most definitely wasn’t his sister.

  Her slim figure looked almost like a boy’s, too, in the rough dark kurta-tunic and pjamy-trousers and riding boots. Except that boys didn’t affect him this way, which was something he knew with absolute certainty, after spending over half of every year from six to sixteen at United Services boarding school.

  “You looked a little like my sister then,” he explained as he took the length of leather from her and trimmed it deftly with his belt knife, cut a new tongue for the buckle, and handed it back. The cut leather all came off the part that went across her back, which didn’t have cartridge loops.

  “Yes, that is much better,” she said, adjusting it. “And I would like to meet your sister. From what you say, she seems to be a woman of much spirit.”

  “That she is,” King said. Good Ganesha tell me, what would Cass make of her? Or Mother . . .

  “Chalo!” he said aloud. The thought was irrelevant with diabolists, Thugs, and spies on their trail. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

  A touch of his foot, and the camel he’d picked knelt. He swung up into the high-cantled rest that spanned the animal’s hump—it was more like straddling a divan than sitting in a horse’s saddle—and looked up at the stars.

  “Follow me!” he said, and grinned, tapping the camel again so that it rose, grumbling, rump first. “Tally-ho!”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “I like Bombay,” Charles Saxe-Coburg-Gotha said, speaking loudly to be heard over the roar of the crowd as he waved.

  He took an instant from official duty and brushed rice and flowers off his uniform. Cassandra King leaned over from beside Sita in the front of the open howdah and brushed off a few more, feeling a rush of tenderness she knew was absurd.

  “Your dupatta is covered with the stuff,” he said.

  “Oh!” Cassandra said, and shook her head shawl back off her piled chestnut hair before replacing it—this was a little public for even a daring Whig professor to leave her hair uncovered for more than an instant.

  The kunwari of the Raj squeaked a little. “Now you’re getting it on me!”

  “So sorry,” Cassandra said, flustered. “Not used to having people throw things at me. Except brickbats, metaphorically.”

  “Better flowers and rice than bombs,” the heir to the Lion Throne said grimly, his smile fading.

  “Or bullets,” Henri de Vascogne agreed.

  The howdah swayed slightly as the elephant strode on; it was a thing of glass and silver filigree to all appearances, but far from fragile. Howdah and elephant put them a good dozen feet above the surface of the street; most of the flowers flung up at the riders ended up beneath the feet of the great gray beasts. The elevation of the howdah didn’t hinder the manifold thousands of well-wishers showering blossoms on them from the taller buildings along the way, of course.

  This elephant was second of twelve. The first held the King-Emperor and his aide and sister, Dowager Princess Jane; behind came that of Sir Benjamin Sukhia, KCBE, the Parsi mayor of the city, and his lady; from there the procession shaded off into lesser dignitaries in mere carriages. Many of them owned the office buildings that towered four, five, and even six stories on either side in a rococo splendor of carved-stone balconies, columns, polychrome statues, glass, gilding, and mosaic, and stretched ahead down the Avenue of the Adventurers—the headquarters of the great textile and shipping firms and the world’s most powerful banks.

  The flowers thrown by the crowd from windows and balcony-terraces and rooftops filled the air in a brilliant rain as heavy as the monsoons of summer, turning the avenue ahead into a tunnel of brightness and scent, a thundering blaze of color and cheers in air heavy with smoke, incense, and sea salt. The elephant’s flanks from the howdah nearly to the ground were covered by a gold-mesh fabric with the Imperial arms and the patron goddess of Bombay, Mumba Devi, blazing and glittering as it rippled in the bright winter sunshine—although wits claimed that the real city divinity was Mahalakshmi, goddess of wealth and business. Charles was in the dress uniform of the Poona Lancers, of which he was honorary colonel-in-chief; indigo blue tunic frogged with silver lace, gray trousers, and polished high boots, his turban cloth-of-gold and lavishly plumed, a jeweled tulwar held between his knees. The ceremonial escort trotting along on either side were from the same regiment, a mass of bristling points, pennants, and glossy hides showing endless work with currycomb and polish. The faces under the turbans were dark brown and mainly clean-shaven, reminding her of Detective-Captain Malusre; the Poona Lancers were a Marathi unit.

  Infantrymen stood to attention and presented arms along the sides of the street—and behind them another file stood facing the other way, rifles held horizontally to make a living fence and keep the madly cheering crowds at bay. Some of the jawans doing parade duty were from the Gurkha regiment of Foot Guards, sent ahead from Delhi by train. More were Imperial Marines in scarlet coats and archaic-looking pith helmets, and more still were Navy men in blue sailor-suits and turbans. Bombay was the main headquarters of the Royal and Imperial Navy, as well as the country’s largest trading port.

  “Why do you like Bombay specifically, Charles?” Cassandra asked.

