In the Palace of the Khans

by Peter Dickinson

  “I sleep … slept little. How can I? But I am well … Nigel.

  “What’s up? What’s happened?”

  “My regents … They are afraid of the Russians. My brother is in Moscow, my father’s oldest son. Perhaps they will say he is the true Khan. Avron Dikhtar has said—you were right, Nigel, he tells us so much—he’s said it is a very rich Russian building man who pays Sesslizh and Madzhalid for killing of my father so that he will build our dam. Already the television in Moscow has news about my vengeance. They say the British meddle too much in Dirzhan. They say the British ambassador visits with my father in his private hunting lodge …”

  “Do they say anything about me being in the palace with you yesterday?”

  “They don’t know. They mustn’t know. I did not tell my regents this, even. Now I must do what they want. So you were not in Dara Dahn, Nigel. You were all the time in Sodalka. You must go in secret back there for a few days. Then you come to Dara Dahn.”

  “I’m going back to England next week.”

  “I know. It is best. You spend few days in Sodalka and then … Oh, Nigel …!”

  “And anyway, what about the guys who were with us in the palace?”

  “They will not tell, Nigel. Think who you are. It will be terrible for them to tell your secrets.”

  “They can’t all believe that.”

  “Of course they believe. They saw what happened yesterday. I believe also. We cannot chance to be so lucky. Don’t you believe?”

  Nigel laughed uncomfortably.

  “Not really,” he said, but he wasn’t sure if it was true.

  “Who else has seen you?” she said.

  “Nardu and his sons. The people at the fish quay. No, it was just Rick and me there, so they wouldn’t have made the connection … Hang on.”

  His father had come in and was hovering, clearly waiting for him to finish.

  “It’s Taeela,” he said. “She wants me to sneak back to Sodalka and make like I’ve been there all along.”

  “Now that’s not at all a bad idea … provided we can get away with it. It depends who else …”

  “She says the guys who were with us in the passages won’t talk. Tell you later. Hello, you still there? Dad’s all in favour.”

  “You will need bodyguards still. Wait … Yes, I will call Chief Baladzhin so that he can send bodyguards to bring Lucy to Sodalka to fetch you and say thank-you to him for looking after you. You can go with her so nobody sees you. Can she do this, Nigel?”

  “I’ll ask her. I wanted to take her to Sodalka anyway. Hang on.”

  “No, I will talk to her.”

  He carried the hand-set over. His father beckoned him back.

  “This would solve a lot of problems, Niggles,” he muttered. “We’d need to fix how to smuggle you up there …”

  “She’s got that sorted, if Mum can do it,” said Nigel, and explained.

  “Amazing child,” said her father. “But I hope she doesn’t imagine she can run the country like that on her own.”

  “I think she’s letting the regents take over. She said she’s got to start doing what they want.”

  “Yes … Listen, Niggles. You’re not going to like this, but I think you’d better stay up there almost till you’re due to go home.”

  “But …”

  “I’m anxious to quash the perception that there might be anything on between the two of you, which is of course what everybody wants to think. I imagine Taeela’s regents feel even more strongly about this. We’ll put it about that you found the whole experience pretty traumatic, and we need to give you peace and quiet to recover. OK?”

  “No … Oh, hell!… Let’s see what Taeela says.”

  “Right … Tell me, how sure can we be that the men who were with you in the palace will keep their mouths shut?”

  “Dead sure, almost. It’s that baizhan thing I told you about. Especially after yesterday, when everything went pretty well impossibly right. You could almost feel the way they believed in it, like … I don’t know what.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.”

  Across the room Nigel’s mother had been talking cheerfully to Taeela, just as if it had been an ordinary, everyday chat, the sort he wished he could have had. Now she said goodbye and held the handset out for him.

  “Hi. I’m back.”

  “Oh, I am sorry … I wish, Nigel …”

  “OK, you needn’t go on. I get it. We’re supposed to be like we aren’t friends any more.”

  “We are friends, Nigel. It is for a few days only, and then … Wait. Somebody comes. I’ll call you when I am able.”

