In the Palace of the Khans (41 page)

The TV was showing what looked like some kind of enormous street party filling the Iskan Bridge, with stray fireworks, loosed off at random, soaring over the water.

“They showed us that bit they blacked out yesterday, darling,” said his mother. “The part you told me about. I expect they'll show it again if you want to see it.”

“Not much,” said Nigel. “I don't like watching people getting killed.”

“They're telling us rather more than I'd have expected,” said his father. “I'm afraid the pledge you were given had its limits. There were several casualties on both sides in the attack on the television station.”

“One poor woman got killed by a stray bullet,” said his mother.

“That wasn't us,” said Nigel. “That was a lot of deserters from one of the barracks Mizhael roped in.”

“But on the whole they seem to have been remarkably efficient,” said his father. “Of course all the colonels' most committed troops are away from Dara Dahn, dealing with various pockets of unrest. There's no news yet about how they're reacting.”

“But it's nothing like all over, is it?” said Nigel. “Not the way that lot on the bridge seem to think it is.”

“Popular support is all very well, as far as it goes,” said his father. “But there's a lot of powerful people who won't be too happy about what your friends have done. As far as they're concerned it's nothing like over. It'll be a year or two before we can expect to see anything like a functioning parliamentary democracy.”

“For God's sake, Dad, this is Dirzhan! They wouldn't know what do with a functioning democracy. Let them do it their own way. They'll work something out.”

“You may well be right, Niggles, but if they do they will be very much the exception. I will put your point of view to my superiors, though I'm afraid you mustn't expect them to listen.”

“Do you want me to tell you about what happened to us after the President got shot?” said Nigel.

“Tell us while we're eating,” said his mother. “It's cold, because I didn't know when you'd wake up.”

“Do you mind if I record what you say?” said his father. “There'll be useful stuff in it and I don't want to keep stopping you while I take notes. And I'd like Roger and Tim to listen to it later.”

It was midnight before Nigel got to bed. From his window he could see that the party on the Iskan Bridge was still in full swing, with people dancing round a huge bonfire in front of the palace. The great building glowed in its floodlighting, making it impossible to tell which windows were lit from behind. He wondered whether Taeela was asleep yet, and if so where. Her old bedroom had probably been ransacked. She mightn't want to use it anyway.

He was home, if anywhere was home for him since Santiago. But everything was strange.

CHAPTER 24

Hi! Here I am again. At last. How long has it been? 13 days I make it. Sorry about that, but stuff's been happening. I've seen the Brit papers, so it's probably been on TV. Just remember a lot of what they say about me is wrong
…

Nigel slept late. His mother had finished her breakfast but was still in the dining room, reading. The TV was on with the sound turned down.

“Anything new?” said Nigel.

“I don't think so,” she said. “We decided there wasn't any point in Ivahni hanging around to tell me what they were saying when they weren't really saying anything. Three planes came over about half an hour ago—I don't know if you heard them. They just screamed round a couple of times and whizzed off. To show they could, I suppose.

“Ivahni's called the hospital. They operated on Rick last night, and he's doing fine. We tried to call your friend Janey but she's already on her way back.

“How are you feeling, darling?”

The right answer would still have been “Strange,” but he didn't feel like explaining. He couldn't have, anyway, even to himself.

“Hungry,” he said, and helped himself to scrambled eggs.

He ate slowly, in silence, thinking about yesterday. It already seemed to be much longer ago than that, as if it was fading into the past, becoming just memory. Over. Like his old school in Santiago. When he looked up he saw that his mother had stopped reading and was just sitting there, watching him.

“You've grown up,” she said. “It wasn't just the hair.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he said. Perhaps that was what was strange. She sounded as if she thought so. Things were different between them now.

“No wonder,” she said.

“Well, you might tell Dad. Then he might stop calling me by my baby name.”

She laughed, but before she could answer the telephone rang beside him on the table.

“Nigel?”

His heart bounced at the sound of her voice.

“Hi. How are you? Did you sleep OK? When am I going to see you?”

