Tamburlaine's Elephants

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Borte dismantled her chain mail of spoons and sconces, bits, stirrups, whistles and inkwells, daggers, sheaths, gauntlets and spearheads and belt buckles. She was in a hurry to get her plunder to the market before neighbours could fetch down the value with their own hoard of looted trinkets. She raged with grief at finding she had lost the golden bracelet, prize of her collection, and a wedding gift from Cokas.

  “We’ll sell that pony of yours, too,” she said, polishing a copper beaker she had pillaged from Delhi.

  “Arrow?” Did she mean Rusti to go on foot in future? She had already sold Rusti’s old pony to a neighbour whose horse had dropped dead on the trail.

  “What d’you need horseflesh like that for? You can buy some cheap nag and use what’s left for supplies. How else do you mean to pay? In Delhi you got nothing worth having, did you? Well, did you?” She paused for breath before throwing one last jibe at her tajik husband. “At least we shall finally see the back of those vile elephants!”

  “My elephants?” The thought had never occurred to Rusti.

  “Your elephants?” spat Borte contemptuously. “Is that what they are? Have you told the Grand Emir? Go on, then! Drive them to market and sell them. Your elephants, indeed! Be sure and hold out for a good price, won’t you? Your elephants. Huh!”

  Rusti, who tried never to meet his wife’s eye, looked across at her now – at the sneer on her sour, shrewish face – and thought, If the royal elephants stay in Samarqand, I’ll stay too. An absurd thought, of course, but he could not imagine passing the creatures over into the care of anyone else.

  Borte was right. The Emir’s zoo was here, his collection of exotic beasts, his curiosities. Rusti had only ever been an escort, delivering the Emir’s captives into the charge of the royal zookeepers. On the trail, elephants were a nuisance. They served no purpose. Camels can pull carts. Horses carry a man into battle. Greyhounds and leopards can be used for hunting. But elephants? The generals did not want them for weapons. The quartermasters said they ate too much. They were good for nothing but the Royal Zoo, or maybe one of the Emir’s circuses.

  Rusti got to his feet, angry and miserable. Borte demanded to know where he was going.

  “To see the elephants. They’ll need cleaning up – getting ready. Come, Kavita. You can help me.”

  “Oh no you don’t,” Borte told him, grabbing their slave by the wrist and dragging him over the threshold. Outside she took hold of a hank of hair and manhandled Kavita towards the ponies. “I need her to carry my saleables.”

  Rusti took hold of Kavita’s other wrist. “And I need her to help deliver the elephants,” he retaliated.

  For a moment, he thought Borte would make it a tug of war and that Kavi would have his arms pulled out of their sockets. But his wife’s desire to be rid of the elephants must have outweighed her need for someone to bully. Borte let go, spat on the ground and said, “Maybe we can trade her for a girl that doesn’t stink of elephants.”

  Rusti really did need Kavi’s help with the elephants: he could never have steered them through the busy city streets single-handedly. He still did not know how he was going to part with them. Borte knew that. So she rode alongside them all the way to the zoo. There was no chance for the friends to talk, no chance for Rusti to apologize for parting the little mahout from his giant friends. The elephants were Kavi’s last link with Delhi. In parting with Gaurang and Mahamati, Phoolenda, Gajanan and Mumu, he would have to stop being Kavi the Mahout and become Kavita ever more. Rusti would just have to be a better friend to Kavita, once the elephants were gone.

  The Emir’s zoo was a sordid patch of ground amid the other splendours of the city. A smell of rotting meat and blood hung in the air. The bones of carcasses fed to the meat-eaters lay everywhere, like the relics of a massacre. The elephants baulked at the smell, the melancholy, the fear, the noise, the sickness in the air. Their trunks coiled in revulsion. Their ears lay close against their heads. Rusti did his best for them. He repeated over and over again the quantity of hay his beasts would need, the amount of water, and gave instructions on how to tend their hides. But the zookeepers were not listening. They simply gaped and marvelled, and all they took in was the bigness of elephants. “No, no! Not meat-eaters!” wailed Rusti distractedly: “HAY!” Meanwhile, Borte looked on with disgust, and complained that time was wasting: she had valuable loot to sell.

