Peter Dickinson - The Poison Oracle

Morris turned away from the window. Three days after the flood-going feast last year Kwan had been dead, and Morris still missed him.

With a shrug he went to his little work-bench, unlocked a Dinah-proof drawer and took out a sheet of blue plastic. Marking out a precise row of blue crosses was soothing work, and as soon as his little jig-saw began to whine Dinah woke and filled his mind completely. She was always thrilled with excitement when Morris started to cut new symbols, and then unmanageable with disappointment if they merely turned out to be replacements for ones which she had lost or broken, or simply hidden (which happened frequently with the red circles.) She watched the cutting out with panting absorption until he gave her the first complete cross, untrimmed and unpolished, to play with. He stopped work and watched her carry it over to her toy-store. Her own collection of counters was kept in a leather bag; she shook them out on to the floor and, as usual, sorted eagerly through them just in case (Morris believed) one of the symbols meaning fruit had appeared among them. Then she set out a well-known practice sentence:

white square: Dinah

green circle with hole: go

yellow/white square: bed

She barely sniffed at this before flinging herself to the curtain-rail over the door, from there to the top of the bookshelf and from there with a crash and rattle into her nest, where she shook herself a couple of times and chattered while she studied the blue cross she still held in her left hand. Then she lowered herself gently to the floor and loped back to the symbols.

She tried the cross both at the beginning and end of her sentence, removed it, replaced it first with a blue triangle which turned the sentence into one half of a conditional clause, then with the blue square which meant Morris. Morris made a few notes and returned to his crosses. He had cut them all out and was adjusting his polishing wheel when a eunuch’s flute tootled tunelessly beyond the door-curtain.

“Come in”, he called in Arabic, then realised that the flautist couldn’t hear him so got up and pulled the curtain aside.

A black slave, grinning like an idiot, entered. Dinah leaped to her nest and crouched there, peering over the edge like a soldier in a fox-hole. The slave took the curtain from Morris, allowing him to back into the centre of the room to receive his visitor—Hadiq’s mother, presumably, come for a PTA meeting—with proper formality. But, concealing though the robes were, the figure that came through the door could not possibly have been that of the Sultan’s fat, worried first wife—and the pale blue eyes that showed through the eye-slits were unique in Q’Kut. Morris’s mouth fell open and began to twitch, just as it had done when he had last seen her.

“I hope you’re not busy,” she said, glancing at the cluttered desk and work-bench, and Dinah’s spilt toy-store, and the gnawed and tattered furniture.

“No, no,” he said. “Come in. Sit down. The chairs are cleaner than they look.”

“This bloke’s got to stay too, you know?” she said. “It’s that kind of scene.”

“I’m used to it,” said Morris. He unlocked another drawer and tossed the slave two of the sticky black cheroots he had originally bought for Kwan. The slave grinned, propped his scimitar in the corner and settled down to chew them like liquorice sticks. Morris brought him a bowl to spit into.

“How will he react if I take this lot off,” said the girl, feeling for the brooch of her robe.

“What are you wearing underneath?” asked Morris nervously.

“Just clothes.”

“I should think that’ll be OK. He’s not a Moslem. That flute code is quite elaborate, but I doubt if it covers points like this. He could slice your head off, of course, but I don’t know whether he’s empowered to do that without consulting higher authority.”

“I’ll risk it.”

She plucked the black, mask-like veil over her head, smoothed her hair and began to unfasten the swathing folds of the robe. As she did so she glanced sideways at Morris with a curious teasing look, provocative but not exactly sexually provocative. He half expected her to emerge wearing something to startle or embarrass him—a diving suit, or a belly-dancer’s outfit with the naked skin tattooed with revolutionary slogans; but what she had on was the traditional baggy trousers, in pink silk, and a frothy white blouse fastened up to her throat with long crisscrossing laces, like a skater’s boot but following a slightly shallower curve. She still looked as fit as a gymnast, though her face had paled during her five weeks out of the sun—paled till the pink-and-white beneath the fading tan made it even less likely that she was any kind of Arab. Morris decided that she was as English as himself.

She adjusted the glossy swathes of black hair, slightly ruffled by the removal of her veil. It was a tactful little gesture, deliberately inviting Morris to inspect her without actually staring. But for her eyes he mightn’t have recognised her as the same girl who had stood declaiming about women’s rights from the wing of the wrecked aeroplane. She hadn’t exactly changed, but had, so to speak, adjusted. Her lips seemed fuller; her cheekbones showed in the softened planes of flesh; even her slightly hooked nose had somehow become less accipitrine than columbaceous; and the pride with which she held herself was the confidence of good breeding rather than any Amazonian arrogance. Later Morris was to discover how fast she could re-adapt her features to any role she chose, but for the moment he was only conscious of being asked to look at an outstandingly pretty woman and feeling awkward about it.

“OK?” she said to the slave, but he didn’t look up.

“I can never remember which ones are deaf and dumb,” she said to Morris. “In fact it’s difficult to believe they really are—the other women treat them as if they weren’t there—or weren’t human anyway, more like dogs. You don’t mind what you do in front of them, after a bit. Where do they all come from? Africa?”

“No. Most of the ordinary slaves come from Africa, but these are marshmen from Q’Kut. It’s a hereditary job.”

“That can’t be easy. They’re eunuchs,” she said, settling into the less ramshackle armchair. Morris sat down also but couldn’t loll. He found himself crouched forward on the edge of his chair with his elbows on his knees and his fingers tightly laced together.

“No, it’s like that,” he said. “Down in the marshes there’s one clan—the eel clan—who always castrate their second sons and cut out their tongues and pierce their ears. If that son doesn’t survive they do it to the third son, and so on.”

She looked at him with lordly disgust.

“I hate sick jokes,” she said.

“I’m afraid it’s true. In fact it’s an essential part of the economy of the marshes, and population control.”

“How horrible.”

“Not much more than . . . oh, forget it.”

Morris had no wish to start an argument about the ethics of terrorism. He hated that amount of involvement, and usually lost, too. She smiled at him with sweet complicity. There had been a very severe-seeming administrative officer at Bristol; she too had sometimes smiled at Morris like that, because he’d had digs in the same street as her and had seen how she dressed in the evenings, to go out with how many varied men, in what cars. Just so this girl was smiling now to establish a convention whereby that other girl—the one with the gun at her hip and the dead bodies of innocent men behind her—had nothing to do with this visit. This visit was quite different, the daughter of the big house paying a social call on, oh, the rather dull local doctor, being uncondescendingly charming, not yet mentioning whatever business it might be that the charm was expected to pay for.