Tamburlaine's Elephants

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Rusti caught his breath. So here it was. He had not escaped. In a second Shidurghu would say it: that he had seen Rusti and Kavita playing at the river; that he knew Rusti had helped an enemy warrior to escape death, and had hidden him in his tent, disguised as a girl.

  Shidurghu was studying him so closely that he seemed about to draw a portrait of Rusti. “I remember when the chariot of our Mighty Emir was drawn by conquered men in place of horses. I remember kings caged and queens manacled in chains…such is the power of War, the might of our Sublime Warrior-King. I remember –” the eyes narrowed for a moment – “I remember another triumph. A victory as glorious as Delhi. Another victor’s wreath around the brow of Our Gracious Emir, Pattern of All Excellence. No one should forget these golden achievements of our Magnificent Leader and all that he has done.” As he assembled each flat, glittering sentence, he reminded Rusti of a tiler cementing beautiful tiles to a wall, using a dirty rag. “It happened many years ago. Do you wish to see?”

  Rusti nodded dumbly. Why would a man of such importance want to show him anything at all? He was expecting Shidurghu to fetch out some old parchment from the desk or a trunk. But the old man simply swept the table clear of those precious pages – those priceless, wonderful parchments embellished with mystical swirls of writing. And on a clean piece of parchment he began to draw. Suddenly he was no longer an old man, slow and careful.

  Two strokes and there was a hill. Twelve strokes and there was a range of hills with mountains beyond. A clutter of crude huts. A mosque. A wall. A tower – no! A palace. When his hand paused, it was shaking, and although it is not unusual for an old man’s hand to shake, it had not been shaking earlier.

  “I speak of the glorious victory at Zubihat (may it live long in the memory of the world). Zubihat lies in the province of Sorkh Pash. But when Mighty Tamburlaine added Sorkh Pash to the marvellous Mongol nation, did the foolish sons of Zubihat surrender? No! Did they send shroud and sword and beg for mercy? No! They chose to reject the wise and kindly rule of the Gungal Emir. Naturally he had to make an example of them. So he set aside his merciful nature and employed the fist of Might.” His voice was sing-song, but at this point his fist shot out and punched a saddle hanging from the roof. The pen clenched in his fist broke and crumpled.

  Ow, thought Rusti, but Shidurghu did not seem to notice any pain. Throwing aside the broken quill, he sharpened another to a point and began drawing again. A tower?

  “A tower without doors,” said the Chronicler. Scritch-scratch and he had created a plain beyond the tower – scritch-scratch – and on it a jumble of boots, shields, helmets, limbs, heads and horses upside down. A few inky ticks, and crows were circling overhead.

  Just as they had twelve years before.

  There were odd shapes sticking out from the sides of the tower, like buds blossoming on a twig. Rusti could not make out what they were supposed to be. Shidurghu gave a shrill, unexpected bleat. “Defy the Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction? Such things cannot be allowed to happen! Surely the sky would fall. Surely the rivers would freeze! Surely the sea would run dry! Defy Tamburlaine the Great? Ambassadors come to visit this demi-god, from kingdoms the world over, to heap on him gifts and flattery and treaties and purses of money. And does Zubihat dare to cross him? Then it must be taught a lesson! And so, after the battle of Zubihat is won, a tower is built. And into it are put all the women, the old men, the children. Babies. Here and there a hole – a piece of shoddy building – so that hands reach out. And voices, of course.”

  Rusti could not take his eyes off the picture of that tower. Not buds blossoming, then. Hands. Dozens and dozens of hands. A townful of women and children walled up inside a tower, thrusting out their hands through holes in the brickwork. Rusti could smell the perfumed oil on their hair.

  “Voices, of course. Calling out,” said the old man. His own voice had become a peculiar, one-note whisper, and his mouth was rucked out of shape. “I find these events strange. But then I am a foreigner. To a Mongol hero there is no dishonour in stealing from the dying, in tormenting the helpless, in killing women and children. Daily I record such acts of…bravery in my Chronicles. One day all the world may read what I have written, and marvel at the deeds of Mighty Tamburlaine… But I was speaking of the baby, wasn’t I?” Shidurghu’s voice became sing-song and breezy once again.

  “Baby?” whispered Rusti. “No. What baby?”

