The Poison Oracle

Six

1

MORRIS WAS NOT at all prepared for Gal-Gal, when the fleet came to it in the middle of the third morning. It was a holy place, mentioned in many songs, often with modifiers which meant “of a dark, reddish hue” and “stony”, so he had envisaged it as another great mound among the reed-beds, like a blob of Devonshire, red clay and small stones.

Gal-Gal came out of the mists almost between stroke and stroke of the paddles, looming like a fortress. It was one vast slab of red rock, striated from end to end, and terraced over the ages by the rub of the river. Some movement of the continents had tilted it so that the layers ran five degrees from the horizontal and its flat top sloped up to a sort of prow about sixty feet above the water. The clefts and ledges along its side were fuzzy with stunted growths, mostly a strange succulent shrub whose branches projected at gawky angles, carrying little fat blue-green leaves and hanging bunches of wizened brown berries. There was a slow current here which kept a wide reach clear of reed and mimulus; down this the fleet swept.

Morris was being towed. Nobody would come in the canoe with him and Dinah, except Peggy, and he wasn’t given a paddle. He had been passed from village to village all the previous day, some of them on mounds like Alaurgan-Alaurgad, others consisting of huts built on rafts of reeds which were added to as they sank or as the floods rose. At each village most of his escort had returned home and only a few token warriors and elders continued with him. At the last one they had picked up a number of women and small girls.

“Perhaps you will find a friend,” he had said to Peggy, as he had watched a group of these scramble shrilling into a large canoe.

“Lord, they are of the duck clan,” she had answered with surprise and something like disgust.

The suppuration of her sore had gone and the skin was creeping across it. He had spent much of his time telling her European stories, Snow White and Oedipus and Beauty and the Beast; in exchange she had sung him, reluctantly at first, some of the women’s songs, which men are not supposed to hear. The words were slightly different from man-talk and the songs disappointing, very repetitive and often meaningless, but with haunting, wailing melodies. Her small voice went unnoticed in the general clamour of the fleet’s progress. At the moment Morris was being towed by two canoes of the heron clan, who had some sort of ancient antipathy to the men of the water-snake clan which was expressed in a ritual of jeering, a series of grotesque similes wherein the herons taunted the water-snakes for their big stomachs and the water-snakes taunted the herons for their small penises. Kwan had once said something about one of these clans always taking its wives from the other, but Morris couldn’t remember the details. The men of the two clans took the ritual seriously, snarling at each insult and putting real venom into their replies, but the other clans shouted with laughter. They seemed to be in no particular awe of Gal-Gal, for the racket continued as they jostled for landing places and began to swarm like baboons up the red rock.

Morris waited till his canoe was safely moored, then he settled Dinah, prostrate with heat, on to his left hip and with his right hand picked the pole out of its rings. The raw new box swung above his head with the ancient bones inside it.

“Bring food,” he said to Peggy.

“Lord, no food is eaten on Gal-Gal.”

“Bring water then,” he said crossly, “or I shall die thirsting.”

He stepped ashore and watched as she filled the water-bottles from the river and dropped a couple of Campden tablets in each. He had not told her what the tablets were for, nor had he told her a magical fable about them. He had simply forbidden her to give him water without them or to drink it herself. She was an obedient little doll.

Ages ago someone had cut good steps up the side of Gal-Gal. A worn flight of them rose to the left of the landing-place but ended in vacancy where a section of rock had fallen sheer away. The marshmen ignored them and scrambled up anyhow; there seemed to be several easiest-ways-up, such as boys find in a good climbing-tree. Morris, burdened with Dinah and the pole, chose to follow a crude sort of litter on which lay a man so deformed and bloated that he seemed like a piece of abstract soft sculpture. Three wives and a son carried this litter, going a long way round to find the most convenient path from terrace to terrace. At one such point they caught up with an old woman one side of whose body was completely withered, so that leg and arm were like dead branches. As she scrabbled to haul herself up a three-foot step the young male litter-carrier reached out with his foot and kicked her to one side, so that she fell clumsily and lay twitching. Without looking at her the four of them hoisted the litter over the obstacle and scrambled on. Mysteriously, it was at that moment that Morris’s tolerance of the marsh-people broke.

He didn’t do anything visible. He simply changed his mind. No doubt ever since he had found Maj’s body he had been building up to this decision, but now, as he helped the beldame to her foot (taking care only to touch sound flesh in case the withering was infectious) he found himself saying the hell with them. The Arabs have got them right. A conceivable alternative future for mankind, phooey. They are a dead end, a waste product, excrement. The language is an accident, and might still turn out to be a tool of minor importance for psycholinguistic research, but what was its point beyond that? Perhaps it wasn’t even as astonishing as Morris thought it—cold natures tend to find weird outlets for their romantic drives.

The old woman stared at him for a moment with dark, unreadable eyes, but said nothing. He picked Dinah up and using the pole as an alpenstock climbed on. The heat off the rock struck back with a steady, dull intensity. Sweat streamed all down him. His gasps seemed to fetch in nothing breathable and his heart slammed erratically. He reached the top on the verge of heat-stroke and stood there, gulping and blinking.

Slowly the red blur left his vision and the thudding blood became quiet; he took a water flask from Peggy and poured some over his neck and chest, then he told her to spread a mat on a bare patch of rock and lowered Dinah on to it. There was no shade, but the noon haze veiled the sun. One was steamed, not roasted.

“What happens now?” he said.

“I do not know, my lord. Only the women of the duck clan come to Gal-Gal. The men of the other clans do not speak about it.”

He looked at her with strange exasperation. She was one of them too, or would be, one day, if she survived today—a cheerful drowner of strangers, a passer-on of repellent diseases and obscene cruelties. On the other hand Dinah liked her.

“Rest.” He said. “Drink if you are thirsty.”

