The Poison Oracle

Three

1

“HOLY . . . CATS . . . BATMAN,” read Prince Hadiq, “. . . am . . . I . . . seeing things . . . back . . . to . . . the . . . Batcave . . . Wonderboy . . . this . . . looks . . . like . . . wit . . . widge . . . wicket . . .’ I cannot read one word, Morris.”

“Is it ‘witchcraft’?” asked Morris, without turning from the window. The whole tail-fin had now vanished, and some genius had contrived to remove one of the engines, but had been unable to shift it more than a few yards. It simply lay on the concrete by the wing, but no doubt time would whittle it away. The guard had been withdrawn, now that all the more easily detachable parts had vanished, but the thieves’ work went on at its regular pace.

“Yes, witchcraft,” said the Prince. “A woman is witching my father. Is witching also Gaur.”

Morris turned and saw that the prince was looking up from the comic as though he wished to pursue this conversation. The lesson had not gone well so far, and any subject which would encourage the boy to talk must be pursued. He was really getting on quite well, but something—perhaps this stupid worry about Anne being a witch—had caused a slight relapse.

“Where is Gaur, by the way?” asked Morris.

“Outside the curtain,” said the Prince. “We have . . . a matter to laugh . . . to laugh at, I say. Gaur tells you are a big witch, witching me. I tell this woman is a big witch, witching Gaur.”

“I’m not a witch, and I don’t think Anne is,” said Morris. “We don’t have witches in England any longer.”

“If so, how this?” said the Prince, flapping his hand against the Batman comic.

“Oh, that’s only a story—and I expect you’ll find that it turns out that there is no witchcraft at all, only some kind of machinery made to look like witchcraft.”

“Stupid,” said the Prince, dropping the comic. “The mother of me, the Shaikhah, she tells this woman . . . is a witch.”

Morris smiled, but was answered by a scowl.

“You think . . . I am telling woman’s talk. Wallah, Morris, the mother of me has go . . . has gone . . . to London . . . to Paris . . . to New York. The Sultan has much women, always. She thinks OK. A man is a man. Never she tells them witching. When I am baby, she . . . I speak Arab, please?”

“If you want to, but you’re doing very well.”

“By God, Morris, I tell you the woman is a witch. I have seen the Shaikhah mourn and weep because my father does not remember to take her to his bed when he is mad for love of some dancing girl. But never before has she told me to find her poison!”

“Speak English,” hissed Morris, knowing how whispers could travel and float along the corridors of the palace. “What are you going to do?”

“I ask you. What?”

It was a great honour to be consulted over so intimate a matter as whether one should help one’s mother to murder one’s father’s mistress. Morris did not care for great honours.

“I wouldn’t do anything for a bit,” he said. “I’d tell your mother it’s difficult to get poison.”

“But is not difficult. Saqwa is . . . medicine for . . . skin of camels. Gaur also. He knows many . . . poisons . . . in marshes.”

“Yes, I see,” said Morris. Saqwa, he knew, was usually arsenic, and certainly the songs were full of ugly deaths after feasts.

“So what I do?”

“Well, I could talk to Anne, I suppose. I expect your mother could give her a message asking her to come and see me, and I could suggest that she stops doing whatever she is doing to your father. And Gaur, of course.”

“Oh, Gaur is mad only. Is mad for love. He make songs for the woman.”

“Does he, by God!” said Morris. He had never taped anything like that, the love-songs and canoe-chants and lullabies of the ordinary marsh-people. All he had in his collection was the formal music of the singing clan.

“Yes. He lies on the floor. He groans. He is mad. I tell him, unless . . . if my father hear . . . he shoot him. True.”

“That doesn’t sound like witchcraft.”

“But Gaur is mad. My father shoot him. Will shoot him.”

“I know. The thing is that down in the marshes Gaur is a warrior of the ninth clan, and that means he’s not allowed to marry, but he is not punished if he takes another man’s wife. So I expect it seems natural to him.”

“OK. But he is mad, still. I send Dyal to you. You tell him tell Gaur. OK?”

“Fine,” said Morris, who had in a vague way been waiting for a chance to talk to Dyal about the future of the marshes, without doing anything to bring such a meeting about.

“But this woman,” said the Prince. “She make my father . . . send . . . other womans . . . women . . . away. Send back to tents . . . Such is great . . . great ’aib.”

“A great disgrace? I see.”

“Not for all peoples a disgrace. He send young woman back to tents with a good gift . . . yes, OK. She finds good husband quick, if peoples are Hadahm, Mura’ad, that sort. But some peoples tell it is a great . . . disgrace. My father knows this. He will not do it, but she is witching him.”

“Yes, I see,” said Morris inwardly cursing the pretty busybody for scattering the seeds of female emancipation on such unwilling ground. “Yes, of course I will talk to her. Don’t let your mother poison her, though. She isn’t a witch—she’s just a fool.”

“A witching fool?”

“Yes . . . I mean no. I mean what you are trying to ask is ‘Is she a foolish witch?’ The answer is no. She is foolish, but she isn’t a witch.”

But she’s a witching fool all right, he thought.

2

When Kwan had wanted to pay Morris a visit, he used to send one of the marsh eunuchs carrying a short piece of reed, notched in the middle. Morris would break it at the notch and send one half back with the slave—the reed symbolised a spear, and breaking it was a sign of peace. Kwan used this ritual even when he was himself standing just outside in the passage; it gave Morris time to unroll the reed visiting-mat and fetch out a box of cheroots and a can of sweetened condensed milk; then Kwan would come in, settle on the mat, suck at the can, chew tobacco and talk, endlessly, never repeating himself, about old doings among the buffalo herds.