  Shidurghu picked up a chess piece from the corner of a nearby chessboard – a black turret-piece – and set it down on the parchment. It was as if the tower had taken on solid form once more:

  “There is a boy – no older than yourself – riding in the company of his father, Baliq.”

  “Oh! That was my father’s name,” said Rusti, amused by the coincidence, then suffered a pang of fear: did that count as naming the Dead, he wondered? Shidurghu did not allow it to interrupt his story.

  “Baliq, yes. The boy’s name is Cokas.”

  “Cokas?” said Rusti, but he was in the middle of swallowing, and no noise came out. Not an uncommon name, and yet… Rusti could not help now picturing his brother, Cokas, as the boy in the story. Cokas alive again, young again. Cokas when he was Rusti’s age. Back then, Rusti himself would have been – what? A baby. Just a little baby.

  “This is his first siege. Cokas’s first battle,” Shidurghu was saying. “Naturally he wants proof of his manliness – some loot, some plunder – a present, perhaps for a future bride. His eye is caught by the glint of gold. And so he rides up to the tower, to pluck the bracelet from the wrist reaching through a hole in the wall. It is done in a moment. But the woman has more to give him! Into his hands she thrusts something soft and warm. ‘Save my child! My child has done nothing!’ And there he is: a boy, holding a baby.”

  Shidurghu looked at Rusti, as if it was his turn to speak, but Rusti could think of nothing to say. There seemed to be room in his head for only one question, a question too big to squeeze out through his throat: What baby?

  He tried to speak it, but it wedged in his gullet, like a hand wedged in a gap too narrow; stayed trapped inside him like a child in a tower without doors. Shidurghu went on with his story.

  “Warrior-boy Cokas swings the baby by its legs, ready to dash it against the wall, or throw it to the dogs. But his father Baliq stops him – a hand on his sleeve – says they will keep it. Says, ‘A man can never have too many sons.’ And so warrior boy takes the golden bracelet, and his father takes the baby.” Shidurghu sat back in his chair, hands clasped on his stomach, watching Rusti’s face intently. “What do you say, boy? Was the father wise to take this baby? Was he wise to call it a son? Was he wise to foist this small creature on his family? Was he wise to make his son vow to treat it like a brother? The thing was a tajik, after all. Dangerous. Might it not carry inside it the failings of a tajik? Pity? Mercy? Gentleness?” The old man spat after each word, though Rusti noticed he was not very good at spitting and thought perhaps he did not do it very often.

  A rime of sweat had formed on Rusti’s top lip, like the beginning of a moustache. (When had it arrived? He could not tell.) One single word was filling his head to bursting. One word. What did it look like? This wise man knew words. He could draw their portraits out of loops and lines and pen strokes.

  “Honoured Shidurghu,” said Rusti. “Please write a word for me.”

  For the first time, the Chronicler was startled. His heavy lids lifted for the briefest moment. “What word, boy? Your name? There. RUSTI. A good Mongol name. Given you, like any name, when you had no other.”

  Rusti looked at his name on the parchment and shook his head. It was not the right word, and anyway he could not see it. (When had he started to cry? He could not tell.) Still the right word kept jabbing his brain with its sharp hooks and loops.

  “Shall I teach you how to write it yourself?” said Shidurghu, reaching out the quill towards Rusti. A single drop of ink welled up at its tip and dropped onto the precious carpet. Rusti closed his han
ds into fists and stepped backwards. Write a word? The very idea was preposterous. Almost as preposterous as the idea that he, Rusti, could be…could ever have been…could possibly be…

  “Not ‘Rusti’. My wife calls me by another name,” he blurted, and Shidurghu dipped his quill into the ink again. “Will you write down that name for me, honoured Shidurghu?”

  And obligingly – scritch-scratch – the old man wrote what Rusti told him – wrote it, in his mysterious, silent, inky, coded, curlicue letters:

  Chapter Eight

  BAD DREAMS

  He did not tell Kavi – not even Kavita (although Kavita would have understood about being one thing on the outside and another on the inside). Nor did he tell Borte that he understood now why she called him “tajik”.

  Shidurghu gave him the parchment as a gift, and Rusti took it home with him. He wanted to look and to look and to look until his eyes wore out the ink and he could see inside that inky cylinder of bricks, that tower: until he could see the women shut up inside.

