The Poison Oracle

by Peter Dickinson

  “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.

  Epilogue

  THE APPALLING CLATTER of the rotors slowed, deepened and flogged into silence. Even with the help of the radio beacon which Gaur had placed there, Gal-Gal had been hell to find in the mist; so the noise seemed to have gone on unbearably long while the helicopter had swung and hesitated, jerking in the erratic air, and the cabin had seemed to absorb heat into itself until it became like a lava-bubble floating blindly and stickily towards a vent.

  With a sigh of relief Morris removed his ear-muffs. Peggy aped his movement. She had refused to wear Arab clothes, but so did many Arab children and the Shaikhah had easily found jeans and a Yogi-Bear tee-shirt to fit her.

  “That was very much noise,” she said gaily, in English. Once again Morris marvelled at the accuracy of her ear—timbre apart, it might have been his own voice talking.

  “Too right!” said the pilot. “Jesus, what a dump! Do you come here often?”

  Morris grunted and climbed out. The marsh-waters had sunk in the last four months almost to their lowest level, reducing the humidity but raising the heat. All the acres of exposed mud reeked of rot. For a moment he thought that the weeks of coaxing and negotiation had come to nothing, for the rock seemed deserted and he had been expecting to be met by the representatives of all eight clans. But as soon as the bee-hive basket was handed out to him (on a shortened pole, to fit the cabin, and empty, though the marshmen were not to know that) black heads emerged from behind the cliff edges, wherever there was a foothold out of sight. For a while they simply remained heads; they might have been stuck there, bodiless, after some tribal raid, a suitable necklace for Gal-Gal; but when Peggy and Doctor Knopf, the specialist in tropical diseases, climbed down a few of them began to climb up. From the cliffs nearest the landing-place a group of three men came cautiously towards him, the two on the outside looking comparatively intact, but supporting in the centre an old man with a disgustingly swollen leg. He was Qab.

  “Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow,” said Morris.

  “Half my cheeses are thine,” said Qab. “Is this man also a great witch, Lord?”

  “The words are thine, Qab. The man knows much of big legs and withered arms and weeping skins and belly-devils.”

  Morris switched into English: “What can you do about a leg like that, Knopf?”

  “Not much, by the look of it,” said Doctor Knopf, a lean, yellow-skinned young man. “Can’t tell for sure without tests, but when they’re as bad as that you can usually only arrest the process and lessen the pain a bit. Grief, what a collection! What you’ve got here is a museum of tropical medicine. God! Is this a fair sample of the inhabitants?”

  In silence the representatives of the eight clans hobbled, or crawled, or were carried towards the helicopter, their limbs swollen or shrivelled, their skins scaly or suppurating.

  “The witches have been busy, Lord,” said Qab. “You have said that you would bring great witches to Gal-Gal, witches not of the moon-world, who by their charms would undo this charm and that charm. Is this a true report?”

  “It is true in part. My friend does not think he can make thy leg less big, but he can make it cease from growing. Moreover, he can ease the pain. But thy young men and thy sons—these he can protect from witchcraft, and drive out the charms that have recently begun to work . . .”

  “We have been told lies,” said Qab angrily.

  “Who has told lies?” said Morris in a bullying manner. “Do I lie? Does the ninth clan lie? Who else has spoken?”

  “You are an old fool, my uncle,” said one of the men who was supporting Qab. “Witch, there is a foul charm starting to work at my back. Can thy friend
drive it out?”

  He swung round. Qab staggered and clutched at his other supporter. On the nephew’s back, just below the left shoulder-blade, was a circular mess of yellow and orange pus, about two inches across, crusted brown at the edges. Doctor Knopf bent forward to examine it.

  “Antibiotics should clear that up,” he said. “It’s hard to say. These people are teetering right on the edge of extinction. They were probably OK until about fifty years ago, with a bit of immunity to all the local bugs and uglies; but now the river’s bringing them half the sewage of Asia. Still, that should clear up.”

