The Game

by Laurie R. King

  He couldn’t hide a wince, although whether at the idea of leaving or of writing, I couldn’t be certain. “Oh, exotic adventure stories aren’t exactly my bailiwick.” The book of his that I had read comprised two hundred pages of hallucination, internal monologue, and sexual reminiscences on the part of a young man who lay in hospital after having been sent down from Cambridge, joined the Communist Party, and been knocked unconscious by a police baton during a violent march in Trafalgar Square.

  “No,” I said, “of course not. But your writing seems to be concerned with people and their struggle for”—I nearly said integrity, but changed it at the last moment—“independence. It occurred to me that the context of an Indian ‘native state’ would give a writer of your calibre considerable scope. The political world in microcosm.”

  He stared at me, either because he hadn’t thought of such a topic, or because he hadn’t thought anyone else would. Finally he pulled himself together enough to say, “Microcosm, yes.”

  “I mean to say, the maharaja seems a benevolent enough dictator, but still, one has to ask oneself about the people living under him. Take the poor coolies yesterday, one of them was rather badly hurt by a boar, and all because we—”

  But Trevor Wilson was not listening. His gaze had gone inward, and he abruptly stood and dropped his table napkin on his plate. He took two steps away before his manners recalled him enough to turn back and say, “Excuse me, Miss, er …” Then he was gone, leaving me staring open-mouthed at his retreating back. So much for my idea of picking the brain of the maharaja’s secretary for his master’s inner thoughts.

  Faith and Lyn had finished their meal, and paused by my table on their way to the terrace. “More pigs today?” Faith asked, a sparkle in her eye.

  I laughed. “I don’t think I could even look at a horse for another couple of days. His Highness is showing me the zoo this morning, but I thought maybe this afternoon I might walk into the city and have a look at the bazaar.”

  “Would you like some company?”

  “I’d love it. Shall I send word, when I’ve returned from admiring the bison and orangutans?”

  “That would be fine.”

  “I won’t be joining you,” Lyn said. “I have a date with a novel.”

  Not, I noted, with a piece of sculpture. I finished my coffee, glancing through a copy of The Times that was only three days old. A few minutes before nine o’clock, I presented myself to the chuprassi outside my door for guidance to the “toy room.”

  We set off as if going to the main block with the durbar hall and ball-room, but continued on to the western wing, mostly hidden from the gardens by large trees. Its shaded arcade was chilly, the marble floor damp enough to require caution in places. The electrical lights that brightened the guest quarters, it appeared, had not extended here, and a faint odour of lamp-oil betrayed the means of illumination.

  We travelled for nearly ten minutes around the great inner garden and down the twisting passages before the chuprassi stopped at a door that had been painted a startling blue. He held it open, then closed it behind me; I was alone.

  “Hallo?” I said. There was no answer, although the back of my neck prickled, as if I were being watched. The room’s only light came from a shaft of sun through a high window; it shone onto more purdah screens—they seemed to be a feature of the Fort architecture, although this maharaja’s ladies lived in town. By the dim reflected light, I peered around me, trying to make out the room’s contents. That it contained a great deal was immediately clear, but it seemed more the clutter of a storage room than a used living space, and I looked in vain for an electric switch to throw light on the matter.

  “Toy room,” the note had said. And hadn’t Nesbit’s brief biography of the family mentioned that the previous ruler, the current maharaja’s grandfather, was an enthusiastic collector of mechanical oddities? With that hint, my eyes began to adjust to the gloom and pick out its contents.

  The first figure to come into focus appeared to explain the sensation of being watched: a full-sized suit of armour, parked at the other side of the door. So strong had the feeling been that, half embarrassed, I flipped up the visor to be certain, but there was no face behind it, only cobwebs.

