The Poison Oracle

Seven

1

THERE WAS A MOMENT when the water between the reeds and the shore lay like black glass reflecting the paling sky and the last few stars and the ridiculous palace, turned the right way up; then another moment when the surface became smeared; and then it seemed to smoke, breathing out a layer of greasy mist which would rise and hang all day over the marsh, shielding it from the torturing sun. When the layer of mist was four feet thick Gaur grunted once, the paddles dug in and the two canoes hissed out of the reeds towards the landing stages.

They had spent the night in a village of the water-vole clan, because it was only a mile from the shore-line. Gaur and his brothers had simply descended on the village like rooks on a seed-bed, demanding food and sleeping-mats without any kind of payment. Three of them had gone scouting along the shore in the dusk; they had found the nibbled remains of the body of another Arab—presumably Jillad—and also two places where men had lain hidden, waiting, as if for somebody to return from the marsh. During the night Morris had twice heard distant shots, but they might have meant anything, as Arabs are as likely to loose off their guns at a feast as at a fight.

They caught the boat-guard snoring on the silk cushions of the Sultan’s never-used launch. He was fully dressed, with an ancient rifle across his lap. “Do not kill him,” Morris had whispered, knowing that matters were already sufficiently precarious without the additional problem of blood-feuds with the cousins of boat-guards. Gaur had nodded and become part of the black water in the boat-shed. The guard woke with a wet black hand round his mouth and a wet arm pinning him to the shiny thwart. Morris stepped gingerly into the rocking launch.

“Salaam Alaikum,” he whispered. “If you cry out you die. Let the man speak, Gaur.”

“Who is it?” said the man.

“I am Morris. I know you. We have been hawking many times along the marsh edges. You have shown us good sport.”

Before the man could reply Anne came quietly into the shed.

“There’s one tent about thirty yards away,” she said. “And there’s a newish truck just behind the sheds. The rest of the camp’s further off—I can hear them beginning to wake up.”

“Fine,” said Morris. “Gaur, thy brothers must leave now, before the sun comes. Peggy, hold Dinah fast. Anne, you’d better keep watch for a bit—I’m going to try to persuade this chap to drive us up to the palace. Now, my friend, is that your tent behind the sheds?”

“It is my brother’s.”

“And is that your fine truck?”

“It is the Sultan’s.”

“How long have you served the Sultan?”

“Seventeen years.”

“You are a faithful man, and should be rewarded. If I ask him, he will give it you.”

In the half light Morris could see the man’s eyes widen. He was a dark little middle-aged Arab with a puckered scar along his left cheek, the result of wild shooting in a pig-hunt. He probably already regarded the truck as virtually his own property, but if it were formally given to him he could then with honour loot something else from his patron.

“But first I must reach the Sultan, who is my friend,” said Morris. “I think there are men in the camp who might try to kill me.”

The man thought for a few seconds.

“I am your friend also,” he said. “Let me sit up. I will drive you to the palace. I will take you on my face and my brother will give us clothes to hide who you are.”

“The Sultan will reward him also,” said Morris. “What is the news?”

“The news is good,” said the man automatically. “They are all fools,” he added with that dismissive sideways movement of his hand, so typical of Arab talk. “They say they will fight the marshmen because they killed the Sultan, the two servants of bin Zair, and you also. I thought you were a spirit, Morris—for that reason alone I was afraid. But already they are quarrelling about who shall have the oil-rights and in what proportions. They have bought aeroplanes and bombs and napalm, but the pilots have looked at the marshes and say they cannot fly over them in the day because of the mists—and how else can they fight with the marshmen? They do not know marshmen as I do, who have been the Sultan’s boatman for seventeen years.”

To trust him or not to trust him?

“We are on thy face, then?” said Morris. “I and the marshman and our women?”

“Have I not said so?” said the boat-guard. “Good, I will wake my brother and bring clothes—for how many?”

To trust him.

Waiting for his return Morris reflected that it was strange that one should be able to rely on the abstract notion of being on a man’s face with as much confidence as if it had been a physical phenomenon—not with absolute certainty but, say, about as much as one would rely on a car starting, and far more than on a phone call getting through.

One could even rely on the brother, despite his obvious fear of Gaur and dislike of the whole business. Half an hour later they drove without hurry through the waking camp. Anne sat in the front seat, heavily veiled, with Dinah even more heavily veiled in her lap. Gaur, Peggy and Morris sat in the back, the two men robed like bedu and with Morris perched on a pile of tent-hangings with the guard’s rifle across his knees. Morris shouted anonymous greetings to any waking Arab in ear-shot. Perhaps the whole charade was unnecessary. It was difficult to connect the pastoral-seeming tents with murder, as the Arabs stirred to the dawn hour which was one of the two tolerable ones in the Q’Kuti day. Here and there Morris could see men at their prayers, with their mats spread beside gleaming limousines. As the lorry climbed the hill the steam above the marshes seemed to climb too, continuing to veil distances which one would have thought a higher viewpoint would bring in sight. Gal-Gal was somewhere there, in that mess.

The truck stopped under the enormous overhang of the upper floors. Morris climbed down, stiff from five nights on bare damp ground; he looked at the glass, self-opening doors, beside which a sabre-carrying slave, not a eunuch, lounged. Morris remembered his face—he was one of the regulars, a sardonic, spoilt gang who owed all their allegiance to the Sultan and tended to despise free Arabs. That was hopeful. Morris stripped his robes off, said to Anne “Count twenty, then come straight to the lift,” and strolled towards the doors in shirtsleeves and shorts. The slave gaped at him.

“I am no spirit,” said Morris. “I bring good news for the Sultan. Let my friends pass.”