Of course he should have tried to escape with her. They might have been safe, sneaking away through the witch-protected dark. She might have known the way. But he had become obsessed with his mission, and the need to talk to Gaur, even on Gal-Gal.

In fact nothing much happened for a long time, except that more and more people arrived. The top of the rock was not a clean slope as it had seemed from the water; it was more like a slightly cupped hand, lowest at the wrist and rising to the fingertips; about in the centre of where the heart-line would have run was a large, rectangular slab of a different sort of stone, and below this lay a natural arena, forty feet across, where nobody walked. Morris watched the new arrivals, many of them crippled or deformed, but all wearing rather more beads and ornaments than had seemed normal on Alaurgan-Alaurgad. Several men wore, not as covering but as decoration, strips of cloth which he recognised by the pattern as being upholstery from the crashed plane; many wore waist-belts from which dangled dark little rubbery blobs which seemed to have no aesthetic value at all, but only when a young man strutted by wearing a belt of magnetic tape from which hung two similar objects, but paler and not yet fully shrunk, did Morris realise that he was looking at the genitals of defeated enemies. This young man had killed Arabs not long ago. Maj. Jillad? Where had he got the tape?

Morris was distracted from this problem by the arrival of the other hand of Nillum, carried up with no ceremony at all by a middle-aged man with a grossly distended stomach, who waddled over with it to a group of warriors, leaned on the pole and stood chatting like a farmer at a cattle-market. Everybody was behaving like that—like, in fact, guests at the reception after a large wedding, greeting and gossiping in noisy groups. Nobody looked at Morris at all, and after a while he left his wives in each other’s care and started to wander about.

The stone object turned out to be man-made, a thing like a giant’s coffin, lidded with three enormous shaped blocks of grey sandstone. Along its sides ran a series of blobs and lumps that might once have been a bas relief but were now uninterpretable with age. Morris was not surprised. There had been the broken steps below, and out in the desert there were stone-lined wells of great depth, an achievement beyond any known technology of the Arabs who had lived there in historical times. It was curious to realise that even the primeval-seeming marshmen had been preceded by a different people, but in itself the stone thing was like so many other stone things, apparently interesting but really boring.

A faint wind stirred, creating the illusion of coolness. Something seemed to be happening up at the far end of the platform, though nobody near Morris paid any attention to it. Lethargically, almost like a tourist at a village festival, he strolled towards it.

Close to the cliffs at the highest point of the rock a group of women sat on the ground with a number of gourd bowls between them. Two other women and a girl no older than Peggy knelt in the middle of the circle being made up for the ceremony. The pots contained pigments, a greyish white, a muddy orange, indigo and olive. The bodies had been painted white all over and white paint had been rubbed into the hair which had then been teased out into spikes. By the time Morris arrived the white had dried on the first woman and she was now being painted with herringbone stripes of the other colours; the pattern ignored natural contours, marching over breast and buttock like a Roman road. The old woman with the withered arm and leg sat just outside the circle, swaying like a drunk and singing in a monotonous wheeze, words which Morris didn’t know, though the inflections and modifications were of the same type as in marsh speech—he imagined this was a secret language, used only for magical chants. The whole process seemed dingy and banal. The painting was crude and the result ugly but not frightening—scarcely even striking.

His attention, such as it was, was distracted by a group of men coming up to the circle with a curious tangle of wickerwork and plaited reed ropes. Roughly they picked the old woman, still chanting, off the ground and carried her to the edge of the cliff; for a moment he thought they were about to throw her over, but they lashed her into the wickerwork, settled a bowl in her lap and lowered her over the edge with the ropes. She seemed to be in a sort of trance all the while, and her dreary chant came faintly up to Morris’s ears from below. Crane as he might he couldn’t see what she was at down there, though the men moved the ropes along about twenty feet of cliff. He gave up and looked out across the marshes.

Far down the reach of the main river a long canoe nosed out of the reeds, paddled by at least six men. They seemed to have a white passenger, but it was too far off to be sure before the canoe’s prow swung towards Gal-Gal and the foremost oarsmen hid the rest.

When the old woman was hauled back the pot in her lap was half full of little orange berries. The men carried her back to the circle of women, one of whom took the pot and another washed the old woman’s good hand in what appeared to be urine. A small girl appeared carrying a wicker basket out of which she took a bedraggled brown duck. It was a pitiful thing. The girl held it under one arm and with her free hand forced its head back and its beak open. A woman used two bits of reed like chopsticks to drop one of the berries down its throat then poured a little water on top. The girl put the duck down in the middle of the circle, where it stood in a dazed fashion, flapping one wing with feeble strokes. The other wing had been broken. The women who were doing the make-up stopped their task to watch. The old woman came out of her trance and fell silent. The babble of men’s voices surged on in the background, but here was a little island of stillness, in the middle of which the duck fell dead. Morris almost believed he could hear a slight thump as it hit the rock. Suddenly all the women looked at him for the first time. He hadn’t thought they’d noticed his presence, but now they stared at him with a single, black, inquisitive glance. The little girl who was being painted laughed aloud.

At first Morris thought that the trial was over, that he had been found guilty, that the other preparations were all for some ritual to do with his slow death. He swallowed dryness, became dizzy and managed to sit down without actually falling. The dizziness left him but the fear remained, mingled with growing disappointment and resentfulness. If one was to be speared, or poisoned, or drowned inchmeal, one was at least entitled to expect that the moment of decision should be less hugger-mugger. One didn’t wish to seem egotistical, but one would appreciate it if the smelly little savages who had brought one to this place to die would stop gossiping about buffaloes for a few seconds and turn round and watch one’s fate. And surely they could have spared a less seedy duck to die with one.

Slowly he realised that he had misread the incident, and that the women had only been checking the quality of the poison berries. He stood up and saw that somebody else was watching him, a group of five young men, black and naked, the shortest of them almost twice as tall as the average marshman. The family likeness in three of them was so strong that he couldn’t decide which was Gaur, and when he waved a friendly hand they all five turned away.

