The Poison Oracle (3 page)

“Serene rivulet of the fountain of power and wisdom, it is many years since thy father honoured me with the undeserved gift of his friendship. No man knows the heart of another, but I have learnt some of thy father’s ways. If thou wast to go to him complaining of my insolence, he would not satisfy thee, but he would invent some subtle manner whereby thy complaint could be used to diminish both thee and me. Is it not written ‘Ask not of the King that which the King cannot give, for thereby is his glory the less.’? Therefore let us come to an agreement. When we speak in Arabic we will conduct ourselves in the manner of Arabs, among whom thou art a prince, and so shall I treat thee. But when in obedience to thy father’s command we speak English, we will conduct ourselves in the manner of the English, from whom Allah has withheld the comprehension of honour.”

“Their mothers are she-asses.”

“In many cases thy observation is just. But when thy father speaks with me in English he condescends to answer bray with bray.”

“Why may the ape feast on grapes when they are denied to a prince?”

Morris picked up the satchel.

“Dinah will get you some grapes if you ask her,” he said slowly in English.

“Yes, yes,” said the prince, suddenly thrilled. He was both jealous of and fascinated by Dinah. Morris sorted the necessary symbols on to the coffee-table.

“What they mean?” said the prince.

“What
do
they mean?”

“What do they mean?”

“Good. You can say the words as we put them down.”

white crescent:  please

white square:  Dinah

yellow circle with hole:   give

blue/white square:  grapes

black square:  (to) person other than Morris or Dinah

“The prince must say please to the ape?”

“Well . . .” said Morris, then shrugged. It was a nice point. Neither Dinah nor the symbol language was covered by the new agreement.

“OK, OK,” said the prince charmingly. Morris clicked his fingers for Dinah’s attention and she climbed carefully down from her nest on top of the wardrobe, dangling from her left paw the forlorn skeleton of her bunch of grapes. The Prince arranged the symbols in a very precise line.

The coffee-table was just the right height for Dinah to read from when she was on all fours, and she did so with her usual quick sniffing sound, as though she somehow smelt the meaning. The message puzzled her. She read it three times, then with a dubious gesture offered the grape-skeleton to the prince, who backed away as if it were something the Koran declared unclean. Morris sorted through the satchel again and made a second message.

yellow square:  thing with no name

red circle with hole:   negative verb

blue/white square:  grapes

Dinah sniffed at the symbols, laid the grape-skeleton down on the yellow square and sniffed at the symbols again. She chattered a little to herself as she re-read the first message, then moved resolutely towards the kitchen door, where she stopped and glanced at Morris over her shoulder. He made a “Go” gesture to her.

The buzzer sounded as soon as she broke the beam to the photo-electric cell. The prince laughed. She looked back and Morris made the “Go” gesture again. With a nervous leap she was gone

“She is not take?” asked the prince.

“No, she will not take anything. But please will you give her a few of the grapes when she comes back?”

“I give,” asserted the prince, “. . . a few.”

Morris smiled. The boy was his father’s son, in his quick calculation of the possible profits of generosity. Dinah emerged with the stalk of a bunch of grapes clenched in her fist and offered them to Morris, who had the negative red circle ready and showed it to her. She sniffed again at the message on the coffee-table, frowning; then, with the same hesitation and doubt she often showed in the early stages of learning a new skill, she offered them to the prince. He carefully broke off a twig of grapes and handed them to her. She smacked her lips and leaped for her nest with them.

Morris got up and stopped the buzzer. For a moment he thought there was something wrong with his ears, but the prince, too, was frowning and staring at the ceiling.

“Aeroplane!” he said, first in Arabic and then in English. “Big!” he added after a few seconds.

Morris nodded. Q’Kut was not on any conceivable route from anywhere to anywhere. The air-strip’s only users were the Sultan’s executive jet and the old Dakota that flew in such luxuries as grapes and apes. The sweating Italians who manned the oil-derricks, up in the hills on the far side of the marshes, had their own strip, but by the sound of it this plane was aiming to land here. Already the prince was crouched against the window, craning for a sight of it.

“Lo!” he squeaked in Arabic. “See! See! See!” he added in English.

