Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

But he was actually sorry for her too. She was not merely physically naked. Further down the slope of Gaur’s island Dinah and Peggy were playing peep-bo round a hut. They were naked too, in the sense of being without clothes; but they were not stripped down to the bare soul, as Anne was, the thing itself, unaccommodated woman. She had even lost all her roles so far that she had allowed the flat diphthongs of some northern city to reappear in the voice that had once told him that Mummy would have thought vets were beneath them. She had become like a creature in a cage in an old-fashioned zoo, something totally uncivilised.

“Have you learnt any of the language?” he said.

“You know what I’m like. I can’t even begin. Can you make him let me go? Where the hell is he, anyway?”

“Gaur? He went back to Gal-Gal to try and buy something I saw one of the men wearing.”

“You never told me what the hell was happening up there, while I was being eaten.”

“I didn’t really understand it all myself. I was being tried for being a witch. They give a poison to a duck and watch how it dies, and one of the women of the duck clan reads the signs. That went on most of the day—the preparations and the actual trial, I mean—and then right at the end there was a row over what the witch-finder’s verdict was. You see, a lot of people had come to Gal-Gal with various diseases. The theory seems to be that when you send a witch back to the moon-world with luck he drags along with him some of the moon-world creatures that have been causing people’s limbs to swell up or drop off or go septic, so there were a crowd of people there who wanted to see me die—in fact to stand as close as possible to me while I was dying . . .”

“It sounds a bit like Lourdes.”

“Ung?”

“OK, I’ve never been there—but I was a nun for a few weeks, once.”

Morris stared at the brown wall of reeds that ringed the prison-island, all set with poison-stakes through which only Gaur and his brothers knew the paths. He thought that a civilisation that allows you to become anything also allows you to become nothing. In other cultures you have to be what you are.

“Anyway,” he said, “the witch-finder decided I was a witch, but not the sort who ought to be killed. Don’t ask me why. Gaur didn’t give a very coherent explanation—he didn’t think it was interesting. The explanation, I mean. It was just a fact, like all the other facts in the marsh. Besides, the idea of mutually coherent superstitions is peculiarly western—I mean the idea that if two beliefs are logically incompatible one of them must be wrong . . . but the upshot was that the sick men wanted to kill me and the others—who’d only come for the fun—fought them off, and then Gaur pulled me out of the ruckus. It’s no use asking for any more explanations. The language doesn’t run to providing the questions, let alone the answers.”

“And you’re going to let it go on that way? You aren’t going to do anything to bring the poor bastards up to date?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, I think I’ve done it already.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well . . . oh, I don’t know . . . we’ve kept talking about this thing . . . the Bond of Na!ar. . . as if it were almost something like a belt, or a strap—just a single bond on its own. But really, well, I expect you’ve seen how the camel-drivers secure an awkward load with an extraordinary criss-cross of lashings which doesn’t look as if it would ever hold anything, but it does its job for ninety miles and at the end the camel kneels down and the driver undoes one knot and pulls at one rope and the whole network just . . . well . . . shrivels off the load? I think the Bond’s like that. Or rather it’s part of a network like that, only much more complicated. And it’s starting to come undone anyway. The language is an image of the culture, an enormous web of relationships. It can adjust to little changes, births and deaths and diseases and bad floods, by allowing for an adjustment of relationships. If you take the cross-threads out of a spider-web the spider can scuttle across and repair them—but there are two or three threads—the ones it spun to carry the web in the first place—which it can’t repair. Cut one of them and the web collapses. And now the marsh culture is starting to unravel in two places. I made a hole in the language last night, and whoever killed the Sultan was trying to slice through the main girder-thread. The marsh-people can’t repair the damage because they don’t think in terms of cause and effect.”

“Who did kill Bruce?”

It took Morris a moment to remember that that was her name for the Sultan. He pulled at his lip and watched Peggy teaching Dinah to play the strange and sinister girl-children’s game of the marshes, which looked like an elaborate version of mud-pies but was in fact a ritual to prevent the ghosts of one’s eventual husband’s female ancestors from sucking one’s own spirit away when one slept in the corner of his hut where once they too had slept. Peggy was very much senior partner now. Beyond them the brown wall of reeds hid the water, and above them the white mists hid the sky. There were women who had been brought to this place by the ninth clan warriors and never since that day seen anything else. That could be Anne’s fate, too, and who could say whether she did or didn’t deserve it?

“Tell me what happened that last day in the zoo,” he said. “You and the Sultan went to my office. I think you quarrelled. Bin Zair turned up. The Sultan sent you away. I went to the main doors to tell Gaur not to let anyone in. When I got back to my office you were still there. Can you fill in the gaps?”

“What the hell’s it got to do with you?”

“I need to know.”

“You can bloody well . . . oh, forget it. I’ll tell you if you’ll get me out of here.”

“I’ll try.”

“OK. Done. Well Bruce took me to your office to screw me, but I wouldn’t let him. He’d spotted Mr Muscles making eyes at me, and he just wanted to show everyone I belonged to him. I wasn’t having any. I said I was through with him unless he promised to let me go. He was furious. I mean, we’d had this sort of row before—he liked being stood up to for a bit provided he got his way in the end—but that morning he wanted it then and there. I was seething too. When he sent me away, I stopped as soon as I was round the corner, before I reached the chimp cage, and went back to look for one of your pop-guns. I just wanted to loose off at the fat slob. But the cupboard was empty.”

“Did you look at the darts?”

“No.”

“I see. Then you left the office and walked along in front of the cages. I heard the Sultan come past about half a minute after you’d gone. I didn’t think you’d had time to get out of sight.”

“I didn’t. I was about opposite the polar bear when I heard their voices. I turned and waved.”

“Was he carrying one of the guns?”

“I didn’t notice. He turned his back on me, so I left. OK?”

“And then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you reached the lobby. How many people were there? Did anything else happen?”

“Look at me.”

He did so. The very process of talking to him had changed her, given her a layer of confidence. There was even a hint of malicious sexuality in her glance.

“Have you talked to Mr Muscles?” she said.

He nodded.

“And now you’re just being sticky-minded, wanting it all over again?”

“I want to know what happened,” he said crossly. “Look, when we’d found the bodies bin Zair and I rushed along to the lobby. Gaur was there and no one else. The lift was going down, and Gaur said that nobody was in it. No, wait a bit, he said that no man was in it. I want to be able to prove that nobody except you, Gaur, bin Zair or me killed them. Or some combination of us.”