Dinah was still asleep, but Peggy had news.

“Lord, men of the ninth clan came.”

“I saw them.”

“They brought a woman, white as thou.”

“I do not see her.”

Peggy led him to the edge of the rock and pointed. A single long canoe was moored in the middle of the channel.

“She hid,” said Peggy with a giggle. “She was ashamed when the men shouted.”

2

The ceremony proper didn’t begin until that curious quarter-hour when the whole marsh air turned to a glowing, coppery fog. It was like being inside a sunset cloud. At this time, Peggy said, witches are weakest, caught between world and world.

Proceedings began with an argument about seating arrangements. The dry-dung fires had been lit to drift their acid smoke around the rock-top, and the whole crowd had gathered, jostling, round the arena; but there was a certain orderliness in their behaviour for the first time that day; the men seemed to have grouped themselves into their seven clans, above each of which a resin-soaked torch of reeds flared and fumed. The women of the duck clan sat on the ground opposite the stone object, which was now decorated with a rope of shells of fresh-water mussels, and several small unmeaningful bits and bobs. Dinah had woken and Peggy had taken her down to the canoe and given her fruit. Now Morris led his wives, holding each one by the hand, towards the arena. Two clans bustled aside to clear a path for him, but began to mutter and grumble when he stopped level with their front rank and signed to Dinah to sit down. An old man with a weeping pink mess where his left eye should have been half-turned to him, and without looking at him directly said “The witches stand beside the house of spirits.”

“There is no witch,” Morris answered, even more loudly than he had intended.[1]

A puzzled mutter ran round the arena. The old man opened his mouth to speak again, but changed his mind and merely pointed. Dinah looked up and snickered at him.

“There is no witch,” said Morris again. He’d had plenty of time to wonder how he would face his accusation, but had not expected it to come so early. His previous attempts to argue about his supposed crime with Gaur, Dyal and Qab had, he now saw, foundered on a property of the marsh language, whereby the negative relation carried certain positive implications, so that to say “I am not a witch” had been to admit the possibility that he might be. Earlier Morris had been bound by his own feeling that the language and culture were sacrosanct, but now he didn’t care how many strands of that intricate old network he broke as he threshed to escape.

Curiously it was the children who first grasped what he was actually saying. He heard Peggy gasp, and at the same moment the child in her skin of paint began to whine. What, no witch, when she had spent eight hours putting her make-up on? The men on either side of Morris drew back still further, as if embarrassed by this faux pas. The old woman stopped her snivelling chant and listened while one of the other women whispered in her ear. She muttered what must have been an order, for as she snivelled on the women huddled together, active at something in their midst, whispering brief phrases. In an extraordinarily short time one of them stood up and walked slowly round the edge of the arena to the stone object, against which she set (with an action that reminded Morris strangely of the Queen laying wreaths at the Cenotaph) three crude mommets. They were identical, made of reed and cloth, without arms or legs. Only the narrowed neck between the round head and the long body made them human at all, but human they undoubtedly were—Dinah, Morris and Peggy, ready to stand trial for witchcraft.

The little orchestra of women struck up the overture on quite different instruments from the ones Morris had heard at the flood-going feasts; these were two long, thin drums, reed pipes and clay groaners. The old woman also groaned and began to shiver or rather to shudder. She sat to one side of the orchestra, and on the other knelt the two painted women and the painted girl, each with a little pot in front of her. The noise from the orchestra was a weird, continuous wheeze, unpatterned, as though a wild-life recording enthusiast had put his microphone against the stomach of some big beast with indigestion. The arena was an ellipse, with the orchestra at one end and the House of the Spirits, the stone object, at the other; all round the perimeter the black crowd jostled for position, but no one interfered with Morris’s view; they left a clear three feet all round him, like filings repelled by the pole of his presence. This was nothing to do with the hand of Na!ar dangling above his head—at least the fat man who carried the other hand was given only so much room as the bulge of his stomach cleared for him.

Suddenly the old woman’s shuddering came to a climax. Her withered limbs shook in the still air with a life of their own. She cried aloud a single word of her secret language—a command by the sound of it—then rigor gripped her. She toppled sideways and lay still.

Nobody paid any attention to her, because on her cry the two painted women jumped to their feet and began to dance; each held her pot in her left hand and used the right hand as a lid as she hopped round the arena in short, galvanic leaps, both feet together as if tied by a rope. They hopped in opposite directions, and the first to pass Dinah had the most extraordinary effect on her; she rushed away from the arena to the end of her leash, and when she could get no further she had what looked like an epileptic fit on the ground, writhing and sobbing. Morris moved back and knelt beside her, trying to calm her with his touch. Peggy came and squatted on the other side of her, frowning in the dusky light.

“Dinah is eaten with a spirit, Lord.”

“No. She was frightened by the dancing woman.”

“It is the spirit T!u who dances.”

“Peggikins, it is a woman covered in white paint.”

He regretted his words the moment he had said them—if the child was going to be killed, it would be easier for her if she accepted the whole grisly mummery as something true and real. He lifted Dinah, panting and whimpering, and carried her back to the arena, where she lay still with her head buried in his shoulder. Peggy took his free hand unasked.

The two women by now had reached the very centre of the arena and were standing back to back, jigging up and down; the noise of the orchestra seemed to change, but not in any meaningful way; the women jigged round until they faced each other and began to hop backwards; as soon as they were far enough apart to do so they bent almost double and, still hopping, started to take the contents from their pots and dribble them down on to the rock. It was a process that reminded Morris of something-yes, a gardener sowing seed along the line of a drill—but the women moved not in straight lines but in two outward moving spirals like the arms of a nebula, leaving their trail of whatever it was behind them, bent double, hopping all the time. It must have been killingly exhausting, but they kept it up for twenty minutes until they reached their place by the orchestra.

