By the time we retraced our steps around the Fort and through the gates, even Sunny’s protective older brother appeared to have forgotten, or forgiven, the dull crack of the spine within the maharaja’s fingers.

After the morning’s unsettling events, I was tempted to remain in my rooms, thinking. However, the idea of a long walk, and of being free of The Forts for several hours, was too appealing, so with the sun high in the sky, Faith and I swung out happily from the gates. I paused to lean over the waist-high stone wall that separated the upper section of the drive from the precipitous hill. There was, I noticed, a vestigial sort of path leading straight down to the main road, duplicated on the other side by an almost imperceptible smooth line leading up the other side to the gate of the eastern fort. Worn by guards too hurried to follow the winding road, I thought; certainly no threat to the security of New Fort itself.

When we had doubled back to the main road, a movement behind us caused me to look back.

“Hell,” I said. “There’s someone coming after us.”

Faith glanced over her shoulder and kept walking. “Just one of the guards. Don’t worry about him.”

“But I don’t want a guard.”

“You don’t have a choice. If you’re Jimmy’s guest, he has you looked after.”

The man, red-turbanned and uniformed, complete with a sidearm in a belt-holster, had stopped dead when I came to a halt and looked back at him. When I reluctantly started up again, he followed at the same distance.

“Maybe we’ll lose him in the bazaar,” I told Faith.

“You’d better hope for his sake we don’t,” she answered.

“The maharaja takes guarding his guests seriously, then?”

“Oh, yes.”

“All right. I wouldn’t want the fellow to lose his job.”

“Or his head,” she added. She was joking, of course. I turned my back on the man, physically and mentally, and determined to enjoy the outing.

Snow-capped peaks lay on three sides of the valley that was Khanpur, brisk contrast to the near-tropical crops that grew alongside the road, the sugar cane and new-planted melons. Men worked the fields, women swayed beneath loads of copper water-jugs and cloth-wrapped bundles, children wielding cane switches urged goats and cattle from the cultivated land, and Faith and I strode alone talking, our armed escort an unvarying two hundred yards to the rear.