by Eric Flint
“Don’t you need a weapon?” the man asked, retrieving the match cord from the floor.
“I have one,” John said. Suddenly scared he’d lost it, and utterly without thinking, he reached for his armpit to where his wife’s 9mm had been holstered when the shooting started.
Something popped in his shoulder, making him moan.
“You need a medic, John?” Bertram asked.
“No,” John wheezed, blinking. “I think it just popped back into place.”
“Good…” Bertram muttered. “If true.”
Gingerly, John returned his hand to the holster, unsnapped, and pulled the gun free. He made a push check as he’d been taught and, as the slide traveled smoothly, figured it was intact.
While he was feeling the spare magazines in the other armpit for any sign they’d been bent out of shape, Bertram coughed to clear his throat, then hiked a thumb at the door opposite the one they’d come through.
Switching to Persian, the smaller man eventually continued, “Because it sounds like the fighting is still going on”—the stuttering crash of a volley penetrated the door—“and I don’t think Bidhi Chand will ever let us live it down if we don’t take some part.”
The fighting men with them, their hands busy reloading, checking weapons or rendering aid to the injured, chuckled.
“Right,” John said. Mopping sweat from his brow, he straightened and took a deep breath. Bertram bent and picked up the unconscious man’s sword.
A new sound, muffled better by the door, joined the gunfire: the steel on steel of a melee.
“Shit.” John went to the door and shot the bolt.
John was about to push it open when the men he was supposedly leading shouldered him aside and, screaming, charged blindly out. Blindly, because the morning rays of the sun had momentarily cut through the smoke to shine from blades, helmets, and shields.
Blinking, John stepped into chaos. It was…beautiful in a way a train wreck could be fascinating. Each instant both a cause and an effect trailing after a thousand others that terminated for some men but allowed others to travel to the next.
The man he’d handed the gun to raised it to fire at a warrior who’d climbed into view and paused to draw a heavy curved sword from his hip.
The gun banged.
The swordsman staggered, arms windmilling as he fought for balance. He was given no opportunity to recover as the defender reversed his weapon and swung it by the barrel. The butt of the gun clipped the man’s knee, dropping him like a stone. And, like a stone, he rolled and fell to the earth below.
Careful of his aim, John lined up a shot at the head of a warrior appearing between the crenellations. The man’s bearded face disappeared before he could pull the trigger.
Another of Aurangzeb’s warriors leapt at one of John’s companions, katars in each fist. Dara’s man went down in a welter of blood. Crouching over his victim, the man slashed at another warrior who skipped backward to avoid losing a limb.
John shuffled sideways away from Bertram to get a clear shot. He let the sight settle on the man’s chest and pulled the trigger twice. The first shot sparked through the man’s mail, the second, taken while the pistol was still climbing from the recoil of the first, ripped into his throat below the beard.
The man staggered but didn’t go down.
Bertram rushed forward and drove his sword home in the man’s pelvis just as another man scrambled over the wall behind the first.
John shot without taking careful aim and lost track of how many times he’d pulled the trigger when the guy finally fell screaming.
Bertram was already blocking the sword of another man.
There were a good twenty enemy amongst almost the same number of defenders now. Their proximity prevented the Sikh platoon on the far redoubt from firing at them for fear of killing their own.
John’s movement had left him next to the long ramp leading to the ground level inside the fort. He spared a glance down it, praying reinforcements were already on their way.
His relieved sigh was drowned as a mass of heavily armored warriors began to scream, “Skanda! Skandaaaa!” as they charged up the ramp and among the men struggling along the wall.
The next few minutes passed in a panting blur of fear, anger, and violence. When it ended, there was a lull John used to reload and look around. The nearest gun crew, much reduced from its pre-battle numbers, was already hard at work loading one of the shells copied from the Lønsom Vind’s stores.
“You’ve been cut, John,” Bertram grunted, nodding at John’s right arm as he tried to regain his breath.
