The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories Part 25

Here was treachery writ large.

He read it, writ subtle, in Ganelon's face. He could never have thought to be so betrayed, and so simply. And by his brainless braggart of a stepson.

They had all drawn back from him. He seemed just now to realize it. He was white under his elegant beard, struggling to maintain his expression of innocence. Ganelon, who had never made a secret of his hatred for Roland; whose very openness had been deceit. Who would have expected that he would turn traitor? Open attack, surely, daggers drawn in hall, a challenge to a duel; but this, no one had looked for. Least of all, and most d.a.m.nably of all, the king.

"It would have been better for you," Charles said, "if you had killed him before my face. Clean murder bears a clean penalty. For this, you will pay in your heart's blood."

"Pay, sire?" Ganelon struggled even yet to seem baffled. "Surely, sire, you do not think-"

"I know," said Charles. His eyes burned. They were wide, he knew, and pale, and terrible. When they fell on the Greek, the man blanched.

"I am not," he said, "a part of this. I counselled against it. I foresaw this very outcome."

"You sanctioned it with your empress' gold," said the king.

"For what an agent does with his wages, I bear no responsibility."

Charles laughed. His guards had drawn in, shoulder to shoulder. If the traitor had any thought of escape, he quelled it. He regarded his quondam ally with no surprise, if with nothing approaching pleasure.

"You shall be tried," the king said to him, "where the law commands, before my tribunal in Gaul. I expect that you will receive the extremest penalty. I devoutly pray that you may suffer every pang of guilt and grief and rage to which even a creature of your ilk should be subject."

Ganelon stiffened infinitesimally, but not with dismay. Was that the beginning of a smile? "You have no certain proof," he said.

"G.o.d will provide," said Charles.

"G.o.d? Or Allah?"

Bold, that one, looking death in the face. If death it was that he saw. It was a long way to Gaul, and his tongue was serpent-supple. Had not Charles himself been taken in by it?

Charles met his eyes and made them fall. "Yes," he said, answering the man's question. "There you have it. G.o.d, or Allah? The Christians' G.o.d, or all the G.o.ds of my faith who in the end are one, or the G.o.d of the Prophet? Would you have me choose now? Julian is dead, his teachings forgotten everywhere but in my court. The Christ lives; the sons of the Prophet rule in Baghdad, and offer alliance. I know what I am in this world. Byzantium dares to hope in me, to hold back the armies of Islam. Islam knows that without me it can never rule in the north of the world. How does it twist in you, betrayer of kin, to know that I am the fulcrum on which the balance rests?"

"Islam," said Ganelon without a tremor, "offers you the place of a va.s.sal king. Byzantium would make you its emperor."

"So it would. And such a marriage it would be, I ruling here in Gaul, and she on the Golden Horn. Or would I be expected to settle in Constantinople? Who then would rule my people? You, kinslayer? Is that the prize you played for?"

"Better I than a wild boy who could never see a battle without flinging himself into the heart of it."

The king's fist lashed out. Ganelon dropped. "Speak no ill of the dead," Charles said.

The others were silent. They did not press him; and yet it was there, the necessity, the making of choices. If he would take vengeance for this slaughter, he must move now.

He began to smile. It was not, he could well sense, pleasant to see. "Yes," he said. "Revenge. It's fortunate for my sister-son, is it not, that I'm pagan, and no Christian, to have perforce to forgive. You plotted well, kinslayer. You thought to turn me against Islam and cast me into the empress' arms. Would there be a dagger for me there? Or, more properly Greek, poison in my cup?"

Sire," said Ganelon, and that was desperation, now, at last. "Sire, do not judge the empire by the follies of a single servant."

"I would never do that," Charles said. "But proof of long conviction will do well enough. I will never set my people under the Byzantine heel. Even with the promise of a throne. Thrones can pa.s.s, like any other glory of this world; and swiftly, if those who offer them are so minded."

"Still, my lord, you cannot choose Islam. Would you betray all that the Divine Julian fought for? Would you turn against Rome herself?"

If the Greek had said it, Charles would have responded altogether differently. But it was Ganelon who spoke, and Ganelon who felt the pain of it.

"I am," said Charles, "already, in the caliph's eyes, his emir over Spain. I am not able for the moment to press the claim. Gaul needs me, and Gaul is mine first. If Baghdad will want the justice in that, then," he said, "I choose Islam."

No thunder roared in the sky; no shaking rent the earth. There were only a handful of men in a narrow pa.s.s, and the dead, and the sun too low still to cast its light on them. Spain was behind them; the mountain before and beyond it, Gaul. What its king chose, it also would choose. He knew his power there.

He bent and took up Roland's horn. It rang softly, bearing still a weight of imperial gold. With it in his hands, he said the words which he must say. If his conviction was not yet as pure as it might be, then surely he would be forgiven. He was doing it for Gaul, and for the empire that would be. But before even that, for Roland who was his sister's son, who had died for Byzantine gold.

