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Authors: Peter Dickinson

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BOOK: In the Palace of the Khans
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Taeela looked up and came scampering across holding out her hand for the mobile, the picture of affront.

“Hang on, mum. She wants to talk to you. You mustn't believe a word she says.”

Taeela snatched the handset.

“Mrs. Rizhouell? No. It is Nigel you must not believe. I tell the truth, always. When he come home he'll say terrible things about me. They are not true. Can he come again tomorrow, please, so I tell him how bad he is?”

He heard his mother laugh as she answered, and took the phone back.

“That sounds all right,” she said. “Enjoy your chess, darling. I'll see you later. They're driving you home, apparently.”

The President's office was right round the gallery on the other side of the Great Hall. Once again Nigel had to have a body-search before he was let through. Inside, the layout was the same as that in the private apartments, with an almost identical inner lobby. The cigar smell was stronger, and the walls were hung with photographs of the President doing things like watching a parade or coming down the steps from a neat little jet with a group of bigwigs waiting to greet him.

Another door, and beyond it an office like any old office apart from the panelled walls and the vaulted ceiling. Desks, filing cabinets, a man and a woman using desk-top PCs, another man talking on the telephone. They glanced up from their work as Nigel was led through. One of the men raised his thumb and grinned at him. Another door …

Nigel halted, startled by the shock of change. It wasn't the office itself. That was much as he'd expected, with the President sitting at a big desk under the window, and behind him, seen through another of the stone lattices, the vista of the river with the steep-piled houses of Dahn. What stopped him was the wall of cigar-smoke that billowed through the doorway.

The President noticed. He shrugged and stubbed out the thin black cigar he'd been smoking.

“I will spare you,” he said. “I cannot work without it, but we will eat and play in my study with the windows open. You said you play for your school, Nigel. Are the others in your team about your age?”

“No, sir. They're all older than me.”

“So you play bottom board?”

“No, sir. Second.”

“An experienced player, then. You do not think I need to give you a piece by way of a handicap?”

“Uh … Let's see how it goes, sir.”

The study was a fair-sized room, also looking out over the river. There were bookshelves, easy chairs, a music centre and TV. At the back of the room was a table set out with plates, cutlery, glasses, a jug of juice and a beer-bottle, and several little dishes of food.

“Help yourself,” said the President. “The food is all local. These are little fish from our lake, pickled in sweet vinegar, and those are the eggs of our mountain quail …”

Nigel did as he was told, taking a little of anything the President recommended. He was too nervous to feel hungry. The air in here was mercifully fresher, though the President himself still reeked. The chess table was set up under the window, with low tables beside each chair for the trays. The President took his over and sat, then waited for Nigel to do the same. He picked up a couple of pawns, juggled them between his hands and held out his closed fists. Nigel chose the left. Black.

“I can spare forty minutes,” said the President said, putting a stopwatch down beside the board. “We will play two minutes a move, maximum, but faster if possible.”

He advanced his queen's knight's pawn one square and clicked the watch. Nigel pushed a centre pawn two squares and did the same. The President shifted his bishop onto the empty pawn square to threaten it. Nigel was surprised. It was a flashy sort of opening, Mr Harries had told him, but schoolboys are always trying that sort of thing, so he'd met it before. He merely supported the pawn, then continued to occupy the centre, developing his pieces and at the same time blocking the President's attack down the diagonal. They castled on opposite sides and exchanged a couple of pawns.

The centre of the board was already becoming congested when for the first time Nigel took his two minutes. He wasn't thinking about how to win the game, but whether to. He hadn't worked it out exactly, but he thought he could do it in about eight moves, most of which would seem merely to be countering the President's coming attack. What had his father said? “
I believe he plays, I don't know how well, though I doubt is there's anyone in the country with the nerve to beat him.

Scary? Not necessarily. The President can't have seen the threat, so he'd never know if Nigel simply played on without putting it into action.

He couldn't bring himself to do it. He bit his lip and made a couple of what looked like nothing-much moves. Now, he thought, and swallowed convulsively. His heart started to pound.

