Tamburlaine's Elephants

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Inside Kavi’s head there was no laughing: none at all. Kavi remembered the massacre of the prisoners. Kavi remembered the fall of Delhi. Kavi remembered the carcasses of the dead elephants lying like so many bloodstained boulders on the plain. He also remembered how easily these same all-conquering Mongols had been killed themselves by a few drops of rain.

  Now, each time the Horde passed through a gorge, Kavi found himself trying to conjure landslides. When they were fording a river, he pictured dangerous currents and hidden depths snatching them under and drowning them. When the Horde entered forests, he tried, by force of will, to make a single tree fall, fetching down another and another until the whole forest would come crashing down and bury the Mongols under trunks and branches. When they camped around a lake, Kavi tried to conjure crocodiles by the thousand, with jaws the length of a man and an appetite for flesh.

  Forced to play the gentle, harmless girl on the outside, he made up for it on the inside, with thoughts of blood and slaughter… And he did not need Rusti’s permission to wish Borte dead; he already prayed for it night and morning.

  It was harder to go on hating Rusti. Rusti would persist in being friendly! Kavi would have liked to keep things simple. He would have liked just to hate every Mongol alive, with all his might and main. Why, he only had to catch sight of his own girl’s clothing, or smell the scent of the almond oil on his hair, to fan the embers of his hate. The Crooked Pig Tamburlaine had reduced him to this – robbed him of family and freedom and dignity and turned him into something ridiculous. So Kavi spent a lot of time thinking about dire revenge. He imagined putting a poisonous snake into Borte’s bed. He imagined setting light to the crimson robes or golden brocaded white kibitki of that crippled butcher Tamburlaine. He imagined slicing the heads off all the officers of the Royal Court.

  I might just let Rusti live, “Kavita” told himself each night as he combed scented oil into his long, luxuriant hair. If he gets down on his knees and begs.

  Chapter Six

  FOUND OUT

  Bath time for the elephants would have been a happy time, no matter what. The huge animals relished it so much that they would speed up at the very sight of a river, shortening their stride into a comical, mincing trot, then flopping into the water like a collapsing riverbank. They would guzzle up gallons, then begin splashing and cavorting about, without a thought for their dignified status as Royal Elephants of the Gungal Emir. Rusti and Kavi got soaked, so they left their clothes on the bank, out of harm’s way. But no one saw the elephants cavorting, because no one else came near. The Horde kept up its superstitious fear of the beasts. Rhinoceroses look stupid. Goats look edible. Rats can be clubbed to death with a mallet. But elephants, with their huge, domed foreheads, terrifying tusks and nimble feet, look clever as well as fearsome. Rusti and the Mighty Tamburlaine himself were probably the only two Mongols in the entire Horde who were glad to have the elephants along.

  The more time Rusti spent with them, the fonder he grew of Mumu and the rest. Each had a different personality. There was Gajanan with his rumbling guts; Gulab with her fussing; nervy little Alpa, who always kept hold of another elephant’s tail for fear of being left behind. There was Damini who picked up his feet as if he was walking on nettles. One was called Gaurang, because of the paleness of his hide, and one, Mahamati, because she had the biggest brain box of all. And there was Phoolenda whose youthful dung was always a different colour from that of the older elephants. Phoolenda would spend a lot of time studying the dung of the older elephants, warming one foot at a time over it, longing (presumably) to match its splendour. Gajanan’s name meant that he looked like an elephant.

  “What else would he look like?” asked Rusti, when he heard this.

  “I not name him,” said Kavi with a shrug.

  In shallow water the elephants would lie luxuriantly, legs cocked up like dogs wanting their bellies scratched with the boys’ twig brooms. In deep water they would almost dance, geysers of silver water bursting into the sky from their upraised trunks. Yes, bath time was best of all. Best of all, because there was no chance of Borte coming anywhere near, no risk of discovery for Kavi. The two boys played and laughed and scrubbed and stood in bare feet on living, breathing stepping stones in the river, surrounded by the giggles of running water. And if they fell in, the sun dried them.

