His Majesty's Elephant (2 page)

Rowan bit down on the back of her hand. No one was making any move to distract the Elephant or to rescue the boy. She took off her veil. It was not much, but if she flapped it in the Elephant's face—

She got as far as the edge of the crowd before she realized what was happening. The boy had his hand on the Elephant's shoulder, stroking it.

The Elephant shuddered. Now it would move. Now it would trample him.

Its trunk came down. Rowan poised to leap.

As gently as a lady plucking a May blossom, the pink tip of the trunk curled around the end of the grass-twist.

The boy let the twist go. The Elephant tucked it into the mouth that hid under the trunk and the tusks, and chewed slowly, solemnly.

There was no sound but that, and the breathing of too many people pressed too close, and the boy's soft voice speaking in a strange language. For a moment Rowan thought he was an infidel. He was dark enough for one, and his nose was a fierce enough curve.

But he did not feel to her like one of the Caliph's men, of whom there were many in the yard, and he was not dressed like them, either. His tunic was Frankish without a doubt, and his shaggy head was bare of a turban.

He stroked the Elephant and talked to it, while everyone stared. After a while he seemed to notice that he was not alone in the world. He said in clear Frankish with a hint of a lilt, “You may go away now. Abul Abbas is tired of your noise. He says that he will go into his prison, if only he may rest there in peace.”

Rowan found that her mouth was open. She shut it. She was a princess of the Franks, and she had seen a fair lot of arrogant young lordlings. She had never seen anything to match this stableboy in the dusty tunic.

More startling still, people obeyed him. The Caliph's men bowed in the way they had, touching brow and lip and breast. Her father's people were louder and less orderly, but even they did as the boy told them. The few who stayed clearly had business to keep them there.

The boy seemed to have forgotten them again. He took the Elephant's trunk as if it had been a child's hand, and led the great beast into the tent.

oOo

It was dim under the sag of the roof, with an odor of old canvas, and something indescribable that must have been the Elephant. There was hay laid out, enough to fill a cart, and water in a barrel, and a bed of good straw. The Elephant tasted the hay, using its trunk like a hand, and drank from the barrel in a way that made Rowan gape: drawing up a trunkful of water and sucking it into its mouth. She would have been horrified if it had not been so interesting.

She stayed near the open side of the tent, for prudence, although the Elephant seemed quiet now. It looked at her once or twice, without any hostility that she could see.

She did not know whether she found that comforting. Now that she understood its sadness, she had a powerful temptation to go to it and put her arms around it and tell it that she understood. Her mother had died when she was young, and her nurse when she was a little older. She knew what it was to lose something that one loved.

If she did not go soon, it would be dark before she could saddle her pony and ride. The shadows were long in the yard. The Elephant was hardly more than a shape and a gleam of gold-tipped tusks. But she stayed where she was.

The boy's shadow moved apart from the Elephant's. His voice was sharp. “Didn't I tell you to go away?”

“Why should I have listened?” Rowan asked him. She had been studying Gisela; she knew how to make her voice perfectly, maddeningly sweet.

“You're upsetting Abul Abbas,” the boy said.

The Elephant was not upset. He was paying them no attention at all. Rowan decided to follow his example and ignore the boy's nonsense. “Is that his name? Abullabas?”

“Abul Abbas.” The boy's precision was insulting.

“My name is Theoderada,” said Rowan, “but everyone calls me Rowan. Father Angilbert gave us all poetry-names, you see, when we were little. Gisela is Lily, Bertha is Rose, Hrotrud is Linden—”

“Theoderada is Chatterbox.” The boy was sneering, she could tell, even if it was too dark to see.

“And what,” asked Rowan, “do they call you?”

She did not think that he would answer, but after a while he did, biting it off short. “Kerrec.”

“Kerrec,” said Rowan, “and Abul Abbas.” She took care to say it correctly. “How is it that you know about elephants?”

That, he did not reply to.

“I suppose you'll be his keeper now,” she said, “since no one else can manage him. It will make a change from horses.”

