At first Morris thought that the trial was over, that he had been found guilty, that the other preparations were all for some ritual to do with his slow death. He swallowed dryness, became dizzy and managed to sit down without actually falling. The dizziness left him but the fear remained, mingled with growing disappointment and resentfulness. If one was to be speared, or poisoned, or drowned inchmeal, one was at least entitled to expect that the moment of decision should be less hugger-mugger. One didn’t wish to seem egotistical, but one would appreciate it if the smelly little savages who had brought one to this place to die would stop gossiping about buffaloes for a few seconds and turn round and watch one’s fate. And surely they could have spared a less seedy duck to die with one.
Slowly he realised that he had misread the incident, and that the women had only been checking the quality of the poison berries. He stood up and saw that somebody else was watching him, a group of five young men, black and naked, the shortest of them almost twice as tall as the average marshman. The family likeness in three of them was so strong that he couldn’t decide which was Gaur, and when he waved a friendly hand they all five turned away.
Dinah was still asleep, but Peggy had news.
“Lord, men of the ninth clan came.”
“I saw them.”
“They brought a woman, white as thou.”
“I do not see her.”
Peggy led him to the edge of the rock and pointed. A single long canoe was moored in the middle of the channel.
“She hid,” said Peggy with a giggle. “She was ashamed when the men shouted.”
2
The ceremony proper didn’t begin until that curious quarter-hour when the whole marsh air turned to a glowing, coppery fog. It was like being inside a sunset cloud. At this time, Peggy said, witches are weakest, caught between world and world.
Proceedings began with an argument about seating arrangements. The dry-dung fires had been lit to drift their acid smoke around the rock-top, and the whole crowd had gathered, jostling, round the arena; but there was a certain orderliness in their behaviour for the first time that day; the men seemed to have grouped themselves into their seven clans, above each of which a resin-soaked torch of reeds flared and fumed. The women of the duck clan sat on the ground opposite the stone object, which was now decorated with a rope of shells of fresh-water mussels, and several small unmeaningful bits and bobs. Dinah had woken and Peggy had taken her down to the canoe and given her fruit. Now Morris led his wives, holding each one by the hand, towards the arena. Two clans bustled aside to clear a path for him, but began to mutter and grumble when he stopped level with their front rank and signed to Dinah to sit down. An old man with a weeping pink mess where his left eye should have been half-turned to him, and without looking at him directly said “The witches stand beside the house of spirits.”
“There is no witch,” Morris answered, even more loudly than he had intended.[1]
A puzzled mutter ran round the arena. The old man opened his mouth to speak again, but changed his mind and merely pointed. Dinah looked up and snickered at him.
“There is no witch,” said Morris again. He’d had plenty of time to wonder how he would face his accusation, but had not expected it to come so early. His previous attempts to argue about his supposed crime with Gaur, Dyal and Qab had, he now saw, foundered on a property of the marsh language, whereby the negative relation carried certain positive implications, so that to say “I am not a witch” had been to admit the possibility that he might be. Earlier Morris had been bound by his own feeling that the language and culture were sacrosanct, but now he didn’t care how many strands of that intricate old network he broke as he threshed to escape.
Curiously it was the children who first grasped what he was actually saying. He heard Peggy gasp, and at the same moment the child in her skin of paint began to whine. What, no witch, when she had spent eight hours putting her make-up on? The men on either side of Morris drew back still further, as if embarrassed by this faux pas. The old woman stopped her snivelling chant and listened while one of the other women whispered in her ear. She muttered what must have been an order, for as she snivelled on the women huddled together, active at something in their midst, whispering brief phrases. In an extraordinarily short time one of them stood up and walked slowly round the edge of the arena to the stone object, against which she set (with an action that reminded Morris strangely of the Queen laying wreaths at the Cenotaph) three crude mommets. They were identical, made of reed and cloth, without arms or legs. Only the narrowed neck between the round head and the long body made them human at all, but human they undoubtedly were—Dinah, Morris and Peggy, ready to stand trial for witchcraft.
The little orchestra of women struck up the overture on quite different instruments from the ones Morris had heard at the flood-going feasts; these were two long, thin drums, reed pipes and clay groaners. The old woman also groaned and began to shiver or rather to shudder. She sat to one side of the orchestra, and on the other knelt the two painted women and the painted girl, each with a little pot in front of her. The noise from the orchestra was a weird, continuous wheeze, unpatterned, as though a wild-life recording enthusiast had put his microphone against the stomach of some big beast with indigestion. The arena was an ellipse, with the orchestra at one end and the House of the Spirits, the stone object, at the other; all round the perimeter the black crowd jostled for position, but no one interfered with Morris’s view; they left a clear three feet all round him, like filings repelled by the pole of his presence. This was nothing to do with the hand of Na!ar dangling above his head—at least the fat man who carried the other hand was given only so much room as the bulge of his stomach cleared for him.
Suddenly the old woman’s shuddering came to a climax. Her withered limbs shook in the still air with a life of their own. She cried aloud a single word of her secret language—a command by the sound of it—then rigor gripped her. She toppled sideways and lay still.
Nobody paid any attention to her, because on her cry the two painted women jumped to their feet and began to dance; each held her pot in her left hand and used the right hand as a lid as she hopped round the arena in short, galvanic leaps, both feet together as if tied by a rope. They hopped in opposite directions, and the first to pass Dinah had the most extraordinary effect on her; she rushed away from the arena to the end of her leash, and when she could get no further she had what looked like an epileptic fit on the ground, writhing and sobbing. Morris moved back and knelt beside her, trying to calm her with his touch. Peggy came and squatted on the other side of her, frowning in the dusky light.
“Dinah is eaten with a spirit, Lord.”
“No. She was frightened by the dancing woman.”
“It is the spirit T!u who dances.”
“Peggikins, it is a woman covered in white paint.”
He regretted his words the moment he had said them—if the child was going to be killed, it would be easier for her if she accepted the whole grisly mummery as something true and real. He lifted Dinah, panting and whimpering, and carried her back to the arena, where she lay still with her head buried in his shoulder. Peggy took his free hand unasked.