The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  “You, sowar,” he said. “Are you injured?”

  The trooper looked as though the attention from on high was more painful than the arm. “It is nothing, Kunwar, ” he murmured. “A clean break—my horse shied—it will heal.”

  Charles turned to his sister. “It might have been his neck!” he snapped.

  Sita flushed. “I am sorry,” she said; then repeated it in Hindi to the horse-soldier.

  “It is nothing, Kunwari,” the trooper demurred. He looked at the dead boar, and at the spot where the royal family’s guest had lain. “Good spear! And the arm is nothing; I have eaten your salt; it is my karman to shed blood for your House.”

  “And rajadharma not to make men risk their lives without need!” Charles said crisply, and called over his shoulder for a surgeon.

  Sir Manfred had dismounted; he murmured in his guest’s ear: “Rajadharma; ruler’s duty.”

  The prince went on: “What is your name, sowar?”

  The man drew himself erect: “Burubu Ram, Kunwar.”

  “Where did you break that?”

  He nodded when the officer described the location; he knew this hunting park as well as most knew their front gardens.

  “Miles, at a gallop, with a broken arm?”

  The Rajput officer coughed discreetly: “He would not return, Kunwar. Please forgive the indiscipline.” The words were apologetic, but the tone rang with pride.

  “Very well,” Charles said, and looked at the trooper again. “You are given six months sick leave, with pay. Before you return to your home . . . your family hold land?”

  “Han, Kunwa.” Yes, Imperial Prince. “Thirty acres, northwest of Bikaner on the new Es-smeet Canal—a grant to my father for twenty-five years’ service. I am heir to the holding.”

  “The Smith Canal . . . Good. Surgeon, see to this man’s arm.”

  His comrades helped him dismount, and the doctor began to probe it gently, then to prepare a splint. That sort of medicine was always available on the hunting field.

  “Sowar Burubu Ram, before you go on sick leave, you may select one horse and its tack from the Imperial stud; that is my sister’s gift to you.” He looked up and shifted to English for a moment: “You’re paying for it out of your allowance, by the way, Sita.” In Hindi once more: “Also, if you have a younger brother who would care to enlist in the Guards, I will furnish his mount.”

  The trooper grinned despite his pain. Imperial cavalry regiments were raised on the sillidar system; the Raj provided weapons and ammunition, but the trooper found his own horse and its fodder and gear out of his stipend, replacing the mount as needed unless it was lost in battle. It ensured the cavalry a better class of recruit than the infantry units, but the initial expense could be heavy for a middling-prosperous yeoman, and prohibitive for more than one son.

  Sita swung down out of the saddle. She unfastened the long jewel-hilted hunting knife from her belt and tucked it into the injured man’s sash.

  “A keepsake from your princess, sowar,” she said. “And if you have a sister who wishes a position in the household, it will be given.”

  The trooper started to salute, winced, and gave a dignified salaam as he spoke his thanks. Then he walked off, accompanied by comrades who helped him toward the roadway and damned him for a lucky dog in genial whispers, swearing that they’d gladly break both arms for the favor he’d been given.

  “I don’t think this has to go any further, Highness,” Sir Manfred said quietly. “Seeing how embarrassing it would have been if our special ambassador had been ripped up by a boar on the outskirts of Delhi.”

  Charles nodded. “Leave it to the rumor mill, then,” he said in a clipped tone. “And Sita, isn’t it about time you grew up?”

  “You mean it’s adult behavior to let ambassadors get ripped up by boars on the family’s hunting grounds, brother?” she said sweetly, and remounted. “Lieutenant Utirupa,” she went on. “Perhaps a gentle canter to the ruins?”

  Prince Charles shook his head as the diminished bodyguard followed her. “Merciful Krishna help the French court,” he muttered.

  Henri de Vascogne smiled.

  Chapter Six

  “I do not like these palitikal officers,” Narayan Singh said. “They will make an intriguer of thee—a cutchsahib, instead of a fighting man.”

