Saxon: The Emperor's Elephant (17 page)

I
SPENT MOST OF
the next day alternately arguing and pleading with the treasury’s senior bookkeeper. A stickler for detail, he demanded full and
proper accounts for the funds I had taken to Kaupang. When I was unable to provide them, he showed his displeasure by restricting the amount of silver allowed for the new mission. He provided
instead a document authorizing me to requisition supplies from royal stores along the road. I considered going directly to Carolus to put a stop to this bureaucratic nonsense but was wary of being
seen again in the royal apartments. There was too much risk of encountering Princess Bertha, and early the following morning I slipped out from Aachen feeling relieved that I had avoided her. I was
on my way to rejoin Osric and the others. As arranged, Abram was waiting for me an hour’s brisk ride along the now-familiar road. With him were three mounted servants in charge of half a
dozen packhorses. The men had the vigilant yet patient manner of seasoned travellers and I guessed they were Abram’s regular attendants.

‘I hope we don’t run out of money,’ I confided to Abram after explaining my tussles with the skinflint in the treasury.

‘I can arrange cash for us along the way,’ he answered.

‘As far as Baghdad?’

He gave an easy smile. ‘As far as necessary.’

The sun was burning off the dawn mist and the day promised to be blisteringly hot. The horse provided to me by the royal stables had already worked up a sweat and we paused for a few minutes to
allow the animal to cool down. The dragoman took the opportunity to introduce his attendants to me. One of them was a cook, good at producing a decent campfire meal, and another was handy with
making running repairs to the tents and other equipment strapped to the horses. There was no need to ask about the third man. He had a serviceable-looking sword dangling from his saddle and was
evidently a bodyguard. Never before had I felt so well prepared when starting on a journey.

‘Does your cook prepare special meals for you?’ I asked as we moved off at a gentle amble. It was a leading question for I was curious to know more about my travelling companion. I
presumed his attendants were his co-religionists but he had made no mention of the fact.

‘I try to follow the dietary laws of my faith,’ Abram replied. ‘Fortunately, Radhanites are allowed broad dispensation due to our wandering way of life.’

He turned in the saddle to check on our little pack train, and I stole a sideways glance at my companion. He rode well, his handsome face alert as he watched the passing traffic.

‘Alcuin told me about the constant wayfaring, but that’s almost all he knew about your people.’

The dragoman showed no sign of resentment of my probing. ‘We originated in Mesopotamia many centuries ago, according to one theory. Others say that we came out of Persia.’

‘What do you believe?’

‘Under the present circumstances I prefer Persia. In that country’s language “rah” means a path and “dan” is one who knows. So a Radhanite is “one who
knows the way”.’

‘Then Persian is one of those dozen languages that Alcuin said you speak.’

He acknowledged the compliment with a graceful shrug. ‘Once you’ve acquired six or seven languages, the rest come easily.’

‘I’ve yet to reach that stage.’

‘So Frankish is not your mother tongue?’ He regarded me with polite interest.

I shook my head. ‘No, I grew up speaking Saxon. I learned Latin as a child, Frankish and Arabic later.’

‘Then, like me, you are a wanderer.’

‘Not by choice,’ I admitted, and found myself confiding to him how Offa had forced me into exile.

He heard me out, his expression turning to one of sympathy. When I finished I realized that instead of learning more about Abram, it was the reverse.

‘Is there anything about our mission that worries you?’ I asked him, hoping to divert the conversation back to what I had intended.

‘Getting the animals across the Alps before the first snowfall of winter,’ he said, guiding his horse around a deep rut in the road surface.

‘The ice bears would enjoy seeing some snow,’ I said cheerfully. I was relaxed and carefree, happy at the thought that I had a dragoman to recommend how far to travel each day, where
to spend the night and find our food.

‘You might consider taking a different route, avoiding the mountains entirely.’ He made the suggestion diffidently.

‘The royal chancery decided we go by river barge along the Rhine as far as possible. At some stage we’ll shift the animals onto carts and haul them over the mountain
passes.’

Abram sighed. ‘The Arabs have a saying: “Only a madman or a Christian sails against the wind.” It seems that a Christian also chooses to travel against the current.’

‘Is there an alternative?’