  The overall texture to my left proved to be an entire wall of open shelves, laden from floor to the ceiling fifteen feet above with metal wind-up toys of all makes, conditions, and vintages. White-painted Indian cows and German birds in nests, tigers and horse-drawn carriages, clowns and Victorian gentlemen. A lady in the dress of the nineties sat at an elaborately painted tea table, one hand frozen halfway between table and lip—although on closer examination the hand held, not a tea cup, but a cigarette: shocking. Next to this iconoclastic figure, a roughly clad and bearded man awaited a turn of the key to resume his chopping of firewood. And here was one that brought back my childhood with a thump—a tin boy on a pennyfarthing bicycle, identical (if in better condition) to my father’s childhood toy, given to me when I was five. Life in a myriad of forms, all with keys in their backs or on the shelves beside them, all frozen and awaiting the animation of tension on their mainsprings.

  When I returned the pennyfarthing boy to his place, I was surprised to feel dust on my fingers, although the air smelt faintly of machine oil. The room was maintained, but not tidied.

  My eyes had adjusted sufficiently to trust myself not to bump into something, so I pressed on into the room. Scattered across the floor, looking as if they had been unloaded there rather than arranged, were display cases, some of which contained larger machines such as those in fun fairs near the sea. As I threaded my way across the room I saw at least six fortune-tellers, two of them old gipsy women, the others turbanned swamis, all set to different coinages. In two machines, the customer’s coin seemed to produce nothing more thrilling than a circuit of a train through a painted landscape, with a duck-laced pond here, a mountain tunnel there. No doubt the whistle blew several times during the circuit.

  Behind the smaller display cases rose four enormous constructions of mahogany and plate glass, their contents more diorama than mechanism. At first the figures within appeared to be dolls about six inches in height, but on closer examination, underneath their costumes they proved to be specimens of taxidermy art. Most of the creatures were furry, blunt-faced rodents with no tails to speak of and short ears—a variety of guinea pig, perhaps. One case held perhaps thirty of the things, posed on their hind legs and dressed for a formal ball, half of them in white tie, the others wearing silk or velvet, with diamonds on their hairy throats and diminutive champagne glasses clasped in their upraised paws. The second case represented, I assumed, a box at the Ascot races: A dozen of the creatures clutched tiny binoculars and wore elaborate spring hats. The third was a night-club, with dancers on a stage, their furry bodies graced with strips of costume and feathers perkily jutting from their heads. The fourth case held eight infant piglets, of the pale domesticated kind, gathered in a Victorian conservatory around a laden tea table; something about their attitudes made it seem a cruel parody of society at the time—English society, that is.

  As elaborate pieces of humour, they were most emphatically not to my taste. I thought it more than a little perverse, in fact, to raise a hundred small creatures just for the purpose of being transformed into facsimile human beings.

  Along the back wall of the room a trace of gravel on the floor gave further evidence of the paucity of attentive servants in this place. (And as for their master, I thought, where was the maharaja, anyway? I’d been well after nine o’clock getting here, thanks to the unexpected distance between my rooms and this place.) Farther along, nearly in the corner, I came across the collection’s more, well, esoteric contraptions. The first startled me by appearing to be a man; this, on closer examination, proved to be what he was, a life-sized waxwork Englishman in the uniform of the Crimean War, complete with musket. I supposed he fired it when animated. He had been placed, possibly by accident, as if to stand guard over a cluster
of glass-cased boxes, although these had neither gipsies nor swamis, and one glance made me glad I did not have the requisite tokens for putting them in motion. The women had skin that was uniformly pink and pearly, the men ranged from white to a darker shade of English pink, and all of them were comprehensively nude. I shook my head and turned to retrace my steps to the door, and nearly shrieked at the silent and unpainted figure ten feet away.

  “Heavens!” I said, my heart pounding. “Your Highness, I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you come in.”

  “My grandfather’s collection. And I do wish you’d call me Jimmy.”

  “They’re … extraordinary.”

  “Do you want to see them work?”

  “Oh no,” I said, more hastily than I had intended.

  He laughed. “Not those, no. He was a dirty old man, my grandfather. Here, let me show you one I rather like.”

  He slipped through a part of the room I hadn’t got to yet, ending up not far from the door. Before him stood a particularly magnificent carved wooden plinth about waist height, on which stood a foot-tall mechanical contraption and a perfect little celadon bowl holding half a dozen old-fashioned coins. The maharaja took one of them and pushed it through a slot on the wooden base.

