Tamburlaine's Elephants

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  “They salute me! The monsters are saluting me!” cried the Emir, his voice childlike and piping. The small boy steering the elephants might as well have been invisible, for the Emir saw only the giants dancing, not their dance master. But the court officials to right and left of the throne stopped wringing their hands. They caught Rusti’s eye, their faces full of gratitude – even admiration. They could not have done so much. They could not have got the better of these monumental grey satchels of wrinkled hide. They could not have put such a smile on the weather-beaten face of the Emir Tamburlaine, Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction.

  Last in the string of elephants came Mumu, smaller than the rest and with a nervous, sidling gait. She had been found wandering vacantly among the ruined palaces of Delhi, one tusk shattered, her trunk kinked like a cat’s tail that has been shut in a door. She was utterly docile. Rusti understood why now: Mumu had despaired. He had seen that same silent stillness in the mothers and widows of Delhi, who had lost their sons and brothers and husbands and city. Just from the sagging hopelessness of her head, Rusti knew that Mumu had lost Kavi.

  Like all the other elephants, Mumu kneeled to Tamburlaine. She too bellowed his praises to the purpling evening sky. Rusti was almost disappointed in her. Then he remembered that he did not speak Elephant very well yet. Perhaps, after all, Mumu was bellowing filthy, defiant curses at the Gungal Emir, threatening revenge. Perhaps all of the elephants were kneeling there thinking, “One swipe of my trunk, and I could wipe that smile off your face, Gungal Emir, quicker than you could say, ‘I win’.” It was a shocking thought and Rusti wondered whatever had put it into his head.

  The Chronicler Shidurghu, recorder of the mighty deeds of Tamburlaine, wrote down how the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction had conquered Delhi as the lion conquers the gazelle, as the sun conquers night, as the sickle conquers the wheat. In his beautiful tooled leather book he listed the treasures that had been captured and shared out among the Horde. He wrote what great mercy the Emir had shown to those who surrendered – of the justice meted out to those who had defied his might. Shidurghu wrote of the outlandish animals that had paraded past the royal throne; how the elephants had trumpeted their praise for the Gungal Emir. But if Shidurghu wrote in his chronicle about the young Mongol boy who had tamed the fearful giants, he did not mention it to Rusti. Boys like Rusti do not learn to read, let alone glimpse History on the page.

  Chapter Three

  THE SPOILS OF WAR

  Mumu was not the only one to have been injured in the taking of the city. Rusti’s brother Cokas remembered nothing about the looting of Delhi. Rusti had managed to drag him out of the barn, through the elephant dung and dirty straw, just as the thatch caught light. Somehow he had managed to put Cokas face down across his horse, but all the way home, his face had slapped limply against the horse’s flank. He was still unconscious when they got back to camp, and did not come round until after the victory parade and the speeches of surrender. While Rusti was putting the elephants through their paces in front of the Great Emir, Cokas lay like a dead man in his tent.

  Where Mumu had thrown him against the wall, a patch of his hair had been torn off and his skull dented. In the days that followed, he drifted up to the surface of sleep and asked questions, demanded answers. But then he would sink back down, so deeply asleep, that, from time to time, Borte had to turn him over with the sole of her foot, to stop him choking on his own tongue.

  “Wake up, man! Get up!” she would bark, her voice as sharp as a cheap enamelled dagger. “They are dividing up the cattle! They are dividing up the spoil! We are missing out!” The fact that Rusti had been awarded a slave-girl and fifty gold coins, by order of the Emir, seemed to enrage, not comfort, her.

  A slave-girl? When Rusti first heard this, he was delighted. A slave-girl to fetch and carry for him, to fold up his bed and pack his belongings, to pour him a cup of water, to saddle his horse and cure the skins of the animals he caught when he went hunting! A slave-girl to mend his clothes for him and pick the lice out of his hair! But as he approached the acre of wailing women and children corralled on the plain, delight gave way to doubt. Would he have to feed her, this slave-girl he had won? Where was she supposed to sleep? Should he choose one big enough to do all his work, or one smaller than him, so that he could safely beat her without her hitting him back?

