Her eyes, still a bit swollen with weeping, were a pale, pale northern blue. He was too startled to speak, but his mouth twitched as though it were trying to find sentences of its own.
Two
1
IN A SEALED and seasonless environment, such as the palace, it was difficult to judge the passage of time. Morris used the wrecked aeroplane as an erratic calendar, judging the weeks since its landing by the amount of it that remained unstolen. Despite the three turbaned guards who sat gambling in its shade the whole machine was gradually disappearing. The baffled engineers who had come to study the problem of flying it back to civilisation would soon have no problem left—the aeroplane would simply have dissolved like an object acted upon by two powerful acids, the thieving aboriginals of the marshes and the thieving Arabs of the sands. Morris saw that another large chunk had been sawn from the tail fin: that made it about five weeks since that nightmare day. (If it has been possible for him to peer through the surface of time, instead of seeing only the reflected past he would have been able to watch a different process of disintegration, and used it to measure the two weeks and two days that remained before the murders.)
Meanwhile the haze above the marshes had steadily thickened, as it was bound to do when the floods were at their height. Something was happening at the marsh edge, where the first reeds rose—a small body of men, mostly slaves, stood there. Four of the slaves carried a blue canopy, fringed with gold. Another carried a long pole with a wicker box at the top. Morris fetched his binoculars and saw that a little Arab was sitting on a carry-chair beneath the canopy; he was dressed all in white, and his grey beard flowed to his waist; it could only be bin Zair.
As Morris came to this conclusion the group stirred and bin Zair rose from his chair. Morris lowered his binoculars and saw that a long canoe was emerging from a channel between the reeds, paddled by a dozen naked marshmen, all as black as the blackest negro. Like most marshmen they were small and scrawny, and so was the man who stood near the bows holding a pole with a box at the top, similar to the one on the shore. But the man who sat in the stern, clothed all in white, looked really big, as big as the Sultan or Dyal, though his face was as black as any of the others’. He hadn’t been there last year.
Last year! Time suddenly became solid and exact.
This day last year Morris had stood at the window with Kwan beside him, and the gaunt old marshman had explained the meaning of the ceremony. It was a preparation for the flood-going feast, at which the compact between the first Arab conqueror of Q’Kut and the last free ruler of the marshmen was celebrated and re-stated. According to Kwan the boxes on the ends of the poles contained the mummified right hands of the two heroes.
Morris turned away from the window. Three days after the flood-going feast last year Kwan had been dead, and Morris still missed him.
With a shrug he went to his little work-bench, unlocked a Dinah-proof drawer and took out a sheet of blue plastic. Marking out a precise row of blue crosses was soothing work, and as soon as his little jig-saw began to whine Dinah woke and filled his mind completely. She was always thrilled with excitement when Morris started to cut new symbols, and then unmanageable with disappointment if they merely turned out to be replacements for ones which she had lost or broken, or simply hidden (which happened frequently with the red circles.) She watched the cutting out with panting absorption until he gave her the first complete cross, untrimmed and unpolished, to play with. He stopped work and watched her carry it over to her toy-store. Her own collection of counters was kept in a leather bag; she shook them out on to the floor and, as usual, sorted eagerly through them just in case (Morris believed) one of the symbols meaning fruit had appeared among them. Then she set out a well-known practice sentence:
white square: Dinah
green circle with hole: go
yellow/white square: bed
She barely sniffed at this before flinging herself to the curtain-rail over the door, from there to the top of the bookshelf and from there with a crash and rattle into her nest, where she shook herself a couple of times and chattered while she studied the blue cross she still held in her left hand. Then she lowered herself gently to the floor and loped back to the symbols.
She tried the cross both at the beginning and end of her sentence, removed it, replaced it first with a blue triangle which turned the sentence into one half of a conditional clause, then with the blue square which meant Morris. Morris made a few notes and returned to his crosses. He had cut them all out and was adjusting his polishing wheel when a eunuch’s flute tootled tunelessly beyond the door-curtain.
“Come in”, he called in Arabic, then realised that the flautist couldn’t hear him so got up and pulled the curtain aside.
A black slave, grinning like an idiot, entered. Dinah leaped to her nest and crouched there, peering over the edge like a soldier in a fox-hole. The slave took the curtain from Morris, allowing him to back into the centre of the room to receive his visitor—Hadiq’s mother, presumably, come for a PTA meeting—with proper formality. But, concealing though the robes were, the figure that came through the door could not possibly have been that of the Sultan’s fat, worried first wife—and the pale blue eyes that showed through the eye-slits were unique in Q’Kut. Morris’s mouth fell open and began to twitch, just as it had done when he had last seen her.
“I hope you’re not busy,” she said, glancing at the cluttered desk and work-bench, and Dinah’s spilt toy-store, and the gnawed and tattered furniture.
“No, no,” he said. “Come in. Sit down. The chairs are cleaner than they look.”
“This bloke’s got to stay too, you know?” she said. “It’s that kind of scene.”
