The Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

  “People, I come from the heir of Nillum under the hand of Na!ar. By the Bond I call you. Send me a guide.”

  He was so nervous of the silence and strangeness that his cry was a croak. He told himself he was a fool and shouted again, loud enough this time to wake Dinah, who whimpered feebly at him then curled up in the bottom of the boat as though it were her own nest. Nothing else happened. Next time he paddled on he discovered the cause of the sinister rustling—he was doing it himself. The slight ripple of his wake was enough to disturb the limp lower leaves without making the stiff spears quiver at all. Reason is king, he thought. To connect cause with effect is to drive out fear. But then the realisation that that was not a sentence you could translate into marsh-language—not even an idea you could express—brought fear seeping back.

  He stopped and called for a guide several more times. Dinah became livelier as the air cooled, but her natural sense of balance kept the boat trimmed as she moved about. Once, in what seemed to Morris perfect stillness, she snorted angrily at a stand of reeds and something there began to move—a solid, animate body. Without waiting to see whether it was man or boar Morris paddled rapidly on. Night came fast, between one rest and the next. The dews condensed, and the half moon that had begun as an aureoled haze changed to a hard-edged object. Dinah lay in the bows and watched its reflection gliding through the water.

  Moonlight is deceptive. Daylight, even the drear haze that imbrued the marshes all day, came from all directions and gives things distance and dimension; but moonlight comes from one place only. Things exist or not, as it strikes them. The silvery reed-plumes existed but were useless; a glistening patch of clear water existed, but was passed in ten strokes; everything else was black and indecipherable; there was no variation in its blackness either—any bit of it might be a buffalo, or a mudbank, or mere shadow. The only sure way of making progress was to drive towards whatever glistened.

  Following this principle Morris finally stuck. The channel he was in opened quite suddenly into a sort of lake, almost a hundred yards across and twice that from end to end. The sensible thing would have been to work round the edge, looking for another exit, but in sheer relief from the claustrophobia of the reed-channels he started to paddle straight across it. After about twenty strokes he ran into a mild resistance, and without thinking paddled more strongly to get through it. In another twenty strokes be was stuck. Dipping his hand overboard he found that just below the glistening surface of the water lay a great mesh of weed. Paddling didn’t seem to move him an inch, backward or forward, so he shrugged in the dark, then clicked to Dinah who came humping aft for supper. Into her last banana he prodded a sleeping-pill which she swallowed without noticing. Then he groomed her for a while until she dropped contentedly asleep.

  He called once more to the unanswering dark, carefully unrolled the mosquito net down the length of the boat and finally slid under it. He lay on his back looking up through the mesh at the stars and thought of Maj, lying in almost the same position, dead and mutilated. The bloody fool, he thought. Or perhaps they hadn’t told him about the marshmen.

  2

  A drip woke him. The dew had condensed on the net in tiny beads, which had slowly joined to each other and runnelled down folds until a minute reservoir had collected and forced a thin, chill stream into his left ear. He woke, and was wide awake at once, knowing where he was and why. With a slow movement he edged away from the drip, then raised both hands above his head to roll back the netting. The droplets had made it opaque, but when he exposed the first clear pearly triangle by the sternpost he knew that it was dawn and would soon be sunrise.

  He rolled a little more, then lay still. Something was moving on the water, and a faint, strange muttering filled the air. Deciding that he could not lie there indefinitely he rolled the net back as far as his knees and sat up, very gingerly and ready to duck.

  The moment his head appeared above the thwart the muttering became a clamour of voices. Deliberately he re-enacted the role of a man waking from deep sleep; he yawned, stretched, rubbed his eyes and looked around. In front of him lay the lake, lightly disturbed by glistening sleek shapes, one of which shifted and became a buffalo, hook-horned and bearded with the weed it was eating. A whole raft of this weed lay between him and the animals. He was, in fact, stuck about twenty feet into the raft and in the clear water behind him lay a ring of boats, each of which held two naked black men—one kneeling with the paddle in the stern and the other standing amidships with his spear-thrower poised. As he turned to them the gabble stilled. He looked and saw the tense, poised bodies, so practised in their art that the boats did not rock a millimetre; he saw the glistening black stuff on the little flint spear-heads; he knew how Maj had died.

