Tamburlaine's Elephants

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  The guards outside the white kibitki held the pony’s head while Rusti dismounted. (They would never have done that a month before!) Rusti wondered if he could bring Kavita along with him one of these days, so that his friend could see the way he was treated, the wonders that lay beyond that dark tent entrance.

  “And how is your wife?” Shidurghu asked, as they settled to the second game.

  “A credit to her father and a terror to the enemy,” said Rusti (who had had time to think up a proper answer). He moved a pawn, releasing the turret-piece in the corner to roam around the board. The first thing he did, in any game, was to free his turret-pieces: he could not relax, somehow, until they had their freedom.

  “And how is your servant?”

  Rusti knocked over a whole squad of pawns, who rolled onto the floor.

  “Kavita?”

  “Ah yes,” said Shidurghu. “Kavi-ta.”

  It was not fair. Just when Rusti had forgotten all about the river, the elephants’ bath time, here he was, cornered by the Truth.

  “I won her. At Delhi,” he said, down on his knees, under the table, looking for pawns who had gone into hiding amid the rich patterns of the carpet. “She works. Like slaves should. She helps with the cooking.” Rusti plunged on. “And with the elephants.”

  “Ah! That, boy, is very…telling.”

  Rusti kneeled painfully on a pawn and cursed. Then he banged his head on the underside of the table and fetched a whole host of chessmen blipping down onto him and the floor. “Sorry, sorry, sorry, sorry,” he said as each rolled over the edge. “Sorry.”

  The Chronicler rested the tips of his fingers together and watched Rusti struggle with panic and a headful of lies, none of them big enough to cover the situation. Shidurghu knew about Kavi, and Rusti knew that he knew, and Shidurghu knew that Rusti knew that he knew.

  “A good slave is hard to come by,” the old man said. “You must keep her safe. Not let her out of your sight.”

  “Yes. I mean no. Mmmm. Definitely. Yes. A good slave is…like you said.”

  Shidurghu tapped his fingertips together. “In Samarqand, you will sell her?”

  “NO!” Both the place name and the idea caught Rusti off guard. “Why? Are we making for Samarqand?”

  “Even the wind turns homeward once in a while,” said Shidurghu spreading his palms.

  Rusti gathered up all the chess pieces and replaced them on the board. One turret-piece was missing. There was no suggestion of going on with the game. The Chronicler retreated behind closed lids, and Rusti backed awkwardly away – important not to turn his back on such an important man – towards the tent flap and the sunlight. Just as Rusti felt its comforting warmth, Shidurghu spoke again.

  “Samarqand. By way of Zubihat,” he said.

  “Zubihat?”

  “So you will be able to see for yourself the mighty works of Tamburlaine.” And Shidurghu opened his hand to show the lost turret-piece lying black in his pale palm. Rusti collided with a bridle hanging from the roof, got tangled up in its reins and fetched it down on himself as he struggled to get free. The Chronicler did not even trouble to open his eyes.

  Chapter Ten

  WARRIOR BOY

  It was true: even the Mongol Horde did not wander about perpetually, aimlessly, like leaves blowing in the wind. The Gungal Emir, Timur the Lame, Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction, was turning towards Samarqand, capital city of his Empire and a place of fabled magnificence. There had to be some spot on the rolling earth where ambassadors could seek audience with him; somewhere to house the chronicles of his daring exploits; somewhere for him to display the works of art he had looted and the presents he had been given by captured cities begging for mercy. There had to be somewhere for his Royal Zoo. Somewhere to sell captives to slavers, or put them to work building endless walls or canals. Somewhere to share out the Empire among his sons.

  The Horde headed eagerly for Samarqand as if, like tajiks, they would be happy to get home where they belonged. In fact it was more like a holiday destination, where they would spend a season trading, drinking, bragging, sleeping and getting bored enough to leave again. But after the hardships of this particular campaign, no one was complaining as the Horde flocked northwards towards Samarqand.

