was soft enough to spread on a hunk of cornpone.
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 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.”
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,
