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!”