Tamburlaine's Elephants

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Rusti’s contempt for the little tajik lessened as he watched him pull and poke the monster about with his little hooked stick; watched him scrub its leathery back and bed down in the curl of its trunk. Next day, contempt gave way to admiration as he saw Kavi put the elephant through its paces – making it kneel, making it lie down, making it lift him bodily in its trunk, making it trumpet. The noise sent shock waves through the camp; the Mongols dropped the door-flaps of their kibitkis and sat with their fingers in their ears.

  But little by little, Rusti’s own terror gave way to a fascination for the hulking, gentle, sad-eyed elephant that had held him in its trunk. It had been entrusted to him by the Great Emir and, like the Emir, it filled him with awe. As with the Emir, there was no point in being afraid of it: it just was.

  Watching Rusti strike up an acquaintance with his elephant, Kavi was jealous. But he could not help feeling a sneaking admiration for this boy, who refused to be scared of Mumu. Plainly the other Mongols were terrified of elephants, but this boy explored every inch, as if he was mapping her. He found the places where her skin got dry and sore. He found the exact place at her shoulder where she lost sight of him, because an ear got in the way. He even picked through her dung with a stick, to see the kind of things she ate.

  Without ever meaning to learn each other’s languages, Kavi and Rusti found they quickly understood a few words. Mahout meant elephant rider. Kibitki meant tent. In conversation, they sounded like animal trainers barking instructions. But animal-and-trainer don’t laugh. Animal-and-trainer don’t get the giggles. Animal-and-trainer don’t experiment at wearing each other’s clothes, or share their food when it is in short supply. Rather than let Rusti poke his beloved elephant with the hooked stick, Kavi showed him how to use it properly. He did so grudgingly at first, but then, seeing Rusti grin and nod and jump up and down with delight, taught him every trick, with the flourish of a magician teaching his apprentice. Before long, Rusti found that Kavi’s round eyes no longer reminded him of a cow. Kavi discovered that Rusti’s eastern eyes were not narrowed in disgust or hatred. In sharing rice and shelter and closeness, both boys even began to smell the same. Rather like the elephant, in fact.

  Meanwhile, the citizens of Delhi continued to defy the Great Emir. They did not come out onto the Jumna Plain to fight, but neither did they surrender their treasure-house city, nor send shroud and sword, nor beg for their lives to be spared. Their defiance was heroic. It began to encourage others.

  All those dejected Hindu prisoners – those one hundred thousand men, women and children Tamburlaine had captured and enslaved on his long journey of conquest – began to lift their heads. Hope stirred in their broken hearts. If the citizens of Delhi could defy Tamburlaine, perhaps they could recover their courage, too! Perhaps they could even rise up and break free!

  Tamburlaine guessed what they were thinking. Some people sense rain coming. Tamburlaine sensed what was in the minds of his one hundred thousand prisoners. He had not captured half the world by using gentleness and generosity. He had not rolled up the maps of Asia and put them in his pocket using kindliness and pity. It is ruthlessness that makes for conquest. Now his ruthlessness uncoiled like the lash of a whip. He knew how to thwart an uprising.

  “Kill them all,” he told his men. “Kill all the prisoners.”

  It does not take minutes. It does not take hours. It takes whole days to kill one hundred thousand men, women and children. Whole days and nights. Isolated from the rest of the vast, sprawling camp, Rusti, Kavi and the elephant listened to the massacre being carried out.

  One thousand acres of screaming.

  One thousand acres awash with blood.

  One thousand acres of twisted bodies and gathering flies.

  The noises scoured Rusti’s head empty of thought. Mumu heaved herself from foot to foot, her great head tossing from side to side. Long after dark she kept up her dance of distress.

  Rusti knew that he, like everyone else, must kill his prisoners. But how? One – the elephant – he did not know how to kill. The other – his friend – he did not…know how to kill, either. It was a different kind of ignorance – he hated himself for it – told himself he was a man now and that men know how to do these things. But nightfall came and still he havered, irresolute. Kavi stared at him, dumb with terror, awash with tears, the elephant’s trunk caressing his small face, as if trying to read its expression in the dark.

