At first Johnny listened to what I told him, but soon, being Johnny, he listened less and less, and talked more and more. Lord Johnny Sponson of all England just laughed and danced across his plundered carpets and around his gilded logpiles of half-ruined furniture in his great and echoing halls. Johnny did all the things he’d always been good at, and all his new friends and commanders—and mistresses—agreed and applauded and laughed and danced as well. The women, of course, were mad for him. For the ease of his limbs, and who he was, and what he could do for them. And if that look in his eyes, the way he smiled, wasn’t quite the same as the Johnny I remembered, who the hell was there but me to care or notice?
Spring turned to summer, and the Indians with all their new supplies and fresh foreign troops pushed out from their fortresses. They defeated us at Bewdley and Oxford. They moved back across the Severn and the Thames. The weather turned hot, and food grew short because most of the farms in the area around London where we rebel sepoys were now pinned had been abandoned and no one had thought to harvest the crops. The Indian armies had the repeating rifles that they’d never allowed us sepoys to use. They had proper cannon instead of our antique ceremonial relics. They had fresh elephants, and armored aeropiles to plough along the captured rivers, and barrels of terrible Greek Fire. Their victories weren’t so much defeats as routs—organized destruction, and the revenge they made upon all the thousands of sepoys they captured was terrible. They tied our bodies to their new guns and blasted them to pieces because they thought that we Christian English feared for our souls if we weren’t given a proper burial. They pierced us with hooks. They burned us on slow fires of charcoal. They fed us, half-roasted but still alive, to the crows.
It was late August by the time London was fully encircled, and the great sepoy army that Lord Johnny had drawn around him had gathered within its feeble walls. The place was hot and overcrowded. The sewers were shattered. The river stank. The wells had turned. Yet there was still hope. There was still dancing. The severed heads of freshly discovered collaborators and Indians were regularly borne along the streets while the Indian generals waited outside the city walls.
I remember I was wandering one morning in the strange place London had become. The temples were emptied, the buildings and bridges were torn. There were no sadhus now, no beggars—or we were all sadhus and beggars. It was hard to tell. A smog of burning hung over the city. It darkened the sky. It shaded out the sun. The streets seemed strangely paved in that odd twilight. I pushed through drifts of sheet music. My boots crunched on the shattered brass shells of pocketwatches looted from a store. Stooping to look at them more closely, I saw there were even a few broken scraps of gold. I remembered walking—it seemed, not so long ago—arm in arm with Johnny close to this same place as we headed back from that bar at Charing Cross. There was no beer now. There was scarcely any water. But ahead of me, although now daubed with fresh layers of slogans, was the wall of the English Repository against which Johnny had pissed.
A movement caught my eye. This city was no longer safe—my hand went straight to my bayonet—but what I saw was a female figure, smallish and seemingly youngish, dressed in a brocaded red sari. The figure beckoned. Although I had no idea what she wanted, I followed.
The entrance to the English Repository had once been grand. Filthy statues that I suppose had once been supposed to represent art, or love, leaned around its collapsing arch. It was dark outside that day, but inside the darkness was far greater. The sort of dark you get that piles up over ages from shadows and mildew and things long left to rot. A few muttonfat candles smoked, and I could see it was just as Johnny had said. Old stuff, once kingly and grand, but now so ruined as to have been ignored even by the rampaging mobs, was piled everywhere. Rain-leaked ceremonial carriages. Beds like the bloated corpses you saw down by the river, their upholstery green and swollen. And books everywhere. Not just on shelves, but piled on the floors and spilling their leaves amid the puddles. It was a damp place, even in the middle of summer. Reeked of piss, as well. The English Repository would barely have smoldered when all the rest of London had burned.
The woman in the glittering, once-beautiful sari was still shuffling ahead of me. Beckoning me on, and talking all the while in this cracked voice—saying words that made no sense, but also sounded familiar. Something about the rags of time, and love knowing no season—nonsense really, but pretty, bookish nonsense of a kind I knew only too well. I understood what she was by now, and I saw as we entered some kind of courtyard filled with the dead remains of furniture and rusting suits of armor that there were many others of her kind. They looked like crows—roosting there, and cackling as well. Repository girls, Johnny had called them. What a strange and desolate place to live, I thought—but I let the woman pull me to her, even though she stank as sourly as the city itself.
She was fumbling beneath my trews with black crow fingers. And I could see the rotting spines of the books amid the mushroom shelves behind. Could even read the same names that Johnny had once said to me. Shakes-something. And Chancer—Chaucer? Donne—Dun, Donny, is that how you’d say it? Somebody called Marlow. All the old Johnny bullshit. At least, that was how it seemed to me. And beyond that, leaning against a mossy wall with dead bits of vine growing over it and half the paint peeled and blistered off, there was this huge old painting of some lost great English estate. You could tell that it no longer existed. You could tell that it came from an England that had been plundered and destroyed long ago. I pulled away from the woman and threw the scraps of gold I’d picked up outside that looted shop as I fled to stop her following—although, like everything else in this city, it was worthless. She was shouting after me about how she had a son, a nice boy, for sale as well.
