The Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

  There was a stir of interest, perhaps because the verb was one which included the possibility of torture.

  “Gaur is gone,” said Hadiq, after a pause. “He came to me the day my father died. He had not learnt to speak more than a little Arabic. He said ‘Your father. My father.’ He put his hands to the collar of his robe and tore it from top to bottom. He wept. I have not seen him since. I think he has gone back to the marshes.”

  “Let him be sent for,” said someone. Several people with better local knowledge explained the folly of this remark.

  “There is still the woman, then,” said Umburak.

  “I am told,” squeaked bin Zair, “that in the full heat of that afternoon a naked marshman came to the boathouses, leading a veiled woman. He came from the palace. He took the boat-guard’s gun from him and stunned him with his fist. When the guard woke a canoe had been taken.”

  There was a brief murmur of discussion, not very interested, and then Fuad was on his feet again, shouting “What does it matter? The old savage killed the Sultan. The young savage killed the Sultan. Morris helped or he did not. However it be, the killing was done by one of these devils from the marshes. Let them be punished. Let them be driven out. We do not want them in our land!”

  “I have heard that when men drained the marshes above Basra much good land was exposed,” said the supposedly lecherous elder.

  These two speeches brought the meeting to its full fervour. The notion of war, combined with the idea of fertile land (which then would be eroded to desert in a generation by bad husbandry) seemed to stir almost every Arab soul. Even the impassive Umburak was on his feet, shouting, and it took Morris some time to realise that he was dissenting from the motion.

  “Fools! Fools! Fools!” he was shouting.

  Nobody paid any attention. He looked round, ignored Morris, strode out of the circle, picked up a heavy alabaster spittoon, lifted it, carried it into the middle of the circle and slammed it down upon the mosaic floor. The effect was remarkable; there must have been some flaw or stress in the bowl, for the pedestal shot clean through it and it crashed to the floor and broke, spilling out date stones and tangerine peel and chewing-gum, all mixed with the gub of ancient hawkings. The silence after the crash was beautiful.

  “You are fools,” said Umburak. “How will you fight against the marshmen? This is no camel-raid. How will you go among the reeds, where your enemies know every winding and hide in every patch of cover with their poisoned spears? One scratch and a man dies. Lo, the Sultan and the slave died with the prick of a poisoned needle. You have guns, but you have only six hundred fighting men. They have eight thousand, and I, with my own eyes, have seen a marshman spear a small pig at thirty paces. I tell you, it is not a camel-raid.”

  This was not a popular speech.

  “We will not fight them in the marshes, then,” said the young man with the cleft chin. “The Sultan has two aeroplanes. Let him buy bombs and napalm and thus drive these demons out of the reeds on to the sands, where we can deal with them.”

  “I will not do it,” shouted Hadiq. “By God, I tell you I will not do it. I tell you the treaty is not broken. We do not know it to be broken. It may be that Gaur killed for love. It may also be that some other man came to the zoo and tricked him—he did not know our ways. Shall I now hunt like animals the people my father loved and protected? By God I tell you I will not.”

  “Had the Sultan no braver sons?” shouted Fuad. A ripple of shock ran round the circle, but Morris sensed that the question was merely premature. In a few days it could be asked openly, and the suggestion made that Hadiq was reluctant to attack the marshmen because by their help he had come to his inheritance. He rose, very pale, but suddenly looking remarkably like his father.

  “Hear me,” squeaked bin Zair. “Umburak speaks well. Fuad speaks impertinent folly. You cannot fight the marshmen at once. Thought must be taken. Preparations must be made. Therefore there is time to make further enquiries. Let a man go into the marshes to seek out Gaur and this woman, and bring them here.”

  “He will be speared before he has paddled a mile,” said Umburak. “It is their custom.”

  “Let him go under the hand of Na’ar,” said bin Zair (who like all Arabs was quite unable to pronounce the !) “They will not harm him then.”

  “Who will go?” said someone.

  “Let Lord Morris go,” said bin Zair.

  “No! For God’s sake!” said Morris.

  “He speaks their language and knows some of their customs,” said bin Zair, as though Morris had not spoken.

  “But . . . but. . .” said Morris.

  Bin Zair rose and with a tiny jerk of his head indicated that he wanted to talk to Morris in private. They moved off together until they could whisper in the corner below the frilly gallery where the women sat for the feasts.

  “It is well that you are reluctant,” said bin Zair. “Thus they cannot say that you are running away to your friends.”

  “Running away?”

  “I know Arabs, Lord Morris. They have come here to fight, and now they must wait. In two days, three days, they will look for other sport. They will remember the words of Kadhil, that it was you who planned the murders . . .”

  “Why on earth should I?”

  “The oil, Lord, the oil. The smell of it makes Arabs mad, and so they believe it must make other men.”

  “I see.”

  “You will be safe in the marshes.”

  “But what about the zoo? Those two damned slaves have disappeared. What about . . .”

  “Oh, that happens always. Slaves hide at the death of their lord. He was killed in the zoo, so the zoo slaves hide, lest they be tortured. I will find you fresh slaves, and by my beard I will see that they do their work. You will go?”

