“They get along. Then there’s another aspect of the linguistic-cultural nexus that particularly interests me. You speak the language in sentences, but the sentences are made up not of words but of word-accretions . . .”
“Like those long words in German?”
“A bit like that. But all the word-accretions are constructed round roots of relationship . . .”
“Cousins and things?”
“Not that kind of relationship—or not only. We tend to build up our sentences round verbs. That’s to say our central notions are notions of action. They accrete their words round particular roots which describe the relationship between the various parts of the accretion. Their central notion seems to be a notion of everything’s position in a very complicated network of relationships.”
“Isn’t cause and effect a relationship?”
“Yes, of course it is, but I didn’t say that they had ways of describing all possible relationships—only the ones that seem to matter to them. For instance they can use a single syllable to express a particular personal obligation which it would take us several sentences to attempt to describe. But the thing about cause and effect is that it’s a relationship of such enormous power—I mean for us it is the relationship—it’s what verbs are about—that if you admitted it into a system like the marshmen’s I think it would destroy it—destroy the language, and thus, ultimately, the way of life. I must admit that I find the whole problem of relation-roots absolutely fascinating.”
“That’s funny. It doesn’t sound really your thing.”
“Oh?”
“Well—oh hell, I suppose this is rude—but you don’t look as though you related to anything much, except Dinah.”
With extreme care Morris parted a fresh section of the short, almost bristly hairs and peered at the line of greyish flesh below.
“It is arguable that the looker-on sees most of the game,” he said in as distant and donnish a voice as he could contrive.
“That’s what I mean,” she said. “You sit up here in this glass fortress, miles from anything that’s actually happening, teaching a monkey conditional clauses. That’s all done with, that way of life. You can’t know what it’s like, what it’s about, what it means, until you’ve been part of it. I bet you don’t even go into the marshes if you can help it!”
“I don’t go at all. I was taught the language by an old man called Kwan, who was the previous Sultan’s bodyguard. He used to arrange for the singing boys who sometimes come for state occasions to sing me a lot of their songs, which I taped. But he died just under a year ago, and as far as I know the only other person in the palace who speaks the language is Dyal, the present Sultan’s bodyguard.”
“There are some in the women’s quarters. I think that’s what they must be. I hadn’t realised.”
“There ought to be eight of them, very black, tattooed with different patterns under their eyebrows.”
“I haven’t looked that close. They keep to themselves, and—I oughtn’t to say this, but they really stink.”
“I believe they rub themselves all over with rancid buffalo milk.”
“It smells worse than that. The Arab word for them means . . .”
“I know.”
“I’m glad it’s only buffalo milk. Why eight?”
“Well, there’s a slightly odd arrangement down in the marshes. I’m not an anthropologist, so I 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 chief of the Arabs, Nillum ibn Nillum. They killed each other, but seem to have reached some sort of agreement before they died. Or perhaps their followers reached the agreement, and put it back into their mouths to sanctify it, if you see what I mean. Anyway, it’s all in the Testament, which is a perfectly marvellous epic song-cycle embodying the treaty; and the main effect is that the marshmen acknowledged Nillum’s heirs as their overlords, and in return he gave them the right to kill any of his followers who trespassed into the marshes . . .”