Saxon: The Emperor's Elephant

by Severin, Tim

  ‘The knife attack in Kaupang you described to the Nomenculator. Then Protis loses his life in the arena in the Colosseum. You could have been the victim just as easily.’

  ‘Maybe someone wanted to harm the animals and damage Carolus’s embassy to the caliph, as you had feared,’ I said.

  The dragoman tilted his head, squinting through half-closed eyes at the fisherman who was disentangling what looked like a twig from his net. ‘We need to keep alert.’

  I was taken aback. ‘Even here? In Egypt?’

  He turned to face me. I noticed how much browner he was now, tanned by the Mediterranean sun. He could have passed for an Egyptian himself. ‘Make no mistake. Our arrival in Alexandria was noted.’

  ‘But we are in the caliph’s territory now. That is security enough.’

  He treated me to a sceptical glance. ‘Did you listen to the dock workers in Alexandria, or to the port captain when he spoke with his assistants?’

  I failed to see the point of his question so he added, ‘They were speaking Greek. Alexandria may be part of the caliph’s possessions but in their hearts its citizens still think of themselves as Greeks. They were proud members of the Byzantine Empire for centuries and, if asked, they would still serve Byzantine interests.’

  He did not have to explain any further. In Aachen, Alcuin had warned me of the hostility of the Greeks when they learned Carolus was sending gifts to their Saracen enemies. To them, the caliph was a foe. I also recalled the Khazar slave traders in Kaupang who would have passed through Byzantium on their way north. They had vanished a few days before I was attacked, and Osric had suspected them as being Greek agents. Unbidden, there sprang into my mind an image of the Greek priest in his dark robes officiating at Protis’s funeral. The largest foreign community in Rome was Greek. They had their own churches, shops and guilds. For every Saxon pilgrim you might encounter in the streets of Rome, you were rubbing shoulders with fifty Greeks. They had the means and resources to organize the events that led to Protis’s death.

  ‘Protis was a Greek,’ I said. ‘If the Greeks have been trying to prevent our embassy reaching the caliph, we have to remember that Protis lost his life helping us.’

  The dragoman was unimpressed. ‘Protis was a Massalian. His Greece was the homeland of ancient heroes. Neither he nor his city had any ties to Byzantium.’

  Both of us turned at the sound of a high-pitched cry of delight. It was Walo. He was in the bow of our boat, waving and shouting incoherently. I hurried forward to find out what was the matter.

  ‘There! There!’ he babbled.

  His finger shook as he pointed at the reeds that fringed the river.

  I looked in the direction in which he was pointing. The countryside of the delta was so utterly flat that my view was the empty washed-out sky and the thick wall of reeds, taller than a man, on both banks of the river. Wherever there was a small gap in the reeds, it offered only a glimpse of foreshore, a pattern of cracks and fissures where the water level had fallen and the sun had baked the mud into a pale brown crust. I saw nothing unusual.

  ‘What is it?’ I demanded irritably. I was still trying to come to terms with what Abram had just told me and Walo’s simple-mindedness could at times be exasperating.

  ‘There! Right down by the water!’

  Osric had come forward along the wide deck and joined the two of us. ‘What’s Walo so excited about?’ I asked him.

  ‘A crocodile.’

  Then I saw it. I had mistaken it for a dead tree submerged close to the reeds. A gentle ripple spread out. First a broad snout, the colour of wet bronze, and nostrils appeared, then two protruding eyes. The full size of the beast revealed itself as its armoured back and spine quietly broke the surface followed by the ridge of its long thick tail. I judged the beast to be fifteen feet in length. Beside me, Walo let out a gasp; part delight, part fear. Despite myself, I stepped back a pace, wondering if the animal could swim the short distance and lunge at our vessel. But our Egyptian boatmen appeared untroubled as we glided past the creature and it sank back down, reverting to being a drowned log.

  Walo was breathless with excitement. ‘Could you see tears in its eyes?’

  ‘It was impossible to say,’ I answered.

