The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  Wakeful, Athelstane King lay on his back and looked up at the desert stars as he waited for his turn to go on watch. He was humming very quietly under his breath, a tune whose words went:“On a battlefield

  Six thousand years ago—

  In the midst of danger

  Arjuna dropped his bow . . .”

  The moon was very large as it hung near the horizon, and bright enough to pale the stars near it. Elsewhere they hung like frosted silver dust in a sky blacker than velvet; the small campfire had long since been banked, and the others were mere black shapes on the pale silver sand. The air was cold, cold enough to make the yak-hair blankets Elias had thoughtfully provided more than welcome. King sat up and gathered his around his shoulders, trying to spot the sentries, and failing—David’s men knew their business.

  He listened to the sounds of the desert night. There was an occasional crinking of insects—which reminded him to check his boots carefully before he put them on again; this place swarmed with scorpions. The big black kind, often fatal. Last night he’d heard a lion roar, and in the morning ridden past the three-quarters-devoured chinkara gazelle the pride had brought down. Tonight there was only the far-off yapping and moaning howls of a pack of dhole—red-coated wild dog. The desert air was painfully dry, but it had an exhilarating cleanness.

  The camels were some distance off, kneeling in sleep, with their long heads outstretched. They knew their business, too, and had kept up splendidly. Everyone was worn down and tired, but the party ought to make the railroad early tomorrow, well before the noon break—

  Yasmini gave a muffled scream and sat bolt upright. King leapt to his feet reflexively, pistol in hand. The other men did likewise; Ibrahim Khan shot over the crest of the dune behind them and cast himself down, carbine to his shoulder and eyes glaring for danger.

  Athelstane knelt gently by Yasmini’s bedroll. “What is it?” he asked.

  It need not be a vision. The poor girl had “natural” nightmares enough; sometimes he was surprised that she ever got a good night’s sleep at all.

  “Men come,” Yasmini said thickly.

  Then she threw herself on him, clutching him around the neck and burying her head in the hollow of his shoulder. He could feel the quick thudding of her heart against his, and the tense, lithe body within the curve of his arm. Nightmares were bad enough. When you knew, from cold fact, that the nightmares could come true—

  “Many,” she whispered. “Horsemen from the west. They come to kill. I saw them kill, kill us all, I felt it.”

  My dear, I don’t envy you your gift at all. However useful it might be. He repeated her words aloud as she shuddered back to self-control; he saw puzzlement on the others’ faces that matched his own. Westward was only the worst of the Thar, and then the Ran of Kuch—salt-marsh even more hostile to man than these empty sands. Then his face changed.

  “Sahib?” Narayan Singh said.

  “The railway. We’re heading for it, but if you suddenly got a report that we’d headed out into the desert, learned too late to pursue us from behind—how would you get horsemen into place to intercept us? By train.”

  “Or perhaps less a report than a rumor,” David bar-Elias said, scrubbing at his face with both hands to rub the sleep out of his head. “If you were one of the enemy leaders, and had most of your men watching more likely roads, then heard a rumor that a party had left to cross the Thar—”

  Yasmini cut in. “We must kill them all. Not one can escape. If any does—we die.”

  King nodded grimly. “Can you describe them?” he said.

  She did; thin men, with long, embroidered coats and cloaks over them, large bulbous turbans; all ragged-looking and none too prosperous, some riding barefoot with their big toes thrust through ring stirrups. One or two dressed otherwise, but mostly so.

  He could identify them: Rabari shepherds, quasi-Gypsies who were the nomadic tinkers and herders of the Thar. Even as many Rajputs lived outside the “land of princes,” so likewise not everyone who dwelt within it and spoke the tongue were considered Rajputs. The Rabari were a good example. Not quite an officially listed criminal tribe, but they had a bad reputation for horse-theft and occasional high-binding; they’d been much worse in the old days.

