Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

“Perhaps there will be no killing,” said Morris. “We must go to the palace and talk with thy brother; the Arabs will try to kill us first. When it is known how thy fathers died, then we can consider killing. Can we go to the palace this dusk?”

“We go at dawn,” said Gaur, and that was that. He looked at Anne and then around the muddy mound of his home.

“Ho, there are many people in this place,” he said. Before Morris could translate Anne had taken Gaur’s hand and given him a little pull towards the canoe. Together they scampered down the slope like a couple of undergraduates running across the Meadows towards a punt on the Isis. Morris watched the prow vanish into the reeds and then began to unravel the magnetic tape. Gaur had even managed to recover the reel, though the human trophies had luckily been retained by their owner. Quite soon Peggy woke, saw that he was doing what looked like woman’s work and came and took it from him, nimble-fingered. Dinah slept on, smashed with heat, but the careful rewinding of tape on to its spool would not have been one of her accomplishments.

Let’s pray there’s something useful on it, thought Morris. That’s all.

[1] To those to whom it seems ridiculous to find a footnote dangling from a moment of high drama, I apologise for my lack of art. Briefly, Morris had constructed a phoneme-group which was grammatically (and therefore to marshmen logically) impossible, but at the same time was perfectly clear in its meaning. He said “khu//ralçutlangHo”—“khu//-” negative relation-root “-r-” euphony insert “-al-” nominal qualifier ending, inapplicable to relation-roots, “-çu-” positive-identity relation-root, “-tlangHo” nominal qualifier of witchcraft. A rough English equivalent might be “Notness is witch.”

Seven

1

THERE WAS A MOMENT when the water between the reeds and the shore lay like black glass reflecting the paling sky and the last few stars and the ridiculous palace, turned the right way up; then another moment when the surface became smeared; and then it seemed to smoke, breathing out a layer of greasy mist which would rise and hang all day over the marsh, shielding it from the torturing sun. When the layer of mist was four feet thick Gaur grunted once, the paddles dug in and the two canoes hissed out of the reeds towards the landing stages.

They had spent the night in a village of the water-vole clan, because it was only a mile from the shore-line. Gaur and his brothers had simply descended on the village like rooks on a seed-bed, demanding food and sleeping-mats without any kind of payment. Three of them had gone scouting along the shore in the dusk; they had found the nibbled remains of the body of another Arab—presumably Jillad—and also two places where men had lain hidden, waiting, as if for somebody to return from the marsh. During the night Morris had twice heard distant shots, but they might have meant anything, as Arabs are as likely to loose off their guns at a feast as at a fight.

They caught the boat-guard snoring on the silk cushions of the Sultan’s never-used launch. He was fully dressed, with an ancient rifle across his lap. “Do not kill him,” Morris had whispered, knowing that matters were already sufficiently precarious without the additional problem of blood-feuds with the cousins of boat-guards. Gaur had nodded and become part of the black water in the boat-shed. The guard woke with a wet black hand round his mouth and a wet arm pinning him to the shiny thwart. Morris stepped gingerly into the rocking launch.

“Salaam Alaikum,” he whispered. “If you cry out you die. Let the man speak, Gaur.”

“Who is it?” said the man.

“I am Morris. I know you. We have been hawking many times along the marsh edges. You have shown us good sport.”

Before the man could reply Anne came quietly into the shed.

“There’s one tent about thirty yards away,” she said. “And there’s a newish truck just behind the sheds. The rest of the camp’s further off—I can hear them beginning to wake up.”

“Fine,” said Morris. “Gaur, thy brothers must leave now, before the sun comes. Peggy, hold Dinah fast. Anne, you’d better keep watch for a bit—I’m going to try to persuade this chap to drive us up to the palace. Now, my friend, is that your tent behind the sheds?”

“It is my brother’s.”

“And is that your fine truck?”

“It is the Sultan’s.”

“How long have you served the Sultan?”

“Seventeen years.”

“You are a faithful man, and should be rewarded. If I ask him, he will give it you.”

In the half light Morris could see the man’s eyes widen. He was a dark little middle-aged Arab with a puckered scar along his left cheek, the result of wild shooting in a pig-hunt. He probably already regarded the truck as virtually his own property, but if it were formally given to him he could then with honour loot something else from his patron.

“But first I must reach the Sultan, who is my friend,” said Morris. “I think there are men in the camp who might try to kill me.”

The man thought for a few seconds.

“I am your friend also,” he said. “Let me sit up. I will drive you to the palace. I will take you on my face and my brother will give us clothes to hide who you are.”

“The Sultan will reward him also,” said Morris. “What is the news?”

“The news is good,” said the man automatically. “They are all fools,” he added with that dismissive sideways movement of his hand, so typical of Arab talk. “They say they will fight the marshmen because they killed the Sultan, the two servants of bin Zair, and you also. I thought you were a spirit, Morris—for that reason alone I was afraid. But already they are quarrelling about who shall have the oil-rights and in what proportions. They have bought aeroplanes and bombs and napalm, but the pilots have looked at the marshes and say they cannot fly over them in the day because of the mists—and how else can they fight with the marshmen? They do not know marshmen as I do, who have been the Sultan’s boatman for seventeen years.”

To trust him or not to trust him?

“We are on thy face, then?” said Morris. “I and the marshman and our women?”

“Have I not said so?” said the boat-guard. “Good, I will wake my brother and bring clothes—for how many?”

To trust him.

Waiting for his return Morris reflected that it was strange that one should be able to rely on the abstract notion of being on a man’s face with as much confidence as if it had been a physical phenomenon—not with absolute certainty but, say, about as much as one would rely on a car starting, and far more than on a phone call getting through.

One could even rely on the brother, despite his obvious fear of Gaur and dislike of the whole business. Half an hour later they drove without hurry through the waking camp. Anne sat in the front seat, heavily veiled, with Dinah even more heavily veiled in her lap. Gaur, Peggy and Morris sat in the back, the two men robed like bedu and with Morris perched on a pile of tent-hangings with the guard’s rifle across his knees. Morris shouted anonymous greetings to any waking Arab in ear-shot. Perhaps the whole charade was unnecessary. It was difficult to connect the pastoral-seeming tents with murder, as the Arabs stirred to the dawn hour which was one of the two tolerable ones in the Q’Kuti day. Here and there Morris could see men at their prayers, with their mats spread beside gleaming limousines. As the lorry climbed the hill the steam above the marshes seemed to climb too, continuing to veil distances which one would have thought a higher viewpoint would bring in sight. Gal-Gal was somewhere there, in that mess.

The truck stopped under the enormous overhang of the upper floors. Morris climbed down, stiff from five nights on bare damp ground; he looked at the glass, self-opening doors, beside which a sabre-carrying slave, not a eunuch, lounged. Morris remembered his face—he was one of the regulars, a sardonic, spoilt gang who owed all their allegiance to the Sultan and tended to despise free Arabs. That was hopeful. Morris stripped his robes off, said to Anne “Count twenty, then come straight to the lift,” and strolled towards the doors in shirtsleeves and shorts. The slave gaped at him.