  “I come under the hand of Na!ar,” he said. “Do you greet me with spears?”

  The nearest warrior hesitated, then lowered his spear-thrower. He took the spear carefully out of it and slid a little sheath over the poisoned tip. The others were starting to do the same when their stances changed, and their faces also. Morris felt his own boat rock wildly. He looked over his shoulder and saw that Dinah, woken by his voice, was struggling to free herself from the mosquito netting. He clicked his fingers loudly, then rolled his end of the net rapidly towards the threshing figure; she must have seen his knees for she dropped flat and allowed him to drag the rest of the net clear before rising, panting with fear, and rushing into his arms.

  When Morris, holding her, turned carefully to renew negotiations with his rescuers they were gone. Only the reeds swayed.

  “People,” he called, “I come from the heir of Nillum. I am a good-comer. Do not fear me.”

  He would have liked to add that they mustn’t be afraid of Dinah, either, but the language had the wrong mesh to trap that thought; fear is a relationship between A and B, to be expressed by a full root then extended by syllables nominating the poles of the relationship, the whole then modified by various consonantal transfers to the placatory imperative; but the language, for all its richness, contained no word for chimpanzee, nor for any of the more general terms all the way up to “animal”; the only nominal extenders carrying the thought of “unknown living creature” were always applied to the horrors of the moon-world; while to incorporate Dinah’s name in the phrase would have turned it into a piece of formal boasting, used normally as a step in the ritual of declaring a blood-feud. Morris swallowed twice, watching the motionless reeds, thinking feverishly of relationships which would not land him in claiming anything that a marshman would think impossible.

  “We come under the hand of Na!ar,” he called at last. “My woman is also a good-comer.”

  Well, Dinah, he thought. Now we’re married. Don’t worry—I’ll divorce you as soon as we’re out of this bloody marsh.”

  He gave her a couple of oranges to seal the bargain.

  Suddenly the reeds rattled again and a single canoe slid out; in its centre, as before, stood a man with his spear-thrower poised. Before Morris could cry out the arm shot over, and the dart was standing stiff in the thwart, a foot from his right hand. It took him time to see that a cord trailed from it across the weeds.

  He called his thanks and fastened the cord, which appeared to be made of human hair, round the upcurving stern. The man shouted and hauled. His canoe was anchored to something in the reeds so that, with Morris using his paddle to thrust the weeds down where they gathered in skeins under the stern-post, the trapped boat was gradually drawn clear. More canoes slid from the reeds, but still nobody answered any of Morris’s remarks; only when the little fleet began towing him down the channel did they utter a sound; a man in one of the leading boats started a paddle-chant, which was a rhythmic list of the virtues of a certain she-buffalo interwoven with a punning counterpoint about the vices of the singer’s mother-in-law. The song ran from boat to boat, each man answering the next with a fresh line; some lines seemed to be new
, for they raised laughter and catcalls, but when Morris looked about him for the minimal comfort of cheerful faces he saw that every man in the fleet kept his head turned well away from him.

  They came, quite soon, to a low mound rising out of the water. Nothing grew on it, but its whole surface was covered with a random pattern of cattle-pens and tunnel-shaped reed huts. As soon as Morris’s keel grounded he started to rise, but sat heavily back as a dozen men seized the rope and hauled the canoe well clear of the water. Even so when he stepped on to the land he found he was ankle-deep in slime. He picked Dinah up, and with his free hand lifted the pole from the rings, so that he could carry the hand of Na!ar above him, like a chinese lantern, still shedding its mysterious protection around him. The men formed into two straggly groups on either side of him and together they all walked up the hill, moving in such a fashion that Morris walked in nobody’s footsteps and nobody in his.

