The Game - Laurie R. King [57]
“He seems to have formed an affection for us—certainly for you.”
“But can you see him hesitating for a moment to drop us if something better came along?”
I could not. The jackdaw-boy, with his fascination for shiny knick-knacks and decorations, was probably just taken by the oddity that we represented, and perhaps by the challenge. “Do you think he’ll try to steal us blind when he goes?” I had been keeping all my valuables on my person, not where he could find them on the cart.
“Oddly enough, I do not. He seems to have a set of standards he holds himself to. If he leaves, he may well help himself to some of our possessions, but only by way of compensation for what wages he considers earned but unpaid. Not more.”
With this reminder of the curious Oriental concept of ethics, back my thoughts circled to the enigma of Kim. “And do you think O’Hara might not have done the same? Was the Survey part of the world with which he was casual friends, or was it family, to which he bound himself irrevocably?”
Holmes sucked his teeth, a peculiar habit he had never demonstrated before coming here—a part of his current persona, no doubt. “That’s the essential question, is it not? I had the impression that O’Hara would lay his life down for Creighton’s organisation, but it is, I suppose, possible that his mind differentiated between Creighton and the Survey. That when Creighton went, the ties of brotherhood lapsed, and O’Hara merely stayed on for a while out of good manners.”
“The same good manners Nesbit was talking about, that drive an Indian to tell you yes when he knows the answer is no.”
“Precisely.”
“Which means that if O’Hara has joined the other side—whichever side that might be—it isn’t so much treason as a resumption of deeper loyalties.”
“Yes.”
“I can’t see that helps much.”
“No.”
By dusk, we had a mostly blue donkey cart, and Bindra went about preparing the meal with a hum of satisfaction between his teeth. And while Holmes and I were occupied with the evening’s performance, the donkey-boy laid claim to our paraffin lamp to continue his work. I looked down the road at the bright glow of the light, and saw him dusting off the wheels preparatory to painting them, squinting over the smoke from his bidi. Later I saw that he had begun to sketch some other design along the upper edge of the cart with a charred twig. Before Holmes forcibly reclaimed the lamp and shut it down for the night, the boy had laid a precise border of yellow Indian swastiks along all the edges, and begun a large, all-seeing magic eye on the front panel, to proceed us down the road. The next day he found frustrating, as the painting of the sun and moon he wanted on the side panels was not made any easier by the jostle of the cart, and eventually he gave up, sulking when Holmes would not stop the night at a pleasant village reached at two in the afternoon.
However, the enforced delay proved beneficial. The night before, I had been replacing the small mirrored juggling balls back into their protective bag, under the watchful eye of the young artist, when the method of their manufacture attracted my closer attention. The balls were made of some sort of plaster into which, while it was soft, many small pieces of mirrored glass had been set. Holmes had chosen them carefully, lest they have protruding edges that shred our fingers, and the plaster nestled closely against each segment.
If damp plaster could hold glass, other things could as well, I thought, and began watching for a shop that sold manufactured goods. These were rare in rural India, but late that day we passed a shop with tins of marmalade and boxes of Mrs Bird’s Custard stacked in its door, jammed in between a carpenter’s piled high with half-sawed tree trunks, wooden ploughs, and half-finished furniture, and a lacquer-goods manufacturer draped with toys, utensils, and decorative charpoys. I ducked inside, made my purchases, and was out before Bindra noticed. That