The Game - Laurie R. King [62]
“Er, do you know how to count to fifty?” I asked him. He glared at me and snatched the ball.
That took care of him for the rest of the morning: no more blinding flashes. The red shape would appear rhythmically over his head for a while as he walked alongside the placid donkey, then he would drop it, run after it, and start again. He improved rapidly, and kept the ball going for longer and longer. I could tell when he began to experiment with closing his eyes, because he tended to veer slowly away from the donkey’s side, the ball slapping between his hands as he headed for the fields to the side, or came closer and closer to the animal’s sharp little hooves as the beast followed a turn in the road and her barefoot master did not.
Most entertaining—although I was glad we were no longer on the crowded Grand Trunk Road. The boy would surely be crushed in the first mile.
In the meantime, Holmes and I conversed, almost exclusively in Hindustani now. My brain had grown calluses with the heavy use, and I no longer found the exercise exhausting.
“How old do you think Bindra is?” I said to Holmes in the vernacular tongue.
“He is of the hill people, and they are small. I think him older than he appears.”
“I thought he might be—he was watching one of the girls in that last village, and she had to be at least thirteen. Are hill people round of face, like him? From his features, I thought at first he was mentally retarded.”
“Oh, that he is not.”
“He really should be in school, then.”
“You may find he has been, at some time in his past. I saw him reading a notice on a wall the other day.”
“Then what on earth was he doing shovelling muck for a horse-dealer?”
But Holmes could not answer that, any more than I.
Chapter Twelve
Over the week of our sojourn, the radiant and majestic line of snow-covered peaks had grown from a line of white teeth to a wall of jagged peaks stretching so wide there was nothing else in their half of the world, towering so high they ate the sky itself. Step by step we had been drawn into their icy embrace, until finally on Wednesday we reached the town of Kalka, huddled at their very feet.
We found rooms for the night, and arranged to leave the donkey and our heavier belongings with the innkeeper while we took the train to Simla. The man swore that no one would so much as lay a finger on anything, and guaranteed it by taking only a small payment, leaving the larger part until we returned. Holmes then went off to make arrangements with an ironmonger and carpenter for some conversions to the cart itself, which negotiations took the better part of the afternoon. We had intended to leave Bindra with our possessions, but the boy, unimpressed by the town, would have none of it, and in the end, it was easier to allow him to come than to keep arguing. At least he did not insist on a space in our room that night, making do with a charpoy in the stables. I saw him at dusk, sitting cross-legged, tossing the red and green balls up and down.
The boy was waiting for us when we came down in the morning, no doubt fearful we would sneak out and leave him behind. Still, I could not quite understand why a trip into the mountains with us was preferable to a warm, quiet holiday in the stables. So when we were standing on the platform waiting for the train that would climb with us to Simla, I asked him.
“Why do you keep following us?”
“Because you are so very interesting,” he retorted. “And I learn many things—see?” That morning he had demanded that I give him the yellow ball, and he now stood, tossing the three spheres up and catching them in a smooth rhythm, talking nonchalantly all the while. Soon he would be better than I.
“You’re going to wear them out,” I said.
“When do I throw the mirror-balls? And when do I throw with you?”
“The mirror-balls when you can keep these in the air for two hundred paces without dropping them. And as a partner when you can keep