The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  “Yes, Kunwari,” he said woodenly. “I kiss feet, Kunwari .”

  “And by ever again, I mean while you wear my father’s uniform. If you do, you won’t be wearing it any longer. Do I make myself clear?”

  Henri wouldn’t have wanted to be under the flaying knife of that voice—and a thousand times never in front of men he commanded. The officer’s face was like something carved out of lard rather than a living man’s. On the other hand . . .

  “Yes, Kunwari. Perfectly clear.”

  “Thank you, Captain Pienaar. Thank you all,” she concluded, nodding to the rest of the bridge crew.

  She turned and extended a hand. Henri put his arm under it, and they walked down the corridor. As the hatchway closed behind them, he heard Sita give a slight hiss; her face was calm as a temple image, but he realized she was furious as he’d never seen her.

  “He didn’t just mean sudras,” she said, in a voice that trembled imperceptibly. “Or even untouchables. He meant anyone with a brown skin—and half the crew in that compartment with him are martial-caste Indians, and don’t think they didn’t know exactly what he meant!”

  “Are there many of your, mmmm, sahib-log who think like that?” Henri asked.

  “Some, although most of those have the sense not to say it. But he’s not sahib-log—he’s barely Angrezi. He’s a Kapenaar baas. They treat all their lower castes over there like dirt, and everyone’s lower caste except them, there. It’s a . . . Father called it a festering boil on the Empire’s arse.”

  “How does he come to have such a position of prestige, him?” Henri asked.

  There were regional differences in France-outre-mer; far more Muslims in Morocco and Tunisia than in the central block around Algiers, for instance, and the special problem of newly conquered Sicily. To know how the Raj handled similar problems was valuable.

  “Well, he’s a decorated veteran,” Sita said. “He was second officer on an airship damaged during the suppression of a native uprising in Kilimanjaro Territory; got her into the air and a lot of refugees out to safety, then went back for more with half his engines out and gas leaking. Lost his own wife and children during the fighting there, as a matter of fact. And he’s an extremely good airshipman; he helped with the design for this class. And the Cape holds a quarter of the seats in Parliament—they have to get appointments of honor in proportion . . . Oh, let’s talk about something else, Henri.”

  “As you wish, chérie,” he said absently, nodding to an Oriental-looking airshipman who had risen from his cubbyhole of equipment—one of the also-to-be-envied wireless telegraphs, from the look of it. Sita noticed his slight check, and paused to give the young man a gracious smile as he salaamed.

  The corridor ended with the circular stair of fretted rosewood that led to down to the deck of the main observation gallery. There were a dozen or more people there, grouped around the vision wells set into the deck, or at the long galleries to port or starboard. Sita took her hand from Henri’s arm, and they walked to the vision well themselves.

  Bombay was passing by below; from a thousand feet it looked like a relief map, save that figures and vehicles moved in the streets; the storm of gulls over the dock was like flakes of confetti, save where some came startlingly close beneath the glass. The north-south hook-shape of the harbor showed clearly, and tiny white wakes from freighters and ferries and warships. Some of those elevated their guns as the shadow of the Garuda passed above them, and fired salutes whose thudding bellows rumbled up a perceptible instant after the flash of red flame and billow of smoke. Henri felt another bubble of envy at the low-slung gray steel shapes, with their turrets fore and aft and more heavy guns in barbettes along their flanks; with a squadron of those, France could smash the Caliph’s entire fleet to kindling.

  And it is precisely to obtain such help that you are here, he thought. Not that this trip has lacked either enlightenment or pleasure otherwise.

  More warships would be out already, strung across the Arabian Sea toward Aden; the Garuda was as safe as a surface vessel, but the Royal and Imperial Navy was taking no chances whatsoever. Two more dirigibles curved up from the naval airship base as he watched; they were slightly smaller than the Garuda, their hulls narrower—the long pencil shape that the Imperials’ so-admirable Analytical Engine had shown was actually less efficient than the portly whale outline of the newer craft.

  “The Clive and the Raffles,” a voice said quietly beside him.

