The Poison Oracle (8 page)

The expressionless clay mask chanted on. The voice of the main singer was expressionless too, telling, as if in a stone frieze, the precise cruelties that the two heroes dealt each other until both were dying.

Na!ar dragged himself through the reed-bed

Using only his arms.

The barbs of his own spear held fast in his liver.

The spear-shaft caught and dragged among the reed-roots.

Where clear water gleamed he lay still.

He saw the piebald horse wallow away, saddle empty.

He saw Nillum kneeling in the water.

He felt the poison-creatures beginning to suck up his soul.

Words then Na!ar, shield of the people, spoke.

Morris thrilled to the grammatical surprise, though he was ready for it, the sudden, rare null-root, the expression of general and involuntary action, contorted almost to the end of the longest word-group for many minutes. He was quite sure that the effect was intentional: the fight itself had been a personal matter between two men, moving their own limbs at their own will; but now a different power stirred in Na!ar’s dying mouth, as large and impersonal as the movement of the floodwaters or the return of day, for which the null-transitive root was invariably used. A series of heavy strokes on the slack-stringed harps seemed to underline the effect and at the same time to usher in another procession of dishes to fill the interval before the cryptic exchange of oaths and absolutions that actually embodied the ancient treaty.

Shivery and sighing Morris switched his tape-recorder off. In an attempt to protect his inner silence from any idiot who might want to break in with gossip or comment he pretended to be absorbed in the ridiculous architecture of the Council Chamber.

Even the Sultan was a bit ashamed of the Council Chamber; he would never explain quite how it had been designed, but Morris’s own theory was that the architects had been told to go to Oxford and Cambridge and produce a large room that combined all the most striking features of various college dining halls—though it looked as though they might have strayed into a few chapels as well. In some ways they had been ingenious, adapting the idea of a music gallery to make the place whence the women could watch from behind a screen (carved into a uniquely eclectic Gothic-Arabic design) their lord gobbling. No use had been found for the pendulous great nodules of plaster that hung from the fan vaulting—unless there were secret switches that enabled the Sultan to release them like bombs on to the unwelcome guest. The stained-glass windows had to be lit by an electric sun, because the chamber had no outside walls. The chandeliers were certainly very fine. But everything had somehow been thrown out of proportion partly (Morris suspected) because the Sultan had at a late moment decided to add a few feet to the dimensions here and there, and partly because of the tables. Perhaps it is impossible to design a room which will look right when all the furniture consists of one low throne, a lot of cushions, and five enormous black oak tables only eighteen inches high; Morris was actually beginning to wonder about this as he came out of his trance when the persistent litigant on the far side of bin Zair belched so loudly that he woke himself up. Bin Zair turned pointedly away from him, so could hardly avoid addressing Morris.

“I will come and see the animals to-morrow morning,” he said. “Thus we will settle this matter.”

“I am your debtor already,” said Morris.

“It is convenient,” explained bin Zair. “These Yemenis are slave-merchants; thus I can buy what you need, or order it if they do not have the stock in hand.”

He was turning away but the litigant, quite unrebuffed, was still there waiting his chance. Bin Zair half rose from his cushions so that he could resettle with his back completely towards the man, which brought him directly opposite the tape-recorder.

“What is the machine?” he asked.

Morris explained, adding that he already had a tape of the Testament, but that the quality was poor as last year he had been sitting further away.

“And what use do you make of these howlings?” asked bin Zair when he had finished.

“I have learnt the language. I find it very interesting.”

Bin Zair nodded like a grave goat.

“I have lived all my life at the edge of the marshes,” he said. “But I have learnt no more of their language than is needed for various ceremonies.”

“You have been busy with greater matters, no doubt.”

“Perhaps.”