‘You could use the river Rhone instead . . . and have the current help you.’

I wondered if this was an excuse for Abram to be among his own people. Alcuin had said that the Radhanites in Frankia clustered along the Rhone. ‘Let’s see how far Osric and Walo
have already taken the animals along the Rhine before we change our plans,’ I replied cautiously.

*

The sound alerted me three days later – a familiar yowling and yapping. The noise came from the direction of a low ridge that ran parallel to the highway, the width of a
field away. We turned aside and when we topped the slope, found ourselves on the crest of an artificial earth embankment built to protect the neighbouring fields from flood. In front of us was the
broad river, and we were looking down on a barge firmly stuck on a shoal a few yards out. The two ice bears were in their cage at one end of the vessel. The aurochs occupied a larger, heavier cage
at the opposite end. The dogs were tethered between them, tied to a thick rope. They were jumping up and down, quarrelling and lunging at one another, tangling their leashes, and ignoring
Osric’s shouts of exasperation. Walo was nowhere to be seen. Closer at hand, standing on the muddy foreshore, was a huddle of what I took to be the barge men. They looked disgruntled and
mutinous.

Osric glanced up and saw me. With a final angry yell at the dogs, he clambered over the side of the barge and squelched his way across the ooze to come to speak with me.

‘Didn’t expect you back so soon,’ he said. His legs were slathered to the knees with grey sludge.

‘Where’s Walo?’ I asked, dismounting.

Osric gestured upriver. ‘He’s gone ahead with a cart. Took the gyrfalcons with him.’

A sudden apprehension gripped me. ‘You didn’t let him go off on his own? Anything might happen.’

My friend was calm. ‘He’s training the birds. He does that every day. Says that they need exercise or they will lose condition. He’s got them flying on a length of line, and
coming back to a lure. Besides, one of the barge men went with him, to find some oxen.’

‘They’ll need at least twenty,’ said Abram. He too had got down from his horse and was standing beside me.

Osric had begun scraping the mud off his legs with a twig. ‘The barge men say that we can rely on the flood tide only for another fifty miles or so. After that, we’ll have to haul
and row the barge,’ he said.

In a language I did not understand, Abram called back to his servants waiting at a discreet distance. One of them slid from the saddle, handed the reins of his horse to a companion, unlaced a
bundle attached to a pack saddle, and hurried forward with a small folding table.

As the servant opened up the table and set it firmly on the ground, I caught Osric’s eye. ‘Abram has been appointed as dragoman to our embassy,’ I explained.

Abram removed a leather tube from his own saddlebag, and extracted a scroll wound around two slim batons of polished wood. When the servant had withdrawn, he rolled the parchment from one baton
to the next – it must have been thirty feet long at least – until he came to the section he wanted, then placed the scroll face up on the table. The parchment was sprinkled with tiny
symbols carefully drawn and coloured. The most frequent symbol was a double-fronted house, its twin roofs coloured red. A number of oddly elongated dark brown shapes resembled thin loaves, and a
few drawings looked like large stylized barns. Many symbols were linked, one to the next, by thin straight lines ruled in vermilion ink. Near these lines were written numerals in Roman script.

‘We are here,’ Abram said, placing a finger beside a double-fronted house. Next to it in small, neat lettering was written ‘Dorestadum’.

It was an itinerarium, a road map, something I had heard of but never seen until this moment. An itinerarium was greatly prized, and I doubted if even the royal archive in Aachen possessed such
a treasure.

‘How far does your itinerarium extend?’ I enquired. I noted that Abram had taken care to reveal only a small portion of the scroll.

The dragoman rewarded my knowledge of the map’s name with a slight smile. ‘My people would not thank me if I told you. They spent generations in assembling the information it
contains.’

He turned his attention back to the map. ‘Here we are, still close to Dorestad. This red line –’ his finger slid across the surface of the map – ‘is the route that
the chancery in Aachen would have us take. Here we would leave the Rhine and continue along this next red line up through these mountain ranges marked in brown, and down into Italy, and finally to
Rome.’ His finger came to rest on a symbol, larger and grander than the others. It showed a crowned man seated on a throne holding a sceptre and an orb. Clearly the pope.

Osric was quick. ‘Those numbers marked beside the road are the distances between the towns, I presume.’

