by Severin, Tim
Our next landing was again to replenish our store of drinking water. All morning our helmsman steered as close as possible to the coast while the youngest and nimblest member of our crew perched on the great spar of the mainsail, high above the deck. Soon after midday, he called down that he could see a stream trickling down the face of a low cliff, leaving a stripe of green against the rock. The nearby beach appeared to be deserted. Sulaiman ordered the sails lowered, and we dropped anchor. Our sailors paddled cautiously ashore in the ship’s boat. We watched as they scouted the beach and then one of them returned to say that it was safe for the watering to begin. Osric, Walo and I helped to lower the empty earthenware jars into the boat and then went ashore ourselves.
With more than forty jars to fill and transport back to the ship, the men would be busy for a while. There was still no sign of the local inhabitants, so I suggested to Osric and Walo that we explore a little distance inland. A narrow gulley offered a way up from the beach and we made a short climb that brought us out on an expanse of open, rough country covered with tall, coarse grasses, parched and yellow. Rocky outcrops rose like small islands in the sea of grass, and here and there were stands of flat-topped trees, their branches offering patches of shade in an otherwise empty landscape.
Walo was the first to see it. He was looking towards a grove of leafy trees when a movement caught his attention. He gulped with excitement and pointed, his whole arm shaking. I looked in that direction and could only see something small and dark, flicking back and forth beside a tree trunk. I mistook it for a bird. My gaze travelled upward and I caught my breath. High in the branches something else moved, a head. I stared transfixed, unable to credit what I was witnessing. Beside me, Walo and Osric kept stock-still, not daring to move and equally astonished. A bizarre-looking animal now moved from behind the tree and into full view. It stood on four very long slender legs that were totally ill matched. The front pair were so much taller than the back ones that the creature’s body sloped downwards, ending in a cow-like tail with a tuft constantly flicking back and forth to ward off the flies. But it was the neck that made the creature so outlandish. Unnaturally thin and long, the neck alone was the height of two men and ended in a deer’s head almost twenty feet above the ground.
‘A cameleopard,’ I breathed in wonder. It was everything that the Book of Beasts had promised, and more.
Swishing its cow-like tail, the cameleopard moved around the tree, grazing on its leaves.
‘Why does it not have the pard’s spots?’ asked Walo. The bestiary had stated that the cameleopard got its name because it had the body of a camel and the spotted skin of the leopard. Yet the pelt of this extraordinary creature in front of us had a bold network of white lines on a yellowy-orange background. The colouring had blended with the dappled shadows under the tree. It was little wonder that we had failed to see the cameleopard sooner.
Walo was beside himself with elation. He tugged my arm as he crouched down. ‘Come!’ he begged. ‘Let’s get closer!’
Bending double we crept through the tall grass towards the feeding animal. Soon we were close enough to see the animal’s long tongue licking out to twist off the leaves as it fed in the high branches. The creature swivelled its head towards us and the ears flicked out, listening. In place of large horns there were two short stumps on its head. ‘It’s a deer, not a camel,’ announced Walo.
The cameleopard caught sight of us and took fright. Suddenly it wheeled about and fled, kicking out the long, ungainly legs and running with a rocking motion. Its panicked flight startled other cameleopards that we had not seen. They had been hidden in a fold in the ground, and now they appeared as if by magic. First their heads and then their long necks rising from the grass as they ran up the slope. All of a sudden we were watching an entire herd of them galloping away over the grassland.
The spectacle brought to mind the Nomenculator’s story in Rome, of the timid animals that had been set loose in the Colosseum and hunted down by lions. Surely they had been cameleopards.
Walo was capering with delight. ‘We must catch one and bring it home with us!’ he cried. ‘We can dig a pit like the one in the forest and put down leaves for bait!’
He was thinking back to the day he had seen the aurochs taken in the pitfall. Despite the day’s heat I shuddered. I recalled seeing the aurochs gore his father to death.
For Walo the thrill of seeing a cameleopard wiped away the horror of that memory. He was beaming with anticipation. ‘Catching a cameleopard will be easy!’ he insisted.
‘We should go back to the ship and speak with Sulaiman,’ I said, ‘and ask him if it will be possible to transport a cameleopard aboard.’
We turned around and began to make our way back along the path in single file. Walo led, giving a little skip every few paces. At one point he turned to me, his face radiant, and said, ‘This is the land where the beasts in the book have their homes . . . cameleopards, hyenas and crocodiles. We are sure to find the griffin!’
He carried on a few paces further and came to an abrupt halt. ‘Look,’ he called back over his shoulder, ‘it is just as I said. All the beasts live here. There’s an asp.’
He was pointing at an indistinct grey shape lying beside the path, half hidden beneath a fallen tree trunk.
The hair rose on the back of my neck, and I backed away so suddenly that Osric bumped into me from behind. ‘Stay away, Walo!’ I urged him.
But he ignored me entirely. He stepped off the track and approached the grey shape. It moved, shifting and twisting on itself. It was a serpent, scarcely a yard in length, but gross and fat, the head smaller than the bloated body, its skin a pattern of chevrons, grey on black.
