Tamburlaine's Elephants

by Geraldine McCaughrean

  Then the little cloth elephant was dancing and capering clumsily across the ring towards the dais, shouting and jeering:

  “Hee hee hee, can’t catch me!

  I’m the King of the Elephants, see!”

  Someone in the crowd laughed.

  Inside the elephant head it was hot – hot as terror – and very difficult to see.

  Inside the elephant-rider’s head it was hot – hot as madness and hatred and terror, all three. Kavi dug his hooked stick into the softness of Gaurang’s neck and turned her towards the red dais. Now! Now, he was a warrior! Once – a long age before – he had ridden Mumu into battle – his first battle – and proved nothing but a feeble failure of a boy. But now he was a warrior – a killer. Hadn’t these Mongol jackals taught him that Life is War? That fighting and killing are all that matters? Are what turn a boy into a man? Well, now he had learned his lesson! Now he would trample the Crooked Pig Emir and all his ministers! Flatten them like a grove of bamboo! Crush them like eggs under a hammer! Grind their bones into the Rose-mine! Tamburlaine only thought he had conquered the City of Gems. Now he would find victory turning to bitterest defeat, because, in his vanity, he had taken captive Delhi’s elephants. Now they would cut him down for it, Kavi and his elephants. A red heat-haze of horror and hate and fear blinded Kavi to everything except the scarlet chair and the demon who sat smugly smiling there. Through it all, though, he became faintly aware of a voice:

  “Hee hee hee, can’t catch me!

  I’m the King of the Elephants, see!”

  Some of the crowd were laughing. Let them! In a moment laughter would turn to broken glass in their throats! But what was that shape standing directly in front of the red dais, jigging from foot to foot like a fool? What was it supposed to be? A trunk, two ears and a body like an empty sock. Kavi could make nothing of it – cared even less. Let it move out of the way or be trodden into the grass by Mumu and Phoolenda and Alpa and Gulab and… The stampede of death was unstoppable: first over the sock-shaped creature, then the splintering dais, then the scarlet throne and the Gungal Rat, then out into the dark beyond it, until the stars fell down on Kavi – or a spear or an arrow…

  “Hee hee hee, can’t catch me!

  I’m the King of the Elephants, see!”

  Gaurang faltered. Mumu collided with his rump, and the cavalcade abruptly slowed. Only then did Kavi realize that the figure on the ground was supposed to be an elephant, too. What is more, it was using the signals of a mahout.

  The elephants, confused and nervy, bellowed shrilly, making the crowd scream. Momentum carried their great bulk forward, still forward. The wedding party clutched one another. Some half-rose from their seats, thinking to throw themselves off the dais. Tamburlaine, who never showed fear, simply went on smiling, smiling…

  Inside the head of the cloth elephant, Rusti felt sweat roll down his face like tears. Will you ride me down too, Kavi? Will you? he said, but not out loud. Before you kill them, you will have to kill me, whispered the cloth elephant inside its ridiculous head. Only seconds – only a breath – stood between Rusti and death now. A trunk struck him, a tassle of golden wire swinging from Gaurang’s tusk wound itself around his outstretched arm. He reeled, trod back on his trailing elephant bottom, and almost fell.

  More of the crowd laughed. A stunt! A show! Of course!

  A jumble of trunks flailed the air around and above Rusti’s head. He could smell sour hay.

  Inside Kavi’s head, white tusks of thought slashed to and fro. Why would Rusti try to stop him? Why had Shidurghu moved to sit in the path of the stampede? How would it feel to trample friends in the dirt and hear them die?

  Inside the heads of the elephants were greater thoughts by far – thoughts as large and round and silent as the planets in the sky; wordless thoughts made up of instinct and yearning love. Unlike Kavi, they knew Rusti at once. The costume did not fool them. They knew his smell, his voice, his signals. They felt his willpower. Though their foreheads could break down walls, fell towers and trees, they sensed Rusti’s willpower, like a wall of glass in the smoky air…

  And they would not break it. They came to a halt.

  Only Deepti’s calf, young, untrained and over-excited, kept on galloping about, knocking over torch-stands and a clutter of drums, crushing the box that had held the doves, toppling a bench full of guests onto their backs. As for the rest, they came to a standstill, nose-to-nose with the wedding guests on the red dais, flakes of purple paint falling like dandruff, speckling the magnificent wedding clothes of the mighty.

