Tamburlaine's Elephants

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  The sight of the elephants instantly lifted his spirits. The anxious, rheumy-eyed beasts he had last seen milling unhappily about, frightened and bewildered, were transformed. They had been washed and oiled, then painted with swirling patterns of indigo paint. From the tips of their indigo trunks to their absurdly stringy tails, wound in gold cord, they were magnificent, exotic, monumental. They filled Rusti with awe, as gods might if they arrived unexpectedly one day at your door.

  And best of all, there was Kavi! Not Kavita, no, but Kavi! He was pushing handfuls of shrivelled apples into the mouth of Gaurang and Alpa, Mahamati, Gajanan and the rest. His hands and forehead were also stained blue with indigo.

  “Kavi! Kavi!” called Rusti and, in his heart, he thanked the old Chronicler over and over. Now the elephants would be tended properly. Now Kavi would be freed of his disguise. “Kavi! Over here!” Rusti had wanted the job himself. But now at least he could come here and help, and all would be well between old friends. “Kavi!”

  But Kavi did not come. It was Mumu who recognized Rusti’s voice and came running over, reading his face, leaving blue kisses on his cheeks with the tip of her scarred trunk. The calf followed her, out of curiosity; the calf’s mother was close behind. Then Kavi was obliged to come to the edge of the field and to hoick them away with his mahout’s stick.

  “Go away, Rusti,” he said in an undertone. “Alone I do.”

  Panic nudged Rusti in the chest: “Does the History Man know you are here? Did you run away?”

  “No. He know. All is good. Go now.”

  But Rusti did not go, of course. He explained his new plans: how he had decided not to go back on the trail. He was going to stay in Samarqand. Let Borte go. Let the others go. He would stay and help Kavi tend the elephants.

  “No. I am good. Not need you. Alone I do.”

  “What about the promise? You made me promise to help you…”

  “I need you not. Go away.”

  And something collapsed inside Rusti, like a mud brick tower, and he felt robbed and cheated and miserable. It was good, wasn’t it, that Kavi no longer wanted to murder Tamburlaine? That was sensible. Why then did Rusti feel so unwanted, so unnecessary? Because Kavi had taken from him all the things that made him special: his elephants, his place in the white kibitki, and his role as Tamburlaine’s elephant boy. “Why are they blue?” he asked flatly, trying not to resent Kavi. “Are they going to the wedding circus?”

  At last the little mahout beamed. “Oh yes!” And a flash of light went through his eyes as bright as summer lightning. For some reason, Rusti was very, very scared by that lightning flash.

  The Royal Chronicler had a home in the city – beside the library that housed the journals of Nasir al-Din Tusi, Zafar-nama of Sharaf al-Din Yazdi and all the other great writers-down of History. The guards did not want to let him in, but Rusti told them he had come to play chess. He had to know if Kavi had been truly freed from slavery. If his friend had simply run away, there would be a death sentence on his head, men searching the city for him to burn him alive as an example to other would-be runaways.

  “I have no taste for games today, boy,” said Shidurghu when Rusti entered. The old man’s hands moved in a flutter over his desk, as if the boy’s arrival had alarmed him.

  “I have to talk to you, sir,” Rusti insisted. “About that slave, Kavi.”

  Shidurghu waved a hand. “All is well. He has my permission.”

  “But—”

  “A man should do what he does best. My slave – my ex-slave, I should say – has a skill with elephants. In Samarqand live many races. In a city a foreigner may fade into obscurity, lose himself. Look at me, for example…” He picked up a coin from the desk and turned it over and over between finger and thumb.

  “So he didn’t run away? He’s allowed? You did set him free? ”

  “Free. What is that? The Mongol Empire is, you might say, a large net full of fish. The fish may swim to and fro. They may fool themselves that they are at liberty. But ultimately their fate is sealed. Things other than chains bind us, lad. Duty. Oaths. Gratitude.” The coin clicked down on the desk and Shidurghu invited Rusti to pick it up. Rusti stepped backwards. Again the coin: its three lucky planets, its three words. Kavita had cost sixty. Why was Rusti worth only one? It would appear that the Chronicler had finished with him. He had served some purpose without knowing it, then been dismissed like a beggar, with the offer of one coin. How dare Shidurghu stir up all those feelings with his story of towers and babies and golden bracelets, and then take Kavi instead!

