Free The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson Page B

cushions so that he could resettle with his back completely towards the man, which brought him directly opposite the tape-recorder.
    “What is the machine?” he asked.
    Morris explained, adding that he already had a tape of the Testament, but that the quality was poor as last year he had been sitting further away.
    “And what use do you make of these howlings?” asked bin Zair when he had finished.
    “I have learnt the language. I find it very interesting.”
    Bin Zair nodded like a grave goat.
    “I have lived all my life at the edge of the marshes,” he said. “But I have learnt no more of their language than is needed for various ceremonies.”
    “You have been busy with greater matters, no doubt.”
    “Perhaps.”
    At last the litigant rose and stalked away. Bin Zair bowed with great politeness to Morris but closed the conversation, which was a relief. As Morris settled to brooding on the passage they had just heard, he realised that it had been at this point in the feast last year that he had seen Kwan’s lined face glistening with tears, glistening like the spear in the song and the other spear which lay crosswise on top of the primitive offerings, its point looking as though it had been dipped in the blackest of black treacle. He wondered to whom else, now, the song had such a fierce meaning—none of the Arabs; not the Sultan who, Morris already knew, claimed to speak the language when in fact he had only an ill-accented smattering; Dyal, of course, and the new black giant sitting on the mat behind Prince Hadiq on the far side of the room; Morris himself, in his academic way; and (strange, strange) the eight women whom Morris had never seen, sitting up in the screened gallery, stinking of rancid milk. For them, perhaps, each syllable meant the stench of the lagoons, and the smoke of dried buffalo dung filling reed huts, and fevered babies muttering in the moist dark, and fighting duck, and home.

    3

    Dinah was having trouble with the concept of time. At first, though clearly puzzled by the blue cross being a different shape from any of the other nouns, she naturally attempted to identify the symbol with the egg-timer. Morris had anticipated this, and produced a square counter divided into blue and red along the diagonal.
    Blue/red diagonal square: egg-timer.

    He had also prepared a couple of other blue-diagonal squares, one for the clepsydra he intended to make out of a coffee-tin, and one for the kitchen timers he had sent for. He thought that Dinah’s first move would probably be to try and use the blue cross as a general noun to cover all transparent objects—glass always fascinated her. That wouldn’t be too hard to correct by producing the other gadgets—but then she would try to use the cross as a symbol for “gadget”.
    Morris was watching her build one of her untidy towers of play-blocks, and thinking of carefully timed processes which did not involve gadgets, when the curtain was pulled aside. Dinah fled to her nest.
    “Hi,” said the Prince. He looked grave. There was someone in the corridor behind him.
    “Come in,” said Morris, not rising.
    The newcomer turned out to be the large young marshman whom Morris had seen a few days ago in the canoe, and last night at the feast. The Prince produced what was obviously a very carefully rehearsed sentence.
    “Friend of my father, it is Gaur.”
    “Gaur is welcome,” said Morris, rising.
    The Prince made an encouraging little nod to his companion.
    “Salam Alaikum,” said Gaur, stumbling over the ancient desert greeting of the Arabs.
    “Alaikum as Salam,” said Morris, then added in the language of the marshmen their own salute: “Thy buffaloes may rest in my wallow.”
    Gaur hesitated an instant, no doubt because Morris had used the special vocative for addressing a warrior of the ninth clan, but there was no place in the language for somebody who, like Morris, did not belong to the hierarchy of the reeds. In the end he settled on a