  With a creak that I at first thought was the protest of disuse, the machine began to move. But it was not a creak, it was a mechanical simulation of a roar, because the creature was a tiger. Its tail wagged and its legs began to carry it forward to where a man in red uniform lay. It stopped—a marvelously complex piece of clockwork, this, considering its obvious great age—and bent to the man, seizing him in its great jaws. The man kicked, the tiger’s tail wagged, the geriatric roaring went on.

  The maharaja was watching me watch his tiger, and although it was too dim in there to be sure, I thought the man smiled.

  “This is magnificent,” I told him, my voice rather louder than it needed be. “I’ve seen something of the sort, in London.”

  “Tipoo’s Tiger, in your Victoria and Albert Museum. A smaller, less sophisticated version. My grandfather saw it, liked it, and had this made. Two years after the Mutiny, in fact.”

  That took me aback. A man who had made a clear gesture of loyalty to the British, and had been lavishly rewarded for his brutal but effective actions, less than two years later commissions a piece showing a British soldier chewed to bits by an Indian tiger.

  “Did your grandfather show this to many of his English visitors?” I asked.

  The man at my side laughed, pleased that I had understood the underlying jest. “Not many, no. Come, it is too nice a day to be closed in this stuffy room.”

  Stuffy, I thought as I followed him out the door, it was not. Uncanny, perhaps. Even macabre.

  The sun was a welcome antidote.

  Four others waited for us in the gardens, watching as a servant scattered food over the lotus pond to bring a school of exotic white and golden carp to the surface. It was not until I saw my fellow guests that it struck me how odd the means of my retrieval had been. Why have me go first to the room of mechanical toys, when the others had clearly been told to gather near the pond? And beyond that, why had a servant not fetched me back here, instead of the prince himself? I could only assume that my host had wanted me to see his grandfather’s machines, and me alone; and moreover, he had wanted to see my reaction to them.

  I did not know what this meant. Perhaps, I told myself, it was just that he’d wanted to keep Sunny Goodheart’s innocent eyes from the erotic devices and the small furry creatures, for Sunny was one of those at the pond. Or maybe it was something about me that promoted me above the others. As an honorary member of the pigsticking fraternity, were my sensibilities hardened beyond those of most women? I decided to prod, gently.

  “Your Highness, why—”

  “Please, call me Jimmy.”

  “Jimmy, then. Why not display the machines more openly? It’s an extraordinary collection.”

  He continued walking, until I thought he was not going to answer. Then, just out of earshot of the others, he said, “I am a public figure. I like to keep some things to myself, and a few chosen friends.”

  Then the others were with us, Sunny, her brother, the Kentish poloplayer (whose name was, I thought, Robbins), and a tall, silent woman I had seen but hadn’t realised was his wife. We walked across the courtyard to the gate, where we were joined by three merry salukis, and a pair of armed guards fell in behind us. The dogs raced ahead down the road that circled New Fort, their plumed tails adding a touch of gaiety, although the maharaja ignored their antics entirely. At the base of the hill we continued around, as I had done the first day, although instead of going on to the stables, the salukis flashed down a tree-lined set of steps leading to the left, in the direction of a growing chorus of jungle noises. In moments, a great uproar was heard from the tall monkey-house.

  “The monkeys don’t seem to care for the dogs,” I noted.

  “Oh, they don’t mind them so much. But the dogs signal my arrival, which always causes excitement.”

  Then the steps gave way to a pathway of crisp, white gravel, and we were in the Khanpur zoological gardens.

  It was, indeed, a zoo, with cages and paths, but considerable aesthetic attention had been paid, and the areas behind the bars resembled landscape rather than merely concrete and iron boxes to hold the specimens. The lions watched us from a little piece of Africa, a cunningly constructed rock wall with ledges and caves wrapped around by heavy bars; on the other side of their enclosure half a dozen varieties of African herbivore ran free, zebras and wildebeests and even, hiding in a far corner, a pair of wan-looking giraffes. The monkey-cage was the height of a three-storey building, and although the trees inside had long since been stripped to dead trunk, a natural-looking waterfall welled up from a pile of rocks in the centre of the cage, and the tall trees outside of the cage provided shelter to the inhabitants.