It was coiling back, deeper into the overhang of the fallen tree trunk.
‘You see! It retreats in fear just as the book says,’ Walo exulted. He felt inside his shirt and pulled out his little deerhorn pipe, the same one with which he had tamed the ice bears. He put it to his lips, and played the same three notes.
The serpent coiled again, retreating even further.
Walo turned to me with a triumphant smile. ‘The book was right. It fears the music.’
Despite my terror of the serpent, I half believed him. According to the Book of Beasts the asp dreads music. When an asp hears music it seeks to flee, and if that is impossible, it attempts to block out the sound, pressing one ear to the ground, and bringing the tip of its tail around and thrusting it into the other ear.
Walo blew a few more notes and – sure enough – the snake writhed and formed an extra loop, doubling back on itself, and its tail came near its squat, flat head.
I remembered how Walo had handled the little horned snake in the desert of Egypt and wondered if again he would show his uncanny skill with wild creatures.
He was moving closer, slowly and confidently, and playing the notes again. The serpent writhed as if in distress.
Walo took another step, bent forward and played the notes again. This time the asp reared up its head, and hissed loudly at him.
My blood ran cold.
Walo took another half-pace closer.
The asp was hissing constantly now, and its thick body was bloating and inflating, a grotesque sight. The flat head and upper part of its body began to rise from the ground. The mouth opened wide and pale, showing the throat. All of a sudden I knew that it was not about to thrust its tail into its own ear to try to block out the music. This was the warning of death.
‘Walo! No nearer!’ I begged him.
Walo ignored me and moved closer still. He was now within an arm’s length of the asp, still bending forward and playing the pipe. His shadow fell across the serpent.
The asp struck. It happened almost too fast for the eye to see; a gaping pale mouth, a glimpse of fangs, and the asp had bitten Walo on his leg.
Walo did not flinch. He stayed where he was, still playing the whistle.
The serpent struck again, viciously and twice more, each blow as lightning-fast as
the previous one. Only then did Walo stagger. The serpent turned, and its evil gross body slithered away beneath the log.
Walo seemed disappointed rather than distressed. He had been wearing loose sailor’s trousers, and there were marks with patches of blood where the fangs had struck. ‘I should have played a different tune,’ he said meekly.
He was swaying, his face puzzled.
I ran forward as his leg began to crumple beneath him, and caught him as he fell. There was a ripping sound and I turned to see Osric tearing a strip of cloth from the hem of his gown.
‘We have to bind the leg tight and get him back to the boat as quickly as we can,’ said my friend. As a young man in Hispania Osric had been a student of medicine among the Saracens. In Hispania, too, there were serpents.
Together we helped Walo along the path, his arms around our necks. His injured leg was dragging on the dry earth.
On the beach we found that Sulaiman and his men had nearly completed watering.
‘An asp has bitten Walo,’ I told the shipmaster, near-panic in my voice, and he shouted to his boat crew to hurry to assist us.
We lifted Walo into the ship’s boat and brought him out to the vessel. ‘My leg is getting stiff. It hurts very much,’ he groaned as we laid him on deck.
Zaynab placed a roll of cloth beneath his head to make him more comfortable but her face was troubled.
While the crew were rigging a length of canvas to shade Walo where he lay, she took me to one side and asked me to describe the serpent. It took only a few words, and when I finished she turned away, tears filling her eyes.
‘Is there no cure?’ I asked.
She shook her head.
*
Walo’s death was painful and ugly. He was unable to move or bend the injured leg. A pale fluid mixed with blood oozed from the puncture holes where the serpent’s fangs had pierced. Within hours he was feverish and flushed. From thigh to ankle the leg began to swell, puffing up as if in imitation of the asp that had bitten him. The skin turned a nasty purplish-grey. The next day it burst, splitting like an over-ripe plum. A long weeping wound revealed rotting flesh beneath. That evening Walo lay with his eyes closed, taking shallow breaths, losing the fight for life. Yet he still clung to his belief in the bestiary. ‘That was a prester asp,’ he told me, his voice so weak that I had to lean closer to him. ‘If it had been the hypnalis, I would be asleep, like Cleopatra.’
He licked his lips and swallowed, struggling to speak. ‘I remember you read to me that the asp called prester moves with an open mouth, and those it bites swell up and rot follows the bite.’
A spasm of pain racked him and he reached out and clutched my hand. ‘The rare beasts are here! Take a young griffin from its nest and bring it home. Feed it meat, just like Madi and Modi.’ Those were the last coherent words he spoke.
We dug his grave at the foot of the low cliff close to the spot where we had filled the water jars. The hole was deep enough so that the wild animals would not reach his body, and we put him in the ground within hours of his passing. Sulaiman was urging us to hurry.
As we left the beach, the shipmaster drew my attention to the heavy swell now rolling in from the sea.
‘There’s a storm somewhere out there,’ he told me bluntly. ‘If it catches us on this exposed coast, we’ll be as dead as your friend back there.’
His words struck me as callous and I had to remind myself that on his voyages Sulaiman must have seen many deaths from accident, drowning and disease.
