In the Palace of the Khans (24 page)

Half stunned, he struggled up from under the thing that had fallen on him and found himself staring down at the body of the man who'd been about to shoot Rahdan. Taeela was standing where he had seen her, with her head bowed and her lowered pistol still clasped between her hands. Janey, Rahdan and the girls were just beside him, staring at her.

“Wha … what …?” he said.

“She shot 'em,” said Janey. “It was them or us. Good riddance.”

“I killed two men, Nigel,” said Taeela, dragging the words out. “I killed two men.”

“Uh … Like Janey says, it was them or us.”

“Yes. But I killed two men. They were my people.”

Slowly, as if the air were as dense as water, she slid the safety catch on her pistol down, fished a small cardboard box out from somewhere under her dahl, tipped four rounds into the palm of her hand, fed them into the magazine and slid pistol and box back under the dahl. Every movement seemed to quiver with the horror of what she had been forced to do, this new, huge shock on top of yesterday's tragedies and terrors. Hardly noticing what he was doing or how his shoulder hurt Nigel moved beside her and put his good arm round her shoulders. He stared at the bodies, hypnotised. Two more deaths. The guard in the shadowy gallery above the Great Hall. The President in the glare of lights on the stairs. The men who'd fallen into the trap Fohdrahko had set. These two now in the clear hill air. Yes, they had been vile, the President a monster, the guards, who knows? How many more before the nightmare was over?

Beside him Taeela straightened, drew a long breath and let it go, and eased herself away from him.

“Natalie sees something,” she muttered.

The others had moved up the rough track beside the orchard and were looking down at its surface. Rahdan had one of the dead men's AKs slung over his shoulder. Nigel disentangled the other from its owner's body and followed Taeela over.

“Natalie spotted it,” said Janey. “Been some sort o' truck 'long here, looks like. Not come back, neither.”

“It” was a single tyre-track crossing a patch of bare earth where a puddle had formed in the rains but had now evaporated. The surrounding surface was already dry, but in the track itself it was soft. Moisture glistened in the individual tread-marks.

Rahdan unslung his gun. Taeela took her pistol out of her dahl. Nigel put his thumb ready by the safety catch of his AK. His shoulder was getting increasingly sore. Without discussion they stole up the track. Here and there the tread-marks showed again, and then more plainly where they turned round the corner of the orchard. A shabby, medium-sized brown van was parked beside the trees about twenty yards further on.

Rahdan took control, gesturing where he wanted everyone to go—himself directly opposite the rear doors with his AK raised to his shoulder, Taeela and Nigel facing each other a few paces either side of the van, Janey to open the doors and Natalie and Lisa watching their rear.

Janey tried the doors, but they were locked. She held up her hand for silence and called softly, a question. Distinct thumping noises came from inside the van. She called again, reassuringly, this time. The thumpings stopped. She tried both cab doors, but they were locked too.

Rahdan said something and hurried off.

“Gone to look in the guys' pockets,” said Lisa.

They waited, twanging, till he returned and gave a key-ring to Janey. The doors opened with the first one she tried. Nigel heard a steady scuffling and saw Janey, who had started to climb up, shift her position to reach in. Two girls emerged, roped together back to back at the wrists. Janey helped them to the ground and cut them free with Rahdan's knife. One was about Natalie's age, the other a couple of years younger.

They stood for a moment staring at their rescuers, then without a word turned and ran round the van and along the side of the orchard. They stopped, stared, screamed and dashed out of sight. The screams became wails.

“I better go,” said Janey. “You lot waiting here.”

They watched her follow the two girls and duck in under the trees. The wailing died, became a few sobbing words in answer to Janey's voice, and broke out again. The pattern repeated itself several times before it reverted to agonised wailing as Janey came back, grim-faced, and told them in Dirzhani what she'd seen, finishing with a question addressed to Rahdan.

He didn't answer, but looked at Taeela.

“I will talk to them,” she said.

Janey made as if to protest, and stopped herself. They watched Taeela strip off her dahl and pocketed jacket, and walk away bare-headed.