Charles was, when it came to it, a simple man. The choice had not been simple, until Ganelon made it so. A better traitor than he knew, that one. Traitor even to his own cause.

" There is no G.o.d but G.o.d," said the king of the Franks and the Lombards, "and Muhammad is the Prophet of G.o.d."

The English Mutiny.

Ian R. MacLeod.

I was there. I was f.u.c.king there.

I know that's what they say, all of us English anyway, and half the rest of the Empire besides. The fact that people think they can make that claim-tell anyone who'll listen to them how they survived the atrocities and sieges-is supposed to be evidence enough. But I was. I was there. Right at the beginning, and way, way earlier than that. I knew Private Sepoy Second Cla.s.s Johnny Sponson of the Devons.h.i.+res long before that name meant anything. More than knew the guy, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d, the sadhu holy monster, the saint-whatever you want to call him. I loved him. I hated him. He saved my f.u.c.king life.

Me? I was just a soldier, a squaddie, another sepoy of the Mughal Empire. I really didn't count. Davey Whittings, Sir, Sahib, and where do you want that latrine dug? Always was-just like my dad and his dad before him. All took the Resident's rupee and gave their blood. No real sense of what we were, other than targets for enemy cannon. Stand up and salute or drop down and die. n.o.body much cared what the difference was, either, least of all us.

But Johnny Sponson was different. Johnny came out of nowhere with stories you wouldn't believe and a way of talking that sounded like he was forever taking the p.i.s.s. In a way, he was. In a way, he was s.h.i.+tting us all with his tall good looks and his la di da. But he was also deadly earnest.

This was at the start of the Scottish campaign. One of them anyway-rebellious b.a.s.t.a.r.ds that the Scots are, I know there's been a lot. Never really saw that much of Johnny at first as we marched north through England. But I knew there was this new guy with us who liked the look of his reflection and the sound of his voice. Could hear him sometimes as I lay trying to get some sleep. Holding forth.

But no-no ... Already, I'm getting this wrong. The way I'm describing Johnny Sponson, someone like him would never have got as far as being torn apart by Scottish guns. He'd have copped it long before in a parade ground misfire with some sepoy-oops, sorry Sarge, silly me-leaning the wrong way on his musket. Or maybe a garrote in the night. Anything, really, just to shut the loudmouthed f.u.c.ker up. But with Johnny, there was always something extra-a tale beyond the tale he was spinning or some new scam to make the half-blood NCOs look like even bigger c.u.n.ts than they already were. Even then, even before the revolt, mutiny, freedom war, whatever you want to call it, Johnny simply didn't give the tiniest f.u.c.k about all the usual military bulls.h.i.+t. He was an original. He was a one-off.

Johnny might have been just a private, a sepoy, lowest of the low, but he'd grown up as Lord-in-waiting on one of the last English estates. Learned to read and fight and fence and dance and talk there, and do all the other things he could do so much better than the rest of us combined. Even I was listening to Johnny's stories by the time we crossed Hadrian's Wall. We all were. And the place he was describing that he'd come from didn't sound much like the England I knew. There were no factories or hovels or beggars. I pictured it as a world of magic-like so-called Mother India or heaven, but somehow different and better still. The landscapes were softer, the skies less huge. I saw green lawns and cozy rooms filled with golden warmth, and the whole thing felt real to me the way things only can when you're marching toward battle and your back aches and your feet hurt. It was a fine place, was Johnny's estate, and all of it was taken from him because some Indian vakil lawyer came up with a sc.r.a.p of ancient paper that disproved the Sponson family t.i.tle.

The way Johnny told his story, it span on like those northern roads we had to march. He used words we'd never heard. Words like right and liberty and nation. Words like reversion, which was how the Mughal Empire had swallowed up so much of England when the country was rightly ours. Bankrupted, disinherited, thrown out on the streets, Johnny had had no choice but to sign up for the Resident's rupee like the rest of us. And so here he was, marching north behind the elephants with the rest of us Devons.h.i.+res to fight the savage b.l.o.o.d.y Scots.

Never seen such mountains before. Never felt such cold. The Scottish peasants, they live in slum hovels that would make a sorry dump like York or Bristol seem lovely as Hyderabad. They reek of burned dung. The women came to our camps at night, offering to let us f.u.c.k them for half a loaf of bread. They'd let you do it, as well, before they slipped a dagger into your ribs and scarpered off with the bread. Can't even remember how I got hit exactly. We were on this high, wind-bitten road. Elephants pulling the ordnance ahead. Then a whoosh. Then absolute silence, and I was staring at a pool of my own steaming guts. It seemed easy, just to lie there on the frozen road. I mean, what the h.e.l.l difference did it make? Private Davey Whittings, second cla.s.s. Snap your heels, stand up straight lad, salute the flag of Empire and pay good attention to the cleanliness of your gun. Death or glory, just like my dad always used to say before beating me for something I hadn't done.

