In the Palace of the Khans (11 page)

He found Taeela and his mother sitting down to a full English afternoon tea laid out at one end of the sitting-room. A log fire crackled in the hearth, thunder rumbled overhead, lightning blinked and blinked again, the tree-tops thrashed to and fro, rain-laden gusts slammed like gravel against the windows.

Nigel watched the storm in dreamy contentment while the other two hunted for the birds they had seen in two of the local bird-guides his mother had found waiting for her in her room, one in English and one Russian. This worked perfectly, his mother consulting her notes and finding a candidate in the English guide, and Taeela looking it up under its Latin name in the Russian one and translating the entry. They were both obviously having a wonderful time.

Taeela specially. She can't have had anything like this before. How could she have any real friends, friends who could talk to her as if she wasn't the daughter of the President Khan? Let alone any grown-up? She and his mother had known each other … how long? About nine hours. And yet they were already acting like friends. For Taeela it must have been totally amazing.

Perhaps that was why he got on with her so well. He too didn't have any real friends. Most of the kids at school were friendly enough, but there was no one he regularly hung out with. Of course he'd only been at that school a few months, but even in Santiago, where they'd lived almost four years, there hadn't been anyone he really missed when they'd left. He wondered if he simply didn't do that kind of friendship.

Except for Taeela now. Really he hadn't known her that much longer than his mother had, but he was certainly going to miss her when he flew home in a few weeks, and next time he came out to Dirzhan he was going to look forward to seeing her almost as much as he did his parents.

How come she could do that to him? Because she was a girl? To be honest he was thankful for the strict Dirzhani rules against his getting too near her. It made being friends a lot simpler. Suppose she'd been a boy …

He day-dreamed contentedly until they put the bird-books away. Then they taught Taeela to play various card-games until Nigel's father returned from the lake with three fine trout which he insisted on presenting to Taeela with full ambassadorial pomp. It ought to have been embarrassing, but she obviously enjoyed it. They were all four playing
Oh Hell!
when the President returned.

“Please sit down,” he said, and came across to see what they were doing. He too had that wild-weather look, and was walking with a slight limp.

“You've hurt your leg!” said Taeela.

“I twisted my ankle helping the men to drag a tree-trunk aside so that we could haul the inflatable down to the shore. Marizhka has done what she can with it. What game is this?”

“It's called … er …
Oh Bother
?” said Nigel.

“It is very good, very right,” said Taeela quickly. “You must not capture the queen.”

“Clearly you will have to teach me.”

Taeela stared at him as if this was something that had never happened before. He ignored her.

“What news of the other helicopter, sir?” said Nigel's father.

“Mixed, but it might have been much worse. At least there is nobody dead. We took the inflatable up as far as the landslip on one of the trucks and dragged it down through the wood before the weather cleared. That left just time for two trips to pick up the men from the mouth of the gorge. As I say, nobody is dead, but there are two stretcher cases; one, most unfortunately, my doctor, with a broken leg, and one of the pilots with internal injuries which may be more serious. Two others have broken bones, but can walk, and two of the women and three more men will not be fit for duty for some days. Otherwise nothing much more than cuts and contusions. I have sent for a surgical team to come up by road and see to the pilot. By the time they arrive workmen from the estate will have built a usable pathway across the landslip.

“You have had a satisfactory afternoon, Ambassador?”

“Excellent all round,” said Nigel's father. “Taeela will tell you.”

“No doubt,” said the President. “But first you must teach me this game. What is its real name?”

“It varies from country to country,” said Nigel's father. “In England it is
Oh, Hell!
In Chile we called it
Diablo
. I now learn that in Dirzhan it is
Oh, Bother!
In fact it's only a variant of whist.”

“I have played bridge. Show me.”

He picked the game up at once and played seriously, thinking about it, trying to win. Till now Taeela had been playing almost at random, relying on her luck, but she too began to take it seriously—not, Nigel guessed, simply to win but because her father did, and she wanted to beat him. If she'd never played cards with him before this might have been her first chance, ever. Luck repaid her at last when she was able to discard the queen of spades on a trick he was forced to take, causing him to lose ten points.