So Morris found himself off-balance when, the day before the murders, Dyal came to the door unannounced and asked in his excellent Arabic if Morris was busy. Morris had in fact been watching some film of the chimpanzees and had a slight headache because the palace developing laboratory (installed by the Sultan to satisfy a sudden fad for wild-life photography, but now also apparently used by Akuli bin Zair for his home porn movies) was erratic in its results. So Morris was glad of the excuse to switch off and open the blinds. Dinah, who had been having one of her scuttering, restless mornings, leaped hooting to her nest where she stuffed her mouth with the shavings she used for bedding and glowered at the visitor. Morris rose from his desk.

“Peace be on you,” he said. “You are very welcome. How would you choose to be seated? I have the visiting-mat that Kwan used to use.”

“A chair is more comfortable,” said Dyal, smiling. “We have no customs in common, Lord Morris. We are both far from our own people, you in distance and I in time. So we can ignore all customs.”

“All right. That chair is cleaner than it looks. Would you like coffee? Or . . . er . . . Kwan used to drink sweet milk and chew tobacco.”

“I like weak instant coffee in a large cup, very hot.”

Morris laughed aloud because this was so exactly the opposite in every way of the Arab notion of what coffee should be. Dyal laughed too, a large easy sound, showing that he understood the joke.

“But I will chew tobacco,” he went on. “In this I am still a marshman. We have a root in the marshes which we chew, but tobacco is better. My brother the Sultan has made me swear an oath not to chew it in his presence, nor to buy it for myself; but I may take a gift of it. Thank you. Ah, yes, that is good stuff!”

He chewed with slow gusto while Morris got the coffee ready. The jaw-movement altered his face and gave it a less human look; in fact for a moment he seemed to have more in common with Dinah than with Morris. Perhaps it was this emergence of a more primitive aspect of his guest that made Morris relapse into marsh language.

“The floods go very slowly,” he said.

“Let us continue in Arabic,” said Dyal, too gravely for the words to sound like a snub. “I cannot think easily now in the old language. But let us omit all that coffee-talk—how it wearies me to stand behind the shoulder of my brother the Sultan and hear the same words spoken over and over again, by each guest, as though they had never before been said. I prefer the manners of you Franks. You say ‘Good morning. How are you?’ and then you do business.”

Morris was impressed. There was a relaxed lordliness in Dyal’s tone, and he had pronounced the English words in a very comprehensible accent. His bulk filled the shabby chair. He might have been an old-fashioned Oxford don putting a freshman at ease before his first tutorial. Kwan had had a kingly manner too, but a whole Toynbeean cycle of civilisations seemed to lie between their two styles of majesty.

“As you wish,” said Morris. “It is only that since Kwan died I get little chance to practise the language.”

“You must speak it with Gaur. Prince Hadiq tells me that you wish to talk to me about young Gaur.”

“It was the Prince’s wish,” said Morris carefully. “The Prince is both my pupil and my friend, and it is painful to him that Gaur should be afraid of me.”

Dyal’s laugh made Dinah duck out of sight.

“He is not physically afraid of me,” explained Morris. “But he thinks I am a witch.”

“He is a boy, a savage straight from the mud. His head is full of old women’s chatter. When a boy becomes a man down in the marshes they do not give him a man’s mind. I remember, when first I came to the sands—before this house was built, when we all lived in a big mud fort—how many childish tales I believed. Yes, I will tell him to be a man.”

This was all uncomfortably abrupt. Morris had hoped to ease from a fairly detailed demonstration that he was not a witch into the next item on the agenda. Now he would have to tackle it direct.

“The Prince,” he said, “also believes in the truth of witches.”

“So do all sensible men.”

“Perhaps. But he believes that the Frankish woman, who is my countrywoman, has cast a spell on Gaur.”

“It is possible.”

“A love-spell?”

Dyal laughed again like a man auditioning for Father Christmas.

“By God, boys are always the same. I remember when I came to the sands, how it was. There were four of us in the reeds, of the ninth clan, who became men that year. Before the dances we slept in the same hut, talking all night of women, the girls we had seen, or the young wives herding buffalo, and how we would take this woman or that as soon as we were made men. But then I was sent for, to be the prince’s shadow, here in the sands, and here there were no women to be seen, all shut away, hidden under litters when they rode out. So I wept and groaned in the dark to think of my comrades sporting among the reedbeds. Surely, if there had then been one such as the Frankish woman walking about the fort unveiled, I would have rolled my eyes at her!”

“But what would the old Sultan have done if he had seen your eye-rollings?”

“Now, he was a man! Perhaps he would have laughed and given me the woman. But my Prince was more of an age with me than Hadiq is with Gaur, so most likely the Sultan would have sent for brides from the eight clans for his son, who would then have lent them to me.”

Morris blinked but Dyal didn’t seem to notice.

“As it happened,” he went on, “my Prince soon went to get his learning in your country, and I returned to the marshes and waited. It was a weary three years, but I eased them with hunting pig and women.”

“Prince Hadiq believes that the Sultan would shoot Gaur if he knew.”

“It is not possible. What! Break the Bond of Na!ar for a woman!”

“Oh?”

“Have you not heard the Testament of Na!ar? Does it not say that thus is the Bond broken. Many things in that song are obscure, but those lines, as I remember, are clear.”

Morris was puzzled. He remembered the passage clearly enough, but since Arabs and marshmen had continued to murder each other occasionally over the intervening centuries, he did not see how the lines could have a precise meaning. However, it gave him a lead-in to the next subject.

“Is that the only fashion in which the Bond can be broken?” he asked. “For instance, I have heard talk among the Arabs that the Sultan will soon give permission to the oil company to start drilling in the marshes, and later to drain them.”

“I have heard such talk many times. The Arabs are always full of foolish stories. They think about nothing but money.”

“I expect you’re right. But I have listened to a lot of Arab talk, and I think I have learnt to tell the grain from the chaff. This rumour seemed to me to have some substance to it. And bin Zair has been recently to the wells—he told me so himself.”

“It is foolishness,” said Dyal, calm, academic, slightly bored. “First, it would break the Bond, as you say, and my brother the Sultan knows that. He would have talked with me about whether it was possible. Second, if the oil company came we would kill them.”