But the voice I heard was Private Johnny Sponson's, not my dad's at all. My dad's been dead these last fifteen years, and I hope the b.a.s.t.a.r.d didn't give the vultures too much bellyache. But I was raving about him-and how my dear mum had then done the decent thing and walked into a furnace-as Johnny pushed my insides back where they belonged, then lifted me up and tied me to what was left of a wagon. Then, seeing as all the elephants were dead and the bullocks were all shot to mincemeat, he started to haul me himself back along that windy road for ... I really don't know how many days, how many miles.

At the end of it, there was this military hospital. I already knew all about military f.u.c.king hospitals. If you wanted to live, you avoided such places like the plague. If you wanted to die, it was far better to die on a battlefield. Without Johnny Sponson there, I wouldn't have stood a chance. The whole place was freezing. Wet tents in a lake of mud. Got me through, though, Johnny did. Found me enough blankets to stop me freezing solid. Changed the dressings on my wound, nagged the nurses to give me some of the half-decent food they otherwise saved for themselves. b.a.s.t.a.r.d saved my f.u.c.king life. So in a way I was the first of Johnny Sponson's famous miracles, least as far as I know. But Christ wasn't there, and neither was Mohammed or Shakti. Johnny wasn't some ghost or saint or angel like the way you'd hear some people talk. It was just him, and he was just being Johnny, and filling my head with his Johnny Sponson stories. Which was more than enough.

Told me how half the platoon had got killed or injured in that Scottish bombardment. Told me how he'd fluked his way around the cannonfire in the same way he'd fluked his way around most things. Then he'd seen me lying there with half of me insides out and decided I could do with some help. Suppose he could have saved someone else-someone with a far better chance of living than I ever had. Why me? All the time I knew him, I never thought to ask.

Johnny told me many things. How, for example, little England had once been a power to be reckoned with in the world. How this guy called William Hawkins had once sailed all the way around the Horn of Africa to India back in the days when the Mughal Empire didn't even cover all of India let alone Europe, and no one had even dreamed of the Egyptian Ca.n.a.l. How Hawkins arrived in pomp at the court of Jehangir. How, the way things had been back then, he'd been an emissary from equal kingdoms. No, more than that, because Hawkins had sailed from England to India, and not the other way around. After that, there'd been trade, of course. Spices and silks, mainly, from India-with English wool and the sort of cheap gewgaws we were already getting so good at manufacturing in return. The stuff became hugely fas.h.i.+onable, so Johnny a.s.sured me, which always helps.

So there we were, the English and the Mughals, equal partners, and safely half a world away from each other, and between us lay the Portuguese, who were traveling and trading as well. Then something changed. I was still half in and out of my fever, but I remember Johnny shaking his head. Like, for just this once, he didn't know the answer. Something, he kept saying, as if he couldn't figure what. Of course, these were difficult times, the sort the priests will still tell you about-when it snowed in England one sunless August and the starving ate the dead, and the Mughals expanded across India looking for food and supplies-looking for allies, as well. They could have turned to England, I suppose. That was what Johnny said, anyway. But the Mughals turned to Portugal instead. A great armada was formed, and we English were defeated, and the Mughal Empire expanded all that way to the northerly fringes of Europe. I know, I know-I remember Johnny clapping his hands and laughing and shaking his head. b.l.o.o.d.y ridiculous-England and India united by an Empire, which has since pushed south and west across France and Spain and Prussia, and east from India across all the lands of Araby. Half the world taken as if in some fit of forgetfulness, and who the h.e.l.l knows why...

So I recovered in that hospital with a scar on my belly and a strange new way of looking at things. Sometimes, it sounded to me as if Johnny was just talking to himself. In a way, I think he was. Practicing what he wanted to say in those famous speeches that came not long after. He certainly had a way of talking, did Johnny. So much of the truth's lost now, but Johnny really was an educated man. He'd say the words of writers written years ago in English, of all languages-instead of proper Persian or Hindi or Arabic-as if they were fresh as baked bread.

There was this Shakes-something, and I thought at first Johnny meant an Arab prince. I can even remember some. If it is a sin to covert honor, then I am the most offending soul. That was one of them. Learned from his tutors, who taught him about the old ways of England in that fine estate before the Mughals took it away from him like the greedy bloodsucking b.a.s.t.a.r.ds they are. Not that Johnny would put it so bluntly, but I learned that from him as well-how it wasn't as simple as the Indians being in charge and us English being the servants, the sepoys, the ones who worked the mines and choked on our own blood to keep their palaces warm.