  As for Kavi, he watched with dull, blank eyes. He did not, like Rusti, wipe away shaming tears with the heel of one hand. He did not say “goodbye”, as Rusti did, to each animal in turn. “Goodbye Phoolenda. Goodbye Alpa. Goodbye Mumu—” The sadness of the moment hardly touched home at all, because there was a hate inside Kavita’s head larger than all these elephants put together.

  Worn down by Borte’s nagging, they left the zoo and headed for the markets. The streets of Samarqand were crammed with foreigners, tradesmen and Tamburlaine’s Horde. The home comers had been celebrating ever since reaching the Rose-mine Plain, and were mostly drunken, reeling, loud and loutish. Bodies collided. Tables were rummaged and knocked askew. But the tradesmen went on smiling, hands clasped over their stomachs, nodding a welcome, mouthing a blessing, commending their wonderful arrays of fruit, shoes, perfume, sweets and silk scarves.

  The merchants who had come to buy, on the other hand, shook their heads and ran sad eyes over the loot laid in front of them. They pushed out their lips, wrinkled their noses and sucked their teeth.

  “So many of these.”

  “Such poor stuff.”

  “No demand.”

  “Not worth a chicken feather.”

  They bought, but they paid next to nothing.

  “Do you know the trouble I will have selling this?”

  “Two stirrups yes, but one?”

  Borte raged and cursed and threatened the merchants, but they had heard it all before – the stories of daring and hardship. For an hour, she refused to sell any of her loot at such low prices, barging Kavita onwards ahead of her, a hand on the slave’s neck. Burdened down with the heavy basket of loot, Kavita staggered and stumbled. On and on the three of them went, from table to table, through the paved squares, the crowded parks, into the slave market where an auctioneer was selling a different kind of loot: the girls and women enslaved at Delhi.

  A hapless peasant was selling flowers out of the panniers on his balding donkey. “A present for your lovely wife!” he called out to Rusti. “No thorns, guaranteed! A rose for your sweetheart! One also for your mother there!”

  Borte might not have noticed the insult at all if Rusti had not laughed. He should never have laughed, but the completeness of the mistake was too much for him: a boy mistaken for his wife, his wife mistaken for his mother. The joke fizzed down his nose like sherbet, and he gave a great shouty laugh. Borte grabbed the rose out of the vendor’s hand – and promptly impaled herself on the thorns guaranteed not to be there. Then even Kavita the Silent, Kavita the Sad showed his teeth in a helpless, sniggering grin.

  Borte punched the donkey. The donkey set off to run. The rose seller went after it, calling on his ancestors to snap the poles of Borte’s kibitki and let it fall on her and all her relations. The two boys laughed even more, hysterical in the stifling heat. They pushed each other, told each other to stop, but the laughter just kept coming. Borte, hot and frustrated, had bruised one hand on the donkey and scratched the other on the rose. So she did not lash out with her fists. She did not scream at Rusti that he was a tajik and a fool. She simply looked around for a way to wipe the smiles off their faces. What she would give to be rid of that thin, black-eyed, jet-haired slave-girl Rusti took such a delight in!

  So she gave the corner of Kavita’s shawl into the grasp of the auctioneer. “Sell this one,” she said.

  “Half to you, half to me,” said the slave merchant, but Borte no longer cared about getting a good deal. She just yearned to do something spiteful.

  “NO!” said Rusti.

  “She’s a strong worker. Strong like a man,�
�� Borte told the auctioneer; she was the one wearing the grin now.

  The market square was rainbow-hued with Delhi’s womenfolk, their wailing and sobbing buried dune-deep now under months of misery on the trail. They were so far sunk into despair that they seemed barely curious about what new unhappiness lay in store for them. Only those with sisters or mothers still alive clung to them for fear they would be parted for ever.

  “I forbid it,” said Rusti. “I need her for the…”

  Borte’s grin widened. “Elephants? But the elephants are gone, aren’t they?”

  Prospective buyers were poking and prodding the slaves on sale, staring into their mouths to judge their ages. “Do you not want help with your work, woman?” Rusti demanded, but his voice came out whining and peevish.

  “With the profit from your horse, I can buy better,” said Borte. “A big Syrian boy for me. A big, handsome, Syrian boy.”

  “I am not selling Arrow!”

