“Go away, fool,” said bin Zair. “We have only just drunk coffee.”
The man picked up his tools and went.
“Friends,” said bin Zair, “the Sultan has something to say.”
“The marshmen are on my face,” stammered Hadiq, “as they were on my father’s.”
“What!” said someone. “They killed your father and you will take them on your face?”
Fuad’s party shouted agreement.
“It is true there is a certain old treaty . . .” began bin Zair.
“Broken, broken,” yelled Fuad. “Death to the treaty-breakers!”
“Let us be told about this treaty,” said Umburak. “Let us also be told in what manner the Sultan died, that we may judge whether the treaty is indeed broken.”
“Good,” said bin Zair. “The treaty is not written, because the marshmen do not write. But they tell it every year at a feast when the floods go, always in the same words. I have heard it many times, and Lord Morris here has a tape of it. It is a peace treaty, ending the fighting between the marshmen and the Sultans, whereby they the marshmen acknowledge the Sultans as owners of the marshes and feudal overlords, and agree to pay a token tribute each year, and the Sultans agree not to harry the marshmen nor send their men into the marshes. There are indeed words about how the treaty ends, but they are very difficult and I do not understand them. Lord Morris?”
Morris put his head in his hands and thought of the clay-masked boys chanting in this place only a fortnight ago. The passage was in fact much less obscure than most of the cryptic utterances that made up the Bond of Na!ar.
“Yes,” he said, “it means something like this. The veins of us two are nets of poison. The poison binds our veins into one net. It binds son to son, a strong net. It does not rot. The floods come and go, and still the net binds son to son. The net becomes hard, being old poison. When new poison flows in new veins, but is the same poison in the same veins, then is the Bond broken.”
“It is all a lot of camel’s wind,” grumbled somebody.
“I ought to explain,” said Morris, “that the poison the marsh-men use on their spears does harden with age. It has to be renewed about once a fortnight. But I have always taken those last lines to mean that the Bond will last for ever, because the alternative is impossible.”
“Yet lo, it has happened,” said bin Zair. “The thing was done as closely to those verses as the bodyguard could achieve. Now I will continue to tell what I know. On the very morning of the murders a man came to me from the marshes. It is part of my office to know what is happening among the savages, so I have always shown favours to certain savages who brought me news, and this man came with a story that the marshmen were preparing to betray their lord. He said that the Sultan’s bodyguard, this Dyal, had learnt that the Sultan was preparing to prospect for oil in the marshes, and that the marshmen, to keep the oil, had declared themselves an independent nation and were going to send a delegation to the United Nations. At once I took this news to my master . . .”
There was now some agitation in the old man’s manner as he recounted his doings that morning, his insistence that the Sultan should talk to him out of earshot of Dyal, and the Sultan’s rage at the story. There were cries of disgust from the Arabs when he told how they had found poison on the darts; even the placid Umburak muttered angrily. Occasionally he turned to Morris for confirmation, and at the end called to him to explain the deliberate imitation of the story in the Testament of Na!ar and the relevance of the lines Morris had translated earlier. Troubled and stumbling, Morris did so.
“And has the Lord Morris more to tell?” he squeaked at the end.
“Well, yes. Two days ago I talked to the bodyguard, Dyal about the possibility that the Sultan might wish to drill in the marshes. He said he did not believe this was possible, but that if it happened then the treaty would be broken, and the marshmen would fight, and he would fight on their side. Certainly this seems to bear out what bin Zair has told us . . .”
“Kill them! Kill them all!” shrieked Fuad.
He seemed to have the meeting on his side. They voted with their lungs, raucously. Morris sat tugging at his lip and wondering what he could safely do to prevent his irreplaceable research material being bombed and burnt into oblivion. He was fairly sure that bin Zair had the facts roughly right, on the surface, but he was equally sure that it wasn’t really like that—OK, two men had killed each other, horribly, but what conceivable chain of reasoning could turn that into the cause for a massacre of a whole race, a whole culture? Morris was almost nerving himself to object—to object and be over-ruled—when his eye was caught by a movement in the uproar where there had been no movement before. The new Sultan, Hadiq, rose slowly from his throne and held his arms high.
Arabs of the desert do not respect Sultans as such, much, so it must have been some residual awe for the dead man that brought the meeting to silence.
“I say it is impossible,” said Hadiq. “Morris, friend of my father, tell them that it is impossible. Tell them that Dyal cannot have killed my father, nor my father him.”
Well, it was an opening. Unwillingly Morris took it.
“Certainly two days ago I would have said it was impossible,” he said. “I would have wagered all the money I have against it, yes, even after I talked to Dyal. And still, despite what bin Zair and I have said, I see two difficulties, and also a third matter. First, we must suppose that Dyal had planned this killing beforehand; there was not time or opportunity that morning for him to take the extra gun and hide it and poison the darts, and so on. Therefore he had time to consider his plan. Yet we are to suppose that he poisoned the dart with which the Sultan was to shoot at him. He chose this death. Is that probable?”
The point about poisoning was a strong one, but was lost when Fuad shouted that the marshmen were wild animals, and who could understand their minds? Morris did not sit down.
“Secondly,” he said, “my darts do not work immediately unless they pierce a vein. Who remembers the day when the hijacked aeroplane landed? On that day the Sultan boasted about two shots he had fired, the second hitting a small window of the aeroplane at several hundred yards, and the first with one of my dart-guns hitting the leg-vein of a chimpanzee in the cage. Both these were very fine shots, but the shots that killed the Sultan and Dyal were finer still—over twice the distance at which the chimpanzee had been shot, and through wire mesh, and remember that the second shot was fired in haste.”
This argument, which Morris thought equally strong, made very little impression, producing only a series of anecdotes about incredibly fluky shots over great distances. Morris stayed standing.
“Lord Morris has a third thing to say,” said bin Zair, deftly choosing an instant of silence to break the flow.
“Yes,” said Morris. “The Sultan and Dyal were not the only people much enraged that day. There was a Frankish woman there, whom the Sultan had taken to be one of his women; he would not let her go. When I came to my office after the arrival of bin Zair, I found her closing my gun-cupboard. Later I discovered it was empty. And there was also another marshman, a young man who was mad for love of this woman. Now, when bin Zair and I went to the lift-shaft we found only the young marshman there, but we could see by the lights that the lift was descending . . .”