  At bath time, Rusti forgot that his wife called him a tajik and spat at him. Sometimes Kavi even put aside his own rage – like the dress he hung from a tree on the riverbank so as to play stark naked. And they vied to see who could jump from Deepti’s shining spine onto Elephant-Face Gajanan, and back again without falling in. Then Kavi challenged Rusti to mortal combat and they tried to push each other off their slippery grey islands with the twig brooms. Rusti lost, and as he heaved himself out of the water again onto Damini’s rump, he happened to glance over at the bank. That was when he saw the man in the shadow of the trees. Watching. They were being watched. An old man was standing, one hand looped around the gauzy cotton of Kavita’s dress.

  A local peasant, thinking to steal it. That would be all right: Rusti could chase after him and take it back. An elderly thief. That would be all right.

  But the old man’s clothes were not local. They were Mongol.

  A poor old Mongol, then, who had outlived his warrior days and his teeth, and was living on charity: that would be all right. For a few coins, or a plate of stew, he might be persuaded to keep quiet about what he had seen.

  But the old man’s clothes were not poor. He was dressed in the finest of robes. This was a man of wealth and rank. Worse on worse: when the sun went behind a cloud and the dazzle died off the water, Rusti could see the man more clearly – well enough to recognize him. It was Shidurghu the Chronicler, writer-down of History, a minister who every day sat at the feet of the Gungal Emir. For fully fifty heartbeats Rusti stood still, looking back at the man, waiting.

  Terror bit into his guts like a river crocodile. He wanted to tell Kavi: We’ve been seen! We’ve been found out! But what was the point? Why share the fear? He looked up at his friend – skin gleaming, long black hair plastered to his shoulders, whirling his broom over his head and whooping with triumph and glee. Kavi lived his whole life stitched up inside a bag of fear. Let him enjoy a few more minutes free of it. Time enough to suffer when the Chronicler reported what he had seen, when the guards came looking for the “elephant boy” and his “slave-girl”, when the death penalty was pronounced.

  And when Rusti looked back, the old man was gone. A breeze plucked at the dress in the tree, and set it billowing. It blew this way and that until its thin fabric caught on thorns. But beyond it, there was no one.

  “What?” said Kavi, following his gaze.

  “Oh,” said Rusti. “Nothing.” Kavi would find out soon enough. Surely, within the day justice would fall on them both like an axe. Rusti had seen men executed – their backs broken over a rock, a club blow to the head; heads bowling away from the axe. Knowing he was going to be sick, he slid down from Deepti’s back and went ashore. Rivers should never be polluted. Being a nomad, Rusti had known that all his life.

  He thought of running away. But Rusti was a herd animal, like a sheep or a horse or a cow. He could not imagine being apart from the herd – being one – an individual, rather than one ten-thousandth of the whole. So he helped Kavi pluck the hated dress out of the clutches of the tree and watched him turn himself back into Kavita. I’m sorry, he wanted to say. I am so sorry. We have been found out. But instead they remounted the elephants and rode back to camp. On the way, they passed the old man, walking. Rusti searched his face for signs of malice or outrage. The pale, filmy eyes met his: blank, inscrutable.

  Everything was normal. Borte greeted them as usual: Rusti with a muttered curse, Kavita with a slap to the head. There was no one else. Of course. They were ahead of Shidurghu; he had not yet reached home. Kavita lit a fire using dried dung for fuel, and cooked a dinner: spicy chunks of meat. Borte opened the keg of ferm
ented milk. Three tents away a husband was beating his wife. Somewhere a dog had decided to bark itself hoarse. The meat sat in Rusti’s mouth like muddy stones. He could not remember how to swallow. He drank some koumis to wash it down. Koumis, sour and curdled. It turned his stomach. This evening was no different. It swilled around in his stomach like seawater in the bilges of a ship. But he drank more, in the hope it would stop him from thinking. Still no one came.

  Borte was surprised by his drinking. She regularly taunted him that he was not man enough to take strong liquor. Seeing how it startled her, Rusti drank some more. Still no one came.

  Kavita watched, wide-eyed, out of the shadows. Rusti could see the pale circle of his friend’s face, changing shape, like a setting moon: the koumis was melting his eyeballs, making his ears sweat. Funny that Kavita had the job of making this horrible stuff: milking the mares and fermenting their milk. His own religion forbade Kavi to drink strong liquor, so he said. Unmanly religion, obviously. Not that being unmanly mattered as far as Kavita was concerned. The less manly the better, really. At the thought of this, Rusti gave a snort of laughter that brought koumis spluttering down his nose. Still no one came to drag him away for harbouring a tajik boy.

