Free The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson

instance, there were to be some question about the validity of the treaty, then it might be useful to be able to prove its antiquity.”
    Bin Zair sat pulling his beard and looking at Morris with his old, bloodshot eyes.
    “The matter shall be looked into,” he said at last. “I trust, excellency, that all your animals are in beautiful health, and the slaves attending to them with care.”
    Morris blinked. So abrupt a change of subject is not common in polite Arab conversation, nor had bin Zair ever before evinced the slightest interest in the zoo. No doubt the old man considered that the new Foreign Minister was in danger of regarding his post as other than merely honorific. But in fact there had been a tedious little dispute about the number of helpers needed in the zoo—the sort of problem that in a place like the palace could only be settled by high authority, but which was in itself too trivial to bother high authority about, and so never got settled. Morris explained. Bin Zair nodded non-committally. The meat came round. A litigant sidled up and began, with ridiculous circumlocution, to sound bin Zair out on the possibility of helping his case along with a few bribes; Morris turned away and pretended to adjust the tapes of his recorder, ready for the next episode of the song. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the Sultan was starting on his second bottle of “sherbert” (bottled on the Heidsieck estates in Rheims, but re-labelled in Aden.) At last a soggy little drum began to revive the echo of the hoof-beats, and hands as black as insulating cable slid over the strings of two little harps, producing a tuneless, shivery whispering. Morris started his recorder. The music, if you could call it that, died. The boy in the centre threw back his head and sang.
    Last year Morris had regarded this passage as a disappointing one, after the reverberant nastiness of the scene in which Na!ar’s grandmother’s second brother had gathered and prepared the poisons, and the barbaric clutter of the preparations for the hunt. This time he listened with increasing absorption to the sparsely ornamented lines that brought the two heroes together for their necessary deaths.
    One of the traditional adornments employed by the makers of the marsh songs was a patterned arrangement and modulation of the successive relation-roots; even an apparently artless lyric would on inspection turn out to contain, for instance, three sections, the outer two using a series of roots in the same order and the central one reversing them. There was none of that in the description of the duel. Word-group after word-group clustered round the same root, the strong (or willed) transitive. The groups themselves were unusually short, the nominal and adjectival elements always the commonest of many possible synonyms, inflected very straightforwardly—straightforwardly, that is, for a language in which it was possible to inflect the nominal element “cheese” so that three syllables meant “the first-pressing cheese made last drought from the milk of my elder brother’s three-year-old buffalo”. As the heroes closed, the language became drier still.

    Nillum rode by the reeds.
    His servants and his friends were far behind him,
    Hunting a different boar.
    Hidden in the winter reeds Na!ar waited.
    His spear-thrower was hard in his hand.
    The tip of his spear glistened with fresh poison.
    He moved like a fisherman,
    An old fisherman who creeps to spear a quick fish.
    Nillum rode by the reeds. He reined in his horse.
    Na!ar sprang up. He threw his spear.
    He shouted with joy to see it fly straight.
    Nillum heard the shout . . .

    Of course the story carried the listener through. Cynical calculation? If your material is all blood and drama, it’s a waste to put frills on it, because no one will notice them? But to a man of Morris’s temperament the whole passage seemed to prove that he was listening to the work of a truly potent artist, a forgotten savage