In the Palace of the Khans Page 8

  “Famished,” said Nigel’s mother.

  It was a pleasant, medium-sized, wood-panelled room with two large windows looking out over the invisible lake. They sat at a table laid for five at one end of the room, leaving an empty chair at the head of the table. Two serving maids wearing dazzling white aprons over high-collared purple tunics with silver buttons brought them a series of dishes with half a dozen different sauces to try. Taeela didn’t know the English words for most of the food, and her stiffness broke up into laughter as they tried to work out between them what everything was. At the same time her rather anxious English relaxed and she started talking much more as she used to when Nigel came to the palace. They were getting along fine when the President came in.

  “Sit, sit,” he said, as he strode to his place and settled into his chair. “I must apologise for having deserted you.”

  “Of course you had to,” said Nigel’s mother. “Taeela has looked after us beautifully. I hope your men are all right.”

  “It is hard to tell. The Sikorski came down in the water close to the entrance to the gorge and was blown onto the rocks on the far side. The men are all out and ashore. Their radio was damaged in the landing, but from their hand signals we understand that some of them are sufficiently injured to need medical attention. They have first aid supplies and my doctor was aboard, so he will be able to do what he can for them, unless he himself is injured. We will send down one of our inflatables as soon as the storm eases. The forecast is that it should do so briefly later in the day.”

  The maids had been offering him food while he talked, and he’d helped himself without apparent thought and started to eat, talking between mouthfuls.

  “Forgive me,” he said. “There are urgent arrangements to be made. It was as well we left the helicopters when we did. Both of them suffered damage on landing. With our extra weight it could have been much worse. One can perhaps be repaired, the other will need specialist equipment. Furthermore a section of the roadway has been washed into the lake. The place is passable on foot, but not by motor vehicles, so we shall have to wait until the storm system has blown past. If the forecasts are right this should be in two days’ time, so it should be possible to watch the fish-owls on Monday, along with your visit to the dam site, if you can stay the extra day, and then return to Dara Dahn by road. I must in any case be back in time for the ceremony on the Thursday, which I trust you will also be able to attend.

  “The alternative would be to skip the fish-owls and arrange for cars to meet us the other side of the landslip. That would gain us an extra day, or perhaps two, but in storm-weather the journey would be considerably more than the standard eight hours. The choice is yours. Mrs Ridgwell?”

  “Oh, it won’t be any hardship to stay, Mr President. I’d give anything to see the fish-owls, and if it means Nick gets a bit more fishing …”

  “If I may just call the embassy, if that’s all right, sir,” said Nigel’s father. “I doubt my mobile will work in the mountains.”

  “There is a secure telephone line. The major domo, Mizhael, will show you. But I must ask you, Ambassador, to say nothing that gives any indication of my movements, nor that our security guard is currently depleted and the helicopters out of action.”

  “No problem, sir. We arrived safely, and because of the weather are staying on an extra day. Of course I shall have to make a report of our visit to the dam site, but there’s no reason I should say anything about the journey, except perhaps to mention the skill of the pilots in difficult conditions.”

  Ambassador-talk, thought Nigel. He’s really laying it on.

  He caught Taeela’s eye and winked. She pursed her mouth, suppressing a smile, and glanced at her father. He must have noticed the exchange, for he paused with a forkful of fish half way to his mouth and looked at her severely.

  “A lesson in diplomacy, my dear,” he said. “You are going to have to play hostess this afternoon and see that our guests are amused. Mizhael will make any arrangements. Now, if you will forgive me …”

  He rose, so they did too. One of the maids came across with a tray, picked up the remains of his meal and followed him out.

  “So, what will we all do?” said Taeela brightly, already playing the hostess for all she was worth. “When the rain stops, His Excellency will catch fish for our supper, yes?”

  “I don’t guarantee to catch any,” said Nigel’s father, joining in her game.

  “You will catch three fine fish for my supper, your Excellency. I wish this. Mizhael will tell the cook that you bring … are bringing them.”

