In the Palace of the Khans (12 page)

“Good,” she said. “That is the safety. Raise the gun. No. Point it that way, good. Now you push the safety up with your thumb …”

Nigel could almost hear her father's ghostly voice behind hers, giving her the same instructions. The guard tied the balloon-neck and glanced at him enquiringly. He nodded. The balloon touched the water and drifted away.

He raised the gun, and did as Taeela had told him. It was harder than it looked. His aim kept straying as he swung too fast or too slow. There! Now or never. He moved his finger round the trigger, opened the safety and squeezed firmly. The shot slapped into the water beyond the balloon.

“Too high,” said Taeela. “Again. Don't jerk.”

The balloon was a smaller target now as it drifted further away, but at the same time the sideways movement was less. He managed to keep it steady in his sights long enough to fire more coolly, but missed again. Only just, though. The balloon bobbled perceptibly in the ripples of the splash.

“Enough,” said Taeela. “It is too far away for my little gun.”

“I bet you hit first time you tried,” he said.

“No, I missed twice. I was ten only when my father gave me the gun. Nilzha will shoot your balloon. Then we will try some more. Cover your ears.”

In a brief, brutal clamour Nilzha's AK obliterated the escaping balloon. Nigel gave Taeela her pistol and she popped a couple more balloons and gave it back to him. He took it reluctantly, certain that he'd miss again, and he did. But this time he'd been ready for it, so adjusted his aim and fired almost at once. The balloon vanished. With a sigh of relief he gave the pistol to Taeela.

“No thanks,” he said next time she offered it to him. “You're the one supposed to be practising. Hope you don't ever need it for real.”

It was meant as a half-joke, but she nodded seriously and settled to work, letting the balloons drift further away each time before she fired her first shot. She missed only three first time and got two of them with her second shot, but the last one drifted out of range. Nilzha abolished it with her AK, then rested the gun against the seat while she put the remaining balloons and the pump away.

Nigel craned to look at it. He hadn't seen an AK close to, but they'd done a module on them in Geog with Mr Udall last term. There were millions of the things in all the trouble-spots of the world, openly sold in market places, cheap as mobiles, being loosed off in celebration at weddings, protecting drug traffickers, terrorising villagers, status symbols in street gangs, ambushing food convoys, kidnapping tourists, and here, now, popping red balloons from a luxury speedboat in the middle of a peaceful lake.

Nilzha must have noticed his interest, because to his surprise she picked the gun up and offered it to him. He took it and weighed it in his hands. It was a workman's tool, no kind of a gadget. But also for killing people.

He lifted it to his shoulder and looked along its sights, aiming at a pine tree on the edge of the water. The stock was a bit long for him but otherwise it would have been comfortable to use, and held like that seemed lighter than it did in the hand. When he turned to give it back to Nilzha he saw that she had got the pump back out of the locker and was starting to inflate another balloon.

“It's all right,” he said hastily. “I don't want to fire it. I just wanted to see what it felt like. Thanks.”

She looked up, shook her head, said something in Dirzhani and went on pumping.

“She tells you that a boy is not a man until he has shot with a gun. You must do it, Nigel. It is an honour she gives you her gun.”

(Oh, come on, Nigel. Don't be wimp. There were kids at school who'd give their iPods away to be able to say they'd fired an AK.)

“Oh well, fine,” he said. “Tell her the right things for me, will you?”

Nilzha showed him the controls. Taeela translated.

“That is the safety. That is for quick shots and one shot only. She puts it to one shot only. She says the gun jumps when you fire it, and you're not big enough to hold it doing quick shots.”

“One's fine,” said Nigel.

He took the gun back, checked the safety and watched the balloon drifting away. When it was a decent distance from the boat he raised the AK to his shoulder, opened the safety, aimed carefully—much easier than with the pistol—and fired. All, till that instant, ordinary, or at least no stranger than a lot of what had happened to him since he came to Dirzhan. The gun was an inert metal object, he himself was interested but relaxed. But as his finger tightened on the trigger the gun leapt into life like a hound startled out of sleep. It was only a moment, and then it was inert metal again. And the balloon was gone. It could have been a life. He felt no elation as he handed the AK back to Nilzha.

