In the space of a day, dry river valleys turned into roaring torrents of water bearing along whole trees and bushes and drowned animals. Tracks turned to slicks of mud more slippery than ice. The scenery disappeared – whole mountains, whole plains – behind a curtain of falling water, so that the army slowed to a halt, the ponies turning round and round on the spot, disorientated, struggling to keep their footing. Horsemen cursed their mounts for refusing to budge, drummed their feet into the ponies’ ribs and drove them forward, only to find the ponies had had a reason for stopping dead: the ground ahead was not solid. So mud came up to their boots – to their sword hilts – to their chests – to their necks… Unable to back out or reach firm ground, they kept on moving forwards. Rusti watched men ride into mud up to their eyes – and then a helmet was floating for a moment – and then it was gone.
Rusti had never seen men ride underground before.
The mighty Tamburlaine was sheltered from the downpour by a canopy over his head; four outriders held the four corner poles. But the outriders’ eyelids were beaten shut by the raindrops. The poles grew so slippery, their hands so cold and wet, the canopy so heavy with rain, that one pole broke and the canopy slipped, dumping a bathful of water onto the head of the Gungal Emir, Conqueror of the World.
The outriders, seeing that nothing but death awaited, rode off into the rain and instantly disappeared from sight. It was as if the ancestors had passed judgement and dissolved them into mud.
Mud. It rose up over the wheels of the siege engines. It flowed into the throats of the noise-throwing guns. It desecrated the portable mosques. It gulped down the portable kitchens. Sheep and goats, lifted from their feet, floated by – bleating, capsizing – and sank from sight. The pack mules brayed in dismay at the disappearance of their hoofs, their knees, at the cold slop of mud against their bellies. Their eyes rolled. Their packs floated away. Camels stood stock still amid the chaos, like stilt huts in a brown lake.
Rusti, in charge of the elephants, feared every moment that they would take fright and stampede. He badly wanted Kavi’s help, and peered through the blinding rain for the cart. At his first clear sight of Kavita, his heart gave a lurch of fear. For the rain had turned the thin clothing transparent and plastered it against the thin body inside. It was plain, to anyone with eyes, that Kavita was a boy.
But nobody was looking. Nobody had time for so much as a glance: they had troubles enough of their own. A cartload of kibitkis had just overturned and the skin tents were sinking into the swill, like pigs drowning.
The bull elephants answered the thunder with defiant bellows. The smaller, female elephants began to scamper in circles or nod their heads up and down, up and down, like gossips fervently agreeing with one another.
“Kavita! Kavita! Come and help me! Come and ride Altan!”
Kavi looked up, his long eyelashes full of glistening rain. With a slight tilt of his head, he indicated that he had already been given his task for the day: to look after the injured Cokas. In his lap, Cokas was thrashing about, open hands slapping the hides that cradled him, talking to invisible people:
“Look there, see? Jebe come down, you’ll fall! Rusti tell him. Hey look! Buji is puking again! He eats too much cheese, that one! Temujin – hey Temujin!! Have you seen my dog? It was here…before… I had it right here in the…”
Rusti put his fingers in his ears. Kavi scowled up at him, not understanding.
“Don’t you hear? My brother is naming dead people! Everyone knows! You must never, never, never speak the names of the Dead! It brings disaster!” But worse than hearing his brother speak the unspeakable was knowing that Cokas plainly was seeing the ancestors – that they really were there – amid all this chaos – flying blithely through rain so torrential it was bringing horses to their knees.
The ancestors were gathering like crows over a battlefield.
Dread seized Rusti. “Kavita! Kavita! Make him be quiet! Do something!”
Bewildered, Kavi put his fingers into Cokas’s babbling mouth, and winced as the man chewed on them.
The elephants, who had seen many a monsoon, were quite untroubled by the rain. But they did begin to pick up on the human terror around them. They mooed and twirled and tossed their heads. Rusti shouted commands at them, but such was the hiss of the rain, even he could not hear what came out of his own mouth. A little bull calf elephant suddenly turned and ran off. Within a few strides, it was lost from sight – rubbed out by the rain. It would wreak havoc among the baggage wagons.