  That means David’s right, too. This is something someone on the other side is doing on a guess, hiring what muscle he can get. Wave a little money around some Rabari camps out on the edge of cultivation, and you could get hired blades enough. Our camels alone would be a big lure, if whoever-it-is can persuade them the police won’t find out. They won’t be martial caste, but your average Thar Desert goatherd is plenty tough. Bring them in by the rail line we’re trying to reach—no reason the railways would stop a bunch of Rabari goatherders from shipping horses and water out to Stop Number X on a local, if they had the money.

  “How many?” he asked.

  “Twenty, thirty,” she said.

  That meant odds of two or three to one. King scanned the group; he doubted that any bunch of scratch hirelings could match their quality, but they weren’t a trained military unit. Of course, neither was the opposition. With a ten-man file from his own squadron of the Peshawar Lancers, he’d be completely confident of the outcome and trying to figure out a way to do it without loss on his side. As it was . . .

  “If they disappear, how long before their side notices?” King wondered aloud.

  “Not soon,” David bar-Elias said. “If these are local hirelings, the man who bought them will wait until success to report to his superiors. Less chance of punishment if he fails—more credit if he succeeds and presents them with our deaths.”

  King raised an eyebrow. He’d met a few officers who operated that way, always trying to keep their own arses in a protected corner, but it wasn’t wise to underestimate the enemy.

  Yasmini nodded. “Yes. That is how things are, under the Peacock Angel. How not, when no man trusts another not to take advantage? I would not have known men could live otherwise, save for my dreams and my mother’s tales.”

  “Good,” King said grimly. They have the firsthand knowledge of how the enemy operates. Which means . . .

  “Yasmini’s perfectly right. We have to kill all of them. If we do, we have a chance of making a clean break to Bombay; they won’t have an earthly idea where we are because whoever’s running them wouldn’t have told his superiors.”

  Ibrahim and Narayan Singh had thrown themselves prone and pressed their ears to the ground not far off—on a patch of hard sand, where the looser surface accumulation had been blown aside. After a moment they both rose, dusting the powdery stuff off their clothes.

  “It is true, sahib. Many horsemen, and coming in directly from the west.”

  “In alignment with the last well, to cover the paths anyone coming from the closest water would take to reach the te-rain,” Ibrahim added. “They must know this countryside.”

  “We have fifteen minutes, twenty at most. Perhaps Allenby sahib leads them,” Narayan said, a savage eagerness in his voice.

  Then he worked the action of his carbine, snapped the shell out of the air with his hand, and licked the bullet before reloading with a click-clack. That was a Sikh gesture of a particular, exact significance.

  And Allenby would be very, very unhappy to see it, King thought, catching his orderly’s eye and nodding with a grim smile.

  Then he looked around, drawing the lay of the big soft-sided dunes and occasional wind-scoured rock into a mental map. “Do you remember how Colonel Claiborne caught the Baloch in his trap, that time they were raiding Scinde?”

  “Indeed, sahib,” Narayan said. “But here are no large rocks suitable for hiding men.”

  “No, but we can substitute,” King said. “On a smaller scale. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’ll need a couple of mirrors and some stiff paper or leather—”

  David bar-Elias nodded, went to rummage in one of the capacious camel saddles, and tossed a rectangular object to King. The Lancer caught it, turni
ng it over in his hands, then snapped the device of leather-covered tinware open. It was a black periscope, with an eyepiece below and a rectangular slit on the other end.

  “Capital,” King said. David listened gravely to the rest of the plan and offered a few refinements. When the scheme was complete, Narayan Singh chuckled again and tapped the breech of his weapon.

  Ibrahim Khan drew his chora, laughing aloud as he spat on his pocket hone and touched up the edge, new respect in his eyes when he looked at King.

  “I will show you how to cut throats!” he said. “The point goes in behind the windpipe, and the heel of the blade separates the neckbone! That is the way to slay a Rajput!”

  Athelstane King lay in hot, stifling darkness and waited, eye pressed to the eyepiece of the periscope, tasting the sweat that ran onto his chapped lips and stung, smelling on himself the results of a week’s desert travel without clean clothes or washing water.

