THE PESHAWAR LANCERS

CHAPTER ONE:

Captain Alfred King rinsed out his mouth with a swig from the goatskin water bag slung at his saddlebow. Even in October, a shadeless noon in the lowlands of the North West Frontier province was hot and the dust was everywhere, including enough to grit audibly between his back teeth. When he spat the saliva was as khaki-colored as his dusty uniform or the cloth of his turban. It made a brief dark mark on the white crushed stone of the military highway that snaked down from the Khyber Pass to Peshawar.

Looks the way I feel, he thought. Dirty, tired, pounded flat. Necessary work -- nobody who'd seen a village overrun by hill-tribe raiders could doubt that -- but not much glory in it.

Right now the Grand Trunk Road was thronged with the returning men and beasts of the Charasia Field Force, following the age-old path trodden by generations of fighting-men -- for most of them, by their own fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers, under the Old Empire and the New. Feet and hooves and steel-shod wheels made a grumbling thunder under the smoking pillar of dust that marked their passage, camels gave their burbling cries, occasionally an elephant pulling a heavy artillery piece squealed as it scented water ahead with its trunk lifted out of the murk.

Horse-drawn cannon went past with a dull gunmetal gleam, rocket-launchers like bundles of iron tubes on wheels, and machine-guns on the backs of pack-mules. There were even a few self-propelled armored cars. Two of them were not self-propelled any longer, and were being pulled back to the workshops by elephants; King gave a sardonic smile at the sight. The newfangled stirling-cycle air engines were marvelous for factories and airships, or the motorcars that were rich man's toys on good roads. In the field, the day of the horse-soldiers wasn't over quite yet.

Staff officers with red collar-tabs galloped about, keeping all orderly in the endless steel-tipped snake that wound down from the bitter sunbaked ridges of the Border. The right margin of the road was reserved for mounted troops, and there the Peshawar Lancers moved up in a jingle of harness and flutter of pennants and rumbling crunching clatter of iron-shod hooves on gravel. They trotted past the endless columns of marching infantry and the wheatfield ripple of the Metford rifles sloped over their shoulders.

King ran a critical eye over them as they passed; the jawans had shaped well up in the hills... for infantry, of course. There were Sikhs with steel chakrams slung on their turbans, Baluchis with long oiled black hair spilling from under theirs, and Gurkhas in rifle-green with their kukris bouncing at their rumps and little pillbox hats at a jaunty angle above their flat brown Mongol faces. There were a regiment of the Darjeeling Europeans -- young men of the Sahib-Log doing their compulsory service -- and even a slouch-hatted battalion of Australians.

King frowned slightly at the sight. They were devils in action, but an even worse headache to the high command back in camp. And their ideas of discipline were as eccentric as their dialect of English, which they had the damned cheek to claim was the pure tongue of the Old Empire.

One of their officers answered Colonel Claiborne by saying he didn't understand Hindi! Damned cheek indeed.

His own men were in good spirits as they rode homeward; they were a mixed lot -- Marathas, Rajputs, Sikhs and Punjabi Jats, for the most part. Swarthy bearded faces grinned beneath the dust and sweat, swapping bloodthirsty boasts and foul jokes, or just glad to be alive and whole. Each carried a ten-foot lance with the butt socketed in the ring on his right stirrup iron; their cotton drill kurta-tunics and loose pjamy-trousers were stained with hard service, but the carbine before each man's right knee was clean and the curved tulwars at their belts oiled and sharp. Pennants snapped jauntily beneath the steel points that rose and fell in bristling waves above.

They'd had a few sharp skirmishes, and the usual jezzailachi-behind-every-rock harassment you could expect on the Frontier, but the plunder had been good and they were returning victorious.

"Quite a sight," King murmured. "Fifteen thousand, horse and foot and guns -- enough to give even the Masuds and Afridis pause, not to mention the Emir in Kabul. Or so they said, at least, when they signed the treaty."

With a bayonet at their backs and a boot up the bum, he added to himself.

The man beside him spat into the roadside dust in turn; he was a little younger than his officer's twenty-eight years, with a full black beard and sweeping buffalo-horn mustachios and snapping dark eyes above a curved beak of nose, broad-shouldered and heavy-armed with a fuzz of black hair on the backs of his big strangler's hands. King had spoken in English, and Narayan Singh understood it perfectly - had he not followed the young sahib from infancy as playmate, sparring-partner, soldier-servant, shield-on-shoulder and right-hand man? Had not his father been the like to the sahib's father before him? But when he replied, it was in Army Urdu, as was fitting.