  Rusti had been there just three times in his short life. He remembered its marvels – squares and streets and brick buildings three storeys high – its mosques and mosaics and the white horses who grazed the peculiarly perfect meadows outside its walls. Best among his memories were the sweet-sellers in the market, their wares set out at eye level (well, it had been a while now), all crawling in flies and a perfume that set his spit running. Worst among his memories was watching his father Baliq die in bed – somewhere indoors – of a rat bite that had turned gangrenous. His last words to Cokas and Borte had been a simple instruction, easily obeyed he supposed: “Keep your oath to me,” Baliq had said. But his words to Rusti had left the little boy weeping, powerless to obey. “Take off the ceiling, son. I want to see the stars.” Even standing on a chair, the four-year-old Rusti had not been able to perform his father’s dying wish. So Rusti had mixed feelings about Samarqand. It spoke to him of failure and ghosts.

  And the route home did take them through Zubihat.

  Well, they could have skirted by it, of course: taken a different route. But Tamburlaine liked to revisit the scenes of his victories. He liked to make sure that the cities he had captured remembered who had spared their miserable lives, who had broken their pride and rubbed their noses in the dirt. Twelve years was a long time, but Timur had made certain the people of Zubihat would never forget him.

  Sitting one night eating his dinner, Rusti heard two old men talking outside the kibitki:

  “Two days to Zubihat, by my reckoning.”

  “…remember that name…forget why.”

  “The place where we built that tower, yes? For the women, yes? Waste of women, to my way of thinking.”

  Rusti’s ribs closed up tight around his heart so that it did not quite have room to beat. He was about to see the place where he was born. His home. His native valley. Ah but no! That was nonsense! The Chronicler’s story had been about some other boy, some other baby. Unable to breathe, Rusti shouldered his way out of doors, stumbling over Borte, who slapped angrily at his legs. “Clumsy fool! What did I do to deserve such a camel for a husband?”

  Outside, he shook his head hard, trying to dislodge all thought of Zubihat from his skull. It only made him dizzy. And the thoughts came back, black as crows. His shadow lay along the ground, slim and slight, jeering at him for ever thinking he might be a Mongol by birth, might one day become a warrior or even a proper man. Rusti kicked dust over his own shadow. “I won’t go. They can’t make me.” He breathed in the comforting smells of the Horde: filth and food and animals. He was the Great Emir’s elephant boy. That was all. That was quite enough! Shidurghu had been lying, or mistaken. Or his story had been about some other boy. “I’ll go around. I’ll take the elephants round another way. Don’t need to go there. Nothing to do with me. I won’t go.”

  “Go? Where go?” said Kavita, emerging from the tent with an empty bucket, on his way to fetch water. He flicked his shawl over his head with a gesture unknowingly learned from the female slaves.

  “It’s a story,” said Rusti, and pursed shut his mouth.

  “I like story,” said Kavita. “Tell.”

  Rusti looked nervously over his shoulder: the Mongols were a race of spies. “Not here,” he said.

  So the story was told within the shelter of lazing elephants. In the grey leathery ravine between their knobbly spines, great grey ears fanning away the evening flies, Rusti told Kavi the story of the tower at Zubihat – though of course he did not mention the baby boy. Kavi did not need to know everything. It was just a story, after all.

  The closer they came to Zubihat, the more certain Rusti was that he had never been there. Proof! If he had been born in these parts, he would surely recognize the cur
ve of the hills, the stones on the ground, the clouds in the sky.

  At night he dreamed he was walking into the place, and that people came running out of their homes, waving and smiling, calling him by name. “Look who’s here! Look who it is!” And their dogs wanted to lick him, and the women wanted to cook him supper, but he kept trying to point to Kavi somewhere behind him, and to say, “No, not me. It’s him. He’s the tajik! Not me, him!” When he woke, he told himself there was no truth in dreams.

  He was right.

  There were no people in Zubihat.

  Oh, there were a few settlements nearby. Even some of the houses they passed were built of stone carried away from the demolished town. But Zubihat itself had not been rebuilt after its defeat at the hands of Tamburlaine. It had been abandoned: a place of ghosts; a place poisoned by memories, as a waterhole can be poisoned by the body of a dead dog. The air was dank with sorrow, and people do not choose to raise their children where the air is bad.