  “OK. See you.”

  He went and stared out of the window. Tiny figures were moving about in front of the palace, raking the litter into mounds, shovelling the ashes of the glorious bonfire into barrows and carting them away. Him too. He was a bit of litter being cleared away up to Sodalka after the party was over. He tried to tell himself that Taeela was as unhappy about it as he was. It didn’t help much.

  She didn’t call back.

  Dara Dahn was having one of its hotter-than-hell days, so there wasn’t any excuse for not bringing his blog up to date. He yelped with astonishment when he saw how many hits he’d had in his absence. There’d never been more than maybe a word or two from Mr. Udall, and a snide remark from some kid in his class doing his own blog. Now there were 12,387, with the count going up even as he watched. And pages of comments about entries he’d posted before stuff had really started happening, mostly from kids wanting to be his friends, or to know more about Taeela, or to put him down one way or another.

  He glanced at a few of them, but forgot about them as soon as he started to sort out the stuff on his memory stick, since that last morning when Rick had driven him down to the palace. He’d been at it for over an hour when Roger came in with the printouts from the London papers.

  The main story in the serious ones was about some big bank going bust, but they’d all got the same grainy picture next to it, lifted from Dara Dahn TV, Taeela standing on the grand stairway, side on to the camera, with her pistol half raised and Mr Dikhtar cowering at her feet. The headlines ranged from TEENAGE PRINCESS STAGES SUCCESSFUL COUNTER-COUP IN DARA DAHN to TAEELA GET YOUR GUN. All the stories had at least one thing wrong. Several of them said things like “Nigel Ridgewell son of the British ambassador, who had been with the Khanazhana at the time of the coup and had participated in her escape, was previously reported as being safe in an undisclosed location, thought to be Kyrgyzstan. He will be returning to Dara Dahn as soon as it is safe to travel.”

  He carried on with the blog until he got to the peach orchard. He’d need to ask Taeela about that, and anyway he was pretty well brain dead, so he just wrote “More next time,” and printed it out for his father to check over.

  “Spot on,” said his father. “Plenty for people to get their teeth into, and no toes trodden on, to mix a metaphor or two. Something I wanted to ask you, though. This baizhan thing …”

  “I’m not going to say anything about it. The Dirzhaki would think I’m ruining Taeela’s luck.”

  “Yes, of course. But have you thought about what’s going to happen here when you have to go back to home, Nigg … Nigel?”

  “Thanks,. Dad.”

  “High time, I suppose. Where were we? Oh, yes, we may think of it as irrational nonsense, but if it’s part of the Khanazhana’s mystique it has to be taken seriously. Can it be passed on? If so does your successor have to be another person? One of the old khans had a white mule, I think you said.”

  “Yeah, I know. It’s been bothering me. She won’t talk about it, and I guess nobody else will. Even Mizhael said he felt iffy telling me. Anyway, I’ll ask him when we’re in Sodalka. Doctor Ghulidzh might know, I suppose.”

  The afternoon shuffled dully away. Beneath their windows Dara Dahn slept in the blanketing heat. Only as the lights came on did life begin to stir. At last Taeela called.

  “Great,” he
said. “Something I want to ask you. It’s for my blog. There’s thousands of people reading it now. Is that scary or is that scary?”

  “I have thousands of people watching me Nigel. Tens of thousands. All of the time.”

  She sounded tired and low-spirited. She wasn’t putting him down.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That must be really tough. This is the same sort of thing, I suppose. That stuff on the way to Sodalka, when you had to shoot …”

  “Tell them what happened, Nigel. Everything.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I am sure. Let us … let’s talk about something else.”

  It didn’t work. He hadn’t done anything worth talking about, and she’d endured a series of dispiriting hassles and frustrations which she didn’t want to think about.

  “I think we will stop,” she said at last. “Oh, Nigel, it will never be the same! Perhaps it will be better when you are in Sodalka.”

  She rang off without giving him time to answer.