Death. Guns. Spit and blood and polish. How to use a bayonet in the daylight of battle and a garrote in the dark. That was all I knew before Johnny Sponson came along. I was never that much of a drinker, or a chancer, or a gambler of any kind. Don't stand out-that was the only thing I'd ever learned from my dear departed dad, b.a.s.t.a.r.d that he was. I spent most of what little spare time I had, and even littler spare thought, on wandering around whatever place I happened to be billeted. Liked to look up at the buildings and over the bridges and stand outside the temples, just studying the scene. Watch the sadhu beggars with their ash-smeared bodies, their thin ribs and twisted and amputated limbs. I was fascinated by the things they did, the way they adorned and painted what was left of themselves, affixed it with hooks and nails and bamboo pins. But what struck me most was the contrast-the beauty of their aspiration to be one with G.o.d, and the ugliness of what you actually saw. And the ways they smiled and rocked and moaned and screamed-was that pain, or was it ecstasy? I never really understood.

Those of us Devons.h.i.+res considered alive enough to be worth saving were put on board this s.h.i.+p which was to take us to our next posting in London. The winter weather was kind to us on that journey south. The cold winds pushed us easily and the sea was smooth, and the sailors were good at turning a blind eye in the way that sailors generally are. We sepoys lay out there on the deck underneath the stars with the sconces burning, and we talked and we danced and we drank. And Johnny, being Johnny, talked and drank and danced most of all.

You remember what that time before the mutiny was like-you remember the rumors? The plans to extend the term of service for us sepoys from fifteen to twenty years? That, and the forced conversion to Islam? Not that we cared much about any kind of religion, but the business of circ.u.mcision-that got us as angry as you'd expect. It just needed something ... I remember Johnny saying exactly that as I leaned with him looking out at the s.h.i.+p's white backwash and the wheeling gulls-how the Indians would be nothing without us English, how the whole of their Empire would collapse if someone finally pulled out just one tiniest bit like a house of cards...

There was a lot of other stuff as well. Hopes and plans. What we'd do come the day. And Johnny seemed at the center of it, to me at least. But where all those rumors came from, whether they were his or someone else's or arose in several different places all at once, I really couldn't tell. But that whole idea that England was waiting for Johnny Sponson-like the people knew him already, or had invented him like something magical in their hour of need ... I can't tell you that that was true. But there are many kinds of lies-that's one thing that being around Johnny Sponson taught me. And maybe the lie that there were whole regiments of sepoys just waiting for the appearance of something that had the size and shape and sheer f.u.c.king b.a.l.l.s of Johnny Sponson ... Well, maybe that's the closest lie there is to the truth.

So we ended up down in London, and were billeted in Whitehall barracks, and the air was already full of trouble even before that spring began. Everywhere now, there was talk. So much of it that even the officers-who mostly couldn't speak a word of English to save their lives, as many of them would soon come to regret-caught on. The restrictions, the rules, the regimental bulls.h.i.+t, got ever stupider-and that was saying a lot. The whole wretched city was under curfew, but Johnny and I still got out over the barracks walls. There used to be these bars in London then, down by Charing Cross-the sort where women and men could dance with each other, and you could buy a proper drink. Illegal dives, of course. The sweat dripped down the walls, and there was worse on the floor. But that wasn't the point. The point was just to be there-your head filled up with pipe smoke and cheering and music loud enough to make your ears ring.

And afterwards when the booze and the dancing and maybe a few of the girls had finally worn everyone out, Johnny and I and the rest of us sepoys would stagger back through London's curfew darkness. I remember the last time we got out was the night before the Muharram parade when the mutiny began, and how Johnny danced the way even he had never danced before. Tabletops and bar-tops and crashed-over benches held no obstacle-there was already a wildness in his eyes. As if he already knew. And perhaps he did. After all, he was Johnny Sponson.

Johnny and I rolled arm in arm late that night along the ghats beside the Thames. And still he talked. He was saying how the Moslem Mughals were so nice and accommodating to the Hindus, and how the Hindus took everything they could in return. Something about an officer cla.s.s and a merchant cla.s.s, and the two getting on with each other nicely, the deal being that every other religion got treated like dogs.h.i.+t as a result. Like the Jews, for example. Or the Romanies. Even the Catholic Portuguese, who'd had centuries to regret helping conquer England for the Mughals. Or us Protestant Christians here in England-although anyone rich enough to afford it turns to Mecca or buys themselves into a caste. Why, Johnny, he could take me along this river, right within these city walls, and show me what was once supposed to have been a great new cathedral-a place called Saint Paul's. A half-built ruin, it was, even though it was started before the Mughals invaded more than two hundred years ago.

I remember how he disentangled himself from my arm and wavered over to a wall in that elegant way he still managed when he was drunk. The guy even p.i.s.sed with a flouris.h.!.+ Never stopped talking, as well. About how this wall was part of something called the English Repository, where much of what used to belong to the lost English kings-the stuff, anyway, that hasn't been melted down and s.h.i.+pped back to India-had been left to rot. Thrones and robes. Great works of literature, too. Shakespeare, Chaucer-men no one in England has heard of now ... n.o.body came here, except a few mad scholars looking for a hint of English exoticism to spice up their dreary poems. That, and another kind of trade ... Johnny was still p.i.s.sing as he talked. "I believe the mollies frequent the darker aisles. Their customers call them repository girls..." Finally, he hitched himself up, turned around and gave me the wink. "I believe they're quite reasonable. You should try them, Davey."