  Then, one by one, the elephants of Delhi bent a knee to Tamburlaine and his tribe.

  Kavi and Rusti looked at one another. Rusti put up a hand and gripped Kavi’s ankle. The dust settled. The crowd cheered. Shidurghu crushed the screw of paper between his hands until it was as small as an apple. There were bright spots of colour on his cheeks now, but his expression showed nothing at all. He was unreadable.

  “Why?” said Kavi in an undertone. “I help you. You make promise. You help me.”

  “They would have killed you for it, Kavi. They would have killed you horribly.”

  “So?”

  “The elephants, too.”

  “Ah,” said Kavi.

  As if to prove Rusti right, Tamburlaine the Great spoke. Still smiling, still chortling, still nodding his admiration, Tamburlaine spoke out of the corner of his mouth to his Master of Horse and ordered an execution. A bench had been knocked over: some of his guests had been made to look foolish, and that reflected badly on the Emir’s hospitality. “Kill it,” he said.

  Meanwhile Borte, in her slow, dogged and spiteful way had been thinking. The sight of those wretched elephants vexed her past enduring. Their wild stampede around the ring had scared her. The sight of Kavita as a bare-chested boy had baffled her. Anger, fright and bewilderment mixed together inside Borte, dangerous as the ingredients of gunpowder. The sight of her husband emerging from a baggy and ridiculous cloth elephant costume finally lit the fuse. She decided then and there to be rid of this millstone, this embarrassment, this tajik husband once and for all. She would inform on him and on the deceitful Kavita who had hoodwinked her.

  When she stood up, her head spun: the wedding drink was strong and she had been drinking it as fast as possible to make the most of the Emir’s hospitality. Her stomach was bloated, too, from all the bakemeats. She settled the wedding shawl vainly around her shoulders and hurried forwards into the light of the circus ring.

  “I know something! I know something you should know, Your Greatness!” Never timid in the first place, liquor made Borte fearless. “That one there! That tajik there – and him..!” she began, moving towards the red dais, pointing, gesticulating.

  Two of the Royal Bodyguard seized her by both arms. Standard procedure. No one was suffered to approach the Great Emir – not even members of his own family – unless in the tight grasp of his bodyguards. But Borte did not know that. A stranger to court protocol, she struggled and protested, and the men’s grip tightened. “Let go! Get off me! I have to speak to the Emir! I have to tell him about a plot! About that boy there! He’s a spy!”

  She ought to have waited for the noise to die down. She ought to have waited until the next day when she was sober.

  “That Delhi boy there…he’s a shape-shifter! He’s a girl! And my husband – that tajik – that one there – my husband’s brother – he isn’t his father’s son… I have to tell about the plot!”

  The bride and her mother tittered with nervous laughter, but Borte had caught Tamburlaine’s attention at last. “Plots” were always of interest to the Emir. He signalled that the bodyguards should bring the woman closer.

  Nearby, the Royal Chronicler rose to his feet – frail and pale, a figure of infinite dignity and prestige. Stepping between Borte and the Emir, he said, “Tell me, woman. Is that my wedding shawl you wear around your shoulders? The one that lay in my tent until this morning?”

  Startled, Borte squinnie
d down at the embroidery. “This?”

  “For myself, I would give you the coat from my back, if you are in want. Charity is the duty of every man. But to come to a wedding in stolen finery: is that not an insult to your host…and also somewhat foolish?”

  Borte’s mouth fell open. The bodyguards tightened their grip on her, but their attention was suddenly distracted by a loud squealing. The baby elephant had just met his executioner. The adult elephants shunted each other in alarm. Borte seized her chance and ran. She had been accused of thieving – and by a member of court! She knew what happened to thieves, and Tamburlaine’s justice was swift and merciless. Run now, explain later. Outraged innocence was written all over her face, but she bunched up her robe and ran for the darkness – ran for the only break in the circle of gawping faces.