At last the litigant rose and stalked away. Bin Zair bowed with great politeness to Morris but closed the conversation, which was a relief. As Morris settled to brooding on the passage they had just heard, he realised that it had been at this point in the feast last year that he had seen Kwan’s lined face glistening with tears, glistening like the spear in the song and the other spear which lay crosswise on top of the primitive offerings, its point looking as though it had been dipped in the blackest of black treacle. He wondered to whom else, now, the song had such a fierce meaning—none of the Arabs; not the Sultan who, Morris already knew, claimed to speak the language when in fact he had only an ill-accented smattering; Dyal, of course, and the new black giant sitting on the mat behind Prince Hadiq on the far side of the room; Morris himself, in his academic way; and (strange, strange) the eight women whom Morris had never seen, sitting up in the screened gallery, stinking of rancid milk. For them, perhaps, each syllable meant the stench of the lagoons, and the smoke of dried buffalo dung filling reed huts, and fevered babies muttering in the moist dark, and fighting duck, and home.

3

Dinah was having trouble with the concept of time. At first, though clearly puzzled by the blue cross being a different shape from any of the other nouns, she naturally attempted to identify the symbol with the egg-timer. Morris had anticipated this, and produced a square counter divided into blue and red along the diagonal.

Blue/red diagonal square: egg-timer.

He had also prepared a couple of other blue-diagonal squares, one for the clepsydra he intended to make out of a coffee-tin, and one for the kitchen timers he had sent for. He thought that Dinah’s first move would probably be to try and use the blue cross as a general noun to cover all transparent objects—glass always fascinated her. That wouldn’t be too hard to correct by producing the other gadgets—but then she would try to use the cross as a symbol for “gadget”.

Morris was watching her build one of her untidy towers of play-blocks, and thinking of carefully timed processes which did not involve
gadgets, when the curtain was pulled aside. Dinah fled to her nest.

“Hi,” said the Prince. He looked grave. There was someone in the corridor behind him.

“Come in,” said Morris, not rising.

The newcomer turned out to be the large young marshman whom Morris had seen a few days ago in the canoe, and last night at the feast. The Prince produced what was obviously a very carefully rehearsed sentence.

“Friend of my father, it is Gaur.”

“Gaur is welcome,” said Morris, rising.

The Prince made an encouraging little nod to his companion.

“Salam Alaikum,” said Gaur, stumbling over the ancient desert greeting of the Arabs.

“Alaikum as Salam,” said Morris, then added in the language of the marshmen their own salute: “Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow.”

Gaur hesitated an instant, no doubt because Morris had used the special vocative for addressing a warrior of the ninth clan, but there was no place in the language for somebody who, like Morris, did not belong to the hierarchy of the reeds. In the end he settled on a strange, archaic form which Morris had only come across before in a ballad in which two men met by night and could not identify each other’s status.

“Half my cheeses are thine,” he eventually replied, guardedly.

“Be welcome,” said Morris. “Dost thou eat tobacco?”

Gaur unsmilingly handed Morris the
Batman
comics and accepted a cheroot to chew, but before he had settled to it Morris saw him flinch and stare across the room. Dinah was doing her trench warfare trick again. Gaur muttered an invocation and made a curious sideways gesture with spread palms, as though he were glancing some missile to the side.

“What what?” said the Prince, like an early Wodehouse character.

“Gaur thinks that Dinah is a demon,” said Morris slowly.

“What means demon?”

Morris explained in Arabic.

“The marshes are full of witches and demons,” he added.

“Oh, I know it. You speak Gaur Dinah goods. Dinah is good. Speak you teach me English. I teach Gaur Arab.”

Something had happened, Morris saw, to produce this erratic flow of language. Normally the Prince would have paused for a minute between each sentence, and then ejaculated it unhappily; but today he thought it no shame to be wrong. Morris explained to Gaur, but Dinah for some reason refused to emerge from her nest to demonstrate that she was a mere animal (and was she?), while Gaur reluctantly returned the cheroot to its box; his smooth young face remained impassive, but his free hand now clutched the little amulet that had hung round his neck since he was a child. At the explanation about the English lessons he merely nodded.

At this point a pompous little slave arrived to say that bin Zair really was going to pay his unlooked-for visit to the zoo, and trusted that Morris had recovered sufficiently from the feast to be able to meet him there; very likely this was the self-same official who had hitherto thwarted Morris over the zoo-cleaners, for he managed to fill his little message with indignities. Morris never minded about that sort of thing, but suddenly the Prince snapped, in Arabic, “Thy soles shall be flayed off thy feet before this dusk,” and the slave whimpered away. Certainly the Prince was full of sudden confidence.