  “Do you wish to go to the wedding circus?” said Shidurghu unexpectedly. The offer must have surprised even him, for he seemed about to take it back. Then he thumped the desk with a clenched fist and said, “Yes! You should. You should see!” And rose stiffly and walked over to an ottoman chest and took out a wedding shawl. As he laid the band of brilliant embroidered silk around Rusti’s shoulders, his long pale trembling hands seemed loath to let go of the cloth. Then he enclosed Rusti’s head, just for an instant, in a grip of steel, before pushing him bodily out of the door.

  As soon as Borte saw the wedding shawl, she tugged it from round his neck. Maybe she means to sell that too, thought Rusti.

  “This is mine. What will you wear?” she said, admiring her reflection in a polished metal pot.

  The prospect was certainly thrilling: a place at the ringside, along with the officers and ministers and chroniclers and chamberlains and wives and bodyguards of the Grand Emir, Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction. Rusti would see the bride and groom – the clowns and acrobats – dancers and daredevils! His elephants, too. But Rusti was still shaking from his encounter with the Chronicler, still struggling to make sense of the coin, the shawl, the push.

  Borte combed the dry skin out of her eyebrows, oiled her hair and bound a silk scarf so tightly over her nose that the veins stood out around her eyes. A small nose might be the mark of beauty in a woman, thought Rusti, but a purple pulse throbbing in her forehead probably wasn’t.

  “I am going alone,” he told her, but she ignored him as completely as she ignored the flies sipping the oil off her hair.

  In the event, the scene was so chaotic that, seeing Rusti’s wife cleaved to his side and wearing the marriage-guest gift, no one challenged his own right to be there: the one shawl allowed in two guests. On their way in, they passed the tiring tent and caught a glimpse of dancing boys climbing naked into their animal – and bird – suits. They had left it to the last moment to put on the sweltering costumes. Puzzled by one ugly brown costume with large flapping ears, Rusti realized that it was someone’s idea of an elephant.

  Their fellow guests smelled of koumis and sweat and rotten meat. The circus smelled of tarry torch smoke, horses and attar of roses. Banners hung limp, firecrackers dangled.

  Borte sat herself down on a bench right at the front, and Rusti sat down too, trying to look as if it had been his idea from the start. They were soon sandwiched between a magistrate and an ambassador from Georgia. For an hour nothing happened, and the audience snacked on rumour: the Emir was ill! The bride had quarrelled with the groom! A meteor storm had been seen in the sky, presaging bad luck! But there was no truth in any of it. The wedding party arrived amid wild cheering and quacking music, the Emir looking as tiny and crooked as ever, but beaming with delight, holding hands with the lovely Cholpan-Mulk-agha, his favourite wife.

  And there, lacking a wedding shawl, of course, but close to the high, red seat of Tamburlaine, Shidurghu the Chronicler sat, to witness yet another memorable day and to record it for future generations. His face was as pale as parchment paper, and Rusti could not read it. The bride was presented with a gift of white birds in a box, which she meekly released – so meekly in fact that the doves stayed inside the box and had to be poked into flight with a stick.

  The pretend animals cavorted about on stilts, pushing their heads into baskets, knocking off hats, frightening small children. A “panther” stalked somethi
ng with long soft ears and killed it in a kind of tragic ballet. The real animals flinched and shied away from the noise, the fires, the seething press of people. Led in on chains, they hung back fearfully, showing the whites of their eyes.

  A clown cracked a whip playfully around the ears of the pretend animals. He caught an “elephant” a nasty flick on the ear and the elephant (who had been drinking since morning) came after him – launched a punch and missed (hampered by being up on stilts), then lost his balance and fell over. The clown knocked him unconscious with the butt of his whip. Those who saw it roared with joy. Tamburlaine himself gripped the arms of his chair and bared a jumble of brown teeth, and his shoulders jerked with mirth.

  Was this the man whose praise had meant so much to Rusti? This man who built towers? If Shidurghu was truly a man of Zubihat, how could he bear to sit meekly by, scribing words in praise of this man? He ought to hate Tamburlaine just as much as Kavi did.