The doors hissed apart as he trod on the mat. Inside the entrance hall two other slaves were playing draughts on the floor. Four strange Arabs were talking round a low coffee-table with rifles at their side, and a handsome young man with a cleft chin was asleep on a divan. Morris remembered him as the man who had waved a gun at him in the Council Chamber. Ah, well.

The lift was already waiting, open. Morris moved over as unobtrusively as he could and put his foot against the bottom of its door. The glass hissed apart again and the rest of his party came quickly in—but not smoothly. It was Dinah, as usual, who betrayed them. He had forgotten to tell Anne to carry her, and she was scuttling along on all fours, chattering angrily as she stumbled among her cloying robes. One of the slaves looked up from his game and shouted with laughter and surprise. The Arabs in the corner broke into clamour. The young man on the divan woke, shouted and reached for his gun, but by then the lift doors were closing. Peggy screamed with terror as the sudden acceleration sucked at her bowels. Gaur laughed. Dinah, delighted to be back in a world where there were control buttons to play with, leaped towards them, stumbled over her robes again and chattered with anger. Morris picked her up. His palms were sweaty, and his whole skin seemed to be tingling with the effects of unused adrenalin. It was not a sensation he enjoyed, not because it was in itself unpleasant but because it reminded him, like one of his rare bouts of sexual energy, that given a different history he would have been a different person.

The moment the doors opened he flicked the Emergency Stop switch down, then changed his mind and reversed it. The minute’s possible delay was not worth the admission that he had anything to fear. For the same reason he forced himself not to run to his rooms, but the moment he was in them he dumped Dinah, snatched at the telephone and dialled.

“Salaam Alaikum. Do I speak to bin Zair? I trust you had finished your prayers. Yes, I am not dead . . . You are most kind . . . I have the young bodyguard and the Frankish woman . . . No . . . Ah, I was told of two Arabs found in the marshes, who by signs showed that they wished to cross to the sand on the far side, so the marshmen guided them; perhaps they were Maj and Jillad. I shall be sorry if they have gone. They were good zoo-men. When does the Council meet? Good, I will come and bring the young bodyguard so that he may be questioned. Wait. There is another matter which I do not know whether I should raise at the Council. I seek your advice. I have spoken with many marshmen, and I believe that if they were approached by a man with proper authority, such as yourself, they would welcome the company into the marshes to explore for oil . . . oh, I do not think it would be dangerous if I were there . . . yes, it is good news, but I do not know how welcome it will be to some of the Council . . . then perhaps I had better not speak of it . . . but meanwhile nothing must be done to alienate the marshmen . . . of course, you know these Arabs better than I . . . I will leave all that to you . . . are you there? Hello, hello . . . Good. That is all. Farewell.”

Rather pleased with himself Morris put the receiver down. The last bit of bustle he had heard might well have been the man with the cleft chin arriving for fresh orders. He dialled again. The connection did not sound good, but no one expects a place like Q’Kut to run to a particularly refined system of wire-tapping. A voice he didn’t recognise answered, claiming to be the Sultan’s Secretary and claiming that the Sultan was in conference. The man spoke with the blasé effrontery of any official who does not even hope to be believed. Morris put the phone down, pulled his lip and thought.

“I think we’re OK for the moment,” he said to Anne. “But the Council meeting may be tricky. Do you think you could bear to put that veil back on and go to the women’s quarters—Gaur had better go with you so that you aren’t spotted sneaking around unguarded, and he’ll get you past the eunuchs if there’s any trouble. I want you to find the Shaikhah.”

“Bruce’s first wife? She and I don’t click.”

“So I hear. You’ll have to make it up, that’s all. The point is I want some fire-power hidden up in the gallery. Before I left I suggested to Hadiq that he might try to arm the eunuchs—see what you can do—slide a bit of veil through the screen if you’ve brought it off—don’t show yourselves or make any noise until I give a signal—I’ll clap my hands. I don’t want any shooting, only the threat, so if you can manage it you’d better see that the guns aren’t loaded. OK?”

“Sure,” she said. He explained to Gaur what he wanted, then got his tape-recorder out and wound the strange spool on to it, spinning it through at top speed to find a couple of breaks where it would need splicing. He had just switched the gadget to “Play” when he heard Dinah whimper. He looked up.

She had managed to wriggle out of her clothes and was standing in the middle of the floor, peering at Peggy. Peggy stood quite still, with her dark eyes staring wide and a curious blue-grey tinge to her skin, as though all the blood had drained from behind the blackness.

“Art thou ill, little Peggikins?” he said.

No answer. Her eyes didn’t even flicker towards him. As he crossed the floor he smelt the reek of fresh urine. Her skin was weirdly cold and clammy. He picked her up and carried her into his bedroom, where he stripped off the soiled robes and laid the black, chill body in his bed. She was breathing, and he found her pulse, heavy and slow. Shock, he thought as he piled the blankets on her. Cultural bloody shock—much as a chimpanzee must feel when it is whisked from the living jungle to a concrete grove. He piled several more blankets on her and turned the thermostat of the air-conditioner up to a hideous ninety degrees. Dinah leaned solicitously forward from the other side of the bed and with gentle fingers plucked at Peggy’s straight, coarse hair. All of a sudden her pose changed and the fur along her shoulders bristled. But she had only heard the noise a second before Morris as it swelled to its full clamour. He rushed back into his living-room to turn the volume down, and found Gaur there, staring pop-eyed at the tape-recorder. Morris stood listening, made a note of where the sounds came, and rewound the tape to the place he wanted.

“There is no ghost in the box,” he said, using the same grammatical contortion that he had before his witch-trial.