“Will you just,” he said tightly, “go away? So that Abul Abbas can rest?”

Really, thought Rowan, he was rude beyond words, even if he was too much a stranger to know who she was. She was not in a mood to enlighten him, but neither was she so contrary as to argue with the dismissal. The Elephant had fought a hard battle. He would be tired, and he would want to do his grieving in solitude.

Though maybe the grief would be less now, with Kerrec to keep him company. Rowan would have hated it, but she could see what kind of person Kerrec was: no time or sympathy for people, but a world of it for animals.

oOo

She had just enough time to saddle her pony and manage a canter around the knights' field, which was empty for once, except for a hen that had wandered in from somewhere. The bird was too haughty or too stupid to care that it was in Galla's way, and Galla made do, when necessary, by jumping neatly over it.

It would have been better sport if they could have taken longer at it, and if the flies had not come to the feast. Galla's warding of watered vinegar was wearing thin. When the pony flew into a bucking fit around the whole rim of the field, Rowan brought her in.

Rowan liked to do her own stablehanding, even the stalls when there was no one near to be scandalized. Tonight the grooms were all either huddled in corners talking about the Elephant or absorbed in looking after the embassy's beautiful little horses. Galla was half Arab herself, and it showed in her fine head and her elegant tail, but she had enough good Frankish cob in her to make her sensible.

Rowan brushed the red-brown coat till it shone, and sponged on another bowlful of vinegar. Galla snorted at it, but it kept the flies at bay. A bit of bread mollified her, and a fistful of dried apple.

oOo

It was dark by the time Rowan left the stable. There were lamps lit in the yard, and one by the Elephant's pavilion. She heard Abul Abbas moving about inside, but she did not go back to see him—and certainly not to see his keeper. “Good night, Lord Elephant,” she said softly. Maybe he paused, listening. Maybe he was only comfortable at last, and slipping into sleep.

The Caliph's men stayed through spring into summer, feasting and hunting and talking politics. In the middle of that, more people came, dark bearded men from the east like the Caliph's men, but these were Christians, and they spoke Greek, and called themselves servants of the Empress of the East.

They hated the Caliph's men. The Caliph's men hated them. They were all excruciatingly polite, because Rowan's father was stronger than any of them.

The palace was bursting at the seams. The women had to double up in the little rooms behind their hall. They were sleeping crammed together like sheep in a pen, and falling over one another in the daytime, trying to stay out of the way of all the embassies.

The little chapel where Rowan went to talk to her mother was full of sloe-eyed bearded priests. The stable was full of foreign horses—Galla was put out to pasture, and never mind what Rowan thought of that. There was no place to go to be by herself, except maybe one.

She made an excuse, to begin with. She really was out of thread for the border she was embroidering, or trying to embroider when she had to stop every few stitches to let someone climb over her.

She knew perfectly well that she should find a maid to run the errand, or ask one of her sisters to go with her. But that had always been her chief rebellion: to go out alone.

There was silver in her purse, and a fistful of copper. It would do.

She put on her plainest gown and tied up her hair in a bit of linen. Her heart was racing, which was silly. She went alone to the market all the time. But it never quite stopped being an adventure.

oOo

With the Caliph's men in the city, and now the Byzantines, the market had swelled out of its square and into the streets round about. Merchants came from everywhere to show their wares, and people came to buy them or to trade for them.

Cooks and bakers came in to feed the crowds, and sellers of wine and ale, and butchers and poulterers, cheesemongers, spice-merchants, greengrocers and fruitsellers; and for those who ate too much, apothecaries with their stalls full of wonderful things. Rowan could follow her nose through the market, pork roasting here, cheese aging there, bread baking, wine spilling, and once a sweetness so strong that she staggered: spices whose names she barely knew, steeped in honey and mixed in cakes or wine.

She was not looking for things to eat. Simply smelling them was enough. In among them she found the other things: gold and silver and copper, bronze and iron forged into shapes as noble as weapons or as lowly as buckles for a harness, perfumes as powerful as the spices, flowers as potent as the perfumes, the good pungent smell of well-tanned leather, the warm oily scent of woven wool, the dusty-dry smell of linen.