  He stepped back a pace and considered his handiwork. Athelstane King stood naked on the floor, looking at himself in the mirror. The stain made the rest of his body match the tan of his face and arms; only the neat new bandage on his right forearm showed what had happened a few hours ago.

  “Bhai,” King said. “If we do not become intriguers, these swine of Deceivers and hashasshin daggermen will make us dead men altogether.” He used the Punjabi that was the Sikh’s mother tongue, and one of his own.

  Narayan Singh nodded, then frowned. “We cannot say thou’rt a Sikh; it would take too long for the beard to grow.” Sikhs never cut theirs, tucking the ends up under their turbans instead.

  Then he snapped his fingers and grinned. “I have it, huzoor! I had thought to make of you a trooper in Probyn’s Horse, or a jawan of the Rumbur Rifles. You could pass for a Punjabi Jat—perhaps—or certainly for a Kalasha. Or even a man of Sindh. But instead you shall be of the Kashmir Horse Artillery; a naik”—corporal —“and a learned man with a sahib-log or two in your bloodline, skilled in mathematics.”

  King nodded; the technical branches of the Army were the likeliest places to find a Eurasian, since they required more in the way of technical education. It would make a Kashmiri accent natural, too, and his was slight but noticeable in both his English and his Hindi; it would also account for the odd little slip or carelessness about caste rules. Kashmir had the most mixed population of any province in the Indian part of the Empire, and the highest proportion of sahib-log.

  Narayan Singh went on: “A desirable position, sahib; twenty-five rupees a month, and batta field allowance! We shall call thee . . . Kiram Shaw. Nor will it be strange for you to travel to your home for the festival.”

  Home, King thought. Krishna. I’ll have to tell Hasamurti’s parents what happened. The thought brought sadness back, combined with shame heavy and thick like castor oil. He’d been Hasamurti’s protector, and that was a duty he’d failed at—badly.

  He’d have to tell her kin, and they’d want to know why she’d died. The worst of that was that he didn’t have the faintest idea.

  “Pranam,” King said.

  He pressed his palms together and bowed to the near-naked, tangle-haired ascetic who sat on his mat at the corner, eyes staring at emptiness, with the sacred thread across his shoulder and three lines of yellow ash drawn across his forehead to represent the three aspects of Shiva—creator, preserver, and destroyer. A bubble of space surrounded him in the thronging crowd that filled the roadway.

  King would have made the reverence anyway, out of politeness, and it sat well with the character he’d assumed. The man blessed him absently, scowled a little at Narayan Singh’s lordly disdain, and returned to his meditations. The two young men bought samosas hot from a vat of oil presided over by a vendor at the corner of the narrow, winding street and walked on, carefully munching the three-cornered savory pastries, holding pieces of corn husk beneath them to keep the oil off their uniforms. A man jostled King’s elbow; he caught himself just in time to suppress his natural icy stare at the effrontery and scowled instead, letting his left hand drop to the pommel of his plain stirrup-hilted saber.

  A horse-artillery naik couldn’t expect the deference due a sahib-log cavalry officer. On the other hand, he wouldn’t be expected to show the same restraint on his temper, either.

  “Watch where you step, hubshi,” King said, with a truculence befitting a soldier of the Sirkar.

  The man—a hairy, hulking young Pathan with a potsheen coat hanging off his shoulders—put his hand on the hilt of his chora in turn, growling insults in Pushtu and asking what man expected to live after calling him a hubshi, a
wooly-haired Negro.

  “Does this misbelieving pig with hair on his liver insult thee, bhai?” Narayan Singh asked, turning and letting his teeth show white as he jutted his chin. “Doubtless he comes to town seeking to find who fathered the children of his wives—let him look in the pox hospital for men without discrimination. Or perhaps he tires of the embraces of goats.”

  The Pathan spat aside, pretending not to understand the Hindi the two men spoke, which was exceedingly unlikely—it being one of the official languages of the Empire along with English, and used more often. He looked to be a hillman come into town to trade, but ready enough to quarrel, until a shrill whistle sounded. A policeman trotted up, in blue jacket and yellow trousers and leather hat, twirling a sal-wood truncheon and looking the Pathan up and down.