  Walo had pleaded with me on the voyage from Italy to consult the bestiary and to make a list of the animals we could expect to encounter in Egypt and beyond. I had done so, though the book seldom made it clear which country each creature lived in. The crocodile was an exception. The bestiary stated that the crocodile was born in the Nile, and that its skin was so hard that it did not feel the blows of even the heaviest stones. It had fierce teeth and claws and laid its eggs on the land where male and female guarded them, taking turns. It was unique among all beasts in that it could move its upper jawbone.

  ‘Walo, crocodiles can’t weep,’ observed Osric. Like me, he was not convinced that the information in the bestiary was always accurate. The book claimed that a crocodile shed tears just before and after eating a man, and from then onwards could not cease crying.

  ‘You saw the creature for yourself,’ said Walo obstinately. ‘It was exactly like its picture.’

  ‘But the book also says that the crocodile takes to the water only by night. It remains on land by day. So something is not right,’ Osric pointed out.

  ‘We should ask the boatmen what they know,’ I suggested.

  We squeezed our way around the aurochs’ cage, which occupied most of the midships of the boat, and went to where the boat master squatted near the helm. An old man, he was wizened and scrawny, his white hair close cropped to stubble, and dressed in a grubby white gown. I questioned him about the crocodile and its habits, but he found my Saracen difficult to understand, and even when we asked for Abram to help out with interpreting, he still looked puzzled.

  ‘Show him the picture in the book,’ suggested Walo.

  I fetched the bestiary from my luggage. The crocodile was illustrated twice. The first picture showed the beast on a riverbank. From its jaws protruded the naked legs of a man it was swallowing entire. The boat master looked at it with rheumy eyes, and nodded vigorously.

  ‘You see,’ said Walo triumphantly. ‘The crocodile does eat men.’

  My efforts at miming the beast crying tears were not understood so I showed the second illustration. Here the crocodile had an unpleasant-looking creature bursting out sideways from its stomach, through the skin. It was, according to the text, the crocodile’s main enemy, a hydris. It was a water snake that hated the crocodile. If a crocodile lay on the riverbank with its jaws open, the hydris disguised itself as a ball of mud, rolled up to the open mouth and leaped in. From inside the crocodile’s stomach the hydris then ate its way sideways, killing its enemy.

  The old man frowned for several minutes at the picture of the hydris, and then shook his head.

  ‘Why don’t you show him that other Egyptian creature we doubted?’ suggested Osric.

  I turned the pages until I found the hyena. Neither Osric nor I believed the animal really existed. The humped shoulders, sloping backbone and ghoulish face were too grotesque. It was shown straddling an open coffin, and gnawing on a human corpse. To my surprise the elderly captain recognized the hyena immediately. He nodded energetically and made a sound like an odd coughing grunt, then smiled at us before spitting a gob of phlegm over the side. He pointed to the writing beneath the picture.

  ‘He wants to know what’s written there,’ prompted Abram who had come aft to join us. ‘If you read it aloud, I’ll try again to translate what it says.’

  With the dragoman interpreting my words, I read out: ‘The hyena’s jaws are so strong that they can break anything with their teeth, then they grind up the morsels in the belly. The hyena is male one year, female the next. It cannot bend its neck, so must turn the whole body to see behind.’

  I glanced at the old man to see his reaction. He squatted in the sunshine, arms against his bony knees, expressionless.

  ‘The hyen
a can imitate the sound of a human voice,’ I read on, ‘it calls travellers by their names so that as they emerge from their tents, they leap upon them and tear them to pieces.’

  ‘How would a hyena know my name?’ asked Walo with his usual unanswerable directness.

  I ignored the interruption. ‘If it wishes, the hyena’s cry resembles someone being sick. This attracts dogs who are then attacked.’

  ‘That’s what the old man was doing – imitating the hyena’s cough,’ said Osric. ‘Mind you, if I heard that noise outside my tent at night, I think I’d prefer to stay where I was.’