Gaur smiled.

“In seven days I have changed seven age-sets,” he said.

“Will thy people also change age-sets?”

“Perhaps. What do we do now?”

“We go to the Council; hide throwing-sticks in thy robes. I take thee among men who perhaps wish to kill thee.”

“So thou camest to the marshes for me.”

Morris shrugged, unable to explain his real motives for undertaking that unpleasant adventure. Peggy, he thought, would sleep for several hours. Dinah he must take with him. He sorted carefully through his wallet of chips to check that it contained all the symbols he might need; then he nestled the tape-recorder into the bottom of a canvas grip and covered it with fruit. Dinah watched both processes shining-eyed, and took his hand eagerly when he clicked to her; but inwardly he was deeply reluctant to involve her in this quarrel, a thing no more concerned with her species than the question whether he was a witch had mattered to the duck on Gal-Gal. Only it had mattered. It was the answer that hadn’t—the duck would have died either way.

2

The Council began with extreme casualness. The coffee-pestle was already busy when Morris and Gaur reached the anteroom; they could hear the slightly syncopated thud whose rhythm, to the true Arab connoisseur, becomes somehow incorporated into the taste. Besides the two regular guards in the anteroom there were two heavily-armed strangers, one of whom Morris thought he recognised as having been in the palace entrance earlier that morning. He slouched over and barred the way.

“I am called by Akuli bin Zair to the Council,” said Morris mildly. “This man is a witness whom the Council have asked to hear.”

“And the ape? Is she also a witness?” snarled one of the strangers.

“A better one than you, bin Duwailah,” shouted one of the regular guards, more truly than he knew. It sounded as though there was a certain amount of needle here, but the two strangers refused to give way until the young sheikh with the cleft chin appeared from the hail and cursed them for fools.

“But the slave must leave his weapons,” he said.

Morris translated, and smilingly Gaur handed his belt, with its sheathed dagger and holstered revolver, to one of the regular guards.

Deliberately Morris allowed Dinah loose as they entered the hall itself; she had been restless with curiosity ever since she heard the noise of the coffee-pestle, and now she raced across the mosaic floor to investigate, to try the taste of a coffee-bean and spit it out, and then to pout at the dozen sheikhs already assembled. The diversion allowed Morris to settle on an unoccupied patch of cushions, to check the position of the recorder-switch while he pretended to be sorting Dinah’s fruit, and finally to run a vague eye round the Council Chamber and see that a dark wisp of veil dangled through the tracery of the women’s gallery.

He sighed with relief and snapped his fingers at Dinah, who ran over to see whether he was going to pay proper attention to her.

“Sirs,” he said as he took her on his lap, “I ask your pardon for bringing this ape to the council, but she has been much frightened on our journey in the marshes and I cannot leave her alone. She is more valuable than many hawks. The Sultan paid ten thousand dollars a month to keep her in Q’Kut.”

After a mutter of astonishment the conversation shifted to the subject of animals and their prices, famous mares and camels, and a long account of how someone’s uncle had traded into Somaliland on a rumour of a strain of superb horses and had come back with nothing but a shipload of mules. Where he could, Morris brought in references to their own Sultan’s wealth and generosity.

In about ten minutes Hadiq arrived, escorted by bin Zair and the new secretary, a dark-skinned little man who bore a vague resemblance to bin Zair himself, and turned out to be his nephew. Hadiq, looking strained, made a little speech of welcome and thanks for the advice they were about to give him. His eye fell on Morris.

“Hi, Batman, welcome back to the Batcave,” he said.

“Hi, wonderboy,” said Morris. “Let’s go.”

But Hadiq rose from his throne and crossed to where Gaur stood, massive and withdrawn, outside the circle of councillors. He took both his hands and greeted him in Arabic. Gaur stumbled through his reply. Several of the Arabs looked furious, and one leaped to his feet, shouting that he owed no allegiance to a Sultan who befriended the murderers of his own father. Three of the younger men jumped up with their hands on their daggers. Morris got ready to clap, long before he had planned to, but bin Zair came scuttling off his stool by the throne, tugging at their arms, squeaking for calm. They settled. Hadiq went back to his throne. Coffee was served, tiny cups offered to each man in strict order of precedence. Morris was delighted to see how high he came on the list, but all the same he watched the process carefully; there is a well-known Arab technique whereby the coffee-man secretes poison under his thumbnail and by pouring coffee over it is able to eliminate any selected guest. Morris got his three tiny helpings unthumbed, but even so he was very nervous. This was not his sort of scene at all—it had to go just right, with no opportunities for re-runs and erasures.

Dinah seemed to sense his nerves, but luckily didn’t respond by fidgeting around, badgering the coffee-man and mocking the grave sheikhs. Instead she nestled into his lap, still as a sick child, and fingered at his shirt-buttons.

As the junior councillor at last shook the coffee-cup to show he had had enough, bin Zair rose.

“Friends of two Sultans,” he said, “you are very welcome once more. And we have good news. Lord Morris is returned safe from the marshes, so we do not have his death to avenge. But we also have bad news. As you know, we have bought aeroplanes and bombs and napalm, but the pilots whom we hired—both good men who have fought in many little wars—say they cannot fly these planes across the marshes. The changes in the air, they say, would break an old aeroplane in pieces. Moreover they say it will be very difficult to find any targets in the haze.”

“They simply want more money,” said someone. “All mercenaries are the same. Offer them double. The Sultan is very rich.”

“They have refused double,” said bin Zair. “I think perhaps some fool has told them how the marshmen would treat them if they were forced to land among the reeds.”

