“What was Freya Stark like?” he asked, though in fact the lone explorers of Arabia, the Doughtys and Starks and Thesigers, filled him only with relief at not being like them.
“She wore strange shoes,” said bin Zair. “Now, the women at the oil-wells are like men—and the men are like women. Perhaps you will see them when they begin to drill in the marshes.”
The old man’s watery and blood-shot eyes looked speculatively at Morris, as though trying to guess whether his taste ran more to manly women or womanly men.
“They will not drill in the marshes, surely,” said Morris. “The Sultan won’t let them.”
“My master has many minds. No man can know them all.”
“But the treaty—the Testament of Na!ar!”
“Is my master a child, or a lover, to turn from his path for the sake of a song? I tell you, sir, I have done what you suggested and have counted the tusks in the chest. There are eighty-two pairs. The ceremony of the tribute therefore began when my master’s grandfather was a young warrior. If the treaty is true, it is yet not truly old.”
“There may have been another chest.”
“True. But where is it?”
Bin Zair peered into his empty cup like a hairy little ape looking for a fat grub in a hole. Dinah suddenly lost her temper with her typewriter and slid it angrily across the floor, but Morris hadn’t time just now to start her off on a new ploy; against all his own rules he fetched a banana from the cupboard and gave it her.
“Surely the marshmen will fight,” he said.
“With spears, against guns and aeroplanes?” asked bin Zair, holding out his cup to be filled.
“Perhaps,” said Morris as he poured. “In the Sudan, in the south, there are tribes which have warred for ten years against the government, and have not been conquered. They too live in marshes and swamps.”
“It is said that these marshes can easily be drained. They have but to build two short new watercourses through the southern hills; and when that is done, they also say that where the waters were will be good land, able to feed many cattle.”
“Has he told Dyal?” asked Morris, remembering how comparatively badly the bodyguard had shot.
“A slave? Sir, will you speak to my master of this matter?”
“I will ask him, yes.”
Bin Zair leaned forward, suddenly emphatic.
“Let not my master know that I have told you of it,” he said. “I am old, and so speak more than I should. You must ask him cleverly, as if the thought came from your own mind. He is your friend—he will not lie to you. Now you must show me your needs.”
As they rose Dinah picked up the typewriter again and threw it with a crash across the room; she must have decided it was an easy way of being given bananas. Morris clicked at her and she followed him sulkily out into the passage.
Bin Zair was a very Arab Arab, Morris found. One of his characteristics was that he was unselective about the relevance of information. He seemed to want to see everything; as a result the zoo inspection took well over an hour. For instance Morris had to go into exact detail of how the apparent cost of the equipment to purify the polar bear’s water, and the labour to keep its litter clean, was negligible compared with the cost of providing a new bear every few months. Bin Zair combed his beard with thin, shaking fingers and watched the big beast pad its ceaseless figure-of-eight across the diagonal of its cage. Polar bears always reminded Morris of mediaeval barons, narrow-brained, shaped for slaughter, magnificent, useless. No doubt Nillum ibn Nillum, the Sultan’s original ancestor, had been of that nature also, so the Sultan had come a long way. There was hope for mankind yet.
Far off in the other gallery the whoosh of the spring-guns sounded through the stillness.
“Must each animal have its own slave?” said bin Zair dubiously.
“No. All I want is two men who do their work properly, and do only that, and are not taken from the zoo to perform other duties. I want no more than I need. It is less trouble to use two good men than a lazy twenty. I would prefer hired men to slaves—I am not accustomed to the idea that an animal should be worth more than a man.”
“I can remember a horse which my father bought for the price of three hundred slaves,” said bin Zair. “Now let us consider the rhinoceros.”
But at that moment Dinah raced away down the front of the cages to the chimpanzee grove and crouched chattering by the bars. One of the caged chimps answered her. She bristled and backed away, still chattering, while the deeper voice of one of the males joined in the racket. Though she was perfectly safe Morris instinctively hurried to her side.
He found the whole group more lively than he’d yet seen them. Except for Murdoch, who had retired for safety with her baby to the top of the central tree, they were all ranged along the front of the cage, chattering or grimacing at Dinah. The scene reminded Morris of an episode in some ancient Wizard where the town urchins mock through the school railings one of their number who has been forced to dress in an Eton jacket and be educated with the nobs. Dinah answered their jeers with bitchy confidence, as if she knew that she had indeed left the slums to join the evolutionary smart set, Man.
At the back of the cage the shiny panel of black glass slid up, and there were Anne and the Sultan leaning on the window-ledge, laughing at the scene. The Sultan beckoned.
“His Majesty is angry,” said bin Zair. “You must go quickly. I will wait in your office.”
“Good,” said Morris. “I hope you’re wrong. He looked pleased.”
Even so he was slightly nervous as he took Dinah by the paw and hurried her off to the upper gallery, where he found that the atmosphere was indeed stickier than he would have guessed from that glimpse of the couple at the window. Dyal and Gaur were sitting against the wall several yards down the corridor. The Prince stood apart, withdrawn and angry, fiddling with one of the spring-guns as though, in the usual Bedouin manner, he wanted to take it to bits and put it together. Anne continued to lean on the window-sill while the Sultan turned unsmiling to Morris.
“What the hell have you been up to?” he said.
“In what way?”
“You don’t seem to have taught Hadiq a single syllable of English.”
“Rubbish mate! He’s not getting on at all badly, considering. He just lacks confidence, especially with you standing there expecting him to spout a mixture of Wordsworth and Bertie Wooster.”
The Sultan turned his head towards Anne.
