The Game

by Laurie R. King

  I took a handful from the bag, to try it myself. With fierce concentration, I could tell one tiny grain from the other after rubbing them for some seconds between finger and thumb. Without benefit of vision, it would take me hours, days to work my way through the two or three pounds his sack contained. He was halfway through it already.

  I went to sit next to Holmes, and whispered in English what I had seen. He raised his voice and asked the boy, “Bindra, tell us why you have bought these sweepings from the market?”

  “Not sweepings! I do not eat unclean food from off the ground. This is merely the work of a clumsy seller of grain, who allowed one to spill into the other. And he is lazy as well, for rather than going to the labour of sorting, he would rather sell it for next to nothing.”

  “And have I paid the full cost of the dhal and the rice, or next to nothing?” Holmes asked drily.

  “Not full, no!” the boy declared, filled with righteous indignation. But under Holmes’ gaze, he faltered, and made a show of checking the water to see if it was boiling yet. “I divide the cost of the two, that you may thus pay me for my labours of sorting. Since,” he pointed out darkly, “you have not agreed on a wage for my other hours.”

  Holmes chuckled. “You speak fairly, Bindraji. Next time buy the lentils and the rice already separated, and spend your hours at some other work. I shall grant you one rupee each week. And more, when you prove your worth.”

  The boy nodded, satisfied for the moment. When the sack was empty he tipped the bowl of lentils into the fried onion and the rice into the water. He scooped up half a dozen round chapatis that he had bought in the market and laid them on top of the pot lids to warm.

  “We seem to have found a most capable servant,” Holmes murmured.

  “That dinner does smell good.”

  “It is, however, provocative to reflect that the trick with the rice and lentils is commonly used to teach sensitivity to the fingertips of apprentice pick-pockets.”

  As our meal cooked the caravanserai had been filling up, so that when we looked up from our empty bowls, we found ourselves between a group of Rajputs on their way to the races in Calcutta and a family of Sikhs going home to the Punjab. The Sikhs were four men and a boy of about twelve, all of them handsome and proud.

  The men settled their livestock and sent one of their number off to buy a meal. Bindra swilled out our pots beneath the pump, then squatted next to the donkey and smoked one of the noxious Indian cigarettes called bidis before getting out the purloined horse-brush and applying it to the sides of the appreciative donkey. Holmes took out a shiny coin and began to fiddle with it until he caught the Sikh boy’s eyes; he then sharply stretched out his right hand, palm down and fingers outstretched, but the coin, instead of dropping to the ground, vanished. More slowly, he extended his other hand, turned the hand palm up, and there sat the coin. Simple tricks, playing on the shininess of the silver in the firelight, and ignoring the sensation he was causing when the boy tugged at the sleeve of his uncle and pointed at the flicker and dash of silver in the stranger’s hands.

  When Holmes appeared to lose the coin, patting all over his garments for it and searching the ground around his feet in alarm, the Sikh family began to do the same—until Holmes looked up, seeming to notice them for the first time. He rose upright, marched across the four paces that separated our two encampments, and shot his hand out to snatch the coin from the brief head-covering of the startled boy.

  Holmes held the coin out to the lad, pinched between finger and thumb, but when the boy reached out for it, the coin was gone.

  The older men laughed, appreciating the trick, and the boy ducked his head in confusion. But when Holmes moved into his marginally more advanced routines, the adults’ superior smiles faltered, and soon gave way to expressions of frank amazement very like that worn by the boy. And when the magician pulled from his cap a distinctive bridle decoration, which none of them had noticed him steal from their mare a full hour before, there was a general “Oah” of astonishment and much fondling of beards as they discussed the magician’s authority.

  Holmes threw me a half-wink, and turned to his bedding roll.

  I lay long and listened to the sounds of the Indian night, the murmur of voices and the bullfrog groans of hookahs slowly dying away, leaving only snores, coughs, the bubbling grumble of the camels, the coo of doves, and the distant yammer of jackals to break the great stillness.