  *

  Our travel plans were thrown into utter disarray three days later. Our boats had progressed through the delta, sailing and rowing against the sluggish current by day, tying up at night. The larger animals in our menagerie were bearing up remarkably well despite the increasingly ferocious daytime heat. The crew rigged awnings over their cages to keep off the Egyptian sun, and threw buckets of water over the aurochs and the two bears whenever they seemed to be uncomfortable. The Nile water was tepid, but helped them cool off, and the ice bears had the good sense to spend most of the daylight hours fast asleep in the shade, waking up at night. Walo had clipped the heavy coats of the dogs, and flew the gyrfalcons regularly for their exercise, watched by our boatmen who regarded him with something approaching awe. They took to acting as his lookouts – scanning the banks of the river and drawing his attention to the creatures that he might otherwise have missed. Crocodiles were commonplace. Often half a dozen of the ugly beasts were drawn up, side by side, on the dried mud of the bank, sunning themselves, mouths open. Walo triumphantly pointed out to me that the beasts did indeed move their upper jaws, just as the bestiary had claimed. But we never saw the hydris, the crocodile’s deadly enemy, and it totally slipped my mind that Walo and I had also talked about the hypnalis, the asp that killed Cleopatra the Queen of Egypt.

  Had I thought more carefully about the dried and cracked mud of the riverbank I would have avoided the disappointment awaiting us. When we arrived at the junction where the canal met the river, it was to find a sizeable settlement of whitewashed houses and reed-thatched storage sheds. Moored against the riverbank lay a score of boats, empty and idle. The canal itself was dry.

  ‘If you had got here two months ago, it would have been different,’ the canal superintendent told me, spreading his hands in a gesture of helplessness. ‘The canal is only open when the water level in the Nile is high enough. When the Nile flood recedes, the canal empties out until just a few puddles remain.’

  We were seated on cushions on the floor of his office where, at times of high water, the merchants came to pay the tolls that allowed them to use the canal. It was a large, comfortable room, furnished in the local style with low tables and carved chests that contained his ledgers. Slatted shutters over the window openings allowed any breeze to circulate, and the building’s thick mud walls served as a barrier to the heat outside.

  ‘Right now there are places in the canal where you couldn’t float a child’s toy,’ he went on, shifting his weight on his cushion. He was very corpulent, his thighs bulging under his gown as he sat cross-legged. A thin gold chain almost disappeared into the fleshy folds of his neck.

  ‘Is there no way of retaining the flood water in the canal?’ It was the sort of question that Protis would have posed. I felt a sudden wrench of sorrow that the young Greek was no longer with us. He would have loved to suggest an ingenious solution to a practical problem.

  ‘There would be no point,’ said the superintendent. ‘If we sealed the mouth of the canal and trapped the water inside, the summer sun would suck it all up in a matter of weeks or it would seep away through bed of the canal. And there would have to be a system of lifting the cargoes from river level and loading them on canal boats.’

  He paused and gave me a calculating look. ‘You are not the first to have arrived here after the canal has shut.’

  I waited for him to go on.

  The superintendent swatted away a fly circling near his face. ‘If the cargo is urgent, a caravan can be arranged.’

  ‘A caravan?’ I asked, feigning ignorance though I had been waiting for him to make the suggestion. Abram had learned that the superintendent supplemented his income by privately hiring out the labour force that should have been doing canal maintenance.

  ‘A road runs alongside the canal almost as far as the eastern marshlands. There it branches off and goes directly to the port at al-Qulzum. The land journey only takes a few days more than if you had gone by water. Regrettably, it involves hiring waggons, draught animals, baggage handlers and guards . . . which, of course, incurs extra expense.’ He paused to allow the last words to sink in.

  I decided that, for appearance’s sake, I should haggle. ‘I don’t understand the need for guards. Are the caliph’s governors not charged with ensuring the security of travellers?’

  ‘The guards are there to protect against wild animals,’ the superintendent answered smoothly. ‘Beyond the marshland the desert is infested with lions.’

  ‘And hyenas?’ I said, meaning to sound sarcastic.

  Unexpectedly he agreed. ‘Of course. Lions and hyenas. They go together and they prey on travellers.’

  The superintendent was well aware that I had no choice but to hire a caravan. The canal would not reopen for many months and even if the ice bears survived the long delay, I did not fancy arriving in Baghdad late and with mangy, half-starved animals.

  With heartfelt insincerity I told him that I would be most grateful if he would arrange a caravan to transport my menagerie across the desert. He struggled to his feet with an effort and assured me in the same spirit of fraudulent friendship that my well-being and the success of my mission were close to his heart. He would make sure that the caravan would be ready to depart within a week.

