Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

The shouting died only slowly. Two women with brooms of reed swept a path to the duck’s body, and two others picked the old woman up and carried her there. One of the painted women brought dry reeds, and the other a flaming rush-light to light them. The old woman pulled some feathers out of the duck and threw them on the flames, watching intently as they curled and stank and became ash. One of the painted women knelt beside her and with a sliver of flint slit open the duck’s belly by the vent and teased the entrails out. While the old women smelt and fingered them the crowd talked, in a relaxed but expert way, about the trial. Morris caught fragments from the two nearer clans . . . Wah, that was a brave duck . . . the spirits are strong . . . Tchinai finds the trail hard to read . . . do you remember that she-witch from the garfish clan . . . in my father’s day they caught fierce witches . . . the duck found death close by the House of Spirits . . . No, by the centre . . . it is a hard trail . . . but wah, it was a brave duck . . .

Soon he was yawning. The tension that should have been there was gone out of him, replaced by a dreary sense of uselessness and moral exhaustion. Apathetically he squatted down and teased Dinah’s fur for a while, and then played which-hand with her. Peggy sat and watched the game, but kept glancing at the arena, where the two women with brooms were now meticulously sweeping the whole surface, scooping up the little heaps of seed they made on to flat leaves and throwing them on to the fire, where they stank with a new and strangely chemical smell. Three of the torches had burnt out and were not re-lit. Time passed.

At last there was a fresh stirring of interest. Morris stood and saw the old woman being lifted to her feet. The clans surged forward to surround her, a jostling mob of which Morris wanted no part, so he stayed where he was. Not long now, he told himself. Soon be over. Probably won’t hurt at all.

Suddenly a roar of angry voices broke out round the old woman. A thin man disentangled himself and rushed at Morris with his spear raised and its poison-tip unsheathed; but he was slowed by some deformity of his leg and as Morris cringed another man caught up with him and snatched the spear from behind; it was the second man who actually threw the weapon, not at Morris but out into the dark, over the cliff; he was Fau.

“Nearly thou art dead, Morch,” he shouted cheerfully and swung round to face the rush, his own spear raised. The crowd surged down towards them, but not in any kind of organised charge—far more like a mass of bellicose drinkers being thrown out of a pub on Saturday night, each man intent on his argument with his neighbour—but as far as Morris could see in the swaying light of the remaining torches none of the poisoned spear-heads were unsheathed.

Dinah leaped to his arms. He hefted her round and snatched up Peggy with his free arm, thus leaving himself quite unable to ward off from the three of them any shaft or blow. Yelling, the marshmen flowed about him absorbed in their impenetrable quarrel, shouting ancient insults from clan to clan and from age-set to age-set while Dinah and Peggy sobbed with fear against his shoulders. It seemed to him that amid the human mess there were people actually trying to defend him, or at least to argue his case, while there were others attempting to get at him. The presence of his defenders was more useful than anything they actually did, because nobody could aim with any accuracy in the melee, and a weapon that missed him was certain to hit a marshman and start one of those complicated feuds that run from generation to generation and end in an epic when everybody is dead.

So the battle raged in Homeric confusion around the bizarre standard of the hand of Na!ar. There seemed to be no conceivable resolution. But suddenly out of the dark came a sinister rescue.

It began to his left, but he didn’t notice it until the quality of the shouting to that side changed, and by then the wedge of ninth-clan warriors had almost reached him; the new cries came from the men whom Gaur and his brothers were simply picking up and tossing to either side. A black hand reached out and grasped the elbow that held Dinah. He almost let go of Peggy as he was snatched out of the scrum, like a handbag from a bargain-counter, and carried bodily across the top of the rock, wives and all.

They put him down at the cliff edge, and thankfully he lowered Dinah and Peggy, though he expected that he himself would be instantly tossed into the dark waters.

“Flee,” said Gaur. “Friend of my brother, show my brothers thy boat. Go.”

One of the huge men picked Peggy up. Another took Morris by the arm. They went down the rock face like falling stones. The boats bounced and wallowed as they jumped in, but before Morris had settled they were cutting out across the glistening water towards the single long canoe.

“Wai,” wailed Peggy, “I am stolen. I am stolen.”

“Yes, and I will roast thee for my supper,” said one of the big men. Another bellowed with laughter.

Behind them Gal-Gal was tumult still, filling the night with screams of vengeance and shouts of triumph and, on a different register, what sounded like the hysterical laughter of the women of the duck clan. The canoe bumped alongside the larger boat.

“Oh, Christ,” said Anne in a dismal voice. “I’ve been eaten alive by mosquitoes.”

She didn’t sound as though she expected anyone to understand, and gasped when Morris answered.

“I’ve got some Camoquin somewhere,” he said.

Before they had finished transferring his stores Gaur and the last three warriors slid alongside.

“Wah!” said one of them, “that was a brave duck!”

For all their size they barely rocked the long canoe as they took their places. Someone gave an order that was no more than a grunt. The paddles dug in, all together. The grunt came again, marking the stroke, and again and again as they shot down the main reach, leaving clamorous Gal-Gal behind so rapidly that before Morris had recovered from his first shivering-fit of relaxing terror it had diminished from looming cliffs to a vague hull-like blackness beneath the moon, a stone ark, stranded in the floods with its cargo of the alternative future.

“Where are we going, sons of Na!ar?” he whispered.

“Gaur has an island,” said someone.

“Protect us from the things of the moon-world, witch, until we get there,” said someone else.

“What the bloody hell’s been going on?” said Anne.

“Am I not then stolen?” said Peggy, with a ridiculous hint of disappointment in her voice.

“God knows,” said Morris in English.

The rhythm of the grunts altered. The stroke side paddles lifted all together, poised, dripped silver driplets, lunged backwards against the water. With a gurgle and rustle the canoe swung through a sharp are and up a narrow little channel between two bare mudbanks. Well rowed Balliol, thought Morris. Well rowed Balliol.

3

“I’ve been a bloody fool,” said Anne.

“I could lend you my spare shirt and trousers,” said Morris.

“Oh, I’ve got a pile of perfectly good clothes, but Mr Muscles won’t let me wear them. For God’s sake, I’m not even allowed to sit on one of those bloody stupid mats. I have to kneel here, like this.”

“I’m sorry,” said Morris.

He meant it in more ways than one. He would have preferred to see her clothed. To a man with a low sex-drive the Q’Kuti culture had been a curious release from vague guilts. Even in respectable Bristol Morris had been continually nudged by little reminders that he was some distance off from the admired male norm of modern British life, though that was obviously no more a real norm than the stringy girls in the glossies are, in the true sense, models of British womanhood—still, in England Morris had felt got at, whereas in Q’Kut the sex-obsessed Arabs actually seemed to admire his capacity for continence. Now, with this girl kneeling naked in the dust beside him, however unbecomingly mottled with mosquito bites, he was being got at again. He knew quite well what she expected him to be thinking, and if she’d known how wrong she was she would have thought even less of him.