The Game

The man’s drunkenness was not an act, not entirely. I thought at first it was, expected him to put it aside and go rational, but he was too far gone for that. Not that the rational portion was entirely overwhelmed. He was sitting on the edge of his bed, shoeless and wearing neither tie nor coat, when I came in. He raised his wavering head.

“Ah, Russell. My ol’ fren’ Martin Russell. Have to ask you to help me into the johnny, that’s a good man.” He raised his arm, asking for my support, and I went to his side to haul him upright. My shoulder kept him from falling, and we made the cloakroom without mishap. “Tha’s fine, you jus’ leave me here for a minute.”

From the bedroom I listened to the sounds of gagging and retching. When the splash of the flush toilet had run its course, I took him a glass of water and helped him back to the bed. He dropped heavily down, his hands clutching his skull to keep the world from whirling.

“Sorry,” he said, slurring the sounds. “Sorry. He wouldn’t let me stop, and there’s only so much whisky you can spill on the floor. God, this is bad.” I saw his face change, and hurriedly shoved the shaving-bowl into his hands. A second glass of water was sipped more slowly, and stayed down. “Never seen him like this. Madman,” Nesbit muttered.

I took the description as hyperbole, and waited impatiently for him to tell me what we were going to do next. All plans of making a reconnaissance of the Old Fort had clearly shot out the window; by the time Nesbit was sober enough to walk, it would be light.

“Saw the magician again,” he said.

I straightened sharply. “Where?”

“In the . . . Where were we?” he said to himself. “The gun-room.”

“That horrible fur-lined room? Why?”

“Jimmy wanted to see his tricks. Clever man.”

“I know,” I said. “Did you say anything, accidentally?”

“No.” He spoke firmly, with absolute assurance, and I thought that this might be one drunk who retained a thin edge of control.

“Did he give you anything?”

“Who?” He raised his head, struggling to focus on my face. “Jimmy?”

“No, Hol—the magician,” I said, although we were speaking quietly.

The green eyes narrowed exaggeratedly in thought, and Nesbit started to pat his pockets, then looked around for some place to put the glass. I took it, and watched him search pockets with clumsy fingers until impatience got the better of me, and I dipped my own into breast and coat pockets until I encountered the tiny twist of paper, no bigger than an apple seed.

“Got it,” I told him. He blinked owlishly at the object, and I resigned myself to the fact that there would be no more help or even sense got out of the man tonight. Holmes’ skin dye would have to last another day. I pulled back the bedclothes and patted the pillow. “You go to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Got things to do,” he declared, and prepared to rally his body’s mutinous forces to his side.

“Nesbit,” I said in a firm voice. “Geoffrey, there’s not a thing either of us can do tonight. Sleep it off. We’ll talk in the morning.”

He focussed on my face, inches from his, and then his eyes went soft, and after a minute he sagged sideways into the pillow and went limp. I pulled the bedclothes up to his shoulders and crossed the room, but at the door I heard his voice.

“Pig sticking. In the morning. Early.”

Damnation.

Outside, I gave the servant a third cigarette and told him, “Nesbit sahib will need aspirin and strong coffee when he wakes. And someone to help him shave,” I added.

“Yes, sahib,” the man said merrily. “Aspirin and coffee we have much of.”

I’ll bet, I said to myself.

In my room, with a chair braced under the door’s handle, I eased open the tiny wad of thin paper Holmes had secreted in Nesbit’s pocket:

First floor, southeast wing. Keys in the desk box. Bring rope, morphia, needle.

I was accustomed to odd shopping lists from Holmes, but this gave me a moment’s pause. Rope I could probably find, but the rest? As I traded my dark clothes for nightwear and climbed into bed, my mind was taken up with ways in which I might casually ask the servants for a drug addict’s gear.

Nesbit looked like death in the morning. The aspirin and coffee might have got him dressed and on the horse, but only time would restore the colour to his face and the flexibility to his posture. Still, he was there, and mounted, albeit looking decidedly queasy. His greeting to me was a brief nod; his answer to the maharaja’s hearty greeting not much more effusive. The prince laughed and clapped his guest on the shoulders.

“You’re getting soft, Nesbit,” he declared. “Not holding up the British side.”

“The day’s not over yet, Jimmy,” Nesbit answered, but the maharaja only laughed the louder. I realised with a shock that this drinking partner was still half drunk; how the hell could he manage the intellectually tricky and physically demanding business of going after pig? And I was none the happier when he chose Nesbit and myself as his partners for the run.

We rode five miles northwest, past the air field to where the servants were waiting. During that time, Nesbit pulled himself together, his seat improving with every minute, his green eyes taking on the gleam of challenge. It was a relief, to think that we weren’t all going to be hopeless at the task ahead.

The maharaja, on the other hand, became increasingly peculiar. His high spirits seemed to twist as we went along, climbing and turning hard, his remarks to his guests taking on an edge of spite, even cruelty, his hand on the reins causing his lovely white Arab to fret and sidestep nervously. When we reached the servants, it had worked itself into a sweat despite the coolness of the morning, and the lead shikari eyed his master and the Arab’s sweaty neck with equal apprehension.

The attitude was quickly justified, when the first spear handed the maharaja proved to have some flaw in its polish; petulance became fury and the razor-sharp head flashed down, missing the servant’s foot by a hairbreadth, and that only because the man had jumped back. The substitute spear proved more satisfactory. I exchanged a long look with Nesbit, and accepted a weapon of my own.

Riding behind our host, I murmured to the blond man, “What the hell is wrong with him? He acts like he’s taken some kind of drug.”

“Possibly. I’ve never seen him quite like this. Watch your back.” But before I could ask how exactly I was to do that, given the already hazardous setting of a pig-hunt, the man ahead of us turned to shout us forward, and we kicked our mounts to obey.

The day passed in a confusion of fury and high apprehension, until I felt as if I were dancing over a bed of planted swords with a partner courting suicide. We flushed three pigs, each one increasingly vicious, stronger than the last, ever more clever. It was as if Nature itself was being fed by its prince’s wild force, his manic laughter and cutting barbs driving his guests and servants on, welding us all into a kind of wild hunt, a pack out for blood. It was, I thought in a brief clear moment, only a matter of time before we turned on one of our own. Nesbit’s emerald eyes glittered and I found skills I could not have imagined, coaxing the horse into the turns of an acrobat, balancing the awkward spear like an extension of my arm.

It was with the fourth pig that it all came crashing down on us. It was an old and wily creature, still enormously broad across the shoulders but with one of its upper tusks broken down, and it came out of its thicket as ill-tempered as the prince himself. It ran and jinked and I dropped back so the two men didn’t ride me over, only to find the creature halting dead and reversing straight for me. Nesbit and the maharaja had ridden well past it by the time they could pull up, and the tusks were closing in, too fast.

What followed was the most furiously incomprehensible dance yet, the boar in the middle, all three of us jabbing and ducking away and coming back to its charges, waiting for an opening, the boar too experienced to allow us one. Around and around we went, the pig a welter of blood from a dozen minor wounds, not giving an inch,