“Ho!” said Qab. “Will Fau carry such a message to the ninth clan? Ho!”
“I will give Fan a sign to take to Gaur’s new woman,” said Morris. “He will come.”
Qab looked suddenly impressed. He shouted to his wives, who came shrinkingly over, eased his leg on to a sort of sledge and prepared to drag him into the hut. He stopped them with a snarl.
“Dniy,” he shouted, “thou has a daughter who will die soon. The witches have touched her, so this witch can harm her no more. Give her to him for a wife, and my sister’s son will pay thee a third of the next calf of his lame mottled cow.”
A fat little man with a twisted leg strutted grinning from the ring. Hell, thought Morris, but he was in no position to give any more offence to the people of Alaurgan-Alaurgad, so he drew a sliver of reed from the mat, made it into a loop and tied the ends together. Dniy lowered his spear and Morris put the loop over the sheathed point.
“Good,” said Qab. “The witch’s hut is that where Tek died.”
His wives dragged him into the hut. The ring of watchers melted away, except for a man who squatted down a few yards off to make dung. Morris’s second wife (counting Dinah as the first) was a little black girl with a festering sore on her left shoulder. She came alone, very timidly, up to the mat in front of Qab’s hut and grovelled in the dirt before him. She wore a blue-bead amulet round her neck, and a blue-bead belt, and the loop of reed round her right wrist.
“How many years have you?” asked Morris.
“Seven, Lord,” she whispered into the dirt.
The marshmen could count, but usually didn’t bother. Seven meant any lowish number.
“What is thine outer name?”
“My lord has not yet told me.”
Morris thought, for the first time for years, of his own mother, longing for a friendly girl instead of her cold, clever, stodgy son. She used to make long, Barrie-ish fantasies about this other child she would never see. When Morris had sorted through the house after her death he had found a shelf of picture books with the same name written in each of them.
“Thine outer name is Margaret Lucy Morris,” he said. “For speaking it is Peggy.”
“I am Peggy,” she said, pronouncing the word exactly as he had done. “I am Margaret Lucy Morris.” She got that right too. She looked up. Her eyes were glazed with fright.
“Little Pegling,” he said, lacing his speech with all the friendly diminutives he could think of. “You are welcome. See, this is Dinah. She sleeps when the sun is hot. Her home is a big tree. She is a little naughtikins. She likes to be touched, very gently, thus.”
He showed her how to groom Dinah’s coat, and in doing so found a disgusting great tick, fat with blood. Peggy laughed when he squashed it and soon came to help. Then he gave her a banana, which she ate with grave doubt. She became afraid again when he insisted on dressing her sore with antibiotic ointment, but endured his touch. After all, if he had taken her down to the water and drowned her like a kitten, she would have thought that perfectly proper, and wouldn’t have resisted. About noon she showed him to their hut, sideways and down from Qab’s, but well above the flood-line. There was an old mat there which she unrolled for him, before going back to make the first of many journeys down with his belongings. She was shocked to find that he had no weapons, but wouldn’t let him carry anything else, except Dinah.
While she was staggering to and fro Fau came to his hut with the armature of a modern electric motor, presumably looted from the hijacked plane.
“To-morrow I seek Gaur,” he said. “The stranger will give me a safe sign for the new woman.”
“Come this evening,” said Morris. “When do we go to Gal-Gal?”
“On the third day. Let not the stranger fear that Qab will poison him. My age-set will not permit it. There is good sport on Gal-Gal.”
Worrying though it was to be still in the third person, it was also a relief to feel that one could eat and drink with nothing more to fear than the swarming ailments of the marsh. Morris thanked Fau and settled down to unpick the wire from the armature.
It was early evening before he had the hand assembled. Peggy was fanning a stinking little fire of dried dung right in the entrance of the hut. He would have liked to tell her to make it elsewhere, but this was her first day’s housekeeping, and he could see that every other hut on Alaurgan-Alaurgad was being similarly treated.
“Peggy,” he said. “I will need a basket for this, before I go to Gal-Gal.”
“I will ask my mother’s sister. She makes our baskets.”
“Good.”
Morris laid the completed hand on the mat. Struck by its size he spread out his own beside it, and found that his fingers did not reach as far as the last knuckles. That was curious. He had always envisaged Na!ar, despite the emphasis in the Testament on the hero’s size and strength, as another little wizened marsh man; but he must have been almost a giant. Like Dyal, like Kwan, like Gaur.
“Dost thou know any of the ninth clan?” he asked.
“My lord need not fear. I am not beautiful enough for a ninth-clan warrior to steal me.”
Morris laughed, waking Dinah at last.
“Who are their fathers?” he said.
“Their father is Na!ar,” she said. “He was big. They are big.”
“Where does Na!ar live?”
“Does my lord not know? Why, he lives in the body of the descendant of Nillum. He takes eight wives, one from each clan, and he begets on them warriors. Thus does Na!ar still fight for the people.”
Dinah stretched, scratched and looked around her. Morris offered her an orange, and while she was eating it she noticed Peggy, shrinking a little away from the edge of the mat, on which she would not have dreamed of setting foot. Dinah looked at Morris with puzzled limpid eyes. He clicked with his fingers encouragingly.
“Be still,” he said, as she moved carefully over to inspect Peggy at two-inch range. She noticed the weeping sore on the black shoulder and immediately made a funny cooing noise and prodded her fingers together.
“Dinah is sad thou art hurt,” said Morris.
“My lord must not see the place,” said Peggy, with a curious huffiness, like a teenage girl whose boy-friend has drawn attention to a pimple on her chin; then she was distracted by Dinah’s vacuum-like kiss. In a minute they were sharing a second orange, putting it pig by pig into each other’s mouths. In ten they were starting down to the shore, where the slow cattle were plunging home through the soupy lake while their warrior-masters danced, clicked and sang on the shore.
“Keep fast hold of her hand,” called Morris. “She has fewer years than thou.”
With something that was almost a lightening of heart he watched them move towards the melee; Peggy ought to have been carrying a toy bucket and spade, and beyond them should have stretched the sandy levels of low tide and beyond that still the lightly curling wavelets of a holiday sea. He thought with detached interest about what Peggy had told him, and knitted it in with what Dyal had once said about the problem of finding women when first he came out of the marshes. It explained, far better than any amount of buffalo-milk, the persisting size of the warriors of the ninth clan. It explained Dyal’s unservile relationship with the Sultan, and Gaur’s last words to Prince Hadiq. It also explained why it was almost impossible that either Gaur or Dyal had deliberately killed the Sultan.
Once there had been two races in Q’Kut, in that lost Saturnian age when the dunes had been green. Neither race had been Arab. There had been a big-boned, dominant people, and a race of scrawny near-slaves. Then the Arabs had come, and the big people had fought them, and the last of these, the hero Na!ar, had died fighting. Then those first Arabs, seeing the impregnability of the marshes, had reached a status quo with the little people by adapting their relationship with the extinct big men. There was no guessing quite how much had been changed, but the way it worked now was this: in each generation wives were sent from the palace to the marshes; these wives were the Sultan’s but were “lent” by him to his bodyguard—an arrangement which would have seemed shocking to most Arabs, and so was not widely known, though Morris felt he ought to have guessed that his fastidious friend would not have found it easy to beget children on women who reeked of rancid milk; after a while the children of these wives went back to the marshes, where the sons became the ninth clan; the largest and strongest was then chosen to be bodyguard to the next Sultan, and thus the system bred for continuing size; the prohibition on marriages in the ninth clan kept the genetic lines reasonably clear, though Morris didn’t like to think what happened to such babies as were born . . .