The Peshawar Lancers

by S. M. Stirling

  She’d had no children: Albert I was her cousin, a professor of Indo-European Linguistics most of his life, and Cassandra’s imagination put a you want me to be what? behind his wide blue eyes. His daughter Elizabeth, only twenty years dead in this year of grace 2025, the Whig Empress as they’d called her, the one who’d pressured and intimidated Oxford and Cambridge and the Imperial University into opening their doors to women.

  And John II, Elizabeth’s second son, whom she’d now actually met and chatted with . . .

  “You’re lucky to have him,” Cassandra said. “Not the King-Emperor, but a father. I can scarcely remember mine; the first thing I really recall is his ashes and sword coming home, when I was about five.”

  “Yes,” Charles said. “My mother died when I was about that age; Sita can’t recall her at all, although she’s supposed to be the image of her. Looking up there, though—I was wondering how long before I’d be a set of names and dates schoolchildren had to learn. At least I’m the oldest son; Father had it dropped on him unexpectedly, after Uncle Edward broke his neck playing polo. He wanted nothing more than to stay in the Army.”

  “Would you, Charles, if you weren’t heir?” Cassandra asked.

  “Lord, no, although it’s better than what Father has to go through. Most of military life is routine . . . well, you know that.”

  She nodded; you couldn’t be the daughter and sister of soldiers without getting some idea of what life in the officers’ quarters of a base was like, or the boredom of endless drill and field days. There was always some skirmish or other going on—it was a big Empire—but the Imperial Army was also big, large enough that most of its units didn’t see action in any given year, for which she thanked the Gods. The heir to the Lion Throne went on:

  “What I’d like—” He paused, and blushed slightly. “Well, it sounds a trifle silly, coming right out and saying it . . . what I’d really like is to do something like what Henri did the other night. Or what the first Raja Brooke did, or . . . well, I’d like to have adventures. Not just amusing myself, hunting and so forth, but doing something important with my own hands and wits, and a few friends.”

  He looked at her, raising a brow. “Instead I’ll probably turn into my father. D’you think the less of me, then?”

  Cassandra took his arm and squeezed slightly. “Charles, I long ago reconciled myself to the fact that men are men—which is to say, that they have a lot of boy in them, even when they’re grown-up. The ones who don’t aren’t worth much.”

  Yasmini moaned in her sleep. Athelstane King felt her forehead again and frowned; then he used the thermometer, holding her mouth gently shut. His hand could cup right around her jaw, but he was careful of that—she seemed to grow distressed when she felt herself held against her will. Considering some of the things she’d babbled in her sleep, that wasn’t surprising at all.

  Ninety-nine, he thought, reading the instrument, flicking it sharply to drive the mercury down, and then returning it to the glass by the bedside. He gently folded a damp cloth and laid it on her brow; she muttered something under her breath. This time the fever spike was lower and it broke in sweat sooner. She muttered again, louder.

  I wonder what that was she said, he thought. Sounded like . . .

  “Mati,” Elias bar-Binyamin said softly. “Mother. That much we all have in common.”

  King nodded, and so did the old Jew’s son, where he sat quietly beside his father.

  The Lancer officer suspected they’d both seen enough men die ugly deaths to know that mother was the last thing most of them said—screamed, if the pain was bad enough. Although water ran a close second. That was certainly the way it was on battlefields. Probably the same for dying women, too.

  His lips quirked; he remembered lying sobbing in bed, a small boy who’d lost the father he’d adored, and his mother coming to him. There were probably earlier layers of memory he couldn’t reach, lying under that, back to . . . well, perhaps back to the womb—memories of comfort, of safety, of everything being made right. He’d read a few things like that; his taste ran to the classics, but he’d dabbled in avant-garde fiction now and then, or even a few books by academic alienists Cassandra had recommended, with their theories about childhood and the unconscious.

  It’s no wonder we’re never great heroes to our mothers, he thought ruefully. They remember, too.

  “I’m worried that she’s not waking,” he said. “It doesn’t seem like a coma or an infection”—the doctor hadn’t thought so, at least—“but it’s not natural.”