The President launched his attack as if nothing had changed. When the massacre was over he was a knight for a pawn up but Nigel had his rooks doubled on a half-open file. Confidently the President shifted his remaining bishop to threaten Nigel's queen. Instead of retreating Nigel advanced her along the diagonal and took the bishop. As the President's hand was hovering to retake with a protecting pawn he saw what would happen. Move the pawn and the file would be fully open. Another move and Nigel would have his front rook on the back rank. Check. The knight could retake, but Nigel's second rook would take it in turn and the President's king would be trapped in its own fortress. Checkmate.

A really good player would have resigned two moves ago, but then a really good player wouldn't have got into that mess.

Abruptly the President stood, turned to the window, snatched a handkerchief out of his pocket and sneezed violently into it, a real trumpet-call of a sneeze. He turned, shaking his head and wiping his eyes with the handkerchief, and then folded it fussily and put it back into his pocket. As he was about to sit down there was a tap at the door.

He looked towards it, frowning, and called out. A man came in with a phone in his hand. The President took it and asked an irritable-sounding question. A pause, and then he sighed, shrugged and turned to Nigel.

“My apologies, but I must break off,” he said brusquely. “Something urgent has come up. We will play again some time.”

He spoke to the man, who answered briefly and left. The President had started to put the pieces away and Nigel was about to do the same but as soon at the door closed the President stopped.

Nigel looked up. The President didn't do or say anything, but stood there motionless, looking down at him.

Now he was really scared.

“You were about to checkmate me,” said the President.

“Yer … yes, sir.”

“You realise what this means to me, to be beaten, by a child, my guest, in my own palace?”

“Yer … yes, sir. I … almost …”

“Decided not to make the queen move? To let me overwhelm you a few moves later? And yet you did it. Why? Pride? Vanity? To have beaten the President of Dirzhan? Something to boast about to your friends?”

“Oh, no, sir! That queen sacrifice—I hadn't even been thinking about it. It was just there, all set up, ready, and I sort of noticed it. I've never done one before. I could see it was going to work. Then … I knew what it meant—I could have just retreated the queen and fought you off—it'd have been a close thing—but I couldn't do it. It would have been a kind of … cheating, I suppose. I felt if I did it I'd never be given a present like that again.”

“Cheating whom?”

“I … I don't know … The game … You too, sir, I suppose. You've done me proud, having me here, letting me visit your daughter—it's a terrific honour. I'd have been doing something sneaky, behind your back …”

He ran out of words and waited. His right hand was trembling. He couldn't stop it.

“My daughter appears to like you,” said the President. “She has asked you to return tomorrow?”

(How …? Oh yes, of course. Mr. Dikhtar must have told him.)

“… er … Yes, sir … If that's all right.”

“I asked you to play chess with me to see if you knew enough about the game to teach her. She is anxious to learn and I do not have the time.”

“I'll try if you like, sir.”

“And what do you propose to tell your parents about our game?”

“I'll say … I'll say we were still slogging it out when something came up and you had to go.”

The President nodded and turned to the door, but paused with his hand on the doorknob.

“We will play again soon,” he said. “And you will play your best. No ‘cheating'. And I will beat you.”

Nigel sighed, shuddered, and finished putting the pieces back in the box. Jet-lag swept over him with a rush, but by the time Mr. Dikhtar came to take him down to the car his hands had almost stopped trembling.

He got his favourite meal for supper, grilled lamb chops, with chips and French beans and mushrooms. His mother had cooked it herself, to make sure the embassy's Dirzhani chef didn't mess it up with spices and sauces, but it all seemed to be subtly different from what it would have been in England. Surely a French bean is a French bean wherever you eat it, but these seemed to be French with a Dirzhani accent. His father was working late downstairs and didn't come in to supper till Nigel was well into his second helping.

“At last!” said his mother. “I've been bursting to know how Nigel got on at the palace, but it didn't seem fair to ask him to tell us twice.”

