Impatiently he walked towards the main doors. Bin Zair scurried on one side of him and Dinah on the other.
“We must question the guards,” said bin Zair. “If no one entered the zoo and no one left, and you and I were together, then it is plain reason that they must have killed each other.”
“I don’t know. You say the Sultan was very angry. Perhaps he killed Dyal in a rage and then had a heart-attack.”
“I have seen men die with heart-attacks, but never with their skin of such a colour. And whence came the poison.”
“Oh God! I don’t know. Let’s see whether Gaur heard anything.”
The short passage to the zoo doors was empty. In the lobby beyond them stood Gaur alone. The lights of the lift-panel winked in descending order.
“What man descended in the box?” said Morris in the language of the marsh.
“No man, lord,” said Gaur, spreading his palms to show emptiness. And of course it was perfectly likely that the lift was plying between lower floors without ever having reached this level.
“Since I spoke with thee who has come and gone?”
“Only the white woman I love, lord.”
“How long since?”
(Yes, Anne had been standing by the gun-cupboard when he’d looked up from his desk and seen her. That damned silly cloak could easily have hidden a gun.)
“Thou didst go and she came. All that as long since as it takes a man to milk a buffalo with a four-month calf.”
(Ten minutes? Quarter of an hour? Too long ago, anyway.)
“He says nobody came or went,” said Morris in Arabic.
“He is a marshman also. He is fresh from the marshes. That poison does not keep its strength many weeks, they say.”
“Well at any rate he won’t be lying about whether anyone else has been here. The ninth clan don’t lie.”
“All men lie, Morris. Who comes now?”
The lights blinked again as the lift ascended. Its doors rattled open and out flooded a pack of rifle-brandishing guards, sweeping with them the puffy little Arab whose main task hitherto had been to mix the Sultan’s hangover-cures. Morris took Dinah back to his office and listened to the shouts of rage and cries of astonishment. The Captain of the Guard came to ask for keys, saying that bin Zair had ordered a complete search of the zoo for lurking assassins.
“I’ll have to come too,” said Morris. You won’t be able to search the bear’s cage or the lion’s without my help.”
“We had intended to shoot them,” said the Captain. “What use are they, now my master is dying?”
Morris picked up the keys without answering. The Sultan’s body had gone, but as they passed the chimpanzee grove Morris’s eye was caught by the second dart. That might be evidence, he realised.
“Wait,” he said and unfastened the door. Dinah scampered away, whimpering, no doubt thinking that she was about to be shut in with the lower classes again. The apes, who were in a very nervous state, backed away into corners as he walked across the cage. Only Sparrow didn’t move. Sparrow sat against one of the concrete tree-trunks with his face drawn into the full rictus of dominance-display. Morris, as he bent for the dart, kept an eye on him in case of a sudden charge. It took him several seconds to realise that Sparrow was dead. He had been poisoned too.
Four
1
ONLY RARELY HAD the Sultan’s deep identification with the Arabs of the desert come to the surface. He had spent most of his time in the whimsical luxury of his palaces, and when Morris was present had revelled in the role of English eccentric; but in essential matters his reactions had been those of the bedu. The palace was where it was partly because of his feudal duties to the marshmen, but largely to satisfy his love of the big sands. He had refused to send Hadiq, or any of his other sons, abroad for their education, saying that they must first understand where they belonged. This beduism had not been a merely intellectual attitude; his favourite sport had been hawking, and he preferred to do this from the back of a camel, sometimes riding several days into the desert and while there regarding the heat, foul water, hardship and pain as normal and endurable. He used to refer to these trips as his health-cures, a way of losing a few stone, but they had been more to him than that.
For these reasons he had been much more admired and respected by the Arabs themselves than were many other little Sheikhs and Sultans. Even so Morris was astonished by how quickly the news of his death spread. Overnight men seemed to seep out of the desert; the dunes along the marsh were pimpled with their tents and the shore-line noisy with their camels; on any flat patch a couple of Mercedes stood twinkling in the sunlight. Three hundred rifles had been loosed off into the air as the old Dakota bumbled down the runway, up, and south with the Sultan’s body to the traditional family burial grounds. By next day the number of tents was doubled, and when Morris went to the Council meeting he had to push through crowded lobbies where groups of men stood around shouting at the tops of their voices.
There was a stack of weapons at the entrance to the Council Chamber, and as well as the usual pair of scimitar-toting slaves a young man with a cleft chin, carrying a modern sub-machine-gun.
“What are you?” he shouted at Morris without any greeting. “The war is an Arab matter. We don’t want any outsiders.”
“Oh,” said Morris, rather relieved. “In that case . . . Is Akuli bin Zair within? Since he asked me to come, I must tell him that . . .”
“Bin Zair!” said the man. “Enter. I did not know.”
About twenty Arabs sat in a circle in front of the throne. There were several gaps, which gradually filled. Hadiq sat on a low stool beside the empty throne, looking ill and tired, having flown down to the burial last night, mourned all night and returned that morning. He smiled palely at Morris, who settled on to a cushion beside a fat sheikh called Umburak, with whom he had once gone hawking along the marsh shore. Looking round the circle Morris saw that the three or four other Arabs he knew were all important men; so, presumably, were the strangers. The conversation was restrained and desultory, mostly concerning the dead Sultan’s virtues and especially his generosity. Every now and then somebody would curse the marshmen.
The last gaps filled. Coffee came slowly round—Morris was served about fifth, surprisingly high in the pecking-order. At last Hadiq stood up.
“You are welcome, friends of my father,” he whispered. “But I am sick with grief, so bin Zair, who was my father’s right hand, will speak for me.”
Bin Zair’s voice seemed scarcely stronger, but he was perfectly audible and less squeaky than usual. He made a more formal welcome, naming each of the assembly in turn; then he spoke simply of his love for his dead master, and said how long he had served him and his father before him, and that he could not eat nor sleep until his death was avenged; and then he turned politely to a dark little man, an almost legendary camel-raider called Fuad, and asked how this should be done.
Fuad leaped to his feet, pulled a piece of chewing-gum out of his mouth, stuck it behind his ear and began cursing. It was a peculiar performance, ugly but not very impressive, though he spoke at the top of his voice and his mouth frothed and his eyes bulged and shone with a pathological intensity. His speech contained almost no logical argument, no indicative sentences. It reminded Morris of the hoarse bellowings of an old-style trades union agitator trying to whip an apathetic strike meeting into action.
But it had its effect. Soon half a dozen men were on their feet, including the young man with the cleft chin, who appeared to have forgotten to leave his gun outside. They shouted too. Morris noticed that Umburak and some of the other men seemed totally unmoved by this uproar; they treated it as if the speakers were having a fit of coughing, and waited politely for it to end. But Hadiq was standing by the throne, waving his arms, trying to say something, without effect. Bin Zair leaned over and tugged gently at his robe. Hadiq sat down. Bin Zair waited a few seconds then rose and made a sign to the coffee-man, who came strutting into the middle of the circle, knelt down and began to pound his pestle into the mortar. The shouting stopped at once.