Once there had been two races in Q’Kut, in that lost Saturnian age when the dunes had been green. Neither race had been Arab. There had been a big-boned, dominant people, and a race of scrawny near-slaves. Then the Arabs had come, and the big people had fought them, and the last of these, the hero Na!ar, had died fighting. Then those first Arabs, seeing the impregnability of the marshes, had reached a status quo with the little people by adapting their relationship with the extinct big men. There was no guessing quite how much had been changed, but the way it worked now was this: in each generation wives were sent from the palace to the marshes; these wives were the Sultan’s but were “lent” by him to his bodyguard—an arrangement which would have seemed shocking to most Arabs, and so was not widely known, though Morris felt he ought to have guessed that his fastidious friend would not have found it easy to beget children on women who reeked of rancid milk; after a while the children of these wives went back to the marshes, where the sons became the ninth clan; the largest and strongest was then chosen to be bodyguard to the next Sultan, and thus the system bred for continuing size; the prohibition on marriages in the ninth clan kept the genetic lines reasonably clear, though Morris didn’t like to think what happened to such babies as were born . . .
So Dyal had been Gaur’s father, and Kwan Dyal’s—their real fathers, that is; but in their own eyes the fathers to whom they owed their duty as sons had been the Sultans, and when Dyal had called the Sultan “my brother” he had not been using a figure of speech. Among Arabs sons have murdered fathers and brothers brothers through all their blood-veined history, but Morris could not remember a single reference in any of the marsh-people’s songs to parricide, and fratricide was governed by the Rules of Cricket, as described by Qab.
Morris was wondering whether Hadiq had known this (and hence insisted so strongly that neither Gaur nor Dyal had killed his father) when his two wives came trailing up from the shore, with Peggy carrying a bowl of buffalo-milk in one hand and Dinah wearing the blue-bead belt over her left eye, like a tipsy coronet. Several happy children followed them, shrieking ruderies.
Night fell. The function of the filthy fires became apparent, as their smoke drifted through the tunnel-shaped huts and cleared the malarial mosquitoes away. Morris showed Peggy how to make a nest of reeds for Dinah; then he dressed the sore on her shoulder again.
“That will soon be well, Pegling,” he said.
“My lord, do not call me little-names. I am a woman. I wear a blue belt. My mother’s sister put it on me.”
He sighed. He was exhausted with last night’s efforts and to-day’s drama. She too was swaying and red-eyed, in the yellow flicker of the reed rushlight that burnt in the corner of the hut.
“Among thy clans thou art a woman,” he said. “Among mine thou art a child.”
“I will never be a woman,” she whined. “I will never smear myself with sour milk. In three days they will take us to Gal-Gal, and they will spear thee for a witch, and drown thy wives.”
Morris was too tired to feel the shock just then.
“Perhaps I am not a witch,” he said. “Or perhaps it is a good life in the other world. Where wilt thou sleep? Shall I make thee a nest like Dinah’s?”
She smiled, somehow, and without a word went to Dinah’s nest and crawled in beside her. Dinah adjusted her limbs without waking. By the time Morris had constructed a tent of mosquito netting over the pair of them they were fast asleep, fast entangled.
He sat down and wrote a careful note to Anne, most of which was taken up with an explanation for someone who couldn’t read phonetics of how to pronounce in the language of the marsh the formal summons “Thy blood-brother calls thee to Gal-Gal.”
Six
1
MORRIS WAS NOT at all prepared for Gal-Gal, when the fleet came to it in the middle of the third morning. It was a holy place, mentioned in many songs, often with modifiers which meant “of a dark, reddish hue” and “stony”, so he had envisaged it as another great mound among the reed-beds, like a blob of Devonshire, red clay and small stones.
Gal-Gal came out of the mists almost between stroke and stroke of the paddles, looming like a fortress. It was one vast slab of red rock, striated from end to end, and terraced over the ages by the rub of the river. Some movement of the continents had tilted it so that the layers ran five degrees from the horizontal and its flat top sloped up to a sort of prow about sixty feet above the water. The clefts and ledges along its side were fuzzy with stunted growths, mostly a strange succulent shrub whose branches projected at gawky angles, carrying little fat blue-green leaves and hanging bunches of wizened brown berries. There was a slow current here which kept a wide reach clear of reed and mimulus; down this the fleet swept.
Morris was being towed. Nobody would come in the canoe with him and Dinah, except Peggy, and he wasn’t given a paddle. He had been passed from village to village all the previous day, some of them on mounds like Alaurgan-Alaurgad, others consisting of huts built on rafts of reeds which were added to as they sank or as the floods rose. At each village most of his escort had returned home and only a few token warriors and elders continued with him. At the last one they had picked up a number of women and small girls.
“Perhaps you will find a friend,” he had said to Peggy, as he had watched a group of these scramble shrilling into a large canoe.
“Lord, they are of the duck clan,” she had answered with surprise and something like disgust.