“Cannot men be found who are not cowards?” shouted Fuad, the hysteric camel-raider, just as if he had maintained the same pitch of frenzy all the time Morris had been away.

Bin Zair smiled and pulled his beard.

“Now,” he said, “we who live by the marshes know this. When the floods are fully gone, the reed-beds become very dry, and it is then the custom of the marshmen to burn certain patches. Now, at that time, if we buy hovercraft and mount flame-throwers on them, we could safely burn . . .”

Hadiq was rising to his feet, pale and nervous. But Fuad spoke first.

“How long?” he shouted. “Hovercraft? They will take many weeks to come.”

“The reeds will not be fully dry for four months,” said bin Zair.

Fuad started to shout again, sensed somehow that the feeling of the meeting was against him and sat down; his Adam’s apple jerked about in his throat as though he were actually swallowing bile.

“We cannot wait here for four months,” said the young man with the cleft chin.

“In my time I have waited twenty years to take vengeance,” said Umburak, placid as ever. While he told the well-known details of two ancient murders, Morris managed to catch Hadiq’s eye and make a tiny signal that he wanted to speak. The reminiscent mutterings were still dying away when Hadiq stood up.

“Four days ago I buried my father, whom I loved,” he said. “Still I do not know how he was killed. Have you news, Morris?”

It didn’t sound as though the Council was prepared to devote more than a few seconds to this academic point, but Morris cleared his throat and answered loudly.

“Yes, I have news about that, and also about the oil.”

At the marvellous word the whole tone of the meeting changed. There was a brief outburst of muttering and whispering. Morris clapped his hands, as if for silence, and though he didn’t dare look he thought he heard a faint rattle of metal on stone, somewhere up in the gallery. In the following hush he fished a tangerine out of his basket and gave it to Dinah to keep her quiet; but she must have sensed his nervousness, for she insisted on huddling into his lap to eat it.

“Yes,” he said, “I have spoken with many marshmen, both about the oil and the death of their lord. It was clear to me that they did not know that the oil even existed. It follows from this that bin Zair killed the Sultan.”

He spoke the accusation directly at the old man, peering for some sign of guilt or shock, but saw only a slight jerk of the head and widening of the yellow-oozing eyes. The result was that he didn’t notice the nephew until he saw a revolver being brandished under his nose. He shrank back. Dinah clutched too tightly for him to free an arm. The nephew was prodding at the safety-catch but his spittle was already reaching its target on the wings of his curses. Then suddenly he reeled back. The revolver rattled to the floor and he lay supine with blood streaming from his temple where Gaur’s throwing-stick had struck.

Everybody shouted. Morris pushed Dinah clear and leaped to his feet, shouting too, and pointing to the gallery. A few yelling heads turned, then more. The ensuing silence was ridiculously dramatic.

“Let no man move,” panted Morris. He turned from where the six dark muzzles poked through the frivolous white tracery of the screen and knelt by the fallen man. The pulse seemed reasonably strong, and the gash in the forehead not deep, though very productive of blood.

“Let Salim tend to the wound,” said Umburak in an arid voice. “We would hear your accusation, Morris. We have known bin Zair many years.”

Morris went back to his cushions pulling at his lip. Dinah scuttled out from behind the throne, crept into his lap and pulled her lip also.

“Let us begin with the film bin Zair showed us,” said Morris. “Now, the Frankish woman left my office and passed in front of the cages very shortly before bin Zair and the Sultan also came that way. She says she was still in the gallery when they came, and she turned and waved to them. Yet we watched the film for several minutes before the Sultan and bin Zair appeared, and we did not see the Frankish woman. Nor did Dinah appear in the cage. Moreover you all said that the Sultan staggered like a man shot in the back—would he have staggered so if he had been struck with a sharp dart in the neck?”

There was some disagreement on this point, with evidence adduced from personal experience of shooting men in the back, and (given equal weight) from the elderly westerns nowadays available to any Arab who didn’t mind doing two hundred miles across the desert to the nearest drive-in cinema.

“Furthermore,” said Morris, “I have taken many films with that camera, but none so bad. What does all this mean? It means that the film was taken in the early morning, when the sun shines from the east. This was done for two reasons—first because nobody would come to the zoo at that hour, and second in order that the bad light would help to hide the fact that the larger figure was not the Sultan but one of the slaves bin Zair had found for the zoo, a man called Maj.”

“I am an old man and unused to machines,” said bin Zair. “What do I know of films?”

“You told me that you had made a film of a male prostitute who dances among the Hadahm,” said Morris.

“True, I have seen it,” said somebody.

At this piece of corroborative evidence, however peripheral to the real case, a new note entered the coughs and whispers of the men. One of them, and not this dubious Frank, had now cast his tiny stone at old bin Zair.

“There are other matters,” said Morris, “which bin Zair both understands and is ignorant of. At the flood-going feast he questioned me about my tape-recorder, and yet I am told he uses such things in his work. And you yourselves will remember that at some moments he cannot understand the marshmen’s language, and at others he understands it clearly enough. However, let us return to the film. The big man in the picture may have been Maj, but the little man was undoubtedly bin Zair. Therefore the film must have been made with his help.”

“The points are not very strong,” said Umburak. “The ape might have been hiding, the light might have been bad, who knows how a man will act when a bullet or dart strikes? And a woman’s evidence—a woman who then ran from the palace—it is all frayed rope.”

“There is more,” said Morris. “Let me continue about these slaves. At the flood-going feast I asked bin Zair for better help in the zoo, and within two days he found me these two men. Now one of these men was a good mechanic and the other was large and stout, like the Sultan. They were Sulubba, and they told me that they were hereditary slaves . . .”

A few grunts of disbelief filled the pause which Morris deliberately left.

