The Game - Laurie R. King [151]
He saw Nesbit’s impatience with the metaphor, and relented. “I went more deeply into suspect territory than I ought, and asked questions more pointed, and became more visible than any player of The Game dare do. I became, in short, a rank amateur, showing off for my son. His mother had died of the cholera when he was six, and he lived with his Tibetan grandparents for the three years after that. I thought the time had come to take him by my side, and as this was to be my last such expedition, I saw no harm in showing him some of the rules of our Game.”
He sighed, and shook his head. “My Holy One spent long hours expounding on the Wheel that is life, trying to re-form me from the imp I was. In the Wheel that holds the essence of Tibetan Buddhism, the hub is formed of the conjoined animals whose individual natures are ignorance, anger, and lust. Taken together, the hub of Illusion is pride.
“Yes, Nesbit, I see you wish fact and not philosophy. Very well. The boy and I went into Khanpur itself, selling copper pots. Which might have been innocent enough, but why then should a seller of pots take himself north out of the town for six or seven miles, to a place where there is no village, only a fort? Why should a seller of copperware be so interested in the maharaja’s air field, he ventures into the very buildings where the aeroplanes are stored? In my eagerness to come up with a prize for my last round in The Game, I chose to forget the danger of my opponent.
“I would have been executed forthwith, I think, but for the presence of the boy, which puzzled the men who took me, and puzzled their master when we were brought before him. Had they let him go, I would have gone to my death with a degree of equanimity—after all, when one has cheated The Great Illusion as many times as I have, it is hardly sporting to complain when it catches one up. But they held the boy, and they were preparing to use him to open me up.
“So I offered to give them what they wanted, without having to go to the effort and delay of torture, if only they would let him go free. And moreover, I told the maharaja, I would offer him a great prize, one he would never get from me by the brand or the rack, as soon as I had seen the child cross the Khanpur border. I promised him that it would be worth it, and he looked into my eyes, and he decided to gamble that I was giving him the truth.
“I sent the boy to my friends, extracting from him first the promise that he must never enter Khanpur again without my word, and watched him go down the road and through the guard’s post. As soon as he had passed, I turned to my captor and told him who I was. That I was not only an agent of the British Intelligence service, but that I was also the boy known to the world through the writings of Rudyard Kipling.”
“And you gave him your word that you wouldn’t try to escape under your own power,” Nesbit concluded. “Thus condemning me to a case of severe back-strain.”
“I did make a considerable effort not to grow fat inside the prison,” O’Hara countered. “Since I thought it possible that such a scenario might come about.”
“Possible, my foot,” his superior officer said with a grin. “You planned for it. That’s why you worded your vow the way you did. You knew someone would come after you sooner or later, and had to trust that they would be able to haul you off.”
“Or drive me at gunpoint,” O’Hara said, shooting a grin of his own in my direction. “Yes,