  The hut at the very top of the mound was larger than the others, though not so much that Morris could have stood upright in it. Before its opening two mats had been unrolled and on one of these sat a man, grey headed and wizened and as black as a prune. He was tiny for the most part, with limbs like sticks and hands that were almost transparent; the exception was his left leg which was so swollen with the activities of some parasitic worm that the flesh had completely enveloped the foot and the whole limb looked like a black plastic bag filled with jelly.

  Morris walked past him, between the mats, and slid the pole into the spear-rings by the hut entrance, then returned and sat on the other mat with Dinah on his lap. He groomed her carefully, to keep her placid. It was difficult quite to judge how far to conform to what he knew of the customs of the marsh; he did not want to offend anyone, but nor did he wish them to think of him as subject to those customs. At any rate he must keep silence until the old man spoke.

  He watched two small boys further down the slope training a buffalo calf; one of them skipped backwards in front of it, dancing and calling its name and clicking his fingers; the other walked behind it with a bamboo pole and when the calf tried to veer away from the dancing boy he clipped it sharply on the side of its head to straighten it up; thus, when the calf was grown the boy or his father would be able to call it to the milking floor by dancing, singing and clicking his fingers in front of it. Kwan had told Morris about this, but it was not the same thing as seeing it happen.

  Canoes slid out across the water; most of the men were returning to the buffalo pastures. Because of the haze Morris could not see the lake where he had been trapped; still less could he see the palace perched on its hill, though he believed he was looking in the right direction. The world was a mile wide, walled with the warm steam. Two women came up from the boats carrying his belongings and set them at the edge of his mat without a word. Five minutes later a girl brought a bowl of buffalo milk up the hill; she looked about twelve years old, but either she was pregnant or disease had shaped her like that. These three women sat down a little out of earshot; a fourth arrived from behind the hut with a bundle of reed; they settled down to split the canes and pound them with two flat stones.

  Suddenly the old man picked up the bowl of milk and drank three big gulps, then passed it to Morris, who managed to do the same, despite its harshly acid flavour. Dinah reached up a long arm and put a finger in the bowl and then into her mouth. She spat. The old man’s face changed, but not interpretably.

  “Of what clan is this stranger,” he said.

  “My clan is Brit. My woman’s clan is Tchim. My outer name is Wesley Naboth Morris. For speaking it is Morch. My woman speaks no words. No words are spoken to her.”

  “Wah!”

  “What is this place?”

  “It is Alaurgan-Alaurgad. The chief elder of it is one Qab, of the water-snake clan, who sits on this mat.”

  “May Qab enjoy many clean wives.”

  Qab waved a deprecatory hand to where the squalid quartet of women worked at their task in the moist dust. Morris thought he had made a good start; Alaurgan-Alaurgad was not mentioned in many of the songs, but it had an important role in the Testament of Na!ar, for it was on this dull mound that the hero, pricking his own spear-hand to let the blood fall on this soil, had sworn his oath that he would not drink milk again until he had killed Nillum ibn Nillum. Now that hand had come back; it hung above the hut of the chief elder. Morris thought it a good omen, but he wished that the people of Alaurgan-Alaurgad seemed less remote.

  Dinah became restless, so Morris let go of her; there was no point in putting her on her leash, as soon she would become prostrate with the increasing heat of the morning; meanwhile it would do her no harm to rove around a bit. There did not seem to be much mischief she could do on Alaurgan-Alaurgad. She scampered round the space in front of the hut, noticed Qab’s wives and bustled over to see what they were doing. They rose, flustered, with little shrieks of alarm. She picked up one of the stones and banged it on the other in the way she had seen them doing, then tried to copy their activities with the reeds but made a mess of it; so she scattered their work around in frustration and came back to Morris. Her eye was caught by the pattern on the mat; she settled down and started to tease at it with her forefinger. The women picked up their reeds and moved to a new place; one of them went and fetched two fresh stones. They left the ones Dinah had touched lying where they were.

