The Peshawar Lancers Page 2

  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 it was the single 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 cleared. 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 with long dark curls and a tuft of chin-beard dyed to a black the deep lines of age on his face belied, dressed in a sober elegance of velvet and broadcloth cut in an antique style. 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 the half dozen men who awaited him around the table of the White Room.

  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 as 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. Stokes, the secretary of the Royal Society; Sir William Thomson down from Glasgow, despite the state the railways were in; Tait likewise from Edinburgh; Maxwell from Cambridge—

  It was the Glaswegian who spoke: “We would no ha’ troubled ye, my lord, 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 that kept creeping back into the corners of his mind, images born 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 other island didn’t shelter it; far worse in most of maritime 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 shattered 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 are 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 my lord, 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. Not for at least one year. Possibly . . .” Thomson’s face sagged. “Possibly as many as three or four. Snow and cold will continue all through what should be the summer.”

  Disraeli stared at the scientist for a long moment. Then he slumped 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 scientist’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 this 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 Liverpool, 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. “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,” Thomson said quickly. His voice was steady, although the burr of his native dialect had grown stronger. “Forebye the weather will turn strange over all the 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, Sir William? 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 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 h
igh 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 eye 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.

  His left 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—or Tchernobog as some called Him, the demiurge worshiped 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, Athelstane 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 olive-colored, 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 still warm as October faded. This close to a major city and frontier base the roads were 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 cottager-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 substantial yeoman-tenant 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, peasant cottagers, the men in dirty white cotton pants and tunics, women in much the same but with longer tunic-skirts and head scarves instead of turbans, 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 afterward, 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, to the wild tribes.

  A few minutes later, a stout gray-bearded zamindar trotted by on a dappled hunter. A pair of sandy-haired Kalasha mercenaries from up in the hills above Chitral were riding at the landowner’s tail with carbines in the crook of their arms, which was wise; he 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, 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?”

  Athelstane 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.

  Not quite what the newspaper correspondents dwell on, though, he thought.

  His smile was broader for the next passerby, a woman in a pony-trap with a tasseled sunshade. She was likely a wealthy man’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 full 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 ostrich-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.

  “Now I know thou’rt wounded in truth, huzoor,” Narayan Singh said dryly from his side, as they trotted on toward the outskirts of Peshawar town.

  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.

  Narayan Singh snorted. A daffadar was a noncommissioned man, but there was no excess of deference in his voice.

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

  Countryside gave way to villa-fringed outskirts and the broad straight streets of the Civil Lines—the military cantonment was on the south side of town. The streets were filled with 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 humanity and coal smoke from the factories spreading south and east. Their horses breasted through t
he 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 overhung by balconies shielded with carved wooden purdah screens, and below, the buildings were full of little chaikanas where patrons sat on cushions drinking tea laced with cardamom and lemon and smoking their hookahs. The streets were loud with 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; full 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 . . .

  “Good to be back to civilization,” King said with a sigh.

  “Han, sahib,” Narayan Singh said, as they drew rein before the wrought-iron gate of the Peshawar Club. “Good to sleep where we need not keep one eye open for knives in the dark!”

  King laughed and nodded, as grooms ran to take their horses.

  Chapter Two

  Miss Cassandra Mary Effingham King—Ph.D., F.R.S.—tilted her glasses down her long straight nose and looked over them. That gave her a view out the slanting windows that ran along the airship’s side galleries, and at the ground a thousand feet below, distracting her from the knot of anxiety in her stomach.

  It isn’t the height that’s bothersome. She had been born in Kashmir and had been an alpinist from her early teens, yet another of her eccentricities. Clinging to a cliff with a sheer drop beneath didn’t worry her.

  What disturbed her about flying was the knowledge that she was hanging under millions of cubic feet of hydrogen gas.