  “There is to be no brawling here,” he said mildly. “About your business, banchut. I shall have an eye to you on the streets I patrol.”

  The policeman was stout and middle-aged—positions in the Imperial Indian Police were a common reward for military service—and armed only with the yard-long billy club. The Pathan showed some acquaintance with good sense by growling a final oath before he turned and shoved his way through the crowd; not without a last curious glance at King’s face. The constable touched his hand to his cap and walked on.

  One lesson King had learned in this latest frontier campaign was that confidence was most of the battle when you were trying to seem something you were not. People saw what they expected to see, and at least the effort of keeping up his disguise was distraction enough to keep away angry puzzlement at the assassins—in the Peshawar Club, of all places—and nagging guilt over Hasamurti.

  “I must be a man of more importance than I thought,” he said quietly. “Someone is willing to go to a great deal of trouble to kill me.”

  They filed through the workaday chaos of the railway station and showed their leave passes—free second-class travel on the Imperial Indian Railways was among a soldier’s perquisites. A mordant flicker of humor went through him as the babu clerk read them; he’d signed his own ticket-of-leave permit with Captain King’s name.

  “It is not a desirable honor, to be thus sought after,” Narayan Singh said dryly, as the railways porters stashed their duffels over the seats of their compartment. “We are like to die of it.”

  The compartment was dusty, and the upholstery on the seats was threadbare, but it was better than the crowded board benches of third class, and the Indian Railways’ broad standard gauge of five-foot-six made for comfortable rolling stock. King had gold mohurs in his money belt, as well as banknotes and silver rupees and copper pieces in his pouch, but it would have been dangerously conspicuous to use them. Not that there was any law against two enlisted men buying a first-class ticket; it was just jarringly unlikely. King leaned out of the compartment window, looking at the crowd that thronged the platform under the high arched glass-and-iron roof.

  Is that the Pathan we met? he thought. Then: Probably not. Not even a mountaineer nourishing a grievance would follow them all the way into the train station—spending money on a ticket—for so casual a quarrel.

  Nobody else tried to enter their compartment; a middle-class Muslim came down the side corridor with his veiled wife and daughters, took one look at the raffish, smiling soldiers, and decided that the next section wasn’t so crowded after all. So did a fat babu-clerk in a tussore turban with a watermelon under one arm and a valise under the other, for entirely different reasons, fearing a deficit of friendliness where the husband anticipated an excess.

  The local to Rawalpindi and Oxford was no Trans-India Express; it chuffed along at a stately forty miles an hour, trailing black coal smoke. It was pulled by a Babur-class 4-6-2 built to a design standardized in the days when Edward was King-Emperor, Lord Salisbury was prime minister, and the twentieth century was young. Thousands of them worked everywhere from Australia to the Cape and even beyond; some had been sent to aid in the resettlement of Britain and the still more remote colonies on the North American coasts. This one also stopped at every small town along the way, those growing more frequent as they moved out of the Northwest Frontier Province and into the richer, more densely settled Punjab.

  Like most soldiers, King had long since learned to snatch sleep when he could, but today his slumber was troubled. Several times he was startled awake as the train crossed bridges in a rattle and hum of metal; a huge affair of girders over the Indus River, and dozens of smaller ones over the lesser streams and innumerable irrigation canals that diverted the Five Rivers to the fields and made the Punjab the granary of the Raj. The waterways that laced the land flashed silver and red in the setting sun, with the green line of the Muree Hills to the northeast.

  The square fields were dead-flat for the most part, and would have been dull to any but a countryman’s eyes—dusty where the cool-season crops of wheat and barley had been reaped, others shaggy with cotton or rustling green-gold with maize or neat with stooked sheaves of rice. Ryots looked up from the round-the-clock work of cutting sugarcane, nearly as incurious as the oxen that carried the heaped stalks; at sunset a cloud of fruit bats took off from a grove of oranges and circled against the great red globe of the rising moon before heading for a mango orchard.

