In the Palace of the Khans

by Peter Dickinson

  He was fighting the urge to join her in her hysteria when he heard the crackle and squeal of wrenched timber from further up the slope. That steadied him enough to be able to push her away and grab her wrist.

  “Come on. We’re supposed to be helping. We’ll talk later,” he said, and started to drag her up the slope. The effort of the climb loosed the laughter-demon’s hold, and by the time they reached the others she was merely panting.

  There were two branches ready for them to take, which was easy enough with the slope in their favour. On the way down they met Herr Fettler and Nigel’s guard climbing up to help, and at the bottom they found that the guard who had run off towards the Humvees had just returned with one of the drivers, bringing a first-aid kit, plus some tools and cord and stuff.

  “I’m sure they’ve got plenty of people up there now,” said Nigel’s mother. “Why don’t you stay and help me, Taeela? I could do with someone to hold the torch.”

  So Nigel, still bewildered by Taeela’s reaction, climbed the slope with the guard and driver and then held a torch for one of the men while he hacked and trimmed. It didn’t take long with several workers and the right tools, nor did the job of assembling what they’d collected into a usable stretcher back down by the path.

  “What happens now, sir?” said Nigel’s father as they watched the process.

  “We return to the offices,” said the President. “I must make some immediate telephone calls and Mrs Ridgwell will do what she can for the casualty. The rest of you will eat while you are waiting. Do you have any calls to make, Ambassador? Your mobile won’t work from here but I have satellite communication with the palace. If you will give me Mr O’Hara’s number I can instruct someone to warn him he may have to accompany the security squadron to Vamar tomorrow. Then you can brief him more fully from the lodge. Is there anyone else?”

  “Not immediately, sir. It can wait till we’re back at the lodge.”

  “Very well. I must apologise to you for our expedition having been so unfortunately interrupted.”

  “At least we did see the owls,” said Nigel’s mother. “That was wonderful!”

  CHAPTER 8

  They climbed out of their Humvee in front of the Owl Project office, and watched the guard unload the stretcher from the other one. Nigel’s mother and Taeela headed off for the toilet.

  “Me too,” said Nigel’s father. “Come on, Niggles.”

  “I’m all right.”

  “Might as well while you can. Come along.”

  There was something urgent in his voice. Anxiously Nigel tagged along. The toilets were separate from the other buildings, on the far side of the parking lot. His father slowed to let him catch up.

  “Keep your eyes open, Niggles,” he muttered. “We’re not out of this yet.”

  “Uh?”

  “The President’s got a problem. He knows there’s no way I can’t put in a report on what’s happened, however much I tone it down.”

  Nigel halted in his stride, his mouth opening and closing.

  “But … but it was only one guy taking a pot shot at him because he didn’t want the dam built, Dad. It wasn’t a big deal. I mean … I mean it was an effing big deal for us, worst thing that’s ever happened to me, but … but it wasn’t like the guy was trying to overthrow the government.”

  “As far as we know, Niggles. Even that is bad enough from his point of view. Green issues were big back home at the last election, and the Greens don’t want the dam built. They’ll make a lot of this—evidence of how strongly the locals think about it, and so on and so forth.

  “But there’s another possibility. Doesn’t it strike you as a bit too opportune that a man should be out there with a rifle and night sights good as that on an evening when, for the first time ever, the President arrived without enough guards to secure the area? What serious hunter tries to shoot game at that sort of range in the dark? What’s more, sights that good really cost. And you don’t find them in every corner gun-shop. You’d need a couple of days at least to lay it on.”

  He sounded much less jumpy now, talking about the danger they’d been in calmly, reasonably, as if it were something in a film they’d seen. It was his way of dealing with it, but it wasn’t much help to Nigel.

  “B … but that would mean …”

  “Exactly. Somebody would have had to have passed the word on almost the moment the accident had happened—effectively as soon as the President had called the palace to tell them. I doubt if they could have done it even then, from scratch.”