  Walo was waiting for me outside, shifting from foot to foot with impatience. ‘Can you come at once,’ he blurted out.

  Alarmed, I asked, ‘There’s nothing wrong with the animals, is there?’

  ‘No, no,’ he replied. ‘There’s something you must see.’

  His face set in a worried frown, he led me down a side-street of modest whitewashed houses, their wooden doors warped and cracked by the sun. It was mid-morning and there was almost no one about. A few birds like starlings, dark brown with bright yellow bills and legs, flew down to peck at the piles of rubbish. We turned down an alleyway between high blank walls where the outer layer of mud was flaking off in scabby patches, and finally came to the rear of a long, low stable building. From the far side I could hear a medley of strange sounds. The background noise was a moaning and grumbling like a herd of cows in distress. Punctuating this clamour were sudden angry roars and enormous bubbling belches. I could not imagine what creatures would utter such constant complaints. Walo and I walked round the corner of the building and there in front of us was a row of bizarre creatures lined up beside a long water trough. On ungainly legs, they stood taller than a man and had serpent necks. Several of them swung their heads to look at us as we stepped into view, and greeted us with those loud, disagreeable groans.

  Walo turned towards me, ‘What are they?’ he asked, obviously perplexed.

  ‘Camels,’ I told him. I had seen camels pictured in the church mosaics in Rome.

  ‘But they don’t look like the camel in the book,’ he objected. That was true. The bestiary’s camel had two distinct humps on its back. The creatures in front of us had a single hump covered with unsightly clumps of dark brown fur. They appeared to be moulting.

  Walo and I approached closer. The burping and groaning and moaning grew louder and more insistent with each step.

  ‘They could be the giant offspring of a deer and a cow,’ said Walo. One of the creatures shifted on its great padded feet, lowering its head to inspect us more closely, peering past huge eyelashes. ‘Look! The upper lip is split. It moves in two parts. Like a rabbit.’

  He reached up to touch
the creature’s mouth.

  The camel jerked up its head in alarm, and gave a gurgling grunt from deep within its gut. Its mouth gaped and I caught sight of long yellow teeth and feared it was about to bite. Instead it shook its head violently from side to side, the pendulous lips flapped, and out shot a thick gush of foul-smelling green soup. It splattered over Walo, drenching his head and shoulders. The smell was of rotten grass blended with dog excrement.

  *

  Twenty of the ungainly beasts laden with bales of fodder and baggage formed our caravan when we took to the road. Only the lead camel had a rider. The rest of us – guards, cooks, attendants, camel drivers, the men leading our dogs on leads, and assorted hangers-on – were on foot. The cages for the ice bears and the aurochs had been fixed onto ponderous wheeled platforms, each drawn by a pair of harnessed camels. A third cart followed with the gyrfalcons in their cages and a great barrel that contained a supply of water for our menagerie.

  Our route along the canal bank led across an impoverished land dotted with poor villages where the peasants worked the thin grey soil with mattocks and hoes. Old men sat in the shade of dusty palm trees and veiled women held back their curious children as they peeked from the darkened doorways of mud-brick hovels. The only livestock were flocks of scraggy goats and a few donkeys. All life depended on the spindly wooden structures that, from a distance, I mistook for hangman’s gallows. They were devices for raising water from the canal. A bucket dangled from the end of a long pole pivoted one-fifth along its length from a tall frame. A large stone fastened at the shorter end of the pole served as a counterweight so the bucket could be lifted and lowered with ease. The bucket scooped water, was swung over the bank, and the contents were tipped into a drinking trough for animals or into an irrigation ditch. I found myself wishing that Protis was still with us and could see for himself the ingenuity of this device. Where enough water remained in the bed of the canal, our camels were driven down to stand in the shallow puddles. Walo looked on from a safe distance as they noisily slaked their thirst. According to what I had read to him from the bestiary, a camel prefers muddy water, so it stirs up the silt with its feet before drinking. Our camels failed to do this and I could only presume from the look of mistrust on Walo’s face that he doubted whether they were true camels. His faith in the Book of Beasts was unshakeable.