Time’s Eye

Though Bisesa’s all-weather flight suit kept her reasonably protected, the others suffered. As they struggled into the wind the soldiers wrapped themselves up in their blankets and groused about how they should have brought their winter greatcoats. Both Ruddy and Josh became subdued, locked in themselves, as if the wind was leaching the energy out of them. But nobody had expected these conditions; even old Frontier hands said they had never known such a chill in March.

Still they marched doggedly along. Most of the time even Kipling didn’t complain; he was too cold to bother, he said.

Fourteen of the twenty troopers were Indian. It seemed to Bisesa that the Europeans kept away from the sepoys, and that the Indians had poorer equipment and weapons.

Ruddy said, “Once the proportion of British troops to Indian was about one in ten. But the Mutiny shattered all that. Now there’s one European for every three Indians. The best weaponry, and all the artillery pieces, are in the hands of British troops, though the Indians may be used as muleteers. You don’t want to train up and arm potential insurgents; common sense, that. Remember that the Indian Civil Service employs only about a thousand people—brave men of the plains, all!—to administer a country of four hundred million. It is only the backing of force that enables such a bluff to be played effectively.”

“But that’s why,” she said gently, “you have to train up an Indian elite. This isn’t America, or Australia. There’s no way British colonists or their descendants will ever outnumber the Indians.”

Ruddy shook his head. “You’re talking of our growing crowd of babus— with all respect to yourself! That notion might wash in London, but not here. You must know of Lucknow, where the whites were summarily slaughtered! That’s the tinderbox we’re sitting on. We may be withholding the best guns, but by filling a babu ’s head with visions of liberty and self-determination you are handing him the most potent weapons of all—weapons he isn’t yet mature enough to use.”

Such casual patronizing set Bisesa’s teeth on edge. But she knew that Ruddy was actually representative of his class, if more articulate than most. It was some consolation to her to know that Ruddy was quite wrong about the future—even what would unravel in his own lifetime. The confrontation between Cossacks and sowars in Central Asia, so long feared in London, would never come to pass. In fact Russia and Britain came to be allies in the face of a new enemy common to both, in the person of the Kaiser. The Empire had always been about acquisition and profit, but Britain’s legacy in this region wasn’t all bad. It did leave India with a functioning civil service, and right up to Bisesa’s time India remained the second-largest democracy in the world, second only to Europe. But the well-intended partition imposed when the Raj withdrew caused tensions from the beginning, tensions that resulted in the terrible destruction of Lahore.

That was the old history, though, she reminded herself. Just in the few days they had been here, she thought she detected a change in the sepoys’ attitude. They were not quite so respectful to the whites, as if they now knew something of the future—that babus like Gandhi, and Bisesa herself, would eventually win. Even if time somehow stitched itself back together again, she couldn’t believe that this bit of history, polluted by her own present, could ever be quite the way it had been before.

Soon they found themselves clambering through high-shouldered hills, and as the northern wind was funneled into steep-walled valleys and gorges the going got tougher still. But these were just foothills.

At last they broke through a final cluttered valley, and emerged to face a view of the mountains themselves. The peaks were clad in bright gray-white glaciers that descended from their summits and tumbled down their flanks. Even from here, still kilometers away, Bisesa could hear the groan and crack of the ice rivers as they forced their way down the gouged flanks of the mountains.

They all stopped in their tracks, quite stunned.

“Good God,” said Ruddy. “The sepoys are saying, it wasn’t like this before.”

Bisesa dug out her night-vision goggles, and set them to a binocular setting. She scanned the base of the mountains. Beyond the peaks the ice stretched away, she saw; this was the edge of an ice cap. “I think this is a piece of the Ice Age.”

Ruddy, shivering, had wrapped his arms around his bulk. “Ice Age … Yes … I have heard of the phrase. A Professor Agassiz, I think … controversial idea … Controversial no more, then!”

“Another time slip?” Josh asked.