1637: The Peacock Throne

by Eric Flint

  The goblet clipped the side of the girl’s head, sending her sprawling in what Smidha hoped was a welter of wine, not blood.

  Roshanara’s drunken laughter filled the garden as the dancers stopped abruptly.

  Disgusted if not entirely surprised by the princess’s behavior, Smidha shook her head. Where Jahanara had stopped indulging in temper tantrums once she came of age, Roshanara had frequently indulged even the slightest inconvenience by beating her nurses.

  Slowing, Smidha’s heart swelled when her gaze found two particular women among the dancing girls. Glad neither had been Roshanara’s victim, she gave each woman a tiny nod. Both gave somewhat more obvious nods in return, but Smidha doubted very much that Roshanara would notice.

  Setting herself as if to carry a heavy load across uneven ground, Smidha stopped a few steps from the platform and cleared her throat.

  The musicians, their performance already drowned by the constant arrhythmic percussion of the battle and Roshanara’s behavior, stopped playing. They were long accustomed to taking such inaudible cues from Smidha.

  “Roshanara Begum, you will come with me,” Smidha said.

  “What is this?” Roshanara asked, refusing to turn and look at her.

  “You will come with me,” Smidha repeated.

  “I will do no such thing, servant.”

  An angry Monique stepped up next to Smidha and, before the older woman could stop her, said, “Jahanara Begum commands it, Roshanara.”

  The outburst got the princess’s attention. She turned her head and glared at Monique. “I don’t care if you are Jahanara’s pet ferenghi, you will not speak to me in such tones. I’ll have you whipped.”

  Monique smiled. “You are welcome to try.”

  Roshanara’s expression slipped from angry hauteur to angry suspicion before she mastered it.

  “Come with me, now,” Smidha said.

  “You think you can threaten me?” Roshanara asked, voice rising as she got to her feet.

  Smidha laughed. “Threaten? Why would I threaten you?”

  “I—”

  “When we can just make you come along?” Smidha interrupted, lifting her chin.

  The two dancing girls rushed the platform and, vaulting it with the smooth grace born of hard training, grabbed the princess.

  “Unhand me!” Roshanara screamed. “I have done nothing wrong!”

  Smidha tutted, raised a forefinger before the princess’s face and waggled her head as if instructing her. “You have done a great many wrongs, Shehzadi; we are just seeing to it you do nothing wrong for the next little while.”

  Roshanara screamed again, struggling to free herself from the dancing girls, to strike at Smidha.

  The response from her captors was immediate and, from their smiles, something they rather enjoyed: one thrust a knee into Roshanara’s gut with an economical move Smidha presumed she’d learned defending herself from highborn bastards thinking they could take advantage. When Roshanara reflexively folded over her abused belly, the other girl wrenched the arm she held behind the princess’s back.

  “I would not give these young women yet another excuse to mistreat you, Roshanara.”

  “I have done nothing!” Roshanara gasped.

  Smidha sniffed and regretted it. Roshanara’s breath was redolent with wine. Nonetheless she pointed at the girl who was being helped to her feet by the remaining members of her troupe.

  Roshanara followed the line of Smidha’s finger to rest on the dancing girl. She tossed her head, dismissive. “That, that’s nothing!”

  “No, Roshanara, she is someone. She is the girl you hurt out of petty spite, for no other reason than you could.”

  “No, it is nothing. Nothing compared to what I will do to you once Aurangzeb rules!”

  Smidha hoped she kept the sudden thrill of fear she felt run down her spine from reaching her face and asked, “You admit to working for the pretender?”

  “Pretender?” Roshanara scoffed. “Can you not hear the sound of his guns? He is the strongest!”

  Smidha shook her head and passed the nearest dancer a length of silk cord to bind their prisoner with.

  Roshanara’s struggles were more violent but no more effective this time. She ended up facedown on the grass and gasping for air as the girls bound her hands together behind her back.

