The Game - Laurie R. King [141]
He whirled the stallion on its haunches and kicked it into a gallop, its hooves sliding dangerously over the stones of the yard. Nesbit and I climbed more reluctantly into our saddles and followed at a more sedate gait; as we left the yard, the two armed guards were shouting at the syces to bring up their two bays.
“What do you suppose he has in mind?” I asked Nesbit as we trotted along the dusty road. “Panthers? His pet African lions?”
“I suppose we should be glad he didn’t just have his men tie us up between two elephants.”
He looked glum, but the thought of that sort of punishment made the breakfast go queasy in my stomach. “You don’t think . . .”
“That he’s going to do us in? No, I don’t think he’s that mad. Besides which, he seems to have in mind more of a demonstration. Or a contest—yes, that may be it.”
“Whatever it is, for God’s sake let him win.”
“I’ll do my best. But I shouldn’t think that doing so openly would be a good idea. Having a rival deliberately throw a game could well be the match that lit the charge.”
I could see that, and I reflected, not for the first time, that those who had decreed that British boys grow up playing demanding games had a lot to answer for.
“Perhaps it’s time just to tell him who we are.”
Nesbit screwed up his face and shook his head, more in doubt than in disagreement. “We may have to. But I’d rather keep that as a last resort. That, too, might be the spark that drove him to violence, to think that a friend was now spying on him—you heard what he said about spies. The other princes would probably feel much the same—a lot of uncomfortable questions would be asked if they thought they might be the object of surreptitious surveillance. No, none of them would like it one bit.”
We rode for an hour, into the open land where we had ridden after pig on the first day. My exhaustion retreated with the exercise, the clean air clearing my head, the horse’s eager energy proving contagious. I had no wish to pit myself against some deadly animal while armed with nothing but a sharp stick, but if the maharaja was determined to do so in order to prove Khanpur’s superiority over the effete Brits, so be it. I had a gun that would give pause to anything smaller than an elephant, and a horse under me that could outrun most predators.
All in all, although I was not pleased with how the day was turning out, it could have been worse. The maharaja might, as Nesbit said, have thrown us into the cell next to Holmes’, or had us executed outright. Or he could have come up with some kind of competition that would have proved instantly disastrous for Martin Russell, such as wrestling or employing the more primitive skills of the nautch girls. With any luck, he would merely rub our noses in our inferiority and throw us out of the kingdom, leaving us no worse off than we had been yesterday night. Yes, there remained the problem of retrieving Holmes, but as Holmes himself had said, he need only stand up and publicly declare himself an eccentric English magician, and the maharaja would have no choice but to allow him to leave.
With any luck.
Again the shikaris waited beneath their tree, spears in their hands, but this time with apprehension in their straight spines and the sideways glances they cast at the man on the white horse. The dry grassland rustled beneath a light morning breeze; the fields of sugar cane and barley glowed green and lush in the bright light; the stand of trees from which the herd of pigs had been driven stood on the rise, unchanged.