The Game - Laurie R. King [108]
The cage contained a single slim, short-haired creature resembling a cross between a cat and a ferret, with clever hand-like paws and a wise-looking face. More of the creatures could be seen in the open-air pen attached to the outside of the building, many perched upright on their hind legs, watching their trapped comrade through the intervening glass with worried expressions. They were clearly perturbed, making quick forays in and out of their burrows, sitting up, chattering to one another. But the one inside was nearly frantic, for the maharaja had inserted his arm into the cage through a small trap-door, on his hand a glove-like puppet the shape and colour of a dove.
“You see?” he was saying. “They have an instinctive fear of birds, even harmless ones such as this. I have been trying to overcome this instinct by invariably feeding them with a hand concealed inside a dove, but time and again they panic, and need to be hungry to the brink of starvation in order to overcome their fear of a thing with wings.”
As he lectured, he glanced at Sunny, whose reflection in the glass showed her face twisted with an agitation nearly as great as that of the animals imprisoned outside.
“Oh, don’t tease it!” she pleaded. “The poor thing, it’s—”
Her interruption had caused the maharaja’s attention to shift, with the result that his hand dipped inside the cage. The small creature, wild with the terror of this perceived attack, leapt to defend itself. In a tan blur, the thin body flew up and attached itself to the dove, biting down furiously. With a bellow of pain, our host shook his hand hard. Puppet and creature slapped into the side of the cage, and the animal lay there, stunned, unable to defend itself from the bare, blood-smeared hand that snatched it up by the scruff of the neck and hauled it from the cage.
The creatures outside had vanished, the holes in the ground looking empty and bereft.
The maharaja held up the creature, studying its faint struggles. And then he snapped its neck.
Sunny fled outside, Thomas and Mrs Robbins moving to comfort her while Mr Robbins protested. “I say, was that really necessary?”
But the maharaja’s eyes followed Sunny, as they had been on Sunny since the moment he drew the creature from its cage. He had done it deliberately, I realised incredulously, just as he had showed me the Englishman-eating tiger and the obscene mechanicals. He had forced the captive to bite his hand precisely in order to demonstrate cruelty to this girl, little more than a child, who thought him “dreamy” and romantic.
Tossing the limp body into the cage, he strode out into the sunlight in pursuit of the girl and her comforters. There he apologised, he explained, he charmed, until poor Sunny found herself agreeing reluctantly that an animal that bit couldn’t be permitted to live, too confused by the varying faces of our host to remember that he himself had tormented the poor creature into attacking. He was most solicitous the rest of the tour, allowing her to feed a baby elephant, giving her and Mrs Robbins wide hats so they might walk through the aviary with its flashing tumble of colours and screeches, and finally making her the present of a sleek infant mongoose, an endearing slip of a creature that snuffled into the girl’s neck and hands before curling up in her pocket to sleep.
By the time we retraced our steps around the Fort and through the gates, even Sunny’s protective older brother appeared to have forgotten, or forgiven, the dull crack of the spine within the maharaja’s fingers.
After the morning’s unsettling events, I was tempted to remain in my rooms, thinking. However, the idea of a long walk, and of being free of The Forts for several hours, was too appealing, so with the sun high in the sky, Faith and I swung out happily from the gates. I paused to lean over the waist-high stone wall that separated the upper section of the drive from the precipitous hill. There was, I noticed, a vestigial sort of path leading straight down to the main road, duplicated on the other side by an almost imperceptible smooth