The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  The Rabari had just time enough to scream as the sharp curved edge took him under the short ribs; a soft heavy jarring thump struck King’s wrist. His foeman flew backward in a fan spray of blood that shone like black rain for an instant in the unnatural light. The horse reared in panic, flailing its forehooves. King ran in, dodging, grasped a handful of mane, and jumped. The stirrups were rawhide, and much too short for him, but he got his feet into them and the reins into his free hand. The horse turned in a single tight circle and submitted.

  That let him see what happened behind. Narayan Singh ran after a horseman, with no hope of catching him, but then something silver flashed through the air, turning, close enough to make the Sikh curse and dodge. The haunch of the horse suddenly sprouted half a chora, and the animal shied and went into a frenzy of heaving leaps, screaming, shedding its rider. The Rabari was agile, rolling and coming back on his feet like a cat, wheeling with curved sword in hand. The Sikh met his defense with a smashing overarm cut that rocked him backward; the next stroke snapped his sword in half, and the third sheered off half the nomad’s face.

  Ibrahim Khan went past him at a dead run and snatched the chora out of the ham of the bucking, kicking horse in an astonishing display of agility. That put him alongside a horseman as the mount began to labor in the softer sand of the rising dune; the Afghan dodged under a backhand slash, leapt up behind the man, and slit his throat to the neckbone with a long drawing cut.

  “After them! After them!” Yasmini called, pointing.

  The last two of the six Rabari were spurring their horses up the short but steep face of sand where the dunes met. King shouted, “Guard the woman!” to Narayan Singh, and kicked his borrowed horse into a gallop, cursing. Ibrahim Khan drew up beside him, and the Lancer rapped out:

  “Yours the left! Mine the right!”

  King’s target was a tall man in black robes on a better horse than the rest of the nomads, riding it with reckless skill. The fleeing man reached the dune before King and put his horse at it, crouching in the saddle and firing behind him with a revolver. The dimly seen muzzle spat little jabs of red fire at him, and something struck the horse the Lancer had seized. He kicked his feet loose as it bucked and plunged, felt himself fly free for an instant. Then he hit the soft sand with a winding thump, forced himself to his feet while he was still struggling to draw breath.

  The black-robed rider’s mount was just ahead of him, haunches bunching as it churned at the sand. Hate to do this, King thought, as he raised his saber and flung himself forward.

  The keen steel bit just above the horse’s right hock, and King whipped the blade across in a drawing cut. There was a heavy impact that rattled up his wrist to his shoulder, and something parted like a wire under tension before the saber grated on bone. The horse screamed, a raw enormous sound, unbearably piteous, and toppled backward; he could smell the sudden salt-and-copper stink of blood. The rider managed to get off it before he was crushed and scrambled to climb the dune his horse had tried in vain. King dodged as well, barely avoiding a flying hoof that clipped his turban and would have spattered his brains if it had been a little to the right.

  The shots behind continued, but they slackened a bit and there was a clash of steel as well. King wasn’t worried; the Rabari were shattered. In an affair like this numbers meant little, surprise and position everything. What was important was to see that there were no fugitives to carry the tale. He lunged forward and grabbed the ankle of the fleeing man, dragging him back and flipping him over in a single surge of strength. He raised his blade, dripping with the horse’s blood, then paused:

  “You!” he snarled, as the man lying beneath on his back screamed and held up his arms against the steel.

  It wasn’t Ignatieff; that was too much to hope for—and the Russian would never have let himself be taken like this. Richard Allenby slowly let his arms fall.

  “Finish it, then,” he gasped. He was panting, and his face was slick with sweat. “Finish it.” His face slowly relaxed and went calm. “I’ve earned death, but let me die like an Allenby.”

  “No,” King said grimly.

  “What you’ve earned is a pi-dog’s death and a slow one.” King laughed harshly as Allenby blanched. “But you’re luckier than you deserve—we aren’t Kali-worshipers.”