“Come and help me, Kavi! Please!”
Kavi squirmed out from under Cokas, whose thrashing arm caught him a blow on the ear. Cokas went on grinning at the faces he saw in the sky, calling up to them: “Khasar! Thought you were dead, my friend! Stop spilling your drink on me, Khasar, you clumsy dog!”
Kavi hitched up his skirts and clambered up onto the beast alongside Rusti’s, and they steered all the elephants away from the chaotic column of men, women, children, carts, animals and machines. Terrifyingly, a rhinoceros appeared out of the blinding rain, at one point, and trotted clear between them, its wrinkled hide streaming. The Emir’s zoo was escaping under cover of the rainstorm.
For a mile or more the elephant boys encountered clusters of people, overturned carts, tents pitched by those who had decided to sit out the rain and hide from the lightning. Invisible one moment, people suddenly appeared right in the path of the trotting elephants – blurred figures seized by panic, scrabbling to get out of the way, snatching up children and baskets… Kavi had to get the elephants far, far away from the floundering Horde.
Not that the Horde was a column, walking single file, of course – nothing as organized as an army. It was a nation strung out from one horizon to the other. But Kavi and Rusti struck off at a tangent and somehow, eventually, reached somewhere free of people; where there seemed to be nothing but rain and mud and thunder. They plodded blindly through a monsoon that turned the sky green and washed away the horizon. It washed the thoughts out of their heads, the words out of their mouths. They just rode.
The rain would slacken from time to time, raising Rusti’s hopes…then new downpours pulsed across the sky. Noon and evening were indistinguishable. Grey trees stood in the murk, like giant ghosts. Rusti was a Mongol, a herd animal. To him, solitude like this was as menacing as a pack of wolves.
“I think we should turn back now,” he said at last. “Find Borte. Find Cokas.”
Kavi said nothing.
“Did you see them?” Rusti blurted out.
“See?” said Kavi, speaking for the first time.
“The ancestors! My brother could see the ancestors!” Rusti said, frightening himself all over again. “He spoke their names. That’s bad luck a million times over!”
“He die,” said Kavi with a shrug, and found that the thought gave him pleasure.
“Die? No! Ha-ha! Cokas isn’t dying! He’s a warrior! Hard like a rock!”
Kavi shrugged again. “People die. All people. Is will of God.” But he found that it was also the will of Kavita. Kavita wished Cokas dead, along with his ugly wife and all his kind. “I go now. I go home.”
“What? NO!”
But Kavi’s elephant had broken into a trot. The dark, gleaming slab of grey, the smear of bright colours astride its neck was moving off at speed. Kavi, like the captured animals, was making a bid for freedom.
Elephants are herd animals: the rest set off to follow, despite Rusti cursing them and ordering them to come back.
Kavi urged on Deepti – a big cow-elephant who seemed just as eager as he was to escape slavery. In fact, she willingly broke into a run.
“Come back, Kavi!” called Rusti, and in his surprise and fright, he shouted all the wrong things, all the worst things he could have said:
“I saved you!
Where can you go?
I forbid you!
I own you!
You’re my slave-girl!
I won you!”
Soon
the two boys were riding at full tilt – clinging tight – Kavi shouting over his shoulder, “Go away! Go back!” –
Rusti taking no notice – “Wait! Don’t go!”
Thunder rumbled around the sky. Water splashed from under the flat-footed elephants. Then a whole muddle of dark hummocks, like molehills, were suddenly cluttering up their path…
Tents.
And mothers were running to snatch small children out of the way, and there were dogs, and banners flapping, and hobbled ponies rearing up in panic. Kavi tried to slow down, but Deepti did not stop running. She had not taken off in search of freedom at all. She was looking for her calf – the one that had run off during the storm – and she did not stop running until she found him.
Unwittingly, the elephant boys had ridden full circle and returned to the Horde. Kavi broke down and wept; the rain bullied the tears off his face.
Deepti was reunited with her calf. Rusti was reunited with his sister-in-law and her rattling armour of cutlery and bad temper. Tamburlaine was reunited with his prize string of war-elephants. Kavi became Kavita again, dark eyes aswirl with a new kind of turmoil.