The music changed again. The women put their pots down and picked up the child, who held her own pot cradled in her white arms; they carried her to the middle of the arena where they left her kneeling. The orchestra stopped playing and the child opened her mouth and sang a thin and tuneless chant in the secret language, rocking her body to and fro with the pot huddled against her chest. The chant was short, but she repeated and repeated it until Morris could discern the grammatical form under the meaningless words. In English it might have gone:

The —— comes to ——

It ——s into the ——

It ——s this and that

It ——s to and fro

Ai!

It ——s the ——.

While she was singing it for the fifth or sixth time, watched in total silence by the hitherto restless crowd, a flood of fear washed suddenly into Morris, filling every creek of his being, as strong and uncontrollable as nausea. His tongue seemed to stick to his palate; it made a sucking noise as he wrenched it away with his throat-muscles and clung back as soon as he relaxed. He shut his eyes and bowed his head, filled with furry darkness. Only the touch of Dinah’s head against his cheek meant anything other than this gulping dread, which wasn’t even dread of pain and death, but was as though a vast invisible bird had nestled down on to the rock, covering him with its stuffing feathers of fear. He loosed Peggy’s hand and teased the back of Dinah’s head, unconsciously at first but slowly gathering out of her a vague comfort that enabled him at last to look up again and face his trial. As he did so the girl broke off her chant in mid syllable.

She stiffened. Her head went back. Her mouth was open and her eyes stared. One drum beat, very slowly. The girl rose to her feet as though the sound jerked her upwards and with a strange mannish gait started to strut round the arena. At one drum-beat she thrust her hand into the pot; at the next she drew it out; at the third she tossed whatever she was holding out across the arena. She moved widdershins round the outside of the circle, throwing with her left hand towards the middle something that fell with a light rattle on to the rock. Again it was a motion like seed-sowing, but this time that of a Victorian sower broadcasting his wheat-seed across a field. The crowd on either side of Morris seemed to shrink back a little when she was throwing in their direction, and then to relax again when the danger was past; but in fact all the little projectiles fell well short—it must have been a very practised performance, for all that the girl moved like a creature controlled by powers outside her.

By now it was almost dark. The girl did two circuits and stopped near the orchestra. The stiffness went out of her. She dropped the empty pot with a crash and at the same moment looked down at her left hand and started to wail, a real child in real pain. Two women ran out of the shadows and pulled her down beside a larger bowl, where they sponged at the paint on her arm, using bits of cloth on the end of reeds; the arm itself seemed to be twisting about as if there were no bones in it, but they were careful not to touch it with anything except their cloths. The wailing diminished, but Morris in his daze of fear, though he shut his eyes, seemed to see the arm grow monstrous, a snake with fingers at the end, or the leafless limb of a dead tree. He realised that once the old woman with the withered side might have been just such a girl, tossing out poisoned seed at a witch-finding, wailing as the poison penetrated the thick paint and began to bite like fire into the young flesh, starting the process that would one day wither the whole side . . .

But when he looked up he saw that two men were standing over the inert form of the old woman, prodding her with the butt end of their spears. A mild hum of talk had broken out, such as civilised people produce between items at a concert. He shifted Dinah to his other hip and as he did so let her see that the white leaping things that had given her the horrors had vanished from the arena. She chattered a little and blew in his ear, then wriggled to be put down; so he settled her at his feet, fixed her leash and stood on it, so that she could only move a couple of feet; contentedly she began to fasten and unfasten the buckle of his sandals.

One of the painted women came back into the arena wearing on her feet two thick little reed mats which prevented her soles from touching the poison-seed; she carried half a dozen flat dishes which she placed at various points in the arena; then she fetched a big gourd and poured water out of it into the bowls—all this without any ceremony, as though she were preparing a meal in her own hut. Then she went back to the shadows.

At last the old woman stirred, groaning. The men who had been prodding her stood back and watched as she rolled on to her stomach and pushed herself with her good hand into a sitting posture. She called out, quite strongly, in the secret language, and a cry answered from the dark. A woman brought a closed wicker basket and put it in front of her. She shuddered again and sang a short, fierce invocation in the secret language, waving her good hand to and fro over the basket. The woman with the mats on her feet then carried it to the exact centre of the arena, where she lowered a flap in its side and retreated. Total silence fell again. The night was now dark, and the mists beginning to clear from the dull moon; the seven torches burnt yellowish-orange, with sudden spurts of green; the ring of jet-black bodies seemed to absorb most of the little light they gave. Morris peered at the meaningless basket.

Something moved at the opening and immediately the orchestra struck up a series of quavering hoots and whistles, backed by a dull pattering on the drums. Hesitantly the duck stepped out into the open.

It was quite a presentable creature, something like a female mallard but larger. Its wing, as far as Morris could see, was not broken but lashed to its side. Once out in the wavering torchlight it lost its shyness, cocked its head a little sideways and peered about, then darted forward and scooped up a few seeds from the rock. The marshmen sighed. The old woman craned forward, her little eyes glistening in the flames. The duck, with absurd confidence, began to follow one of the spiralling trails of seed, but suddenly darted aside for a drink of water from the nearest dish. When it had drunk, raising its head to the moon to swallow each sip, it wandered about until it hit on another trail of seed, which it again began to follow round the spiral. Morris had another of his attacks of sick fear. Dry-mouthed and gulping he tried to work out where the girl had thrown the seed from her pot. In his mind’s eye he could see her white, ghastly figure, with its drab aureole, strutting round the arena. He could envisage the jerky arc of her sowing-arm. But he couldn’t calculate where the seeds might have fallen—more towards the outside than the inside, he thought.

