In the Palace of the Khans

by Peter Dickinson

  At that point he heard the van start up, and was folding the map when it came lurching round the corner of the orchard. Janey got out of the cab and opened the rear doors.

  The two girls were huddled together in the far corner beside a battered suitcase and what could only be their parents’ bodies, covered with a piece of tarpaulin. Taeela was sitting opposite them resting her chin on her hands; their own baggage was stacked beside her. There were a couple of large jerry-cans strapped either side of the doors.

  “Wait,” said Nigel, as Janey started to climb in. “Don’t you want to go in front? I’ve found where we are on the map. I’ll show you.”

  “No good with maps,” she said. “You go front.”

  “You’ll have to show me where we’re going. I can’t read most of the names.”

  “Cousin to my mother living in Sodalka. Is to west from Podoghal, sixty, seventy kilometre.”

  Sodalka? The place Fohdrahko had wanted Taeela to go, and she didn’t?

  “Sodalka is OK,” said Taeela without looking round. “We must go, Nigel.”

  The map was difficult to manage one-handed. His shoulder, after the initial blast of pain, had just felt badly bruised, but now it began to hurt every time he moved his left arm. Sodalka had its name printed in both scripts, and was roughly where Janey had said. The route he’d traced would do as far as he’d got, so at the village he raised a warning hand to where Rahdan could see it and pointed ahead and left.

  They started to climb, gently at first, following the twists and turns of a fair-sized stream, still a foaming cataract in places after the rains. The road surface was riddled with potholes. In bottom gear they jolted up a series of hairpins, through scraggy woodland and out onto a bleak, rock-strewn slope. By the time they reached the top of the pass the engine was sounding increasingly unhappy. At the first possible place Rahdan pulled off the road, climbed out and raised the engine cover. The heat that rose from it wavered in the cooler upland air.

  “That’s more like it,” said Lisa as she climbed out of the back of the van. She wasn’t wearing her dahl and had stripped off what clothes she could but was still flushed and streaming with sweat. So were the others.

  They gathered at the roadside and looked around. The two orphans, haggard with heat and grief, clung like nervous puppies to Taeela’s side. It was a typical mountain pass, a broad saddle between two bare slopes that rose more and more steeply towards the separate summits, neither high enough to have kept a covering of snow at this time of year. Behind them they could see all the way down the road to where the first set of hairpins emerged from the trees.

  “Not much of water left,” said Janey. “Been a right oven in there. Maybe we find a stream.”

  “Rahdan’s going to need some too,” said Nigel. “We must pretty well have boiled the radiator dry, climbing that last bit. That looks like it might be a stream, that greener bit. Water should be pretty good, right up here, after the rain. Why don’t you lot go and have a look? I’ll keep a look-out. Someone in that village could’ve seen us turn off and told them.”

  “If you saying so,” said Janey.

  They collected the empty water bottles out of the back of the van, and after a brief conversation with Rahdan she and the five girls trooped off. Nigel got his AK out of the cab, though he doubted he’d be able to use it with his shoulder the way it was, climbed up to a boulder high enough to stop him showing above the skyline, and settled down to watch the road and try to put his nightmares aside and come to terms with what had happened back at the orchard.

  Between them he and Taeela had killed two men. OK, his part in the killing had had been pretty well pure chance, but he didn’t think Taeela could have done it without him. He’d taken both men completely by surprise. They’d never expected a girl to react like that, let alone bang into the man the way he had; and they hadn’t wanted to shoot him because if he was a girl he was worth money. The other guy would have been watching it happen, and that had given Taeela her chance to get her pistol out.

  He thought about it, massaging his shoulder. Yes, killing someone was a big deal. It would have been easier to cope with if he’d done it on purpose, because then it would have been the right thing to do. Otherwise Janey and Rahdan would be dead, and Lisa and Natalie would be trussed up like the other two, to be taken away and sold to some bastard, and Taeela auctioned off to the highest bidder, while he himself was either dead or held for ransom.