‘Or the number of days’ travel required for each sector,’ answered the dragoman. He shot me a mischievous grin. ‘In Persia the distances are stated in parasangs, not
miles.’

‘What are you proposing? ‘I asked. From where I stood I could see that the short wavy blue-green lines represented the course of rivers. Areas painted a dark green were the sea.
Every feature was distorted and out of shape, stretched in some places, compressed in others, so as to fit on the scroll. It was not so much a map as a stylized diagram that showed what mattered to
a traveller – the important locations and the distances in between.

Abram looked down at the diagram. ‘The further we proceed up the Rhine, the stronger the current will run against us. We cover less distance each day and risk reaching the Alpine passes
when they are closed by snow.’

He traced a thin red line that went south-eastward. ‘I recommend that we leave the Rhine at the tidal limit and go by waggon along this road to a different river, the Rhone. That river
flows in our favour.’

I interrupted him. ‘What about the difficulty of transferring the animals from one river to the other?’

‘The road between the rivers is suitable for wheeled vehicles. It crosses low hills and rolling countryside, not mountains.’

His reasoning was sound, and yet I was reluctant to be persuaded. ‘Every extra mile by land means additional costs – relays of oxen, fodder to feed them, wages for waggon drivers.
Our resources may not be sufficient,’ I told him.

His response was to point to a symbol on the parchment. It depicted a substantial building arranged around a hollow square. Even without the arches of what could only be a cloister, it was
clearly the symbol for a monastery. I ran my eye along the new route Abram proposed. I counted five monasteries spaced at convenient intervals. I smiled to myself. I had told Abram about the
skinflint in the royal treasury. The bookkeeper would regret giving me the written authority to requisition stores along my route. Every abbot in Frankia was obliged to obey that royal writ, and
then reclaim the cost from the king. By the time I had finished providing for my waggon train that document would drain more money from the treasury than if the accountant had given me the silver I
wanted.

Abram sensed that he had made his point. ‘At the mouth of the Rhone we charter a ship to take us directly to Rome’s port. The voyage lasts no more than four or five days,’ he
said.

Osric cleared his throat. ‘The Rhone empties into the Mediterranean not so far from the territory of the emir of Cordoba.’

I recalled Alcuin’s warning that the emir was a bitter rival of the caliph in Baghdad, and if the emir could interfere with our mission, he would do so.

Abram was unconcerned. ‘When we reach the mouth of the Rhone, my contacts there will tell me if the emir’s ships are too great a risk.’

Osric was still cautious. ‘And if we cannot continue by sea?’

The dragoman fluttered a hand dismissively. ‘Then we follow the example of the great Hannibal. He came out of Hispania with his elephants, crossed the Rhone and took his elephants to Italy
through the mountains. The southern Alpine passes are easier than those that the chancery in Aachen wants us to use.’

Abram began putting away the itinerarium. ‘When I was preparing to bring the caliph’s elephant from Baghdad to Frankia, I studied Hannibal’s route. I was thinking of using it,
but in reverse. Unfortunately, I never got the chance.’

He slid the scroll back into its leather tube with a gesture of finality and turned to face me. ‘Sigwulf, the route is your decision.’

Involuntarily, I glanced down at the aurochs, still standing in its enclosure on the barge. After months of captivity, the huge animal was still angry and dangerous. It bellowed and flung itself
from side to side, trying to get free.

I made up my mind. ‘I accept Abram’s suggestion. We go along the Rhine only as far as the tide can help us. Then we head south overland and follow the Rhone to the sea.’

There was little point in having a dragoman, I told myself, if one ignored his advice.

*

Abram sent his men ahead to make the arrangements. By the time our barge reached the Rhine’s tidal limit, they had paid carpenters to strengthen a massive four-wheeled
farm waggon to carry the aurochs in its cage. Wheelwrights widened the axles so that the vehicle would not tip over when the beast thrashed about. A similar waggon for the ice bears was only
slightly smaller. A team of four draught animals would pull each vehicle. A further three carts of a more normal size would carry stores and food. Nothing had been overlooked. There was even a lad
hired to scurry up and down our line of waggons with a brush and a bucket of wool grease, daubing the grease on the axles so that they turned smoothly.