Lucky are they, beyond earth’s common lot,
Whose friends amuse, whose enemies do not.
Sometimes he had considered this trait to be a reaction of his mother’s insistence on suitability, but since he had been in Q’Kut he had come round to believing that it was a phenomenon of western civilisation, and that there were probably a lot of people like him in existence in countries where all recognisable cultural structures had withered or exploded into fragments. Living among Arabs, whose ancient culture had the strength of its own narrowness and so was only now beginning to collapse, or listening to the songs of marshmen who still knew the exact function of every man, every buffalo, every reed-channel in their universe, he had come to understand as a tangible reality what had before been only an academic commonplace, that the great thing is to belong, know what you belong to, and your place in it, to accept it and be accepted by it. But not any old grouping would do—it had to be of a graspable size, to contain its own inner structure, to give at least the appearance of permanence. A desert tribe, or a mining village, yes; the Pan-Arab nation, or some bloody great industrial union, no. Old bin Zair knew what he was, and where he belonged, but Morris had been unable to accept his own native culture. It had none of the desiderata—it was too large, too boneless, too impermanent. So quite unconsciously he had refused to accept his role in it, by refusing to accept people apparently like himself who had accepted their roles; and in the end he had escaped to Q’Kut, to the highly unsuitable roles of zoo-keeper and Foreign Minister, acceptable because of their very absurdity.
Morris thought about these matters erratically, poking the symbols into meaningless messages as he did so; in the end he got cramp in his left haunch, rose to ease it and rambled round his room full of a vague inner smugness at his own isolation. I am heroically alone, he thought. There is no one remotely like me in all Q’Kut.
Stooping to clear the counters away he saw that the last message he had made actually meant something, if you could call it a meaning:
blue square: Morris
brown circle: has qualities of
black square: person other than Morris
(The brown circle did not exactly mean “is”. It had been mainly used in an earlier stage when Dinah had been learning about qualifiers—Morris would present her with a banana and a yellow play-brick and a sentence to say or ask what they had in common.)
All right, he thought, all right. I probably did it subconsciously. It doesn’t mean anything.
But as he tidied the counters away he wondered whether in fact Anne too had chosen her role as a rejection of the non-culture she was supposed to belong to. Her roles, rather, because that was the alternative course. You could choose, like Morris, to be a quietist and wash about where the tides drifted you; or you could actively seek roles, the more extreme and violent the better, switching them as the mood took you, wearing mask after mask to hide the lack of features behind. Perhaps even the vet-despising, dog-owning Mummy was an invention, a beauty spot on such a mask—there had been something a little off key about her very first line in the role—absolutely giddy bonkers. Hmph.
He wondered what she would make of the flood-going feast, if she bothered to go and watch it from the women’s gallery.
2
Quite unreasonably Morris had expected the boys to be the same three that had sung the Testament last year. They wore the same white clay masks whose lips were set into a permanent pout to allow room for the funnels that made the young voices resonate, but they were three different boys. The main singer’s voice was less limpid than last year’s but he sang with greater drive and drama, even with a slight harshness that contrasted well with the softer voices of the younger pair. Their naked black bodies were striped with ochre designs. They sat cross-legged, motionless on a patterned reed mat in front of the throne, while to either side of them the little orchestra of their fathers and elder brothers thumped and clinked and gurgled at their tuneless instruments.
The wonderfully ornate passage about the preparations for Nillum’s boar-hunt came to an end in an onomatopoeic flourish of hoofbeats and horns. A vast series of dishes piled with spiced rice and mutton was carried in to the hail. The audience—petty sheikhs and their cousins, random brigands, senior palace courtiers, a party of town Yemenis on some unexplained mission, several groups of litigants who had arranged their cases to coincide with a famous free meal but whose real interest was in camel-theft and water-rights and blood-money—maintained for the most part the extraordinarily dignified silence with which they had listened to the singers, not one word of whose song any of them could have understood.
The Sultan spoke affably to a small fat sheikh. The leader of the Yemenis listened, nodding. Akuli bin Zair scratched his ribs, pulled his beard and turned to Morris, who was evidently still Foreign Minister, to be sitting so near the throne.
“Your excellency is entertained by the squealings of the savages?” he asked in his high, tinny voice.
“I like the songs,” said Morris.
“I have made a film of the performance of one of our dancing boys, one of the Hadahm. He is very beautiful and can do strange things. Your excellency must come to my quarters to see it.”
“The pleasure would be as great as the honour,” said Morris, who had in fact often been forced to watch the smutty contortions of young male prostitutes which seemed for some reason to delight and amuse quite respectable old Arabs. He himself detested them, so switched the subject back to the marshmen.
“I saw yesterday, from my windows, the ceremony at which the tribute was brought,” he said, gesturing at the odd little pile of offerings in front of the singers. “What do you do with them when the feast is over?”
“The spear is burnt, always. It is a sign that the killing of each other is finished. The boar-tusks we put in a chest, as we did even when the Sultan’s father lived under tents. That is how it has always been done.”
“You mean that if you were to count the pairs of tusks in the chest, you would know how many years ago the ceremony first started?”
“No doubt,” said bin Zair. “However, some may have been lost or stolen.”
“Even so, I expect you could have the oldest ones carbon-dated.”
“You think the matter important?”
“It is not for me to say. I am always interested in such matters. But if, for 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.