Worlds That Weren't

Robre kept his confident smile, but something sank within his gut. He would never get 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.”