“And I thought Galveston was bad,” Lt. Eric King of the Peshawar Lancers said to his companion, laughing. “This-what do they call it, Dannulsford? — is worse.”
Both were in the field dress of the Imperial cavalry: jacket and loose pyjamy trousers of tough khaki-colored cotton drill, calf-boots, leather sword-belts around their waists supported by a diagonal strap from right shoulder to left hip; their turbans were the same color, although the other man’s was larger and more bulbous than his officer’s, which was in the pugaree style with one end of the fabric hanging loose down his back.
“Han, sahib,” Ranjit Singh grunted in agreement as they stood at the railing of the primitive little steamboat. “It is so, lord. These jangli-admis ”-jungle-dwellers-“live like goats.”
The lands along the river had been pretty enough to his countryman’s eye, in a savage fashion; swamp and forest on the banks, giving way to a patchwork of wood and tall-grass savannah to the west, with the occasional farm and stretch of plowed black soil. The settlements of the barbarians were few and scattered, crude log cabins roofed in mossy shingles, surrounded by kitchen gardens and orchards of peach and pecan, and farther out, patches of maize and cotton and sweet potatoes surrounded by zigzagging split-rail fences. Corrals were numerous, too, for they seemed to live more by their herds than their fields; the grasslands were full of long-horned, long-legged cattle and rough hairy horses, and the woods swarmed with sounders of half-wild pigs.
Woods stood thicker on the eastern bank, wilder and more rank. The air over the Three Forks River was full of birds, duck and geese on their southward journey, and types he didn’t recognize. Some were amazing, like living jewels of jade and turquoise and ruby, darting and hovering from flower to flower with their wings an invisible blur. That sight alone had been worth stopping here, on his way back from the European outposts of the Empire to its heartland in India.
“Sahib,” grumbled Ranjit Singh, “this wasteland makes England look like a cultivated garden-like our own land in Kashmir.”
King nodded. England remained thinly peopled six generations after the Fall. Still, after long effort from missionaries and settlers you could say it was civilized again in a provincial sort of way; farms and manors, towns, and even a few small cities growing again in the shadow of the great ruin-mounds overgrown by wildwood. Four millions dwelt there now, enough to give a human presence over most of such a small island. The countryside here had the charm of true wilderness, if nothing else.
This little settlement called Dannulsford, on the other hand… Squalid beyond words is too kind, he thought. The stink was as bad as the worst slum in Calcutta, which was saying a good deal; smoke, offal, sewage, hides tacked to cabin walls or steeping in tanning pits, sweat and packed bodies. The water smelled for a mile downstream, as well.
“Probably they’re not as bad when they’re not jammed in together like this,” he said. “And we won’t be here long. Off to the woods as soon as we can.”
“Of woods we have seen enough, this past year and more, sahib,” Ranjit Singh said, as he dutifully followed Eric down the gangplank. “Europe is full of them.”
“And the woods there full of danger,” Eric chaffed. He’d just spent six months as part of the escort for a party of archaeologists, exploring the ruins amid the lost cities of the Rhine Valley and points east. “We’ve earned a holiday.”
“In more woods?” the Sikh said sourly.
“For shikari, not battle,” Eric said. “Some good hunting, a few trophies, and then back home.”
“After this, even Bombay will feel like home,” the Sikh said. “When we leave the train in Kashmir, I shall kiss the dirt in thankfulness.”
King shrugged, a wry turn to his smile. “Well, daffadar, you’re free to spend your leave as you please.”
Ranjit Singh snorted. “Speak no foolishness, sahib,” he said. “If you wish to hunt, we hunt.”
The Imperial officer shrugged in resignation. King’s epaulettes bore the silver pips of a lieutenant; Ranjit’s arm carried the three chevrons of a daffadar, a noncommissioned man. Besides being his military subordinate, Ranjit Singh was the son of a yeoman-tenant on the King estate, and his ancestors had been part of the Kings’ fighting tail ever since the Exodus, martial-caste jajmani- clients who followed the sahib into the Peshawar Lancers as a matter of course. That mixture of the feudal and the regimental was typical of the Empire’s military, and it made discipline a very personal thing. Ranjit Singh would obey without question, as long as the order didn’t violate his sense of duty-by letting his sahib go off into the wilderness without him, for example.
