In the Palace of the Khans Read online

  “I’ve got my own.”

  “Won’t work here. The sticker on the back’s a special license to use an internet connection. That’s so they can monitor what you’re saying and come after you if you get out of line …”

  “How’m I going to post my blog?”

  “You can do that from the office here. Don’t worry. One gets used to it. Finally, for real emergencies this is a number we want you to memorise. It isn’t difficult.”

  Nigel frowned at the pencilled number. 1491 8191 6601. Not difficult …?

  “Try backwards,” said Roger.

  Ah, of course. William the Conqueror, end of World War One … urn …

  “Dunkirk?” he guessed.

  “And Battle of Britain. All that. Now, that’s a secure line, routed via satellite to London and back directly to us here in the embassy, so that the signal then sounds to anyone listening in as if it’s coming from there. We’ve just had the system put in for when the dam project is in full swing. It takes a bit of a while to get through. If there’s anything wrong you’ll hear a bit of canned piano music, and you ring off at once. Otherwise your father will answer, or Tim or me if he’s out. Keep it short. There’ll be longish pauses while the signal goes to and fro.”

  “This is all for real?”

  “‘Fraid so. Dirzhan is that sort of country, but with luck you’ll never need it. What else? Oh yes. Tell me if you want to go out and I’ll find you a bodyguard. And wear a hat of some sort. A baseball cap will do, with the peak down over the back of your neck. The sun’s hotter than you think, and anyway it’s the custom.”

  They chatted for a bit about Nigel’s flight, and he left. Nigel put the notes in his new money belt and the rest of the stuff back in the folder and with very mixed feelings settled down to watch the CD. He wanted to know what happened. Also to see what the monster looked like. He wasn’t so keen to watch a rare and beautiful animal getting shot. That must be how it had ended—the monster would never have let a video of an unsuccessful ibex hunt get out. On the other hand Nigel’s father must have known how he’d feel about it … And then Roger’s last remark … Reluctantly he pressed the “Play” button.

  It wasn’t the amateur, hand-held job he’d expected, more like a TV travel ad. There were titles in Dirzhani with translations below—English, Russian and Chinese. Background music, hunting horns—Nigel had heard it before—Haydn? Mozart? One of that lot. Anyway, it didn’t sound at all Dirzhani—not that he’d any idea what Dirzhani music did sound like. Then he was looking at a steep rocky snow-strewn hillside, sunlit and dotted with patches of scrub. Snow-covered mountains above. A line of men and women, tiny with distance, working their way down towards the camera, pausing wherever the line reached a scrub-patch and thwacking it with the staffs they carried while the rest of the line moved on into an arc, ready to drive whatever emerged from the scrub on down the hill.

  The camera swung to the hunting party, four men screened from further up the slope by a bank of brushwood. One was a cameraman. Another carried two guns. The other two were watching the beaters over the top of the hide. One of them lowered his binoculars and turned towards the camera. The focus closed in on him, a stocky, muscular figure. Bare-headed, with dark close-cropped hair. His smooth skin was a pale, yellowish brown, and he was wearing a brown winter coat with a lot of pockets. Below that, breeches and stockings.

  Without obviously posing he stood as if he was confident that people would want to look at him. Of course they would. He was President of Dirzhan, wasn’t he?

  The other watcher raised an arm and pointed up the hill. The President turned to look. The bearer handed each of them a gun and the camera swung back to the hillside. Five white animals were racing down it in great flowing bounds, utterly sure-footed over the rocky surface. The line of beaters broke into a run but were soon outdistanced

  The view cut to another camera, and Nigel was looking over the President’s shoulder along the line of the hide. The camera swung to show the ibexes leaping towards a gap about thirty yards further on. They were quite obviously goats, the largest he’d seen, a ram, two nannies and two kids, almost as white as the snow. The ram had a thick black mane like a pony, and all of them had black muzzles and black tails. The ram was leading the group. It was half again as big as the nannies, with magnificent coiled horns. The camera switched to slow motion as it leaped through the gap. It was in mid-air when the President’s gun twitched slightly with the recoil of the soundless shot.

