(Ten minutes? Quarter of an hour? Too long ago, anyway.)
“He says nobody came or went,” said Morris in Arabic.
“He is a marshman also. He is fresh from the marshes. That poison does not keep its strength many weeks, they say.”
“Well at any rate he won’t be lying about whether anyone else has been here. The ninth clan don’t lie.”
“All men lie, Morris. Who comes now?”
The lights blinked again as the lift ascended. Its doors rattled open and out flooded a pack of rifle-brandishing guards, sweeping with them the puffy little Arab whose main task hitherto had been to mix the Sultan’s hangover-cures. Morris took Dinah back to his office and listened to the shouts of rage and cries of astonishment. The Captain of the Guard came to ask for keys, saying that bin Zair had ordered a complete search of the zoo for lurking assassins.
“I’ll have to come too,” said Morris. You won’t be able to search the bear’s cage or the lion’s without my help.”
“We had intended to shoot them,” said the Captain. “What use are they, now my master is dying?”
Morris picked up the keys without answering. The Sultan’s body had gone, but as they passed the chimpanzee grove Morris’s eye was caught by the second dart. That might be evidence, he realised.
“Wait,” he said and unfastened the door. Dinah scampered away, whimpering, no doubt thinking that she was about to be shut in with the lower classes again. The apes, who were in a very nervous state, backed away into corners as he walked across the cage. Only Sparrow didn’t move. Sparrow sat against one of the concrete tree-trunks with his face drawn into the full rictus of dominance-display. Morris, as he bent for the dart, kept an eye on him in case of a sudden charge. It took him several seconds to realise that Sparrow was dead. He had been poisoned too.
Four
1
ONLY RARELY HAD the Sultan’s deep identification with the Arabs of the desert come to the surface. He had spent most of his time in the whimsical luxury of his palaces, and when Morris was present had revelled in the role of English eccentric; but in essential matters his reactions had been those of the bedu. The palace was where it was partly because of his feudal duties to the marshmen, but largely to satisfy his love of the big sands. He had refused to send Hadiq, or any of his other sons, abroad for their education, saying that they must first understand where they belonged. This beduism had not been a merely intellectual attitude; his favourite sport had been hawking, and he preferred to do this from the back of a camel, sometimes riding several days into the desert and while there regarding the heat, foul water, hardship and pain as normal and endurable. He used to refer to these trips as his health-cures, a way of losing a few stone, but they had been more to him than that.
For these reasons he had been much more admired and respected by the Arabs themselves than were many other little Sheikhs and Sultans. Even so Morris was astonished by how quickly the news of his death spread. Overnight men seemed to seep out of the desert; the dunes along the marsh were pimpled with their tents and the shore-line noisy with their camels; on any flat patch a couple of Mercedes stood twinkling in the sunlight. Three hundred rifles had been loosed off into the air as the old Dakota bumbled down the runway, up, and south with the Sultan’s body to the traditional family burial grounds. By next day the number of tents was doubled, and when Morris went to the Council meeting he had to push through crowded lobbies where groups of men stood around shouting at the tops of their voices.
There was a stack of weapons at the entrance to the Council Chamber, and as well as the usual pair of scimitar-toting slaves a young man with a cleft chin, carrying a modern sub-machine-gun.
“What are you?” he shouted at Morris without any greeting. “The war is an Arab matter. We don’t want any outsiders.”
“Oh,” said Morris, rather relieved. “In that case . . . Is Akuli bin Zair within? Since he asked me to come, I must tell him that . . .”
“Bin Zair!” said the man. “Enter. I did not know.”
About twenty Arabs sat in a circle in front of the throne. There were several gaps, which gradually filled. Hadiq sat on a low stool beside the empty throne, looking ill and tired, having flown down to the burial last night, mourned all night and returned that morning. He smiled palely at Morris, who settled on to a cushion beside a fat sheikh called Umburak, with whom he had once gone hawking along the marsh shore. Looking round the circle Morris saw that the three or four other Arabs he knew were all important men; so, presumably, were the strangers. The conversation was restrained and desultory, mostly concerning the dead Sultan’s virtues and especially his generosity. Every now and then somebody would curse the marshmen.
The last gaps filled. Coffee came slowly round—Morris was served about fifth, surprisingly high in the pecking-order. At last Hadiq stood up.