John glanced down, saw a shallow wound he didn’t remember taking lining one forearm. It was already scabbing, so John left it alone and returned his attention to the battle.
There were thousands more men swarming across the open ground toward the stretch of wall between Lahore Gate and where the wall turned out of view in its progress toward Delhi Gate.
His gaze fell on the nearest redoubt, the one where the Sikhs had been shooting from and stood slack-mouthed in wonder.
Bidhi Chand, dressed in what looked like plate mail out of some geek’s D&D character fantasy, danced from one crenellation to another, seeming to ignore the deadly drop on one side as he stabbed and slashed anyone crazy enough to climb into reach of his blade.
“Would you look at that?” John said.
“What?” Bertram asked, tying off a bandage around his calf.
“That crazy fucker,” John said, pointing at the leaping figure.
Bertram followed John’s hand and shook his head in wonder.
“Shit,” John said.
“What?”
“While Bidhi and his men are fighting hand to hand, they can’t shoot at—” He stopped speaking and risked a quick glance over the wall. A fresh wave of attackers was within feet of the parapet.
“Get ready!” he screamed.
He pushed out over the wall again, leading with the pistol this time. Two shots at each climber in view emptied the magazine in no time. As he pulled back to reload an arrow flashed by within an inch of his face.
Putting discomfort and fear from his mind, John put his back to the tower wall. Dropping the empty magazine into his off hand and stuffing it into his belt, he slapped the last magazine into the well. He had more 9mm back in his quarters, and the bandoliers he was strapped with still had a lot of .308, but the rifle was among the ruins of the middle gate and he couldn’t exactly shout time out! and run to his room for more ammunition.
“Just where the hell is Dara?” Bertram yelled, stabbing downward at an attacker who got too close.
“Good question!” John snatched up a fallen sword in his off hand. Lousy with a blade, John was young, strong, relatively healthy, and about to run out of ammo. Better a sword in hand than buried in his guts.
He glanced again at the redoubt to the east. Bidhi Chand continued to dance between arrows and swords, shining in the sun as he cut men down with grace and astonishing speed.
Fucking Conan, that guy!
“John!” Bertram’s desperate scream snapped John’s reverie.
A bandy-legged warrior had Bert’s blade locked with his and was steadily pushing the smaller man over backward. There was no way he could shoot from his current position without hitting Bertram.
Never too close to miss.
John strode forward to press the pistol to the man’s head just below the turban and pulled the trigger. The man dropped dead, smoke drizzling from the contact wound.
Bertram shoved the corpse from him, screaming, “Where the fuck is Dara?”
Panting, John didn’t answer. Indeed, he was happy enough to surrender all attention to surviving the moment. That way he didn’t have to think about any of what he had done—or would do—in order to survive the next few heartbeats.
I will hold Ilsa again.
Pavilion of the Healers
“Begum, it is not proper or right!” the physician said in scandalized tones, de
spite all the times all of the hospital staff had been warned that Priscilla would be treating the wounded.
“Damn your ideas of what’s right, these men need treatment and she can treat them!” Jahanara raged, waving at Priscilla. Jahanara had been walking the up-timer to the operating room she was to use when a tall, rangy physician whose name she could not remember exited the chamber and blocked the way.
The up-timer, both hands up and raw from scrubbing, nodded.
Did the idiot think they’d been lying to him this entire time? All of the staff had been trained on the procedures, and those procedures had Priscilla as the overflow surgeon in any situation where urgent cases outnumbered the other physicians.
The physician—Jahanara could not remember his name beyond thinking it was a convert’s—was one of the traditionalists she’d felt she had to keep in service as she built the medical corps, if for no other reason than his connection to the project would make the umara, and therefore their men, more comfortable with the idea.
A poor bargain, if this is the result!
She considered calling for a guard, but wasn’t sure how many would answer. Rather than show such weakness, she lifted her chin as a new thought occurred to her. “Why are you here instead of seeing to your patient?”
