The Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

  “Haven’t you got one?” he said.

  “I’ve had my British one withdrawn, the sods. I’ve been getting about on a Syrian travel document, but I think Bruce has impounded it. A Q’Kuti passport would be just the job.”

  “Ung.”

  She stopped grooming Dinah to look at him with the same speculative glance he had seen earlier. She was calculating his price. Not money, not sex . . .

  “The point is,” she said, “I don’t think Bruce is going to let me go. Ever. We’re having a wild time together at the moment, but it can’t last. And when it’s over . . . He hasn’t said anything, but I’ve been listening to the women . . . sometimes he’s taken a fancy to a dancer from Dar or somewhere and had her flown in for a week and given her a present and sent her home . . . they talked about Simoko as if she was one of those. But they talk about me as if I’m one of them—you know, there’s several old women there who were Bruce’s father’s girls—they’ve been shut up in the women’s quarters for years—when it was only a sort of mud fort. OK, I’m enjoying myself right now, but I’ve got work to do.”

  “Exactly,” he said.

  She stopped grooming Dinah and swung round at him like a gun on a tank turret.

  “Who made you judge in Israel?” she snapped. “Slavery for life, is it?”

  “I don’t know . . . nobody . . . I’m not a judge . . . to set you free, either.”

  “As far as you’re concerned I’m just another monkey in Bruce’s zoo? And you’re one of them? ”

  She made a gesture, vivid with passion, towards the oblivious eunuch. Dinah parodied it. Anne didn’t laugh this time.

  “I don’t know what I think,” said Morris. “I’m not very clever at either/or situations, I’m afraid. As a matter of fact I don’t really approve of the Sultan keeping a zoo here at all; but since he insists on having one I try to make it tolerable for the animals. And, well, I suppose you’re better off here than you might be in prison.”

  “Which is where I belong, you think?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know!”

  Slowly she swung back to Dinah.

  “Sorry, sweetie,” she said. “We got interrupted.”

  They returned to the silent ritual of grooming. Morris felt a twitch of jealousy that they should seem to understand each other, instantly, so much better than he understood either of them. Hell, there were things he could accomplish which this girl could never begin on—he began to run his mind over the probable grammar of Dinah’s exploration of the future tense.

  “What were you saying about to-morrow night?” said Anne. “About this feast, I mean, and knowing whether you were still Foreign Minister?”

  It was uncanny how smoothly she flipped herself back into the unruffled stream of polite chat.

  “Oh,” said Morris, “well, there’s this feast. Theoretically it’s held when the floods begin to recede, but it doesn’t work out like that . . .”

  “It’s probably something to do with the moon. Like Easter.”

  “Yes. Well . . . you know, you ought to go and listen to some of it. The Sultan gives this feast—it lasts six hours—and in between the courses boys from the marshes sing the Testament of Na!ar. There’s one clan—the rock-dove clan—where all the boys have to learn all the traditional songs. Really it’s an astonishing performance, especially if you know that they aren’t allowed to sing them after they’ve reached puberty. Why don’t you make friends with the marshwomen? They could explain. You see, there’s a special gallery with a pierced screen where the women can sit if they want to . . .”

  When she had gone, mission unaccomplished, Morris settled again at his work-bench; the whine of his fine-toothed saw, the hum and fizz of his polisher discs, the small feeling of accomplishment as each blue cross took on an almost professional finish—these should have been soothing, but despite them he felt irritated and disappointed. Dinah, too, was suddenly tiresome. Quite soon he had to give up his work to try to occupy both their minds with education.

  It didn’t go well. Morris kept thinking about Anne, and perhaps Dinah did too. He was surprised, almost alarmed, by the strength of his wish that she had stayed longer, and how his original awkwardness and resentment in her presence had changed to liking. If the Sultan had known, be would have been full of jeering innuendoes, but . . .

  Dinah suddenly swept a row of six counters off the coffee-table and squatted sullenly, waiting for some kind of reproof or punishment that would give her the excuse for a tantrum. When it didn’t come she shuffled off to her nest, stuffed her mouth with shavings and went to sleep.

  Morris picked up the scattered counters and then sat crouched forward on his chair, poking them around at random and thinking about himself. This was not a thing he often did in any analytic way, because he considered his own personality rather null and unrewarding; he spent much more time speculating about Dinah’s character, or the Sultan’s. But now he was struck once more with a kind of resentment of a trait in his own nature which seemed to make it impossible for him to enjoy the company of suitable friends and colleagues—suitable in the sense that his mother had used when she selected suitable children for him to play with; all his life the people he had got on with had been quite wrong for him, hopelessly out of his sphere, or even morally corrupt—a raffish collection of High Tory squirelings at Oxford, that ruthless fat Dutchman who smuggled orangs and talked about nothing but guns, the Sultan, Kwan, and even this murderess.

  Lucky are they, beyond earth’s common lot,

  Whose friends amuse, whose enemies do not.

