Tamburlaine's Elephants

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Rusti has also married again – a sweet girl from Tashkent, whom he heard singing one day outside his window. All nationalities live in Samarqand; where they were born matters very little. His wife Ghazal does not ride into battle, a blue silk sash across her face and only her scowl showing. She is not a warrior. But then neither is Rusti. City men cannot hope to marry fighting wives. Ghazal’s delight is in breeding foals from Arrow. She made Rusti buy a pretty brood mare which cost him all of Borte’s loot and more. He did not mind in the least, but the fact remains: marriage is still a day-to-day terror for Rusti. This wife is so delightful that he cannot quite believe she will stay – that she will not simply wander off one day. He cannot quite believe that Ghazal loves him for anything but his horses.

  Little does he know that Ghazal lives in fear and trembling, too. In the tiny family apartment hangs a pen-and-ink portrait of the most beautiful woman she has ever seen. Thinking it must be Rusti’s dead wife (whom he never, never mentions), Ghazal cannot imagine how she can possibly comfort him for such a loss, how she herself can possibly compare with such a beauty.

  In one way, though, she is like Borte. Ghazal is afraid of elephants. So whenever Rusti goes to the zoo and sits with his animals and talks to them of God and lightning and India, he goes there alone. They regard him sorrowfully with their small eyes, nod their great heads in sorrowful understanding, caress his face sympathetically with the fluted ends of their trunks. We understand, they seem to say. We too have been enslaved by someone smaller than ourselves. He loves them too: his elephant confidantes, loves to lie along their bony spines on a night like this, counting the stars.

  Inside Samarqand today there were silk banners in the streets and red apples floating in the public fountains. There was a royal hunting expedition with greyhounds and panthers, a polo tournament, and a reading of poetry. Rusti’s head is aswirl with the memory of it.

  But though the wedding festivities will last for weeks, he knows Emir Tamburlaine will not stay. He never does. Cities are for tajiks. Soon the kibitkis and pavilions and travelling mosques will be packed onto carts again, and a new campaign will begin. The Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction will lead his million-strong family out again on their perpetual journey of conquest…

  Not Rusti. Rusti works now at the royal mint in Samarqand, striking coins which carry three planets and three words. Throughout Tamburlaine’s vast Empire, these coins pay for everything: bread and slaves and swords and bracelets and spies and paper and ink and towers of brick. The coins Rusti makes will travel as far as the edge of the world…but Rusti will stay at home.

  Only at times like these, when the Horde reels home full of drink and loot and stories and scars and boasting and contempt, only then do the royal elephants come into their own again. As the acrobats string their tightropes and the clowns sew themselves into their animal costumes…then Rusti parades his real-life elephants out of Samarqand, onto the Rose-mine, to perform in the royal circuses.

  Tamburlaine’s finest cavalrymen gallop their horses up and down, performing death-defying feats. They pick up their shields from the ground without ever leaving the saddle. They shoot their arrows into targets while riding at full gallop. They slice the heads from straw dummies and send them rolling in among the feet of the crowd, who bray like donkeys, with delight. But sadly Rusti is a tajik. So all he sees, as the straw head rolls to a halt between his feet, is a soft cheek, a beardless chin, a pair of eyes asking him a question he cannot answer.

  No matter. A boy astride an elephant is taller than any warrior, and Rusti parades the elephants of Samarqand out onto the Rose-mine, to perform in the royal circuses.

  He and Kavi, that is. For where would the elephants of Delhi be without their mahout? And where would Rusti be without his best friend?

  Mumu lifts her trunk and snuffs the scent of roses, spices, feasting. She looks as if she is groping for the stars. But the boys know better. They know that elephants ask very little from life. Only Tamburlaine is ambitious to capture the stars and all the lands that lie beneath them.

  Author’s Note

  Timur i Lang (1336–1404) became ruler of Transoxania – a huge empire encompassing a vast tract of Central Asia. He set out to conquer Persia, northern India, the Ottomans and Malmuks, and China. There is no such place as Zubihat, but there were many like it visited by the Emir on his endless travels. In Western history books – and Christopher Marlowe’s famous play – Timur i Lang is referred to as “Tamburlaine the Great”.

  Usborne Quicklinks

  For links to websites where you can learn more about the Mighty Tamburlaine and the famous battles he led, and find out what it was like to live a nomadic life with the Horde, go to the Usborne Quicklinks Website at www.usborne.com/quicklinks and enter the keywords “tamburlaine’s elephants”.

  Here are some of the things you can do at the recommended websites:

  View an animated map of the growth of the Mongol empire.

  Watch video clips of nomads living in Mongolia now.