  The ibex had heard it, of course. In the dance-like, slowed-down movement Nigel saw it already trying to turn aside. It landed, swerved and bounded away.

  Missed! Both of them! The other hunter had been out of sight, but he must have been there as a back-up to make it look like a successful hunt even if the President shot wide. But surely in that case he’d have been a crack shot … Nigel couldn’t see what they were up to because the view had cut back to the other camera, not in slow motion, following the ibexes across the slope.

  Without warning, between bound and bound, the ram seemed to miss its footing, stagger, reel aside, collapse, try to rise, collapse again and lie still. The nannies and kids raced past.

  The camera closed in on an inert white mound, half hidden by a boulder, then cut to the foremost beaters rushing towards it. They lined themselves up a respectful few paces away, and stood waving their fists in the air like goal-scoring footballers, as if they themselves had heroically slain the creature. The President came into view, strode round the fallen ibex and turned to face the camera. This time he was posing, the great hunter, the Khan of Dirzhan, exercising his ancient privilege and so setting the seal upon his khanship.

  Nigel stared at him. Why didn’t he feel absolutely sick? It should have been obscene, disgusting, but, but … Those subtitles. The President was planning to show the world what he’d done. There’d have been an international outcry, the last thing he wanted before the major fuss there was bound to be about the dam. And he wasn’t stupid, Roger said. “The video will give you a bit of an idea, perhaps. I won’t spoil it for you.” He waited, frowning.

  At last the President looked down at his victim, knelt beside it on one knee and gently eased something out from under the coarse mane. He rose and held it up. The camera closed right in. It was some kind of small dart.

  (Oh, of course! Nigel kicked himself now for not having got it.)

  Cut to a night scene. The same wintry hillside, but with a dozen good fires blazing. Villagers feasting around them. The President and four other men eating more formally, with chairs and a folding table. In the foreground, the drugged ibex. As the camera watched it raised its head, stared, started awkwardly to its feet and staggered away into the dark.

  The villagers were all on their feet too, shouting and cheering. One of the men at the table clapped his hands for silence. An older man, clearly one of the villagers, made a short speech and raised his goblet to the President. With silent shouts of applause the feasters drank to their Khan, who answered with a rather longer speech, waited for the applause and held up his hand.

  Solemnly he picked up a small object from the table, presented it to the man who had just spoken and kissed him on both cheeks. They were standing there face to face, with the firelight dancing across them, when the video ended.

  Nigel returned to the start and watched it again, looking for clues. The gun had a sort of bulge at the end of its barrel, presumably for the dart. It couldn’t be very accurate. Lucky shot to hit the ibex in the neck, so that it didn’t show as it bounded on. No, of course not. It had really been shot by somebody hidden much nearer on the far side, and the fake dart planted after the ibex had fallen. He started again at the beginning. Yes, the shadows were wrong—too long. That scene must have been shot at least an hour later than the one showing the hunt. He was watching the closing moments again when his mother came back.

  “I suppose that’s the village headman,” he said. “Do you know what he’s giving him?”

&n
bsp; “Actually he’s a professional actor. But the headman really did get a purse of gold, worth as much as a pair of ram’s horns, Nick says.”

  CHAPTER 2

  Day 2.

  Hi there. Well, I’ve now been in an ordinary Dirzhani house—not that ordinary, actually, really posh, right on the river, belongs to this guy—I’ll call him Mr G—who’s something big in Dara Dahn. He got together with my dad at some sort of a meeting and when Dad said I was coming on a visit he asked if I could hang out with his daughter a bit, help polish up her English. I’ll call her Luana …

  Nigel’s father and the two Secretaries were British. Otherwise all the tiny embassy staff were “local”. Tim’s and Roger’s wives were really British too but counted as local; they were embassy secretary on alternate days while the other one had their kids. Nigel’s mother’s secretary, Ivahni, was a Dirzhak who spoke good English. Most of the guards and servants spoke a bit of English. And then there was Rick, who really was local, and really was British.

