In the Palace of the Khans (42 page)

Twice they were stopped at dodgy-looking road-blocks on their way north, but their guards carried passes from Chief Baladzhin and made it clear that they were prepared to back them up with their own fire-power, so there was no serious trouble.

They were lunching beside a rocky stream half way up a pass when Nigel's mother said dreamily “I've had an idea about what you were talking to your Dad about yesterday. He would have to persuade Herr Fettler, of course.”

“Herr Fett …? Mum, that's brilliant!”

“I thought so. You'd still have to find out how to do it.”

A little way short of Sodalka they halted again for Nigel to change cars. The one he was in went on ahead, entered the town by a different gate and drove round to the back of Chief Baladzhin's house so that he could be out at the front gate with him to greet his mother. A television crew was waiting to film him running forward, regardless of protocol, even before her car had drawn to a halt, and then flinging his arms round her as she emerged.

She threw herself into the act, laughing and crying as he dragged her back up the steps to introduce her to a beaming Chief Baladzhin.

They spent six good days at Sodalka. In the mornings they poked around in market stalls with Lily-Jo and Doglu, or explored wonderful over-the-top buildings and streets where hardly a house looked less than hundreds of years old, or sat under awnings sipping ice-cold juices and nibbling Dirzhani snacks. Though nobody now sneaked up to try to touch him he was all the time conscious of the pressure of suppressed excitement at his presence. “It's creepy the way they won't quite look at you,” said his mother.

On the second day the journalists started to show up, trying to interview Nigel, and when they didn't get anywhere with that just asking people about him. They didn't get anywhere with that either. One woman spotted him and his mother leaving the market and rushed up with a microphone, but an angry crowd gathered round her before she reached him and his mother had to wade in and rescue her. Next day the embassy announced he would be giving a press conference when he got back to Dara Dahn so they went away to wait for that.

They spent the heat of the day indoors and summoned the real world back for an hour or so by watching the Dara Dahn television news and phoning Nigel's father. Taeela phoned them too, when she could, and she and Nigel got better at keeping a conversation going. At one point he was telling her how he and his mother had used the cool of the previous evening to take the four girls up into the hills to look for birds. Lisa and Natalie were teaching the other two English, competitively and in a Leeds accent, with a lot of teasing and giggling, all four working together to bury, if only for the moment, the horrors they had been through.

“It isn't fair, Nigel!” she said. “You have fun. You do these things with Lucy and the girls, and I work, work, work. And it is not—what do you say?—proper work. Anyone who has a smiley face can do it. I will find a girl looking the same as me …”

“A double? That's a great idea! And then you can sneak up here and do fun stuff with us.”

“When did I last ride my beautiful horses, Nigel? My poor horses! They will be so bored. They will forget me.”

“You're right. Seriously, Taeela, it isn't good for you. You must tell your regents …”

“I do not tell them, Nigel. They tell me. They tell me I must show everybody my smiley face so they all say ‘Yes, this is a good government.'”

“Come off it. You tell them, don't you?”

“A little bit. It is like a difficult horse. Three difficult horses …”

Her tone had changed. The flash of her old self was over.

She hadn't been exaggerating about her work-load. There were always at least a couple of items about her doings on any news bulletin, talking to patients in hospitals, visiting the makeshift camps of refugees from the three patches of fighting still going on, inspecting troops, welcoming a UN peace delegation and so on. She did a very genuine-seeming smiley face.

Doctor Ghulidzh couldn't find anything in any of his books about switching baizhani. Alinu just shook her head warningly.

“Guess you'll just have to make something up,” said Mizhael.

“What would you do in one of your fantasy games?”

“Don't ask me. I just market them. Any ideas, love?”

“A magical apple, maybe,” said Lily-Jo. “The tree guarded by a dragon. The old baizhan takes a bite and passes it to the new baizhan. Or …”

“If Zhanni's going to eat it it's got to be fish,” said Nigel.