  See paintings of war elephants from different times in history.

  The recommended websites are regularly reviewed and updated but, please note, Usborne Publishing is not responsible for the content of any website other than its own. We recommend that children are supervised while using the internet.

  Read on for a sneak preview of The Middle of Nowhere by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Starbuck, doubly startled, jinked forward in her traces and jerked the trap. Quartz Hogg sat down sharply. Comity slid off her horse and started to run the furlong to the buggy. She could not breathe: a roaring noise was emptying her lungs of air. As she ran, she stopped and picked up stones and began to throw them. She threw them with all her might, over and over again, rearming herself as she ran on. The stones began to hit the wheels, the tailgate, the upholstery. Smith, who had turned to watch Fred die, gave a startled grunt as a stone hit him in the neck. Another hit Starbuck, who towed the trap off the summit of the rise, and again the men lost their balance. Comity went on running, went on pelting them with stones. One caught Smith on the ear, one hit Hogg on the back of the head. What she would have done when she reached the trap, even she did not know. But chortling amusement gave way to curses, and having achieved his objective, Quartz Hogg recovered control of the cart and turned in a wide circle to head for home. He drove at Hart’s horse to frighten it away: the long walk home would teach the girl a lesson.

  It was the longest distance she had ever run, or so it felt. Past the dead kangaroo, past the termite mound, past the belt that had finally slipped from Fred’s wrists; past the blood spatter… Her skirts hampered her, her boots weighed like lead, her hair got in front of her eyes and stopped her seeing.

  “Fred?”

  He was lying on his side in the dust, one arm flung up over his head, his legs bent as if he was still running, a pool of blood beneath him. But he lay so still that the flies were drinking sweat from his armpit undisturbed. His xylophone ribcage was perfectly silent and still. A few termites still clung to the hairs of his skin. She brushed them off – and felt the muscles flinch.

  “They are gone,” she said. “You can come out now,” – just as if he was under the verandah and she up top reading too scary a book.

  The ribcage did swell then. The fingers did flex, but Fred did not sit up. Comity lay down so as to see under his arm, and his eyes were open, as if he was listening, ear-to-the-ground, deducing clever things about the coming and going of hoofs. “Fred?”

  His eyes moved to focus, but drifted apart again into a blank stare. A tear crawled down the side of his nose. Fred was not feigning deadness; he was dying.

  “We should go to your gunyah,” she said.

  His eyebrows signalled his dismay, his desire to be spared the effort. But Comity insisted. They could not go home, or Hogg would finish what he had started, and kill Fred for sure – Comity too, maybe, because she had seen him shoot down a child. And at least Fred’s gunyah was close by. Beside
s, without a plan, she would have simply to sit back on her heels and howl like a dingo, and what good would that do? No one would come.

  The mare came. Hogg’s attempts to scare her away had turned the obstinate, idle nag into a nervy foal in need of comfort. She walked up behind Comity, reins dangling down from her mouth to trip her up, and swung her big head against Comity’s back. Do something. Do something, the horse seemed to say.

  To find out what happens next, read:

  When her mother dies from a snake bite, Comity Pinny’s life in the middle of the Australian outback changes for ever.

  Her father, Herbert, retreats into his work transmitting telegrams, abandoning Comity when she needs him most. Comity turns to Fred, the young Aboriginal yard boy and he becomes her only friend. But then a new assistant arrives who delights in playing cruel games. Soon Comity struggles to hold things together as events begin to spiral dangerously out of control…

  “Writing for children at its very best.”

  The Bookseller

  ePub ISBN 9781409557371

  GERALDINE MCCAUGHREAN IS

  “A SUPERB STORYTELLER”

  Times Educational Supplement

  A Conversation with Geraldine McCaughrean

  What was your inspiration for writing Tamburlaine’s Elephants?

  I have always loved the work of the Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe. He shoved his plays together with all the finesse of someone stuffing a cushion, but the poetry he used was just fabulous. He even managed to make Tamburlaine pitiable at a couple of moments in the play just by putting such beautiful words into his mouth. When I read up on the real thing, though, Timur i Lang did not have any redeeming qualities. He was just a brutish despot. But that was okay, because I wanted to write a book about two boys caught up in Timur’s world, not about the man himself.

  The shifting, rootless existence of the Mongol Horde fascinates me, too. It is a bit like modern society, always wanting to move on, get somewhere else, gain some new ground; never content to come to a halt and rest easy.

  Why does writing historical fiction appeal to you, and how much research do you do?