  It must have looked that way. Lisa had just pretty well told him she thought he’d deliberately charged into the man, and Janey not so clearly, the way she’d accepted it when he’d suggested they might go and look for water. She hadn’t been like that before.

  That wasn’t enough. It was pure accident he’d managed to help kill both men, so their wickedness was no excuse. They’d been living, breathing creatures, and now they were dead meat lying by the track. Only in his dreams they would wake and search for him. He shuddered, pulled himself together and craned round the rock to see how Rahdan was doing.

  He’d changed his mind about Rahdan. His picture of him had been coloured by their first meeting, when he’d seemed just a swaggering careless slob; and then by the cringing wreck who’d crawled out of his prison cell. Nigel had told Janey he’d done OK as they’d found their way up through Dara, but that was only because Taeela had made him. But since then he’d done more than OK, taken charge of things when they’d found the van, driven it sensibly. He obviously knew how to handle a gun. And now he’d found some tools in the van and was up on the roof of the cab sawing an air-vent into the rear section.

  Time passed. Rahdan stopped sawing and scrambled down just as Janey arrived with a couple of refilled water-bottles. By the time Nigel joined them Janey was having some kind of an argument with him while he topped up the radiator. He shook his head and made a despairing gesture towards Nigel. Janey frowned, pursed her lips and turned.

  “We going bury these kids’ mum and dad here, Nidzhell,” she explained. “We find very good place. Making it OK by them, telling them Rahdan will say one prayer. He’s being stupid on this, scared. Isn’t religious, don’t know what he say. Maybe you do it for them. Much better it’s a man.”

  “Oh Lord. I suppose so. Have we got time? Somebody better keep a look-out still. How do Moslem prayers start? ‘In the name of Allah, the something, the something,’ isn’t it?”

  “‘Allah,’” she corrected him. “Yes, ‘Allah who is, er, judge, who is kind.’”

  “Oh yes, of course. ‘The just, the merciful,’ isn’t it?”

  “You do it, then, Nidzhell?”

  “Do my best. I’ll need to think what to say. Rahdan’s getting a bit of air into the back for you, and he’ll want to top up the petrol and stuff. I’ll go ahead and try and work something out. Somebody’d better keep an eye out down the pass as long as possible.”

  “OK. I do that till you send Lisa and Natalie back. Then I come help Rahdan lifting bodies.”

  He walked slowly along the road trying to remember that what had happened at Uncle Ted’s funeral. Usually he tried not to think about it. His godfather Ted Finching was the first ambassador his father had served under. Typical of his father to pick someone like that, and to insist on their coming home for the funeral when he’d been killed in a motorway pile-up, and on Nigel going to it with them. He’d been only seven, and he couldn’t remember anything much about the church service, except that it had been boring. But he’d remember the bit at the graveside all his life.

  Lady Finching had Alzheimer’s and hadn’t a clue what was going on. As she stood by the open grave, a tall pale, bewildered old woman all in black, she kept looking over her shoulder to see where Uncle Ted had got to, while her son beside her tried to calm her down. Then, as the first handful of soil rattled onto the lid of the coffin—“Earth to earth, dust to dust, and the spirit …”—understanding had suddenly broken through and she’d started to scream and pulled herself away from her son and thrown herself down i
nto the grave. Somehow she hadn’t hurt herself, but had clawed herself upright and then just stood there, clinging onto the edge of the grave, screaming. He never saw how they got her out because he’d started screaming too and his mother had taken him away and hugged him close and explained about Alzheimer’s and stuff to him until he’d calmed down. That was how he’d always remembered it. It was what everyone else had seen. But now …

  He stopped in his tracks. He’d reached the top of the pass. Ahead of him the foothills stretched away, ridge beyond ridge. He saw none of that. Two scenes filled his mind, two images that were somehow the same image. Only yesterday he’d seen the shattered body of the President on the stairs of the great hall rear itself up out of the pit of death in a last desperate gesture to the one person he’d loved. And long before, in an English churchyard, he’d seen the smashed body of Uncle Ted claw its way out of a hole in the ground, the grey, distorted face, the wide mouth screaming.