“I sleep … slept little. How can I? But I am well … Nigel.

“What's up? What's happened?”

“My regents … They are afraid of the Russians. My brother is in Moscow, my father's oldest son. Perhaps they will say he is the true Khan. Avron Dikhtar has said—you were right, Nigel, he tells us so much—he's said it is a very rich Russian building man who pays Sesslizh and Madzhalid for killing of my father so that he will build our dam. Already the television in Moscow has news about my vengeance. They say the British meddle too much in Dirzhan. They say the British ambassador visits with my father in his private hunting lodge …”

“Do they say anything about me being in the palace with you yesterday?”

“They don't know. They mustn't know. I did not tell my regents this, even. Now I must do what they want. So you were not in Dara Dahn, Nigel. You were all the time in Sodalka. You must go in secret back there for a few days. Then you come to Dara Dahn.”

“I'm going back to England next week.”

“I know. It is best. You spend few days in Sodalka and then … Oh, Nigel …!”

“And anyway, what about the guys who were with us in the palace?”

“They will not tell, Nigel. Think who you are. It will be terrible for them to tell your secrets.”

“They can't all believe that.”

“Of course they believe. They saw what happened yesterday. I believe also. We cannot chance to be so lucky. Don't you believe?”

Nigel laughed uncomfortably.

“Not really,” he said, but he wasn't sure if it was true.

“Who else has seen you?” she said.

“Nardu and his sons. The people at the fish quay. No, it was just Rick and me there, so they wouldn't have made the connection … Hang on.”

His father had come in and was hovering, clearly waiting for him to finish.

“It's Taeela,” he said. “She wants me to sneak back to Sodalka and make like I've been there all along.”

“Now that's not at all a bad idea … provided we can get away with it. It depends who else …”

“She says the guys who were with us in the passages won't talk. Tell you later. Hello, you still there? Dad's all in favour.”

“You will need bodyguards still. Wait … Yes, I will call Chief Baladzhin so that he can send bodyguards to bring Lucy to Sodalka to fetch you and say thank-you to him for looking after you. You can go with her so nobody sees you. Can she do this, Nigel?”

“I'll ask her. I wanted to take her to Sodalka anyway. Hang on.”

“No, I will talk to her.”

He carried the hand-set over. His father beckoned him back.

“This would solve a lot of problems, Niggles,” he muttered. “We'd need to fix how to smuggle you up there …”

“She's got that sorted, if Mum can do it,” said Nigel, and explained.

“Amazing child,” said her father. “But I hope she doesn't imagine she can run the country like that on her own.”

“I think she's letting the regents take over. She said she's got to start doing what they want.”

“Yes … Listen, Niggles. You're not going to like this, but I think you'd better stay up there almost till you're due to go home.”

“But …”

“I'm anxious to quash the perception that there might be anything on between the two of you, which is of course what everybody wants to think. I imagine Taeela's regents feel even more strongly about this. We'll put it about that you found the whole experience pretty traumatic, and we need to give you peace and quiet to recover. OK?”

“No … Oh, hell!… Let's see what Taeela says.”

“Right … Tell me, how sure can we be that the men who were with you in the palace will keep their mouths shut?”

“Dead sure, almost. It's that baizhan thing I told you about. Especially after yesterday, when everything went pretty well impossibly right. You could almost feel the way they believed in it, like … I don't know what.”

“I'll take your word for it.”

Across the room Nigel's mother had been talking cheerfully to Taeela, just as if it had been an ordinary, everyday chat, the sort he wished he could have had. Now she said goodbye and held the handset out for him.

“Hi. I'm back.”

“Oh, I am sorry … I wish, Nigel …”

“OK, you needn't go on. I get it. We're supposed to be like we aren't friends any more.”

“We are friends, Nigel. It is for a few days only, and then … Wait. Somebody comes. I'll call you when I am able.”

“OK. See you.”

