The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

His bliss is the highest.

  Released from evil

  His mind is constant

  In contemplation:

  The way is easy,

  Brahman has touched him,

  That bliss is boundless—”

  The sannyassin scowled angrily as he had to step aside for the riders, and saw the two horsemen behind King looking up and jesting with the harlot as they blocked his path. He raised his staff in admonishment:

  “Those who wallow in foulness in this life court foul rebirth,” he said, shaking his tangled white hair. “Renounce desire! Seek escape from the grip of the senses, which turn the spirit to gross and worldly things. Fear desire for worldly pleasures like fire, for the wind is no wilder!”

  King laughed. “Pranam, heaven-born,” he said, making the gesture of respect—in this crush it was easy to drop your reins on your horse’s neck. The man wore the sacred thread across his shoulder.

  Better say something. If Ibrahim spat on a Brahmin ascetic, there might be a riot, and the Pathan was fully capable of it.

  “Your blessing, heaven-born,” he went on.

  “Shall I bless mockers and fornicators?” the wandering ascetic said.

  Whatever other sins he’s shed, pride isn’t one of them, King thought, meeting the fierce dark eyes. Instead of replying directly, he chanted himself:“Action rightly renounced brings freedom:

  Action rightly performed brings freedom:

  Both are better

  Than mere shunning of action.”

  In a normal voice he went on: “We are men who act, holy one; better to act as our karman in this turn of the Wheel demands, than to try a path beyond our merit, and fail. Bless us!”

  He tossed a silver rupee into the man’s begging bowl; the ascetic looked as if he was seriously considering throwing it out, or arguing further—King’s theology was exceedingly weak, if you knew the next section of that gita—but he scowled and made the gesture of blessing before he strode on, chanting again:“Who burns with the bliss

  And suffers the sorrow

  Of every creature

  Within his own heart,

  Making his own

  Each bliss and each sorrow:

  Him I hold highest

  Of all the yogis—”

  “Maybe he isn’t such an old sourpuss as I thought,” King said, raising a brow in surprise.

  “Idolater.” Ibrahim Khan shrugged.

  “Polytheist,” Narayan Singh agreed, then caught himself with a frown.

  Narrow-minded, the pair of you, King thought, looking about and taking his bearings.

  He was familiar enough with Delhi, though not the northern outskirts they’d spent most of the day crossing. The central districts, Old Town, he knew a little, but he’d spent most of his time there in the Red Fort—a Moghul work which was still formally the headquarters of the Imperial armed forces. Most of the real work of governance—and upper-caste social life—happened in the southern zone, in buildings no older than the New Empire; the tide of commerce flowed through the great factory districts and workers’ housing of the East End. In those parts of the Raj’s capital it was easy to forget that there had been a city here before Victoria the First arrived in Calcutta in the forefront of the Exodus.

  And spent one month among the Bengali bogs, before she shook the mud of the Ganges delta from her feet and commanded that the capital be moved to Delhi, King thought sardonically. Which is abominably hot in summer but at least not a total swamp.

  But coming in from the north, up the Rohtack Road and past the Kashmir Gate; there you rode past the memorial to the heroes who’d fought the First Mutiny, standing near an ancient lion-headed pillar the Maurya ruler Ashoka had erected Gods-knew-where not long after Alexander the Great. The pillar itself had been moved here by Feroz Shah Tughlaq in the days of the Slave Dynasty, around the time of Richard the Lion-heart . . .

  If you came that way you were reminded that when London was founded as a trading post among head-hunting savages, Delhi was already a great metropolis attracting scholars and merchants from half the world.

  Which it still is, and London’s a trading post among savages again, King thought whimsically, reining his horse over to the side of the road at the ring of a silvery bell.

  That let him avoid the silent smooth rush of a motorcar; there were enough in the environs of Delhi that there were special laws governing them, one being the bell. Fewer of them came into their destination, the narrow ways of Old Delhi. That was the walled city that Shah Jahan had refounded in the days when the pride and pomp and power of the Mughals was the wonder of the world, and she whom the Taj Mahal would enfold forever still lived amid the pleasures of the Padishah’s court.