Morris strolled over, uneasy, but could see nothing because of the overhang of the floor above. He knelt to bring himself to the prince’s level and immediately saw the big red and blue plane whining away with flaps down and black smoke streaking from its four jets. The prince bounced with the thrill of it.

“Am coming!” he squeaked.

“It is coming. I hope to God not. The strip’s too short.”

But the wings tilted sharply. Now the plane was curving towards the south, showing all its upper half to the glare of the sun; the curve tightened and the gap between the machine and the marshes grew less and less. Now, by sleight-of-air, the plane seemed to vanish for several seconds as it pointed straight towards the palace; and now it was a slant dark line in the wavering sky, jerking among the erratic thermals. At last the pilot levelled for the runway.

“Christ!” said Morris, “he’ll never make it! Those things need thousands of feet!”

Burnt rubber smoked behind the braking wheels. Some of the tyres seemed to be tearing themselves into strips. The huge plane hurtled down the concrete towards the dunes, bucketing as the pilot fought to hold it steady. A wing tip almost touched the ground. The plane slewed, still doing about eighty mph. When it was sideways on half the undercarriage collapsed, but the machine went sliding along the concrete. The blind, tiny panes of the flight deck smashed all together, blasted out by an inexplicable small explosion. The prince squealed. Morris shut his eyes, though he knew flames would be invisible in that sunlight.

The telephone rang.

Morris opened his eyes again and stared at the scene. The plane lay still, thirty yards from the end of the runway, with its tail towards the dunes and its near wing resting on the concrete. Still no flames. The symbol of the rising sun stared from the tall tail fin. The telephone was still ringing, so he picked it up.

“Morris, old fellow?”

“Yes, it’s me. What the hell was all that about?”

“A slight emergency. I need your help. Would you be kind enough to go down to the runway and greet any survivors?”

“Survivors?”

“Some buffoon was sitting in the cockpit with a live grenade in his hand, but it looks as if he dropped it in the landing. There ought to be somebody alive in the cabin, though, so I’d be terribly grateful if you . . .”

“Me?”

“Pick up a walkie-talkie as you go and tune in on channel A. We had radio contact with them, but its gone dead. The thing is, old fellow, that this is one of those hijack jobs—Palestinians, but they made a mess of it.”

“I’m a zoo-keeper, dammit!”

“By this word we, Pacific Sultan of Q’Kut, Lord of the Marshlands, etc, etc, appoint our trusty and well-beloved companion Wesley Naboth Morris to the office and privileges of Foreign Minister of Q’Kut, for such period as shall please us. Thanks be to Allah!”

“Balls.”

“Look, Morris, I need you. It’s got to be someone who speaks Japanese, for a start. And someone I can trust, to go on with. You won’t need to take any decisions—I’ll be on Channel A.”

“Something’s happening.”

The emergency door at the root of the tilted wing opened, and a figure walked precariously out and down the slope.

“There
are
survivors, you see,” said the Sultan softly. “Carry on, Morris—Dyal and I will have you covered from here. Don’t get out of sight.”

“Oh, all right,” said Morris.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to walk. Before the radio went dead they said just one man, on foot, to meet them.”

“What! In this sun!”

“Take a brolly-man. He won’t count.”

“Oh, all
right!
”

Morris snapped the phone down. He found it hard to compose himself enough to explain in courteous Arabic to the prince that their lesson must be postponed. Before he had finished that Dinah chattered nervously at him from her nest, and he realised that he hadn’t time to dispose of her. He’d have to take her along. He clicked, and she came rushing over. Thoughtlessly, as if for reassurance in this daunting and unwelcome task, he took her hand and led her out.

3

Sweat streamed in prickling rivulets all down Morris’s skin. He walked slowly, to lessen the risk of heat-stroke and allow for the pace of the brolly-man behind him. His sunglasses were not quite big enough to eliminate all the glare from the side. He felt a fool, and frightened.

“Testing, testing, one two three four,” he said.

“My dear fellow, I know you can count,” hissed the expensive gadget in his shirt pocket. “I’ve got her bang in my sights. By Jove, that’s what I call a figure!”