“You are welcome, friends of my father,” he whispered. “But I am sick with grief, so bin Zair, who was my father’s right hand, will speak for me.”
Bin Zair’s voice seemed scarcely stronger, but he was perfectly audible and less squeaky than usual. He made a more formal welcome, naming each of the assembly in turn; then he spoke simply of his love for his dead master, and said how long he had served him and his father before him, and that he could not eat nor sleep until his death was avenged; and then he turned politely to a dark little man, an almost legendary camel-raider called Fuad, and asked how this should be done.
Fuad leaped to his feet, pulled a piece of chewing-gum out of his mouth, stuck it behind his ear and began cursing. It was a peculiar performance, ugly but not very impressive, though he spoke at the top of his voice and his mouth frothed and his eyes bulged and shone with a pathological intensity. His speech contained almost no logical argument, no indicative sentences. It reminded Morris of the hoarse bellowings of an old-style trades union agitator trying to whip an apathetic strike meeting into action.
But it had its effect. Soon half a dozen men were on their feet, including the young man with the cleft chin, who appeared to have forgotten to leave his gun outside. They shouted too. Morris noticed that Umburak and some of the other men seemed totally unmoved by this uproar; they treated it as if the speakers were having a fit of coughing, and waited politely for it to end. But Hadiq was standing by the throne, waving his arms, trying to say something, without effect. Bin Zair leaned over and tugged gently at his robe. Hadiq sat down. Bin Zair waited a few seconds then rose and made a sign to the coffee-man, who came strutting into the middle of the circle, knelt down and began to pound his pestle into the mortar. The shouting stopped at once.
“Go away, fool,” said bin Zair. “We have only just drunk coffee.”
The man picked up his tools and went.
“Friends,” said bin Zair, “the Sultan has something to say.”
“The marshmen are on my face,” stammered Hadiq, “as they were on my father’s.”
“What!” said someone. “They killed your father and you will take them on your face?”
Fuad’s party shouted agreement.
“It is true there is a certain old treaty . . .” began bin Zair.
“Broken, broken,” yelled Fuad. “Death to the treaty-breakers!”
“Let us be told about this treaty,” said Umburak. “Let us also be told in what manner the Sultan died, that we may judge whether the treaty is indeed broken.”
“Good,” said bin Zair. “The treaty is not written, because the marshmen do not write. But they tell it every year at a feast when the floods go, always in the same words. I have heard it many times, and Lord Morris here has a tape of it. It is a peace treaty, ending the fighting between the marshmen and the Sultans, whereby they the marshmen acknowledge the Sultans as owners of the marshes and feudal overlords, and agree to pay a token tribute each year, and the Sultans agree not to harry the marshmen nor send their men into the marshes. There are indeed words about how the treaty ends, but they are very difficult and I do not understand them. Lord Morris?”
Morris put his head in his hands and thought of the clay-masked boys chanting in this place only a fortnight ago. The passage was in fact much less obscure than most of the cryptic utterances that made up the Bond of Na!ar.
“Yes,” he said, “it means something like this. The veins of us two are nets of poison. The poison binds our veins into one net. It binds son to son, a strong net. It does not rot. The floods come and go, and still the net binds son to son. The net becomes hard, being old poison. When new poison flows in new veins, but is the same poison in the same veins, then is the Bond broken.”
“It is all a lot of camel’s wind,” grumbled somebody.
“I ought to explain,” said Morris, “that the poison the marsh-men use on their spears does harden with age. It has to be renewed about once a fortnight. But I have always taken those last lines to mean that the Bond will last for ever, because the alternative is impossible.”
“Yet lo, it has happened,” said bin Zair. “The thing was done as closely to those verses as the bodyguard could achieve. Now I will continue to tell what I know. On the very morning of the murders a man came to me from the marshes. It is part of my office to know what is happening among the savages, so I have always shown favours to certain savages who brought me news, and this man came with a story that the marshmen were preparing to betray their lord. He said that the Sultan’s bodyguard, this Dyal, had learnt that the Sultan was preparing to prospect for oil in the marshes, and that the marshmen, to keep the oil, had declared themselves an independent nation and were going to send a delegation to the United Nations. At once I took this news to my master . . .”