  And in Shah Jahan’s day the Chandi Chowk—the Square of Silver Moonlight—had been a stately, tree-lined processional way running down to his seat of power in the Red Fort, flanked by the mansions of Jahan’s courtiers and poets and adorned with a canal down its middle.

  Here and now it was a shoving, chattering mass of folk on foot, riders or rickshaws, oxcarts, now and then a wandering dewlapped cow given space for its sacred-ness. Gathering evening made the crush even greater than in full day, as those who worked regular hours headed home. As the huge red ball of the sun sank westward the streetlights came on with a sharp pop, electric sparks lighting gas. The light was warm and yellow, shading a little brighter as the mantles of the gas jets began to glow, throwing a hectic mass of moving shadow on the walls. Ibrahim started at the sound and wash of light.

  Narayan Singh grinned. “There, it is time for prayer,” he said. The muezzins were calling from their minarets. “Shall we stop while you unfold a rug, child of misbelief?”

  “Are you mad? In this crush?” Ibrahim said, then scowled as he realized he was being teased—or mocked, depending on how you chose to look at it. “Chaff not at the All-Powerful, the Beneficent, the Merciful,” he growled.

  “The Stupid, the Nonexistent, the Pimp of the houris,” Narayan said.

  “He will turn thee into a worm in Hell!”

  “And I shall gnaw the stupid thing’s entrails!”

  King looked over his shoulder, and the two young men grinned sheepishly and subsided; he knew the Sikh had used anger to drive out the Pathan’s gathering unease at his surroundings. When they passed the Fatehpuri Masjid—a mosque built by one of Shah Jahan’s wives—they were on the Chandi Chowk proper, the ancient Street of the Silversmiths, and the roaring turmoil of the packed pavement made the country-bred horses snort and roll their eyes, tossing their heads with a champing of teeth and a spray of foam. The street was broad by Old Delhi standards even after it left the square, perhaps forty feet, flanked on both sides by buildings of stone or brick four or five stories high; shop windows and entrances below, slit-windowed dwellings or blank-walled warehouse or workshop above. Temples and churches and mosques were exclamation points of chanting and incense amid the swarming, sweating throngs of commerce.

  Signs in half a dozen scripts advertised wares as various as the languages vendors used to scream out the superb quality and infinitesimal prices available within. They made wedges of brightness spilling out onto the sidewalks, many glinting as light shone on the piled goods—metalwork of a hundred kinds, from brass trays to kitchen knives to swords and samovars and hookahs, glass, piled silk bright with dyes, trays of colored spice-powders . . .

  By then it was full night, and the horses weren’t the only ones who felt out of place amid the endless throngs. Narayan Singh was smiling a little at the Pathan’s discomfort as Ibrahim turned gray and fingered a string of worry beads. They rode on at a slow walk, past the Digamber, the Jain temple, with its attached hospital for sick birds; past the clanging bells and shrill cries of vendors selling flowers and vermilion powder around the Gauri Shankar temple dedicated to Shiva and Parvati with its thousand-year-old sacred lignam . The Sikh made a gesture of reverence at the great marble-and-gold gurudwara of Sisganj, where Tegh Bahadur, the ninth of the Gurus,
had been martyred by Aurangzeb, the last of the great Moghuls.

  A little farther, near the spice market of Khari Baoli, was the Kotwali police station. King and Narayan both saluted: there had been a battle there and a great killing in the First Mutiny, when the troops of the Old Empire reconquered Delhi—and an even greater one a century before, when the Persian warlord Nadir Shah watched his men behead thirty thousand townsmen. The people of the modern city swarmed by like ants, claiming the stage for a moment until they became one with the dust they raised.

  Ibrahim shoved his beads away at last, straightened in the saddle, and spat eloquently on the bare feet of a street vendor who took one look at the Border countenance and decided to push his handcart heaped with silk slippers elsewhere.

  “Istrafugallah!” the Pathan burst out. “This city is a lie! There are not so many folk in all the world!”