  He was the embassy driver. Before that he’d been general odd-job man at the FO’s Kyrgyzstan outpost in Dara Dahn. His parents had come to England from Antigua, and he’d been born in Leeds. He’d gone into the army when he’d left school, but had got sick of the racial harassment and dropped out. Then he’d met and married a Dirzhani girl who was working as a cleaner at the hospital. He’d come back to Dirzhan with her as soon as it split off from the USSR and got himself made driver and odd-job man and pretty well everything else in the new FO outpost in Dara Dahn. He’d lived there for fifteen years now, and had two daughters. He wore a smart navy blue uniform and cap and held himself like a soldier. He liked to talk, and still did it in what Nigel guessed was a Leeds accent.

  Now he spoke in Dirzhani to the bodyguard, who opened the rear door of the plush old embassy Rover and climbed in.

  “You come up in front with me, sir,” said Rick, holding the passenger door for Nigel. “Khan dun’t like to be kept waiting, but we’ve a bit of time over so I’ll take you down through the old town, and tell you what’s what.”

  “You can call me Nigel if you like,” said Nigel as Rick settled into the driver’s seat. The car wasn’t air-conditioned, so they kept the windows open.

  “Suits me,” said Rick. “Not in front of your dad, mind. Dun’t give a flip for himself, but in Dirzhan he’s H.E. the British Ambassador, and we got to keep standards up, even when there’s nobody looking.”

  “You must like living here.”

  “Not half. I’m quids in here. I mean that, literal. Pound here will buy you two, three times what it would in England, less you’ve a taste for fancy foreign shoes and such. They cost all right. Besides, I’m somebody here. I get a bit of respect. Nothing like that for me back home.”

  He broke off to shout a greeting to a man leading a donkey-cart loaded with sawn timber up the steep, crowded, cobbled street. Most of the older men had thick, bushy beards and were wearing a kind of floppy turban, a long loose jacket and baggy trousers. All the women had shawls over their head or some kind of veil or even one of those long all-over cloaks that that covered them from head to toe except for the bit around their eyes.

  “Those are burkas or something, aren’t they?” said Nigel.

  “Dahli, we call ’em,” said Rick. “Dahl’s a bit different anyway, seein’ we’re Dirzhaki. We’re like that.”

  There were teenagers of both sexes in T-shirts and jeans, but all the girls, even kids not much older than toddlers, had shawls over their heads and the boys wore caps. And they kept apart, boys together, girls together.

  “What would happen if I said hello to a girl I didn’t know?” he asked. “Would they lynch me?”

  “Know her or not, no difference,” said Rick. “Don’t try it, ’less you want your face spat in.”

  There didn’t seem to be any shops, but every open space, however small, seemed to have a sort of mini-market in it, with a few stalls. And there weren’t any advertisements, apart from enormous posters of the President on every blank wall. The man with the donkey-cart shouted cheerfully back as the two ancient vehicles edged past with millimetres to spare.

  “Third cousin of Janey’s—that’s the wife,” explained Rick. “’Nother thing about being here—you get real families. Like it was back in Antigua, ’cording to my mum. England, you get folks dun’t know how many kids their brothers an’ sisters got, pretty well.”

  “What do they think about the President? Do they all call him the Khan, like you did?”

  Rick took his right hand off the steering-wheel, lowered it as if he was fiddling with his seat belt, and pointed urgently with his thumb towards the back seat. Nigel had forgotten about the bodyguard.

  “Yeah, he’s the Khan all right,” said Rick. “Never had a President did ’em any good. Doubt the old khans were much better, but they’ve forgot about that. They respect this one. He’s done all right by them, anyone can see. Hospitals, schools, steady jobs, food in the markets. Step out of line, mind you, deal drugs, anything like that, and you’ll get it in the neck.

  “Getting there soon, lad. That’s it across the river—fancy bit of building, dun’t you think?”

  Without warning they had emerged into openness. It was as if the narrow, twisting street down which they had been driving, with its higgledy-piggledy houses, had been chopped short to create a modern tree-lined boulevard running beside the river. The trees were saplings, and the glass-walled offices and government buildings looked only a few years old.