  “It is not a woman,” said Qab suddenly. “It is a moon-world creature. The women know it.”

  Women, of course, were the experts in the detection of witches.

  “You speak some truth,” said Morris. “Dinah is not a woman. She is not a moon-world creature. She is, as it were, the cousin’s cousin of a dog.”

  “It is not a dog,” said Qab, examining Dinah critically. At that moment she became bored with the mat and noticed the hamper of fruit lying beside it. She was at the fastenings in a flash, and Morris had to hold the lid shut to prevent her rifling it. Furiously she flung herself in a circle round the mats, rushed over to frighten Qab’s wives, came back to see whether that had had any effect and at last jumped chattering to the ridge of Qab’s hut, where she sat grimacing at the steaming landscape. Well, she’s out of mischief up there, thought Morris, and turned patiently to his host.

  “Qab,” he said. “You hear me speak the words of your people. Kwan of the ninth clan taught me these words. They are not the words of my people and perhaps my tongue will stumble. When I speak unacceptable words, do not think that it is my own soul speaking . . .”

  “You propose to tell me lies,” said Qab.

  “No, no.”

  “Speak then acceptable words. Do not tell me again that your creature is a dog. Morch, you came to our pastures in the night. You slept in the middle of Tek’s Lesser pond. We heard you calling in the dark. You rose unharmed in the dawn. The witches are your friends.”

  Despite the lack of cause-and-effect constructions in the language it was possible to put together a fairly damning case by producing a series of short, unconnected sentences, or single-word accretions, as Qab had done. Morris half-rose until he could reach the roll at the furthest end of his bundles; he opened it and spread it out until Qab could see the ultra-fine mesh of the mosquito net.

  “We slept beneath this cloth,” he said. “See how small are the holes. Not even the cleverest witch can pass through.”

  Qab fingered the net with his fleshless hands, fine as a lemur’s.

  “Wah!” he said. There was a longish pause before he restarted the conversation. Morris sat looking at him; this was not what he had expected, after the archaic nobility of Kwan, the civilised calm of Dyal, the raw dignity of Gaur. This little man carried none of that weight. He did not even seem cunning, let alone clever. In another context he might have been an old peasant sitting on his doorstep, being approached by a stranger with some slightly unorthodox request and simply thinking how to make money out o
f the visit.

  “Thou comest,” he said at last, “under that hand.”

  He used the same archaic second person that Gaur had once used.

  “True,” said Morris. “The descendant of Nillum sent me. He requires the aid of the people.”

  “Qab has heard that the Bond is broken.”

  “Morch has not heard that story.”

  “Qab has heard this: a warrior of the ninth clan lived in the hut of the descendant of Nillum. The descendant of Nillum slew him with a poisoned dart.”

  Curiously, this was the sort of conversation to which the language was well adapted. Qab had used a form implying that the Sultan was still alive.

  “A poisoned dart slew Dyal, of the ninth clan,” said Morris. “At the same hour a poisoned dart slew the descendant of Nillum.”

  “Who saw this fight?”

  “No man, perhaps. I heard shouts. They used not weapons but practice-darts.”

  (There was a word for these, as every male child was presented with a practice-dart and spear-thrower on being initiated into his first age-set.)

  “Qab,” said Morris, “a man hunting his enemy will smear his dart-tip with poison. Will he also smear the dart-tip of his enemy with poison?”

  “Riddles are for children and witches.”

  “I do not speak riddles. The place of the fight was the hut of Dinah and her family. A warrior stood at the door, guarding it. This warrior was Gaur, of the ninth clan. He was new come to the place, and did not know our . . . our tracks. He greatly feared the kin of Dinah. On certain days Dyal and the descendant of Nillum threw practice-darts at the kin of Dinah, for sport. Did Gaur smear the darts with poison, hoping to slay some of the kin of Dinah?”

  “No man of the sun-world knows the mind of another.”