Slowly the watchers became more intent. The bird, after various meanderings, was now pecking among the seeds which had fallen over to Morris’s right, not quite where the three mommets sat, but uncomfortably close to them—supposing the oracle was worked by mere proximity—part of the terror was the meaninglessness of the whole procedure—if he had known what the duck’s movements meant, and how they could be read, he’d have had fixed points to pin his fears on, to reduce them to rational order, to master them, even. But . . . why, I haven’t even been accused of anything, he thought. Let alone given a chance to answer. The hell with them!

For the moment resentment overcame his fear, and he peered with hot eyes at the duck filling its crop with gusto, pausing only for sips at the water-dishes. The savages followed its progress with a sort of aware concentration which also infuriated him. They knew what was happening, goddammit.

“Oh, get on with it,” he whispered. “For Christ’s sake get on with it!”

Almost as his lips moved the bird’s actions altered. It darted towards a bowl of water, missed and performed its gulp and swallow in dry air. The whole crowd hissed with indrawn breath. The old woman cried aloud. The orchestra began to make as much noise as its instruments would permit, but this was immediately drowned by the shouts of the audience, everybody bellowing at the top of their lungs. He felt a movement at his side and glanced down to see Peggy skipping with excitement and whooping too. The bird was now straight in front of the mommets, staggering around, gulping and swallowing at nothing. It almost fell but recovered, and with a wild flapping of its free wing darted in an arc towards Morris himself, collided with one of the water-dishes, swung away and crashed headlong into the side of the basket in the centre of the arena. The basket fell on its side and rolled away. The bird also fell, on to its back. Its feet paddled at air for a moment and its free wing flapped twice. And then it was dead, as stiff as if it had dropped frozen out of the sky.

The shouting died only slowly. Two women with brooms of reed swept a path to the duck’s body, and two others picked the old woman up and carried her there. One of the painted women brought dry reeds, and the other a flaming rush-light to light them. The old woman pulled some feathers out of the duck and threw them on the flames, watching intently as they curled and stank and became ash. One of the painted women knelt beside her and with a sliver of flint slit open the duck’s belly by the vent and teased the entrails out. While the old women smelt and fingered them the crowd talked, in a relaxed but expert way, about the trial. Morris caught fragments from the two nearer clans . . . Wah, that was a brave duck . . . the spirits are strong . . . Tchinai finds the trail hard to read . . . do you remember that she-witch from the garfish clan . . . in my father’s day they caught fierce witches . . . the duck found death close by the House of Spirits . . . No, by the centre . . . it is a hard trail . . . but wah, it was a brave duck . . .

Soon he was yawning. The tension that should have been there was gone out of him, replaced by a dreary sense of uselessness and moral exhaustion. Apathetically he squatted down and teased Dinah’s fur for a while, and then played which-hand with her. Peggy sat and watched the game, but kept glancing at the arena, where the two women with brooms were now meticulously sweeping the whole surface, scooping up the little heaps of seed they made on to flat leaves and throwing them on to the fire, where they stank with a new and strangely chemical smell. Three of the torches had burnt out and were not re-lit. Time passed.

At last there was a fresh stirring of interest. Morris stood and saw the old woman being lifted to her feet. The clans surged forward to surround her, a jostling mob of which Morris wanted no part, so he stayed where he was. Not long now, he told himself. Soon be over. Probably won’t hurt at all.

Suddenly a roar of angry voices broke out round the old woman. A thin man disentangled himself and rushed at Morris with his spear raised and its poison-tip unsheathed; but he was slowed by some deformity of his leg and as Morris cringed another man caught up with him and snatched the spear from behind; it was the second man who actually threw the weapon, not at Morris but out into the dark, over the cliff; he was Fau.

“Nearly thou art dead, Morch,” he shouted cheerfully and swung round to face the rush, his own spear raised. The crowd surged down towards them, but not in any kind of organised charge—far more like a mass of bellicose drinkers being thrown out of a pub on Saturday night, each man intent on his argument with his neighbour—but as far as Morris could see in the swaying light of the remaining torches none of the poisoned spear-heads were unsheathed.

Dinah leaped to his arms. He hefted her round and snatched up Peggy with his free arm, thus leaving himself quite unable to ward off from the three of them any shaft or blow. Yelling, the marshmen flowed about him absorbed in their impenetrable quarrel, shouting ancient insults from clan to clan and from age-set to age-set while Dinah and Peggy sobbed with fear against his shoulders. It seemed to him that amid the human mess there were people actually trying to defend him, or at least to argue his case, while there were others attempting to get at him. The presence of his defenders was more useful than anything they actually did, because nobody could aim with any accuracy in the melee, and a weapon that missed him was certain to hit a marshman and start one of those complicated feuds that run from generation to generation and end in an epic when everybody is dead.

So the battle raged in Homeric confusion around the bizarre standard of the hand of Na!ar. There seemed to be no conceivable resolution. But suddenly out of the dark came a sinister rescue.

It began to his left, but he didn’t notice it until the quality of the shouting to that side changed, and by then the wedge of ninth-clan warriors had almost reached him; the new cries came from the men whom Gaur and his brothers were simply picking up and tossing to either side. A black hand reached out and grasped the elbow that held Dinah. He almost let go of Peggy as he was snatched out of the scrum, like a handbag from a bargain-counter, and carried bodily across the top of the rock, wives and all.

They put him down at the cliff edge, and thankfully he lowered Dinah and Peggy, though he expected that he himself would be instantly tossed into the dark waters.

“Flee,” said Gaur. “Friend of my brother, show my brothers thy boat. Go.”

One of the huge men picked Peggy up. Another took Morris by the arm. They went down the rock face like falling stones. The boats bounced and wallowed as they jumped in, but before Morris had settled they were cutting out across the glistening water towards the single long canoe.

“Wai,” wailed Peggy, “I am stolen. I am stolen.”

“Yes, and I will roast thee for my supper,” said one of the big men. Another bellowed with laughter.