“Suits me,” said his father. “Reheats are seldom as good as the original dish. Well, Niggles, what did you make of the girl?”

“No, start at the beginning,” said his mother. “Rick dropped you at the door and saw you taken inside, he says. Then what?”

Nigel took them through it in detail. His mother interrupted with questions and comments, about the eagles, for instance: “That's an outrage! Those magnificent birds, shut up in a mews!”

“It's probably the most effective way of protecting them,” said his father. “Shepherds are going to think twice about putting out poison bait for the Khan's birds. Go on, Niggles. No, wait. I take it that apart from that interesting comment about the video you didn't discuss much by way of matters of state.”

“He isn't there as a British spy, Nick! Absolutely not! I'd never have agreed …”

“As you say, absolutely not. But neither is he there as a channel through which the President can pass on information, or more likely misinformation, to me. If anything of that kind were to come up, I don't want to know about it. I think in fact the President will co-operate.

“And since we're on the subject, about your blog—odious word—Niggles, I think you'd better not say anything about your visit to the palace.”

“Oh, but.…”

“It isn't just that there's a lot of people back home who wouldn't be happy about the idea of the British ambassador cosying up with a ruthless dictator …”

“That's how I feel,” said Nigel's mother.

“… I've a fine line to tread right here. Because of the dam project it is important that I should be on reasonable terms with him, but it is equally important that I shouldn't give the Russians the slightest excuse for claiming that I'm in any way close to him. Since the war in Georgia they've become increasingly hostile to anything that might be construed as Western interference in any of the states on their border that used to be part of the old Soviet empire. Only a few years back they persuaded Kazakhstan to turf the Americans out of an important airbase there. No doubt they've been putting similar pressure the President to let them take the dam project over. They'll find him a tough nut to crack—he won't stand for interference from anyone—but if he has a weak spot it is his daughter. Your visits to her may seem trivial in the light of world affairs, but in the hands of a skilled propagandist they could cause considerable embarrassment.”

“I wasn't going to say he was the President, Dad. Just a rich guy with a swank house on the river.”

“Ah … In that case … You'll show me when you've finished?”

“All right. Shall I go on?”

Was almost beating the President at chess a matter of state? The President seemed to think so. Nigel was pretty sure that that monstrous sneeze had been a sort of get-me-out-of-this signal. The interruption had been just too neat to be for real. Anyway, he'd already worked out what he was going to tell his parents, and it didn't make any difference what his father had just said.

“I took him a bit by surprise, I think. He only wanted to play me to see if I was good enough to teach Taeela, so maybe he was a bit careless. Out of practice too. We were about level when something came up and he had to go.

“And really that was it. Oh, yes, one thing, Mum. Any chance there's a video here Taeela might want to watch with people talking posh in it? Like Helena Bonham-Carter, he said.”

“I'll look.”

CHAPTER 3

Day 3
.

Back to Mr G.'s in the morning
…

This time one of the palace cars came to fetch Nigel. The driver didn't speak English, or pretended not to, and drove him along a boring modern ring-road, over a different bridge and round to the back of the palace, then through an archway guarded by sentries into a huge central courtyard, with a pillared arcade running all the way round it.

He parked in the far corner, got out, opened the door for Nigel, muttered what must have been the Dirzhani for “This way,” and led him to a side door. A bored guard checked Nigel's pass, rootled a bit in his bag, frowned at the video of
The Railway Children
, shrugged and handed the bag back. The security seemed to be much slacker down here than it was at the main entrance. He did a perfunctory body-search and let Nigel in to a small modern hallway whose only feature was the door of a lift-shaft, with a key-pad on the wall beside it. Not bothering to hide what he was doing the guard pressed in a stupidly simple code, 9876. The door sighed open and he gestured to Nigel to enter, then leaned in, pressed the “2” button and withdrew as the door closed. Somewhere up at the top of the shaft a buzzer sounded. The lift started upward.

BOOK: In the Palace of the Khans
9.39Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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