“A magical pool, then,” said Lily-Jo. “A grim guardian in the depths.”

“Cool,” said Mizhael.

On the fourth morning Nigel and his mother went to the market alone and bought a sheaf of brilliant red-purple flowers like miniature gladioli. They left the town by the west gate with the sun already roasting on their backs and climbed the short distance to the place where the helicopter had come down. The wreckage had been cleared away but the circle of blackened hillside was there, spreading away from the fatal boulder, and the clean hill air still reeked faintly of burnt aviation fuel and—or was this only imagination?—charred meat.

Nigel scrambled onto the boulder from above and his mother passed him the flowers. He crossed to the other side, laid them carefully down near the edge, moved a pace back and stood with his head bowed. The black circle was the pool of grief, and the dead soldiers were there, and the parents of Halli and Sulva, and the brutes who had killed them, and Adzhar Taerzha and Sesslizh and Madzhalid and the soldiers who'd fallen down the drop-traps, and their dog, and the unknown others who'd died in the fighting at the TV station, and the woman who'd just been in the way of a bullet. His flowers would wither by sunset, the black circle would be green next year, but the boulder would remain.

They walked down the hill in silence. A line of people were watching from the walls as they came through the gate.

Taeela called that same evening. The first thing she said was “The flowers, Nigel. Where the helicopter was crashed. Why did you do this? It was on the television. What does this mean, Nigel?”

“It doesn't mean anything! It's private! Look, if I hadn't wanted to talk to Mum those guys would a still be alive! I don't feel guilty, only sad. It isn't anything to do with anyone else, just me!”

“Everything you do has meanings, Nigel. I think this has good meanings for my people. It is because of who you are … No, what you are.”

“Well, as far as I'm concerned it's still private. Oh, I suppose I'm glad you think it might be some use, but, tell you truth, I'm sick of all that! I can't wait to get out of Dirzhan … Hell! Sorry, I don't mean it like that. I still think you're terrific—the best thing that ever happened to me …”

“You really think this, Nigel?”

“Oh, sorry. I didn't mean … well, yeah … yeah, now I've said it, I guess so. But it's no use, is it? Not if we can't be together a bit. And Mum and me'll be flying out Friday. Look, I've got to see you before I go. Alone. Well, I suppose you'd better have Satila there, but no one else. It isn't because of what I just said. I mean, I really want to see you of course, but I've got to, too. Whether your regents like it or not. It's important for both of us. Thursday, if poss. We'll be back in the embassy Tuesday evening. You can call me there to tell me when. OK?”

“Good. I will make it possible … Wait …”

There was a long uninterpretable pause, then she spoke in a rapid mutter, as if she'd had to force herself to say it.

“Nigel, you are the best thing that ever happened to me.”

She rang off before he could think of an answer.

There were newspaper printouts waiting at the embassy, but fewer and shorter than last time, as some kind of banking crisis was sweeping round the world like a tsunami, washing yesterday's news away as it went. But there were stories about Nigel himself being in the palace with the Khanazhana when her father was murdered and escaping with her up to Sodalka. They'd only got his blog to go on, plus a lot of rumours. They made a big thing of Taeela shooting the two thugs at the peach orchard, of course. He was still looking at the printouts when she called.

At first they were back to where they'd started, heaving the conversation along through a series of awkward pauses. Nigel had very little to tell her apart from Chief Baladzhin giving his mother a huge turban pin in his household colours, and telling her that if she'd been free he'd have made it a wedding ring.

The return to Dahn had been an eventless seven-hour drive. He'd thought of asking if they could go back over the pass where they'd buried Halli and Sulva's murdered parents so that he could put flowers on their grave, without any photographers lurking around. He didn't tell Taeela that bit. It was too close to the emotional bog they'd fallen in yesterday.

She at least had something to talk about. She'd spent part of her morning being smiley to a delegation of East Dirzh rebels who'd come to negotiate with the regents about a cease-fire.

“That sounds like good news,” he said.