“I’m used to it,” said Morris. He unlocked another drawer and tossed the slave two of the sticky black cheroots he had originally bought for Kwan. The slave grinned, propped his scimitar in the corner and settled down to chew them like liquorice sticks. Morris brought him a bowl to spit into.
“How will he react if I take this lot off,” said the girl, feeling for the brooch of her robe.
“What are you wearing underneath?” asked Morris nervously.
“Just clothes.”
“I should think that’ll be OK. He’s not a Moslem. That flute code is quite elaborate, but I doubt if it covers points like this. He could slice your head off, of course, but I don’t know whether he’s empowered to do that without consulting higher authority.”
“I’ll risk it.”
She plucked the black, mask-like veil over her head, smoothed her hair and began to unfasten the swathing folds of the robe. As she did so she glanced sideways at Morris with a curious teasing look, provocative but not exactly sexually provocative. He half expected her to emerge wearing something to startle or embarrass him—a diving suit, or a belly-dancer’s outfit with the naked skin tattooed with revolutionary slogans; but what she had on was the traditional baggy trousers, in pink silk, and a frothy white blouse fastened up to her throat with long crisscrossing laces, like a skater’s boot but following a slightly shallower curve. She still looked as fit as a gymnast, though her face had paled during her five weeks out of the sun—paled till the pink-and-white beneath the fading tan made it even less likely that she was any kind of Arab. Morris decided that she was as English as himself.
She adjusted the glossy swathes of black hair, slightly ruffled by the removal of her veil. It was a tactful little gesture, deliberately inviting Morris to inspect her without actually staring. But for her eyes he mightn’t have recognised her as the same girl who had stood declaiming about women’s rights from the wing of the wrecked aeroplane. She hadn’t exactly changed, but had, so to speak, adjusted. Her lips seemed fuller; her cheekbones showed in the softened planes of flesh; even her slightly hooked nose had somehow become less accipitrine than columbaceous; and the pride with which she held herself was
the confidence of good breeding rather than any Amazonian arrogance. Later Morris was to discover how fast she could re-adapt her features to any role she chose, but for the moment he was only conscious of being asked to look at an outstandingly pretty woman and feeling awkward about it.
“OK?” she said to the slave, but he didn’t look up.
“I can never remember which ones are deaf and dumb,” she said to Morris. “In fact it’s difficult to believe they really are—the other women treat them as if they weren’t there—or weren’t human anyway, more like dogs. You don’t mind what you do in front of them, after a bit. Where do they all come from? Africa?”
“No. Most of the ordinary slaves come from Africa, but these are marshmen from Q’Kut. It’s a hereditary job.”
“That can’t be easy. They’re eunuchs,” she said, settling into the less ramshackle armchair. Morris sat down also but couldn’t loll. He found himself crouched forward on the edge of his chair with his elbows on his knees and his fingers tightly laced together.
“No, it’s like that,” he said. “Down in the marshes there’s one clan—the eel clan—who always castrate their second sons and cut out their tongues and pierce their ears. If that son doesn’t survive they do it to the third son, and so on.”
She looked at him with lordly disgust.
“I hate sick jokes,” she said.
“I’m afraid it’s true. In fact it’s an essential part of the economy of the marshes, and population control.”
“How horrible.”
“Not much more than . . . oh, forget it.”
Morris had no wish to start an argument about the ethics of terrorism. He hated that amount of involvement, and usually lost, too. She smiled at him with sweet complicity. There had been a very severe-seeming administrative officer at Bristol; she too had sometimes smiled at Morris like that, because he’d had digs in the same street as her and had seen how she dressed in the evenings, to go out with how many varied men, in what cars. Just so this girl was smiling now to establish a convention whereby that other girl—the one with the gun at her hip and the dead bodies of innocent men behind her—had nothing to do with this visit. This visit was quite different, the daughter of the big house paying a social call on, oh, the rather dull local doctor, being uncondescendingly charming, not yet mentioning whatever business it might be that the charm was expected to pay for.
“Do tell me about your zoo,” she said.
“Well, I’m not really a zoologist. My field is psycholinguistics . . .”
“Oh.”
(She meant “Oh?”)
“It’s rather a vague subject—it’s the study of the effect of language on the mind, and one way you can tackle it is by researching into the linguistic abilities of non-human creatures. I happened to start working with a particularly intelligent female chimpanzee at Bristol, but about eighteen months ago when the Sultan was in London he asked me to come up and have dinner—we used to live on the same staircase at Oxford and got on pretty well—and I told him what I was doing. He offered me a fantastic salary to come out here with my chimp and look after the zoo as a sideline.”
“What’s in it for him?”
“God knows. When you’re that rich you don’t have motives any longer—or rather any motive is as good as any other motive, since you can satisfy them all. I think he likes having me about. And he’s a bit obsessed with Oxford—he never sat his finals, you see. And if Dinah really comes up to scratch we actually might one day hit the academic headlines.”
“That’s a slave name.”
“I didn’t choose it. And I don’t think of it like that.”
“You think you don’t think of it like that. What are you actually doing with her?”
