In the Palace of the Khans

by Peter Dickinson

  “So you play bottom board?”

  “No, sir. Second.”

  “An experienced player, then. You do not think I need to give you a piece by way of a handicap?”

  “Uh … Let’s see how it goes, sir.”

  The study was a fair-sized room, also looking out over the river. There were bookshelves, easy chairs, a music centre and TV. At the back of the room was a table set out with plates, cutlery, glasses, a jug of juice and a beer-bottle, and several little dishes of food.

  “Help yourself,” said the President. “The food is all local. These are little fish from our lake, pickled in sweet vinegar, and those are the eggs of our mountain quail …”

  Nigel did as he was told, taking a little of anything the President recommended. He was too nervous to feel hungry. The air in here was mercifully fresher, though the President himself still reeked. The chess table was set up under the window, with low tables beside each chair for the trays. The President took his over and sat, then waited for Nigel to do the same. He picked up a couple of pawns, juggled them between his hands and held out his closed fists. Nigel chose the left. Black.

  “I can spare forty minutes,” said the President said, putting a stopwatch down beside the board. “We will play two minutes a move, maximum, but faster if possible.”

  He advanced his queen’s knight’s pawn one square and clicked the watch. Nigel pushed a centre pawn two squares and did the same. The President shifted his bishop onto the empty pawn square to threaten it. Nigel was surprised. It was a flashy sort of opening, Mr Harries had told him, but schoolboys are always trying that sort of thing, so he’d met it before. He merely supported the pawn, then continued to occupy the centre, developing his pieces and at the same time blocking the President’s attack down the diagonal. They castled on opposite sides and exchanged a couple of pawns.

  The centre of the board was already becoming congested when for the first time Nigel took his two minutes. He wasn’t thinking about how to win the game, but whether to. He hadn’t worked it out exactly, but he thought he could do it in about eight moves, most of which would seem merely to be countering the President’s coming attack. What had his father said? “I believe he plays, I don’t know how well, though I doubt is there’s anyone in the country with the nerve to beat him.”

  Scary? Not necessarily. The President can’t have seen the threat, so he’d never know if Nigel simply played on without putting it into action.

  He couldn’t bring himself to do it. He bit his lip and made a couple of what looked like nothing-much moves. Now, he thought, and swallowed convulsively. His heart started to pound.

  The President launched his attack as if nothing had changed. When the massacre was over he was a knight for a pawn up but Nigel had his rooks doubled on a half-open file. Confidently the President shifted his remaining bishop to threaten Nigel’s queen. Instead of retreating Nigel advanced her along the diagonal and took the bishop. As the President’s hand was hovering to retake with a protecting pawn he saw what would happen. Move the pawn and the file would be fully open. Another move and Nigel would have his front rook on the back rank. Check. The knight could retake, but Nigel’s second rook would take it in turn and the President’s king would be trapped in its own fortress. Checkmate.

  A really good player would have resigned two moves ago, but then a really good player wouldn’t have got into that mess.

  Abruptly the President stood, turned to the window, snatched a handkerchief out of his pocket and sneezed violently into it, a real trumpet-call of a sneeze. He turned, shaking his head and wiping his eyes with the handkerchief, and then folded it fussily and put it back into his pocket. As he was about to sit down there was a tap at the door.

  He looked towards it, frowning, and called out. A man came in with a phone in his hand. The President took it and asked an irritable-sounding question. A pause, and then he sighed, shrugged and turned to Nigel.

  “My apologies, but I must break off,” he said brusquely. “Something urgent has come up. We will play again some time.”

  He spoke to the man, who answered briefly and left. The President had started to put the pieces away and Nigel was about to do the same but as soon at the door closed the President stopped.

  Nigel looked up. The President didn’t do or say anything, but stood there motionless, looking down at him.

  Now he was really scared.

  “You were about to checkmate me,” said the President.

  “Yer … yes, sir.”