  “Here I was, worrying Jahanara’s order to confine you might be excessive.” Ilsa’s tone was light as she stepped close to Roshanara, but Smidha did not miss how one hand cupped her belly and the baby growing there. “But now I wonder if we shouldn’t just throw you to your brother? Perhaps from atop the nearest tower?”

  “Ferenghi bitch!” Roshanara spat. “You and yours will be first to die!” A sudden heave bounced one of the dancers off her back.

  “That’s not very nice,” Monique said, straddling the princess with a length of dark silk in one hand. Leaning down, she ground an elbow into the small of Roshanara’s back.

  When the princess’s head came off the grass, Monique slipped what turned out to be a silken bag over it.

  “You seem entirely too practiced at that, Monique,” Ilsa said.

  Monique grinned. “Papa was right: there is no such thing as a misspent youth.”

  “Really?” Ilsa asked.

  Monique shrugged, still grinning.

  Smidha shook her head. These people were almost as strange as the up-timers they had chosen to make their lives with.

  Strange, but on our side, thankfully!

  Pavilion of the Healers

  “Here they come,” Rodney said.

  Gervais looked up from his preparations to see his friend was correct. The first few sets of stretcher-bearers were crossing the big courtyard from both the north and south, field medics trotting beside the wounded. The patient coming in from the north had an arrow protruding visibly from the juncture of her neck and shoulder.

  “We are ready for this, my friend,” he said, thoroughly drying his hands and then inspecting his nails. It wouldn’t do to have one catch on a man’s wound or stitches.

  “I sure hope so.”

  “We are better prepared than any army other than that of the USE itself,” Gervais said, with what he hoped was perfect confidence.

  The bearers from the south were the first to arrive, hustling their charge into Rodney’s operating room.

  “See you when it’s over,” Rodney rumbled, following them.

  “See you then, Rodney.”

  Gervais went to his own station, giving a reassuring nod to his team. Several women were not only present, but integral to the team. Two of them would make better doctors than any of the current crop of male candidates, but Gervais knew better than to pursue their elevation too soon. Pushing too hard and early had resulted in far too many swindles going sideways on him. The more people thought a given thing their own idea, the easier they were to bring around to your purpose.

  The second set of bearers entered. The patient was fully conscious and looking at Gervais with interest and no little fear under sweating brows.

  “Single wound. No exit. Patient hasn’t lost a lot of blood,” the medic was saying, “but it seems the shaft of the arrow may have broken on penetrating. I thought it best to leave it in place and bring him to you.”

  Brow cocked above her veil, Sunitra held up the opium pipe.

  Gervais nodded to her but spoke to the medic, “Well done. Don’t forget to resupply before you go back out.”

  Sunitra lit the opium pipe and thrust it at the wounded warrior.

  “I don’t need this,” the warrior said, pushing the pipe away with his good hand.

  “Not yet,” Gervais said, lifting one of the larger surgical knives, “but when I start cutting on you with this, I think you’ll be glad of it. Now shut up and suck on that pipe.”

  The man’s eyes went comically wide. When Sunitra held the pipe out again, he grasped it, quickly stuffing the stem between his lips to draw, hard, on it.

  Gervais gestured
. “Move a little onto your side, if you please, and let me take a look at that.”

  He had to cut the cotton tunic away from the man’s back, as the arrow hadn’t penetrated it. From the look of it, the arrowhead was indeed broken off. He could see the nearly blunt cylinder of the arrow shaft pushing the skin at his back up.

  “Do you know what happened?” Gervais asked. He needed to let the opium work on the boy before cutting anyway, and if the fellow could tell him where the arrowhead was, it might just help.

  “I’m not sure. I was at the loophole firing. I heard a clatter, felt like I got punched, and was nearly spun off my feet. My brother said the arrow hit the wall and then me.”

  “Which probably saved your life. Of course it doesn’t really help me figure out whether or not the arrowhead’s in you or sitting at the bottom of the loophole you were defending from, but still…” He pressed gently on the would-be exit wound. When the man barely responded, Gervais glanced at one of the men and gave a sharp nod.

  That man, a burly fellow selected for his muscles, gently took the patient’s wrists in his own hands.