  “Why? What do you want with a good horse, tajik? Sell the one you stole, and buy some nag instead. A slave for me and a nag for you.”

  The auctioneer broke off from shouting his wares, amused by the squabble. Then he gave a tug on Kavita’s shawl and toppled him in among the other slaves.

  “Not for sale!” shouted Rusti, but the man shrugged, suggesting he could not hear for all the noise. “If he tries to sell her, I will buy her back!” Rusti told his wife, but she only snorted with contempt.

  “Listen to your mother, boy. Mothers know best,” advised the auctioneer, and Borte abruptly stopped laughing.

  Kavi, who lived every day on a knife-edge of fear, felt the knife cut deep. A new owner would soon find out his secret. Would-be buyers were crowding round, groping and squeezing the goods on sale, like cooks buying peaches or plums. A woman pinched his biceps. Would it be here, then? Was today the day that had been hurtling towards him all along? The day when he would be found out? Was this where he would meet his end, trodden underfoot like a rotten orange, in a foreign marketplace?

  The slave merchant completed a sale – three girls bought by a skinner to scrape animal pelts and dye leather. The other girls, like bright fish in a pool, moved sharply away, trying to reach the rear of the shoal, stay out of sight, avoid the eyes of customers. And suddenly the skinner had hold of Kavi by the hair. “I’ll take this one too,” he said.

  “Not for sale!” shouted Rusti, and the crowd laughed, thinking they understood: a favourite slave-girl: a jealous wife. The skinner ran his hands over Kavita’s back to judge whether the slave-girl had been well fed.

  “What are you bidding?” the auctioneer wanted to know.

  “Not for sale!” repeated Rusti, and his wife kicked him.

  “Ten,” said the skinner.

  “Twenty,” said a butcher in the crowd, thinking how he would put the girl to work on the offal first and let her work her way up to jointing and filleting.

  “I was given her by the Gungal Emir!” Rusti protested, knowing no one was listening. All these girls had been gifts from Tamburlaine to his men, hadn’t they?

  “Twenty-five,” said the skinner, but his eyes trailed towards a more shapely girl. He would not go higher than twenty-five.

  “Thirty!” bawled the butcher.

  “I hate you, Borte,” said Rusti. “He was my friend.”

  “He? Who?” said Borte, bewildered but unmoved.

  “Sixty!” The bid came from the back of the crowd, and everyone turned round with a babble of astonishment, to see who was squandering such wealth on a scrawny, shapeless slave-girl. There sat a man astride a white saddlecloth, his helmet and horse’s bridle trimmed with ermine: a sure sign of rank. His heels nudged his horse forwards, and the crowd parted respectfully to let him through.

  Kavi’s hands clenched into fists, then opened limply again. Was it Fate, this armoured figure moving towards him with a bagful of coins? Kavi raised one arm, and the rider lifted him onto the horse. The bag of money passed to the auctioneer.

  Borte gave a crow of pleasure at this unexpected luck. Casting not one glance at Kavita (with whom she had shared a tent for a year) she began quarrelling with the auctioneer about his cut of the money. Only out of the corner of her eye did she see her husband take off and run.

  Rusti ran after the man on the horse, dodging round people, jumping over small children and dogs, straining to keep the white-brimmed helmet in sight. The crowds gave way to the horse, but not to Rusti. He had to run the entire length of the camel market, the lane of potteries, the Park of Good Fortune, the Palace of the Queens, and his lungs were empty of air before he drew level, outside the paper factory. “Please! Please wait! Mistake!” he panted, taking hold of a stirrup and the boot within it.

  Both rider and Kavi looked down at him, their faces impassive, watching him struggle to catch his breath.

  “…pay more!” he gasped. “…buy back. Seventy. Eighty! Horse! Got a horse! Worth plenty!”

  A fly settled on the horseman’s cheek. He waved away the fly, or possibly the boy holding his boot. “I was sent,” he said, as if words were too costly to lavish on the likes of Rusti. “I follow orders. I buy.”

  “Who? Who sent you? I’ll ask him!”

  The horseman seemed too bored to do more than smirk. Life had taught him only to oblige those above him in rank.

