Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

But Dinah was quick too; the blow, aimed at her ribs, caught her glancingly above the wrist as she shied away. She screamed and raced to Morris, flinging herself into his arms and showing him the red, inch-long slash through the dark hair. He clutched at her, dragged the wound to his mouth and sucked. His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out and sucked frenziedly while she struggled. She was very strong but he shifted his grip and managed to hold her, sucking and spitting. In his mind’s eye he saw the deft blow again, and remembered how neatly bin Zair had plucked the gun from the hands of the young man at the earlier Council meeting, and confused both movements with something he had not seen, the blow that had struck the Sultan down. His lips were very sore. Bristly little hairs filled his mouth, as when a toothbrush starts to disintegrate. A hand shook him by the shoulder.

“Lord,” said Gaur’s deep voice, “you cannot suck the poison from the wound . . .”

Morris looked up, dull and hopeless. Dinah wriggled and bucked in his grasp. The dagger floated in front of his face with a drop of blood drying on the surface of the poisonous smear.

“This poison has died,” said Gaur. “See.”

A black finger-nail pinched at the blacker ooze and broke through. Now Morris could see the inner stickiness under the hardened outer skin. Gaur squeezed and black fresh globules of the stuff were forced through to the surface.

“Now it is alive again,” he said, and tossed the weapon away. Probably he had weighed it in his hand while Morris had been sucking at Dinah’s arm, for though few Arab daggers are any use for throwing this one flew straight to where bin Zair sat erect on the cushions, silent and waiting judgment. Morris, still in his daze of shock and effort, did not actually see it strike, but he saw bin Zair flinch, recover and with a careful hand draw the dagger from his thigh, leaving a streak of blood on his white robe. Everyone fell silent. With difficulty the old man rose to his feet and looked round the ring of them, bowing his head slightly when he came to Hadiq.

“It was Allah’s will,” he squeaked. He turned and limped away.

“Shall I pick him off?” called Anne in clear, clipped tones from the gallery.

“No,” sighed Morris.

Four hours, he thought. You take four hours to die. That man killed Kwan. He killed my friend Kwan. Now he’s dying the same way himself, and what he wanted to happen is going to happen anyway.

Dinah whimpered and he realised he was still holding her with all his strength. He let go. She looked with horror and disbelief at her arm, still puckered and bleeding. To distract her he peeled a banana and gave it to her. She had begun to eat it left-handed without much relish when her whole body stiffened as if with cramp in his arms. Her eyes remained open but the banana slipped from her hand.

“Gaur!” he called in alarm. Gaur strolled over and knelt by his side, feeling Dinah’s limbs and forehead.

“That is not the work of poison, Lord,” he said judiciously. “A speared man becomes hot, like fire, before he dies, and his joints are loose. Thy creature is cold and stiff.”

Morris only grunted and lurched to his feet with Dinah in his arms. He remembered to bow to Hadiq before he turned and staggered wearily away. Before he was through the doors the Council was in full spate again, retelling all these dramas.

3

Up in his rooms Morris laid Dinah in her nest; she whimpered as he persuaded her stiff limbs into the necessary curve, but once she was nestled in her eyes closed and the slow hammer-beat of her pulse began to ease to the normal rhythm of sleep. He covered her with a blanket and slumped into one of the chairs, where he sat sweating and worrying in mazed circles until he realised that he could at least do something about the sweat. Resetting the thermostat reminded him about Peggy.

She was asleep too, but stirred and smiled when he felt her pulse, which seemed normal. She was a resilient little brat, he thought. Perhaps Dinah was only undergoing a sort of shock coma too—it wouldn’t be surprising, after everything that had happened to her, but it was a bit uncanny that both of them should suffer the same sort of collapse at the same moment—several times, as his worry and tiredness slipped gear into a kind of feverish doze he had the same recurring vision of the two primitive little females groping through a dark, arched tunnel in opposite directions, brushing against each other as they passed and then groping on to emerge, somehow, in each other’s worlds. Fully awake he knew it was more likely that Dinah’s collapse was an effect of the poison, and he could only hope that it had lost enough of its virtue for her to survive, but as soon as he half-slept again the same sequence returned.

After about the third or fourth time another creature seemed to be there in the tunnel, scuttling hurriedly from end to end, greyish and wispy, completely ignoring the slow, small figures that might have been Dinah and Peggy; it moved rapidly through the dark but as soon as it reached the twilight zones at the ends it hesitated and scuttled back, unable to emerge into either kind of daylight. It was bin Zair.

Awake again he thought about the old man. A decent old goat, really. Morris discovered that he both liked and respected him, and that the murders were strangely easy to forgive, even Kwan’s. Was this the result of that bizarre element of innocence that permeated the appalling cruelties and slaughters which were the sole history of the desert tribes? Or was it simply another symptom of the tepidity of Morris’s own nature? Or was it that what bin Zair had done had an inner inevitability, a moral logic, that made other courses of action seem fanciful, mere wishful thinking? The palace stood like a teetotum balanced on its spindle, maintained there only by its own circular momentum—that was Morris’s world of high civilisation, to which the Sultan also and even Dinah partly belonged. Beside it lay the apparent mess of the marshes, which was also a balance, a taut and intricate web maintained by its own tensions, Qab’s world and Gaur’s and Peggy’s. But the balance of bin Zair’s world had been broken, so that it was inhabited by whirling or scuttling creatures like Anne, or the dead hijackers, or the young man with the cleft chin . . .

Bin Zair would be praying now, if he was still conscious. He wouldn’t be thinking about this sort of thing. If he wondered at all about his own compulsions he would think in the language of money and prestige and tribal obligations and watering rights. He would perhaps regret that he had evolved a scheme so crazily complex, but he wouldn’t consider its underlying . . . well . . . propriety. It was proper that he should have used a modern hypodermic dart tipped with a primitive poison, proper that his plan should involve films and tapes as well as the swift blow of the killer, proper even that it should take place in a milieu where a supercivilised prince was attempting to recreate the jungle culture of apes . . .

“I have slept, Lord” whispered Peggy from the bedroom door. “Now my bladder is very full. How may I leave this hut and empty it?”

With a sigh Morris rose and showed her how the lavatory worked. She thought its flush was the finest toy in the world and wasted a lot of water playing with it.

Epilogue

THE APPALLING CLATTER of the rotors slowed, deepened and flogged into silence. Even with the help of the radio beacon which Gaur had placed there, Gal-Gal had been hell to find in the mist; so the noise seemed to have gone on unbearably long while the helicopter had swung and hesitated, jerking in the erratic air, and the cabin had seemed to absorb heat into itself until it became like a lava-bubble floating blindly and stickily towards a vent.