The Game - Laurie R. King [101]
When the meal was over, the musicians who had been playing softly in the background filed out, leaving their violins and flutes on their chairs. It appeared as if we were to follow them, the maharaja leading us to a room I had not been in before, somewhat smaller than the durbar hall he used for dining, but none the less ornate. Its floor was strewn with carpets, rich maroons and indigo colours that gleamed with silk, across which had been scattered cushions and couches, and the walls were alive with frescoes of hunts and life in palaces. The wall nearest me showed an elephant with a tiger climbing up its side, the men on the huge beast’s back fighting the cat off with spears. In the background, a pair of English soldiers in red coat were riding furiously away, one of them having lost his stirrups so that he was about to tumble off his horse. My eyes followed the paintings to the far end of the room, where the painted musicians were echoed by their living counterparts, setting up on a low stage. Now, instead of the familiar implements of chamber music, they were wielding drums and woodwinds and stringed instruments of peculiar construction and more peculiar sound. After a minute or two I decided that they were merely tuning up, not playing some spectacularly atonal piece of music.
The maharaja led me over to a floor cushion next to Sunny Goodheart, who greeted me as a long-lost friend in a desert wasteland. “Mary, oh, how completely great to see you. Oh, you’re wearing the necklace, how sweet! Tell me, was it thrilling, to spear that great beast? Are you going to have its head mounted for your wall?”
“No,” I said. “Thank you.” I had absolutely no wish to keep the nightmare object as a souvenir—and I could just imagine what Mrs Hudson would say if I walked into the house with that tucked under my arm.
“Oh, but you should,” she urged.
“It would be quite impressive,” the maharaja said. “Generally speaking, the tusks go to the man who took first blood off a beast, but in this case you’ve earned them.”
“If you want the head for your wall back in Chicago, Sunny, it’s all yours. Unless the maharaja has other plans for it.”
“Call me Jimmy, please,” he told me. “And although the unique circumstances of this particular animal make it tempting, I think I have about as many boars’ heads as the walls will take. Let me know if you change your mind, Miss Russell. Now, will you be comfortable here? Yes? Then enjoy your evening.”
Sunny watched the maharaja’s retreat to what appeared to be the men’s side of the room. A jungle of hubble-bubbles rose up there, the graceful bodies wound around with their flexible tubes that held the mouthpieces, although the women’s quarters had a pair of them as well, for those who cared to indulge. Gay Kaur, I noticed, had claimed a place near one of the instruments, as had the two Parisian artists Faith and Lyn.
“Mr Wilson told me it was dangerous to go after a wounded pig.” Sunny’s face was screwed up in worry.
“I’d have to agree.”
“The word he used was ‘foolish.’ ”
I couldn’t argue with that, but if the child was waiting for some promise that I wouldn’t do it again, she would not get one. After a minute, she sighed and moved on.
“Mary, what are those things?” she asked.
I followed the direction of her eyes, back to the jungle of burbling tubes. “Those are hubble-bubbles. Hookahs, they call them.”
“Oh, yes! The caterpillar in Alice smokes one!”
“Er, right.”
She lowered her voice, and her gaze. “Tell me . . . is it drugs?”
“Sometimes. Often it’s just another way to smoke tobacco.” I thought, all in all, that most of these in the room held nothing more intoxicating than pipe tobacco, although as the evening went on I did catch the occasional whiff of something stronger. “Sunny, are you enjoying your stay in Khanpur?”
“Oh yes,” she replied, although her tone was not one of unrelieved ecstasy.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing, really. Mama’s wanting to go, and I have to say, although