“You too.”

“Certainly. I am here under the Bond. If that is broken I go back to my people and fight for them, as did Na!ar, himself. And how could the oil company explore and drill when every reed-bed might hold twenty poisoned spears? They could bring machine-guns and helicopters, but there is good hiding in the reeds, and until the last male child in the marshes was dead they could not begin. Do you think these Italians would come here to work on those terms, though they were paid ten times over? There is safer work elsewhere.”

“And you yourself would fight against the Sultan?”

“If the Bond were broken. We are each other’s hostages for its continuance, but when it is broken it is my inheritance to fight for the people.”

“I hope you are right, then.”

Dyal had been speaking in a slightly odd fashion. Morris had once worked with a Professor who had suffered a slow kind of nervous breakdown, lasting several months, until one appalling morning his personality had completely come to bits while he was showing the Mayor round a new wing of his language department. By hindsight the Professor’s colleagues had then realised that what had seemed minor mannerisms had in fact been symptoms, and one of these had been a tautness, almost an aggressiveness, in discussing the trivia of weather and county cricket, combined with a steady languor when the topic was of any importance. There was something vaguely similar in the way in which Dyal now switched from affable civilised conversation, about machine-guns and danger-money for oil-men and hereditary feuds, back to academic chat. Perhaps it was part of a boredom, already expressed, with social niceties, though he knew that his visit ought to have such a coda. But to Morris it suggested that there was more tension than appeared on the surface between the white-robed, westernised bodyguard and the naked savage who had once hunted pig and women among the reed-beds.

“It matters to you, then, whether the marshes are drained or no?” said Dyal.

“Certainly. I admire the language of the marshmen and the songs. If the marshes are drained, all that will go.”

“It has lived,” said Dyal. “That is enough.”

He spoke dispassionately, like a hunter discussing the necessary death of an old hound.

“Last year at the flood-going feast,” said Morris, “I saw Kwan weeping during the songs.”

“Yes, they are strong. I close my mind when the boys sing, but perhaps when I am old I will open it again. Kwan was a good man, and a great warrior. He killed many men. Once, before I came to the sands, he went hawking alone with the old Sultan, and the Sultan’s brother sent men to attack them. They fought all day and killed seven of the men, and in the evening the Sultan rode for help while Kwan prevented the rest from following. There was no moon, so Kwan stripped off his clothes and became a piece of the night. We marshmen know the smell of Arab. When the Sultan rode back with his guard in the morning he met Kwan walking unwounded out of the desert. They found fifteen dead men among the sands, eight of them killed with one small knife.”

“He never told me, though he talked a great deal to me. I never even knew that the old Sultan had had a rebellious brother. What happened to him?”

“He was sent to the marshes. Our women have a trick of drowning a man, so that the drowning lasts all night. Of what, then, did Kwan speak? It is strange, for he was a silent man.”

“I’ll show you.”

Morris rose and got out the tape-recorder. At the click of its cover Dinah climbed down from her nest and came carefully over with the curious, stiff-legged walk which chimpanzees use when they are being formal. Morris showed her which button to press and she wound the old tape off, watching with delight as the reels whirled. Then he threaded the new tape in and let her prod down with her black-nailed finger on to the “Play” button.

A mutter, a hush, and then Kwan’s voice.

“The dance for a dead warrior is arranged in this fashion. First, the dead man’s sister’s son kills a year-old male buffalo and drains the blood into a bowl, so that the priestesses can paint the secret symbols against witchcraft with the blood on the dead man’s body. Then the song-maker is sent for, who is the dead-man’s spirit-brother, and he makes a song and teaches it to his sons. Next . . .”

Morris did not play this tape often, partly because he was not much interested in anthropological minutiae, and partly because it reminded him how much he missed Kwan’s company. He stood staring out at the marshes, thinking of his big, gentle friend creeping naked about the desert under the stars, killing men with his knife. It took him some time to realise that something was the matter with Dyal.

Dyal was having a fit. He was sitting bolt upright in the chair, with the whites showing all round the iris of his staring eyes, with sweat all across his forehead like the condensation on a chilled coke-tin. He had a pistol in his right hand, but he clutched it to his chest just as Gaur had clutched his amulet. Morris switched the recorder off.

“Are you all right?” he said.

Dyal muttered several times and tried to speak. Then his whole body shuddered and relaxed. He lay back in the chair, wiped his brow with the back of his hand and sat for several seconds looking down at the pistol on his lap.

“By God, you have done an evil thing,” he said.

“I have not done it willingly, and if I can I will undo it.”

“I thought to kill you.”

“Oh. Well . . . er . . .”

“A year ago Kwan lived. He was well. His eye was clear and his skin soft and black. Next day he was dead, as if by witchcraft. Now I see that you keep his soul in a black box, and summon your unclean servant to make him speak.”

“He was my friend. I would not have hurt him for all the gold in Sheba. I swear to you, Dyal, that his soul is not in this box. It is only a piece of machinery. I will tell you how it works.”

“Oh, I know that. I have seen such things, for bin Zair uses one in his office. But . . but . . .”

Suddenly, awkwardly, he dropped into the language of the marsh.

“There are two worlds, and both are true. A man may throw his spear in the sun-world and hit nothing, but in the moon-world that spear strikes into his enemy’s liver. To be a witch is to know how the channels wind in the moon-world, and when the floods of that world come and go. One deed may be done twice, by those who know, once in each world. The soul of a man is in his words—how otherwise can the singer make the souls of his hearers dance? You have put Kwan’s soul in a box, Kwan who was my father’s brother.”

He spoke with a strange, jerky rhythm, which might have been caused by emotion or might have been the result of his long disuse of the language. Certainly he made two or three little slips of syntax.

“The guilt is mine, but I did not know it,” said Morris. It was a line that occurred in several different songs.

