The Game

“What do you know of the conflict along India’s northern frontier?” he asked me.

“I know that war in one form or another has gone on for most of the last century, until the Bolshevik revolution five years ago. The Tsar wanted to extend the Russian borders across the mountains into Afghanistan and ultimately India, while we kept him out by a show of force and holding close watch on the passes. In the meantime, both sides have been mistrusted, manipulated, and often murdered by the countries in the middle; the Afghans particularly have made the trapping of outsiders a national sport.”

“In 1891,” Holmes resumed, “Kim O’Hara was seventeen years old and fresh from school when he was dropped straight into the thick of The Game. A pair of ‘hunters’ came out of the hills carrying, along with their rifles, trophies, and a collection of well-hidden survey equipment, secret messages from the Tsar to some hill rajas entertaining treasonous thoughts. O’Hara was at the time in the company of his lama, and used his role as the man’s chela, or disciple, to conceal his government work. The job was hard and nearly killed him, but he succeeded in capturing the relevant letter, and was rewarded by being turned loose for a time. His lama was dying and wished to breathe his last in Tibet—and the boy’s superiors knew full well that if they attempted to keep him from his duties as a disciple, he would simply slip the reins and vanish.”

“Tibet.”

“Yes. A country all too aware of its vulnerability and its desirability, and therefore closed with grim determination against the eyes of all foreigners, a place with the habit of executing anyone even suspected of secret doings, a place where no Westerner had ever set foot. Unfortunately, just four months earlier, a Survey agent had gone missing from a mission into the reaches of Tibet, and it was feared that he had been taken captive, and was being questioned, under fairly drastic means—certain pieces of inside information had come to public knowledge. It was feared that any agent known to this man was in danger of exposure.”

“So Mycroft suggested sending in someone whom the man could not have known,” I supplied. “You.”

“Correct again. The timing was coincidental—my own unlooked-for availability and their sudden and urgent need for a competent stranger. And although by the time I reached India, O’Hara and his lama had left the plains, I managed to join a Scandinavian expedition into the mountains whose path would coincide with theirs.”

“Wheels within wheels.”

“Quite an appropriate image, Russell. The Tibetans often pray by means of a wheel spun on the end of a stick, its body filled with written prayers. With prayers, or with any other piece of writing a man might wish to carry with him. A map, say, or the copy of a private letter.”

“So you persuaded a couple of Tibetan monks to take on a Norwegian explorer?”

“They were, as I mentioned, begging for their meal by the side of the road, as is customary for religious individuals in the East. I was in the habit of concealing a roll in the breast of my coat, for just such an eventuality, and slid inside it a wadded-up note suggesting that a ‘son of the charm’ might find a friend in the tent with the orange door. The boy came to me after his lama was asleep that night, bristling with suspicion, fingering in a most un-monk-like fashion the revolver he wore inside his shirt lest I prove an enemy—or worse, a colleague set on dragging him back to his responsibilities.

“I gave him food—the boy ate meat as if he was starving, which he may well have been—and tobacco, and we sat on our heels in the dark and talked. He was the most remarkable blend of hard and soft, cunning and naive, schoolboy one moment, petty criminal the next. He was a prodigy, who’d played a similar Game in the streets before he’d even heard of Crown or Tsar—if Creighton had sat at a drawing-board to design the very tool for bearing the Survey’s eyes and ears, he couldn’t have come up with anything better than Kimball O’Hara. His only weakness was a distaste for lying to his friends, and even then, he would practice deceit joyously when it was part of The Game.

“In the end I managed to convince the lad that, far from wishing to pull him out of the mountains, I would urge him to go as far and as wide as he could with his lama—my sole request being that he take me with him. Two purposes had I: The more immediate was to find word of Creighton’s missing agent, but beyond that, I had been asked, if it came into my purview, to whisper into the Dalai Lama’s ear that, despite the alarming actions of certain importunate missionaries, England was in fact more interested in treaty than takeover. That we had no wish to rule Tibet, merely wished Tibet’s assurance that they would not side with Russia and allow The Bear to use their land to stockpile troops and materiel for an invasion of India.

“At that time, I had no real thought that I would be allowed within shooting distance of the Dalai Lama, much less close enough to converse. That possibility came much later.

“The boy didn’t want me. He was afraid I’d give them away, and bring some impossible-to-predict form of wrath down on his lama. However, he was greatly tempted, seeing that supporting my assignment might go some way towards obviating his rebellion against his Survey masters. O’Hara would freely have given his life for the lama, but it troubled him greatly to give up his future. In the end, the benefits outweighed the risk, and he agreed to take me with them.

“Because the old lama was growing feeble, he and the boy moved more slowly than our well-equipped expedition. So I remained a Norwegian for some weeks, and acquitted myself well enough to receive mention in the world press before the Scandinavians pulled back to the foothills in front of the snows. I went with them, then slipped away and doubled back to join O’Hara.

“Somehow or other he’d managed to assemble another set of monk’s clothing for me, complete with prayer- beads and the sort of tam-o’-shanter cap they wore.”

I paused in our peregrination of the foredeck to study Holmes, trying to picture him in the colourful fittings of a Tibetan monk. I could not.

“We wintered just below a pass, taking shelter in a monastery of like-minded individuals until the snows retreated in the spring.”

“That must have felt like a long winter,” I commented. If he’d fled England because he hungered for action, months in a snow-bound monastery must have been hugely frustrating.

But to my surprise, he leant forward to rest his elbows against the ship’s rail, a half-smile coming onto his narrow mouth as memories took his gaze to the horizon. “In some ways, yes. Certainly it didn’t take long to run out of objects to play the Jewel Game with. But those two, the young white boy raised as a street urchin and the ancient Buddhist scholar, made for the most extraordinary company I’ve ever encountered, Russell. The one bursting with youth and beauty, the other a sea of wrinkles, the one a guttersnipe and petty thief, the other a revered head of a monastery—but when they met, the old man laid a potter’s hands on the boy, and re-formed him in his image. The bond between them was so powerful, and so completely unlikely, it made one begin to believe in the doctrine of reincarnation. It was the only way to explain it, that they’d known each other many times over the ages.”

I stared; the strange thing was, I couldn’t tell if he was jesting.

He felt my gaze, and although he did not meet it, he straightened and went on more briskly. “In any event, the winter did grant me sufficient leisure to become word-perfect as a red-hat monk. I spent many hours teaching the boy certain skills he might need, if he chose to return to the road of the Intelligence agent, and in exchange he coached me until I could recite the lama’s prayers better than he could, could expound on texts and write simple charms. And long hours out-of-doors in that high altitude rendered my skin as dark as those around me. When the pass cleared, I could probably have strolled into Lhasa without them.

“But Lhasa was where the lama was bound, and Lhasa was where his chela, and now their companion, would take him.

“We crossed over into Tibet in late March, reciting our rosaries all the way. The snows were so high, I would have chosen to wait another fortnight, but the lama was impatient—for a man who had attained enlightenment, he could be remarkably susceptible to his desires—and O’Hara thought himself strong enough for both. In the end, I had the old man on my back for a number of very rough miles—and at fifteen thousand feet, that can be rough indeed. But we half-staggered, half-rolled down the other side, tipped our hats to the startled border guards and said a blessing on their unborn sons, and went our way.

“And there we were, inside Tibet, two British sahibs in a place where, had they known, the countryside would have swarmed up like an anthill and exterminated us, or at the very least thrown us out on our ears. But because the lama was known and loved, and because he vouched for his chela and the companion who had joined them some months before, no man questioned us, no official barred our way.

“I spent the rest of that summer and autumn there, during which time I succeeded in locating our captured