  Instead of striking, he reached down and took the man by the neck, hauling him erect and pushing him before him into the space where the campfires had been, and where David bar-Elias’s lights still sputtered. Nothing moved except wounded horses and his own party; Yasmini and the Jew were bandaging hurts. Ibrahim Khan came back out of the night leading his horse, plunging his chora into the sand to clean it as he came down a dune in something between a fall and a stroll.

  “No escape from me, huzoor,” he called cheerfully. “He got a hundred yards. I took him from behind, thus—”

  King held up a hand for silence, looking for Narayan Singh. “Daffadar!” he called.

  The Sikh had been helping with the first aid; he gently held down the eyelids of one of the Jew’s retainers before he rose and turned. His face changed as he saw who stood before King with the point of the Lancer captain’s sword resting between his shoulder blades.

  “You!” he said, and his hand darted to the hilt of his tulwar. Then he stopped, and looked at his officer.

  “He’s yours, bhai,” King grated.

  Allenby started. “No—you can’t do that, King! For God’s sake man, I’m sahib-log, too; you can’t let a native—”

  “You’ve got a saber, Allenby. I suggest you use it, unless you want to die begging on your knees. Death by an honest soldier’s sword—it’s more than you deserve.”

  He turned away, cleaning and sheathing his blade, then unslinging his carbine. Not far away a horse lay on its side, thrashing and trying to rise despite a broken leg. They’d have to kill all the horses they could catch, too; someone might recognize them. He looked to both sides. With a little labor, they could pull dune sand down and bury all the bandits and their animals ten feet deep. Eventually the wind would uncover the bodies and the jackals would feast, but by then it wouldn’t matter.

  Steel clashed behind him, briefly, as he put the muzzle of the carbine to the horse’s head. It rolled its eyes at him, begging mutely for help: The crack of the shot and Allenby’s cut-off scream came together.

  Yasmini came up beside him, gasping. King took the carbine from her hands and examined it; the extractor had torn off the base of a cartridge. A flick of his knife freed it, but the woman almost dropped the weapon.

  “What’s the matter?” he said, sharp concern in his voice. “Are you wounded?”

  “No.” She turned her eyes on him, enormous with fear. “I saw where they would go. I Saw it.”

  “Damned good thing, too; they might have gotten away.”

  “No, you do not understand. I Saw them with my waking mind, for an instant, without the drugs. It should not be so. It should not!”

  The Thar sun had risen, warm even in December but welcome after the bitter night, and the northwest wind flicked grit into their eyes. King and his companions stood with their heads bowed, as David bar-Elias prayed beside two graves marked only by oblong mounds of stones. When they mounted, he rode beside the older man, the sun hot on the back of his neck, swaying with the motion of the camel.

  “Sorry about your men,” he said. “I know how that feels.”

  David bar-Elias nodded, looking over his shoulder for an instant. His voice was musing as he replied:

  “I bought Hassan in Basra.”

  King nodded; slavery was illegal in the Empire, of course, but widespread in the Caliphate. “The black with no tongue?”

  Bar-Elias nodded. “Long story. Bought him and freed him—it’s a mitzvah, a good deed.”

  “And the bowman, Togrul?” King asked.

  There are times when you have to talk, he thought. Otherwise, the pain gets too much to bear, and the only alternative is drinking alone. Talking hurts a l
ot less next day.

  Both the caravan guards had been unlucky; the black trampled by a wounded horse he was trying to catch, the archer shot in the belly at point-blank range by a Rabari who was probably too frightened to fire until he saw the troll shape looming up out of the darkness. Skill took you only so far in a fight. Sooner or later bad luck put you in precisely the wrong place at the wrong moment, and then nothing helped.

  “Moishe Togrul was probably the only Jewish Mongol in history, did you know?” David shook his head. “I picked him up outside a caravanserai in Gansu—dried him out, too. I liked the way he kept crawling back where they’d just finished beating him up and throwing him out. Crawling back and trying to fight again; a crooked dice game with some Nipponese soldiers and too much kumis.”

  A smile. “I told him I had a job for a good man, but not for a drunk, then a month later sent him into a town we passed, sent him with money to buy supplies. He didn’t come back.”