  When he saw them, he stopped thinking and just stared. Here were the real gems of Delhi – these slim-bodied women with liquid eyes like deer and dark waterfalls of glossy hair. Their tissuey brightness was torn and streaked with dirt where, in their grief, they had rent at their clothing and daubed themselves with dust or soot. From time to time one would bend down and scrape at the parched ground and rub the dirt into her shining black hair. Jewellery had been torn from delicate noses and ears, leaving streaks of blood. Dusky children clasped their mothers’ legs. Old women sat on the ground, silently rocking, covering their faces with big-knuckled hands.

  Rusti felt a pain, as if a runaway goat had butted him in the stomach. He could not understand why, and wondered for a moment if he had eaten something rotten. Why else would his stomach cramp and the sickness gather in his throat?

  How to choose? It was one thing to pick a pony from amongst a captured herd. It was different to pick out a girl. Would the Emir be offended if he refused the honour? (Would Borte ever forgive him?)

  A cordon of warriors encircled the widows and orphans of Delhi. Now and then one would lunge forward and, plucking a captive by the wrist, drag her away to his kibitki, or give her his shield to carry or tie her plait to his bridle. Children were separated from their mothers. The air was full of shrieking and sobbing. Rusti told himself these were tajiks, and did not feel things as keenly as Mongol women and children. They would soon get used to slavery. But somehow the noise and fluttering tatters of the prisoners made the pain worse and worse under his belt. He found himself wishing the Mighty Tamburlaine had overlooked him when it came to doling out rewards.

  I will choose one who’s quiet and won’t cry all the time, he decided, and began to search among the faces for just one girl who was dry-eyed. That was when he saw Kavi.

  Astonishing that he recognized the little mahout at all, under the drapery of a woman’s sari, little clenched fists half hiding his face. But the huge round eyes were fixed on Rusti, and there was something in the look – that mixture of shame and terror and pleading – that snatched Rusti’s attention and put the name right there in his mouth: “Kavi?” He wanted to laugh.

  Men were pushing through the huddle of women and girls, just as they had waded into the lily ponds of Delhi’s palaces to wrench up the lilies. They pulled back shawls, flicked hanks of hair, felt what strength was in an arm – even checked the captives’ teeth, as they would ponies at a horse fair. At any moment, a hand would fall on Kavi, strip away his disguise and show him for what he was: a frightened gibbering little boy trying to save his wretched hide by pretending to be a girl. A Mongol warrior would die rather than do such a thing, but Delhi boys (Rusti told himself) could hardly be expected to be forged from the same iron.

  A pair of brothers, who had been drinking for hours, lurched out of a nearby kibitki and into the compound, peering blearily about. Without each other to lean on, neither could have kept upright, but leaning shoulder-against-shoulder they ploughed their way through the prisoners, determined not to let the best spoils of war escape them. One pointed at Kavi – “Her! Shkinny chicken with the big eyes!” – then both ducked their heads and plunged towards him, huge and noisy. If Rusti hesitated one moment longer, his friend’s life would slip out of his grasp, into a bottomless ravine, and those round eyes would haunt his nightmares for ever. The brothers parted, like the flaps of a tent, intending to pinion Kavi between them. Rusti darted right between them and grabbed Kavi by both wrists. “This one’s mine,” he said.

  One drunken brother seemed inclined to punch Rusti in the face, but the other recognized him – “’S’elephantboy!” –
and they beamed generously at him and lurched off to rumple and paw a few more of the gems of Delhi.

  Without a word, Rusti pushed Kavi ahead of him, wanting to say his name, wanting to giggle at the sari, at the situation; at the same time knowing that it was not funny, not one bit funny. Kavi said nothing, but held his lips between his teeth and stumbled and rounded his shoulders and folded his hands in against his body and sobbed once or twice out of purest fear. I should tell someone, thought Rusti, knowing already that he would not.

  Surely his brother and sister-in-law were bound to recognize Kavi as soon as they saw him? After all, before the fall of Delhi, before the massacre of prisoners, Rusti and the little mahout had been together every day. What if they accused him of helping an enemy? What would he say then? He would say he had not noticed the captive was a boy! Ah, but then he would be laughed to scorn! Rusti hesitated outside the tent, jigging from foot to foot. Oh for an elephant. With an elephant under him, he was a warrior who commanded respect. Without an elephant, he was just a boy. Grabbing one of Kavi’s wrists roughly, he lifted the tent flap and went in.

