The Poison Oracle

Five

1

IT WAS STRANGE how the reed-beds rustled. There was no wind, and the feathery plumes at the top of the stems stayed still against the hazy sky, as though they were posing for a woodcut. But down at water-level the fibrous leaves stirred and hissed. Morris had done a little canoeing in Europe in a featherweight modern derivative of the kayak, propelled by a double-ended paddle. The craft he was now learning to control was twice the size and ten times the weight, a marshman’s canoe made of reeds, several layers thick, tarred, and shaped into graceful upward curves at prow and stern. He had to kneel to paddle, driving the blade upright along by the fat thwart; the whole boat was slightly curved in plan, so that gliding through the water it naturally moved in a slow arc to the right; this was counteracted by the tendency of the paddle-stroke to push the prow to the left—a cunning arrangement, the result of centuries of sophistication of design, but awkward for a beginner. The kneeling position was also peculiarly tiring for the hams.

Morris tired quickly. He had been concerned to drive the canoe as fast as possible into the cover of the reed-beds, because it now seemed to him possible that one of the factions of Arabs might wish his mission to fail, and try to achieve this by setting a marksman somewhere along the shore to pick him off; the awkward sploshings of his paddle and his own panting and cursing had been the loudest sounds in the marsh. He rested and these noises and the thud of his heart slowly quietened enough for him to hear only the plop of drops from the end of his paddle lying across the thwarts. Dinah, destroyed with heat, slept in the centre of the boat by the provisions.

When he started paddling again he found that the knack of boat-control had suddenly come to him; it was now that he first noticed the rustling. It sounded as though some large, lithe thing—not a pig, not a man, but perhaps a snake or crocodile—was moving parallel to his course through the reeds, but peer as he might he could see nothing. The channel he was in branched, unsignposted. He took the wider branch. There was nothing to show that he was not paddling into a blind alley, an inextricable mudbank, an ambush. But the ambush had been sprung before his coming.

Rounding the next bend he came at once on a corpse. It lay face up among the reeds, naked, the corpse of a portly brown man, almost submerged but buoyed by the reed-roots. As Morris drew alongside two columns of flies rose into humming clouds above the two wounds, one a sharp gash in the throat and the other where the genitals had been hacked off. Morris rested his paddle to look and wonder but the curve of the keel began to swing him in to the reeds, so he dug the blade in and paddled on. There was nothing he could do. The body was that of his own zoo-slave, Maj. He was glad Dinah hadn’t seen it.

He felt very sick and cold, though the swamp heat hung round him like butter-muslin. From time to time he glanced up at the little beehive-shaped box that swayed from the end of a bamboo pole stuck through two special rings set in the upcurving prow. The box was made of woven reeds, covered with red clay, patterned with cheap blue glass beads and polished. In one or two places the clay had cracked away. It seemed a very dubious protection.

Even so, the next time Morris rested he cupped his hands round his mouth and called.

“People, I come from the heir of Nillum under the hand of Na!ar. By the Bond I call you. Send me a guide.”

He was so nervous of the silence and strangeness that his cry was a croak. He told himself he was a fool and shouted again, loud enough this time to wake Dinah, who whimpered feebly at him then curled up in the bottom of the boat as though it were her own nest. Nothing else happened. Next time he paddled on he discovered the cause of the sinister rustling—he was doing it himself. The slight ripple of his wake was enough to disturb the limp lower leaves without making the stiff spears quiver at all. Reason is king, he thought. To connect cause with effect is to drive out fear. But then the realisation that that was not a sentence you could translate into marsh-language—not even an idea you could express—brought fear seeping back.

He stopped and called for a guide several more times. Dinah became livelier as the air cooled, but her natural sense of balance kept the boat trimmed as she moved about. Once, in what seemed to Morris perfect stillness, she snorted angrily at a stand of reeds and something there began to move—a solid, animate body. Without waiting to see whether it was man or boar Morris paddled rapidly on. Night came fast, between one rest and the next. The dews condensed, and the half moon that had begun as an aureoled haze changed to a hard-edged object. Dinah lay in the bows and watched its reflection gliding through the water.

Moonlight is deceptive. Daylight, even the drear haze that imbrued the marshes all day, came from all directions and gives things distance and dimension; but moonlight comes from one place only. Things exist or not, as it strikes them. The silvery reed-plumes existed but were useless; a glistening patch of clear water existed, but was passed in ten strokes; everything else was black and indecipherable; there was no variation in its blackness either—any bit of it might be a buffalo, or a mudbank, or mere shadow. The only sure way of making progress was to drive towards whatever glistened.