“We learn . . . we shall learn . . . more English with animals?” he asked.

“Fine,” said Morris.

He clicked at Dinah. Gaur flinched as she came leaping to the door but his big hand did not move to his knife or to the heavy new revolver at his hip—such weapons are no use against demons—the only hope is to clutch your amulet. To calm him Morris carried Dinah. She clung close all the way to the lifts.

The syndicate of architects who had designed the palace had made their name running up swish hotels in Beirut. The Sultan’s fantasies had dictated certain elements, such as the absurd external elevation, the grottoed audience chamber, several internal vistas and coups de theatre—and, of course, the zoo. But between these fixed points the architects had doodled in the light of their past successes, producing a series of plush but garish suites and lobbies. There were even meaningless side-rooms, dark and secret, which in a less teetotal environment would have been cosy little bars for lonely travellers.

But upon this characterless background the inhabitants and transients had imposed their own pungent culture. Morris had never yet met a goat trying to graze the amber pile of a corridor, but he would not have been surprised if he had. Stacks of coke-tins tended to collect in corners behind pierced mock-alabaster screens; tribesmen, wrapped in their tattered cloaks, snored and stank in random gathering-places, or played their stone-age version of peggoty in noisy groups round the indoor fountains; their tobacco, which they smoked in spent cartridge tubes passed round from hand to hand, smelt of gunpowder and dung-fires; somewhere far off someone always seemed to be boiling sour mutton-fat, but this odour was occasionally swamped by the presence of a young Arab who had been experimenting with cheap scent from Dar. They were a people who moved with great silence, while the plush decor muffled their fidgets. All the sounds in the palace seemed to come from mouths—arguments about the virtues of a strain of camels, reminiscences about old murders and raids, prayers, whisperings, greetings, snores and tubercular hawkings, and the mysterious reedy code of the eunuchs’ flutes. It was a world where action was hushed but every sound had a meaning, and for that reason it suited Morris. He had even come to like the smells.

The lifts were working today. Dinah escaped from his arms for long enough to press every button on the control panel, so it took them some time to ascend the four floors to the zoo. While the slow box sighed from floor to floor Morris studied Gaur, who would not meet his glance; he was a magnificent specimen, even allowing for his having lived on milk from birth and never having drunk the wriggling waters of the marshes. His skin was so black that in the dull light of the lift the shadows on it had a bluish tinge; his face, like Dyal’s, had in it only a few suggestions of Arab blood but was not at all negro—flattish, thin-lipped, high cheekboned, and narrow-eyed. He wore a white turban beneath which, Morris knew, the straight black hair would be surprisingly sparse, although it had never been cut. He would never grow a beard. (Kwan had once told Morris that he had at first felt friendly at the sight of another hairless face, and thought it very curious that Morris needed to shave to achieve the effect.)

Suddenly a number of possible explanations slid together. Morris turned to the Prince.

“I suppose the age-sets must have changed down in the marshes,” he said.

Even when he turned the sentence into Arabic the Prince only shrugged and nodded at Gaur. Morris asked the giant direct.

“New men became,” said Gaur. “At the flood-going.”

“Would I had been there to see,” said Morris—though to be honest he would rather have read about the ceremony, and perhaps watched a film of the dances. But his mild courtesy was received with a withdrawn glance that flickered for a moment from him to Dinah and then away. Still, it was gratifying to have guessed right; with the initiation of a new age-set—boys “became men” at roughly five-year intervals—Gaur must have reached warrior status and so could be sent to the Palace to guard the Sultan’s eldest son; and his arrival constituted an acknowledgement that Hadiq was indeed the chosen heir—with so many other products of the royal loins available, even an eldest son by a first wife needed to be constantly awarded symbols of his primacy. Gaur was a very potent symbol, with his gun at his hip and his hand on his amulet.

When at last the lift doors opened, Morris saw that the lobby outside the zoo was not empty. Two eunuchs sat on the floor playing their inexplicable finger-game; they had not, of course, heard the movement of the lift but the alteration of light made them look up and come smiling to their feet. They grinned at Dinah and made a curious wristy gesture to Gaur, but when the party moved towards the zoo doors they barred the way.