  He glared about him, his gaze not even stopping when it passed over the display in a jeweler’s window. It was behind a latticework of steel bars that covered the glass, but the black velvet behind flashed and glittered. Inside the proprietor bowed and smiled as a woman in a silver-shot sari and her maids picked over trays temptingly lain out. This was not only the largest city in the world, but the richest; even most of the porters and rickshaw men were healthy-looking. There was a dense smell of dust, packed sweating humanity, of curry and ghee, but little sewer stink.

  “Not the place I’d choose to live myself,” King admitted, hiding a smile. “But quite real, I assure you.”

  The Pathan grunted again, then seemed to take himself in hand by main force. “Sheep are many,” he said. “Wolves care not.”

  Narayan Singh grinned; he’d been born a farmer himself, but in a civilized province with many towns, and the city of Oxford—small, but definitely urban—no more than a day’s travel away.

  “Many sheep mean many guardians,” he pointed out. “And the wolf cares much for those . . . if he be a wise wolf.”

  “From thy own mouth. Note well: I did not call thee dog,” Ibrahim said with poisonous politeness, and grinned in his turn at the Sikh’s flush. “Not even a dog who guards sheep.”

  “Peace,” King said. “We’re all of the same pack, for now.” And I’m the head wolf, his tone added without words. The two younger men subsided.

  The buildings had numbers, as required by law, but they were small, often faded or obscured. Time to make up your ruddy mind, he thought. Elias’s address was just up the side street ahead. Sir Manfred’s was at Metcalfe House, which was a bit farther east, toward the Red Fort. Duty calls, and official business takes precedence.

  The crowds thinned a little, enough so that walkers didn’t have to use their elbows continuously. There were still a few government bureaus close to the fort, and many small trading firms had their head offices here; some were less small than old-established and discreet. One building held a modest brass plaque that read Metcalfe House. There were also a few bays with hitching posts. You could hire a watcher to water and guard your horse for a few piece, and would get exactly what you paid for. King had a better trick than that.

  “Ibrahim,” he said, as he reined in. “Watch the horses. And watch. Someone looking for me might think to lie in wait here.”

  To do that would mean weeks of surveillance on an office of the Political Service, whose members generally would notice and take action. Still, people had been trying to kill him—and his sister, by Krishna!—since Peshawar. Better not to take chances.

  Ibrahim nodded. “Han, huzoor. You know the call?”

  “Are we weaned?” Narayan Singh said. “Do you know the place of refuge?”

  “Did your lord not point it out?” the Pathan said, insulted. “Four buildings back, on the far side of the alley, the entrance marked with the Seal of Solomon.”

  Ibrahim’s eyes were already scanning shadowed rooftops and balconies as they dismounted, much as he might have boulders and ravines in his native hills. Frustration shone from him with an almost palpable heat; there were just too many here for him to see plain intent among the crowds. His left hand gripped the hilt of his chora with a force that made the skin turn pale under the grime embedded in his knuckles. King himself was pricklingly conscious of the weight of the tulwar at his side, and the pistol riding at the small of his back under the thigh-length kurta he wore. The tunic was split behind and before, horseman’s fashion; his hand could sweep in quickly to get at the weapon. If there was a fight, though, he preferred cold steel; he was a good shot, but the sword was his weapon, and with that he was very good indeed.

  “—po-russki?” a voice asked, and a small hand tapped him on the elbow. The question was repeated, louder, to cut through the white noise of the crowds. “Govorite-li vy po-russki?”

  He spun, reaching for his hilt, then relaxed; it was a woman, slight-built under a black burqua, and very short—no higher than his breastbone, like a blacker shadow in the dimness of the street. Then he tensed again as the words made sense. Do you speak Russian? The question was in Russian, and in the old High Formal mode, at that. An aristocrat’s dialect, the type they spoke at the Czar’s court.

  “Da,” he said reflexively. “Govoryu. Kto vy takoy?”

  Yes, I understand Russian. And who are you?

  “There is no time,” the woman said.

  Her voice had a high, slightly singsong note; all he could see of her as she spoke again was a hint of eyes through a slit in the chador.

