S. M. Stirling - Shikari in Galveston

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Shikari in Galveston

S.M. Stirling

PROLOGUE: A Feasting of Demons

I told you not to eat him!" the man in the black robe said."Come out!"

He was alone, standing on a slight hillock amid the low marshy ground. The log canoe behind him held

more—three Cossack riflemen, their weapons ready, a young woman lying bound at their feet, and a

thick-muscled man with burn scars on his hands and arms. He whimpered and cowered and muttered

pajalsta—please, please— over and over until he was cuffed into silence by one of the soldiers.

Beyond them the tall gloom of the cypresses turned the swamp into a pool of olive-green shadow, in

which the Spanish moss hung in motionless curtains. There was little sound; a plop as a cotton-mouth

slipped off a rotting log and into the dark water, arid muffled with distance the dull booming roar of a bull

alligator proclaiming his territory to the world. The air was warm and rank, full of the smell of decay . . .

and a harder odor, one of crusted filth and animal rot.

"Come out!" the one in black snapped again; he was a stocky man in his middle years, black-haired, with

a pale high-cheekboned face and slanted gray eyes.

They did; first one, then a few more, then a score, then a hundred. The man laughed in delight at the

sight of them: the thickset shambling forms, the scarred faces and filed teeth, the roiling stink. One with a

bone through his broad nose and more in his clay-caked mop of hair came wriggling on his belly like a

snake through the mud to press his forehead into the dirt at the man's feet.

"Master, master," the figure whined—in his language it was a slightly different form of the word for

killer, and closely related to the verb to eat.

"He sickened," the savage gobbled apologetically. "We only ate him when he could not work."

The robed man drew back a foot and kicked him in the face; the prone figure groveled and whimpered.

"A likely story! But the Black God is good to His servants. I have brought you another blacksmith . . .

and weapons."

He half turned and signaled. Most of the men in the canoes kept their rifles ready and pointed; a few

dragged boxes of hatchets and knives out and bore them ashore. A moaning chorus came from the figures,

and hands reached out eagerly. The man in black uncoiled a whip from his belt and lashed them back.

"Who do you serve?" he asked harshly.

"The Black God! The Black God!" they called.

"Good. See you remember it. Keep this man healthy! Set more of your young to learning the smelting

and working of the iron! No one is to hunt or kill or eat such men, for they are valuable! It is more pleasing

to the Black God when you eat His enemies than when you prey on each other—"

He let the moaning chorus of obedience go on for a moment while he lashed them with words,

then signaled; the young woman was pushed forward. She was naked, a plump -swarthy Kaijan girl trying

to scream through the gag that covered her mouth. There would be a time for her to scream, but not quite

yet.

"And the Black God has brought you food, tender and juicy!" the robed man called, laughing and

grabbing her by the back of the neck in one iron-fingered hand. She squealed like a butchered rabbit

through the cloth as the eyes of the watchers focused on her.

A moment's silence, and another cry went up, hot and eager: "Eat! Eat!"

"We shall eat, my children," he laughed. "But the killing must be as the God desires, eh? Prepare the

altar!"

They scurried to obey. When the work was done, the man who commanded their service drew a long

curved knife from his girdle; the rippling damascened shape was sharp enough to part a hair, unlike the

crude blades of the savages.

"If you want the Black God to favor you, you must kill his enemies—kill them in fight, on the altar, by

ambush and stealth. Kill them! Take their lands! Hunt them down!"

"Kill! Kill all Tall Ones! Kill and eat!" A vicious eagerness was in the words, and an ancient hate.

"And on that good day, I shall return to bring you His blessing! Now we shall make sacrifice, and

feast."

He reached down and flicked off the gag, and the sacrifice gave the first of the cries prescribed in the

rite, as he swept the blade of the khindjal from throat to pubis in an initial, very shallow cut. The man

sighed with pleasure and swept his arms open and up, invoking the Peacock Angel.

"Eat!" the swamp-men screamed. "Eat!"

Technically, they should be chanting the Black God's name at this point in the ritual. But it was all the

same, in the end. For would not Tchernobog eat all the world, in time? He cut again, again . . .

"Eat! Eat!"

