The Poison Oracle (10 page)

All might have been well—tempers been smoothed, Morris’s treatment of Dinah justified, even his qualifications for teaching Prince Hadiq confirmed—had not Dyal and Gaur come to join the group; but Dinah was never very happy with the qualifying group of symbols; she knew perfectly well how they worked, but their presence in a message seemed to make the whole thing harder for her. Now she picked up the gun, trailing it by its muzzle, and studied the possibilities before her, the Sultan, the Prince, Anne and the two bodyguards. The hush of waiting became ridiculously tense, almost as though it should have been filled by a circus drum-roll. At last, with a rush, she laid the gun ungraciously at Gaur’s feet and scampered back to Morris’s side.

The ten seconds’ silence was so intense and shocking that it seemed almost as though Dinah’s mistake had some ritual significance.

“Well,” said the Sultan at last, “what went wrong?”

“Honestly it was pretty good,” said Anne. “In fact it was marvellous. Only she gave it to the wrong person.”

“Exactly,” said the Sultan, clearly so angered by her intervention that Morris wondered whether his haphazard reading had included some potted Freud.

“Give her a chance,” said Morris. “She’s got a tiny vocabulary, with as few nouns in it as possible, because we’re more interested in her grasp of logical sentence-structure than just lists of words. I told her to give the bloody gun to a big man. That’s the nearest I could get. The language doesn’t contain a
name
for you.”

As if to settle things he gave Dinah her banana, with which she retreated to the far wall, as though one of them was going to try to steal it off her. Morris crouched to pick the counters off the tiles, scrabbling with his finger-nails on the slippery surface.

“Whose names does she know?” asked Anne.

“Just her own and mine—these two. This black square means a person other than one of us . . .”

The Sultan interrupted, dropping into Arabic, the first time for years that he had used it, except on formal occasions, when talking to Morris.

“By God, Morris, you do me great shame. You and the ape have eaten my bread and taken from me many gifts, and yet you have not thought me worth a name of my own, to tell me apart from some slave or goat-boy!”

“I’m sorry . . .” Morris began in English.

“Let it be seen to. I will have a name. Let a black symbol be made and on it set in gold the shape of a hand, the symbol of my house.”

“If you like,” said Morris. “She’s going to have to see quite a bit of you if she’s going to learn to associate it with you, and only you.”

The Sultan laughed, and reverted to English.

“She can come to the Council—we’ll make her Minister of Education, eh, my dear? And Morris, old boy, you really must see that she spends more time with the other apes. Got it?”

He smiled, a jovial great genie. But his eyes were still as hard as glass.

Three

1

“HOLY . . . CATS . . . BATMAN,” read Prince Hadiq, “. . . am . . . I . . .
seeing things . . . back . . . to . . . the . . . Batcave . . . Wonderboy . . . this . . . looks . . . like . . . wit . . . widge . . . wicket . . .’ I cannot read one word, Morris.”

“Is it ‘witchcraft’?” asked Morris, without turning from the window. The whole tail-fin had now vanished, and some genius had contrived to remove one of the engines, but had been unable to shift it more than a few yards. It simply lay on the concrete by the wing, but no doubt time would whittle it away. The guard had been withdrawn, now that all the more easily detachable parts had vanished, but the thieves’ work went on at its regular pace.

“Yes, witchcraft,” said the Prince. “A woman is witching my father. Is witching also Gaur.”

Morris turned and saw that the prince was looking up from the comic as though he wished to pursue this conversation. The lesson had not gone well so far, and any subject which would encourage the boy to talk must be pursued. He was really getting on quite well, but something—perhaps this stupid worry about Anne being a witch—had caused a slight relapse.

“Where is Gaur, by the way?” asked Morris.

“Outside the curtain,” said the Prince. “We have . . . a matter to laugh . . . to laugh at, I say. Gaur tells you are a big witch, witching me. I tell this woman is a big witch, witching Gaur.”

“I’m not a witch, and I don’t think Anne is,” said Morris. “We don’t have witches in England any longer.”

“If so, how this?” said the Prince, flapping his hand against the
Batman
comic.

“Oh, that’s only a story—and I expect you’ll find that it turns out that there is no witchcraft at all, only some kind of machinery made to look like witchcraft.”

“Stupid,” said the Prince, dropping the comic. “The mother of me, the Shaikhah, she tells this woman . . . is a witch.”

Morris smiled, but was answered by a scowl.

“You think . . . I am telling woman’s talk.
Wallah,
Morris, the mother of me has go . . . has gone . . . to London . . . to Paris . . . to New York. The Sultan has much women, always. She thinks OK. A man is a man. Never she tells them witching. When I am baby, she . . . I speak Arab, please?”

“If you want to, but you’re doing very well.”

“By God, Morris, I tell you the woman is a witch. I have seen the Shaikhah mourn and weep because my father does not remember to take her to his bed when he is mad for love of some dancing girl. But never before has she told me to find her poison!”

“Speak English,” hissed Morris, knowing how whispers could travel and float along the corridors of the palace. “What are you going to do?”

“I ask you. What?”

It was a great honour to be consulted over so intimate a matter as whether one should help one’s mother to murder one’s father’s mistress. Morris did not care for great honours.

“I wouldn’t do anything for a bit,” he said. “I’d tell your mother it’s difficult to get poison.”

“But is
not
difficult.
Saqwa
is . . . medicine for . . . skin of camels. Gaur also. He knows many . . . poisons . . . in marshes.”

“Yes, I see,” said Morris.
Saqwa,
he knew, was usually arsenic, and certainly the songs were full of ugly deaths after feasts.

“So what I do?”

“Well, I could talk to Anne, I suppose. I expect your mother could give her a message asking her to come and see me, and I could suggest that she stops doing whatever she is doing to your father. And Gaur, of course.”

“Oh, Gaur is mad only. Is mad for love. He make songs for the woman.”

“Does he, by God!” said Morris. He had never taped anything like that, the love-songs and canoe-chants and lullabies of the ordinary marsh-people. All he had in his collection was the formal music of the singing clan.

“Yes. He lies on the floor. He groans. He is mad. I tell him, unless . . . if my father hear . . . he shoot him. True.”

“That doesn’t sound like witchcraft.”

“But Gaur is mad. My father shoot him. Will shoot him.”

“I know. The thing is that down in the marshes Gaur is a warrior of the ninth clan, and that means he’s not allowed to marry, but he is not punished if he takes another man’s wife. So I expect it seems natural to him.”

“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.”