"The cobra spits, huzoor, and the Pathan speaks - who will grow rich on the difference?" he grunted. "The tribes will stay quiet until they forget men dead and captives led away and villages burning. Then some fakir of their faith will send them mad with lies about their stupid Allah, and they will remember the fat cattle and silver and women of the lowlands. On that day we shall see the hillman lashkars come yelling down the Khyber once more."

King grinned and slung the water bottle back. "It could be worse; we could be in the Khyber Rifles. Comfort yourself with that, bhai. We won't be stationed in some Border fort, sleeping with our rifles chained to our wrists."

Which was the only way you could be sure, when a hillman came ghosting over the wall looking for a weapon better than the flintlock jezails their own craftsmen could make. A Pathan of the free highlander tribes could steal a man's shadow, or rustle a horse from a locked room.

Another rider came trotting down the line towards him, also in the uniform of an officer in the Lancers, but with gray streaks in his brown beard and the jeweled clasp of a Colonel at the front of his turban. The regimental rissaldar-major followed him, with a file of troopers behind.

King saluted, trying not to wince at the pull of the healing wound in his right arm. "Sir!" he said crisply.

Colonel Claiborne returned the gesture and frowned, an expression that made the old dusty-white tulwar scar on his cheek draw up one corner of his mouth. "Dammit, you insolent young pup, I said you weren't fit for duty yet!"

"Sir, the doctor said --"

"Dammit, I'll have you know that I know a damned sight more about wounds than some yoni-doctor from the Territorial Reserve, and I say you're unfit for duty."

King forced himself not to smile; the regiment's current medico was from the reserve and was a gynecologist in civilian life. "I just wanted to see my squadron settled in before I took leave, sir."

Claiborne let approval show through his official anger. That was the answer that a good officer would give. "I assure you," he said dryly, "that the Peshawar Lancers -- yea, verily even the second squadron of the Peshawar Lancers -- will survive without your services until you return from convalescent leave. Dammit, you are dismissed, Captain."

Then the Colonel smiled. "I'd hate to have to explain to your lady mother why you'd lost your sword-arm, lad. Go on, and go soak way some of the Frontier at the club. You'll be spending Diwali at home, or I'll know the reason why, dammit if I don't."

King saluted again. "Since you put it as a direct order, sir."

Then he touched the rein to the neck of his charger and fell out of the column. The Rissaldar -- senior native officer -- of the 2nd squadron barked an order; the unit reined in, wheeled right and rode three paces onto the verge before drawing to a halt like a single great multiheaded beast. Only the tips of the lances moved, quivering and swaying slightly, catching the sun as a horse shifted its weight or tossed its head.

They moved with a precision that was smooth rather than stiff; the subtle trademark of men whose trade was war. King rose in the stirrups to address his command:

"Shabash, sowar! Sat-sree akal!", he said, dropping effortlessly into Army Urdu, one of his birth-tongues: Imperial English being the other, of course. Honor to you, riders! Well-struck! "Go to your homes and women, and we shall meet again when the swords are unsheathed; the Colonel-Sahib has ordered me on leave."

The rissaldar raised his sword-hand: "A cheer for Captain King bahadur! A cheer for the Afghan kush!"

King grinned as he waved his hand and cantered off. It was capital, to be called champion and killer-of-Afghans. A hand smoothed dust-stained mustachios. Even if it was deserved...

***

The cave where Yasmini slept was cold; she was curled into a ball under the piled sheepskins, but it was not the damp chill of this crevice in the Hindu Kush that made her shiver. It was the words and sights that ran through her sleeping brain. She knew them all too well, these visions; they were nothing like true dreams.

Instead, they were simply true... though they might be of places and deeds far away, of things that might have been, of things that might yet come to be.

This time it was of the past -- some sense she could not have named told her that it was the one past that could lead to this cave in this night...

A cold wind from the west flogged snow through the streets of London, piling it in man-high drifts against the sooty brick at street corners and filling the cuts made by a thousand shovels near as fast as they could be wielded. Great kettles of soup steamed over coal fires in sheltered spots, and children too young to do other work shuttled back and forth with pannikins of the hot broth. Under the wailing of the fanged wind they could hear the dull crump ... crump where parties from the Royal Engineers tried desperately to blast a way for supply ships through the thickening ice on the Thames. The men and women who toiled to keep the streets cleared were bundled in multiple sets of clothes, greatcoats, mufflers and improvised garments made from blankets, curtains and any other cloth that came to hand. More pulled beside skeletal horses to drag sleds of fuel and food, or boxed cargo down to the docks.