I: The Bear in His Strength

Robre—Robre sunna Jowan, gift-named the Hunter, of the Bear Creek clan of the Cross Plains

tribe—grunted as he strode southward past the peeled wands that marked the boundaries of the

Dan-nulsford Fair. There were eleven new heads set on tall stakes in the scrubby pasture.outside the

stockade, fresh enough with the fall chill that the features could still be seen under the flies. One was of

his own people, to judge from the yellow beard and long flaxen hair; that color wasn't common even

among the Seven Tribes and rare as hen's teeth among outlanders. He thought he recognized Smeyth

One-Eye, an outcast from the Panthers who lived a little north and west of here.

Finally caught him lifting the wrong man's horses, he supposed with idle curiosity. One-Eye had

needed shortening for some time, being a bully and a lazy, thieving one at that. Or maybe it was lifting the

wrong womans skirts.

The other heads were in a clump away from One-Eye's perch, and their features made him look more

closely, past the raven damage—they weren't as fresh as the outlaw's. They were darker of skin than his

folk, wiry-haired, massively scarred in zigzag ritual patterns that made them even more hideous in death

than they had been in life, several with human finger-bones through the septums of their noses. The lips

drawn back in the final rictus showed rotting teeth filed to points.

Man-eaters, Robre thought, and spat.

He waved greeting to the guards at the gate—Alligator clansmen, since Dannulsford was the seat of

their Jefe. The Bear Creek families had no feud with the Alligators just at the moment, but he would have

been safe within the wands in any case. A Fair was peace-holy; even outright foreigners could come

here unmolested along the river or trade roads, when no great war was being waged.

Two of the Alligator warriors stood and leaned on their weapons, a spear and a Mehk musket, wearing

hide helmets made from the head-skins of their totem and keeping an eye on the thronging

traffic. They wouldn't interfere unless fights broke out or someone blocked the muddy path, in which case

they could call for backup from half a dozen others who crouched and threw dice on a deerhide. Those

warriors kept their weapons close to hand, of course, and one had an Imperial breech-loading rifle that the

Bear Creek man eyed with raw but well-concealed envy. The Alliga-' tors were rich from trade

with the coastlands, and inclined to be toplofty.

One of the gamblers looked up and smiled,, gap-toothed. "Heya, Hunter Robre," he said in greeting.

"Heya, Jefe's-man Tomul," Robre said politely in return, stopping to chat. "A raid?" He jerked his

thumb at the stakes with the ten heads. "Wild-men?"

The hunter stood aside from a string of pack mules that was followed by an oxcart heaped with

pumpkins; axles squealed like dying pigs, and the shock-headed youth riding the vehicle popped his

whip. The three horses that carried Robre's pelts were well trained and followed him, bending their heads

to crop at weeds when their master stopped.

"Yi-a/i, swamp-devils, right enough." The Alligator chieftain's guardsman nodded. "Burned a settler's

cabin east of Muskrat Creek—old Stinking Pehte."

"Not Stinking Pehte the Friendless? Pehte sunna Dubai?"

"Him 'n' none other; made an ax-land claim there 'n' built a cabin two springs ago, him 'n' his wife 'n'

younglings. Set to clearing land for com. Jefe Carul saw the smoke 'n' called out the neighborhood men

in posse. Caught 'em this side of the Black River. Even got a prisoner back alive—a girl."

Robre's eyebrows went up. "Surprised they didn't eat her," he said.

"They'd just started in to skin her. Ate her kin first. 'S how we caught 'em—stopped for their fun."

Stinking Pehte must have been an even bigger fool than everyone thought, to settle that far east, Robre thought,

but it wouldn't do to say it aloud. Men had to resent an insult to one of their own clan and totem, even if they

agreed with it in their hearts.

"Where's ol' Grippem 'n' Ayzbitah?" the guard asked, looking for the big hounds that usually followed

the hunter.

Robre cleared his throat and spat into the mud of the road, turning his head to cover a sudden prickle

in his eyes. "Got the dog-sickness, had to put 'em down," he said.

The guards made sympathetic noises at the hard news. "Good hunting?" Tomul went on, waving

toward the rawhide-covered bundles on the Bear Creek man's pack saddles.