  “You realise what this means to me, to be beaten, by a child, my guest, in my own palace?”

  “Yer … yes, sir. I … almost …”

  “Decided not to make the queen move? To let me overwhelm you a few moves later? And yet you did it. Why? Pride? Vanity? To have beaten the President of Dirzhan? Something to boast about to your friends?”

  “Oh, no, sir! That queen sacrifice—I hadn’t even been thinking about it. It was just there, all set up, ready, and I sort of noticed it. I’ve never done one before. I could see it was going to work. Then … I knew what it meant—I could have just retreated the queen and fought you off—it’d have been a close thing—but I couldn’t do it. It would have been a kind of … cheating, I suppose. I felt if I did it I’d never be given a present like that again.”

  “Cheating whom?”

  “I … I don’t know … The game … You too, sir, I suppose. You’ve done me proud, having me here, letting me visit your daughter—it’s a terrific honour. I’d have been doing something sneaky, behind your back …”

  He ran out of words and waited. His right hand was trembling. He couldn’t stop it.

  “My daughter appears to like you,” said the President. “She has asked you to return tomorrow?”

  (How …? Oh yes, of course. Mr. Dikhtar must have told him.)

  “… er … Yes, sir … If that’s all right.”

  “I asked you to play chess with me to see if you knew enough about the game to teach her. She is anxious to learn and I do not have the time.”

  “I’ll try if you like, sir.”

  “And what do you propose to tell your parents about our game?”

  “I’ll say … I’ll say we were still slogging it out when something came up and you had to go.”

  The President nodded and turned to the door, but paused with his hand on the doorknob.

  “We will play again soon,” he said. “And you will play your best. No ‘cheating’. And I will beat you.”

  Nigel sighed, shuddered, and finished putting the pieces back in the box. Jet-lag swept over him with a rush, but by the time Mr. Dikhtar came to take him down to the car his hands had almost stopped trembling.

  He got his favourite meal for supper, grilled lamb chops, with chips and French beans and mushrooms. His mother had cooked it herself, to make sure the embassy’s Dirzhani chef didn’t mess it up with spices and sauces, but it all seemed to be subtly different from what it would have been in England. Surely a French bean is a French bean wherever you eat it, but these seemed to be French with a Dirzhani accent. His father was working late downstairs and didn’t come in to supper till Nigel was well into his second helping.

  “At last!” said his mother. “I’ve been bursting to know how Nigel got on at the palace, but it didn’t seem fair to ask him to tell us twice.”

  “Suits me,” said his father. “Reheats are seldom as good as the original dish. Well, Niggles, what did you make of the girl?”

  “No, start at the beginning,” said his mother. “Rick dropped you at the door and saw you taken inside, he says. Then what?”

  Nigel took them through it in detail. His mother interrupted with questions and comments, about the eagles, for instance: “That’s an outrage! Those magnificent birds, shut up in a mews!”

  “It’s probably the most effective way of protecting them,” said his father. “Shepherds are going to think twice about putting out poison bait for the Khan’s birds. Go on, Niggles. No, wait. I tak
e it that apart from that interesting comment about the video you didn’t discuss much by way of matters of state.”

  “He isn’t there as a British spy, Nick! Absolutely not! I’d never have agreed …”

  “As you say, absolutely not. But neither is he there as a channel through which the President can pass on information, or more likely misinformation, to me. If anything of that kind were to come up, I don’t want to know about it. I think in fact the President will co-operate.

  “And since we’re on the subject, about your blog—odious word—Niggles, I think you’d better not say anything about your visit to the palace.”

  “Oh, but.…”

  “It isn’t just that there’s a lot of people back home who wouldn’t be happy about the idea of the British ambassador cosying up with a ruthless dictator …”

  “That’s how I feel,” said Nigel’s mother.