  “You mean …”

  “Either a big criminal organisation, or the military, most likely … Wait. They’re coming out. I haven’t said anything to Lucy about this yet. Don’t want to worry her.”

  Nigel waited in the dark, shaking his head. It couldn’t be true. It mustn’t be true. Somebody in the palace … He barely noticed his mother and Taeela heading back across the parking lot.

  His father didn’t say anything more about it until they’d started to follow them. Then he broke into a rapid mutter.

  “Look, there isn’t time to tell you the whole thing. The point is, all this is going to be pretty obvious to anyone back home, no matter how much I tone my report down. If he’s going to do anything to stop me it’s got to be before I call home. The obvious thing would be for all three of us to have an accident on the way back to the lodge. I don’t think it’s at all likely—he’d be crazy to try it, but maybe he is a bit crazy deep down inside. Tyrants get like that, in the end.”

  “No, Dad! He isn’t like that!”

  “He is, Niggles. I’ve read the reports. I’ve only told you a bit of them.”

  “But Taeela would be devastated! She really hit it off with Mum.”

  “There’s no reason she should know it wasn’t an accident if she travels in a different car. I’d say he’d do it if he thought he could get away with it. I really don’t think it’s at all likely, but to be on the safe side, do your best to travel in the same car as Taeela if you get the chance. OK?”

  “I suppose.”

  The guards had fetched cool-bags and a hamper from the Humvees and were spreading food and cutlery out on a folding table, and Herr Fettler was fussing around finding stuff for them. The President had disappeared to make his telephone calls. The wounded guard was lying on a mattress on the floor with Nigel’s mother kneeling beside her, easing her out of her blood-soaked trousers, and Taeela watching her, helping when she could. Nigel’s father was sitting at one of the office desks making notes on a pad, with Nigel alone on the other side of the room, hunched into himself, shuddering and sighing.

  Everybody else had found something to do. His eye was caught by a movement in the pool of light round the desk, his father’s long-fingered hand combing the blond forelock out of his eyes and then picking up a pencil and writing two or three words and repeating the movement.

  Something about the gesture …

  Yes that’s what it was, a gesture, a signal, to tell everyone, himself included, how deeply he was thinking, how urgent and important his notes were. Nigel knew he wasn’t being fair, but he felt resentful. OK, his father had a lot on his mind, specially if he was right about what he’d told Nigel in the car park, but before starting on that couldn’t he at least have asked Nigel how he was bearing up, said something to show he understood how utterly shattered he must be? Instead he’d plunged straight in, loading Nigel with a fresh lot of horrors, a whole new nightmare still to come.

  The horrors withdrew into the darkness outside as Nigel thought about his father.

  You don’t think about your parents when you’re small. They’re just there, filling your life, too big to get your mind round. Slowly you begin to learn what they’re like, compared to other people, but you don’t judge them. They are what they are.

  Until a few weeks ago Nigel would have said that his father had been a pretty good dad when he’d not been busy working or fishing or whatever. He’d taught Nigel how to do things, played
games with him, read to him at bed-time if he was free, and so on. Nigel had just taken all that for granted till one weekend last term when he’d been staying with his sister Libby.

  He’d been in the kitchen, drying up while she washed, relishing the feel of ordinary family life going on. He’d been missing that since Santiago.

  On the spur of the moment he’d said, “Any chance we can all get together for a bit—you and Toby and Tim and Cath and Mum and Dad and me—next time they’re home? Seven’s a lucky number, you know.”

  Libby had sighed and shaken her head.

  “Dad and I don’t get on,” she’d said. “I thought you knew.”

  “I didn’t know it was still … I mean, now you’re married and you’ve got a family of your own.”