  Sunny was nearly speechless with pleasure, exclaiming over the glimpse of a baby monkey and clapping her hands together at the lemurs, who looked disgruntled at being prodded from their rest by a servant.

  The most startling thing, at first glance, was the collection of servants tending the animals. They bore the skin tones and facial characteristics of peoples from across the world—Asia, Africa, Scandinavia—but not one of them was taller than four feet: These were the inhabitants of the dwarf village Gay Kaur had referred to. And sure enough, between the cages and the sprawling plain filled with African wildlife lay a pseudo-African village whose proportions were at first disconcerting, the height of its grass huts and the size of its residents making it appear farther away than reason permitted.

  I thought it somewhat tasteless to house this particular group of servants alongside the zoo they tended, as if they were a part of it, but I supposed it was no stranger than the archaic European fashion of importing Nubian boys as decorative pages and footmen. Certainly, the small people seemed pleased enough with their lot, bustling officiously along the white paths and giving brisk orders to chuprassis twice their size. I tore my eyes from the shrunken village and joined the others at the lion cage.

  I often think that caged predators are kept alive by their deep inner fantasies of ripping apart the two-legged creatures outside their bars. It would explain their habit of watching our movements from beneath half-lowered eyelids, as if tempting us to venture too near. These, no less than their brothers in Regent’s Park, seemed to be salivating at the proximity of their small attendants, and I had no doubt that they would be even happier to make a fuller meal should, say, a royal personage stray close. The maharaja, however, kept his distance, although he did take us into the building behind the cage so that we could look through thick, smeary windows at the great dun carnivores, lying in the shade two feet away. I could practically feel the heat rising off them; when one of the females stretched luxuriously and her claws scraped on the stone floor, more than one of us shivered.

  The dogs were snuffling in the bushes behind
the building, but the maharaja called them sharply back, and indeed, this white path ended at the door to the lion building. Instead, we retraced our steps into the central area, past the cages of hippopotamus and wart hog, finally going into a low stone building with pens behind it. The inside was light and, despite the smell of animals, well kept. The maharaja led us over to a small, glass-fronted cage built at chest height into one wall; I, being taller than most of them, had no problem in seeing what he was doing.

  The cage contained a single slim, short-haired creature resembling a cross between a cat and a ferret, with clever hand-like paws and a wise-looking face. More of the creatures could be seen in the open-air pen attached to the outside of the building, many perched upright on their hind legs, watching their trapped comrade through the intervening glass with worried expressions. They were clearly perturbed, making quick forays in and out of their burrows, sitting up, chattering to one another. But the one inside was nearly frantic, for the maharaja had inserted his arm into the cage through a small trap-door, on his hand a glove-like puppet the shape and colour of a dove.

  “You see?” he was saying. “They have an instinctive fear of birds, even harmless ones such as this. I have been trying to overcome this instinct by invariably feeding them with a hand concealed inside a dove, but time and again they panic, and need to be hungry to the brink of starvation in order to overcome their fear of a thing with wings.”

  As he lectured, he glanced at Sunny, whose reflection in the glass showed her face twisted with an agitation nearly as great as that of the animals imprisoned outside.

  “Oh, don’t tease it!” she pleaded. “The poor thing, it’s—”

  Her interruption had caused the maharaja’s attention to shift, with the result that his hand dipped inside the cage. The small creature, wild with the terror of this perceived attack, leapt to defend itself. In a tan blur, the thin body flew up and attached itself to the dove, biting down furiously. With a bellow of pain, our host shook his hand hard. Puppet and creature slapped into the side of the cage, and the animal lay there, stunned, unable to defend itself from the bare, blood-smeared hand that snatched it up by the scruff of the neck and hauled it from the cage.