The Peshawar Lancers Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Epilogue

  Appendix One: - The Fall

  Appendix Two: - The Exodus

  Appendix Three: - The Angrezi Raj/British Empire

  Appendix Four: - Imperial English and Other Languages

  Appendix Five: - Technology and Economy

  PRAISE FOR S. M. STIRLING

  The Peshawar Lancers

  “Lush backgrounds, tight research, lively characters, thoroughly nasty villains, a fascinating and plausible society—what more can anyone possibly want?”

  —Harry Turtledove

  “Sure to please S. M. Stirling’s legion of devoted fans . . . The Peshawar Lancers is a wonderfully evocative adventure, told by an absolute master.”

  —Mike Resnick, Award-winning Author of The Outpost

  “[An] alternate-historical homage to a host of classic swashbucklers . . . includes the author’s usual splendidly detailed world building, compelling characters, and breakneck pacing, with state-of-the-art action scenes. Nearly irresistible.”—Roland Green, Author of Voyage to Eneh

  “Exciting.”

  —Santa Fe New Mexican

  “Complex and bloodthirsty . . . superlatively drawn action scenes and breakneck pacing . . . an irresistible read.”

  —Booklist

  “A remarkable alternate history. Stirling’s impeccable research infuses both plot and characters with depth and verisimilitude, creating a tale of high adventure, romance, and intrigue.”

  —Library Journal

  “Aimed at readers who thrill to King, Empire, and the fluttering Union Jack . . . a nifty premise.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Stirling shows his ability to paint quite a vivid tale of intrigue.”

  —BookBrowser

  Island in the Sea of Time

  “A perfectly splendid story . . . endlessly fascinating . . . solidly convincing.”

  —Poul Anderson

  “A compelling cast of characters . . . a fine job of conveying both a sense of loss and hope.”

  —Science Fiction Chronicle

  “Quite a good book . . . definitely a winner.”

  —Aboriginal Science Fiction

  “Meticulous, imaginative. . . . Logical, inventive, and full of richly imagined characters, this is Stirling’s most deeply realized book yet.”

  —Susan Shwartz, Author of The Grail of Hearts

  “Utterly engaging. This is unquestionably Steve Stirling’s best work to date, a page-turner that is certain to win the author legions of new readers and fans.”

  —George R. R. Martin, Author of A Game of Thrones

  “One of the best time travel/alternative history stories I’ve ever read, period. Stirling combines complex, believable characters, meticulous research, and a fascinating setup to produce a book you won’t want to—and won’t be able to—put down. An outstanding piece of work.”

  —Harry Turtledove

  “The adventure that unfolds, powered by Stirling’s impressive stores of knowledge and extraordinary narrative skill, is an enormously entertaining read.”

  —Virtual North Woods Web site

  Against the Tide of Years

  “Fully lives up to the promises made in Island in the Sea of Time. It feels amazingly—often frighteningly—real. The research is impeccable, the writing excellent, the characters very strong. I can’t wait to find out what happens next.”

  —Harry Turtledove

  “Mixing two parts historical fact with one part intelligent extrapolation, S. M. Stirling concocts another exciting and explosive tale of ambition, ingenuity, intrigue, and discovery. Against the Tide of Years is even more compelling than Island in the Sea of Time—but just as much fun.”

  —Jane Lindskold, Author of When the Gods Are Silent

  “Against the Tide of Years confirms what readers of the first book already knew: S. M. Stirling is writing some of the best straight-ahead science fiction the genre has ever seen.”

  —Amazing

  On the Oceans of Eternity

  “Readers of this book’s predecessors . . . will find the same strong characterizations, high historical scholarship, superior narrative technique, excellent battle scenes, and awareness of social and economic as well as technological factors in evidence again.”

  —Booklist

  Other Books by S. M. Stirling

  Island in the Sea of Time

  Against the Tide of Years

  On the Oceans of Eternity

  ROC

  Published by New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street,

  New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand,

  London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road,

  Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcorn Avenue,

  Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road,

  Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices:

  Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First Roc Mass Market Printing, January 2003

  Copyright © Steven M. Stirling, 2002

  All rights reserved

  eISBN : 978-1-101-09898-1

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  In Memoriam:

  To Poul Anderson

  1926-2001

  Acknowledgments

  To Melinda, Yvonne, Walter, George, Daniel, the two Terrys, Sandra and Trent, of Critical Mass.

  To Harry Turtledove, for the gift of Hobson-Jobson, which was an immense help; and to Eric Flint, for recommending the Cultural Atlas of India.

  To Mark Anthony, best chiropractor in the West.

  For inspiration, I’d also like to thank Kipling, Mundy, Lamb, Merritt, Howard, Sabatini, Masters, Fraser, Bur-roughs, Wren, Kline, and all the others, the grand storytellers of adventure and
romance.

  Quotations from The Golden Road and Hassan, by James Elroy Flecker.

  “What shall we tell you?

  Tales, marvelous tales

  Of ships and stars and isles where good men rest

  Where nevermore the rose of sunset pales

  And winds and shadows fall towards the West . . .”

  Chapter One

  Captain Athelstane King rinsed out his mouth with a swig from the goatskin water bag slung at his saddlebow. Even in October this shadeless, low-lying part of the Northwest Frontier Province was hot; and the dust was everywhere, enough to grit audibly between his back teeth. When he spat, the saliva was as khaki-colored as his 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 path trodden by generations of fighting men—for most of them, by their own fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers. Feet and hooves and steel-shod wheels made a grumbling thunder under the 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’s smile held a trace of malice. The newfangled Stirling-cycle gas engines were marvelous for airships, or the motorcars that were rich men’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 order in the endless steel-tipped snake that wound down from the bitter sun-baked 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 up well 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 forest green with their kukris bouncing at their rumps and little pillbox hats at a jaunty angle above their flat, brown Mongol faces. There was a regiment of the Darjeeling Rifles—young men of the sahib-log doing the compulsory service required of all the martial castes—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—half Sikhs and Punjabi Hindus of the Jat-cultivator caste, the rest Marathas and Rajputs 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 jezailachi-sniper-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 to the soldier riding at his side. “Fifteen thousand, horse and foot and guns—enough to give even the Masuds and Afridis a taste for peace, not to mention the Emir in Kabul. Or so they all assured us, 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-five years, broad-shouldered, with a full black beard and sweeping buffalo-horn mustachios, and snapping dark eyes above a curved beak of nose. 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 Hindi, 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; Narayan Singh was undoubtedly right. The lashkars— tribal war bands—would come again; raid, banditry, and blood feud were the Afghan idea of being sociable, having fun with your neighbors and kin, like a polo match or tea party among the sahib-log. A razziah into the Imperial territories was more dangerous than stealing from each other, but also much more profitable.

  “It could be worse; we could be in the Khyber Rifles. Comfort yourself with that, bhai,” he said. “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 toward 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 away some of the frontier at the Club. You’ll be spending the Diwali festival at home, or I’ll know the reason why, d
ammit 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 second 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 in a glittering ripple as a horse shifted its weight or tossed its head.

  The maneuver went 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 Hindi, one of his birth-tongues, Imperial English being another, 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 . . .