Following this principle Morris finally stuck. The channel he was in opened quite suddenly into a sort of lake, almost a hundred yards across and twice that from end to end. The sensible thing would have been to work round the edge, looking for another exit, but in sheer relief from the claustrophobia of the reed-channels he started to paddle straight across it. After about twenty strokes he ran into a mild resistance, and without thinking paddled more strongly to get through it. In another twenty strokes be was stuck. Dipping his hand overboard he found that just below the glistening surface of the water lay a great mesh of weed. Paddling didn’t seem to move him an inch, backward or forward, so he shrugged in the dark, then clicked to Dinah who came humping aft for supper. Into her last banana he prodded a sleeping-pill which she swallowed without noticing. Then he groomed her for a while until she dropped contentedly asleep.

He called once more to the unanswering dark, carefully unrolled the mosquito net down the length of the boat and finally slid under it. He lay on his back looking up through the mesh at the stars and thought of Maj, lying in almost the same position, dead and mutilated. The bloody fool, he thought. Or perhaps they hadn’t told him about the marshmen.

2

A drip woke him. The dew had condensed on the net in tiny beads, which had slowly joined to each other and runnelled down folds until a minute reservoir had collected and forced a thin, chill stream into his left ear. He woke, and was wide awake at once, knowing where he was and why. With a slow movement he edged away from the drip, then raised both hands above his head to roll back the netting. The droplets had made it opaque, but when he exposed the first clear pearly triangle by the sternpost he knew that it was dawn and would soon be sunrise.

He rolled a little more, then lay still. Something was moving on the water, and a faint, strange muttering filled the air. Deciding that he could not lie there indefinitely he rolled the net back as far as his knees and sat up, very gingerly and ready to duck.

The moment his head appeared above the thwart the muttering became a clamour of voices. Deliberately he re-enacted the role of a man waking from deep sleep; he yawned, stretched, rubbed his eyes and looked around. In front of him lay the lake, lightly disturbed by glistening sleek shapes, one of which shifted and became a buffalo, hook-horned and bearded with the weed it was eating. A whole raft of this weed lay between him and the animals. He was, in fact, stuck about twenty feet into the raft and in the clear water behind him lay a ring of boats, each of which held two naked black men—one kneeling with the paddle in the stern and the other standing amidships with his spear-thrower poised. As he turned to them the gabble stilled. He looked and saw the tense, poised bodies, so practised in their art that the boats did not rock a millimetre; he saw the glistening black stuff on the little flint spear-heads; he knew how Maj had died.

“I come under the hand of Na!ar,” he said. “Do you greet me with spears?”

The nearest warrior hesitated, then lowered his spear-thrower. He took the spear carefully out of it and slid a little sheath over the poisoned tip. The others were starting to do the same when their stances changed, and their faces also. Morris felt his own boat rock wildly. He looked over his shoulder and saw that Dinah, woken by his voice, was struggling to free herself from the mosquito netting. He clicked his fingers loudly, then rolled his end of the net rapidly towards the threshing figure; she must have seen his knees for she dropped flat and allowed him to drag the rest of the net clear before rising, panting with fear, and rushing into his arms.

When Morris, holding her, turned carefully to renew negotiations with his rescuers they were gone. Only the reeds swayed.

“People,” he called, “I come from the heir of Nillum. I am a good-comer. Do not fear me.”

He would have liked to add that they mustn’t be afraid of Dinah, either, but the language had the wrong mesh to trap that thought; fear is a relationship between A and B, to be expressed by a full root then extended by syllables nominating the poles of the relationship, the whole then modified by various consonantal transfers to the placatory imperative; but the language, for all its richness, contained no word for chimpanzee, nor for any of the more general terms all the way up to “animal”; the only nominal extenders carrying the thought of “unknown living creature” were always applied to the horrors of the moon-world; while to incorporate Dinah’s name in the phrase would have turned it into a piece of formal boasting, used normally as a step in the ritual of declaring a blood-feud. Morris swallowed twice, watching the motionless reeds, thinking feverishly of relationships which would not land him in claiming anything that a marshman would think impossible.

“We come under the hand of Na!ar,” he called at last. “My woman is also a good-comer.”

Well, Dinah, he thought. Now we’re married. Don’t worry—I’ll divorce you as soon as we’re out of this bloody marsh.”

He gave her a couple of oranges to seal the bargain.

Suddenly the reeds rattled again and a single canoe slid out; in its centre, as before, stood a man with his spear-thrower poised. Before Morris could cry out the arm shot over, and the dart was standing stiff in the thwart, a foot from his right hand. It took him time to see that a cord trailed from it across the weeds.

