The Game - Laurie R. King [103]
“I don’t know about that,” I told him. “I should think the sensation becomes less astonishing with repetition. It may be a thing that should be done once, and treasured for its uniqueness.”
I wished him a good night, and steered Sunny through the crowd of guests and servants to the door. She paused to look back in, half wistful, and we both saw the maharaja watching us.
On the stairway, she said to me, “He doesn’t seem entirely happy.”
“The maharaja? No, he doesn’t, does he?”
“But you’d think, with all this . . .” She gestured at the stones, the garden beyond, the world created for this one man’s pleasure.
I didn’t answer. I thought the maharaja had, in fact, looked at me with envy. And how else, if a man had arranged his entire life with the goal of excitement? He had conquered every danger he had set himself against—racing cars, aeroplanes, casino tables, dangerous game animals fought with sparse weapons; what thrills were there left to seek?
Chapter Eighteen
The morning found me aching from scalp to soles, and I nearly asked the chuprassi who brought the tea tray to fetch me strong drink, or a nice dose of morphia. But then I noticed the thick white envelope tucked under the saucer, which proved to be a note written by the same elegant hand that produced the daily schedule:
His Highness will see you at nine o’clock for a tour of Khanpur zoo. Please meet him in the toy room.
Under those circumstances, intoxication did not seem a good idea, so I waved the servant away and tottered into the bath-room to switch on the geyser. At least with a gentle walking tour of the maharaja’s zoo, I might avoid too much sitting on my black-and-blue posterior.
The bath loosened me enough to dress and take a gentle turn through the gardens, where the combination of motion and crisp, fresh air had me moving almost normally as I turned for the dining room. Half a dozen of my fellow guests were there, distributed among three tables. I waved to Faith and Lyn but chose a seat near the novelist Trevor Wilson, whose presence in Khanpur interested me. I eased myself onto the chair, murmured a greeting, and opened his discarded copy of the previous day’s Pioneer. When he’d had a few minutes to become accustomed to my presence, I pushed the paper away as if weary of the world’s problems.
“Mr Wilson, pardon me, but you’ve been here for quite a while, I believe you said? It’s just that I was thinking of taking a walk into the city this afternoon, and wondered if there was anything you could suggest that I see there?”
“I’m not much of one for sight-seeing,” he answered, then proceeded to list for me a dozen sights that should not be missed, encompassing as he did so a fairly comprehensive history of Khanpur. I kept my gaze on him as he spoke, nodding and exclaiming occasionally to keep him going. We spoke of Moghul ruins and inheritance rights for a while as I slowly worked the conversation around to what I was really interested in.
“So, how long have you actually been here?”
“Eighteen months, more or less.”
“I imagine you’ll have enough material for half a dozen books, by the time you leave.”
He couldn’t hide a wince, although whether at the idea of leaving or of writing, I couldn’t be certain. “Oh, exotic adventure stories aren’t exactly my bailiwick.” The book of his that I had read comprised two hundred pages of hallucination, internal monologue, and sexual reminiscences on the part of a young man who lay in hospital after having been sent down from Cambridge, joined the Communist Party, and been knocked unconscious by a police baton during a violent march in Trafalgar Square.
“No,” I said, “of course not. But your writing seems to be concerned with people and their struggle for”—I nearly said integrity, but changed it at the last moment—“independence. It occurred to me that the context of an Indian ‘native state’ would give a writer of your calibre considerable scope. The political world in microcosm.”
He stared at me, either because he hadn’t thought of such a topic,