“It is not a woman,” said Qab suddenly. “It is a moon-world creature. The women know it.”
Women, of course, were the experts in the detection of witches.
“You speak some truth,” said Morris. “Dinah is not a woman. She is not a moon-world creature. She is, as it were, the cousin’s cousin of a dog.”
“It is not a dog,” said Qab, examining Dinah critically. At that moment she became bored with the mat and noticed the hamper of fruit lying beside it. She was at the fastenings in a flash, and Morris had to hold the lid shut to prevent her rifling it. Furiously she flung herself in a circle round the mats, rushed over to frighten Qab’s wives, came back to see whether that had had any effect and at last jumped chattering to the ridge of Qab’s hut, where she sat grimacing at the steaming landscape. Well, she’s out of mischief up there, thought Morris, and turned patiently to his host.
“Qab,” he said. “You hear me speak the words of your people. Kwan of the ninth clan taught me these words. They are not the words of my people and perhaps my tongue will stumble. When I speak unacceptable words, do not think that it is my own soul speaking . . .”
“You propose to tell me lies,” said Qab.
“No, no.”
“Speak then acceptable words. Do not tell me again that your creature is a dog. Morch, you came to our pastures in the night. You slept in the middle of Tek’s Lesser pond. We heard you calling in the dark. You rose unharmed in the dawn. The witches are your friends.”
Despite the lack of cause-and-effect constructions in the language it was possible to put together a fairly damning case by producing a series of short, unconnected sentences, or single-word accretions, as Qab had done. Morris half-rose until he could reach the roll at the furthest end of his bundles; he opened it and spread it out until Qab could see the ultra-fine mesh of the mosquito net.
“We slept beneath this cloth,” he said. “See how small are the holes. Not even the cleverest witch can pass through.”
Qab fingered the net with his fleshless hands, fine as a lemur’s.
“Wah!” he said. There was a longish pause before he restarted the conversation. Morris sat looking at him; this was not what he had expected, after the archaic nobility of Kwan, the civilised calm of Dyal, the raw dignity of Gaur. This little man carried none of that weight. He did not even seem cunning, let alone clever. In another context he might have been an old peasant sitting on his doorstep, being approached by a stranger with some slightly unorthodox request and simply thinking how to make money out of the visit.
“Thou comest,” he said at last, “under that hand.”
He used the same archaic second person that Gaur had once used.
“True,” said Morris. “The descendant of Nillum sent me. He requires the aid of the people.”
“Qab has heard that the Bond is broken.”
“Morch has not heard that story.”
“Qab has heard this: a warrior of the ninth clan lived in the hut of the descendant of Nillum. The descendant of Nillum slew him with a poisoned dart.”
Curiously, this was the sort of conversation to which the language was well adapted. Qab had used a form implying that the Sultan was still alive.
“A poisoned dart slew Dyal, of the ninth clan,” said Morris. “At the same hour a poisoned dart slew the descendant of Nillum.”
“Who saw this fight?”
“No man, perhaps. I heard shouts. They used not weapons but practice-darts.”
(There was a word for these, as every male child was presented with a practice-dart and spear-thrower on being initiated into his first age-set.)
“Qab,” said Morris, “a man hunting his enemy will smear his dart-tip with poison. Will he also smear the dart-tip of his enemy with poison?”
“Riddles are for children and witches.”
“I do not speak riddles. The place of the fight was the hut of Dinah and her family. A warrior stood at the door, guarding it. This warrior was Gaur, of the ninth clan. He was new come to the place, and did not know our . . . our tracks. He greatly feared the kin of Dinah. On certain days Dyal and the descendant of Nillum threw practice-darts at the kin of Dinah, for sport. Did Gaur smear the darts with poison, hoping to slay some of the kin of Dinah?”
“No man of the sun-world knows the mind of another.”
“True. Now this Gaur has come to the marshes again. I wish to ask him this. I wish also to ask him what people passed the door where he stood guard. Will you send for Gaur?”
“Ho! I must send for a warrior of the ninth clan when he has taken a new woman into the reeds! Who hunts the boar with a feather?”
“He is under the Bond.”
“The Bond is broken.”
“That is not known. When Gaur has spoken it will be known.”
“Morch, this is an old tale. The blood-guilt is on the man that throws the spear. Another man has poisoned it. The thrower does not know. But the blood-guilt is his—every child knows that. It is in many songs.”
It was interesting that Qab knew that Gaur had brought Anne with him; it also accounted for Qab’s many hints that Morris was really a creature of the moon-world—the story of his witchcraft would have reached the marshes before him. But it was no help in the frustrating task of presenting a logical argument to a stupid and secretive old man in a language solely designed for making an elaborate and detailed picture of the surface appearance of things and actions.
“These two dead men were brothers,” said Morris. Dyal had used the word in Arabic which means blood-brother.
“Yes,” said Qab; it was the minor affirmative, a convenient grunt which agrees with a proposition only provisionally.
“I have heard songs in which brother fought with brother. Always they used unpoisoned spears.”
“Morch, you tell me lies. These are lies a child would know. A man who fights his brother does not use a practice-dart. He uses a new spear, never before tried. He does not put poison on it nor say spells over it. How should a man begin to kill his brother with a practice-dart?”
Morris opened his mouth to answer, but the very shape of Qab’s question defeated him. It wasn’t simply that the ugly little savage had restated Morris’s case as though it were a clinching rebuttal of that case; also his modification of the relation-root of killing which made the action incomplete—“begin to” was a very blurry translation—this showed how impossible it was going to be to prove a case to the marshmen by any logical chain of argument. It was as close as Qab could think to the idea of purpose and motive, and at the same time impossibly far from them.
A little to the left of where they sat, but almost down at the greasy edge of the water, two boys were practising with their throwing-sticks, those stunted clubs with which the marshmen stalked small game. The art, Kwan had said, was to throw them with the wrist only, not moving any other joint, so that the duck or water-lizard or whatever it might be was not scared by too much movement. The boys stood like little wizened statues, aiming at the horns of a buffalo-skull in the mud in front of them; Morris couldn’t see the flick of the black hands in front of the black bellies, but the throwing-sticks didn’t seem to miss at all. They struck the horns with a light clunk, sharply, in a steady flow, until the boys walked forward to pick them up. There seemed to be no connection between thrower and stick and target. Qab’s method of argument was like that—one sharp little isolated fact after another, related each to each only by his speaking them. Morris tried again.