The Poison Oracle (23 page)

Let’s pray there’s something useful on it, thought Morris. That’s all.

Seven

1

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

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

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

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

“Who is it?” said the man.

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

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

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

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

“It is my brother’s.”

“And is that your fine truck?”

“It is the Sultan’s.”

“How long have you served the Sultan?”

“Seventeen years.”

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

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

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

The man thought for a few seconds.

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

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

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

To trust him or not to trust him?

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

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

To trust him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gaur smiled.

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