  At the same moment, the elephant calf came galloping back in search of its mother, a spear hanging from a wound in its flank, trunk coiled, mouth wide, squealing. It did not notice where it trod or what stood in its path. It barely even noticed the painless collision, the soft obstacle under its feet. As it scrambled and clambered over Borte, its only thought was to reach its mother Deepti, as hers was to reach her calf. Mother and son were reunited in the centre of the circus ring, smudging their purple finery, flank against flank, cheek against cheek, delicately interlacing their trunks, as gently tender as any mother and baby.

  The writer-down of History, Shidurghu, was first to reach the side of the trampled woman. He ordered everyone else to stay away, to keep their distance. Reverently he covered the body with the very wedding shawl the thief had stolen from him. Afterwards, he showed everyone the lethal knife he had found (he said) in Borte’s hand; told them her dying words too. “The Crooked Pig must die,” said Shidurghu, his face a picture of grief and bewilderment. “To me the words make no sense. But I can only guess that she meant to kill the Divine Father of the Nation.” And the crowd gasped, suitably horrified.

  Tamburlaine granted a reprieve to the elephant calf. In fact, he granted it a royal pardon, and sent his own surgeon to tend the wound his soldiers had made trying to execute it. After all, it had felled an escaping thief – more! – a fleeing assassin.

  “I must give her a funeral,” said Rusti, still shaking from head to foot.

  “You must never speak her name again, or refer to her for as long as you live,” said Shidurghu sharply. “Our glorious Emir has shown the depth of his infinite mercy, or you would be dead already. Generally he puts to death the whole family of those who conspire against him: every cousin, slave, child, horse and dog.”

  “But she did nothing!”

  “Ah!” said the old man, pulling a face. “The worst crime of all, some would say. To live and to do nothing.”

  They sat facing each other over the chessboard, in a white kibitki lit by a half-dozen candles. There were no pieces on the board. The time for games was past. Rusti would have liked to mourn poor Borte. Instead he felt nothing at all: only a guilty sense of relief, like when thundery weather clears.

  Suddenly – like a fortune-teller or a witch – the Chronicler looked clear into Rusti’s head and answered the question he found in there.

  “Yes, boy, I meant it to be you,” he said. “When I first summoned you? During the season of chess? Yes, I intended you to be my accomplice, to do what I could not; to be what I could not.” He gave a bitter laugh. “I told you about the tower at Zubihat, thinking you would knock down the man who built it. But you knocked down the tower instead! For that I blame your mother. There is too much gentleness in you. You take after your mother.” He broke off, and his eyes focused not on the Present but on the Past. They had a dull, shineless emptiness, those eyes. He had not been expecting to outlive the Night of the Elephants, and now more years stretched out ahead of him in the service of the man he hated above any other.

  “But Kavi was a slave, wasn’t he?” suggested Rusti. “So he had to do what you told him.”

  “Aha! Kavi! Free or in chains, Kavi knows nothing but hate. Kavi has a desire as great as mine for revenge.” As he spoke, he tapped incessantly with a dry quill on the chessboard. Watching his hand was like seeing a bird dying by degrees.

  “Are you my father?”

  Shidurghu dropped the quill in surprise. “No! Why? What a thought! What foolish… No! No. Nonsense. Put that vanity out of your head, grubby boy!”

  But Rusti did not apologize. “You are a man of Zubihat: the guards told me. You knew my mother. You are my father. I’ve always known! All along! Ever since you drew the tower!”

  “NO!”

  Rusti slumped back in his chair so heavily that it almost overturned. He had wanted it so much to be true – wondered if he could go on pretending, even now, because he wanted it so much to be true.

  “No. No, no, no.” Shidurghu fumbled in his pocket, took out a single coin, clicked it down on the chessboard. Again the coin. “What does it say?”

  Rusti picked up the coin and said in bored disgust, “Rasti and Rusti. I can’t read it, but everyone knows that. ‘Truth and Safety’.”

  Shidurghu nodded. His whole body seemed to be settling like a bonfire after the fire has burned out its heart. “The father who named you could have chosen either word: ‘Rasti’ or ‘Rusti’. ‘Truth’ or ‘Safety’. He chose ‘Safety’. Think, boy. He chose ‘Safety’. That was what he wished for you. Who am I to thwart him in his wishes? Baliq was a wise man. Who can live with the Truth in his heart without his heart breaking?”