  Another clown tied a string of firecrackers to the tail of a pretend donkey and lit them. The donkey brayed and bucked and kicked up his hind legs. Easy to forget there were people inside. Clever. Funny (though the sudden flash and banging had scared Rusti).

  Too much like lightning.

  The daylight gradually choked on the black smoke from the thousand torches. The sky blackened into evening. The moon grew silver enough to sell in a Samarqand market. The crack cavalrymen brought their tricks to a close and an evening breeze blew in a strange smell, and a cacophony of animal noises. The Emir’s only remaining rhinoceros got away from its keepers and trotted through the crowd scattering wedding guests.

  Tamburlaine chortled with glee. Rusti wished the rhinoceros would turn its single horn on the Gungal Emir and toss him over the moon. But of course the monster came to a halt, dazzled and confused in the empty arena. Its keepers fell on the eight chains trailing from its tusk and feet and throat and, after a moment or two, dragged it away.

  Now the elephants were coming! Rusti could glimpse them emerging from the darkness, the crowds parting to give them passage. They set their feet down so gently that they made no sound, only welled into view, like sea breakers. In their indigo splendour they looked utterly magnificent. There was something about all those inky loops and coils that put Rusti in mind of Shidurghu’s writing, his secret code. What would Rusti have written if he had properly mastered reading and writing? What would he have written on the huge vellum of an elephant? Anything! Since the Great Emir could not read. Anything at all! Inside his head, Rusti began to compose the poem he would paint on an elephant if he were still to own one…

  The Gungal Emir Tamburlaine,

  Bringer of sorrow, bringer of pain,

  Cruel and ugly and stupid and vain,

  Let him be drowned in a puddle of rain!

  “Her!” Borte’s shove pushed Rusti off his bench. “There! Look! See? Her!”

  And there was Kavi, perched up on the neck of Gaurang, in a turban of indigo silk. “Look, you turnip! Are you blind? It’s your…your… It’s our… It’s Kavita!”

  For a whole year Borte had shared a kibitki with Kavita without ever looking carefully enough to see through the disguise. Now, by moonlight, on a smoke-filled evening and at a great distance, seeing him bare-chested and sitting astride an elephant, she recognized the features of her husband’s slave.

  “Yes,” said Rusti, because he was busy thinking there ought to be two elephant boys riding into the light: Rusti and Kavi.

  Baffled at first, astounded by the deception that had been practised on her, Borte could only cluck and fret like a chicken. What did it mean? Someone had cheated: it followed that she had lost out somehow, missed a trick, been deprived of some opportunity. “It’s her! She’s a boy!” was all she could find to say. Rusti fixed his eyes on Kavi and willed him to look round. But it was too far and, besides, Kavi’s eyes were fastened on the royal dais, on the royal chair.

  And suddenly – like a bolt of lightning, it struck Rusti. He knew that he was looking not at Kavi the Mahout, but at Kavita with her soul of steel.

  And he knew what she was planning.

  What to do? What to do? Rusti sat wedged between his wife – “It’s her! It’s a boy!” – and the diplomat from Georgia, sweating prodigiously in a quilted coat. They were almost directly opposite the royal dais, separated from it by a wilderness of monkeys.

  A dancing girl waving a ribbon on a stick had attracted the attentions of a monkey. It had grabbed the ribbon and was sitting with the end clamped between its teeth. The girl tugged. The monkey pulled back.

  Rusti drew out his picture – the one he carried inside his clothes: the Chronicler’s sketch of the tower at Zubihat. Rolled inside it was the pen Shidurghu had broken and let fall to the floor of his tent. Its sharpened point was clogged with dried ink. No ink. No ink to draw with! But by filling his mouth with spit and dipping the quill tip into his own saliva Rusti brought the dried ink back to life. It trickled down his chin. It dyed his lips purple.The taste was purple, too, with minerals and herbs and crushed beetles. But Rusti did not draw beetles.

  He drew a red chair – a blobby head, a scratchy crown. He drew an elephant – trunk, legs, ears and mahout. If he had just learned to write, he could have written – “assassin!”

