The Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

  “OK. But he is mad, still. I send Dyal to you. You tell him tell Gaur. OK?”

  “Fine,” said Morris, who had in a vague way been waiting for a chance to talk to Dyal about the future of the marshes, without doing anything to bring such a meeting about.

  “But this woman,” said the Prince. “She make my father . . . send . . . other womans . . . women . . . away. Send back to tents . . . Such is great . . . great ’aib.”

  “A great disgrace? I see.”

  “Not for all peoples a disgrace. He send young woman back to tents with a good gift . . . yes, OK. She finds good husband quick, if peoples are Hadahm, Mura’ad, that sort. But some peoples tell it is a great . . . disgrace. My father knows this. He will not do it, but she is witching him.”

  “Yes, I see,” said Morris inwardly cursing the pretty busybody for scattering the seeds of female emancipation on such unwilling ground. “Yes, of course I will talk to her. Don’t let your mother poison her, though. She isn’t a witch—she’s just a fool.”

  “A witching fool?”

  “Yes . . . I mean no. I mean what you are trying to ask is ‘Is she a foolish witch?’ The answer is no. She is foolish, but she isn’t a witch.”

  But she’s a witching fool all right, he thought.

  2

  When Kwan had wanted to pay Morris a visit, he used to send one of the marsh eunuchs carrying a short piece of reed, notched in the middle. Morris would break it at the notch and send one half back with the slave—the reed symbolised a spear, and breaking it was a sign of peace. Kwan used this ritual even when he was himself standing just outside in the passage; it gave Morris time to unroll the reed visiting-mat and fetch out a box of cheroots and a can of sweetened condensed milk; then Kwan would come in, settle on the mat, suck at the can, chew tobacco and talk, endlessly, never repeating himself, about old doings among the buffalo herds.

  So Morris found himself off-balance when, the day before the murders, Dyal came to the door unannounced and asked in his excellent Arabic if Morris was busy. Morris had in fact been watching some film of the chimpanzees and had a slight headache because the palace developing laboratory (installed by the Sultan to satisfy a sudden fad for wild-life photography, but now also apparently used by Akuli bin Zair for his home porn movies) was erratic in its results. So Morris was glad of the excuse to switch off and open the blinds. Dinah, who had been having one of her scuttering, restless mornings, leaped hooting to her nest where she stuffed her mouth with the shavings she used for bedding and glowered at the visitor. Morris rose from his desk.

  “Peace be on you,” he said. “You are very welcome. How would you choose to be seated? I have the visiting-mat that Kwan used to use.”

  “A chair is more comfortable,” said Dyal, smiling. “We have no customs in common, Lord Morris. We are both far from our own people, you in distance and I in time. So we can ignore all customs.”

  “All right. That chair is cleaner than it looks. Would you like coffee? Or . . . er . . . Kwan used to drink sweet milk and chew tobacco.”

  “I like weak instant coffee in a large cup, very hot.”

  Morris laughed aloud because this was so exactly the opposite in every way of the Arab notion of what coffee should be. Dyal laughed too, a large easy sound, showing that he understood the joke.

  “But I will chew tobacco,” he went on. “In this I am still a marshman. We have a root in the marshes which we chew, but tobacco is better. My brother the Sultan has made me swear an oath not to chew it in his presence, nor to buy it for myself; but I may take a gift of it. Thank you. Ah, yes, that is good stuff!”

  He chewed with slow gusto while Morris got the coffee ready. The jaw-movement altered his face and gave it a less human look; in fact for a moment he seemed to have more in common with Dinah than with Morris. Perhaps it was this emergence of a more primitive aspect of his guest that made Morris relapse into marsh language.

  “The floods go very slowly,” he said.

  “Let us continue in Arabic,” said Dyal, too gravely for the words to sound like a snub. “I cannot think easily now in the old language. But let us omit all that coffee-talk—how it wearies me to stand behind the shoulder of my brother the Sultan and hear the same words spoken over and over again, by each guest, as though they had never before been said. I prefer the manners of you Franks. You say ‘Good morning. How are you?’ and then you do business.”

  Morris was impressed. There was a relaxed lordliness in Dyal’s tone, and he had pronounced the English words in a very comprehensible accent. His bulk filled the shabby chair. He might have been an old-fashioned Oxford don putting a freshman at ease before his first tutorial. Kwan had had a kingly manner too, but a whole Toynbeean cycle of civilisations seemed to lie between their two styles of majesty.