And Cokas was reunited with his ancestors.
By the time the sky brightened, Cokas was gone. His soul was up there among the rain clouds: a spirit, dangerous and unpredictable and everlastingly travelling on the wind. Cokas had joined the great Horde of the Dead.
They found the cart, buried beyond its wheels, where they had abandoned it to go and quell the elephants. Still aboard were the sleeping mats and fleeces, the sodden family kibitki. But of Cokas there was not a trace. It was as if the rain had sluiced him away, and the mud swallowed him down.
Borte was a widow.
She raged and drank, and threw hot coals at the slave-girl Kavita for letting Cokas die. The neighbours offered little sympathy: a great many men had died in the flood – good men, fit men, men of rank. The neighbours had little pity to spare for Borte, who had lost a sick and helpless husband and might well be better off by it. “God is good,” they said flatly, and their faces told her not to argue. “Now you can take a new husband.”
If they pitied anyone, it was Rusti. He saw the pitying looks, but mistook them for sympathy over a dead brother.
Borte spat on the ground and said, “That it should come to this! That it should come to the likes of you!”
Creased by grief for his dead brother, Rusti struggled to understand her. “Me?”
“Well?” she barked. “Your brother’s dead, isn’t he? It falls to you. His duties fall on your shoulders. Aii! For what offence do the ancestors punish me like this?” And her undergarment of spoons and combs and bits and stirrups clonked and clanked, as she shuddered with disgust. “Archh! The shame!” and she spat again, this time full in his face.
Rusti gawked at her, mouth half open, not understanding, not wanting to understand. “What?” he said stupidly, because just at that moment he really wanted to be stupid.
Borte rolled her head and lurched from foot to foot like an elephant in distress: “Archh! And must I be married to such a fool?”
Chapter Five
HATE
No days were given over to preparations. Rations were low: no time to squander food on a wedding feast. A few words, a few rites, and Rusti and Borte would be man and wife. Well, boy and wife.
The marriage took place under a full moon as round as a battle shield. The moonbeams came down white as blades. Rusti waited for his bride in the rain, sitting astride his horse, watching the beast’s ears swivel uneasily, its breath turn to steam. From here and there in the darkness came the wailing of mourners keening over the death of child or parent, wife or husband in the floods.
But the neighbours gathered round, as they might gather round a brawl and cheer on the fighters. They grinned toothless grins at Rusti and shouted dirty jokes he did not understand, hacking up phlegmy coughs and cheers that sounded like jeering. They saw it as a chance to drown their troubles. After the ceremony, they would drink every drop of koumis, eat every morsel of food left in Cokas’s tent, then go, without leaving any presents, blaming the mud and bad luck.
Rusti lifted himself clear of the saddle to let the rainwater empty out from under him. The bride was so long in coming that even the snorts of laughter had fallen silent by the time the gossips fetched her out of the kibitki. She looked like a sacrificial beast being led to the slaughter. Her women friends yodelled and warbled wedding chants, but the struggle had worn them out. It had taken all their energy to persuade Borte to let down her hair and to prise her out of her rattling underwear of loot.
“Someone will steal it,” she greeted her bridegroom, hissing the words in his face. “If it gets stolen, it’s your fault.” And her face was livid with rage and cosmetics. Her pony bit into the flank of Rusti’s mount, whose feet were too deeply sunk in mud to kick back.
The ancestors were summoned to witness the marriage.
“My father would never have let this happen to me,” said Borte under her breath.
The mention of fathers brought childish tears to Rusti’s eyes. He liked what he remembered of his own father, a powerful, big man who might have fathered other sons for Borte to marry, if he had not died: sons Borte would have preferred: sons more like Cokas. Marriages are terrible for making you miss people who ought to be there and are not. That night, Rusti even missed his mother – and she had been dead so long he did not even remember her.
A drink of koumis was served to bride and groom in a single cup. Borte drank first then thrust the cup so sharply at Rusti that its contents slopped into his hair.
