The Poison Oracle (20 page)

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 almost 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.

Dinah was still asleep, but Peggy had news.

“Lord, men of the ninth clan came.”

“I saw them.”

“They brought a woman, white as thou.”

“I do not see her.”

Peggy led him to the edge of the rock and pointed. A single long canoe was moored in the middle of the channel.

“She hid,” said Peggy with a giggle. “She was ashamed when the men shouted.”

2

The ceremony proper didn’t begin until that curious quarter-hour when the whole marsh air turned to a glowing, coppery fog. It was like being inside a sunset cloud. At this time, Peggy said, witches are weakest, caught between world and world.

Proceedings began with an argument about seating arrangements. The dry-dung fires had been lit to drift their acid smoke around the rock-top, and the whole crowd had gathered, jostling, round the arena; but there was a certain orderliness in their behaviour for the first time that day; the men seemed to have grouped themselves into their seven clans, above each of which a resin-soaked torch of reeds flared and fumed. The women of the duck clan sat on the ground opposite the stone object, which was now decorated with a rope of shells of fresh-water mussels, and several small unmeaningful bits and bobs. Dinah had woken and Peggy had taken her down to the canoe and given her fruit. Now Morris led his wives, holding each one by the hand, towards the arena. Two clans bustled aside to clear a path for him, but began to mutter and grumble when he stopped level with their front rank and signed to Dinah to sit down. An old man with a weeping pink mess where his left eye should have been half-turned to him, and without looking at him directly said “The witches stand beside the house of spirits.”

“There is no witch,” Morris answered, even more loudly than he had intended.
[1]

A puzzled mutter ran round the arena. The old man opened his mouth to speak again, but changed his mind and merely pointed. Dinah looked up and snickered at him.

“There is no witch,” said Morris again. He’d had plenty of time to wonder how he would face his accusation, but had not expected it to come so early. His previous attempts to argue about his supposed crime with Gaur, Dyal and Qab had, he now saw, foundered on a property of the marsh language, whereby the negative relation carried certain positive implications, so that to say “I am not a witch” had been to admit the possibility that he might be. Earlier Morris had been bound by his own feeling that the language and culture were sacrosanct, but now he didn’t care how many strands of that intricate old network he broke as he threshed to escape.

Curiously it was the children who first grasped what he was actually saying. He heard Peggy gasp, and at the same moment the child in her skin of paint began to whine. What, no witch, when she had spent eight hours putting her make-up on? The men on either side of Morris drew back still further, as if embarrassed by this faux pas. The old woman stopped her snivelling chant and listened while one of the other women whispered in her ear. She muttered what must have been an order, for as she snivelled on the women huddled together, active at something in their midst, whispering brief phrases. In an extraordinarily short time one of them stood up and walked slowly round the edge of the arena to the stone object, against which she set (with an action that reminded Morris strangely of the Queen laying wreaths at the Cenotaph) three crude mommets. They were identical, made of reed and cloth, without arms or legs. Only the narrowed neck between the round head and the long body made them human at all, but human they undoubtedly were—Dinah, Morris and Peggy, ready to stand trial for witchcraft.

The little orchestra of women struck up the overture on quite different instruments from the ones Morris had heard at the flood-going feasts; these were two long, thin drums, reed pipes and clay groaners. The old woman also groaned and began to shiver or rather to shudder. She sat to one side of the orchestra, and on the other knelt the two painted women and the painted girl, each with a little pot in front of her. The noise from the orchestra was a weird, continuous wheeze, unpatterned, as though a wild-life recording enthusiast had put his microphone against the stomach of some big beast with indigestion. The arena was an ellipse, with the orchestra at one end and the House of the Spirits, the stone object, at the other; all round the perimeter the black crowd jostled for position, but no one interfered with Morris’s view; they left a clear three feet all round him, like filings repelled by the pole of his presence. This was nothing to do with the hand of Na!ar dangling above his head—at least the fat man who carried the other hand was given only so much room as the bulge of his stomach cleared for him.

