The Poison Oracle (9 page)

“My father is at here,” said the Prince. “One woman also.”

His hands fluttered through the sign language of the harem. Dinah recognised the process, though not the symbols, and promptly made her own sign to demand food. One of the eunuchs laughed, a breathy gargle. The other used his flute to blow a short message, answered almost at once by a near call and a distant answer. It was Dyal who opened the doors. Morris paused in the short corridor that led to the main inspection gallery and said to the Prince “Your father will ask how your English lessons are going. Tell him ‘Not so dusty’.”

“Dust was . . . dirt?” asked the Prince.

“Forget it,” said Morris.

But, like almost everything else that happened that morning, the idea turned out badly. The Sultan was showing off his marksmanship to Anne, who was wearing a very English tweed skirt, a powder-blue twin-set and a double row of pearls. Only the pearls were different from what her alleged mother might have worn at a point-to-point twenty-five years ago—they were far too big. Presumably the Sultan had sent for this gear in order to gratify his penchant for the English county style, and it was amusing to see how Anne wore the clothes: not exactly to the manor born, but with the slightly exaggerated stance and gestures of a musical comedy actress of the ‘thirties playing a manorial role; whether deliberately or by luck, she had hit the exact off-key note that would entrance her captor.

“Hello,” said the Sultan affably. “And how’s the English going, my lad?”

The Prince stammered, looked desperately at Morris and blurted out in Arabic “Not as the language of excrement.”

“I should think not,” said the Sultan. “Morris, you haven’t been trying to muddle his wits with the marshmen’s lingo, have you?”

“No . . . well . . . I mean . . .”

But before he could sort out the mistranslation they heard more fluting from the doors and another cry from Dyal. This time, of course, it was bin Zair, and the explanation about the Prince’s linguistics got lost in an argument about how far the old man should be forced to crawl, with the Sultan insisting on his own ludicrous rights simply because both Anne and Morris asked him not to. He then decided that as there were now seven people in the zoo they would have a shooting match. Dyal and Gaur were summoned from the door and they all took it in turns to bombard the gorilla with empty hypodermic darts. Anne, very much in a squire’s-lady fashion, attempted to put Gaur at his ease by striking up a conversation, all smiles and good-will; and despite the lack of language they seemed to get on well enough to spoil the Sultan’s aim; then Prince Hadiq had the lack of tact to shoot straighter than his father; either Dyal knew better or he too was disturbed about something. Anne turned out to be a very moderate shot; Gaur started badly, never having seen any kind of gun till a week ago, but improved quickly; Morris completely missed the gorilla with two of his five shots, while old bin Zair never hit it at all and was heaped by the Sultan with the harsh traditional mockery of the desert for the feeble warrior. They tried to get Dinah to shoot, but she was unable to connect the gun itself with the sudden appearance of the darts on the gorilla’s chest. In any case she had never much cared for the gorilla, who had been stuffed in a bristling pose of snarling anger. Morris found it a relief when he could at last pick her up and retreat, side by side with bin Zair, backwards from the Sultan’s presence. He took the old man into his office and made the ritual coffee. Dinah settled down to trying to type on the ancient, unbreakable Remington he kept for her.

“The women of your country, are they all so shameless?” asked bin Zair.

“It is not our custom to wear a veil,” explained Morris.

“Oh, I have seen the faces of women, many times. I have talked with Freya Stark. Even now there are women who work at the oil wells, unveiled. But I have not seen them roll their eyes and show a moist lip to some young savage, as your countrywoman did.”

“She was only trying to be friendly.”

“Among my people, if a man’s sister behaved so he would shoot her, and be praised by his friends.”

Morris could only shrug and pour bin Zair his second tiny cup of coffee. After this they would be able to get down to business. As so often before, he was maddened by the lack of subjects for small-talk—life in an unvarying climate made one realise how much the English owe to their crazy weather as a source of uncontroversial chat.

“What was Freya Stark like?” he asked, though in fact the lone explorers of Arabia, the Doughtys and Starks and Thesigers, filled him only with relief at not being like them.

“She wore strange shoes,” said bin Zair. “Now, the women at the oil-wells are like men—and the men are like women. Perhaps you will see them when they begin to drill in the marshes.”