  Sometimes he had considered this trait to be a reaction of his mother’s insistence on suitability, but since he had been in Q’Kut he had come round to believing that it was a phenomenon of western civilisation, and that there were probably a lot of people like him in existence in countries where all recognisable cultural structures had withered or exploded into fragments. Living among Arabs, whose ancient culture had the strength of its own narrowness and so was only now beginning to collapse, or listening to the songs of marshmen who still knew the exact function of every man, every buffalo, every reed-channel in their universe, he had come to understand as a tangible reality what had before been only an academic commonplace, that the great thing is to belong, know what you belong to, and your place in it, to accept it and be accepted by it. But not any old grouping would do—it had to be of a graspable size, to contain its own inner structure, to give at least the appearance of permanence. A desert tribe, or a mining village, yes; the Pan-Arab nation, or some bloody great industrial union, no. Old bin Zair knew what he was, and where he belonged, but Morris had been unable to accept his own native culture. It had none of the desiderata—it was too large, too boneless, too impermanent. So quite unconsciously he had refused to accept his role in it, by refusing to accept people apparently like himself who had accepted their roles; and in the end he had escaped to Q’Kut, to the highly unsuitable roles of zoo-keeper and Foreign Minister, acceptable because of their very absurdity.

  Morris thought about these matters erratically, poking the symbols into meaningless messages as he did so; in the end he got cramp in his left haunch, rose to ease it and rambled round his room full of a vague inner smugness at his own isolation. I am heroically alone, he thought. There is no one remotely like me in all Q’Kut.

  Stooping to clear the counters away he saw that the last message he had made actually meant something, if you could call it a meaning:

  blue square: Morris

  brown circle: has qualities of

  black square: person other than Morris

  (The brown circle did not exactly mean “is”. It had been mainly used in an earlier stage when Dinah had been learning about qualifiers—Morris would present her with a banana and a yellow play-brick and a sentence to say or ask what they had in common.)

 
All right, he thought, all right. I probably did it subconsciously. It doesn’t mean anything.

  But as he tidied the counters away he wondered whether in fact Anne too had chosen her role as a rejection of the non-culture she was supposed to belong to. Her roles, rather, because that was the alternative course. You could choose, like Morris, to be a quietist and wash about where the tides drifted you; or you could actively seek roles, the more extreme and violent the better, switching them as the mood took you, wearing mask after mask to hide the lack of features behind. Perhaps even the vet-despising, dog-owning Mummy was an invention, a beauty spot on such a mask—there had been something a little off key about her very first line in the role—absolutely giddy bonkers. Hmph.

  He wondered what she would make of the flood-going feast, if she bothered to go and watch it from the women’s gallery.

  2

  Quite unreasonably Morris had expected the boys to be the same three that had sung the Testament last year. They wore the same white clay masks whose lips were set into a permanent pout to allow room for the funnels that made the young voices resonate, but they were three different boys. The main singer’s voice was less limpid than last year’s but he sang with greater drive and drama, even with a slight harshness that contrasted well with the softer voices of the younger pair. Their naked black bodies were striped with ochre designs. They sat cross-legged, motionless on a patterned reed mat in front of the throne, while to either side of them the little orchestra of their fathers and elder brothers thumped and clinked and gurgled at their tuneless instruments.

  The wonderfully ornate passage about the preparations for Nillum’s boar-hunt came to an end in an onomatopoeic flourish of hoofbeats and horns. A vast series of dishes piled with spiced rice and mutton was carried in to the hail. The audience—petty sheikhs and their cousins, random brigands, senior palace courtiers, a party of town Yemenis on some unexplained mission, several groups of litigants who had arranged their cases to coincide with a famous free meal but whose real interest was in camel-theft and water-rights and blood-money—maintained for the most part the extraordinarily dignified silence with which they had listened to the singers, not one word of whose song any of them could have understood.

  The Sultan spoke affably to a small fat sheikh. The leader of the Yemenis listened, nodding. Akuli bin Zair scratched his ribs, pulled his beard and turned to Morris, who was evidently still Foreign Minister, to be sitting so near the throne.

  “Your excellency is entertained by the squealings of the savages?” he asked in his high, tinny voice.

  “I like the songs,” said Morris.

  “I have made a film of the performance of one of our dancing boys, one of the Hadahm. He is very beautiful and can do strange things. Your excellency must come to my quarters to see it.”

  “The pleasure would be as great as the honour,” said Morris, who had in fact often been forced to watch the smutty contortions of young male prostitutes which seemed for some reason to delight and amuse quite respectable old Arabs. He himself detested them, so switched the subject back to the marshmen.

  “I saw yesterday, from my windows, the ceremony at which the tribute was brought,” he said, gesturing at the odd little pile of offerings in front of the singers. “What do you do with them when the feast is over?”

  “The spear is burnt, always. It is a sign that the killing of each other is finished. The boar-tusks we put in a chest, as we did even when the Sultan’s father lived under tents. That is how it has always been done.”

