Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

“But this woman,” said the Prince. “She make my father . . . send . . . other womans . . . women . . . away. Send back to tents . . . Such is great . . . great ’aib .”

“A great disgrace? I see.”

“Not for all peoples a disgrace. He send young woman back to tents with a good gift . . . yes, OK. She finds good husband quick, if peoples are Hadahm, Mura’ad, that sort. But some peoples tell it is a great . . . disgrace. My father knows this. He will not do it, but she is witching him.”

“Yes, I see,” said Morris inwardly cursing the pretty busybody for scattering the seeds of female emancipation on such unwilling ground. “Yes, of course I will talk to her. Don’t let your mother poison her, though. She isn’t a witch—she’s just a fool.”

“A witching fool?”

“Yes . . . I mean no. I mean what you are trying to ask is ‘Is she a foolish witch?’ The answer is no. She is foolish, but she isn’t a witch.”

But she’s a witching fool all right, he thought.

2

When Kwan had wanted to pay Morris a visit, he used to send one of the marsh eunuchs carrying a short piece of reed, notched in the middle. Morris would break it at the notch and send one half back with the slave—the reed symbolised a spear, and breaking it was a sign of peace. Kwan used this ritual even when he was himself standing just outside in the passage; it gave Morris time to unroll the reed visiting-mat and fetch out a box of cheroots and a can of sweetened condensed milk; then Kwan would come in, settle on the mat, suck at the can, chew tobacco and talk, endlessly, never repeating himself, about old doings among the buffalo herds.

So Morris found himself off-balance when, the day before the murders, Dyal came to the door unannounced and asked in his excellent Arabic if Morris was busy. Morris had in fact been watching some film of the chimpanzees and had a slight headache because the palace developing laboratory (installed by the Sultan to satisfy a sudden fad for wild-life photography, but now also apparently used by Akuli bin Zair for his home porn movies) was erratic in its results. So Morris was glad of the excuse to switch off and open the blinds. Dinah, who had been having one of her scuttering, restless mornings, leaped hooting to her nest where she stuffed her mouth with the shavings she used for bedding and glowered at the visitor. Morris rose from his desk.

“Peace be on you,” he said. “You are very welcome. How would you choose to be seated? I have the visiting-mat that Kwan used to use.”

“A chair is more comfortable,” said Dyal, smiling. “We have no customs in common, Lord Morris. We are both far from our own people, you in distance and I in time. So we can ignore all customs.”

“All right. That chair is cleaner than it looks. Would you like coffee? Or . . . er . . . Kwan used to drink sweet milk and chew tobacco.”

“I like weak instant coffee in a large cup, very hot.”

Morris laughed aloud because this was so exactly the opposite in every way of the Arab notion of what coffee should be. Dyal laughed too, a large easy sound, showing that he understood the joke.

“But I will chew tobacco,” he went on. “In this I am still a marshman. We have a root in the marshes which we chew, but tobacco is better. My brother the Sultan has made me swear an oath not to chew it in his presence, nor to buy it for myself; but I may take a gift of it. Thank you. Ah, yes, that is good stuff!”

He chewed with slow gusto while Morris got the coffee ready. The jaw-movement altered his face and gave it a less human look; in fact for a moment he seemed to have more in common with Dinah than with Morris. Perhaps it was this emergence of a more primitive aspect of his guest that made Morris relapse into marsh language.

“The floods go very slowly,” he said.

“Let us continue in Arabic,” said Dyal, too gravely for the words to sound like a snub. “I cannot think easily now in the old language. But let us omit all that coffee-talk—how it wearies me to stand behind the shoulder of my brother the Sultan and hear the same words spoken over and over again, by each guest, as though they had never before been said. I prefer the manners of you Franks. You say ‘Good morning. How are you?’ and then you do business.”

Morris was impressed. There was a relaxed lordliness in Dyal’s tone, and he had pronounced the English words in a very comprehensible accent. His bulk filled the shabby chair. He might have been an old-fashioned Oxford don putting a freshman at ease before his first tutorial. Kwan had had a kingly manner too, but a whole Toynbeean cycle of civilisations seemed to lie between their two styles of majesty.

“As you wish,” said Morris. “It is only that since Kwan died I get little chance to practise the language.”

“You must speak it with Gaur. Prince Hadiq tells me that you wish to talk to me about young Gaur.”

“It was the Prince’s wish,” said Morris carefully. “The Prince is both my pupil and my friend, and it is painful to him that Gaur should be afraid of me.”

Dyal’s laugh made Dinah duck out of sight.

“He is not physically afraid of me,” explained Morris. “But he thinks I am a witch.”

“He is a boy, a savage straight from the mud. His head is full of old women’s chatter. When a boy becomes a man down in the marshes they do not give him a man’s mind. I remember, when first I came to the sands—before this house was built, when we all lived in a big mud fort—how many childish tales I believed. Yes, I will tell him to be a man.”

This was all uncomfortably abrupt. Morris had hoped to ease from a fairly detailed demonstration that he was not a witch into the next item on the agenda. Now he would have to tackle it direct.

“The Prince,” he said, “also believes in the truth of witches.”

“So do all sensible men.”

“Perhaps. But he believes that the Frankish woman, who is my countrywoman, has cast a spell on Gaur.”

“It is possible.”

“A love-spell?”

Dyal laughed again like a man auditioning for Father Christmas.

“By God, boys are always the same. I remember when I came to the sands, how it was. There were four of us in the reeds, of the ninth clan, who became men that year. Before the dances we slept in the same hut, talking all night of women, the girls we had seen, or the young wives herding buffalo, and how we would take this woman or that as soon as we were made men. But then I was sent for, to be the prince’s shadow, here in the sands, and here there were no women to be seen, all shut away, hidden under litters when they rode out. So I wept and groaned in the dark to think of my comrades sporting among the reedbeds. Surely, if there had then been one such as the Frankish woman walking about the fort unveiled, I would have rolled my eyes at her!”

“But what would the old Sultan have done if he had seen your eye-rollings?”

“Now, he was a man! Perhaps he would have laughed and given me the woman. But my Prince was more of an age with me than Hadiq is with Gaur, so most likely the Sultan would have sent for brides from the eight clans for his son, who would then have lent them to me.”

Morris blinked but Dyal didn’t seem to notice.

“As it happened,” he went on, “my Prince soon went to get his learning in your country, and I returned to the marshes and waited. It was a weary three years, but I eased them with hunting pig and women.”

“Prince Hadiq believes that the Sultan would shoot Gaur if he knew.”

“It is not possible. What! Break the Bond of Na!ar for a woman!”

“Oh?”

“Have you not heard the Testament of Na!ar? Does it not say that thus is the Bond broken. Many things in that song are obscure, but those lines, as I remember, are clear.”