“Their mum and dad. Shot in the back of their heads,” muttered Lisa. “Girls don't want to leave 'em. Would've happened to us, but for you two.”

Nigel blinked. Him? He put it aside and turned to Janey.

“Listen,” he said urgently. “We've got to get out of here before that other lot come back. We can't hang about. They may pick up another load before they reach Dara Dahn. We can't leave those girls here. If they won't leave their Mum and Dad's bodies I know what Taeela will say. We've got to take them too. No, Janey, listen. She saw her own dad killed in front of her eyes yesterday. She saw men come and take his body away like a dead animal to dump it somewhere. She'll never know where. She knows what it's like.

“If we can't take them she'll stay with them, and so will I and so will Rahdan. He's sworn the blood oath, remember. Maybe we can ambush the men when they come back, and take their truck …”

He ran out of steam.

The silence was broken by the twitter of a mobile's ring-tone down on the track. They froze.

“That's the other lot checking these two have got us OK,” said Nigel. “They'll be slower coming back in that traffic, but …”

“OK, let's get on with it,” said Janey. “You lot clear out. We'll deal with this, Rahdan and me.”

Back on the track Natalie kept a look-out while Lisa got their baggage ready for loading and found the road map. Rahdan had been through some of one man's pockets, pulling stuff out and leaving it scattered around until he found the keys. Nigel, outraged by the sheer wickedness of what the dead men had done, put his horrors aside and finished the job. The mobile was lying by the track, but twittered again while he was working. The wailing had stopped and from beyond the orchard came the comforting sound of the van being reversed up to where the murdered parents lay.

The mobile didn't appear to have a licence. It must be illegal. He stuffed it into his bag, plus a couple of loaded AK magazines, matches and fags for Rahdan, and both wallets, one bulging with dzhin notes, and threw the rest away. Then with Lisa's help he rolled the two bodies off the track. She did the job untroubled, and when they'd dealt with the second one she gave it a kick.

“Scum,” she said, and went to join Natalie. Nigel settled down to look at the map.

It was a single large sheet but well detailed. Most of the place names were in Dirzhani script, but the larger towns were bilingual. They'd passed a couple of small towns on the way north, and turned off this road soon after the second one. It appeared to lead to a village a few miles on and then ramble away eastward, but at the village a smaller road branched northwards and after a while turned west to rejoin the road to Podoghal.

At that point he heard the van start up, and was folding the map when it came lurching round the corner of the orchard. Janey got out of the cab and opened the rear doors.

The two girls were huddled together in the far corner beside a battered suitcase and what could only be their parents' bodies, covered with a piece of tarpaulin. Taeela was sitting opposite them resting her chin on her hands; their own baggage was stacked beside her. There were a couple of large jerry-cans strapped either side of the doors.

“Wait,” said Nigel, as Janey started to climb in. “Don't you want to go in front? I've found where we are on the map. I'll show you.”

“No good with maps,” she said. “You go front.”

“You'll have to show me where we're going. I can't read most of the names.”

“Cousin to my mother living in Sodalka. Is to west from Podoghal, sixty, seventy kilometre.”

Sodalka? The place Fohdrahko had wanted Taeela to go, and she didn't?

“Sodalka is OK,” said Taeela without looking round. “We must go, Nigel.”

The map was difficult to manage one-handed. His shoulder, after the initial blast of pain, had just felt badly bruised, but now it began to hurt every time he moved his left arm. Sodalka had its name printed in both scripts, and was roughly where Janey had said. The route he'd traced would do as far as he'd got, so at the village he raised a warning hand to where Rahdan could see it and pointed ahead and left.

They started to climb, gently at first, following the twists and turns of a fair-sized stream, still a foaming cataract in places after the rains. The road surface was riddled with potholes. In bottom gear they jolted up a series of hairpins, through scraggy woodland and out onto a bleak, rock-strewn slope. By the time they reached the top of the pass the engine was sounding increasingly unhappy. At the first possible place Rahdan pulled off the road, climbed out and raised the engine cover. The heat that rose from it wavered in the cooler upland air.