  “Because Father doesn’t? No, really—because my namesake founded it. Charles II.”

  Let’s see, 1662 . . . Cassandra th
ought—with a quick memory of chalk dust and a well-chewed pencil. Three hundred and sixty-three years ago. Charles II got it as the dowry of Catherine of Portugal . . . Right back at the beginning of the Old Empire.

  That made it a young city, by Indian standards. “I see your point,” she said. “There was nothing here but a swamp, some islands, and a run-down Portuguese fort. We built it, we Angrezi—or at least it was built under us, and the Empire’s peace.”

  Henri de Vascogne gave a smile. “We in France tend to remember those years as a time when our ancestors fought yours for the dominion of India,” he said. “If that had gone otherwise, we might still be having this conversation—but in reverse.”

  Prince Charles laughed aloud. “Vishnu preserve us! A Franco-Indian Empire . . .” He shook his head. “Well, the moving finger writes, and all that. No offense, but I’m glad it came out the way it did.”

  “None taken. All men tend to think the present is the best of all possible worlds, for it leads to us, our ineffable selves,” Henri said. “Permit me to say that the Angrezi triumph was not all to the good. I remember that railway station with disbelief, twice. On my arrival, and just now finding that my memories had muted the horror.”

  Cassandra looked behind her: The great prickly pile of Victoria Terminus—named for Victoria the Good, not her great-granddaughter Victoria the Wicked—was barely visible. It had been built during the last years of the Old Empire in a leaden High Gothic Revival style that the twenty-first-century Angrezi eye could hardly grasp, all gargoyles and bell towers and fussy arches. Even after seeing it with your own eyes you could hardly believe that it could have been commissioned by men who ruled the country of the Taj Mahal and lived with the Palace of the Winds.

  “Well, there is that,” Charles said. “But as a city, Bombay’s less stuffy than Delhi.”

  That made her blink again, until she realized he was talking about the very top echelons of society. In Delhi that meant people with seats in the Commons or Lords, generals, courtiers, and ICS upper-roger bureaucrats. Despite its size, wealth, and the growth of industry in the last few generations, Delhi was a political city, with the military and landed aristocracies and their retainers and hangers-on at its heart. That had been true since Mughal times and before.

  Bombay meant new men and new wealth, looking out onto the Arabian Sea and the wide world; here financiers and factory owners and shipping magnates set the tone. Even the military component was largely naval, and that was the middle-class service; the Army was too firmly rooted in the land and its time-encrusted hierarchies to have much place for box-wallahs or banians.

  “Let’s see,” Charles said. “I’ve made puja at the city goddess’s temple—I’d swear that Brahmin burned my hand deliberately when I took darshana; they’ll always take a chance to do a kyashtria down—Father heard mass at St. Thomas, Aunt Jane cut the ribbons on the orphanage and slum-clearance project, Sita opened that library Aunt Jane endowed . . .”

  “That was a really splendid book they gave me, though,” Sita said. “I’ve always admired Vasami’s engravings. The hand-coloring was exquisite.”

  She tapped a foot against it where it rested in a rosewood-and-ivory box on the floor of the howdah. Cassandra felt herself flushing a little; the choice had been a lavishly illustrated edition of the Kama Sutra, probably in honor of her rumored-to-be-impending nuptials. Luckily, a nudge from a lady-in-waiting had reminded the kunwari to confine herself to a gracious word of thanks and a quick flip, rather than diving into the volume right then and there.

  “What we really ought to be doing,” Sita went on, with a wink at Cassandra, “is to be making puja to Santoshi Mata.”

  The three Angrezi chuckled—the two members of the royal family, she noted, without showing an unseemly expression to the crowds or halting the graceful, economical turn-the-wrist waves she’d been trying to imitate.

  It must be practice. Or maybe it’s genetic. The motion made her forearm ache.

  Henri looked from one face to the other. “What, or who, is Santoshi Mata?”

  “A recent goddess,” Cassandra said, taking pity on him—Sita looked set for one of her Epic Teases, which could go on longer than a full performance of the Ramayana and reduce the victim to a gibbering madness of frustration. “She’s the goddess of . . . ah . . . modern aspirations and career success for women.”

  “She’s a kinematograph goddess,” Sita went on. “No, Henri, I’m not pulling your leg. This time. Bombay is the kinematograph capital of the Empire, you know; all the best studios work out of the Bombay Sacred Wood district. There was a goddess in a kinematograph play made here, and none of the pantheon quite fit—so they made one up.”

  “Ah,” Henri said. “A joke, then.” With a wry smile: “The small jokes, they are among the most difficult things to learn in a foreign land; of a sudden you trip over one, and realize you are far from home.”