He called his thanks and fastened the cord, which appeared to be made of human hair, round the upcurving stern. The man shouted and hauled. His canoe was anchored to something in the reeds so that, with Morris using his paddle to thrust the weeds down where they gathered in skeins under the stern-post, the trapped boat was gradually drawn clear. More canoes slid from the reeds, but still nobody answered any of Morris’s remarks; only when the little fleet began towing him down the channel did they utter a sound; a man in one of the leading boats started a paddle-chant, which was a rhythmic list of the virtues of a certain she-buffalo interwoven with a punning counterpoint about the vices of the singer’s mother-in-law. The song ran from boat to boat, each man answering the next with a fresh line; some lines seemed to be new, for they raised laughter and catcalls, but when Morris looked about him for the minimal comfort of cheerful faces he saw that every man in the fleet kept his head turned well away from him.

They came, quite soon, to a low mound rising out of the water. Nothing grew on it, but its whole surface was covered with a random pattern of cattle-pens and tunnel-shaped reed huts. As soon as Morris’s keel grounded he started to rise, but sat heavily back as a dozen men seized the rope and hauled the canoe well clear of the water. Even so when he stepped on to the land he found he was ankle-deep in slime. He picked Dinah up, and with his free hand lifted the pole from the rings, so that he could carry the hand of Na!ar above him, like a chinese lantern, still shedding its mysterious protection around him. The men formed into two straggly groups on either side of him and together they all walked up the hill, moving in such a fashion that Morris walked in nobody’s footsteps and nobody in his.

The hut at the very top of the mound was larger than the others, though not so much that Morris could have stood upright in it. Before its opening two mats had been unrolled and on one of these sat a man, grey headed and wizened and as black as a prune. He was tiny for the most part, with limbs like sticks and hands that were almost transparent; the exception was his left leg which was so swollen with the activities of some parasitic worm that the flesh had completely enveloped the foot and the whole limb looked like a black plastic bag filled with jelly.

Morris walked past him, between the mats, and slid the pole into the spear-rings by the hut entrance, then returned and sat on the other mat with Dinah on his lap. He groomed her carefully, to keep her placid. It was difficult quite to judge how far to conform to what he knew of the customs of the marsh; he did not want to offend anyone, but nor did he wish them to think of him as subject to those customs. At any rate he must keep silence until the old man spoke.

He watched two small boys further down the slope training a buffalo calf; one of them skipped backwards in front of it, dancing and calling its name and clicking his fingers; the other walked behind it with a bamboo pole and when the calf tried to veer away from the dancing boy he clipped it sharply on the side of its head to straighten it up; thus, when the calf was grown the boy or his father would be able to call it to the milking floor by dancing, singing and clicking his fingers in front of it. Kwan had told Morris about this, but it was not the same thing as seeing it happen.

Canoes slid out across the water; most of the men were returning to the buffalo pastures. Because of the haze Morris could not see the lake where he had been trapped; still less could he see the palace perched on its hill, though he believed he was looking in the right direction. The world was a mile wide, walled with the warm steam. Two women came up from the boats carrying his belongings and set them at the edge of his mat without a word. Five minutes later a girl brought a bowl of buffalo milk up the hill; she looked about twelve years old, but either she was pregnant or disease had shaped her like that. These three women sat down a little out of earshot; a fourth arrived from behind the hut with a bundle of reed; they settled down to split the canes and pound them with two flat stones.

Suddenly the old man picked up the bowl of milk and drank three big gulps, then passed it to Morris, who managed to do the same, despite its harshly acid flavour. Dinah reached up a long arm and put a finger in the bowl and then into her mouth. She spat. The old man’s face changed, but not interpretably.

“Of what clan is this stranger,” he said.

“My clan is Brit. My woman’s clan is Tchim. My outer name is Wesley Naboth Morris. For speaking it is Morch. My woman speaks no words. No words are spoken to her.”

“Wah!”

“What is this place?”

“It is Alaurgan-Alaurgad. The chief elder of it is one Qab, of the water-snake clan, who sits on this mat.”

“May Qab enjoy many clean wives.”

Qab waved a deprecatory hand to where the squalid quartet of women worked at their task in the moist dust. Morris thought he had made a good start; Alaurgan-Alaurgad was not mentioned in many of the songs, but it had an important role in the Testament of Na!ar, for it was on this dull mound that the hero, pricking his own spear-hand to let the blood fall on this soil, had sworn his oath that he would not drink milk again until he had killed Nillum ibn Nillum. Now that hand had come back; it hung above the hut of the chief elder. Morris thought it a good omen, but he wished that the people of Alaurgan-Alaurgad seemed less remote.