Suddenly the old woman’s shuddering came to a climax. Her withered limbs shook in the still air with a life of their own. She cried aloud a single word of her secret language—a command by the sound of it—then rigor gripped her. She toppled sideways and lay still.

Nobody paid any attention to her, because on her cry the two painted women jumped to their feet and began to dance; each held her pot in her left hand and used the right hand as a lid as she hopped round the arena in short, galvanic leaps, both feet together as if tied by a rope. They hopped in opposite directions, and the first to pass Dinah had the most extraordinary effect on her; she rushed away from the arena to the end of her leash, and when she could get no further she had what looked like an epileptic fit on the ground, writhing and sobbing. Morris moved back and knelt beside her, trying to calm her with his touch. Peggy came and squatted on the other side of her, frowning in the dusky light.

“Dinah is eaten with a spirit, Lord.”

“No. She was frightened by the dancing woman.”

“It is the spirit T!u who dances.”

“Peggikins, it is a woman covered in white paint.”

He regretted his words the moment he had said them—if the child was going to be killed, it would be easier for her if she accepted the whole grisly mummery as something true and real. He lifted Dinah, panting and whimpering, and carried her back to the arena, where she lay still with her head buried in his shoulder. Peggy took his free hand unasked.

The two women by now had reached the very centre of the arena and were standing back to back, jigging up and down; the noise of the orchestra seemed to change, but not in any meaningful way; the women jigged round until they faced each other and began to hop backwards; as soon as they were far enough apart to do so they bent almost double and, still hopping, started to take the contents from their pots and dribble them down on to the rock. It was a process that reminded Morris of something-yes, a gardener sowing seed along the line of a drill—but the women moved not in straight lines but in two outward moving spirals like the arms of a nebula, leaving their trail of whatever it was behind them, bent double, hopping all the time. It must have been killingly exhausting, but they kept it up for twenty minutes until they reached their place by the orchestra.

The music changed again. The women put their pots down and picked up the child, who held her own pot cradled in her white arms; they carried her to the middle of the arena where they left her kneeling. The orchestra stopped playing and the child opened her mouth and sang a thin and tuneless chant in the secret language, rocking her body to and fro with the pot huddled against her chest. The chant was short, but she repeated and repeated it until Morris could discern the grammatical form under the meaningless words. In English it might have gone:

The —— comes to ——

It ——s into the ——

It ——s this and that

It ——s to and fro

  Ai!

It ——s the ——.

While she was singing it for the fifth or sixth time, watched in total silence by the hitherto restless crowd, a flood of fear washed suddenly into Morris, filling every creek of his being, as strong and uncontrollable as nausea. His tongue seemed to stick to his palate; it made a sucking noise as he wrenched it away with his throat-muscles and clung back as soon as he relaxed. He shut his eyes and bowed his head, filled with furry darkness. Only the touch of Dinah’s head against his cheek meant anything other than this gulping dread, which wasn’t even dread of pain and death, but was as though a vast invisible bird had nestled down on to the rock, covering him with its stuffing feathers of fear. He loosed Peggy’s hand and teased the back of Dinah’s head, unconsciously at first but slowly gathering out of her a vague comfort that enabled him at last to look up again and face his trial. As he did so the girl broke off her chant in mid syllable.

She stiffened. Her head went back. Her mouth was open and her eyes stared. One drum beat, very slowly. The girl rose to her feet as though the sound jerked her upwards and with a strange mannish gait started to strut round the arena. At one drum-beat she thrust her hand into the pot; at the next she drew it out; at the third she tossed whatever she was holding out across the arena. She moved widdershins round the outside of the circle, throwing with her left hand towards the middle something that fell with a light rattle on to the rock. Again it was a motion like seed-sowing, but this time that of a Victorian sower broadcasting his wheat-seed across a field. The crowd on either side of Morris seemed to shrink back a little when she was throwing in their direction, and then to relax again when the danger was past; but in fact all the little projectiles fell well short—it must have been a very practised performance, for all that the girl moved like a creature controlled by powers outside her.