Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

He prodded the tips of his fingers together and Dinah, looking up from her search among the counters for the blue/white square that meant grapes, copied him with a puzzled air.

“I am a scholar of languages,” said Morris. “I came to Q’Kut to study the language of the marshmen. But another part of my study is to see to what extent an ape can learn language. We use these little coloured counters for words. Thus.” Morris explained the meaning of each counter as he placed it in position.

white square: Dinah

orange circle with hole: get/fetch/find

black square: person

purple rectangle: (qualifier) big

Dinah sniffed eagerly at the array, looked round the assembly, poked a finger at the qualifier, scampered teasingly round the circle and finished by tugging triumphantly at Gaur’s white robe.

“This is childishness,” squeaked bin Zair angrily, but he was immediately shouted down by many voices, even those of his own party. What! Interrupt a scene that would fill a hundred evenings with good talk!

Morris clicked to Dinah who came rushing over for her reward; he showed her two small branches of grapes and gave her one which she ate while he explained the next sentence.

yellow circle: question

white square: Dinah

white circle: eat

green/blue square: banana

He laid the second branch of grapes beside it. Dinah sniffed rapidly, compared the grapes with the noun-square, snickered scornfully and snatched out of Morris’s hand the large red circle which meant “No.”

She watched Morris with dark, excited eyes as she ate the second lot of grapes, already thrilling to her thrilled audience. He explained a new sentence:

white square: Dinah

orange circle with hole: get/fetch/find

black square with gold hand: Sultan

He could see she was puzzled. She sniffed the message several times, turned the black square over to see if she could thus convert a king to a commoner, chattered a little, pouted, and loped off to inspect the audience. She paused momentarily at the throne, perhaps reminded of scenes where Hadiq had been present with his father; she also hesitated a short time over Gaur, and longer over the old fat sheikh; at last she came to the inert body of bin Zair’s nephew and possibly it was that that reminded her. At any rate she came scampering back to Morris, prodding her finger-tips together, and then hunted through the counters for the purple circle with the hole. It didn’t take her long to arrange her two-word sentence.

black square with gold hand: Sultan

purple circle with hole: hurt/be hurt

A whispering sigh rose from the council as Morris explained the meaning. The hunt was up. Bin Zair’s thin, grey hand combed ceaselessly at his beard. Nobody looked at him direct.

Unfortunately Dinah didn’t make the next step of her own account, so Morris, rather than lose the momentum of the trial, had to ask her a leading question:

yellow circle: question

black square: person

purple circle with hole: hurt/be hurt

black square with gold hand: Sultan

Dinah considered the problem with a protruding lower lip, judiciously nodding her head up and down as if to shake her thoughts into a pattern. Morris offered her only the yes and no symbols, placing them equidistant from her; and though she was slow in coming to her conclusion her arm in the end snaked out with no hesitation and snatched up the large green circle. The room released its breath. Morris had intended to explain, if they got this far, that Dinah didn’t connect the darts with the act of firing the guns, and that therefore if she said a man had hurt the Sultan that man must actually have struck him, but he sensed that the audience was not in a mood for logic. Even Dinah, when he offered her a few more grapes, seemed more interested in the game than the reward. Perhaps she too felt the human lust for drama, the quickened pulse of the closing hunt. They had already used all the symbols Morris needed for his final question but he held them up again to explain their names and her eyes followed each one to its location in the line of meaning.

white square: Dinah

orange circle with hole: get/fetch/find

black square: person

purple circle with hole: hurt

black square with gold hand: Sultan

Relative clauses had once been a bugbear. A year ago Morris had been brooding on grammatical devices to obviate them; but suddenly, between session and session, Dinah had sorted the problem out for herself, poking the symbols out of the straight until the two halves of the sentence could be read along different lines. By now there was an established grammatical convention whereby relative sentences went at right-angles, the symbol on the corner (in this case the black square) containing in itself the relative link. Her discovery of this principle had been probably the most exciting moment in Morris’s life, both for the logical beauty of it, and for the realisation that there might be no limit to her abilities.

So now he was perfectly confident that she would understand the message; he was less sure that her memory would be up to the task of recognition—after all, he well knew how long it takes a quite intelligent human to learn to distinguish one chimpanzee from another. He watched with real anxiety as she at last nosed up from the symbols and looked round at the hushed Arabs.

Slowly, walking on her knuckles, she sidled across the circle and peered into the face of a man with a green headcloth and a straggly dark wisp of beard. He shrank away; his throat worked as if there was a scream imprisoned there, but Dinah only chattered in a dissatisfied fashion, came back to the message, read it again and started off in a different direction.

Her progress was far from systematic. Sometimes she went straight across the circle and then back to the man she had just inspected; often she would dart back to Morris as if to check that she was doing the right thing; when she did this he gave her a few more grapes, which she ate slowly as she zig-zagged across the bright mosaic floor. The process cannot have lasted more than a few minutes, but suddenly in the middle of it Morris experienced a shuddering shock of recognition—something like the spasm of fierce wakefulness that shakes a man back to this world just before he falls asleep—or as if the lobes of his brain, having been fractionally out of phase, had jerked back to full sympathy. All this had happened before. On Gal-Gal a man had watched his life or death being decided by the erratic movements of an animal, a trained animal, to and fro across an arena ringed by silent, intent spectators. Morris, after his bout of activism, had watched his fate with an apathy close to accidie; and so did bin Zair watch now. The difference was that the duck on Gal-Gal had not yet eaten its poison; whereas Dinah had long been eating hers, day by day, from Morris’s own hand, the ancient poison of words.

There must have been something unnoticeable about bin Zair, an inherent camouflage that might have made a marvellous hunter out of him if his life had not been spent on the track of more illusory game. Dinah only spotted him as if by accident, grey and silent on the cushions. Her glance flicked towards him as she was crossing the arena, and away. She continued half a pace on her path, then froze. Very slowly, as if she herself was the hunted creature, her head swung back towards bin Zair, her left hand staying poised in the air for the next pace. She stared at him for one of those unmeasurable times that was probably only half a heartbeat; then she was darting across the floor to him, pulling at his robe, hooting with excitement.

Bin Zair must have been ready for her. Even before the Arabs broke into excited chatter and applause his curved dagger was out and striking. He was old but very quick—Morris’s eye only registered when the blow was over that at the tip of the gunmetal blue curve of the blade something sticky and black glistened.