The Poison Oracle (6 page)

“Jesus!”

“I don’t think it’s always as bad as that. They’ve got to be caught in the act, for one thing; and I’ve got a tape of a song about a ninth-clan warrior who took a man’s wife and defended her from the man’s family until she was too old to bear children, and then she drowned herself and he poisoned himself with his own spear.”

“This still goes on?”

“Drowning women? Yes, I should think so.”

You cannot groom a chimpanzee to her satisfaction without careful scrutiny of every millimetre of flesh that is exposed as you move the hairs, so Morris had been talking without looking at the girl. The quality of this new silence made him look up.

The ghost of Mao was back at her elbow. She was sitting straight up in the chair, square-shouldered, pale-cheeked, her pretty mouth a hard slit. Her angry Wedgwood eyes held his.

“You sit here,” she said, snipping the words apart with bright emphatic teeth, “teaching an animal tricks while there are people down there living like . . .”

She was trapped by her own rhetoric, by the use of the earlier noun. She changed gear.

“You’ve never been down there, even,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s
like.
You just wait here, snug as a bug in a rug, learning it all second hand.”

“That’s right,” said Morris. “Perhaps I prefer to work that way, so perhaps it’s lucky I can’t.”

“Can’t?”

“Uh-uh. One, the Sultan wouldn’t permit it. Two, if I tried the marshmen would skewer me through with poisoned spears.”

“Oh.”

“They aren’t isolated by accident. They chose to be isolated. It’s all in the Testament of Na!ar.”

“Go on.”

Morris picked up Dinah’s limp hand and studied it, as though he thought a secret might be hidden in the strangely non-human lines that criss-crossed the human-seeming palm.

“As far as I can make out,” he said, “all this basin was once fertile and was inhabited by the ancestors of the marshmen. There are songs which seem to imply that. Then the sands encroached and they retreated into the marshes. It probably took centuries. Then—quite late—the Arabs came, and they fought. The marshes are pretty well impregnable, so it was stalemate until the last of what I think must have been the ruling clan of the marshmen, a hero called Na!ar, managed to ambush the chief of the Arabs, Nillum ibn Nillum. They killed each other, but seem to have reached some sort of agreement before they died. Or perhaps their followers reached the agreement, and put it back into their mouths to sanctify it, if you see what I mean. Anyway, it’s all in the Testament, which is a perfectly marvellous epic song-cycle embodying the treaty; and the main effect is that the marshmen acknowledged Nillum’s heirs as their overlords, and in return he gave them the right to kill any of his followers who trespassed into the marshes . . .”

“No feud? No blood-money?”

“The Sultan would pay that, but in fact it doesn’t happen. There hasn’t been anything to go into the marshes for, until recently. The Arabs don’t even water their camels here if they can help it, because the water’s so full of diseases. There’s probably every known form of bilharzia down there, and quite a few unknown ones. I’m always astonished that they manage to produce specimens as magnificent as Dyal and Kwan—the singing boys and the musicians are all weedy little runts.”

“The women are tiny too,” said Anne. “But why didn’t you get them to teach you? That might have persuaded you that you ought to
do
something about those people, instead of just sitting here.”

Morris shrugged, stuck his lower lip out, pulled at it, retracted it. Dinah, who had been peering into his face to see whether he would carry on grooming her, imitated his grimace but made it ludicrous by the extreme size and elasticity of her own lips. The girl laughed and became a social caller again.

“I don’t know,” said Morris seriously. “I didn’t think of it. I suppose I ought to learn the women’s language, which is a bit different, supposing they’d teach it to me. But as for
doing
anything, I don’t know. I mean, all I know is that it’s not up to me to make moral decisions about other people’s lives. Of course I agree that some of the things that happen down there seem unspeakably vile—there’s a lot worse than I’ve told you—but . . . well, take these blokes . . .”

He nodded towards the eunuch in the corner, now nibbling cheerfully at his second cheroot.

“I’ve never seen any of them looking at all unhappy. Admittedly I can’t even bring myself to think what it was like when they were . . . you know . . .
done,
but now they seem perfectly content. And Kwan always talked about life in the marshes as if it were a lost paradise. Last year, when the boys were singing the Testament at the flood-going feast I saw his face streaming with tears . . .”

