The Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

  “Nearly thou art dead, Morch,” he shouted cheerfully and swung round to face the rush, his own spear raised. The crowd surged down towards them, but not in any kind of organised charge—far more like a mass of bellicose drinkers being thrown out of a pub on Saturday night, each man intent on his argument with his neighbour—but as far as Morris could see in the swaying light of the remaining torches none of the poisoned spear-heads were unsheathed.

  Dinah leaped to his arms. He hefted her round and snatched up Peggy with his free arm, thus leaving himself quite unable to ward off from the three of them any shaft or blow. Yelling, the marshmen flowed about him absorbed in their impenetrable quarrel, shouting ancient insults from clan to clan and from age-set to age-set while Dinah and Peggy sobbed with fear against his shoulders. It seemed to him that amid the human mess there were people actually trying to defend him, or at least to argue his case, while there were others attempting to get at him. The presence of his defenders was more useful than anything they actually did, because nobody could aim with any accuracy in the melee, and a weapon that missed him was certain to hit a marshman and start one of those complicated feuds that run from generation to generation and end in an epic when everybody is dead.

  So the battle raged in Homeric confusion around the bizarre standard of the hand of Na!ar. There seemed to be no conceivable resolution. But suddenly out of the dark came a sinister rescue.

  It began to his left, but he didn’t notice it until the quality of the shouting to that side changed, and by then the wedge of ninth-clan warriors had almost reached him; the new cries came from the men whom Gaur and his brothers were simply picking up and tossing to either side. A black hand reached out and grasped the elbow that held Dinah. He almost let go of Peggy as he was snatched out of the scrum, like a handbag from a bargain-counter, and carried bodily across the top of the rock, wives and all.

  They put him down at the cliff edge, and thankfully he lowered Dinah and Peggy, though he expected that he himself would be instantly tossed into the dark waters.

  “Flee,” said Gaur. “Friend of my brother, show my brothers thy boat. Go.”

  One of the huge men picked Peggy up. Another took Morris by the arm. They went down the rock face like falling stones. The boats bounced and wallowed as they jumped in, but before Morris had settled they were cutting out across the glistening water towards the single long canoe.

  “Wai,” wailed Peggy, “I am stolen. I am stolen.”

  “Yes, and I will roast thee for my supper,” said one of the big men. Another bellowed with laughter.

  Behind them Gal-Gal was tumult still, filling the night with screams of vengeance and shouts of triumph and, on a different register, what sounded like the hysterical laughter of the women of the duck clan. The canoe bumped alongside the larger boat.

  “Oh, Christ,” said Anne in a dismal voice. “I’ve been eaten alive by mosquitoes.”

  She didn’t sound as though she expected anyone to understand, and gasped when Morris answered.

  “I’ve got some Camoquin somewhere,” he said.

  Before they had finished transferring his stores Gaur and the last three warriors slid alongside.

  “Wah!” said one of them, “that was a brave duck!”

  For all their size they barely rocked the long canoe as they took their places. Someone gave an order that was no more than a grunt. The paddles dug in, all together. The grunt came again, marking the stroke, and again and again as they shot down the main reach, leaving clamorous Gal-Gal behind so rapidly that before Morris had recovered from his first shivering-fit of relaxing terror it had diminished from looming cliffs to a vague hull-like blackness beneath the moon, a stone ark, stranded in the floods with its cargo of the alternative future.

  “Where are we going, sons of Na!ar?” he whispered.

  “Gaur has an island,” said someone.

  “Protect us from the things of the moon-world, witch, until we get there,” said someone else.

  “What the bloody hell’s been going on?” said Anne.

  “Am I not then stolen?” said Peggy, with a ridiculous hint of disappointment in her voice.

  “God knows,” said Morris in English.

  The rhythm of the grunts altered. The stroke side paddles lifted all together, poised, dripped silver driplets, lunged backwards against the water. With a gurgle and rustle the canoe swung through a sharp are and up a narrow little channel between two bare mudbanks. Well rowed Balliol, thought Morris. Well rowed Balliol.

  3

  “I’ve been a bloody fool,” said Anne.

  “I could lend you my spare shirt and trousers,” said Morris.

  “Oh, I’ve got a pile of perfectly good clothes, but Mr Muscles won’t let me wear them. For God’s sake, I’m not even allowed to sit on one of those bloody stupid mats. I have to kneel here, like this.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Morris.

  He meant it in more ways than one. He would have preferred to see her clothed. To a man with a low sex-drive the Q’Kuti culture had been a curious release from vague guilts. Even in respectable Bristol Morris had been continually nudged by little reminders that he was some distance off from the admired male norm of modern British life, though that was obviously no more a real norm than the stringy girls in the glossies are, in the true sense, models of British womanhood—still, in England Morris had felt got at, whereas in Q’Kut the sex-obsessed Arabs actually seemed to admire his capacity for continence. Now, with this girl kneeling naked in the dust beside him, however unbecomingly mottled with mosquito bites, he was being got at again. He knew quite well what she expected him to be thinking, and if she’d known how wrong she was she would have thought even less of him.

