The Game - Laurie R. King [8]
Once in our cabin (this, at any rate, had no priest in residence) I crept into bed, praying that exhaustion would take my body into sleep before the pitch and toss of the boat asserted itself. To my relief, such was the case: The steam-roller of the past fifty-four hours rumbled over my recumbent body, and my last memory was of Holmes wrestling open the small port-hole, letting in a wash of frigid air scented with salt, and nary a hint of garlic.
I woke a long time later to a more subdued sea, a pallid attempt at sunshine, and the ting of a spoon against china. When I reached for the bed-side clock, my hand knocked against the water carafe; after a moment Holmes came through the doorway with a cup of tea in each hand. He set one on the table, and sat down on the other bed with his own. It was, I saw, nearly noon.
The tea had the bitter edge of a pot that has sat for a while, but it was still hot, which told me that Holmes, too, had slept late, and was only on his second cup. I slurped in appreciation, grateful that the bed wasn’t tossing beneath me. When the cup was empty, I threaded my glasses over my ears so I could see my partner.
“I suppose I shall be spending the next two weeks being force-fed some language or other?” I asked.
“Hindustani is the common tongue of the north, used by all traders. You won’t find it difficult.”
“Before we begin, I want to know more about this O’Hara person.”
“Not a ‘person,’ a young gentleman, despite his history and lineage. A sahib.”
“But he was only a lad when you knew him.”
“Even then.”
“That was, what, thirty years ago? Why hasn’t he made a name for himself in that time?”
“A man does not play The Game successfully for thirty years and more if he catches the eye of any but his superiors.”
“O’Hara has been a spy for the Crown for all that time?”
“O’Hara has been many things, but yes, he has been there when he was needed.”
“Tell me about—”
“Breakfast first, and a lesson in Hindi. Then I shall tell you old and happy, far-off things and battles long ago.”
He reinforced his edict by standing up and walking into the adjoining room.
I finished my tea, dawdled over my morning rituals, and joined him moments after our mid-day breakfast came through the door. As I came in, he looked up from the fragrant plate and said, “Begumji, hazri khaege?” Lessons had begun.
At first my mind tried to slide the new language sideways into its niche for Arabic, a tongue I had learnt under similar circumstances five years earlier, but by the end of the afternoon, it had grudgingly begun to compile a separate store-house of nouns and verbs in a niche labelled Hindi. With concentrated (that is, around-the-clock) effort, the rudimentaries of most languages can be grasped in a week or two, with childish phrases and a continual “Pardon me?” giving way to slow, stilted fluency a week later. By the end of four weeks, under Holmes’ tutelage, I had no doubt that my somewhat bruised brain would be dreaming in its newest tongue. And it went without saying, my accent would be identical to his, that is, negligible. By the time we landed in Bombay, I would be able to pass for a genial idiot; another fortnight, and I would merely sound stupid.
However, it seemed that Hindustani was not the only subject Holmes had in mind. When our plates were clean and I had satisfactorily recited the nouns and articles for all the objects on the tray, he swept the leavings to one side and laid a pair of tea-spoons and a linen napkin onto the table between us, and began a demonstration of sleight-of-hand.
Under the command of those long, thin, infinitely clever fingers, the silver came alive. It vanished and reappeared in unlikely places; it multiplied, shrank, changed shape, became near liquid, and finally sat quietly