The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (55 page)

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 bastard 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 fucking 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. Bastard saved my fucking 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 Canal. 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 fashionable, so Johnny assured 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. Bloody 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 hell 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 bastards 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, bastard 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 God, 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 Devonshires considered alive enough to be worth saving were put on board this ship 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 circumcision—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 ship’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 fucking balls 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 bullshit, 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 class and a merchant class, and the two getting on with each other nicely, the deal being that every other religion got treated like dogshit 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
pissed
with a flourish! 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 shipped 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 ... Nobody 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 pissing 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 arses 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 passing 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 Devonshires were there to celebrate the great victory we were supposed to have won against the savage Scots. Whatever, it was another fucking 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 shining 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 scrape up and toss their shit 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 fucking hilarious—sheer bloody 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.