  But he was actually sorry for her too. She was not merely physically naked. Further down the slope of Gaur’s island Dinah and Peggy were playing peep-bo round a hut. They were naked too, in the sense of being without clothes; but they were not stripped down to the bare soul, as Anne was, the thing itself, unaccommodated woman. She had even lost all her roles so far that she had allowed the flat diphthongs of some northern city to reappear in the voice that had once told him that Mummy would have thought vets were beneath them. She had become like a creature in a cage in an old-fashioned zoo, something totally uncivilised.

  “Have you learnt any of the language?” he said.

  “You know what I’m like. I can’t even begin. Can you make him let me go? Where the hell is he, anyway?”

  “Gaur? He went back to Gal-Gal to try and buy something I saw one of the men wearing.”

  “You never told me what the hell was happening up there, while I was being eaten.”

  “I didn’t really understand it all myself. I was being tried for being a witch. They give a poison to a duck and watch how it dies, and one of the women of the duck clan reads the signs. That went on most of the day—the preparations and the actual trial, I mean—and then right at the end there was a row over what the witch-finder’s verdict was. You see, a lot of people had come to Gal-Gal with various diseases. The theory seems to be that when you send a witch back to the moon-world with luck he drags along with him some of the moon-world creatures that have been causing people’s limbs to swell up or drop off or go septic, so there were a crowd of people there who wanted to see me die—in fact to stand as close as possible to me while I was dying . . .”

  “It sounds a bit like Lourdes.”

  “Ung?”

  “OK, I’ve never been there—but I was a nun for a few weeks, once.”

  Morris stared at the brown wall of reeds that ringed the prison-island, all set with poison-stakes through which only Gaur and his brothers knew the paths. He thought that a civilisation that allows you to become anything also allows you to become nothing. In other cultures you have to be what you are.

  “An
yway,” he said, “the witch-finder decided I was a witch, but not the sort who ought to be killed. Don’t ask me why. Gaur didn’t give a very coherent explanation—he didn’t think it was interesting. The explanation, I mean. It was just a fact, like all the other facts in the marsh. Besides, the idea of mutually coherent superstitions is peculiarly western—I mean the idea that if two beliefs are logically incompatible one of them must be wrong . . . but the upshot was that the sick men wanted to kill me and the others—who’d only come for the fun—fought them off, and then Gaur pulled me out of the ruckus. It’s no use asking for any more explanations. The language doesn’t run to providing the questions, let alone the answers.”

  “And you’re going to let it go on that way? You aren’t going to do anything to bring the poor bastards up to date?”

  “I don’t know. Anyway, I think I’ve done it already.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well . . . oh, I don’t know . . . we’ve kept talking about this thing . . . the Bond of Na!ar. . . as if it were almost something like a belt, or a strap—just a single bond on its own. But really, well, I expect you’ve seen how the camel-drivers secure an awkward load with an extraordinary criss-cross of lashings which doesn’t look as if it would ever hold anything, but it does its job for ninety miles and at the end the camel kneels down and the driver undoes one knot and pulls at one rope and the whole network just . . . well . . . shrivels off the load? I think the Bond’s like that. Or rather it’s part of a network like that, only much more complicated. And it’s starting to come undone anyway. The language is an image of the culture, an enormous web of relationships. It can adjust to little changes, births and deaths and diseases and bad floods, by allowing for an adjustment of relationships. If you take the cross-threads out of a spider-web the spider can scuttle across and repair them—but there are two or three threads—the ones it spun to carry the web in the first place—which it can’t repair. Cut one of them and the web collapses. And now the marsh culture is starting to unravel in two places. I made a hole in the language last night, and whoever killed the Sultan was trying to slice through the main girder-thread. The marsh-people can’t repair the damage because they don’t think in terms of cause and effect.”

  “Who did kill Bruce?”

  It took Morris a moment to remember that that was her name for the Sultan. He pulled at his lip and watched Peggy teaching Dinah to play the strange and sinister girl-children’s game of the marshes, which looked like an elaborate version of mud-pies but was in fact a ritual to prevent the ghosts of one’s eventual husband’s female ancestors from sucking one’s own spirit away when one slept in the corner of his hut where once they too had slept. Peggy was very much senior partner now. Beyond them the brown wall of reeds hid the water, and above them the white mists hid the sky. There were women who had been brought to this place by the ninth clan warriors and never since that day seen anything else. That could be Anne’s fate, too, and who could say whether she did or didn’t deserve it?

  “Tell me what happened that last day in the zoo,” he said. “You and the Sultan went to my office. I think you quarrelled. Bin Zair turned up. The Sultan sent you away. I went to the main doors to tell Gaur not to let anyone in. When I got back to my office you were still there. Can you fill in the gaps?”

  “What the hell’s it got to do with you?”

  “I need to know.”

  “You can bloody well . . . oh, forget it. I’ll tell you if you’ll get me out of here.”

  “I’ll try.”