“Yes, I am very happy for it. Oh, Nigel …”

She pulled herself up, teetering for a moment on the edge of another section of the bog.

“OK,” he said in desperation. “Let's talk about that sort of stuff tomorrow, only not on the telephone, right? When am I going to see you?”

“Half after three. We have one hour and twenty-five minutes. Then I take you to meet my regents.”

“I've got to do a press conference in the morning.”

“I want to ask you about this. Nigel, those men I had to shoot. There are people who say they put their guns down, and then I shot them. It was in Moscow papers like this. We tell everyone it isn't true, and Rahdan saw it, and Janey, but they are my servants, so these people say of course they lie for me. You must tell them at your press conference what you see … saw.”

“Right. Dad says he knows a friendly journalist. We'll get him to ask. Anything else? What about my bet with Zhiordzhio Baladzhin? Do you want them to know about your dad's promise, and yours, and all that?”

That kept them going until they could decently ring off, in Nigel's case with a curious mixture of relief and disappointment.

CHAPTER 25

Day whatever-it-is
.

Hi, there. We're off to England tomorrow, so this is my last from Dirzhan
…

They held the press conference in the entrance hall of the embassy, which was another miniaturised clone of the Great Hall in the palace, with a fine staircase at the back leading to a gallery above. There were about twenty reporters there with two TV crews, one at the back of the room and the other up in the gallery. His father started things off.

“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I've only two things to say. First, that this is not an official occasion, sponsored by the British government. It is entirely Nigel's affair, as all his actions have been since the death of the late President. He got into his adventure entirely by accident, when the President asked me if he could spend some time with his daughter while he was in Dara Dahn, to help improve her English accent, and it was because of that that he happened to be with her in the palace at the time of her father's assassination. Apart from a few brief telephone calls to assure us of his continuing safety we had no contact with him until after the Khanazhana's dramatic return. For fear of compromising my position he had not even told me that anything of the sort might be afoot.

“Secondly I must ask you to remember that Nigel has been through a series of experiences that even an adult would have found traumatic, and not to press him too hard about anything he may say.

“When he has finished I will take advantage of your presence to answer any questions you may want to ask about the likely effect of the current financial upheaval in the banking sector on the construction of the Vamar dam.

“Nigel.”

He waited while the man adjusted the microphone, and began.

“OK. Well, like Dad says, I was with the Khanazhana when … Look, I'm going to call her Taeela because that's how I think of her. We were just friends, that's all. OK?”

The first part was mostly in his blog, but he went through it again, deliberately making it as dull as he could. The secret passages were simply there, with a few traps which Fohdrahko knew how to use, and a room to hide in, and a way down to the dungeons, and then out of the palace, but nothing about how creepy and scary it all was and how shattered Taeela had been by her father's death and how tough despite that. He said what an ace old man Fohdrahko had been, and how he'd died, because he wanted people to know, and it would give them something to write about that wouldn't cause any problems.

Escaping from Dara Dahn disguised as girls being people-trafficked should be good stuff too. Besides, it led on to what had happened at the peach orchard. Again he treated that as flatly as he could, just explaining that the President had given Taeela a gun and made sure she knew how to use it, and she'd got it out just in time to stop them killing Rahdan.

A hand went up in the middle of the room.

“Sorry,” he said. “Did I say something wrong?”

A large bald man with a red beard stood up.

“Edwards, WPA,” he said. “I'm sorry to interrupt, but I think this is an important point that needs to be clarified. There is a report in certain sections of the press that the Khanazhana shot these two men after they'd surrendered their weapons.”

“That's crap! The guy had his gun up with the safety off and his finger on the trigger. She didn't even have time to think. And if she hadn't shot him in time Rahdan would be dead and Janey would be dead and the girls would be up in the hills somewhere being sold to guys who fancied having an extra wife to play with and the two thugs and their mates would be asking around to find who'd pay them the most for getting their hands on the Khanazhana and how much they could squeeze out of Dad for letting me come home.