He went and stared out of the window. Tiny figures were moving about in front of the palace, raking the litter into mounds, shovelling the ashes of the glorious bonfire into barrows and carting them away. Him too. He was a bit of litter being cleared away up to Sodalka after the party was over. He tried to tell himself that Taeela was as unhappy about it as he was. It didn't help much.

She didn't call back.

Dara Dahn was having one of its hotter-than-hell days, so there wasn't any excuse for not bringing his blog up to date. He yelped with astonishment when he saw how many hits he'd had in his absence. There'd never been more than maybe a word or two from Mr. Udall, and a snide remark from some kid in his class doing his own blog. Now there were 12,387, with the count going up even as he watched. And pages of comments about entries he'd posted before stuff had really started happening, mostly from kids wanting to be his friends, or to know more about Taeela, or to put him down one way or another.

He glanced at a few of them, but forgot about them as soon as he started to sort out the stuff on his memory stick, since that last morning when Rick had driven him down to the palace. He'd been at it for over an hour when Roger came in with the printouts from the London papers.

The main story in the serious ones was about some big bank going bust, but they'd all got the same grainy picture next to it, lifted from Dara Dahn TV, Taeela standing on the grand stairway, side on to the camera, with her pistol half raised and Mr Dikhtar cowering at her feet. The headlines ranged from
TEENAGE PRINCESS STAGES SUCCESSFUL COUNTER-COUP IN DARA DAHN
to
TAEELA GET YOUR GUN
. All the stories had at least one thing wrong. Several of them said things like “Nigel Ridgewell son of the British ambassador, who had been with the Khanazhana at the time of the coup and had participated in her escape, was previously reported as being safe in an undisclosed location, thought to be Kyrgyzstan. He will be returning to Dara Dahn as soon as it is safe to travel.”

He carried on with the blog until he got to the peach orchard. He'd need to ask Taeela about that, and anyway he was pretty well brain dead, so he just wrote “More next time,” and printed it out for his father to check over.

“Spot on,” said his father. “Plenty for people to get their teeth into, and no toes trodden on, to mix a metaphor or two. Something I wanted to ask you, though. This baizhan thing …”

“I'm not going to say anything about it. The Dirzhaki would think I'm ruining Taeela's luck.”

“Yes, of course. But have you thought about what's going to happen here when you have to go back to home, Nigg … Nigel?”

“Thanks,. Dad.”

“High time, I suppose. Where were we? Oh, yes, we may think of it as irrational nonsense, but if it's part of the Khanazhana's mystique it has to be taken seriously. Can it be passed on? If so does your successor have to be another person? One of the old khans had a white mule, I think you said.”

“Yeah, I know. It's been bothering me. She won't talk about it, and I guess nobody else will. Even Mizhael said he felt iffy telling me. Anyway, I'll ask him when we're in Sodalka. Doctor Ghulidzh might know, I suppose.”

The afternoon shuffled dully away. Beneath their windows Dara Dahn slept in the blanketing heat. Only as the lights came on did life begin to stir. At last Taeela called.

“Great,” he said. “Something I want to ask you. It's for my blog. There's thousands of people reading it now. Is that scary or is that scary?”

“I have thousands of people watching me Nigel. Tens of thousands. All of the time.”

She sounded tired and low-spirited. She wasn't putting him down.

“Yeah,” he said. “That must be really tough. This is the same sort of thing, I suppose. That stuff on the way to Sodalka, when you had to shoot …”

“Tell them what happened, Nigel. Everything.”

“Are you sure?”

“I am sure. Let us … let's talk about something else.”

It didn't work. He hadn't done anything worth talking about, and she'd endured a series of dispiriting hassles and frustrations which she didn't want to think about.

“I think we will stop,” she said at last. “Oh, Nigel, it will never be the same! Perhaps it will be better when you are in Sodalka.”

She rang off without giving him time to answer.

Next morning two SUVs carrying five armed guards drew up at the Embassy with the Baladzhin pennant fluttering from their aerials. Wearing his dahl, sunglasses and a pair of his mother's sandals Nigel tittupped down the steps and climbed shyly in beside her. Nobody seemed to be watching.