London had stirred itself while I was in the English Repository’s darkness. The streets were suddenly rivered with people. They were smashing what hadn’t already been destroyed. They were chanting and wailing and pulling at their clothes. Guns were firing into the air—a waste of precious shot. I feared that the Indians had already breached our walls. But I know what a battle feels like, and I realized that this wasn’t one, although there was so much noise and confusion that it took me some time to find out what had really happened. Even then, I still didn’t believe it. Johnny Sponson, Lord Protector of all of England, had been out walking this very morning, keeping up morale, touching the ill and the wounded who clamored to be cured, showing his face to the adoring crowds. I’m sure he thought he was well-protected, but the Indians must have positioned snipers close enough for one of them to pick him out. After all, he’d have made an obvious target, dressed as he now dressed. I grabbed arms and shouted into faces. Was he alive? Was he dead? No one seemed to know for sure.
I pushed on toward Saint James’s Palace. Just like everyone else. Try to go any other way, and I’d have been trampled for sure. You’ve never seen such sights—heard such sounds. And then, of all things, I heard my own name being shouted by the guards who were protecting the palace gates, and hands were all over me and I found myself being lifted up. Yes. Here’s the one. Yes, this is Private Sepoy Davey Whittings. No, no, back, back you fucking idiots. This is him. I feared for my life, although death and I had long since reached an understanding. But there I was, being hauled over the crowds and shoved through the gates of Saint James’s Palace by Johnny Sponson’s liveried guards, then led through ruined logfalls of gilded furniture that weren’t so very different to those in the English Repository. Then a final door banged behind me, and I was standing alone in the great hall of Johnny’s throne room.
The place seemed huge and oddly still, emptied of all the usual so-called generals, and fawning and laughing fools. But something big had been set in the middle of it—a tall thing of red curtains and lotus-carved pillars more than large enough to make a room of its own. When I peered inside it, I saw Johnny, and I realized it was some kind of bed. He was half-lying, half sitting, against these cushions, and he was smiling—almost chuckling—and he
was wearing his usual cloak and a jewel-studded turban and many chains of office, and his right arm was hooked in a sling. It took me a moment to take in what I was seeing.
“So you’re not dead?”
“Is that what they’re saying?”
“No one knows for sure.”
“And they’re all crying, howling out my name?”
“What would you expect?”
He chuckled louder. “Glory,” he muttered, “is like a circle of water, which never ceases to enlarge, till by broad spreading it disperses to nothing—haven’t you found that to be the truth, Davey?”
“You know I don’t understand that kind of fucking bollocks. I never did.”
“Don’t you?” He seemed surprised—almost pained. “Perhaps not.”
“Why did you ask for me, Johnny? Why the fuck did you bring me here?”
Part of me wondered if he really had feared that he was dying, and had wanted to see his old pal Davey Whittings for one last time. But then, he didn’t look so bad, and so many others were closer to him now—hangers on, women who dressed like princesses and acted like whores, men who smelled like butchers because of the reek of death on their clothes. Old mates of mine, some of them, although you wouldn’t have recognized them now. But I was still plain old Davey Whittings, Sir, Sahib, Sepoy Second Class. With all of London wailing his name outside, I wondered if Johnny Sponson hadn’t simply wanted to see me just to remind himself of how very far he’d come.
He didn’t give a straight answer to my question, of course. He never could. He just gave another one of those Johnny chuckles. He just grinned a Johnny grin. And then he started talking about how England had needed someone. Not Johnny Sponson necessarily, but he’d been the one more than anyone else who had felt that need, and had known how to fill it. Said he was like the soil of England, this sceptered Isle, this seat of majesty ... all the usual bollocks. It really was like he was giving me his deathbed speech, even though he plainly wasn’t dying. Or, more likely, he was doing the same thing that he’d done when he sat beside me in that filthy hospital, and was rehearsing what he planned to say later to a much bigger audience when he climbed the Great Temple of Ganesh, or perhaps, seeing as he was wounded, got himself hoisted up there on a wooden cross.
I could imagine his words ringing out across the adoring crowds. And I knew that they’d love him all the more now that he’d cheated death itself. And he was right, as well—when he said he gave them the spirit they needed to fight. That they needed him as much as he needed them. Without him, they’d be a rabble of looters and cutthroats—soldiers without orders. And without them ... he’d just be plain old Johnny Sponson. The man who’d saved my life. The man I’d once grown to love.
But this different Johnny Sponson seemed pleased, excited, by his brush with a sniper’s bullet. He was full of new wildness and strange hope, and odd new theories to add to all of those he already had. How, for example, the reason that the Indians had spread this Empire so far was because of their simple need to survive those dreadful few summers and freezing winters of two hundred and more years ago. How it all would have been different if something strange hadn’t fallen out of the skies to darken our world. As ever, he was full of it. Nothing had changed. Part of him was just being more and more of what he already was.