  “Not unless he’s changed, and he isn’t going to. I’ll still be just an add-on to his life, along with Toby and Tim now, not us with lives of our own. And now that he’s got this precious ambassadorship … Nothing in the world is going to matter beside that … I’d better stop before I break something … I’m sorry, Bro. Raw spot. Anyway, Mum’s lovely. I miss her.”

  “So do I. Thanks for telling me. I suppose.”

  He hadn’t taken it all that seriously, then. Libby was just like that. But now he found himself seeing his father through her eyes.

  Looking back, it struck him that his father had always chosen the games they’d played and read him the books that he himself had liked as a kid. He’d taught Nigel chess in Santiago, but really he just knew the rules and a few very simple things. Then he’d made the mistake of giving Nigel a book about the game, and Nigel had started beating him. He hadn’t wanted to play after that. He didn’t have time to read the book.

  And of course Nigel had his father’s own stupid name. It was difficult for him to be fair about that because he hated it so much, hated it almost as much as the baby name his father still insisted on calling him by. The same with the family likeness. If you looked in old albums at pictures of the two of them at the same age you couldn’t tell them apart. The real difference was in what they thought about it. Nigel’s father liked the way he looked. It had never before struck Nigel as odd that there should have been a mirror just inside the living room door of any house they’d lived in. Now he realised why.

  So was it a good sign that Nigel hated the way he looked as much as he hated his name? Did it mean that in his heart of hearts he didn’t want to be like his father, inside as well as outside? Like in the way they both hated rows, tried not to get involved, to keep their cool, to deal with anything like that just in their heads? He could dye his hair, of course, and dress like a slob, and change his name when he was old enough. That wasn’t important, any of it. The real question was could he change the way he thought? And felt?

  Next time something like tonight happened, if it did (please not!), would he be able to think about anything except getting himself out of it? The way he hadn’t even noticed causing his mother to hurt her leg? Or his father hadn’t really wanted to help carry the wounded guard? He was pretty sure of that now, looking back at the moment, though again he hadn’t noticed it at the time. Too wrapped up in his private terror. But the moment the wounded guard had reached the woods his mother had stopped looking at her own leg and gone to help.

  Why couldn’t he be like that? He was her son as well. OK, he didn’t look like her, the way Libby did and Cath didn’t, but something of her had got to be there inside him, hidden away, secret even from himself.

  I’ll find it, he told himself. I’ll bring it into the open. And next time …

  No. No next time. Please.

  When the meal was ready he ate without noticing. Taeela was sitting beside him, apparently as withdrawn into herself as he was. With an effort he roused himself try what his father had told him.

  “Do you want to talk?” he muttered.

  She shook her head.

  After all that, the seating for the return journey worked out without Nigel or his father needing to do anything about it. Herr Fettler had found a mattress for the wounded guard to lie on. With the rear bench seats folded flat it fitted lengthwise along one side of a Humvee, leaving room for a couple of small individual seats to be unfolded from the other side.

  “I will sit there and look after Annalin,” said Taeela decisively. “It is too small for Lucy. She can go in front. Nigel can be with me.”

  Her father shrugged, his face expressionless, then whispered in her ear. Frowning, she climbed into her seat, and Nigel followed.

  They headed off into the dark, with all the men in the President’s car and Nigel the only male in the second one. They drove on sidelights only until they were over the ridge, when the President’s car switched on its powerful headlights, allowing them to swoop down the curves of the new road to the valley beyond, and then on more joltingly along the road they’d come by.

  One of the jolts caused something to brush against the back of Nigel’s hand where it was dangling beside his seat. He felt around and touched Taeela’s hand. She hadn’t snatched it back into her lap, as any decent Dirzhani girl should have done. Instead she moved it to brush against his again.

  He knew why, too. She wasn’t breaking the rules for the fun of it, while she had the chance. Carefully as a pickpocket he found the edge of her hand and slid his fingers round it. Her fingers closed on his palm.

  “Oh, Nigel,” she whispered. “I was so scared.”

  “Me too. I threw up in the woods. Before you came.”