  “Your wish is my command.”

  “Good. And Mrs Ridgwell and Nigel will look for birds. I will come too. We will ride my horses. What birds do you wish to see, Mrs Ridgwell?”

  “Oh, anything. It doesn’t matter.”

  “Come on, Mum” said Nigel. “You’re talking to the Khanazhana. If she says you would like to see a great pink hoopoe, someone will make sure it happens.”

  “I don’t think they get hoopoes up here, darling.”

  “Come on, Mum!”

  “Oh, well. A black-throated kingfisher, I suppose. They’re very local, but there might be some here.”

  “You shall see a black-throated kingfisher. I will speak to Mizhael,” said Taeela, laughing. “Now I’ll stop being the Khanazhana. I’m Taeela. I’m Nigel’s friend.”

  “Well, in that case I’m Lucy and this is Nick. That’s what Nigel’s other friends call us. What about when your father is here?”

  “Ah … Perhaps you ask him, uh, Lucy.”

  “As soon as I get the chance.”

  They’d lunched very late, and the rain and wind had begun to ease by the time they’d finished. A guard and driver were waiting for Nigel’s father with a Jeep, and he was off before the last drops fell. When the sky cleared Taeela, in full riding kit and looking like an advertisement in a glossy country magazine, met Nigel and his mother in the front hall, and they were driven the few hundred yards to the stables, where three absurdly handsome ponies were waiting for them, along with a couple of bodyguards, a woman and a man, with two more ordinary-looking horses.

  Nigel had ridden a bit in Chile, and his mother had apparently been horse-mad when she was a kid, but then got interested in too much other stuff to keep it up. Taeela, of course, rode like a princess, because that was what her father expected of her.

  They followed a trail up through the trees, and out onto the open mountainside like the one on the video of the snow ibex, a vast slope twinkling with little rivulets after the rain and strewn with boulders, tussocks of scrawny grass clinging to whatever soil had lodged there, and scattered clumps of stunted bushes. Their emergence surprised a large bird that must just have caught some small mammal and started to tear it apart. It looked round with shreds of meat hanging from its beak, then lumbered into the air and soared away with the limp carcass dangling from its talons. A steppe eagle, Nigel’s mother decided.

  The track turned and led them slantwise across the slope. The air up here seemed magically clean. They could see for uncountable miles in every direction except to the south-west, across the lake, where about ten miles away the next instalment of the storm was working its way towards them.

  There were plenty of birds to see, active after the rain. Taeela must have longed to put her beautiful horses through their paces and show her guests what they could do, but she kept to a sedate walk beside Nigel’s mother, halting when she wanted to use her binoculars, borrowing them so that she could look too, and asking questions about the birds. Nigel, still stiff from his swim, was happy not to have to do anything more demanding. They’d already ridden as far as he felt like when he noticed the bodyguards muttering to each other, and looking to his left he saw why. The thunder was already faintly audible

  “Hey, isn’t it time we turned back?” he said. “We don’t want to get soaked.”

  Taeela stared contemptuously at the coming cloud-mass.

  “No problem, mi
ster,” she said in her Bart Simpson voice, wheeled her pony round and set it to a rapid canter. Nigel’s mother and the female guard kept up but Nigel followed more cautiously, and the male guard stayed with him. He’d expected Taeela to go careering down through the wood, but she reined in and waited for them to catch up then rode down at a sensible pace. The first rain-veil swept up from the lake as they reached the stables.

  Nigel dismounted, groaning.

  “Me too,” said his mother. “I shall have to have another bath or I’ll be stiff as a bench.”

  “And sore,” said Nigel. “I didn’t notice a lot of kingfishers, Taeela.”

  “All down by the lake. They take a lesson from your father, how to fish. I’ll send my father’s … what is the word? She rubs you, makes you better.”

  “Masseuse?”

  “Good, I’ll send her to you, uh, Lucy. After that she can punch Nigel.”

  “Isn’t she amazingly sane?” Nigel’s mother whispered as they went upstairs. “Considering the crazy life she leads.”