  “Oh, hell!”

  “Lord, if you do not go, I cannot answer for your life.”

  “Oh, I suppose so.”

  “Good. I will suggest to His Majesty that you are appointed Minister for Native Affairs. Thus you will have authority.”

  That’s great, thought Morris, turning sweaty with fear back towards the sinisterly silent ring of Arabs. Absolutely great. If only Mum could know. My son, the Minister for Native Affairs. Great.

  2

  A conscript into the noble army of martyrs has trouble deciding what to pack. Morris was not exactly a hypochondriac, in that he was seldom ill and when he was took as little medicine as possible; this was not heartiness, but a perpetual vague fear that some really ugly ailment was waiting to get him, and that if he was lavish with drugs for minor ills they would have lost their potency when the big bug pounced. So even in England he kept a well-stocked medicine-cupboard, and had come to Q’Kut with half a chemist’s shop; and that had been supplemented by such things as antibiotics for sick bears and eye-lotions for panthers. He had plenty to choose from against the swarming horrors of the marsh.

  Dinah flounced round, thrilled with sensed excitement. He had given himself various excuses for deciding to take her along—there was no one to look after her in the palace; he couldn’t leave her unguarded in the chimpanzee grove without risking traumatic troubles that might undo weeks of work; she might amuse or impress the marshmen—but he really knew he was taking her for company. He was afraid to go alone. She was his teddy-bear, to share with him the witch-riddled dark. The malaria season was not yet at its height, but he had been giving them both Paludrine since the floods began to recede. He packed her sedatives, so that if she became a real nuisance he could take the bounce out of her, but he thought the heat of the marshes would do that anyway.

  When he had packed the medicines, clothes, mosquito net, compass, torch, rag books, fruit, favourite toys and so on there was still a couple of hours before it would be tolerably cool. He hoped to find a guide in the early dusk when, acco
rding to Kwan, there was always a lot of movement in the marshes as the buffalo were brought back to the villages. Meanwhile, to distract Dinah from her physical fidgets and him from his mental ones, he got out the plastic counters. Almost the first that spilled out into the lid of the wallet was the black square with the gold hand.

  He picked it up, stared at it and put it to one side. But Dinah leaned over and with a long arm snatched it back. She too stared at it for a while, panted a little and then prodded her fingers together. It was always exciting when she actually showed she wished to communicate, rather than merely demonstrating like a star pupil that she was able to, so Morris picked out the purple circle with the hole in the centre. Unhesitatingly she placed it to the right of the other:

  black square with gold hand: Sultan

  purple circle with hole hurt/be hurt

  Morris snapped his fingers encouragingly, made a quick note and then fished out more tokens. He already had quite a bit of evidence about Dinah’s memory processes, but this mostly concerned matters which she had learnt by repetition. There was not much about single events that had made enough impression to stay firm in her mind. She had evidently been impressed by the death of the Sultan; it would be interesting to see whether this—a purely external event though involving a major figure in Dinah’s own mythology—could be linked in any way with her attack on Sparrow, Sparrow’s retaliation, or Sparrow’s death—things, one would have thought, much more deeply impressive to her mind. Morris picked out five more nouns, spread them on one side of the table, added the Sultan’s own symbol and left the single verb lying where it was. Dinah hesitated, picked up her own square and studied the remaining symbols for anything that might mean eat or food. If she had been human she would have shrugged her shoulders to acknowledge the expected disappointment; her own way of doing this was a little grunt and a hunching of her back before she returned to making a sentence that involved the single verb “hurt”.

  She brought the Sultan’s token back to the centre of the table and formed the same sentence as before, but she seemed dissatisfied with it and without any encouragement from Morris returned to the remaining nouns. She almost did what he expected first go; her fingers hesitated over the yellow square “nameless object” which in this case would surely have been the dart, and then they hovered over the black square which might have meant Sparrow. But when she returned to sniff at the two symbols already chosen she seemed to make up her mind:

  black square: person other than Dinah, Morris, or Sultan

  purple circle with hole: hurt

  black square with gold hand: Sultan

  She chattered at Morris, and looked with her brown, round eyes into his face, seeking what? Confirmation? Approval of her cleverness? Morris astonished her by rewarding her with a whole bunch of grapes, and while she ate them in her nest he sat quite still, pulling his lip and thinking.

  A chimpanzee can communicate. A chimpanzee can be mistaken as to the facts it communicates. Can a chimpanzee lie? With the surface of his mind Morris began to sketch out a possible series of experiments to investigate this problem, but the work did not satisfy his deeper mind, which in fits and starts insisted on rearranging the events of the last few days into a different pattern. He had already been naturally nervous about the journey into the marshes. Now he was very frightened indeed.

  3

  Morris and Hadiq stood by the boat-sheds under two brollies and looked at the grey reaches of water and the brown stands of reed. The retreating flood had left a long band of mud along the shore where, hidden in slimy burrows, the lungfish were beginning to croak their painful evening dirge; no scientist, as far as Morris knew, had ever investigated this particular species; he himself believed that the noise was no sort of chant or mating-song, but simply a by-product of the process of breathing; you could hear how it hurt.