Behind them Gal-Gal was tumult still, filling the night with screams of vengeance and shouts of triumph and, on a different register, what sounded like the hysterical laughter of the women of the duck clan. The canoe bumped alongside the larger boat.

“Oh, Christ,” said Anne in a dismal voice. “I’ve been eaten alive by mosquitoes.”

She didn’t sound as though she expected anyone to understand, and gasped when Morris answered.

“I’ve got some Camoquin somewhere,” he said.

Before they had finished transferring his stores Gaur and the last three warriors slid alongside.

“Wah!” said one of them, “that was a brave duck!”

For all their size they barely rocked the long canoe as they took their places. Someone gave an order that was no more than a grunt. The paddles dug in, all together. The grunt came again, marking the stroke, and again and again as they shot down the main reach, leaving clamorous Gal-Gal behind so rapidly that before Morris had recovered from his first shivering-fit of relaxing terror it had diminished from looming cliffs to a vague hull-like blackness beneath the moon, a stone ark, stranded in the floods with its cargo of the alternative future.

“Where are we going, sons of Na!ar?” he whispered.

“Gaur has an island,” said someone.

“Protect us from the things of the moon-world, witch, until we get there,” said someone else.

“What the bloody hell’s been going on?” said Anne.

“Am I not then stolen?” said Peggy, with a ridiculous hint of disappointment in her voice.

“God knows,” said Morris in English.

The rhythm of the grunts altered. The stroke side paddles lifted all together, poised, dripped silver driplets, lunged backwards against the water. With a gurgle and rustle the canoe swung through a sharp are and up a narrow little channel between two bare mudbanks. Well rowed Balliol, thought Morris. Well rowed Balliol.

3

“I’ve been a bloody fool,” said Anne.

“I could lend you my spare shirt and trousers,” said Morris.

“Oh, I’ve got a pile of perfectly good clothes, but Mr Muscles won’t let me wear them. For God’s sake, I’m not even allowed to sit on one of those bloody stupid mats. I have to kneel here, like this.”

“I’m sorry,” said Morris.

He meant it in more ways than one. He would have preferred to see her clothed. To a man with a low sex-drive the Q’Kuti culture had been a curious release from vague guilts. Even in respectable Bristol Morris had been continually nudged by little reminders that he was some distance off from the admired male norm of modern British life, though that was obviously no more a real norm than the stringy girls in the glossies are, in the true sense, models of British womanhood—still, in England Morris had felt got at, whereas in Q’Kut the sex-obsessed Arabs actually seemed to admire his capacity for continence. Now, with this girl kneeling naked in the dust beside him, however unbecomingly mottled with mosquito bites, he was being got at again. He knew quite well what she expected him to be thinking, and if she’d known how wrong she was she would have thought even less of him.

But he was actually sorry for her too. She was not merely physically naked. Further down the slope of Gaur’s island Dinah and Peggy were playing peep-bo round a hut. They were naked too, in the sense of being without clothes; but they were not stripped down to the bare soul, as Anne was, the thing itself, unaccommodated woman. She had even lost all her roles so far that she had allowed the flat diphthongs of some northern city to reappear in the voice that had once told him that Mummy would have thought vets were beneath them. She had become like a creature in a cage in an old-fashioned zoo, something totally uncivilised.

“Have you learnt any of the language?” he said.

“You know what I’m like. I can’t even begin. Can you make him let me go? Where the hell is he, anyway?”

“Gaur? He went back to Gal-Gal to try and buy something I saw one of the men wearing.”

“You never told me what the hell was happening up there, while I was being eaten.”

“I didn’t really understand it all myself. I was being tried for being a witch. They give a poison to a duck and watch how it dies, and one of the women of the duck clan reads the signs. That went on most of the day—the preparations and the actual trial, I mean—and then right at the end there was a row over what the witch-finder’s verdict was. You see, a lot of people had come to Gal-Gal with various diseases. The theory seems to be that when you send a witch back to the moon-world with luck he drags along with him some of the moon-world creatures that have been causing people’s limbs to swell up or drop off or go septic, so there were a crowd of people there who wanted to see me die—in fact to stand as close as possible to me while I was dying . . .”

“It sounds a bit like Lourdes.”

“Ung?”

“OK, I’ve never been there—but I was a nun for a few weeks, once.”

Morris stared at the brown wall of reeds that ringed the prison-island, all set with poison-stakes through which only Gaur and his brothers knew the paths. He thought that a civilisation that allows you to become anything also allows you to become nothing. In other cultures you have to be what you are.

“Anyway,” he said, “the witch-finder decided I was a witch, but not the sort who ought to be killed. Don’t ask me why. Gaur didn’t give a very coherent explanation—he didn’t think it was interesting. The explanation, I mean. It was just a fact, like all the other facts in the marsh. Besides, the idea of mutually coherent superstitions is peculiarly western—I mean the idea that if two beliefs are logically incompatible one of them must be wrong . . . but the upshot was that the sick men wanted to kill me and the others—who’d only come for the fun—fought them off, and then Gaur pulled me out of the ruckus. It’s no use asking for any more explanations. The language doesn’t run to providing the questions, let alone the answers.”

“And you’re going to let it go on that way? You aren’t going to do anything to bring the poor bastards up to date?”

“I don’t know. Anyway, I think I’ve done it already.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well . . . oh, I don’t know . . . we’ve kept talking about this thing . . . the Bond of Na!ar. . . as if it were almost something like a belt, or a strap—just a single bond on its own. But really, well, I expect you’ve seen how the camel-drivers secure an awkward load with an extraordinary criss-cross of lashings which doesn’t look as if it would ever hold anything, but it does its job for ninety miles and at the end the camel kneels down and the driver undoes one knot and pulls at one rope and the whole network just . . . well . . . shrivels off the load? I think the Bond’s like that. Or rather it’s part of a network like that, only much more complicated. And it’s starting to come undone anyway. The language is an image of the culture, an enormous web of relationships. It can adjust to little changes, births and deaths and diseases and bad floods, by allowing for an adjustment of relationships. If you take the cross-threads out of a spider-web the spider can scuttle across and repair them—but there are two or three threads—the ones it spun to carry the web in the first place—which it can’t repair. Cut one of them and the web collapses. And now the marsh culture is starting to unravel in two places. I made a hole in the language last night, and whoever killed the Sultan was trying to slice through the main girder-thread. The marsh-people can’t repair the damage because they don’t think in terms of cause and effect.”