“That's more like it,” said Lisa as she climbed out of the back of the van. She wasn't wearing her dahl and had stripped off what clothes she could but was still flushed and streaming with sweat. So were the others.

They gathered at the roadside and looked around. The two orphans, haggard with heat and grief, clung like nervous puppies to Taeela's side. It was a typical mountain pass, a broad saddle between two bare slopes that rose more and more steeply towards the separate summits, neither high enough to have kept a covering of snow at this time of year. Behind them they could see all the way down the road to where the first set of hairpins emerged from the trees.

“Not much of water left,” said Janey. “Been a right oven in there. Maybe we find a stream.”

“Rahdan's going to need some too,” said Nigel. “We must pretty well have boiled the radiator dry, climbing that last bit. That looks like it might be a stream, that greener bit. Water should be pretty good, right up here, after the rain. Why don't you lot go and have a look? I'll keep a look-out. Someone in that village could've seen us turn off and told them.”

“If you saying so,” said Janey.

They collected the empty water bottles out of the back of the van, and after a brief conversation with Rahdan she and the five girls trooped off. Nigel got his AK out of the cab, though he doubted he'd be able to use it with his shoulder the way it was, climbed up to a boulder high enough to stop him showing above the skyline, and settled down to watch the road and try to put his nightmares aside and come to terms with what had happened back at the orchard.

Between them he and Taeela had killed two men. OK, his part in the killing had had been pretty well pure chance, but he didn't think Taeela could have done it without him. He'd taken both men completely by surprise. They'd never expected a girl to react like that, let alone bang into the man the way he had; and they hadn't wanted to shoot him because if he was a girl he was worth money. The other guy would have been watching it happen, and that had given Taeela her chance to get her pistol out.

He thought about it, massaging his shoulder. Yes, killing someone was a big deal. It would have been easier to cope with if he'd done it on purpose, because then it would have been the right thing to do. Otherwise Janey and Rahdan would be dead, and Lisa and Natalie would be trussed up like the other two, to be taken away and sold to some bastard, and Taeela auctioned off to the highest bidder, while he himself was either dead or held for ransom.

It must have looked that way. Lisa had just pretty well told him she thought he'd deliberately charged into the man, and Janey not so clearly, the way she'd accepted it when he'd suggested they might go and look for water. She hadn't been like that before.

That wasn't enough. It was pure accident he'd managed to help kill both men, so their wickedness was no excuse. They'd been living, breathing creatures, and now they were dead meat lying by the track. Only in his dreams they would wake and search for him. He shuddered, pulled himself together and craned round the rock to see how Rahdan was doing.

He'd changed his mind about Rahdan. His picture of him had been coloured by their first meeting, when he'd seemed just a swaggering careless slob; and then by the cringing wreck who'd crawled out of his prison cell. Nigel had told Janey he'd done OK as they'd found their way up through Dara, but that was only because Taeela had made him. But since then he'd done more than OK, taken charge of things when they'd found the van, driven it sensibly. He obviously knew how to handle a gun. And now he'd found some tools in the van and was up on the roof of the cab sawing an air-vent into the rear section.

Time passed. Rahdan stopped sawing and scrambled down just as Janey arrived with a couple of refilled water-bottles. By the time Nigel joined them Janey was having some kind of an argument with him while he topped up the radiator. He shook his head and made a despairing gesture towards Nigel. Janey frowned, pursed her lips and turned.

“We going bury these kids' mum and dad here, Nidzhell,” she explained. “We find very good place. Making it OK by them, telling them Rahdan will say one prayer. He's being stupid on this, scared. Isn't religious, don't know what he say. Maybe you do it for them. Much better it's a man.”

“Oh Lord. I suppose so. Have we got time? Somebody better keep a look-out still. How do Moslem prayers start? ‘In the name of Allah, the something, the something,' isn't it?”

“‘All
ah
,'” she corrected him. “Yes, ‘Allah who is, er, judge, who is kind.'”