Suddenly a number of possible explanations slid together. Morris turned to the Prince.
“I suppose the age-sets must have changed down in the marshes,” he said.
Even when he turned the sentence into Arabic the Prince only shrugged and nodded at Gaur. Morris asked the giant direct.
“New men became,” said Gaur. “At the flood-going.”
“Would I had been there to see,” said Morris—though to be honest he would rather have read about the ceremony, and perhaps watched a film of the dances. But his mild courtesy was received with a withdrawn glance that flickered for a moment from him to Dinah and then away. Still, it was gratifying to have guessed right; with the initiation of a new age-set—boys “became men” at roughly five-year intervals—Gaur must have reached warrior status and so could be sent to the Palace to guard the Sultan’s eldest son; and his arrival constituted an acknowledgement that Hadiq was indeed the chosen heir—with so many other products of the royal loins available, even an eldest son by a first wife needed to be constantly awarded symbols of his primacy. Gaur was a very potent symbol, with his gun at his hip and his hand on his amulet.
When at last the lift doors opened, Morris saw that the lobby outside the zoo was not empty. Two eunuchs sat on the floor playing their inexplicable finger-game; they had not, of course, heard the movement of the lift but the alteration of light made them look up and come smiling to their feet. They grinned at Dinah and made a curious wristy gesture to Gaur, but when the party moved towards the zoo doors they barred the way.
“My father is at here,” said the Prince. “One woman also.”
His hands fluttered through the sign language of the harem. Dinah recognised the process, though not the symbols, and promptly made her own sign to demand food. One of the eunuchs laughed, a breathy gargle. The other used his flute to blow a short message, answered almost at once by a near call and a distant answer. It was Dyal who opened the doors. Morris paused in the short corridor that led to the main inspection gallery and said to the Prince “Your father will ask how your English lessons are going. Tell him ‘Not so dusty’.”
“Dust was . . . dirt?” asked the Prince.
“Forget it,” said Morris.
But, like almost everything else that happened that morning, the idea turned out badly. The Sultan was showing off his marksmanship to Anne, who was wearing a very English tweed skirt, a powder-blue twin-set and a double row of pearls. Only the pearls were different from what her alleged mother might have worn at a point-to-point twenty-five years ago—they were far too big. Presumably the Sultan had sent for this gear in order to gratify his penchant for the English county style, and it was amusing to see how Anne wore the clothes: not exactly to the manor born, but with the slightly exaggerated stance and gestures of a musical comedy actress of the ‘thirties playing a manorial role; whether deliberately or by luck, she had hit the exact off-key note that would entrance her captor.
“Hello,” said the Sultan affably. “And how’s the English going, my lad?”
The Prince stammered, looked desperately at Morris and blurted out in Arabic “Not as the language of excrement.”
“I should think not,” said the Sultan. “Morris, you haven’t been trying to muddle his wits with the marshmen’s lingo, have you?”
“No . . . well . . . I mean . . .”
But before he could sort out the mistranslation they heard more fluting from the doors and another cry from Dyal. This time, of course, it was bin Zair, and the explanation about the Prince’s linguistics got lost in an argument about how far the old man should be forced to crawl, with the Sultan insisting on his own ludicrous rights simply because both Anne and Morris asked him not to. He then decided that as there were now seven people in the zoo they would have a shooting match. Dyal and Gaur were summoned from the door and they all took it in turns to bombard the gorilla with empty hypodermic darts. Anne, very much in a squire’s-lady fashion, attempted to put Gaur at his ease by striking up a conversation, all smiles and good-will; and despite the lack of language they seemed to get on well enough to spoil the Sultan’s aim; then Prince Hadiq had the lack of tact to shoot straighter than his father; either Dyal knew better or he too was disturbed about something. Anne turned out to be a very moderate shot; Gaur started badly, never having seen any kind of gun till a week ago, but improved quickly; Morris completely missed the gorilla with two of his five shots, while old bin Zair never hit it at all and was heaped by the Sultan with the harsh traditional mockery of the desert for the feeble warrior. They tried to get Dinah to shoot, but she was unable to connect the gun itself with the sudden appearance of the darts on the gorilla’s chest. In any case she had never much cared for the gorilla, who had been stuffed in a bristling pose of snarling anger. Morris found it a relief when he could at last pick her up and retreat, side by side with bin Zair, backwards from the Sultan’s presence. He took the old man into his office and made the ritual coffee. Dinah settled down to trying to type on the ancient, unbreakable Remington he kept for her.
“The women of your country, are they all so shameless?” asked bin Zair.
“It is not our custom to wear a veil,” explained Morris.
“Oh, I have seen the faces of women, many times. I have talked with Freya Stark. Even now there are women who work at the oil wells, unveiled. But I have not seen them roll their eyes and show a moist lip to some young savage, as your countrywoman did.”
“She was only trying to be friendly.”
“Among my people, if a man’s sister behaved so he would shoot her, and be praised by his friends.”
Morris could only shrug and pour bin Zair his second tiny cup of coffee. After this they would be able to get down to business. As so often before, he was maddened by the lack of subjects for small-talk—life in an unvarying climate made one realise how much the English owe to their crazy weather as a source of uncontroversial chat.
“What was Freya Stark like?” he asked, though in fact the lone explorers of Arabia, the Doughtys and Starks and Thesigers, filled him only with relief at not being like them.
“She wore strange shoes,” said bin Zair. “Now, the women at the oil-wells are like men—and the men are like women. Perhaps you will see them when they begin to drill in the marshes.”
The old man’s watery and blood-shot eyes looked speculatively at Morris, as though trying to guess whether his taste ran more to manly women or womanly men.
“They will not drill in the marshes, surely,” said Morris. “The Sultan won’t let them.”
“My master has many minds. No man can know them all.”
“But the treaty—the Testament of Na!ar!”
“Is my master a child, or a lover, to turn from his path for the sake of a song? I tell you, sir, I have done what you suggested and have counted the tusks in the chest. There are eighty-two pairs. The ceremony of the tribute therefore began when my master’s grandfather was a young warrior. If the treaty is true, it is yet not truly old.”
“There may have been another chest.”
“True. But where is it?”
Bin Zair peered into his empty cup like a hairy little ape looking for a fat grub in a hole. Dinah suddenly lost her temper with her typewriter and slid it angrily across the floor, but Morris hadn’t time just now to start her off on a new ploy; against all his own rules he fetched a banana from the cupboard and gave it her.