  That was where the nightmares began.

  “Earth to earth, dust to dust …”

  Over and over his lips repeated the words, laying the ghosts, thinning the nightmares until they faded into the warm hill air and he woke from his trance and walked on.

  The good place Janey had talked about was a little way up the stream, where a couple of boulders had embedded themselves parallel to a huge sheer-sided slab of rock, leaving a narrow strip of clear ground between them. The girls were fetching loose rocks brought down by the stream and piling them into the gap between the boulders. Nigel sent Natalie and Lisa back to keep watch and did what he could one-handed until Janey and Rahdan arrived with the truck.

  “Good,” said Taeela. “I will take Halli and Sulva to look for flowers, so they do not watch while you carry their mum and dad up. You make them look nice, then you wave to me. Rahdan will say prayers for them, and then we cover them over.”

  “He doesn’t want to. He says he isn’t religious, but I guess he’s afraid of messing up in front of everybody. Janey asked me, but you’ll have to translate. I think they’d like that anyway. Do you know all their names? I’ll just say ‘father,’ ‘mother’ and so on and you can put the names in.”

  “Yes, this is better. I’ll tell them who you are, Nigel. They’ll like that.”

  They used the tarpaulin to bring the bodies up from the van, Rahdan taking the weight of the head and shoulders and Janey the lighter end, with Nigel, still one-handed, taking a corner beside her. They’d been shot in the back of the head, so there wasn’t a lot of blood, but it was gruesome all the same. They looked so dead.

  They spread one side of the tarpaulin out between the wall and the slab, laid the bodies on it and folded the other half beside them. While Janey cleaned their faces and tidied them as best she could Nigel checked the position of Mecca with his compass, then used a screwdriver from his knife to loosen a patch of soil beside the grave. When the others were ready he climbed onto the slab and waved to Taeela to bring the girls back.

  There weren’t many flowers pick at this time of year, but they’d made two little sheaves of some kind of reed with pretty golden seed-heads. Side by side, kneeling on one of the boulders, the girls leaned over and placed one on each of their parents, then went round and stood at the foot of the grave weeping silently. Janey and Rahdan folded the other half of the tarpaulin over the bodies.

  Nigel faced west and counted five.

  “In the name of Allah, the just, the merciful,” he said, and waited for Taeela to translate. “We’ve brought the bodies of—father’s name … and mother’s—here to bury them. Please look after them, Allah … and take their souls into your paradise … so that their daughters—girls’ names now—can meet them there one day …”

  He bent, scooped up some of the loosened earth, and sprinkled it over the two bodies. He was so choked he could hardly get the words out.

  “Dust to dust … earth to earth … and the spirits to … Allah who gave them.”

  He bowed his head, trying to master his tears. He realised he was weeping for Lady Finching as much as he was for the murdered mother and father. It was as if there was one unchanging pool of grief below the scurrying surface of things, and they were all three there.

  He moved aside to watch Taeela and the two girls place the first rocks on the tarpaulin. Covering it right over with enough rocks to keep scavengers out was going to take a while.

  “I’m not going to be much use here,” he muttered to Janey. “I’d better go back and keep a look-out, and Lisa and Natalie can come and help you. I’ll give it half an hour.”

  “Your shoulder is bad?”

  “Pretty sore. I can’t do much with that arm.”

  “When you come back I make you a …”

  She gestured, not knowing the word.

  “A sling. That’d be great.”

  CHAPTER 15

  It was in fact getting on an hour before they finally left the pass. Nigel watched the last rocks being added to the pile while Janey adjusted his sling, adapted from a headscarf. The sun was well down the western sky, and beneath it the mountains of Dirzhan stretched away into the distance. It wasn’t a bad place to be buried, he thought. He fetched the map out of the van and marked the place with a cross, in case there was ever a chance for the children to give their parents a proper Muslim funeral.

  They drove on for a while through featureless upland, passed a couple of shabby hamlets and turned west, then down through a series of hairpins into a wooded valley. In the fading light they found a place where they could get off the road far enough to hide the van among the trees.