  “What she is, that is not natural,” Elias said.

  Seen close to in the clear warm winter sunlight of Delhi, the older Jew’s skin was like parchment that had been rubbed smooth and reused several times, a network of infinitely fine wrinkles; King had begun to suspect that the dashing but middle-aged David was the son of his host’s old age. They were sitting in a pool of the light that came through an arched window from the courtyard, stopping just short of the low bed where Yasmini lay. Elias’s daughter-in-law had just bustled out, leaving a pile of fresh-baked flatbread and homemade yogurt with chunks of fruit in it, orange juice, and coffee. The coffee was good enough to convince him there was something to the beverage, even without cardamom. An elderly, stiff-jointed cat wandered in, sniffed, climbed painfully into David bar-Elias’s lap, and went to sleep; the man stroked it absently, and it began to purr in its slumber, kneading its paws and drooling a little.

  “It may not be natural, and it certainly seems to take it out of her—but she used it for us,” King said.

  There was a chess set beside the bed as well, the black jade one Elias had been using the night King came knocking on the door of his warehouse. They’d had several games, with Elias spotting the younger man a queen and two knights; King had even won, once. He suspected that was because his own headlong style had simply surprised the other man with its recklessness—it certainly hadn’t happened since. The enforced concentration still did him good; waiting had never been his strongest point, and a soldier needed patience.

  He slid a bishop forward. At least, he thought it was a bishop; the set was East Asian of some sort, perhaps Chinese. Elias said one of his ancestors had bought it from one of King’s in Old Empire times, though that meant little—men of the Angrezi breed had been picking up spare valuables all over the world for a very long time. Walking off with whole continents, come to that.

  “Ah, you are improving,” Elias said, smiling to himself.

  There was a final flurry of thrust and parry, and then a long pause. King nodded, and tipped over his king.

  “Tcha-hey!” Elias said, setting up the pieces again. “You have no patience—a young man’s fault. You could have held me off for another six moves, perhaps eight.”

  “Would there be a point?” King said ruefully.

  “There is always a point!”

  He reached across the board and prodded King between the eyes with a finger:

  “Would you fight so with a sword? No? I thought not! You would try to cut your enemy even as his blade split your heart. That is the Angrezi vice; you would rather die than go to the effort of thinking. You are not stupid, but you are lazy—” He touched the side of his head to show what he meant. “You will toil like bullocks with your bodies rather than make your brains sweat.”

  King grinned. “Well, at least you’re not claiming the national vice is a taste for getting our bums switched. But I thought fear of embarrassment was the great Angrezi weakness?”

  David bar-Elias stifled a snort of laughter. His father grumbled on: “Another aspect of the same thing. Look at this message from your sister—”

  “And the King-Emperor,” King pointed out. Krishna, but it’s odd to think of Cass mixing it in at court!

  “And the King-Emperor, may the Lord save and keep the righteous ruler who has been good to the Lord’s people. He and the ones who know the threat—they will do nothing—nothing!—because they are afraid they can’t explain why
what should be done should be done. And the politicians, the bureaucrats, the ones they are afraid of will not listen because the facts do not fit their preconceptions! They cannot bear the pain of having to reason from first principles. Tcha!”

  “Maybe we should pick men of your people for our governors,” King said, stroking his clean-shaven jaw. “Then they could do all that unpleasant thinking, and suffer the embarrassment—”

  “You did,” Elias pointed out. “Your St. Disraeli. And he saved you all, because he was not afraid to think—to imagine—to use his mind instead of his instincts and prejudices and his belly. How do you think of him? Your Moses? But he thought of an Exodus from a land under the curse of God. An apostate, but he thought like one of us.”

  “A hit,” King said, smiling still.

  It was easy to smile, on a sunlit day, when you’d dealt your enemy a stinging defeat.