  In his trench in the sand he could hear the approaching hooves clearly. They had stopped a while ago—that would be while the enemy sent scouts forward to confirm their position. The camp lay in the hollow between two big dunes that met on either side, leaving an almond-shaped hollow by some chance of the winds; they would have a man crawling up to the crest, to check on their target. Perhaps to left or right of the dune’s midpoint, for the wall of sculpted sand was steep in the center, like a frozen wave about to topple. It was near-vertical on the side facing the campfires.

  The Lancer officer smiled wolfishly. That man would see a picket line of tethered camels at some distance, gear and saddles, two low fires of dung and thornbush separated by a pile of stones, and a man sitting with his head on his knees, asleep—near him the blanket-covered shapes of nine more sleepers. His mind provided him with the image of a snaggle-toothed snarl of contempt for travelers too stupid to set a better guard, and then—

  The hooves grew to a drumbeat next to his ear, but he waited until he saw the moonlight shimmer on the dust that galloping horses raised. Then he used his shoulder to push at the sand-shrouded blanket above him; the draught of cool desert-winter air was inexpressible relief, but he didn’t want to draw attention to himself. His head and shoulders came out of the gravelike pit he’d dug, and he saw the night with almost painful brightness, after half an hour in utter dark save for the trickle through the instrument.

  A long line of horsemen crested the top of the dune opposite and rode whooping down the steep slope below it, breaking like a curling wave around the steepest central part and flowing down toward the camp.

  Thirty men, he snap-counted, robes flapping in the rushing night air, swords swinging, some with couched lances glinting in their hands. Some of them reined their horses back onto their haunches to descend the slope; all of them whooped and screeched out war cries. Good horsemen—only one lost his saddle coming down, and managed to dodge his mount as it stumbled and rolled.

  The others raced into the camp, some stabbing with lances at the sleeping forms, another swinging his tulwar in a great sweep at the head of the drowsy guard, steel glinting in starlight. Their harsh cries split the night as they struck to kill. King smiled at the sight, as he brushed sand off the breech of his carbine and took a turn of the sling around his forearm. With his left elbow on his knee, that gave another point to steady the aim. Ten yards to either side, Narayan Singh and Ibrahim Khan were doing likewise. The aiming point was a scrap of white cloth, on the mound of dense granite rock between the two fires.

  King let out a slow breath, let the foresight steady down on the mark. He waited an instant, while a bewildered horseman reined his mount out of the way and prodded at the sand-stuffed clothes that “sat” by the fire. A few of the riders had even jumped down to rummage among baggage and blanket rolls, as if the victims they’d expected to find, kill, and rob were somewhere there.

  Now. The trigger release on this carbine was extremely smooth. Crack. And crackcrack from the other two men. A second of suspense, while he worked the action and slid another cartridge into the chamber, pausing to blow on it first. You had to be very careful about getting sand in the action of this model of carbine; otherwise, it was liable to jam when hot from rapid fire.

  And . . . KE-RRRACK!

  A spot of white radiance hit his eyes; he blinked against the floating purple afterimage, cursing himself for not looking away. David bar-Elias had put ten pounds of guncotton under those rocks, and the explosion had turned them into a hail of lethal missiles whipping and pinwheeling through the night. King hated guncotton, despite its usefulness; it was unstable, liable to sweat beads of nitro when stored in hot weather and then to go off unpredictably. He’d always preferred to use the tried-and-true black powder for blasting, even if it wasn’t as powerful. David had sworn that his variety was reliable, and evidently he was right.

  Screams of pain split the sudden darkness, human and the louder, more heartrending cries of the horses—he sympathized with them. Nobody had asked the horses if they wanted to play bandit. Dimly seen forms crawled or staggered or thrashed about.

  King took careful aim at a flash of bright clothing atop a bucking horse, stroked the trigger again. Crack, and a harsh red spear of light in the darkness. He let it fade, picked another target, worked the action, fired. The recoil against his shoulder was a surprise, as it always was when you were shooting well.

  “Concentrate on the ones still mounted!” King shouted as he fired again. They’re the ones most likely to escape.