When the horses died, they went butchered into the stewpots; hideous rumors spread about human bodies disappearing from the piles where they were stacked...

The immaterial viewpoint that was her suspended consciousness swooped like a bird through the wall of a building guarded by soldiers in fur caps and greatcoats, a building where messengers came and went incessantly. In a chamber within she saw a man, one with much gray in his long dark hair and tuft of chin-beard, dressed in a sober elegance of velvet and broadcloth cut in an antique style current before the Fall. He turned from the window, shivering despite his thick overcoat and the blazing fire in the grate.

The face was one Yasmini recognized, long and full-lipped, with a beak of a nose and great dark eyes; a Jewish face, clever and quick and intensely human. And she could feel the being of him, not just the appearance...

Benjamin Disraeli rubbed his hands together, putting on an appearance of briskness. Even number 10 Downing Street was cold this October of 1878; sometimes the Prime Minister wondered if warmth was anything more than a fading dream, if blue sky and green leaves would ever come again.

"I fear must beg your pardon, gentlemen," he said to those who awaited him around the table.

She understood the speech somehow, even though it was the pure English of six generations past, not the hybrid tongue of the second century after the Fall. It was if her mind rode with his, a deep well full of memory and thought where concepts and ideas rose with a darting quickness, like trout in a mountain stream.

A wave of his hand indicated the meager tray of tea and scones. "You will appreciate, however..."

He had never taken more than a dilettante's interest in the sciences, but it was clear that an awesome amount of talent was involved in this delegation. Wheatstone from London, and Thompson down from Edinburgh, despite the state the railways were in.

It was the Scotsman who spoke: "We would no ha' troubled ye, but for the implications of our calculations concerning the impacts the globe has suffered. Even now, we're no sure if 'twere a single body that broke up as it struck the atmosphere or a spray, perhaps of comets... consultations took so long because travel is so slow, and telegraphs no better."

In his youth, Disraeli had been something of a dandy. There was a hint of that in the way he smoothed his lapels now. "I am sure your speculations are very interesting, gentlemen --"

Inwardly, he fumed. The world has suffered the greatest disaster since Noah's Flood; God alone knows how we will survive until the spring; and yet every Tom and Dick and Harry sees fit to demand some of my time -- when that commodity is as scarce as coal.

Perhaps those who crowded into every church and chapel and synagogue in London -- probably in the whole world, with mosques and temples thrown in -- were wiser. They were helping keep each other warm, and at least weren't distracting him.

The annoyance was a welcome relief from the images kept creeping back into the corners of his mind, images borne of the papers that crossed his desk. Fire rising in pillars from where the hammer of the skies had fallen all across Europe, so high that the tops flattened against the upper edge of the atmosphere itself. Walls of water striking the Atlantic coast of Ireland and scouring far inland, wreckage all along the western shores of England where the sister island didn't shelter it; far worse in most of martime Europe. Reports of unbelievably worse damage, on the American side of the Atlantic. Chaos and panic spreading like a malignant tide from the Channel deep into Russia as the governments broke under the strain.

Only the supernal cold had kept plague at bay, when the corpses of the unburied dead lay by the millions across the ruined lands.

"Perhaps we could discuss the scientific implications of the Fall at some time when events were less pressing--when the weather has improved, for example."

The professor exchanged a glance with his colleagues, then cleared his throat and spoke with desperate earnestness: "But Mr. Prime Minister, that is precisely what we must tell you. The water vapor and dust in the upper atmosphere -- there will be no improvement in the weather, sir. Not for at least one year. Possibly..." Thompson's face sagged. "Possibly as many as three or four. There snow and cold will continue all through what should be the summer."

Disraeli stared at the scientist for a long moment. Then he sagged forward, and the world turned gray at the edges. Vaguely he could feel hands helping him into his seat, and the sharp peat-flavored taste of whiskey from the Scotsman's silver flask.

Moments ago he had been consumed with worry about the hundreds of thousands of refugees pouring in from the flooded, ruined coasts of Wales, Devon and Cornwall. With finding ships to bring in Australian corn. Now...

He came back to himself -- somewhat. A man did not rise from humble beginnings to steer the British Empire without learning self-mastery. Doubly so, if he were a Jew. He hadn't asked for his burden. All that I desired was to dish that psalm-singing hypocrite Gladstone, he thought wryly. Now Gladstone was dead in the sodden, frozen ruins of Manchester, and... the burden is mine, nonetheless.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, gentlemen, but as far as I can see you have just passed sentence of death on ninety-nine in every hundred of the human race. If any survive, it will be as starving cannibals."

