Outside the Palace, washed, combed, and intimately dusty with flea-powder. Mallory sought a lumpy purchase atop the Zephyr’s wooden coal-wain. The chugging little gurney had barely room for two men within its line-streamed tin shell. Tom and Fraser had taken those seats. They were arguing now over a London street-map. Brian stamped out a rude nest within the wain’s flabby canvas, stretched atop a diminishing heap of coal. “They take a deal of shoveling, your modern gurneys,” Brian observed, with a stoic smile. He sat across from Mallory. “Tom does take-on about this precious machine of his; talked my ear off about Zephyrs, all the way from Lewes.” The gurney and wain lurched into motion, the coal-wain’s wooden-spoked rubbered wheels turning with a rhythmic creak. They rolled down Kensington Road with a startling celerity. Brian brushed a flaming smokestack spark from his dapper coat-sleeve. “You need a breathing-mask,” Mallory said, offering his brother one of the makeshift masks the ladies had sewn within the Palace: a neatly stitched ribboned square of gingham, stuffed with cheap Confederate cotton. Brian sniffed at the rushing air. “Ain’t so bad.” Mallory knotted the ribbons of his own mask neatly behind his head. “Miasma will tell against your health, lad, in the long run.” “This don’t compare to the pong of an Army transport boat,” said Brian. The absence of Fraser seemed to have relaxed him. There was something more of the Sussex lad about him, and less of the stern young subaltern. “Coaly fumes pouring out our engine-room,” Brian reminisced, “and the lads tossing-up their rations from the mal-de-mer, right and left! We steamed through that new Frenchy canal in Suez, straight from Bombay. We lived in that bloody transport for weeks! Rotten Egyptian heat — straight through to hard Crimean winter! If the cholery, or the quartan fever, didn’t carry me off from that, then I needn’t worry over any little mist in London.” Brian chuckled. “I often thought of you, in Canada,” Mallory told his brother. “You, with a five-year enlistment — and a war on! But I knew you’d do the family proud, Brian. I knew you’d do your duty.” “We Mallory lads are all over the world, Ned,” said Brian, philosophically. His voice was gruff, but his bearded face had colored at Mallory’s praise. “Where’s brother Michael right now, eh? Good old Mickey?” “Hong Kong, I think,” Mallory said. “Mick would be here today with us surely, if luck had put his ship in port in England. He was never the sort to flinch from a proper fight, our Michael.” “I’ve seen Ernestina and Agatha, since I was back,” Brian said. “And their dear little ones.” He said nothing about Dorothy. The family did not talk about Dorothy anymore. Brian shifted on the lumpy canvas, turning a wary eye on the looming crenellations of a palace of savantry. “Don’t care much for a fight in the streets,” he remarked. “That was the only place the Russkies really stung us, in the streets of Odessa. Scrapping and sniping house-to-house in the city, like bandits. That’s no civilized war.” He frowned. “Why didn’t they stand up straight, and give you an honest battle?” Brian glanced at him in surprise, then laughed, a bit oddly. “Well, they surely tried that at first, at Alma and Inkermann. But we gave ’em such a hell of a toweling that it knocked ’em into a panic. You might call that partly my doing, I suppose. The Royal Artillery, Ned.” “Do tell,” Mallory said. “We’re the most scientific of the forces. They love the Artillery, your military Rads.” Brian snuffed another fat smokestack spark with a spit-dampened thumb. “Special military savantry! Dreamy little fellers with specs on their noses, and figures in their heads. Never seen a sword drawn, or a bayonet. Don’t need to see such things to win a modern war. ‘Tis all trajectories, and fuse-timings.” Brian watched with alert suspicion as a pair of men in baggy raincoats sidled down the road. “The Russkies did what they could. Huge redoubts, at the Redan, and Sevastopol. When our heavy guns opened up, they came apart like cracker-boxes. Then they fell back into trench-works, but the grapeshot from the mortar-organs worked like a marvel.” Brian’s eyes were distant now, focused on memory. “You could see it, Ned, white smoke and dirt flying up at the head of the barrage-line, every round falling neat and true as the trees in an orchard! And when the shelling stopped, our infantry — French allies mostly, they did a deal of the footwork — would trot in over the palisades, and finish poor Ivan off with wind-up rifles.” “The papers said the Russians fought with no respect for military decency.” “They got mortal desperate when they found they couldn’t touch us,” Brian said. “Took to partisan work, fighting