  I had anticipated enormous problems, living in such public circumstances as a male. It is one thing to adopt the guise in a desert place such as Palestine, when one may see a handful of others in the course of an entire morning, but here, there would be no such privacy. Very fortunately, I have been blessed with a strong bladder, and found that by timing my visits to the fields to the dusk hours, and by making use of the privacy afforded by the tent, my uncharacteristic physiognomy went unnoted. Either that, or my neighbours were too polite to comment.

  At first light, with the coughs and throat-clearing rising around us like the sounds of a hospital mustard-gas ward, we beat the frost from our tent and continued on our way. The dawn turned the sky to a yellow-pink at the east, a deep rose to the west, with all the world between made up of insubstantial pink-grey silhouettes, treetops and temples and distant buildings called into being from the drifts of rosy mist, disconnected from any objects that might have roots and foundations, mere islands of dark solidity in a glowing pink sea.

  And then the light grew stronger, and the silhouettes took on depth, and soon the sun lumbered huge and orange over the horizon, pulling free of the obscuring mist and dust and smoke. India’s great age and crowdedness and solidity re-established itself, sucking the frost and freshness and youth from the air. The land grew colour and dimension, the spectacular mountains on the horizon retreated into the haze, and a small troupe of wandering magicians left the hurly-burly of the Grand Trunk Road to set off across the Indian countryside.

  Of all the possible disguises an English spy might choose, doctor or antiquarian or big-game hunter, ours was one of the more idiosyncratic. For one thing, we were on foot, our pace confined to what our legs would permit, our possessions in a cart so small it looked more a joke than a useful form of transport. To have it pulled by a donkey rather than a bullock, or even a mule, added to the disarming unlikeliness of the entourage, and with Bindra to cook our decidedly non-English meals and barter for staples and fuel added the final touch of verisimilitude. We were foreign, certainly, but nothing about us said “British.” That was, after all, the point of the exercise.

  It is something over one hundred and fifty miles between Delhi and Simla. We could have made it there in a forced march—indeed, we might have saved ourselves a great deal of trouble and taken the train, or even hired a motorcar—but at this point in our expedition, the need was greatest to perfect our act, that when we got into the hills, we might be word-perfect. Moving at donkey rate, pausing each day to set up camp and do our performance, we covered at most twenty miles a day.

  But in that time I learned to levitate under Holmes’ hand and to swallow a sword without gagging, and we even began to juggle flaming brands between ourselves. When he first saw our conjuring and magic, Bindra was apprehensive, but once he had witnessed the similar reaction of the rustics, he immediately took on the garments of sophistication and scorned to gape, other than secretly. I think he understood that what we did were tricks, not actual necromancy; on the other hand, I do not know that to his mind, there would be much difference between cleverness and supernatural powers.

  By the third day on the road, however, he clearly decided to throw himself into the act. On the morning of that day, we passed through a small town, too large for our purposes but convenient for the purchase of supplies. So when the boy turned to Holmes and demanded some money, I figured it was because he’d spotted some brinjal or eggs that he thought we needed, or some of his horrid little bidis. Holmes fished out a rupee, but Bindra left his hand out and said, “Five.” />
  “Five rupees?” Holmes asked. “But why?”

  “You will see.”

  Holmes thought about it, and after a moment the remaining coins fell out of the sky, bouncing off the boy’s head. Bindra gathered them from the dust without remark and trotted back the way we had come. Holmes and I continued on our way, for by this time the donkey was nearly as willing to go with us as it was with the boy.

  Outside of town, we joined a flock of goats for a time, then found ourselves following a veritable mountain of rustling greenery down the road. When it turned off into a field, we paused to watch a group of men scramble up to loose the huge load of sugar cane from the elephant’s back, leading the animal to one side where it stood patiently, swinging one hind foot while it picked over an offering of the cane it had borne. This was a gur factory, the cane fed through a hand-run crusher so that its grey juice ran into a series of vats set over a fire. All four vats were already boiling furiously, great clouds of intoxicating steam billowing into the cool air. Holmes bargained for half a dozen fist-sized lumps of molasses-rich gur sugar, still warm, which melted under our tongues as we continued on our way.

