The Game - Laurie R. King [60]
Luckily for me, the demands of our rural entertainments were on a fairly basic level. Indeed, putting on too slick a show would only alarm the simple folk, and cause any of the more knowledgeable residents to ask themselves why we were here rather than in some city or raja’s town where we might actually earn some rupees. Rudimentary and clumsy, and clearly tricks rather than the more sinister magic.
I juggled. Not very well, and taking full advantage of the humour in the odd fumble, I juggled, looking puzzled as the balls turned into apples, then potatoes, and exclaimed and nearly dropped them when they began to sparkle and shine with the shards of mirror embedded in the bright plaster. Then one at a time, the five mirror-balls transformed themselves into small golden birds, which one by one flew away, leaving me with four balls, then three, until I tossed one lonely, sparkling ball from one hand to the other. Finally, it, too, flew off. I stood gazing into the darkness after it, bereft, when all of a sudden the sky began to rain down apples and potatoes and mirror-balls, causing me to stumble and trip in confusion and in the end duck down under cover of my arms. The rain of objects slowed, and ceased, and I cautiously peeped out from under my hands—at which one final potato dropped down on my turban. I sat down abruptly on the ground, and the entire village roared with laughter at my misfortune.
A good start.
Still seated on the ground, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cap, a simple Moslem cap such as Holmes wore. I peered inside and took from it an egg, which I held up to look at, and to allow the village to look at, before placing it on the ground in front of my tucked-in legs. I looked back into the cap, and drew out a flower, then a mouse (which ran, fortunately, away from my cloth-covered legs) and a small sparkling ring and a clay cup full of tea, which I drank thirstily and set down. I gazed again into the cap (which measured, of course, no more than the circumference of a head and four or five inches tall), then reached into it. This time my hand went in, and kept going. In a moment my forearm was buried in the shallow headgear while I frowned, deep in thought, over the heads of the villagers (all of whom had by now emerged from behind their walls, even the women). I felt farther into the cap, up to my elbow and beyond, scowling ferociously now. A boy of about seven started to giggle, and it spread through the audience. My upper body contorted with effort, my arm almost entirely consumed by the inadequate scrap of cloth—and then triumph! I jerked as my hand (which had travelled unseen up my other sleeve as far as my rib cage, through a well-concealed slit in the cap) seized some elusive object hidden impossibly deep inside, and began to draw it out. Arm, elbow, forearm, wrist, then—slowly, slowly—two fingers, delicately pinched around a scrap of bright orange, clear in the flashing torchlight. I tugged gently; the scrap grew, and I pulled and it grew some more, inches and feet of silk until I was hauling yards of the brilliant stuff out onto my lap. I swam in it—a sari length is a lot of silk—and beat it away from my face, drowning in orange, until with a sharp jerk the last of the fabric snapped into the air. I worked to gather it, armloads of orange with a sparkle of silver along the border, climbing awkwardly to my feet with the unwieldy burden bursting from my grasp in all directions. And then I bent to look at the ground, and freed one hand to pat at my clothing, and looked in increasing desperation at the ground all around, but the cap was gone.
Putting on my face a look of Harold Lloyd sadness, and crumpling the stubbornly escaping ends of silk back into the wadded armload, I carried it over to the audience and handed it to the first person who did not draw back from me, a boy of about seventeen. He took it, half reluctant, half pleased, and I heard a gasp from the darkness behind him where his family stood—probably a young wife, who I hoped would know what to do with all those