  I have always liked writing about The Past: it is the one holiday resort no travel agent can take you to but a book can. And life was so much more dangerous and life-threatening six centuries ago. I admit, I never used to do much historical research before setting to work on a new book. If my book was set in medieval England I would simply steer clear of including cars and nylon and TV… I was not, after all, setting out to educate my readers. (Don’t you just loathe those books that digress from the plot to tell you a little bit about Norman architecture or the causes of the Peasants’ Revolt?) But then I started writing adult books, and adults, unlike young readers, mind very much if an author gets her facts wrong: they write in and complain and you have to write back and apologize. So it was that I discovered the joys of historical research! Such amazing, bizarre things happened in the past! Things I could never make up in a hundred years.

  The only problem is that if an author has compiled a whole card-file full of interesting facts, there is a temptation to try and cram them all into the book, and that can slow down the action. So now I tend to throw the card-file out of the window after a chapter or two. And it never hurts to make things up, either. This is fiction we are talking about, after all. My mother once said, about a book I had written that was set in a French chateau, "I could tell which bits were based on things you saw while you were in France." But when she described those scenes, they were all things I had invented myself.

  Where do you get your ideas?

  I usually base a story on some crumb of true fact – something I have read in the newspaper (Gold Dust); some documentary I have seen on TV (Stop the Train), or some passing mention in a book (Plundering Paradise). I have retold a lot of myths during my career, so myths often creep into my stories, too. I am forever looking for subjects that no one has ever written about before. This is really stupid of me. Clever authors find one sort of book that they can do well and which pleases their readers, then stick with it. Series books sell very well. But I have never written a sequel to any of my books. The only sequel I have ever written was to someone else’s book – J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and Wendy. But my mum told me “Never boil your cabbages twice, dear”, so I don’t. I want each new book to turn out differently from anything I’ve ever done before. Anyway, that’s half the fun – giving myself a new challenge. Mind you, Tamburlaine’s Elephants is in fact my second book involving the Mongol Empire. The Kite Rider was set in China at the time when the Mongol Khubilah Khan had conquered it and made it part of his vast empire…but that was a long time before Timur i Lang came along.

  Have you always been a writer?

  I did a lot of jobs – secretary, teacher, journalist, sub-editor. But I wrote as I travelled to and from work: it was my hobby. Now I stay home all day and write. It’s great, but it still seems odd to earn a living by having so much fun.

  What or who initially inspired you to start to write?

  I have a very clever older brother called Neil. When I was young, everything he did, I wanted to do. So when, at 14, he had a book published, that became a great ambition of mine. I was also very shy and timid. (I still am.) The one place I dared to have adventures was in my imagination, writing stories.

  What is your favourite book?

  As a child I remember enjoying The Ship that Flew by Hilda Lewis as well as horsey books like Silver Brumby and historical novels by Rosemary Sutcliffe. I think now that Alan Ahlberg’s Jeremiah in the Dark Woods is literally “perfect” – not a word wrong, not a comma out of place. My favourite adult books get inside the heads of each character in turn and make you like and understand every single one.

  What is your favourite place?

  Home, definitely, though I do like hot sun and blue-sea-side and bright, bright light. I get gloomy in the winter.

  Do you have any pets at home?

  Daisy, a golden retriever. Until recently we had never had pets – except for fan-tail doves which the neighbourhood cats quickly ate.

  What ambitions do you still have?

  I’d like to write more plays – for stage and radio and schools. Maybe Peter Pan in Scarlet will give me the chance. I’d like to get on a train or tube or bus and see the passenger opposite reading a book of mine. One day!

  Geraldine McCaughrean is one of today’s most successful and highly regarded children’s authors. She has won the Carnegie Medal, the Whitbread Children’s Book Award (three times), the Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize, the Smarties Bronze Award (four times) and the Blue Peter Book of the Year Award. In 2005 she was chosen from over 100 other authors to write the official sequel to J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. Peter Pan in Scarlet was published in 2006 to wide critical acclaim.

  Geraldine lives in Berkshire with her husband, daughter and golden retriever, Daisy.

  www.geraldinemccaughrean.co.uk

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  www.usborne.com/fiction

  Editorial consultant: Tony Bradman

  This ebook first published in the UK in 2013 by Usborne Publishing Ltd., Usborne House, 83-85 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8RT, England. www.usborne.com

  First published in 2007. Text copyright © Geraldine McCaughrean, 2013, 2007.

  The right of Geraldine McCaughrean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  The name Usborne and the devices are Trade Marks of Usborne Publishing Ltd.

  All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or used in any way except as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or loaned or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those
responsible may be liable in law accordingly. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ePub ISBN 9781409582724

  Batch no. 00549-02