  Or “beware!”

  Or “elephant!”

  Or “trample!”

  Instead, he had to draw a picture of his own. He drew the red chair toppled, the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction lying helpless on his back, Gaurang’s stumpy feet poised over the Gungal Emir ready to crush the life out of him.

  A tug of war was still going on between the monkey and the girl with the ribbon stick.

  “Girl! Hey, girl!” called Rusti, and the girl came instantly, bowing to him. (Astonishing. Rubbing shoulders with diplomats and noblemen had turned him into a man of rank.)

  “What are you doing?” Borte jabbed him in the side. Was her fool of a husband about to disgrace her again?

  “Take this to the Royal Chronicler – there. Yonder! The man with…” Over and over again, he explained to the girl, so that there could be no mistake. If the note fell into the wrong hands, death and disaster would follow. The girl pranced off, carrying the parchment that might prevent a nightmare. Bombarded by monkeys, dodging the fallen torch-stands, smiling a broad, bright smile that never wavered, the dancing girl approached the benches where the Emir’s closest, most trusted, most important guests sat. She wasted no time, because out of the corner of her eye, she could see the elephants starting forward into the ring, and they terrified her.

  Rusti held his breath.

  Shidurghu took the creased and battered scroll from the girl’s upstretched hands, unrolled it, examined his fingertips as the ink stained them. His face was so pale. Looking at the scrawl, the old man turned the paper round, turned his head to one side. Then he looked directly over at Rusti – no searching the crowd: he knew just where to look. Eyes pale as snow; face pale as death.

  And he smiled and nodded and crumpled the paper between both hands, and gave the girl a coin, a single coin, for her pains.

  Yes, said the nod. You are right. You have guessed rightly.

  And like a bolt of lightning it struck Rusti: his picture had told Shidurghu nothing the old man did not already know. Shidurghu had not innocently opened his doors to a little assassin. He had deliberately recruited Kavi. They were accomplices. They were twin assassins united by a single cause: to trample Emir Tamburlaine under the feet of his own elephants.

  Chapter Thirteen

  LITTLE ELEPHANT

  Somehow, Rusti wriggled out from between wife and Georgian. Borte grabbed pieces of him – his hair, his sleeve, his ankle – “Where do you think you are going, you oaf?” – but he prised himself free, stepping along the back of the bench, stepping on ambassadors and the gentry of Samarqand.

  He willed the elephants not to enter the ring, but even as he reached the end of the bench, their great shadows flickered past the circling t
orches. Gaurang entered the light, leading a cavalcade of elephants embellished in purple and gold. The wedding crowd drew in a single breath.

  Another elephant – a puny, cloth elephant – lay on the ground: Rusti almost fell over it. It was the stilt-walker, knocked unconscious by the clown. The stilt-walker was still dead to the world. It is hard to wrestle an unconscious man out of an elephant costume. But Rusti managed it. He had no idea how to balance on stilts – his would be a very short elephant – but he managed somehow to wriggle into the sweaty, tatty, itchy costume and clutch it close around him. His rear end dragged in the dirt. It could not be helped.

  Already Kavi was steering his elephants into position, circling the open space in front of the red dais. All evening the crowd, straining for a better view, had been creeping forward so that the circus ring grew smaller and smaller. Now they recoiled in superstitious dread: the circus ring widened like a startled eye.

  Faster now the elephants circled, trunk-holding-tail, heel-toe, heel-toe. The little mahout astride the largest gave no visible signals, but the beasts obeyed like well-drilled soldiers, their walk breaking into a run. On the red dais, Shidurghu got up and moved closer to the Emir. The Royal Bodyguards eyed him warily, but not so warily as they eyed the elephants, who were running now, faster, all the time faster. Think what might happen if the elephant rider were to lose control…!

  Suddenly another elephant entered the ring – a puny, cloth elephant, all head and no body. It was not even up on stilts, so that its cloth rump dragged along the ground. It hesitated for a moment – had to jump aside as the elephants hurtled round the ring. The crowds hardly noticed, mesmerized by the swirl of purple patterning and the trembling of the ground under their seats. The Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction leaned forward in his throne, teeth bared in rapt fascination.