We wandered on. But, as any soldier will tell you, it's a whole lot easier to get out of barracks than it is to get back in, and Johnny and I were spotted by the sentries just as we were hanging our a.r.s.es over the top of the wall. Which is how we ended up on punishment duty on next day's famous parade, and perhaps why everything else that happened came about.

It started out as a fine late winter's morning. People seem to forget that. Muharram, it was, and I remember thinking that this whole pestilential city seemed almost beautiful for once as we troops were mustered beside the Thames at dawn. Even the rancid river looked like velvet. And on it was pa.s.sing all the traffic of Empire. Red-sailed tugs, and rowboats and barges. I remember how this naval aeopile came pluming by, the huge sphere of its engine turning, and how the sky flickered like spiderwebs with the lines of all the kites, and me thinking that, despite all Johnny said, perhaps this Empire which I'd spent my whole life defending wasn't such a bad thing after all.

Then the parade began. You know how the Indians love a bit of pomp, especially on holy days. And us Devons.h.i.+res were there to celebrate the great victory we were supposed to have won against the savage Scots. Whatever, it was another f.u.c.king parade, and soon the clear skies darkened and it started sleeting, although I suppose it must still have looked some sight just like it always does. Elephants ploughing up Whitehall with those great howdahs swaying on their backs. Nautch girls casting flowers, and the dripping umbrella lines and prayer flags of the crowds who'd quit their sweatshops in Holborn, Clerkenwell, and Chelsea for the day. The s.h.i.+ning domes of balconies of the Resident's Palace along Downing Street. And camels and oxen and stallions and bagpipes and sitars.

Johnny and I had been given these long-handled shovels. It was our job to follow a cart behind the elephants and sc.r.a.pe up and toss their s.h.i.+t onto the back of it. Punishment duty, like I said, and we were lucky not to have got something a whole lot worse. But the crowd thought it was f.u.c.king hilarious-sheer b.l.o.o.d.y music hall, the way we slipped and slid, and I guess that Johnny's dignity was hurt, and he was tired and he was hung-over as well, and maybe that was just one last hurt too many in a life full of hurts.

There a was guy in the crowd who thought me and Johnny scrabbling and falling in the sleet and s.h.i.+t in our best uniforms was even funnier than everyone else. He kept pus.h.i.+ng on through the crowds so he could point and laugh some more. I hardly noticed, but Johnny gave this sudden roar and lunged toward him, waving his s.h.i.+t-caked shovel like it was a halberd. Not sure that he actually meant to hit anyone, but he was mad, and people started falling over and shouting just to get out of his way, and that spooked the elephants, and the next thing I knew a wave of chaos was spreading along the parade.

Soon, guns were firing. You could tell they were Indian repeaters rather than the slow old muskets that was all us sepoys were trusted with. It didn't feel like a parade any longer-more like some kind of battle, which is the one thing we sepoys know something about. The elephants' bellowing and rampaging added to the chaos. I remember how the whole side of this great gold-crusted temple just crumbled when one lunged into it. I remember the way it fell apart, and how the bibis and the priests inside came screaming out, and the freezing English sleet just kept on pouring down. f.u.c.king beautiful, it was.

London was in uproar, and I managed pretty well that day with just my bayonet and my shovel, even if I say so myself. Of course, there was bloodshed, but there was far less than anyone expected, or the tales would have you believe. The Indians-the so-called loyal troops, the camel regiments out of Hyderabad and all the cavalry-they just fired and fell back beyond the city walls. London didn't burn that day-although the temple monkeys got it, and of course the tigers in Hyde Park and anything else that didn't look English. Like I say, there had been rumors of an uprising, and most of the higher caste Indians and the rich merchants and the Resident and all of his staff had left London days or weeks before. The city just fell into our hands.

We were like kids, rampaging after years of being kept locked up. The shops and warehouses were gutted, of course, and so were all the bungalows of Chelsea and the temples of Whitehall and the palaces of Whitechapel. It was like an army of ants at work in a kitchen, only people were carrying these huge sideboards and settees instead of grains of rice. Everything was spilling out of doors, and we were all dancing and laughing, and most of our gunshots were aimed in the air. Sepoy or Londoner, half-blood or English-on that first day of the uprising it really didn't matter. We were all on the same side.

Didn't see much of Johnny for a while-got myself lost in the cheering crowds. When I did find him it was already late in the afternoon. It was no surprise that the crowds were cheering most loudly around him-waving bits of curtain rod and billhooks and scythes, beating stolen temple drums. This was outside the great temple of Ganesh at Whitefriars, and I suppose most of its treasures must already have been looted, and its priests killed, and there was Johnny clambering high on the tower to speak to us all.