  “Use the ties, that’s what they’re there for.”

  The orderly did as he was told. The next few minutes were lost to Gervais as he explored the wound and eventually extracted the arrowhead with a minimum of cuts that he was quite pleased with.

  “Doctor Vieuxpont, I can finish here.”

  Gervais paused, hand halfway to picking up the suture needle. He looked up and saw there were three more patients waiting for his attention.

  He dropped his hand. “Please do.”

  The burly orderly and Sunitra left with the first patient, the lovely local already marking the point where she would suture the wound.

  “Next!” he called as another woman entered carrying a tray of fresh surgical knives. As she exchanged the trays he dropped the scalpel he’d been using on the old one.

  “You’re welcome, Doctor.” Gervais flinched, recognizing the voice. Veiled and dressed in one of the nondescript robes that were provided to hospital workers because they could be easily laundered or replaced, he could hardly be blamed for having mistaken Shehzadi Jahanara for a servant girl.

  “My thanks, Begum Sahib.”

  “You are most welcome, Doctor.” The princess left without another word or backward glance.

  Shaking his head, Gervais lost himself again in the treating of wounds and the healing of bodies, a skill and calling he would never have had the chance to practice had he remained in Europe rather than coming to this exotic, beautiful land.

  Lahore Gate

  John coughed as the stairwell filled with blinding, choking dust. The gatehouse shook so violently he stumbled, barked a knee on the next stairs. He was dragging himself upright when another colossal pair of impacts made his ears ring.

  Something caught on his rifle, dragging him off his feet and sideways. Something hard and heavy hit his other shoulder and upper chest. A noise like a freight train passing within inches of his ear rumbled and clattered to a crescendo. He blinked, shot his arms out in an attempt to grab something that wasn’t moving. An interminable, horrifying scrabble later, he lay prone on the uneven steps of the gatehouse, rifle somewhere below.

  He coughed again, started to wipe at the dust-caked eyelashes that glued his eyes shut, but stopped as his shoulder throbbed a protest. He switched hands, managed to clear his vision enough to look around in the dust-tinged predawn light.

  The entire upper works of the middle gatehouse’s western side had been shattered and fallen outward. When it went it had taken the wall to his right with it. He looked down, saw rubble and bodies strewn like some giant child had a tantrum in front of the gate.

  John decided then that sandstone was fine for most purposes, and looked pretty, but he would have preferred granite, especially for the outer defenses. The outer and middle gatehouses of the Lahore gate complex weren’t backed by earth like the inner gate, making them eggshells in comparison. It was like sitting in a thin stone box while someone hammered it with steel sledgehammers.

  Comparisons between his current predicament and the storied race between John Henry and the steam drill came to mind, making him chuckle.

  Don’t matter one bit to the stone whether its muscle, steam, or black powder driving the sledgehammer.

  His mad chuckle ended in a dust-choked cough that made something grate in his chest.

  Guns started to speak again as he looked for a way down from his perch.

  Either that or his ears had recovered enough to hear such noises over the ringing.

  He looked over at the sound of the guns and saw a few of the silvery tips of Sikh helmets working over the long barrels of Talawat’s .45-70 rifles. Long plumes of gunpowder reached out from the walls.

  Hope those guns shoot as good as they look…Never did name ’em…His thoughts sluggish, like molasses in winter, John shook his head.

  What was I doing before the gatehouse fell on me?

  “Bertram!” he croaked. The down-timer had been just behind him on the stairs. He spat. Hacked. Spat again. There was blood in the mud that dribbled from his mouth.

  He tried again: “Bert!”

  “Doan…call…medat.”

  John looked around, but still couldn’t see Bertram. “What?” he said.

  A coughing fit gave away Bertram’s position.

  A shiver ran down John’s spine. Bertram was about ten feet above John. How he’d ended up there, John didn’t even want to guess.

  “Don’t. Call. Me. Bert.”

  “Okay, I won’t.”

