The Game - Laurie R. King [155]
O’Hara had something else in mind. “We will cover your eyes, and you will walk through the stables by way of demonstration.”
It seemed to me a rather silly exercise, but we were, after all, embarked on a game here, and perhaps my accepting the challenge would move things ahead more rapidly.
And so it proved. From the moment O’Hara snugged the linen dish-cloth around my head to the time we slipped across the Khanpur border was a matter of half a day.
We left with a rucksack Bindra had found somewhere, provisioned with food, water, and candles; two knives and an ancient revolver Holmes had got from the khansama; the rope and morphia, which Holmes had hidden about his person ever since the night in the gaol; and several small but vital pieces of inside information possessed by Nesbit. Only when we had extracted the facts did we reveal to the man that we were leaving him behind. He was not pleased; we had to chain his wrist to the iron bed to keep him from joining us.
His curses, however, followed us far down the snowy road.
Nor was Bindra happy to be left outside of the Khanpur border with the horses, but the boy had to admit, when pressed by a father employing all the logic of Socrates, that bearing the weight of an abducted maharaja would be beyond his abilities, and that someone needed to watch the beasts. We built a makeshift shelter for them below the snow-line, in an area of deep brush and woods far from the track, where Bindra could keep the animals quiet: The weightiness of that responsibility calmed him. At least we hadn’t left him back at the dak bungalow, making sure that Nesbit did not get free.
Just before dark we reached the end of the forest, east and slightly to the south of The Forts, more or less where Nesbit and I had left O’Hara after the gaol-break. The moon rose with the darkness; when it was well clear of the mountains behind us, we slipped from the trees into the cultivated edges of the rough terai.
At ten o’clock, with an enormous, bright moon full in the sky, we crossed the main road without having disturbed anything more than pi-dogs and a few night birds. On the other side, the land was more heavily used, but in India even farmers tend to live inside village walls. We gave those wide berth, keeping to fields and paths and moving cautiously; we saw no person.
Well before midnight, the smells of the zoo came to us across the frigid air. A rooster crew, some big animal—one of the lions, perhaps?—coughed irritably, nocturnal habits lying uneasy beneath the daylight régime of its keepers. Another half mile, and we were at the walls surrounding the village of dwarfs. There we paused for whispered consultation.
“The fence here seems to be nothing but thorn brush,” I noted.
“Too noisy to move,” Holmes countered. “We go around.”
The tangle of dry thorn eventually gave way to high, strong wire fencing that kept the maharaja’s giraffes from straying into the sugar cane. We had brought rudimentary burglary tools with us, but it proved unnecessary here, as the fence was not topped by barbed wire. We climbed up and dropped into the pen, keeping near the fence as it pushed deeper into the zoo, then at the far side climbed out again. The white gravel paths glimmered in the light from over our heads, giving us direction, although we did not walk on the gravel for fear of the betraying crunch.
The lions’ pen would have been easy for a blind person to locate, stinking of carnivore, the faint splash of water from the hillside spring the only noise in the great stillness. Our boots made no sound on the winter-soft grass, our clothing gave less rustle than the breeze in the leaves. We drew near the high, gleaming bars, the trees and rock wall behind them a dapple of light and dark.
Then a lion roared from what seemed ten feet away, and I nearly screamed in response. We froze, and my heart coursed and leapt in my chest, making me dizzy; the night seemed to pulse and fade. There came the sound of a large body shifting,