Saxon: The Emperor's Elephant (18 page)

We lost no time in taking to the road. Our progress, after we had climbed from the river valley, was stately. We seldom covered more than a dozen miles each day, proceeding at a steady walk. The
weather was glorious, with day after day of summer sunshine. As Abram had promised, the route was undemanding. Great tracts of rolling countryside presented little difficulty to the plodding oxen.
July was the time for haymaking so their fodder was readily available. The meadows were full of workers scything the long grass, turning and stacking it when dry. The monasteries along our path
owned extensive lands, and I had only to produce my letter from the royal treasury for the local steward to supply whatever we needed – loaves, ale and wine for the men, meat for the bears
and dogs, pigeon breasts and day-old chicks to feed to the gyrfalcons. Each day we set out an hour after first light, rested at noon, then walked until the sun was halfway down to the horizon. One
of Abram’s servants rode ahead. He identified the open ground for us to stop and rest the animals for the noontime halt. He also made sure that water was available in a nearby stream or pond
or drawn from a well by local people whom he paid in advance for their labour. When we reached our chosen camping place each evening, it was to find our tents had been erected and a cooked meal was
waiting for us.

Men and animals thrived. Walo made wicker cages for the falcons. By day they were hung from a framework on one of the carts. At night he covered the cages with dark cloths. His training of them
progressed so well that whenever we stopped, he could fly them off his hand and let them fly free for exercise before attracting them back with a morsel of fresh meat. He also fitted the five white
dogs with collars and each animal was attached by its lead to a different vehicle so it, too, was properly exercised. In the evening after they had been fed, they were tied to stakes placed just
far enough apart so they could not fight. The aurochs remained as truculent as ever, attempting to attack anyone who came close to its cage. It was extremely dangerous to feed and water the beast,
and clear out its vast piles of dung. But the job had to be done.

Most of all, Walo concentrated on tending to his beloved bears. Try as I might, I still found it difficult to identify which was Madi and which was Modi. To me they looked alike and I saw no
difference in their behaviour. Fortunately, they adapted to the summer heat. They kept their appetites and, with shade and water within their cage, they showed no sign of distress. Walo fed and
brushed them, played them tunes on his wooden pipe until they laid their heads on their paws and slept for hour after hour.

I envied them. Despite the idyllic conditions I was plagued by disturbing dreams. In the four weeks it took us to make our ponderous way across country to the Rhone, there was scarcely a night
when I did not wake up in the darkness, my heart pounding, covered in sweat. Occasionally, I was shouting in panic. My nightmares always concerned an elephant. Sometimes I was riding on its back,
high above the ground, feeling the creature sway beneath me as we moved across a depressing, broken landscape of grey rocks and harsh mountains. The motion made me feel giddy and I would wake up
nauseous. In other dreams I was on the ground and the elephant was deliberately trying to trample me. I would turn and run for my life, pursued by the monstrous, enraged beast.

My nightmares often woke Osric and Walo, who shared a tent with me. Neither of them said anything until one evening shortly before we reached the Rhone. We had completed our day’s journey
a little earlier than usual. Our road lay through an extensive forest of oak and beech and we had come upon a broad clearing where a spring of clean water had been channelled into a pool lined with
stone slabs. Charred marks of campfires showed that previous travellers had rested there before us. Very soon our waggons and carts were drawn up in a neat line, the draught oxen unyoked, and all
our animals had been taken care of. There were several hours of daylight left, so we were relaxing in the last rays of sunshine before the shadows from the surrounding trees spread across the
clearing. All traffic along the road had ceased, and the place was so quiet that I could hear the low mutter of the ox drivers talking among themselves as they prepared to spread their bedding
rolls beneath the carts. Even the white dogs had fallen silent.

‘I think I’ll sleep under the stars tonight,’ Osric commented, treating me to a meaningful glance. He, Walo and I were sitting by the embers of the campfire. We had finished
our supper and Abram, who preferred to take his meals with his own men, had just rejoined us.

‘I’m the one who should sleep outside,’ I said. ‘There’s not much I can do about those dreams.’

‘What dreams are those?’ Abram asked.

I told him briefly about the elephant.