  “What did you get?” Borte snapped at him. She was pushing a lump of mutton about a pot of boiling water as if it was still alive and she trying to drown it. “No one worth having, I’ll swear.”

  “Hold your tongue, woman,” said a voice from his bed in the deep dark shadows of the tent. Cokas was conscious again. “It’s a fool who spits on good luck.”

  Always a superstitious man, Cokas had taken it into that dented skull of his that his little brother Rusti had been blessed with good luck by the ancestors: something he had dreamed, perhaps. Now Cokas flapped one hand, summoning the slave-girl to come closer so that he could look “her” over.

  Rusti gave Kavi a push. “She’s called Kavita,” he told his brother.

  Kavi tottered into the darkness as towards a lion in its den. After the bright sunshine, his eyes could make out nothing, but gradually the deeper darkness at his feet resolved itself into a pile of animal skins and the figure of a man, his head swathed in dirty bandages. The eyes seemed shineless, dead: pain had crumpled up Cokas’s face, like a sheet of vellum.

  Though it cost him tremendous effort, Cokas swivelled his eyes towards the shape. It was silhouetted against the knifing sunlight in the doorway, and he did not want to admit that he could see two, three, four overlapping slave-girls. “Passable,” he said. “She’s passable.”

  Rusti waited for his sister-in-law to recognize Kavi – to shriek – to laugh? – to demand an explanation. Her fists closed around Kavi’s upper arm and she jerked him towards the daylight. Her eyes flicked over him from head to foot, and what she saw brought a sneer to her flat leathery face. Then she went back to the cooking pot and sank the mutton so violently that the broth slopped out over her feet. “More meat on a locust,” she said, and she did not mean the mutton bone.

  She saw what she expected to see: a captive tajik in a dress. Who troubles to look at a tajik’s face anyway? They all look the same.

  “It is all right! You see? You see?” said Rusti, the first time the two boys were truly alone. They had gone to tend the elephants, and the elephants guaranteed they would be on their own. “See Mumu? There’s Mumu! Right there! She knows you, I’m sure she does. You know Kavita, don’t you, Mumu! No one is going to kill you, Kavita! You can help me with the elephants. If you want, I’ll say you have to stay here and sleep with the elephants at night, and Borte will never suspect, and people don’t dare come near here, and it’ll be like before…”

  The huge round eyes looked back at him, blankly. Kavi said not a word, but went and stood on the far side of an elephant, stroking the grey hide with small grey hands, tracing the maze of grey wrinkles with the tip of one finger.

  Rusti was too glad to notice. He had an ally in the world again – someone who did not scowl at him, someone who did not expect him simply to kill things and to get drunk; someone who was more scared than he was. (Oh, the joy of finding there was someone in the world who was more scared than he was!) With his big eyes and his rustling, female clothes, “Kavita” was in no position to condemn Rusti for being soft, for still secretly feeling like a little boy on the inside. Rusti was too glad to notice: Kavi said nothing at all.

  If Kavi had been thrown from a boat in mid ocean, then to stay alive he would have learned to swim. Different skills were needed here, but he had to learn them just as fast. Here, it was a matter of learning to walk with a sway of the hips and never taking long strides; of tilting his head forward and keeping his eyes on the ground; of guessing the meaning of the words shouted at him; of doing everything he was told; of rising before dawn and spending as much of the day as possible among the elephants, where he was left in peace and where Borte would not come looking to hit him.

  Kavita’s hair already reached his shoulder blades. Because it was coarser than a girl’s, Rusti combed sesame oil into it, and so his slave-girl took on a scent much sweeter than elephant (or elephant boy). Most wisely of all, Kavita never spoke. Not that Kavi’s voice had broken, or had anything very masculine about it. But by not speaking, he escaped attention. At first Borte would hit out with whatever she was holding – bridle, ladle, tent pole, fist – whenever Kavita came within range. But when the slave-girl’s soft and silent comings and goings did not disturb her daily routines, Borte almost forgot about Kavita. Kavi was a quick learner too. Every day he learned a dozen new words, an oath or two.