  “… I’ve a fine line to tread right here. Because of the dam project it is important that I should be on reasonable terms with him, but it is equally important that I shouldn’t give the Russians the slightest excuse for claiming that I’m in any way close to him. Since the war in Georgia they’ve become increasingly hostile to anything that might be construed as Western interference in any of the states on their border that used to be part of the old Soviet empire. Only a few years back they persuaded Kazakhstan to turf the Americans out of an important airbase there. No doubt they’ve been putting similar pressure the President to let them take the dam project over. They’ll find him a tough nut to crack—he won’t stand for interference from anyone—but if he has a weak spot it is his daughter. Your visits to her may seem trivial in the light of world affairs, but in the hands of a skilled propagandist they could cause considerable embarrassment.”

  “I wasn’t going to say he was the President, Dad. Just a rich guy with a swank house on the river.”

  “Ah … In that case … You’ll show me when you’ve finished?”

  “All right. Shall I go on?”

  Was almost beating the President at chess a matter of state? The President seemed to think so. Nigel was pretty sure that that monstrous sneeze had been a sort of get-me-out-of-this signal. The interruption had been just too neat to be for real. Anyway, he’d already worked out what he was going to tell his parents, and it didn’t make any difference what his father had just said.

  “I took him a bit by surprise, I think. He only wanted to play me to see if I was good enough to teach Taeela, so maybe he was a bit careless. Out of practice too. We were about level when something came up and he had to go.

  “And really that was it. Oh, yes, one thing, Mum. Any chance there’s a video here Taeela might want to watch with people talking posh in it? Like Helena Bonham-Carter, he said.”

  “I’ll look.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Day 3.

  Back to Mr G.’s in the morning …

  This time one of the palace cars came to fetch Nigel. The driver didn’t speak English, or pretended not to, and drove him along a boring modern ring-road, over a different bridge and round to the back of the palace, then through an archway guarded by sentries into a huge central courtyard, with a pillared arcade running all the way round it.

  He parked in the far corner, got out, opened the door for Nigel, muttered what must have been the Dirzhani for “This way,” and led him to a side door. A bored guard checked Nigel’s pass, rootled a bit in his bag, frowned at the video of The Railway Children, shrugged and handed the bag back. The security seemed to be much slacker down here than it was at the main entrance. He did a perfunctory body-search and let Nigel in to a small modern hallway whose only feature was the door of a lift-shaft, with a key-pad on the wall beside it. Not bothering to hide what he was doing the guard pressed in a stupidly simple code, 9876. The door sighed open and he gestured to Nigel to enter, then leaned in, pressed the “2” button and withdrew as the door closed. Somewhere up at the top of the shaft a buzzer sounded. The lift started upward.

  When the door opened again Nigel stepped out into far end of the lobby in the Khan’s private apartments. The door of the living-room was already ajar. Taeela came running to it and flung it wide, but stopped there and did her pout.

  “You … you’re late!” she said.

  He looked at his watch.

  “I’m three minutes early.”

  “Three minutes early is late!”

  “OK.”

  Her new toy, he thought, as he followed her into the room. The eunuch, on his stool just inside the door, greeted him with a smile and a slow, deferential nod. He smiled back and raised a hand in greeting. Boys, he wondered. Apart from school, does she get to meet boys at all? If so, how do they cope with it, the precious daughter of the Khan, the eunuch listening to every syllable, watching every gesture with his sleepless single eye? They’d be out of there as soon as they got the chance, wouldn’t they? Not much fun for her.

  “Can I call him Fofo?” he muttered as he sat down

  She glanced towards the door, frowned and shook her head.

  “Then you must teach me to say his name.”

  “Fohdrahko.”

  The aitches were tricky. She kept him at it until she was satisfied, then called the eunuch over.

  “Say it to him,” she said.

  Nigel rose. He didn’t want to have his hand kissed again, so he put his palms together in front of his face as he’d seen Indians do, bowed his head slightly and said “Greetings, Fohdrahko.”

  The eunuch copied the gesture one-handed.