  Borte demanded to see what he had brought back from his meeting with the Royal Chronicler – “What is it? Give it here!”– and snatched the page out of his hands. But she made no sense of the sketchy lines; mistook the tower and its waving hands, for a tree in blossom. “Why did the Chronicler send for you?” she asked accusingly.

  “He was drawing elephants. I showed him how elephants fold their legs.”

  “Elephants. Elephants,” snarled Borte, unable to think of an appropriate insult. He thought she might tear the parchment into pieces or burn it during one of her rages, so he slid it under his bedroll, and when it came to striking camp and packing away their belongings, he carried it inside his clothing. A woman inside a tower, inside a roll of parchment, inside his shirt.

  Inside his head.

  Rusti looked at it in secret: at the warriors lying dead on the battlefield. One of those must be the baby’s father, he decided. That helmet, there. That shield. They were his. The father’s. My…

  But however hard he studied the inky picture, it would not show him the women inside the tower. Only his dreams took him there.

  He began to have dreams every single night – terrible, shifting dreams; lightless, sweating dreams in which he was sealed up in a tiny space, crushed and barged by soft dark shapes he could not see. Oh, and he did try to see. In his dreams, he peered through the darkness until his eyeballs were dry from trying. And he tried to scrabble through the wall that penned him in, but his hands were soft as candle wax. He tried to force a way out, pushing with all his might against the bricks. Once he dreamed of a golden bracelet and knew that if he could just make himself small enough to squeeze through its tiny circle then he would be free! But he was too hulking big – big like Cokas, big like Borte, big like a Mongol pony, big like an elephant…

  Rusti’s dreams were full of noise and terror, his ears full of shrieking and wailing and metal scraping stone. And he woke with his ears full of saltwater, where his own tears had run down as he slept and filled the hollows.

  Then he hated himself, because only tajiks cry.

  “Tell me about Delhi,” he said to Kavi the next time they were scrubbing clean the elephants. He could remember how, after the fall of Delhi, Kavi had been eaten up with homesickness.

  But how could Kavi, with his few learned Mongol words, even begin to describe to Rusti the sunlit courtyards of his home city, the orange groves, the festivals, the markets, the sunsets, the gardens? How could he conjure up the watermelon sellers or the workshops at the end of his lane where he had watched carpenters build the howdahs to be strapped to elephants’ backs? Reddled leather straps drying in the sunshine. Besides, these days all Kavi remembered was the slaughter, the fire, the humiliation of defeat.

  Rusti wanted to know how it felt to live in a city all year round, to plant crops and see them grow, to harvest them and eat them under the same rag of sky. He wanted to know. He wanted to know how it felt to be a tajik. But his friend could not tell him.

  And Kavi was having dreams of his own.

  Kavi dreamed every night that he was standing near the Gungal Emir. Sometimes, on cold nights, the dream placed them on a cliff top, and Kavi would step up and put his hands against the Crooked Pig’s crooked back and try to push him over the edge, to watch him falling, falling. But his feeble pushes only dab-dab-dabbed against the quilted robe.

  And sometimes, on stuffy nights, Kavi dreamed he was in a dark tent, with barely light enough to see by, but knowing that the dark shape in front of him was the Crooked Pig. Then Kavi’s hands would close around a brass candlestick or a tent pole or a cooking pot, and he would go to batter and bludgeon the life out of the detested old butcher.

  But he could never hit hard enough; his arms were not strong enough! Pat, pat, pat his blows would fall, like snow on a sheep, and he would wake grunting with effort, sweating with frustration, sobbing with unspent hatred.

  “I kill Gungal Rat. One day,” said Kavita to Rusti, the next time they were scrubbing clean the elephants. “One day I rip heart.” Then he looked up and smiled: gentle, soft-spoken, doe-eyed Kavita, with his long, glossy hair and his soul of dry steel. And Rusti laughed, of course…because that is what you do, isn’t it, when someone is talking nonsense?

  Chapter Nine

  TURRET

  The next week, Rusti was summoned again to the Chronicler’s kibitki. His head teemed with unanswered questions – Was it me? Was that baby really and truly me? – but Shidurghu did not wish to talk. He wished simply to play chess. That week, the next week, and every week thereafter.