I won't bore you with most of what Johnny said. You either know it already or you don't care, and you can still get the pamphlets the censors haven't destroyed if you know who to tip the wink. It was just ... Well, for me, it was simply Johnny being Johnny. Going on the way he always did, only now he had a bigger audience. And some already knew he was the guy who had swung that first shovel that got the whole mutiny started, and the rest would have believed anything he said by then. That day, we all wanted to believe. The stuff he was saying as he clung to the lotus blossom carvings on that tower, to me it was all typical Johnny Sponson-and it was still sleeting, and the stones must have been slippery, and he'd have killed himself if he fell. Stuff about how, contrary to most outward appearances, London was a great city, and this whole country was great as well. Not some province of Empire, no, but England, England, in its own right! And he mentioned all the names I'd often heard-names that the other sepoys and the rest of London were soon chanting as well. Elizabeth! Arthur! King Henry the Something! No, no, he was telling us, this shouldn't be the temple of Ganesh. If it was anyone's temple, it should be the temple of Christ, for Christ was an Englishman, and so was G.o.d. And if the Indians thought we were rats, well, then we'd make it the temple of Karair Matr, the rat G.o.ddess, and we'd swarm all over them and eat out their eyes ... ! Once Johnny got going, there was nothing could make him stop, and we were all cheering and no one wanted him to. London was some place to be, on that first great day of the English Mutiny.

I found Johnny again some time later down by Three Cranes when it was fully dark. By then, people had lit many fires-after all, it was freezing and they needed to keep warm. The city glittered with broken things. It looked like a box of spilled jewels. And those who had gathered around him had already sorted themselves in the way that people who sense where power lies always do. Already, he was giving out orders, and all of London was taking them. I had to job to get to him as he sat by this huge bonfire on the padded bench of a broken palanquin surrounded by bodyguards. Nearly got knifed in the process, until Johnny saw who it was and shouted for them to let me through.

"Well, Davey," he said. "Something has happened. Birnam Wood has moved, perhaps. Or Hampstead Heath, perhaps..." It was still his old way of talking, and I could tell from his eyes that he was long past being drunk.

"What happens now?"

He smiled at the fire. "That's up to us, isn't it? They that have the power to hurt, and will do none, they rightly do inherit heaven's graces."

Despite the flames, I felt myself going cold. Already, I was starting to hate such nonsense, and all the bloodshed and destruction that I already feared would follow. We've all suffered one way or another, I suppose, Indian and English, no matter what side we took in that mutiny or revolt. The odd thing to me is how little us sepoys, who know as much as anyone about battle, didn't see how it was bound to turn out. Thought we could just march out across England, that everything would fall to us as easily as London did on that first marvelous day.

It even seemed that it was going to happen that way-at least for a while. We got news from Chester about a revolt that had started there several days earlier, and how all the non-English in the city had been slaughtered, which helped explain why the Indian troops in London had been so edgy, and quick to pull out. News from Bath and Derby, as well. Not that I'm much at reading maps, but Johnny used to study them endlessly as his rebel regiments fanned out from London to mop up what then seemed like the flimsy Indian resistance. It really was like dominos or falling cards or some unstoppable tide-all of the fancy descriptions Johnny liked to use when he climbed high on that tower of that temple of Ganesh to speak to us all.

It's a lie to say we didn't have a plan. We were soldiers, we were disciplined-we knew how to fight, and we knew that this whole land was rightly ours. Of course, we needed supplies, and of course we took them, but that's no more than any army does. And as for the other things-well, armies do tend to do some of those, as well. It comes with the trade. But the rumors of bonfires being made of all the raped and mutilated bodies-that's just Indian talk. Bodies don't burn that easily in any case. And Johnny, he never wanted those things to happen, and he flew into towering rages when they did. And all the time the red of Empire was changing on his maps to English green, just as the English winter was warming to spring. We'd hear that yet another town had overthrown its oppressors, or another battalion or whole regiment that had gone over to the rightful English side. Seemed like just a matter of time before this whole country was ours. Seemed like it wouldn't be long before we heard news that the Resident himself had peacefully surrendered to the Zenana Guard who protected his women, and then we could put away our bayonets and guns and garrotes. And after that ... After that, everything would be the same as it was before, only better.

But Johnny's dreams were bigger, and we needed those as well. We needed him. It's an odd thing, I suppose, that we were happy to kowtow to a high-caste omrah like Johnny Sponson when we were so busy despoiling the estates his likes had come from. But that was how it was, and it was something Johnny played up to. Set himself up in old Saint James Place, he did. Said the place could be defended, if push ever came to shove. Didn't exactly sit on a throne-he was always too busy pacing about and giving orders-but there was certainly a throne in the great hall in which he'd established his command, and its walls and floors were covered with beautiful rugs and many other fine things that had been looted from the Indian palaces across London. Every time he climbed that gold-encrusted tower of the Great Temple of Ganesh, he climbed a little bit higher, and the clothes he wore were that much grander. He fanned his arms out to all the thousands who waited below him, and this red velvet robe set with jewels and gold encrustations spread out around him in the wind.

