The Poison Oracle (5 page)

“What are you wearing underneath?” asked Morris nervously.

“Just clothes.”

“I should think that’ll be OK. He’s not a Moslem. That flute code is quite elaborate, but I doubt if it covers points like this. He could slice your head off, of course, but I don’t know whether he’s empowered to do that without consulting higher authority.”

“I’ll risk it.”

She plucked the black, mask-like veil over her head, smoothed her hair and began to unfasten the swathing folds of the robe. As she did so she glanced sideways at Morris with a curious teasing look, provocative but not exactly sexually provocative. He half expected her to emerge wearing something to startle or embarrass him—a diving suit, or a belly-dancer’s outfit with the naked skin tattooed with revolutionary slogans; but what she had on was the traditional baggy trousers, in pink silk, and a frothy white blouse fastened up to her throat with long crisscrossing laces, like a skater’s boot but following a slightly shallower curve. She still looked as fit as a gymnast, though her face had paled during her five weeks out of the sun—paled till the pink-and-white
beneath the fading tan made it even less likely that she was any kind of Arab. Morris decided that she was as English as himself.

She adjusted the glossy swathes of black hair, slightly ruffled by the removal of her veil. It was a tactful little gesture, deliberately inviting Morris to inspect her without actually staring. But for her eyes he mightn’t have recognised her as the same girl who had stood declaiming about women’s rights from the wing of the wrecked aeroplane. She hadn’t exactly changed, but had, so to speak, adjusted. Her lips seemed fuller; her cheekbones showed in the softened planes of flesh; even her slightly hooked nose had somehow become less accipitrine than columbaceous; and the pride with which she held herself was the confidence of good breeding rather than any Amazonian arrogance. Later Morris was to discover how fast she could re-adapt her features to any role she chose, but for the moment he was only conscious of being asked to look at an outstandingly pretty woman and feeling awkward about it.

“OK?” she said to the slave, but he didn’t look up.

“I can never remember which ones are deaf and dumb,” she said to Morris. “In fact it’s difficult to believe they really are—the other women treat them as if they weren’t there—or weren’t human anyway, more like dogs. You don’t mind what you do in front of them, after a bit. Where do they all come from? Africa?”

“No. Most of the ordinary slaves come from Africa, but these are marshmen from Q’Kut. It’s a hereditary job.”

“That can’t be easy. They’re eunuchs,” she said, settling into the less ramshackle armchair. Morris sat down also but couldn’t loll. He found himself crouched forward on the edge of his chair with his elbows on his knees and his fingers tightly laced together.

“No, it’s like that,” he said. “Down in the marshes there’s one clan—the eel clan—who always castrate their second sons and cut out their tongues and pierce their ears. If that son doesn’t survive they do it to the third son, and so on.”

She looked at him with lordly disgust.

“I hate sick jokes,” she said.

“I’m afraid it’s true. In fact it’s an essential part of the economy of the marshes, and population control.”

“How horrible.”

“Not much more than . . . oh, forget it.”

Morris had no wish to start an argument about the ethics of terrorism. He hated that amount of involvement, and usually lost, too. She smiled at him with sweet complicity. There had been a very severe-seeming administrative officer at Bristol; she too had sometimes smiled at Morris like that, because he’d had digs in the same street as her and had seen how she dressed in the evenings, to go out with how many varied men, in what cars. Just so this girl was smiling now to establish a convention whereby that other girl—the one with the gun at her hip and the dead bodies of innocent men behind her—had nothing to do with this visit. This visit was quite different, the daughter of the big house paying a social call on, oh, the rather dull local doctor, being uncondescendingly charming, not yet mentioning whatever business it might be that the charm was expected to pay for.

“Do tell me about your zoo,” she said.

“Well, I’m not really a zoologist. My field is psycholinguistics . . .”

“Oh.”

(She meant “Oh?”)

“It’s rather a vague subject—it’s the study of the effect of language on the mind, and one way you can tackle it is by researching into the linguistic abilities of non-human creatures. I happened to start working with a particularly intelligent female chimpanzee at Bristol, but about eighteen months ago when the Sultan was in London he asked me to come up and have dinner—we used to live on the same staircase at Oxford and got on pretty well—and I told him what I was doing. He offered me a fantastic salary to come out here with my chimp and look after the zoo as a sideline.”

“What’s in it for him?”

“God knows. When you’re that rich you don’t have motives any longer—or rather any motive is as good as any other motive, since you can satisfy them all. I think he likes having me about. And he’s a bit obsessed with Oxford—he never sat his finals, you see. And if Dinah really comes up to scratch we actually might one day hit the academic headlines.”