  As Tamburlaine’s elephants passed by the ruins, Mahamati twitched her ears and stepped anxiously from foot to foot: her rider was sitting so rigid in the crease of her neck, that she could not understand what the boy wanted of her. Her trunk reached back and kissed his arm, his kneecaps, questioning. But Rusti simply sat and looked around him. Kavita sat alongside, riding Gaurang, whose pale hide made her look ashen with fear or sorrow. It is frightening, after all, to ride across the pages of a story, especially a true one.

  Within sight of the tower, they pitched camp, eating supper under a rosy evening sky. The old men settled to telling stories of their heroism during the fall of Zubihat. There was a festive mood; laughter flittered overhead amid the bats. Everything made for laughter among the veteran warriors and their bloodthirsty children: the cowardice of the citizens of Zubihat, the weakness of the defending soldiers, the way the tajiks had pleaded for their lives…

  How is that funny? thought Rusti. But looking across the campfire at his wife, he saw her laughing with all the rest. Once, her eyes turned in his direction, and her expression changed to loathing. Was she comparing him with his dead brother Cokas? Or was she recalling how, twelve years before, Cokas and his father had helped to build that tower yonder, and had taken away with them a couple of souvenirs: a gold bracelet and a baby boy? All he had to do was ask her – call out to her now through the smoke of the bonfire; whisper the question in her ear before they went to sleep. “That tower over there: is that why you call me a tajik? Is that where I came from?” But the question stuck in his throat. It seemed to have been walled up inside him, and could not break out.

  He needed to know!

  Unable to eat, unable to sleep, Rusti went looking for the Royal Chronicler, Shidurghu – rode Arrow recklessly fast, towards the fluttering bannerettes of the Royal Encampment. He would ask the man straight out: was it true? But the tent of the Royal Chronicler was not pitched alongside the others of the Royal Court. Like a white chess piece, it had been removed from the board.

  The guards waved Rusti away: no chess-playing boys needed this evening: Shidurghu had gone upcountry with the Gungal Emir, to act as his interpreter. After all: this was his native district, they said. The Chronicler was a Zubihat man himself.

  “Of course. I forgot,” said Rusti as if he had known all along. He did not let his face register any of the things hammering at his heart.

  Back by the campfire, Borte had begun to dance, flirting with a neighbour whose wife had died in childbirth that day; vowing to put a smile back on his face… Rusti could see the shape of her big body, flabby and smooth through the cloth of her robe. She was clearly not wearing her chain mail of loot.

  Ducking inside the family tent, Rusti began to search. There was no lamp, and it was very dark. Something moved in the shadows, and he reared up guiltily from his hands and knees. Only Kavita.

  “Where is it?” Rusti hissed. “She’s not wearing it. Help me find her loot! I have to find it!”

  With silent footfall, Kavita crossed the rug, unlaced a bedroll and unrolled it, loosing its sour, sweaty smell. There was a tinkling of metal, as Borte’s spoils of war spilled out of it. Rusti had never before examined his wife’s booty, never even touched any of the bridle-rings and belt buckles, the helmet spikes, or strings of foreign coins.

  “What you look?” asked Kavi.

  “A bracelet. A golden bracelet!” Of course, Cokas might have kept the bracelet himself – not given it to his wife when they married. Or Borte might have sold it when times were hard. Anyway, there was no golden bracelet, because the whole thing had happened to someone else, hadn’t it? Or because Shidurghu was lying and the whole thing had never happened at all!

  Kavi leaned across and picked up a glittering O from among the other dross; picked it up and handed it to Rusti without a word. His dark, scratched fingers were so slender they could almost have belonged to a woman: a woman reaching through a hole in rough brickwork, to buy mercy with a golden bracelet.

  Of course the world has produced a great many golden bracelets. This one might have come from anywhere – from Tiflis or Baghdad. But to Rusti it was proof – absolute proof – of Shidurghu’s story. For a moment he held the warm metal against his cheek. And from that moment he believed.

  “Will you come back here with me?” he urged in a whisper. “After the rest move on? Will you come back here with me?”

  In the darkness of the tent, nothing showed but the liquid glimmer of Kavi’s big, dark eyes. Then his head tilted slightly to one side and he pushed his long hair clear of his ears to listen.

