In the Palace of the Khans (16 page)

Nightmare woke Nigel early, with nowhere for his mind to go but the real nightmare stuff of the last four days. No point lying there letting it go on churning, so he got up, had a shower, dressed and went to look for a CD that might take his mind off it. He found Taeela at the living-room window in her dressing gown, staring out at Dara Dahn.

“Hi,” he said. “Great view, isn't it?”

She turned, and he saw the bruised look around her eyes. But the eyes themselves sparkled.

“When I am Khan, I will have this for my house,” she said. “In the morning I will ride down to the palace on one of my horses and rule over Dirzhan. Then in the afternoon I will come home to my children.”

“Sounds good to me. How many kids?”

She thought about it.

“Three girls and one boy,” she decided. “Not two boys, or they'll fight who will be Khan when I am dead. I'll choose good strong young men to marry my daughters, and they will give me nineteen grandchildren. No. I change my mind. My oldest daughter will marry the son of the President of America. My second daughter will marry the son of the President of Russia, and my youngest daughter will be very, very beautiful—hot—so she will marry the son of your Prince William. They will give me nineteen grandchildren still.”

“That'll keep the photographers busy. Is it OK for us to be alone together in here?”

She shrugged.

“Lucy was asleep. Her light was lit and her glasses were on her face.”

“She must have had as bad a night as I did. You too, I guess.”

“Before this I never sleep not in my own bed.”

“Wow! Then we are honoured, like Dad said. Nobody's told me why.”

Her tone changed.

“There are not enough guards in the palace. Some are hurt in the helicopter, some have gone to Vamar to question the villagers. So they must teach new guards.”

The call came on the private line while they were having breakfast. Nigel's mother took it.

“Hello … Oh, good morning … I don't think any of us slept that well. It's a bit difficult to settle down after all that … Not at all. It's been a real pleasure having her.… Of course. She'll be ready … Yes, here she is.”

Taeela was already hovering by her shoulder, but managed not to snatch when the telephone was handed to her. She chattered away in Dirzhani until her father cut her short and she rang off.

“After lunch I'll go home,” she announced. “I must stay in this house. My father doesn't want that that I … want me to be seen. He's making a speech at eleven o'clock, on the television. I must watch that. I will tell you what he says.”

The speech was all about tax breaks for farmers to help them increase food production, and how that meant prices in the shops would come down. Not a hint about what had happened at Lake Vamar. Just a lot of good news for your average Dirzhani, and the President showing that he had made it happen. When it was over Taeela chose a Doctor Who to watch. Nigel had already seen it and hated the Doctor's icky sidekick, so he slipped away to look for Rick. He found him fixing a leak in the downstairs toilet. Nigel had already worked out how to deal with the obvious question.

“Hi, lad. How are you doing? Interesting weekend?”

“Amazing. And then some.”

“Don't worry. I ain't going to ask you any more. Do anything for you?”

“Nothing special. It's just a feeling. Has anything been happening—anything funny? Everybody seems a bit jumpy.”

“Who's everybody?”

“Well, Dad mostly, I suppose.”

“You'll 'ave to ask 'im. 'Part from that, your guess is as good as mine, Nigel … Better, likely.”

The pause, the deliberate flatness of the last two words, gave them their meaning. Rick knew.

To make Taeela's visit as unobtrusive as possible they said goodbye to her in the living-room. She thanked Nigel's parents and shook hands with his father, but then hugged his mother as if she never wanted to let go. At last she turned to him.

“Nigel,” she said.

“Bye, Taeela. Been great having you. See you soon.”

She took the meaningless phrase straight.

“Tomorrow? It is the Chiefs' present-giving … How do I say that, Nick?”

“Hm. The Tribute of the Chieftains? That sounds sufficiently formal.”

“That's still on!” said Nigel's mother. “In spite of everything?”

“Of course. Officially there's no reason to change it.”

“Am I still supposed to come? What about Nigel?”