  The water-front opposite was utterly different. The river was about the size of the Thames in London, and along its further shore the buildings were any old age and crowded right to the water: wharves with derricks; the backsides of a couple of mosques, built as if they hadn’t expected to be looked at from this direction; warehouses; one or two cafes actually fronting the water; a few ordinary little houses like those in the old city; and in the middle of it all, looking across at this handsome new boulevard, the Palace of the Khans.

  Nigel thought it was the most beautiful building he’d ever seen, more beautiful the Empire State in New York or the Parthenon in Athens or Hagia Sophia in Istanbul. It was three tall storeys high, built mainly of a pale, fawn-coloured stone, exactly right to support the astonishing blue of the domes—lapis something, he vaguely remembered—a big one at the centre and two smaller ones either side. They were bordered with gold round their lower rims, ribbed with gold and topped with little golden spires. The entrance doors were set back under an archway reaching almost to the rim of the central dome and supported by two pairs of blue lapis-something pillars. Four narrower arches ran up the façade on either side, filled in with a delicate carved-stone lattice, a pattern like frozen flames.

  “Wow!” said Nigel. “What’s it like inside?”

  “Never been, meself,” said Rick. “You’re one of the lucky ones. S’posing you come out again, o’ course.”

  It was a joke. Didn’t mean anything.

  Two turbaned sentries stood at the top of the steps, with their guns slung behind their backs and purple sashes running slantwise from shoulder to hip over their khaki uniforms.

  “You wait there, lad,” said Rick. “We’re on parade again.”

  He got out, walked round in front of the Rover, climbed the three steps and spoke to one of the sentries, then came back, opened the passenger door, saluted as Nigel got out and handed him his shoulder-bag.

  “Thank you, Rick.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  Self-consciously Nigel climbed the five steps alone. Both sentries saluted as he reached the top. He knew the form from having seen his father go through this sort of thing, so he raised his hand in acknowledgment and was about to show them his pass when a man in a dark suit and purple tie came out of the doorway and walked up with his hand outstretched. Nigel tried to put his pass in it but the man took it with his other hand and then shook Nigel’s.

  “The President is expecting you, Mr. Rizhouell,” he said in
a high, anxious voice. “Avron Dikhtar. I am under-secretary to the President-Khan. I hope you have recovered from your journey.”

  He was a small man, pale faced, dark haired, already going a bit bald, though he can’t have been that old. Apart from the actual name his English was pretty good. He’d probably been practicing. So had Nigel.

  “I am honoured to be invited,” he said. “The flight was fine, thank you.”

  “Will you please to come this way.”

  There was no lobby. The doors led directly into an enormous hall, just as stunning as the outside. There the day had been bright and clear, but this was a different sort of brightness, a rich dazzle and glitter sparkling from ten thousand polished surfaces, softened here and there by huge, deep-coloured hangings, all lit by hidden lights. The middle section rose to the full height of the central dome, with lower sections on either side. The only daylight came from a row of windows ringing the base of the dome.

  Nigel would have liked to stop and look but Mr. Dikhtar led him briskly across the hall, up a few steps to a broad, stage-like dais and on up a magnificent staircase to a pillared gallery running round three sides of the central section of the hall. They turned left at the top and followed the gallery round to a door guarded by another two sentries.

  “I regret the necessity, Mr. Rizhouell,” said Mr. Dikhtar, “but it is a routine for all visitors to the private apartments. Please give me your bag and raise your arms above your head.”

  Nigel did as he was told, and the sentry leaned his gun against the doorpost and systematically ran his hands all over Nigel’s body. When he got to his belt he grunted and spoke.

  “You are wearing a money belt, Mr. Rizhouell?” said Mr. Dikhtar.

  “Er … my proper one’s bust,” said Nigel.

  It was half true. The buckle had started to come unstitched, but it didn’t show. He’d bought the money belt in the airport because he thought it was a cool gadget, like his Swiss Army knife and his compass and his monocular for bird-watching and his travelling chess set. He was a sucker for that sort of thing.