  He came down in an almost trance-like state of relaxation after his massage. The masseuse had turned out to be one of the maids who’d waited on them at lunch. Her name was Marizhka. She’d been bossy and unsmiling, and spoke no English, but whatever she’d done had really worked. His aches were almost gone, and he was hungry all over again after his ride.

  He found Taeela and his mother sitting down to a full English afternoon tea laid out at one end of the sitting-room. A log fire crackled in the hearth, thunder rumbled overhead, lightning blinked and blinked again, the tree-tops thrashed to and fro, rain-laden gusts slammed like gravel against the windows.

  Nigel watched the storm in dreamy contentment while the other two hunted for the birds they had seen in two of the local bird-guides his mother had found waiting for her in her room, one in English and one Russian. This worked perfectly, his mother consulting her notes and finding a candidate in the English guide, and Taeela looking it up under its Latin name in the Russian one and translating the entry. They were both obviously having a wonderful time.

  Taeela specially. She can’t have had anything like this before. How could she have any real friends, friends who could talk to her as if she wasn’t the daughter of the President Khan? Let alone any grown-up? She and his mother had known each other … how long? About nine hours. And yet they were already acting like friends. For Taeela it must have been totally amazing.

  Perhaps that was why he got on with her so well. He too didn’t have any real friends. Most of the kids at school were friendly enough, but there was no one he regularly hung out with. Of course he’d only been at that school a few months, but even in Santiago, where they’d lived almost four years, there hadn’t been anyone he really missed when they’d left. He wondered if he simply didn’t do that kind of friendship.

  Except for Taeela now. Really he hadn’t known her that much longer than his mother had, but he was certainly going to miss her when he flew home in a few weeks, and next time he came out to Dirzhan he was going to look forward to seeing her almost as much as he did his parents.

  How come she could do that to him? Because she was a girl? To be honest he was thankful for the strict Dirzhani rules against his getting too near her. It made being friends a lot simpler. Suppose she’d been a boy …

  He day-dreamed contentedly until they put the bird-books away. Then they taught Taeela to play various card-games until Nigel’s father returned from the lake with three fine trout which he insisted on presenting to Taeela with full ambassadorial pomp. It ought to have been embarrassing, but she obviously enjoyed it. They were all four playing Oh Hell! when the President returned.

  “Please sit down,” he said, and came across to see what they were doing. He too had that wild-weather look, and was walking with a slight limp.

  “You’ve hurt your leg!” said Taeela.

  “I twisted my ankle helping the men to drag a tree-trunk aside so that we could haul the inflatable down to the shore. Marizhka has done what she can with it. What game is this?”

  “It’s called … er … Oh Bother?” said Nigel.

  “It is very good, very right,” said Taeela quickly. “You must not capture the queen.”

  “Clearly you will have to teach me.”

  Taeela stared at him as if this was something that had never happened before. He ignored her.

  “What news of the other helicopter, sir?” said Nigel’s father.

  “Mixed, but it might have been much worse. At least there is nobody dead. We took the inflatable up as far as the landslip on one of the trucks and dragged it down through the wood before the weather cleared. That left just time for two trips to pick up the men from the mouth of the gorge. As I say, nobody is dead, but there are two stretcher cases; one, most unfortunately, my doctor, with a broken leg, and one of the pilots with internal injuries which may be more serious. Two others have broken bones, but can walk, and two of the women and three more men will not be fit for duty for some days. Otherwise nothing much more than cuts and contusions. I have sent for a surgical team to come up by road and see to the pilot. By the time they arrive workmen from the estate will have built a usable pathway across the landslip.

  “You have had a satisfactory afternoon, Ambassador?”

  “Excellent all round,” said Nigel’s father. “Taeela will tell you.”

  “No doubt,” said the President. “But first you must teach me this game. What is its real name?”

  “It varies from country to country,” said Nigel’s father. “In England it is Oh, Hell! In Chile we called it Diablo. I now learn that in Dirzhan it is Oh, Bother! In fact it’s only a variant of whist.”