“You are quite right, my dear,” he said. “It is a clear proof of the need to hire properly qualified teachers for the school.”
“You aren’t being fair,” she said. “Mr Morris is an absolute whizz at languages.”
“What school?” said Morris.
“Oh, it’s just a little plan we’ve dreamed up,” said the Sultan. “Dinah doesn’t seem to be making much progress either.”
“Rubbish again. She’s getting on fine.”
“She didn’t appear to be just now,” said the Sultan.
“Oh, that . . . I was talking about her learning the future tense.”
“There is a limit to my patience, Morris. I have gone to great trouble and expense to set up this experiment, and you dismiss it as ‘Oh, that . . .’ How much time has Dinah actually been spending with the other chimps?”
“Not very much, so far. I’ve had to wait for them to settle down.”
Morris did in fact feel mildly guilty about his having kept so much to the old routine that had prevailed before the wild chimps came, with Dinah spending practically all her time in his company; but he hadn’t expected the Sultan to react with such cold, bullying anger. The little dark eyes were like opaque beads in the flat, sand-coloured face. Morris, always easily cowed, was beginning to stammer reasons when Anne deliberately broke the tension.
/> “I’d love to see Dinah read something,” she said. “Could she do that now?”
“I don’t know,” said Morris. “She’s not in a very good mood, and in any case she’s just had a banana.”
“By God, Morris,” shouted the Sultan, “you seem to think you own this place!”
“OK, OK, let’s give it a go,” said Morris. “What would you like her to do?”
He found that he too, by now, had joined in the general fit of sulks that seemed to have permeated the gallery; he had always particularly disliked making Dinah do her reading as if it were a circus trick.
“Let her fetch the spring-gun from Dyal and give it to me,” said the Sultan, and without waiting to ask whether this was practicable he called to Dyal to put the gun in front of him on the floor. Morris scurried back to his office to fetch fruit for a reward to Dinah, and found bin Zair looking systematically through the files in the small cabinet. He looked up and smiled when Morris apologised for the delay.
Back in the upper gallery Dinah scampered over at the first rattle of the counters, instantly the alert pupil, teacher’s pet. Morris laid out a message on the tiles.
white square: Dinah
green circle with hole: go
orange circle with hole: get/fetch/take
yellow square: thing with no name
She sniffed a couple of times at the message, which was a form they normally used for search-games, then set off towards Morris’s office. Morris clicked and slapped down the red negative circle. She sniffed at it, then set off in the opposite direction, along the bleak corridor towards where the two guards set. Gaur shrank visibly from her, but Dyal laughed and when she picked up the spring-gun and returned he rose and followed her. She placed the spring-gun on the floor and dubiously compared it with the yellow square. Morris added a positive green circle to the message, and she immediately began to bounce up and down, eager for the banana, then chattered irritably as he spelt out a new message.
white square: Dinah
yellow circle with hole: give
yellow square: thing with no name
black square: (to) person other than Morris or Dinah
purple rectangle: qualifier “big”
All might have been well—tempers been smoothed, Morris’s treatment of Dinah justified, even his qualifications for teaching Prince Hadiq confirmed—had not Dyal and Gaur come to join the group; but Dinah was never very happy with the qualifying group of symbols; she knew perfectly well how they worked, but their presence in a message seemed to make the whole thing harder for her. Now she picked up the gun, trailing it by its muzzle, and studied the possibilities before her, the Sultan, the Prince, Anne and the two bodyguards. The hush of waiting became ridiculously tense, almost as though it should have been filled by a circus drum-roll. At last, with a rush, she laid the gun ungraciously at Gaur’s feet and scampered back to Morris’s side.
The ten seconds’ silence was so intense and shocking that it seemed almost as though Dinah’s mistake had some ritual significance.
“Well,” said the Sultan at last, “what went wrong?”
“Honestly it was pretty good,” said Anne. “In fact it was marvellous. Only she gave it to the wrong person.”
“Exactly,” said the Sultan, clearly so angered by her intervention that Morris wondered whether his haphazard reading had included some potted Freud.
“Give her a chance,” said Morris. “She’s got a tiny vocabulary, with as few nouns in it as possible, because we’re more interested in her grasp of logical sentence-structure than just lists of words. I told her to give the bloody gun to a big man. That’s the nearest I could get. The language doesn’t contain a name for you.”
As if to settle things he gave Dinah her banana, with which she retreated to the far wall, as though one of them was going to try to steal it off her. Morris crouched to pick the counters off the tiles, scrabbling with his finger-nails on the slippery surface.
“Whose names does she know?” asked Anne.
“Just her own and mine—these two. This black square means a person other than one of us . . .”
The Sultan interrupted, dropping into Arabic, the first time for years that he had used it, except on formal occasions, when talking to Morris.
“By God, Morris, you do me great shame. You and the ape have eaten my bread and taken from me many gifts, and yet you have not thought me worth a name of my own, to tell me apart from some slave or goat-boy!”
“I’m sorry . . .” Morris began in English.
“Let it be seen to. I will have a name. Let a black symbol be made and on it set in gold the shape of a hand, the symbol of my house.”
“If you like,” said Morris. “She’s going to have to see quite a bit of you if she’s going to learn to associate it with you, and only you.”
The Sultan laughed, and reverted to English.
“She can come to the Council—we’ll make her Minister of Education, eh, my dear? And Morris, old boy, you really must see that she spends more time with the other apes. Got it?”
He smiled, a jovial great genie. But his eyes were still as hard as glass.
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 alo
ng 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.”
The Poison Oracle Page 8