  That was the King-Emperor; Henri took his elbows from the railing and straightened, then relaxed at a slight gesture. The ruler of the Angrezi Raj was in uniform again, a Naval Air Service commander’s light and dark blue this time.

  “They each have a company of the Gurkha regiment of the Guards on board, sir,” Lord Pratap Batwa said from beside him. “We have a platoon, here on the Garuda. Packed in like lamb kebab rolled up in a piece of naan, I’m afraid.”

  “Ah,” Henri said. Prince Charles and Cassandra King were a step behind the monarch. “Perhaps that was why the ship was slightly heavy, according to Captain Pienaar. About eight hundred pounds—five persons, shall we say?”

  None of the faces reacted much; Henri was somewhat impressed. Even Cassandra King, the astronomer and a naïf, only flushed a little at the news that her brother was probably aboard. Sita quickly changed the subject:

  “And speaking of Captain Pienaar—”

  Her father tugged at the left side of his full cheek-whiskers, scowling.

  “Damn the man, and may he be reborn a labor-tenant on his own estate—that would feed him ‘some of his own tobacco.’ ” A sigh. “There’s only so much even Parliament can do about the Viceroyalty of the Cape, much less the throne. The way they diddle the franchise laws over there—” He shrugged. “And it’s a sensitive time, what with the Egyptian matter, and the clashes with Dai-Nippon. The Empire needs unity.”

  “I’m afraid it’ll always be a sensitive time,” Charles said. “Those chickens are going to come home to roost, someday, sir.”

  “With luck, not in my time or yours,” John II said. “And more often than not, if you leave a problem alone long enough, it solves itself—something governments are loath to learn.”

  A chime ran. “Ah, dinner. My dear?” he said, offering Cassandra his arm. A murmur ran through the watching courtiers.

  Cassandra accepted. Henri heard her murmur in turn: “I can see you in your daughter, sometimes, sir.”

  “Hunf,” Athelstane King snarled, straining in the hot stuffy darkness.

  The wicker of the baggage trunks around him was both strong and resilient, and that made it a hell of frustration to try to push them apart. They were also closer above than below. With an unconscious Yasmini lying at his feet, he had both knees against one side of his prison and his shoulders against the other. Pushing them apart wasn’t the problem—keeping them from springing back as soon as he relaxed again was. At last he managed to brace his sheathed saber crosswise between the sides, hilt and scabbard chape caught by the brass caps at the corners of two of the trunks in the top row.

  “Now, carefully, Athelstane,” he told himself in a mutter.

  He didn’t have room to bend; instead he had to squat with his knees apart and reach down to pick the girl up with his torso still bolt upright, lifting with the strength of his arms alone and not dislodging the diagonally braced saber either.

  Carefully—how all the rakashas in all the underworlds would laugh if he pulled a muscle or put his back out now!—he raised her. The weight wasn’t really the problem; she was barely a hundred pounds. The problem now was the utter limpness of her body. Her breath was barely perceptible and her pulse light; it wasn’t the only time he’d had a girl faint in the middle of things, but it was most definitely the first time his own heart had nearly stopped in turn because he was afraid she’d dropped dead. Inch by inch he pulled her free and slid her onto the top of the upper layer of trunks. There was a gap of a little under a foot between those and the light planks
of the decking above it; he could just barely have stood erect if the hold had been empty.

  The bulkhead forward was thin metal, probably aluminum alloy—that was too expensive to use for anything but aircraft and luxury goods. From the feel, it held water; ballast, undoubtedly. Something knocked against it from the other side occasionally, with a hollow bong sound.

  That was the strangest experience I’ve ever had, he thought. Not unpleasant—one of the advantages of being male, he supposed, was that it couldn’t be—but very strange. Very fucking strange in the most literal sense of the term.

  He hooked the knickers and petticoat that went under the sari up from the floor, after a few tries that made him realize the full disadvantages of blindness for the first time; his booted feet had no feeling. Getting the clothes back on her was going to be hard work, even harder than getting them off had been; but first he folded the fresh handkerchief from his uniform pocket into a pad and applied it between her legs. There wasn’t much blood, as far as he could tell by touch in near-total darkness, but she’d definitely been virgo intacta.

