Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

“Unless they killed each other.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“If you say so. Really, that makes it in my interest that there should have been someone else in the lift.”

“I doubt it. Arabs will kill pretty well on suspicion. You ought to know that. Especially if it’s a woman.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I suppose so. What happened was this. I was still seething when I got to the zoo doors, and there was Mr Muscles seething too. He looked at me, and half reached out his hands. I’ve never seen anyone look so miserable . . . no, that’s not true—I have in the camps. What I mean is I’ve never seen anyone look like that for love. And I thought the hell with Bruce—why not? So I smiled at him and took his hands. He wanted to have it there and then, but I could see he was frightened of Bruce. He went out and shooed the eunuchs away, and as soon as the lift came back he dragged me in, took it down half a floor and pressed the emergency stop. I was surprised how quick he’d caught on about lifts.”

“He’d learnt that from Dinah, I expect.”

“Oh. Well, we didn’t have much time, but he was pretty good for a beginner.”

“You took the hell of a risk. If the Sultan . . .”

“I was so bloody furious that I’d have done it in front of him, given the chance. Anyway Mr Muscles knew just enough Arabic for me to be able to arrange that he’d take me away, into the marsh. My idea was that he’d take me right across and I could get to the oil-rigs and hitch a lift out from there somehow. But that wasn’t his idea at all—it turned out he’s only got one idea.”

Morris grunted. Her account of the morning of the murders tied in closely with Gaur’s, though considerably less like The Song of Solomon in tone. He’d known it would. The ninth clan do not lie—though no doubt under the new dispensation they would soon learn.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

He sighed and picked at the tasselled edge of the mat. It had been woven by the eel clan, he thought—that intricate knotting was their trade-mark. There was no way of telling whether it had been made one year ago or a hundred.

“I don’t have to do anything,” he said. “It’ll just happen. It’ll all come undone. In ten years’ time rich nits will be able to pay two thousand quid to take a safari trip out here. They’ll have outboard motors on the canoes.”

“About me!” she snapped. “What are you going to do?”

“Oh, sorry. Well . . .”

He called to Peggy, who immediately stopped her game and came soberly up the slope, leaving Dinah to slap in a random fashion at the graves of ghosts.

“Dost thou remember, Peggy, the song of Anintu?”

“Anintu the warrior? I can sing that song.”

“Sing that song.”

Peggy knelt by the mat, interlaced her fingers behind her head and sang a reedy repetitive chant. Dinah sidled up and tried to copy the pose. Morris translated in a whisper, about the warrior-woman in that lost age when the desert had born grass, who had fought feuds, owned buffalo, even married wives—though she had also taken lovers and had children.

“But I want to get out of here,” said Anne, whiningly, when the song was over and Dinah had dragged Peggy back to the mud-pies.

“It’d be a start. If he accepted the idea you wouldn’t be his belonging any more. You could come and go as you wanted, though he wouldn’t be under any obligation to lend you his canoe or show you the waterways . . . I don’t know . . . I think he might even welcome the idea. I suppose it depends whether he thought you’d . . . I mean whether you’d still . . .”

“How mealy-mouthed can you get, Morris? I’ll keep him happy.”

Trapped by her altered tone he turned and stared at her. The change was extraordinary. In an instant she had grown into the role, and was sporting invisible uniform. The Emperor’s new uniform. He had seen her hold her head at just that angle before, once, when she had stood on the tilted wing of the airliner with a gun at her hip.

Gloomily Morris turned back to the reeds, thinking here we go again, the whole stupid circle of mindless action beginning once more. There’s only one real hero in this story, and he’s dead almost at the start—the Jap pilot who brought the plane down out of the bucketing thermals on to an inadequate runway with an assassin sitting beside him holding an unpinned grenade.

“I hope that lad brings back some decent gen,” said Anne in a bored voice. “Then we can get weaving.”

Probably she always overdid it at first, hamming her part until she had settled in to it. But she had an instinct for survival—even that weird false note in the car, when she had described the builder of the palace as absolutely giddy bonkers, had been a precise echo of the Sultan’s taste.

The invisible sun climbed higher. Heat and humidity swelled unrelenting. When Morris rose from the mat to try to create a faint breeze by strolling slowly round the camp, he saw that all the area where he had been sitting was dark with his sweat. As he walked it gathered like dew on the hems of his shorts and squelched inside his plimsolls. Dinah crept whimpering into the hut and collapsed. Anne slept frowning and Peggy smiling. Two stolen women who belonged to Gaur’s brothers sat cross-legged by another hut, chewing the roots of a particular bamboo and spitting their chewings into a pot to become the basis of the bitter fermented milk-drink which seemed to be the warriors’ staple diet. The warriors were with Gaur, or herding buffalo. There were no children, not because the ninth clan were an infertile cross-breed, like mules, but because ninth-clan children were an anomaly in the system, and so had to be adopted into other clans at birth, or if that failed, drowned. Morris wondered what Anne was doing to prevent pregnancy—whatever it was it could not last for ever. The fate of that unbegotten, hypothetical half-caste child decided him to do his best for her when Gaur came home.

An hour later the long prow nosed out of the reeds. Black and massive, four warriors strode up the slope like emergent water-gods. Gaur was noticeably the largest and most magnificent, the leader, though two of the others were older than him. In the palace his dignity had been withdrawn and silent, but here he swaggered up the slope, radiating arrogance and kingship.

“Where is my woman?” he said, tossing a tangle of magnetic tape down on to the mat.

“This woman came to Q’Kut with a dart-thrower in her hand,” said Morris. “Her comrades were slain, but she came with thirty captives, she alone.”

“Ho!” said Gaur.

“Among her people she is a warrior. Chiefs fear her. I have seen her speak with the Sultan as if she were a man of his age-set. She is a woman like Anintu in the song. But now I find her before thy hut, without clothes or weapons, forbidden to use a mat, as if she were one of those.”

Morris gestured angrily at the two women by the other hut, crouched in the mud beside their owners. Anne timed her entry well. She had rifled Morris’s kit for a khaki shirt and shorts, and she was wearing the bandolier and gun which Gaur had carried in the palace. Somehow she managed not to look ridiculous. She stood smiling at Gaur and held out her hands to him. His glance flashed sideways to where his brothers sat drinking their milk-mess, and then down to Morris and back to Anne. He laughed aloud and took her hands.

“Ho!” he said again. “We are in need of warriors. I must avenge my fathers with the deaths of many Arabs, but the people are afraid of new things and will not come. You did not need to talk of Anintu, Morris. This is a time of new things.”

It was astonishing to Morris how far Gaur was prepared to contort the language to express these ideas—but of course, he was still very young. Magnificent though his physique might be, the cartilege of his mind had not yet hardened into bone.