The Thing appeared helpless and worn out, so summoning up all his nerve, Rusti threw a rock at it. When nothing happened, he ran in and kicked it. It was like kicking a boulder; for a minute he thought all his toes were broken. But the Mighty Emir, Conqueror of the World, Lord of the Fortunate Conjunction had told him to take the creature captive. Tamburlaine had given him a direct order: to take it prisoner. Desperation lent Rusti courage. He tugged on the bell-rope tail. He shoved with his shoulder against the bloated grey bulge of the belly. He even went to heave on the nose, but it groped at him like a hand, and he stepped smartly away again, out of reach.
“Aaaow!”
He had stepped back onto one of the Hindus. This was no archer or javelin thrower. He was nothing but a boy – younger even than Rusti: the driver presumably. Rusti drew his dagger. A hot, sharp pang went through him. He had just ridden into battle for the first time: now he was about to make his first kill.
Kavi the elephant boy looked up at the Mongol warrior who had trodden on him, and his throat closed up with fear. The flat round face peering down at him looked so cruel, its eastern eyes the colour of dry dust. He had heard what merciless killers these devils were, sweeping over the land like a sandstorm, leaving it scoured of life. There was no point in pleading for mercy. The only chance he stood of surviving the next few seconds was if he could rouse his elephant and make her obey him. He would command her to pick up the Mongol devil in her trunk and hurl him to the ground… Then Kavi would simply set off and run for his life…
“Get up, Mumu! Lift the devil! Toss the devil! Kill the devil!” he urged the fallen elephant.
But the elephant was dazed, hurt, afraid. She plucked at him with her trunk, like an old woman asking a neighbour’s help to get up. Kavi gave a sob of frustration. Was it because of this stupid creature that he was about to die?
The boy looking up at Rusti had huge, oddly round eyes, unlike any Mongol’s. His nose was bleeding, his teeth chattering with fear. Well, not a kill, perhaps. A prisoner, rather. Yes! This little elephant driver could be Rusti’s first prisoner! The Great Tamburlaine had taken one hundred thousand prisoners on his march into India. Now Rusti had one of his own. It was an exciting thought. A warm feeling of power stirred in him, as the young elephant rider jabbered piteously, presumably begging for his life. But the fact remained; Rusti was supposed to make a prisoner of the elephant, too, and he had not the slightest idea how to begin.
Sudden inspiration struck. Rusti put his dagger-tip to the boy’s throat, pointed at the monster and said: “Make it get up!”
A mind reader! Almost before Rusti had spoken, the little boy was up on his feet, unlashing the ruins of the turret, picking up a hooked stick, snagging the great, flapping ear, shouting at the beast in his own incomprehensible language. With a lurch, the massive animal dragged itself to its feet. Rusti could not help grinning.
“Good! Good, Mumu! Now kill him!” shouted Kavi, eye-to-eyeball with the swaying elephant. “Gore the filthy Mongol! Kill him! Do it for me!” (It did not matter how loudly he shouted it: the foreigner would not understand what he was saying.) The elephant blinked and pitched to its knees again, making both boys yelp. Kavi slapped his own skull. He sobbed and pleaded with his elephant, throat straining, failing to make the right noises of command. Soon he could not even remember the right noises to make. “Please, Mumu! Pleeeeaase! Pleeeeaaaase don’t let him kill me!” he wept. At last the elephant reached out her trunk, coiled it around the thighs of the Mongol warrior and lifted him off the ground.
Rusti thought his last moment had come. He looked up into the sky, hoping to glimpse his ancestors gathering to receive his spirit. Far beneath him his prisoner’s face broke into a beaming smile. Then the elephant slotted Rusti between the lumpy hills of its domed skull, and sat him gently on its neck – astride its neck. Surely he was not going to have to ride the monster!
With the deftness of a pickpocket, the elephant reached for the other boy and lifted him, too, onto her back. Kavi and Rusti were thrown together, the fastenings of their clothes tangled. Rusti’s breath was hot and quick in Kavi’s neck, making him squirm. The elephant staggered: Rusti flung his arms around the other boy’s waist and clung on tight. Then Mumu took off and ran – stupid and flat-footed – heading not for home, not even for the hills, but blundering after the Mongol cavalry, bellowing like a cow in labour. Mumu was only young, and rather stupid. In fact, she was the elephant equivalent of a scared boy, caught up in his first real taste of danger.
So it was that Rusti accidentally rode into Tamburlaine’s camp on the back of a war elephant, his prisoner sitting in his lap. The moment was so extraordinary that he forgot his fright. A hundred hardened warriors fell back, muttering prayers. Little children ran to their mothers. As friends of Rusti’s recognized him, their mouths fell open and they pointed up at him. Neighbours struggled to put a name to his face, so that they could claim to know him: “Rusti,” he heard. “Cokas’s brother, Rusti.” Laughter rose through Rusti as if the elephant’s lumpy trot had shaken it out of him.
As for Kavi, his terror gave way to helpless despair. Wherever he looked, he saw those stitched-closed Mongol eyes. His captor’s arms held his own pinned tight to his sides and the boy’s laughter stirred the hairs on Kavi’s neck. There would be no escape. He was a prisoner of the Mongol Horde and his life was worth less than a fly in a jug of milk.
Rusti had to tether the beast behind a row of carts on the edge of camp, because the Mongols were so afraid of it. Even then, they moved their kibitkis as far away as possible, superstitiously whispering: “The Prince of Delhi has two hundred of these monsters!”
“Their hide is so thick no weapon can pierce it!”
“Their tusks are deadly poisonous!”
“What do they eat?”
“Small children and sheep, that’s what I heard.”
Rusti tethered his human prisoner, too. “Look, Cokas! I took a prisoner!” he told his brother. “The Emperor told me to fetch home the…Thing, and I did! And I’ve got a prisoner!”
Cokas curled his lips away from his teeth in an unattractive sneer, but there was no mistaking his surprise, his envy. He would have accused Rusti of making it up, but he had seen it with his own eyes – the Mighty Emir addressing his little brother! The boy entrusted with a man’s task, and by the mighty Tamburlaine! Cokas had never so much as seen the wondrous man up close. He had never so much as seen one of these leather-bag animals before, let alone captured one.
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 a
nimal-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.
To find out what happens next in this explosive story, read
TAMBURLAINE’S ELEPHANTS
ISBN 9780746090930
Editorial consultant: Tony Bradman
First published in the UK in 2013 by Usborne Publishing Ltd., Usborne House, 83-85 Saffron Hill, London EC1N 8RT, England. www.usborne.com
Copyright © Geraldine McCaughrean, 2013
The right of Geraldine McCaughrean to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
Cover illustration by Ian McNee.
The name Usborne and the devices are Trade Marks of Usborne Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or used in any way except as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or loaned or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ePub ISBN 9781409557371
Batch number 02351-02
The Middle of Nowhere Page 19