“On the morning of the murders,” he went on, “they were cleaning the cages and had brought a pile of fresh reeds to make bedding for the animals. They had brought more than was necessary, so when they had finished they left a pile of reeds in the passage near the chimpanzee cage . . .”

“Enough to hide a man?” asked Umburak.

“No,” said Morris. “But enough to hide a gun, and some other small object.”

He fished more fruit out of the basket for Dinah, and in doing so pressed the “Play” button of the recorder.

“Now before bin Zair came to my room,” he said, “I heard a lot of noise from the chimpanzees, noise enough to drown the sound of a quick scuffle and perhaps a shout of anger. When bin Zair came to my room he said he had been struck by the Sultan, and asked whether I had heard anything. I said I had not. We talked for a short time, and then . . .”

He didn’t time it quite right. There was a longish pause, during which mutters of doubt and impatience began to gather strength. But suddenly they were drowned by the rushing whoosh of an airgun, a hoarse cry and another whoosh. Morris lifted the recorder out of the basket, ran the tape back to the monkey noises, and played some of them.

The reaction was that of children watching a conjurer, small cries of amazement and even delight, deliquescing into seriousness as each man explained to his neighbour the significance of the sounds. Head after head turned towards bin Zair, who sat stroking his beard but showing no more emotion than a look of scholarly interest. Morris gave him time to answer, but he was too wary for that.

“Whence came the tape?” said a providential straight man.

“I will tell you. It concerns the two slaves of whom I was speaking. When I went at your bidding into the marshes I had travelled less than a mile when I came upon the body of a man floating in the water. He had been killed with a spear-thrust, stripped naked and mutilated. He was Maj.”

The news brought only a few cries of rage, and many reminders that the man had not been a true bedu, but a Sulubba.

“Now, later,” said Morris, “I went to a ceremony in the marshes, and there I saw a marshman wearing this tape as an ornament from which hung the penises of two pale-skinned men. I made enquiries and found that this marshman had come upon two men lying in wait in the two channels that led from the landing-stages below the palace. They were armed and hiding, as if to ambush a man coming into the marshes. The marshman came from behind and killed them. In the canoe of the smaller man was this tape.”

A dour, tall Arab who had not so far spoken coughed for silence.

“I believe I have heard of this pair, under other names,” he said. “They were skilled assassins. Certainly if they were thus taken by surprise it proves that the marshmen would have been difficult to fight in the marshes.”

The point was argued around for a while, and the true identity of Maj and Jillad discussed, and tales of their earlier, more successful craftsmanship retold.

“And what is the significance of all this?” asked Umburak at last.

“I think bin Zair’s whole object was to open up the marshes,” said Morris. “He visited the oil wells from time to time, and I think he probably arranged with them, in exchange for a large sum of money, that he would bring about a situation in which it would eventually become possible for the marshes to be drained and exploratory drilling begin. A war between the Arabs and the marshmen would be one way of achieving this. If an Englishman appeared to have been killed by the marsh-people that would help too, and you will all bear witness that it was bin Zair who persuaded me to go into the marshes. On the other hand, if the marshmen killed Maj and Jillad, that would remove two witnesses who might have been troublesome later. He was right in this—I have no doubt that Jillad took the tape in order to blackmail bin Zair later.”

“It is a long way round to travel in order to kill a man,” said Umburak.

“Yes,” said Morris. “But it had to be, because simple killing wasn’t the object. The object was to persuade both the Arabs and the marshmen that the Bond was broken, and to do this by seeming to follow as closely as possible the story in the Testament of Na!ar. The Arabs, he was sure, could be persuaded to fight quite easily; but the marshmen had to hear of the Sultan and a warrior of their people killing each other with poisoned spears. This was a complicated effect to achieve, but I believe he had been thinking about it for more than a year. A year ago, just after the flood-going feast, a man called Kwan died, very suddenly; Dyal told me it had happened as if by magic. Dyal was a marsh-man, and to the marshmen the poison they use on their spears is a magical substance. A poisoned spear is sent to the Sultan at the flood-going feast as part of the tribute, and I think it possible that bin Zair was then testing the poison to see if it worked. It did, but as the poison loses its virtue in two or three weeks he had to wait another year.

“Suddenly he became very interested in the zoo, and inspected every detail. I think he had not thought of doing the murders there until he came one morning and saw the Sultan playing with the spring-guns. The marshmen throw their spears with a spear-thrower, so a spring-gun is quite a close parallel. He found two men, who were far too good to be zoo slaves. That morning they came to the zoo early and hid the gun and recorder among the reeds—indeed Maj became very angry when my ape started to throw the reeds about. Then bin Zair came to the zoo with papers for me to work on, so that I had to go to my office. He insisted that the door should be close guarded, so that there was no question of anybody else having done the killing—though he did not then know the Frankish woman was still in the zoo. He told the Sultan some tale which would persuade him to walk down into the lower gallery, and he gave Dyal tobacco to chew with poison in it—something very quick-acting, a cyanide capsule, perhaps. He knew that Dyal would not eat it in the Sultan’s presence but that he was very much addicted and would chew it as soon as he could. Bin Zair must have been alarmed to see the Frankish woman still in the zoo, but Dyal was already dead, so he was forced to continue his plan.

“As soon as she was out of sight he started the tape-recorder—perhaps he pretended he had brought the Sultan down there to listen to it—and when the ape-noises began he struck the Sultan with the hypodermic dart. If he struck accurately into that vein the anaesthetic would act in two seconds, and the ape-noises would conceal any shout or scuffle. The poison would take some hours to act—I ought to have noticed that Dyal died quickly and with a contorted face and the Sultan slowly and peacefully. And yet they were supposed to have died of the same poison.