The old man’s watery and blood-shot eyes looked speculatively at Morris, as though trying to guess whether his taste ran more to manly women or womanly men.

“They will not drill in the marshes, surely,” said Morris. “The Sultan won’t let them.”

“My master has many minds. No man can know them all.”

“But the treaty—the Testament of Na!ar!”

“Is my master a child, or a lover, to turn from his path for the sake of a song? I tell you, sir, I have done what you suggested and have counted the tusks in the chest. There are eighty-two pairs. The ceremony of the tribute therefore began when my master’s grandfather was a young warrior. If the treaty is true, it is yet not truly old.”

“There may have been another chest.”

“True. But where is it?”

Bin Zair peered into his empty cup like a hairy little ape looking for a fat grub in a hole. Dinah suddenly lost her temper with her typewriter and slid it angrily across the floor, but Morris hadn’t time just now to start her off on a new ploy; against all his own rules he fetched a banana from the cupboard and gave it her.

“Surely the marshmen will fight,” he said.

“With spears, against guns and aeroplanes?” asked bin Zair, holding out his cup to be filled.

“Perhaps,” said Morris as he poured. “In the Sudan, in the south, there are tribes which have warred for ten years against the government, and have not been conquered. They too live in marshes and swamps.”

“It is said that these marshes can easily be drained. They have but to build two short new watercourses through the southern hills; and when that is done, they also say that where the waters were will be good land, able to feed many cattle.”

“Has he told Dyal?” asked Morris, remembering how comparatively badly the bodyguard had shot.

“A slave? Sir, will you speak to my master of this matter?”

“I will ask him, yes.”

Bin Zair leaned forward, suddenly emphatic.

“Let not my master know that I have told you of it,” he said. “I am old, and so speak more than I should. You must ask him cleverly, as if the thought came from your own mind. He is your friend—he will not lie to you. Now you must show me your needs.”

As they rose Dinah picked up the typewriter again and threw it with a crash across the room; she must have decided it was an easy way of being given bananas. Morris clicked at her and she followed him sulkily out into the passage.

Bin Zair was a very Arab Arab, Morris found. One of his characteristics was that he was unselective about the relevance of information. He seemed to want to see everything; as a result the zoo inspection took well over an hour. For instance Morris had to go into exact detail of how the apparent cost of the equipment to purify the polar bear’s water, and the labour to keep its litter clean, was negligible compared with the cost of providing a new bear every few months. Bin Zair combed his beard with thin, shaking fingers and watched the big beast pad its ceaseless figure-of-eight across the diagonal of its cage. Polar bears always reminded Morris of mediaeval barons, narrow-brained, shaped for slaughter, magnificent, useless. No doubt Nillum ibn Nillum, the Sultan’s original ancestor, had been of that nature also, so the Sultan had come a long way. There was hope for mankind yet.

Far off in the other gallery the whoosh of the spring-guns sounded through the stillness.

“Must each animal have its own slave?” said bin Zair dubiously.

“No. All I want is two men who do their work properly, and do only that, and are not taken from the zoo to perform other duties. I want no more than I need. It is less trouble to use two good men than a lazy twenty. I would prefer hired men to slaves—I am not accustomed to the idea that an animal should be worth more than a man.”

“I can remember a horse which my father bought for the price of three hundred slaves,” said bin Zair. “Now let us consider the rhinoceros.”

But at that moment Dinah raced away down the front of the cages to the chimpanzee grove and crouched chattering by the bars. One of the caged chimps answered her. She bristled and backed away, still chattering, while the deeper voice of one of the males joined in the racket. Though she was perfectly safe Morris instinctively hurried to her side.

He found the whole group more lively than he’d yet seen them. Except for Murdoch, who had retired for safety with her baby to the top of the central tree, they were all ranged along the front of the cage, chattering or grimacing at Dinah. The scene reminded Morris of an episode in some ancient
Wizard
where the town urchins mock through the school railings one of their number who has been forced to dress in an Eton jacket and be educated with the nobs. Dinah answered their jeers with bitchy confidence, as if she knew that she had indeed left the slums to join the evolutionary smart set, Man.

