The Poison Oracle (26 page)

Slowly, walking on her knuckles, she sidled across the circle and peered into the face of a man with a green headcloth and a straggly dark wisp of beard. He shrank away; his throat worked as if there was a scream imprisoned there, but Dinah only chattered in a dissatisfied fashion, came back to the message, read it again and started off in a different direction.

Her progress was far from systematic. Sometimes she went straight across the circle and then back to the man she had just inspected; often she would dart back to Morris as if to check that she was doing the right thing; when she did this he gave her a few more grapes, which she ate slowly as she zig-zagged across the bright mosaic floor. The process cannot have lasted more than a few minutes, but suddenly in the middle of it Morris experienced a shuddering shock of recognition—something like the spasm of fierce wakefulness that shakes a man back to this world just before he falls asleep—or as if the lobes of his brain, having been fractionally out of phase, had jerked back to full sympathy. All this had happened before. On Gal-Gal a man had watched his life or death being decided by the erratic movements of an animal, a trained animal, to and fro across an arena ringed by silent, intent spectators. Morris, after his bout of activism, had watched his fate with an apathy close to accidie; and so did bin Zair watch now. The difference was that the duck on Gal-Gal had not yet eaten its poison; whereas Dinah had long been eating hers, day by day, from Morris’s own hand, the ancient poison of words.

There must have been something unnoticeable about bin Zair, an inherent camouflage that might have made a marvellous hunter out of him if his life had not been spent on the track of more illusory game. Dinah only spotted him as if by accident, grey and silent on the cushions. Her glance flicked towards him as she was crossing the arena, and away. She continued half a pace on her path, then froze. Very slowly, as if she herself was the hunted creature, her head swung back towards bin Zair, her left hand staying poised in the air for the next pace. She stared at him for one of those unmeasurable times that was probably only half a heartbeat; then she was darting across the floor to him, pulling at his robe, hooting with excitement.

Bin Zair must have been ready for her. Even before the Arabs broke into excited chatter and applause his curved dagger was out and striking. He was old but very quick—Morris’s eye only registered when the blow was over that at the tip of the gunmetal blue curve of the blade something sticky and black glistened.

But Dinah was quick too; the blow, aimed at her ribs, caught her glancingly above the wrist as she shied away. She screamed and raced to Morris, flinging herself into his arms and showing him the red, inch-long slash through the dark hair. He clutched at her, dragged the wound to his mouth and sucked. His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out and sucked frenziedly while she struggled. She was very strong but he shifted his grip and managed to hold her, sucking and spitting. In his mind’s eye he saw the deft blow again, and remembered how neatly bin Zair had plucked the gun from the hands of the young man at the earlier Council meeting, and confused both movements with something he had not seen, the blow that had struck the Sultan down. His lips were very sore. Bristly little hairs filled his mouth, as when a toothbrush starts to disintegrate. A hand shook him by the shoulder.

“Lord,” said Gaur’s deep voice, “you cannot suck the poison from the wound . . .”

Morris looked up, dull and hopeless. Dinah wriggled and bucked in his grasp. The dagger floated in front of his face with a drop of blood drying on the surface of the poisonous smear.

“This poison has died,” said Gaur. “See.”

A black finger-nail pinched at the blacker ooze and broke through. Now Morris could see the inner stickiness under the hardened outer skin. Gaur squeezed and black fresh globules of the stuff were forced through to the surface.

“Now it is alive again,” he said, and tossed the weapon away. Probably he had weighed it in his hand while Morris had been sucking at Dinah’s arm, for though few Arab daggers are any use for throwing this one flew straight to where bin Zair sat erect on the cushions, silent and waiting judgment. Morris, still in his daze of shock and effort, did not actually see it strike, but he saw bin Zair flinch, recover and with a careful hand draw the dagger from his thigh, leaving a streak of blood on his white robe. Everyone fell silent. With difficulty the old man rose to his feet and looked round the ring of them, bowing his head slightly when he came to Hadiq.

“It was Allah’s will,” he squeaked. He turned and limped away.