  Perhaps Ignatieff is dead, he thought. And even if he isn’t, we’ve exposed Allenby, and we’ve broken the secret of the True Dreamers, and Cass is in, well, not safety, but as close as she can get until we win the final battle. And I did save Narayan. With Ibrahim’s help, and David bar-Elias’s, and Yasmini’s, of course, and Togrul and his handy bow. And Elias here really does have a good point about St. Disraeli. Would anyone else have thought of the Exodus, and been able to organize it, to talk and bully and inspire enough men to bring it off?

  “A very palpable hit,” he repeated.

  “Yes,” Yasmini’s voice said, soft and breathy.

  King rose quickly and went to the side of her bed. She looked pale but conscious; he slid a hand under her head, beneath the sweat-dampened curls, and raised it for her to drink.

  “More?” he said. “Water is good for a fever.”

  “Spacebo,” she said, her voice a little stronger. “Gospodin Elias is right. I have seen Disraeli in the dreams, many times. A wise man—very wise, very kind, and so wise he knew when he must be hard. And Gospodin Elias is also right about thinking.”

  King sat easily with his back near the railing of the balcony and his legs crossed, slippered feet resting on the opposite thigh.

  “Spacebo for our lives,” he said. “And don’t tire yourself.”

  “No, it is no matter, I will recover,” she said. A shrug. “If I do not die in the trance that follows the waking dreams, then I have nothing to fear. I will be weak for a time, yes. Longer this time than before. Each time a little longer, until I do not wake, or stop using the drugs, or the madness takes me.”

  King winced inwardly. This girl has guts, he thought. Smart as a tack, too—apart from her . . . abilities.

  Elias spoke, his voice wary but friendly enough. “I thank you for your kind words, young miss. Although Gospodin is not a title I crave.”

  Yasmini stared at him with a flash of temper. “I use it as it was used when the Russki were clean. Should I forget that there was a time before my folk learned to worship devils or to eat man’s flesh?”

  “My apologies,” Elias said, bowing slightly from where he sat.

  Yasmini had been very slightly tense as she spoke; almost as if she expected a blow for her words. At the soft reply she relaxed; King touched her forehead again and found the fever gone. It might return, but for now she was calm.

  “That is a good answer,” Elias went on. “You call yourself a Russian, then?”

  “By blood I am, mostly, with a little Tadjik,” Yasmini said. “The first of the Sisters was Russki—a holy sister, a nun. What the priests say about the dreams being a gift of the Peacock Angel is a lie.”

  “What is the truth, then?” Elias asked, his eyes bird-bright with curiosity. “The lies of the priests of Tchernobog, those I know.”

  “The truth? Czar Nikolai—the Grand Duke, he was then—heard of her among the refugees as they fled south from Kazan through the Kazakh marches in the second year of the great dying—heard that she had prophetic dreams. She was near death because she would not eat . . . that . . . but none dared to slay her to devour. A Dreamer must fast near to death for the first dreams to come, in any case.

  “When the dreams proved so useful for him, the Grand Duke ordered that she be given to eat of whatever clean food they had, and so she lived. He sought out others, men and women of many peoples, those with some trace of her gift, and declared them his personal slaves. In the charge of his priest—the man who turned from Christ to the Peacock Angel and persuaded others, the first of the High Priests of Tchernobog. From them was bred the Sisterhood. Boys with the talent . . . their minds cannot bear the knowing of things that are and are not at the same time, and they go mad when they come to manhood and the dreams come upon them. That is one reason we are so few.”

  Elias nodded. “Some of this I learned in Bokhara,” he said, and was silent for a pause that stretched. “And the thinking? What did you mean by that?”

  “That the Master, Count Ignatieff—he has won many fights by cunning rather than heavy blows. I was never far enough from the count to think of him as anything but the Master. Now I am—oh, ochen khorrosho, most excellent!

  “And . . .” She turned to King. “How do you think of him?”

  “As the Czar’s arm,” King said. “An agent of Russia.”

  “And are all agents of the Empire as one, then?” Yasmini said shrewdly. “Shall I tell you what Ignatieff most feared, at . . . back within the Czar’s domains? He feared to have his schemes discovered.”

  Elias made an interested sound. King nodded slowly. “You mean, not all his superiors would like what he’s doing?”