Dinah became restless, so Morris let go of her; there was no point in putting her on her leash, as soon she would become prostrate with the increasing heat of the morning; meanwhile it would do her no harm to rove around a bit. There did not seem to be much mischief she could do on Alaurgan-Alaurgad. She scampered round the space in front of the hut, noticed Qab’s wives and bustled over to see what they were doing. They rose, flustered, with little shrieks of alarm. She picked up one of the stones and banged it on the other in the way she had seen them doing, then tried to copy their activities with the reeds but made a mess of it; so she scattered their work around in frustration and came back to Morris. Her eye was caught by the pattern on the mat; she settled down and started to tease at it with her forefinger. The women picked up their reeds and moved to a new place; one of them went and fetched two fresh stones. They left the ones Dinah had touched lying where they were.

“It is not a woman,” said Qab suddenly. “It is a moon-world creature. The women know it.”

Women, of course, were the experts in the detection of witches.

“You speak some truth,” said Morris. “Dinah is not a woman. She is not a moon-world creature. She is, as it were, the cousin’s cousin of a dog.”

“It is not a dog,” said Qab, examining Dinah critically. At that moment she became bored with the mat and noticed the hamper of fruit lying beside it. She was at the fastenings in a flash, and Morris had to hold the lid shut to prevent her rifling it. Furiously she flung herself in a circle round the mats, rushed over to frighten Qab’s wives, came back to see whether that had had any effect and at last jumped chattering to the ridge of Qab’s hut, where she sat grimacing at the steaming landscape. Well, she’s out of mischief up there, thought Morris, and turned patiently to his host.

“Qab,” he said. “You hear me speak the words of your people. Kwan of the ninth clan taught me these words. They are not the words of my people and perhaps my tongue will stumble. When I speak unacceptable words, do not think that it is my own soul speaking . . .”

“You propose to tell me lies,” said Qab.

“No, no.”

“Speak then acceptable words. Do not tell me again that your creature is a dog. Morch, you came to our pastures in the night. You slept in the middle of Tek’s Lesser pond. We heard you calling in the dark. You rose unharmed in the dawn. The witches are your friends.”

Despite the lack of cause-and-effect constructions in the language it was possible to put together a fairly damning case by producing a series of short, unconnected sentences, or single-word accretions, as Qab had done. Morris half-rose until he could reach the roll at the furthest end of his bundles; he opened it and spread it out until Qab could see the ultra-fine mesh of the mosquito net.

“We slept beneath this cloth,” he said. “See how small are the holes. Not even the cleverest witch can pass through.”

Qab fingered the net with his fleshless hands, fine as a lemur’s.

“Wah!” he said. There was a longish pause before he restarted the conversation. Morris sat looking at him; this was not what he had expected, after the archaic nobility of Kwan, the civilised calm of Dyal, the raw dignity of Gaur. This little man carried none of that weight. He did not even seem cunning, let alone clever. In another context he might have been an old peasant sitting on his doorstep, being approached by a stranger with some slightly unorthodox request and simply thinking how to make money out of the visit.

“Thou comest,” he said at last, “under that hand.”

He used the same archaic second person that Gaur had once used.

“True,” said Morris. “The descendant of Nillum sent me. He requires the aid of the people.”

“Qab has heard that the Bond is broken.”

“Morch has not heard that story.”

“Qab has heard this: a warrior of the ninth clan lived in the hut of the descendant of Nillum. The descendant of Nillum slew him with a poisoned dart.”

Curiously, this was the sort of conversation to which the language was well adapted. Qab had used a form implying that the Sultan was still alive.

“A poisoned dart slew Dyal, of the ninth clan,” said Morris. “At the same hour a poisoned dart slew the descendant of Nillum.”

“Who saw this fight?”

“No man, perhaps. I heard shouts. They used not weapons but practice-darts.”

(There was a word for these, as every male child was presented with a practice-dart and spear-thrower on being initiated into his first age-set.)

“Qab,” said Morris, “a man hunting his enemy will smear his dart-tip with poison. Will he also smear the dart-tip of his enemy with poison?”

“Riddles are for children and witches.”

“I do not speak riddles. The place of the fight was the hut of Dinah and her family. A warrior stood at the door, guarding it. This warrior was Gaur, of the ninth clan. He was new come to the place, and did not know our . . . our tracks. He greatly feared the kin of Dinah. On certain days Dyal and the descendant of Nillum threw practice-darts at the kin of Dinah, for sport. Did Gaur smear the darts with poison, hoping to slay some of the kin of Dinah?”

“No man of the sun-world knows the mind of another.”

“True. Now this Gaur has come to the marshes again. I wish to ask him this. I wish also to ask him what people passed the door where he stood guard. Will you send for Gaur?”

“Ho! I must send for a warrior of the ninth clan when he has taken a new woman into the reeds! Who hunts the boar with a feather?”

“He is under the Bond.”

“The Bond is broken.”

“That is not known. When Gaur has spoken it will be known.”