  “God protect you, Morris,” said Hadiq in a worried voice.

  “I’ll be OK, I expect,” said Morris in English.

  With a sigh he put Dinah on the ground. He had rubbed her all over with insect-repellant—a process she took for an exotic form of grooming and adored—so that she now had the tousled appearance of a dog after a bath. He too reeked of citrus.

  “What must I do, Morris?” said Hadiq suddenly.

  “Do? Do?” Morris felt impatient of any idea of action. There were enough activists already in Q’Kut. But with another sigh he took the brolly from the hand of the reluctant brolly-slave and walked with Hadiq along the shore. Dinah stayed where she was in the shade of the other brolly.

  “Do as little as you can,” he said. “Protect yourself. Talk with the Shaikhah, your mother. Take your father’s guns and give them to the eunuchs from the marsh.”

  “Why do you say this? Is my mother in danger?”

  “Long ago your father and I were friends at Oxford. He left suddenly to return here, and for many years we did not meet, though we sent each other letters. Then he came to London and sent for me, and we dined together and he drank a lot of wine.

  “So have many good men.”

  “He had a strong head, but that night his tongue ran away. He told me why he had left Oxford. Being the son of the then Shaikhah, he was also your grandfather’s heir, but your grandmother had borne three daughters before him, so there were two sons older than him, by other wives. These two sons poisoned your grandfather, but then quarrelled as to who should rule; there were several factions among the Arabs, but the marshmen knew who was the true Sultan; when your father returned Kwan and Dyal armed the eunuchs, and with their help your father captured both brothers. He told me they took a long time to drown. Now many of these people . . .” Morris nodded towards the tents of the Arabs “. . . remember that your father became Sultan over the bodies of your uncles.”

  “So I am an Arab but I must not trust the Arabs. I must trust the marshmen, though a marshman killed my father—or so they say.”

  “I believe they say wrong. Anyway, my advice is that you arm the eunuchs, trust no one else, and move as slowly as you are able. I shall be back with news in very few days. If you must take action, talk first with bin Zair.”

  They turned and walked slowly back towards the boat-sheds, to the ugly noise of the lungfish adapting themselves over thousands of generations to live in an altered world.

  Five

  1

  IT WAS STRANGE how the reed-beds rustled. There was no wind, and the feathery plumes at the top of the stems stayed still against the hazy sky, as though they were posing for a woodcut. But down at water-level the fibrous leaves stirred and hissed. Morris had done a little canoeing in Europe in a featherweight modern derivative of the kayak, propelled by a double-ended paddle. The craft he was now learning to control was twice the size and ten times the weight, a marshman’s canoe made of reeds, several layers thick, tarred, and shaped into graceful upward curves at prow and stern. He had to kneel to paddle, driving the blade upright along by the fat thwart; the whole boat was slightly curved in plan, so that gliding through the water it naturally moved in a slow arc to the right; this was counteracted by the tendency of the paddle-stroke to push the prow to the left—a cunning arrangement, the result of centuries of sophistication of design, but awkward for a beginner. The kneeling position was also peculiarly tiring for the hams.

  Morris tired quickly. He had been concerned to drive the canoe as fast as possible into the cover of the reed-beds, because it now seemed to him possible that one of the factions of Arabs might wish his mission to fail, and try to achieve this by setting a marksman somewhere along the shore to pick him off; the awkward sploshings of his paddle and his own panting and cursing had been the loudest sounds in the marsh. He rested and these noises and the thud of his heart slowly quietened enough for him to hear only the plop of drops from the end of his paddle lying across the thwarts. Dinah, destroyed with heat, slept in the centre of
the boat by the provisions.

  When he started paddling again he found that the knack of boat-control had suddenly come to him; it was now that he first noticed the rustling. It sounded as though some large, lithe thing—not a pig, not a man, but perhaps a snake or crocodile—was moving parallel to his course through the reeds, but peer as he might he could see nothing. The channel he was in branched, unsignposted. He took the wider branch. There was nothing to show that he was not paddling into a blind alley, an inextricable mudbank, an ambush. But the ambush had been sprung before his coming.

  Rounding the next bend he came at once on a corpse. It lay face up among the reeds, naked, the corpse of a portly brown man, almost submerged but buoyed by the reed-roots. As Morris drew alongside two columns of flies rose into humming clouds above the two wounds, one a sharp gash in the throat and the other where the genitals had been hacked off. Morris rested his paddle to look and wonder but the curve of the keel began to swing him in to the reeds, so he dug the blade in and paddled on. There was nothing he could do. The body was that of his own zoo-slave, Maj. He was glad Dinah hadn’t seen it.

  He felt very sick and cold, though the swamp heat hung round him like butter-muslin. From time to time he glanced up at the little beehive-shaped box that swayed from the end of a bamboo pole stuck through two special rings set in the upcurving prow. The box was made of woven reeds, covered with red clay, patterned with cheap blue glass beads and polished. In one or two places the clay had cracked away. It seemed a very dubious protection.

  Even so, the next time Morris rested he cupped his hands round his mouth and called.