Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

So Dyal had been Gaur’s father, and Kwan Dyal’s—their real fathers, that is; but in their own eyes the fathers to whom they owed their duty as sons had been the Sultans, and when Dyal had called the Sultan “my brother” he had not been using a figure of speech. Among Arabs sons have murdered fathers and brothers brothers through all their blood-veined history, but Morris could not remember a single reference in any of the marsh-people’s songs to parricide, and fratricide was governed by the Rules of Cricket, as described by Qab.

Morris was wondering whether Hadiq had known this (and hence insisted so strongly that neither Gaur nor Dyal had killed his father) when his two wives came trailing up from the shore, with Peggy carrying a bowl of buffalo-milk in one hand and Dinah wearing the blue-bead belt over her left eye, like a tipsy coronet. Several happy children followed them, shrieking ruderies.

Night fell. The function of the filthy fires became apparent, as their smoke drifted through the tunnel-shaped huts and cleared the malarial mosquitoes away. Morris showed Peggy how to make a nest of reeds for Dinah; then he dressed the sore on her shoulder again.

“That will soon be well, Pegling,” he said.

“My lord, do not call me little-names. I am a woman. I wear a blue belt. My mother’s sister put it on me.”

He sighed. He was exhausted with last night’s efforts and to-day’s drama. She too was swaying and red-eyed, in the yellow flicker of the reed rushlight that burnt in the corner of the hut.

“Among thy clans thou art a woman,” he said. “Among mine thou art a child.”

“I will never be a woman,” she whined. “I will never smear myself with sour milk. In three days they will take us to Gal-Gal, and they will spear thee for a witch, and drown thy wives.”

Morris was too tired to feel the shock just then.

“Perhaps I am not a witch,” he said. “Or perhaps it is a good life in the other world. Where wilt thou sleep? Shall I make thee a nest like Dinah’s?”

She smiled, somehow, and without a word went to Dinah’s nest and crawled in beside her. Dinah adjusted her limbs without waking. By the time Morris had constructed a tent of mosquito netting over the pair of them they were fast asleep, fast entangled.

He sat down and wrote a careful note to Anne, most of which was taken up with an explanation for someone who couldn’t read phonetics of how to pronounce in the language of the marsh the formal summons “Thy blood-brother calls thee to Gal-Gal.”

Six

1

MORRIS WAS NOT at all prepared for Gal-Gal, when the fleet came to it in the middle of the third morning. It was a holy place, mentioned in many songs, often with modifiers which meant “of a dark, reddish hue” and “stony”, so he had envisaged it as another great mound among the reed-beds, like a blob of Devonshire, red clay and small stones.

Gal-Gal came out of the mists almost between stroke and stroke of the paddles, looming like a fortress. It was one vast slab of red rock, striated from end to end, and terraced over the ages by the rub of the river. Some movement of the continents had tilted it so that the layers ran five degrees from the horizontal and its flat top sloped up to a sort of prow about sixty feet above the water. The clefts and ledges along its side were fuzzy with stunted growths, mostly a strange succulent shrub whose branches projected at gawky angles, carrying little fat blue-green leaves and hanging bunches of wizened brown berries. There was a slow current here which kept a wide reach clear of reed and mimulus; down this the fleet swept.

Morris was being towed. Nobody would come in the canoe with him and Dinah, except Peggy, and he wasn’t given a paddle. He had been passed from village to village all the previous day, some of them on mounds like Alaurgan-Alaurgad, others consisting of huts built on rafts of reeds which were added to as they sank or as the floods rose. At each village most of his escort had returned home and only a few token warriors and elders continued with him. At the last one they had picked up a number of women and small girls.

“Perhaps you will find a friend,” he had said to Peggy, as he had watched a group of these scramble shrilling into a large canoe.

“Lord, they are of the duck clan,” she had answered with surprise and something like disgust.

The suppuration of her sore had gone and the skin was creeping across it. He had spent much of his time telling her European stories, Snow White and Oedipus and Beauty and the Beast; in exchange she had sung him, reluctantly at first, some of the women’s songs, which men are not supposed to hear. The words were slightly different from man-talk and the songs disappointing, very repetitive and often meaningless, but with haunting, wailing melodies. Her small voice went unnoticed in the general clamour of the fleet’s progress. At the moment Morris was being towed by two canoes of the heron clan, who had some sort of ancient antipathy to the men of the water-snake clan which was expressed in a ritual of jeering, a series of grotesque similes wherein the herons taunted the water-snakes for their big stomachs and the water-snakes taunted the herons for their small penises. Kwan had once said something about one of these clans always taking its wives from the other, but Morris couldn’t remember the details. The men of the two clans took the ritual seriously, snarling at each insult and putting real venom into their replies, but the other clans shouted with laughter. They seemed to be in no particular awe of Gal-Gal, for the racket continued as they jostled for landing places and began to swarm like baboons up the red rock.

Morris waited till his canoe was safely moored, then he settled Dinah, prostrate with heat, on to his left hip and with his right hand picked the pole out of its rings. The raw new box swung above his head with the ancient bones inside it.

“Bring food,” he said to Peggy.

“Lord, no food is eaten on Gal-Gal.”

“Bring water then,” he said crossly, “or I shall die thirsting.”

He stepped ashore and watched as she filled the water-bottles from the river and dropped a couple of Campden tablets in each. He had not told her what the tablets were for, nor had he told her a magical fable about them. He had simply forbidden her to give him water without them or to drink it herself. She was an obedient little doll.

Ages ago someone had cut good steps up the side of Gal-Gal. A worn flight of them rose to the left of the landing-place but ended in vacancy where a section of rock had fallen sheer away. The marshmen ignored them and scrambled up anyhow; there seemed to be several easiest-ways-up, such as boys find in a good climbing-tree. Morris, burdened with Dinah and the pole, chose to follow a crude sort of litter on which lay a man so deformed and bloated that he seemed like a piece of abstract soft sculpture. Three wives and a son carried this litter, going a long way round to find the most convenient path from terrace to terrace. At one such point they caught up with an old woman one side of whose body was completely withered, so that leg and arm were like dead branches. As she scrabbled to haul herself up a three-foot step the young male litter-carrier reached out with his foot and kicked her to one side, so that she fell clumsily and lay twitching. Without looking at her the four of them hoisted the litter over the obstacle and scrambled on. Mysteriously, it was at that moment that Morris’s tolerance of the marsh-people broke.

He didn’t do anything visible. He simply changed his mind. No doubt ever since he had found Maj’s body he had been building up to this decision, but now, as he helped the beldame to her foot (taking care only to touch sound flesh in case the withering was infectious) he found himself saying the hell with them. The Arabs have got them right. A conceivable alternative future for mankind, phooey. They are a dead end, a waste product, excrement. The language is an accident, and might still turn out to be a tool of minor importance for psycholinguistic research, but what was its point beyond that? Perhaps it wasn’t even as astonishing as Morris thought it—cold natures tend to find weird outlets for their romantic drives.