At the back of the cage the shiny panel of black glass slid up, and there were Anne and the Sultan leaning on the window-ledge, laughing at the scene. The Sultan beckoned.

“His Majesty is angry,” said bin Zair. “You must go quickly. I will wait in your office.”

“Good,” said Morris. “I hope you’re wrong. He looked pleased.”

Even so he was slightly nervous as he took Dinah by the paw and hurried her off to the upper gallery, where he found that the atmosphere was indeed stickier than he would have guessed from that glimpse of the couple at the window. Dyal and Gaur were sitting against the wall several yards down the corridor. The Prince stood apart, withdrawn and angry, fiddling with one of the spring-guns as though, in the usual Bedouin manner, he wanted to take it to bits and put it together. Anne continued to lean on the window-sill while the Sultan turned unsmiling to Morris.

“What the hell have you been up to?” he said.

“In what way?”

“You don’t seem to have taught Hadiq a single syllable of English.”

“Rubbish mate! He’s not getting on at all badly, considering. He just lacks confidence, especially with you standing there expecting him to spout a mixture of Wordsworth and Bertie Wooster.”

The Sultan turned his head towards Anne.

“You are quite right, my dear,” he said. “It is a clear proof of the need to hire properly qualified teachers for the school.”

“You aren’t being fair,” she said. “Mr Morris is an absolute whizz at languages.”

“What school?” said Morris.

“Oh, it’s just a little plan we’ve dreamed up,” said the Sultan. “Dinah doesn’t seem to be making much progress either.”

“Rubbish again. She’s getting on fine.”

“She didn’t appear to be just now,” said the Sultan.

“Oh, that . . . I was talking about her learning the future tense.”

“There is a limit to my patience, Morris. I have gone to great trouble and expense to set up this experiment, and you dismiss it as ‘Oh, that . . .’ How much time has Dinah actually been spending with the other chimps?”

“Not very much, so far. I’ve had to wait for them to settle down.”

Morris did in fact feel mildly guilty about his having kept so much to the old routine that had prevailed before the wild chimps came, with Dinah spending practically all her time in his company; but he hadn’t expected the Sultan to react with such cold, bullying anger. The little dark eyes were like opaque beads in the flat, sand-coloured face. Morris, always easily cowed, was beginning to stammer reasons when Anne deliberately broke the tension.

“I’d love to see Dinah read something,” she said. “Could she do that now?”

“I don’t know,” said Morris. “She’s not in a very good mood, and in any case she’s just had a banana.”

“By God, Morris,” shouted the Sultan, “you seem to think you own this place!”

“OK, OK, let’s give it a go,” said Morris. “What would you like her to do?”

He found that he too, by now, had joined in the general fit of sulks that seemed to have permeated the gallery; he had always particularly disliked making Dinah do her reading as if it were a circus trick.

“Let her fetch the spring-gun from Dyal and give it to me,” said the Sultan, and without waiting to ask whether this was practicable he called to Dyal to put the gun in front of him on the floor. Morris scurried back to his office to fetch fruit for a reward to Dinah, and found bin Zair looking systematically through the files in the small cabinet. He looked up and smiled when Morris apologised for the delay.

Back in the upper gallery Dinah scampered over at the first rattle of the counters, instantly the alert pupil, teacher’s pet. Morris laid out a message on the tiles.

white square:  Dinah

green circle with hole:  go

orange circle with hole:  get/fetch/take

yellow square:  thing with no name

She sniffed a couple of times at the message, which was a form they normally used for search-games, then set off towards Morris’s office. Morris clicked and slapped down the red negative circle. She sniffed at it, then set off in the opposite direction, along the bleak corridor towards where the two guards set. Gaur shrank visibly from her, but Dyal laughed and when she picked up the spring-gun and returned he rose and followed her. She placed the spring-gun on the floor and dubiously compared it with the yellow square. Morris added a positive green circle to the message, and she immediately began to bounce up and down, eager for the banana, then chattered irritably as he spelt out a new message.

white square:  Dinah

yellow circle with hole:  give

yellow square:  thing with no name

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

purple rectangle:  qualifier “big”