The maulana mumbled a prayer and invited them to join hands. Rusti reached out to do as he was told, but Borte had clenched her two hands into a single fist, shut so tight that her knuckles felt huge and glossy. She seemed to be forbidding her hands from giving anything at all to Rusti. Their knees banged together. The ponies began to circle each other, spooked by the mood of their riders.
Just then, Emir Tamburlaine, borne on his litter, passed by on one of his nightly tours of inspection. Noticing the little knot of spectators, he ordered his bearers towards it. So, like a man riding a magic carpet, he floated miraculously into Rusti’s line of vision. For the first time in weeks, the Emir’s lined, leathery face broke into a smile. “A marriage!” he said. “My elephant boy is marrying!”
The crowd (for all it was obliged to fall respectfully to its knees in the mud) was overjoyed. The evening was suddenly lucky. The bridegroom soared in their estimation: a personal favourite of the Gungal Emir! The Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction had turned the light of his face on the happy pair. The women forgot their weariness and began to sing.
“Many sons to you,” mumbled the Emir and floated on his way, but the guests (they were guests now, not just spectators) took up the blessing.
“Many sons to you, elephant boy!”
Rusti coloured with delight. Now perhaps Borte would think better of him too and remember that he was, after all, a warrior of the Horde.
“Live long Rusti, and have many sons!” chanted the neighbours.
Borte leaned towards him across the gap between the two ponies and whispered to him in a voice too low for anyone else to hear:
“Die young, like a dog in a ditch…tajik.”
Bad luck was indeed ruling the heavens: it was a terrible season among Tamburlaine’s nomadic army. After the floods came disease. The Royal Chronicler Shidurghu wrote of the mud, wrote of the sickness, wrote of the setbacks that so unfairly afflicted the glorious Gungal Emir.
Nobody wrote about Rusti’s sufferings. Under the great rolling wheels of History, the story of one young boy is easily pressed into the mud. Besides, there must be worse things than being married to a shrewish wife who hates you.
“But why she hate you?” asked Kavi, as they led the elephants down to a river to wash them.
“She calls me a tajik,” said Rusti. The injustice of it baffled him. Maybe Borte thought of the elephants as
tajiks, and that he had taken on their “tajik-ness” in the same way that he had taken on their smell. Phoolenda the bull-elephant sank onto his side in the water, and Rusti began scrubbing extra hard at his wrinkled grey skin. “Maybe it is just the worst bad word she knows,” he said miserably. “Maybe she just thinks I’m unlucky.”
“That cannot be,” said Kavi. “Crooked Pig Emir like you. You do not die in flood. You do not die in sickness. You have luck big like elephant.”
Rusti wondered if his “luck” was too big, and that was why it did not fit inside the family dwelling. He certainly did not feel lucky whenever he had to go home to his bride. “Maybe I’m too young?” Yes, perhaps that was it. Perhaps Borte thought that his twelve years made her, at twenty-seven, look foolish and old. “Or maybe she blames me for being alive when Cokas isn’t. The ancestors should have taken me instead. I’m not handsome like Cokas.”
Kavi gave a snort of laughter that Cokas should be called “handsome”, with his saddlebag cheeks and mean, puffy eyes.
“It’s true, I look nothing like him. I’m never going to be big like Cokas was. I never seem to grow.” A familiar, wistful regret swept through Rusti, and he stood looking at his slender little shadow lying along the riverbank.
“But she hate you before. You say. She hate you always. Before Cokas die.”
And it was true. Long before Rusti had given up trying to grow tall and handsome and clever, Borte had loathed him. “Maybe she knows about you, then.” But even as he said it he knew it could not be true. Borte would have killed Kavi on the spot if she had realized her slave-girl was a boy in disguise: an enemy in the camp.
“You kill her, yes? You kill her when she sleep!” suggested Kavi enthusiastically.
Rusti laughed. These days Kavi often came out with remarks like that: his thoughts circled the idea of murder, round and round, like flies buzzing round raw meat. And it was funny to hear such bloodthirsty words coming out of this small willowy person in a dress. Besides, the idea of Rusti murdering Borte was like a mosquito plotting to stab an elephant to death. So Rusti laughed and gave Kavi a friendly kind of push.
Tamburlaine's Elephants Page 4