  The guards in the Royal Encampment wondered at it at first – supposed the elephant boy must have a genius for chess as well as elephants. But they grew used to the sight of him plodding towards them on his disreputable pony, dismounting outside the Chronicler’s white tent flap, taking off his muddy boots. Soon the sight was so familiar that they lost interest, ceased even to talk about him behind his back.

  Rusti never grew used to the sight of that white tent flap thrown back, the ivory and cedarwood pieces laid out especially for his benefit, the glass of wine poured and waiting. Unlike the guards, he knew he was not a genius at chess. Before getting injured, Cokas had played it with him, using home-made chess pieces so crude that it was impossible to tell turret from pawn, even red from black. Rusti had made sure he never won, because Cokas was a bad loser and would have hit him if he had. But there again it had not been all that difficult to lose.

  Now, here, he was playing against an expert, handling beautifully carved chessmen looted from Tiflis by the Gungal Emir himself. The old man won every game without lending more than half an eye to the board. Losing did not worry Rusti, but it almost broke his heart that Shidurghu did not speak again of Zubihat, or the tower, or the story of the tajik baby.

  After each chess game, the old man would show him one letter – one cipher from his strange, secret, inky language – and have Rusti draw it, with a piece of chalk, on a slate: ten, thirty, fifty times, until the boy saw it in his sleep.

  The skill of copying letters came to him, but never the skill of words, or of reading. The letters remained decorations, pretty patterns on the vellum. To Shidurghu’s gusty annoyance, Rusti simply could not lace them together into words, sound, meaning. Rusti remained a sorcerer’s apprentice copying magic spells without knowing what they were for. There was no magic living inside him – he would have felt it if there was.

  Perhaps the writing lessons were a punishment for playing chess so badly: Rusti barely bothered to wonder. He was too bewildered as to why he was there – too afraid of the old man and what he knew – too busy hankering after the Story of the Tower. But the subject was never mentioned, and Rusti dared not ask.

  Sometimes, Shidurghu asked after Rusti’s wife. An odd topic of conversation, but Shidurghu would ask: “How is your wife?” It was something no Mongol would ever have asked his neighbour, and Rusti was at a loss how to answer.

  “Rich in l
oot,” he said once, thinking it had a ring to it. Then he heard himself adding: “Underneath she’s all spoons and stirrups.”

  The Chronicler regarded him from under papery, drooping lids. “Her heart also, I think.” And Rusti gave a shiver and wondered if the old man knew everything about him, without asking: not just his Past, but his Present too, and all the things going on inside his head.

  Suddenly, after ten weeks – much to his surprise – Rusti started to win at chess. He captured whole battalions of pawns, whole harems of queens. “We should play for more than the honour of winning,” said the Chronicler, sitting back while Rusti reset the board.

  And that was how Rusti won himself a new pony – a young, fit colt with pretty stripes on its rump and worth a bagful of money. He called the pony Arrow, because the stripes looked like a flight of arrow shafts. A warrior is made or marred by his pony. With Arrow under him, Rusti thought he might at last become a proper warrior rather than a boy – might even feel like a proper warrior rather than a boy. He could barely believe his luck.

  Borte could barely believe it either. “Did you steal it? You did! You stole it! From the Royal Encampment!” She went at him with both fists. “We’ll all be stoned to death! Broken under our own wagon wheels! You magpie! You halfwit! You pilfering little tajik rat!”

  Rusti found it difficult to explain. The Chronicler’s wine was rather strong and, after two glasses, his brain grew a kind of wool all over it. But since he had not stolen Arrow, Borte could hardly complain. The pony was too small for her to ride, so she could not take it for herself: Borte made that her excuse to be furious.

  Mounted on Arrow, Rusti began to find the ride to the Royal Encampment less fearful. The old man seemed to like him. The chess was getting easier. (He had already planned his opening gambit for today’s game.) Next time he won, he knew what he wanted for a prize. He would ask for the Truth. Once and for all. Was he the baby in the story? Who was his true father? Had his mother been set free from the tower, after the conquerors moved on? She had, hadn’t she? (For that was what he told himself now, when he woke from his nightmares sweating and breathless.)