“If you can bear it. A show of confidence on our part would be appreciated.”

“But you will come to me first, Nigel,” said Taeela.

Before he could answer her glance shifted sideways and up.

“Please, Lucy,” she said, speaking at first as if her world depended on it, but then deliberately overdoing it. “Please. My father shows me to the chieftains. Just now he tells me. I shall be so …”

She mimed her nervousness, comically appealing.

“I'll come if I possibly can,” he said. “Promise.”

“Well …” Nigel's mother began, but his father interrupted.

“Let's talk about it later. We're holding the Khanazhana up.”

Taeela sighed, smiled, wrapped the long end of her headscarf round her face and led the way out onto the landing. They watched her departure from the head of the stairs. The front door was open and a man and a woman wearing ordinary Dirzhani dress were waiting just inside it, with Taeela's suitcase. They bowed their heads briefly to Taeela and the woman slid her right hand in under her jacket—there'd be a gun in there, Nigel guessed—and moved out onto the doorstep. Taeela waited until she had gazed left and right, then joined her. The man picked up the suitcase and followed, closing the door behind him.

Nigel heard his mother sigh, and turned to her.

“I'm sorry, darling,” she said. “I'm not happy about you going to this tribute thing. About any of us going, really. Something's up they aren't …”

“Please, Mum. She really …”

“Not out there, Niggles,” interrupted his father. “We'll talk about it in here.”

Reluctantly he followed his mother back into the living-room. He hated family rows. His mother began as soon as he'd closed the door, talking not to him but to his father.

“Let's be clear about this, Nick. You've got to tell me what's going on. Something is. All this fuss. Look at how our guards acted on the way back from the lake, checking out the hunting lodge before they'd let us drive up to the front door. And then yesterday not letting us have our picnic where I wanted so they could get the cars out of sight. And the President wanting us to have Taeela here overnight.”

“She said that was because they were short of guards at the palace,” said Nigel. “A lot of them have gone up to Lake Vamar.”

“I don't believe it,” said his mother. “They wouldn't be acting like this if they thought what happened at Lake Vamar had just been some stroppy villager taking a pot-shot at the President. Something's up, and I don't like the feel of it. Is there any way we can get out of this tribute thing, for a start?”

“Let's sit down,” said Nigel's father, and settled into his armchair, putting his finger-tips together in front of his chin, ready to start talking smoothly, reasonably, calmingly.

“First, let me say that I partially agree with you, darling. It seemed to me from the first that it was unlikely that your stroppy villager would have a night vision sight of sniper quality.

“On the other hand it is hard to see how anyone in Dara Dahn, bar a very few trusted members of the President's personal staff, could have known that the helicopter accident meant that there were not enough uninjured guards to patrol the far shore of the lake, and furthermore known the timing of his visit to the fish-owl project. We ourselves didn't know that until the Saturday.”

“Somebody at the hunting lodge?” said Nigel's mother. “I bet some of them are locals. They might be in cahoots with the villagers.”

“But not with anyone in Dara Dahn. From what we've seen of the system I would guarantee that all unauthorised communication between hunting lodge and palace is strictly monitored. What we are discussing is whether the events at Lake Vamar were orchestrated from Dara Dahn, with the implication that it would not be safe for you and/or Nigel to attend the ceremony tomorrow.

“In fact they make it safer, if anything. It is automatic under any regime that after a serious security breach temporary precautions are put in place. Hence the choice of a picnic site and Taeela's visit. Security at the palace tomorrow will be even tighter than usual, if that's possible.

“For myself, I have every intention of attending the ceremony, and would feel obliged to do so even if I thought it was riskier than I do. But if Nigel were to have a diplomatic illness and you stayed to look after him …”

“If you're going I'm going too. And I suppose Nigel can come and sit with us, where he's under our eye.”

“No, Mum. I've got to go to Taeela first. I've pretty well promised. Please.”

