The Game - Laurie R. King [110]
Because Khanpur was well away from the tourist routes, the bazaar offered little beyond the wants of its inhabitants, its luxury goods running more along the lines of astrakhan caps and golden brocades than carvings of Shiva and mass-produced bronze Ganeshas. Faith paused at a silk merchant’s to finger a length of iridescent green fabric; my attention was caught by an ash-smeared holy man seated nearby: I myself had only been in Khanpur little more than forty-eight hours, and it was unreasonable to expect Holmes this soon; still, I examined him closely.
“I loved the garment you wore yesterday night,” Faith said, as oblivious of the shopkeeper’s lively attentions as she was of my inattention. “I was thinking of having one made for Lyn. What do you think of this colour?”
“Sorry?” The near-naked sadhu had a matted beard and wore his hair gathered into a snake’s nest atop his head; he sat motionless on a scrap of what had once been a leopard skin, a brass begging bowl next to one of his folded knees: No, it was not Holmes in disguise. I turned back to Faith, retrieving her words from the back of my mind. “That colour would be beautiful. And the maroon over there would do wonders for you.”
In the end, she bought lengths of both, arranging that they be sent to New Fort. “Jimmy has a tailor who can sew pretty much whatever a person wants,” she told me. “I’ve seen him produce an evening gown from a pencil sketch.”
We bought a bangle here, a handful of dried mulberries there, following the curving streets down towards the river, Faith talking while I studied every passing veiled woman over five and a half feet tall, but again, none of them were Holmes. Eventually the buildings fell away, revealing an open square of pavement with a few weedy trees. A shrine occupied one corner, its deity unidentifiable under the heaps of wilting marigolds and the smears of blood-red dye; in the opposite corner a silent circle of men stared down at a cow, which lay panting in a manner that did not bode well. I was wondering what city-dwelling Hindus did with cows that died, whether they just stood back and let the vultures in or if they found someone to drag it away, when my speculations were interrupted by Faith.
“Oh, look,” she said. “A magician. Shall we go see?”
I looked: dramatic black garments, shiny fat donkey, a magnificently painted and mirrored little wagon that had once pulled English children, a great eye now gracing its front.
Sherlock Holmes had arrived in Khanpur.
Chapter Nineteen
Holmes was just coming to the end of the preliminary part of the act, the flashy tricks and joking patter designed to capture an audience. He drew glittering balls from the air, made others vanish from sight, and caused one to burst into flame, its ashes floating upwards on the breeze. Young Bindra was nowhere in sight, and Holmes’ face looked tired to gauntness beneath the dye.
When he had brought together a sufficient number, he turned to the mind-reading portion. Faith’s Hindi was limited to “How much is it?” and “Get away from me,” but the magician’s gestures and the reaction of his impromptu partners was entertainment enough. After he had astonished by perceiving a number of unknowable things about five or six of the men (the process of deductive reasoning working as well in this setting as it did in London), he caused a deck of playing cards to appear, and proceeded to guess which was in a person’s hand (as if Sherlock Holmes would stoop to guessing!). In the smaller villages, he had used coins, but in a large town, playing cards would be common enough to be used for the trick. Again, Faith could not understand what either he or his partners were saying, but there was no mistaking their declarations of astonishment.
When the man in the black garments had magically transformed the entire deck into black aces, then flung it into the air to float down as fifty-two ebony feathers, he came