“Then bin Zair came to my office, saying that the Sultan had struck him—to account for any noises I might have heard—and waited for the recording of the two shots. We rushed out and found the Sultan’s body, but my ape had taken the dart and used it to attack an enemy ape, who later also died. Then bin Zair ran round to the upper gallery, where he struck Dyal’s dead body with another dart, and hid the remainder of the tobacco.

“So died my friend the Sultan. And all at once very many Arabs came from nowhere out of the sands, as though knowing that some such thing was about to happen . . .”

Suddenly there was uproar. Hitherto the Arabs had listened with an intentness that would have been more reassuring if Morris hadn’t known how eagerly Arabs will listen to any accusation, however incredible, for the sake of retelling it later round some camp fire. There were hands on belt-daggers, and implausible cries of innocence. Ostentatiously Morris turned his head towards the guns as if ready to give a signal, but the Council calmed itself.

“There was a rumour,” said the dour sheikh, “that the marsh-men were planning to attack the palace. Fuad brought the news to my tents . . .”

“And he is bin Zair’s father’s cousin’s wife’s brother’s grandson,” added someone—a piece of instant desert genealogy that brought grunts of confirmation.

“Fuad told me that if there was war the Arabs could take the marshes and drain them and profit from good fresh land and the oil beneath; therefore, being loyal to my Sultan, I drove across the desert though I had my camels on good grazing.”

“But the marshmen knew nothing of any such attack,” said Morris. “Whence came this rumour? Furthermore, whence came the bombs and napalm in so few days, with two good aeroplanes and experienced pilots? Such things take time to find, unless a man knows in advance that they will be needed and is friends with an international oil company. Note also that it was bin Zair who persuaded me to go to the marshes at all, after I had begun to suggest doubts about his story; and lo, when I return to the palace it is already known that I am dead . . .”

Morris allowed his voice to tail away. There were a few more loose ends he could have tied in, but he didn’t want to muddle his case with complexities. To calm himself he started to pick his way along the fur of Dinah’s fore-arm. She cradled herself close to him, crooning slightly. The Arabs evidently recognised the dramatic moment and waited without snivel or cough for bin Zair to begin. He took his time, but at last he sighed an old man’s patient sigh.

“Morris has spoken,” he said. “Now I must collect my wits. You must understand that I did not come to the Council expecting to hear so mad an accusation. I am surprised that Morris did not add that I flew to the zoo on the back of a winged lion and that these poisons were fetched for me by the djinns at my command. Alas, I am an old man. I loved my master. I served him many years. I crawled many times to his feet. How should I kill him? But lo, you listen like children round their grandmother to this wild tale. And there is no evidence here, save the word of Morris. He says he saw this, he heard this; he brings a tape, which he says he found in such-and-such a place, and there are noises on it. But perhaps he put the noises there himself. He says the marshmen knew of no plot, but he alone speaks their language—how shall his tale be tested. He says I slew my master. Who saw me do this? No man, says the Lord Morris, this story-teller, and here at least he speaks truth.”

This was a strong point. The Arabs, even more than other people, prefer the evidence of the most drunken, short-sighted, corrupt and biassed witness to that of the most coherent net of circumstantial reasoning.

“No man saw you, bin Zair,” said Morris. “But my ape did.”

“And how shall it bear witness?” cried someone.

“Thus,” said Morris, releasing Dinah and spilling the counters into the lid of his wallet.

“Are we all crazed,” cried bin Zair, “to listen to such nonsense?”

“We will listen,” said Hadiq. “I have seen how this ape makes words. My friends, it is true. Morris will explain.”

“Ai!” said a fat sheikh. “Let us at least see, and then we can decide. It will be news to tell, certainly.”

Everyone agreed with that. News is a valuable commodity in the desert, and to be present at the beginning of a fresh piece of news—the birth of someone’s son, the theft of a camel, a quarrel over grazing, a record bag by a famous hawk—makes a man welcome in many tents.

“Now see,” said Morris. “Dinah cannot speak. Her mouth and tongue are not of human shape. She can make a few signs with her hands, as a deaf-and-dumb person does, and when we stood by the body of the Sultan she made a sign to me that the Sultan was hurt, thus.”

He prodded the tips of his fingers together and Dinah, looking up from her search among the counters for the blue/white square that meant grapes, copied him with a puzzled air.

“I am a scholar of languages,” said Morris. “I came to Q’Kut to study the language of the marshmen. But another part of my study is to see to what extent an ape can learn language. We use these little coloured counters for words. Thus.” Morris explained the meaning of each counter as he placed it in position.

white square: Dinah

orange circle with hole: get/fetch/find

black square: person

purple rectangle: (qualifier) big

Dinah sniffed eagerly at the array, looked round the assembly, poked a finger at the qualifier, scampered teasingly round the circle and finished by tugging triumphantly at Gaur’s white robe.

“This is childishness,” squeaked bin Zair angrily, but he was immediately shouted down by many voices, even those of his own party. What! Interrupt a scene that would fill a hundred evenings with good talk!

Morris clicked to Dinah who came rushing over for her reward; he showed her two small branches of grapes and gave her one which she ate while he explained the next sentence.

yellow circle: question

white square: Dinah

white circle: eat

green/blue square: banana

He laid the second branch of grapes beside it. Dinah sniffed rapidly, compared the grapes with the noun-square, snickered scornfully and snatched out of Morris’s hand the large red circle which meant “No.”