  “OK. Done. Well Bruce took me to your office to screw me, but I wouldn’t let him. He’d spotted Mr Muscles making eyes at me, and he just wanted to show everyone I belonged to him. I wasn’t having any. I said I was through with him unless he promised to let me go. He was furious. I mean, we’d had this sort of row before—he liked being stood up to for a bit provided he got his way in the end—but that morning he wanted it then and there. I was seething too. When he sent me away, I stopped as soon as I was round the corner, before I reached the chimp cage, and went back to look for one of your pop-guns. I just wanted to loose off at the fat slob. But the cupboard was empty.”

  “Did you look at the darts?”

  “No.”

  “I see. Then you left the office and walked along in front of the cages. I heard the Sultan come past about half a minute after you’d gone. I didn’t think you’d had time to get out of sight.”

  “I didn’t. I was about opposite the polar bear when I heard their voices. I turned and waved.”

  “Was he carrying one of the guns?”

  “I didn’t notice. He turned his back on me, so I left. OK?”

  “And then?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, you reached the lobby. How many people were there? Did anything else happen?”

  “Look at me.”

  He did so. The very process of talking to him had changed her, given her a layer of confidence. There was even a hint of malicious sexuality in her glance.

  “Have you talked to Mr Muscles?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “And now you’re just being sticky-minded, wanting it all over again?”

  “I want to know what happened,” he said crossly. “Look, when we’d found the bodies bin Zair and I rushed along to the lobby. Gaur was there and no one else. The lift was going down, and Gaur said that nobody was in it. No, wait a bit, he said that no man was in it. I want to be able to prove that nobody except you, Gaur, bin Zair or me killed them. Or some combination of us.”

  “Unless they killed each other.”

  “I don’t think that’s possible.”

  “If you say so. Really, that makes it in my interest that there should have been someone else in the lift.”

  “I doubt it. Arabs will kill pretty well on suspicion. You ought to know that. Especially if it’s a woman.”

  “Uh-huh. Well, I suppose so. What happened was this. I was still seething when I got to the zoo doors, and there was Mr Muscles seething too. He looked at me, and half reached out his hands. I’ve never seen anyone look so miserable . . . no, that’s not true—I have in the camps. What I mean is I’ve never seen anyone look like that for love. And I thought the hell with Bruce—why not? So I smiled at him and took his hands. He wanted to have it there and then, but I could see he was frightened of Bruce. He went out and shooed the eunuchs away, and as soon as the lift came back he dragged me in, took it down half a floor and pressed the emergency stop. I was surprised how quick he’d caught on about lifts.”

  “He’d learnt that from Dinah, I expect.”

  “Oh. Well, we didn’t have much time, but he was pretty good for a beginner.”

  “You took the hell of a risk. If the Sultan . . .”

  “I was so bloody furious that I’d have done it in front of him, given the chance. Anyway Mr Muscles knew just enough Arabic for me to be able to arrange that he’d take me away, into the marsh. My idea was that he’d take me right across and I could get to the oil-rigs and hitch a lift out from there somehow. But that wasn’t his idea at all—it turned out he’s only got one idea.”

  Morris grunted. Her account of the morning of the murders tied in closely with Gaur’s, though considerably less like The Song of Solomon in tone. He’d known it would. The ninth clan do not lie—though no doubt under the new dispensation they would soon learn.

  “What are you going to do?” she said.

  He sighed and picked at the tasselled edge of the mat. It had been woven by the eel clan, he thought—that intricate knotting was their trade-mark. There was no way of telling whether it had been made one year ago or a hundred.

  “I don’t have to do anything,” he said. “It’ll just happen. It’ll all come undone. In ten years’ time rich nits will be able to pay two thousand quid to take a
safari trip out here. They’ll have outboard motors on the canoes.”

  “About me!” she snapped. “What are you going to do?”

  “Oh, sorry. Well . . .”

  He called to Peggy, who immediately stopped her game and came soberly up the slope, leaving Dinah to slap in a random fashion at the graves of ghosts.

  “Dost thou remember, Peggy, the song of Anintu?”

  “Anintu the warrior? I can sing that song.”

  “Sing that song.”

  Peggy knelt by the mat, interlaced her fingers behind her head and sang a reedy repetitive chant. Dinah sidled up and tried to copy the pose. Morris translated in a whisper, about the warrior-woman in that lost age when the desert had born grass, who had fought feuds, owned buffalo, even married wives—though she had also taken lovers and had children.

  “But I want to get out of here,” said Anne, whiningly, when the song was over and Dinah had dragged Peggy back to the mud-pies.

  “It’d be a start. If he accepted the idea you wouldn’t be his belonging any more. You could come and go as you wanted, though he wouldn’t be under any obligation to lend you his canoe or show you the waterways . . . I don’t know . . . I think he might even welcome the idea. I suppose it depends whether he thought you’d . . . I mean whether you’d still . . .”

  “How mealy-mouthed can you get, Morris? I’ll keep him happy.”

  Trapped by her altered tone he turned and stared at her. The change was extraordinary. In an instant she had grown into the role, and was sporting invisible uniform. The Emperor’s new uniform. He had seen her hold her head at just that angle before, once, when she had stood on the tilted wing of the airliner with a gun at her hip.