  Maybe the old Chronicler was blind and had seen nothing? Yes, that must be it! Or maybe he was so old that his memory failed, and he forgot the thing before he even got back to his tent? So no one would come, after all! Rusti was not found out. No one would hack Kavi limb from limb. No one would drag Rusti to death behind a galloping horse.

  Not that they would ever be so careless again. He would tell Kavi tomorrow, “You must be Kavita from now on, every moment of the day and night.”

  The koumis in his stomach turned to something hard and toxic. When he tried to get up and go outside, he was too drunk to stand. A tiny blacksmith inside his head began to beat out pain – to forge pain and nail it in a horseshoe shape round the back of Rusti’s skull. He fell against his wife and was very, very sick.

  He expected her to hit him, to scream and rage and bewail the miserable fate that had saddled her with such a husband. But in that instant Borte’s hatred of him turned as cold and solid inside her as rancid koumis. “You filthy tajik,” she said. “Sleep light. One night, I’ll kill you where you lie!”

  Then there was a massive THWACK of wood against hide, and the air filled up with choking dust. Someone had struck the wall of the tent, using the shaft of a spear. Now the spear’s end jerked in at the door and lifted the heavy flap aside. “The elephant boy must come,” barked the Royal Guard. “Elephant boy to the Royal Compound.”

  Outside, the guard rapped the spear against Rusti’s hand. He looked down stupidly at his reddened knuckles, before realizing that he was meant to take hold. Then the guard set off at a loping run, and Rusti, towed along behind, had to run his fastest to keep up. In this way, presumably, the guard did not have to demean himself by either touching or speaking to the boy he had been sent to fetch.

  Weaving in and out of tents, jumping animal tethers and guy ropes, avoiding small children and treading on the occasional drunk, they ran for at least two miles, through the straggling immensity of the Horde, to where a spinney of glistening banners and pennons flapped against a pink sunset.

  There was the Gungal Emir’s travelling palace – a small hill of spotted hides, carpets, furs and tapestries, tasselled with horse tails. Gathered around it, and looking like men crouched in prayer, were the tents of his sons, a wife or two, his chief ministers and generals. The spear was wrenched out of Rusti’s hand, and the Royal Guard, without a word or a blow, ran on his way, leaving Rusti standing at the door of a magnificent kibitki. In that moment, a melting fear went through Rusti that made his legs sag and his hands cramp shut to catch their own sweat.

  Not one but four lamps were burning within the tent, lighting up an interior large enough for a family of twelve. And yet only one man slept between the hanging panels of brocade and the fleece rugs. There was spindle-legged furniture from countries a year’s ride to the west. This was the tent of Shidurghu, the Royal Chronicler, writer-down of History for the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction.

  “Step forward, Rusti,” said Shidurghu, his face a livid yellow in the light from the lamps. And as Rusti stumbled over the threshold, Shidurghu opened a drawer and took out a small sharp knife. “Come here, boy. I have to question you.”

  Chapter Seven

  WORDS AND PICTURES

  On the table in front of the old man lay a pile of parchments, pinned down at each corner with carved lumps of polished wood.

  “Elephants,” he said, turning on Rusti a face as unreadable as the letters written in front of him.

  “Yes,” said Rusti stupidly.

  “Today I went to look.”

  “Yes,” said Rusti. And then, “Yes, Your Honour.”

  “Come close. I need your eyes,” and Shidurghu picked up a small knife.

  Rusti clapped both hands over his eye sockets and imagined blindness. It was not a punishment he had been expecting. His legs shook uncontrollably.

  “You refuse to look at my elephants?”

  Rusti parted his hands. Was this, then, the last sight he would see? An old man, mildly put out, sharpening the quill of a feather to a point?

  Suddenly Shidurghu slapped the back of one hand against the papers on his desk. “Pigs! I draw elephants and I have pigs!” Then, leaning on one elbow, the Chronicler rested his head on one hand and regarded the parchment in front of him, lips pushed out in a pout of dissatisfaction.