  “Went on a spree?” King said, doubt in his voice. David bar-Elias struck him as a kindly man, but shrewd as any he’d ever met, and not an easy mark.

  “No, he got knocked on the head from behind and robbed. Then he tracked down the men who did it, killed them, got the money back, bought the supplies, and caught up with the caravan on his own, half-dead and raving. When we got back to Delhi six months later, he started pestering our rabbi. It isn’t easy to become a Jew—not impossible, but you have to prove you really mean it. It took him three years, and he ended up knowing more of the Law than I do. That was twenty years ago, and he traveled with me from China to the Danube and back . . . and to Bokhara.”

  He shook his head. “I thought we’d both retired from that sort of thing. He had a wife in Delhi; distant relative of mine. The Lord gives—the Lord takes—blessed be the Name of the Lord.”

  King set a hand on his shoulder for a moment; the rest of the morning’s ride was in silence. They were all too weary with the aftermath of victory for anything else, and with lack of sleep and the strain of a week’s hard travel through the wasteland.

  The sun was well past noon when he stood in the stirrups with a cut-off oath. The railway was not far off, half a mile perhaps and downslope, stretching in a line of shining steel from north to south through a desolate landscape of thorn and scrub, dune and low rocky hills. He unshipped binoculars and focused them; there was a cutting directly ahead, and far to the right—northward toward the distant Punjab—a tiny plume of smoke. Nothing else moved in the whole vast landscape save dust devils and a circling of vultures far above. A few others perched motionless on the telegraph wires that swooped from pole to pole along the train tracks.

  “Be a bit of a stretch to make that one,” he said. “The next will have to do.”

  “No!” Yasmini said, coming up beside him. “I recognize now—that is the train we must take.”

  King suppressed an impulse to snarl; Yasmini couldn’t help the fact that her dreams came to her in fragments, or that she often only realized what they meant when she met the reality head-on. As far as he knew, she’d never told him anything but the truth as she knew it.

  He turned to David bar-Elias, and fished in his tunic. The Jew’s eyes widened slightly when he recognized what King was holding out—Elias’s half of the tessera, returned to King in Delhi. His hand snapped it out of the air reflexively as the Lancer officer tossed it underhand.

  “Whenever you need me or mine,” King said. “For now, stay here—you’ve got men hurt, and they need rest. We’ll abandon the camels, and you can pick them up by the line.”

  They leaned far over to clasp wrists, and then the Jew started pulling things out of his robe. “Take these,” he said, as they jounced along side by side. “A few extra of my lights—they may come in useful.”

  “Thanks!” King called. The Jew nodded, and pulled up as King flicked his own camel with the riding crop thonged to his wrist.

  “God go with you!” bar-Elias called.

  “Hup! Hup!” King called as he waved an answer, and the racing camel seemed to find a new reserve of strength. It pounded down the slope and over the flat toward the distant cutting, speed building as it sensed its rider’s determination.

  Yasmini’s beast had less trouble; it was carrying barely half the weight. She herself worried him. The brutal week of travel and the tension of the fight had worn even the Lancer officer down—he felt every jolt of the camel’s feet right up into his spine—and she had fewer physical reserves . . . and hadn’t slept well at all. There were huge dark circles under her eyes, and the elfin face was thinner, her lips peeling and chapped from the endless dry wind. She seemed to be holding on by sheer willpower; plenty of that, but it could take you only so far before the flesh rebelled.

  Narayan Singh’s face was set in grim determination, but he hunched over the pommel of his saddle and gripped it with both hands.

  Not surprising, King thought, worried a second time. He really should have been on bed rest for twice as long, after what that swine Allenby and his goondahs put him through.

  Only Ibrahim seemed untouched; the hardships that ground down the others had merely made him irritable, as if the desiccating Thar wind could only dry the rawhide of him harder.

  King calculated angles. The freight wasn’t a fast train; still toy-tiny at this distance, but it looked like a Danavas-class 482, a standard heavy hauler. That meant forty miles an hour or so, on a straightaway and flat ground.