  Why losing a hymen should turn off something that happened in the brain he had no faintest idea; but then, since he had no idea of how her ability worked in the first place . . .

  Maybe it’s like those yogis who can sleep on nails or hold their left arms up for ten years at a stretch, because they believe they can do it, he thought. Mind over matter. Of course, that’s just another way of saying I don’t know.

  When he’d clothed the girl again and tugged her sari down, he called softly. “Anyone in trouble?”

  “Curse these wicker pythons to the pit!” Narayan Singh said, also softly but with total sincerity. “My arse and belly will bear patterns like a reed mat the rest of my life.”

  Somewhere, Ibrahim Khan chuckled, drawing a volley of whispered curses. King had smiled himself—but only because the darkness hid it. He could get out, and crawl with great difficulty in the space between the top trunks and the roof. Strength would make do where suppleness couldn’t, if he didn’t mind losing some skin. The Pathan had his own build in seven-eighths scale, and was just as active, so it would be easier for him. Narayan was stronger than either of them—certainly in the arms and shoulders—but also far bulkier. That none of it was fat merely made the problem worse, since muscle didn’t compress as well as soft tissue, and bone didn’t compress at all.

  Warburton would be no problem; the man had the build of a weasel, and the agility of one, too.

  As if to confirm his thought, a voice spoke not far away: “How is Miss Yasmini? She sounded . . . distressed . . . for a moment there.”

  “Ah—” King felt himself flush in the dark. Making love to a woman in a space that required an acrobat’s flexibility in both parties to avoid torn tendons, and doing so for medical reasons . . . it would be hard to explain.

  “She had a convulsion,” he said. True enough. “I think it had to do with her . . . talent. She’s unconscious now.”

  “And we should act.”

  “Very well,” King said.

  Of course, what exactly should we do? Our seeress is out of the Seeing business, if what she said is true. And what on earth did that last thing she said mean? “He is born!”

  His hand touched her in the darkness, with a moment’s tenderness, then his mind went to work—the one advantage of being in the dark was that you didn’t have to close your eyes to visualize. The keel compartments ran from here to the bow of the gondola, but they were useless—this one didn’t even have a hatch opening above. Several others could only be accessed from outside the hull, and there was no through passageway; much of the space was taken up with fuel and water tanks. Above that were two decks fore and aft, interrupted by the space of the main observation deck in the middle. There were two vertical ladders at each end of the gondola that ran through the hull to observation bubbles on the upper surface, and internal galleries one-third of the way up on either side that allowed access to the engines.

  “Sir Manfred,” he said softly. “As I remember the plans, we’re directly below the kitchen stores, aren’t we?”

  A second; Warburton was probably nodding. “Yes,” he said. “If you mean the very rear of this baggage compartment, over the ramp.”

  “All right.” He felt upward. “Thank the little gods of vanity this is a luxury vessel. The boards are secured to these metal stringers by screws and the heads are down—improves the appearance of the floors, no doubt.”

  He felt again. “They’ll be the very devil to get loose, though—my hands can’t get a tool properly underneath them. And we do not want to attract official attention.”

  “Provided we can get the planks loose?”

  “We’ll go up through the pantry, through the ceiling of that, and then straight up to the rear observation bubble. It’s not used except in action or certain maneuvers—and there’s room for all of us. That can be our base. You, and Yasmini if she can—”

  This time Warburton made an affirmative noise. Narayan Singh cursed again. “And we’ll have to get Narayan out—at worst, we can cut him free, but I don’t want to do that unless we have to. Noise.”

  “Like a buffalo mired in a ditch,” Ibrahim whispered. “And bellowing . . .”

  “Let me get my hands upon you, child of misbelief, and—”

  “Silence,” King said.

  He tested Yasmini’s pulse again; a little more rapid, and her breathing was normal. Wriggling, he managed to get the flask out of his back pocket and dribble a little on her lips. For a moment the liquor merely ran down her cheeks; he gently opened her lips with his fingers and rubbed her throat.

  Then she coughed, tried to sit up, struck her head on one of the metal stringers.