“Who did kill Bruce?”

It took Morris a moment to remember that that was her name for the Sultan. He pulled at his lip and watched Peggy teaching Dinah to play the strange and sinister girl-children’s game of the marshes, which looked like an elaborate version of mud-pies but was in fact a ritual to prevent the ghosts of one’s eventual husband’s female ancestors from sucking one’s own spirit away when one slept in the corner of his hut where once they too had slept. Peggy was very much senior partner now. Beyond them the brown wall of reeds hid the water, and above them the white mists hid the sky. There were women who had been brought to this place by the ninth clan warriors and never since that day seen anything else. That could be Anne’s fate, too, and who could say whether she did or didn’t deserve it?

“Tell me what happened that last day in the zoo,” he said. “You and the Sultan went to my office. I think you quarrelled. Bin Zair turned up. The Sultan sent you away. I went to the main doors to tell Gaur not to let anyone in. When I got back to my office you were still there. Can you fill in the gaps?”

“What the hell’s it got to do with you?”

“I need to know.”

“You can bloody well . . . oh, forget it. I’ll tell you if you’ll get me out of here.”

“I’ll try.”

“OK. Done. Well Bruce took me to your office to screw me, but I wouldn’t let him. He’d spotted Mr Muscles making eyes at me, and he just wanted to show everyone I belonged to him. I wasn’t having any. I said I was through with him unless he promised to let me go. He was furious. I mean, we’d had this sort of row before—he liked being stood up to for a bit provided he got his way in the end—but that morning he wanted it then and there. I was seething too. When he sent me away, I stopped as soon as I was round the corner, before I reached the chimp cage, and went back to look for one of your pop-guns. I just wanted to loose off at the fat slob. But the cupboard was empty.”

“Did you look at the darts?”

“No.”

“I see. Then you left the office and walked along in front of the cages. I heard the Sultan come past about half a minute after you’d gone. I didn’t think you’d had time to get out of sight.”

“I didn’t. I was about opposite the polar bear when I heard their voices. I turned and waved.”

“Was he carrying one of the guns?”

“I didn’t notice. He turned his back on me, so I left. OK?”

“And then?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you reached the lobby. How many people were there? Did anything else happen?”

“Look at me.”

He did so. The very process of talking to him had changed her, given her a layer of confidence. There was even a hint of malicious sexuality in her glance.

“Have you talked to Mr Muscles?” she said.

He nodded.

“And now you’re just being sticky-minded, wanting it all over again?”

“I want to know what happened,” he said crossly. “Look, when we’d found the bodies bin Zair and I rushed along to the lobby. Gaur was there and no one else. The lift was going down, and Gaur said that nobody was in it. No, wait a bit, he said that no man was in it. I want to be able to prove that nobody except you, Gaur, bin Zair or me killed them. Or some combination of us.”

“Unless they killed each other.”

“I don’t think that’s possible.”

“If you say so. Really, that makes it in my interest that there should have been someone else in the lift.”

“I doubt it. Arabs will kill pretty well on suspicion. You ought to know that. Especially if it’s a woman.”

“Uh-huh. Well, I suppose so. What happened was this. I was still seething when I got to the zoo doors, and there was Mr Muscles seething too. He looked at me, and half reached out his hands. I’ve never seen anyone look so miserable . . . no, that’s not true—I have in the camps. What I mean is I’ve never seen anyone look like that for love. And I thought the hell with Bruce—why not? So I smiled at him and took his hands. He wanted to have it there and then, but I could see he was frightened of Bruce. He went out and shooed the eunuchs away, and as soon as the lift came back he dragged me in, took it down half a floor and pressed the emergency stop. I was surprised how quick he’d caught on about lifts.”

“He’d learnt that from Dinah, I expect.”

“Oh. Well, we didn’t have much time, but he was pretty good for a beginner.”

“You took the hell of a risk. If the Sultan . . .”

“I was so bloody furious that I’d have done it in front of him, given the chance. Anyway Mr Muscles knew just enough Arabic for me to be able to arrange that he’d take me away, into the marsh. My idea was that he’d take me right across and I could get to the oil-rigs and hitch a lift out from there somehow. But that wasn’t his idea at all—it turned out he’s only got one idea.”

Morris grunted. Her account of the morning of the murders tied in closely with Gaur’s, though considerably less like The Song of Solomon in tone. He’d known it would. The ninth clan do not lie—though no doubt under the new dispensation they would soon learn.

“What are you going to do?” she said.

He sighed and picked at the tasselled edge of the mat. It had been woven by the eel clan, he thought—that intricate knotting was their trade-mark. There was no way of telling whether it had been made one year ago or a hundred.

“I don’t have to do anything,” he said. “It’ll just happen. It’ll all come undone. In ten years’ time rich nits will be able to pay two thousand quid to take a safari trip out here. They’ll have outboard motors on the canoes.”

“About me!” she snapped. “What are you going to do?”

“Oh, sorry. Well . . .”

He called to Peggy, who immediately stopped her game and came soberly up the slope, leaving Dinah to slap in a random fashion at the graves of ghosts.

“Dost thou remember, Peggy, the song of Anintu?”

“Anintu the warrior? I can sing that song.”

“Sing that song.”