  “My friend says he believes that charm can be undone,” said Morris. “Listen, when I came to Alaurgan-Alaurgad thine uncle gave me a wife, a girl of no value at all, who had just such a charm working on her shoulder, and was sure to die soon. But I put a paste on the sore place, and behold, it is gone. I will show you. Qab will bear witness.”

  He turned to call for Peggy. She seemed to have disappeared, hidden by the ring of marshmen who stood or sat listening to the conversation. Then he saw her, above their heads, climbing up on to the mysterious stone slab which they called the House of Spirits. Really, he thought with exasperation, she’s worse than Dinah.

  All the heads had swung round to watch her, but Morris did not feel the wave of communal horror that flooded through the crowd. He was transfixed by the usual pang of longing for Dinah. She wasn’t dead, but she might as well have been. Bin Zair’s attack on her, at the very moment when she had triumphantly brought off a great feat of intellect, had destroyed her whole relationship with men, including Morris. Now her only acknowledgment of his existence was that she chattered at him for fruit when he showed himself in front of the cage; she was almost fully integrated into the chimpanzee group, leader of the younger females, scruffy and slouching, accepting the bullying by the males as a norm of life. Occasionally in the first couple of months Morris had tried to renew her interest in the plastic symbols, but she had scattered them about in hysterical rage. Since then he had drugged himself with work—annotating the fast-growing pile of tapes of marshmen’s talk, and negotiating for the Sultan with the marshmen themselves.

  With an effort he pushed all that out of his mind.

  “There may be trouble,” he muttered to Doctor Knopf. “You’d better get back into the machine. Tell the pilot to be ready to go.”

  But none of the tribesmen moved, or even looked at the white men. They stared at Peggy, waiting. Morris couldn’t believe that she had climbed up there for anything except adventure, with perhaps an element of scorn for superstitions which she had grown out of. But as soon as she saw that she was a focus of attention she accepted her role, spread her arms wide, waited for several seconds, and at last began to dance. Now the marshmen crept towards her, silently, and it seemed unwillingly, like birds or small beasts hypnotised by the coiling and writhing of a snake.

  Her steps speeded up. She whirled like a dust-eddy from one end of the slab to the other and then back to the centre, where she stopped abruptly with her arms raised above her head. She began to sing.

  She sang in English. She had insisted that Morris should teach her his own language, and what right had he to refuse? What property had he in her marsh mind, as a research tool, if she chose to put it away? Besides, her will was stronger than his. All he could do was tape the learning process, to record whatever problems she faced in adapting to alien modes of thought. The answer had been almost none.

  “You are fools,” she sang to the marshmen. “You are a lot of stupid people. You do not know things. You do not know cause and effect. Cause and effect.”

  It was Morris’s own voice, piping triumphant and scornful through the steamy air.

  “Soon all you fools will be dead. Cause and effect. Cause and effect. Cause and effect.”

  Peter Dickinson

  in conversation with

  Sara Paretsky

  When asked if I would do a conversation with Peter Dickinson for The Poison Oracle, I jumped at the chance. Dickinson is one of the premier writers of the Twentieth Century. His language is meticulous, his narratives carefully thought out, his characters vivid and credible. I should have looked before I leapt: it’s one thing to be an admiring reader, another to conduct a conversation. Besides, the act or art of writing feels like a delicate watch, something like the handmade one with all the little moving parts that tennis great Rafael Nadal wore and lost. If you start tinkering with the mechanism, you destroy the watch.

  Sara Paretsky: I first read The Poison Oracle when it was published in 1982. The novel is so rich with themes and nuances—language, clashes of cultures, how do we communicate across cultures? across species? What makes a moral person, what goads a person who thinks himself a coward to act?—that I’ve always put it on my own private best-ten list.