“I-I was getting fresh bandages.”
Liar. She could smell the fear on him.
But fear made him strong—and foolish—in the face of her anger. “Begum Sahib, I beg you, reconsider. These men will die or not, as God wills, all in accordance with the natural order of things.”
Two women appeared behind the physician. Wives of her brother’s umara that she had drafted to serve the physicians as orderlies and nurses. One—why could she not remember names this day?—waved a hand at a corpse lying on the table in the operating room, pointed at the physician’s head and pantomimed breaking a stick between two fists.
So, madness and fear drive this creature, not moral outrage! Typical.
“They can make penance in future. Get out of the way.”
He shook his head. “I’ll not allow it.”
“Allow it?!” Jahanara snarled, drawing herself up. The anger burned in her so brightly she thought surely he would boil away under her gaze. “Get. Out. Of. Our. Way. And. Get. Back. To. Work.”
But the man’s fear rendered him immune to threats as well as reason. He shook his head again, beard bristling, and shrilled, “I will not let you endanger their souls!”
Jahanara drew breath to call a guard to put an end to this idiocy, but Priscilla stepped between them, surprising her.
“Fuck this,” Priscilla said. Without breaking stride, she kicked the wretch, hard, in the crotch. So hard, the man went up on tiptoe. The way his expression went from utter surprise, to fear, to pain, might have been comical under other circumstances. As it was, Jahanara was too surprised, both by the man’s obstinate idiocy and Priscilla’s violent solution to do much more than stare as Priscilla walked daintily past the man who, on striking the marble floor, folded up and vomited.
Sensing Jahanara had stopped following her, Priscilla turned to face the princess, who was still staring.
“What?” Priscilla said, raising her hands. “I’m scrubbed in and wasn’t about to wash up again just so I could punch him.” She touched his shoulder with a toe. “Besides, I was always better with my feet than hands.”
Pressing her lips together to avoid loosing a mad giggle, Jahanara joined her friend, skipping across the physician’s curled legs to avoid the small pool of vomit.
Priscilla waved goodbye as she backed into the operating room. Another wounded man was being brought in as the door swung closed behind her.
Jahanara motioned the two women over. Perhaps it was fatigue, but she could not dredge up their names.
“Would one of you find Firoz Khan and ask for help removing this creature, please?”
The women looked at one another. The shorter one nodded but it was the taller who spoke. “Begum Sahib, it will be our pleasure to drag this dog out ourselves. That was our cousin he failed to save.”
“I am sorry,” Jahanara said, her heart heavy and slow in her chest. She took a deep breath, reaching for calm. A princess must appear collected in such circumstances.
“May we?” the woman repeated.
“Please,” Jahanara said, releasing the miasma of ill-feeling the encounter had engendered with the exhale. “Tell Firoz this man thought he could physically bar my way and countermand all the hard work of the last few months simply because he is a man and I am not. Firoz will know what to do with him.”
“Yes, Begum Sahib,” the pair said. They bent and, none too gently, batted aside his feeble attempts to prevent them grabbing his arms.
He started to find his wind, however, and burbled some further complaint until one of the women slapped him as one would a wayward boy. Not to hurt, just to remind the fool who was in charge.
Say one thing about the women of Dara’s court: if the men would not or could not handle the challenges of the moment, the women were ready to handle anything.
“Begum Sahib?” Smidha said.
Jahanara turned to find her advisor staring down at the still-writhing physician, several taller women behind her. One, richly dressed in a beautifully dyed sari, had a black silk bag drawn over her head. Two muscular dancing girls stood to either side of the hooded figure.
Jahanara blinked. “Merciful God, but did she have to resist?” she asked, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“A monkey is ever a monkey,” Smidha said.
“Is this how you treat your sister?” Roshanara barked from beneath the bag.
“You put a hood on but didn’t gag her?” Jahanara asked.