“I don't see why he shouldn't …”

“No, Nick. I see you've got to go because of your job, and it'll look almost as bad if I don't go too. That doesn't apply to Nigel, but if he absolutely insists on coming I won't say no, but I'm not letting him out of my sight.”

“But, Mum …”

“I'm sorry, darling …”

“Mum! Please listen!”

“If I may intervene …” said Nigel's father.

“Wait, Nick,” said his mother. “I want to hear what Nigel says.”

Nigel took a deep breath, trying to pull himself together.

“Taeela's going to notice, Mum. And she's going to know why you didn't let me come. Because you didn't think it was safe. Mum, she's really scared.”

“We were all scared, darling.”

“You're not getting it, Mum. She
is
scared. It's over for us. It isn't for her, and it won't ever be. She told me about it in the car coming back from the lake. All we've got to do is go away somewhere and we'll be out of it. Like waking up from a nightmare. But it's real for her, ordinary. She's been waiting for something like Lake Vamar to happen all her life. She gets taught nightmare stuff like we get taught PE—how to gouge someone's eyes out, what's the best place to stick a knife into him, all that. She's got her own pistol she carries around. It isn't a toy. It's in case she has to use it.

“And then the thing happens and it's real and none of that's any use and she finds out what it's like to be really, really scared, and she's going to be in it for the rest of her life, trying to pretend it's ordinary all her life. Just now, just for a moment, when she was asking you to let me go and be with her before the tribute thingy, she let us see how it really, really mattered. And then she hammed it up, so as to hide it.

“No, wait. I haven't finished. There's never been anyone in her life before who really cared about her, cared about Taeela for herself, not just because she's the Khanazhana. Apart from Fohdrahko and her dad, but they don't count. But now there's you and me. We don't just like her, we care about her. She knows she can trust us. And now we're going to let her down. She's never going to trust anyone again.

“Suppose one day she's going to be Khan herself, which is what she wants, do you want her to be a khan like her dad, not trusting anyone, not letting anyone care for her, killing anyone who gets in her way, hanging villagers in their doorways, just because they had a hunting rifle in the house? That's what she meant when she said it was hard being a khan. She'd worked it out about her dad having to decide whether to have us bumped off on our way back from Lake Vamar, before we could tell anyone what had happened there.”

“No! He wouldn't have … Nick! This has got to be nonsense!”

“I'm afraid not, darling. This is one of the realities of absolute power. One of the reasons for my being here, and wanting to stay here, is that I—we—can attempt to mitigate it. Have you any more to say, Niggles?”

“Yes. That's the bit about Taeela. This is about me. It's about how I feel. How I'm going to go on feeling for the rest of my life if I don't get it right this time. I didn't at Lake Vamar. OK, we were all scared about what happened, like you said, but I wasn't just scared. I lost it completely. I panicked. I couldn't think about anything else except me getting the hell out of there. Not anyone else. I hurt your leg, bolting for the door. I heard you yell. I didn't think about it. When we were running along the walkway I saw you were limping, but all I thought about it was that you were slowing me up. Same when I found you sitting by the path, looking to see how bad your leg was. It just didn't register.

“Same with Taeela. I never even thought about what it would be like for her, what she must be feeling. Least I could've done was wait for her under the trees, just to be there when she got to safety. I didn't. I ran away again. I'd actually lost it completely again on the walkway and tried to bolt, and my guard had to grab hold of me to make me stay put, and there she was running along beside her guard like she was doing it just for the exercise. I couldn't face her. It was only when we were going up to drag branches down for the stretcher and she told me how scared she'd been that I started to think about her at all.

“Think about me, Mum! Me inside. How'm I going to feel for the rest of my life if I don't go? Let her down again, worse than before? Start telling myself that I haven't got the guts—that's just how I am? Finish up being like that? Is that what you want for me?”

“I really do think it's much safer than you suppose, Lou,” said Nigel's father. Neither of them paid any attention. Nigel's mother was staring at him, blinking. She wiped an eye with her finger. He could hear the croak in her voice when she spoke.