“That’s a slave name.”

“I didn’t choose it. And I don’t think of it like that.”

“You think you don’t think of it like that. What are you actually doing with her?”

Morris clicked. Instantly Dinah exploded from her nest to the top of the bookshelf, then sprang, whirling like a falling sycamore seed, down to his lap, where she sat pouting at the stranger.

“This is Dinah,” he said. “My name’s Wesley Morris, but everyone calls me Morris. I’m afraid I don’t know yours.”

“I’ve got a lot of names. You’d better call me Galayah.”

He repeated the name, but couldn’t help correcting her pronunciation.

“Bloody hell!” she said, flushing. “All right, call me Anne. I used to answer to that.”

Dinah stopped pouting and shifted round until she could pick at Morris’s shirt-buttons. She had never discovered a satisfactory way of grooming him, except in the sparse and unrewarding strip of hair that circled his bald patch. This was only a sign that she would like to be groomed herself, which in turn meant that she wanted reassurance. That makes two of us, he thought, starting to pick systematically along the fur of her forearm.

“Well,” he said, “currently I’m setting up an experiment to investigate Dinah’s ability to cope with the idea of time.”

“Animals don’t have one.”

“So people say. We’ll see. If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have said that animals couldn’t understand or construct conditional clauses, but Premack in California taught a chimpanzee called Sarah how to, and Dinah and I have duplicated his work. So why not time?”

“I see. What else?”

“Well, the Sultan is very anxious to make a breakthrough with an experiment for which
he
can claim some credit, and his idea is that Dinah should have a baby, and then we can see how much she teaches it of what she’s learnt from me.”

“Will she even look at a male chimp? Doesn’t she think she’s human, living all the time with you?”

“We don’t know, yet. She spent her first three years at Bristol with other chimps, including her mother, only coming out for tests and lessons. Since then she’s lived with me, but I’ve never treated her as a human—I mean dressed her in clothes or let her eat with a knife and fork. She doesn’t sleep in a cot, but as near as I can arrange to a jungle nest. She’s got her own room—that’s essential, so that I can shut her up if I have to do something without her—but it isn’t at all like a human room. She even wears a leash sometimes, though she hates it. Nowadays she spends a bit of her time with a family group of near-wild chimps we’ve imported, and my impression is that she recognises them as being the same species as herself. For instance, one of the females was in season a few weeks ago, which meant that her sex organs swelled to a large pink mound on her rump. Dinah saw it, and spent a lot of time inspecting herself for the same symptoms.”

Anne laughed and stretched. Morris found himself relaxing slightly, but when he started to lean back in his chair Dinah grabbed his hand and re-applied it to the bit of her shoulder he had been working on.

“So that’s why you’re in Q’Kut,” she said. “For bread.”

“Not entirely,” said Morris. “I mean, I don’t need all that money. I do like having an unlimited budget for my research, of course. On the other hand I miss the kind of colleagues I could talk things over with. I didn’t realise it till I got here, but the real attraction of Q’Kut is the marshmen.”

“And the marshwomen?”

“No, as a matter of fact, not. Oh, I see, you mean sexually. Not that either.”

“You’ll have to explain.”

“Well, there are about a dozen languages left in the world which are not dialects of other languages and are spoken exclusively by a coherent group of people. By ‘exclusively’ I mean they are monoglots. They don’t speak any other language. There’s a few in New Guinea, a few in Brazil, and a remarkable tribe in the Andaman Islands called the Jarawa. There may be something still in Central Asia, but I doubt it. But the Q’Kuti marshmen are easily the largest and most uncontaminated of such groups, apart perhaps from the Jarawa. From a psycholinguist’s
point of view, Q’Kut is the most exciting place in the world.”

“It doesn’t look it.”

“No, but the marsh language . . .”

“Can you speak it? How the hell many languages can you speak? You hissed away in Japanese, didn’t you, that day I came? Can you speak Chinese? Have you read Chairman Mao in the original?”

“I’ve only read his thoughts,” said Morris, rather bowled over by this sudden spate of eager questions, and afraid that it might signal a metamorphosis to some other role, terrorist or vamp or ardent student. He felt better able to cope with her as she was.

“That’s great,” she breathed.

“I don’t know. I mean, you can understand a language without understanding what somebody is saying. That’s one of the things psycholinguistics is about.”

“Please go on about that,” she said, politely laying the ghost of Chairman Mao.