Smidha waggled her head. “She was quiet for the walk over here.”
“Saving it up for me, was she?”
Smiles lit all faces in response to her mild attempt at humor. The smiles Ilsa and Monique gave were far more predatory than humorous, making the princess briefly wonder why their expressions were so hungry.
Roshanara, as was her wont, killed the moment. “Jahanara, I am no dancing girl or slave to be manhandled this way, I am a princess of the blood, just as you!”
“True,” Jahanara said, nodding encouragement at the two dancers. “And were you to start acting like one, perhaps you wouldn’t be treated like an ill-bred falcon.”
“I will have your—”
“Guess I should have gagged her,” Monique said, removing the long, colorfully dyed scarf she used to tie back her heavy curls.
“You don’t say?” Jahanara opined, the words freighted with irony.
“Your pet ferenghi won’t silence me!” Roshanara yelled.
“Want to bet?” Monique said, slipping the scarf around the shorter woman’s head and pulling it tight around her nose.
“My nose!” Roshanara cried, which proved precisely the thing Monique had been waiting for. She let the scarf slip off the nose and pulled it savagely tight as soon as it was between Roshanara’s open lips. Then, began tying it off.
Smidha arched a brow. “You seem quite…practiced at certain things…”
Monique’s shrug revealed indifference to any censure in Smidha’s tone.
Shaking her head, Jahanara looked at Smidha. “I had hoped we would not have to imprison her, but I think we must?” She looked for confirmation from Smidha.
“Hear that, spying bitch?” Monique punctuated each word with a hard jab of two fingers into Roshanara’s breastbone.
Surprised at the feral anger in the gesture, Jahanara opened her mouth to ask what had Monique so angry, but saw Smidha’s hand motion asking for silence.
“I believe that’s an excellent idea, Begum Sahib,” the old servant said.
“Very well,” Jahanara gestured at the dancers, “escort my sister to the Jasmine Tower”—she glanced at Monique and Ilsa, gauging how they would respond to her next words—“and see to it she has no harm done to her.”
Neith
er woman appeared ready to object, though Monique was still staring angrily at Roshanara.
“Then see Firoz Khan for your reward,” Smidha added.
Jahanara nodded. “Yes, do tell the diwan I am most pleased with your service.”
“Yes, Begum Sahib,” the pair said.
Monique made to go with them, but Smidha caught her wrist. “Bide with us, please. You as well, Ilsa.”
The two Europeans stood glaring as a whimpering Roshanara was led away.
Jahanara stepped over the mess Adnan Dashti—that was his name!—had left behind and joined Smidha.
“Where are the rest of your ladies, Begum Sahib?”
The princess gestured widely at the pavilion. “Those who are not caring for their own elders or children are at the tasks set for them when they volunteered their service.”
Smidha nodded.
“Let us go to the veranda. We could all do with some news from the battle and perhaps a drink,” Jahanara said, knowing Smidha wanted some time to think before she spoke what was on her mind.
“Not for me, thanks, I already have to pee too often!” Ilsa said, covering her belly. Her expression, at least, had none of the anger of a moment before.
Chapter 47
Ground outside Red Fort
Delhi Gate
Atisheh grimaced as she let fly with another arrow, felling a man who had thought to oppose Dara’s lightning charge. There were fewer men willing to do that because Dara’s sowar were in among the tents of the enemy, cutting down wounded and bewildered men as they sought to cause as much chaos as they could, as quickly as possible.
In fact, things were on the verge of getting out of hand. Dara needed—
The Sultan Al’Azam, as if hearing her thoughts, reined in. He shouted, “Drummer, signal: on me!”
Atisheh didn’t immediately slow, as she’d been hard-pressed to keep up with the emperor over the last few minutes. Not only did he have the better mount, he’d barely used the magnificent bow he carried, and so did not have to slow in order to provide the stable platform necessary for accurate archery.