  Rusti looked. He could see nothing at first because of the tears of fright in his eyes, but blinking them furiously away he finally made out pictures at the edge of the pages, like patterns bordering a carpet. The pigs to which the old man referred were chalked on a piece of slate. Over and over again. Long-nosed pigs.

  “It’s the legs,” Rusti said. “They bend the other way. Not like horses. Like…like… Well. Like elephants, Your Honour.”

  “Ah!” Wiping the slate with one sleeve (Borte would have killed Rusti for letting a single grain of chalk touch such a sleeve!) Shidurghu chalked a new sketch.

  “And the eye is lower? The head bigger?” suggested Rusti. And when he could not describe what was wrong with the tusks, he drew it himself: the Chronicler put the chalk into his hand. Rusti had scratched many pictures of elephants in the dusty ground. But never had he seen the like of the elephants that flowed from Shidurghu’s quill pen after that. The Chronicler made quick small strokes that fetched a scratchy whisper from the parchment. And like twigs drifting together in a moving river, the sketch somehow built up. They created the likeness of an elephant. It was still something long in the legs and short in the trunk, but it was definitely an elephant. Unmistakably an elephant. Rusti marvelled as he watched: a whole caravan of elephants standing about at the edge of a forest of writing.

  “When the ink is dry I shall add more colours,” said Shidurghu. “Red. Gold. Small houses on their backs, as at Delhi.” And Rusti remembered with a jolt the howdahs strapped to the elephants’ backs on the day he first saw them. After the battle the elephants of Delhi had been reduced to bare-backed beasts, maimed and scarred. Rusti had forgotten, until now, those miniature palaces of crimson and gold that had housed flame-throwers, spear wielders and mahouts.

  The old man’s fingers were long and pale, the backs of his hands mapped with big purple veins. Not Mongol hands. A foreigner.

  “What does it say?” asked Rusti, without knowing he had been going to speak at all.

  “I write of the Great Conquest of Delhi, when the Mighty Emir, Glory of the World, captured the City of Gems and put to flight the powers of obstinacy and error. I write so that the air may be filled with his praise as the sky is filled with birds at sunset.” (He used such words! Rusti had never exactly thought of the Great Emir as “a snowy swan upon a lake of blood” or “the shining face of genius and might”, but of course if the Chronicler said he was, in that matter-of-fact voice, then
it must be true.) Shidurghu drew an elephant upside down at the foot of the page, its trunk severed from its body, but its howdah still in place and its legs straight up in the air as if it were floating downriver rather than rolling over in death onto its knobbly spine. Sprinkling sand over the wet ink, he picked up the page and shook off the surplus. Underneath lay another sheet strewn with more horizontal figures. Men. Women. Children. It was a picture of the massacre of prisoners. “Behold the ungrateful rebels who defied the will of Our Mighty Emir, Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction and Bringer of Mercy, and had to be punished.” His voice was as flat as the battlefield.

  Rusti’s mind tried to swerve round the memories, but they were just too big: one hundred thousand prisoners massacred in the space of days. His nose filled up even now with the smell of it: the blood, the pile of dung he had set alight, to make the Emir think he had done his duty. Another lie. Another betrayal. What a worthless warrior Rusti had proved to be since his first battle! Probably he deserved to have his neck broken, or to be dragged to death behind galloping horses.

  A further sheet was peeping out from underneath the Great Conquest at Delhi, showing a blue-tinted border. There were the wavy blue lines overtopping the heads of horsemen, overturning carts, weaving their way through huddles of homes. “The floods!” exclaimed Rusti, starting to understand. A marvellous mystery took place inside this tent. Here the past was preserved for ever, on sheets of milk-white parchment. Wait till he told Kavi!

  “The floods, yes. When your unfortunate brother Cokas died,” said the Chronicler, and looked so intently at Rusti with his pale, foreigner’s eyes, that Rusti’s fright slithered about inside him like a piece of raw liver. How could Shidurghu, a minister of the Royal Court, possibly know anything at all about Cokas, or his obscure twelve-year-old little brother? “I write what I see,” said Shidurghu. “I write everything I see. Almost. That is my purpose. And I have seen much.”