  Some of the bandits retained sufficient presence of mind to fire at the muzzle flashes from the crest of the dune. King heard a slug go by in the night with an ugly whit-whit-whit, and saw the flash of muzzle and frizzen at the same time, just before several more volleyed at him. Flintlock jezails, then, the only sort of firearm a bunch of Thar Desert goatherders were likely to own, allowed them to protect their herds from predators.

  His chance of getting hit by one of the smoothbore abortions under the present circumstances—dark of night, fifty yards away, and ten yards above their heads—was about on a par with slipping in the bath and breaking his neck. Their chances of reloading successfully were rather less.

  As he fired his third round—less than twenty seconds from his first—some of the surviving riders reached the same conclusion. They turned their horses around and spurred frantically along the path they’d arrived on.

  If the bandits had had enough time, they would have led their horses up the slope; it was much steeper than the reverse, as is the way of wind-moved sand—the central part of the dune was near-vertical. With even a little time, they would have taken the slope at an angle, to put less strain on their horses—they were experienced desert dwellers, after all. Right now they were in a panic. The horses labored, throwing up plumes of fine sand that glittered in the moonlight, legs churning but making slow progress. One reared and toppled over backward on its rider, crushing him like a beetle under a boot, save for the brief scream of terror.

  And the other seven members of King’s party erupted out of their hiding holes just below the steepest part of the dune’s crest to slam a volley into the horsemen’s faces. David bar-Elias didn’t fire right away. He kept his carbine in the crook of his right arm and pulled small cloth-wrapped bundles out of his robes, tapping them on the stock to start their fuses before tossing them down into the mass of men on horse or foot. Three exploded with a wicked snap—snap—snap, sending fragments of the nails bound around their core of gun-powder to savage flesh. The fourth and fifth hopped and sputtered, shedding a bright weird light on the scene, revealing torn bodies and turning shed blood black, a magnesium flare in Hell.

  The Rabaris’ war yells had turned to cries of panic now. The light blinded them, leaving them in a bubble of brightness surrounded by an impenetrable darkness out of which bullets came—and arrows driven by a powerful Mongol bow, perhaps less dangerous but more demoralizing. King watched coldly as the wailing men were shot down, using his carbine with implacable skill.

  Th
en a small figure came running and sliding down the face of the dune. Yasmini! he thought. What the hell is she—

  Even as he ran toward her, the hair prickled up along his spine. Half a dozen of the enemy had broken away from the others, and they were spurring their horses toward the southern edge of the hollow that held the camp, where the two main dunes met in a V.

  But she started to move before they did, he realized, shivering.

  Running through deep soft sand was like running in a nightmare, the very earth dragging at your feet; he was vaguely conscious of Narayan and Ibrahim behind him, less so of calculation. He was in a very bad position for a shot, with dark shadow hiding the targets, making them indistinct save for glints off metal. Yasmini’s—literal—foresight had put her in a position to catch them between her and the flares that lit the “campsite.”

  Much better shooting ground; from here I wouldn’t have time to fire more than twice, and I’d probably miss at least once. Just time to get there, though, if I hurry. Move your boots, Athelstane.

  She took stance, aimed with cool care, and fired. A Rabari threw up his hands and tumbled backward over his horse’s rump.

  Then she worked the lever . . . and it refused to function. He could see her struggling with it for an instant, then reversing it to grip by the barrel. Can’t have that, he thought. She was a good rifle shot, and brave enough for two—but using a wood-and-iron club to effect took heft that a woman barely five feet and perhaps ninety-five pounds soaking wet just didn’t have.

  He arrived just in time to take stance before her. A Rabari drove toward him with lance couched, outlined stark against the magnesium fire that turned his spear-head to glimmering blue-white. King’s teeth showed in a mirthless grin; he hadn’t spent the last six years in a Lancer regiment for nothing. His left hand went out for balance as he crouched, and he brought his saber up in a guard position with the hilt above his head and the blade slanting down to the front. The lance head came at his face with a galloping horse behind it, and he pivoted aside at the last instant, too late for the Rabari to correct his aim, bending his body aside like a toreador. The sword lashed down in a blurring stroke as he did, slicing through the tough bamboo in a cleat cut, then up, around, backhand in a whistling horizontal slash at his own eye height.