“Now!” she cried. “See, I sacrifice my queen! I win!”

“Very good,” he said. “But you must not tell anyone, my dear. It is a state secret.”

She laughed, but he nodded, straight-faced.

Later they went up and got into their best clothes for dinner and met again in the living-room. This time Nigel was playing a rather sleepy game of chess with Taeela when the President joined them. He chatted to Nigel's parents for a while and then came over and glanced at the board.

“Do you want to play, sir?” said Nigel. “Later, I mean?”

“You will be too tired. It is likely to rain for much of tomorrow, so you will have plenty of time to rest.”

“I'll do my best, sir. I want to win too.”

“Excellent.”

And this is Day 7. Not a lot to report. When they do storms in Dirzhan, they really do storms
…

The forecast was spot on. All Sunday it rained as if it was never going to stop. At first the President was doing president-stuff in his office, so Nigel's father worked on a report, his mother wrote her Sunday letter to Granddad and Taeela did the same to her mother in Moscow. Nigel settled down with his laptop and tried to write yesterday's blog, but then spent most of his time just staring at the screen. There was so much he couldn't write about without letting on they'd been staying with the President in his hunting lodge. OK, the imaginary Mr G might have had a private helicopter and a lodge of his own … They could crash-land in the storm …

It was difficult to make it all seem real …

The four of them were playing Newmarket when the President came in for coffee, smelling of cigar-smoke, and told them that the surgical team had arrived and the pilot was seriously hurt but stable. He chatted to Nigel's mother about Tolstoy and Solzhenitsyn and guys like that, and then he took Nigel's father off for more than an hour to talk about world affairs or whatever, so Nigel got Taeela to tell him all sorts of ultra-cool stuff about weird old customs that still went on in Dirzhan to fill in the gaps in his blog.

“Now I'm afraid I must work again,” said the President after lunch. “My falconer will come in half an hour to take you to look at the birds. We not only keep hawks and a pair of eagles. There is also a rescue aviary, so you may be able to see some of our local birds at close hand. You will go with them my dear, to translate? And later Nigel and I will play chess.”

They settled down to the game immediately after tea. Nigel was nervous again, but not scared this time. The President was probably going to beat him, and that was OK. But he was afraid of not playing well enough. Taeela and his father came to watch.

His nerves left him as soon as they started to play. He had the white pieces. The game was all there was. The President played that way too. Dirzhan, the dam, the injured pilot, the constant danger to himself and his daughter—all that was somewhere else, unreal. Reality was concentrated into the thirty-two pieces on the board. The sense of unpredictable power that came from him was as strong as ever, but now it was focussed onto this single centre. If thought had been sunlight the board would have burst into flame.

After the first few moves of one of the standard openings, which they didn't need to think about, the game slowed. The position became complicated, with too many possibilities to work out. If you have white you have the advantage and you've got to attack or you'll lose it, Mr Harries said. To clear the way Nigel exchanged a knight for a bishop and sacrificed a pawn. Four moves later he'd lost the advantage and was still a pawn down.

That was OK by him. He was always happier defending, reacting to the other player's moves, waiting for him to make a mistake. Not much chance of that this time, he thought. But a few moves later, astonishingly, it happened. He stared at the board, thinking it must be a trap, but he couldn't see how. He was too tired to think clearly. Even in important school matches he'd never played at this intensity before. Might as well get it over, he decided, so he forced the rook exchange and took the extra pawn back.

The President played on as if that's what he'd been expecting to happen, but after another few moves he looked at his watch and then at Nigel, which he hadn't done since the game began.

“I think I ought still to win,” he said, “but there is not enough time.”

“I'll resign if you like, sir,” said Nigel, relieved not to have made a fool of himself, and by the thought they could now stop playing.

“No. The position is not sufficiently clear. We will play again some time. I ought not to have lost that pawn.”