“By God,” said Dyal in Arabic, “I almost killed you and your ape.”

“I can take Kwan’s voice from the tape,” said Morris. “I can wipe it off so that it will be if he had never spoken.”

“Let it be done.”

Morris hesitated a moment. He felt that what he ought to do was borrow a recorder from the Sultan and play the tape through once more, using the headphones and speaking Kwan’s words himself. Then this no doubt invaluable account of funeral rites would be preserved. But the hell with it. He rewound the tape and set it to erase itself. The reels moved hypnotically. Goodbye, he thought. Goodbye.

“So a man may be a witch without knowing it?” he said. “He may act quite innocently in the sun-world and yet harm his neighbour in the moon-world.”

“That is true.”

“So there is no way in which I can prove to Gaur that I am not a witch, if I may be one without knowing it.”

“None.”

Dyal rose and came to the table. Morris stopped the machine, wound the tape back a little and showed him that it was now blank. Dyal nodded and prepared to leave.

“It must happen often in the marshes,” said Morris, “men being accused of witchcraft when they do not know whether they are witches or not. What happens then?”

“They ask the ducks.”

“Oh?”

Dyal shook his head, unsmiling, and left with no formalities at all.

3

It must have been Anne who had persuaded the Sultan not to appoint Dinah Minister of Education—he was quite capable of doing so, even in a matter which with another part of his mind he took seriously. So the slow process of giving him a name in Dinah’s language took place in the zoo, every morning, at a time which was thoroughly inconvenient to everyone but himself. It also meant that Morris had no way of avoiding putting Dinah into the cage with the other chimps for at least one half of the morning, and that meant that he had to spend long periods at the observation window. At first he had tried introducing her when the chimps had had their morning’s excitement over the sudden harvest of fresh fruit and green leaves that came down the chutes or appeared on the two branches that could still be relied on to extrude bananas. But Sparrow, who had quickly recovered his dominance from Rowse, always used the feeding period to prove his authority over the whole group, snatching fruit and displaying aggressively at all the other chimps in turn, even when he was no longer hungry. The arrival after this process of another ape who had not been through it meant that he then focused all his moral thuggery into subduing her. So it turned out better to let her join in the riot and receive only her fair ration of bullying. She hated being taken to the cage, but in fact the experiment was beginning to work with far more success than Morris would have believed possible. It had taken her about three sessions to learn not to challenge a male—even placid old Cecil—about anything. The first time she had received a real buffet she had shot off to a corner jabbing her bunched fingers together—her usual sign for “hurt”. But quite soon she learnt to peel off the invisible gown and mortar-board as soon as she entered the cage and work by instinct. She had always kept the facial responses of a wild ape, and after a week of integration she was making the gestures of submission and appeasement in a manner indistinguishable from the others. This enabled her to sort out her own place in the hierarchy; there were two slightly older female adolescents in the group, the Deneke sisters, whom she discovered she could dominate individually but not if they ganged up on her; together they built up a precarious relationship, running to each other for grooming sessions when they needed comfort. Dinah was wary now in her relationship with the mature chimps, though she occasionally pestered Murdoch to let her play with the baby; but apart from Sparrow, whom she feared and detested, she seemed well on the way to accepting them all, and they her. Morris thought that in another week or so it would become safe to leave her in the cage most of the time, unguarded. From a scientific point of view this was an exciting step forward. Emotionally it was shipwreck.

On the morning of the murders Morris took Dinah to the zoo as soon as he had breakfasted; it was the day for cleaning out the cages of the big carnivores, and he did not yet care to risk the new slaves doing this unsupervised. Though no one else in the palace would have even shrugged if a slave had got himself mauled, Morris was anxious to keep them. Bin Zair had found them less than a week after his zoo-inspection. They were Sulubba and not negroes, and already very good at their work. Jillad was a dark little man with a very narrow face and hollow cheeks, but intelligent eyes; Maj was large, fat and silent. When Morris had asked how they came to be slaves Jillad had grinned and said that his parents had been slaves before him. Maj had scowled and said nothing. Morris was beginning to think he ought to get Jillad to put some of his life-story on tape, as it must have been unusual; Sulubba, the mysterious desert people who are said to be descended from camp-followers of the crusaders, captured after Christian defeats, are despised by the Arabs but have recognised rights, so it was unusual for them to be slaves; nor were hereditary slaves often sold.

Morris was pleased to find them already in the lower gallery in front of the cages, waiting beside a big pile of fresh-cut young reeds. Dinah pretended to be frightened of them and jumped into his arms. Morris exchanged the traditional greetings.

“The Sultan will be here in two hours,” he said. “We must have everything finished and tidy before then. That is far more reeds than we will need.”

They shrugged and laughed. Then Morris watched while Jillad coaxed the polar bear into the corner of its cage with a lump of raw camel-meat, allowing Maj to lower the special grille that penned the big beast there. Jillad then renewed the filter chemicals, working quickly and accurately under Morris’s eye though he had only once been shown how to do it. Maj raked the stale bedding out of the den, scooped the coarse dung into a bucket and went to fetch fresh reeds.

Immediately there was uproar, wild chattering from Dinah and cursing from Maj. Morris turned to see that Dinah was playing king of the castle on the pile of reeds, and when Maj came for an armful had snatched the other end of his bundle and pulled it to bits, scattering it round the passage. Maj, quick-tempered, lashed out at her with his foot and caught her in the ribs. Jillad laughed. Dinah backed away, chattering, but when Morris came to collect her gathered courage to mock the aggressive slave.

“She is mischievous but not wicked,” said Morris. “It is better to be her friend.”

Maj only shrugged again and began sullenly to sweep the reeds together and pile them back on to the canvas. Morris loosed Dinah, who went scampering off down towards the chimps’ cage, almost as though she thought them better company than humans. But she stopped before she reached them and returned to roam in aimless rushes, like a hairy spider, around the working men, jeering at Maj who rushed to guard his reeds whenever she came near them.