The walkie-talkie smacked its metal lips. Warily Morris peered across the concrete furnace—he still had a hundred yards to go. He wished that the hijackers had allowed him to come in a car—the bullet-proof one would have done fine. The girl posed on the wing had a nasty-looking gun at her hip, which distracted Morris’s attention from what the Sultan considered her finer points. She was dark-haired and brown-skinned, slim in her blouse and jeans. Visor-like sunglasses hid her eyes, but her nose had a hawkish look. Her stance was tired but confident, quite different from the deflated exhaustion of the dozen people who stood grouped before her on the concrete, covered by her gun.

Dinah whimpered and tugged at Morris’s hand to be carried. It was too hot for that—but then he realised how the concrete must be burning her feet and picked her up. She clung to his side, shading her eyes against the glare.

“Stop,” called the girl in Arabic. “That is near enough.”

She had the words right, but her accent was appalling. She called again as Morris came on and waved the gun his way. Then she tried French, which she spoke even worse. Morris became more confident as he approached. It was too hot to shout over distances.

“I insist that you stop,” she said suddenly in perfectly good English, clipped and officer-like.

Morris walked on until he was about ten feet from the wing-tip, where he and the girl and her captives formed the points of an equilateral triangle. He took the sweat-towel which the brolly-man carried, folded it and put it on the ground in the shade of the brolly. Thankfully he dumped Dinah on it, then turned and bowed to the captives.

“His Pacific Majesty the Sultan of Q’Kut conveys his greetings,” he said in Japanese. “He is honoured to receive you in Q’Kut.”

The captives stiffened with surprise and hope. Several of them returned his bow. He turned to the girl.

“Is anybody injured?” he said in English.

“No,” she snapped. “Who are you? What powers do you have?”

“My name is Doctor Wesley Morris, and I am Foreign Minister of Q’Kut. I am also in radio contact with His Majesty.”

“Fine,” she said. “You can tell his nibs I . . . we want a new plane, with a pilot, and food and drink. We demand these things in the name of Arab solidarity, for the liberation of Palestine.”

Morris muttered into the walkie-talkie.

“Yes, yes,” answered the Sultan. “A pilot? See if you can find out what happened to the other one. And there ought to be three guerrillas.”

“Get on with it,” snapped the girl.

“Listen, Morris,” said the walkie-talkie, “I’ll have to back these goons up to keep my Arabs quiet, though privately I say pooh to Palestine. But the oil company is run by a rabid bunch of absentee Zionists. I want
no part of any of this. They only landed here because some idiots at Karachi tried to shoot their tyres out and got a fuel pipe as well.”

“Get on with it,” said the girl again. “Or I’ll shoot that chimp to show I mean business.”

“His majesty is an ardent supporter of the Palestinian cause,” said Morris, “but regrets that he has no plane or pilot available.”

“He can have one flown in,” said the girl. “We’ll get back into the plane and wait—I don’t think it’s going to catch fire after all.”

“In that case you will all die of heat-stroke,” said Morris.

“Don’t give me that,” said the girl. “Come on you lot.”

“This is a comparatively cool day,” said Morris. “To-morrow will probably be twenty degrees hotter.”

He turned to the captives and asked in Japanese whether any of them knew whether the air-conditioning was still working. There was a mutter among the group. A square, blue-suited businessman moved to one side and allowed Morris to see that there were two diminutive air hostesses standing among the men, limp little rag dolls in pretty kimonos.

“We think the air-conditioning is now broken,” said one of them. “We think also the pilots and two of the attackers are dead. One attacker was holding a grenade with the pin drawn, on the flight deck, when we landed, and there was a big explosion before the aeroplane stopped.”

The she-guerrilla’s gun was now wavering vaguely from the captives to Morris and back again. Morris translated quietly into the walkie-talkie and listened to the reply.

“Christ,” he whispered, “that’s a hell of a risk. Are you sure . . .”

“Quite sure, old fellow. I’m enjoying myself.”

Morris licked his lips.

“His Majesty requests you to stand quite still,” he said to the girl. “He is about to shoot out the window by your left hip—for God’s sake don’t move.”

Her mouth opened. None of them heard the crack of the rifle, only the snap and tinkle when the bullet hit the thick glass. The group on the concrete gasped and closed up, but one of the men clapped his hands. Dinah copied him vigorously.