‘We should head back to al-Ubullah,’ I said. Until Walo died I had been prepared to give the bestiary the benefit of the doubt and was ready to accept its descriptions of outlandish creatures – after all, so many had come true. I blamed myself for not questioning the claim that music would tame the asp. Had I done so, Walo, whom I had brought on this venture, would still be alive.
‘I will gladly set a course for home,’ said the shipmaster. ‘I’ve already taken us further beyond Zanj than I had promised to Jaffar, but first,’ he nodded towards the south horizon where the sky was beginning to cloud over and show a peculiar colour, pearl grey with a hint of green, ‘I think, we must put our trust in the All-Merciful.’
The storm that enveloped us later that evening lasted for a full three days. Had the gale come from the east when it howled in on us, our ship would have been driven ashore and dashed to pieces. Fortunately, the wind and waves came from the opposite direction and forced us out to sea instead. Faced with such a tempest our crew could only lower the spars and sails to the deck, lash them securely, then crouch in shelter, seeking to escape the blast of the wind and rain. To stand and work on deck was impossible. Sulaiman made no attempt to steer a course. He surrendered to the supremacy of the storm and let his vessel drift where the gale pushed her. The ship rolled and pitched wildly, shuddering to the repeated blows of the great waves that marched down on us. We thought only of survival, bailing water from the bilge, trying to keep the hatches covered so that the waves that often washed across the deck did not pour into the hold, and staying afloat. When the wind eventually eased, leaving a lumpy, grey sea, we were wet, hungry and utterly exhausted. The cooking fire had long since gone out, and we were eating handfuls of dates clawed from the last remaining sack of them in the hold. Yet throughout the ordeal Sulaiman had squatted near the helm, needing only short naps to keep himself alert. Whenever I glanced in his direction, he looked to be calm and unworried. I understood why the crew placed their confidence in his judgement and experience, trusting him to keep them safe. I knew that I had failed to do the same for Walo.
On the fourth day, as the height of the waves eased and they began to lose their white crests, Sulaiman climbed up on the lowered mainspar and stood there, one arm around the mast. With more than deliberate care he scanned the entire horizon before dropping back onto the deck, and coming over to speak with Osric and me.
‘There’s land to the south-east,’ he said. ‘We’ll go there and find an anchorage.’
‘Can’t we set course for home?’ I asked. Walo’s death had affected me deeply. More than ever, I wanted to be finished with the voyage. My curiosity was at an end. No longer did I care if there was such a creature as a rukh or a griffin, and on the slim chance that it did exist, I did not have the stomach to go on with the quest when the lives of those precious to me were placed at risk: Osric and – of course – Zaynab. I would return to Baghdad and tell the caliph that Sulaiman had brought us further than any of us had imagined possible, and we had found nothing.
The old man shook his head. ‘We must check the ship for storm damage. Then we head for al-Ubullah.’
‘Where do you think we are?’ I enquired.
‘Tonight, if the sky clears so I can read the stars, I’ll have a better idea. My guess is that we’re off Komr or possibly WaqWaq.’
As far as I could recall, neither place had been mentioned when Musa had shown us the map in the royal library.
Sulaiman rubbed at the thin stubble of his beard. ‘Captains from al-Ubullah picked up reports of those places while trading on the coast of Zanj. I’ve not heard of anyone landing there.’
He frowned at the distant dark line on the horizon. ‘We need to find a gently shelving beach of clean, hard sand on which to beach the hull and check the stitching.’
I had forgotten that our vessel was held together with cords of coconut rope. ‘What about the inhabitants? Will they be friendly?’
The old man shrugged. ‘Maybe we’ll find the place uninhabited.’
*
The unknown land, whatever its name, showed a flat coastal strip fringed with grey-green gurm trees. To seaward their tangle of roots presented an impenetrable wall, each root thrust deep into the sucking ooze, and it was midday when Sulaiman eventually found a small crescent of sandy beach protected by a tongue of land. By then the gale was no more than an evil memory, and we made the final approach on a gentle breeze, gliding across water so clear that Sulaiman could judge his moment an
d run the keel of his ship gently into the sand. It was a moment of utter relief.
‘We wait here for two full tides,’ said Sulaiman, ‘to check and clean the hull, and we can stay longer if we decide on any repairs.’ He looked across at me. ‘That will give you and Osric enough time to explore inland if you wish.’
I declined without hesitation. ‘Osric and I will remain with the ship. I want no more accidents.’
If Sulaiman had not sent two of his sailors to gather firewood I would have kept my word. But we needed to light a fire to cook and most of our firewood had been washed into the sea during the gale. What we still had on board was soaking wet. So the two men were despatched even before the tide had ebbed and we were waiting for the water to recede and the ship to settle on the sand.
They returned after a short while, bringing back an object that they had stumbled upon in the undergrowth.
They gave it to Sulaiman, who walked across to where I was standing with Osric.
‘I think you should see this,’ he said to us. It looked like a fragment from a broken bowl, no larger than the palm of my hand. Dirty cream in colour, the dished side was smooth and the outer surface was slightly rough.