  “He buys for me,” said a voice, and all three looked up. At an upper window of the paper factory stood Shidurghu, the Royal Chronicler, his arms filled with sheaves of paper. “You, girl. Come up here. Carry these for me.”

  Wordless, Kavi slid from the horse and climbed the stairs to take the old man’s purchase from him. On the staircase Kavita looked like someone swimming upwards from the seabed.

  In front of a stranger, Rusti could not object. And he could hardly offer Shidurghu his own pony, in payment. The old man flicked a coin – its shine spun out of the shadows and landed at Rusti’s feet. What, did he think Rusti was: a beggar?

  “She was not for sale,” said Rusti, leaving the coin on the ground.

  “Read it,” said Shidurghu in his high, querulous voice.

  Rusti looked down at the coin lying in the dirt. He knew the meaning of the three circles stamped into the metal: they were the fortunate conjunction of planets that had marked Tamburlaine’s birth. There were words, too, on the coin. But what were words to the likes of Rusti?

  Shidurghu and his new slave turned away indoors, and passed into the dark.

  Chapter Twelve

  CIRCUS

  A circus. The prospect raised everyone’s spirits, though few would be invited. A niece of the Gungal Emir was to be married, and marriages need celebrating. What better than to float apples in the water fountains, loose songbirds from rooftop wicker cages, hang up flags in the streets? And put on a circus!

  A circus calls for animals – not just acrobats and clowns and daredevil riders but animals, both real and pretend. The Royal Zoo was thrown into panic and confusion. For whatever way the zookeepers turned, they fell over elephants. No cage was big enough to hold them. They had been penned into a paddock but within the hour they had “leaned” the fences flat. These saggy, raddled giants from Delhi were perpetually thirsty, so that they roamed about supping water from any trough, anywhere. Perpetually hungry, they walked out of the barren compounds in search of food, pulling up the delicate little trees and shrubs in the royal parks, plucking the apples out of the fountains and dislodging the flags with their tusks. Unscrubbed and unoiled, they had begun to pick up parasites from the other beasts in the zoo and, scratching themselves against its pillars, brought down the portico of a government building.

  The zookeepers tried hobbling the elephants, chaining big chocks of wood round their ankles. All but the smallest, the calf, only dragged the chocks away with them, smashing a whole row of terracotta urns standing outside the potteries, before returning in a mob to the zoo.

  What was needed was an expert handler. What was needed was the boy who had delivered the Emir�
��s elephants to the zoo! But how to find him? Impossible! He had disappeared into the teeming chaos of the Rose-mine and its six thousand kibitkis, and they did not even know his name.

  Luckily, another boy turned up.

  It was as if he had fallen out of the sky in answer to the zookeepers’ prayers. A dark-skinned, doe-eyed Indian boy was spotted one day standing in among the elephants, rubbing balm into the chain burns on their monstrous ankles. And when the zookeepers discovered that he could make the elephants obey him, they were overjoyed. The boy had been sent (he said) by the Emir himself, to prepare the animals for the wedding circus. Who were they to argue?

  Many animals appeared in the circuses of Samarqand: cheetahs and monkeys, lions and horses, bears and camels. Not all of them were the real thing. Elaborate costumes stitched from split-skin and dyed to outlandish colours were brought out of storage and softened with vegetable oil and by beating. On the day before the royal wedding, the tiring tent, where the costumes were stored, looked like the scene of some dreadful atrocity. The limp and sorry bodies of animals were apparently being beaten mercilessly with flails. But as fur flew, the hide softened. Meanwhile, acrobats and clowns limbered up and practised their dances, complaining of the heat. Next day they would wriggle into their animal suits and cavort about for the entertainment of the royal guests. The twin brothers, who wore the orange camel suit, were quarrelling about who would be the front and who the back half. They had been quarrelling for years. Their mother, who stitched them into the suit before each performance, blamed the bad-tempered nature of camels: said anger had rubbed off on them from the camel hide. (They were certainly both fond of spitting.)

  Rusti passed them on his way into the city to visit the elephants. He did not pay much attention. An elephant, once it has arrived, occupies a very great space in a boy’s life, and the disappearance of Tamburlaine’s elephants from Rusti’s life had left him as hollow as one of those empty carnival suits swinging in the sunshine. Kavi, too, had left an emptiness.