Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

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”

All might have been well—tempers been smoothed, Morris’s treatment of Dinah justified, even his qualifications for teaching Prince Hadiq confirmed—had not Dyal and Gaur come to join the group; but Dinah was never very happy with the qualifying group of symbols; she knew perfectly well how they worked, but their presence in a message seemed to make the whole thing harder for her. Now she picked up the gun, trailing it by its muzzle, and studied the possibilities before her, the Sultan, the Prince, Anne and the two bodyguards. The hush of waiting became ridiculously tense, almost as though it should have been filled by a circus drum-roll. At last, with a rush, she laid the gun ungraciously at Gaur’s feet and scampered back to Morris’s side.

The ten seconds’ silence was so intense and shocking that it seemed almost as though Dinah’s mistake had some ritual significance.

“Well,” said the Sultan at last, “what went wrong?”

“Honestly it was pretty good,” said Anne. “In fact it was marvellous. Only she gave it to the wrong person.”

“Exactly,” said the Sultan, clearly so angered by her intervention that Morris wondered whether his haphazard reading had included some potted Freud.

“Give her a chance,” said Morris. “She’s got a tiny vocabulary, with as few nouns in it as possible, because we’re more interested in her grasp of logical sentence-structure than just lists of words. I told her to give the bloody gun to a big man. That’s the nearest I could get. The language doesn’t contain a name for you.”

As if to settle things he gave Dinah her banana, with which she retreated to the far wall, as though one of them was going to try to steal it off her. Morris crouched to pick the counters off the tiles, scrabbling with his finger-nails on the slippery surface.

“Whose names does she know?” asked Anne.

“Just her own and mine—these two. This black square means a person other than one of us . . .”

The Sultan interrupted, dropping into Arabic, the first time for years that he had used it, except on formal occasions, when talking to Morris.

“By God, Morris, you do me great shame. You and the ape have eaten my bread and taken from me many gifts, and yet you have not thought me worth a name of my own, to tell me apart from some slave or goat-boy!”

“I’m sorry . . .” Morris began in English.

“Let it be seen to. I will have a name. Let a black symbol be made and on it set in gold the shape of a hand, the symbol of my house.”

“If you like,” said Morris. “She’s going to have to see quite a bit of you if she’s going to learn to associate it with you, and only you.”

The Sultan laughed, and reverted to English.

“She can come to the Council—we’ll make her Minister of Education, eh, my dear? And Morris, old boy, you really must see that she spends more time with the other apes. Got it?”

He smiled, a jovial great genie. But his eyes were still as hard as glass.

Three

1

“HOLY . . . CATS . . . BATMAN,” read Prince Hadiq, “. . . am . . . I . . . seeing things . . . back . . . to . . . the . . . Batcave . . . Wonderboy . . . this . . . looks . . . like . . . wit . . . widge . . . wicket . . .’ I cannot read one word, Morris.”

“Is it ‘witchcraft’?” asked Morris, without turning from the window. The whole tail-fin had now vanished, and some genius had contrived to remove one of the engines, but had been unable to shift it more than a few yards. It simply lay on the concrete by the wing, but no doubt time would whittle it away. The guard had been withdrawn, now that all the more easily detachable parts had vanished, but the thieves’ work went on at its regular pace.

“Yes, witchcraft,” said the Prince. “A woman is witching my father. Is witching also Gaur.”

Morris turned and saw that the prince was looking up from the comic as though he wished to pursue this conversation. The lesson had not gone well so far, and any subject which would encourage the boy to talk must be pursued. He was really getting on quite well, but something—perhaps this stupid worry about Anne being a witch—had caused a slight relapse.

“Where is Gaur, by the way?” asked Morris.

“Outside the curtain,” said the Prince. “We have . . . a matter to laugh . . . to laugh at, I say. Gaur tells you are a big witch, witching me. I tell this woman is a big witch, witching Gaur.”

“I’m not a witch, and I don’t think Anne is,” said Morris. “We don’t have witches in England any longer.”

“If so, how this?” said the Prince, flapping his hand against the Batman comic.

“Oh, that’s only a story—and I expect you’ll find that it turns out that there is no witchcraft at all, only some kind of machinery made to look like witchcraft.”

“Stupid,” said the Prince, dropping the comic. “The mother of me, the Shaikhah, she tells this woman . . . is a witch.”

Morris smiled, but was answered by a scowl.

“You think . . . I am telling woman’s talk. Wallah, Morris, the mother of me has go . . . has gone . . . to London . . . to Paris . . . to New York. The Sultan has much women, always. She thinks OK. A man is a man. Never she tells them witching. When I am baby, she . . . I speak Arab, please?”

“If you want to, but you’re doing very well.”

“By God, Morris, I tell you the woman is a witch. I have seen the Shaikhah mourn and weep because my father does not remember to take her to his bed when he is mad for love of some dancing girl. But never before has she told me to find her poison!”

“Speak English,” hissed Morris, knowing how whispers could travel and float along the corridors of the palace. “What are you going to do?”

“I ask you. What?”

It was a great honour to be consulted over so intimate a matter as whether one should help one’s mother to murder one’s father’s mistress. Morris did not care for great honours.

“I wouldn’t do anything for a bit,” he said. “I’d tell your mother it’s difficult to get poison.”

“But is not difficult. Saqwa is . . . medicine for . . . skin of camels. Gaur also. He knows many . . . poisons . . . in marshes.”

“Yes, I see,” said Morris. Saqwa, he knew, was usually arsenic, and certainly the songs were full of ugly deaths after feasts.

“So what I do?”

“Well, I could talk to Anne, I suppose. I expect your mother could give her a message asking her to come and see me, and I could suggest that she stops doing whatever she is doing to your father. And Gaur, of course.”

“Oh, Gaur is mad only. Is mad for love. He make songs for the woman.”

“Does he, by God!” said Morris. He had never taped anything like that, the love-songs and canoe-chants and lullabies of the ordinary marsh-people. All he had in his collection was the formal music of the singing clan.

“Yes. He lies on the floor. He groans. He is mad. I tell him, unless . . . if my father hear . . . he shoot him. True.”

“That doesn’t sound like witchcraft.”

“But Gaur is mad. My father shoot him. Will shoot him.”

“I know. The thing is that down in the marshes Gaur is a warrior of the ninth clan, and that means he’s not allowed to marry, but he is not punished if he takes another man’s wife. So I expect it seems natural to him.”

“OK. But he is mad, still. I send Dyal to you. You tell him tell Gaur. OK?”

“Fine,” said Morris, who had in a vague way been waiting for a chance to talk to Dyal about the future of the marshes, without doing anything to bring such a meeting about.