  Peter Dickinson: That’s nice, but actually I don’t often think about that sort of thing when I’m writing. My focus is mainly on stuff like getting a character from one room into another. In a sense the plot—the story—is there to allow the big questions to happen up without actual ratiocination. Once there they have to be accommodated. Otherwise you start thinking of yourself as a Great Writer, which is death.

  SP: The Poison Oracle is a book about many things, but language and communication lie at its heart. It feels ominously prescient, with a hyper-polyglot as the protagonist. Hyper-polyglots are hot now; books are being written about them, but you were ahead of the curve. Are you, in fact, a polyglot yourself?

  PD: Far from it. I smatter French. I was intensively taught Greek and Latin for eleven years but never got so I could read Homer for pleasure. I seem to have a hang-up about this. Many of my books hinge on there being a language that some of the characters can speak and others not.

  SP: But the language that the marsh people speak is so carefully thought out.

  PD: That’s an illusion. Like most of the stuff in my books the language got built up as I went along. The only test is whether it is consistent with what’s already there, and, within limits, with reality itself. For instance the technical details in the “Note on Translation” at the start are, as far as I know, gibberish, but I was pleased to discover after I’d written the book that there are cultures that have no easy way to express cause and effect in their own language.

  SP: And the footnote in the middle of the oracle ceremony?

  PD: I’m not entirely happy about that. I had to re-read the book in order to talk to you about it and the footnote came as a bit of a shock. I’d forgotten it was there. I think I put it in because I wanted to give a bit more solidity to Morris’s nightmare predicament of having to argue for his life in a language in which rational argument is impossible. By hindsight, this is a key moment. Morris admires, respects, even loves, the language and he is forced to violate it. It is as important to provide specific detail of how he does this as it would be to describe the detail of a fistfight in a Mickey-Spillane-type novel. I’d tried doing this inside the narrative, so to speak, i.e. inside the nightmare, but I couldn’t make it work. I needed a more objective viewpoint. At the time I thought my apology for my lack of art was a joke, but I now think it may have been justified.

  SP: Communicating with animals is also becoming a rich field for scholars, and for people like me who communicate intensely with our dogs.

  PD: This is where the book began. I was listening to a radio talk about teaching chimps to use language. The earliest experiments were with hand signals—“deaf-and-dumb language”—and concentrated on vocabulary. But the programme I heard was mainly about a chimp called Sarah who was being taught to use coloured plastic counters of various shapes as words and other counters as grammar. Aha! I thought. There’s a book there. What if such a chimp were the only witness to a murder?

  I started next week, without a lot of thought. Setting the book in a standard research institute would requ
ire too much research on my part and involve unwanted real-world complexities. Besides, working with chimps is expensive, so who was going to pay for it? What about an eccentric millionaire, an oil-rich sheikh, say, running his own tiny sultanate at the back of nowhere? So no regular police-work. (I always have trouble with that sort of thing.) Like many of my books, The Poison Oracle is a version of the traditional country-house murder.

  SP: A pretty sophisticated country house. I wouldn’t have made a parallel between that and the kingdom of Q’Kut.

  PD: It’s an isolated community without much access to a larger world. And within it, or at least right next to it, is an even more isolated community, the world of the marsh people.

  SP: I wasn’t sure they existed when I first read The Poison Oracle. And then, in the run-up to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, the New York Times wrote about Saddam Hussein’s draining of the marshes in the Tigris-Euphrates valley. These had been home to Marsh Arabs for at least a thousand years. Did you visit the marshes?

  PD: I’m afraid not. I didn’t know much about Arabs, but I’d been reading Wilfred Thesiger’s book on the Marsh Arabs and been fascinated by the setting. Otherwise all of this landscape, the marshes and the desert, comes out of my imagination. I find if one thinks carefully enough about time and place and human behaviour, descriptions of place become authentic. You start with a premise of a world, in this case the marsh and desert side-by-side. The reader will accept that premise if everything that follows is emotionally authentic.