Soon she became enough of a nuisance for Morris to leave the two slaves to get on with the work while he took her further down the corridor for some language practice. He fetched a box of objects from his office and settled down at a point where the slaves could call to him if they needed help or advice. The session went badly, with Dinah refusing to pay attention from the very beginning, and throwing the objects about, deliberately scattering the symbols, and looking down the corridor to jeer from time to time at Maj. Then, quite suddenly, her mood changed and she plucked a little at Morris’s shirt buttons which was one of her ways of demanding affection. He cradled her in his arms and gently teased the fur on her ribs. She wriggled slightly and prodded her fingers together, looking into his eyes. He picked out three of the scattered symbols.

yellow circle: query

white square: Dinah

purple circle with hole: hurt

She left his arms and studied the symbols apathetically. All of a sudden she became animated, chattered at Maj where he was working by the cheetah’s cage, found a black square and rearranged the symbols.

black square: person other than Morris, Dinah or Sultan

purple circle with hole: hurt

white square: Dinah

Morris clicked sympathetically and made her sit still while he felt carefully along her ribs. Nothing seemed to be broken, but the shock of being hit by a human was for some reason greater than her reactions to Sparrow’s bullying. Perhaps she was instinctually conditioned to her role as a female chimpanzee, among chimpanzees, whereas her relationship with mankind was an entirely learnt set of responses, a flimsy network that once broken could not repair itself by natural growth, but would have to be carefully re-knitted by some outside agent. Morris decided that he would have to speak to the slaves about their treatment of Dinah. It was the sort of job he hated, being conscious of how likely he was to make a mess of it, and simply put their backs up. But he was determined to try to keep them. They were jewels. Jillad, in particular, was a good example of the weird interweaving of civilisations in the desert—a man competent to cope with a fairly sophisticated gadget like the water-filter, and still a slave, because his father had been one.

They worked fast, too, now that Dinah was no longer distracting them. They were just finishing clearing the litter out of the chimpanzee grove when the special signal that heralded the Sultan fluted faintly down from the zoo doors.

“Finish and go,” said Morris. “You have worked well.”

Maj smiled and bowed, a portly salute with something of the absurd dignity that invests an orang.

“I will leave the reeds,” he said. “They are tidy, Lord. You will not let your ape touch them?”

“Good,” said Morris, and hurried away. Dinah loped beside him.

“Ah, there you are, old fellow,” said the Sultan. “You’ll be glad to learn I’m becoming quite scientific in my old age. I’ve brought a control group. I thought we might play hide-and-seek for a change.”

Anne, leaning on the Sultan’s arm, laughed. Today she was wearing an extraordinary get-up; basically it was riding-kit—glossy brown boots, white kid breeches moulded tight to buttock and thigh, taut blouse—but over this she wore a scarlet silk cloak ankle length and buckled at the throat. She also carried a little silver-handled hunting-crop, and looked altogether as though she were starring in a camp re-make of The Sheikh.

“A control group?” he said, gaping at her. “You’ve got some funny ideas about control.”

The Sultan chose to be not amused, an act he did very well. He waved an impatient hand towards where Dyal and Gaur stood, a little further along the upper gallery.

“It struck me that Dinah might simply be using my symbol for any big man who happened not to be Dyal,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Morris. “You’ve got to remember that it’s natural for her to think in terms of any group having a dominant male. Sparrow’s that down there. You’re it up here. In fact I get the impression that she’s fascinated by you, but she’s scared of you too.”

“You have a peculiar line in flattery, Morris.”

“Oh, come off it. I’m just telling you Dinah knows perfectly well who you are, and there’s no chance of her muddling you up with anyone else.”

“Good, good. Now, this game. My idea is that a couple of us hide and Dinah is told which one to find. You’ve got a symbol for find, haven’t you?”

“I suppose so.”

“‘I suppose so!’ Morris, in some ways you’re a lout. Just because it’s not your own idea, you go out of your way to make it sound impractical.”

This was a perfectly fair criticism, and in fact the game went beautifully. Dinah coped with commands such as “Dinah: find: man: big: new sentence: Dinah: find: negative: Sultan.” As soon as she discovered that there were grapes for her at the end of each hunt if she got it right she applied her wits to the task. When it was Gaur’s turn to be the one discovered he needed some cajoling.

“Come thou,” said Dyal, “it is not a witch finding. There is no duck, no poison.”

“What’s the trouble?” said Anne, in English.

“He’s got it into his head that I’m a witch and Dinah is my familiar.”

“How sweet,” said Anne, smiling at the young savage. He rolled his eyes, clutched his amulet and went. The Sultan looked at her sidelong but said nothing before he too moved heavily out of sight. Morris counted his fifty, spelt out the message for Dinah and let her go. She scampered off, chuckling. He looked up to see Anne standing face to face with the gorilla, imitating its grimace.

“It doesn’t suit you,” he said.

She understood before he did what he really meant, and ran a calm hand down her ribs and over her hip.

“There’s a law of diminishing returns,” she said. “When my grandfather was getting on, he used to complain that my grandmother was cheating him over his curries—he couldn’t taste them any more, because he must have burnt his taste-buds pretty well clean off with trying.”

“That looks a fairly strong curry,” said Morris.

She shrugged.

“The fantasies of male domination . . . oh hell. Time I got out of here.”

She swung back and stared at the gorilla.

“Get stuffed,” she whispered.

But in fact, Morris thought, she was living the fantasy with every bit as much gusto as the Sultan, and even had enough spare sexual drive to flash bright glances towards poor Gaur. Perhaps she got a kick out of the risk; or perhaps she only wanted to spice up the Sultan’s curry with the sharp tang of jealousy. Mercifully it was none of his business. He turned to watch through the window where Cecil was examining with intense interest the incipient sexual swelling on Starkie’s rump.