She watched Morris with dark, excited eyes as she ate the second lot of grapes, already thrilling to her thrilled audience. He explained a new sentence:

white square: Dinah

orange circle with hole: get/fetch/find

black square with gold hand: Sultan

He could see she was puzzled. She sniffed the message several times, turned the black square over to see if she could thus convert a king to a commoner, chattered a little, pouted, and loped off to inspect the audience. She paused momentarily at the throne, perhaps reminded of scenes where Hadiq had been present with his father; she also hesitated a short time over Gaur, and longer over the old fat sheikh; at last she came to the inert body of bin Zair’s nephew and possibly it was that that reminded her. At any rate she came scampering back to Morris, prodding her finger-tips together, and then hunted through the counters for the purple circle with the hole. It didn’t take her long to arrange her two-word sentence.

black square with gold hand: Sultan

purple circle with hole: hurt/be hurt

A whispering sigh rose from the council as Morris explained the meaning. The hunt was up. Bin Zair’s thin, grey hand combed ceaselessly at his beard. Nobody looked at him direct.

Unfortunately Dinah didn’t make the next step of her own account, so Morris, rather than lose the momentum of the trial, had to ask her a leading question:

yellow circle: question

black square: person

purple circle with hole: hurt/be hurt

black square with gold hand: Sultan

Dinah considered the problem with a protruding lower lip, judiciously nodding her head up and down as if to shake her thoughts into a pattern. Morris offered her only the yes and no symbols, placing them equidistant from her; and though she was slow in coming to her conclusion her arm in the end snaked out with no hesitation and snatched up the large green circle. The room released its breath. Morris had intended to explain, if they got this far, that Dinah didn’t connect the darts with the act of firing the guns, and that therefore if she said a man had hurt the Sultan that man must actually have struck him, but he sensed that the audience was not in a mood for logic. Even Dinah, when he offered her a few more grapes, seemed more interested in the game than the reward. Perhaps she too felt the human lust for drama, the quickened pulse of the closing hunt. They had already used all the symbols Morris needed for his final question but he held them up again to explain their names and her eyes followed each one to its location in the line of meaning.

white square: Dinah

orange circle with hole: get/fetch/find

black square: person

purple circle with hole: hurt

black square with gold hand: Sultan

Relative clauses had once been a bugbear. A year ago Morris had been brooding on grammatical devices to obviate them; but suddenly, between session and session, Dinah had sorted the problem out for herself, poking the symbols out of the straight until the two halves of the sentence could be read along different lines. By now there was an established grammatical convention whereby relative sentences went at right-angles, the symbol on the corner (in this case the black square) containing in itself the relative link. Her discovery of this principle had been probably the most exciting moment in Morris’s life, both for the logical beauty of it, and for the realisation that there might be no limit to her abilities.

So now he was perfectly confident that she would understand the message; he was less sure that her memory would be up to the task of recognition—after all, he well knew how long it takes a quite intelligent human to learn to distinguish one chimpanzee from another. He watched with real anxiety as she at last nosed up from the symbols and looked round at the hushed Arabs.

Slowly, walking on her knuckles, she sidled across the circle and peered into the face of a man with a green headcloth and a straggly dark wisp of beard. He shrank away; his throat worked as if there was a scream imprisoned there, but Dinah only chattered in a dissatisfied fashion, came back to the message, read it again and started off in a different direction.

Her progress was far from systematic. Sometimes she went straight across the circle and then back to the man she had just inspected; often she would dart back to Morris as if to check that she was doing the right thing; when she did this he gave her a few more grapes, which she ate slowly as she zig-zagged across the bright mosaic floor. The process cannot have lasted more than a few minutes, but suddenly in the middle of it Morris experienced a shuddering shock of recognition—something like the spasm of fierce wakefulness that shakes a man back to this world just before he falls asleep—or as if the lobes of his brain, having been fractionally out of phase, had jerked back to full sympathy. All this had happened before. On Gal-Gal a man had watched his life or death being decided by the erratic movements of an animal, a trained animal, to and fro across an arena ringed by silent, intent spectators. Morris, after his bout of activism, had watched his fate with an apathy close to accidie; and so did bin Zair watch now. The difference was that the duck on Gal-Gal had not yet eaten its poison; whereas Dinah had long been eating hers, day by day, from Morris’s own hand, the ancient poison of words.

There must have been something unnoticeable about bin Zair, an inherent camouflage that might have made a marvellous hunter out of him if his life had not been spent on the track of more illusory game. Dinah only spotted him as if by accident, grey and silent on the cushions. Her glance flicked towards him as she was crossing the arena, and away. She continued half a pace on her path, then froze. Very slowly, as if she herself was the hunted creature, her head swung back towards bin Zair, her left hand staying poised in the air for the next pace. She stared at him for one of those unmeasurable times that was probably only half a heartbeat; then she was darting across the floor to him, pulling at his robe, hooting with excitement.

Bin Zair must have been ready for her. Even before the Arabs broke into excited chatter and applause his curved dagger was out and striking. He was old but very quick—Morris’s eye only registered when the blow was over that at the tip of the gunmetal blue curve of the blade something sticky and black glistened.

But Dinah was quick too; the blow, aimed at her ribs, caught her glancingly above the wrist as she shied away. She screamed and raced to Morris, flinging herself into his arms and showing him the red, inch-long slash through the dark hair. He clutched at her, dragged the wound to his mouth and sucked. His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out and sucked frenziedly while she struggled. She was very strong but he shifted his grip and managed to hold her, sucking and spitting. In his mind’s eye he saw the deft blow again, and remembered how neatly bin Zair had plucked the gun from the hands of the young man at the earlier Council meeting, and confused both movements with something he had not seen, the blow that had struck the Sultan down. His lips were very sore. Bristly little hairs filled his mouth, as when a toothbrush starts to disintegrate. A hand shook him by the shoulder.