“Morch, this is an old tale. The blood-guilt is on the man that throws the spear. Another man has poisoned it. The thrower does not know. But the blood-guilt is his—every child knows that. It is in many songs.”

It was interesting that Qab knew that Gaur had brought Anne with him; it also accounted for Qab’s many hints that Morris was really a creature of the moon-world—the story of his witchcraft would have reached the marshes before him. But it was no help in the frustrating task of presenting a logical argument to a stupid and secretive old man in a language solely designed for making an elaborate and detailed picture of the surface appearance of things and actions.

“These two dead men were brothers,” said Morris. Dyal had used the word in Arabic which means blood-brother.

“Yes,” said Qab; it was the minor affirmative, a convenient grunt which agrees with a proposition only provisionally.

“I have heard songs in which brother fought with brother. Always they used unpoisoned spears.”

“Morch, you tell me lies. These are lies a child would know. A man who fights his brother does not use a practice-dart. He uses a new spear, never before tried. He does not put poison on it nor say spells over it. How should a man begin to kill his brother with a practice-dart?”

Morris opened his mouth to answer, but the very shape of Qab’s question defeated him. It wasn’t simply that the ugly little savage had restated Morris’s case as though it were a clinching rebuttal of that case; also his modification of the relation-root of killing which made the action incomplete—“begin to” was a very blurry translation—this showed how impossible it was going to be to prove a case to the marshmen by any logical chain of argument. It was as close as Qab could think to the idea of purpose and motive, and at the same time impossibly far from them.

A little to the left of where they sat, but almost down at the greasy edge of the water, two boys were practising with their throwing-sticks, those stunted clubs with which the marshmen stalked small game. The art, Kwan had said, was to throw them with the wrist only, not moving any other joint, so that the duck or water-lizard or whatever it might be was not scared by too much movement. The boys stood like little wizened statues, aiming at the horns of a buffalo-skull in the mud in front of them; Morris couldn’t see the flick of the black hands in front of the black bellies, but the throwing-sticks didn’t seem to miss at all. They struck the horns with a light clunk, sharply, in a steady flow, until the boys walked forward to pick them up. There seemed to be no connection between thrower and stick and target. Qab’s method of argument was like that—one sharp little isolated fact after another, related each to each only by his speaking them. Morris tried again.

“I do not tell lies,” he said. “I tell you things that are difficult to say with your words. Let us talk of another matter. I will tell you what the Arabs say.”

“You are an Arab, Morch.”

“No.”

“You are white, like them.”

Morris had been, during his time in Q’Kut, so subconsciously aware of his status as a white man among brown men, that it was a shock to realise that to people as black as the marshmen they were all equally pale strangers.

“I live with the Arabs, but I am not an Arab.”

“You are certainly not of the people.”

“True.”

Qab nodded. Morris saw that in his mind only two types of man inhabited the sun-world. Anyone else came from the other place. He ploughed on.

“The Arabs also say that the Bond is broken. They say that Dyal poisoned the darts. They say it is the manner of the marsh-men’s hunting, but then the descendant of Nillum took the dart from his body and threw it back, as in the Testament of Na!ar, poisoning Dyal also. They say the beginning of the fight was this: there are great riches in the marshes . . .”

“The buffalo give good milk this year, it is true.”

“They do not seek to take your buffalo. Again, it is hard to say in your words. But first they will take the water. There will be no more floods.”

Qab frowned at Morris, then turned to stare at the grey, unruffled water that interlaced the brown reed-banks.

“They say that Dyal killed the descendant of Nillum,” said Morris, “He did not wish that the Arabs should come among the marshes. They say the Bond is now broken, and they will take vengeance. They will make war, saying it is for vengeance, but in their hearts they desire your land.”

“The Bond is broken. We may go among the Arabs and slay and steal.”

“I say the Bond is not broken. I say the new descendant of Nillum sent me here. I say he asks your help. He must show the Arabs that the blood-feud is foolish. Gaur must tell the true story of the killing. I seek for Gaur, coming to you under that hand.”

Morris had spoken with emphatic oratory and now gestured, without looking round, to where the box swung on the pole. The possibility of war had made Qab listen with real interest, and his eyes followed the gesture. At once his face changed. His hand was clapped in horror to his forehead and his mouth breathed soundless syllables. Morris swung round.

Dinah had been very quiet, presumably already listless with heat. Not so—she had been, for who knows how long, squatting on the roof-tree solving the problem of how to reach the box. At the moment of Morris’s gesture she must have worked it out, twisting the pole in its rings until the curve of it brought the box above her head. Morris leaped to his feet and grabbed the pole in the same moment that she grabbed the box. He hoicked up, she down; something gave and he was overbalancing with the pole waving while she was scampering to the other end of the roof to examine her trophy.

