The Poison Oracle Read Free Page B

integration into the society of the new chimps didn’t seem to be spoiling her relationship with him.
    As he waited for the lift that would take him two floors down to his own living quarters he realised that it would have been a bitter blow if she had preferred Sparrow’s company.

    2

    Dinah ate her grapes with slow, concentrating enjoyment, perched up in her nest and peering at each one like a jeweller inspecting an emerald for flaws. Prince Hadiq, accompanied by the usual weedy Somali slave carrying the Batman comics, arrived for his English lesson before she had finished. He looked at her for some seconds while he fought with words.
    “I am . . . want . . . the grapes . . . above,” he muttered.
    “I would like some grapes too, please,” corrected Morris. He tried to sound patient, but his residual bad temper over the shooting of Sparrow came clearly through.
    The Prince pouted. His fine but childish features became set as he started on the construction of another sentence. Morris found the process agonising to watch. He could never achieve imaginative sympathy with anyone, even a clever child like this, who could not pick up a language in a few weeks, so he swung away and looked through the window as though he was interested in the unappealing view.
    There was only one hill in that part of Q’Kut, not counting dunes. The palace stood on its summit, ninety feet above the dead levels where the marshes seemed to bounce and heave in the glaring noonday heat. In the foreground the new concrete of the airstrip blazed like a white-hot ingot, painful to look at despite the double layer of tinted glass. But everything else that Morris could see was coloured the same sulky khaki and wavered before his eyes as the heated air rose in different columns above reed-bed and mud-bank and water-course and lagoon. Q’Kut was one of those places where you expected to see further by night than by day; when the heat-haze condensed into dew Morris could usually make out the black line of the hill ranges, ninety miles away on the borders of the tiny sultanate, but now he couldn’t even see the nearest stand of giant pig-reed three miles beyond the air-strip.
    “You are give me better honour unless I tell my father will make you flodge,” said the prince all in one squeaky breath.
    “Flogged,” corrected Morris automatically. But he had seen the child’s reflection in the tinted glass, and the misery of pride made inadequate. Morris hated that sort of thing, hated being exposed to it. And the prince would never have allowed him to see it direct. Really, it wasn’t a bad shot at a very complex conditional sentence—passion finds its own expression. Morris turned with a sigh, put the palms of his hands together, lowered his head respectfully and spoke in formal Arabic.
    “Serene rivulet of the fountain of power and wisdom, it is many years since thy father honoured me with the undeserved gift of his friendship. No man knows the heart of another, but I have learnt some of thy father’s ways. If thou wast to go to him complaining of my insolence, he would not satisfy thee, but he would invent some subtle manner whereby thy complaint could be used to diminish both thee and me. Is it not written ‘Ask not of the King that which the King cannot give, for thereby is his glory the less.’? Therefore let us come to an agreement. When we speak in Arabic we will conduct ourselves in the manner of Arabs, among whom thou art a prince, and so shall I treat thee. But when in obedience to thy father’s command we speak English, we will conduct ourselves in the manner of the English, from whom Allah has withheld the comprehension of honour.”
    “Their mothers are she-asses.”
    “In many cases thy observation is just. But when thy father speaks with me in English he condescends to answer bray with bray.”
    “Why may the ape feast on grapes when they are denied to a prince?”
    Morris picked up the satchel.
    “Dinah will get you some