“Shall I pick him off?” called Anne in clear, clipped tones from the gallery.

“No,” sighed Morris.

Four hours, he thought. You take four hours to die. That man killed Kwan. He killed my friend Kwan. Now he’s dying the same way himself, and what he wanted to happen is going to happen anyway.

Dinah whimpered and he realised he was still holding her with all his strength. He let go. She looked with horror and disbelief at her arm, still puckered and bleeding. To distract her he peeled a banana and gave it to her. She had begun to eat it left-handed without much relish when her whole body stiffened as if with cramp in his arms. Her eyes remained open but the banana slipped from her hand.

“Gaur!” he called in alarm. Gaur strolled over and knelt by his side, feeling Dinah’s limbs and forehead.

“That is not the work of poison, Lord,” he said judiciously. “A speared man becomes hot, like fire, before he dies, and his joints are loose. Thy creature is cold and stiff.”

Morris only grunted and lurched to his feet with Dinah in his arms. He remembered to bow to Hadiq before he turned and staggered wearily away. Before he was through the doors the Council was in full spate again, retelling all these dramas.

3

Up in his rooms Morris laid Dinah in her nest; she whimpered as he persuaded her stiff limbs into the necessary curve, but once she was nestled in her eyes closed and the slow hammer-beat of her pulse began to ease to the normal rhythm of sleep. He covered her with a blanket and slumped into one of the chairs, where he sat sweating and worrying in mazed circles until he realised that he could at least do something about the sweat. Resetting the thermostat reminded him about Peggy.

She was asleep too, but stirred and smiled when he felt her pulse, which seemed normal. She was a resilient little brat, he thought. Perhaps Dinah was only undergoing a sort of shock coma too—it wouldn’t be surprising, after everything that had happened to her, but it was a bit uncanny that both of them should suffer the same sort of collapse at the same moment—several times, as his worry and tiredness slipped gear into a kind of feverish doze he had the same recurring vision of the two primitive little females groping through a dark, arched tunnel in opposite directions, brushing against each other as they passed and then groping on to emerge, somehow, in each other’s worlds. Fully awake he knew it was more likely that Dinah’s collapse was an effect of the poison, and he could only hope that it had lost enough of its virtue for her to survive, but as soon as he half-slept again the same sequence returned.

After about the third or fourth time another creature seemed to be there in the tunnel, scuttling hurriedly from end to end, greyish and wispy, completely ignoring the slow, small figures that might have been Dinah and Peggy; it moved rapidly through the dark but as soon as it reached the twilight zones at the ends it hesitated and scuttled back, unable to emerge into either kind of daylight. It was bin Zair.

Awake again he thought about the old man. A decent old goat, really. Morris discovered that he both liked and respected him, and that the murders were strangely easy to forgive, even Kwan’s. Was this the result of that bizarre element of innocence that permeated the appalling cruelties and slaughters which were the sole history of the desert tribes? Or was it simply another symptom of the tepidity of Morris’s own nature? Or was it that what bin Zair had done had an inner inevitability, a moral logic, that made other courses of action seem fanciful, mere wishful thinking? The palace stood like a teetotum balanced on its spindle, maintained there only by its own circular momentum—that was Morris’s world of high civilisation, to which the Sultan also and even Dinah partly belonged. Beside it lay the apparent mess of the marshes, which was also a balance, a taut and intricate web maintained by its own tensions, Qab’s world and Gaur’s and Peggy’s. But the balance of bin Zair’s world had been broken, so that it was inhabited by whirling or scuttling creatures like Anne, or the dead hijackers, or the young man with the cleft chin . . .

Bin Zair would be praying now, if he was still conscious. He wouldn’t be thinking about this sort of thing. If he wondered at all about his own compulsions he would think in the language of money and prestige and tribal obligations and watering rights. He would perhaps regret that he had evolved a scheme so crazily complex, but he wouldn’t consider its underlying . . . well . . . propriety. It was proper that he should have used a modern hypodermic dart tipped with a primitive poison, proper that his plan should involve films and tapes as well as the swift blow of the killer, proper even that it should take place in a milieu where a supercivilised prince was attempting to recreate the jungle culture of apes . . .