  “No. Not even all the priests of the House of the Fallen. The Czar follows Tchernobog’s cult, but he is not eager to meet the Peacock Angel. To weaken your Empire, da. He thinks—”

  She nodded to the chessboard.

  “Russians are chess players, yes,” Elias said musingly. “Not polo or cricket: chess.”

  “Da,” the girl said. “But against each other, no? The Czar thinks to hand down power to his sons and grandsons. He would not seek the death of all that lives—not in deeds, though he might pray loudly in public to Malik Nous to bring the ending of all things.”

  “You think we could get Ignatieff . . . recalled?” King said.

  Yasmini shook her head, then winced slightly at the pain the motion brought. He gave her more of the water, and she continued:

  “No. He is of too much power at court, and would not the Czar believe that it was a plot to divide his forces? Especially while to say so would anger Ignatieff’s faction and kindred.”

  “Tcha-hey,” Elias agreed. “Captain King, you cannot conceive of what it is to live in that land—such suspicions, such a viper’s nest of murder and betrayal—treachery and black intrigue—not unless you have breathed its air. Samarkand is bad. Bokhara is worse.”

  Yasmini nodded. “But if the Czar were to learn of Ignatieff’s mission—his full mission—after it failed . . . then he would have a lever to move against the Patriarch. Many boyars chafe at the power of the priesthood, or envy its lands and wealth. And factions within the House of the Fallen, more interested in riches than the coming of the Black God, they would join him to throw down Ignatieff’s patrons. The Czar is Supreme Autocrat—Tchernobog’s Claw upon Earth, much though the Patriarch envies him the title. He could demand that the Serpent Throne be given access to the Dreamers, to prove or disprove.”

  “Never thought I’d be considering giving the Czar a helping hand,” King mused.

  Elias shuddered. “The Czar is bad. The House of the Fallen . . . worse. Much worse. Tyrants can be outlived—bribed—outwitted—fought. It was not for power or wealth that the Crusaders slaughtered us until the streets ran with blood, or the Inquisition hunted us like rats for flaying and burning—although they robbed us, too, yes. It was for ideas, for religion, for belief in things they thought holy. The worst in men is the best corrupted. Ideas kill more than kings; brains are more dangerous than fists. That is the Angrezi strength, though: you will not follow ideas if
that means doing things that are . . .”

  He dropped into upper-crust Imperial English for a second: “Just not done, old chap.”

  “Well, that leaves us with Ignatieff to deal with first,” King said practically.

  A quiet streak of Punjabi blasphemies came from the corridor outside, along with a squeak of rubber and a raw Pathan whoop of glee—King was immediately reminded of an old Afghan saying, that the sound of the Pushtu language was like listening to rocks falling down a mountainside. Ibrahim pushed Narayan Singh through the door, in a wheelchair. The Pathan thought that a marvelous invention, though more as an instrument of torture than of healing. Sir Manfred Warburton followed, not using a cane anymore or looking quite so much like an old man; David bar-Elias rose to give him his arm. Warburton lowered himself inch by inch into his cushions; David sat beside his father; the Pathan squatted on his hams beside the Sikh’s wheelchair.

  “So, you mend, bhai?” King said.

  “With every day, sahib,” Narayan Singh said. “Already I can walk a little. In a week’s time, I will run—two, and I will be fit for duty.”

  He looked drawn and a little gaunt, but good feeding and an expert masseuse—brought in blindfolded, and led out the same way—were mending the damage, aided by youth and native strength.

  King nodded, feeling a vast relief. Being without Narayan Singh was like lacking his own right arm.

  “Well, we’d best take counsel,” he said.

  David bar-Elias nodded. “Men have been watching our house on the Chandi Chowk,” he said. “I have confirmed it.”

  King hissed. “Ignatieff’s alive, then,” he said. “More lives than a cat, that one.”

  “The devil protects his own, they say,” Warburton said.

  Elias stroked his beard. “Ignatieff saw my son—knew him from his time in Bokhara—at Allenby’s house,” he said. “That he would have our known properties watched—that is only reasonable, from his point of view.”