  Next morning two SUVs carrying five armed guards drew up at the Embassy with the Baladzhin pennant fluttering from their aerials. Wearing his dahl, sunglasses and a pair of his mother’s sandals Nigel tittupped down the steps and climbed shyly in beside her. Nobody seemed to be watching.

  Twice they were stopped at dodgy-looking road-blocks on their way north, but their guards carried passes from Chief Baladzhin and made it clear that they were prepared to back them up with their own fire-power, so there was no serious trouble.

  They were lunching beside a rocky stream half way up a pass when Nigel’s mother said dreamily “I’ve had an idea about what you were talking to your Dad about yesterday. He would have to persuade Herr Fettler, of course.”

  “Herr Fett …? Mum, that’s brilliant!”

  “I thought so. You’d still have to find out how to do it.”

  A little way short of Sodalka they halted again for Nigel to change cars. The one he was in went on ahead, entered the town by a different gate and drove round to the back of Chief Baladzhin’s house so that he could be out at the front gate with him to greet his mother. A television crew was waiting to film him running forward, regardless of protocol, even before her car had drawn to a halt, and then flinging his arms round her as she emerged.

  She threw herself into the act, laughing and crying as he dragged her back up the steps to introduce her to a beaming Chief Baladzhin.

  They spent six good days at Sodalka. In the mornings they poked around in market stalls with Lily-Jo and Doglu, or explored wonderful over-the-top buildings and streets where hardly a house looked less than hundreds of years old, or sat under awnings sipping ice-cold juices and nibbling Dirzhani snacks. Though nobody now sneaked up to try to touch him he was all the time conscious of the pressure of suppressed excitement at his presence. “It’s creepy the way they won’t quite look at you,” said his mother.

  On the second day the journalists started to show up, trying to interview Nigel, and when they didn’t get anywhere with that just asking people about him. They didn’t get anywhere with that either. One woman spotted him and his mother leaving the market and rushed up with a microphone, but an angry crowd gathered round her before she reached him and his mother had to wade in and rescue her. Next day the embassy announced he would be giving a press conference when he got back to Dara Dahn so they went away to wait for that.

  They spent the heat of the day indoors and summoned the real world back for an hour or so by watching the Dara Dahn television news and phoning Nigel’s father. Taeela phoned them too, when she could, and she and Nigel got better at keeping a conversation going. At one point he was telling her how he and his mother had used the cool of the previous evening to take the four girls up into the hills to look for birds. Lisa and Natalie were teaching the other two English, competitively and in a Leeds accent, with a lot of teasing and giggling, all four working together to bury, if only for the moment, the horrors they had been through.

  “It isn’t fair, Nigel!” she said. “You have fun. You do these things with Lucy and the girls, and I work, work, work. And it is not—what do you say?—proper work. Anyone who has a smiley face can do it. I will find a girl looking the same as me …”

  “A double? That’s a great idea! And then you can sneak up here and do fun stuff with us.”

  “When did I last ride my beautiful horses, Nigel? My poor horses! They will be so bored. They will forget me.”

  “You’re right. Seriously, Taeela, it isn’t good for you. You must tell your regents …”

  “I do not tell them, Nigel. They tell me. They tell me I must show everybody my smiley face so they all say ‘Yes, this is a good government.’”

  “Come off it. You tell them, don’t you?”

  “A little bit. It is like a difficult horse. Three difficult horses …”

  Her tone had changed. The flash of her old self was over.

  She hadn’t been exaggerating about her work-load. There were always at least a couple of items about her doings on any news bulletin, talking to patients in hospitals, visiting the makeshift camps of refugees from the three patches of fighting still going on, inspecting troops, welcoming a UN peace delegation and so on. She did a very genuine-seeming smiley face.

  Doctor Ghulidzh couldn’t find anything in any of his books about switching baizhani. Alinu just shook her head warningly.

  “Guess you’ll just have to make something up,” said Mizhael.

  “What would you do in one of your fantasy games?”

  “Don’t ask me. I just market them. Any ideas, love?”