“But all you really know is what one man has told you. One
man.
”

“I suppose so. But there’s something else. I was telling you about the language—well, in fact the whole verbal culture is as rich and sophisticated as anything I’ve come across—certainly anything that exists among illiterate people. It’s not just the language, it’s the way they use it. I’ve never heard anything to touch the songs, which range all the way from little blessings for the birth of a calf to great chanted epics. Those are perfectly marvellous. You get a basic story, but inside it you get dramatic sections, and love lyrics, and witches’ spells—there’s a lot of witchcraft in the marshes—but it isn’t a hotch-potch, it’s shaped and coherent, quite fit to stand up beside anything I’ve read in Western literature. Anyway, I’m quite certain that as soon as you started tampering with the culture, bringing in outside influences, pop music (I mean, look what’s been happening in Java, for instance) Cairo radio, Bible societies, all that, you’d kill the culture dead in a generation and the language in two. Look, half the world these days seems to tear its hair out and beat its breast if a rather dull species of bird is in danger of extinction. It seems to me much more terrible to risk the death of a language.”

The unaccustomed energy of Morris’s speech seemed to unsettle Dinah. She shrugged herself free of his inattentive hands, slid off the side of the chair and loped over to her toy-store. Knowing her as well as he did Morris could see that this was only one of her typically devious feints. She had decided that Anne was not a hungry predator and was therefore worth investigating, stealthily, from the flank.

“Is that Bruce’s line too?”

“Bruce?”

“Your Sultan. I always call my blokes Bruce. It keeps them in their place. In fact I know an Anatolian village where they now think Bruce is the English for ‘darling’.”

“Oh . . . er . . . I didn’t know.”

“Why should you?”

“Um. Well, if you ask him he just takes the line that he has an hereditary obligation, and that’s that. He takes it seriously, anyway. I mean, there’s much more comfortable places he could live, but he stays here ten months of the year.”

“I know. The women spend most of their time grumbling and discussing what they’re going to buy next time they go to Paris. How rich is he?”

“I don’t know. Enormously, but I don’t know how enormously. He told me he couldn’t afford to buy a Concorde. It wasn’t the capital expenditure, it was the upkeep. But that’s his sort of joke.”

“Did you see the emerald he gave Simoko when she left?”

“Simoko?”

“That’s a funny thing about this place. It’s just one building, but there’s such a lot going on in it that people only a few rooms away haven’t any idea about the dramas happening in your bit. Simoko was one of the air hostesses—the plain one, too sweet—and she and Bruce had a passionate five days; they kept at it just as if the world was ending, and when the plane came to fly the Japs out he gave her an emerald as big as my thumbnail. You could have bought a Phantom with it. It was rather funny—the other women weren’t at all jealous, even the real wives. In fact they loved it—something to gossip about. But if Bruce can afford that sort of thing, why doesn’t he do something for the marshmen? I bet there isn’t a school or a clinic anywhere. What about his hereditary obligation?”

Out of the corner of his eye Morris could see Dinah beginning her flank attack, pushing a couple of building-bricks with deceptive aimlessness across the floor. He kept his gaze on Anne so as not to spoil the fun, and saw that her indignation was again simmering up to a full revolutionary boil-over.

“There are clinics and schools for the Arabs,” he said quickly. “There’s a young Parsee doctor who goes round the tents in a very up-to-date mobile unit, and the Sultan flies in teachers during the winter, when there’s steady grazing up in the hills which means that the kids stay all in one place for a bit. But he won’t let anyone touch the marshmen—I don’t think he’d be very pleased if he knew how far I’d got with the language.”

“It seems bloody selfish to me.”

“Ung. Well, I expect you realise that most of his money comes from the oil company. Apparently their geologists decided that the richest fields were probably under the marshes, but he wouldn’t let them drill there. He still won’t.”

Dinah had left her bricks and was creeping in behind Anne’s left shoulder.