  “Bozhe moi!” she said, the last word muffled through his palm.

  When he removed it, she spoke again in a shaken whisper, but still in Russian. “My . . . head is empty. As it is between dreams—but more. As if I am alone for the first time. A sound gone I did not know was there until it left—”

  “Well, you’re not alone,” King replied. “I’m . . . we’re very much here. Can you move?”

  “Yes.” He could sense her testing herself in the darkness. “Yes, a little sore.” There was a smile in her voice. “Not a bad soreness, though.”

  “Oh, thank Pravati. I was afraid I’d hurt you.”

  Astonishingly, she chuckled. “That is vanity. After all, even a small baby’s head is much bigger than—”

  Warburton coughed, and Yasmini was silent for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice was desolate.

  “But what use is Yasmini now, without her dreams?”

  King reached out in the darkness and found her hand. “You were extremely useful at the fight in the desert,” he said. “And I suspect that being able to climb around in small spaces is going to be useful here once more.”

  “Da.” A growing strength. “What can I do?”

  “We need some boards removed. About twenty feet in that direction.”

  Vladimir Obromovich Ignatieff was used to cold. Part of his initiation into the cult of the Black God—the one that raised him to the Inner Ring, not the ordinary manhood rites—had involved hours lying naked on a glacier in the mountains on the Roof of the World, using his command of the body’s energy to keep him from death. Many initiates did not survive that test.

  The water in the ballast tank was worse than the glacier; even though this time he was coated in thick grease and wore tight-woven silk that trapped a layer of water between it and his skin as extra insulation. Still, the sluggish movements of the ballast leached away his inner heat, hour upon endless hour. Patience, he told himself. This is the one place that nobody will suspect or inspect. His hands and feet were numb, and his teeth had begun to chatter despite the iron will that clenched his jaw, when he heard the dogging ring in the hatch above him move.

  When the hatch finally opened, only great control kept him from trying to lunge up the two rungs of the
ladder that were above the surface and into the dim corridor beyond.

  That dimness was bright to his eyes. He saw the square face of the Kapenaar captain above him, and an extended hand. Help was hateful, but he took it and lay for a moment on the wooden surface of the corridor while Pienaar hauled on the rope that ran from his waist to the water. A bundle broke surface, fifty pounds wrapped in thick layers of rubber.

  “Quickly, into my cabin,” Pienaar said, pulling him up and dragging him along with one arm over his rescuer’s shoulder before going back for the bundle.

  That was a cubicle, enough for a bed and a desk, and a tiny alcove with a shower and toilet. Pienaar pushed him into that and turned on the hot water; it was enough to billow steam and sting, but he scarcely felt it for long moments. It brought strength, though, and after a while he was able to command himself again, turning the handle and stepping out, stripping off the silk and wiping away the tallow. He hid a smile at the thought of what his tool would think if he knew the nature of the beast it was rendered from.

  Pienaar was busy slitting open the package, taking out the explosives and blasting caps and detonators. Ignatieff fell on the food set out on a small table—sausage, bread, cheese, chocolate—like a starving wolf, stoking himself.

  Pienaar looked up at him. “I wouldn’t have believed a man could stay alive in the tank so long,” he said. “Particularly a man who wasn’t fat to begin with.”

  Ignatieff grunted—he certainly wasn’t going to share any secrets with this ally-of-the-moment.

  “The Peacock Angel gave me strength,” he said—both truth and a lie, which was delightful, but not missing Pienaar’s slight grimace of distaste. “And that belief of yours is why the ballast tank was the best place to hide.”

  As he spoke he dressed, putting on the plain blue working overalls of an Imperial Navy airshipman. The room was stark, obviously not lived in for long. The only personal touches were a strange demonic mask carved from some dark reddish hard-grained wood, a broad-bladed spear, and a photograph of a smiling fair-haired woman and three small children. The Okhrana agent hid his sneer at that, and watched Pienaar strapping the explosives to his own body beneath the coat. The Kapenaar was soft about his woman and spawn; could he not sire more? But that softness had tempered him hard in the fires of hate. He might be an idiot, but he was a useful idiot.