There was now some agitation in the old man’s manner as he recounted his doings that morning, his insistence that the Sultan should talk to him out of earshot of Dyal, and the Sultan’s rage at the story. There were cries of disgust from the Arabs when he told how they had found poison on the darts; even the placid Umburak muttered angrily. Occasionally he turned to Morris for confirmation, and at the end called to him to explain the deliberate imitation of the story in the Testament of Na!ar and the relevance of the lines Morris had translated earlier. Troubled and stumbling, Morris did so.
“And has the Lord Morris more to tell?” he squeaked at the end.
“Well, yes. Two days ago I talked to the bodyguard, Dyal about the possibility that the Sultan might wish to drill in the marshes. He said he did not believe this was possible, but that if it happened then the treaty would be broken, and the marshmen would fight, and he would fight on their side. Certainly this seems to bear out what bin Zair has told us . . .”
“Kill them! Kill them all!” shrieked Fuad.
He seemed to have the meeting on his side. They voted with their lungs, raucously. Morris sat tugging at his lip and wondering what he could safely do to prevent his irreplaceable research material being bombed and burnt into oblivion. He was fairly sure that bin Zair had the facts roughly right, on the surface, but he was equally sure that it wasn’t really like that—OK, two men had killed each other, horribly, but what conceivable chain of reasoning could turn that into the cause for a massacre of a whole race, a whole culture? Morris was almost nerving himself to object—to object and be over-ruled—when his eye was caught by a movement in the uproar where there had been no movement before. The new Sultan, Hadiq, rose slowly from his throne and held his arms high.
Arabs of the desert do not respect Sultans as such, much, so it must have been some residual awe for the dead man that brought the meeting to silence.
“I say it is impossible,” said Hadiq. “Morris, friend of my father, tell them that it is impossible. Tell them that Dyal cannot have killed my father, nor my father him.”
Well, it was an opening. Unwillingly Morris took it.
“Certainly two days ago I would have said it was impossible,” he said. “I would have wagered all the money I have against it, yes, even after I talked to Dyal. And still, despite what bin Zair and I have said, I see two difficulties, and also a third matter. First, we must suppose that Dyal had planned this killing beforehand; there was not time or opportunity that morning for him to take the extra gun and hide it and poison the darts, and so on. Therefore he had time to consider his plan. Yet we are to suppose that he poisoned the dart with which the Sultan was to shoot at him. He chose this death. Is that probable?”
The point about poisoning was a strong one, but was lost when Fuad shouted that the marshmen were wild animals, and who could understand their minds? Morris did not sit down.
“Secondly,” he said, “my darts do not work immediately unless they pierce a vein. Who remembers the day when the hijacked aeroplane landed? On that day the Sultan boasted about two shots he had fired, the second hitting a small window of the aeroplane at several hundred yards, and the first with one of my dart-guns hitting the leg-vein of a chimpanzee in the cage. Both these were very fine shots, but the shots that killed the Sultan and Dyal were finer still—over twice the distance at which the chimpanzee had been shot, and through wire mesh, and remember that the second shot was fired in haste.”
This argument, which Morris thought equally strong, made very little impression, producing only a series of anecdotes about incredibly fluky shots over great distances. Morris stayed standing.
“Lord Morris has a third thing to say,” said bin Zair, deftly choosing an instant of silence to break the flow.
“Yes,” said Morris. “The Sultan and Dyal were not the only people much enraged that day. There was a Frankish woman there, whom the Sultan had taken to be one of his women; he would not let her go. When I came to my office after the arrival of bin Zair, I found her closing my gun-cupboard. Later I discovered it was empty. And there was also another marshman, a young man who was mad for love of this woman. Now, when bin Zair and I went to the lift-shaft we found only the young marshman there, but we could see by the lights that the lift was descending . . .”
“Yet the slave told us it was empty,” squeaked bin Zair. “And you yourself have said, Morris, that the ninth clan do not lie.”
“He said no
man
was in it,” said Morris. “Now it is possible that the lift was empty and merely descending because someone had called it from below. But it is also possible that the woman waited and persuaded Gaur to help her shoot the Sultan and Dyal, she to escape and he for love.”
“Whence came the poison?” said bin Zair. “Such a killing, as you say, would not be a thing forethought of.”
“The marshman was freshly come from the marshes,” said Morris. “If each of these approached close to one who trusted them, then they could shoot the dart easily into a vein.”