The Poison Oracle by Peter Dickinson

chief of the Arabs, Nillum ibn Nillum. They killed each other, but seem to have reached some sort of agreement before they died. Or perhaps their followers reached the agreement, and put it back into their mouths to sanctify it, if you see what I mean. Anyway, it’s all in the Testament, which is a perfectly marvellous epic song-cycle embodying the treaty; and the main effect is that the marshmen acknowledged Nillum’s heirs as their overlords, and in return he gave them the right to kill any of his followers who trespassed into the marshes . . .”
    “No feud? No blood-money?”
    “The Sultan would pay that, but in fact it doesn’t happen. There hasn’t been anything to go into the marshes for, until recently. The Arabs don’t even water their camels here if they can help it, because the water’s so full of diseases. There’s probably every known form of bilharzia down there, and quite a few unknown ones. I’m always astonished that they manage to produce specimens as magnificent as Dyal and Kwan—the singing boys and the musicians are all weedy little runts.”
    “The women are tiny too,” said Anne. “But why didn’t you get them to teach you? That might have persuaded you that you ought to do something about those people, instead of just sitting here.”
    Morris shrugged, stuck his lower lip out, pulled at it, retracted it. Dinah, who had been peering into his face to see whether he would carry on grooming her, imitated his grimace but made it ludicrous by the extreme size and elasticity of her own lips. The girl laughed and became a social caller again.
    “I don’t know,” said Morris seriously. “I didn’t think of it. I suppose I ought to learn the women’s language, which is a bit different, supposing they’d teach it to me. But as for doing anything, I don’t know. I mean, all I know is that it’s not up to me to make moral decisions about other people’s lives. Of course I agree that some of the things that happen down there seem unspeakably vile—there’s a lot worse than I’ve told you—but . . . well, take these blokes . . .”
    He nodded towards the eunuch in the corner, now nibbling cheerfully at his second cheroot.
    “I’ve never seen any of them looking at all unhappy. Admittedly I can’t even bring myself to think what it was like when they were . . . you know . . . done, but now they seem perfectly content. And Kwan always talked about life in the marshes as if it were a lost paradise. Last year, when the boys were singing the Testament at the flood-going feast I saw his face streaming with tears . . .”
    “But all you really know is what one man has told you. One man. ”
    “I suppose so. But there’s something else. I was telling you about the language—well, in fact the whole verbal culture is as rich and sophisticated as anything I’ve come across—certainly anything that exists among illiterate people. It’s not just the language, it’s the way they use it. I’ve never heard anything to touch the songs, which range all the way from little blessings for the birth of a calf to great chanted epics. Those are perfectly marvellous. You get a basic story, but inside it you get dramatic sections, and love lyrics, and witches’ spells—there’s a lot of witchcraft in the marshes—but it isn’t a hotch-potch, it’s shaped and coherent, quite fit to stand up beside anything I’ve read in Western literature. Anyway, I’m quite certain that as soon as you started tampering with the culture, bringing in outside influences, pop music (I mean, look what’s been happening in Java, for instance) Cairo radio, Bible societies, all that, you’d kill the culture dead in a generation and the language in two. Look, half the world these days seems to tear its hair out and beat its breast if a rather dull species of bird is in danger of extinction. It seems to me much more terrible to risk the death of a language.”
    The unaccustomed energy of Morris’s speech seemed to