When the hide-and-seek was over the usual shooting-match began; Dinah ate her last grapes with slow absorption and then Morris took her down to the cage. He came back to find that the Sultan’s tortuous processes of revenge were in action; if your mistress flirts with a handsome young man, what more natural than to humiliate him in her presence, fondling as you do so, before his eyes, the forbidden flesh. The Sultan was speaking in slow Arabic.

“Let the boy guard the door for a while,” he said. “Let him learn his duties. It is not good for the young to have no work to do, eh, my dear?”

The last three words were in English, but they would have sounded insulting in any language. Dyal was visibly put out—startled more than angry—and led Gaur away with a puzzled expression. The Sultan laughed.

“May I borrow your office for a bit, old boy?” he said.

“Make yourself at home,” said Morris.

He began to load oranges and cabbage into the chutes, and then he and Dyal watched in silence for twenty minutes while the chimpanzees had their lunch-time threshabout. For one who was not emotionally involved it was amusing to watch. Dyal laughed aloud—a deep and strangely solemn sound—several times. Morris watched Dinah work a sort of three-card trick on Sparrow, confusing him for the moment with a piece of orange-peel while she scuffled a real orange under the fresh bedding and then allowed herself to be harried round the grove until Sparrow forgot his grievance and she could retire, whimpering, to the reeds and eat the orange under cover of her sulks. Yes, Sparrow was thick all right, but so were they all by comparison with Dinah. Dinah was civilised. No. Westernised? Urbanised? Humanised?

On the other hand, comparing her appearance with what she had looked like when she had first joined the group in the cage, weeks ago—why, it had been the morning the hijacked jet had landed—she had lost some of her gloss. Her coat was less shiny and her air less detached. She had the scuffed, used look of the other chimps, though she was still set apart. Thus must the emigré aristos in Boston have looked, cobbling and laundering for a living but still set apart from those who had never known Versailles. Even so, Sparrow and Co were making an ape of her. Morris could not regard it as a change for the better. He watched the riot with gloom.

This feeling was little alleviated by the arrival of bin Zair, after a shout from Gaur and an answer from Dyal. The Prime Minister came strutting along the black-and-white tiles with a wad of tattered documents under his arms, and though it was a relief not to have to watch him crawl, Morris could only see his arrival as a further knot in the tangled noon. It was to get away from encounters such as this, dammit, that he had come to Q’Kut at all. That and the money.

Bin Zair thrust his wad of papers at Morris without explanation. It looked like a file on financial matters, but it had been clearly dropped and regathered without sorting.

“His Majesty is where?” asked bin Zair, with no formal greetings at all.

“In my office, alone, with the Frankish woman.”

Morris had seen Arabs express emotion before, but he had never actually seen a beard torn. Now it happened—at least when bin Zair finished his frenzied wrenching several strands of grey hair came away in his fingers.

“What is this?” said Morris, tapping the file.

“Yes, that is urgent also. It is the accounts for the animals before you came. This year his majesty has demanded a budget, with comparative tables of previous expenditure. He has ordered it by next week! My clerks will do the additions, but the file is disordered and I cannot trust them to know what is relevant. Allah! Allah! That he should be wantoning at such a time!”

Allah was mighty that day. At least, at the sound of his name the office door clicked. Morris switched the camera on and moved hurriedly down the corridor to the corner. The flood of anger hit him like a beam of light. Their faces were set. The Sultan’s eyes were cold as stones, and Anne, though flushed and dishevelled, did not now look like a prince’s plaything but more like she had done that first day on the aeroplane wing. Whatever they had borrowed the office for, it hadn’t been a bit of idyll. Both of them looked at Morris as though he had been caught peeping through the keyhole.

“Bin Zair is here,” he muttered. “He’s in a considerable flap.”

“Who would be a monarch?” said the Sultan. “My dear, you had better not let him see you in that rig. He has high standards.”

“Oh, God!” snapped Anne.

“He’s in the top gallery, is he Morris? Well you’d better go along the lower one, my dear. Go straight to the women’s quarters. That’s an order. I’ll come and see you there.”

She opened her mouth but said nothing, then swung away and strode down the short passage with the red cloak streaming behind her. She was moving so rapidly that it seemed to stay in sight long after she herself had vanished round the corner. Morris turned into his office but he had hardly laid the papers on his desk when he heard the Sultan call. He went out into the corner to find bin Zair and the Sultan standing at the top of the steps into the upper gallery.

“Come here a moment, will you, old boy?” said the Sultan. But when Morris reached the top step it was bin Zair who spoke, in a low voice, in Arabic.

“Lord Morris,” he said, “will you go softly to the doors and there tell the young slave who guards them that he is to let no man enter, for any reason. You speak his tongue and can make your meaning clear.”

“Dyal could do it,” said the Sultan. “Morris is not a messenger boy.”

Bin Zair raised his head to the ceiling, as if in prayer. In fact for the moment he looked like a model for St Anthony at the height of his temptations.

“It’s all right—I’ll go,” said Morris.

Round the corner, in the upper gallery, he found Dyal leaning by the observation window, still watching the chimps with large affability. Morris nodded to him and hurried on, to find Gaur in a markedly contrasting state. The young man was just outside the main doors, posed like a sentry but groaning aloud, and with a face so contorted with grief and passion that even the two deaf-and-dumb eunuchs had stopped their touching-game and were looking at him pop-eyed. Morris gave his message quickly and hurried away. He had no desire to witness the fresh outpourings of torment that would probably begin when Anne, going the long way round, reached the lobby. Thank heavens I’ve missed out on all that, he thought, almost scampering past the point where the Sultan, bin Zair and Dyal were already involved in what seemed to be a council of state. Little bin Zair was talking in a low, urgent voice, while the two large men looked down at him in silence. As Morris came into earshot bin Zair stopped speaking, but began again as soon as he had rounded the corner into the short passage that led down to the office. Morris was so anxious not to overhear anything, not to become involved, that he almost fell down the flight of steps.