The dragoman smiled apologetically. ‘That was my fault. I shouldn’t have brought up the subject of Hannibal and his elephants.’

‘What’s an elephant?’ interrupted Walo. He had been listening in.

‘An elephant is a remarkable animal that the great ruler of the Saracens sent as a gift to Carolus,’ I told him.

Walo’s voice had been hesitant but his half-closed eyes were bright with interest.

‘Some say that it is the largest animal that walks on land,’ I added.

‘Even larger than that one there?’ Walo gestured towards the aurochs in its cage.

‘Yes, much, much larger.’

‘What does it look like?’

I started to explain what I knew about an elephant, its size and shape, but my words soon petered out. I had never seen the living animal and, for me, everything was hearsay. Abram was looking
on with an amused expression.

‘Our dragoman can explain better than me,’ I was forced to admit.

Abraham chuckled. ‘I doubt I could paint a word picture that would do justice to the strangeness of the elephant. For a start, its nose reaches to the ground and can be used as an extra
hand.’

‘You’re making fun of me,’ Walo said. He sounded hurt.

Abram’s statement reminded me that there was a painted illustration of an elephant in the bestiary that Carolus had given me. Until now I had kept the volume carefully protected in my
saddlebag. With a guilty pang I realized that I had never really explained to Vulfard’s son what had led up to his father’s gruesome death and why we were now halfway across Frankia.
This was my chance to begin to do so. I went to our tent and brought back the book.

I had wrapped it for safety in a long length of heavily waxed linen. With great care I removed the layers. Walo came across and looked over my shoulder as I opened the cover of the book and
turned the pages. The elephant was the sixth illustration. The copyist had drawn two elephants facing one another across a stream. They were coloured a sombre green. They had large, doleful eyes,
white curving tusks, and their trunks were about to touch. I presumed they were male and female.

I heard Walo take an excited breath. ‘Their noses look like trumpets, not hands,’ he announced.

The artist had drawn the trunks so that they splayed at the tip like a musical instrument.

‘Rightly so,’ said Abram from the other side of the fire. ‘If you’ve heard the voice of an angry elephant, you’ll remember it for the rest of your life. It’s
like the hoarse blare of a giant trumpet, far louder and more fearsome than anything you have ever heard.’

Walo could not tear his eyes away from the drawing. ‘If the elephant is so big and dangerous, how did they manage to catch it so that it could be given to Carolus?’

I wondered if he was thinking of his father and the deadly pitfall in the forest. Below each picture in the bestiary a brief paragraph gave selected details about the animal:

‘
The elephant has no joints in its legs
,’ I read aloud, ‘
so it never lies down because it would be unable to get back on its feet. When it sleeps it leans against
a tree for support. The hunters cut part way through the tree so that it topples over when the elephant rests against it, and the elephant falls. Then the hunters secure the helpless
elephant.
’

I heard a barely stifled snort of disbelief from Abram on the other side of the fire. It occurred to me that the hunters would still need some way of getting the captive elephant back on its
feet. Perhaps they dug out a sloping pit in much the same way we had handled the aurochs.

Walo reached out a hand to touch the picture with a grubby finger and hastily I moved the precious volume out of his reach. ‘It is also written,’ I told him, ‘that an elephant
lives for three hundred years, and is afraid of mice.’

‘What else does the book claim?’ asked Osric. I glanced across at him. He, too, wore a rather sceptical expression.

I read aloud further. ‘
The female elephant carries her unborn child within her for two years. When she is ready to give birth, she stands in a pool up to her belly. The male elephant
remains on the bank and guards her against attack from the elephant’s most deadly enemy, the dragon.
’

‘Will I get to see a dragon on this journey?’ asked Walo in an awed tone.

One of Abram’s servants was approaching. He bent down to murmur in his master’s ear. Abram rose to his feet. ‘Please excuse me, there is something I must attend to.’
Turning to Walo, he said, ‘I can’t promise you will meet a dragon on this journey, but you will see something almost as extraordinary: men riding in small houses fastened to the back of
the elephant.’

Walo waited until Abram was out of earshot before asking me, ‘Is that really true, Sigwulf? Men living on top of elephants?’