  “As you wish,” said Morris. “It is only that since Kwan died I get little chance to practise the language.”

  “You must speak it with Gaur. Prince Hadiq tells me that you wish to talk to me about young Gaur.”

  “It was the Prince’s wish,” said Morris carefully. “The Prince is both my pupil and my friend, and it is painful to him that Gaur should be afraid of me.”

  Dyal’s laugh made Dinah duck out of sight.

  “He is not physically afraid of me,” explained Morris. “But he thinks I am a witch.”

  “He is a boy, a savage straight from the mud. His head is full of old women’s chatter. When a boy becomes a man down in the marshes they do not give him a man’s mind. I remember, when first I came to the sands—before this house was built, when we all lived in a big mud fort—how many childish tales I believed. Yes, I will tell him to be a man.”

  This was all uncomfortably abrupt. Morris had hoped to ease from a fairly detailed demonstration that he was not a witch into the next item on the agenda. Now he would have to tackle it direct.

  “The Prince,” he said, “also believes in the truth of witches.”

  “So do all sensible men.”

  “Perhaps. But he believes that the Frankish woman, who is my countrywoman, has cast a spell on Gaur.”

  “It is possible.”

  “A love-spell?”

  Dyal laughed again like a man auditioning for Father Christmas.

  “By God, boys are always the same. I remember when I came to the sands, how it was. There were four of us in the reeds, of the ninth clan, who became men that year. Before the dances we slept in the same hut, talking all night of women, the girls we had seen, or the young wives herding buffalo, and how we would take this woman or that as soon as we were made men. But then I was sent for, to be the prince’s shadow, here in the sands, and here there were no women to be seen, all shut away, hidden under litters when they rode out. So I wept and groaned in the dark to think of my comrades sporting among the reedbeds. Surely, if there had then been one such as the Frankish woman walking about the fort unveiled, I would have rolled my eyes at her!”

  “But what would the old Sultan have done if he had seen your eye-rollings?”

  “Now, he was a man! Perhaps he would have laughed and given me the woman. But my Prince was more of an age with me than Hadiq is with Gaur, so most likely the Sultan would have sent for brides from the eight clans for his son, who would then have lent them to me.”

  Morris blinked but Dyal didn’t seem to notice.

  “As it happened,” he went on, “my Prince soon went to get his learning in your country, and I returned to the marshes and waited. It was a weary three years, but I eased them with hunting pig and women.”

  “Prince Hadiq believes that the Sultan would shoot Gaur if he knew.”

  “It is not possible. What! Break the Bond of Na!ar for a woman!”

  “Oh?”

  “Have you not heard the Testament of Na!ar? Does it not say that thus is the Bond broken. Man
y things in that song are obscure, but those lines, as I remember, are clear.”

  Morris was puzzled. He remembered the passage clearly enough, but since Arabs and marshmen had continued to murder each other occasionally over the intervening centuries, he did not see how the lines could have a precise meaning. However, it gave him a lead-in to the next subject.

  “Is that the only fashion in which the Bond can be broken?” he asked. “For instance, I have heard talk among the Arabs that the Sultan will soon give permission to the oil company to start drilling in the marshes, and later to drain them.”

  “I have heard such talk many times. The Arabs are always full of foolish stories. They think about nothing but money.”

  “I expect you’re right. But I have listened to a lot of Arab talk, and I think I have learnt to tell the grain from the chaff. This rumour seemed to me to have some substance to it. And bin Zair has been recently to the wells—he told me so himself.”

  “It is foolishness,” said Dyal, calm, academic, slightly bored. “First, it would break the Bond, as you say, and my brother the Sultan knows that. He would have talked with me about whether it was possible. Second, if the oil company came we would kill them.”

  “You too.”

  “Certainly. I am here under the Bond. If that is broken I go back to my people and fight for them, as did Na!ar, himself. And how could the oil company explore and drill when every reed-bed might hold twenty poisoned spears? They could bring machine-guns and helicopters, but there is good hiding in the reeds, and until the last male child in the marshes was dead they could not begin. Do you think these Italians would come here to work on those terms, though they were paid ten times over? There is safer work elsewhere.”

  “And you yourself would fight against the Sultan?”

  “If the Bond were broken. We are each other’s hostages for its continuance, but when it is broken it is my inheritance to fight for the people.”