"Passable—just passable," Robre replied, with mournful untruth. He pushed back his broad-brimmed,

low-crowned hat to scratch meditatively at his raven-black hair. "Mostly last winter's cure, the

second-rate stuff I held back in spring. Hope to do better this year."

"Jefe Carul killed two cows for God-thanks at sunrise," Tomul said; it was two hours past dawn now.

"Probably some of the beef left if you've a hunger."

Robre snorted and shook his head. Sacrificial beef was free to any man of the Seven Tribes, but also

likely to be old and tough. Lord o' Sky didn't care about the quality of the Cattle, just their number, it

being the thought that counted. He wasn't that short of silver.

Tomul went on: "See you around, then; we'll drink a mug. Mind you don't break the Fair's peace-bans

while you're here, or it's a whuppin' from the Jefe."

"I'm no brawler," Robre said defensively.

"Then give me these back," Tomul chuckled in answer, pulling down the corner of his mouth with a

little finger to show two missing molars.

The other warriors around the deerskin howled laughter and Robre laughed back, taking up the lead

rein of his forward pack horse and leading the beasts under the massive timber gateway, between hulking

log blockhouses. The huge black-oak timbers that supported the gate on either side were carved and

painted; Coyote on the left grinning with his tongue lolling over his fangs and a stogie in the corner of his

mouth, the Corn Lady on the right holding a stalk of maize in one hand and a hoe in the other, and God

the Father on the lintel above. Robre bowed his head for an instant as he passed beneath the stern

bearded face of the Lord of Sky, murmuring a luck-word.

' The pack horses followed him into the throng within, shying and snorting and rolling their eyes a bit.

Robre sympathized; the crowds and stink were enough to gag a buzzard. Nearly a hundred people lived

here year-round; Jefe Carul in his two-story fort-mansion of squared timbers, and his wives, his children;

his household men and their wives and children in ordinary cabins of mud-chinked logs; a few slaves and

landless, clanless laborers in shacks; plus craftsmen and tinkers and peddlers who found Dannulsford a

convenient headquarters, and their dependents.

Now it swarmed with twenty times that number; the Dannulsford Fair got bigger every year, it seemed.

This year's held more people than Robre had ever seen in one place before, until only narrow crowded

lanes were left between booths and sheds and tents and more folk still spilled over into camps outside the

oak logs of the stockade. The air was thick with wood smoke, smells of dung and frying food and fresh

corn bread, man's sweat, and the smells of leather, horses, mules and oxen, and dogs. The Fair came

after the corn and cotton were in but before hard frost and the prime pig-slaughtering season; a time for

the Jefe to kill cattle for the Lord o' Sky and to preside over disputes brought for judgment, and for the

assembled free men of the clan to make laws.

And, he thought with a grin, to make marriages and chase girls and swap and dicker and guzzle

popskull, boast, and tell tales. Robre was a noted tale-teller himself, when the mood was on him. Time to

trade with outland men, too.

Dannulsford was as far north on the Three Forks River as you could float anything bigger than a canoe;

that meant the Fair of the Alligators was far larger than most. There were Kumanch come down over the

Westwall escarpment with strings of horses and buffalo pelts; Cherokee from the north with fine tobacco,

rock-oil to burn in lamps, and bars of wrought iron for smiths; Dytchers from the Hill Country with wine

and applejack and dried fruits; and black-skinned men from the coast with sugar and rum, rice and

cinnamon and nutmeg.

Some from even farther away. A Mehk trader rode by, wearing a broad sombrero and tight jacket and

tooled-leather chaps over buttoned knee-breeches, his silver-studded saddle glistening. The great wagons

behind him were escorted by a brace of leather-jacketed lancers, short stocky men with brown skins and

smooth cheeks, bandannas on their heads beneath broad-brimmed hats, gold rings in their ears, machetes at

their belts, sitting their horses as if they'd grown there.

Say what you like about Mehk, they can ride for certain sure, Robre thought: or at least their

caballeros and fighters could. Among the Seven Tribes every free man was a warrior, but it was different

beyond the Wadeyloop River.

The merchant the lancers served was crying up his wares as he went; fine drink distilled from the

maguay cactus, silks and silver jewelry and bright painted pots, tools and sundries, dried hot peppers and

gaudy feathers and cocoa and coffee in the bean. He had muskets and powder and round lead balls for

sale, too; Robre's lip curled.