  Something slashed through the air beside John’s head and buried itself in the stones between him and Bertram. Both of them spent a moment stupidly watching the arrow quiver like a flower reaching for the sun.

  “Move, John!” Bertram yelled.

  John was already crawling across the broken stone toward the uncertain safety of Bertram’s perch as fast as his injured shoulder, brutalized lungs, and the unstable surface would allow.

  Another cannonball struck nearby, making the stones beneath him shiver. Much more abuse, and there might be another collapse.

  He had more immediate threats to concern himself with, though, as arrows and the occasional bullet cracked and clattered around him. He slipped, or the rubble he was climbing shifted.

  I am not dying here.

  John crawled faster, ignoring the pain in his shoulder as he kept losing ground. The crawl became a mad scramble as the falling rubble seemed to pick up speed, sliding from beneath his hands, his feet.

  He started to fall.

  Shit, I might die here.

  Bertram was screaming, reaching for him.

  John reached, missed.

  Bertram did not. The down-timer’s hand clamped on John’s arm, slid to his wrist as the full weight of the falling up-timer came to bear.

  They both screamed.

  “Quick, for God’s sake,” Bertram gasped.

  John didn’t need encouragement. He grabbed Bertram at the other armpit and started to pull himself up. Ignoring the increasingly vicious pain in his shoulder, he climbed.

  With a final heave he collapsed atop Bertram.

  “Get. Off,” Bertram gasped.

  John flopped onto his back, breathless and giddy with the narrowness of his escape.

  “John, you need to lose some weight,” Bertram groaned.

  “For you, Bert, anything,” John returned, coughing again. He took it as a sign of how much pain Bertram was in that the down-timer didn’t bother to comment on or correct John’s abbreviation of his name.

  He coughed again and, wheezing, rolled on his side.

  After a few careful breaths, John figured he was relatively intact, and ought to consider contributing to the battle raging around them. He looked around to find the dust was settling, the smoke clearing, and the sun rising.

  Or perhaps the sun had been up for a while. How else had he seen Bertram? It hurt his head to think.


  He shook his head. The sun wasn’t the only thing rising: several hundred of Aurangzeb’s men were scaling the inner wall to the west of the gatehouse. They were using what looked more like a scaffolding than a ladder, men without the saffron robes and heavy armor of the warriors assembling the structure with astonishing speed.

  The tower to the east of them still had archers manning it, if the arrows that fell among the climbers were any indication. He watched an arrow strike home through a man’s saffron kaftan, his chain mail, and exit the other side of his thigh. The stricken man merely leaned out from the ladder and used one hand to snap the arrowhead off before resuming his climb.

  “Jesus,” he breathed.

  “The Sikhs, John!” Bertram called.

  John saw them at the same time: two rows of about twenty helmeted men appeared atop the bastion. Their officer raised his scimitar. The first rank lowered their shotguns and took aim. The scimitar dropped. Twenty barrels belched fire, smoke, and buckshot at the men scaling the scaffold not twenty yards distant. The man John had seen struck by the arrow fell at last, his seeming immunity to pain rendered irrelevant by trauma and blood loss from the weight of lead from several shotguns.

  The officer’s sword turned, blade flashing in the dawn light. Obscured by gun smoke and distance, John could only imagine the trooper’s fingers shifting to secondary triggers as they’d been drilled endlessly in the last few months.

  The sword rose, fell. Another volley, another tide of men ripped from their perches to fall in the deepening pile of corpses at the base of the walls.

  “Jesus,” Bertram said, surveying the ruin just twenty men had made.

  John didn’t want to see more dead men, and so kept his eyes on the shooters.

  The front and rear ranks exchanged places with well-drilled precision. Once behind the front rank, brass bases twinkled in the dawn light as the spent paper shells were ejected high into the air. The entire unit disappeared behind the growing cloud of gun smoke in the next instant as the front rank fired.

  Another cannonball roared by to slam into the tower supporting the Sikhs. About a foot square of the sandstone face shattered, the surrounding yard or so of material cracked as well, but the impact went almost entirely unnoticed by the defenders manning the redoubt.