  “You mean that if you were to count the pairs of tusks in the chest, you would know how many years ago the ceremony first started?”

  “No doubt,” said bin Zair. “However, some may have been lost or stolen.”

  “Even so, I expect you could have the oldest ones carbon-dated.”

  “You think the matter important?”

  “It is not for me to say. I am always interested in such matters. But if, for instance, there were to be some question about the validity of the treaty, then it might be useful to be able to prove its antiquity.”

  Bin Zair sat pulling his beard and looking at Morris with his old, bloodshot eyes.

  “The matter shall be looked into,” he said at last. “I trust, excellency, that all your animals are in beautiful health, and the slaves attending to them with care.”

  Morris blinked. So abrupt a change of subject is not common in polite Arab conversation, nor had bin Zair ever before evinced the slightest interest in the zoo. No doubt the old man considered that the new Foreign Minister was in danger of regarding his post as other than merely honorific. But in fact there had been a tedious little dispute about the number of helpers needed in the zoo—the sort of problem that in a place like the palace could only be settled by high authority, but which was in itself too trivial to bother high authority about, and so never got settled. Morris explained. Bin Zair nodded non-committally. The meat came round. A litigant sidled up and began, with ridiculous circumlocution, to sound bin Zair out on the possibility of helping his case along with a few bribes; Morris turned away and pretended to adjust the tapes of his recorder, ready for the next episode of the song. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the Sultan was starting on his second bottle of “sherbert” (bottled on the Heidsieck estates in Rheims, but re-labelled in Aden.) At last a soggy little drum began to revive the echo of the hoof-beats, and hands as black as insulating cable slid over the strings of two little harps, producing a tuneless, shivery whispering. Morris started his recorder. The music, if you could call it that, died. The boy in the centre threw back his head and sang.

  Last year Morris had regarded this passage as a disappointing one, after the reverberant nastiness of the scene in which Na!ar’s grandmother’s second brother had gathered and prepared the poisons, and the barbaric clutter of the preparations for the hunt. This time he listened with increasing absorption to the sparsely ornamented lines that brought the two heroes together for their necessary deaths.

  One of the traditional adornments employed by the makers of the marsh songs was a patterned arrangement and modulation of the successive relation-roots; even an apparently artless lyric would on inspection turn out to contain, for instance, three sections, the outer two using a series of roots in the same order and the central one reversing them. There was none of that in the description of the duel. Word-group after word-group clustered round the same root, the strong (or willed) transitive. The groups themselves were unusually short, the nominal and adjectival elements always the commonest of many possible synonyms, inflected very straightforwardly—straightforwardly, that is, for a language in which it was possible to inflect the nominal element “cheese” so that three syllables meant “the first-pressing cheese made last drought from the milk of my elder brother’s three-year-old buffalo”. As the heroes closed, the language became drier still.

  Nillum rode by the reeds.

  His servants and his friends were far behind him,

  Hunting a different boar.

  Hidden in the winter reeds Na!ar waited.

  His spear-thrower was hard in his hand.

  The tip of his spear glistened with fresh poison.

  He moved like a fisherman,

  An old fisherman who creeps to spear a quick fish.

  Nillum rode by the reeds. He reined in his horse.

  Na!ar sprang up. He threw his spear.

  He shouted with joy to see it fly straight.

  Nillum heard the shout . . .

  Of course the story carried the listener through. Cynical calculation? If your material is all blood and drama, it’s a waste to put frills on it, because no one will notice them? But to a man of Morris’s temperament the whole passage seemed to prove that he was listening to the work of a truly potent artist, a forgotten savage who had understood the essential nature of action, its drab
ness, the perfunctoriness of muscle-movements compared with the salivating torments of anticipation and the long, rich pastures of regret.

  The expressionless clay mask chanted on. The voice of the main singer was expressionless too, telling, as if in a stone frieze, the precise cruelties that the two heroes dealt each other until both were dying.

  Na!ar dragged himself through the reed-bed

  Using only his arms.

  The barbs of his own spear held fast in his liver.

  The spear-shaft caught and dragged among the reed-roots.

  Where clear water gleamed he lay still.

  He saw the piebald horse wallow away, saddle empty.

  He saw Nillum kneeling in the water.

  He felt the poison-creatures beginning to suck up his soul.

  Words then Na!ar, shield of the people, spoke.

  Morris thrilled to the grammatical surprise, though he was ready for it, the sudden, rare null-root, the expression of general and involuntary action, contorted almost to the end of the longest word-group for many minutes. He was quite sure that the effect was intentional: the fight itself had been a personal matter between two men, moving their own limbs at their own will; but now a different power stirred in Na!ar’s dying mouth, as large and impersonal as the movement of the floodwaters or the return of day, for which the null-transitive root was invariably used. A series of heavy strokes on the slack-stringed harps seemed to underline the effect and at the same time to usher in another procession of dishes to fill the interval before the cryptic exchange of oaths and absolutions that actually embodied the ancient treaty.