In the Palace of the Khans (23 page)

“That's more like it,” he whispered. “They're bringing us something to eat. I'll go and see how they're doing.”

He headed for the sound of bustle, along past the stairs towards the back of the house, past a room where Janey was laying out clothes on a bed, and another where Rahdan was taking a shower, by the sound of it. He found Lisa and Natalie arguing in whispers as they loaded a couple of trays out of a gleaming fridge As soon as they realised he was in the room they stopped and stared at him as if he'd been a burglar.

“That's great,” he said. “Look, try and ease off a bit with Taeela, like you did with me that time. Forget about her being the Khanazhana. Suppose one of the kids at your school had seen her dad gunned down in front of her eyes, and then she'd been hunted like a rat through Dara Dahn, and she'd got somewhere where she can rest for a bit and pull herself together …

“See what I mean? She wouldn't want people staring at her like she was some kind of freak would she? She'd …”

He saw the girls eyes move, and turned. Janey was standing in the doorway, her face unreadable.

“I … I was just trying to explain … I hope that's all right.”

She nodded.

“What she want to do?” she said.

“Head north, I suppose. She's a Varaki. We haven't had time to talk about it. When we've had a rest and something to eat …”

She nodded again and held up a hand to stop him.

“We come too,” she said. “Rick telling me, something bad happen, like today, we clear out. Find a man who go with us, he says. This guy Rahdan, he OK, you thinking?”

Nigel started to try to explain. Janey cut him short.

“Khanazhana telling me,” she said. “I ask, is he brave man?”

“He's done OK so far.”

Janey nodded, unimpressed, and picked up one of the trays. They found Taeela already asleep. She woke when they'd almost finished eating, had a few mouthfuls, and let Janey take her off to her bed.

Nigel felt that he had barely closed his eyes when Janey was shaking him awake. He was curled up in the two easy chairs pushed end to end in the living room. Rahdan was sitting up yawning on the floor beside him. Taeela had slept in the spare room and Janey and the girls in their own beds—if Janey had gone to bed at all, he later realised; she must have been up most of the short night getting stuff ready.

They'd talked it through over supper, so there was a lighter dahl for him, one of Lisa's jackets and a skirt of Janey's long enough to hide his feet. He'd enough of a suntan to pass for a local, with a pair of sunglasses to hide his blue, northern eyes. Rahdan was wearing some of Rick's clothes—a bit too small for him but looking like any other Dirzhani. Taeela looked as though she'd hardly slept at all, but you'd still have known she was a princess.

There were knapsacks or shoulder-bags already packed for all of them. Breakfast was cold, apart from hot chocolate. Last thing before they left Nigel called the embassy. His father's voice answered, furry with sleep.

“Ambassador speaking.”

“Hi, Uncle Nick. Is Nigel there? This is Timmy.”

There was a kind of echo on the line.

“My dear Timothy, have you any idea what time it is here?”

“Oh, I'm terribly sorry. Did I wake you up? Could you just give him a message, then? He'll know what it means. It's about Rover.”

“Some kind of dog?”

“There's this guy who looks after him who told us to go to the country. Wales, somewhere. We're all going. Could you tell him?”

“I'll do my best. All well with you?”

“We're fine, Uncle Nick. Got to go now. Best love to Aunt Lucy.”

“Will do. Next time please call at a more sensible hour.”

“I'm terribly sorry. Bye.”

“Good bye, Timmy. And good luck.”

He put the phone down. It had been contact of a sort, but pitifully little. The others were staring at him, baffled.

The stars were fading between the branches of the twisted tree when they crept out into the courtyard. They waited while Janey checked the street outside, then followed her across Digvan Ildzhu into the maze beyond. The route she took would have been difficult even with a map, but she knew it as a rabbit knows its warren. They saw no patrols as they worked their way north.

The old city ended as suddenly as it had begun, at the ring-road the palace drivers used to ferry Nigel back to the embassy. They crouched behind a hoarding to let a patrol car go slowly past, then dashed across. This was a different kind of maze, one that he was familiar with from the shanty towns of South America, with open sewers running in the streets, and houses built any old how out of corrugated iron and odd bits of planking. These were the homes of people who'd come to the city looking for a better life, and not found it.