“I have slept, Lord” whispered Peggy from the bedroom door. “Now my bladder is very full. How may I leave this hut and empty it?”

With a sigh Morris rose and showed her how the lavatory worked. She thought its flush was the finest toy in the world and wasted a lot of water playing with it.

Epilogue

THE APPALLING CLATTER of the rotors slowed, deepened and flogged into silence. Even with the help of the radio beacon which Gaur had placed there, Gal-Gal had been hell to find in the mist; so the noise seemed to have gone on unbearably long while the helicopter had swung and hesitated, jerking in the erratic air, and the cabin had seemed to absorb heat into itself until it became like a lava-bubble floating blindly and stickily towards a vent.

With a sigh of relief Morris removed his ear-muffs. Peggy aped his movement. She had refused to wear Arab clothes, but so did many Arab children and the Shaikhah had easily found jeans and a Yogi-Bear tee-shirt to fit her.

“That was very much noise,” she said gaily, in English. Once again Morris marvelled at the accuracy of her ear—timbre apart, it might have been his own voice talking.

“Too right!” said the pilot. “Jesus, what a dump! Do you come here often?”

Morris grunted and climbed out. The marsh-waters had sunk in the last four months almost to their lowest level, reducing the humidity but raising the heat. All the acres of exposed mud reeked of rot. For a moment he thought that the weeks of coaxing and negotiation had come to nothing, for the rock seemed deserted and he had been expecting to be met by the representatives of all eight clans. But as soon as the bee-hive basket was handed out to him (on a shortened pole, to fit the cabin, and empty, though the marshmen were not to know that) black heads emerged from behind the cliff edges, wherever there was a foothold out of sight. For a while they simply remained heads; they might have been stuck there, bodiless, after some tribal raid, a suitable necklace for Gal-Gal; but when Peggy and Doctor Knopf, the specialist in tropical diseases, climbed down a few of them began to climb up. From the cliffs nearest the landing-place a group of three men came cautiously towards him, the two on the outside looking comparatively intact, but supporting in the centre an old man with a disgustingly swollen leg. He was Qab.

“Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow,” said Morris.

“Half my cheeses are thine,” said Qab. “Is this man also a great witch, Lord?”

“The words are thine, Qab. The man knows much of big legs and withered arms and weeping skins and belly-devils.”

Morris switched into English: “What can you do about a leg like that, Knopf?”

“Not much, by the look of it,” said Doctor Knopf, a lean, yellow-skinned young man. “Can’t tell for sure without tests, but when they’re as bad as that you can usually only arrest the process and lessen the pain a bit. Grief, what a collection! What you’ve got here is a museum of tropical medicine. God! Is this a fair sample of the inhabitants?”

In silence the representatives of the eight clans hobbled, or crawled, or were carried towards the helicopter, their limbs swollen or shrivelled, their skins scaly or suppurating.

“The witches have been busy, Lord,” said Qab. “You have said that you would bring great witches to Gal-Gal, witches not of the moon-world, who by their charms would undo this charm and that charm. Is this a true report?”

“It is true in part. My friend does not think he can make thy leg less big, but he can make it cease from growing. Moreover, he can ease the pain. But thy young men and thy sons—these he can protect from witchcraft, and drive out the charms that have recently begun to work . . .”

“We have been told lies,” said Qab angrily.

“Who has told lies?” said Morris in a bullying manner. “Do I lie? Does the ninth clan lie? Who else has spoken?”

“You are an old fool, my uncle,” said one of the men who was supporting Qab. “Witch, there is a foul charm starting to work at my back. Can thy friend drive it out?”

He swung round. Qab staggered and clutched at his other supporter. On the nephew’s back, just below the left shoulder-blade, was a circular mess of yellow and orange pus, about two inches across, crusted brown at the edges. Doctor Knopf bent forward to examine it.