“It was only a silly pawn,” said Taeela.

“If I still had it I could have made it into a queen,” said the President. “That should mean something to you, my dear.”

The rest of the evening passed in a mild daze. They talked about the birds in the aviary and taught the President to play
Newmarket
. Then there was another terrific meal, which Nigel was too tired to pay attention to, though he was awake enough to notice how much his mother was enjoying talking to the President and how he was taking the trouble to see she did. He didn't remember going upstairs to bed, but when his mother came in to say goodnight he woke up enough to whisper “Do you still think he's a monster?”

“A very civilised monster,” she said.

“Perhaps he's only a full-moon monster. Like were-wolves.”

“He'd still be a monster, I'm afraid.”

CHAPTER 7

Day 8

Fish-owl day, but not till the evening. Before that we mucked around in a speedboat, Luana and me, and did some target practice, popping balloons with a real pistol
…

Again the forecast was spot on. Nigel was woken by a tactful cough from Drogo as he came in to open the shutters. Sunlight blazed in and unfamiliar birds whooped and whistled in the trees, against a faint background tinkling of the rivulets from two days' downpour scurrying down to the lake.

After breakfast the President worked, Nigel's father fished, and he and his mother and Taeela rode out to watch the falconers fly their birds. They all met up for lunch, happy and relaxed, as if they'd known each other a long time. But the President was the President, there, inescapable. If you'd closed your eyes you'd still have known he was in the room, by the way people spoke, by the feel of the silences.

In the afternoon he took Nigel's father off to visit the site of the new dam and Taeela and Nigel went out on the lake in the presidential speedboat. One of the female guards came along.

The speedboat was ultra-cool, like a vintage Rolls Royce, with a shiny varnished deck and brass fittings and padded leather bench seats and a searchlight on the bows. No vulgar outboard motors. Two vast aero engines under the after-decking purred into life as they nosed away from the quay. The purr became a bellowing boom, far too loud for speech. The bows rose, the stern dug itself down into the surface of the lake, and the shape of the hull flung it out in two wide-arching silvery wings of spray that spread themselves either side of the foaming wake as they roared out over the silky calm.

Nigel sat in front with the boatman, of course. He heard Taeela crowing with excitement behind him. He turned to grin at her, and saw her gripping the hand-rail on the back of his seat and bouncing up and down like a small child on a fairground ride. Beside her sat the guard, blank-faced, her gun held ready across her lap as she scanned the nearer shore, where clouds of startled birds rose from the reed-beds and the forest beyond, and further back the wave of their wake foamed into the shallows. When Taeela had had enough she tapped the boatman on the shoulder and gestured to him to slow down.

The spray wings vanished, the hull levelled and the speedboat drifted into stillness at the centre of the lake, part of its peaceful beauty. But not for long. The guard put her gun down, opened a locker and took out a packet of party balloons and a pump. Solemnly she started to inflate a red balloon. Beside her Taeela drew a pistol from an inside pocket, looked at Nigel and grinned.

“Wow!” he said. “Is it real?”

“Sure. It can kill a man. My father give … gave it to me. He says I must know to use it. It isn't a toy. So now I practise.”

The guard knotted the neck of the balloon, leaned across Taeela and dropped it over the side of the boat. Taeela watched the plain red sphere drift away under the light breeze. When it was about ten yards off she raised the pistol two-handed, aimed carefully and fired. The two explosions were lost in each other, but the sphere had vanished and there was only a crumpled red something on the surface of the lake, still drifting away among the spreading ripples.

“You want to try, Nigel?”

“Sure.”

“You know how to do this?”

“Never touched a real gun in my life.”

“I show you. Hold it how I did.”

She passed the pistol to him, holding it with the barrel pointing downwards and the butt towards him, and didn't let go till he'd got a comfortable grip. It wasn't a fancy weapon, plain black, solid-feeling, workmanlike, but precisely made. His sort of gadget. Only for killing people.