He opened his fruit-box and took out a banana, then hurried to the other end of the hut and clicked his fingers at her. She looked up. He showed her the banana. She put the box to her ear and shook it. Silently Morris cursed her intelligence—she would prefer to win a reward by solving a problem than win one by being good. He hadn’t much time, for she was experienced in closed-box problems and would soon spot that there was no lid or catch to this one, but that it was woven all in one piece, and then her strong, dark hands would tear it apart in seconds. The moment she was absorbed in her problem he swung the pole along the roof and knocked her off the end.

She fell, twisting like a gymnast, landing fully-balanced on her feet, still grasping the box. He grabbed at it. She wrenched from the other side. The ancient wickerwork collapsed and out of its ruins tumbled a pale shape. Morris had just time to see that it was the bones of a hand, wired together with copper, before she had pounced and was scampering away to the next hut, leaping for the roof and settling down to examine her trophy. As he raced across with the banana in one hand and the pole in the other she wrenched a finger from the hand and put it in her mouth.

One chew and she was in a tantrum, the hysteric indignation of those who have been cheated by themselves. No banana—only dry bones. She spat the finger out, rose to her feet and tore the hand apart, throwing the bones to and fro round the hut, screeching with disappointment. Morris scuttered about picking the bones up and stuffing them into his shirt pocket. The wrist-bone landed in the corner of a buffalo-pen, six inches deep in slime, and by the time he had probed it clear Dinah was back on top of the original hut, smugly eating the banana he had dropped.

He knelt on his mat and took the bones out of his pocket, arranging them loosely in their proper pattern; but being no anatomist he found himself with three unlikely oddments left over, which he was only able to place by the position of the broken wires. When at last he looked up he saw that another man had joined them, younger than Qab, small and sturdy. This man held a spear in the stabbing position with its serrated flint tip two feet from Morris’s neck and glistening with black unguent.

“I will mend the hand,” whispered Morris. “See, I have all the bones.”

“The Bond is broken. So the hand is broken,” said Qab. “This is sure. A witch comes to Alaurgan-Alaurgad, where Na!ar swore his oath. He brings a creature who breaks the hand. He dances before this creature, clicking his fingers like a child training a buffalo calf.”

The third person was not chosen because Qab wished to state his case dispassionately, but because there is a class of beings to whom no wise man will speak direct.

“I am not a witch,” said Morris. “Dinah is not a creature of the moon-world. I do not command her. Would I come here thus, by day, when there are warriors in Alaurgan-Alaurgad, with spears to kill me?”

“Ho,” said Qab. “The witch came in the dark, but the good mimulus-weed, which sinks by night, deceived him with the appearance of clear water. A witch lives in the moon-world, as one may see from the colour of this witch’s skin. To send a witch back to the moon-world he must be killed in the sun-world. A child knows this. Witches are very stupid, being dazzled by light, in the sun-world. Strike, Fau.”

Morris looked bleakly round. About fifty men and women had come from somewhere and stood in a half-circle to watch him die. Dinah tossed her banana-skin down from the roof. It fell with a flap on the mat. Fau lowered his spear.

“The men of my age-set say ‘Let us take him to Gal-Gal’,” he said.

“Strike,” said Qab.

“His words are perhaps true.”

“He tells many lies. A child would know them. He is so stupid with sunlight.”

“I slay him here, now. Then the other clans say ‘Was this a witch? Who is Qab to declare the Bond to be broken? When did the water-snake become wise?’ There will be many buffaloes to pay, Qab.”

“Strike, Fau.”

“Let us take him to Gal-Gal. Then the duck clan will not say ‘When did the water-snake learn the smell of a witch?’ They cannot then demand buffaloes. You are an old fool, Qab, and soon you will die. Your sons have taken all your buffaloes. You are like spear-poison which is seven and seven days old. Yes, soon you will die. But my age-set is full of strength, and we say ‘Let us take one calf to the duck clan now. Let us not pay seven sevens calves next flood.’”

Qab relaxed and scratched his crotch.

“Can the witch make my leg clean?” he asked the steaming air.

“I am not a witch,” said Morris shakily. “I do not heal wounds nor drive out blackwater spirits. I only carry a message from the descendant of Nillum. But let us go to Gal-Gal. Let Gaur be sent for also.”

“Ho!” said Qab. “Will Fau carry such a message to the ninth clan? Ho!”

“I will give Fan a sign to take to Gaur’s new woman,” said Morris. “He will come.”

Qab looked suddenly impressed. He shouted to his wives, who came shrinkingly over, eased his leg on to a sort of sledge and prepared to drag him into the hut. He stopped them with a snarl.

“Dniy,” he shouted, “thou has a daughter who will die soon. The witches have touched her, so this witch can harm her no more. Give her to him for a wife, and my sister’s son will pay thee a third of the next calf of his lame mottled cow.”