The suppuration of her sore had gone and the skin was creeping across it. He had spent much of his time telling her European stories, Snow White and Oedipus and Beauty and the Beast; in exchange she had sung him, reluctantly at first, some of the women’s songs, which men are not supposed to hear. The words were slightly different from man-talk and the songs disappointing, very repetitive and often meaningless, but with haunting, wailing melodies. Her small voice went unnoticed in the general clamour of the fleet’s progress. At the moment Morris was being towed by two canoes of the heron clan, who had some sort of ancient antipathy to the men of the water-snake clan which was expressed in a ritual of jeering, a series of grotesque similes wherein the herons taunted the water-snakes for their big stomachs and the water-snakes taunted the herons for their small penises. Kwan had once said something about one of these clans always taking its wives from the other, but Morris couldn’t remember the details. The men of the two clans took the ritual seriously, snarling at each insult and putting real venom into their replies, but the other clans shouted with laughter. They seemed to be in no particular awe of Gal-Gal, for the racket continued as they jostled for landing places and began to swarm like baboons up the red rock.
Morris waited till his canoe was safely moored, then he settled Dinah, prostrate with heat, on to his left hip and with his right hand picked the pole out of its rings. The raw new box swung above his head with the ancient bones inside it.
“Bring food,” he said to Peggy.
“Lord, no food is eaten on Gal-Gal.”
“Bring water then,” he said crossly, “or I shall die thirsting.”
He stepped ashore and watched as she filled the water-bottles from the river and dropped a couple of Campden tablets in each. He had not told her what the tablets were for, nor had he told her a magical fable about them. He had simply forbidden her to give him water without them or to drink it herself. She was an obedient little doll.
Ages ago someone had cut good steps up the side of Gal-Gal. A worn flight of them rose to the left of the landing-place but ended in vacancy where a section of rock had fallen sheer away. The marshmen ignored them and scrambled up anyhow; there seemed to be several easiest-ways-up, such as boys find in a good climbing-tree. Morris, burdened with Dinah and the pole, chose to follow a crude sort of litter on which lay a man so deformed and bloated that he seemed like a piece of abstract soft sculpture. Three wives and a son carried t
his litter, going a long way round to find the most convenient path from terrace to terrace. At one such point they caught up with an old woman one side of whose body was completely withered, so that leg and arm were like dead branches. As she scrabbled to haul herself up a three-foot step the young male litter-carrier reached out with his foot and kicked her to one side, so that she fell clumsily and lay twitching. Without looking at her the four of them hoisted the litter over the obstacle and scrambled on. Mysteriously, it was at that moment that Morris’s tolerance of the marsh-people broke.
He didn’t do anything visible. He simply changed his mind. No doubt ever since he had found Maj’s body he had been building up to this decision, but now, as he helped the beldame to her foot (taking care only to touch sound flesh in case the withering was infectious) he found himself saying the hell with them. The Arabs have got them right. A conceivable alternative future for mankind, phooey. They are a dead end, a waste product, excrement. The language is an accident, and might still turn out to be a tool of minor importance for psycholinguistic research, but what was its point beyond that? Perhaps it wasn’t even as astonishing as Morris thought it—cold natures tend to find weird outlets for their romantic drives.
The old woman stared at him for a moment with dark, unreadable eyes, but said nothing. He picked Dinah up and using the pole as an alpenstock climbed on. The heat off the rock struck back with a steady, dull intensity. Sweat streamed all down him. His gasps seemed to fetch in nothing breathable and his heart slammed erratically. He reached the top on the verge of heat-stroke and stood there, gulping and blinking.
Slowly the red blur left his vision and the thudding blood became quiet; he took a water flask from Peggy and poured some over his neck and chest, then he told her to spread a mat on a bare patch of rock and lowered Dinah on to it. There was no shade, but the noon haze veiled the sun. One was steamed, not roasted.
“What happens now?” he said.
“I do not know, my lord. Only the women of the duck clan come to Gal-Gal. The men of the other clans do not speak about it.”
He looked at her with strange exasperation. She was one of them too, or would be, one day, if she survived today—a cheerful drowner of strangers, a passer-on of repellent diseases and obscene cruelties. On the other hand Dinah liked her.
“Rest.” He said. “Drink if you are thirsty.”
Of course he should have tried to escape with her. They might have been safe, sneaking away through the witch-protected dark. She might have known the way. But he had become obsessed with his mission, and the need to talk to Gaur, even on Gal-Gal.
In fact nothing much happened for a long time, except that more and more people arrived. The top of the rock was not a clean slope as it had seemed from the water; it was more like a slightly cupped hand, lowest at the wrist and rising to the fingertips; about in the centre of where the heart-line would have run was a large, rectangular slab of a different sort of stone, and below this lay a natural arena, forty feet across, where nobody walked. Morris watched the new arrivals, many of them crippled or deformed, but all wearing rather more beads and ornaments than had seemed normal on Alaurgan-Alaurgad. Several men wore, not as covering but as decoration, strips of cloth which he recognised by the pattern as being upholstery from the crashed plane; many wore waist-belts from which dangled dark little rubbery blobs which seemed to have no aesthetic value at all, but only when a young man strutted by wearing a belt of magnetic tape from which hung two similar objects, but paler and not yet fully shrunk, did Morris realise that he was looking at the genitals of defeated enemies. This young man had killed Arabs not long ago. Maj. Jillad? Where had he got the tape?