  “You are going in there. Men will try to kill you. You must kill them, and bring away the other man they seek to kill, or you die. The whole world will die.”

  Charles Saxe-Coburg-Gotha levered his fingers into the crumbling rock and swung himself up onto the summit plateau with a grunt of effort. For a moment he lay panting, letting the warm wind dry his sweat, then sat up and unbuckled his harness.

  The rock face beneath him was an upthrust ridge of granite and rose-colored quartz, an outlier of the Aravali Range on the border of Rajputana, where central India heaved itself out of the flat clay plains of the Ganges and Indus. The view northward was familiar but beloved; this area and several thousand square miles surrounding it were Imperial Forest land, theoretically property of the ruling dynasty, although much of it was open to anyone who paid a modest fee and didn’t try to poach. The wind blew mild and clean from the north, over leagues of grassland dotted with brush and trees. There was a teak and sal and rosewood forest at the foot of the hills, crowding around the clearing that held the little lodge where the court party was staying, and the tall mooring post for the Garuda, the royal family’s air yacht.

  Clouds towered into the sky northward, like mountains that grew from black through clotted cream to rose-tipped pearl.

  Good hunting country, too, he thought. Black buck, boar, tiger, and leopard in thickets and along the watercourses, and lion on the open plains. Bustard if you were in the mood for hawking. And, of course, fine climbing.

  Odd how it upset his guardians; they didn’t object to pigsticking or polo, which broke hundreds of necks a year, or even to his seeing combat with the Guards regiment of which he was colonel-in-chief. Though the ten thousand faces of God all realized that even the frontier Pathans knew better than to risk killing the heir to the Lion Throne.

  But let me climb a little way up a cliff, and the security detail all react like a bunch of nervous women clucking and squawking.

  The thought made him grin a little; from below he could hear panting, and a quiet curse. Now Dr. King is not nervous at all. Not about climbing, at least. Extraordinary woman!

  Her head appeared over the edge, and he restrained the impulse to extend a helping hand, which she would not appreciate. A fierce grin of concentration split her unfashionably tanned face; a movement, the slap of her hand on a knob of rock, and she hauled herself onto her belly on the edge.

  “Shabash, Dr. King,” he said, holding up his hand and snapping his fingers.

  There were already guards and servants—and two of Si
ta’s ladies-in-waiting, for chaperonage—on the little plateau. Several scurried forward with a bright silk umbrella, a picnic basket, and carafes of iced water and juices; there would have been an orchestra and a pavilion, if he hadn’t put his foot down.

  And I can never really get away from them. Not without climbing a much more inaccessible cliff; this one had a footpath, steep but doable, up the southern slope. Most of the time he didn’t think about it much; the attendants were part of his life and had been since infancy. It wasn’t until he went to Sandhurst, the military academy up near the old hot-season capital at Simla in the lower Himalayas, that he appreciated what privacy could mean. Cadets weren’t allowed to have more than a batman and a groom; and the security detail were discreet about it, their presence far in the background.

  But back at the palace, or even at a country lodge like this . . .

  There’s no escaping them; prying, peering, hovering—all for my own good, of course, lest I lack anything I want or be endangered or stub a toe. May their dear loyal souls be reborn as termites!

  He didn’t mind the Gurkhas, really; most of them were as relieved to get out of the palace as he was. They stayed well back, covering the approaches.

  “That is an interesting climb,” the young scholar said. “Not particularly strenuous, but interesting, and the view is superb.” She sat lotus-style on the rock and accepted a tall glass of ice water lightly flavored with citron. “Ah, that is pleasant, too. Yes, a good climb; you took it at a very brisk clip, too, although I suppose you’re familiar with it.”

  Charles nodded. There was praise and praise—most people around court still abided by St. Disraeli’s unfortunate maxim about laying it on with a trowel when dealing with royalty. He didn’t think Cassandra King was one of them, though.

  He nodded. “I have to speed-climb it to get anything worthwhile out of it,” he went on. “Now, I understand that the south approach to Nanga Parbat—”