A fat little man with a twisted leg strutted grinning from the ring. Hell, thought Morris, but he was in no position to give any more offence to the people of Alaurgan-Alaurgad, so he drew a sliver of reed from the mat, made it into a loop and tied the ends together. Dniy lowered his spear and Morris put the loop over the sheathed point.

“Good,” said Qab. “The witch’s hut is that where Tek died.”

His wives dragged him into the hut. The ring of watchers melted away, except for a man who squatted down a few yards off to make dung. Morris’s second wife (counting Dinah as the first) was a little black girl with a festering sore on her left shoulder. She came alone, very timidly, up to the mat in front of Qab’s hut and grovelled in the dirt before him. She wore a blue-bead amulet round her neck, and a blue-bead belt, and the loop of reed round her right wrist.

“How many years have you?” asked Morris.

“Seven, Lord,” she whispered into the dirt.

The marshmen could count, but usually didn’t bother. Seven meant any lowish number.

“What is thine outer name?”

“My lord has not yet told me.”

Morris thought, for the first time for years, of his own mother, longing for a friendly girl instead of her cold, clever, stodgy son. She used to make long, Barrie-ish fantasies about this other child she would never see. When Morris had sorted through the house after her death he had found a shelf of picture books with the same name written in each of them.

“Thine outer name is Margaret Lucy Morris,” he said. “For speaking it is Peggy.”

“I am Peggy,” she said, pronouncing the word exactly as he had done. “I am Margaret Lucy Morris.” She got that right too. She looked up. Her eyes were glazed with fright.

“Little Pegling,” he said, lacing his speech with all the friendly diminutives he could think of. “You are welcome. See, this is Dinah. She sleeps when the sun is hot. Her home is a big tree. She is a little naughtikins. She likes to be touched, very gently, thus.”

He showed her how to groom Dinah’s coat, and in doing so found a disgusting great tick, fat with blood. Peggy laughed when he squashed it and soon came to help. Then he gave her a banana, which she ate with grave doubt. She became afraid again when he insisted on dressing her sore with antibiotic ointment, but endured his touch. After all, if he had taken her down to the water and drowned her like a kitten, she would have thought that perfectly proper, and wouldn’t have resisted. About noon she showed him to their hut, sideways and down from Qab’s, but well above the flood-line. There was an old mat there which she unrolled for him, before going back to make the first of many journeys down with his belongings. She was shocked to find that he had no weapons, but wouldn’t let him carry anything else, except Dinah.

While she was staggering to and fro Fau came to his hut with the armature of a modern electric motor, presumably looted from the hijacked plane.

“To-morrow I seek Gaur,” he said. “The stranger will give me a safe sign for the new woman.”

“Come this evening,” said Morris. “When do we go to Gal-Gal?”

“On the third day. Let not the stranger fear that Qab will poison him. My age-set will not permit it. There is good sport on Gal-Gal.”

Worrying though it was to be still in the third person, it was also a relief to feel that one could eat and drink with nothing more to fear than the swarming ailments of the marsh. Morris thanked Fau and settled down to unpick the wire from the armature.

It was early evening before he had the hand assembled. Peggy was fanning a stinking little fire of dried dung right in the entrance of the hut. He would have liked to tell her to make it elsewhere, but this was her first day’s housekeeping, and he could see that every other hut on Alaurgan-Alaurgad was being similarly treated.

“Peggy,” he said. “I will need a basket for this, before I go to Gal-Gal.”

“I will ask my mother’s sister. She makes our baskets.”

“Good.”

Morris laid the completed hand on the mat. Struck by its size he spread out his own beside it, and found that his fingers did not reach as far as the last knuckles. That was curious. He had always envisaged Na!ar, despite the emphasis in the Testament on the hero’s size and strength, as another little wizened marsh man; but he must have been almost a giant. Like Dyal, like Kwan, like Gaur.

“Dost thou know any of the ninth clan?” he asked.

“My lord need not fear. I am not beautiful enough for a ninth-clan warrior to steal me.”

Morris laughed, waking Dinah at last.

“Who are their fathers?” he said.

“Their father is Na!ar,” she said. “He was big. They are big.”

“Where does Na!ar live?”

“Does my lord not know? Why, he lives in the body of the descendant of Nillum. He takes eight wives, one from each clan, and he begets on them warriors. Thus does Na!ar still fight for the people.”

Dinah stretched, scratched and looked around her. Morris offered her an orange, and while she was eating it she noticed Peggy, shrinking a little away from the edge of the mat, on which she would not have dreamed of setting foot. Dinah looked at Morris with puzzled limpid eyes. He clicked with his fingers encouragingly.