from ambush, firing on white flags and such. Ugly business, dishonorable. We couldn’t put up with that. Had to take measures.” “At least it was all over swiftly,” Mallory said. “One doesn’t like war, but it was time to teach Tsar Nicholas a lesson. I doubt the tyrant will ever tug the Lion’s tail again.” Brian nodded. “It’s right astonishing, what those new incendiary shells can do. You can lay ’em down in a grid-work, neat as pie.” His voice fell. “You should have seen Odessa burning, Ned. Like a flaming hurricane, it was. A giant hurricane . . .” “Yes — I read about that,” Mallory nodded. “There was a ‘storm-fire’ in the siege of Philadelphia. Very similar business, very remarkable principle.” “Ah,” said Brian, “that’s the problem with the Yankees — no military sense! To think of doing that to your own cities! Why, you’d have to be a cack-handed fool!” “They’re a queer folk, the Yanks,” Mallory said. “Well, some folk are too chuckleheaded to manage themselves, and that’s a fact,” Brian said. He glanced about warily as Tom piloted the Zephyr past the smoldering wreckage of an omnibus. “Did you take to the Yankees, at all, in America?” “Never saw Americans, just Indians.” And the less said about that the better, thought Mallory. “What did you think of India, by the way?” “It’s a dreadful place, India,” Brian said readily, “brim-full of queer marvels, but dreadful. There’s only one folk in Asia with any sense, and that’s the Japanese.” “I heard you took part in an Indian campaign,” Mallory said. “But I never was quite sure who those ‘Sepoys’ were, exactly.” “Sepoys are native troops. We had a rash of trouble with mutineers, Moslem nonsense, about pig-fat in their rifle-cartridges! It was sheer native foolishness, but Moslems don’t care to eat pork, you know, all very superstitious. It looked dicey, but the Viceroy of India hadn’t given the native regiments any modern artillery. One battery of Wolseley mortar-organs can send a Bengali regiment straight to hell in five minutes.” Brian’s gold-braided shoulders glittered as he shrugged. “Still, I saw barbarities at Meerut and Lucknow, during the rebellion . . . You’d not think any man could do such vile, savage things. Especially our own native soldiers, that we ourselves had trained.” “Fanatics,” Mallory nodded. “Your common Indian, though, must be surely grateful for a decent civil government. Railroads, telegraphs, aqueducts, and such.” “Oh,” said Brian, “when you see some Hindu fakir a-sitting in a temple niche, filthy naked with a flower on his hair, who’s to say what goes on in that queer headpiece of his?” He fell silent, then pointed sharply over Mallory’s shoulder. “Over there — what are those rascals doing?” Mallory turned and looked. In the mouth of an adjoining street, the paving had been taken over by a large and thriving ring of gamblers. “They’re tossing dice,” Mallory explained. A knot of shabby, disheveled men — scouts of some primitive kind, lawless pickets — were standing lookout under an awning, passing a bottle of gin. One fat ruffian gestured obscenely as the Zephyr chugged past, and his startled companions booted disbelieving taunts from behind their rag-masks. Brian flung himself full-length across the coal-wain, and peered over the wooden wall. “Are they armed?” Mallory blinked. “I don’t think they mean us any harm –” “They’re a-going to rush us,” Brian announced. Mallory glanced at his brother in surprise, but to his greater astonishment he saw that Brian was quite right. The shabby men were capering after the Zephyr, almost skipping down the empty street, with a shake of their fists and a slosh of their gin-bottle. They seemed possessed with an angry yapping energy, like farm-dogs pursuing a carriage. Brian rose to one knee, untoggled his holster-flap, set his hand to the large queer pistol-butt within it — He was almost flung from the wain as Thomas hit the Zephyr’s throttle. Mallory grabbed his brother’s belt and hauled him back to sprawling safety. The Zephyr racketed smoothly up the street, a small cascade of coal pattering out the back with the shock of acceleration. Behind them the pursuers stopped short in disbelief, then stooped like idiots to pick at the fallen coals, as if they were emeralds. “How did you know they would do that?” Mallory asked. Brian knocked coal-dust from his trouser-knees with a pocket-kerchief. “I knew it.” “But why?” ” ‘Cause we’re here, and they’re there, I suppose! ‘Cause we ride and they walk!” He looked at Mallory red-faced, as if the question were more trouble to him than a gun-fight. Mallory sat back, looking away. “Take the mask,” he said mildly, holding it out. “I brought it just for you.” Brian smiled then, sheepish, and knotted the little thing about his neck.