Peter Dickinson: The Poison Oracle

He pulled the door shut and stood gulping.

Behind him Dinah chattered suddenly, and he turned. She was crouched in the luggage rack, trying to take a picture of him with a miniature camera she had found.

“Morris?” said the walkie-talkie.

“I’m OK. There are five dead men on the flight deck. Two of them aren’t wearing the airline uniform.”

“Splendid, perfectly splendid. The cars are almost there, so you’d better come out. You don’t sound too good.”

“I’m OK, I tell you.”

Morris clicked for Dinah’s attention but she snuggled away from him on a nest of coats, hugging the camera to her crotch. He clicked again, making her twist her head to look sulkily back at him. He spread his hands, palm up, making a slight pushing gesture towards her: the I-give sign. Her expression changed to one of farcical surprise as she stared to and fro between him and her new toy, as though thinking it might be booby-trapped; then she catapulted off the rack into his arms.

Out in the furnace air he saw five of the Cadillacs sliding across the runway. He stood on the wing and gestured at them with his free arm, making four of them circle round to the nose of the plane while the fifth stopped beside the brolly-man. In the group beneath the fuselage one of the passengers was now lying supine on the concrete with a stewardess kneeling beside him and loosening his collar. Morris went hurriedly down the wing, but when he put Dinah back on her towel she scampered straight across the concrete, opened the front passenger door of the nearest car and jumped inside.

“There’s a stretcher in one of those cars,” said the walkie-talkie. “I meant it for the bodies, but you might as well use it for that bloke.”

Morris organised a couple of the chatterbox drivers to cope with the patient, a wizened little Japanese still stertorously breathing. Then he called to Dyal who came striding over, huge and seeming blacker than ever in the hateful sun. Morris took two of the robes from his arm and turned to the air hostesses.

“The Sultan is most honoured by your presence,” he said in Japanese, “and has already expressed to me his admiration of your beauty. So it is with double regret that he requests you to veil yourselves, according to the custom of the country.”

Through all the weariness and disintegration their trained smiles flicked alight, like a cuckoo clock striking in a bomb-smashed house. They even started to giggle as they swathed each other in the robes. Morris walked across with Dyal to the girl on the wing. Her pose was of such abject defeat that he spoke to her apologetically.

“We’re going now,” he said. “We’ll send out men to bring in the bodies of your friends.”

She didn’t move.

“I’m afraid you’ll have to wear a veil till you’re in the women’s quarters,” he went on, a bit despairingly now. But she looked up and reached down her hand for the robes. Below the sunglasses her cheeks were smeared with tears. She rose to her feet, towering above him, and tossed the robe away with an arrogant gesture

“I’m not wearing that gear,” She declaimed. “That’s one of the things it’s all about. You can shoot me first.”

From the way she spoke there might have been a vast audience gathered on the air-strip, listening to this declaration of a basic human liberty. At any rate she spoke loud enough for the walkie-talkie to pick her words up.

“Beautiful, beautiful,” said the Sultan. “The two male goons arrive dead, and the female one’s first act is to flout local Arab feelings. You may tell her that I have no intention of making her a martyr to fashion.”

But the girl was already stalking down the wing towards the Cadillac, as though it had been ordered for her by some millionaire admirer. She was a bit nonplussed to find Dinah already occupying the front seat.

Morris watched her out of the corner of his eye as the car slid towards the palace. His own nerves were completely shredded, but the other two seemed quite cool, although Dyal’s finger was on the trigger of his gun and its muzzle no more than six inches from her left breast. She seemed to relax and soften in the lovely air-conditioning, lolling against the golden silk upholstery. When she spoke her tone was adjusted to polite party conversation.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking,” she said, “but if you’re Foreign Minister, who’s that? First Secretary?”

She pointed at Dinah, who was playing with the radio controls. “Well, as a matter of fact I’m the zoo-keeper too,” muttered Morris.

“That proves it,” she said. She made an elegant little gesture towards the startling shape of the palace, outlined on its hill against the ferocious sky.

“I’d already decided that whoever built that place must be absolutely giddy bonkers.”

Morris was so surprised by the phrase that he turned and stared straight at her. She returned his stare, lowering her sun-glasses to do so.

Her eyes, still a bit swollen with weeping, were a pale, pale northern blue. He was too startled to speak, but his mouth twitched as though it were trying to find sentences of its own.

Two

1

IN A SEALED and seasonless environment, such as the palace, it was difficult to judge the passage of time. Morris used the wrecked aeroplane as an erratic calendar, judging the weeks since its landing by the amount of it that remained unstolen. Despite the three turbaned guards who sat gambling in its shade the whole machine was gradually disappearing. The baffled engineers who had come to study the problem of flying it back to civilisation would soon have no problem left—the aeroplane would simply have dissolved like an object acted upon by two powerful acids, the thieving aboriginals of the marshes and the thieving Arabs of the sands. Morris saw that another large chunk had been sawn from the tail fin: that made it about five weeks since that nightmare day. (If it has been possible for him to peer through the surface of time, instead of seeing only the reflected past he would have been able to watch a different process of disintegration, and used it to measure the two weeks and two days that remained before the murders.)

Meanwhile the haze above the marshes had steadily thickened, as it was bound to do when the floods were at their height. Something was happening at the marsh edge, where the first reeds rose—a small body of men, mostly slaves, stood there. Four of the slaves carried a blue canopy, fringed with gold. Another carried a long pole with a wicker box at the top. Morris fetched his binoculars and saw that a little Arab was sitting on a carry-chair beneath the canopy; he was dressed all in white, and his grey beard flowed to his waist; it could only be bin Zair.

As Morris came to this conclusion the group stirred and bin Zair rose from his chair. Morris lowered his binoculars and saw that a long canoe was emerging from a channel between the reeds, paddled by a dozen naked marshmen, all as black as the blackest negro. Like most marshmen they were small and scrawny, and so was the man who stood near the bows holding a pole with a box at the top, similar to the one on the shore. But the man who sat in the stern, clothed all in white, looked really big, as big as the Sultan or Dyal, though his face was as black as any of the others’. He hadn’t been there last year.

Last year! Time suddenly became solid and exact.

This day last year Morris had stood at the window with Kwan beside him, and the gaunt old marshman had explained the meaning of the ceremony. It was a preparation for the flood-going feast, at which the compact between the first Arab conqueror of Q’Kut and the last free ruler of the marshmen was celebrated and re-stated. According to Kwan the boxes on the ends of the poles contained the mummified right hands of the two heroes.