  “Look!” he shouted, and repeated it until he was sure all had understood. “We’ll hide behind that hill.” It had been split in half by the track-cutting, and there was an upgrade on the slope leading to it.

  “When the engine is past, watch me—we race out and jump onto the train. Me first, then Ibrahim, then Narayan, then Yasmini. Understood?”

  They all nodded. The swift rolling of the camels brought them closer and closer to the cleft hill, a pile of rock with a single dead acacia in a crack in its side. King kept his head moving, watching the train until the rising ground ahead cut off his view. It was a freight all right, mostly flatcars loaded with huge Himalayan cypress logs a yard through and thirty feet long. They were in pyramidal stacks, a bottom course of three logs, then two, then one, all held secure by thick chains. Other flatcars carried cotton in five-hundred-pound bales, stacked square and too high to climb, and a few boxcars toward the rear might have anything; most probably grain in sacks.

  Then they were behind the hill, with their heads turned south and the rail to their right. The camels seemed to think they had permission to lie down once they’d stopped, and had to be dissuaded. There was a moment of brutal work with boot, whip, and reins—those ran to brass rings in the camels’ noses—amid a chorus of guttural groans and angry squeals and shouted curses in Hindi, Pushtu, and Russian. Yasmini shook her head violently and forced herself up from a droop after her mount nearly threw her.

  “Everyone, drink some water,” King snapped.

  He pulled the goatskin chuggle up from his own saddlebow, rinsed out his mouth, spat, drank, rubbed a handful over his face, and felt strength flowing back into him. The others followed suit, Ibrahim smirking a little, Narayan Singh sitting more upright, Yasmini letting the water dribble across her chin and going into a coughing fit. They set their beasts moving as the noise grew behind them, the shriek of the steam whistle, the chuff of the cylinders and rhythmic whuffling giant’s breath of the stack, an iron squeal and rattle of wheels.

  “Now! Chalo, chalo, chalo!” King shouted.

  His own camel spurted into the lead as the engine swept by, a great length of dark gray steel, the driving wheels pounding at the rails and connecting rods pis-toning back and forth. Bitter sulfurous coal smoke mixed with wet hot steam flared back into his face, and the camel’s—the animal snorted and tried to whip its long snaky neck around, but he mastered it and drove it on. The train was laboring, slowing to less than a horse’s best pace. He came up alongside one of the flatcars of timber, and tossed over his bundle
d goods. They bounced, but did not quite fall, settling instead in the curve of one of the pine trunks. King forced everything but the distance out of his mind, took a deep breath, brought his long legs beneath him, and leapt.

  An instant of flight, and then he landed with a grunt against the hard wood and rough bark. His fingers dug in, and he turned to the others. Ibrahim tossed him his bundle, gauged his time, and leapt with the surefooted grace of one brought up on knife-edge heights, touching down with two feet and a hand. Narayan Singh made a strong jump, but his camel chose that moment to swerve away, and the other two men grabbed desperately for his arms. They touched, enough to swing him down so that his thighs made bruising contact with the edge of the flatcar; he howled and dragged on their arms with gorilla strength, and they hauled back to put him on his feet.

  That left Yasmini. King would not have been worried, if she had had more rest; he remembered her jumping the alleyway as they fled over the roofs of Delhi.

  “Yasmini! You can do it!” he called, trying to pour strength through his voice as her camel raced by the train’s side; the engine was beginning to pull them faster as the track leveled.

  “You’ll make it!” he called, as she hesitated. “Just jump.”

  She almost did make it, but one boot slipped on the camel’s saddle; Thar sand, perhaps, turning the rough leather into something slippery as mountain ice. King acted without thought, throwing himself out—and felt Narayan Singh’s hand close on his sword belt right over the small of his back. Without that grip he would have fallen, too; with it, he had just enough reach to grab one wrist, and wrench back with huge and desperate strength. The Sikh pulled from behind. Yasmini catapulted forward into him, knocking him back against the logs, her arms around his neck.