Despite London being surrounded by a far larger and better-equipped army, Johnny was convinced that this wasn’t the end of the English Mutiny. And, as he talked of how the Scots had seized the moment to attack beyond Hadrian’s Wall and were marching south even now, and how the Lowland Hollanders would soon be breaking the Indian blockade and sailing up the Thames with fresh ships and supplies, he even began to convince me. I could feel it happening—I could see the colors returning to English green on his beloved maps, and I knew that others would believe him even more than I did. But the difference was, I hated the very thought of yet another battle, even if victory was the result. Nor could I understand why I was suddenly on the same side as the fucking Scots seeing as I’d nearly lost my life fighting them. All that would happen if we sepoys were able to break this siege and the Hollanders arrived and the Scots came to our aid was that there would be more destruction, and another year’s harvest fallen to neglect as a result. Above all, there would be more deaths. Killing was the only thing that we sepoys were good for, when all was said and done. Try to get us to do anything else and we fucked it up.
I looked around me at this great and empty throne room. Johnny was going on even more now about duty, and about flags, and the need for loyalty, the need to stand up straight before what mattered, and fight for your nation and obey orders and do the right thing, even if the right thing was death. Perhaps the wound in his arm was worse than I’d thought, or perhaps he’d already taken something to help with the pain, or maybe he was simply a little drunk, but he was ranting now—and all of it was stuff I’d heard before. On parade grounds and from the mouths of officers, and back when I was a kid in the hovel we used to call home.
I reached my hand into my pocket, and felt for the loop of wire I still carried there, just like the good soldier I still was. And I opened it out and held it there while Johnny was still talking. I think it took him a moment to realize what I was about to do. And even then he didn’t exactly seem surprised. After all, part of him was still like me, still a sepoy. He knew death was always waiting around the next corner, especially at the moment when you thought you’d finally left it behind.
“Why...?”
He struggled, but he was wounded—hampered by that sling and his ridiculous clothes—and my movements were quick, and by then I’d had more than enough of Johnny’s bullshit talk. Still, it’s not a swift death, or an easy one. You need strong hands, a strong will, to use a garrote. His loosened hands batted against me. His legs spasmed. His face reddened, then blued. His tongue went out. He leaked piss and blood. His eyes rolled. But I didn’t let go. I was a soldier, a sepoy. Death was my job. But in truth, it wasn’t the thought of all the fresh battles he’d urge us sepoys to fight that kept me pulling the wire. It wasn’t even all the dead bodies and sobbing women and smoking skies and ruined towns that another season’s fighting would bring. If the bastard had sounded like anyone toward the end in what he’d been saying, it was like my dad when he was in his cups. So it wasn’t for the glory or for the sake of saving anyone or rescuing London or preserving the Empire that I killed Johnny Sponson. I simply wanted to shut the fucker up.
Someone must have decided that I’d been alone with my supposed best mate in that throne room for a little too long. Perhaps, seeing as they knew what Johnny was like, it had gone a bit quiet, as well. Whatever it was, the guards burst in yelling, and they saw instantly what I had done. Word went out from there quicker than you could ever have imagined—beyond the palace gates and across London, right out over the city walls to the waiting Indian armies with their huge siege engines and repeating guns. Johnny Sponson, Lord of whatever he was lord of, our Prince and our King—private sepoy second class, expert bullshitter, brilliant dancer, and secret son of some English Repository whore—was dead. The grief and the chaos was incredible. London burned that night. It was wrecked even before the Indians moved in to occupy it the next morning. Or so I think I’ve been told.
I’d imagined Johnny’s guards would simply kill me. I hadn’t counted on the fact that they were sepoys just like I was, and understood that death wasn’t something I’d care that much about—that it was like the face of someone you’re given up trying to love. They knew, as well, that their own chances of survival and the success of this whole mutiny had vanished with Johnny Sponson’s death. They’d probably even seen the bodies of their captured comrades—or, once the Indians had finished, what was left of them.
You can see what Johnny’s sepoys did to me yourself. They had a whole night to work at it before the Indians breached the city walls. And work they did. Then they left me there, destroyed as I was, right there in Johnny’s throne room, laid beside the bod
y of the man I had killed as flames took hold of the rugs and tapestries and licked up the walls. Perhaps they wanted me to be a signal, a sign, although I doubt if they ever imagined I’d have survived for as long as I have.
As you will long ago have noticed, they left me my mouth and tongue after they’d cut away my legs and retwisted my arms. I miss my vanished sight the more, though, because I’d love to have seen what has been made of this newly rebuilt city on the cold northerly fringes of this great Empire. I’d like to believe it’s as beautiful as sometimes, in the right fall of hope or light or darkness, I thought it might become. I can’t hear you, either, kind Sir, Sahib, Brahmin, Begum, Fakir, Lord, Lady, but I do not ask for words, or alms. Just touch here on my chest where the white ash is smeared. Tell me it’s true that this city has been remade into something beautiful—that I’m propped on the marble steps of a fine new temple, filled with light and mosaic and the very breath of Christ, Mohammed, Brahma—that the skies above teem with kites and flags and spires and muezzin towers and the cries of mullahs and the clamor of bells. Touch me here, where the flesh isn’t so burned. Then I’ll know. Then I’ll understand.
The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology] Page 41