  “I hope you are right, then.”

  Dyal had been speaking in a slightly odd fashion. Morris had once worked with a Professor who had suffered a slow kind of nervous breakdown, lasting several months, until one appalling morning his personality had completely come to bits while he was showing the Mayor round a new wing of his language department. By hindsight the Professor’s colleagues had then realised that what had seemed minor mannerisms had in fact been symptoms, and one of these had been a tautness, almost an aggressiveness, in discussing the trivia of weather and county cricket, combined with a steady languor when the topic was of any importance. There was something vaguely similar in the way in which Dyal now switched from affable civilised conversation, about machine-guns and danger-money for oil-men and hereditary feuds, back to academic chat. Perhaps it was part of a boredom, already expressed, with social niceties, though he knew that his visit ought to have such a coda. But to Morris it suggested that there was more tension than appeared on the surface between the white-robed, westernised bodyguard and the naked savage who had once hunted pig and women among the reed-beds.

  “It matters to you, then, whether the marshes are drained or no?” said Dyal.

  “Certainly. I admire the language of the marshmen and the songs. If the marshes are drained, all that will go.”

  “It has lived,” said Dyal. “That is enough.”

  He spoke dispassionately, like a hunter discussing the necessary death of an old hound.

  “Last year at the flood-going feast,” said Morris, “I saw Kwan weeping during the songs.”

  “Yes, they are strong. I close my mind when the boys sing, but perhaps when I am old I will open it again. Kwan was a good man, and a great warrior. He killed many men. Once, before I came to the sands, he went hawking alone with the old Sultan, and the Sultan’s brother sent men to attack them. They fought all day and killed seven of the men, and in the evening the Sultan rode for help while Kwan prevented the rest from following. There was no moon, so Kwan stripped off his clothes and became a piece of the night. We marshmen know the smell of Arab. When the Sultan rode back with his guard in the morning he met Kwan walking unwounded out of the desert. They found fifteen dead men among the sands, eight of them killed with one small knife.”

  “He never told me, though he talked a great deal to me. I never even knew that the old Sultan had had a rebellious brother. What happened to him?”

  “He was sent to the marshes. Our women have a trick of drowning a man, so that the drowning lasts all night. Of what, then, did Kwan speak? It is strange, for he was a silent man.”

  “I’ll show you.”

  Morris rose and got out the tape-recorder. At the click of its cover Dinah climbed down from her nest and came carefully over with the curious, stiff-legged walk which chimpanzees use when they are being formal. Morris showed her which button to press and she wound the old tape off, watching with delight as the reels whirled. Then he threaded the new tape in and let her prod down with her black-nailed finger on to the “Play” button.

  A mutter, a hush, and then Kwan’s voice.

  “The dance for a dead warrior is arranged in this fashion. First, the dead man’s sister’s son kills a year-old male buffalo and drains the blood into a bowl, so that the priestesses can paint the secret symbols against witchcraft with the blood on the dead man’s body. Then the song-maker is sent for, who is the dead-man’s spirit-brother, and he makes a song and teaches it to his sons. Next . . .”

  Morris did not play this tape often, partly because he was not much interested in anthropological minutiae, and partly because it reminded him how much he missed Kwan’s company. He stood staring out at the marshes, thinking of his big, gentle friend creeping naked about the desert under the stars, killing men with his knife. It took him some time to realise that something was the matter with Dyal.

  Dyal was having a fit. He was sitting bolt upright in the chair, with the whites showing all round the iris of his staring eyes, with sweat all across his forehead like the condensation on a chilled coke-tin. He had a pistol in his right hand, but he clutched it to his chest just as Gaur had clutched his amulet. Morris switched the recorder off.

  “Are you all right?” he said.

  Dyal muttered several times and tried to speak. Then his whole body shuddered and relaxed. He lay back in the chair, wiped his brow with the back of his hand and sat for several seconds looking down at the pistol on his lap.

  “By God, you have done an evil thing,” he said.

  “I have not done it willingly, and if I can I will undo it.”

  “I thought to kill you.”

  “Oh. Well . . . er . . .”

  “A year ago Kwan lived. He was well. His eye was clear and his skin soft and black. Next day he was dead, as if by witchcraft. Now I see that you keep his soul in a black box, and summon your unclean servant to make him speak.”