  In fact, Kavi was a natural born actor. He played his part to perfection, learning the lines, studying the moves. Soon the feminine gestures and movements became second nature to him. So did the loathing he felt for himself.

  Chapter Four

  RAIN

  Amazingly, the disguise went on working! Cokas was too ill to notice anything. His neighbours were too absorbed in their own ever-shifting lives. Even Borte still did not see through the lie. Maybe she scowled so much that those shaggy eyebrows of hers blinded her.

  The patch of hair torn from Cokas’s skull never regrew. In the weeks that followed, his skin took on a waxy paleness and his face thinned, so that his teeth looked too big for his mouth. Food made him sick. It was a problem. It was a problem during the weeks the Horde spent stripping Delhi, like eagles stripping a carcass. It was more of a problem once the Horde stirred itself and moved on.

  Every morning Cokas had to be got onto his horse; helped into the saddle; handed his own reins. But inside his dented head, little night-times would fall without warning, and then he would tumble out of the saddle and hit the ground without so much as putting out a hand to save himself. So they put him into a cart, cocooned in his bedding, wedged in with the bulky folds of the family kibitki. Each time a wheel struck a rock or dropped into a rut, Cokas would be pitched about, rolling from side to side, groaning and cursing. Borte told Kavita to ride in the cart with him, and so Kavi sat with Cokas’s head in his lap, while the tossing of the cart flexed his spine like a whip. Kavi’s world shrank to a lapful of greasy hair, a mouthful of stinking breath, an open head-wound.

  Rusti, riding astride the largest of the elephants, leading the others, could look down into the cart where his friend and his brother rode. He too watched Cokas sink and shrink and turn into a different sort of brother – one who needed help to eat, one who mumbled and squealed, one who saw things when they were not there.

  It was dismal travelling at the rear. The dust that rose up from the heels of the vast, migrating army quickly coated Rusti and the elephants and the cart and its occupants so thickly that they looked like earthenware statues. Borte, who was used to riding among the foremost five hundred, alongside her warrior husband, could not endure to be among the pack mules and the baggage wagons and the captured elephants. The sight of Cokas babbling to himself, his head in the lap of a slave-girl, was even more intolerable than the tons of dust settling on her head. Prestige came from being married to a warrior, but none from being saddled with a sick and useless idiot. But though she shri
eked this in Cokas’s face several times a day, he still refused to pull himself together. Borte rode alongside the cart for a week or so, then moved farther and farther ahead.

  Rusti would have liked to ride with her – well, not with her, perhaps, but farther forward, up among the warriors. He was, after all, a warrior himself. He and the elephants ought to be leading the way, dwarfing the puny cavalrymen on their fighting ponies, keeping a lookout for ambushers and guerrillas and the dust cloud that would signal the approach of a massed army. Inside his head, Rusti imagined himself charging into battle, acquitting himself like a hero, taking Cokas’s place, slashing to right and left, firing arrows point-blank into the faces of oncoming…

  Plash, plash. Cold drops fell in his face and cut canals through the caked mask of dust.

  Then the rains came.

  The noise of thunder had been making everybody jittery for days. Rusti was not alone in fearing lightning: the whole Mongol Horde went in terror of thunderstorms. Thunder spoke of a restless heaven, of angry ancestors. So warriors and courtiers alike were a-jump with nerves when, with a noise like the sky collapsing, the monsoon rains came.

  Drops fell in sharp, hard grains the size of rice – then huge eggy globules; then gouts as warm as blood; then torrents so dense that the ancestors must have been emptying pails of water out of the sky.

  In fact poor, sick Cokas thought he could see the ancestors doing it.

  The lice in Rusti’s hair took shelter under his chin, then in his armpits, then in his groin. Then they were sluiced away altogether, along with packs from the horses, pipes from belts, food from the wagons, trees from the hills. The dust washed off. The elephants changed colour, to a dark granite grey, and tassels of water hung from their tails and sprayed from the tips of their swinging trunks as they walked.