  “Khanazhan Nigel,” he said carefully.

  Taeela clapped her hands.

  “I teach … taught him how he … how to say your name. Khanazhan means little khan. Now you can call him Fofo.”

  She spoke in Dirzhani to the eunuch, who gave a silent laugh, bowed his head again to Nigel and returned to his stool.

  “What would you like to do?” said Nigel. “My mother’s found a film you might like to watch. If we get bored I could start teaching you chess.”

  “Cool,” she said experimentally.

  As soon as the film started Fohdrahko brought his stool over and settled behind the sofa. Watching it was a slow process because Taeela kept pausing it to ask Nigel questions about stuff she hadn’t understood, or simply to explain what people were saying to Fohdrahko. She was starting to sound like Jenny Agutter when the servant came in with the drinks and biscuits. They were still only half way through, but she switched the TV off.

  “Enough,” she said. “Now you teach me chess.”

  Mr. Harries used the school team to help teach beginners, so Nigel knew the drill. First he showed her the moves, and how to take pieces and what check and checkmate meant and so on. Then he set the board up, giving her the black pieces, and advanced his king’s pawn.

  “Your turn,” he said.

  “What I … do I do?”

  “Anything you like, so long as it’s legal. I won’t be trying to beat you, I’ll be trying to keep the game going. It’s just so you can get a feel of how it works.”

  The first game took about five minutes. In the second he started saying things like “I can take that knight with my bishop unless you protect it with that pawn.” By the third she’d stopped moving almost at random and was beginning to play more intently, starting to make a move, taking it back (Mr. Harries let beginners do that), defending her pieces with other pieces and so on.

  As they set up the pieces for the next game Nigel said “We’d better make this the last one. I’ll have to go soon.”

  “I will play ve-ry slow-ly. This time I am black.”

  In fact she played only a little slower, and that because she was thinking more. When there were only a few minutes left he said “Are you sure you want to do that?”

  She stared at the piece she’d just moved, and shrugged.

  “Why not?”

  He advanced a pawn to fork her knight and rook.

  “You’ve got to lose one of them,” he sai
d.

  She glared at him and shifted the knight.

  “I like my little horses,” she said.

  “You mustn’t think like that,” he said. “That rook was much better placed, and it’ll be stronger once the board’s a bit clearer. You’ve got to get used to the idea of giving pieces up, any piece, if it’s worth while. There’s nothing more exciting than a good queen sacrifice.”

  “Show me.”

  “Next time. I’ll have to think it out.”

  “No, show me now. This game is stupid.”

  Impatiently she picked her queen up and handed it to him.

  “Oh, all right. But if the driver …”

  “I tell him to wait.”

  “Oh, all right.”

  Because it was fresh in his memory and he could do it without thinking he quickly set up the position at the end of yesterday’s game.

  “Now look,” he said. “I’ve got a strong attack on your king here. It’s your move. The first thing you’re going to do is …”

  There was a tap at the door and the rustle of its movement across the carpet. It wasn’t the under-secretary coming to tell Nigel the car was ready. It was the President.

  Nigel rose. Taeela rushed across the room, grabbed his hand and started to pull him towards the board.

  “Come! See!” she said. “Nigel is showing to me how I sacrifice my queen!”

  He came and stood, gazing down at the board. Nigel’s throat was taut, his mouth dry. He had to stop his tongue from continually licking his lips.

  “You gave her the black pieces?”

  “Yes, sir. Uh, she had them already. Uh, I’d forked her knight and rook …”

  He stumbled through to the end of his explanation.

  “Why this position?”

  “It was a game I’d, uh, studied not long ago so I didn’t have to think it out.”

  Another tap on the door and swish of its opening.

  “Tell the driver to wait,” said the President without looking round. “Very good, Nigel. Continue the demonstration.”

  Nigel managed to take a grip of himself. It was going to be all right. This time, anyway. He turned to the board.