  “It is not the same for you. You are not ready. You don’t expect it. But for me, all my life I get ready for it. I learn to shoot my gun. I learn how to fight a man who is attacking me, how to hit him with a knife, how to tear out his eye with my thumb, how to kick him with my knee. I learn how to jump from a window, how to walk with no sound, how to hide myself in a forest, how to leave no mark where I go—all this. I tell myself, when it happens, I’ll be brave. I am ready.

  “It happens, and I am not ready.”

  “There wasn’t anything you could have done. A guy was taking pot-shots at us from the other side of the lake. None of the stuff you’ve been talking about would …”

  “No, Nigel. I was not ready inside. I wasn’t brave. I hid myself behind Nilzha. I wanted to scream, to run …”

  “Me too.”

  “It is different for you,” she said. “You do not need to be ready. England is a safe place.”

  She shifted her hand in his, but didn’t let go. Fat lot of help he’d been, he thought. There must have been something he could have said. Too late now.

  They drove on through dark woods, through an unlit village, up over a pass, visible only by the mountainous skyline seen through the opposite window against ten thousand stars.

  Taeela’s hand moved—squirmed—in his, and he discovered how tightly he’d been holding it.

  “Sorry,” he murmured, relaxing his grip. “Thinking too hard.”

  “Thinking is hard,” she said. “These thinkings.”

  “Listen. I want to tell you something. When we were coming along the walkway my guard had to grab hold of me to stop me bolting. That’s how bad it was. And we got into the trees and I turned round and saw you coming along behind us and I thought you were terrific. You were moving like a princess. No, listen. You felt like that inside because you couldn’t do any of the things you’d been taught, but you didn’t panic like I did. Suppose you’d needed to do some of that stuff, you’d have done it. And you’d have got it right. There was this grizzled old guy in a war movie I saw once talking about fighting to a rookie. ‘If you aren’t scared inside,’ he said, ‘you aren’t going to live long.’ Makes sense to me.”

  She nodded slowly, thinking about it.

  They sat in silence, still holding hands, for an hour or more, until the cars drew to a halt and switched off their headlights. One of the guards got out of the leading car and disappeared. Nothing but forested darkness showed in the windows opposite, but twisting his head round Ni
gel caught glimpses of moonlit water beyond the trees. The President came back and opened the front passenger door.

  “We are almost home,” he said, “and no later than we would have been if we had stayed to watch the fish-owls uninterrupted. It will be difficult for you, but will you try to talk and act as if nothing unexpected had occurred at Lake Vamar? It is only natural that you should seem too tired for much conversation.”

  They waited till the guard came back and then drove on.

  The windows of the hunting lodge were ablaze with lights. Servants came down the lit steps to greet them and take their baggage up to their rooms, all indeed behaving as if nothing unexpected had happened at Lake Vamar.

  Nigel was woken by the telephone. Still druggy with the sleeping pill his mother had made him take, he was struggling to sit up when Drogo came in and brought the handset over to him.

  “Uh?” he grunted.

  It was his father.

  “Niggles? Sleep all right? ’Fraid you’re going to have to wake up and have some breakfast. We’re leaving in an hour. They’ve managed to repair one of the helicopters. The President has arrangements to make for this ceremony on Thursday, so he’s leaving for Dara-Dahn in that, any minute now. He’s taking the injured pilot and the guard who got accidentally shot yesterday, with a medical team to look after them. No room for anyone else. So Taeela’s coming with us by road. Company for you, eh? Get down as soon as you can, old man. Your room servant will pack for you.”

  He sounded smug as hell, as if he’d managed to arrange the whole thing himself. Nigel registered that officially now the guard had been shot by accident. There was going to be a lot of stuff like that.

  Day 9

  Came back to Dara Dahn. Took pretty well all day. Dead boring. Long way better than the journey up, though …

  Taeela took charge when they came to board the Humvee.