I remembered Hannibal’s story. ‘They don’t live there. They climb up before a battle, and wage war as if from a moving castle.’

Carefully I shut the bestiary, preparing to wrap it up again safely. The copyists in the royal chancery had been in a hurry. The stitches holding the pages together were uneven, and the book
closed awkwardly, the covers slightly askew. Gently I opened the book once more, to straighten the pages.

‘There’s our beast from the forest!’ exclaimed Walo.

He was pointing at a picture of a strange-looking creature. At first sight it did resemble the aurochs, for it had a bull’s head and body, four cloven hooves, and a long whiplash of a tail
ending in a tuft of hair. Like our aurochs, too, the animal had enormous horns and there was an angry glare in its eyes. The copyist had coloured it a rich chestnut brown.

‘What does the book say?’ asked Walo excitedly.

I consulted the description. ‘It’s called a bonnacon. It’s not the same as our aurochs.’

‘Are you sure?’ Walo sounded disappointed.

‘According to this book, the bonnacon’s horns curl backwards so far that they are useless as weapons. The animal cannot defend itself with them.’

Walo giggled. He had noticed a comical human figure in the picture. A man dressed as a hunter was shown standing behind the rump of the bonnacon, his face was wrinkled in disgust.
‘Why’s he holding his nose?’ he asked.

‘According to the book, when the bonnacon is chased, it runs away at great speed deliberately shooting quantities of dung from its backside. The dung has a ferocious smell and burns anyone
it touches.’

There was a furious outburst of barking from the tethered dogs. One of them had slipped its collar and was snapping and snarling at its neighbour. Walo jumped to his feet and ran off to deal
with the situation.

Osric stretched and yawned. ‘I’ve never seen Walo so animated. The pictures in the book draw him out. Perhaps you should show more of them to him when you have time . . .’

He waited until I had closed the bestiary and carefully wrapped it back inside the stiff linen cover, then added, ‘Have you checked our pages from the Oneirokritikon for the meaning of
those elephant dreams that have been troubling you?’

‘There’s nothing,’ I answered, rather more abruptly than I intended.

Osric and I had agreed that our fragments from the Book of Dreams were too valuable to leave behind in an empty house in Aachen. They were hidden in the outer, double folds of the same heavy
linen wrapper that protected the bestiary.

Osric frowned, searching his memory. ‘Dreams of elephants were mentioned somewhere. Maybe in the complete version of the book. I remember translating them. What precisely have you been
dreaming?’

‘Mostly, that I was riding on the back of an elephant. But sometimes the animal is trying to stamp me into the ground,’ I told him.

My friend thought for a moment. ‘If I remember correctly, to dream of riding on an elephant means you will meet someone of great power and influence, a king or an emperor.’

‘That sounds promising,’ I said with more than a touch of sarcasm. My vivid dreams were not only worrying. They meant that I had been losing sleep. ‘Maybe we will get to meet
the caliph in person. What about the dream of being attacked by an elephant?’

Osric ignored my ill humour. He was serious. ‘If the elephant succeeds in crushing the dreamer, it foretells an early death. But if the dreamer evades the attack, it means the dreamer will
face great danger yet escape with his life.’

‘I wake up before the dream elephant squashes me to pulp,’ I said. His words left me uneasy, and at that moment I felt the sudden sting of a biting fly on my neck. I reached up and
slapped it. My hand came away with a tiny smear of blood and, despite my outward bravado, I wondered if it too was an omen.

My friend glanced across to where Walo had succeeded in calming the quarrelling dogs. ‘Did anything come of your dream of Walo with those wolves and the bees?’ he asked.

It was my chance to tell Osric that the bees foretold Walo’s death. But I shied away from admitting that earlier I had kept the truth from my friend. Instead I described how the sight of
Walo in Kaupang seated between the ice bears in Ohthere’s bear pen was the fulfilment of my vision.

Osric heard me out in silence. ‘And now? Does anyone else appear in your elephant dreams? Like Walo with those wolves?’

‘Abram. I see him climbing onto the carcass of a long-dead elephant and delving through a slit in the grey skin. Then he pulls out great long white bones.’