After an early tea they left for the Vamar Gorge. It was an almost two-hour drive in one of the Humvees. One of the guards had a black eye and a plaster on her temple. The other one was Nilzha. The one-way glass in the windows gave the sunlit world a brownish tint. For some while they followed a bumpy dirt track beside the lake, then climbed steeply up a series of hairpins with waterfalls splurging down the crags on either side and eagles soaring in the gulfs of air below. Then down, past two shabby mountain villages where people came out of their houses to stare distrustfully at the Humvee. They joined a good new road and followed it for about twenty miles, then turned off, climbed, levelled over a pass, and there below them, under a sky already starting to glow pink and gold with sunset, lay Lake Vamar.

It was hardly a lake at all. From the top of the pass it looked more like a fair-sized river running along the bottom of a wider valley. To north and south the hills plunged down, but far enough apart to leave room at the bottom for two broad, gently sloping strips of farmland. Good land too, by the look of it, with a few fields still green. Even at this distance the villages looked far better built and kept than the ones they'd seen earlier. Three of them had their own little mosques. When the dam was finished they would all be far below the surface, and the people who had lived in those houses and worked those fields for generations would have been moved somewhere else. Roger had dug some reports and newspaper cuttings about the dam out of the embassy files for Nigel to look at. Seeing it now for real, it struck him as odd that there seemed to be rather more fuss about the fish-owls than there was about the people.

The road branched, ending at a large, almost empty parking lot just above the lake with a few temporary-looking buildings along one side. They found the President and Nigel's father in a well-equipped office, talking to a short, pudgy, bald man with a bushy beard called Herr Fettler, who was in charge of the fish-owl project.

They stayed there only long enough to shake hands with him, and set off in both Humvees on a dirt track above the shore-line, with the lake a few fields away on their right. Where the valley narrowed and the farmland ended they got out and walked on along a twisting footpath with Nilzha leading the way and the other guard coming behind. Nilzha would trot ahead for a bit, then wait, gun at the ready, scanning the hillside, till the main party caught up. Then she trotted on again. Looking to his right where the path twisted back on itself to round an inlet he saw the rearguard doing the same, timing each run so that one of them was always on the watch while the other was on the move.

The bare hillside changed to woodland. The slopes on either shore became steeper and steeper, until they were cliffs. On this side of the lake there was a wooden walkway clinging to the rock-face, which ran sheer down to the water, but on the far side a jumble of fallen boulders ran along the base of the cliff. Both cliffs curved inwards until they were barely fifty metres apart. Beyond that gap the Vamar Gorge stretched away.

The walkway ended at a roofed hide, built like a log cabin against the cliff, open at either end and with a waist-high parapet on the side looking across the lake. Two more guards, men, were already there, waiting for them.

“Look at that view!” said Nigel's mother, getting her camera out.

He turned to see what she was talking about and found himself staring down the whole length of the lake, with mountains and sunset reflected in its stillness. Herr Fettler coughed a pay-attention bark.

“I bring you here,” he said in a thick, difficult accent, “so you best see how the lake is made, and how high the new water is to be, and what is the problem with the birds. The dam is twenty kilometres further in the gorge, but the fish-owls they are here. To this lake they are unique. Here alone they can live.

“You look this way, please. You see the cliff across the lake? It is new rock, four hundred thousand years, nothing. So they are soft. But this cliff …”

He strutted to the back of the platform and slapped his hand dramatically against the rock-face.

“… it is one point six million years, very old, very hard.”

Dutifully Nigel got his pad out of his pack and made notes for his blog about how hundreds of thousands of years ago the whole valley had been full of water, and crayfish had burrowed holes in the softer rock on the far side, until the water had broken through at the weak point where the two rock surfaces met, forming the gorge and lowering the lake surface, which allowed the owls to take the holes over.