Morris clicked. Instantly Dinah exploded from her nest to the top of the bookshelf, then sprang, whirling like a falling sycamore seed, down to his lap, where she sat pouting at the stranger.
“This is Dinah,” he said. “My name’s Wesley Morris, but everyone calls me Morris. I’m afraid I don’t know yours.”
“I’ve got a lot of names. You’d better call me Galayah.”
He repeated the name, but couldn’t help correcting her pronunciation.
“Bloody hell!” she said, flushing. “All right, call me Anne. I used to answer to that.”
Dinah stopped pouting and shifted round until she could pick at Morris’s shirt-buttons. She had never discovered a satisfactory way of grooming him, except in the sparse and unrewarding strip of hair that circled his bald patch. This was only a sign that she would like to be groomed herself, which in turn meant that she wanted reassurance. That makes two of us, he thought, starting to pick systematically along the fur of her forearm.
“Well,” he said, “currently I’m setting up an experiment to investigate Dinah’s ability to cope with the idea of time.”
“Animals don’t have one.”
“So people say. We’ll see. If you’d asked me five years ago, I’d have said that animals couldn’t understand or construct conditional clauses, but Premack in California taught a chimpanzee called Sarah how to, and Dinah and I have duplicated his work. So why not time?”
“I see. What else?”
“Well, the Sultan is very anxious to make a breakthrough with an experiment for which he can claim some credit, and his idea is that Dinah should have a baby, and then we can see how much she teaches it of what she’s learnt from me.”
“Will she even look at a male chimp? Doesn’t she think she’s human, living all the time with you?”
“We don’t know, yet. She spent her first three years at Bristol with other chimps, including her mother, only coming out for tests and lessons. Since then she’s lived with me, but I’ve never treated her as a human—I mean dressed her in clothes or let her eat with a knife and fork. She doesn’t sleep in a cot, but as near as I can arrange to a jungle nest. She’s got her own room—that’s essential, so that I can shut her up if I have to do something without her—but it isn’t at all like a human room. She even wears a leash sometimes, though she hates it. Nowadays she spends a bit of her time with a family group of near-wild chimps we’ve imported, and my impression is that she recognises them as being the same species as herself. For instance, one of the females was in season a few weeks ago, which meant that her sex organs swelled to a large pink mound on her rump. Dinah saw it, and spent a lot of time inspecting herself for the same symptoms.”
Anne laughed and stretched. Morris found himself relaxing slightly, but when he started to lean back in his chair Dinah grabbed his hand and re-applied it to the bit of her shoulder he had been working on.
“So that’s why you’re in Q’Kut,” she said. “For bread.”
“Not entirely,” said Morris. “I mean, I don’t need all that money. I do like having an unlimited budget for my research, of course. On the other hand I miss the kind of colleagues I could talk things over with. I didn’t realise it till I got here, but the real attraction of Q’Kut is the marshmen.”
“And the marshwomen?”
“No, as a matter of fact, not. Oh, I see, you mean sexually. Not that either.”
“You’ll have to explain.”
“Well, there are about a dozen languages left in the world which are not dialects of other languages and are spoken exclusively by a coherent group of people. By ‘exclusively’ I mean they are monoglots. They don’t speak any other language. There’s a few in New Guinea, a few in Brazil, and a remarkable tribe in the Andaman Islands called the Jarawa. There may be something still in Central Asia, but I doubt it. But the Q’Kuti marshmen are easily the largest and most uncontaminated of such groups, apart perhaps from the Jarawa. From a psycholinguist’s point of view, Q’Kut is the most exciting place in the world.”
“It doesn’t look it.”
“No, but the
marsh language . . .”
“Can you speak it? How the hell many languages can you speak? You hissed away in Japanese, didn’t you, that day I came? Can you speak Chinese? Have you read Chairman Mao in the original?”
“I’ve only read his thoughts,” said Morris, rather bowled over by this sudden spate of eager questions, and afraid that it might signal a metamorphosis to some other role, terrorist or vamp or ardent student. He felt better able to cope with her as she was.
“That’s great,” she breathed.
“I don’t know. I mean, you can understand a language without understanding what somebody is saying. That’s one of the things psycholinguistics is about.”
“Please go on about that,” she said, politely laying the ghost of Chairman Mao.
“Oh, well, the marshmen have a very interesting language. It contains a number of unique elements, but it lacks a number of other things which we would regard as normal, if not essential. For instance, there are no words and no grammatical structures with which to formulate notions of cause and effect. It can be done, but you have to go a long way round, using very clumsy expressions to achieve it. There are almost no general nouns, either. You see, the marshes are a closed world, in which almost everything is known, and has its own name. They have a few general nouns for things that seem to them mysterious, such as foreigners and particularly witchcraft. But you can’t say ‘plant’, for instance. You can’t even say ‘reed’. You have to name the particular type of reed.”
“That must make life difficult.”
“They get along. Then there’s another aspect of the linguistic-cultural nexus that particularly interests me. You speak the language in sentences, but the sentences are made up not of words but of word-accretions . . .”
The Poison Oracle Page 4