Morris was distracted from this problem by the arrival of the other hand of Nillum, carried up with no ceremony at all by a middle-aged man with a grossly distended stomach, who waddled over with it to a group of warriors, leaned on the pole and stood chatting like a farmer at a cattle-market. Everybody was behaving like that—like, in fact, guests at the reception after a large wedding, greeting and gossiping in noisy groups. Nobody looked at Morris at all, and after a while he left his wives in each other’s care and started to wander about.
The stone object turned out to be man-made, a thing like a giant’s coffin, lidded with three enormous shaped blocks of grey sandstone. Along its sides ran a series of blobs and lumps that might once have been a bas relief but were now uninterpretable with age. Morris was not surprised. There had been the broken steps below, and out in the desert there were stone-lined wells of great depth, an achievement beyond any known technology of the Arabs who had lived there in historical times. It was curious to realise that even the primeval-seeming marshmen had been preceded by a different people, but in itself the stone thing was like so many other stone things, apparently interesting but really boring.
A faint wind stirred, creating the illusion of coolness. Something seemed to be happening up at the far end of the platform, though nobody near Morris paid any attention to it. Lethargically, almost like a tourist at a village festival, he strolled towards it.
Close to the cliffs at the highest point of the rock a group of women sat on the ground with a number of gourd bowls between them. Two other women and a girl no older than Peggy knelt in the middle of the circle being made up for the ceremony. The pots contained pigments, a greyish white, a muddy orange, indigo and olive. The bodies had been painted white all over and white paint had been rubbed into the hair which had then been teased out into spikes. By the time Morris arrived the white had dried on the first woman and she was now being painted with herringbone stripes of the other colours; the pattern ignored natural contours, marching over breast and buttock like a Roman road. The old woman with the withered arm and leg sat just outside the circle, swaying like a drunk and singing in a monotonous wheeze, words which Morris didn’t know, though the inflections and modifications were of the same type as in marsh speech—he imagined this was a secret language, used only for magical chants. The whole process seemed dingy and banal. The painting was crude and the result ugly but not frightening—scarcely even striking.
His attention, such as it was, was distracted by a group of men coming up to the circle with a curious tangle of wickerwork and plaited reed ropes. Roughly they picked the old woman, still chanting, off the ground and carried her to the edge of the cliff; for a moment he thought they were about to throw her over, but they lashed her into the wickerwork, settled a bowl in her lap and lowered her over the edge with the ropes. She seemed to be in a sort of trance all the while, and her dreary chant came faintly up to Morris’s ears from below. Crane as he might he couldn’t see what she was at down there, though the men moved the ropes along about twenty feet of cliff. He gave up and looked out across the marshes.
Far down the reach of the main river a long canoe nosed out of the reeds, paddled by at least six men. They seemed to have a white passenger, but it was too far off to be sure before the canoe’s prow swung towards Gal-Gal and the foremost oarsmen hid the rest.
When the old woman was hauled back the pot in her lap was half full of little orange berries. The men carried her back to the circle of women, one of whom took the pot and another washed the old woman’s good hand in what appeared to be urine. A small girl appeared carrying a wicker basket out of which she took a bedraggled brown duck. It was a pitiful thing. The girl held it under one arm and with her free hand forced its head back and its beak open. A woman used two bits of reed like chopsticks to drop one of the berries down its throat then poured a little water on top. The girl put the duck down in the middle of the circle, where it stood in a dazed fashion, flapping one wing with feeble strokes. The other wing had been broken. The women who were doing the make-up stopped their task to watch. The old woman came out of her trance and fell silent. The babble of men’s voices surged on in the background, but here was a little island of stillness, in the middle of which the duck fell dead. Morris alm
ost believed he could hear a slight thump as it hit the rock. Suddenly all the women looked at him for the first time. He hadn’t thought they’d noticed his presence, but now they stared at him with a single, black, inquisitive glance. The little girl who was being painted laughed aloud.
At first Morris thought that the trial was over, that he had been found guilty, that the other preparations were all for some ritual to do with his slow death. He swallowed dryness, became dizzy and managed to sit down without actually falling. The dizziness left him but the fear remained, mingled with growing disappointment and resentfulness. If one was to be speared, or poisoned, or drowned inchmeal, one was at least entitled to expect that the moment of decision should be less hugger-mugger. One didn’t wish to seem egotistical, but one would appreciate it if the smelly little savages who had brought one to this place to die would stop gossiping about buffaloes for a few seconds and turn round and watch one’s fate. And surely they could have spared a less seedy duck to die with one.
Slowly he realised that he had misread the incident, and that the women had only been checking the quality of the poison berries. He stood up and saw that somebody else was watching him, a group of five young men, black and naked, the shortest of them almost twice as tall as the average marshman. The family likeness in three of them was so strong that he couldn’t decide which was Gaur, and when he waved a friendly hand they all five turned away.
The Poison Oracle Page 16