  “No,” Sita protested. “No, really! She’s a real goddess—with a temple, and everything. Career girls pray to her—make offerings so she’ll bless them and they can afford to buy a sewing machine or learn to use a typewriter, or have a telephone in their office. I’ve made puja to her myself, but she’s not . . . mmmm . . . weighty enough for an official occasion like this.”

  Henri blinked, goggling. “And people of a veracity believe in this goddess?” he asked, his accent suddenly a little thicker.

  Cassandra had the impression that France-outre-mer’s Christianity had absorbed some of Islam’s sternness, or perhaps merely kept such a quality from before the Fall. Whereas the Established Church of the Raj . . .

  “Henri,” she said, “if you’re going to understand our religion, you’re really going to have to understand how . . . flexible . . . it can be. I’m quite content with the Established Church, myself—and an occasional offering to Saraswati, which is where my bhatki would go if I were inclined to devotion.”

  Especially considering the current theological controversy over whether Christ is an incarnation of Vishnu, or possibly His son.

  The Bible’s God was far too active post-Creation to be readily assimilated to Brahma, but He fit Vishnu and/or Shiva rather neatly, and since those three were the Hindu trimurti—Trinity—the missing pieces of the jigsaw were being earnestly sought.

  Charles added: “Saraswati—wife of Brahma—goddess of learning. And beauty,” he added, glancing at her.

  Cassandra flushed again. He’s been a perfect gentleman, she thought, scolding herself. It’s not fair to him to hint that you wish he wouldn’t be. Of course, it also seemed vilely unfair that Charles could work out his frustrations with some nautch-girl and nobody would think the less of him for it, while she . . .

  While I wouldn’t want to even if there were dancing-boy equivalents, Cassandra thought dismally. I wished I could have flirtations, like other women. I should have been more careful about that—how much work would I get done in this state? The sooner I get back to Oxford, the better. There’s always daydreaming and solitary vice.

  Admiralty House loomed ahead. Another banquet, she thought—and with so few opportunities for rock-climbing or even long walks, she’d gained five pounds since she came to court.

  Charles echoed her thought. “More stuffing. I do hope I’m next to the mayor, though—quite an interesting chap. Worked for several years in Zanzibar, helping set up a bank there, after we conquered it and ran the Omani slavers out.”

  He looked southward. “You know what I’d really like to do? I’d like us all to put on disguises and go to Chow-patty Beach.”

  Sita clapped her hands, forgetting to wave for an instant: “Oh, let’s! Like Haroun al-Raschid in the Thousand and One Nights!” She had a well-thumbed copy of Burton’s translation. “We could ride on the Ferris wheels, and dunk someone at the coconut shy, and eat bhelpuri from the stands—”

  Cassandra caught Henri’s smile, and joined it: Sita was just eighteen. Her brother’s expression was wry:

  “And Father would have
us both thrown into an active volcano, and rightly so—Sita, do remember what’s been happening. Although,” he added, “I’d at least find out what people really thought of us.”

  “I think this is reasonably genuine,” Henri said, indicating the crowd.

  They were approaching the City Hall, just off the round park of Horniman Circle, where a famous banyan tree that had sheltered the city’s first stock exchange still stood. Policemen in yellow derby-shaped hats began to replace the soldiers as the imposing neoClassical bulk of the building came into view. The crowd there was even gaudier than that which had lined the Avenue and, if possible, even more enthusiastic. Some of them managed to break through the line of konstabeels and perform a full prostration, tossing handfuls of vermilion powder on the feet of the King-Emperor’s elephant. That elderly beast was well trained in public ceremonies, and managed to kneel without excessive rocking or squashing some unfortunate loyalist.

  “Father says that it’s because business is so good,” Charles observed, as their own mount began the slow folding process and attendants came up with a wheeled staircase.

  Cassandra clutched a handhold unobtrusively—there weren’t many elephants in Kashmir, and this was her first long ride on one—and spoke:

  “That’s not a bad reason for people to like their rulers, Charles,” she said. “I wouldn’t like to live here in Bombay, myself—but business is what puts roofs over these people’s heads and feeds their children, lets them get on with their lives and better themselves.”

  “Well, we’re not responsible for that—or not much,” Charles objected.

  Henri shook his head. “A regiment’s colors are merely wood and cloth,” he pointed out. “Yet men see them, and for them will do things that you would swear men could not do.”

  “That’s the politest way I’ve ever heard you called a totem with a flagpole up your bum, brother dear,” Sita said sweetly, waiting with cruel exactitude for the moment his foot sought the first riser.

  The vice admiral waiting to greet the party of the kunwar and kunwari at the bottom of the stairs went rigid with alarm, as the heir to the Lion Throne seemed to stumble and almost fall. Then he smiled in relief himself, and again more broadly when he saw their faces; the heir and his sister and their companions all seemed to be in high good humor.