Taeela stared around.

“Those murdering fools!” she muttered. “My father had good plans for all these places, after the dam is built and the money comes. Now … They will not do it. They will steal the money for themselves. Murderers! Robbers! Soon you will see, Nigel.”

“See what?” he said. “You've lost me.”

“The Garden of the Khans. You will be seeing it. It was beautiful long ago, but the communists stole it for their pigs. My father made it beautiful again for his people.”

“We can get out of Dahn through it? They won't be guarding it?”

“We will see.”

There was almost no one about so early, and they picked their way through the empty streets and came out into what might one day become a handsome avenue, though its trees were still little more than saplings, and the houses either side of it had been bulldozed flat but their replacements not yet built. The vista to the left stretched away down over Dara to the mountains beyond, but to the right it ended only a hundred yards off with a huge bronze statue of the President in front of a green slope dotted with young trees. A soldier was leaning against the plinth of the statue, smoking, with his gun propped beside him.

Janey gestured and they drew back out of sight, except for Rahdan, who stayed where he was for a while, stroking his chin and studying the man, before he joined them to talk with Taeela and Janey. Lisa muttered an explanation.

“Talked about it last night, case something like this come up. He's going to make out they're wife-dealers, him and Ma. Happened in the old days, despite it weren't legal. Guys got hold of kids from areas like we just been through, families glad to have 'em off their hands, and sold 'em on to guys out in the sticks. Only took a few dzhin to make the cops look the other way. The Khan put a stop to it. Hanged anyone he caught, and the cops what took the money along of 'em.

“Rahdan's going to make out he's starting up again, now the Khan's dead. Says there's an old guy in his village used to do it this way so's not to have to pay the cops. We're the wives. You too, Nigel, and we ain't happy about it, right?”

“It sounds pretty hairy to me,” said Nigel.

“Me too, but Rahdan, he's been a soldier. He says it'll work. All set, Ma? We going to try it?”

“I talk with the guy. I decide then,” said Janey.

“Do you need any money?” said Nigel.

“I got enough. Sorting it out after,” said Janey and walked confidently away.

A few minutes later four sobbing girls were herded along the unfinished avenue roped wrist to wrist in pairs with Janey's washing line, followed by Rahdan with the other end of the rope wound round his hand and one of her kitchen knives in his belt. When Natalie stretched out a pleading arm to the soldier he turned away.

Once inside the park they hurried away to the left and worked their way round it, looking for a gap in the fence. Behind them the mountain peaks glittered under the rising sun, but the distances were already becoming vague as the heat haze rose. It was going to be another roasting day.

CHAPTER 14

It was mid-morning, hot and still, by the time they reached the main road north. Nigel had stripped down to shirt and trousers but was sweating under his dahl. They settled to rest in the shade of a few scrawny trees, drinking sparingly from their water-bottles and watching the traffic stream by—cars, trucks and pick-ups crammed with passengers; the occasional group of sweating cyclists; mules under mountains of baggage or with two or even three riders; a camel, once, with four perched on it somehow—all fleeing from the chaos in Dara Dahn.

An empty truck came past going the other way. Rahdan raised an optimistic thumb pointing north. Astonishingly the truck pulled over and a man got out and came across. The haggling—Janey, Rahdan and the man—lasted several minutes before Janey gave him some money, the man waved and the truck drove on without him.

“Gone for collect another lot,” muttered Janey. “I give him twenty dzhin so he stop for us when he coming back, then a hundred sixty if he take us to Podoghal. Varaki town, one fifty kilometres. OK?”

“Thirty dzhin a head?” said Nigel. “That sounds cheap, time like this.”

“Is cheap,” said Janey. “Not much trusting him, case he making a run for it when truck coming back, all full. Taking our twenty dzhin, leaving us here. I tell Rahdan keep an eye at him.”

Nigel didn't like the look of the man either. He smiled too much as he chatted to Rahdan, and when he was offered a drink of their precious water he downed more than half the bottle. But half an hour later the truck stopped as arranged, and there was just about room on it for six more passengers once Janey had paid the rest of their fare.

