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much too real.
    He sat down heavily on the side of his narrow bed and frowned at the sweat-soaked sheets. From everywhere around the cantonment came the sound of military men waking and getting ready for the day. The smell of the cow dung used to warm his bathwater, and for cooking breakfast, stung his nose. He heard the stomping of feet and native voices calling. Somewhere, farther off, there was the sound of men’s feet falling in cadence, accompanied by what sounded like a marching song.
    There were maybe, all told, one hundred and fifty Englishmen in Meerut—even including the ten officers, William among them, who had arrived here in the last two months. Surrounding them were thousands of sepoys and native officers. It seemed foolish, crazy, with the rebellion having happened less than fifty years ago, to keep such low numbers. But how else could they do it? The British could not hold India by numbers. It would empty their small island to send forth enough people to command this mass of humanity. So they must control the natives by bluff and courage. And that required as few officers as possible, to impress the natives with their daring.
    And then, William thought, the fact was that the rebellion was well forgotten. He remembered it only because his grandfather had been killed in it, among the wretched garrison of Cawnpore, fortunately leaving his wife in England, alone with their child. She’d been scheduled to join him but had not embarked before news of his death reached her.
    There were books and stories aplenty, all over England, about both the mutineers’ barbarism and the heroism of the defenders. Though very young, he remembered wondering how the writers could know what had happened in those many places where every Englishman had been killed.
    Worse, no one remembered those stories truely anymore. And no one remembered them enough to take the lessons that needed to be taken from them.
    Having read his grandfather’s letters to his grandmother—many of which had arrived well after his grandpapa’s death—William, the second son of the third son of a fairly prosperous esquire, had signed on to the secret service and agreed to a cover identity as a captain of the regulars, but he’d sworn he’d never go to India. Never.
    And now here he was. Here because of the rubies and Her Majesty’s determination to secure them. And yet, he dreamed of riots. It wouldn’t worry him so much if his magical power, such as it was, didn’t run to scrying, to foreseeing.
    He sighed deeply again, as his blood-soaked dreams visited his consciousness in vivid and glaring images. These gifts of his were so scientifically ill-defined and so often wrong—in everyone—that his dreams were not enough to alarm his superiors. They would say he was going all to nerves and pieces and that the dreams came from that, not foreseeing. His superiors had, in fact, got into the habit of dismissing him on anything relating to India.
    He was aware, without paying it much attention, that his bhisti was carrying back and forth can after can of water. They were recycled kerosene cans and it took so long to heat the water for the bath in these that by the time the tub was suitably full most of the water was barely tepid.
    In many ways, it seemed reprehensible to have commanded a daily bath, but sweating as he did every night—between his nightmares and the close-in humid air—he didn’t feel he had a choice. Whatever was said about vapors or humors, his grandfather had written to his grandmother, and William had grown up believing, if you washed yourself, you were far less likely to succumb to one of those fevers that were often ascribed to the climate of India.
    While the bhisti went back and forth, William thought of the man who’d come to see him yesterday. Was that a corroboration of his dreams? Enough at least to call them prophetic and to mention them to his superiors.
    Gyan Bhishma, one of the sepoys, had come to William with hints that