  “Someone come,” he said.

  Pure terror went through Rusti, thinking it was Borte returning to the tent. He pushed the bracelet inside his clothes, bundled the loot clumsily back into the mattress and rolled it up. What if she caught him meddling with her warrior hoard? She would break his neck – or take a cleaver to him.

  But Kavi had picked up a sound much farther off – beyond the usual rowdy clamour of drunkenness, quarrels and children. He rested the flat of his hand on the floor, feeling vibrations. “Horses,” he said. “Big many horses.”

  And all of a sudden, the evening noises of eating, drinking and brawling changed, and the Horde gave a shout, as with one voice. The encampment was under attack…

  Women screamed their children’s names. Drinkers cursed. Kibitkis slumped flat with a noise like collapsing camels. Dogs barked. Ponies snorted and whinnied. Kavi looked around for somewhere to hide. With a soft thud, something struck the roof above his head, and an arrowhead pierced the felt and hide, and came sliding through for most of its length. It did not matter that it had lost its momentum, for it came fletched with fire. At once, the burning arrow began to char the fabric of the roof. Quickly Kavi pulled it right through the kibitki wall and plunged it in the cooking pot.

  Squirming outside, Rusti was blinded by the last, low rays of the sun, billowing smoke and divots of mud thrown up by a passing rider. His neighbour’s pony lay dying, with an arrow in its throat. His thieving neighbour was kneeling to free Rusti’s pony of its hobble. It took five heartbeats. Rusti waited until the fifth, then leaped onto Arrow’s back and took off at a gallop, toppling the neighbour onto his face in the mud.

  There were a million sights to take in, and any one might mean the difference between life and death. Attack out of the sunset. Element of surprise. Who? Few helmets. No banners. Targes – just like his own little shield. What shield? Rusti turned his pony in a circle so tight that its nose touched its rump, and galloped back to the kibitki.

  “Kavi! Weapons! Sword! Shield!” Three heartbeats. Four. The weapons flew out of the doorway of the kibitki, thrown as hard as Kavita’s puny arms would allow. Rusti had to lean right down to the ground to pick them up. The targe rolled along on its rim and Rusti had to snatch it up at the gallop. Felt better for succeeding. Felt better for the shape of a sword hilt in his hand, the weight of leather on his arm. Must see everything. Notice everything. Life depends on it. Cavalry streaming down
from the Royal Encampment. Defenders. Must tell them apart. How? Poor light. Arrows from where? Horizontal? Or out of the sky? Axes and scimitars. A few halberds. A sickle? Peasants, then. Blacksmith’s wagon, on fire. Riderless camel, mad with panic. Rusti had the impression that he was watching the battle through a long dark tunnel – that he was not somehow a part of it. Strange how the mind becomes detached…

  Strange altogether. A minute before, he had been scared – terrified at the thought of Borte catching him. Now they were under attack, and he was hardly scared at all; hardly of anything. Must see everything, notice everything. Three children hand-in-hand, eyes shut, as if told not to look. Pail of milk knocked over.

  The runaway camel tripped on a guy rope and crashed down, one of the bristly lumps on its head brushing Rusti’s legs. “Where are the elephants?” he said aloud, and the camel’s teeth burst ajar as if it was about to gasp an answer. The blacksmith ran by with his clothes on fire. The defending cavalry swept past in a blur and collided with the attackers, like waves breaking against rocks. Two ponies fell. Arrow stepped on something soft and broke her stride so sharply that Rusti shot forward and bruised himself on the sharp base of her neck.

  “Blind rats!” yelled a familiar voice. It was Borte, and for a moment Rusti assumed she was shouting it at him: another insult. Then someone else shouted. “Fatherless dogs!”

  And another: “Grass eaters!”

  “Geldings!”

  “Black sheep!”

  Rusti pictured a flock of silly sheep stampeding closer, chewing as they came, and a shouty, strangled laugh burst out of him, unexpected. Then the attackers emerged out of the brightness of the sun, and he saw they were not animals of any breed, but men on horseback with swords and bows and axes.