  “He was my friend. I would not have hurt him for all the gold in Sheba. I swear to you, Dyal, that his soul is not in this box. It is only a piece of machinery. I will tell you how it works.”

  “Oh, I know that. I have seen such things, for bin Zair uses one in his office. But . . but . . .”

  Suddenly, awkwardly, he dropped into the language of the marsh.

  “There are two worlds, and both are true. A man may throw his spear in the sun-world and hit nothing, but in the moon-world that spear strikes into his enemy’s liver. To be a witch is to know how the channels wind in the moon-world, and when the floods of that world come and go. One deed may be done twice, by those who know, once in each world. The soul of a man is in his words—how otherwise can the singer make the souls of his hearers dance? You have put Kwan’s soul in a box, Kwan who was my father’s brother.”

  He spoke with a strange, jerky rhythm, which might have been caused by emotion or might have been the result of his long disuse of the language. Certainly he made
two or three little slips of syntax.

  “The guilt is mine, but I did not know it,” said Morris. It was a line that occurred in several different songs.

  “By God,” said Dyal in Arabic, “I almost killed you and your ape.”

  “I can take Kwan’s voice from the tape,” said Morris. “I can wipe it off so that it will be if he had never spoken.”

  “Let it be done.”

  Morris hesitated a moment. He felt that what he ought to do was borrow a recorder from the Sultan and play the tape through once more, using the headphones and speaking Kwan’s words himself. Then this no doubt invaluable account of funeral rites would be preserved. But the hell with it. He rewound the tape and set it to erase itself. The reels moved hypnotically. Goodbye, he thought. Goodbye.

  “So a man may be a witch without knowing it?” he said. “He may act quite innocently in the sun-world and yet harm his neighbour in the moon-world.”

  “That is true.”

  “So there is no way in which I can prove to Gaur that I am not a witch, if I may be one without knowing it.”

  “None.”

  Dyal rose and came to the table. Morris stopped the machine, wound the tape back a little and showed him that it was now blank. Dyal nodded and prepared to leave.

  “It must happen often in the marshes,” said Morris, “men being accused of witchcraft when they do not know whether they are witches or not. What happens then?”

  “They ask the ducks.”

  “Oh?”

  Dyal shook his head, unsmiling, and left with no formalities at all.

  3

  It must have been Anne who had persuaded the Sultan not to appoint Dinah Minister of Education—he was quite capable of doing so, even in a matter which with another part of his mind he took seriously. So the slow process of giving him a name in Dinah’s language took place in the zoo, every morning, at a time which was thoroughly inconvenient to everyone but himself. It also meant that Morris had no way of avoiding putting Dinah into the cage with the other chimps for at least one half of the morning, and that meant that he had to spend long periods at the observation window. At first he had tried introducing her when the chimps had had their morning’s excitement over the sudden harvest of fresh fruit and green leaves that came down the chutes or appeared on the two branches that could still be relied on to extrude bananas. But Sparrow, who had quickly recovered his dominance from Rowse, always used the feeding period to prove his authority over the whole group, snatching fruit and displaying aggressively at all the other chimps in turn, even when he was no longer hungry. The arrival after this process of another ape who had not been through it meant that he then focused all his moral thuggery into subduing her. So it turned out better to let her join in the riot and receive only her fair ration of bullying. She hated being taken to the cage, but in fact the experiment was beginning to work with far more success than Morris would have believed possible. It had taken her about three sessions to learn not to challenge a male—even placid old Cecil—about anything. The first time she had received a real buffet she had shot off to a corner jabbing her bunched fingers together—her usual sign for “hurt”. But quite soon she learnt to peel off the invisible gown and mortar-board as soon as she entered the cage and work by instinct. She had always kept the facial responses of a wild ape, and after a week of integration she was making the gestures of submission and appeasement in a manner indistinguishable from the others. This enabled her to sort out her own place in the hierarchy; there were two slightly older female adolescents in the group, the Deneke sisters, whom she discovered she could dominate individually but not if they ganged up on her; together they built up a precarious relationship, running to each other for grooming sessions when they needed comfort. Dinah was wary now in her relationship with the mature chimps, though she occasionally pestered Murdoch to let her play with the baby; but apart from Sparrow, whom she feared and detested, she seemed well on the way to accepting them all, and they her. Morris thought that in another week or so it would become safe to leave her in the cage most of the time, unguarded. From a scientific point of view this was an exciting step forward. Emotionally it was shipwreck.