  “I have played bridge. Show me.”

  He picked the game up at once and played seriously, thinking about it, trying to win. Till now Taeela had been playing almost at random, relying on her luck, but she too began to take it seriously—not, Nigel guessed, simply to win but because her father did, and she wanted to beat him. If she’d never played cards with him before this might have been her first chance, ever. Luck repaid her at last when she was able to discard the queen of spades on a trick he was forced to take, causing him to lose ten points.

  “Now!” she cried. “See, I sacrifice my queen! I win!”

  “Very good,” he said. “But you must not tell anyone, my dear. It is a state secret.”

  She laughed, but he nodded, straight-faced.

  Later they went up and got into their best clothes for dinner and met again in the living-room. This time Nigel was playing a rather sleepy game of chess with Taeela when the President joined them. He chatted to Nigel’s parents for a while and then came over and glanced at the board.

  “Do you want to play, sir?” said Nigel. “Later, I mean?”

  “You will be too tired. It is likely to rain for much of tomorrow, so you will have plenty of time to rest.”

  “I’ll do my best, sir. I want to win too.”

  “Excellent.”

  And this is Day 7. Not a lot to report. When they do storms in Dirzhan, they really do storms …

  The forecast was spot on. All Sunday it rained as if it was never going to stop. At first the President was doing president-stuff in his office, so Nigel’s father worked on a report, his mother wrote her Sunday letter to Granddad and Taeela did the same to her mother in Moscow. Nigel settled down with his laptop and tried to write yesterday’s blog, but then spent most of his time just staring at the screen. There was so much he couldn’t write about without letting on they’d been staying with the President in his hunting lodge. OK, the imaginary Mr G might have had a private helicopter and a lodge of his own … They could crash-land in the storm …

  It was difficult to make it all seem real …

  The four of them were playing Newmarket when the President came in for coffee, smelling of cigar-smoke, and told them that the surgical team had arrived and the pilot was seriously hurt but stable. He chatted to Nigel’s mother about Tolstoy and
Solzhenitsyn and guys like that, and then he took Nigel’s father off for more than an hour to talk about world affairs or whatever, so Nigel got Taeela to tell him all sorts of ultra-cool stuff about weird old customs that still went on in Dirzhan to fill in the gaps in his blog.

  “Now I’m afraid I must work again,” said the President after lunch. “My falconer will come in half an hour to take you to look at the birds. We not only keep hawks and a pair of eagles. There is also a rescue aviary, so you may be able to see some of our local birds at close hand. You will go with them my dear, to translate? And later Nigel and I will play chess.”

  They settled down to the game immediately after tea. Nigel was nervous again, but not scared this time. The President was probably going to beat him, and that was OK. But he was afraid of not playing well enough. Taeela and his father came to watch.

  His nerves left him as soon as they started to play. He had the white pieces. The game was all there was. The President played that way too. Dirzhan, the dam, the injured pilot, the constant danger to himself and his daughter—all that was somewhere else, unreal. Reality was concentrated into the thirty-two pieces on the board. The sense of unpredictable power that came from him was as strong as ever, but now it was focussed onto this single centre. If thought had been sunlight the board would have burst into flame.

  After the first few moves of one of the standard openings, which they didn’t need to think about, the game slowed. The position became complicated, with too many possibilities to work out. If you have white you have the advantage and you’ve got to attack or you’ll lose it, Mr Harries said. To clear the way Nigel exchanged a knight for a bishop and sacrificed a pawn. Four moves later he’d lost the advantage and was still a pawn down.

  That was OK by him. He was always happier defending, reacting to the other player’s moves, waiting for him to make a mistake. Not much chance of that this time, he thought. But a few moves later, astonishingly, it happened. He stared at the board, thinking it must be a trap, but he couldn’t see how. He was too tired to think clearly. Even in important school matches he’d never played at this intensity before. Might as well get it over, he decided, so he forced the rook exchange and took the extra pawn back.