They climbed log steps in the side of the natural levee and strolled up the rutted muddy street that led from the stretch of riverbank. The Imperial cavalrymen walked with their left hands on the hilts of their curved tulwar- sabers; besides those they carried long Khyber knives, and holstered six-shot revolvers, heavy man-killing Webley. 455’s. Otherwise they were alike in their confident straight-backed stride with a hint of a horseman’s roll to it, and not much else.
Eric King was an inch over six feet, broad-shouldered and long-limbed, with a narrow high-cheeked, straight-nosed face, glossy dark-brown sideburns and mustache, and hazel eyes flecked with amber. Ranjit Singh was a bear to his lord’s hunting cat, four inches shorter but thicker in the chest and shoulders, broad in the hips, as well, and showing promise of a kettle belly in later years. He was vastly bearded, since his faith forbade cutting the hair on head or face, and the black bush of it spilled from his cheekbones down to his barrel chest. His eyes were black, as well, moving swiftly despite the relaxed confidence of his stride, alert for any threat.
Mostly the mud is a threat to our boots, Eric thought. Either sucking them off, or just eating them.
Someone had laid small logs in an attempt to corduroy a sidewalk, but heels had pressed them into the blackish mud; passing horses and feet kicked up more, and a small mob of shouting children followed the two foreigners, pointing and laughing.
A wooden scraper stood at the door of their destination, the small building with BANERJII amp; SONS on the sign above, and they used it enthusiastically before pulling off their footwear and putting on slippers.
“ Namaste, Lieutenant King sahib,” the little Bengali merchant said. “I received your note. Anything I may do for the Queen-Empress’s man…”
“ Namaste, Mr. Banerjii,” King replied, sinking easily cross-legged on the cushion and gratefully taking a cup of tea laced with cardamom, a taste of home. Sitting so felt almost strange, after so long among folk who used chairs all the time.
He handed over a letter. The merchant raised his brows as he scanned it. “From Elias and Sons of Delhi!” he murmured in his own language.
Bengali was close enough to King’s native Hindi that he followed it easily enough for so simple a matter. “They’re my family’s Delhi men-of-business,” he said modestly, keeping his wry smile in his mind.
Every trade has its hierarchy, he thought. And in some circles, it’s we who gain status from being linked to them, not vice versa.
“I will be even more happy to assist an associate of so respectable a firm,” Banerjii went on, in the Imperial dialect of English; that was King’s other mother-tongue, of course. “As I understand it, you wish to see something of the country? And to hunt?”
King nodded. And to make a report to the military intelligence department in the Red Fort in the capital; likely nothing would come of it, but it couldn’t hurt. North America was part of the British Empire in theory, even if Delhi’s writ didn’t run beyond a few enclaves on the coast in actual fact. Eventually it would have to be pacified, brought under law, opened up and developed; when that day came any information would be useful. That might be a century from now, but the Empire was endlessly patient, and the archives were always there.
“You will need a reliable native guide, servants, and bearers,” Banerjii said.
“Are any available? The garrison commander in Galveston lent me a few men. Locally recruited there, but reliable.”
And you should have asked for more, radiated from Ranjit Singh.
Banerjii shook his head. “Oh, most definitely you must hire locally,” he said. “Coastal men would be of little use guiding and tracking here-” He gave a depreciatory smile. “-as useless as a Bengali in Kashmir. But the natives have some reliable people. They are savages, yes, indeed, but they are a clean people here, all the Seven Tribes and their clans. From the time of the Fall.”
King nodded in turn; that was one of the fundamental distinctions in the modern world, between those whose ancestors had eaten men in the terrible years after the hammer from the skies struck, and those who hadn’t. The only more fundamental one was between those who still did, and the rest of humanity.
“And they are surprisingly honest, I find, particularly to their oaths-oh, my, yes. But proud-very proud, for barbarians. There is one young man I have dealt with for some years, a hunter by trade, and-”
With a gesture, he unrolled the tiger-skins. King caught his breath in a gasp.