Herr Fettler had a lot to say about the owls, fetching binoculars out of one of a line of locked chests and handing them round while he talked. The owls were unique to this place. They didn't pair for life. When winter came and the lake froze they spread out down into the valleys and lived by themselves, eating fish if they could get it but anything else, birds, mice, beetles and so on, if they couldn't. A lot of young birds didn't make it through the winter but those that did came back in the spring, when the lake unfroze. The males came first and held hooting competitions for the biggest holes in the cliff—Herr Fettler played a tape; it was the most amazing racket, like a traffic jam of police cars and ambulances all in a hurry—and then the females showed up and they got down to chick-production. Most owls lay only two or three eggs because that's all the young they can easily hunt for, but the fish-owls wanted as many chicks as there was room for in the nest-hole so that there was more chance of at least two of them getting through the winter. That was why the biggest holes were the best and why the lake was so vital because it swarmed with fish and the owls were going to have all these hungry beaks to feed.

Sometimes the parents hatched more chicks than there was room for in the hole, in which case the bigger ones pushed the smaller ones out. They drowned if they fell in the water and a predator usually got them if they fell on the rocks, but Herr Fettler's team checked each morning and if any were still alive they reared them by hand, ringed them and released them as soon as they were old enough to fish for themselves. Most winters a few came through.

It all made a mad sort of sense, Nigel thought, in the way even the craziest bits of natural history turn out to do. Mr Udall would like it anyway.

It was darker now. The sun was down behind the mountains, the whole eastern sky fiery with its going. Taeela was getting restless—perhaps she found Herr Fettler's accent hard to follow. She'd stopped listening to him and was studying the cliff face with her binoculars. She gave an excited squeak.

“I see an owl! Oh, it's gone!”

“Please now to be quiet,” said Herr Fettler. “These owls are very shy from people. Now I give you night vision glasses. You need them soon.”

He fetched the glasses from the chest, focussed them and handed them round. They were a bit different from binoculars, two tubes about the size of toilet-roll tubes laid side by side, with eye-pieces.

“Oh, everything's green,” said Nigel's mother. “Does that mean we won't see … Oh, there's one! Isn't it beautiful! Oh, there's another! Goodness, it's caught a fish already.”

The owls were streaming from the cliff now, spreading out, barely flapping their wings, floating in dreamy silence a couple of metres above the water. The whole surface of the lake was hazy with flies. As the fish rose to take them the owls would half fold their wings and drop like stones, their long finger-like talons stretching down to snatch the fish out of the water with barely a splash just as the spread wings neatly braked the fall and took the bird swinging away towards its nest-hole.

The effect was dance-like, beautiful, with the owls—there were three hundred and twelve of them this year, Herr Fettler had said—neatly spaced apart, all at the same level, as if there was a separate surface up there and they were floating on it until the moment came to perform their elegant aerobatic turn.

It was now late dusk, but the night vision glasses made everything as clear as if he'd been looking at it in extremely bright moonlight, except that it was all green. The cliffs were dark green, the sky pale green, the water silky green the owls themselves mid-green with paler undersides. A green world.

Fascinated, wondering how much detail he'd be able to make out at a greater distance than the owls, Nigel trained the glasses on the jumble of rocks on the opposite shore. They too were astonishingly clear, clear enough for him to notice when a rock next to the one he was looking at changed its shape.

He turned his glasses on it, and saw the notch between the two rocks fill in for a moment and reappear. Something was moving among the rocks.

“Oh, they're all going home!” said Nigel's mother.

“Something disturbs the owls,” said Herr Fettler.

“I saw something moving over there,” said Nigel. “I thought it might be a fox.”

“Foxes the owls do not fear,” said Herr Fettler. “It is perhaps a poacher.”

“Everybody get down behind the parapet,” said the President calmly. “Nigel, show me where.”

He added a few words in Dirzhani, moved at a crouch to behind Nigel's shoulder and peered along the line of his night-glasses. Nigel swung them slowly to the left, searching, and saw a flicker of movement as a crouching figure scuttled across a sloping slab, unmistakably human.