The Game

“You can draw us a map.”

“Inaccurate. And you’d need to use a torch or matches, either of which would be seen from the room’s high window. I can walk it in the dark.”

O’Hara’s dark eyes travelled to consult Holmes, who nodded and said, “She has a certain skill at the Jewel Game.”

O’Hara studied me, as if such a talent would show on the surface, then said abruptly, “You went into the stables yesterday night.”

“Yes,” I replied, wondering if he was accusing me of something. “I wanted to see that the horses had been looked after.”

O’Hara had something else in mind. “We will cover your eyes, and you will walk through the stables by way of demonstration.”

It seemed to me a rather silly exercise, but we were, after all, embarked on a game here, and perhaps my accepting the challenge would move things ahead more rapidly.

And so it proved. From the moment O’Hara snugged the linen dish-cloth around my head to the time we slipped across the Khanpur border was a matter of half a day.

We left with a rucksack Bindra had found somewhere, provisioned with food, water, and candles; two knives and an ancient revolver Holmes had got from the khansama; the rope and morphia, which Holmes had hidden about his person ever since the night in the gaol; and several small but vital pieces of inside information possessed by Nesbit. Only when we had extracted the facts did we reveal to the man that we were leaving him behind. He was not pleased; we had to chain his wrist to the iron bed to keep him from joining us.

His curses, however, followed us far down the snowy road.

Nor was Bindra happy to be left outside of the Khanpur border with the horses, but the boy had to admit, when pressed by a father employing all the logic of Socrates, that bearing the weight of an abducted maharaja would be beyond his abilities, and that someone needed to watch the beasts. We built a makeshift shelter for them below the snow-line, in an area of deep brush and woods far from the track, where Bindra could keep the animals quiet: The weightiness of that responsibility calmed him. At least we hadn’t left him back at the dak bungalow, making sure that Nesbit did not get free.

Just before dark we reached the end of the forest, east and slightly to the south of The Forts, more or less where Nesbit and I had left O’Hara after the gaol-break. The moon rose with the darkness; when it was well clear of the mountains behind us, we slipped from the trees into the cultivated edges of the rough terai.

At ten o’clock, with an enormous, bright moon full in the sky, we crossed the main road without having disturbed anything more than pi-dogs and a few night birds. On the other side, the land was more heavily used, but in India even farmers tend to live inside village walls. We gave those wide berth, keeping to fields and paths and moving cautiously; we saw no person.

Well before midnight, the smells of the zoo came to us across the frigid air. A rooster crew, some big animal—one of the lions, perhaps?—coughed irritably, nocturnal habits lying uneasy beneath the daylight regime of its keepers. Another half mile, and we were at the walls surrounding the village of dwarfs. There we paused for whispered consultation.

“The fence here seems to be nothing but thorn brush,” I noted.

“Too noisy to move,” Holmes countered. “We go around.”

The tangle of dry thorn eventually gave way to high, strong wire fencing that kept the maharaja’s giraffes from straying into the sugar cane. We had brought rudimentary burglary tools with us, but it proved unnecessary here, as the fence was not topped by barbed wire. We climbed up and dropped into the pen, keeping near the fence as it pushed deeper into the zoo, then at the far side climbed out again. The white gravel paths glimmered in the light from over our heads, giving us direction, although we did not walk on the gravel for fear of the betraying crunch.

The lions’ pen would have been easy for a blind person to locate, stinking of carnivore, the faint splash of water from the hillside spring the only noise in the great stillness. Our boots made no sound on the winter-soft grass, our clothing gave less rustle than the breeze in the leaves. We drew near the high, gleaming bars, the trees and rock wall behind them a dapple of light and dark.

Then a lion roared from what seemed ten feet away, and I nearly screamed in response. We froze, and my heart coursed and leapt in my chest, making me dizzy; the night seemed to pulse and fade. There came the sound of a large body shifting, the pad of enormous feet, and a second roar. We remained motionless. Would a night watchman come to investigate? Did the roar of lions mean the same as the bark of a dog? Or was the animal merely calling into the night, in hopes that his voice might be heard by another?

After an interminable time, which was probably only six or eight minutes, the animal grunted to itself and padded across the ground. Then it dropped with a breathy grunt and quieted.

I began to breathe again. After a minute, one of the men touched my arm, and we crept forward, cautious as mice in a cattery.

At the end of the lion cage, the greenery closed in so it became impossible to avoid the gravel, but when I gingerly set my foot onto its pale surface, I found that here it had not been refreshed as recently as in the centre of the zoo, and the stones in this damp place had sunk into the ground. We passed the door to the keeper’s building behind the cage where the food and cleaning equipment was stored, and where the white gravel came to an end.

But as I had remembered, there was an unnatural space between the bushes and the building where the salukis had bounded as at a familiar way, and the ground under our feet bore the unmistakable imprint of traffic. Working by feel alone, unable to see anything but the glow of the sky above, I patted my way along the walls until I came to the place where baked-mud wall merged with the naked rock of the hillside.

There we found the door. Unevenly shaped to suit the rough wall, too low for even a short man to pass while standing, and narrow enough to require slipping through sideways.

And locked.

Holmes eased past me to deal with that little problem, and when his pick-locks had done their work, we all breathed a sigh of relief to find the door unbarred. A battering-ram would not have suited our purposes at all.

We slipped inside, into a tight space that smelt of must and stone and the dampness of ages. Holmes closed the door behind him, and I lit a candle. We stood in a hollow perhaps five feet square and seven feet tall, rough- hewn from the rock. I had expected one passage, but we found two, both just wide enough for a man’s shoulders and tall enough for Holmes to walk without being forced to duck. We took the one to the left, which began by heading north, but soon doubled back south, then north again. We were, I decided, cork-screwing upwards in the hill below New Fort, the floor of the passageway ever rising beneath our feet. Twice we came to junctions, and after debate, we took care to mark our choice with small pebbles. After the second junction, we went for five minutes or so before Holmes and I stopped almost simultaneously, sensing the way diverging from where we wanted to be. Returning to the junction, we shifted the pebbles and went on, ever climbing, until the passage came to an end at a door as broad as the outside one had been narrow.

This door, however, had no lock, merely an expanse of uneven, time-darkened wood. I pushed against it, then dug my fingernails into one of the cross-pieces and pulled, but the heavy thing did not budge. Without a word, I stepped back far enough to allow Holmes to pass, and handed him the candle.

He ran the light back and forth over the surface, looking more for signs of wear than for a trigger, but found nothing. Not until he began to search the surrounding rock did he give a grunt of triumph. Shifting the low-burning stub to his left hand, he reached up with his right forefinger to press something hidden by a rough place in the stone. There was a faint click, and the flame danced wildly and snuffed out in the sudden current of air from around the concealed door.

Holmes pressed back against the rock to allow me passage. I laid my hand against the wooden surface, which despite its weight gave way with the silent ease of oiled hinges, and felt forward with the toe of my boot for the high marble trim that had run around the toy-room floor. It was there, and moreover, the air smelt of dust and machine oil. I stepped inside, listening for motion or the sound of stifled breathing, until I was satisfied that we were alone.