“Yet the slave told us it was empty,” squeaked bin Zair. “And you yourself have said, Morris, that the ninth clan do not lie.”
“He said no man was in it,” said Morris. “Now it is possible that the lift was empty and merely descending because someone had called it from below. But it is also possible that the woman waited and persuaded Gaur to help her shoot the Sultan and Dyal, she to escape and he for love.”
“Whence came the poison?” said bin Zair. “Such a killing, as you say, would not be a thing forethought of.”
“The marshman was freshly come from the marshes,” said Morris. “If each of these approached close to one who trusted them, then they could shoot the dart easily into a vein.”
“It is not possible,” said Hadiq, speaking full-voice for the first time. “It is not possible that Dyal should slay my father. Nor is it possible that Gaur should slay either of them.”
Bin Zair nodded, sucking his cheeks in and out, while the rest of the Council disputed this point. When silence settled he spoke.
“Yes,” he said, “your tale might be true, Lord Morris, though I do not think any man here would wager on it. In the same way it might be true that you or I did the killings.”
“You and I,” said Morris. “If we had been in league, we could have done it, though to what profit I do not know.”
“This is all politicians’ talk,” shouted Fuad. “Everyone knows that the old marshman killed the Sultan so that the marshmen should take the profit from the oil which belongs to us Arabs. I say . . .”
Somebody was tugging at his sleeve, but he went on shouting, lashing himself into fresh fervours of rage. Morris was glad, in a way, to have this motive for the Arab interest in the case out into the open. He was even more glad not to have Fuad on his side in the discussion. Once again it was bin Zair who brought the meeting to order, though Morris didn’t notice him doing it. All that happened was that while Fuad was still bellowing away four slaves appeared, carrying a cine projector and a collapsible screen, which they proceeded to erect regardless of the storm of words. By the time they had finished even Fuad was seated again, and waiting in polite silence.
The Council Chamber having no outside windows, it was a simple matter to dim the factitious sun behind the stained glass, though it then felt strange to sit in the expectant dark knowing that a few yards further off a real sun still beat downright upon the dunes.
“Lord Morris has forgotten,” squeaked bin Zair, “that he kept a camera trained upon the apes. Now we may see something. Allah, it is badly developed!”
Certainly there was something wrong, but it was never easy in Q’Kut to trace a technological fault to its origin. This film looked as though it had been over-exposed, so that the tree-trunks and the loafing chimps were all dark silhouettes against the background glare from the windows. For several minutes the chimps had the show to themselves and made nothing of it, lying around in undramatic heaps, reaching with lazy limbs for odd bits of left-over orange peel or vacantly fondling each other. Dinah must have been in one of the corners where the lens didn’t reach. Morris saw Sparrow lurch over to Starkie and give her a random buffet. One of the Arabs commented in the dark that he was just like some other Arab. Everyone laughed. Then, very suddenly, two figures strolled into view on the far side of the cage and stood talking. The small one, by his beard, was unmistakably bin Zair, and the large one, by his robes and figure, the Sultan. For a while they stood silhouetted against the glaring windows. The Sultan held one of the spring-guns cradled on his arm. Bin Zair talked to him with rising energy, hoicking at his beard, gesticulating like an actor. The Sultan seemed to answer once or twice, but suddenly he took a pace forward and struck bin Zair with his free hand, so that the old man almost fell; instead he turned his staggering into a sort of bow and backed slowly out of the picture. The Sultan, with the gun dangling now from his left hand, turned his back on the camera and gazed across the desert. All at once he staggered, as though struck; he swung round, aimed his gun almost at the camera and fired, and in the next instant collapsed against the bars. A chimpanzee (Rowse?) was ambling over to look at him when with a whirr and a click the film ended. The slaves turned the lights on and cleared the projector and screen away.
“Thus was the Sultan shot,” said an old Arab. “Shot in the back. Just so does a man stagger as the bullet strikes. I have seen it over my own sights.”
A general murmur of agreement rose. Those who had not personally shot enemies in the back, presumably ashamed to make their innocence public, joined in the grunts of assent. But something in Rowse’s gawky movements in the last few frames had caused Morris’s mind to make a forgotten connection. His suggestions so far had been not exactly frivolous, but at least academic, an attempt to sow enough doubt in these stony minds to divert them from immediate war. Now he saw a perfectly serious possibility—something which (if you knew the people concerned) was actually more probable than bin Zair’s hypothesis.
“There is yet another way in which the deaths might have come about,” he said. “This young man, Gaur, as the Sultan Hadiq will witness, was in deadly fear of my apes, thinking them demons. Now, we kept three spring-guns, one for use, one for practice and one spare. Only one was necessary, but as you know the Sultan loved guns. Now, is it not possible that the young man, hoping to kill some of the apes, put poison on the darts that were kept for use? And Dyal and the Sultan shot each other half in sport?”
“It is much more possible that he killed for love,” said someone. “A young man will do anything for love. Do you remember, Umburak, how your cousin . . .”
It was a long story of sex and violence and the breaking of sacred obligations to host and kin. Apparently all the Arabs knew it already, for they occasionally corrected the speaker about some detail. But they listened to it right through, without impatience.
“Yes,” said Umburak, when the story was over, “a young man will do anything when he is mad for love.”
“And an old one too,” said a jeering voice.
This must have been an insult too close to home, for at once a dignified old man on the far side of the circle, who had hitherto remained completely silent, was standing up, shouting at the speaker, with his hand on his dagger. Several others joined in. A chain reaction of accusation began, spreading from the old man’s lusts back to a hideous desert feud which had begun a generation ago when the Hadahm had poisoned a well belonging to the Amahra. Most of those present seemed still to owe allegiance to one side or other in the quarrel, and for several minutes it looked as though blood might be shed over it again. But bin Zair and the young man with the cleft chin and one or two others rushed about the riot, pushing angry men apart and coaxing them back on to their cushions. Bin Zair sent for coffee again, and at the sound of the thudding pestle the last of the tumult died.
The silence still bristled. Before the coffee was made a man in Fuad’s party stood up again.
“This Lord Morris,” he said in an angry voice, “talks like a politician. I ask you why? Now he has told us three or four stories of how the Sultan might have died. They are children’s stories, and we are men. But he keeps the guns in his room and he speaks the filthy language of the marshmen. All we men know truly that the marshman shot the Sultan for the oil, but this Lord Morris tries to hide the truth with words and stories. Why? Does it not show that he and the marshmen plotted together to kill the Sultan?”
Morris was astonished, but not afraid because it was impossible for him to take the idea seriously; it took him some time to realise that it was not impossible for others, a point brought strongly home when he looked up from trying to gather his wits amid the uproar and found that the young man with the cleft chin was dancing in front of him but somehow keeping his gun-barrel pointing steadily at Morris’s chest.