  “Kavi dead?” said Kavi, and the knees of his twiggy little legs knocked together in spasms of terror.

  Rusti took out his dagger and studied it. It lay across the palm of his hand, the same shape as an elephant’s tusk. As he moved towards Kavi, he saw the boy’s legs sag and his head turn towards the darkness of the open plain. “Don’t run,” said Rusti.

  Of course some of the prisoners had broken free of their executioners and fled – run and limped and hopped and crawled out onto the plain, gasping for breath, pelting towards the distant lights of Delhi. Tomorrow the cavalry would ride out, overtaking and cutting them down one by one, finishing off the task set them by the Grand Emir. Out on the plain there was nowhere to hide.

  “Don’t run,” said Rusti.

  Kavi drew his arms across his body, eyes fixed on the knife in Rusti’s hand. Of course he could always fight – fight Rusti for the knife and try to wrest it from him: be the killer and not the killed.

  As if he had read Kavi’s thoughts, Rusti suddenly thrust the knife back into his belt, ducked down and picked up the long, hooked stick they both used for controlling Mumu. Kavi’s arms rose to protect his head: so he was to be cudgelled to death, was he? Beyond the row of carts the massacre went on, torchlit shadows leaping huge and ghastly. Kavi shut his eyes – and felt Rusti brush up against him. Mumu gave a grunt.

  Rusti had poked her with the hooked stick – had jabbed it into the elephant’s ear, in fact, and brought her to her knees. Now he tapped Kavi on the shoulder and gave a twitch of his head: “Get on,” he said.

  Kavi’s large eyes glistened in the darkness; it was all Rusti could make out of his friend’s face. Kavi crouched down, kissed Rusti’s foot, then scrambled onto the elephant’s knee, up onto her head. Elephant and mahout swayed away into the dark: elephants can move at tremendous speed when they choose.

  Rusti did not watch them go; he was too busy dragging all the elephant’s dung into a pile, covering it with straw, setting it alight.

  When Tamburlaine called for all the severed heads of his one hundred thousand prisoners to be piled up in cairns, Rusti explained that he had had to burn the elephant (and its mahout), there being no other way to kill it. He pointed out a large, grey, smoking heap as proof. Even the skulls had burned, he said.

  Knowing nothing of elephants, no one questioned it. They believed what Rusti told them.

  Chapter Two

  TAKING DELHI

  When Delhi finally opened its gates and loosed its army of living weapons, the elephants made a terrifying sight in their chain mail. Fire, javelins and arrows rained down from their turreted howdahs.

  But elephants are not indestructible, of course, and their tusks are not poisonous. They do not eat children or small animals. Tamburlaine the Great had had time to think. Thanks to that little elephant-capturing warrior – what was his name? – Tamburlaine had worked out a way to fight this elephant cavalry corps. He ordered bundles of dried grass to be tied to the backs of camels and buffaloes and set alight. Then the burning animals were stampeded in among the elephants.

  Rusti watched, spellbound with horror. He peered through the smoke, trying to tell Mumu from the other elephants, trying to spot Kavi. It was as if Rusti had had the idea and the Great Emir had carried it through: to burn Mumu, to burn Kavi before his very eyes. As the abominable stench reached him on the wind, he was glad of the stinging smoke that accompanied it: he could blame the smoke for the tears that poured shamingly down his cheeks.

  In their terror, the elephants turned and trampled their own Hindu troo
ps. Mongols scaled their grey backs, and hacked down the castle howdahs; Mongol axes slashed through the swinging trunks. Any surviving elephants were taken prisoner.

  So the city of Delhi fell, just as Constantinople, Tashkent, Kabul, Tiflis and Astrakhan had fallen before it. In went Tamburlaine and his Mongols, angry at being kept waiting so long for their plunder.

  Among them was Rusti, on his first pillaging raid. To enter the city, they had to ride around the fallen, the wounded, the horses, the burning howdahs, the screaming buffaloes, the dying camels. Rusti did not look. He kept his eyes straight ahead, fixed on the City of Gems.

  “Keep close to me,” said his brother, “and keep away from the buildings – the tajiks will try to drop things on your head. Watch out for archers on the roofs.”

