The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson Read Free Book Online Page B

don’t know if it’s unique. There are nine clans, eight of which conform to a pattern you do find elsewhere. That’s to say they all have different fishes or animals for their totem, and strict rules about which clan you have to sell your sisters’ daughters to, and so on. Each of those eight clans provides the Sultan with a wife. That’s who they are.”
    “What about the ninth?”
    “They’re quite different. They provide the Sultan’s bodyguard, but they’re set apart in a lot of other ways. It isn’t just that they’re so much bigger than the others that they look like members of a different race—they’re expected to behave differently, too. They never lie, for instance . . .”
    “How do you know?”
    He laughed.
    “I don’t, of course,” he said. “It’s just that they haven’t got a totem animal, but where you’d normally get a totem-reference in a song, with the ninth clan you get a reference to their truth-telling. I’m so wrapped up in the songs that I hadn’t even considered that that might be a polite fiction. Anyway, they’re also set apart by not marrying. They steal women from the other clans, but as they haven’t paid for them it doesn’t count as marriage. There’s quite a bit of feuding among the other eight clans, so a lot of men get killed and the survivors are polygamous, but they’re all very strict about adultery. Kwan said that if they discover a couple in the act the woman is drowned and the man made to take poison; but if he’s a warrior of the ninth clan they let him off scot free. They don’t even demand the bride-price from him. They just drown the woman.”
    “Jesus!”
    “I don’t think it’s always as bad as that. They’ve got to be caught in the act, for one thing; and I’ve got a tape of a song about a ninth-clan warrior who took a man’s wife and defended her from the man’s family until she was too old to bear children, and then she drowned herself and he poisoned himself with his own spear.”
    “This still goes on?”
    “Drowning women? Yes, I should think so.”
    You cannot groom a chimpanzee to her satisfaction without careful scrutiny of every millimetre of flesh that is exposed as you move the hairs, so Morris had been talking without looking at the girl. The quality of this new silence made him look up.
    The ghost of Mao was back at her elbow. She was sitting straight up in the chair, square-shouldered, pale-cheeked, her pretty mouth a hard slit. Her angry Wedgwood eyes held his.
    “You sit here,” she said, snipping the words apart with bright emphatic teeth, “teaching an animal tricks while there are people down there living like . . .”
    She was trapped by her own rhetoric, by the use of the earlier noun. She changed gear.
    “You’ve never been down there, even,” she said. “You don’t know what it’s like. You just wait here, snug as a bug in a rug, learning it all second hand.”
    “That’s right,” said Morris. “Perhaps I prefer to work that way, so perhaps it’s lucky I can’t.”
    “Can’t?”
    “Uh-uh. One, the Sultan wouldn’t permit it. Two, if I tried the marshmen would skewer me through with poisoned spears.”
    “Oh.”
    “They aren’t isolated by accident. They chose to be isolated. It’s all in the Testament of Na!ar.”
    “Go on.”
    Morris picked up Dinah’s limp hand and studied it, as though he thought a secret might be hidden in the strangely non-human lines that criss-crossed the human-seeming palm.
    “As far as I can make out,” he said, “all this basin was once fertile and was inhabited by the ancestors of the marshmen. There are songs which seem to imply that. Then the sands encroached and they retreated into the marshes. It probably took centuries. Then—quite late—the Arabs came, and they fought. The marshes are pretty well impregnable, so it was stalemate until the last of what I think must have been the ruling clan of the marshmen, a hero called Na!ar, managed to ambush the