“Be still,” he said, as she moved carefully over to inspect Peggy at two-inch range. She noticed the weeping sore on the black shoulder and immediately made a funny cooing noise and prodded her fingers together.

“Dinah is sad thou art hurt,” said Morris.

“My lord must not see the place,” said Peggy, with a curious huffiness, like a teenage girl whose boy-friend has drawn attention to a pimple on her chin; then she was distracted by Dinah’s vacuum-like kiss. In a minute they were sharing a second orange, putting it pig by pig into each other’s mouths. In ten they were starting down to the shore, where the slow cattle were plunging home through the soupy lake while their warrior-masters danced, clicked and sang on the shore.

“Keep fast hold of her hand,” called Morris. “She has fewer years than thou.”

With something that was almost a lightening of heart he watched them move towards the melee; Peggy ought to have been carrying a toy bucket and spade, and beyond them should have stretched the sandy levels of low tide and beyond that still the lightly curling wavelets of a holiday sea. He thought with detached interest about what Peggy had told him, and knitted it in with what Dyal had once said about the problem of finding women when first he came out of the marshes. It explained, far better than any amount of buffalo-milk, the persisting size of the warriors of the ninth clan. It explained Dyal’s unservile relationship with the Sultan, and Gaur’s last words to Prince Hadiq. It also explained why it was almost impossible that either Gaur or Dyal had deliberately killed the Sultan.

Once there had been two races in Q’Kut, in that lost Saturnian age when the dunes had been green. Neither race had been Arab. There had been a big-boned, dominant people, and a race of scrawny near-slaves. Then the Arabs had come, and the big people had fought them, and the last of these, the hero Na!ar, had died fighting. Then those first Arabs, seeing the impregnability of the marshes, had reached a status quo with the little people by adapting their relationship with the extinct big men. There was no guessing quite how much had been changed, but the way it worked now was this: in each generation wives were sent from the palace to the marshes; these wives were the Sultan’s but were “lent” by him to his bodyguard—an arrangement which would have seemed shocking to most Arabs, and so was not widely known, though Morris felt he ought to have guessed that his fastidious friend would not have found it easy to beget children on women who reeked of rancid milk; after a while the children of these wives went back to the marshes, where the sons became the ninth clan; the largest and strongest was then chosen to be bodyguard to the next Sultan, and thus the system bred for continuing size; the prohibition on marriages in the ninth clan kept the genetic lines reasonably clear, though Morris didn’t like to think what happened to such babies as were born . . .

So Dyal had been Gaur’s father, and Kwan Dyal’s—their real fathers, that is; but in their own eyes the fathers to whom they owed their duty as sons had been the Sultans, and when Dyal had called the Sultan “my brother” he had not been using a figure of speech. Among Arabs sons have murdered fathers and brothers brothers through all their blood-veined history, but Morris could not remember a single reference in any of the marsh-people’s songs to parricide, and fratricide was governed by the Rules of Cricket, as described by Qab.

Morris was wondering whether Hadiq had known this (and hence insisted so strongly that neither Gaur nor Dyal had killed his father) when his two wives came trailing up from the shore, with Peggy carrying a bowl of buffalo-milk in one hand and Dinah wearing the blue-bead belt over her left eye, like a tipsy coronet. Several happy children followed them, shrieking ruderies.

Night fell. The function of the filthy fires became apparent, as their smoke drifted through the tunnel-shaped huts and cleared the malarial mosquitoes away. Morris showed Peggy how to make a nest of reeds for Dinah; then he dressed the sore on her shoulder again.

“That will soon be well, Pegling,” he said.

“My lord, do not call me little-names. I am a woman. I wear a blue belt. My mother’s sister put it on me.”

He sighed. He was exhausted with last night’s efforts and to-day’s drama. She too was swaying and red-eyed, in the yellow flicker of the reed rushlight that burnt in the corner of the hut.

“Among thy clans thou art a woman,” he said. “Among mine thou art a child.”

“I will never be a woman,” she whined. “I will never smear myself with sour milk. In three days they will take us to Gal-Gal, and they will spear thee for a witch, and drown thy wives.”

Morris was too tired to feel the shock just then.

“Perhaps I am not a witch,” he said. “Or perhaps it is a good life in the other world. Where wilt thou sleep? Shall I make thee a nest like Dinah’s?”

She smiled, somehow, and without a word went to Dinah’s nest and crawled in beside her. Dinah adjusted her limbs without waking. By the time Morris had constructed a tent of mosquito netting over the pair of them they were fast asleep, fast entangled.

He sat down and wrote a careful note to Anne, most of which was taken up with an explanation for someone who couldn’t read phonetics of how to pronounce in the language of the marsh the formal summons “Thy blood-brother calls thee to Gal-Gal.”