“Oh, well, the marshmen have a very interesting language. It contains a number of unique elements, but it lacks a number of other things which we would regard as normal, if not essential. For instance, there are no words and no grammatical structures with which to formulate notions of cause and effect. It can be done, but you have to go a long way round, using very clumsy expressions to achieve it. There are almost no general nouns, either. You see, the marshes are a closed world, in which almost everything is
known,
and has its own name. They have a few general nouns for things that seem to them mysterious, such as foreigners and particularly witchcraft. But you can’t say ‘plant’, for instance. You can’t even say ‘reed’. You have to name the particular type of reed.”

“That must make life difficult.”

“They get along. Then there’s another aspect of the linguistic-cultural nexus that particularly interests me. You speak the language in sentences, but the sentences are made up not of words but of word-accretions . . .”

“Like those long words in German?”

“A bit like that. But all the word-accretions are constructed round roots of relationship . . .”

“Cousins and things?”

“Not that kind of relationship—or not only. We tend to build up our sentences round verbs. That’s to say our central notions are notions of action. They accrete their words round particular roots which describe the relationship between the various parts of the accretion. Their central notion seems to be a notion of everything’s position in a very complicated network of relationships.”

“Isn’t cause and effect a relationship?”

“Yes, of course it is, but I didn’t say that they had ways of describing all possible relationships—only the ones that seem to matter to them. For instance they can use a single syllable to express a particular personal obligation which it would take us several sentences to attempt to describe. But the thing about cause and effect is that it’s a relationship of such enormous power—I mean for us it is
the
relationship—it’s what verbs are about—that if you admitted it into a system like the marshmen’s I think it would destroy it—destroy the language, and thus, ultimately, the way of life. I must admit that I find the whole problem of relation-roots absolutely fascinating.”

“That’s funny. It doesn’t sound really your thing.”

“Oh?”

“Well—oh hell, I suppose this is rude—but you don’t look as though you related to anything much, except Dinah.”

With extreme care Morris parted a fresh section of the short, almost bristly hairs and peered at the line of greyish flesh below.

“It is arguable that the looker-on sees most of the game,” he said in as distant and donnish a voice as he could contrive.

“That’s what I mean,” she said. “You sit up here in this glass fortress, miles from anything that’s actually happening, teaching a monkey conditional clauses. That’s all done with, that way of life. You can’t know what it’s like, what it’s about, what it
means,
until you’ve been part of it. I bet you don’t even go into the marshes if you can help it!”

“I don’t go at all. I was taught the language by an old man called Kwan, who was the previous Sultan’s bodyguard. He used to arrange for the singing boys who sometimes come for state occasions to sing me a lot of their songs, which I taped. But he died just under a year ago, and as far as I know the only other person in the palace who speaks the language is Dyal, the present Sultan’s bodyguard.”

“There are some in the women’s quarters. I think that’s what they must be. I hadn’t realised.”

“There ought to be eight of them, very black, tattooed with different patterns under their eyebrows.”

“I haven’t looked that close. They keep to themselves, and—I oughtn’t to say this, but they really stink.”

“I believe they rub themselves all over with rancid buffalo milk.”

“It smells worse than that. The Arab word for them means . . .”

“I know.”

“I’m glad it’s only buffalo milk. Why eight?”

“Well, there’s a slightly odd arrangement down in the marshes. I’m not an anthropologist, so I don’t know if it’s unique. There are nine clans, eight of which conform to a pattern you do find elsewhere. That’s to say they all have different fishes or animals for their totem, and strict rules about which clan you have to sell your sisters’ daughters to, and so on. Each of those eight clans provides the Sultan with a wife. That’s who they are.”

“What about the ninth?”

“They’re quite different. They provide the Sultan’s bodyguard, but they’re set apart in a lot of other ways. It isn’t just that they’re so much bigger than the others that they look like members of a different race—they’re expected to behave differently, too. They never lie, for instance . . .”

“How do you know?”

He laughed.

“I don’t, of course,” he said. “It’s just that they haven’t got a totem animal, but where you’d normally get a totem-reference in a song, with the ninth clan you get a reference to their truth-telling. I’m so wrapped up in the songs that I hadn’t even considered that that might be a polite fiction. Anyway, they’re also set apart by not marrying. They steal women from the other clans, but as they haven’t paid for them it doesn’t count as marriage. There’s quite a bit of feuding among the other eight clans, so a lot of men get killed and the survivors are polygamous, but they’re all very strict about adultery. Kwan said that if they discover a couple in the act the woman is drowned and the man made to take poison; but if he’s a warrior of the ninth clan they let him off scot free. They don’t even demand the bride-price from him. They just drown the woman.”