For thirty miles or so they ground north along a winding valley, sitting on their bags or perching on the sideboard of the truck, with endless gear changes as the traffic accelerated and slowed. The packed mass of bodies generated its own heat, and the wind of their passage, laden with the exhaust of labouring old engines, gave them no relief.

News and rumours were passed to and fro. Seventeen, no, twenty-four, no, eleven, no, fifty-eight people had been killed when the tanks had fired into the crowd at Iskan Bridge. The soldiers who had stormed the TV station had been dressed in Dirzhaki uniforms but had given their orders in Russian. The Khanazhana had been captured and would be forced to marry the son of Adzhar Taerzha. It was an American plot to prevent Dirzhan becoming an Islamic state. No, it was an al-Quaida plot to make it an Islamic state …

On a hill no steeper than several they'd climbed the engine started to falter. They staggered on with the stinking cloud of their exhaust billowing over the traffic behind, down again and along a level with it sounding increasingly unhappy, until they left the main convoy, turned off along a side road and reversed into a track beside a peach orchard, where they stopped in a cloud of their own smoke.

The driver and another man got out and raised the engine-cover, while the man who had stayed with them came round and talked to the passengers, gesturing towards the orchard as he did so. The shade under the trees looked extremely inviting, and even before he'd finished speaking the passengers were climbing down, leaving their belongings behind and heading for the trees.

Janey said something as she picked up her bag. Rahdan demurred. She answered and he hefted his knapsack.

“We're taking our stuff,” said Natalie. “The guy said not to, but Ma dun't trust him.”

Behind the concealment of his sunglasses Nigel watched the man as they filed by him. He nodded at Janey, apparently accepting their decision, but as soon as she was past his expression changed to a sort of contemptuous smirk.

“She's right,” he muttered. “Did you see his face, Lisa?”

“Engine was sick all right.”

“It's old enough to have a hand throttle. There were trucks like that in Santiago. You've only got to pull the throttle out and that's what happens.”

“Hear that, Ma? What are we …?”

She didn't have time to complete the sentence. The truck's starter grunted twice, the engine caught, coughed, caught again and steadied. The passengers had hardly begun to get to their feet when the men slammed the engine cover shut and scrambled aboard the already moving truck. The passengers rushed out. One who was quick enough to grab the tail-gate clung on till a stamp on his hands forced him to drop. The truck disappeared round the corner with the men waving mocking farewells.

Some of the abandoned passengers continued their rush, screaming their outrage, but gave up one by one and waited for their family group and then trooped miserably back to the main road in the unlikely hope of thumbing another lift. Having got last out of the truck Nigel and the others had gone further along the track to find a resting place, so had been in a better position to see that pursuit was hopeless. All they could do was stand with their bags in their hands and watch it happen.

“Let's have a look at Rick's map,” said Nigel. “See where this road goes. There might be a village …”

He saw Janey's face change and her eyes look past him, over his shoulder. A man had appeared at the corner of the orchard, clearly not a soldier, but with an AK held in front of him, ready to use. He snarled an order. Rahdan, Janey and the girls raised their hands. Nigel was about to follow suit when he realised that Taeela on his left hadn't moved. He hesitated and copied her.

A voice behind them snapped the same command. Again Taeela didn't move, but Nigel glanced round. This man's AK was slung over his shoulder, but a heavy truncheon was dangling from his wrist. Nigel forced himself to turn away and stand, readying himself for the blow, but then watching, unable to move or cry out, as the first man walked towards Rahdan, raising his gun as he came. Rahdan backed away. The man's thumb moved on the safety catch.

Close behind him the second man, nearer now, growled the order again. Something inside Nigel broke, the same kind of total loss of control that he'd experienced at Lake Vamar, but this time exploding not into panic but rage. He hit the first man in a clumsy rugby tackle, catching him a solid thunk, and then somehow clinging on for a couple of seconds until the gun butt hammered against his shoulder. As he staggered and fell he heard the bark of a single shot, quickly repeated. He was starting to get to his feet and run when a massive weight thumped across him, pinning him face down. Twisting his head he saw Taeela, sideways on to him, raise her pistol two handed, take aim and fire, again twice, and then step aside as the man with the truncheon charged past her and collapsed.