  Perhaps there were fabulous treasures found in the Delhi palaces? If so, they went to the Emir’s Royal Guard and the seasoned warriors. They knew how to penetrate in minutes to the heart of a falling city; how to thwart the pitiful attempts of the tajiks to hide their riches and finery; how to beat their fellow Mongols to the loot. But warriors should move fast, if they want a share of the spoils. It was all new to Rusti. He dawdled, cautiously watching every window and rooftop, trying to take in the size, beauty and squalor of the city. So of course he was left with nothing to loot but trinkets and everyday dross: leatherware and cheap jewellery. He took a sword from a dead man, but the blade was bent. He looted himself some spices, but the bag snagged on the bent sword and split, staining him from head to foot in yellow and red and green dust. The mixed smells made his head spin. Every house seemed to have been pillaged by the time he got there – disembowelled, spilling its guts into the street, along with some dead old man or child or dog. Cows, looking stupid and puzzled, clogged up the streets. Rusti had not been expecting cows.

  His brother was furiously irritated by him. “We’ll get nothing! We are getting nothing!” he raged. “You are so slow! I hope Borte has done better than us!” Somewhere ahead of them, his wife too was marauding through the alleyways of Delhi, blue scarf drawn up over her nose, eyes glaring fiercely enough to light fires among the rubble and rubbish.

  So the brothers turned aside down a steep, stepped alleyway, in the hope of finding some untouched source of booty. A man in a turban ran out into their path, waving his hands in the air, wanting to surrender. Rusti’s brother rode him down.

  Rusti felt a scorching pain as a badly aimed arrow scuffed his back and hit the wall beside him, with a pinging noise. His brother wrested his pony’s head round, came back at the gallop and threw a burning brand in at a doorway, judging it to be the house sheltering the archer. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn’t.

  At the bottom of the steep slope, the lane grew so narrow they could not even turn their ponies around, and there was no way forward: only a dead end blocked by a big wooden barn. Behind them, the fire started by Cokas’s brand was spreading quickly to the other houses, and tajiks were emerging from hiding to keep from being burned alive. Some were trying to save their children or their belongings. Others were armed.

  “Your fault,” Rusti’s brother told him, leaning out of his saddle, wrenching open the door of the barn. Sinking his heels into his pony’s flanks, he made it lurch forward into the darkness of the rickety building.

  Rusti heard Cokas cry out, the pony shriek, the thud of a rider hitting the ground. His own pony stumbled and he went over its head – spilled head-over-heels into the darkness of the big space.

  And there was Mumu.

  It was Mumu and it was not. Even those great flapping ears had not been able to shut out the sounds of Tamburlaine’s three-day massacre. The smells of the atrocity had sheathed themselves in that great flexing nose. By the time Kavi had ridden her back, at full tilt, from the Mongol camp to the gates of Delhi, she was a shuddering, prancing, cribbing, wild thing. Mumu was out of her wits.

  When the armourers had come to prepare her for battle – bind blades to her tusks, strap on her howdah, clothe her in link mail, she had simply stood with her rump in the corner of the barn, prancing her front feet, rolling blood-red eyes and bellowing threats to trample them. Cursing her, cursing her little mahout, they had shut her up in the darkness of the barn before going out to do battle with Tamburlaine.

  Now Mumu greeted the sunlight like glass underfoot. She had felled Cokas’s pony, picked up Cokas in her trunk and thrown him against the wall. Now she coiled her trunk and turned her head, three-quarters on, to eye the figure scrambling to its feet in the doorway. Then one tusk scraped through the dirty straw like a ploughshare through soil, and she came at Rusti, grotesquely crouching and twisted, her head on one side, front legs splayed, back legs charging.

  Rusti needed his brother now, big and strong and brave. But Cokas lay unconscious in a pile of dung, at the foot of the wall. Rusti needed his legs to run, but they were waiting for his heart to beat again, and it had forgotten how.

  “Mumu. Stand.” Small and sharp as a mosquito, a little-boy voice came out of the rafters. Kavi’s little-boy form dropped onto the elephant’s back – astride her contorted shoulders where the hide had folded into prodigious wrinkles. “Mumu. Stand.” His mahout’s stick swung and poked: same shape as a mosquito’s sting. How could such a tool possibly subdue a beast as huge and frenzied as a mad cow-elephant? “Mumu. Stand.”

