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, missing fetlocks and bellies by a breath, bolting and feinting and furious.