A smoothbore flintlock didn't have the range or accuracy of a good bow, and it was a lot slower to

use—slower even than the crossbows some favored. A musket was useful for shooting duck with birdshot,

or for a woman to keep around the cabin for self-defense, but he didn't think it was a man's weapon.

All the foreigners stood out, among his own folk of the Seven Tribes—the fearless free-striding maidens

in shifts that showed their calves or even their knees, wives more decorous in long skirts and headscarves,

men much like himself in thigh-length hunting shirts of linsey-woolsey or cotton, breechcloiits and leggings

of deer hide, soft boots cross-laced to the knee, their long hair confined by headbands and topped by

broad-brimmed leather hats often decorated by a jaunty feather or two, their beards clipped close to the

jaw.

Robre returned waves and calls with a polite heya, but stopped to talk with none, not even the children

who followed him calling Hunter! Robre the Hunter! Story, story, story!

Partly that was a wordless shyness he would never confess at the sheer press of people; he was more at

home in the woods or prairies, though he knew he cut a striking figure, and had a fitting pride in it, and in

the fact that many men knew his deeds. He was tall even for his tall people, his shoulders and arms thick,

chest deep, legs long and muscular, a burly blue-eyed, black-haired young man. who kept his face shaved in

an outland fashion just spreading among some of the younger set. His hunting shirt of homespun cotton was

mottled in shades of earth brown and forest green; at his waist he bore a long knife and a short sword in

beaded leather sheaths, with a smaller blade tucked into his right boot-top. Quiver and bow rode at his

shoulder—he preferred the shorter, handier recurved horn-and-sinew Kumanch style to the more usual

wooden longbow—and a tomahawk was thrust through a loop at the small of his back.

The man he sought should be down by the levee on the river-bank, where the flatboats and canoes

clustered. And where . . .

Yes. That's it, and no other.

The boat from the coast was huge, for all its shallow draft, like a flat tray fifty feet long and twenty wide.

At its rear was an odd contraption like a mill's wheel, and amidships was a tall thin funnel; a flag fluttered

red and white and blue from a slender mast, a thing of diagonal crosses—the Empire's flag. Somehow a fire

made the rear wheel go round to drive the boat upstream—

Robre made a covert sign with his fingers at the thought, and whistled a few bars of the Song Against

Witches. The steamboat was an Imperial thing. Imperials were city folk, even more than the Mehk, and so

to be despised as weaklings. Yet they were also the masters and makers of all things wonderful, of the best

guns, of boats pushed by fire and of writing on paper, of fine steel and fine glassware and of cloth softer

than a maiden's cheek. And they told tales wilder than any Robre had made around the fire of an evening,

about lands beyond the eastern seas and a mighty queen who ruled half the world from a city with a

thousand thousand dwellers and stone houses taller than ojd-growth pines.

Robre snorted and spat again. The Imperials also claimed their Queen-Empress ruled all the land here,

which was not just a tall tale but a stupid, insulting one. The Seven Tribes knew that they and none other

ruled their homes, and they would kill any man among them who dared call himself a king, as if free

clansmen were no better than Mehk peons.

I figure the Imperials come from one of the islands in the eastern sea, Robre thought, nodding to

himself. Everyone knew there were a mort of islands out there: England, Africa, the Isle of Three Witches.

Past Kuba or Baydos, even, maybe. They puff it up big to impress gullible folk down along the coast.

The clansman pushed past an open-fronted smithy full of noise and clamor, where the blacksmith and his

apprentices hammered and sweated, and on to a big shack of planks. The shutters on the front were

opened wide, and he gave an inward sigh of relief. He'd have had to turn round and go home, if the little

Imperial merchant hadn't been here; he usually stopped first at Dannulsford Fair on his yearly rounds, but

not always.

"Heya, Banerjii," he said.

Banerjii looked up from the gloom inside the store, where he sat cross-legged on a cushion with a plank

across his lap holding abacus and account book.

"Namaste, Hunter Robre, sunna Jowan," he said, and made an odd gesture, like a bow with hands

pressed palm-to-palm before his face, which was his folk's way of saying heya and shaking hands.

"Come in, it being always wery good to see you," the trader went on, in good Seven Tribes speech but

with an odd singsong accent that turned every w to a v.