Peggy knelt by the mat, interlaced her fingers behind her head and sang a reedy repetitive chant. Dinah sidled up and tried to copy the pose. Morris translated in a whisper, about the warrior-woman in that lost age when the desert had born grass, who had fought feuds, owned buffalo, even married wives—though she had also taken lovers and had children.

“But I want to get out of here,” said Anne, whiningly, when the song was over and Dinah had dragged Peggy back to the mud-pies.

“It’d be a start. If he accepted the idea you wouldn’t be his belonging any more. You could come and go as you wanted, though he wouldn’t be under any obligation to lend you his canoe or show you the waterways . . . I don’t know . . . I think he might even welcome the idea. I suppose it depends whether he thought you’d . . . I mean whether you’d still . . .”

“How mealy-mouthed can you get, Morris? I’ll keep him happy.”

Trapped by her altered tone he turned and stared at her. The change was extraordinary. In an instant she had grown into the role, and was sporting invisible uniform. The Emperor’s new uniform. He had seen her hold her head at just that angle before, once, when she had stood on the tilted wing of the airliner with a gun at her hip.

Gloomily Morris turned back to the reeds, thinking here we go again, the whole stupid circle of mindless action beginning once more. There’s only one real hero in this story, and he’s dead almost at the start—the Jap pilot who brought the plane down out of the bucketing thermals on to an inadequate runway with an assassin sitting beside him holding an unpinned grenade.

“I hope that lad brings back some decent gen,” said Anne in a bored voice. “Then we can get weaving.”

Probably she always overdid it at first, hamming her part until she had settled in to it. But she had an instinct for survival—even that weird false note in the car, when she had described the builder of the palace as absolutely giddy bonkers, had been a precise echo of the Sultan’s taste.

The invisible sun climbed higher. Heat and humidity swelled unrelenting. When Morris rose from the mat to try to create a faint breeze by strolling slowly round the camp, he saw that all the area where he had been sitting was dark with his sweat. As he walked it gathered like dew on the hems of his shorts and squelched inside his plimsolls. Dinah crept whimpering into the hut and collapsed. Anne slept frowning and Peggy smiling. Two stolen women who belonged to Gaur’s brothers sat cross-legged by another hut, chewing the roots of a particular bamboo and spitting their chewings into a pot to become the basis of the bitter fermented milk-drink which seemed to be the warriors’ staple diet. The warriors were with Gaur, or herding buffalo. There were no children, not because the ninth clan were an infertile cross-breed, like mules, but because ninth-clan children were an anomaly in the system, and so had to be adopted into other clans at birth, or if that failed, drowned. Morris wondered what Anne was doing to prevent pregnancy—whatever it was it could not last for ever. The fate of that unbegotten, hypothetical half-caste child decided him to do his best for her when Gaur came home.

An hour later the long prow nosed out of the reeds. Black and massive, four warriors strode up the slope like emergent water-gods. Gaur was noticeably the largest and most magnificent, the leader, though two of the others were older than him. In the palace his dignity had been withdrawn and silent, but here he swaggered up the slope, radiating arrogance and kingship.

“Where is my woman?” he said, tossing a tangle of magnetic tape down on to the mat.

“This woman came to Q’Kut with a dart-thrower in her hand,” said Morris. “Her comrades were slain, but she came with thirty captives, she alone.”

“Ho!” said Gaur.

“Among her people she is a warrior. Chiefs fear her. I have seen her speak with the Sultan as if she were a man of his age-set. She is a woman like Anintu in the song. But now I find her before thy hut, without clothes or weapons, forbidden to use a mat, as if she were one of those.”

Morris gestured angrily at the two women by the other hut, crouched in the mud beside their owners. Anne timed her entry well. She had rifled Morris’s kit for a khaki shirt and shorts, and she was wearing the bandolier and gun which Gaur had carried in the palace. Somehow she managed not to look ridiculous. She stood smiling at Gaur and held out her hands to him. His glance flashed sideways to where his brothers sat drinking their milk-mess, and then down to Morris and back to Anne. He laughed aloud and took her hands.

“Ho!” he said again. “We are in need of warriors. I must avenge my fathers with the deaths of many Arabs, but the people are afraid of new things and will not come. You did not need to talk of Anintu, Morris. This is a time of new things.”

It was astonishing to Morris how far Gaur was prepared to contort the language to express these ideas—but of course, he was still very young. Magnificent though his physique might be, the cartilege of his mind had not yet hardened into bone.

“Perhaps there will be no killing,” said Morris. “We must go to the palace and talk with thy brother; the Arabs will try to kill us first. When it is known how thy fathers died, then we can consider killing. Can we go to the palace this dusk?”

“We go at dawn,” said Gaur, and that was that. He looked at Anne and then around the muddy mound of his home.

“Ho, there are many people in this place,” he said. Before Morris could translate Anne had taken Gaur’s hand and given him a little pull towards the canoe. Together they scampered down the slope like a couple of undergraduates running across the Meadows towards a punt on the Isis. Morris watched the prow vanish into the reeds and then began to unravel the magnetic tape. Gaur had even managed to recover the reel, though the human trophies had luckily been retained by their owner. Quite soon Peggy woke, saw that he was doing what looked like woman’s work and came and took it from him, nimble-fingered. Dinah slept on, smashed with heat, but the careful rewinding of tape on to its spool would not have been one of her accomplishments.

Let’s pray there’s something useful on it, thought Morris. That’s all.

[1] To those to whom it seems ridiculous to find a footnote dangling from a moment of high drama, I apologise for my lack of art. Briefly, Morris had constructed a phoneme-group which was grammatically (and therefore to marshmen logically) impossible, but at the same time was perfectly clear in its meaning. He said “khu//ralçutlangHo”—“khu//-” negative relation-root “-r-” euphony insert “-al-” nominal qualifier ending, inapplicable to relation-roots, “-çu-” positive-identity relation-root, “-tlangHo” nominal qualifier of witchcraft. A rough English equivalent might be “Notness is witch.”