  It was, I thought, both like our wandering time in Palestine and yet very different. Most of the difference lay in the population density, I decided: In Palestine we might walk all day and see but a handful of other nomads, whereas here, we were rarely out of sight of farmers working their fields, holy men tending their roadside shrines, a caravan of camels wending their way from the hills, or women swaying back from the wells with heavy brass pots of water balanced on their heads. Every piece of flat ground was being planted or harvested, every stream was inhabited, if not by young boys and their bullocks, then by the local laundry service, the dhobis slapping their garments on the wet rock, draping the clothing on the bushes to dry, laughing and calling to us without inhibition.

  We were well out of town when Bindra came trotting up, but instead of aubergines and oranges he carried an armful of small tin pots, which he arranged carefully inside the jolting cart. And then, instead of taking his place at the head of the donkey, he hopped inside to perch on the canvas-wrapped shapes. Taking out a small stiff-bristled object resembling a tooth-brush for an iron-gummed giant, he dangled over the side of the cart and started scrubbing away at the shabby wood. Bemused, Holmes and I exchanged glances, then moved forward to avoid the flying specks of old paint and dried muck. The boy had, over the past couple of days, succeeded in burnishing the donkey’s coat until it shone; now, it appeared, the cart was to be brought up to snuff as well.

  It took him hours to scour the cart down to clean wood. But rather than stop there, he turned to his little tin pots, prised the top from the largest, and pulled another, softer brush from inside his clothing. Dangling over the front of the cart like a monkey from a branch, completely oblivious of his two companions who were all but walking backwards down the road to watch him, he dipped his brush into the pot, stuck out his tongue in concentration, and drew a line of deep, rich blue along the edge of the much-abused wood. This was so interesting, we resumed our position behind the cart in order to watch his progress. The donkey seemed happy to walk without guidance, its long ears swivelling from time to time as it listened to the boy’s encouragement and conversation.

  The boy, too, looked healthier, I thought. Certainly he kept cleaner than he had in the livestock-seller’s pens. Holmes had bought him a change of raiment, child-sized pyjama-trousers and buffalo-hide sandals underneath the European-style shirt Bindra had chosen. He went bareheaded, either because of his age or his inclination, and generally bare-footed unless the track was particularly rough, but since he and Holmes had come out of the clothing shop, I had not once seen him without the colourful vest decorated with small chips of mirrored glass held in place with circles of embroidery floss. The shiny specks caught the sun as he dangled on the cart, his brush transforming the entire thing to the colour of the Indian sky an hour after the sun had set, and I had to smile.

  “A curious child,” I commented to Holmes. (A distinct advantage of male dress here was that it permitted me to walk closer to Holmes than I could have as a woman, thus allowing us conversations we might not otherwise have had.)

  “He has his pride,” my companion answered, and I saw what he meant: Bindra’s vision of our troupe’s dignity did not include a bashed-about wagon.

  “What did Kipling call his Kim? ‘Little friend of all the world’?”

  “Yes; being all the world’s friend, O’Hara ultimately belonged to no-one. In that respect, the phrase applies to young Bindra. Kim, however, formed his own family as time went on, binding himself to the chosen few irrevocably and utterly. I am not certain that this child has that capacity.”

  “He seems to have formed an affection for us—certainly for you.”

  “But can you see him hesitating for a moment to drop us if something better came along?”

  I could not. The jackdaw-boy, with his fascination for shiny knickknacks and decorations, was probably just taken by the oddity that we represented, and perhaps by the challenge. “Do you think he’ll try to steal us blind when he goes?” I had been keeping all my valuables on my person, not where he could find them on the cart.

  “Oddly enough, I do not. He seems to have a set of standards he holds himself to. If he leaves, he may well help himself to some of our possessions, but only by way of compensation for what wages he considers earned but unpaid. Not more.”