Odd, Robre thought, as he sat and a few local boys hired by the trader saw to his baggage and beasts.

But then, the merchant was odd in all ways. He looked strange— brown as a Mehk, but fine boned and

plump, sharp featured and clean shaven. His clothing was a jacket of lose white cotton, a fore-and-aft cap

of the same, and an elaborately folded loincloth he called something like dooty. Even odder was his

bodyguard, who was somehow an Imperial, too, for all that he looked nothing at all like his employer, being

three shades lighter for starters; there were men of the Seven Tribes who were darker of skin. The guard

was nearly as tall as Robre, and looked near as strong; and unlike his clean-shaved employer, he wore a

neat spade-shaped beard. He also tucked his hair up under a wrapped cloth turban, wore pants and tunic

and belt, and at that belt carried a single-edged blade as long as a clansman's short sword. He looked as if

he knew exactly what to do with it, too, while Banerjii was soft enough to spread on a hunk ofcornpone.

A young man who looked like a relative of the merchant brought food, a bowl of ham and beans, the

luxury of a loaf of wheaten bread, and a big mug of corn beer. All were good of their kind; the cooked dish

was full of spices that made his eyes water and mouth burn. He cleared it with a wad of bread and a draft

of the cool lumpy beer, which tasted like that from Jefe Carul's own barrels. Banerjii nibbled politely from a

separate tray; another of his oddities was that he'd eat no food that wasn't prepared by his own kin, and no

meat at all. Some thought he feared poison.

They made polite conversation about weather and crops and gossip, until Robre wiped the inside of the

bowl with the heel of the bread, belched, and downed the last of the beer. During the talk his eyes had

kept flicking to the wall. Not to the shimmering cloth printed with peacock colors and beautiful alien

patterns, though he longed to. lay a bolt of it before his mother, or to the axes and swords and knives, or

to the medicines and herbs, or to the tools. You .could get cloth and cutlery and plowshares, needles and

thread anywhere, if none so fine. It was the two rifles that drew his gaze, and the bandoliers of bright

brass cartridges. No other folk on earth made those.

"So," Banerjii said. "Pelts are slow this year, but I might be able to take a few—for friendship's sake,

you understand."

"Of course," Robre said. "I have six bearskins—one brown bear, seven feet 'n' not stretched."

The contents of the packs came out, all but one. They dickered happily, while the shadows grew longer

on the rough pine planks of the walls; the prices weren't much different from the previous season. They

never were, for all that Banerjii always complained prices were down, and for all that Robre kept talking of

going to the coast and the marts of fabled Galveston on his own—that would be too much trouble and

danger, and both men knew it. Robre smiled to himself as the Imperial's eyes darted once or twice to the

last, the unopened, pack.

"Got some big-cat skins," he said at last.

Banerjii's sigh was heartfelt, and his big brown eyes were liquid with sincerity. "Alas, my good friend,

cougar are a drug on the market." Sometimes his use of the language was a little strange; that made no

sense in Seven Tribes talk. "If you have jaguar, I could move one or two for you. Possibly lion, if they are

large and unmarked."

Robre nodded. Jaguar were still rare this far north, though more often seen than in his father's time. And

there were few lion prides east of the Westwall escarpment. Wordlessly, he undid the pack and rolled it out

with a sweeping gesture.

Banerjii said something softly in his own language, then schooled his face to calmness. Robre smiled as

the small brown hands caressed the tiger-skins. And not just tiger, he thought happily. Both animals were

some sort of sport, their skins a glossy black marked by narrow stripes of yellow gold. And they were huge,

as well, each nine feet from the nose to the base of the tail.

"Got 'em far off in the east woods," he said. That was a prideful thing to say; those lands weren't safe,

what with ague and swamp-devils. "You won't see the likes of those any time soon."

"No," Banerjii said. "And so, how am I to tell what their price should be?"

Robre kept his confident smile, but something sank within his gut. He would neverget the price of what

he craved. He was an only son, his father dead and his mother a cripple, with no close living kin—and his

father had managed to quarrel with all the more distant ones. Most of what he gleaned went to buy his

mother's care and food; oh, the clan would not let her starve even if Robre died, but the lot of a friendless

widow was still bitter, doubly so if she could not do a woman's work. The price of the rifle was three times

what he made in a year's trapping and trading . . . and if he borrowed the money from the merchant,

he'd be the merchant's man for five years at least, probably forever. He'd need ammunition, too, not

just for use but for practice, if the weapon was to do him any good.