I might have been Johnny's oldest and best friend, but in most ways I was still nothing special. Had no appet.i.te for giving out orders, for a start-got too much of that from my b.a.s.t.a.r.d dad, and all the bulls.h.i.+t NCOs I've served under since. Anyway, there were plenty of others that did. In the new England we thought we were creating, that was one thing that hadn't changed one little bit-people were still telling other people what to do. Still, Johnny looked out for me, just as he always had. I pa.s.sed messages. I listened. He asked me to be his eyes and ears.

I talked to people. Regiments that had arrived fresh at the capital, or ones that were returning bloodied and exhausted from some campaign. I didn't speak to those who were setting themselves up as captains and majors and generals-even wearing the sashes and badges of the men they'd tortured and killed, they were, by then-but to men like myself, ordinary sepoys, common soldiers, who still had to fight for their lives just like they'd always fought. And they spoke freely. They had no idea that I was any different to them.

That way, and using what I suppose you'd call my soldier's intuition, I started to get a picture of what was happening across England. Sometimes, it seemed to me that I understood things far better than Johnny's generals, or how they were drawn on his precious maps. The Indians and their loyal regiments had retreated, that was for certain, but they hadn't vanished. They'd mostly drawn back into the major cities we sepoys had laid siege to but still hadn't mustered the forces to attack. They were skulking in the huge new fortresses at Dover, for example, and hiding in the castles and ramparts surrounding Liverpool, Portsmouth, and Bristol, which had all been recently enlarged. Basically, the way I saw it, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d Indians had made sure they kept control of the main ports apart from London, which they'd given up because they knew its walls were too old to properly defend. Kept, as well, the power of their navy, both merchant and marine, which-uncaring s.h.i.+ts that sailors are-had remained loyal to them. For me, it seemed as if the Indians had antic.i.p.ated our mutiny far better than we sepoys. I even heard about the s.h.i.+ps and reinforcements coming from Portugal long before the story was believed.

At first Johnny listened to what I told him, but soon, being Johnny, he listened less and less, and talked more and more. Lord Johnny Sponson of all England just laughed and danced across his plundered carpets and around his gilded logpiles of half-ruined furniture in his great and echoing halls. Johnny did all the things he'd always been good at, and all his new friends and commanders-and mistresses-agreed and applauded and laughed and danced as well. The women, of course, were mad for him. For the ease of his limbs, and who he was, and what he could do for them. And if that look in his eyes, the way he smiled, wasn't quite the same as the Johnny I remembered, who the h.e.l.l was there but me to care or notice?

Spring turned to summer, and the Indians with all their new supplies and fresh foreign troops pushed out from their fortresses. They defeated us at Bewdley and Oxford. They moved back across the Severn and the Thames. The weather turned hot, and food grew short because most of the farms in the area around London where we rebel sepoys were now pinned had been abandoned and no one had thought to harvest the crops. The Indian armies had the repeating rifles that they'd never allowed us sepoys to use. They had proper cannon instead of our antique ceremonial relics. They had fresh elephants, and armored aeropiles to plough along the captured rivers, and barrels of terrible Greek Fire. Their victories weren't so much defeats as routs-organized destruction, and the revenge they made upon all the thousands of sepoys they captured was terrible. They tied our bodies to their new guns and blasted them to pieces because they thought that we Christian English feared for our souls if we weren't given a proper burial. They pierced us with hooks. They burned us on slow fires of charcoal. They fed us, half-roasted but still alive, to the crows.

It was late August by the time London was fully encircled, and the great sepoy army that Lord Johnny had drawn around him had gathered within its feeble walls. The place was hot and overcrowded. The sewers were shattered. The river stank. The wells had turned. Yet there was still hope. There was still dancing. The severed heads of freshly discovered collaborators and Indians were regularly borne along the streets while the Indian generals waited outside the city walls.

I remember I was wandering one morning in the strange place London had become. The temples were emptied, the buildings and bridges were torn. There were no sadhus now, no beggars-or we were all sadhus and beggars. It was hard to tell. A smog of burning hung over the city. It darkened the sky. It shaded out the sun. The streets seemed strangely paved in that odd twilight. I pushed through drifts of sheet music. My boots crunched on the shattered bra.s.s sh.e.l.ls of pocket.w.a.tches looted from a store. Stooping to look at them more closely, I saw there were even a few broken sc.r.a.ps of gold. I remembered walking-it seemed, not so long ago-arm in arm with Johnny close to this same place as we headed back from that bar at Charing Cross. There was no beer now. There was scarcely any water. But ahead of me, although now daubed with fresh layers of slogans, was the wall of the English Repository against which Johnny had p.i.s.sed.

A movement caught my eye. This city was no longer safe-my hand went straight to my bayonet-but what I saw was a female figure, smallish and seemingly youngish, dressed in a brocaded red sari. The figure beckoned. Although I had no idea what she wanted, I followed.

