Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

“I am no spirit,” said Morris. “I bring good news for the Sultan. Let my friends pass.”

The doors hissed apart as he trod on the mat. Inside the entrance hall two other slaves were playing draughts on the floor. Four strange Arabs were talking round a low coffee-table with rifles at their side, and a handsome young man with a cleft chin was asleep on a divan. Morris remembered him as the man who had waved a gun at him in the Council Chamber. Ah, well.

The lift was already waiting, open. Morris moved over as unobtrusively as he could and put his foot against the bottom of its door. The glass hissed apart again and the rest of his party came quickly in—but not smoothly. It was Dinah, as usual, who betrayed them. He had forgotten to tell Anne to carry her, and she was scuttling along on all fours, chattering angrily as she stumbled among her cloying robes. One of the slaves looked up from his game and shouted with laughter and surprise. The Arabs in the corner broke into clamour. The young man on the divan woke, shouted and reached for his gun, but by then the lift doors were closing. Peggy screamed with terror as the sudden acceleration sucked at her bowels. Gaur laughed. Dinah, delighted to be back in a world where there were control buttons to play with, leaped towards them, stumbled over her robes again and chattered with anger. Morris picked her up. His palms were sweaty, and his whole skin seemed to be tingling with the effects of unused adrenalin. It was not a sensation he enjoyed, not because it was in itself unpleasant but because it reminded him, like one of his rare bouts of sexual energy, that given a different history he would have been a different person.

The moment the doors opened he flicked the Emergency Stop switch down, then changed his mind and reversed it. The minute’s possible delay was not worth the admission that he had anything to fear. For the same reason he forced himself not to run to his rooms, but the moment he was in them he dumped Dinah, snatched at the telephone and dialled.

“Salaam Alaikum. Do I speak to bin Zair? I trust you had finished your prayers. Yes, I am not dead . . . You are most kind . . . I have the young bodyguard and the Frankish woman . . . No . . . Ah, I was told of two Arabs found in the marshes, who by signs showed that they wished to cross to the sand on the far side, so the marshmen guided them; perhaps they were Maj and Jillad. I shall be sorry if they have gone. They were good zoo-men. When does the Council meet? Good, I will come and bring the young bodyguard so that he may be questioned. Wait. There is another matter which I do not know whether I should raise at the Council. I seek your advice. I have spoken with many marshmen, and I believe that if they were approached by a man with proper authority, such as yourself, they would welcome the company into the marshes to explore for oil . . . oh, I do not think it would be dangerous if I were there . . . yes, it is good news, but I do not know how welcome it will be to some of the Council . . . then perhaps I had better not speak of it . . . but meanwhile nothing must be done to alienate the marshmen . . . of course, you know these Arabs better than I . . . I will leave all that to you . . . are you there? Hello, hello . . . Good. That is all. Farewell.”

Rather pleased with himself Morris put the receiver down. The last bit of bustle he had heard might well have been the man with the cleft chin arriving for fresh orders. He dialled again. The connection did not sound good, but no one expects a place like Q’Kut to run to a particularly refined system of wire-tapping. A voice he didn’t recognise answered, claiming to be the Sultan’s Secretary and claiming that the Sultan was in conference. The man spoke with the blasé effrontery of any official who does not even hope to be believed. Morris put the phone down, pulled his lip and thought.

“I think we’re OK for the moment,” he said to Anne. “But the Council meeting may be tricky. Do you think you could bear to put that veil back on and go to the women’s quarters—Gaur had better go with you so that you aren’t spotted sneaking around unguarded, and he’ll get you past the eunuchs if there’s any trouble. I want you to find the Shaikhah.”

“Bruce’s first wife? She and I don’t click.”

“So I hear. You’ll have to make it up, that’s all. The point is I want some fire-power hidden up in the gallery. Before I left I suggested to Hadiq that he might try to arm the eunuchs—see what you can do—slide a bit of veil through the screen if you’ve brought it off—don’t show yourselves or make any noise until I give a signal—I’ll clap my hands. I don’t want any shooting, only the threat, so if you can manage it you’d better see that the guns aren’t loaded. OK?”

“Sure,” she said. He explained to Gaur what he wanted, then got his tape-recorder out and wound the strange spool on to it, spinning it through at top speed to find a couple of breaks where it would need splicing. He had just switched the gadget to “Play” when he heard Dinah whimper. He looked up.

She had managed to wriggle out of her clothes and was standing in the middle of the floor, peering at Peggy. Peggy stood quite still, with her dark eyes staring wide and a curious blue-grey tinge to her skin, as though all the blood had drained from behind the blackness.

“Art thou ill, little Peggikins?” he said.

No answer. Her eyes didn’t even flicker towards him. As he crossed the floor he smelt the reek of fresh urine. Her skin was weirdly cold and clammy. He picked her up and carried her into his bedroom, where he stripped off the soiled robes and laid the black, chill body in his bed. She was breathing, and he found her pulse, heavy and slow. Shock, he thought as he piled the blankets on her. Cultural bloody shock—much as a chimpanzee must feel when it is whisked from the living jungle to a concrete grove. He piled several more blankets on her and turned the thermostat of the air-conditioner up to a hideous ninety degrees. Dinah leaned solicitously forward from the other side of the bed and with gentle fingers plucked at Peggy’s straight, coarse hair. All of a sudden her pose changed and the fur along her shoulders bristled. But she had only heard the noise a second before Morris as it swelled to its full clamour. He rushed back into his living-room to turn the volume down, and found Gaur there, staring pop-eyed at the tape-recorder. Morris stood listening, made a note of where the sounds came, and rewound the tape to the place he wanted.

“There is no ghost in the box,” he said, using the same grammatical contortion that he had before his witch-trial.

Gaur smiled.

“In seven days I have changed seven age-sets,” he said.

“Will thy people also change age-sets?”

“Perhaps. What do we do now?”

“We go to the Council; hide throwing-sticks in thy robes. I take thee among men who perhaps wish to kill thee.”

“So thou camest to the marshes for me.”

Morris shrugged, unable to explain his real motives for undertaking that unpleasant adventure. Peggy, he thought, would sleep for several hours. Dinah he must take with him. He sorted carefully through his wallet of chips to check that it contained all the symbols he might need; then he nestled the tape-recorder into the bottom of a canvas grip and covered it with fruit. Dinah watched both processes shining-eyed, and took his hand eagerly when he clicked to her; but inwardly he was deeply reluctant to involve her in this quarrel, a thing no more concerned with her species than the question whether he was a witch had mattered to the duck on Gal-Gal. Only it had mattered. It was the answer that hadn’t—the duck would have died either way.

2

The Council began with extreme casualness. The coffee-pestle was already busy when Morris and Gaur reached the anteroom; they could hear the slightly syncopated thud whose rhythm, to the true Arab connoisseur, becomes somehow incorporated into the taste. Besides the two regular guards in the anteroom there were two heavily-armed strangers, one of whom Morris thought he recognised as having been in the palace entrance earlier that morning. He slouched over and barred the way.