One of the scientists dropped his gray-bearded face into his hands and wept like a barking seal. "It is not we who have passed judgment. God has condemned the human race. My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?"

"Nay, it's no quite so bad as that, sir, " Thompson said quickly. His voice was steady, although the burr of his native dialect had grown stronger. "Forebye the weather will turn strange over all world; yet still the effects will be strongest in the northern latitudes, and even there worst around the North Atlantic Basin - the Gulf Stream may be gone the while, d'ye ken... In Australia they might hardly notice it, save that the next few years will be a trifle more cool and damp."

"But what of England, Professor Thompson? What of her millions?"

The scientists looked at him. With a chill twist deep in his stomach, he realized that they were waiting for him to speak...

Yasmini screamed and thrashed against the blankets. A hard hand cuffed her across the ear, and she shuddered awake. A flickering torch cast huge shadows across the rough stone of the cavern wall above her, and glittered in the eyes of the man who held it. Count Ignatieff was dressed in the rough sheepskin jacket, baggy pants and high boots of an ordinary Cossack; but nobody who saw those eyes could ever mistake him for an ordinary man. It was more than the cold boyar arrogance, or even the fact that one was blue and the other brown. She suspected that he thought of himself as a tiger, but it was a cobra's gaze that looked down at her.

"Veno vat, Excellency, " she said. "It was a dream --"

"A true dream, bitch? "

"Yes, Excellency. But not a vision of any use; pajalsta, Excellency. One from the past. It is the vision of Disraeli, once again. Only Disraeli, Excellency."

He struck her again, but for all the stinging pain in her cheek it was merely perfunctory, if you knew the huge strength that lurked behind the nobleman's sword-callused palm as she did.

"For that you should not disturb my sleep," Ignatieff said.

One hand toyed with an earring in the shape of a peacock's tail; it was the sigil of initiation in the cult of Malik Nous, the Peacock Angel, the demiurge worshipped throughout the dominions of the Czar in Samarkand as the true Lord of This World.

"We must be in Kashmir within two weeks. Dream us a way past the Imperial patrols." Ignatieff kicked her in the stomach. "Why do you keep seeing that damned old Jew, anyway?" he demanded.

"I do not know, excellency -- it is my very great fault, excellency," she gasped trying to draw the thin cold air of the heights back into her lungs. "I most humbly apologize."

But Yasmini did know, although there was nothing of conscious control in her dreams. It was the eyes that drew her -- those great brown eyes, eyes that held all the pain of a broken world.

@@@

Peaceful, Alfred King thought, as he and his orderly rode eastward at a steady mile-eating canter-and-walk pace; Narayan Singh had two spare horses behind him on a leading rein. With those, and swinging northeast around the military convoys that filled the Grand Trunk Road just now, they made good speed. Peaceful compared to the tribal country, at least, if not by the standards of home.

Near Peshawar the dry rocky hills of the Khyber gave way to an alluvial plain, intensely green and laced with irrigation canals full of green silt-heavy water from the Kabul River. Plane trees lined the road, arching over the murmuring channels on either side to give a grateful shade; the lowlands were warm, even in October. This close to a major city and Frontier base the road net was excellent, even on the country lanes away from the main highway, and it was a pleasant enough ride on a warm fall afternoon.

Tile-roofed, fortified manor houses of plastered stone stood white amid the blossoms and lawns of their gardens, each with a watchtower at a corner and a hamlet of earth-colored, flat-roofed tenant houses not too far distant; this area had been gazetted for settlement more than a century ago, right after the Second Mutiny. An occasional freeholder farm or small factory with its brick chimney kept the scene from monotony. Around the habitations lay the fields that fed them and the city beyond; poplin-green of sugarcane, grass-green of maize, jade-hued pasture, the yellow of reaped wheat stubble, late-season orchards of apricot and pomegranate shaggy and tattered at the same time. Cut alfalfa hay scented the air with an overwhelming sweetness, and the neat brown furrows of plowed fields promised new growth next year.

People were about; mostly ryots, peasants, the men in dirty-white cotton pants and tunics and turbans, women in long skirts and head-scarves, both with spades and hoes, bills and pitchforks over their shoulders. There were also oxcarts heaped with melons or fruit or baled fodder, moving slowly to a dying-pig squeal of axles; a shepherd with his crook and dogs and road-obstructing smelly flock making the horses toss their heads and shy; a brace of horse-copers from the Black Mountain with a string of remounts for sale...