  “Baliq wasn’t my father! The man who took me and left my mother in the tower? The man who called me Rusti? He was a Mongol. That’s all he was.”

  Shidurghu banged the table. Alerted by the sudden noise, a guard ducked his head inside the tent to see that no harm had come to the Royal Chronicler. When he had gone again, Shidurghu lowered his voice to a whisper: a shouted whisper that whistled in his throat. “That Mongol gave you life when you had none! Baliq gave you a place at his hearth! He fed and clothed you. These are the things a father does. Not all Mongols are bad. That much my years of captivity have taught me. Some are good men. The man who took you into his family was a good man.

  “Me, I watch. Oh I am a great watcher. That is my Fate, you see boy. While men around me fight and die and rejoice and marry and live and suffer and sing, what does Shidurghu do? Shidurghu holds still and watches, like a man watching fish in a pool!

  “Just once I was tempted, it is true. I gave in to temptation. ‘A game of chess: what hurt is there in that?’ I said to myself. ‘A horse for the boy: what harm? Teach him to read! (Try, at least.) Save the fool of a boy from the danger he is putting himself in with this Delhi boy…!’ Just once I reached out… And you see the result? The water splashed. The fish scattered. I am left looking only into darkness. I wanted to make an assassin out of you, boy, but your mother’s spirit prevented me. I will not make the same mistake again. I will hold still: as still as a man in his grave!”

  His whispering – his huge, raging whisper – made the old man’s chest heave and the hollows of his throat deepen and the veins throb in his forehead. He reached for a jug of mare’s milk, but Rusti poured it for him instead.

  “I can still come here. We can still play chess!”

  “No.”

  It felt like being kicked. “I would help you. Next time. Another time. I would! I would!”

  “I have said all the words that need to be said. Go.”

  But Rusti did not go. “You didn’t breathe,” he said, and Shidurghu frowned, not understanding. “You told me once to think for the space of one breath before I decided on a move.”

  The Chronicler gave an impatient wave of his hand and turned his face away. Rusti was dismissed.

  But Rusti took a long deep breath and waited, feeling the fragrant smoke from the candle coil and twist inside him like ghosts in a tower. “I have decided, Your Honour,” he said. “I have decided on my move. I mean to be a tajik. A stayer-in-one-place. I will stay here in Samarqand.”
<
br />   Shidurghu nodded impatiently, in a hurry for Rusti to leave. But Rusti had not finished. He went to the desk, took up a sheet of parchment and a pen, and laid them on the chessboard. “Draw,” he said.

  The old man gripped the arms of his chair as if he was about to get up. “The tower again? No. I will not.”

  “No,” said Rusti. “Not the tower. Draw my mother.”

  The look on Shidurghu’s face said that the task was beyond him, impossible, out of the question, unthinkable. But he did take up the pen and he did draw. For a time the only sound was the scratching of the pen and their breathing settling into the same rhythm.

  A glimmer of wet ink; a sprinkling of white sand to dry it, and the parchment changed hands. Only then did Rusti turn his back and make for the door.

  After the space of, say, one breath, and just as Rusti lifted the flap of the tent, the old man spoke:

  “In all the years since Zubihat, not one breath has passed out of me but I have thought of my daughter. Walled up inside that tower. And of her child. Her little boy.”

  Then Rusti turned and kneeled and pressed his forehead to the soft plush of the carpet, and the sun caught on a coin, as he laid it down at arm’s length in front of him. Circling it, he laid a gold O – a woman’s bracelet.

  “Be safe, honoured grandfather. The Truth is safe with me.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  TWO YEARS ON…

  Rusti sits on a plain called the Rose-mine, outside Samarqand, capital of Tamburlaine’s Empire. Around him, like humps of earth left by a gravedigger, lie the captured elephants of Delhi. Tonight, they will parade in honour of the Emir’s new wife, the twelve-year-old Taman-aghan whom he married yesterday in among the gorgeous pavilions of fur and silk that sprinkle the Rose-mine. The elephants will bend their knees respectfully. They will stretch their trunks and bellow a trumpet fanfare in celebration of the happy event. There will be a circus and poetry, feasting and an ocean of drink.