  They shared out the food that Janey had brought, and after they’d eaten she made Nigel strip off his shirt and probed around on his shoulder with firm, efficient fingers.

  “Caught you a right wallop, didn’t he?” she said. “No wonder you feeling it. Too swoll up for telling if anything’s broke. You must be moving it sometimes, little, little. Like this. I bring paracetamol.”

  “Oh, that’d be great.”

  Sorting himself out to sleep, Nigel found the stuff he’d taken from the two thugs. He gave the fags to Rahdan and showed Taeela the wallets.

  “Good,” she said, leafing through them. “The money will be for Halli and Sulva. And I will find who these men are, and the men in their gang, and they will be punished.”

  “One day.”

  “Yes, Nigel. One day.”

  Lisa had managed to sleep a bit in the van, so she kept first watch. Janey and the girls bedded down in the back, Nigel on the bench seat in the cab, and Rahdan on the ground beside it. The paracetamol did its work and he was deep under when Lisa came to wake him.

  He sat up, wrapped his blanket round him and gingerly started to ease his shoulder the way Janey had shown him, until a bit of his dream came back to him and he was gazing down into dark, moonlit water. A pale shape wavered up out of the depths, vague at first but then becoming a face, a face with its mouth wide open, Lady Finching’s face, screaming. The pool of grief.

  He jerked himself fully awake, startled by having dropped off again so instantly, and tried to force his mind to think about stuff that mattered. With a bit of luck they’d reach Sodalka tomorrow, and Taeela would be recognised and they’d be taken to some tribal bigwig. It struck him that as soon as the others found someone to talk to they’d start telling them what had happened by the peach orchard.

  Bad idea. It might play OK in Dirzhan if it didn’t land Taeela with some sort of blood feud on her hands, but not back home. There’d be headlines you could read across a football pitch.

  KILLER PRINCESS!!!

  So nothing like that had happened by the peach orchard or anywhere else. The van was Rahdan’s and they’d hired him to take them to Sodalka. On the way they’d picked up this couple of kids whose parents had been robbed and murdered. Taeela’d have to explain to Rahdan and the kids anyway, so she could make sure they all said the same thing and stuck to it.

  That was as far as he got before Lady Finching
’s screaming face was swimming up towards him out of the darkness again and he woke with a start. It wouldn’t be the last time, either, if he stayed in the cab. Blearily he clambered out and started to walk around.

  It was a warm, clear night with barely enough breeze to rustle a leaf. He’d have heard a car on the road a mile away. None came. Still, it was best if someone was on the watch. It meant the others could sleep easier.

  Time crawled by. He tried to make plans for tomorrow, how he was going to call the embassy again, and what to say. Supposing all went well at Sodalka and Taeela was in safe hands and so on, what next? Try to get some kind of a lift out to Kyrgyzstan, maybe. Or perhaps …

  His mind kept straying back into the dream. He lost count how many times he stumbled and almost fell because he’d actually fallen asleep until the stumble woke him. Again and again he flicked on his torch to peer at his watch until at last the second hour was up. He shook Rahdan awake, climbed into the cab, took another paracetamol and was asleep as soon as he lay down. He woke in bright daylight with his arm too stiff and sore to move.

  The dawn mist was lifting from the valley when they left, churned up through the usual hairpins to the saddle of a pass, and then down to the main road from Dara Dahn to Podoghal. The refugees were still streaming north, but Nigel signalled to Rahdan to turn the other way and switched on the thugs’ mobile. Surprisingly he was getting a signal, so after a couple of miles he told him to pull off the road. While the others took the chance to stretch their legs he crossed the road, climbed out of sight and called the secure number. No piano was playing when at last the answer came.

  “Embassy.”

  “¿Estoy hablando con el embajador británico en Dirzhan?”

  “Habla el embajador Ridgwell.”

  “¿No lo molesto en este momento, embajador?”

  “That sounds fine, Niggles. If we get interrupted ring off at once and don’t use that telephone again.”