In the Palace of the Khans (2 page)

“Oh, I'll go all right …”

“Nigel!” said his mother. “At least wait till …”

“No, Mum. I don't expect there are a lot of kids for me to hang out with here. It'll be interesting, even if it's only just once. Provided I hit it off with her, of course. I wonder if she plays chess. Do I get to meet the monster?”

“He will certainly want to cast an eye over you,” said Nigel's father, checking his tie in the mirror by the door and rearranging a wisp of pale hair. “You'll be chaperoned all the time you're with her, by the way. I believe he used to play chess in Moscow, I don't know how well, though I doubt is there's anyone in Dirzhan with the nerve to beat him. Shall I tell Roger to lay it on?”

Nigel's mother sighed, slid a marker into her book and put it on the pile.

“I suppose so,” she said to his departing back. “I'm sorry, darling. The diplomatic community here is tiny, and it's hard to make friends outside it. There just isn't anyone your age who'd do.”

“Except the President's daughter, with luck. Has she got any brothers and sisters? Is there a Mrs President?”

“Yes and no. They're semi-separated. They married when he was in Moscow, and their sons were born there. She's Russian, of course, and she doesn't like it here. She can't speak the language, no ballet, no opera, so she lives in Moscow with the boys. One's at university and the other must be just about finishing at high school. They can speak Dirzhani—the President's insisted on that—but all their friends are in Moscow, and so on, so they come back as little as they can get away with.

“Is she pretty, this daughter?”

“I think so, in a Dirzhani kind of way. They're different anyway, Dirzhani girls. A lot of them get married off soon as they're fifteen. They don't get much say in who to …

“Goodness, is that the time? I thought you'd be sleeping much later, but if you can keep yourself occupied till eleven, I'll take you to the market, which is the real thing, not at all Hollywood. Dara Dahn will be an oven after lunch, but it'll be a bit more bearable up in the hills. I've found a falconer who'll show you his birds and if you're interested he'll give you some lessons.”

“Oh, cool!”

“We'll have to take a bodyguard, I'm afraid. You get used to it. The thing you've got to remember about them is that they're only pretending they can't speak English. So be careful what you say in front of them. After that …”

“It's all right Mum! You don't have to look after me every hour of every day. Anyway, I've got my blog to get started on. Stop fussing. What sort of thing do you do at the weekends? Can we get up into the mountains and bird-watch and stuff?”

“Of course. There's a super little hotel at Forghal, with good fishing for Nick and ponies we can hire and scramble around on them with our binoculars …”

“That means two bodyguards, one for us and one for Dad.”

“Nick will slip ours a fifty and tell him to hire his own bloody pony if he wants to come along. He won't. I've got to go now too, darling. See you at eleven.”

In the holidays Nigel liked to have breakfast in his dressing-gown. It gave him a sense of freedom from the endless pressure of time during school term. He'd set his alarm, and the hell with jet-lag, so that he could have breakfast with his parents. It was almost three months since he'd last seen them. Always before they'd been in big cities—Madrid, Athens, Santiago—where they'd lived in ordinary houses with Spaniards or Greeks or Chileans for neighbours and his father had gone to work in the British embassy, like going to the office.

This time his father's appointment had come out of the blue, and the Foreign Office had had to scramble Nigel into an English boarding school. He'd been to a Spanish school in Santiago and spoke English the way his parents did, so he'd felt a bit of an outsider, coming in late, with his silly posh voice and his stupid name and hopelessly uncool slang. He'd gone to his aunt Helen or his sister Libby for most weekends and then, at the end of term, had flown out to join his parents in Dirzhan.

Despite the jet-lag Nigel had enjoyed having his breakfast at a beautifully polished table in his cosy old dressing-gown, being waited on by a maid in a spotless white apron; and now, clean and dressed, he was standing at the living-room window gazing out over Dara Dahn. It was built either side of a river that flowed into a large lake he'd seen from the aeroplane flying in last night. This side of the river was Dahn and the far side Dara. The embassy was air-conditioned, but the roofs of Dahn, tumbling down to the river below him, already glared with heat in the morning sun. In the clean upland air he could see for vast distances beyond Dara on the opposite slope, first a range of lion-coloured hills, and much farther away real mountains, with a faint glimmer against the pale blue sky that might be snow-peaks.

He couldn't see much of Dahn itself except its roofs, mostly wavy yellowish tiles, with zigzag patterns of purple ones worked into them. Minarets rose here and there. (“The Dirzhaki are nominally Muslim,” Google had told him, “but few other Muslim communities accept them as such.”) But Dara was displayed before him. It looked a bit like Istanbul in some ways—they'd been there once on a long weekend from Athens—but somehow wilder, stranger, with even more secrets. There were some interesting old buildings and some hideous new ones. The best and the worst of these were a glorious, ornate, gold-coloured building with five blue domes, spreading along the waterfront; and, further up the hill, a huge pale grey vertical slab like a giant's tombstone.

A tap at the open door behind him. He turned.

“Do I intrude on your meditation?” said Roger.

He was the Third Secretary. There wasn't a First or Second Secretary—the Embassy wasn't important enough. Tim O'Hara, the Commercial Secretary, looked after the Vamar Dam stuff and Roger did everything else. Youngish, round without being obviously plump, smiley, soft spoken. The big thing about him was that he had a passion for languages and he'd learnt Dirzhani for the job.

“What's that horrible thing there?” said Nigel.

Roger put a CD and a blue folder on the table, and answered without coming to look.

“The People's Palace, I expect. Typical bit of Stalinist architecture.”

“It looks like a tombstone.”

“Spot on. Monument to the sterility of the communist ideal. They turned the old Palace of the Khans—that one with the blue domes—into a museum, but President Dharviu moved back in there as soon as he took over.”

“What's it like inside?”

“That's one of the things I came to see you about. Do you know what your plans are for tomorrow? Your mother seems to have disappeared.”

“She said tomorrow was blank.”

“Then you may be seeing for yourself. The President's daughter will be prepared to receive you at ten o'clock.”

“You'll have to clear it with Mum. She wasn't keen, really, but she said OK in the end. What's the problem? They can't do anything to me, can they? Hold me as a hostage to get what they want on the dam deal, or whatever?”

“He's not that kind of a fool. It'd be something much subtler than that. The CD will give you a bit of an idea, perhaps. I won't spoil it for you. We'd better deal with this other stuff first if you'll come over here.”

He opened a folder and began to sort out papers and envelopes onto the table.

“This is an official document in both Dirzhani and English, signed by your father and stating that you are a British subject and have diplomatic immunity. This is five hundred-dollar bills and ten thousand-dzhin notes. This is some local money in smaller denominations. This is a list of telephone numbers. Remember if there's trouble that someone's quite likely to be listening. This is a mobile that works here some of the time, though the signal's extremely patchy. Landlines are purely local. There are masts in Dara Dahn and some of the larger towns, but …”

“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.