  Mumu turned her head so sharply that her flaccid trunk lashed sideways, heavy as hawser, and knocked Rusti to the ground – knocked all the wind out of him. When he looked up, all he could see was the pointed bottom lip of the elephant, and the great spreading arcs of her twin tusks. “Mumu,” he said, but had no breath to put behind the word and give it sound.

  Then something damp and hollow and fluted and warm and terrifying settled over his face. It sucked his cheek from between his teeth. It sucked the hair from behind his ear. It sucked the mucus from his nose, the blood from the cut on his forehead.

  Mumu ran the fluted tip of her trunk over Rusti’s face like a blind man reading a frieze.

  Then one, two, three, four: her feet stepped over him and she moved up the narrow alleyway, grazing her sides against the house walls, impervious to the tufts of flame and plumes of smoke scorching her delicate hide. Kavi, crouching up on her spine on hands and knees to look back the way he had come, met Rusti’s eyes and spoke.

  “Butchers,” he said. “All savages and butchers.”

  The words were spoken in a foreign tongue, and though each boy had picked up a little of the other’s language, Rusti did not understand. He thought he could guess the meaning of the words. He thought Kavi must have called, “Friends. Friends for ever, no matter what!” After the fighting, after the plundering, after the victory, he would search out Kavi among the prisoners. Not difficult, after all: a boy on an elephant is hard to miss.

  After the fall of Delhi, the Great Emir Tamburlaine set up his pavilion at one of the city gates and accepted the surrender of the city’s noblemen, scholars and officials. Musicians played. Poets improvised victory verses in praise of the man who had captured, looted and mangled the City of Gems. As he listened, a thought occurred to the Conqueror of the World and he leaned sideways in his golden chair and spoke a command into the ear of a messenger. The messenger paled and bit his lip.

  “The elephants! I have to bring the elephants!” cried the messenger, eyes hot with panic. He came clambering over the wagons in search of Rusti, raising one arm as he did so, to try and shut out the sight of the captured elephants of Delhi. “The Mighty Emir wants them to parade before him! But how? We killed all the riders!”

  “All of them?” said Rusti stupidly. His hands were full of hay. He had been given charge of the sorry, injured, frightened, captured elephants and he had been trying to calm them and bed them down before dark.

  “Yes, yes!”

  “No prisoners? There aren’t any mahouts among the prisoners?”

  The messenger’s eyes bulged with frustration. “That’s what I said, didn’t I? So what to do?
What to do? What to do?” The Emir’s temper clearly frightened him even more than the elephants.

  “I will bring them,” said Rusti.

  Tamburlaine, his maimed arm and leg more evident out of the saddle, surveyed his conquest from a chair in the doorway of his crimson pavilion. Rhinoceroses from the Sultan of Delhi’s zoo came trampling past – gross, baggy unicorns whose heads took up a third of their bodies. Whipped to a waddle, they passed by the Emir’s throne, silent, sullen, averting their small, piggy eyes. Their indifference irritated and offended Tamburlaine. The dark, mustard-coloured hands resting on the arms of the gilded wooden throne twitched and clenched with dissatisfaction. The courtiers to either side of him quailed and hunched their shoulders. Every day the Emir’s temper grew more unpredictable, more terrifying.

  Then the elephants were brought out – sorry, tattered elephants blotched with their own blood. They were being led by a boy not above twelve years old. The victorious crowds shrank back involuntarily, but the boy seemed to have no fear of the great, shapeless giants. And he was not even an Indian mahout, but a Mongol, just like them! A young boy, barely old enough to have seen battle! And yet he hoicked and prodded each in turn until, one by one, the elephants slumped to their knees.

  Tamburlaine slid to the front of his throne. “They are kneeling to me!” he cried delightedly.

  Rusti drove his stick into the leathery hide, spoke a single soft word, and the elephants threw up their heads and bellowed – a noise like a thousand triumphant trumpets. A look of rapture crossed the Emir’s face, which Rusti felt in his own breast and which he would never forget.