King took a close look at faces and gear as they went by, giving him the salaam and smiling, looking rather like hairy vultures with teeth. Hassanazais or Akazais, he decided.

Those were Pathan-Afghan frontier tribes in the debatable lands; beyond the settled, administered zone, but not beyond the Imperial frontier... not quite. In theory both were at peace, autonomous but tributary to the Sirkar, the government of the Raj. No doubt the horse-copers had kitubs -- official papers -- with the appropriate stamps, seals, good-conduct badges and letters of recommendation from the Political Officers attached to their clans, all as right and tight as be-damned.

King and Narayan Singh both kept wary eyes moving until the pair jogged out of sight and for a half-hour afterwards, lest the officially approved traders unofficially decide on impulse to shoot the Sirkar's men in the back and lift their horses and weapons. To enliven the tedium of spying for the Emir, or half the bandit chiefs on the Border, or both and several others besides; and a modern magazine rifle was worth more than any dozen horses, in the wild lands.

A few minutes later, a stout gray-bearded zamindar trotted by on a dappled hunter. A pair of sandy-haired Kalasha mercenaries were riding at his tail with carbines in the crook of their arms, which was wise. The landowner wore pistol and saber himself, which was also prudent. You didn't go unguarded or unarmed this close to the Border, with loose-wallahs and cattle-lifters and jangli-admis about. Nor were the local Pathans much tamer than their wild kin in the hills, even if they'd learned better than to show it over the last century.

"Good evening, Captain!" the squire called in a cheery voice, lifting his riding-crop to his turban in salute. "Capital work you lads have been doing, eh, what?"

Alfred answered in kind; in fact the Army slang for punitive expeditions of the type he'd just finished was butcher and bolt, and depressingly accurate.

His smile was broader for the next passer-by, a woman in a pony-trap with a tasseled sunshade. She might have been the squire's wife, from the opulence of rings on fingers and toes and the emerald stud through one nostril, and the jeweled collar and leash on the pet monkey that climbed and chattered beside her. Her sari was of black silk shot through with silver, a fold of it over her yellow hair and the other folds showing opulent curves.

"Ma'rm," he said as they passed, bowing his neck and touching one finger to his brow in polite salute.

Sighing, he ignored the pouting invitation of a full lower lip and the flirting blue-eyed glance sent the tall Lancer officer's way from behind her peacock-feather fan.

Last thing you need now is a bloody duel with a husband, he told himself sternly. And nothing could be private; there was a maid in the cart with her, and half a dozen armed retainers following behind. Dogras, he thought, looking at their blue turbans and green-dyed beards. They bristled with spears and matchlocks and knives, one resplendent in back-and-breast armor and lobster-tail helmet.

Think about the first whiskey-peg at the club instead. Think about Hasamurti's delectable rump.

Countryside gave way to villa-suburbs and the broad straight streets of the Civil Lines, wagons and light horse-carts, pedicabs, cyclists - Peshawar had almost as many bicycle manufacturies as Ludhiana -- and an occasional silent motorcar. The country scents of growth and manure and water gave way to a smell of dust, humanity and coal smoke from the factories spreading south and east.

"Now I know thou'rt wounded in truth, huzoor," Narayan Singh said dryly from his side.

King cocked an eye at his companion: Huzoor meant 'sir', but there were ways and ways of saying it.

"What precisely did that mean, daffadar Singh?" he asked.

Their horses breasted through the crowds of Peshawar Old Town itself, the narrow twisted streets near the Kissa Khwani Bazaar, the Street of the Storytellers, with the old Sikh-built fort of Bala Hissar frowning down from its hill. The lanes were full of little tea-shops where patrons sat on cushions smoking their hookahs, of banyan merchants selling dried fruit, rugs, carpets, hairy potsheen coats made from whole sheepskins, karakul lambskin caps and Chitrali cloaks from little open-front shops, of the smell of packed humanity, sharp pungent spices, sweat-soaked wool, horses. And of veiled women, an icily-superior ICS bureaucrat waving a fly-whisk in a rickshaw drawn by a near-naked coolie, a midshipman in a blue jacket visiting his family on leave, bicyclists frantically ringing their handlebar bells, sellers of iced sherbets crying their wares...

Narayan Singh snorted. A daffadar was a corporal, but there was no excess of deference in his voice as the Sikh went on:

"When a woman passes by smiling and making eyes, sahib, and we ride on, I know you are wounded indeed. Wounded and near death!"

***