The Imperial smiled. "But perhaps there is another thing you might do, and—" He dipped his head at the

rifles. "I think, my good friend, you have put me in the way of something even more valuable than these

pelts." He rubbed his hands. "Another of my countrymen has arrived. A lord—a Jefe—:not a merchant like

me, and a hunter of note. He will need a guide. ..."

II: The Lord in His Glory

"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-chents 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 river-bank. The Imperial cavalrymen walked with their left hands on the hilts of

their curved tu/war-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 & 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.

lll: The Maiden in Her Wrath

Sonjuh dawtra Pehte thrust her way into the beer shop through the swinging board doors, halting for a

second to let her eyes adjust to the bright earth-oil lamps and push back her broad-brimmed hat. The

dim street outside was lit only by a few pine-knots here and there.

There were a few shocked gasps; a respectable girl didn't walk into a man's den like this

unaccompanied. Some of the gasps were for her dress.—she'd added buckskin leggings and boots,

which made her maiden's shift look more like a man's hunting shirt, and so did the leather belt cinched

about her waist, carrying a long bowie and short double-edged toothpicker dagger and tomahawk. A

horseshoe-shaped blanket roll rode from left shoulder to right hip, in the manner of a hunter or traveler.

One man sitting on the wall-bench, not an Alligator clansman and the worse for corn-liquor,

misinterpreted and made a grab for her backside. That brought the big dog walking beside her into

action; her sharp command saved the oaf's hand, but Slasher still caught the forearm in his jaws hard

enough to bring a yelp of pain. The stranger also started to reach for the short sword on his belt, until the

jaws clamped tighter, tight enough to make him yell.

"You wouldn't have been trying to grab my ass uninvited, would you, stranger?" Sonjuh said sweetly.

"'Cause if you'were, after Slasher here takes your hand off, these clansmen of mine will just naturally have

to take you to the Jefe for a whuppin'. 'Less they stomp you to death their own selves."

The man stopped the movement of right hand to hilt, looked around—a fair number of men were

glaring at him now, distracted from their disapproval of Sonjuh—and decided to shake his head. A sensible

man was very polite out of his own clan's territory. If he wasn't. . . well, that was how feuds started.

"No offense, missie," he wheezed.

"Loose him," Sonjuh commanded, and the dog did—reluctantly.

The man picked up his gear and made for the door; several of the others sitting on stools and rough

half-log benches called witticisms or haw-hawed as he went; Sonjuh ignored the whole business and

walked on.

The laughter or the raw whiskey he'd downed prompted the man to stick his head back around the

timber doorframe and yell, "Suck my dick, you whore!"

Sonjuh felt something wash from face down to thighs, a feeling like hot rum toddy on an empty stomach,

but nastier. She pivoted, drew, and her right hand moved in a chopping blur.

The tomahawk pinwheeled across the room to sink into the rough timber beside the door, a whirr of

cloven air that ended in a solid chunk of steel in oak. The out-clan stranger gaped at his hand, still resting

on .the timber where the edge of the throwing-ax had taken a coin-size divot off the end of the middle

finger, about halfway down through the fingernail. Then he leapt, howling and dancing from foot to foot and

gripping the injured hand in the other as the mutilated digit spattered blood; after a moment he ran off down

the street, still howling and shouting bitch! at the top of his lungs.

Most of the men in the beer shop laughed at that, some so loud they fell to the rush-strewn clay floor and

lay kicking their legs in the air. She went and pulled the tomahawk out of the wood, wiped it on her sleeve,

and reslung it; Slasher sniffed at something on the floor, then snapped it up. The roaring chorus of guffaws

and he-haws was loud enough to bring curious bypassers to the door and windows, and send more hoots of

mirth down the street as the tale spread; several men slapped her on the back, or offered drinks—offers

she declined curtly. The older men were quiet, she noticed, and still frowning at her.

Instead she pushed through the long smoky room toward the back, where the man she sought was

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