Deliberately he opened and closed the door with a rattle and a bang, and scuttered to his desk, reaching for the pile of papers bin Zair had brought. He was already reading the top one when a splash of unfamiliar scarlet caught the edge of his vision.

“I hope I’m not in your way,” said Anne, meekly.

“Good God! You’re mad!”

“In one sense, yes. But he’s mad all along the line.”

“You must go. Really. Please. He might . . .”

“OK, OK.”

“And quietly. He’s only just up there round the corner. You’ll just have to hope no one’s looking through the window into the chimp-cage.”

“So long. Thanks for everything.”

She slipped out. As the door opened and closed the deep note of Dyal’s voice reached down to him. Very uneasily he settled to the papers, not even looking up when the Sultan came down the steps and along the passage outside his door, on the way to the lower gallery. His angry voice was punctuated by bin Zair’s deprecating squeaks. Most of the documents turned out to be a mixture from two separate files, the first concerning a lengthy wrangle about who ought to pay for a pair of cheetahs that had been delivered dead after what had evidently been a journey of careless cruelty through the hands of half-a-dozen airlines, and the second consisting of correspondence with the court of a neighbouring Sultan, one of whose sons on a visit to Q’Kut had been foolish enough to lose his left arm between the bars of a lion-cage. Presumably the blood-money was a zoo expense. With these were a number of loose sheets, not apparently consecutive, on which a variety of clerks seemed to have made random attempts to detail more ordinary zoo expenses. The noise of some kind of rumpus in the chimpanzee grove came faintly to him. Normally he would have rushed out to see that Dinah was all right, but now he merely sighed and went on with the papers. He hadn’t even reached the bottom of the pile when somebody scratched at the door.

“What is it?” he called.

Bin Zair entered, looking very wild.

“Be welcome,” said Morris.

“May I rest here?” said bin Zair. “The Sultan is much enraged. He struck his servant. Did you hear?”

Indeed the old man’s headcloth was askew and he seemed to have been having another go at his beard. He settled shakily on to the tatty sofa.

“I heard nothing. Shall I make coffee?”

“No, no. His rage is not with me, his faithful old servant. It is with the treacherous marshmen. Children of dogs!”

“What has happened?”

“They have spoken with the oil company. With the company’s help they will send a delegation to the United Nations, declaring themselves an independent people.”

“But how . . .”

“They have done this thing through the Sultan’s own bodyguard, Dyal.”

“No!”

“It is true, Morris. And they have done worse. They are thieves and serpents. They have planned . . .”

He was interrupted. He had left the door open when he came, and so Morris heard clearly the sudden whoof of a spring-gun, a raucous cry, and then slightly nearer the sound of another gun. Still quivering bin Zair struggled to his feet as another inarticulate shout rang out, drowned in turn by an extraordinary clamour among the chimpanzees. Morris was first out of the door. Something very violent must be happening in the cage, he thought, for both Dyal and Sultan to loose off, especially when their minds were full of this stupid oil business. But when he rounded the corner he saw that the Sultan was lying flat on his back against the mesh of the grove. He hesitated. Bin Zair scuttled past him. The noise in the cage was appalling. Morris looked and saw Dinah scampering round the cage pursued by an infuriated Sparrow who struck or kicked at her continually. She must have heard the click of the latch, for she rushed towards the door, shot through and crouched whimpering on the floor of the gallery while Morris re-latched the door and Sparrow raged inside. One of the hypodermic darts lay glistening on the floor of the cage.

Morris shook his head and turned to where bin Zair was kneeling beside his master’s body. A curious orange flush suffused the Sultan’s cheeks. He was breathing heavily through his nose, but his lips were smiling. Bin Zair stood up as Morris knelt to feel for the pulse, which was slow and erratic.

“Does he live?” said bin Zair.

“Yes. But he’s not well. Get help—Dyal and Gaur.”

“Who has done this thing?”

“Nobody. It looks like a heart-attack. You told me he was much enraged.”

“Yet he fired a shot. Look, the gun is beneath him.”

Morris dragged it out by the barrel. It wasn’t the practice-gun and it was now unloaded.

“For God’s sake,” said Morris, “go to my office. Ring for the Sultan’s doctor.”

Bin Zair didn’t move. Morris looked up and for the first time noticed that the inspection window on the other side of the cage was open. Of course—there had been two shots.

“Dyal!” he yelled. “Dyal!”

There was no answer. Suddenly bin Zair made up his mind and ran off round the corner, lifting the skirts of his robe like a woman. Morris stayed where he was, uncertain what to do. The pattern of the Sultan’s heart-beats was very alarming. Dinah appeared at his side, still whimpering and prodding the tips of her fingers together. Morris reached out with his free hand to touch her shoulder reassuringly but she bent forward over the Sultan’s body, peering into the sick-hued face as if she could read signs there. Her “hurt” gesture, which she had continued making without thinking about it, suddenly became more urgent and meaningful.

“Yes,” said Morris, “he’s hurt too.”

“Lord Morris,” squeaked bin Zair. “Come hither. Look!”

His face pale and frenzied, leaned through the inspection window. Dammit, thought Morris, I bet he hasn’t phoned that doctor yet. But he rose, picked up Dinah and ran round to the upper gallery. He found bin Zair bending over another inert body, that of Dyal. A second hypodermic dart projected from the black flesh of the bodyguard’s neck; it looked as though it might have struck deep into the big vein that runs by the collar-bone. The face was contorted from its normal calm to a snarl almost like that of the stuffed gorilla, and a dribble of dark saliva ran down from the corner of the wrenched mouth.

“Who has done this thing?” cried bin Zair.

“It looks like an accident,” said Morris. “Dyal shot at one of the apes; and the Sultan perhaps in sport, shot at Dyal. The drug in the dart only makes a man sleep, but the Sultan has had a heart-attack.”