  Narayan Singh ate a chapati and half an onion, then put up his boots and slept, snoring, with his head lolling to the rhythmic clacking of steel wheel on rail. King found sleep remained elusive, nodding drowsy far into the darkness, envying the Sikh; when his eyes slid shut he kept remembering the attack at the Peshawar Club . . . and worse, Hasamurti.

  I even miss that damned annoying giggle of hers, he thought sadly. That was what Hasamurti meant: merriment . Dammit, I liked that girl, and not just when she was on her back. She made me laugh. She didn’t deserve to have that happen to her, and I was supposed to protect her.

  A chill awoke him in the middle of the night, or so he thought. The military greatcoat had slipped down from his shoulders; he reached a hand for it. Then—

  Ibrahim Khan of the Dongala Kel jerked himself awake again. He couldn’t afford to sleep, no matter how tired he was; the creosoted timbers and gravel bed of the railroad were flashing too close beneath his rump. If he slipped from beneath the carriage, the railroad maintenance workers would scrape him off the wood and stone and iron with brushes. He forced hands and legs to cling more tightly to the iron tie-rods under the passenger carriage, swaying amid the darkness and metal clangor and stink of coal and lubricating oil. It was maddening to one raised in the clean air of the heights above Tirah.

  “There is no God but God, and Muhammad is His Prophet,” he whispered to himself; prayer never hurt and the noise would be lost in the background. Thy curse upon this te-rain, O Allah, he added to himself.

  The hard shape of the chora-knife slung across the small of his back was even more reassuring; unlike prayer, it had never let him down.

  I must strike soon, he thought. My muscles grow stiff, and that will make me slow.

  His father and uncles had taught him long ago that speed and stealth were first among the skills of a Pashtun fighting man. The damned-to-Eblis sahib-log would always win a contest of raw strength and hammerblows; there were too many of them and their hired men, and their weapons were too powerful. Even when the Raj was weakened by the Sword of Allah—and the Afghan tribes united by stark hunger—outright invasion had failed. They had driven his people back into the hills; it had been generations before the Pashtun tribes were more than a scattering of starvelings again.

  So when you fought the sahib-log you must strike hard, but above all strike quickly and from a direction they did not expect—then vanish before they could strike back.

  “Now,” he muttered to himself.

  The train was traveling north in the small hours of the night, cresting the first of a series of rises as it headed toward Kashmir. That slowed it, to little more than the speed of a galloping horse. Muscles cracking with the effort, he won his way to the edge,
hanging upside down from its bottom like a great hairy spider. Then he inched forward, bent himself upward so that his feet twined under the rods beneath the carriage. A single heaving convulsive effort and his upper body was plastered to the exterior door of the compartment, with the half-opened window directly above his head.

  He paused, panting and making himself forget the heart-stopping instant when it seemed he’d lose hold and tumble downward to the moving ground only inches beneath.

  Revenge is good, he thought; he would repay the sahib-log for their harrying of the Tirah country; still more for keeping the riches of the plains to themselves.

  But revenge is a dish best eaten cold. And as for the gold the strange fakir with the seeress promised, gold is useless to a dead man. Carefully, Ibrahim, carefully. All things are accomplished according to the will of God, but a wise man does not tempt Him.

  He drew the chora, slowly, thankful that he had never indulged in extravagances like silver bells for the hilt, even if they did make a pleasant accompaniment to a fight. It was twenty inches of fine steel—forged from the saber of a dead Imperial trooper in the year of Ibrahim’s birth—but severely plain. He clamped the thick back of the blade between his teeth and reached upward to plant both hands firmly.

  With his hands on the sill of the window, he would have to support all his weight on his arms with his body bent into an L-shape, then chin himself and go headfirst through the opening with his legs drawn up behind him by main strength. That entry might wake those within, no matter how great his care. He must kill or disable in no more than two or three strokes; the Sikh and the sahib-log-pretending-to-be-halfbreed had both looked likely men of their hands when he saw them in the streets of Peshawar town.

  He drew a deep breath, reminded his God that those who fell fighting the unbelievers were deserving of Paradise, and lunged upward and in.