  “A magical apple, maybe,” said Lily-Jo. “The tree guarded by a dragon. The old baizhan takes a bite and passes it to the new baizhan. Or …”

  “If Zhanni’s going to eat it it’s got to be fish,” said Nigel.

  “A magical pool, then,” said Lily-Jo. “A grim guardian in the depths.”

  “Cool,” said Mizhael.

  On the fourth morning Nigel and his mother went to the market alone and bought a sheaf of brilliant red-purple flowers like miniature gladioli. They left the town by the west gate with the sun already roasting on their backs and climbed the short distance to the place where the helicopter had come down. The wreckage had been cleared away but the circle of blackened hillside was there, spreading away from the fatal boulder, and the clean hill air still reeked faintly of burnt aviation fuel and—or was this only imagination?—charred meat.

  Nigel scrambled onto the boulder from above and his mother passed him the flowers. He crossed to the other side, laid them carefully down near the edge, moved a pace back and stood with his head bowed. The black circle was the pool of grief, and the dead soldiers were there, and the parents of Halli and Sulva, and the brutes who had killed them, and Adzhar Taerzha and Sesslizh and Madzhalid and the soldiers who’d fallen down the drop-traps, and their dog, and the unknown others who’d died in the fighting at the TV station, and the woman who’d just been in the way of a bullet. His flowers would wither by sunset, the black circle would be green next year, but the boulder would remain.

  They walked down the hill in silence. A line of people were watching from the walls as they came through the gate.

  Taeela called that same evening. The first thing she said was “The flowers, Nigel. Where the helicopter was crashed. Why did you do this? It was on the television. What does this mean, Nigel?”

  “It doesn’t mean anything! It’s private! Look, if I hadn’t wanted to talk to Mum those guys would a still be alive! I don’t feel guilty, only sad. It isn’t anything to do with anyone else, just me!”

  “Everything you do has meanings, Nigel. I think this has good meanings for my people. It is because of who you are … No, what you are.”

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned it’s still private. Oh, I suppose I’m glad you think it might be some use, but, tell you truth, I’m sick of all that! I can’t wait to get out of Dirzhan … Hell! Sorry, I don’t mean it like that. I still think you’re terrif
ic—the best thing that ever happened to me …”

  “You really think this, Nigel?”

  “Oh, sorry. I didn’t mean … well, yeah … yeah, now I’ve said it, I guess so. But it’s no use, is it? Not if we can’t be together a bit. And Mum and me’ll be flying out Friday. Look, I’ve got to see you before I go. Alone. Well, I suppose you’d better have Satila there, but no one else. It isn’t because of what I just said. I mean, I really want to see you of course, but I’ve got to, too. Whether your regents like it or not. It’s important for both of us. Thursday, if poss. We’ll be back in the embassy Tuesday evening. You can call me there to tell me when. OK?”

  “Good. I will make it possible … Wait …”

  There was a long uninterpretable pause, then she spoke in a rapid mutter, as if she’d had to force herself to say it.

  “Nigel, you are the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  She rang off before he could think of an answer.

  There were newspaper printouts waiting at the embassy, but fewer and shorter than last time, as some kind of banking crisis was sweeping round the world like a tsunami, washing yesterday’s news away as it went. But there were stories about Nigel himself being in the palace with the Khanazhana when her father was murdered and escaping with her up to Sodalka. They’d only got his blog to go on, plus a lot of rumours. They made a big thing of Taeela shooting the two thugs at the peach orchard, of course. He was still looking at the printouts when she called.

  At first they were back to where they’d started, heaving the conversation along through a series of awkward pauses. Nigel had very little to tell her apart from Chief Baladzhin giving his mother a huge turban pin in his household colours, and telling her that if she’d been free he’d have made it a wedding ring.

  The return to Dahn had been an eventless seven-hour drive. He’d thought of asking if they could go back over the pass where they’d buried Halli and Sulva’s murdered parents so that he could put flowers on their grave, without any photographers lurking around. He didn’t tell Taeela that bit. It was too close to the emotional bog they’d fallen in yesterday.