“Sleep!” cried bin Zair. “He is dead!”

Morris knelt. He could find no pulse at all. The lungs seemed not to move either.

“God take vengeance!” squealed bin Zair.

“Look, for heaven’s sake go and telephone for that doctor. A few minutes can make all the difference in a heart-attack.”

Bin Zair didn’t move. Impatiently Morris jumped up and strode back to the office with Dinah a pace behind him, whimpering to be carried; she seemed to have sensed his mood of fear and fret and sheer irritation at being involved in these dramas. The telephone exchange was having one of its capricious days; after half-a-dozen futile attempts to dial the doctor (feverishly copied by Dinah on her toy telephone) he found himself in contact with the Captain of the Guard.

“Thank God,” he said. “This is Morris . . . and may your sons all flourish . . . please, this is urgent. . . yes. The Sultan has become very ill in the zoo. I cannot make the doctor hear. Will you send a good man to him at once? At once, or the Sultan will surely die. Be quick! And captain, bring men up here, and a stretcher—two stretchers . . . good.”

He banged the receiver down, looked unhappily round the office as if longing for some excuse to stay there, then moved slowly out and along to the lower gallery, with Dinah still at his side, still whimpering.

The Sultan lay just as he had before, breathing heavily and even peacefully, but with the flesh of his face so strange a colour that it looked as though he had been appallingly bruised three days ago. His hands were the same hue. His pulse was rapid and feeble, but every few seconds would produce a single appallingly heavy beat, like a hammer blow. When Morris had been there a couple of minutes bin Zair came round the corner with a dart in his hand.

“What news?” said Morris.

“The news is good,” said bin Zair automatically. Morris stared until he realised that he had embarked, unintentionally, on one of the traditional desert greetings which always evokes the same answer, come plague, come famine, come slaughter of brothers.

“Look,” said bin Zair, thrusting the dart in front of his face. Morris took it. It was one of the new pattern, unblunted by repeated shots at the gorilla. Its needle was black with blood.

No, no blood was ever as black as that, nor glistened so, as molasses glistens. Morris swallowed several times.

“Do you think that’s poison?” he said.

“I think so. And this dart I pulled from the slave’s neck. Listen, Morris. When I left the upper gallery to talk privately with the Sultan, the slave gave my master the gun he was carrying. My master took it without thought. Now, I believe that when I left him the slave fired at my master and my master fired back at the slave. Perhaps one of your apes took the dart, and there it is now in the cage.”

“But why on earth . . .”

“I do not know, except that the marsh-people had turned against my master.”

“Even so, it won’t work,” said Morris. “The poison doesn’t make you sleep—it needs the drug in the dart to do that; and the other gun only had an empty practice dart in it.”

“How many guns are there, Morris?”

“Three. The practice-gun, the one we keep loaded, and a spare.”

“Where is the third?”

“In my office. Come and see.”

But the cupboard in the office was empty and three new darts were missing from the drawer below. They found the practice-gun at once, tucked in behind the stuffed gorilla. The one by Dyal’s body was the spare.

“Oh, God,” said Morris. “Where’s that bloody doctor?”

Impatiently he walked towards the main doors. Bin Zair scurried on one side of him and Dinah on the other.

“We must question the guards,” said bin Zair. “If no one entered the zoo and no one left, and you and I were together, then it is plain reason that they must have killed each other.”

“I don’t know. You say the Sultan was very angry. Perhaps he killed Dyal in a rage and then had a heart-attack.”

“I have seen men die with heart-attacks, but never with their skin of such a colour. And whence came the poison.”

“Oh God! I don’t know. Let’s see whether Gaur heard anything.”

The short passage to the zoo doors was empty. In the lobby beyond them stood Gaur alone. The lights of the lift-panel winked in descending order.

“What man descended in the box?” said Morris in the language of the marsh.

“No man, lord,” said Gaur, spreading his palms to show emptiness. And of course it was perfectly likely that the lift was plying between lower floors without ever having reached this level.

“Since I spoke with thee who has come and gone?”

“Only the white woman I love, lord.”

“How long since?”

(Yes, Anne had been standing by the gun-cupboard when he’d looked up from his desk and seen her. That damned silly cloak could easily have hidden a gun.)

“Thou didst go and she came. All that as long since as it takes a man to milk a buffalo with a four-month calf.”

(Ten minutes? Quarter of an hour? Too long ago, anyway.)

“He says nobody came or went,” said Morris in Arabic.

“He is a marshman also. He is fresh from the marshes. That poison does not keep its strength many weeks, they say.”

“Well at any rate he won’t be lying about whether anyone else has been here. The ninth clan don’t lie.”

“All men lie, Morris. Who comes now?”

The lights blinked again as the lift ascended. Its doors rattled open and out flooded a pack of rifle-brandishing guards, sweeping with them the puffy little Arab whose main task hitherto had been to mix the Sultan’s hangover-cures. Morris took Dinah back to his office and listened to the shouts of rage and cries of astonishment. The Captain of the Guard came to ask for keys, saying that bin Zair had ordered a complete search of the zoo for lurking assassins.

“I’ll have to come too,” said Morris. You won’t be able to search the bear’s cage or the lion’s without my help.”

“We had intended to shoot them,” said the Captain. “What use are they, now my master is dying?”

Morris picked up the keys without answering. The Sultan’s body had gone, but as they passed the chimpanzee grove Morris’s eye was caught by the second dart. That might be evidence, he realised.

“Wait,” he said and unfastened the door. Dinah scampered away, whimpering, no doubt thinking that she was about to be shut in with the lower classes again. The apes, who were in a very nervous state, backed away into corners as he walked across the cage. Only Sparrow didn’t move. Sparrow sat against one of the concrete tree-trunks with his face drawn into the full rictus of dominance-display. Morris, as he bent for the dart, kept an eye on him in case of a sudden charge. It took him several seconds to realise that Sparrow was dead. He had been poisoned too.