“The Sultan’s manner is very deceptive,” said Morris. “He really is very superficially Westernised. His Oxford accent and his slang and the gadgets in the palace are all a sort of parody of our civilisation—at least half-deliberate—a way of having what he wants of us and rejecting our values at the same time. Anyway, I’m not sure he isn’t right about the marshmen. We’re all rushing along, faster and faster, like water in a river before a cataract, dragging the developing nations along with us. It might be important that there are a few totally undeveloped peoples, so undeveloped that they don’t get involved when we go over the edge. It really isn’t an untenable attitude, but if you adopt it you’ve got to go the whole hog. Those Jarawa I was talking about aren’t the only tribe in the Andamans, but all the others have made vague contact with the rest of the world and either been assimilated or died out—dying out’s more usual in fact. The Indian government won’t let anyone go near the Jarawa, not even anthropologists—that isn’t because they’re enlightened, it’s because the Andamans are an important naval base. But the result is that they’re still totally isolated—different—themselves, and it is just possible that the future of mankind might lie with them. Or with the marshmen here.”

She was about to retort, but was distracted. During the last sentences of Morris’s harangue Dinah’s face had emerged above the tatty chintz of the arm of Anne’s chair, the ludicrous arch of her brows expressing wonder and surprise as her brown clear eyes gazed first at the glossy black hair, then at the soft-skinned cheek, and last at the lacy promontory of the bosom. Suddenly her dark arm snaked forward and two fingers probed at the white curve. Anne barely recoiled. She looked down and laughed kindly.

“Hello, future,” she said.

It is uncomfortable to find oneself liking, however momentarily, somebody of whom one disapproves with all the poor passion at one’s command. Morris distracted himself by watching Dinah, and immediately wished he’d had a camera going—it was a perfect example of her quickness that she should at once recognise in her own nature an element that she shared with this stranger but did not share with him, for she was peering sideways and down at her chest and feeling with her fingers the area round her own nipples. It would have been anthropomorphism to say she was dissatisfied, but to a comical extent she looked it.

Anne, still laughing, reached out a careful hand and started to tease at the fur on Dinah’s nape. Dinah was entranced. For a few seconds she stayed where she was, hunched like a man in a shower to relish the process; then she skipped on to the arm of the chair, took Anne by the wrist and moved her hand to a place on her ribs which she seemed to think needed attention. Anne, Morris could see, did instinctively what he himself had only learnt to do by watching Hugo van Lawick’s films.

“You ought to have trained as a vet,” he said.

“Oh, Mummy always has a dozen dogs in the house. And my father behaved as though our education was complete when we’d learnt how to groom a horse. But they’d have thought vets a bit beneath us. Will you do something for me?”

She had chosen her moment beautifully, establishing a deliciously cosy relationship with Dinah, slipping in a quick reference to her real social superiority to anything Morris knew, then asking. She mightn’t be brainy, but she was cunning.

“Ung?” he said.

“Are you still Foreign Minister?”

“I think so. I’ll know to-morrow, when I see where I’m sitting at the feast.”

“Can you fix me a passport?”

Morris said nothing, but stared at her gloomily, pulling his lip. She and Dinah made a charmingly posed contrast, both beautiful examples of their species, absorbed in their simple task: it was difficult to imagine refusing either of them anything. Really, this girl was a hundred years out of date. The roles she wanted weren’t being written any more—barging about the middle east, meddling in native politics, upsetting everybody, landing in some fracas far beyond her and then expecting to be rescued by a British Naval Party under the command of a snappily saluting little snotty. Now she was expecting Morris to come to the rescue.

“Haven’t you got one?” he said.

“I’ve had my British one withdrawn, the sods. I’ve been getting about on a Syrian travel document, but I think Bruce has impounded it. A Q’Kuti passport would be just the job.”

“Ung.”

She stopped grooming Dinah to look at him with the same speculative glance he had seen earlier. She was calculating his price. Not money, not sex . . .

“The point is,” she said, “I don’t think Bruce is going to let me go. Ever. We’re having a wild time together at the moment, but it can’t last. And when it’s over . . . He hasn’t said anything, but I’ve been listening to the women . . . sometimes he’s taken a fancy to a dancer from Dar or somewhere and had her flown in for a week and given her a present and sent her home . . . they talked about Simoko as if she was one of those. But they talk about me as if I’m one of
them
—you know, there’s several old women there who were Bruce’s father’s girls—they’ve been shut up in the women’s quarters for years—when it was only a sort of mud fort. OK, I’m enjoying myself right now, but I’ve got work to do.”