“Lord,” said Gaur’s deep voice, “you cannot suck the poison from the wound . . .”

Morris looked up, dull and hopeless. Dinah wriggled and bucked in his grasp. The dagger floated in front of his face with a drop of blood drying on the surface of the poisonous smear.

“This poison has died,” said Gaur. “See.”

A black finger-nail pinched at the blacker ooze and broke through. Now Morris could see the inner stickiness under the hardened outer skin. Gaur squeezed and black fresh globules of the stuff were forced through to the surface.

“Now it is alive again,” he said, and tossed the weapon away. Probably he had weighed it in his hand while Morris had been sucking at Dinah’s arm, for though few Arab daggers are any use for throwing this one flew straight to where bin Zair sat erect on the cushions, silent and waiting judgment. Morris, still in his daze of shock and effort, did not actually see it strike, but he saw bin Zair flinch, recover and with a careful hand draw the dagger from his thigh, leaving a streak of blood on his white robe. Everyone fell silent. With difficulty the old man rose to his feet and looked round the ring of them, bowing his head slightly when he came to Hadiq.

“It was Allah’s will,” he squeaked. He turned and limped away.

“Shall I pick him off?” called Anne in clear, clipped tones from the gallery.

“No,” sighed Morris.

Four hours, he thought. You take four hours to die. That man killed Kwan. He killed my friend Kwan. Now he’s dying the same way himself, and what he wanted to happen is going to happen anyway.

Dinah whimpered and he realised he was still holding her with all his strength. He let go. She looked with horror and disbelief at her arm, still puckered and bleeding. To distract her he peeled a banana and gave it to her. She had begun to eat it left-handed without much relish when her whole body stiffened as if with cramp in his arms. Her eyes remained open but the banana slipped from her hand.

“Gaur!” he called in alarm. Gaur strolled over and knelt by his side, feeling Dinah’s limbs and forehead.

“That is not the work of poison, Lord,” he said judiciously. “A speared man becomes hot, like fire, before he dies, and his joints are loose. Thy creature is cold and stiff.”

Morris only grunted and lurched to his feet with Dinah in his arms. He remembered to bow to Hadiq before he turned and staggered wearily away. Before he was through the doors the Council was in full spate again, retelling all these dramas.

3

Up in his rooms Morris laid Dinah in her nest; she whimpered as he persuaded her stiff limbs into the necessary curve, but once she was nestled in her eyes closed and the slow hammer-beat of her pulse began to ease to the normal rhythm of sleep. He covered her with a blanket and slumped into one of the chairs, where he sat sweating and worrying in mazed circles until he realised that he could at least do something about the sweat. Resetting the thermostat reminded him about Peggy.

She was asleep too, but stirred and smiled when he felt her pulse, which seemed normal. She was a resilient little brat, he thought. Perhaps Dinah was only undergoing a sort of shock coma too—it wouldn’t be surprising, after everything that had happened to her, but it was a bit uncanny that both of them should suffer the same sort of collapse at the same moment—several times, as his worry and tiredness slipped gear into a kind of feverish doze he had the same recurring vision of the two primitive little females groping through a dark, arched tunnel in opposite directions, brushing against each other as they passed and then groping on to emerge, somehow, in each other’s worlds. Fully awake he knew it was more likely that Dinah’s collapse was an effect of the poison, and he could only hope that it had lost enough of its virtue for her to survive, but as soon as he half-slept again the same sequence returned.

After about the third or fourth time another creature seemed to be there in the tunnel, scuttling hurriedly from end to end, greyish and wispy, completely ignoring the slow, small figures that might have been Dinah and Peggy; it moved rapidly through the dark but as soon as it reached the twilight zones at the ends it hesitated and scuttled back, unable to emerge into either kind of daylight. It was bin Zair.

Awake again he thought about the old man. A decent old goat, really. Morris discovered that he both liked and respected him, and that the murders were strangely easy to forgive, even Kwan’s. Was this the result of that bizarre element of innocence that permeated the appalling cruelties and slaughters which were the sole history of the desert tribes? Or was it simply another symptom of the tepidity of Morris’s own nature? Or was it that what bin Zair had done had an inner inevitability, a moral logic, that made other courses of action seem fanciful, mere wishful thinking? The palace stood like a teetotum balanced on its spindle, maintained there only by its own circular momentum—that was Morris’s world of high civilisation, to which the Sultan also and even Dinah partly belonged. Beside it lay the apparent mess of the marshes, which was also a balance, a taut and intricate web maintained by its own tensions, Qab’s world and Gaur’s and Peggy’s. But the balance of bin Zair’s world had been broken, so that it was inhabited by whirling or scuttling creatures like Anne, or the dead hijackers, or the young man with the cleft chin . . .

Bin Zair would be praying now, if he was still conscious. He wouldn’t be thinking about this sort of thing. If he wondered at all about his own compulsions he would think in the language of money and prestige and tribal obligations and watering rights. He would perhaps regret that he had evolved a scheme so crazily complex, but he wouldn’t consider its underlying . . . well . . . propriety. It was proper that he should have used a modern hypodermic dart tipped with a primitive poison, proper that his plan should involve films and tapes as well as the swift blow of the killer, proper even that it should take place in a milieu where a supercivilised prince was attempting to recreate the jungle culture of apes . . .

“I have slept, Lord” whispered Peggy from the bedroom door. “Now my bladder is very full. How may I leave this hut and empty it?”

With a sigh Morris rose and showed her how the lavatory worked. She thought its flush was the finest toy in the world and wasted a lot of water playing with it.