  With this reminder of the curious Oriental concept of ethics, back my thoughts circled to the enigma of Kim. “And do you think O’Hara might not have done the same? Was the Survey part of the world with which he was casual friends, or was it family, to which he bound himself irrevocably?”

  Holmes sucked his teeth, a peculiar habit he had never demonstrated before coming here—a part of his current persona, no doubt. “That’s the essential question, is it not? I had the impression that O’Hara would lay his life down for Creighton’s organisation, but it is, I suppose, possible that his mind differentiated between Creighton and the Survey. That when Creighton went, the ties of brotherhood lapsed, and O’Hara merely stayed on for a while out of good manners.”

  “The same good manners Nesbit was talking about, that drive an Indian to tell you yes when he knows the answer is no.”

  “Precisely.”

  “Which means that if O’Hara has joined the other side—whichever side that might be—it isn’t so much treason as a resumption of deeper loyalties.”

  “Yes.”

  “I can’t see that helps much.”

  “No.”

  By dusk, we had a mostly blue donkey cart, and Bindra went about preparing the meal with a hum of satisfaction between his teeth. And while Holmes and I were occupied with the evening’s performance, the donkey-boy laid claim to our paraffin lamp to continue his work. I looked down the road at the bright glow of the light, and saw him dusting off the wheels preparatory to painting them, squinting over the smoke from his bidi. Later I saw that he had begun to sketch some other design along the upper edge of the cart with a charred twig. Before Holmes forcibly reclaimed the lamp and shut it down for the night, the boy had laid a precise border of yellow Indian swastiks along all the edges, and begun a large, all-seeing magic eye on the front panel, to proceed us down the road. The next day he found frustrating, as the painting of the sun and moon he wanted on the side panels was not made any easier by the jostle of the cart, and eventually he gave up, sulking when Holmes would not stop the night at a pleasant village reached at two in the afternoon.

  However, the enforced delay proved beneficial. The night before, I had been replacing the small mirrored juggling balls back into their protective bag, under the watchful eye of the young artist, when the method of their manufacture attracted my closer attention. The balls were made of some sort of plaster into which, while it was soft, many small pieces of mirrored glass had been set. Holmes had chosen them carefully, lest they have protruding edges that shred o
ur fingers, and the plaster nestled closely against each segment.

  If damp plaster could hold glass, other things could as well, I thought, and began watching for a shop that sold manufactured goods. These were rare in rural India, but late that day we passed a shop with tins of marmalade and boxes of Mrs Bird’s Custard stacked in its door, jammed in between a carpenter’s piled high with half-sawed tree trunks, wooden ploughs, and half-finished furniture, and a lacquer-goods manufacturer draped with toys, utensils, and decorative charpoys. I ducked inside, made my purchases, and was out before Bindra noticed. That evening after dinner, I handed him the parcel.

  He undid the twine, taking care with the knots, and unfolded the newspaper from the broken pieces of a looking-glass. It was enough to cover about a square foot, although it was in eight or ten pieces.

  “If you press small pieces into the wet paint,” I told him, having checked my vocabulary with Holmes earlier, “I believe they will stick.”

  He turned the shiny treasure over and over in his hands, relishing the potential. Then he picked up the other object, a dented, palm-sized metal case missing most of its original enamel which, due to the wear, had not cost me much more than the broken glass had. I waited for him to find and manipulate the side latch, then said, “This is the looking-glass of an English lady. The cover protects it from breakage.”

  I might have given him solid gold. He peered into it, looked at me over it, and went back to the contemplation of his own eye. I stood up to get ready for the performance, and as I pulled open the tent flap, I heard a small voice say, “I thank you.”

  “It is nothing,” I told him.

  That night the cart’s sides grew stars, the mirrored glass broken down further with infinite care, rock against rock, each splinter treasured. And despite the proliferation of sharp edges, the boy didn’t so much as scratch himself in the process.