She found the thread she was looking for, woven gold and dear enough to all but empty her purse, but the woman who sold it to her slipped in a twist of silk, too. “To match your eyes,” she said.

The silk was an odd color, which was probably why it came unpaid for: not quite grey, not quite green. Rowan liked to think that her eyes were greyer than that, or at least less muddy. They would not ever be pure clear blue like Bertha's or Gisela's. Her hair was no-color, too, beside Bertha's wheat-gold and Gisela's wonderful almost-silver: neither brown nor gold but somewhere between.

She was glad of the thread, for all that, and she said so. The way the woman looked at her, Rowan knew her name was no secret, or her rank, either. But people in the Emperor's city had a courtesy. They let the Emperor's children go unnoticed if they wanted it.

oOo

With her booty in her purse next to a lonely copper penny, Rowan took the long way back to the palace. She skirted the walls and meandered for a while through the narrow twisting streets, now up toward the great tall tower that was her father's chapel, now down around the crumbling Roman pillars of the baths.

There was a garden in back of that. The gate had a latch and a bolt, but it opened when she tried it. She slipped through.

Her father's garden was young yet. There were trees that would be lovely when they were older, and beds of flowers that needed to thicken a little, like hair on a baby's head. But the little orchard that had been there since the palace was a Roman villa was thriving handsomely.

Rowan could feel the cool of the trees even before she came to them, blessed in the day's heat. There were bees singing in the grass, and a flock of sparrows squabbling in the branches.

Her favorite tree stood in the middle. It was ancient but sturdy, and it bore a good crop every year.

The best of it, aside from its apples, was the way it branched, making a seat just the right size for Rowan. If she rested her back against the rise of the trunk and stretched her legs along the twining of two branches, only someone who knew where to look could see her from below. She had eluded nurses so when she was small, and officious callers-to-duty when she was bigger.

She clambered up to her seat. It was cooler there than it was below, with a bit of a breeze. She opened her bodice to let the breeze in, and tucked her skirts above her knees, and grinned at the pattern of leaves above her. Scandalous, simply scandalous.

She did not mean to stay long, but the sun was warm through the leaves, and the bees sang of sleep. Her eyelids drooped.

oOo

Voices startled her awake. They were not loud, but they were right below her. She caught herself before she could roll off her perch, and peered cautiously down.

They sat on the grass at the tree's foot: a woman in a veil confined by a thin fillet only a little more silver than her hair, and a man with hair as blackly curly as a lapdog's coat. He had a curly beard, too, and a soft wheedling voice.

Rowan would have known what he was even without his elaborate coat. There was no mistaking the sound of a Byzantine in full slither.

What was shocking was that he was slithering about sick-sweet saintly Gisela instead of somebody hotter-blooded, like Rothaide. Gisela fended him off, but feebly.

“Such beauty,” said the Byzantine in accented Latin. “A flower among the Franks. And you say that you wish to wed God and not a man. Surely God never meant you to wither away in a cold cloister.”

“God is a jealous husband,” said Gisela, “and my father is worse. He says that I may go to the convent—but not now, never now, always later. He loves his daughters, you see. He won't let any of us go anywhere that isn't with him. Not to marry, not to serve God, not to do anything but be beautiful for him, and—I shouldn't say it, but I can't lie, either, that's a sin—be perfectly, dreadfully bored.”

“Surely,” said the Byzantine, “one need not pray only in a convent. One can pray anywhere that one is.”

“It's not the same,” said Gisela.

“That may be,” said the Byzantine. “And does he keep you with him even in his wars?”

“Oh,” said Gisela. “Oh, no! He'd never do that.”

The Byzantine laughed. “So maidenly an outrage! And so charming. How did we fail to hear of you even in our fair City? You should be a wonder of the world.”

That was too much even for Gisela. “Really,” she said in a tone that, in anyone else, would have been waspish. “You don't need to flatter me to death. You're very nice to look at. I like the way you sing. Won't you sing me the song you promised, that you learned only for me?”