The Poison Oracle

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.

With a sigh of relief Morris removed his ear-muffs. Peggy aped his movement. She had refused to wear Arab clothes, but so did many Arab children and the Shaikhah had easily found jeans and a Yogi-Bear tee-shirt to fit her.

“That was very much noise,” she said gaily, in English. Once again Morris marvelled at the accuracy of her ear—timbre apart, it might have been his own voice talking.

“Too right!” said the pilot. “Jesus, what a dump! Do you come here often?”

Morris grunted and climbed out. The marsh-waters had sunk in the last four months almost to their lowest level, reducing the humidity but raising the heat. All the acres of exposed mud reeked of rot. For a moment he thought that the weeks of coaxing and negotiation had come to nothing, for the rock seemed deserted and he had been expecting to be met by the representatives of all eight clans. But as soon as the bee-hive basket was handed out to him (on a shortened pole, to fit the cabin, and empty, though the marshmen were not to know that) black heads emerged from behind the cliff edges, wherever there was a foothold out of sight. For a while they simply remained heads; they might have been stuck there, bodiless, after some tribal raid, a suitable necklace for Gal-Gal; but when Peggy and Doctor Knopf, the specialist in tropical diseases, climbed down a few of them began to climb up. From the cliffs nearest the landing-place a group of three men came cautiously towards him, the two on the outside looking comparatively intact, but supporting in the centre an old man with a disgustingly swollen leg. He was Qab.

“Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow,” said Morris.

“Half my cheeses are thine,” said Qab. “Is this man also a great witch, Lord?”

“The words are thine, Qab. The man knows much of big legs and withered arms and weeping skins and belly-devils.”

Morris switched into English: “What can you do about a leg like that, Knopf?”

“Not much, by the look of it,” said Doctor Knopf, a lean, yellow-skinned young man. “Can’t tell for sure without tests, but when they’re as bad as that you can usually only arrest the process and lessen the pain a bit. Grief, what a collection! What you’ve got here is a museum of tropical medicine. God! Is this a fair sample of the inhabitants?”

In silence the representatives of the eight clans hobbled, or crawled, or were carried towards the helicopter, their limbs swollen or shrivelled, their skins scaly or suppurating.

“The witches have been busy, Lord,” said Qab. “You have said that you would bring great witches to Gal-Gal, witches not of the moon-world, who by their charms would undo this charm and that charm. Is this a true report?”

“It is true in part. My friend does not think he can make thy leg less big, but he can make it cease from growing. Moreover, he can ease the pain. But thy young men and thy sons—these he can protect from witchcraft, and drive out the charms that have recently begun to work . . .”

“We have been told lies,” said Qab angrily.

“Who has told lies?” said Morris in a bullying manner. “Do I lie? Does the ninth clan lie? Who else has spoken?”

“You are an old fool, my uncle,” said one of the men who was supporting Qab. “Witch, there is a foul charm starting to work at my back. Can thy friend drive it out?”

He swung round. Qab staggered and clutched at his other supporter. On the nephew’s back, just below the left shoulder-blade, was a circular mess of yellow and orange pus, about two inches across, crusted brown at the edges. Doctor Knopf bent forward to examine it.

“Antibiotics should clear that up,” he said. “It’s hard to say. These people are teetering right on the edge of extinction. They were probably OK until about fifty years ago, with a bit of immunity to all the local bugs and uglies; but now the river’s bringing them half the sewage of Asia. Still, that should clear up.”

“My friend says he believes that charm can be undone,” said Morris. “Listen, when I came to Alaurgan-Alaurgad thine uncle gave me a wife, a girl of no value at all, who had just such a charm working on her shoulder, and was sure to die soon. But I put a paste on the sore place, and behold, it is gone. I will show you. Qab will bear witness.”

He turned to call for Peggy. She seemed to have disappeared, hidden by the ring of marshmen who stood or sat listening to the conversation. Then he saw her, above their heads, climbing up on to the mysterious stone slab which they called the House of Spirits. Really, he thought with exasperation, she’s worse than Dinah.

All the heads had swung round to watch her, but Morris did not feel the wave of communal horror that flooded through the crowd. He was transfixed by the usual pang of longing for Dinah. She wasn’t dead, but she might as well have been. Bin Zair’s attack on her, at the very moment when she had triumphantly brought off a great feat of intellect, had destroyed her whole relationship with men, including Morris. Now her only acknowledgment of his existence was that she chattered at him for fruit when he showed himself in front of the cage; she was almost fully integrated into the chimpanzee group, leader of the younger females, scruffy and slouching, accepting the bullying by the males as a norm of life. Occasionally in the first couple of months Morris had tried to renew her interest in the plastic symbols, but she had scattered them about in hysterical rage. Since then he had drugged himself with work—annotating the fast-growing pile of tapes of marshmen’s talk, and negotiating for the Sultan with the marshmen themselves.

With an effort he pushed all that out of his mind.

“There may be trouble,” he muttered to Doctor Knopf. “You’d better get back into the machine. Tell the pilot to be ready to go.”

But none of the tribesmen moved, or even looked at the white men. They stared at Peggy, waiting. Morris couldn’t believe that she had climbed up there for anything except adventure, with perhaps an element of scorn for superstitions which she had grown out of. But as soon as she saw that she was a focus of attention she accepted her role, spread her arms wide, waited for several seconds, and at last began to dance. Now the marshmen crept towards her, silently, and it seemed unwillingly, like birds or small beasts hypnotised by the coiling and writhing of a snake.

Her steps speeded up. She whirled like a dust-eddy from one end of the slab to the other and then back to the centre, where she stopped abruptly with her arms raised above her head. She began to sing.

She sang in English. She had insisted that Morris should teach her his own language, and what right had he to refuse? What property had he in her marsh mind, as a research tool, if she chose to put it away? Besides, her will was stronger than his. All he could do was tape the learning process, to record whatever problems she faced in adapting to alien modes of thought. The answer had been almost none.

“You are fools,” she sang to the marshmen. “You are a lot of stupid people. You do not know things. You do not know cause and effect. Cause and effect.”

It was Morris’s own voice, piping triumphant and scornful through the steamy air.

“Soon all you fools will be dead. Cause and effect. Cause and effect. Cause and effect.”