“As it happened,” he went on, “my Prince soon went to get his learning in your country, and I returned to the marshes and waited. It was a weary three years, but I eased them with hunting pig and women.”
“Prince Hadiq believes that the Sultan would shoot Gaur if he knew.”
“It is not possible. What! Break the Bond of Na!ar for a woman!”
“Oh?”
“Have you not heard the Testament of Na!ar? Does it not say that thus is the Bond broken. Many things in that song are obscure, but those lines, as I remember, are clear.”
Morris was puzzled. He remembered the passage clearly enough, but since Arabs and marshmen had continued to murder each other occasionally over the intervening centuries, he did not see how the lines could have a precise meaning. However, it gave him a lead-in to the next subject.
“Is that the only fashion in which the Bond can be broken?” he asked. “For instance, I have heard talk among the Arabs that the Sultan will soon give permission to the oil company to start drilling in the marshes, and later to drain them.”
“I have heard such talk many times. The Arabs are always full of foolish stories. They think about nothing but money.”
“I expect you’re right. But I have listened to a lot of Arab talk, and I think I have learnt to tell the grain from the chaff. This rumour seemed to me to have some substance to it. And bin Zair has been recently to the wells—he told me so himself.”
“It is foolishness,” said Dyal, calm, academic, slightly bored. “First, it would break the Bond, as you say, and my brother the Sultan knows that. He would have talked with me about whether it was possible. Second, if the oil company came we would kill them.”
“You too.”
“Certainly. I am here under the Bond. If that is broken I go back to my people and fight for them, as did Na!ar, himself. And how could the oil company explore and drill when every reed-bed might hold twenty poisoned spears? They could bring machine-guns and helicopters, but there is good hiding in the reeds, and until the last male child in the marshes was dead they could not begin. Do you think these Italians would come here to work on those terms, though they were paid ten times over? There is safer work elsewhere.”
“And you yourself would fight against the Sultan?”
“If the Bond were broken. We are each other’s hostages for its continuance, but when it is broken it is my inheritance to fight for the people.”
“I hope you are right, then.”
Dyal had been speaking in a slightly odd fashion. Morris had once worked with a Professor who had suffered a slow kind of nervous breakdown, lasting several months, until one appalling morning his personality had completely come to bits while he was showing the Mayor round a new wing of his language department. By hindsight the Professor’s colleagues had then realised that what had seemed minor mannerisms had in fact been symptoms, and one of these had been a tautness, almost an aggressiveness, in discussing the trivia of weather and county cricket, combined with a steady languor when the topic was of any importance. There was something vaguely similar in the way in which Dyal now switched from affable civilised conversation, about machine-guns and danger-money for oil-men and hereditary feuds, back to academic chat. Perhaps it was part of a boredom, already expressed, with social niceties, though he knew that his visit ought to have such a coda. But to Morris it suggested that there was more tension than appeared on the surface between the white-robed, westernised bodyguard and the naked savage who had once hunted pig and women among the reed-beds.
“It matters to you, then, whether the marshes are drained or no?” said Dyal.
“Certainly. I admire the language of the marshmen and the songs. If the marshes are drained, all that will go.”
“It has lived,” said Dyal. “That is enough.”
He spoke dispassionately, like a hunter discussing the necessary death of an old hound.
“Last year at the flood-going feast,” said Morris, “I saw Kwan weeping during the songs.”
“Yes, they are strong. I close my mind when the boys sing, but perhaps when I am old I will open it again. Kwan was a good man, and a great warrior. He killed many men. Once, before I came to the sands, he went hawking alone with the old Sultan, and the Sultan’s brother sent men to attack them. They fought all day and killed seven of the men, and in the evening the Sultan rode for help while Kwan prevented the rest from following. There was no moon, so Kwan stripped off his clothes and became a piece of the night. We marshmen know the smell of Arab. When the Sultan rode back with his guard in the morning he met Kwan walking unwounded out of the desert. They found fifteen dead men among the sands, eight of them killed with one small knife.”
“He never told me, though he talked a great deal to me. I never even knew that the old Sultan had had a rebellious brother. What happened to him?”
“He was sent to the marshes. Our women have a trick of drowning a man, so that the drowning lasts all night. Of what, then, did Kwan speak? It is strange, for he was a silent man.”
“I’ll show you.”
Morris rose and got out the tape-recorder. At the click of its cover Dinah climbed down from her nest and came carefully over with the curious, stiff-legged walk which chimpanzees use when they are being formal. Morris showed her which button to press and she wound the old tape off, watching with delight as the reels whirled. Then he threaded the new tape in and let her prod down with her black-nailed finger on to the “Play” button.
A mutter, a hush, and then Kwan’s voice.
“The dance for a dead warrior is arranged in this fashion. First, the dead man’s sister’s son kills a year-old male buffalo and drains the blood into a bowl, so that the priestesses can paint the secret symbols against witchcraft with the blood on the dead man’s body. Then the song-maker is sent for, who is the dead-man’s spirit-brother, and he makes a song and teaches it to his sons. Next . . .”
Morris did not play this tape often, partly because he was not much interested in anthropological minutiae, and partly because it reminded him how much he missed Kwan’s company. He stood staring out at the marshes, thinking of his big, gentle friend creeping naked about the desert under the stars, killing men with his knife. It took him some time to realise that something was the matter with Dyal.
Dyal was having a fit. He was sitting bolt upright in the chair, with the whites showing all round the iris of his staring eyes, with sweat all across his forehead like the condensation on a chilled coke-tin. He had a pistol in his right hand, but he clutched it to his chest just as Gaur had clutched his amulet. Morris switched the recorder off.
“Are you all right?” he said.
Dyal muttered several times and tried to speak. Then his whole body shuddered and relaxed. He lay back in the chair, wiped his brow with the back of his hand and sat for several seconds looking down at the pistol on his lap.
“By God, you have done an evil thing,” he said.
“I have not done it willingly, and if I can I will undo it.”
“I thought to kill you.”
“Oh. Well . . . er . . .”
“A year ago Kwan lived. He was well. His eye was clear and his skin soft and black. Next day he was dead, as if by witchcraft. Now I see that you keep his soul in a black box, and summon your unclean servant to make him speak.”
“He was my friend. I would not have hurt him for all the gold in Sheba. I swear to you, Dyal, that his soul is not in this box. It is only a piece of machinery. I will tell you how it works.”
“Oh, I know that. I have seen such things, for bin Zair uses one in his office. But . . but . . .”
Suddenly, awkwardly, he dropped into the language of the marsh.
“There are two worlds, and both are true. A man may throw his spear in the sun-world and hit nothing, but in the moon-world that spear strikes into his enemy’s liver. To be a witch is to know how the channels wind in the moon-world, and when the floods of that world come and go. One deed may be done twice, by those who know, once in each world. The soul of a man is in his words—how otherwise can the singer make the souls of his hearers dance? You have put Kwan’s soul in a box, Kwan who was my father’s brother.”