The entrance to the English Repository had once been grand. Filthy statues that I suppose had once been supposed to represent art, or love, leaned around its collapsing arch. It was dark outside that day, but inside the darkness was far greater. The sort of dark you get that piles up over ages from shadows and mildew and things long left to rot. A few muttonfat candles smoked, and I could see it was just as Johnny had said. Old stuff, once kingly and grand, but now so ruined as to have been ignored even by the rampaging mobs, was piled everywhere. Rain-leaked ceremonial carriages. Beds like the bloated corpses you saw down by the river, their upholstery green and swollen. And books everywhere. Not just on shelves, but piled on the floors and spilling their leaves amid the puddles. It was a damp place, even in the middle of summer. Reeked of p.i.s.s, as well. The English Repository would barely have smoldered when all the rest of London had burned.

The woman in the glittering, once-beautiful sari was still shuffling ahead of me. Beckoning me on, and talking all the while in this cracked voice-saying words that made no sense, but also sounded familiar. Something about the rags of time, and love knowing no season-nonsense really, but pretty, bookish nonsense of a kind I knew only too well. I understood what she was by now, and I saw as we entered some kind of courtyard filled with the dead remains of furniture and rusting suits of armor that there were many others of her kind. They looked like crows-roosting there, and cackling as well. Repository girls, Johnny had called them. What a strange and desolate place to live, I thought-but I let the woman pull me to her, even though she stank as sourly as the city itself.

She was fumbling beneath my trews with black crow fingers. And I could see the rotting spines of the books amid the mushroom shelves behind. Could even read the same names that Johnny had once said to me. Shakes-something. And Chancer-Chaucer? Donne-Dun, Donny, is that how you'd say it? Somebody called Marlow. All the old Johnny bulls.h.i.+t. At least, that was how it seemed to me. And beyond that, leaning against a mossy wall with dead bits of vine growing over it and half the paint peeled and blistered off, there was this huge old painting of some lost great English estate. You could tell that it no longer existed. You could tell that it came from an England that had been plundered and destroyed long ago. I pulled away from the woman and threw the sc.r.a.ps of gold I'd picked up outside that looted shop as I fled to stop her following-although, like everything else in this city, it was worthless. She was shouting after me about how she had a son, a nice boy, for sale as well.

London had stirred itself while I was in the English Repository's darkness. The streets were suddenly rivered with people. They were smas.h.i.+ng what hadn't already been destroyed. They were chanting and wailing and pulling at their clothes. Guns were firing into the air-a waste of precious shot. I feared that the Indians had already breached our walls. But I know what a battle feels like, and I realized that this wasn't one, although there was so much noise and confusion that it took me some time to find out what had really happened. Even then, I still didn't believe it. Johnny Sponson, Lord Protector of all of England, had been out walking this very morning, keeping up morale, touching the ill and the wounded who clamored to be cured, showing his face to the adoring crowds. I'm sure he thought he was well-protected, but the Indians must have positioned snipers close enough for one of them to pick him out. After all, he'd have made an obvious target, dressed as he now dressed. I grabbed arms and shouted into faces. Was he alive? Was he dead? No one seemed to know for sure.

I pushed on toward Saint James's Palace. Just like everyone else. Try to go any other way, and I'd have been trampled for sure. You've never seen such sights-heard such sounds. And then, of all things, I heard my own name being shouted by the guards who were protecting the palace gates, and hands were all over me and I found myself being lifted up. Yes. Here's the one. Yes, this is Private Sepoy Davey Whittings. No, no, back, back you f.u.c.king idiots. This is him. I feared for my life, although death and I had long since reached an understanding. But there I was, being hauled over the crowds and shoved through the gates of Saint James's Palace by Johnny Sponson's liveried guards, then led through ruined logfalls of gilded furniture that weren't so very different to those in the English Repository. Then a final door banged behind me, and I was standing alone in the great hall of Johnny's throne room.

The place seemed huge and oddly still, emptied of all the usual so-called generals, and fawning and laughing fools. But something big had been set in the middle of it-a tall thing of red curtains and lotus-carved pillars more than large enough to make a room of its own. When I peered inside it, I saw Johnny, and I realized it was some kind of bed. He was half-lying, half sitting, against these cus.h.i.+ons, and he was smiling-almost chuckling-and he was wearing his usual cloak and a jewel-studded turban and many chains of office, and his right arm was hooked in a sling. It took me a moment to take in what I was seeing.

"So you're not dead?"

"Is that what they're saying?"

"No one knows for sure."

"And they're all crying, howling out my name?"

"What would you expect?"

He chuckled louder. "Glory," he muttered, "is like a circle of water, which never ceases to enlarge, till by broad spreading it disperses to nothing-haven't you found that to be the truth, Davey?"

"You know I don't understand that kind of f.u.c.king b.o.l.l.o.c.ks. I never did."

"Don't you?" He seemed surprised-almost pained. "Perhaps not."

"Why did you ask for me, Johnny? Why the f.u.c.k did you bring me here?"